skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked at a planetarium for a while. On nights when one of the naked-eye planets were low in the sky, we would get dozens of calls from people either wanting to know what they saw, or trying to report a UFO.

Often, these reports would claim that the light was flashing and jumping around - an effect from seeing it through a thick layer of atmosphere between the observer and the horizon.

Meteor showers or individual meteorites were another rich source of these reports. The variations that can occur here are enormous - see e.g. "Observation of Fireballs" and "Fireballs and Meteorite Falls": https://www.imo.net/observations/fireballs/observations/, https://www.imo.net/observations/fireballs/meteorites/

The first link above points out:

> "The collision of the meteoroid with atmospheric particles causes ablation, and thereby ionization, of both atmospheric and meteoroid constituents. While most of these excited states exist for about 10^-8 seconds only, there are also some atomic states which may persist for times exceeding several seconds (metastable levels). The emissions from such levels may be visible for variable amounts of time, and are designated as persistent trains (see Baggaley, 1980). They appear bright in the night sky after the meteor itself has disappeared. A large meteoroid entering the atmosphere leaves a substantial amount of material in its wake which is distributed along its trajectory."

The kinds of visual effects this can produce are affected by where the trail is relative to the observer - again, looking through more atmosphere tends to create additional effects.

And of course, planets and meteors are not the only causes of relatively uncommon visual effects. Clouds, refracted sunlight or moonlight, smoke, jet trails, etc. are all capable of producing effects whose true cause may either not be apparent to a casual observer or even not without careful study by trained observers.

In short, large numbers of eyewitnesses to something unexplained is most likely to demonstrate the limitations of untrained observers seeing some unusual but perfectly ordinary phenomenon.
Steve Blank Bonfire of the Vanities
There is a J interpreter Android app which works like a charm.
I enjoyed solving the Project Euler problem set in it. You might too:
http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/System/Installation
Upon a diagnosis of brain cancer, Eric Sun set out to achieve some musical goals
The Philosophy of Computer Science
The most fascinating part of the article was the tidbit about how fire was a potential factor in the differentiation of humans and other primates. If the theory holds true, then society perhaps has a greater impact on our evolution than previously thought — as the use of fire is not something in our genes but taught to us by others.
> They always try to say, in roundabout ways, that they are not creating money out of thin air

How else would one create money?
I've seen this mentioned multiple times here. Did you go to any of the retreats? Could you share a bit more info, about your experience?
Yes. AS/400's architecture is superficially very similar to this. All AS/400 resources are objects with a unique 128-bit ID that can be used directly as a pointer, for example. Actually, it goes even further back to the System/38 in the late 70s.

We're finally catching back up to 1978.
Oh boy. It would suck ass to see those guys busted by SEC for offering unregistered securities. The voting rights will definitely make it a security from SEC's standpoint, so the only question is whether they will be considered too small of a fish to bother.

The irony with the ICO market is that it's safe for total scams with untraceable founders and it's safe for big players like FileCoin that voluntarily comply with the securities laws. But if you're a well-meaning techie with no legal team, you may be easily breaking dozens of security-related regulations without even realizing it.
Thanks for the clarification, makes a lot of sense regarding that your post is US-centric.

It seems the US is #18 on the Corruptions Perception Index [1] behind New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong (in contrast to China who are #74) and a whole slew of European countries. Note # doesn't say much about absolute numbers.

> Actually, the urban poor vote strongly Democratic

Not sure what urban poor exactly means but I've seen a documentary series [2] about certain groups and why they voted for Trump. Because he's anti-establishment. They see him as a potential savior whereas Clinton was seen as the status quo. It would not surprise me if these people would normally vote Dems but this time they did not. Anyway, if they vote Dems, then they're a potential target for this rhetoric by the Reps.

> It's small business owners who are the target of this rhetoric, and it's because there's a lot of truth there: the cost of regulatory compliance often falls most heavily on small businesses that have just over 10 workers.

Them as well, but not solely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6082934/
Or maybe they’re a coalition, encompassing factions of vastly different ideologies and priorities who internally struggle for directional control of the party, but always need to keep the other factions pleased enough. Just like the other party. Don’t let yourself by blinded by partisanship. Your post is kind of absurd as a reaction to someone suggesting that maybe some of the other party’s ideas are sensible.
Audiobooks have been a real help for me, especially Audible which makes everything very easy. My problem is with some narrators of non fiction books. Is it me ? Or some narrators are so bad that actually makes you don’t want to listen. While the majority of them are good or acceptable, some are really painful to listen. Is like if you have a science book, and the narrator doesn’t find it interesting, he/she will let you know.
Decentralization Roundup for 2017
The important thing is, though: will it be able to self-drive on street? No.

It will be the most comfortable car there is for the maker, but it won't drive itself.
In my circle of peers, and perhaps beyond, we use "clever" as a pejorative. It roughly means what you said in the last sentence, "more of a display of cleverness than actual cleverness." In other words, calling a piece of code clever, indicates that it was made too complicated to easily grok. We also have an explicit goal of making code not clever.
You might like Haskell. The only possible conditional is a boolean and in general it's quite picky and precise about everything (with a few notable exceptions like partial functions).
As opposed to staring at your lap or the middle distance to demonstrate how you couldn't give a flying rat's ass about them?
Man, I'm having this problem right now at work and it's been a nightmare. Admittedly the problem is like 90% cultural.

People (on my team) don't understand pipeline and they absolutely don't understand Groovy. Before, they would just write a job with a shell script that e.g. ran valgrind, etc. Lots of small repos with similar steps, so they'd write one job and apply it to 20 different repos. It worked pretty well.

That's still an option with pipelines, but it feels much more discouraged (to e.g. write a shared pipeline job that runs a multi-line shell script).

It's also just a bit of an organizational nightmare to see 200+ jobs on the main screen (as opposed to 20 jobs that did the same thing for 200 repos).

Unfortunately, it also seems like declarative pipeline is limited enough that we end up writing a lot of Groovy. I sorta get why Groovy became the official scripting language, but it's like pulling teeth getting people to learn even basic Groovy.

I realize, again, that a lot of this is a cultural problem. Mostly just trying to give a counterpoint that pipelines don't always look as clean as the article implies, especially for orgs with a lot of repos (where committing the same 'test.sh' file to each repo doesn't make a lot of sense).
The counter demo is 9.4mb in amsjs and 1.5mb is wasm.
The ends do not justify the means, rather the means determine the ends you get. And if the means you use are a complete and obvious disinterest in other people...
Apparently self driving cars will need very noticeable signals to warn following human drivers of sudden decelerations. Also crash avoidance algorithms can take into account the presence of following human drivers.
Who will be remembered in 1,000 years?
"Even after almost three years, Elm doesn’t seize to amaze me"

seize should be cease
Mathematical notation is highly ambiguous. See recent discussion of the alleged proof of the ABC conjecture (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15971802 ). If it was really unambiguous then we could parse it like computer code and decide if it is correct or not without all the controversy about what it really means.
Pig War (1859)
Is there really plausible deniability about use of a hard drive that isn't just all zeros (as, AFAIK, they come from the factory)?

I mean, I guess is depends on what burden of proof is needed in the case, certainly if it were balance of probability I'd be surprised if having the disk in a computer looking like it has been written to is sufficient to not make it plausible to deny.
Top 12 Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Books
Can't you get Zojirushi rice cookers pretty easily?
I really wish people could make it a habit to read articles.

The article defines the acronym and even mentions where it comes from.
This doesn't seem to solve any issues that markdown has and also fails to see how fast most modern Markdown implementations are. Using an unmaintaned 5 year old perl script for benchmarking is ignorant.
Prolific, be definition, speaks to volume and not quality? How does proof-reading contradict?

I would say that his lack of quality (dropped T on The ;] Yes I saw them too ) is perhaps supportive of his ability to be prolific "[...]make your first draft, your final draft."

I understand that you are saying that quality of edit indicates quality of thought or insight to you.
The chemical weapon remnants uncovered were from before the first Gulf War (1991). FTA:

The discoveries of these chemical weapons did not support the government’s invasion rationale.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush insisted that Mr. Hussein was hiding an active weapons of mass destruction program, in defiance of international will and at the world’s risk. United Nations inspectors said they could not find evidence for these claims.

AND

American government issued a detailed analysis of Iraq’s weapons programs. The widely heralded report, by the multinational Iraq Survey Group, concluded that Iraq had not had an active chemical warfare program for more than a decade.

The justification for the invasion was an active weapons program, which didn't exist. When people refer to the "WMDs" they refer to this non-existent program, rather than rusty old munitions.
I didn't say it's ok. I said Uber doesn't get to complain.

Indeed, my belief is that this guy's and Uber's behavior are both not-ok, which is exactly why Uber doesn't get to complain.
Interesting examples to pick.

I trained as a classical musician and when I picked up the guitar, I was too lazy to learn the notation and learnt the songs by ear and feel instead (this may be why my guitar is collecting dust in a corner). Conversely I know a lot of "amateur" musicians, some pretty advanced, who have learnt songs by ear and can't decipher musical notation of any kind, or understand any music theory.

Chinese looks complicated even to the Chinese, hence Simplified Chinese arriving in the 1950s (and according to Wikipedia, they've started another round of simplification in 2013). Without an alphabet, there are thousands of characters to learn (8,000 in the 2013 version). Ask any Western-born Chinese how fluent they feel and how easily they can read it...
Comparing this to markdown just seems completely off the, er, mark. It's more like a simplified version of HTML, which has been done many times before, e.g. https://github.com/padolsey/SIML
"USG craves mechanical processes for decision-making. If a decision is made mechanically, no one is responsible for any bad results. Since mechanical management tends to produce bad results, this ass-covering imperative perpetuates itself. Of course, everyone in USG wants to be "in the loop" on everything - even the disasters. Better to be in on a fiasco than twiddling your thumbs around a success. Who needs responsibility?

And mechanical decision models have another benefit. Obviously, USG makes real decisions all the time. Somewhere inside the great machine, there are real people with real power. But, since they exert that power by massaging a mechanical decision process - by disguising their personal whims, which are just as personal as anyone's, in the trackless bureaucratic wastes of law or science or the like - they get to rule in secret. Power without responsibility. What fun!

Mechanical decision processes perform a kind of power laundering. Because all these processes can be gamed and hacked and massaged, they are not truly mechanical at all. But since the machine is so complex as to be incomprehensible to outsiders, no one can see the true power structures of the Beltway."
> "IIRC, at the end of last year they promised 1.0 by the end of this year."

To be honest, I don't think that was ever a realistic goal, even when it was set. The only benefit of setting such a goal ahead of when a clear release date can be determined is in keeping up momentum during the awkward middle phase of language maturity, when key functionality is clearly missing but you want to maintain interest. This isn't just a Red thing, it's fairly common.

If I had to guess, even by the end of next year, it's much more likely we'll be looking at a 0.7.x release (or, best case, 0.8.x) rather than 1.0. The good news is that the language is likely to be generally useful around 0.7.x (assuming the roadmap is stuck to), as that's the point when the network I/O features are being implemented.
Immunity's Aitel Backflips on WannaCry Claims, Kaspersky
The post just seems like a verbose post hoc justification for wanting to reinvent something. Which is fine, a lot of good learning comes out these toy domain languages. I just don't see any technical benefits or conceptual leaps here other than to say "I built this".

It's like back in the day when someone would proclaim smarty to be a disaster and then release their template system that was conceptually exactly the same baring some syntactic sugar
> it’s usually defined by some of its features, such as: reification of functions, avoidance or banning of functions with side-effects, use of higher-order functions and so on. But, doesn’t that sound like a collection of random features? What’s the motivation behind them?

It's a bummer to pose that question as though there isn't an answer, when the answer is well known and very important.

The motivation of avoiding side effects is because we humans make more mistakes when there are side effects. Functional programming is about making a piece of code not depend on anything outside itself. When you do that, it's easier to get right, and harder to screw up the code. In a word, it's safer.

> I’ll present you a view which, at least to me, makes that set of features seem coherent; and functional programming, like a deep and beautiful paradigm: Functional programming attempts to reduce programs to equations.

We also make more mistakes when we make things too abstract, remove specificity. Write code that is too concise, and you lose meaning, context, and readability.

The "functional python" is the best looking code in the article to my eyes. It explains what it does to the reader, semantically. The APL & J examples aren't very enticing to me. I'm curious about them, but I wouldn't want to work in a codebase where if you don't know what the name of the function means, you can't figure out what it does.

Making code mathier is good occasionally, when working on mathy problems, but generally I'd rather have words and const statements in my functional programs than a concise expression with single letter variables.
I very much doubt that there will be a fundamental change. The persistent memory is still not always-on RAM. For true reliable persistence one still needs carefully flush caches, ensure write barriers etc. This is something better done by libraries, which is not that different from programming today using API for a filesystem or DBMS.
> A drop in the level of the uterus during the last weeks of pregnancy as the head of the fetus engages in the pelvis.

The word lightening can also mean 1) to make something lighter or 2) the transfer of crude oil to a relatively larger tanker from a smaller in order to enter a port.
Retailers have taken it to another level by requiring you to commit to availability without a commitment to have work. Nobody gets 40 hours — you target around 28 typically.

Control and keeping high turnover is an objective in retail management. It’s usually cheaper and more efficient to have full time staff, but it’s easier to skimp 5% of labor hours and force the salaried manager to fill the breach.
> DeepMind did not have the requisite approvals for research from the Health Research Authority (HRA) and, in the case of identifiable data in particular, the Confidentiality Advisory Group (CAG)

This is kinda the crux of the matter. All the exciting, and likely beneficial, machine-learning that we would expect from a relationship between an organisation that is good with analytics and another organisation with a lot of data, can happen only under the guise of research.

Any kind of medical research requires ethical approval, and in the UK, this is not an easy process. It requires a responsible organisation (usually academic, like a university, but it can be commercial), extensive documentation on how the data will be collected, handled, processed. Consent and information leaflets, duration of study etc etc is all part of this, and this needs to forwarded to the regional ethics committee - a terrifying panel of around 8 people who are there to ensure that you've thought of everything surrounding the ethical aspects of your research. After this, the hospital's R&D department need to check through and make sure that the things they are responsible for - i.e. ensuring patient data does not leave the premises/country without good reason, are all ok.

There's good reason for all of this, too - it's not that long ago that major breaches of medical ethics have been part of research [1], and medical confidentiality is taken seriously in the UK.

As an example of research done right - here is an observational study on nearly 1 million patients, tracking their admission, discharge from hospital and subsequent complications [2]. Every single patient consented and agreed to their information being used by the researchers for these purposes.

Personally, I'm excited to see machine/deep learning applied to medical data - it's clearly going to be of huge benefit (well, it's happening anyway within academic institutions), but no one should be suggesting it is done without the usual ethical approval. Probably what needs to happen here is for Google or similar to pair up to organisations used to obtaining ethical approval for research - Universities, and work collaboratively with them.

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41811750/ns/health-health_care/t/u...

[2] http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b4583
We would work less if we didn't spend and produce so much junk.
JVM Anatomy Park #14: Constant Variables
Maybe we post again after Xmas to see if we can get some experts in the field ...

That's a good point - I'll make another post in another week or so.
Some of the local landowners do want to change. They want to tear down some buildings and build new taller ones. Local zoning laws are what prevents them from doing so.
I personally have found the article pretty informative as I can relate to the topic very well. Takes me enormous amount of energy to write something that's more than a few random sentences together. There is a well-known fear of public speaking and in my case it's more like a fear of public writing.

Still looking for an efficient way to break thoughts down into pieces and that's one way to approach it.
Not sure how that's a coherent reply to that specific post but as an overall response to my expressed viewpoint I get it.

I'm European, for me practically all politicians in the US are extreme far right. Its just that generally the Democrats are slightly less extreme, and perhaps slightly less authoritarian (following politicalcompass.org theory of x-axis and y-axis [1])

I do agree that one should never dismiss a party, especially not in the United States of America which is practically a two party system where you pick Red or Blue. Because you never know which candidate is put forth. Less short-term wise we've also seen shifts in party politics, for example the neo-conservatives taking over the Reps.

[1] https://politicalcompass.org/analysis2
Definitely. I worked for a while on a Markdown-based CMS. Markdown renderers vary widely in performance, probably because a) it's pretty easy to write a basic renderer, and b) performance doesn't matter for many use cases. But I did a bake-off, found some decently fast ones, and was confident they could be made faster if it mattered.
...volunteers work in two-hour shifts, backed up by dozens of sponsors ranging from Microsoft to the National Defense Industrial Association, Taco Bell and the local Amy’s Donuts in Colorado Springs.

Taco Bell?! According to The Polar Express, only true believers can still hear the bell. Well, I can hear the Bell and enjoy XXL Grilled Stuft Burritos at the same time.

Merry Christmas!
I actually have a Zojirushi, but while I was in Japan I came across some rare rice cookers and even some modded ones that I would have loved to have brought back. I have been unable to find similar ones online, doesn’t help that I don’t know much Japanese.
Somewhat ambiguous headline - I thought maybe she had died.
Example please? Because I'm tempted to respond that there are no inherently messy problems, only insufficient solutions.

What problem could possibly exist that only could be implemented in a convoluted way?

Sounds more like: me and my team made trade offs that were, in retrospect, bad and now we don't know how to transform our code into a new program will fulfills the same requirements but is easier to inspect and understand.