skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a very, very stubborn idea about evolution that has proven to be kind of false. Rapid evolution exists, and we can observe evolution happening in many species:

http://discovermagazine.com/2015/march/19-life-in-the-fast-l...

As I understand, the simplest explanation for species being so stable over millions of years (like, say, sharks) is that while evolution can happen quite fast, it "averages itself out" - there's a kind of regression-to-the-mean effect.
Exactly, right? And they are not Chinese cooking...
7 Ways to Achieve Massive Bokeh
mothers, even mothers who don't carry all the way to birth, get fetal cells, very similar to stem cells, that protect and repair their mothers, but can also trigger autoimmune conditions like lupus, or rheumatoid arthritis.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/205334-fetal-consequences/
Yes I agree with you but I was not making the point of sharing a repository you shouldn't share to a recruiter (I do own a few private repositories that I wouldn't mind sharing to recruiters).

My point was that seeing code is not as mandatory for a recruitment as we currently make it so. I gave the comparison to management but it happens even in engineering areas. It is worth to know your candidate before asking to write a solution to an air conditioning problem in a whiteboard in 40 minutes when applying to a mechanical engineering position. Specially if your company never solves air conditioning problems.
This article is bunk.
This latest video is very interesting, and it seems the translation is progressing

Very nice work
Do you have evidence of your last paragraph ever occurring in such a high frequency to actually matter to people?
If users heard there were better results elsewhere though, they would switch from Google. However, it is more likely that by doing this Google prevents itself from being taken over by a competitor that creates this feature.
The road to Java 9: Twice-yearly releases are coming
Very interesting! I find this kind of line very exciting.

But dows that mean some sort of Lamarckian evolution is taking place after all?

Sexy son hypothesis is also similar. Is it related?
Kotlin is the new Java
It is too off-topic.
We're Americans, we don't have to make sense and float in oceans of hypocrisy.

"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else." - Winston Churchill
not exactly: free market conditions from a theoretical perspective means "no individual's participation in a market will affect price"

A large employer would prefer to be in a comparatively large market such that its hiring would not drive up costs. We're used to thinking of "a company town" as being a monopsony for employment, but this only works to the employer's advantage in unskilled labor markets.
It's important to point it out because media blamed "poor people taking out loans they can not afford". This message shifted the blame away from the real problem.
The article just states the flippers were "those with credit scores in the middle and top of the credit score distribution", not necessarily wealthy.

A wealthy flipper, e.g. a value-add REIT, would not generate as much debt in the first place (as they can just utilize their own bank account) and would be less likely to default en masse since they have spare cash and can wait out the downturn in the markets.
The ratio of PhDs awarded annually to tenure track positions that opens up suggests that a lot of activity in the sector isn't leading anywhere.
Reverse Engineering and Exploitation of a “Connected Alarm Clock”
The armed forces are screaming for tech people and really dont care about your interview skills. The US marines are even talking about dropping thier basic training requirements IOT get more tech people.
Maybe, but the underlying problem is not a particular technology, or even technological in general; it lies in having a system built on false assumptions about the confidentiality of SSNs and other data.

Suppose we have a solution to the underlying problems. It would undoubtedly be difficult and costly for the financial industry to adopt it, and a startup that implements it will not be in a position to force its adoption. About the only thing that could would be regulation - but I'm not holding my breath.
How I work (mostly) TDD-style
In other words, they're pulling a publicity stunt here, with the elections conveniently coming up in two weeks. Interfering with the market is uncalled for here, even though it might make good appearance in local media, and resonates with the intellectually challenged.

The government's job sure is to provide economic conditions such that a market for housing and other basic needs can sustain itself. But what they are rather doing is publicly blaming investors as "evil insects" ("Heuschrecken") in the worst socialist or even Nazi tradition, and making construction expensive by laws such as EnEV (law putting absurd energy efficiency burdens on new buildings) and asymmetric, unreasonable rights in favor of tenants.

Really, if there's a housing crisis, it's entirely the fault of the government, by definition.
>This looks like a lot of elitists trying to grab some notoriety for their niche projects. Inappropriate criticism by people who (quite obviously) want some credit for their time spent, rather bash a casual observer in lieu of that.

This looks like cheering for the "little man" who went against the establishment, similarly to people championing alternative diets, crystals, perpetual motion machines, and cold fusion inventors...
I have a WP blog that I wrote about my experience becoming a licensed professional engineer, which basically entails writing up your experience and taking an ethics exam. At the time I did it to make myself accountable to follow through. It is a super niche area, but with very little content addressing it, especially for free. Years later, with hardly any work from myself, the traffic is not high (2-3k monthly) but the Adsense more than pays for the hosting and I also generate revenue through affiliate sales to someone that sells paid help with the application. That revenue has been roughly $100-200 a month with as high as almost $500, during exam season.

The site is pretty much as passive as it gets at this point. I maybe spend some time every once in a while answering questions posted the blog, but haven't written new content in years.
Ask HN: What obscure corner of the web do you frequently visit?
> because media blamed

It is important to hear information from different sources. I certainly didn't hear a single unified media voice on this (or any other topic, for that matter).
"... with a device that can fit in her hand" and no photo of the device. Yet, another example of bad/poor effort science reporting. The structure of this article looked like an 17 year old copied and pasted some shit from google and performed some really bad unit conversions. His/her editor should be ashamed of such a POS article.

Device in question: https://idw-online.de/de/newsimage?id=42938&size=screen
big.LITTLE has been a thing for years, and at least Qualcomm has had 4+4 chips out for about as long.

Besides, performance doesn't matter if it's locked into a walled garden.
> How about we not let them declare bankruptcy and send them to corporate debter's prison instead: hold them accountable by garnishing future earnings until their debts are accounted for. Essentially let them continue operating but let them hang out in the pink sheets for a decade or so as punishment.

The purpose of bankruptcy is to determine how to proceed when a company's liabilities exceed its assets. The company had $10B in assets and $7B in liabilities, a fine added another $5B to their liabilities, now they're bankrupt. Not all creditors can be paid the amount they're owed. Bankruptcy laws exist to make sure what happens next is fair, e.g. each creditor gets 75c on the dollar instead of having the CEO pay all the debts owed to his brother's company first and leaving the other creditors with nothing.

In practice what usually happens in a case like that is that the company files for bankruptcy, sells all its assets --including its name -- to a new corporation that continues operating its business, and the proceeds from the sale are used to satisfy the old corporation's liabilities as much as possible.

Assuming the sale price is fair market value, there is no way to extract any more money from the company than that -- that's what fair market value means. You can't get any more money by forcing them to continue operating. Their future profits are built into the price of what you can sell their operations for. If that amount is less than what they owe, there is nowhere for the rest of the money to come from.

Well, you could eliminate limited liability and go after the shareholders, but if that's the intention then it shouldn't be done ex post facto.
Indeed. The economy could have easily dealt with a few banks failing---if the central banks would have kept nGDP up.

Australia, and even more Israel, barely noticed the Great Depression. Britain also did much better than American and the Euro area, thanks to a competent reaction by the Bank of England.
Not sure if obscure, but MeFi gets multiple visits from me daily:

https://www.metafilter.com
The suggestion, which many experienced people also make, is that once you've proven your ability the interview shouldn't focus on that. Spending 5 hours asking about algorithms is a waste of time when you already know someone has the technical chops.
It's been almost 10 years already. That is decently long compared to bubbles of years passed. We average about one per decade.

I think it makes sense. Lenders have a never ending impetus from Wall St to grow revenue and profit.

When all of the rich and moneyed people (13.5m people in the USA are millionaires) have already taken on loans, who do you go to next?

It becomes a cycle of just digging deeper and deeper into the question of "how do we sell this large capital asset to someone who barely has the ability to pay it back in the next 30 years".

Eventually, small economic cracks (sub prime defaults) lead to medium economic cracks (minor layoffs) which eventually, if the hysteria is massive enough, lead to massive economic cracks (major layoffs, shutting down business arms, pull backs in investment)

Eventually the govt is expected by market actors to become a lender of last resort, the dust settles, assets are repo'd, and over time...

... the cycle begins anew.

So, keep an eye out for the cracks that may be forming right now. Soon there will be another Lehman, another Enron, another Oil Crisis, another speculative bubble bursting due to credit on credit on credit on credit.
Kiwix does this, at least to a certain degree: http://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content
ScyllaDB's 2017 Q3 Apache Cassandra User Survey Results
Semi-related: is there any easy way to follow local timelines of multiple instances with a single client? My current main instance has only handful of active people, so I've been wondering if I should look at somewhere else. However, I'd rather not leave my current instance altogether; on the other hand, registering n accounts on n instances and then opening n web browser clients to "see it all" seems like an unnecessary hassle.
Sure; same point applies though -- just because 0 happens to be in RAX doesn't mean it's defined behavior.
Apparently I was wrong - according to this

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/16510865/

But this study is contradicted by many studies

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/having-sons-can-s...
I agree, but in fairness, the way credit agencies use that information is nonetheless gameable. They ignore all of your payment diligence when it comes to bills (utilities, rent, cable, etc) but consider it a positive indicator when you get a credit card that you pay off every month.

This leads people to do something they don't want to do, and is no more informative than paying all those other bills would have been, merely to increase their score. That's a kind of gaming.
Primitive societies are known to abandon old people to die when they become a burden rather than an asset.
China isn't really a communist country at all, it is much closer to state capitalism.
It's almost as if most research doesn't go anywhere.

If I put you in a dark room, and ask you to find a way to light it, how many times will you fail to find the switch? Oh wait, I lied. There's not actually a switch, but there might be a candle in that general direction. Maybe.

That's how little we have to go off of. That's how empty any information on your study is. I don't think people really understand how hard this type of work is.

Research is a purely exploratory and creative work. Like art, science requires time, patience, and many many failures. You don't just get a bunch of eureka-Einsteins that come out of MIT day one knocking down Theorems and discovering new physical laws. That's just not humanly possible and it's ridiculous if you think it'll ever work that way

I am perfectly willing to admit that the vast majority of research and PhD's went nowhere and will continue to go nowhere for a long time. But that doesn't mean they're useless. Research requires exploration. It requires trial and error. It is highly inefficient and does not fit well in a consumerist society like ours, but this is the way that works best for us so far.

If you have some better idea, then why don't you go out and do it? How are you going to get a bunch of incredibly intelligent, creative, and independent people funded and provided for in a society that values immediate results over long term achievements?

I'm not arguing the academia system is perfect. Any one knows it's screwed up beyond belief. But it's not out of malice. We're not purposely trying to make the world worse, or something ridiculous like that. You have many people who care a lot about the science, who need to eat and sleep and need money to do that. Sometimes the money goes to their heads, sometimes their massive egos get the better of them, but do you seriously think we don't care about science? You'd have to be an idiot to do a PhD for the money or the fame. Why do you think we put 7+ years of our lives into stuff like this?

So most PhDs don't actually get tenured positions. What are you actually trying to say? Are you saying there aren't enough tenured positions? Or are you implying that these PhDs don't deserve tenured positions? Do you have any evidence for either of those claims? Because otherwise you're just participating in more armchair speculation.
This move of certain municipalities buying housing appears to be one of many tactics being used to address housing shortage. I recall recently reading elsewhere that Berlin govt is also planning for building additional housing and conversion of large unused industrial spaces into housing. I wouldn't be surprised if improvement of certain areas is also part of the renovation/conversion tactics used in their housing strategy.
How long would it take?
You can't say you cracked a mysterious coded text and then not provide the solution except to hand-wave it away by saying there's an additional reference that was lost. I can 'solve' anything that way.

If Gibbs doesn't have the plain text, at best he has a theory.
That's right, she's reflective of the community. And if that community is hostile to Amazon/Boeing, why should they continue to invest in that community?

The Seattle mayoral election candidates are all well over on the left. There isn't even anyone to vote for if you aren't on the left.
Not the Florida scenes, they say subprime grew but it was still small compared to prime. The layering and diving and combining is the Jenga scene.
At the micro level, that could very well be, but at the macro level, competition for reputation should create a business interest in not giving out inaccurate ratings.

When the entire market is dominated by three agencies (two alone have 80% of the market), with the US government considering ratings given by them alone as sufficient for approval for certain listings, then regulatory management of the industry has effectively replaced reputational competition as the primary driver of quality.
I'm not sure I follow your argument. Tearing it all down is or isn't ethical, therefore not caring about ethics is not the key to winning the nation-state game?
I almost went to this hackathon! Even bought a ticket and all, then decided I need rest more than a hackathon.

This is a great idea. Love it!

One suggestion I’d have is to make photos more prominent. Events like this are mist interesting in the image and short video format.
He also raises a very correct argument that considering only benefits of successful class action and not the costs of the litigation and the fallout for both consumers and credit industry is just wrong. I mean, if you win $10 from successful lawsuit but would be forced to pay $20 more next time you need a credit check (numbers are just an invented example, of course), then this setup won't be worth it for you.

This argument confuses a payoff to plaintiffs with costs to the credit bureau's customers - but the plaintiffs would not be the customers of the credit bureau but everyone monitored (involutarily!) by the credit bureau.

Just as much, the purpose of the state allowing a lawsuit would not be to give money to the plaintiffs but rather to give the credit bureau a disincentive for doing what they did - manage their subjects' (now victims) data poorly.

Which is to repeat what other have noted - the average American isn't the credit bureau's customer, they are the credit bureau's product (the customers are employers and landlords). If having a secure credit-check system costs more, let the credit bureau's actual customers pay more.

And sure, landlords sometimes pass credit-check costs on to tenants but that's just one more part of the whole abusive system that it would be nice to see reigned-in (though naturally I'm not optimistic).
“There's no free will, says the philosopher; To hang is most unjust.

There is no free will, assents the officer; We hang because we must.”

―Ambrose Bierce
It's very unpopular to say this but I think it's important not to make assumptions about bankers' actions before the crisis. Many people and bankers expected house prices to continue appreciating and made decisions based on that assumption:
https://www.russellsage.org/sites/all/files/Rethinking-Finan...

Also, taxpayers made a profit on the bank bailouts. The bailouts that cost taxpayers a lot money were of GM and Chrysler:
https://www.thebalance.com/auto-industry-bailout-gm-ford-chr...
Wikipedia has details on TARP, the ProPublica page I usually cite for the return on bank bailouts is down:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
the radiolab is from 2012, and i'm sure they've learned a lot since then, but they do mention that there are a lot of factors (sex of children, number of children, number of fathers) that correlate with both good and bad effects of the fetal cells.
ALLUVIONI E ALLAGAMENTI, QUANDO I GRILLINI CHIEDEVANO LE DIMISSIONI DEI SINDACI
I'm going to go off on a tangent and complain about Ars Technica here.

As a long-time reader of the site, it feels to me like lately (ie. around the time Conde Nast bought them) the quality started slowly but surely sliding down. This here is yet another minor data-point that reinforces that feeling.

The original article covering the supposed discovery was written like it's pretty much a solved thing (yes, all the usual CYA phrases are there so the author can weasel out if it turns out not to be true). Yet for anyone who's ever heard about the Voynich manuscript, the extraordinary claim that it's deciphered should be substantiated with an extraordinary amount of evidence, the lack of which wasn't questioned at all.

Then, without as much as "oops, we've been duped too", the author goes on to describe why claims covered by the first article by so much enthusiasm are not true or proven, ending with an ad-hominem about the "discoverer". This (minus the ad hominems) really should've been part of the original article. Hell, split it into two pages if you're after the clicks!

To me, this says more about Ars than about the (non)issue at hand - it's finally slid down to the level of a typical net publication.

Sad!
The Quest for a New NYC Zoning Plan (1992)
Hi justboxing, thanks for your comments. I fully appreciate what you're saying but I'd be unable to scale LW with that many customers paying < £6 a month.

Whilst I'd LOVE a bunch of clients where 5000 dollars is a rounding error, that's not our target client.

Our target client is a small to medium business with multiple domains or a digital agency that is responsible for (but may not control) a domain / website.
I've never seen an arbitration of such a vague and emotionally charged conflict which I would consider objective. Do you know of any? It would make interesting reading.
That is a severe misstatement of the other side of the argument. They have nothing wrong with just the act of moving, it's the act of displacing others and changing the community in such neighborhoods.
I loved his BYTE column. It was usually just a story of dealing with some problem, either something that stopped working right, or trying to install a new machine or software program. He would take you through what happened, step-by-step, including all the confusions and mistakes, and it was fascinating reading. He used to say, if I remember correctly, "I do it the dumb way so you don't have to."

I was really shocked when BYTE stopped publishing. I couldn't believe that such a superb publication that was so valued by its readers could go out of business. From what I recall, what happened is first it was bought up by a publisher who wanted to turn it into a magazine for average computer users, not techies, and then when that failed to get a market, just shut it down. So much for the idea that the free enterprise system always makes things better.
The pricing is completely reasonable; we are probably going to get the £400/year plan as an agency. I agree the £6 single domain pricing could be more visible. Take advice from customers, not tire-kickers.
Well, you can, but you probably won't get any serious critique and people will dismiss you (it seems like rightfully so in this case).
Apple’s Bet on AR and the Future of UI Design
> Gibbs said in the TLS article that he did his research for an unnamed "television network." Given that Gibbs' main claim to fame before this article was a series of books about how to write and sell television screenplays, it seems that his goal in this research was probably to sell a television screenplay of his own. In 2015, Gibbs did an interview where he said that in five years, "I would like to think I could have a returnable series up and running." Considering the dubious accuracy of many History Channel "documentaries," he might just get his wish.

Welp, this just killed any interest I had even if his idea was intriguing.
Turkish Coffee Reading – Cup Symbols Telling Fortune
https://secure.expirify.com is a free option that works well. I believe I discovered it on HN.
The article points to the FDIC and the misalignment of incentives it creates when it is combined with small undiversified banks, as the primary cause of the crisis. The note on the central bank's monetary policy relates to the Great Depression, not the 2008 crash.
I like http://www.graficaobscura.com/ a lot, obscure and historical collection of computer graphics experiments and other thingies
SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 SP3 Released
> To me, this says more about Ars than about the (non)issue at hand - it's finally slid down to the level of a typical net publication.

One swallow does not a summer make!
I think the word "networking" (not usually a negative) would fit better than "nepotism" (almost always seen as a negative) here. Hiring your friends - ahead of other candidates who might be better qualified - might well be considered nepotism, but going out of your way to make friends with people in the hope that they might hire you probably isn't nepotism as most people would understand it.
What should you know before to visit Morocco