skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
here’s what I don’t get: why are mug shots public at any point prior to conviction?

Should these people go to jail? Yes, it’s extortion plain and simple. But they should never have had these images for anyone who was not found guilty - or in this case even charged.
Why just 2010 to 2018? Mine was terminated back in 2008 with about $500 in it.
But potentially worth something to someone else, which is an argument for selling it or even donating it. Throwing it away seems downright silly.
I wonder why the authors took the time to generate an image of their pattern but refrained from giving the actual DEFINITION. This does not foster constructive discussion of any possible ideas present. As can be seen in dozens of well-meaning comments here, people waste time reversing and guestimating parameters etc.

Looking at the layman letters that my institute gets on a regular basis, I can say, that this is unfortunately a recurring theme with amateur mathematicians: They fail to state their basic definitions and assumptions and seem all to eager to dive right into applications, be it computer graphics, cryptography or finance.

More to the point: This picture seems from a cursory inspection to plot T(k,n) with n=row, k=column from the top left. But why is this interesting?
> people don't understand or accept evolution [...] For example, anyone who accepts equitable distribution of attributes across genetic variances

Even if the straw-man "everybody is totally equal" can't stand up, I think there's a good argument for:

"We have to assume everybody is equal by default,(A) because we are absolutely too ignorant and limited to determine the long-term value or trade-offs within a gene or gene-combination, (B) because some diversity is itself a collective benefit to the species, and (C) because history shows most people who claimed they had the answers were often wrong and racist."
I got into ruby because of _why. I wouldn’t be where I am without that.

I’ve found a similar feeling in the javascript community. There’s a few characters who have changed the way we even recognise the language these days. It’s not quite _why’s beautifully artistic approach, but it has been genuinely exciting working with JavaScript in the last decade.
My first thought was “Ugh, Google forked git and now we’ll have two competing protocols”

So its good to know why this was posted on Google’s site.
> Is whiteboard interviewing so bad that people would go out of their way to avoid it?

Yes. If you have problems with anxiety or imposter syndrome its a special kind of hell - especially when you go in absolutely able to do the work and being qualified, and then getting a hard no on the basis of "you're not a good enough programmer". Even for someone without an ego to be harmed, it feels like a cruel and arbitrary way to determine your future financial and societal well being.
Probably they will not be - but there are cases of extradition of EU citizens to the US for various crimes like hacking. Who knows, maybe it will happen the other way around or some people will have to take holidays in the EU off the list.
> If there is even a 1% chance that when a Big Red Button is pushed the missiles fail to launch the game becomes unwinnable.

Why does that 1% make such a big difference?
I was once banned from a large company's (not Google's) ad program for alleged click fraud and was told there was no appeal process and that they would not be providing additional information. After demanding proof, I was told that they would not provide it due to trade secrets.

However, I didn't give up. I was eventually able to convince them to give me proof by being extremely annoying and repeatedly e-mailing the CEO and others in the company until they relented.

The "proof" they had was one of the most ridiculous misunderstandings of how the web works that I've ever seen; it's as if their click fraud department was run by someone who had no computer skills beyond using Excel. I wrote a comprehensive document explaining what happened in the scenario they saw, why it happened, how to prevent it, and admonished them for stonewalling me on something that was so clearly not my fault and not an instance of click fraud.

As a result, they reinstated me and paid my earnings, but I feel terrible for what I'm sure were hundreds of other people who were wrongly terminated and weren't able to get a response from them like I did.
Glazov Moment: Chelsea Handler Compares Gaza to Auschwitz
So you're telling me that someone who created a site to post job adverts for jobs that don't test programming skills, has managed to write a security vulnerability into the site? Never!

I don't agree with making candidates write algorithms they don't need to know in a format that they don't need to be able to write them, but I am in favour of testing candidates thoroughly.
Wow, to me this read completely differently. More like a primadonna, making knee jerk judgments and contemptuously bandying about his authority.

The impressive character was Carmack.
Steve Wozniak Believes Ethereum Has the Potential to Be the Next Apple
Most people have ears that actually make sound and you can hear your own ear noise when it is quiet.

Source: Working in a lab that recorded these sounds for science.
In my experience, there was considerable pressure on hiring managers to hire someone, because people are honestly needed. So, the risk of hiring one bad apple is offset by risk of being seen as someone who will never hire anyone (and thus will be excluded from hiring).

Then again, probably one of the worst bad apple I have seen would ace whiteboard as he was quite good at trics. He just did not like the actual work involved in software development and tended not to do work he don't like except bare minimum.
In my opinion, they should break things that misuse the version field. Then maybe the makers will learn to develop properly.
I learned shoes some time ago for a project I wanted to test, and dropped it because it didn't suit my needs, but... reading "Nobody Knows Shoes" was extremely fun. The kind of fun that makes you want to keep coding random projects and messing with technology in general, that feeds your curiosity. And that's when you learn the most. It can't be said enough.
Electricity is £10 a month and I'm in credit earning 3% interest in the balance.

Heating oil is 500 every 18 months but depends a lot on weather.

Virtually nothing on petrol as I rarely use the car these days.
I am conflicted about this.

The service runs 40 Anti Virus programs to test your uploaded executable. Obviously - this is used mostly by malware and various shady crap ware software.

But making this a federal offense ?

What happens when they outlaw a c# obfuscation toolkit?
An anonymous browser ?
They know that the guy is innocent, they know that DNA test will confirm that. What they are concerned about is what will happen after he is found not guilty. Who framed him? How, When, Why? In the end of the day many influential people can end up in jail. Plus he will probably get millions from the state for wrongful convocation. They are just covering "their" asses and saving money, for them it is a win win if he stays guilty and is executed.
Frankly, the amount of power Google holds over small businesses is terrifying. It's incredible that a small bug in one of Google's algorithms could destroy your main source of income, with no explanation or recourse.
> accusing the government of sending groups of real (let's define real as regular HN contributors with at least 10 karma pts) people to deflect/defend on a HN post is a technically a conspiracy theory.

I never claimed that in my comment, you should read it more closely.

What I did claim is that regular HN posters will often comment (for their own reasons) in a way that would make the Chinese propagandists and censors happy.
Especial Skills in Experienced Archers
I love this kind of story about the history of science and understanding. Does anyone have pointers to other good ones? Or even better books of them?
I can only speak for myself, but I find joy in living vicariously through others who don't contemplate existential issues. Sometimes I can spend a day just hanging out with my cat watching him do random things with sincerity. Sometimes I envy him.

As far as medium term motivation, guilt, fear and debt seems to work for most people regardless of philosophical disposition.
There's a simple way to get free energy out of a working em-drive: "at some point, the kinetic energy of the device-driven mass exceeds the energy input, and if this energy is collected via decelerating the mass (via regenerative electromagnetic braking, for example), then there would be a net gain in energy." How do you get a net gain in energy out of the Casimir effect?
Insane. Let’s say it’s half that and you make $100k a year. You wouldn’t put in 2 hours for an extra 25k/yr?

I mean this isn’t a lottery, and hopefully you’ve reasoned there will be a high probability of getting hired; say 50%. So then the expected value of your time is $6.25k/hr.

Go, take the moral high ground, and don’t do the homework. That helps rational minded folk achieve an even higher hit rate.
Intel stops reverse engineering of their dodgy firmware
Are you sure? I just looked through an old Debian 8 iso that I have and it had vim in it.
I think it happens fairly often.

In the more mathematical realm in information theory, turbo codes came out of nowhere by people who were not experts in the field of FEC. Their efficiency far surpassed other methods of the time, to the point that their results in the conference paper were doubted. They didn't have any understanding at the time of why they worked well, they just published results.

Lots of physical phenomena start as simple observations that are later worked into theoretical frameworks. The photoelectric effect comes to mind.
Interesting. The whole thing is so simple. A government wants to get their message out quickly and efficiently before negative stories get too much attention. So, how to do it cost effectively? Simple, ask normal government employees to write pro-government posts on social media when they get time. Plus their career prospects improve if they do it. Finally a reminder on certain days about their duty to spread the good news about the government.

I guess the only weakness in the whole scheme is people reporting back to an authority about their work. I am pretty sure they got rid of that after the leak. The genius of this thing is that if you ask the people who write these posts if they are doing propaganda, there's a good chance that their initial genuine response will be to say no.
OP should have linked the PDF instead.
We should definitely be wary of attempts by the Chinese government to distract from meaningful discussion. It’s worth remembering that leftist organizations in the US and around the world during the Cold War were sometimes funded by the Soviet Union.

At the same time, I am reminded of how organizations that in hindsight we know were definitely not funded by the Soviet Union were accused of exactly that during the 50s and 60s. For example, we now know that at one point the KGB and the FBI were concurrently running smear campaigns against MLK.

In that light, I’m skeptical of Lionsion’s motives in posting this. Yesterday he was rightfully called out by some including me for writing of Chinese internment camps in Xinjiang that

> These camps appear to be the result of high-level Chinese government policy that explicitly targets this ethic group. There are no contemporary parallels in the US. If you think there are, do you think Obama was in on it? The US situation is unfortunate, but it's more the result of poverty and lower-level racism, not a policy to imprison blacks.

The whataboutism in his last statement of course goes against the consensus of US academics studying criminal justice issues, the consensus of criminal justice advocates, as well as what (again, thanks to the passage of time) we now know about the deliberate decisions of politicians leading up to the War on Drugs:

https://www.aclu.org/other/race-war-drugs
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-rich...

I think Hacker News should place where we can have a civil discussions about issues. Thanks to the wonders of technology, we are able to have multiple (not just one!) threads and thus to discuss multiple topics. And as I have said previously, most of us can both walk and chew gum at the same time; if someone is unable to even read comments discussing US education reform on an article by an American looking at the Swedish education system, for example, without being “distracted,” I think that’s more of an issue for the easily-distracted person than for the discussants.

But the strange trend of accusing everyone who would like to discuss the relevance of an issue to the US of being funded by the Chinese government is as intellectually demeaning as it should be rhetorically suspect.

I’d be happy to prove that I’m an American citizen not funded by the Chinese or any other government, but I think that might be relatively hard to prove in a fair and respectful way over the Internet. On the other hand, it is much easier to look at someone’s public comment history and to see the unsettling trends there.

More generally, I’m getting tired of having to battle this recent uptick in China scaremongering on what used to be a much more reasonable forum. Lionsion’s account is very new, and I wonder if they are part of the recent influx of new users who have arrived with their own bad habits. Seriously, check the account creation date for users who post things that seem to be weird pro-China or anti-China propaganda. They seem to mostly have been made around 2016.
>> Honestly, all these recent stories about jobs really just paint him in a negative light.

Not really. That's not my interpretation of the story at all. People who judge others for being a jerk in isolation lose the fact that it often comes with the territory of being a visionary or extra-effective at their job.

Sure, it'd be great if Jobs was nice. It'd also be nice if your middle manager who knows your dog's name and loves his family was as smart as Jobs. But skills are finite and scarce, and almost no one develops them all, a lesson many D&D players learn immediately after rolling a character.

Jobs was a dick. But that was the price. If someone is a dick and half as smart and effective as Jobs, yeah, that's a negative. For someone like Jobs, Carmack (plenty of stories about him that are "negative" as you say, I might add), and other 4+ SD talents, it comes with the package. Expecting otherwise is folly.
Similar laws already exist and have existed for a long time. There’s no evidence of disproportionately and illogically large fines having been handed out in the past, and nothing to suggest regulators will start now.
Nano-Newtons. For comparison, the tiny rockets used for attitude control on satellites have a thrust of about four Newtons. Falcon 9 booster, about 7,000,000 Newtons. This thing, if it works, maybe 0.00000001 Newton.
So, by pointing out this book, are you saying that your only metric for education is economic value and wage marketability?
The actual ruling was that him saying 'Gas the Jews' tens of times during the video was calculated to offend, rather than the dog thing
KillZapper: Click to Kill web annoyances
No, but many of the core contributors are employed by Google and spend time on it as part of their day job (with Google's knowledge and permission). This post straddles both the open source part of their jobs and the "Git deployment at Google" part.
>> gets zero criticism when practiced by men

This was literally made fun of in a meeting two days ago for a vendor I work with.
Is the new DM REST API limited to a maximum of 50 users app-wide?
A platform to gather security related JSON schemas and objects
Out of curiosity, do we know that the state actors that built stuxnet didn't simply pay or force those taiwanese companies to turn over the keys?
That's your experience, but far from reality. You're right, it's not easy, but that's why we're here. You also have to realize discipline > motivation. Everything you just said is a personal problem, not something inherent to the process.
>This is long overdue and I'm hopeful that it extends beyond app stores. The primary leverage here will (inevitably?) be an SDK that allows all apps that are members of the union to be disabled remotely by vote should companies overstep.

And then Apple can issue refunds for non functioning apps and ban developers forever. Also, if these apps are popular, expect class action lawsuits. In the US law there's a thing which is called a promissory estoppel (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/promissory_estoppel.asp) and it can be argued that if you buy an app, you expect that it keeps working.

P.S. I am not a lawyer
For me, Picamilon and changing to an alkaline diet stopped my migraines. The only thing which will still trigger them is if I have prolonged exposure to chemical vapors, such as enamel paint, or certain cleaning chemicals. Fortunately, I can recognize those and get out of the immediate area before I get enough exposure to trigger a migraine.
> unless both the board and markers are of very high quality, the boards tend to stain over time

Solved by getting a good office manager.

I'm not even joking. We have very large whiteboards in every room and in almost every space where people can wheel their desks in. Cleaners are happy to clean them up and make sure they are in good condition. One team recently complained that they may be too eager... (Our whiteboards are heavy glass, bolted to the wall. It probably helps.)

Office manager(s) on the other hand always keep their ears open and make sure the office has enough pristine marker packs and erasers available. Having a supply cabinet properly stocked is a cheap investment.

One of the most enjoyable things I can hear at the office is: "Let's hijack a whiteboard".
I always find this a little disturbing as a citizen. I know my taxes pay for it already, but then I have to pay again for it, and have no say in anything for it even though my taxes still pay for it.
Semantic UI React is amazing. I've used it to build a number of applications. My favorite thing is the interoperability between its various components.
The U.S. military was deployed, but the West African outbreak was much larger in scope. The people first on the ground with expertise are probably MSF.

As for the CDC, it looks like they're working with the DRC Ministry of Health: https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/drc/2018-may.html
The surface area of "gotchas" in data science is much larger than software engineering because you have all the "gotchas" from programming/software engineering AND all the new "gotchas" from data science.

For data science the big one is over fitting, which everyone talks about, but can happen in really insidious ways in production. You have to be very disciplined and careful with the data to prevent over fitting.

Another big one is productionizing data science, which in my opinion most data scientists don't have a ton of experience with.

The actual training of the models part of data science isn't that hard, its actually making it work with the crappy data that exists in the real world and putting it into production that are the really hard parts.
The Bush Doctrine ("We fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here"), while bad for foreign policy, works quite well for infectious diseases.
No. Natural selection happens at the level of the phenotype not the genotype. Anyway a gene is not a piece of DNA, but a unit of heredity.

The reason why epigentics is less important in evolution is because it is unstable. If an environmental factor can shift the phenotype one way then another factor can shift it back. Most of these unstable epigenetic changes wash out in an evolutionary short time frame.
Using your frames here's the sequence as N goes from 2 to 90 with a stride of 2: https://streamable.com/l7r96
The Scientific Detectives Probing the Secrets of Ancient Oracle
I do x2 speed. But not all videos are slow.
I was recently back filling a data science position on my team and experienced the same thing. I was getting on average 5 new resumes a day and for the most part it was individuals who were currently in a data science MS program somewhere with no experience.
Google has as much incentive as anyone else to introduce a faster wire protocol. The article mentions the Chrome project, and don’t forget that Google Cloud has a git-repo-hosting product.
"What findings have made it possible?"

Recent evidence is cited, but it's interesting to note that evidence of epigenetic effects (that were ignored as known anomalies) is ancient (of course the mechanism wasn't known.) Such as, the Hinny.

"Horses and donkeys are both equids, but their evolution diverged millions of years ago. Still, they are closely enough related that they can interbreed. But the hybrids they produce look different from each other depending on whether the mother is a horse or a donkey. If she is a horse, her baby is a mule and has very long ears. If she is a donkey, her baby is a hinny. Hinnies are rare, but they are generally smaller than mules, with shorter ears.

People have known for thousands of years that horse—donkey hybrids differ depending on which species is the mother and which the father. The process thought to be responsible for these differences—genomic imprinting—has been known for only a few decades. Genomic imprinting is an epigenetic mechanism, one of the forms of biological inheritance that operate outside the traditional Mendelian mode. Imprinting is a particularly useful model for investigating epigenetic gene regulation and is a major source of epigenetic regulation in the brain.

With genomic imprinting, DNA methylation silences some genes or gene clusters—in egg, sperm, or zygote—depending on which parent they came from. For an imprinted gene, the allele from one parent or the other is shut down and makes no product. The other allele is expressed and produces characteristic outcomes in the offspring. Thus, mom's and dad's chromosomes are not functionally the same.

Imprinting is required for normal development, although if the functioning imprinted gene is defective, as sometimes happens, the outcome can also be fatal, or at least debilitating. Some 30 serious disorders are attributed to disrupted imprinting. Some are rare, but more common afflictions, such as cancers and autism, have also been linked to genomic imprinting."

https://www.academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/61/8/588/336...

Had we cared to investigate this sort of anomaly more closely, I can't help but think that we would have discovered epigenetics decades earlier. I well remember when any such discussion was entirely inadmissable amongst biologists, and proof of one's idiocy if you raised the idea of the genetic mechanism allowing any moderation of DNA as a result of environment or experience (a possibility I did in fact raise in a letter to Jacques Monod in the seventies - only silence came back, such craziness was not worthy of a response.)

There's an interesting list of early experiments, some of which may actually have been valid, but were dismissed, here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism#Weismann's_experime...
Actually no, I didn't.
You can already compile Rust to x86 and Qt to x86, yet they don't work together automatically. Is there any reason to expect WebAssembly will be different?
yeah. in order to agree with that "most sophisticated software" claim i think he'd need to compare it to some other candidates for that title.
Understand the GDPR in 10 minutes
Yup I know about gag orders, etc... I completely agree with the statement that if you care about privacy better go with something else not in U.S. or anywhere in the 14 eyes countries if you are really paranoid.
An Inside Look of Rapid7’s Quarterly Threat Report: 2018 Q1