skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So... I got an undergrad degree in psychology, but then went on to a doctoral program and got a PhD.

I'm not actually disputing your suggestion that a lot of students obtain the degree as a placeholder--it's a problem--but depending on the university, it's far from easy, and I know lots of students who obtain lots of degrees as placeholders. Students perceive that the degree is easy based on introductory psychology, but in a lot of programs, it quickly turns into statistics, neuroscience, and cognitive modeling with upper-level classes. Students coast for their first year or two and then sometime by their 3rd year start struggling.

Anyway, one of my frustrations after my doctoral degree is the stereotypes about the field. I've certainly had more experience with computer science, math, and statistics than most undergrads with those degrees (math might be different). I've worked with comp sci undergrads, and without meaning anything negative, I felt like I was teaching them about programming most of the time, rather than anything the other way around.

And yet, because of my degree, somehow people just assume that I'm interested in past lives therapy or something like that. What I do is closer to ML/AI/epidemiology than anything else. I've published papers in the areas of information theory and statistics, and coded in a large number of languages across various paradigms.

One shift that seems to have occurred since I was in undergrad is this idea that you are your degree. It's pernicious. The liberal arts philosophy is sort of along the lines of "get a degree in philosophy," take your advanced maths and statistics, and then learn more of it later, because the specific degree doesn't matter. But now we see college as an advanced job training program, and people assume that you are only qualified to do what you got your undergrad in. It's absurd.

I admit there's some limits--I'd wonder if an BFA could get deep experience in computer science, but who knows? I've seen all sorts of art projects that involve heavy coding, statistics / ML, and low-level hardware stuff, and know history faculty who are basically doing signal processing research. Coetzee, a nobel prize winner in literature, used to code.

At some level, the problem isn't these degrees all the time, it's the stereotypes about them and the people getting them.
Sure, they were both relevant to what we build
To me, this is another implementation of the housing bubble:

- People see college graduates making a lot of money

- Politicians make it a priority to make it easier for people to get loans to go to college

- More people take out loans to go to college

- Colleges realize there is no downward pressure on price and raise tuition.

- Politicians continue to make it easy for people to go to college

- People take bigger loans to go to any school they wish

Until the music stops, things are sort of OK. People's kids can go to any school they can get into, regardless of cost. Colleges can raise their tuition with no consequences.

Politically it's a difficult problem, because the old solution of making more money available is getting out of hand, but what politician wants to stand up and tell people they can't go to the college of their dreams just because they can't afford it?

During the housing bubble, it was the cycle of "people want to own a home" => "politicians say everyone should be able to own a home and make loans available" => "companies make money packaging up these loans" => "prices go up" => "people can't afford homes" => "politicians make more money available". Until the music stops, everything is great -- everyone is making money, everyone is getting what they want. Then it unravels...
Remember the Valut7 leaks contained an attack via USB on Samsung TVs. If you're targeted, an operative could infect your device in transit before it reaches you.
Webpack: A Gentle Introduction to the Module Bundler
A bunch of hackers (and some Feds) all hanging out at a hotel in downtown DC. Oh yea, there are some talks you can attend as well :)
Shmoocon, like DerbyCon and other small conferences, are in my opinion, better than DEFCON and BlackHat.
I have feeling that the event in the article is about first message that was sent acrosss production network and with the intention of SMS being user accessible (and paid) service.
We will be open-sourcing code in the coming months
Sorry but it doesn't make sense:

You are getting a percentage, 15%

- how you will know how much BTC I have, only thing I am giving you is one empty address, no?
Very true. My dad worked with an engineer who would routinely steal the ideas and work of other engineers and patent them under his name
That seems like something of a defeatist argument, considering everything from the phone the person would be pulling out of their pocket to the pants the pocket is in to the shoes that are being tied to the door they're getting ready to walk out of was probably, in some form, produced by an unfair labor market or a company who has a less-than-stellar environmental record.

Removing a single consumer electronic device from your life isn't going to impact those global markets - they're problems best tackled at a different scale.
Not really America-first, but western world first definitely. Nothing about Google’s products screams USA, and they have more users outside the USA than inside it.
Are you writing this after having called the relevant representatives and senators for your state?
Yeah, and the US doesn’t spy at the UN because it signed treaties saying it wouldn’t, like all the other members of the UN.
> ...you’d think that you’d want that for every Android phone. But in this case, that’s not necessarily true; optimizing an app to take up less storage can also mean it takes a little longer to launch. On phones where storage is at a premium, you optimize for that. On most high-end phones, however, you’d rather get those milliseconds back.

> https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/5/16736260/google-android-o...

Facebook has Messenger Lite in these same markets. It doesn't do all the stuff Messenger does (like video chat), but it's a better experience for people with worse devices or worse connectivity.
> After reading about Pai, it seems like he was hand selected to be the figure head with which the ISPs would finally take down Net Neutrality.

He's not. He's a generic Republican, appointed by Obama (since the commission is obligated by Congress to have no more than a simple majority of appointees from any one party).

The problem is, this is what all Republicans are like nowadays. Any other person that Obama could have appointed would be doing the exact same thing in these circumstances. And in fact, virtually every other regulatory agency and department is doing the exact same thing thanks to Trump appointees. They are un-interested in any semblance of reasonable governance, it's siphoning your money to their backers in the most direct and aggressive fashion, plain and simple.

Elections have consequences. A lot of prominent Silicon Valley figures backed Trump figuring it would be an easy tax cut for them, and this is the result. What's that story Trump liked to tell around the campaign trail, the frog and the scorpion?

Everyone fantasizes they'd be the ones to come out on top (Ayn Rand wrote a whole book about it!), but there is always a bigger fish. Welcome to laissez-faire capitalism, where buying the government is part of the game. Free Markets are not a stable social structure by themselves, they need government regulation to keep the playing field level.

The truth is not in the middle, and not all viewpoints have equal merit. We have one reasonable party whose positions you may or may not like, and one batshit insane party that begins tearing everything down as soon as they're in power. Shame it takes a lesson like this for people to realize that.

Sorry to be blunt, and sorry to bring politics into this forum. But that's the way it is.
Naive question: when an exchange sells, I assume they can decline to buy if they don't have a buyer or too much inventory?

For example, if suddenly everyone wants to sell BTC, the price would drop, at which point the exchange could buy the BTC at a much lower price, or not buy at all?

(unless they commit fraud, massively purchase BTC without having the actual money to back it, then not be able to wire money out of our accounts?)
Really it's just a lot of googling and looking for good tutorials that explain how the Bitcoin protocol works. Whenever you hit a concept you don't understand, google it.

The Bitcoin Developer Documentation is gold: https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-documentation

Start by defining your basic objects, and then begin adding their methods, just like you would any sort of program. The basic objects here are the Blockchain, Transactions, and a Client to interact with the chain. The rest is just implementing rules for how these objects work together.
This is like saying you can't lend out a dollar bill you don't have. It's strictly true, but doesn't accurately represent how the banking system work. The $1,000 dollars in my Charles Schwab account don't correspond to 1,000 physical dollar bills somewhere. They are simply a number in a database somewhere. When I go and withdraw that money, I get back a random selection of $1 bills that other people have deposited.

A bitcoin bank would work the same way. You deposit bitcoins by sending them to the banks wallet. They put a number in a database saying that you have 20 bitcoins in your account. If you then withdraw it, you will get a random selection of bitcoins they have in their wallet.
If you were to cite verifiable sources I would say this is a fair point.
Opinion aside, you're dumb to buy an Echo or similar device now. Why? Because people who really really don't want one will be receiving them as gifts in about 3 weeks. Those are going to end up on eBay for nearly nothing. If you actually want one, wait a month.
Agreed. There is an additional simple point of view which I believe clarifies the situation, which is to look at the total costs and total "value created" ("social welfare") under different systems. In other words, you ask what is the "first best" and what system can achieve it.

Consider selling wheat. If one company owns all the wheat fields, or the wheat fields are evenly split among two companies, the total amount invested in growing wheat is the same. And since multiple companies means competition, lower prices, and more consumers served, having multiple companies is more efficient in the econ sense (higher social welfare = total value - total cost).

But with fiber infrastructure, having two copies of the infrastructure is a huge waste of total resources. It is far more efficient to only have one set of wires. The problem is if they are controlled by a monopolist, they will keep high prices and serve fewer people. So a single copy of infrastructure with a monopolist is sub-optimal, but so is multiple copies of infrastructure with competition. Optimal is a single copy of infrastructure along with regulation or some other means of keeping prices lower than monopoly.

Of course, you can still try to implement market competition over those wires via regulations that force companies to share the wires, etc.
I only raise chemical addiction as a possible exception because nearly everybody agrees there are ways to become addicted to certain chemicals without somehow choosing to do so first, e.g. you get hurt in an accident that is no fault of your own and the doctors administer medication to you that you become addicted to.
This story has been all over the news in the last 24 hours, but it's sending my bogometer well into the yellow because Faraday cages are a simple and effective defense against any electromagnetic interference. (That's why you can safely peer into your microwave oven while it's pouting 1500 watts into your leftover lasagna.) So this feels like a Saddam-has-WMDs-style disinformation campaign to me. It also has a whiff of desperation to it since we really so seem to be pretty helpless to stop NK from developing the ability to deliver nukes to the continental U.S. without more collateral damage to Seoul than the American public is likely willing to accept (to say nothing of the residents of Seoul!)

I fear that the ethos of tell-a-lie-often-enought-and-it-becomes-the-truth has permeated very deeply into the U.S. government. That approach often works in politics. In physics, not so much.
> I have no concerns over privacy.

And that is your right. Where I have problems with this attitude is the question wether all those around you, family or guests you might have over, feel the same way. They're also impacted by this decision, yet they get no say in it.
> despite

Because.
That's at least one thing junk bonds and college degrees have in common.
Actually, it doesn't assume that ;)

While you'll generally have a set of rows with a (more or less) consistent set of columns, the parser is capable of detecting blocks within a sheet that have to be treated differently (i.e., they go into a different "table"). This is why we are looking for beta testers - we need more of these scenarios. Care to join?
Stocks only recovered because of unprecedented money printing by central banks across the world. That experiment is, at best, half over. I'll trust in bitcoin, thanks.
When you keep your phone for 4 years each time, you need to get one with good specs, and I’m not certain that the SE is going to last as long as an 8.
The camera is a huge factor too.
Ask HN: Can I update to Xcode 9.2 without updating to macOS High Sierra?
I was going to update to Xcode 9.2, released on Dec 4th, but noticed that macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 is stealthily included in this update. Screenshot:(https://njarboe.com/images/Xcode9.2UpdateMessage.png). I had read about Apple tricking people into updating to High Sierra, a la Windows 10, but it was still a bit of surprise to see it myself. Does installing this update really install High Sierra (I would guess it does) and is there any way to just get the Xcode update?
Announcing Parcel: A blazing fast, zero configuration web application bundler
> didn't mention San Francisco, Seattle, New York or Los Angeles which have all been run by Democrats for decades.

Are you really citing SF, New York, and Los Angeles as success stories. Those areas have some of the highest rates of homelessness in the US. In addition to the run away costs of living in those cities, they are certainly not models for success. Those examples don't help your argument...
Certainly there are fair reasons for hiding capabilities, and they seem quite adept at determining what is going into the sea or not, but in a war of words environment if it was a certainty as THAAD propenents seem to claim a single shootdown would be a huge PR blow for nk.

It's just not reliable enough to risk and as such is still a last resort measure.

Defending against a nuclear ICBM is not possible to do reliably. It's a sad reality.
Of course it's listening, at all times. Otherwise it would not be able to react to the trigger phrase. What is interesting is whether it sends this data anywhere, and that is probably impossible to ascertain, since it could store it for a while and tunnel it out with innocent looking traffic.

It would be interesting if it could be determined if it stores the passively obtained data at all. If one could monitor writes to memory while in passive state it might give a clue.
Don't forget Globus and Condor!
> Otherwise it sounds like a vague claim that every religious institution would make.

Yeah it's like when people defend hazing. "Oh it builds character!" No thanks please.
I presume you are talking about formulas here?
they're problems best tackled at a different scale.

I'm curious. Which way?
Announcing the S2 Library: Geometry on the Sphere
> the market is extremely illiquid

Trading is dominated by smart money -- whales, arbitrageurs, etc. Coinbase may have a lot of newbies buying 0.002 BTC, but these aren't the ones trading Tether.

Whales and arbitrageurs have many facilities for withdrawing national currencies. They've completed the AML/KYC process. They have access to multiple banks in multiple countries.

If the smart money knows Tethers are fractional reserve, if they know cryptocurrencies are bubbling, wouldn't they withdraw?

Wouldn't the smart money put downward pressure on exchange rates?

And if the market is that illiquid, a little downward pressure would be magnified into even more severe price drops.

Since that's not happening with Tether, BTC or ETH, there must be another explanation.

Maybe the smart money knows something that isn't obvious to the rest of us.
Artificial intelligence – can we rise to the challenge of mass unemployment?
> This is a fact we can verify with tools like Wireshark.

Is it really? I don't think you'd be able to detect steganographic communication or targeted attacks like this.
You can, but you need to drop the entire zero-width assertion if the repetition allows zero occurrences.
They had KJI on their video feeds for 20ish minutes when he was at one of the launches.

It will be interesting to see if not blowing him and the missile up will be considered a mistake..
A service mesh needs a data plane (e.g. Envoy) and a control plane (e.g. Istio). Conduit has both in one product.
CryptoKitties craze slows down transactions on Ethereum
Just a heads up, NCIX has filed for bankruptcy.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12115/ncix-files-for-bankrupt...
Elevators have better latency, but conveyor belts have much better bandwidth.
There is the problem. I have full respect for "useless" degrees. If people want one then they should get one. However since it is "useless" you should not be mortgaging your future to get it. Get a "real job" first and pay for the degree out of your pocket, perhaps taking night classes.

As a member of society I need you to take care of yourself. You are a burden on society if you don't have a productive job paying your own way. We provide a "safety net", but the less who use it the better. Too many people using the safety net will make society break down. We believe is education required to be productive, so we subsidize education to get more productive people in society.

Or to put it simply: If you love art, get an art degree.
Meet Uber’s Open Source Tool for Preventing Resource Exhaustion by DNS Outages
I've seen this form of scientism playing out frequently on Reddit and other Internet forums lately. Discussion will be about some piece of controversial research, e.g. GMOs or vaccines. People who want to discuss the merits of the research are shouted down by what I can only describe as 'science fanbois' -- anything that is 'against science' must be wrong.

They're missing the inherent tension in science between a received body of knowledge and the skepticism it takes to produce new knowledge.
How is that retaining it's value?
That's nearly 10% gone after 7 years.

And that's assuming 1.5%, some years are worse.
looks hardwired: https://medium.com/@justlv/google-home-mini-teardown-compari...
I've heard it said golf is probably on the high end of athletism of what might be termed skill sports like darts, billards, bowling. Lots of eye hand coordination required, some specific strength/power requirements, no aerobic fitness/reaction time requirement.
I generally agree that Windows has done a good job of getting faster on the same hardware (particularly boot time) over the last 10 years, but the hardware requirements have changed.

Disabling desktop composition (the Desktop Window Manager/Aero) was a supported option on Windows 7, but is not an option for W8 and above.
Windows 8 also requires NX and SSE2 support, which leaves out 2003/2004-era P4 and Athlon XPs.
> For $30, an Echo is a steal.

For an extra $5 they'll throw in a smart plug https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KWEAH1K
There are others who think it's okay to discredit scientists and scholars because they understand exactly how research works.
But why mention the percentage? Just say the absolute value itself. $x per transaction.
4 vital things to do *before* marketing your new startup
Some gems:

> Every scholar has a right to make mistakes—if he makes mistakes correctly.

> Weigh pros and cons on the same set of scales.

> Do not hope for chance and luck. The law of gravitation was created in Newton's head and not in the apple.
Something else to consider if you're adventurous:

Dumpster diving.

No, seriously - if you go around various industrial business parks and whatnot, and don't rile the security guards too much, you'd be surprised at what you can find - and many times it's just sitting next to the dumpster, not in it. A lot of companies upgrade their machines, but either don't know what to do with their old machines, or don't want to take the time or energy (laziness) to recycle them properly or donate them (paperwork, ya know) - so to the dumpster they go!

Another option (though you typically have to pay something - but very little) are sales at hamfests. Find one in your area, spend a few dollars getting in to the fest, and bring with you a couple hundred bucks and see what you can buy. It may not net you the latest and greatest hardware, but you might find something worthwhile on occasion.

That, or you'll walk away with something you never expected to see or purchase (you'd be surprised at the stuff that shows up at these fests when old hams clean out their garage). TBH, I think it's an ecosystem of hams selling to other hams to keep the stuff around because they run out of storage - kinda a community distributed physical storage system...lol.
Ask HN: What is your Golang web-dev tech stack?
I picked up Golang recently and I am curious about how people use it to develop web applications. How does your tech stack look like?
> Physical attacks are, in my opinion, uninteresting, because you may as well just plant an old fashioned bug.

The one benefit is the target is going to specifically locate this device in a location where it can hear them, and will relocate it appropriately if they move furniture, rooms, houses, etc. There's nothing physical to discover to tip them off.

It's a listening device disguised as a listening device. No need to hide, even though it's in plain sight.
you don't seem to be interested in or for the open internet with your comment.

Literally a non comment.

Of course they will try and make it illegal. Of course its privatised, do you have a few spare hundred millions to buy some up and use it?

If you put some thought into the future of this country for just 1 second. You wouldn't have made that sort of non comment. Your not interested in the future. Which makes you a liability for all of us who are interested in it.

Good luck.
Aetna CEO Set to Reap About $500M If CVS Deal Closes
Boom Supersonic Partners with Japan Airlines
Newegg. They have excellent service, and are also socially good due to their fighting against patent trolls.
The way to deal with this email style (in my experience) is to read absolutely nothing into any aspect of the communication and respond succinctly to exactly what they said. But that would probably only work if your boss is writing that way because he's actually trying to manage many things and communicate efficiently. If he's doing it as a way to look cool or whatever, he might just get mad at you.
'Removing a single consumer electronic device from your life isn't going to impact those global markets' <- Indeed it will not. Only if society begins viewing owning and using resources differently (which will happen eventually once certain resources get scarce), change will happen.

This is why I am so pessimistic about humanity. It's an outrageous opinion to sacrifice even a bit of convenience for not using resources.

I see the angry downvotes pouring in on my previous post because (unsurprisingly) people get angry at having their consumerist lifestyle criticised.
Morals behind anti-vaccination: Vigilance against tyrannical, impure shots
State schools are still ridiculously expensive
Why couldn't they just open your device and implant another device?

It wouldn't even have to be conspicuous, maybe just replace a power supply board with something with an extra blob.