skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As another anecdote in favor of homeschooling, as a kid I was homeschooled in a small town in north Idaho and I believe I've escaped all the stereotypes of the awkward homeschooled adult. Quite the contrary, I'm a very successful app developer. And even though I work remotely I have a great social circle.

Of the childhood friends I still keep in touch with, I know several other who were homeschooled. None of them are awkward, antisocial or unsuccessful.
A think a governing body solves the wrong problem. Most of the ethical issues that have arisen around data science in particular are actually competency issues. It's not that someone deliberately set out to target already-vulnerable populations. It's that they designed systems without building in checks for unintended consequences. A governing body accomplishes what any legal framework accomplishes: it provides instruction and incentives to limit liability. A legal framework is different than an ethical framework. What we need is an ethical framework.

The original Hippocratic Oath did a fairly good job of this by stipulating ways that a doctor could prove his competence. Doctors who adhered to the oath weren't better doctors because they had some kind of internal moral compass or external adjudicating body. They were better doctors because only the doctors who had competency to spare were willing to make the sacrifices that adherence to the oath required.

https://hackernoon.com/on-the-difficulty-of-creating-a-data-...

Ethical problems get solved (as much as that type of problem can ever really be "solved") by individual practitioners refusing to work with other individual practitioners who refuse to adhere to some basic best practices. That creates a network of competent and trustworthy individuals, who are still totally fallible, but who put their own practice up toe constant public scrutiny.

Ethical problems are problems of systemic risk. Systemic risk doesn't get solved through organizations.
Thank you for this! I have been looking for IC design MOOCs for awhile.
The F35 has already been used in theater by the Israeli's as for the F16I downing it seems that they just assumed that they would not be fired upon they were flying at high altitude exactly in the sweet spot of the Iranian and Syrian AA deployed in the region which is what happens when you fly for nearly 30 years with impunity.

The F16I was shot down over Israel not over Syria despite Syria having the capability to shoot down aircraft over the entire territory of Israel pretty much except for it's most southern parts it was always assumed that they would never fire at Israeli jets inside Israel's territory.

Last time when Syria fired at Israeli jets within Syrian territory Israel has uses it's missile defense system to shoot down the Syrian AA missiles however it seems that this time it didn't happen, likely due to the positioning of the jets within Israel.

So for the most part what would happen is that Israel would start taking evasive measures when flying combat sorties even in it's territory, likely go back to the same path it used to take which is fly low over the med then cross into Syria from it's coastline or through Lebanon via the Baalbek valley.

Israel would also likely push more ABM/AM batteries into it's northern parts to provide additional cover to it's air assets as well as potentially start using it's ground based standoff weapons rather than relying solely on air deployed munitions.
> You can use an induction machine as a generator, but it has to be connected to the grid.

That's not true.

> You need a rotor field to generate power.

Residual magnetic field is enough to start the process, absent that a quick DC zap will do.

> In a permanent magnet machine this field comes from the magnet, but in an induction machine this comes from the motion of the stator field (Lenz' Law).

Yes. Fortunately rotors retain a bit of magnetism after you run them to a stop, which is enough to get things going again later on.

> To maybe put it another way, there is no way to charge a dead battery with an induction machine.

Yes there is, unless the induction machine is fresh from the factory and has never run at all.
Uh, this is just a PR stunt for the movie at the bottom, right? The court report link is broken...
I thought that quote was by Abelson & Sussman in "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs".
I know there is a contingent of people who feel this way, but to be honest I've never heard a compelling argument out of them other than the vague complaints about type classes.

You can certainly do things the way Hedgehog does and it's great. I think many of the nice parts of Hedgehog are not incompatible with quickcheck.
It's mostly not a problem of ethics.

That 1000000x is what you get from allowing corporations of unlimited size. Each level of management will earn what the lower level earns times some factor... making it exponential as you climb the corporate ladder.

Huge corporation size also means you get corporations blackmailing congress to get bailouts. The typical huge corporation is also able to engage in monopoly/monopsony behavior.

To make things extra awful, the largest corporations are the ones that are most difficult to split up. They have political power. Enforcing our anti-monopoly laws mostly doesn't happen.

Possible fix: the larger the company, the higher the tax rate, causing companies to want to split themselves.
Why didn't their patent hold up? It seems like it was a novel idea that they invested a lot in bringing to market.
Simplistic solutions always appeal to the young and inexperienced.
ending anonymity also makes identity theft that much more lucrative.
There's only going to be one kind of music in my coworking space, bagpipe music https://open.spotify.com/track/1bUM4KAW0426M6uELs43lm?si=ihC... .

> Constant generic music is the worst part of retail, and that's saying something.

And getting away from the front-of-house area saturated by muzak doesn't promise much relief, because in the employees-only areas of any blue-collar workplace it's a near-certainty you'll find an FM boombox playing absolutely the worst top-40 station within range. There was a NYT article from a few months ago saying 'employers are starting to play music for their staff, what do we think of this?', basically an enormous shibboleth announcing that none of the people involved had ever worked for minimum wage in their lives.
Probably because research dating back to 1980s (see Peopleware) shows that shared offices are objectively less productive and result in less happy workforce?
Your kid will have many full online degrees on the level of conventional M.S., maybe even PhD, once he's adult. These days you have Georgia Tech's OMSCS/OMSA and Duke's MS in Health Analytics already; I am sure more will come.
For ripgrep, its author weighed in on programming Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7z64nr/oxidizi...
I've worked as a software engineer for over a decade and most of that time was spent in open office spaces. I am most productive in that environment.

I don't doubt that you are more productive in a different environment, but it's a pretty big leap to assume that every engineer is going to be productive in the same environment. Different people work different ways, and the answer is to find a workspace that suits you, not try to apply the work environment that works for you to the entire industry.
It's pretty easy to miss IMHO. The project could probably benefit from having this spelled out on the homepage.
Especially because technology drives automation, and automation pushes us ever closer to a very difficult question: What, exactly, will happen when all jobs which can be automated, are automated?
Meh, sorry. I meant this as a reply to a comment downthread which referenced https://www.codelitt.com/blog/my-first-10-minutes-on-a-serve...
What does conformity have to do with meritocracy? They seem orthogonal.
CASPaxos: Replicated State Machines Without Logs
I live in Illinois. I just looked up in-state tuition for UIUC = $17k/year. That is not cheap, but it's a lot less than many lower-ranking private schools. Loyola charges $21k. Roosevelt charges $26k.

UIUC is a great state school, one of the best in the country. I'd say you got a good deal. But yes, definitely not close to free.
"China will soon have air power rivalling the West’s

In some technologies, it has surpassed it"

https://www.economist.com/news/china/21737074-some-technolog...

"in two years’ time, if not before, America is likely to lose its monopoly of radar-beating stealth combat aircraft with the introduction into service of China’s Chengdu J-20. This has a much longer range than America’s new F-35 fighter and will be a serious threat to American warships in the Pacific."

"At least as worrying for American commanders in the region is the dramatic upgrading of China’s inventory of air-to-air missiles (AAMs). The short-range PL-10, which was introduced in 2015, is regarded by military analysts as comparable in performance to Western equivalents, such as the Sidewinder II. This year, the PL-15, a radar-guided “beyond visual range” missile (BVRAAM), should enter service. Carried by a J-20, the PL-15 can destroy an aircraft 50km away that is trying to evade it. “The Military Balance” believes that a version of the missile is in the works that will have a cruise speed of Mach 3. "
But where would all the mathematicians go?
It's a lousy hand to be dealt, but I don't see how he deserves to take 317k from a charitable organization over it. Everyone else who is born poor just has to live with it. But he gets free money because he has the genetics of rich people who never met him nor even knew of his existence.

The one case I could legitimately see being made for harm to the child caused by being switched at birth is if there is some sort of genetic disease that they could have had diagnosed or treated sooner if they knew their birth parents. Not going to a fancy private school isn't harm though, it's just lack of privilege.
Career outcomes are strongly correlated with IQ in the US, suggesting a fairly robust meritocracy.

Japan is also not “The West” - if you’re being sarcastic, it was a bit under the radar.
If I understand your comment you are equating more houses to more traffic. (the 'standstill' point).

If that is the case, you may find, as I have, some interesting systemic properties in the various studies of Bay Area traffic. The part that really struck me is that traffic is more closely related to people living 'outside' a town or region than people living 'inside' a region. The analysis postulates a model like this:

Lets say you have a single large employer in a city, and no housing. Then every person who goes to work comes from somewhere else to get to the employer, then leaves to go back to where they live. This pattern was exacerbated in the 60's when new cities were all work and the communities around them were 'bedroom' communities. That leads to arterials to the city that get massively clogged during rush hour (and greatly reduced night life / commerce because no one lives there).

Now consider the opposite extreme, you have a large employer or industry and everyone who works there lives in the same town. Now you get short rush hours because people near to the employer can get there easily by walking or biking, people further away can drive but the drive is short. Additionally because there aren't any employees coming in from out of town there is no traffic on the roads between the town and other towns that is commute related.

I am not saying that any place is at either extreme, but in the Silicon Valley area (aka the 'south bay') it is believed that an imbalance exists between available housing and jobs, and further that the imbalance contributes to congestion on the freeways and arterials throughout the various cities. Many of the cities are building additional housing and doing it near transit so that it maximizes the choices the residents have for how they want to travel. There are however some cities that are not so convinced, Cupertino comes to mind, which continues to add office space without adding housing. This is forcing more people to drive through Cupertino to get to work.
Paired with an anonymity layer and TOR hidden services for direct communication it is really solving a lot of the problems present todays Web, where DPIs can mess with the unencrypted HTTP contents, DNS responses faked, web servers and CAs hacked and centeralized services decide on content availability.
I've had this problem in almost every office I've worked at. It shouldn't be different but for whatever reason, people seem to think it beneath them. I often wondered what state some of my co-worker's houses were in.
The real interesting part of this is the formal verification tools they described which were used to uncover these vulns.

It seems that, while not a silver bullet, FV tools of this sort would be the most reliable way of discovering (and preventing) these sort of issues in microarchitecture.
Research Interview
Hello Hackers!

My name is Matthew Zucca and I am a research assistant for Kelly Bronson at the University of Ottawa. Kelly's research is focused on agriculture, technology, and data. Naturally, she has become interested in people with computer skills especially those interested in digital agriculture ("precision ag").

If you know of anyone who might fit the bill, please forward them this email, and encourage them to contact myself (at this email) or Kelly at kbronson@uottawa.ca. If you have any further questions, please ask.

Best,

Matthew Zucca
> Isn't this book too academical for any practical learning of algorithms and data structures?

I don't think so, I've worked through it and I didn't find it that difficult/academic. But I actually don't read a lot of computer science books / textbooks so I don't really have much to compare it to other than mathematical texts which I do read a lot of.

If you don't like proofs or math then its probably not the best text to work through, on the other hand, if you like rigorously understanding the material I would highly recommend it.

Either way, from what I remember it gives psuedocode for just about everything and has lots of graphs and pictures for elucidating the material, so you could probably just skip the math if you have an allergy to corrolaries, theorems, and proofs. Admittedly, that extra insight is probably a lot of the reason I liked it so much.
Most people find that they like some Black Mirror episodes a lot more than others, it's inherent in the nature of this type of anthology SF format.

The people being people thing is _right_. A good antidote to the sort of beliefs we easily trick ourselves into here is to go read Samuel Pepys personal diary. Read about a year's worth, doesn't matter which bits, start in 1666 if you want to actually connect events to history (that's the year of the Great Fire of London). Pepys is over 350 years different in time from us. Yet he's not really different at all. He worries about money, he suffers illness, he moans about incompetent people, he lusts after pretty people who won't sleep with him (and to be fair, some who do). I say Pepys partly because he wrote this stuff down for his own records, whereas most earlier writers have an audience in mind and so we must assume they self-censor, and partly because he wrote just after English had settled down, his meaning is easy to follow without a modern translator between you adding their own interpretation.
The journalist is using the term "alpha male" colloquially. What was actually studied was a proxy for level of testosterone.
How an 'ugly,' unwanted weapon became the most popular rifle in America
> Either science isn't what we think it is

Science isn't what most people think it is. "Reliability" is not the point of science. It never has been. This whole process started with a bunch of old white guys tooling around in dark medieval cottages trying to turn urine into gold. And yet we've still managed to come pretty far.

Science is best understood as a very special form of dialogue. It doesn't matter so much what is being said but it's very important how it is said. It is not a problem at all if one group of scientists are putting out papers claiming X and another group fails to reproduce X. That's the whole point. It's exactly how the dialogue is supposed to go. It would be a problem if one group of scientist published a paper claiming X and then somehow forbid others from trying to reproduce X. Or, when the second group failed to reproduce X the first group sought to discredit or villify or suppress the second group. This would be a big problem and would indicate a termination of the scientific process.

The real problem is that this view of science as a neverending, specialized dialogue is not understood by most people, even most scientists, unless they've been exposed to the philosophy of science. That science in itself is so poorly understood leads to silly articles about a "reproduciability crisis" (as if there was ever a time when the majority of scientific papers were shown to be reproducible) but it makes scientific claims easily impersonated ie pseudo-science.

It's not clear what the solution really is here but worrying about the "reliability" of certain papers doesn't feel like it would really move the needle.
I took badosu's comment to mean that farseer's comment of "Eagerly waiting for the first combat engagement of F-35 with current gen Russian/Chinese SAMS or fighters" is in bad taste, and that nobody should want for anyone to have to be engaged in (likely lethal) combat.

IMO it's pretty fucked up to be eagerly awaiting killing of others, regardless of reason. It may, in this world, be deemed "necessary" by politicians and generals etc, but to derive pleasure and eagerly wish for it to happen really doesn't sit at all well with me.
The Israeli media reported that the IAF finished their investigation and blamed the crash on the pilot prioritizing target destruction over survivability, and that a different decision by the pilot would have prevented the loss of the plane.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/misjudgment-not-negligence-beh...

That's not a decision which implies a tactical switch to the F-35 for that sort of mission.
I agree with this. There comes a point (much sooner than most people like to recognize) when quality and safety get sacrificed to just getting things done. However, I think that's a manageable risk. Most focus - and tooling - centered on analytic/technical design rather than implementation has the potential to catch problematic implementations before they're shipped.

https://towardsdatascience.com/data-is-a-stakeholder-31bfdb6...

It's not fool-proof, of course, and I think a change in perspective away from just moving fast and breaking things would be quite healthy for the industry as a whole.
I feel like there's so many of these foundations, but how are the people doing the research able to keep track of and apply to them all? It would take a growing amount of time to find, read the requirements, prepare application materials, and submit the applications for each one. So just by existing, each additional foundation decreases the amount of actual work or research time for the non-profits. I'm seeing more and more non-profits hiring armies of grants managers who basically just seek out and contact then apply for foundation grants. Especially those working in "social change".

I would like to see these foundations "consolidate", and streamline their grants offering and application processes.
Tell that to any chemist laid off by Pfizer & their ilk.
Anecdotal reply, hot-desking at WW in central London.

* Some days noisy, some days very quiet. I have great headphones, but find myself more productive than when I worked at home. People are noisy, but generally the 'hum' is a sensible level, and it's only really irritating if someone is on Skype and conversing without headphones in (I'm not sure why that's more annoying that overhearing a face to face conversation, but it definitely is).

* Conversation is what you make it. I'm on first name terms with lots of people here, it's easy to make small talk, exchange a name, then intro someone to someone else. Before long, most regular faces know most regular faces.

* The one thing I missed most working at home was water-cooler chat. I go out of my way now to offer tea / coffee, ask about people's lives, whatever - I can have headphones on for 95% of the day, but that 5% is important. I didn't know anyone here before I joined.

* Our kitchen area is tidy 90% of the time. People are pretty good about cleaning up after themselves, the WW staff are generally very good, and if something is awful, asking it to be sorted is usually pretty painless.

I think generally I'm very pro WW. There are some annoyances; it's usually people drinking and drink-chatting too early. But I don't begrudge it and the building is big enough to go work somewhere quiet. Definitely far more productive than WFH.
It's pretty hard to put your foundation or key donor's name on "janitorial operating budget for 2018-2020"
Seems like an amazing service and very much needed by everybody that is not YouTube, because indeed video is too hard.

Also very cheap.

Video Stored: $0.007 per minute per month
Video Streamed: $0.0013 per minute streamed
It will be interesting to see if this approach works. I hope they have some plans for a serious evaluation. My anecdotal experience suggests that most people seems to be unable to cope with fallacies, classical or otherwise, and most seem to have problems separating truth from fiction. Moreover, we use fiction and "lies" as a rhetorical device when explaining complex events.
Sounds like Swype's mistake was either not getting a proper patent, or not enforcing it.

To be honest, though, I never did like using gesture based swipe typing. It always felt like a sloppy and imprecise input method to me.
Struggle Against MS-13 Hampered by Sanctuary Cities
Also: would he say the same?
Why the viewer request latency? 50ms kind of defeats its purpose
Thank you for the share. Simple and useful tips to bring UI to a prettier state. Especially for a "pure" programmer, myself, who has no idea how to make nice interfaces without being guided.
>But another explanation is that the rich child ends up a rich adult because his rich parents actually instill more merit in the child and he ends up with more skills and abilities.

How is that in itself not a form of privilege? is it different to attending an elite school?
>>Eagerly waiting for the first combat engagement of F-35 with current gen Russian/Chinese SAMS or fighters. It could cement lockheeds future for the next 50 years, or put them in hot water.

Its equally disturbing to those of us who detest war, and war machines, and their 'glorious application' towards inhuman goals.

Honestly, its repulsive to have to deal with the notion of 'shiny death machines being pit against each other for fun and profit', and not let a protest be said, in kind.

For the cost of a single death machine, the will for war could be bought: you just use it to deliver books and medicine and food, instead of death and mayhem and misery.
Conformity has nothing to do meritocracy?

Besides I know that mobility and meritocracy don't map perfectly but Japan is actually a society with more intergenerational mobility than the US and about half of Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Gatsby_curve#/media/File...
Building a Supply Chain for Your IoT Product
If merit is independent of your upbringing - the only thing that remains is your genetics.

If you are suggesting some are predisposed at birth to be better than others, which is obviously out of their control, then is a meritocracy even a goal we wish to achieve?