skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I, for one, love asking an honest-to-god question on a potentially contentious topic and then watching my score bounce up and down as folks ascribe intent to the question.

Perfect example, a few weeks ago someone wrote something along the lines of "Harassing Trump's cabinet is getting results" - now I don't particularly follow the news so I have no idea if anything genuinely came about of the harassment - so I asked "What outcomes have there been?" and I watched that question get downvoted and upvoted oscillating back and forth until several hours later someone replied that Scott Pruit had resigned, stating the harassment as the reason why at which point I thanked the replier for actually taking the time to provide a constructive response.

Too often folks just assume intent for every little comment or question and use a downvote to say "I don't like your opinion" regardless of how valid or invalid it may be. I've been own Hacker News for many years, and it's definitely gotten worse, but this has always been a bit of a bastion of maturity. Not always, but it's better than discussing on Reddit and watching the Dunning-Kruger effect in real-time.

I can only imagine Facebook with downvotes will be another rehash of Reddit comments. The beauty of Facebook not having a fire-and-forget downvote system is that it actually requires one to write out their displeasure so it at least forces some semblance of dialogue.
It would be cool for someone to archive some of the early Java Applets, they are even more endangered.
Huh, I had no idea the guy who wrote the light transport thesis also built Adwords.
I spent 2 years of my life getting price gouged while incarcerated by a split between a company called "Bob Barker Ent." and the local county. Prices were 2 to 4 times "street price". My take; Too bad the inmates got caught.
Own your own domain. (In the extreme you could even imagine software that forces one domain per person.)

(Oops, I just saw toomim already posted the same thing.)
My source on WW2 aircraft is my father, a B-17 (and later P-47 Thunderbolt and P-51) pilot. The Thunderbolt is a very heavy airplane, you can imagine what it took to fly that beast at its limits.
I wish there was some sort of logitudinal data to demonstrate that the levels are still climbing or are just louder now due to shifts in design trends. There is not much data in this article aside from a few examples in New York which are probably not representative of the rest of America. That said, lately my partner and I (mid 20s) nearly always wear our hearphones [0] so we can speak in restaurants.

[0] https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/wellness/conversation_en...
The problems of information technogy and law enforcement are not a recent discovery, though this is much overlooked.

Quoting:

By moving in this direction, we could easily end up with the most effective, oppressive police state ever created. The old cliche that "knowledge is power" is especially valid in describing a society that holds extensive information about the movements and history of all its citizens. I can think of no organization or government that has proven itself to be sufficiently benevolent to be entrusted with the power that is derived from the volume of information available in such a system.

"Some Caveats on the Contribution of Technology to Law Enforcement", Paul Baran. (1967)

https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3550.html

Emphasis in original.
It might be informative to see how the average debt burden, in terms of years for humanities graduates to pay off, has changed over the period in question. At several points, the author notes a downwards inflection point around 2011, a time when then-recent economic events might have been expected to bring the issue to the fore.
Computing power solves molecular mystery
With schools increasing costs and no jobs available, going into humanities is a complete financial catastrophe waiting to happen.

If countries care about humanities, they need to fund it via government. I'm not much of a big government person, but things like this is required when you care about things that capitalism won't fund.
Darpa seeks underground mapping capability
It's so strange how this is all playing out almost exactly like the Athlon XP days except with lots of cores and clouds.
On one hand, this is really cool and I'd love this type of info out of AWS.

On the other hand, the whole point of using a cloud provider is to lower the amount of ops work, and this feels like I'm helping do ops work for Google, and paying them for the privilege.
Matt Botvinick (Google DeepMind) “Nature versus Nurture in AI”
didnt fb had dislike btn at some point and then removed it
A fault-tolerant system for stopping ‘leaks’ in quantum computers – YaleNews
Indeed. Instead of seeking a broader understanding of the world and a greater ability to question and think critically about it, more students are seeking knowledge of a more practical nature that can lead to better employment opportunities in the near term. It's understandable.

On the whole, I don't think this is good... but this has been coming for a long time, due to many reasons, including:

* a broken funding system that saddles a majority of students with life-altering debt, effectively keeping many of them from studying what they love and forcing them instead to study what will land them a decent job;

* the slow-motion takeover at many universities and colleges by professional managers who use financial and other metrics to measure the "success" of and decide on the funding for different academic departments;

and last but not least,

* the gradual takeover of liberal arts faculties at many colleges and universities by individuals whom I can only describe as very ignorant -- uneducated, really -- in mathematics, the hard sciences, modern technologies, and the ways of business.[a] Perhaps the smart kids don't want to study with these ignorant individuals?

[a] As C. P. Snow wrote about these people in 1959 in his famous Two Cultures lecture: "A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures)
so they're readding it back now
QED :-)
Who are we talking about here--founding employees who are presumably taking lower than market salaries for more equity, or someone else?

I asked our CEO to give us an update on our runway, and he told me. I guess he could be lying, but I don't see what purpose that would serve.

At my previous company, the CFO was invited to our semi annual engineering meetings, and he'd give us the last quarterly numbers, along with a lengthy Q&A.

At the startup I co-founded before that, the CEO/co-founder was very transparent about our financials and gave me all the time I required to understand the impacts of the business decisions he was making.

Before that, at INRIX, at least once a month during our weekly all-hands, we'd get our financials detailed to us.

Being a founder requires optics, progressive disclosure, and getting creative with the representation of data, but in my experience, I've yet to be in a situation where I felt I was lied to, or purposefully misled.
Even some small companies (100+ employee) carefully track attribution of their top N% of non-VP employees and tie it into executive bonus.
Surely nobody who is reasonably high-functioning operates with a "single-threaded" consciousness.

Isn't it a common experience to work out problems in your sleep or while doing other tasks? If there's no thought going on beyond the surface of your awareness, where do these solutions come from?

I find analyzing a problem is facilitated by using words to describe it out loud or in writing, but there is clearly something that operates simultaneously apart from the target of my focus, because the description is not the analysis.

Also, I find your description of meditating not really in line with my experience - what I think of as meditating is focusing on a mantra in order to suppress conscious thought, gently pushing it away every time it resurfaces. "Generating experiences" would be the opposite of meditating to me.
Sex Scandal Toppled a Silicon Valley Chief. Investors Say, So What?
From the video description: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sporange
I think the comment above was in jest. It's actually a pretty good little joke.
Ok. Let's imagine a world where he achieves his dream. We've democratized access to molecular synthesis with no quality issues. Anyone, anywhere can safely and effectively produce any medicine of their choosing, without regard for IP laws.

Now what? Well, on the one hand, everyone on earth will have cheap, timely access to every medicine that currently exists. That's pretty awesome. On the other hand, who's going to fund the development of new medicines? I'm certainly not going to invest in it, are you?
Maybe you could bequeath it to the Internet Archive, although they may not be willing to pay the registration fees.
LiFEPo batteries, which are notable for their safety, use zero cobalt. There are other ways to accomplish these goals.
What I Learned from Interviewing with the CIA
From your source:

"The regiment flew in wood-and-canvas Polikarpov U-2 biplanes, a 1928 design intended for use as training aircraft (hence its original uchebnyy designation prefix of "U-") and for crop dusting, which also had a special U-2LNB version for the sort of night harassment attack missions flown by the 588th, and to this day remains the most-produced wood-airframed biplane in aviation history. The planes could carry only six bombs at a time, so eight or more missions per night were often necessary.[6] Although the aircraft were obsolete and slow,"

Not exactly the heavy, high performance aircraft flown by the other powers.

> Citation needed

In various accounts I've read, sometimes a pilot will remark how he pulled at the controls with all his strength to recover. Sorry I don't have anything specific.

And besides, aircraft designers are well aware of the control forces designed into the aircraft. Since they expected the pilots to be men, why wouldn't they design it at the limit of men's strength if that meant they could take advantage of that strength to make the plane perform better? If I were a combat pilot, I'd want the designer to give me every goddam advantage possible. Wouldn't you?

It'd be like telling the Roman soldier "we made your swords shorter and lighter for women soldiers, too bad that puts you at a disadvantage when faced with the enemy who has longer and heavier swords."
Lesson learned: Never ever go to Egypt.
One last thing: R.I.P Steve Jobs (2011)
Macs aren't a huge percent of Intel's processor business. It's a big enough percent that they would miss it, but Apple's desktop and portable market share is still small. And then there are servers.
that sounds like a magnificent startup idea that I completely lack the expertise to execute on. hopefully someone else tackles it.
> The problem is that the degree doesn't do anything for you if you aren't making the right moves while you're there, or know where you're going before you start.

I've experienced/am experiencing this same thing myself. A degree itself, STEM or not, does no good if you don't utilize your time at university to do something afterwards.
... written by English or American authors, have
a very refined way of pleasing the reader.

Perhaps you could elaborate on that by contrasting how other languages say German authors writing in German approach the reader. Are they more curt or write in a matter-of-fact manner?

How about other non-English language authors?

Please expand if you've had the good fortune of reading fiction / non-fiction in various languages.
He's also the chief contributor to the S2 Geometry Library.
This is part of the reason I don't go out nearly as much anymore. I got convinced that I was losing my hearing, but it could also be that people are just loud and getting louder, at least in America. After hearing myself say "I can't hear you" and "what's that" over and over again, and resorting to buy more alcohol so I could at least enjoy myself in the haze of speech, I eventually just went "eh" and realized I just don't even care anymore.

Part of me thinks that the idea of a noisy atmosphere is to cause confusion, and confused customers are probably better customers. If they're getting all their enjoyment out of conversations, maybe they're less likely to buy more food and drinks to "smooth over" and "lubricate" their interactions.
It depends what sort of failure. Many sorts of failure would not be a problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundancy_(engineering)
There shouldn't be a problem. If I offer two services and I advertise service 2 on the website for service 1 I'm just doing what makes sense.
“But where then will you have those doing... something something...”

In 10 years it has left me, but a few hours with Wheelock and I’m sure I’d get it back!
In my experience (English natively, Chinese, Japanese & Spanish conversationally, and an interest in the subject with knowledge of about a diversity of other languages), English and Chinese can tolerate a lot of "error" and still maintain strong communication. You can mix up the order of words, you can use the "wrong" vowel for a given word, and there are a lot of different words that mean similar things, but are close enough. All of these aspects make the language understandable, even when the language skills of the speaker or listener are poor. Many different dialects of Chinese use tones very differently, have slightly different word meanings, and have different word orders - and communication in the language persists fairly well even when one speaker has a very different syntax, emphasis, and even vocabulary.

This idea is not really true for languages like Japanese, where mixing up a vowel can render the entire sentence confusing to a listener. And word order is fairly strict (if still expressively diverse). You can't just smash together some ideas and expect someone to really understand you. Similar is true for other more strict romantic languages (Latin is like that as well).

And so both English and Chinese seem to make be amenable to trying out and playing with not just new vocabulary, but new syntax, grammars, and phenomes.
They've started calling me using a number in my phone's area code (instead of an 800 number or one of the area codes common where I live). I've heard of scammers using this technique so I was surprised to see a major company doing it
I had no idea such a device existed! These are really quite cool. Do they actually work as well as advertised?
Maybe deno will implement something like vgo. (If you don't yet know about deno: https://youtu.be/M3BM9TB-8yA )
You can write games just fine using OpenGL (and SDL for windowing/inputs/audio/etc).
> Meaning, if you tap the "like" button and down-vote on the same comment, those actions don't cancel each other out.

This sounds like a really confusing user experience. Also, showing the vote number in addition to reactions complicates the social signaling.
This paper is misleading in calling their method a "deep neural network". It's only "deep" in the sense that it involves stacking multiple physical layers, not in the machine learning sense. From a neural network point of view, it's a single layer network, because the entire thing is linear. 92% accuracy on MNIST is exactly what you can achieve with a single layer network: https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r1.2/get_started/mnist/b...
I see your point but I think that there is a middle ground to be struck here. I don't think medical care and drug research can be ethically applied upon the basis of economic motivation alone. Through this lens Laufer makes some sense. You raise a strong and valid counterpoint however. There is currently a huge profit motive to develop new medical treatments (so long as they are indeed profitable). What will the effects be if we reduce that profit motive? This is a complex question that I think requires a nuanced answer that takes into account both our moral responsibility to take care of the sick but also recognizes the incentives innate to human nature
I'm less worried about nefarious things and more worried about incompetence. A careless rm -rf ${PWD}/build (or cp or whatever) can nuke/overwrite/etc. my files if it happens inside a folder with a space in it. Because of issues like this I really don't trust anyone to writing scripts that execute automatically on a random machine. Heck, I only barely trust me to do it for myself.
Please don't take HN threads on generic flamewar tangents.
Persons of color.

In USA, a lot of things that annoy white people are worse for people who aren't white. E.g. dealing with police, CPS, the courts, etc.
> In countries like India ...

I thought India was pretty unique for its culture that values so highly engineering and as a result has the highest rates of engineering graduates. When you say other countries like India, which countries are you thinking of and what about them brings them to mind?
How is that? I'm considering switching over from Charter.
Thanks! I'm interested in this topic, but I have no idea what I'm doing.

lylecubed AT gmail
Writing off folks opinions as "just an excuse" is rather insulting, impolite, and antagonistic.

That I had the audacity to directly call out that behavior instead of coaching attacks in vague language is the only difference here.

By your own, cited guidelines

> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it.

This whole conversation is off-base. Consistency in the application of rule would be great. This seems like the exact kind of situation that calls for a detach / remove.
How can this article possibly be relevant to a non-negligible number of HN readers? (unless criminal-grade risk-affinity is more widespread than I thought?)

I mean, sure, good on JPay; but the interesting details are mostly absent.

EDIT: I don't know what you people are thinking, but I'm not trolling. These are sincerely my beliefs.
Thanks, TIL.
I presume Ctrl+Shift+Del(all) & BleachBit address such trackers, I use former closing tabs & latter when I close Pale Moon.

I wonder if UB Origin or NoScript address them beforehand...
> law school

Technically still part of the humanities :)

I majored in math and history and my history adviser made it very clear to us how brutal the job market for history phd's was, although he did that in the context of how great the people they were hiring were (compared to the old guard). Basically there were so few tenure track positions open in the whole country that every open position would get world class applicants (or at least close).
Keep watch for the live streaming[0] of the State of the Map 2018 event tomorrow (July 28-30). They already have interesting videos on their channel such as using OSM for traffic simulation.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLqJsr_5PfdvDFbgv1qp2aQ
Yeah, talking about the industry generally. I see you already have your “safe spaces” straw man all set up so I think I’ll just leave you to it.
Kids today?

"“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. " Margaret Thatcher, 1987
"Sous-système du noyau Linux"
"Cache associative à 8 directions"
Given the current cost of rent/food/health care/raising children (especially in the US), I can understand making life decisions purely around money, but it also makes me sad. Wouldn't it be better if people could do what they feel is useful instead of fitting themselves into often-pointless jobs just because they're well-paying? Even if you think humanities research is useless, does the world really need more lawyers and accountants?
Surely the point of posting it was to spread the word. It going viral seems consistent with her original intent.
>“...the price of Daraprim hasn’t changed,” he said. He reached into his pocket and produced a handful of white pills. “I guess I better hand out some more,” Laufer said as he tossed the Daraprim into the audience.

I found it hard to keep reading after that. What's it called when people get so emotional about a cause they just start acting irrationally and doing more harm than good?
Oh, that's an interesting point. Universities have increased their student body share from foreign countries. And from the same source, only 2% study humanities.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/international-studen...

There's a spike from 3% to 5% of the total college population, so that doesn't account for the whole story. But the makeup of their elite school demographics might also differ from average.
It's pretty funny when you see a comment oscillate back and forth. I've theorized that this is because of different time zones, where a certain group of people with their own culture are logging on to HN and upvoting posts they appreciate, and while those people leave work or go to bed another group of people in a different state or country logs in and downvote what they believe is wrong.

What I don't like about downvoting is the possibility that my post will disappear. I understand that there's a utility to it, but I almost never write comments with the intent to troll people so it's tragic for me to write something honest only for it to be banished and never taken seriously by the few people out there who might actually do so or benefit from what I have to say. If that never happened, I'd just think downvotes are funny.

I'm sure I've knee-jerk downvoted before, but I usually only downvote if there's something off-topic or uncivil. I don't even downvote most jokes, although I know there's a thing about joking here.
That's funny. Probably 90% of my spam calls are spoofing local numbers, so I've entirely stopped answering local numbers I don't recognize. I can't recall the last time I got a spam call from an 800 number, so there's actually a slim chance I would answer that. Wonder how their strategy is working out...
I skimmed the article and didn't see this information: I'd like to know how this breaks down by region of the country, by urban vs rural, and by age of the patrons.
> I need my typechecker be total.

Recursion limits make it total, very easily.

> And you don't need turing completeness for arithmetic and recursion.

Yes you do. If you allow basic arithmetic to recurse n times, it can simulate n iterations of a turing machine.
It’s not that the courses themselves are hostile, but the industry certainly can be - and that’s going to dissuade people from starting down that path.
There are a couple places I just won't go because of the noise.

I do go to a few places specifically because they are relatively quiet, even when busy.