skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think incorrect (or even correct, but rare) narratives are dangerous. Especially when they're the feel-good type that people tell to make themselves feel better about the way the world works. (meritocracy, egalitarianism, etc)

Anecdata, but: I left academic hard science because I realized it was too difficult to get ahead; moved to the bay since I can code and it was a way to create a runway and find myself, and pitch companies. Got a contract coding gig, because a professor on the board of my roommate's company was impressed that I had independently implemented his prototype as a personal side project. Applied to 10+ startups for "real programming jobs", including through triplebyte, rejected by all, finally got hired by a roommate's friend (on reputation only) whose company needed asses in seats for an investor meeting.

Meanwhile, I'd been pitching 3 biotech ideas and one tech idea (I had written verilog for a hardware prototype of a deep learning chip) and got no bites on any of my pitches.

Finally, a friend offered me a VP product position (because he needed someone he could trust) which I was about to jump ship for, and then my current CEO counter-offered by agreeing to put his personal money as a lead in one of the biotech startups I'd pitched (that was somewhat meritocratic because he has seen how I operate as a coder in the company and was impressed, and I think he figures, probably correctly that if I'm that good a coder then my biotech skills are even better because that's what I'm formally trained in)

Since getting here, I haven't once advanced through pure merit, and have always advanced through connections.
I support the ability for Google to make this decision but we should not be celebrating this as a good thing. Instead, it should strike fear. Google has a disproportionate amount of influence through its ads and cannot act in the best interest of all individuals.
You’re assuming that an impending earthquake can’t be detected before it’s at full force.
BazQux Reader: https://bazqux.com

It's just like the old Google Reader, but 1) still alive, and 2) $20/yr subscription.

Absolutely worth it.
Very useful! Thank you for sharing this with your fellow applicants.
It seems that the fake news phenomenon could propel a company to derive worth to research what people are reading and matching it to their social media accounts.
SQLite is litteraly used by the military in their Android phones.
> He's already being forgotten by mainstream culture, which is not worse for it.

I disagree. Out of all pop-sci educators there's three that just about everyone who likes science knows: NDT, Bill Nye, and Carl Sagan.
Kudos to Tyler. (Maybe...) However, we'll never know what Theranos was really doing because people are too dumb to read beyond the headlines, and no one can gain from telling the truth.

Shame too, because the real story is much more interesting, as always. The company's board was a who's who of old power of the milind-complex/illuminati ascended from on low. People such as Riley Bechtel, William Perry, James Mattis, Sam Nunn, Bill Frist, David Boies. They even took George Shultz and Henry Kissinger out of cryostasis for this one. None of these people had any medical or biotech background.

I suspect Theranos was an elaborate money laundering plot for illicit war profits from the start. (Perhaps from whatever region of the world the mysterious 'Sunny' Balwani hails from?) Holmes made a great cover story slash scapegoat to distract attention from the real players.

And I'm sorry but the Tyler Shultz story doesn't pass the smell test either. Grandson of uber old power family who joins the company in some sort of new hire capacity for 8 months brings multi billion dollar company to its knees and causes embarrassing blowup for half of Washington, DC? Would you do this and disgrace your famous grandfather?

Maybe getting caught was part of their plan. Depending on the investor structure it sure would be a convenient way to vaporize one side of the books with no questions asked.
Before I had a family (which was some time ago) I did not watch TV nor own a TV. And iPlayer and its like were not dreamt of, still less a twinkle in the eye of a TV licence law. (I ran one of the first UK ISPs around that time.) I was not required to pay a licence fee and so did not. My family does watch TV and so we do have a licence. I still don't watch TV.
Would you rather be in an open field of a place with things above you?

The reason to stay indoors is if you're in a city or next to buildings where glass and shrapnel could fall on you. If you have open space outside, then that is a much better place to be.
I'm going to swoop in and recommend (read: shameless plug) my own RSS reader, Zuperlist. It's trying to do things a little differently: it prioritizes topics the user cares about. More details are on the home page: https://www.zuperlist.com
60/37/3 lead/tin/antimony solder

A quick search seems to indicate that this is not available for purchase anywhere?
Planting 2018 Trees this year and raisng funds on 2018Trees.com
Are you assuming nobody else is trying to exit at the same time? I can get out of my sixth floor apartment in 60 seconds but not if everyone in the building is trying the same thing.
Relevant XKCD https://xkcd.com/385/
After trying a few of the others after Google Reader shut down, I settled on https://tt-rss.org/. It has an official Android client and quite a few iOS clients as well.
>Crawl under a table? I am not facetious.

Yes actually (or go into a doorway or similar). I don't understand the derision extremely simple and basic response strategies (like the well designed and effective "duck and cover" for nuclear strikes) get when they can be absolutely enormous lifesavers. A huge amount of the human injury potential from a lot of major classes of disaster is from simple stuff like flying/falling glass and falling dense materials, all of which can do terrible things to an unprotected human body but are also absolutely trivial to deflect with another inert object. Shattered non-safety glass will cause tremendous damage to soft tissues, and someone can certainly be badly injured or killed by even a small weight like a brick or other dense objects that fall from just ceiling or high shelf height.

But none of those is going to go through heavy steel or wood. Typical work desks and tables (and of course institutional use furniture in general) are quite sturdy. Door frames tend to exhibit significant structural reinforcement as well and be away from many short range dangers. Putting an inch or two (4-6 cm) equivalent of hardwood, dense composite wood, or metal between a person and debris can be the work of seconds, and the difference between a brick landing on the table vs on someone's skull is not nothing, as is getting into a position protecting the face and vulnerable extremities and organs as much as feasible and being braced.

It's true that better architectural and infrastructure design matters tremendously and is worth continuing to work on, that if a heavy building pancakes then anyone inside is in trouble/toast, etc. But on a population survival/mass casualty reduction basis a little executed well can make a bigger difference then a lot of people give credit. The difference between death/grievous injury in many mass disasters can come down to relatively small differences in where someone is and what actions they take right before, and how practiced they are in taking the best actions promptly. Don't underestimate it.
We're also using it and I can only recommend it :-)
I'm not really digging deeply into this at all, because really does it matter, but for what it's worth the rationale this paper has for being more secure than RC4 (on which it is based, and which is infamously one of the most egregiously insecure mainstream ciphers) is a little flimsy.

For many years after the adoption of RC4, it was known that there were pronounced biases early in the RC4 keystream. IIRC, these were the weaknesses that the 802.11 attacks too advantage of.

But the more recent TLS attacks are based on a better understanding of RC4 keystream biases, and some of them (the Fluhrer-McGrew biases, at least) persist throughout the entire keystream. I don't think you can simply encrypt a long nonce to avoid them.

(I'm not an expert on this and could be wrong, of course).
I don't think that's the right comparison. Moving from LP to CD etc. is changing the source format, which loading FO3 assets in FO4 isn't doing. If you bought a better device for playing your media (analogous to the FO4 engine), say a laser turntable or a VHS player that caches the video in memory to facilitate better short-term rewinding/pausing, you wouldn't be expected to re-license the content. (The fact that they are physical products also has _some_ bearing)

VHS to DVD etc. is more akin to there being a re-release of FO3 with higher quality textures, and no-one is suggesting that owning the original necessarily entitles you to that.
If I, an investor, give you money because you tell me you have automated technology, but really it's people in a room, that's a lie and there is absolutely something wrong with it!!

If you can make the automated technology before I find out, well, maybe I won't sue you, but that sure doesn't make it right or acceptable.
No need, a plastic jug of water is good for decades. Yeah, it’ll have carcinogenic nasties in it after sufficient time, but not a huge problem for a temporary emergency situation.
Television-serial serial-killers typically have high IQs. It's the part of the conceit that keeps the character from getting caught, so they can keep making new episodes. They're smart enough to stay one step ahead of the law, but the chief investigator is also smart, so the killer can never get more than two steps ahead. The possibility of getting caught out from just one misstep keeps the tension in the show.

Real serial killers are average intelligence, chased by cops with average intelligence. They get caught for the same reasons that get other criminals collared. They get sloppy, and they fall into predictable patterns, or the cops get lucky. The only reason they can commit the same crime multiple times is that real investigative police work is difficult without CSI-style magical technology. Most people could formulate a simple set of rules that would keep their crimes separate from their public identity--until one of them hits a corner case and leaks critical information.

Don't burgle houses with dogs. Always burn the clothes you wore. Never look inside the package. Use encryption and dead drops. Put thermite on incriminating storage devices. Never work the same postal code twice. Don't work with a pimp. Always pay the boss exactly what you owe. Don't surface the submarine until you get within 50m of the floating dock. Wives and kids are off limits. Don't spend your share conspicuously. Don't sample the goods. Don't talk about Project Mayhem. &c. &c. &c.

It doesn't require mastermind-level plotting. The hardest part about crime is finding a person willing to do it. A lack of empathy goes a long way towards that, and an unwillingness to take responsibility for the consequences of one's actions gets even closer. The smart criminals don't murder people; instead they go into real-estate fraud, money laundering, and insider trading. The money is better and the prosecutions rarer.
Haiti
I am glad that this is becoming more prevalent. While I personally have never really gotten into any trouble, I know a lot of people that have been incarcerated for weed. In other cases, the presence of weed allowed for entry/search by police which for any number of reasons resulted in being charged for one crime or another.

More importantly (to me personally, since this affects people close to me), a big chunk of them experienced insipid forms of violence while locked up, and in some cases this derailed people for years, or even permanently.

I sincerely hope that the sheer human cost of current policies can be reduced or eliminated altogether.
He's also stuck by Tezos through its organizational catastrophe, and it's looking as though that might pay off for him.

Generally, "they're family" sounds like a sensible default attitude for a VC towards their investments.
I treat news like it was an claim about nature by a scientist. Do other (independent) experts agree? If not, then I'm not ready to accept the claim yet. But if so, and the argument seems sound, then I'll tentatively consider believing it.

Or if opinions on the proposed news/idea are mixed or absent, I'll look at how bold the claim is and how disruptive the consequences of accepting it. Bold claims must offer more compelling support (or more undeniable) than mild claims, be that support evidentiary or logical.

Without sound support, at most I'll consider a claim to be plausible and perhaps intriguing. But it's not really trustworthy yet as news, and certainly not as science.
Not having clicked thru the link, that doesn’t sound good for his insider trading case
> Groovy, for example, is as popular as Scala or Kotlin

Things have changed in the past few years. I would now put Apache Groovy in a different tier than those other two. Kotlin's rise has been at Groovy's (as well as Java's) expense. So nowadays I would rank JVM language adoption as these tiers:

1. Java
2. Kotlin, Scala
3. Clojure, Groovy
4. others, e.g. JRuby, Ceylon
Remember that water heaters (if not tankless) are also an important supply of (drinking) water in case of emergency.
I see it can import OPML files but not export.
"Holmes subsequently raised $6 million in funding, the first of almost $700 million that would follow. Money often comes with strings attached in Silicon Valley, but even by its byzantine terms, Holmes’s were unusual. She took the money on the condition that she would not divulge to investors how her technology actually worked, and that she had final say and control over every aspect of her company. This surreptitiousness scared off some investors. When Google Ventures, which focuses more than 40 percent of its investments on medical technology, tried to perform due diligence on Theranos to weigh an investment, Theranos never responded. Eventually, Google Ventures sent a venture capitalist to a Theranos Walgreens Wellness Center to take the revolutionary pinprick blood test. As the V.C. sat in a chair and had several large vials of blood drawn from his arm, far more than a pinprick, it became apparent that something was amiss with Theranos’s promise."
This is a very interesting question. I'm not sure! Your analogy to music is quite interesting too. I'm going to give this some thought :)
I agree with your main idea. Online self-education was implicitly promising stable, well-paying jobs for the people without the means for formal studies.

But instead of governments standardizing, expanding and accrediting these tools, they were abandoned. They are now only used to supplement normal studies.

In my opinion, the reason for that is preserving the status quo. We're used to the rhetoric of merit-based job distribution and knowledge/productivity based salaries.

If a country created university programmes that were nationally accredited (ie by taking tests with physical presence in addition to online classes) then high-paying jobs would be available to everyone. Or would they? Because to a large extent, university degrees are useless without connections. If everyone had access to higher education, the lie that the poor are just lazy and stupid would collapse, exposing the nepotism and corruption of corporate and government jobs, and also empowering the people to take over these jobs themselves.

You can see this difference in the contrast between countries like the US, where higher education is unreachable for most people, and thus owning a degree guarantees almost 10x higher salaries than the poor, and the many countries in the EU where free or subsidized education results in much lower wage inequality.

Making education so accessible that you can earn a degree by watching 2-3 hours of lectures per day would disrupt the current situation completely, exposing many pathologies of both the educational and employment systems.
I can see a reason - protection from falling masonry.
This is strongly embedded in the accounting culture (CPA, in particular tax preparation business): I want every man, woman and child to understand how close we are to chaos. I want everyone to remember why they need us!
I believe EOS (https://eos.io/) uses WebAssembly for non-web applications.
A relative served in the U.S. Army as a doctor many decades ago and said some of the training involved shooting goats with a small caliber gun, removing the bullets, and stitching them up. His specialty was not surgery - I assume this was training for basic field medicine and emergencies.

I've read somewhere that Navy Corpsmen have a training exercise in which a pig is anesthetized and then burned or shot and the job of the corpsman is to keep it alive as long as possible.

ETA: This was happening in 2012 but PETA objected (1); I am not sure if it's still part of the program.

1. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/03/pigs-military-...
This sounds like the sort of existential tool that Silicon Valley ought to be pouring as much funding into as possible. Or fueling the creation of alternate tech hubs.

Martian colonies and mind uploading are unlikely to be ready by the time the Big One comes.
Sociopath is a clinical term, it's just not in the DSM because it's not, per se, a disease or disorder. Being a sociopath doesn't, by itself, cause impairment as defined by the DSM. But that doesn't mean it's not a clinical term. Ask any psychiatrist or psychologist what the defining characteristics are of a sociopath and they could immediately recite the Hare Psycopathy Checklist.

And there are plenty of psychiatrists who treat sociopathy as such. It can cause the sort of impairment cognizable by the DSM, especially as children when the measure of impairment is different than as an adult (e.g. "unruly child", something that would be non-sense once they reach the age of majority). And in those cases while it might be formally treated under the rubric of Anti-Social Personality Disorder, clinicians understand that treatment (in as much as its treatable at all) requires understanding sociopaths as a distinct class with a very distinct pathology.

Sociopath in the vernacular does often connote a serial killer. Fair enough. But there's plenty of literature, for professionals and laymen, that discusses sociopathy in clinical, well-defined terms.

FWIW, AFAIU I don't think there's any real debate about whether sociopathy exists as a concrete human phenomenon. The debate is largely how big the umbrella--do we only include those who are "incurable" (i.e. neurobiologically lack the capacity for empathy, either at birth or from a combination of nature and nurture), or those which behave as-if they lack such capacity, but where the capacity is simply suppressed for other reasons. And of course, this begs the question of what, exactly, is empathy. Like sociopath, I think most agree that empathy is a thing (and much more concretely than, say, "love"). But is "cognitive empathy" a thing? And given these questions, how accurate can we ever hope to get in particular cases?

FWIW, here's a good, recent radio interview discussing a special clinic in Wisconsin that has seem good results treating sociopaths--not in making them stop being sociopaths who harm people, but at least in minimizing their harm to a level below that which is considered criminal.

https://www.npr.org/2017/05/24/529893128/scientists-develop-...

Of course, most sociopaths are already non-violent. Empathy seems to be but one evolutionary mechanism for checking violence and dampening violent tendencies. It's not the sole mechanism and might not even be the most important.
The use of edibles, however, has no secondhand effect. In states where it's legal, candy, beverages, and so on are common.
The Amiga Consciousness
I'm currently withdrawing from a psychiatric medication. In my cohort people take their lives frequently, the pain is so bad. Many of us are finding relief in CBD oil and medical marijuana. To say that the nomination of Sessions to AG (and his subsequent withdrawing of the Cole memo) has made our lives worse, is an understatement. We just want to live normal lives. As much as possible. CBD has allowed me to stay productive, to work, to rescue my career. Take it away and I don't know if I'm here. I wish Rick the best and hope he can make change and, honestly, save some lives.
Mailchimp is working on GDPR tools
Please note soil will not be used in verticle farms. The limiting factor is the cost of electricity. Please note the curve of the cost of electricity over time its downward trending and will eventually be closer to zero.
This is my experience as well. I respect Kottke as a blog/media/internet pioneer. But content is lackluster - a collection of links. And the commentary is almost nonexistent.
“Cost center” doesn’t mean “unprofitable department”. And actually two of the three segments appearing in Amazon financial reports are profitable.
If that was the case, there would be relatively little IP to protect and it would stunt overall progress, in my opinion.
Shouldn't the insurance companies have a huge incentive to see this built?
Toys R Us to close all 800 of its U.S. stores
Anyone remember the old Buzzfeed links that were on the kottke front page? They were there before "Buzzfeed" was "Buzzfeed". I always thought that was strange since back then the day they mostly just re-posted Reddit content.
I believe that focusing on individual pages will slow down the pace at which you can advance. Every user may have tens of pages which he/she visits every day. I reckon that supporting thousands of different pages would be a burden and it would be nearly impossible to please every user.

Instead, I would recommend aiming to develop a rock solid swiss knife for online keyboard shortcuts in the long term as an alternative to vimium with some fine tuning for the most visited 100 websites for instance.

I would probably not feel the need to have an extra layer on top of vimium otherwise.
Stick with 1989, and you donb't have to worry about it.
He acted against the law, and was an idiot.
Yes, I am pretty sure of this based on the startups in this area. Like AI this thing will sneak up on you.
Nah. It should definitely be a Monday!
I think the argument would be that you need to understand what those 30 layers in Photoshop represent and how they interact with each other, not how they are stored.
Why the difficulty in updating the regulation then? Seems like an easy fix.
Emacs is probably the way to go- it has its own lisp dialect for scripting the editor. I don’t have any experience using it as I use vim, though :).
maybe with survival distributions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_function

googling gives some results of scientific papers that would say this is the way its done.
I don't think I like anything you are saying but it would be hard to deny that this is pretty interesting insight.
If you're not an accredited investor and want to invest in a startup you don't have many options. Cryptocurrencies unlock that for a lot of people, even if the startups are absolutely awful.
I'm using Feedbin for now. Tried hosting miniflux 2.0 but there seem to be a few bugs at the moment.
I remember in Contact the signal came through on hydrogen times pi.
I very well may be wrong, but I believe Jason helped start buzzfeed in some way.
Little solace for the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqui and Afghan civillians.
Australia considers fast-track visas for white South African farmers