skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Climbing the Everest has a 1:10 chance of death, yet many people try their luck every year. It's the same thing.
It is installed though, at least for Serbian phones.
There should be dozens of legally proven - court cases - examples of intellectual property theft far worse and larger than anything China has done, given the scale difference of the economies over that time and the supposed capacity to hoover up global communications and put it to use in industrial espionage.

How many legally proven court cases against industrial espionage carried by the Chinese State are there?
I for one would be glad to pay several times the single-
publication price to have a single subscription that
would work across all of them

Perhaps you'd like to try https://blendle.com ? Although it's in beta in the US, I got an invite to join the beta within minutes of expressing an interest.

Admittedly it doesn't cover every publication, but you can't expect them to when it's not even out of beta yet.
So, they got a lot of patents for DNA compression standard MPEG-G. But there is no way to get a license of it? That's unusable standard for 20 years!

What are they thinking?
No. He was a huge jerk. I'd prefer someone who is just as brilliant and less of a jerk. They exist, I've worked with them and they have contributed far more to society than building over priced toys. Let's stop giving credit to this a-hole.
Probability Theory the Logic of Science is an excellent textbook on math and theory. Note the title even references cultus' point.

Unfortunately it predates many of the modern developments in methods / computation, but if you want to dive deep, I strongly recommend it. It takes the perspective of designing a reasoning robot to make the most effective decisions.

Another resource, eg Stan's manual, can get you up and running on computation/inference. Your choice in computation tool should reflect the type and size of of problems you're interested in, and languages you're comfortable with. Stan has bindings for many scripting languages. R also offers Nimble, Python PyMC3 and Edward, and Julia has DynamicHMC and Turing. (EDIT: xcodevn has better Python recommendations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18213923 )
Talent only even begins to matter when you're at levels roughly 4-5 standard deviations away from the mean.
A CLI tool to scrape Google Photos albums
> The thing is, the ads have to be in good taste.

That will never be the case, except may be for some isolated incidents. As far as ads are concerned from NYT's perspective -- we are not the customers (we are the product), advertisers are. In fact, they are so much the customers, that they not only control the ads, they also control the content (by saying which content their ads can be shown on (hence for which content they will pay to be produced) -- but I digress).

Now, you might say, advertisers would want to have ads in "good taste" -- yes, but you know what they'd want even more -- those ads to leave an imprint on your consciousness. So if they can't make an ad in good taste, or the ad in good taste is less effective than an obnoxious ad -- they'll choose the latter, any day, 10 out of 10. That is why we'll rarely have "tasteful" adds.

Another thing tangentially related to taste: how many times exactly you'd want to see a "tasteful ad"? 1, 3, 5 or 500? After how many repetitions the "tasteful ad" becomes "distasteful"?

As it was aptly put in "Ready Player One" -- ad industry will only stop putting ads on your screen once you start having seizures (because at this point it will physically prevent you from buying their stuff). Until then anything goes.

Hoping that you can pay and no longer see ads is naive. Ad revenue is so lofty, nothing end users can pay can even remotely match advertising budgets of the giants.
Good advice, although the original post could be the basis for a sweet fictional novel.
Developer Contest: $10k for WordPress sites
They also seem to be taking some liberties when using the term "manned". But yeah, cool project.
"The prior can generally only be understood in the context of the likelihood"
https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.07487
Climate uncertainty monster: What’s the worst case?
The underlying assumption behind the negative attitude here is that everything worth doing, is easy. That for every line of development which will turn out to be worthwhile, it's possible to build a minimum viable product on a shoestring. This is an understandable idea, because it would be great if it were true. It would be very handy indeed if the universe worked this way.

Unfortunately, it doesn't. Sure, it's true enough for websites because the industry spent several decades building infrastructure to the point where a couple of guys in a garage can build a website. It's not true for much anything else. If we want to make the transition to clean energy before we wreck our environment, if we want to do something about the degenerative diseases collectively referred to as old age before we all bankrupt ourselves trying to prolong dying, if we want to get off this planet before we get snake eyes on the cosmic dice, we need to get back into the habit of understanding valuable goals need big investments.
If so, what value does your comment bring to the discussion?
One of the common traits is an inability to access higher-order cognitive functions such as empathy and being unaware of their inability to do so. This often means they're in a chronic state of anxiety and confusion because the intentions of others make no sense. Conflating empathy for low affect feelings of sympathy while assuming an identity of the most empathetic and most sympathetic person in the world, maybe even thinking they're HSP. Here's one way you can find out and discover to what extent that's factoring into the mix.

Next time you find yourself in a situation where they are behaving contrary to what you would expect, don't assume malice. Make sure you carefully and clearly articulate your feelings and perspective, have them voice their concerns, and then ask them to rearticulate what you just said. Ask them to put into their own words what you are thinking and feeling, to rearticulate what your perspective is and why. Ask them to explain the cause and effect of their actions. And then shut up and let them answer, see what happens. Pay close attention to how they respond, to what extent they can empathise even if it's just simply repeating back what you said. You both may be shocked -- them by the question, you by the response -- but it'll be an enlightening experience. And after a time or two of that, at least you'll know where you are.
Google is relentless in collecting data on everybody and everything. Until suddenly collecting data could possibly incriminate them in an action, at which point they suddenly claim to lack any data whatsoever. Occam's razor would indicate that Google is being less than truthful.
There have certainly been spammers but they are usually shut down quickly
Not in the legal sense but more like a "if you would like to remain on good terms with the community, we really appreciate you doing X" sort of thing.
> Even better would be a qualification of "successful".

Did you... read the article?

Fourth paragraph:

"Among the top 0.1% of startups based on growth in their first five years, we find that the founders started their companies, on average, when they were 45 years old. These highest-performing firms were identified based on employment growth. The age finding is similar using firms with the fastest sales growth instead, and founder age is similarly high for those startups that successfully exit through an IPO or acquisition. In other words, when you look at most successful firms, the average founder age goes up, not down. Overall, the empirical evidence shows that successful entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged, not young."

You can _disagree_ with their definition of success, but they certainly have one.
I'd take him about as seriously as I take Wikipedia. Sometimes useful. Follow links to sources, evaluate those.
screen door on a submarine
That article isn't convincing to me. IQ testing has known issues and if they didn't control for age then the assertion might apply to the general populace right now but not as a general trend that will hold over time, especially since Millennials and Gen Z together are much larger than Boomers. The fertility argument is dumb IMO because while intelligence is heritable, environmental factors and education play at least as large of a role in ability to perform on an IQ test. Also that trend, if it is anything other than a blip (because the wealthiest may actually tend to have more children) just began do there would not be much reason to think gene shift would be a strong factor in IQ trends.

https://qz.com/1125805/the-reason-the-richest-women-in-the-u...
> Gravity and the Higgs field are completely 100% unrelated.

That is an incredible insight for me -- I never thought of it that way. So the thing that creates inertia (mass) is not the same as the thing that generates gravitational force -- they're just correlated in the types of matter that beings like us can interact with?
This is pure bullshit. The idea that Chinese companies and the government are somehow fused has no basis in reality. But it's remarkable to watch people push this sort of conspiracy theory. The exact same people will, when the government cracks down on a company like Tencent, go on to claim that companies are victims of the government.
Facts seem to disagree with you.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Cover-Story/In-China-priva...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-17/china-s-c...

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/business/china-economy-pr...
An interesting alyernative to frequentist and Bayesian is that of the 'likelihoodist'

http://gandenberger.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Statistic...

http://gandenberger.org/2014/07/21/intro-to-statistical-meth...
I would hire him because he's honest. Honest people produce better work.
Throwing money at it would solve all sorts of problems. It'd let us pay teachers more. It'd let us provide more healthcare opportunities to people. It'd help us improve our infrastructure like roads and public transportation. It'd help our libraries. It'd make education less expensive, allowing more people access. Fewer people in economic distress means less crime. Better parks. Better maintenance of natural spaces. Etc.

Government isn't perfect. But neither is private industry. We need both. And both need money to function well.
I said exactly that it doesn't validate the book in my post. But showing a single, very irrelevant stat is not a counterargument either.
One of the best examples of the idea of Bayes is the Monte Hall problem. It is a good example of how prior probability (3 unopened doors) can lead to a more clear posterior-host selects an unopened door with a bad prize and you are asked whether to stay with the unopened door you chose or switch to the remaining open door. Turns out via Bayes it’s better to switch doors because you have more information now.

Tons of write ups and YouTube videos out there on it but here is one example of an explanation:

http://angrystatistician.blogspot.com/2012/06/bayes-solution...
thank you, I've just done it. Another one bites the dust.
The importance of learning humility and discipline to do what needs to be done to stay an entrepreneur overlooked far too often.

Meteoric rises are difficult to keep in the air because of the lack of foundational skills.

Staying a little foolish and hungry (paraphrasing Steve Jobs) seems to be very good long term advice.
It’s, first, an open source library. It optionally integrates with Google Cloud services to use their hardware. But that’s not even likely to be useful in this case, because labeling a few thousand photos just doesn’t require that much power (as opposed to training).
But if all the people who can afford
to buy stuff buy "no ads"

Have you ever heard of a newspaper editor complaining "Too many of our readers are paying subscribers" ?

I haven't - seems to me that's a problem a lot of publications would love to have!
You can own a patent for telescoping ladders and still have to pay royalties to the owners of the telescoping mechanism patent. And if anyone else makes a telescoping ladder with a beverage holder, they can patent that but you can go after them because your patent is more generic. More generic patents take more effort to get but are much more valuable because of this.
Good comments. They got me thinking, what exactly is "research" - I don't know what distinction Rob makes, but for me research software is software that is written with the main goal of publishing a paper in mind. In this sense mapreduce is emphatically not research software - it was first deployed into production and only then there was a paper (with production deployment serving as validation). A good counterexample would be not mapreduce but Stonebraker's c-store which then got commercialized as Vertica.

> One role of CS academic research is to build foundational ideas and then crank out competent researchers who are able to build real systems/algorithms/companies on top of those ideas.

Educational role is very important, but do phd graduates build on top of their research? Instead it seems, they learn the foundations (which were "research" a few decades ago), do a phd project on some very specialized and inconsequential thing and then go off to do real stuff at commercial companies.
I’ve gotten them between 500 and 2000 dollars depending on the lawyer.
BlingEdit – Datapack for World Editing in Minecraft 1.13 [video]
I've definitely been hearing about the project but didn't know it was being ported to GPU, that's great news. How does this compare to things like Gunrock?
Just seems honest to me.

I would also prefer a libre alternative, but I could never find one. Some file managers have transfer, but none use Wifi direct or provide a simple way to connect, from what I've tried.
No, that almost certainly wouldn't happen. If you declare, you're basically given cart blanche provided you can reasonably justify your actions, and if an AFB is closer than a civilian airport, for example, its absolutely okay to land there (though you should probably give them a call first saying you're landing). Your first priority is not dying; legal consequences don't matter when you're in that situation, and the FAA knows that. If breaking a law will save you they'd rather you do that than die, and they almost certainly won't punish you for it.
This needs someone with db skills (yet works well for someone without BE dev skills) though.
It should be noted that, being strictly suborbital, both the challenges and risks are orders of magnitude lower than even a launch to LEO, and that unlike many space programs, they have quite a bit of prior history and information to draw on. I don't know whether this will be enough to reduce risk to near-NASA levels, however.

I am curious as to whether those odds cited are of partial successes, safely-aborted launches, or fatal failures.
At places like Google, where peer reviews determine your bonuses and your career advancement, senior people on your team have to be handled politically. For a person coming in at a level 2, this means nearly everyone.
Who is the most famous tech founder who was 45 or older when they founded their first company?

There were more in the 70s, 80s, or 90s (E.g. Jim Clark) because the industry was still forming, but even then the wunderkind college dropout drove most of the value creation.

In the modern era, Peter Gassner, founder of Veeva was 42. Diane Greene founded VMWare at 43. Brian Acton was 38. You start falling into the 30s fairly quickly.

And if we look in terms of value creation, the crazy outsize wins come from founder founders. E.g. the GAFA companies were all founded by sub-30s.

This study, like most of the Kauffman Foundation studies, tend to rely on obscure methods to reach these counterintuitive results. It's not to say 45-year-olds can't build great companies, but if you made a list of the 150-200 most notable tech startups of the last few decades, you'd see an average age closer to 33 than 45, even lower if you don't include the 2nd or 3rd startups of some founders.
In some ways, it's also easier to run a startup when you're younger. Most younger people have more energy and fewer family obligations. But, that also explains why 45 makes a lot of sense... if you have kids they're probably old enough that they're doing a lot of their own things so you've got the wisdom from age (experience) and you've shed some of the family responsibilities that you might have at, say, age 35.
I love how, left or right, it always ends up being someones fault. Except Italy.

Same story as every thread discussing Greece.
Software Engineers are also hugely underpaid.
I forgot one reason from the list -- to improve color.
Agreed. The thing it took me a long time to realise about stuff like that is that you're not winning by breaking your neck to get something done for an unrealistic deadline, they are!
Just move to an EU country? Over here for any senior software professional the net salary is half of the total salary cost. 50% it is. Dissapointingly it doesn’t convert to exceptional public services or social mobility. It just indicates that one is not connected enough or not born high enough to be above the employment contract relationship.
Jet immediately comes to mind. Many other examples too.
Thank you for that link, it clears up a lot!
That, and a view into whether the distribution is bi-modal.
White lies are confusing things.
it doesn't hurt to be paranoid, especially when it comes to China. If you ran a SaaS, and if a Chinese cloud company there offered to host your SaaS, would you be willing to put your code on those machines? I think you're underestimating
not just Chinese companies, but also the Chinese government.
Here's where you unify the content creator and the advertiser:

> You’re supporting the content provider yet you apparently are not ok with how they fund their content?

You're saying that if you hate the sin (intrusive ads), you're not allowed to love the sinner (content).

That's bogus.

If a company wants to make itself relevant by providing content and then exploiting its visitors with ads, fine. Users have the option of exploiting the content and rejecting the ads.

YouTube is successful because people choose to generate and consume content there. There has to be some room for discussion among users about what form that consumption takes. I reject your suggestion that users have to either accept everything about the platform or go somewhere else.

On a different note, it's probably beneficial to YouTube to hear the conversation about what users block and what they dislike. Otherwise someone else will build a better mousetrap and YouTube will lose its dominance of the video sphere. This is the way business works, otherwise we'd all be connecting to Myspace via AOL and looking for the nearest Toys R Us on Mapquest.
If you’ve lost hope in American democracy, here’s some good news
the only thing approaching 'stealing corporate secrets' in this is detecting bribery by european corporations trying to win contracts
We know from analysis of the cosmic background radiation, that the universe is at least 150 times the size of the observable universe, which puts the minimum diameter of actual universe in the range of 10 to 15 trillion light years. It could be much larger than that, however.
Norway (and other Scandinavian countries) are bad examples that do not apply to the USA, because they have relatively racially and culturally homogenous populations with cultures that didn't evolve in response to the challenge of paying for college in the first place.

Free college in the USA would not work because no middle class person's life would have any meaning -- currently the only meaning that a lot of middle-class people have to sustain them is motivation to pay for their kid's college -- take that away from them, and they really got nothing.

Norway never had the financial barrier to entry to college so it's society's motivations and ethos didn't form in symbiosis with that barrier, but ours did. If you remove the financial barrier to entry to college you also remove the fundamental driving motivation of a huge portion of the middle class.

The reason we can't make college free in America is because we need to keep the middle class working, bro. A college degree is the carrot and student debt is the stick, if you take away the stick the carrot actually becomes less appealing. It's counterintuitive but deeply true.

Making college free in America would have massively demoralizing effects on both youth and adults because our entire youth and adult cultures have evolved in response to the financial barriers to entry into college.
Lady Gaga, Celeb Profiles, and the Third Remake of “A Star Is Born”
The book is literally titled Brotopia, which is an ad hominem slur against our industry. Chang set the level of discourse.
Cool - but is it static? photog is the only photo gallery generation software I have used that will handle large photo galleries efficiently (i.e. it'll work even on a Pi), and that's because it cheats by pre-generating everything.
Go to a fast food restaurant and look at the prices. They'll probably end in .99 because the owners are competing (at least partially) on price.

Now go to a fancy restaurant and look at the prices. They'll probably end in .00 because the owners don't want to look like they're competing on price.

What kind of brand are you trying to build?
I have been looking for something like Polar. Heavy user of Diigo but it doesn't work offline first.
> Serious advice: you're using your brain wrong. Find something better to do with it. Questions which start with "what if everyone <insert verb here>" are bad questions. People will always behave in diverse, contradictory, and conflicting ways.

Serious advice #1: thought experiments can have value even if the thought experiment does not directly model plausible human behavior. The same is true of statistical, scientific, mathematical, and philosophical inquiry. Many foundation proofs begin with "assume this unlikely thing is true." Heck, laissez-faire capitalism as a concept started as a thought experiment based around the fiction of a prior redistribution of wealth (too bad everyone seems to forget that first part).

This is a discussion forum, and the question "what if the majority of folks start doing ______" isn't so absurd a question to ask in all but the most degenerate cases.

> like asking what would happen if gravity reversed

Ironically written given the front page has a detailed writeup on an experiment looking for signs of anti-gravity in the cosmos.

Serious Advice 2: "If you're vexxed by income inequality and consumerism and environmental degradation and such -- as I am" is defining activism of any sort with you as its focal point. Any such activism is doomed, because one need only render you unlikable to derail even unrelated work (as we have seen in the UK's politics these last few years). It's even worse to admonish other people to operate this way. Reconsider it, please.
Hob3l: Fast Slicing of SCAD Files for 3D Printing
It's not reasonable at all. You're 1 instance of bad luck away from death. But that's hardly a reason to not leave home.
Moving countries isn't really viable option for most people. I'm happy to stick around here and try to make this place better.

Anyway, I'd gladly admit that money isn't the only thing. But it's an important thing. If people in your government aren't using that money wisely (and you live in a democracy): Vote for people who will.

And realize that there's no utopian solution: There's stuff that's better and stuff that's worse. Any system will have major flaws. Crooked timber of humanity, and all that.