skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because those who can market themselves lean to 'easier' spaces.

Think of it this way. I'm a very terrible programmer. My understanding of the O notation is abysmal at best. If you ask me to write a distributed database, I probably won't do a good job at it.

But you know what I can write? Webapps! Any Tom Dick and Harry can write them. People who can market themselves well and can write the easy stuff wins. And with that comes the compound effect of the rich getting richer.

Example: I write the next social network and I market the hell out of it. Now I'm the cool company that people who are really good in computer science want to join, since you know, I've scaled out to the point where data is big enough to warrant the term 'Big Data', where information retrieval is now a problem.

Imagine instead if I were say a very very good biologist. That also typically means my focus is very very narrow, and doesn't lend itself to marketability. I cannot start a company saying I want to create a drug that turns off production of the PRSS3 enzyme. No, I'd have to market it as "I am creating a drug cure for prostate cancer". But I can't and I won't (if I am being honest with myself), because all I know about prostate cancer is the PRSS3 enzyme. There are other factors that causes prostate cancer.

People who are experts in their fields are generally stuck on the narrow field they're in. A PRSS3 researcher would know everything there is to know about the PRSS3 enzyme. He/she would probably suck at marketing it though. Same with say, information retrieval experts. The people who don't give talks at XYZ conference. The people who work behind the scenes, engineering everything - they don't market themselves well.

As a result, the people who best market themselves win. The easiest things to make are also usually quite easy to market.

tl;dr: people flock to 'easier' spaces because that's what's easy to market to. Programmers flock to the latest SoLoMo startups, because SoLoMo is easy to market to hackers.

wow I'm so ranty today
That wasn't my experience with Maven (tons of ceremony? never... :)).
While switching now isn't feasible, keep in mind the sunk cost fallacy.
This post makes a third incorrect assumption too. That the "greatest minds of our generation" work at Google, Facebook and Apple.
> don't pay attention to most of the negative things people say here

This is good advice.

> they can't stand to see someone as young as you being more productive than them.

This is not why people are being negative.

If there was no indication of OP's age, do you think the comments would have been much more positive? And if someone asked something like "how do you find time to make games?" and OP had said "I'm fourteen", do you think negative comments would have started springing up?

But it's one thing to see something cool and then realise that it was created by someone young; it's another to see something that is only getting attention because it was created by someone young. And you can't necessarily know whether that's true or not, but having "I'm fourteen" in the title makes it more likely that it's true. This isn't jealousy, it's more an attitude of "I don't care how old you are, I care about the cool things you've made; and if you think your stuff is cool, why are you talking about your age?"

Whether you agree with this attitude or not, I'm pretty sure it's a more accurate model of the negativity than your belief that people are just jealous.
Exactly - music in the future will be algorithms. (Edit: to clarify, I mean instead of something like an MP3, you could download an algorithm that creates music on the fly. Why bother with recordings when you can have the live composer?)
I was really excited when Gates announced his foundation. Smart people, lots of money, focussing on evidence based things that work or should work.

Even though they've done fantastic things it doesn't feel like we're much closer to a cure for Malaria being developed.

Would the world be a better place if smart people weren't sending private vessels to space or the deep ocean or around the world photographing every road or onto the public roads with no human drivers? Like actors working the lousy but well paid films to give them the cash to work on the good but low paid films we need the cat pictures and social buttons and advertising to give companies the funds to do exciting things.

Having said that, anyone facing burnout in the industry should really consider some humanitarian thing because there are problems looking for solutions there, and more smart people can't hurt.
Perhaps the most laughable assumption of all.
I have two different male friends who were really very skinny and both were constantly picking up thin women. They just put themselves out there.

I am not particularly buff, and I've had about a dozen girlfriends, and have "dated" another ten or so. Now if only I could meet the right one....
I don't get it even now - weren't there already b&b sites before AirB&B? So what's so crazy - the air part, which they threw out anyway?
Because they make 100k straight out of college.
Static Typing: Give me a break
Three solid suggestions.
Why is this upvoted..? HN needs a homer simpson exclaiming boorring. Let's tell the truth. At least they're not bankers. The world is truly getting better,
I've had Type 1 diabetes for about 20 years now; it's a little bit of pain in the ass, but I don't get why people bellyache about it so much. Blood sugar meters? Check. Fast-acting insulin? Check. Insulin pumps? Check.

Blindness, amputation and kidney failure are no longer guaranteed and I'm grateful as heck for that. For now I'll count my blessings: one of which is the fact that my wife has yet to find me laid out in a diabetic coma -- something that was very, very common less than 50 years ago.
Well. My post was intended to provoke an emotional (err angry) response, mainly because I have a personal problem with people being overly nitpicky and sounding extremely arrogant. I don't know if you're aware of it, but that's how you come across. I already knew about your background because you mentioned it in another post.

That aside, I really appreciate your effort of teaching me about converting RGB values to gray scale.

On another hand, I don't think that converting the image to something that is accurate to the human eye is something we want to do here (we're not going to show the result to one anyways). Using your formula we would end up overly favoring green levels for our edge detection, even though we want to treat all colors equally. Well, not if the next thing you're going to argue about is the significance of different levels of blue to edge detection and that green in general is the better color for detecting edges.

Call me mean or just stupid, but for my part I think we both should reflect on how much amateurishness we can tolerate and when to just not reply to something.

Sometimes trying to show someone how ridiculous he comes across by mimicking his behavior leads to people wasting countless hours on a pointless internet argument, that at some point is fighting over something that isn't even really related to the main points the authors were trying to prove.

I would have usually left it like that, but in this case I felt bad because you actually made a great effort explaining all that stuff and yourself. Thought it might be fair to tell you how I see this.

Still some interesting stuff, but a lot of information. You should get a blog and write some lengthy (in a good way) posts about this. You seem to have quite a lot to tell people about this, and also a desire to.

I'll continue feeling a little bad about this while I'm sleeping.

Good night

chmod

Edit/PS: Yes, I thought about Blade Runner while writing the first sentence.
The most scary moment - one of the applications we've written was used to take life-saving medications on time. Scary stuff I'm telling you.
Do they disguise metadata as well? File size, name, and directory layout would be more than enough to identify particular files (or at least enough to obtain a warrant to force mega to push trojan client software).

I'm sure they've considered this but if someone has seen an article or post analyzing the client side encryption I'd love to read it.
Functional programming - Haskell or Standard ML for beginners? - Stack Overflow
This is, to me, a really poignant post. I think there's a level of civility that sometimes can be lacking in our daily lives as engineers, and markcc does a good service by writing well about it.
There are more than one million of Type 1 diabetics in the US alone, like the man mentioned in the post (Scott Hanselman). How would those measures improve their life?
MS-DOS? Again?
"Reginald Braithwaite is a software developer at Leanpub, where he and his colleagues take the friction out of writing and selling books"

Why the fuck are the greatest minds of our generation toiling away on a book publishing platform? Oh, right, because you think it's important. Guess what- we all have different opinions. Is book publishing more important than dating? Before you laugh, think about it- finding someone to share your life with is very important to a lot of people. A lot more than will ever publish a book.

It's pretty depressing to see this upvoted as far as it has been on HN. What is it actually saying? It's like one of those stupid motivational posters (only negative)- all emotion-tugging, no depth.

Why are you making a book publishing platform and not following your own advice?
You don't need the password to share a file, you can create a special link that contains the key for that file.
How does the data get from point A to point B? Does everything pass through your servers? Do I have any reason to feel that my URLs/maps/files couldn't be snooped upon by yourself or anyone else?
Is the author of this is currently working on curing diabetes? I think the chances are small he is. What I'm trying to say is that he is a hypocrite.
At one time, my 3rd-party repo almost hit 1GB (committed to SVN).

ANT script becoming more and more complicated. Running unit-test? running integration-test? SVN hooks? extra work, lots of...

Extra JARs (e.g.: Log4J 1.1 and Log4J 1.4) sometimes got included to the WAR or the deliverable output package because multiple projects refer to the same 3rd-party repo but individual project decided to use different versions of the library.

To his of its own, we decided not to move to Maven but instead opted for Ant+Ivy.

Thing is, Maven or Ivy is becoming a norm because _many_ people like me decided that it's the better way to go and we are ready to give up some of the things we had before.

Our build is 100% reproducible _and_ correct vs 100% reproducible _but_ maybe 90% correct.

One of the advantage of Maven (in Eclipse via m2clipse) is the less time it requires to setup 3rd-party JavaDoc _and_ the actual Java source code (assuming the author upload the Java source code to the M2 Repo). I can easily navigate to the source code because m2clipse will download it for me for free. Do that with ANT + Eclipse and I guarantee you that you will burn some time to set things up _AND_ it won't necessarily be cross-platform (often it won't work well across 2 different machines with the same OS anyway if someone decided to mess up with the actual .classpath).

>And what happens if you have an Internet connection but some high-target repo gets rooted and a major Java .jar gets replaced with a version containing an exploit?

Examples? Frequency? You can say the same with FreeBSD packaging, Debian and Ubuntu apt-get repo, or any similar systems.

Again, most of us are thankful that Maven (and IDE integration) exist. To bad you're not.
Wait for the upcoming WQHD Samsung Series 9. [0]

[0] http://www.engadget.com/2012/08/31/samsung-series%209-wqhd-u...
You can't make that post and not give us samples! What kind of a man are you?!
the tribe has spoken
A look inside the Tesla Motors factory at their holiday party
Would love an API so I can push IRC alerts to my phone. Growl integration would also work well.
I have an x220 with both touchscreen and pen running Arch/xmonad. I almost never use the touch capabilities, though I use the pen a fair amount for screen annotation and photoshop. I like pens but if you are a serious developer on a laptop you are in text/keyboard mode most of the time and just don't need a touch screen, imo.

Also, love the keyboard. I use the extra slice battery for it and get about 10-11 hours per charge on that slice plus the standard battery (real world, though I think they make a claim for more).

I have a great lenovo charger that includes usb ports, but sadly I think they discontinued it. I use it constantly for charging my mobile devices even when not charging the laptop.
This would be a lot more likely if the House and Senate science and technology committees were seen as desirable appointments. This is not presently the case for a host of reasons.
Clearly I'm working for the wrong employer
I'd like to call this "Black Swan Hunting".

The idea seems similar to purchasing (wholesale) a crate full of swans (some of which might merely be dyed black) in the hopes that one of them will be a genuine black swan.

In many ways, this isn't a new idea. How many car collectors have dreamed about answering a classified ad for an "old car in the barn" only to have it turn out to be a Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic? But the reality is that 99.99% of the time, it's a rusted out Buick.

It's true we need these "diamond in the rough" hunters out there, and I must admit that if I had many millions of dollars I would probably set up just such a "Black Swan Fund", but I've always imagined that I would style it after the various X-Prize-type competitions that became popular starting around the middle of the last decade. It seems to me that most such ideas can be funded "a step at a time".

The other way to do this would be to consider it as artistic patronage. That way you wouldn't expect a return on your investment other than the creation of something that might not have been there before. Of course you still keep a nice chunk of any potential earnings just in case you get lucky. :)
Elon Musk chose to do PayPal (a rather disliked company on HN) which enabled him to work on Tesla, SolarCity, and SpaceX (which HN rather likes).

Isn't it possible that some of these people toiling away in the corporate womb are acquiring capabilities and capital so they can be reborn to do important, but potentially unprofitable 'change the world' projects?
Ask HN: Has anyone tried to write a Bayesian classifier for stories?
I had an idea that I should write a simple program to take the HN front page, look at the stories, and then use Bayesian inference to learn what I like. It sounds like this would be very simple to do, and would generally be the same idea as spam filtering. My interests are not that varied, and I think a bag-of-words model would easily be able to tell what I like or not.

However, I'm pretty sure lots of people have tried this, and it probably doesn't exist because nobody succeeded.

Has any of you tried doing some ML for interesting stories? Did it work? If so, is it available, and if not, why not?

Any insight on this would be valuable, thanks!
Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123

and I'm glad to see that so many participants, from the founder on to the newest member, enjoy thinking about and checking facts on education issues. There is very good research on boosting student achievement in another charter school network, the Uncommon Schools network

http://www.uncommonschools.org/our-approach/thought-leadersh...

that produced the book Teach Like a Champion.

http://teachlikeachampion.wiley.com/

http://www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470...

Practicing the techniques in that book is improving my own teaching as a private-practice mathematics instructor.

There are a lot of stupid comments that suggest that the main disadvantage of the United States is its ethnic diversity, but the real disadvantage the United States has is low expectations all around, from the most advantaged students

http://educationnext.org/when-the-best-is-mediocre/

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/08/29/lo...

http://educationnext.org/teaching-math-to-the-talented/

to the least.

http://www.ams.org/notices/200502/fea-kenschaft.pdf

The hypothesis that "race" differences matter most in the United States educational achievement profile is thoroughly discredited,

http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/nisbett2012groupdi...

and meanwhile there is abundant evidence--for the rare American who speaks or reads any language besides English--that school systems in other countries sometimes provide a better learning environment simply by expecting more of students,

http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pd...

including, by the way, often learning a second language just to receive school instruction or a third language as a core part of the secondary school curriculum (both of which were part of my wife's experience in Taiwan when Taiwan was still part of the Third World). If further research on KIPP and on The Uncommon Schools network continues to alleviate the effects of the de jure racism in United States public schools that survived into my lifetime, and also gives the lie to ongoing excuses for racism, so much the better.

AFTER EDIT: One more point on the subject of international comparisons in education is that the TIMSS and PISA series of tests don't wholly agree in methodology,

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts...

and hence don't wholly agree in conclusions, although the United States plainly doesn't do as well in educational achievement as its high level of spending on public schools would warrant.

P.S. Every time I see a Hacker News discussion of this subject I reflect that my occupation (supplemental mathematics lessons for advanced learners in mostly suburban school districts in one of the states in the U.S. with the highest academic achievement) wouldn't exist if United States schools were really doing so well for the brightest. See my user profile for more details.
Can anyone explain the "Why is a process wedged?" part? I do understand that piping from /dev/random to /dev/null is going to run forever, but I do not understand the gdb-output, nor what that has to do with the rest of the text.
I hate to sound rude, I mean well. But why the fuck is Raganwald whining about start-ups that aren't solving real problems instead of solving the problems himself? That's what really irks me about today's society. People bitch and whine about things, wanting people to change the world and yet don't do a single things themselves to make it happen. I hate the mentality that it's up to everyone else to solve serious problems when Raganwald is wasting his time whining about people not solving real problems behind his computer screen oblivious to the fact there are people out there trying to make a difference. Curing things doesn't happen over night. After the initial study, it can take upwards of 10 years before a new drug can come to market.

Maybe people aren't solving medical issues because it's not easy. Case in point: a man by the name of Thomas Shaw engineered a syringe that after it's use the tip retracts inside of the syringe to prevent people from jabbing themselves, an obviously genius idea, right? He's worked on the design for over 15 years and has failed to crack into the market, although accomplished many other notable contracts and things other budding start-ups wanting to crack into the medical market could only dream of. Other companies have copied his device, he's had to fight even though his device has been proven to be the best in comparison to others.

The medical industry is not only tightly regulated, it's heavily infiltrated by super lobbyist groups. Doctors taking kickbacks for exclusively using a particular medical supplier or company regardless of safety or price.

Having said that, what makes this guy think people aren't out there solving problems? While diabetes is a serious medical issue, it's manageable. But I would much prefer resources are allocated to illnesses where they're only treatable for so long before you die, like you know cancer and leukaemia. Be grateful you have a condition that if managed properly you can still live a normal life unlike those who are bed ridden and slowly dying from cancer because even though the treatments they have can cure them if caught early they make you extremely sick in the process.
Economics is about allocating resources in order to produce goods and services that people want and need.

A lot of people are spending a lot of time using google and facebook's products these days.

Assuming that people are spending time this way because they like what they are getting, and presumably need or want more of it, it makes sense to allocate resources to the upkeep and evolution of these services.

How to balance want vs need, and how to add all this up to get a useful total score is, of course, subjective and up for debate.

The person doing the complaining is, of course, highly encouraged to offer suggestions for improvement...
Has any interesting large program been written in Rust besides the Rust compiler itself?
That seems easy to explain: most of us would not do so well at a school taught in Finnish.
> The East Asian economic miracle is all about the state in control of the banks (printing).

So was the Asian Financial Crisis. And to a lesser extent Japan's "lost decades".

There are no simple answers in economics. Everything comes with ugly drawbacks.
It also assumes those terrible choices aren't stepping stones, enabling these great minds to undertake the meaningful work Raganwald demands, once they have acquired more capabilities and capital.
Not to mention the assumption that developers working for Google or Facebook would make good bio-medical engineers.
My friend is in the process of completing his residency in emergency medicine. When I asked him what the most difficult part of his job was, he told me, "having to see one obese person after another, knowing what I tell them will almost certainly have no impact."

Lots of people have already mentioned the incentive factor (well covered by Bill Gates in his comment about baldness: http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates_unplugged.html), so I won't speak about that. Rather, it might be worth thinking what solving these real problems involves.

Fixing obesity? Working with obese people day in and day out, trying solution after solution with no success? It's not just that these things aren't glorious - but they're also soul crushing. When you make a social network, people around you get excited for you. When you make a weight-loss application, well... not much happens.

For an industry that is already prone to depression and mental illness, it's not entirely difficult (although it may not be right) to see why things have developed the way they have.
But schools have experience creating classes that raise test scores. Figuring out the best way to help youths develop “grit”

Schools have extensive experience developing "grit". Go out to the football field or basketball court and those same knuckleheads are showing more 'grit' than anyone in the chess club. The reason they don't have 'grit' with respect to academics is because they aren't interested. Getting them interested is mainly fodder for cliche-ridden Hollywood claptrap.
The confidential list of everyone attending Davos this year
787 Dreamliner probe widens after excess battery voltage ruled out
Awesome work. I love the movie and one of the reasons are the visuals. Would love to see a real site with such a theme and WebGL stuff :)
v1 of the Twitter APi is getting killed in a few months and v1.1 requires auth which makes it impossible to directly view the JSON object.

https://api.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/show/64780730286358528....
Because consenting adults aren't allowed to engage in an exchange of medical services without the approval of federal bureaucrats + lurking personal injury lawyers.

All we need is just one state with medical contractual freedom.