skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why Mercenaries Aren't Answer for Afghanistan
They did account for them in the median AFAIK. Which is the number I gave and the most appropriate metric.

I don't see any mention of confidence intervals mentioned in the survey, so what are you talking about? Means and standard deviation are given. But they are mostly useless as the distribution is very skewed. They would be infinite if the "never" people were included of course.
Hydrocodone costs like $3. Drug lobbying is a problem, but not this one.
Just one load of heroin from Mexico will pay for the cost of this sub!
Not GP, but personally I would not trust any system built by a bunch of people building computational contracts who only learned what Turing completeness implies after-the-fact. I'd think they were marketeers willing to do or say anything to sell their snake oil.
This is "off-topic" to the attention span of HN. I recently realized this when someone mentioned corruption as the main problem of some issue; yeah, that's "very general", but nevermind programmers, not even a power user would keep looking for program bugs or worry about the order they do things in when it's already been confirmed that the memory or PSU or something like that is faulty. Anyone worth their salt would stop those other debug activities to focus on correcting that, while someone who absorbed these broken parts and/or their acceptance as part of their synthetic identity will do anything but that.

Also see Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm, et al. This other mediocre shit? This being a "hacker" in a goldfish bowl? That's for those who can't hack the adult responsibilities of the 20th and 21th centuries. those who fell asleep, those who already fell off. They will downvote you today and look the other way as drones take care of you tomorrow, don't hold your breath for anything else. Anything else, any future worth a fuck, has to be done despite their wishes, or rather, despite where they are drifting.
Right Here, Right Now: 27 Simple Actions to Support Women in Tech
If we're going down that path, why not just print out the relevant bits of paper for anyone that asks? For a small fee of course. We can end the race to the bottom and go straight to the finish line.
Siacoins calculator at http://sia.tech/ is claiming a price of $2/TB/month vs $23/TB/month for Amazon S3.

However it neglects to include Backblaze's B2 storage which is only $5/TB/month - https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

That is maybe a not a big enough price saving to convince conservative corporations to switch. Imagine going to your accounts department to request they purchase a cryptocurrency so you can use it to pay for data storage.
I keep hearing that people have (or had) trouble understanding pointers. As someone who has never had that problem or met such a person, I am struggling to understand why...
Ironic that this comment highlights another annoying Google thing. Looks like a link to Google.com but it's an amp page.
> Our combined lists represent most peoples' options. Kind of strange to think about.

To re-iterate, most of the jobs you listed do not require a Community College degree!

Whether a truck driver or store clerk needs algebra is utterly irrelevant. People doing those jobs are not required to have -- and usually do not have -- community college degrees. Their needs are irrelevant in a discussion about community college curricula.

Regarding my examples, I'm not "seeing what sticks". I'm literally just listing what are pretty much uniformly the most popular programs at most community colleges. Again, look up enrollment and funding statistics for some of your local CC's.

> dental hygienicists

Again, I think you're over-estimating the difficulty of the material that students need to master in order to pass community college algebra.

As I said in my original post:

>>> The article is probably correct -- we could stand to have alternatives to the standard CC algebra course. But an effectively similar level of quantitative skill is required for most trades.

I think that's spot on for dental hygenists. They absolutely have to understand ratios, for example, and that's one major stumbling block for CC Algebra students.

So do they need CC Algebra? Maybe, maybe not. But IMO a course covering only the portions they do absolutely need is going to be just as much a stumbling block for these students.
I on the no required math courses train for non-stem. I completely agree!

Of course since the argument can't be practical, ie you will use this someday which you won't, opponents talk about the importance of a liberal arts
education and being well rounded.
I cannot agree more with this comment. Too bad that others feel the need to wrap text and photos in JS, to the detriment of many billions of Internet users out there who aren't on fast connections and powerful machines.
Every single second, mountains of new information becomes relevant. Parties cannot know what they are getting into, because they cannot see the future. They can only make assumptions.

But that's basically obvious to anyone not hinging their personal identities on peddling technocratic revolution.
Still safer than the scooter it's replacing?
I believe we should rethink core technologies of our civilization such as money from base requirements with a high-tech perspective. This does not mean getting rid of money. It means upgrading it and augmenting it with other technologies.

We need to integrate into society structures and technologies that not only allow us to measure, analyze, and when necessary, work together, more holistically, but at the same time need systems that are more decentralized, resilient against over-centralization, and evolve more freely. It seems on the surface that these are just opposed, but by taking a ground-up approach, doing enough experimenting and iteration, and leaning on our newer technologies, I do believe we can make dramatic improvements to society.
> But I do kind of question if it's really a good use of everyone's time to learn algebra.

There are things taught in it (and in other courses of general math) that probably don't need to be—long division comes to mind—but there are some pretty fundamental mental concepts that I'd hate for people to lack.
For the most part, based on my observations, I have realized that libertarian economics is not going to create an ethical society - the one that I would want to live in myself, for example.

I still apply the same basic principles in my politics - i.e. that personal freedom and lack of regulation is a good thing in and of itself, but regulations can be a necessary lesser evil to mitigate some greater evil. Thus, society should have "just enough government", and no more than that. I just draw the line on what is "enough" much further to the left than I used to - enough so to firmly identify as left-wing by now on the basis of policies that I end up supporting with this justification (e.g. socialized healthcare, UBI, some anti-discrimination laws).

As far as tax rates, I'm not sure I get it... who pays a 30% tax off $20k annual income? Unless you include all taxes, such as sales. But then the logical response would be to replace sales taxes with income or property taxes (i.e. make the tax system less regressive), not necessarily to campaign for lower taxes overall.
This. If other people asked you whether you can start a project or not, and you reply using "wife" as an excuse, accept it for what it is. An excuse.
I had met entrepreneur types that replied either yes or no, straight forward and no detour replies.
What about preexisting conditions? Would anything prevent someone who was just diagnosed with cancer (but not bed ridden) from migrating to the UK, paying this $300/year, and receiving full coverage?
> Read the article, the goal is to have alternate math courses.

I'm not opposed to that idea in the abstract, but what other math courses are they suggesting?
Airplanes can fall out of the sky at any moment, but you're still less likely to be hit by one than if you're standing on a rail waiting for a train to dodge around you.

Inflexibility is not an advantage unless you're dealing with formally describable, proven systems. Human behavior and economics are not.
Hmm I disagree that something is wrong if you can't understand algebra.

Something is wrong with a system that make you "learn" information irrelevant to your own life.
> But if banks and major retailers who have huge budgets can get hacked, of course we can too.

Here's the thing: banks and major retailers can't get hacked. At least, not in the sense you're using "hacked".

When Target's credit card systems were compromised, resulting in the CEO resigning and and about $300M in costs to the company to deal with the breach, not one customer lost a penny.

When $171M from Union Bank of India was fraudulently wired via NYC to two Cambodian banks and one Thai one, they got all the money wired back within a day.

The traditional banking system is designed to be unhackable, because the numbers on computers are not authoritative. They're a cache, and they're periodically reconciled, but humans (and other computers!) will look at the cache during reconciliation for obvious attacks like these. A bank can call up another bank, or a retailer can call up a credit card company, or whatever, and say, "Hey, these transactions were fraudulent, please reverse them," and it'll happen. Target did that. Union Bank did that. A hacker can get to some bank's MySQL database? Sure, whatever, it's not what matters. Definitely it's a greater headache than if they got to the bank's website, but at the end of the day it's exactly as fixable as hackers getting to the website.

There are a lot of bright people trying very hard and putting honest work into a problem that simply doesn't need to be solved and shouldn't be solved: making the computers authoritative. When you do that, you're suddenly hackable. When you do that, of course $16M gets actually stolen irrevocably from time to time, no matter how bright you are or how honest your work is.
That's... not how the subprime crisis happened.

Printing money was part of how we got out of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_easing
I (successfully) interviewed with 'emmett at some point at twitch in 2011 or 2012. I didn't end up taking the offer and I don't remember the exact question, but I have a positive memory of the overall experience.

I don't remember anything overly academic or anyone bragging about ivy league percentages.
Well, I've been following the GOP Senate healthcare bill closely over the last month, and several GOP Senators have stood their ground amidst pressure from party leaders as well as the Whitehouse to protect funding for their Home State's opioid epidemic. It's been a frontline issue in nearly every article I've read regarding the GOP's difficulty in getting to 50 votes.

So while the public at large may be ignorant of this crisis (and honestly, on how many issues is even the most educated of us truly knowledgeable about?) the States' representatives that have these problems back home appear to be taking it very seriously.
That's not true, at least for the even number apart example.

The prime method will sample songs p apart from each other, and it's easy to find examples of N and p where p is even, for example N=5 p=2. More generally, this method works for any n that is co-prime with N, so N=5 n=4 works as well.

There are lots of shufflings where subsequent songs are not separated by a constant amount, so your main point is true. There are many combinations of songs that you would never hear no matter which prime you picked.

To quantify just how many takes a little bit of work.

There are N! total shufflings possible. We know that there are N-1 or less numbers that are co-prime with N (you get N-1 when N is prime, less otherwise). For each number that is co-prime, we have N possible shufflings, each starting from a different point. This gives at most N(N-1) shufflings from the prime method (really the co-prime method).

As a percentage of total shufflings, we know the upper bound from the co-prime method is N(N-1) / N! == 1/(N-2)!. This very quickly goes to 0. For the first few N,

N % of shuffles
2 100.00000%
3 100.00000%
4 50.00000%
5 16.66667%
6 4.16667%
7 0.83333%
8 0.13889%
9 0.01984%
10 0.00248%
11 0.00028%
12 0.00003%
13 0.00000%

So for any reasonable number of songs, we know that _most_ shufflings will not be found by the prime shuffling method.
What kind of plastic is this? Actually, I don't care; I wish disposable plastic in general would go away.

Isn't part of their marketing greeness? But their model is keurig-for-calories? They _could_ refuse to do the plastic bottles and ship paper bags of powder...
> How sad to think that some people think that community college intermediate algebra is so abstract that people can't get it.

I agree, but I don't think more motivation is a bad thing. I hated math (even as an engineer) despite being good at it until I was a junior in college. I got interested in high-level math when I saw what some PhD students were doing for research and that inspired me to dig deeper. Now I appreciate math just for the beauty of it. I wish I had this appreciation in high school, but some people just need a good answer for "why?"
>More people driving and perhaps being the first in their families to actually own a car means bad news.

Yeah, god forbid the masses get access to effective means of personal transportation. /s
This is a common thought but overblown. True cures would also bring enormous profits.
John Carmack wishes he had used a Lisp as Quake's scripting language
> I don't need algebra for 2 of those.

All of these are literally the sorts of things you'd find on homework assignments and final exams in a community college algebra course... You do need algebra, and don't realize how difficult this "trivial" algebra is for some students because you can do it without even realizing you're doing it.

I mean, there will be some FOIL and quadratic equation examples as well. And a bunch of stuff in-between like identifying graphs of functions.

But CC Algebra is super bimodal, so it's probably not the case that students are nailing these word problems and only failing with the other stuff.
People of no where don't claim they are number 1
Yes. You're thinking more like a battle-scarred veteran than a novice here.
What constitutes a "serious penalty" is a function of who you are, how much money you have and who's judging. You and I can probably escape "serious" consequences but most people cannot.
It is not clear whether these statements are true.

* QR codes mandate a minimum of 15% area used for error correction and a maximum of 60%.

* Data Matrix codes mandate a minimum of 0% area used for error correction and a maximum of 50%.

* The amount of overhead in QR codes (finders, timing, alignment) is probably in the same ballpark as Data Matrix codes (black lines, checkered lines).

* PDF417 codes demand low vertical resolution (e.g. 15 thick steps) but high horizontal resolution (e.g. 200 thin steps). They are hard to scan on a phone camera. Although this thick-thin design is appropriate for line scanners, the asymmetry in horizontal-vertical information density leads to poor information density overall and higher susceptibility to damage and unreadable barcodes. Square primitive blocks make sense because they are more spatially balanced.
Is there not room in the market for multiple solutions? Both Dropbox and a decentralized solution can co-exist.
What Star Wars Can Teach Us about Analytic Infrastructure
> Algebra is one of the biggest hurdles to getting a high school or college degree — particularly for students of color and first-generation undergrads.

No bigotry of low expectations at play here, none at all.
And by exciting, I don't mean fun or pleasant.
Ah the Mariner debacle.
At $300,000 each (from the article) I think they and their shareholders would offer it gladly. How many Viagras do they have to sell to match that revenue?
What you fail to see in drawing your analogy is that seismologists aren't being incentivized to give specific readings. Pharmaceutical companies are loading the gun and they know it.
And I thought I was the only one to experience it. Had that fixed months ago but didn't think enough of it to save the solution for posterity.
But is raising graduation rates the goal or is raising the education level of the population the goal?

If we wanted to raise graduation rates, we could just hand out degrees after two weeks and no exams.
A Tech Bubble Killed Computer Science Once, Can It Do So Again?
Sorry, why do you need professional help from Google to create infographics?
With your income determined by the market, you can scale big, not limited just to your own 24 hours and two hands.
Someone I know tried depositing btc sale proceeds to their wells fargo bank account. The bank promptly froze all their accounts. It eventually worked out I believe but it doesn't seem as easy as 'just sell them.'
The blog post cites visible damage from door delivery shipping as the major design issue that they were trying to solve.

(Paper) cartons are much weaker and less resilient than plastic bottles. Think about the number of times you've seen dented or folded chicken soup cartons on supermarket shelves... I've certainly seen plenty of Safeway soup boxes to avoid because of obvious exterior damage.

I don't think cartons would get them very far in that area.
Sounds like you don't know anything about JavaScript.
If the Brazilian Model M uses the same cable as the US Model M then I'd be happy to send a cable your way. Feel free to reach out if you're interested (email's in my profile) and we can confirm whether the cables match.
> I'm still confused why I would want my storage to be decentralized.

Say... if you were running a torrent site? Or you just wanted redundancy for your cat videos.

The encryption doesn't bother me. The way I encrypt it ensures it won't be unencrypted without actually knowing the passcode. What bothers me is that when you finally need to access it, it might not be there.
I've been playing on gamesbyemail.com for over 12 years. It's amazing what Scott implemented early on in the AJAX era. I mainly play WW2 the Axis & Allies game. Amazing job. Great fun.

He had a lego dice roller before this.

Amazing site.

Thanks for all the hard work on this.
Thanks for replying! That last point is quite interesting. So if I'm understanding correctly, companies would develop relationships with an employee potentially months or years before an actual job or application is on the table? If that's correct, what do you envision taking it from a casual relationship to an actual job getting offered?

For example, is it about getting in touch with prospective employees who are content in their current role but may be interested down the road when their circumstances change? Or perhaps about identifying people who seem promising, but aren't ready for the job yet, and maintaining the relationship as they develop? I'm curious because I've thought a bit about the latter option, of companies giving potentially promising candidates insight into how they can develop to become competitive for a role, and have wondered why that doesn't take place more often.
By the way, you don't need to put a period in between the c and f in cf, it's shortened from ConFer. Typically it's styled "cf.".
Do tell...
They are selling a lifestyle and an experience more than potions of liquified nutrients. As such the packaging, the marketing, the blogs about it are very important (maybe even more important than what's in the bottle).

It's a bit like people go and pay $5 for a cup of coffee in a coffee shop. They are buying the experience more than the coffee.
The course in question contains topics like imaginary numbers, sequences/series, and conic sections along with the more practical topics like basic inequalities, graphs of functions, and simple systems of equations. The alternative pathways program seems to swap out these topics for basic topics in probability, statistics, and the like.

Seems reasonable to me.
That would be brutal on networks in populated areas I suspect. On update days our office network usage is huge.
Non-motorized transportation options aren't counted in vehicle miles. So accidents involving pedastrians, bicycles and other bystanders would skew this some. Since car accidents don't just hurt other motorists it's useful to measure this against the total population.
the definition of a business is to solve the problems of someone else, not yours.
A few days ago people on HN were arguing that it's okay if cryptocurrencies use a decent fraction of the world's energy, because securing the blockchain and building a financial system that is decentralized and impossible for any human to gain control of is a major project for humankind and worth spending a decent fraction of the world's resources on.

Does that argument still hold up if you're going to have human insurance and human arbitration?
You're "no true Scotsman"ing so hard Mary, Queen of Scots doesn't even qualify.
Time to revive Prolog, perhaps?
Continuing on my thoughts on costs, with some very quick napkin maths (apologies if errors)

* From https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ 1TB of storage cost around $25.
* I'll assume 3 year life-span for a drive.
* Add 50% costs for the infrastructure and electricity to support the storage.
* Add another 17.6% due to redundancy (17 data shards + 3 parity) - https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...

Gives a minimum cost (before employee costs, marketing etc) of $1.22/TB/month.

If we do the same with Siacoin (which I believe stores 3 copies of your data) we get $3.12/TB/month.
> The meatspace system seems very stable until you realize that it's highly brittle. It's impossible to meaningfully measure firm solvency risk, because the behavior of the "VM" is so unpredictable.

Actually, it's not. Regulators and ratings companies do a pretty good job of it, and in extraordinary Great Recession type events there is usually concerted response to keep consumers from incurring any losses. Insured not getting paid due to counterparty issues is a blue moon, black swan risk for business, virtual never happens to consumers.
I said meaningful :P
Pretty sure that Industrial Designers call this a "squarecle"
Effective means of personal transportation shouldn't mean four wheeled vehicles by default. Bikes, motor scooters, motorcycles, Oneboards, skateboards, etc are all probably much more effective than single occupancy drivers in a 4-5 seat vehicle.
Why don’t you just limit the speed of the car to how much impact it can take without seriously injuring the passéngers and possibly pedestrians? That car can’t take a 40mph impact but maybe it can take a 25mph one?
Python is a bit different still: it doesn't have visibility specifiers to begin with, everything is public.
QNAP fixes critical corruption issue, fails to tell anyone
Yeah, your parents don't need to even be middle class in order for you to move back in with your parents, your parents just need to exist and be willing to let you back. In fact loads of poor people live with their parents...
He mentioned hardware-accelerated packet routing. RoCE is not a routing protocol -- it's a UDP packet using IB verbs to DMA directly to hardware on the PCIe bus and bypass the processor. But yes, RoCE is a really interesting protocol and seems to have won the RoCE versus iWarp war.
Didn't you just describe an example where the ambiguity of human language is a problem and a smart contract may actually have a better chance of performing as expected?
away from the hull