skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's say you're working by yourself on your pet project. It's entirely for your personal benefit, and no one else matters. Why would you want version control?

* when you make a change that introduced some bug, you can see exactly what was changed, and roll it back

* when you delete a feature because it's no longer useful, then some time passes, and you realize that feature is useful (or you can use that code for something else), you can just pull up your old code and re-add it.

* you can delete old stuff, knowing that it's not in fact gone.

* you can do more radical experiments by branching your code. While you could do this without version control by just copying your code to a new location.. with VC you could keep all of the file/code history.

I work alone writing software projects. No one has seen my code in 10 years (since I started). I use SVN. Every bit of code gets put in SVN.

If you aren't sure about version control, take my word for it: you want to use version control. It will make your life easier. Just do it, and in a short time, you'll see exactly what I mean.
All I'm trying to say is, I like PHP, I use it a lot for 'daily use'. That is, programming small things for personal use. I gave some examples earlier.

And as I said, there are situations you'd think of another language than PHP, but that doesn't mean programming in PHP is a bad practice.
"can reduce symptoms of ADHD and autism"
Both positive and negative or just negative?
Why China Will Spend $3.5B to Flatten 700 Mountains
I actually want to see this:

hd.Where("name = ?", name).Where("category = ?", category)

So that you can do conditional where easily, for example:

hd = hd.Where("name = ?", name)
if category != "" {
hd = hd.Where("category = ?", category)
}

But It doesn't seem to support this?
> big deal to write cursive clearly

The fact that cursive in US is considered some kind of special writing and is uncommon was one ot the biggest "This year I learned".
This topic pops up on reddit from time to time, and usually there is a comment from non-US "we just call it writing".
AFAIR I learned to write cursive from the very beginning. The first letters we wrote might have been capital ones, but I am pretty sure first words were in cursive.
Well, I'm really just comparing rates of murder to rates of completed suicide. From a very quick bit of web searching I find that rate of completed suicide in US is about 11.3 per 100,000 while rate of homicide is 5.5 per 100,000 people. Completed suicide numbers are roughly double homicide numbers.

Here's my sources:

(http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/suicide-in-the-u...)

NIMH (national institute of mental health) say about suicide in the US:

> In 2007, it was the tenth leading cause of death in the U.S., accounting for 34,598 deaths. The overall rate was 11.3 suicide deaths per 100,000 people.

(Suicide statistics can be tricky and there are normally a bunch of caveats.)

(http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm)

For 2009:

> Number of deaths: 16,799

> Deaths per 100,000 population: 5.5

> Cause of death rank: 15
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The primary problem is that we don't have enough time to consume what we can produce.

Ford an avowed capitalist as any identified this problem in the 20s and 30s and rectified the situation by slashing work hours and paying more money. Workers now had enough time to enjoy the benefits of a car, and now had the resources to buy one.

Effectively they were able to buy cars because they made cars, and wanted cars because cars let them take their family to the beach, camping, etc.

Now that manufacturing is automated we need people who can tell the robots what to produce and they need enough time off to consume all that the robots produce. Eventually the robots will produce so much that we will be paid just to consume.
the U.S. constitution identifies a right to keep and bear arms. Even if the arguments in favor of banning guns were convincing, you can't maintain respect for the constitution or the rule of law while enacting laws that violate the constitution.

Then change the constitution.
> Guns are tools that kill. They have no other purpose.

The other† purpose is to keep countries and people in check. The mere ability to immediately use firearms is enough to stop a lot of possible troublemakers.

A country keeps armed forces: military and border guard to keep external actors in check, police to keep unruly citizens in check. A private person keeps arms to keep in check potential burglars, assailants etc., and any other actor who could come in force, of which there are some historical examples discussed in other posts.

† aside of the sporting, hunting and collector activities.
Not to mention peace of mind when you use an off-site version control repository...

I use an off site repository and a separate off-site backup.
When I read this article, it makes me wonder "what is the typical exposure from other sources?".

In the sense of, do we need to worry about hotels in particular? Or are we exposed every day anyway - on the subway, in offices, schools and shared facilities everywhere?

Without that information, it seems hard to make a reasoned judgement as to whether this is something to worry about or not.
Interest rates are set by central banks, central banks are doing a form of central planning of the price of new money in other words controlling the interest rate. As we know from history of the past central planning works pretty badly for optimal resource allocation.

The American Federal reserve is a private institution, founded by members travelling on a secret journey from a train station in New Jersey to a private club on Jekyll Island. There the key elements of the Federal Reserve act was created.

On board the train was senator Aldrich, the senators daughter was married to Rockefeller. There was also representatives from Rockefeller and Warburg / Rothschild banking dynasty family.

The whole system, seem to be constructed to create as much debt as possible, which channels money upwards in the economic pyramid.

See Edward Griffins book the creature from Jekyll island http://www.bigeye.com/griffin.htm

- The system is flawed
The analogy between governments and people doesn't work, not least because governments are immortal and can print their own money.

However, if we choose to ignore this for a moment, there's a good counter-argument: the way to get rid of debt is to pay it back, and the way to pay it back is to work more and invest wisely. The individual or household that needs to pay off some debt would do better if, say, the people in the household got jobs (if they don't have them) or extra hours at work (if they do). Allowing the unemployment rate to rise as it has done in countries operating "austerity" doesn't fit that analogy at all.

My point is not that the above argument is correct, just that it's possible to argue both for and against austerity using "intuitive" arguments based on analogies with households, and these are rarely correct. That said, neither are most of our mainstream economic theories! (At least some of them must be dead wrong, as they can't all be right).
While you're right about bad guys in the form of criminals / gang members, I don't really think the people going into schools to kill are in a state of mind where they worry about what kind of resistance they meet.
Unfortunately, its definitely separate entities except for me.

Something that stuck out at me is this was accepted exactly as I had hoped it would be. This micro-conversation has enlightened me to a variety of diverse social attitudes towards the subject.
Of course, one can manufacture a gun from a 3D printer plus some additional stuff. But there is a qualitative difference between 'click print' and you get everything you need and a project to get everything you need to build a gun, which utilizes a 3D printer ( and some chemistry and some additional metalwork). After all, it is today possible to manufacture a (completely unregistered) gun yourself utilizing a CNC cutter and some craftsmanship.
What's funny is that many changes were pretty fundamental legal changes, such as the abolition of slavery, massively extending the right to vote, allowing a wide range of pornography & allowing abortion & contraception. To claim those as "merely updating our understanding of what the founding fathers wanted" is misleading, but eh, if it makes you sleep at night.
I never quite understood the first group. I buy a car to drive it not to sell at the moment I am out of the gates.
And where would the get cars if no one bought brand new ones?
Of course it does. Government is elected and has to the right to do whatever is constitutional and gets approved by both assemblies.
Lots of people are dying.
"I don't understand" is to relate to "I don't know", of which something along the lines of this is said:

"He who asks a question may look like a fool once, but he who keeps his question to himself will stay a fool for the rest of his life."

Result-driven teaching in our societies fuels the natural fear of failure and of the look of your peers, when proper teaching should result in driving curiosity through one's own recognition of not knowing something as being a positive thing.
I'm from the UK and I'm broadly in favour of Osbourne's policy. We've run up a huge debt that resulted from the government spending more than it was receiving in tax revenue, for many years. Particularly bad were the years when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister (when he was Chancellor he did pretty well).

Now the UK government is cutting public spending, and a lot of public sector jobs have been lost. However, in that time the private sector has created more jobs than have been lost by the public sector, so employment is high, much higher than in the US.

It took us many years to get into this mess and it'll take many more to get us out, but Osbourne is on the right track.
That's not how GDP is calculated. In your example, GDP is unchanged. The laptop only affected GDP the moment you originally purchased the laptop from the laptop store, and at that moment GDP went up by the price you paid for the laptop (excl. taxes). Used goods transactions do not count in GDP calculations.

EDITS (replies to below):

In the case of the two poems, as archgoon points out, the government will collect sales and income taxes which is why that situation never happens... ever. And if you didn't report the transaction to the government to avoid taxes, GDP will be unaffected because GDP is a statistic that is reported by the government, which can't report things it doesn't know about.

Technotony is right about the smashed windows paradox. You could argue that the "value" that is added is the tradesman gets paid (income), and the shopowner gets a new window.

The GDP is not a perfect measure of the strength of an economy. There are plenty of valid criticisms. But it's certainly one of many useful data points.
Yes, absolutely. Asking questions is how you turn a lecture from a poor substitute for just reading about the subject into something far better.

From the other side I find it incredibly useful to get questions while speaking and I wish I was better at encouraging them. When writing a talk you have to write for some imaginary audience who won't ever quite match your actual one. But if you can get them to start asking questions then immediately you have the opportunity to tailor what you're doing for the audience in front of you. It's a very satisfying feeling :)

Any tips from anyone here for making people feel more inclined to ask questions? Often the ones who could most benefit (and create the most benefit for others) are the the ones least likely to have the confidence to do it.
I'm not sure how you could call those changes "fundamental". Some of them were pretty far-reaching in terms of resulting impact, but they did not fundamentally alter the Constitution.
Guns kill people. Knives kill people. Rocks kill people. Truth of the matter is if people want to kill people they will use any weapon available, even their bare hands. Sure if governments all around the world ban guns people will kill less people, but they still kill. Now, how do you stop all this killing? Because, that's the point. Right?

People kill for different reasons, even with no reason at all.
I live in a country with gun control laws. Despite what you may think, this is not a totalitarial oppressive regime. I'm willing to give up my right to bear arms (and my right to pollute the air, etc.)
Cisco Said to Hire Barclays to Sell Linksys Division
America was made from violent revolution against tyranny, so as part of its 'DNA' (constitution) it includes a simple inoculation against that sort of tyranny in the future in the form of the right of private citizens to be armed.

It was technology that threw the founding fathers the unforeseen curve ball. What seemed like a simple question of allowing or disallowing private weapons was really an un-enumerated, technology restricted question of the form "should a private citizen have the means to deploy deadly force against 1 to 3 others".

Today we ask a different question. "How many other citizens should a private individual be allowed the power deploy deadly force against." Now the answer can be 0, 1, 5, a classroom, a neighborhood, even a small town. But the top end is getting higher every year.

The 2nd amendment is useless to us in answering this question. All that's left is haphazard whack-a-mole bans on emerging technologies.

The founding fathers didn't mean to give us a binary choice between total forced disarmament and allowing red-necks to have their own black-hawk helicopters.

Its time for an amendment.
If you eliminate those cases/areas from the picture, things are not all that different in America from Europe

That's a dishonest and misleading comparison. You're taking 2 regions (USA & Western Europe) and then removing unhelpful numbers from the USA side and comparing it with W. Europe.
The argument in the article seems to be that reduced government spending has depressed the economy, which in turn has killed its income from taxes. So, yes, they reduced spending, but they reduced their income at the same time, so there's no net benefit.
That if you fudge the figures on the USA side, then you can make the USA seem safer!
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Please educate yourself about American gun availability before you give the wing nuts a reason to discredit your point. We do not sell automatic weapons without a whoooole lot of paperwork and money, we could not remove the weapons overnight, and your Walmart example is tasteless.
All I get is huge text "D3", "Data Driven Documents", Github repo link and metainfo. Maybe it is broken in Opera?
New Technology Turns Tumors Into Ice Balls To Cure Cancer
This shouldn't surprise anyone. Austerity (as implemented here) looks only to current account balances and does not consider the long-term impact on revenue. Ditch digging theories aside, when government can borrow at rate x and can reasonably expect to get a return > x on an investment, it should generally do so.

Debt levels must be taken in context. Alone, it is a meaningless number used to scare an ignorant public by people with an agenda of shrinking government. Rather, the focus should shift to promoting more effective government.
I didn't type because I'm on an iPad, and we all know how good is to type on screens. Maybe the app should acknowledge the fact that it isn't very good pinpointing the user location, and based on what it already knows, suggest neighboring places.
While this is true, banning guns makes it harder for a single crazy person to kill many people at once and could prevent some of these US public area mass killings.
Web Discussions:Flat by Design
As someone who has dabbled in using Python for numerical computing in several small projects, I wonder: what would be the motivation for further investment in Python as a numerical platform, considering all Python's problems with concurrency.

Real threads will never come to Python. MPI is a real pain unless you are running very large computations. This will only become more true as time progresses. Am I missing something?
How do we reconcile these two ideas?

I don't see a problem with balancing rights. After all, you can do anything you want in the privacy of your own home. However you can't beat & rape your kids. No-one suggests that this is a massive problem and infringment on rights.
That analogy doesn't work with Governments.

Here's a better example:

Imagine a grandmother taking a loan for her grandchild so they can have a car to drive to work. The household income increases as a result.

If she stops paying the loan the car gets repossessed. The grandchild can no longer earn money. The household income decreases.

The grandmother does this for all her many grandchildren. The grandchildren all work and the family become rich.

In our modern economies the now-wealthy grandchildren refuse to pay the grandmother back, but they agree to pay the interest on the loans. She doesn't push it because her house is big and busy and her family have a lovely lifestyle.

Should she default and let the cars be repossessed or would it be better to get her spoilt grandchildren to start paying back the loans?
It can, in the same way the South African goverment could discriminate by race during the Apartheid.

That something is constitutional doesn't mean it is morally acceptable
I agree that the lack of empirical evidence is probably because it's a pretty fundamental idea that is "common knowledge", but that doesn't mean evidence isn't useful and it also doesn't mean the original poster deserves a bashing.
There are public policy reasons why a simple majority shouldn't be able to do whatever they like. It would be much harder to ever raise any investment if it were trivial for a majority to simply take everything for themselves and never pass anything back to the investors.

In such a scenario you end up with a boilerplate contract that any right-thinking investor will insist on, just to protect themselves in such a scenario.

Basically, company law has simply declared that those clauses are there by default.
You're not an egg. You're an abnormally active rubber duck.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
> governments are immortal and can print their own money

The part with governments being "immortal" is actually incorrect. The fact is that for example UK paper money is just that, colored paper, when it comes to paying up debts taken in foreign currency. A couple of failed States come to mind as examples, like Germany in the early 1920s and Argentina in the late 1990s.
Was saddened that the demo couldn't be controlled on my tablet. Is touch support planned? What about networked multiplayer?
There was a study released on the effectiveness of the gun reform in australia after Port Arthur, with a pretty clear result. In the 18 years prior to the reforms, there were 13 mass murders, and in the 10 years from the reforms to the study's publication, zero mass murders. People will take what they want from that sort of data (one person basically told me that the study was unreliable because it didn't take into account lead poisoning), but hopefully it might be useful to some.

The study is available at http://tobacco.health.usyd.edu.au/assets/pdfs/Other-Research...
You're comparing wildly different situations. I'm honestly not worried at all about the US equivalent of machete-wielding robbers. Plus, even if I was, I'd prefer a thousand criminals with machetes to a thousand criminals with rifles (all other things being equal). There's no reason why US law enforcement would become less efficient if people's guns were taken away tomorrow.

Trouble with firearms boils down to their utterly disproportional power -- a single madman sporting a gun is capable of killing dozens of people before intervening forces can end the spree. A single madman sporting a knife may kill one, two, five, ten others, but not more. Knife-attacks are horrific yet self-limiting.
Why 256 bit keys are large enough
Printing a star is quite simple. Just dump roughly 10^30 kg hydrogen into empty space. It will assemble itself into a spherical shape and start fusion. ( For best results, add a little bit of He and CNO into hydrogen.)
>An evolutionary "strategy" is simply a behavior that an organism exhibits to enhance its survival.

You're describing a rather complicated behavior (who's actual existence itself is controversial!) and describing how that came to be. That's just fantasy. There's no evidence that this happened, it's pure speculation. If the behavior even exists, it could have come about some totally other way.

>say, the eye could.

I accept that the eye exists and that it got there somehow. I'm not convinced that the arm chair speculation of how that might have happened is true. If we actually made one that would be stronger but still wouldn't conclusively prove that it happened that way.

>Dawkins uses that exact phrasing in his books.

Dawkins' books are also largely philosophical in nature, not scientific (which is why he gets blasted in the philosophical community, since his philosophy isn't even always sound and ignores tremendous bodies of work).
Your history is wrong, and the killing power of your average citizen hasn't gone up significantly since the end of the 1920s. Look up the Bath school bombing in 1927-near double the casualties of the current tragedy.

Your interpretation is interesting, though.

Edit--Okay, say, the roaring 20s with the Thompson.
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> What kind of hacker isn't interested in those questions?

At a guess, those that flagged this so it's no longer on the homepage. Or possibly the last thing they want is a rational discussion about this, after all, imagine having to actually defend your position in a rational rather than an emotional way. You might even have to change your mind...
Nice conspiracy theories, but have you noticed that every other country also has a central bank even though they didn't have Rockerfellers and Rothschilds? And when you look at the big picture our economy is extremely successful, the envy of the world.
Doing a review of the diff of your own work for the day before commit is also a good way to spot issues.
That's surprising... They were very supportive of me :-( I'm surprised!

I'm glad to read things got better :-)
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In case the measure theory put anyone off: you don't need Dirichlet Processes for plain LDA, just the finite-dimensional http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirichlet_distribution (which isn't so bad and a very useful tool in Bayesian stats as the conjugate prior for discrete observations)

For some of the non-parametric variants like hierarchical dirichlet process LDA, you need DPs, but that stuff is pretty hardcore -- don't walk before you can run.

Another route to LDA (assumes some Bayesian stats basics):

* Learn a bit about Markov chains if you don't know them already
* Read up on sampling-based approximate inference methods and find a proof that a Gibbs sampler converges (or just take it on trust...)
* Read the classic Griffiths and Steyvers paper deriving a collapsed Gibbs sampler for LDA [1]

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/101/suppl.1/5228.full.pdf
Eventually there has to be a switch from spending imaginary money though, and I doubt there ever will be a point when such transition is painless.
I wouldn't compare letting someone with "only" at least 250000 Eur/y in income anything similar to apartheid.
On Using Nearly-Independent Feature Families for High Precision and Confidence