skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that the law requires a statement of cause in order to apportion responsibility. It cannot abide uncertainty at the moment of judgement. It is accepted that, because in civil cases, the consequences of misjudgement are less severe, it is acceptable to relax the standard of judgement to "balance of probabilities".

Note the case that was mentioned inline that this case was affirming: Hotson v East Berkshire Area Health Authority[1]. First of all, the linked poster should be railing at that decision, this one merely takes it as precedent.

In Hotson there was a question about causality based on the given probability of a child's recovery. Given that a child that fell out of a tree was estimated to be 25% likely to recover, medical staff seemed to have taken the view that the child was basically a hopeless case. Perhaps if they hadn't, went the reasoning, the child might have done better because the staff would have tried harder. In that were so, some responsibility could be apportioned to the Health Authority, and not just to the child falling out of a tree.

The Lords ruled that the only thing that certainly happened was the child falling out of the tree. Counterfactuals based on probabilities couldn't be admitted because there's no way to reliably nail the damn things down. Anybody can come along with a different Bayesian network and give you a different estimate. What mattered, in the view of the Lords, was what could be verifiably said to have actually happened.

A more-than-standard disclaimer:

I am not a lawyer. I was terrible at torts. Torts law is notorious tricky and can vary very widely from country to country -- I studied in Australia and these cases are in England. This post does not constitute legal advice. Hell, it doesn't even make for good reading.
This video shows how to make REST APIs with xhtml that you can test in a browser. It demonstrates independent evolution and decoupled implementation of the client and server:

The code for creating the client is available here:

https://github.com/cimlabs/hypermedia-client-java
This is a joke, yes?
A Finance sector perspective:

In reading through the threads, there's a common underlying assumption that if you don't get the problem right, you won't get hired. That definitely is NOT the case in finance. We use the brain teasers and puzzles as a way to showcase how you think. For my interview, out of 5 brain teasers I nailed 2, was heavily helped through 2 more, and never got the last one, even with lots of help. But for each, the interviewer made it very clear that I was to think out loud. After getting the job, I later used the technique in interviews and gave positive reviews to those who had similarly struggled through puzzles but had used a similar thought process. In general we used this to weed out three different types of people:

1. Hard science majors who learned how to solve problems instead of think through problems. These people learned how to derive the heat diffusion equation, but would never put a story modeling a random walk in connection with that equation.

2. People who freeze when things get tough. Obviously a bad thing on the trade floor. While with coding you can often walk away from a hard problem, think about it, and come back, in finance, you can't walk away from losing lots of money over a short period of time ... you have to stop the bleeding.

3. People who learned how to think quickly and with rigorous process. The type of people you want.
>People doing the job poorly should be banned. But the nurse case is interesting because poor statistics became self-fulfilling.

>"We have some deaths, and this nurse is present when they happen, and so they are all suspicious", becomes "all the deaths that happen when this nurse is working are suspicious, and the deaths that don't happen when this nurse is working are not suspicious". And that sloppy thinking gets turned into "probability is 1 in a gajillion that these happen normally by chance."

Investigators have been known to be unduly influenced by pretty much any kind of evidence imaginable and then all further evidence is construed to support the original assumption/assertion. I need a more concrete difference or divider to promote other methods above statistics.
Offshore oil rigs suffer from malware attacks
this tweet by Kontra sums it up:

WebOS has been targeted to mini-phones, larger smartphones, tablets, printers & now TVs. Won't stop until you see it on a LG refrigerator.

https://twitter.com/counternotions/status/306014344876023808
Google Glass Part Two: Binocular Vision
'Social reading' the next phase of e-book revolution
Unsubscribing
Did you bother reading the post at all? The inference in the ruling is based on the rejection of Bayesian statistics.
I'm honestly struggling to see the value in speed reading. I cannot think of why I would be reading something simply for the sake of reading it without further processing

Sometimes you don't need to fully process a text, just know where in it you can find answers for any questions you might have later. For example when reading technical documentation. Speed reading is great for that.
Modern Lightroom uses WAY more resources than earlier versions, especially when using the newer brush and gradient tools. I find my new 15" MBP/SSD/16 Gigs RAM/etc seems to get pushed pretty hard.

I'd be curious how well Lightroom runs on the Surface Pro, or similar.
Example DNA useful:

Cops find criminal's blood at crime scene. Cops track down murder suspect using security video. Find suspect. Take DNA sample. Sample matches DNA at crime scene. DNA proves guilt beyond reasonable doubt 1:1000000.

Example DNA not useful:

Cops find suspect's blood at crime scene. Cops peek in DNA database and find 3 people in the region with matching DNA. One of them sort of looks like the shadow in the security video. They arrest him, get him picked out of a lineup and say DNA matches blood at the crime scene in the trial. Cops say DNA evidence proves guilt with odds 1:1000000, but odds of innocence are the complete opposite and closer to, say, 1000:1.
No more remote work at Yahoo
Nowadays one mostly reads online. Adds, adds everywhere.
If you add the digits in the sequence you get the Fibonacci sequence.
[1 = 1, 11 = 2, 21 = 3, 1211 = 5, 111221 = 8] => [1,2,3,5,8]

I'm not sure if there being multiple "correct" answers makes me like the question or hate it. The Fibonacci sequence seems a bit more obvious though than the "look and say" answer.
Sorry for the off topic but

"How often do you expect candidates to write a function to calculate the square root of a number? I would fire any developer who chose to re-implement standard library functions."

Not this crap again.

Oh and he says he has an "interest in formal computer science"

No, I don't expect you to reimplement square root. Or maybe I do, because that's what a lot of games do (or something similar) because you have to reach a balance between speed and accuracy.

Or maybe because we need a bigger precision than a double, again there are libraries, but again we may need something else that's not in the library.

So yes, absolutely, what I wouldn't hire is a "computer scientist" that can't work their way around a math problem.

Edit: oh it gets worse, he gives the "never parse HTML without a proper HTML parser" talk

Whine whine whine

Step 1 - learn the rules. Step 2 - learn when to break them

And it's only an example

FB didn't lose a "great engineer", they were right on target.
CEO Supper Club: East Coast entrepreneurs smack talk West Coast VCs
Judges, oddly enough, decide cases according to the rules of legal reasoning. They cannot and won't introduce their own evidence. A judge that did so would be rightly removed from the bench.
Accidents, murders, fires, etc... are all unlikely events by nature. Judging whether one of them can have occurred based on probability does not prove anything. The author post is wrong is the assumption that "an unlikely event"="impossible". Probability does NOT ascertain certitude. There is always an expression of confidence which is not equal to 100%, and therefore it seems logical that a court does not take the probability of an event as a tangible proof of what did or did not happen. Probability != science.
"Communists, socialists and social democrats (read: the left) where fighting the Nazis in the streets before Hitler even came to power"

Sorry, that's not persuasive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives

Internecine wars are always the most bloody. Ask the ghost of Leon Trotsky, or are you going to argue that he wasn't a communist? Maybe Ernst Röhm wasn't a Nazi?
Sony Mobile and Telefónica reinforce partnership
All Galaxy Note devices have it.
The could pair it with a Kinect style gesture interface.

Sigh. I really find TVs with enhanced features that useful. The problem is that the software goes out of date very quickly, and I am entirely dependent on the TV manufacturer for updates, which will likely stop shortly after the TV goes out of production (which is what, 6 months these days).

All I really want out of a TV is good picture quality, and a bunch of input ports. For video streaming, gaming, and other apps, I prefer to have a separate box for that, which can be replaced and/or upgraded less expensively.
I find that most C# developers don't have strong feelings about VB.Net; if they comment on it negatively, they are probably trying to avoid the old stigma by association.

Although VB.Net's syntax is not really my cup of tea (it's a bit too wordy for me), I find that many of the keywords make a lot more sense than the equivalent C# ones. E.g. explaining the meaning of "shared" is a lot easier than explaining "static", because the concepts it brings to mind are closer to what's actually happening.
Not using keyboard on lap is the biggest deal breaker for me, too. Waiting to see how some of these Asus clam-shell convertibles turn out, like that Asus Vivo Tab: http://www.asus.com/vivo/en/vivotab.htm

(But want something more spec'd like the Surface Pro)
You know, I think I'm OK with this.

Sherlock Holmes was a detective, not a judge. What was appropriate for his line of work isn't appropriate in the courtroom. Courts are not about what MIGHT happen (or have happened); they are about what DID (or did not) happen. Probability can be an excellent guide for further investigation into these things, but it should be left to the investigators. If they can't find anything harder than a set of odds, then judges have no place betting on them.
Win a Membership at WPMUdev – a $219 Value
Banks have security cameras out the proverbial wazzu, and every transaction entered is going to be timestamped, audited, tracked, signed, sealed, delivered.

Considering the whole point of bitcoin is anonymity (or at least pseudo-anonymity), there's a great privacy benefit to having these at random locations, assuming the makers can clear some of the logistical challenges.
Show HN: Cowpilot, a cow that reads tweets.
In common law countries there are three main tributaries of law: legislation, the common law, and equity. Depending on where you are, the latter two are sometimes "fused" into a single type of law.

"Law makers" -- I presume you mean legislators -- only control legislation. This is often called "positive law", in that somebody has to take positive action to "make" it where it didn't exist before.

By convention, the common law is considered to be "discovered". It exists independent of men and women, and the role of judges is to determine what it is.

In practice there is a dynamic tension between the evolution of the common law as it finds and adapts to new problems, and the intervention of the legislature when it decides that the law should be something else. Legislation itself quickly accretes case law that decides what the given piece of legislation means.
FizzBuzz is a legitimate litmus test for a candidate. It probably becomes a bit gauche once you get a bit of experience, however. In that case, I'd expect some sort of domain-specific technical question with some hand-holding to get the candidate talking. The idea is to coax the candidate into the problem.
So you agree then? I did not say a judge should propose any evidence.

Perhaps it's easiest to explain with an example.
Let's say the defence argues for A, and prosecution argues for B. The prosecution shows that the probability of A being true is 1%. The judge can not take that as a B having a probability of 99%, since it may be that C is true.

Thus the judge requires prosecution to show that B is 50%+ likely, not that A is unlikely.

Does that make more sense?
Exactly this.

I tried to learn speed reading and got pretty decent at it, I can still do it to an extent. In all honesty, I remembered more about texts that I speed read than texts I would read normally.

The only real difference was that when speed reading I didn't have the feeling that I know the full text, but when tested the knowledge would just magically appear out of nowhere; knowledge I didn't know I had.

Eventually I stopped speed reading because it's too much effort. Usually when I'm reading it's to relax the mind, give it a low effort activity to keep itself busy while I rest. Speed reading seemed counter productive for that sort of thing.

Also, speed reading is rubbish for fiction books. You get none of the pleasant pictures in your head and watching the book like an imaginative movie, but all of the feeling of consuming information at a breakneck pace without much time to take pleasure in it.

PS: my main issue with normal reading is that it isn't taxing enough. Especially when I'm trying to study something. Then my mind starts looking for a distraction and I suddenly realise I have no idea what I'm reading. Or simply get bored of it. Speed reading very effectivelyf orces you to focus on what you're reading (probably why I have a higher retention rate when speed reading)
The really nasty edge case is aliasing. Say you're swapping a[i] with a[j]. What happens when i==j? Nope, not what any sane person expects a swap operation to do in this case...

This nasty trick was actually used in one of the Underhanded C Contest entries in 2007.
Is College worth it?
Review: Textadept
Is the web ide usable from a iPad browser? That is something that not work in Cloud9
Galaxy Note 10.1 also has a Wacom stylus that has 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity. I see most people here weren't even aware of it. And I think it only costs like $400 now, if you're interested in drawing and Sketchbook. The Surface Pro stylus doesn't work on Photoshop anyway, so you're not losing anything, if you're just interested in drawing.
The total excitement of understanding – it’s empowering to create something
I not sure what the OP expects the court of appeal to do. They are tasked with determining if there is cause for appeal; in this specific case whether the original judge erred in law. They determined that he did not. They aren't saying whether the judgement was right or wrong, rather that the judgement was arrived at in a lawful manner.
This isn't being forced on anyone. Mobile operators are doing this voluntarily: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mobile_partnerships
Thanks so much for your feedback, guys! I'll drop it down a little.
I think that this is all being blown far out of proportion, when people are in the office, there is a lot more intent, you are there to work, sure you could spend it surfing HN, or whatever, but you are under more pressure to produce results.

In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to.

We are seeing a company taking away something we - as employees - like, in addition to our $120,000 per year wages, our paid healthcare, our free office snacks and clothes washing and our free donated dairy cow.

I wonder if, in a few years if the bubble pops, we will look back fondly on the days of decadence and wish things where still the same?

-------------

Also, totally unrelated, just realized I've been a member of HN for 6 months, cool landmark :)
You write as if you weren't aware of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact

I don't know how it is where you live, but where I grew up (Sweden), the left has never supported a democratic country against a dictatorship... The communists stopped being Stalinists when Moscow told them Stalin wasn't in, anymore.

Etc...
Economic impact of Mobile World congress in Barcelona
I think your argument really highlights your advanced age and disconnect with modern technology.

I think your argument really highlights that you are an obnoxious, ignorant prat, with an extremely loose sense of morals (people trust you with their business? Tell them that you proudly thieve. Worse, on a completely public network that literally screams your identity). There are a lot of people whose time is much more important and valuable than yours, so your experience differs. Exult in your worthlessness.
This is brilliant. love it.
The Eric Holder Memo on the "Reasoned Exercise of Prosecutorial Discretion"
I would guess they're changing culture, then firing those that don't fit (or have lost all intrinsic motivation) through performance reviews, then making the rest sing and dance until they get burned out, finally replacing those that left or were fired with new blood baptized by the new regime.
My initial reaction to the question was simply assign the value of one variable as the name of the other. Does that count?

a = a0
a0 = b0 // initial assignments
a = b0
a0 = a0 // swapped
Woo, a TTL (time to libertarian) of 10 minutes!

This is being done by the carriers themselves, not the government. And by the way, what makes you think the carriers don't understand their own business? Here's a Wikipedia page to review: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader .
I see your point, but there is a difference between rewards and ripping people off. Anyway, I did not expect at all, this kind of traffic to this post. I just wanted to simply point out to other startupers not to be afraid and stand up to people like that.
> In my experience, having someone there in person is a lot more productive, I get immediate responses to my queries and they get immediate responses to their work, no waiting around for emails to be responded to.

More productive for who? You? Better hope that person wasn't in the middle of something important when you broke his/her train of thought that will take a good half hour for them to recover.
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I'm Sorry, but I would prefer to live in a place where on the hottest day in summer, the ocean water is not freezing cold. Or a place where my kids can grow up and not have to worry about drinking polluted groundwater. Or a place where even though I live 5 miles from work, it still takes me an hour each way to get there. Or a place where the housing is not so out of touch with reality that a 2 bedroom shack costs $600K, when in any other part of the country that same house would be less than $60K.
It's my first blog post, so please be kind. Anyway, I think that college will be a waste of time. The problem is not the content but what people think they could do after graduation.
People at Yahoo need to "work" first to qualify for "remote work". I think this is the right direction. Get the team together, develop team spirit and then transform the company.
Get'em Dave
I have actually passed an interview where a misuse of the swap trick was part of the "what's wrong with this piece of code" question. Maybe this is similar to "have you seen this trivia question before" but reverted: "can you spot this idiotic trick that causes bugs", which I believe is much more valuable.
Aye, but the L-system still fits given the amount of data shown in the question. So is the L-system incorrect, because there's no way to disambiguate the sequence given the data?
That article was more about declarative/functional programming than about the details of the Haskell syntax.

Types are capitalized. Lower-case types in signatures are placeholders in polymorphic functions. The signature

(.) :: (b -> c) -> (a -> b) -> (a -> c)

means: The function that is the . takes a first argument (g) that maps some type b to some type c. The second argument (f) maps some type a to the type b. This ensures that you can always do g(f(x)). The result of the function . is a function that maps the type a (what f takes) to type c (what g returns).

The type signature only deals with types; this is not connected to the names of the function parameters.

Lambda expressions are written without types; they can be inferred (i.e. the return type is not void* , but exactly determined by the compiler). A lambda expression in lambda calculus notation would be written "λx.(+ x 1)". Haskell slightly modifies this, and allows infix operators: "\x -> x + 1"(the \ looks a bit like λ). Punctuation functions are infix by default.

About the data expression: This constructs a new type (typedef). The "|" operator is just used in a declarative fashion. Every time you write Empty in your source code, that thing is a list. The expression "list = Cons foo Empty" would create a list of one element (foo). A cons cell is a pair, this terminology is popular in Lisp. These confusing data type constructors allow pattern matching, as you have seen in the definition of "map": If the list is Empty, return Empty. If the list is a Cons of an element and another list, then return a Cons of (result of our function applied to that element) and (the rest of the list mapped) – recursion.
Dropbucket.org - Drupal Snippets Repository is Launched
Are none of their teams distributed? I'd imagine if you have a distributed team, what's the difference if an employee works from home occasionally. The theory being that their boss or most of their team isn't in their location already.

I can understand if Yahoo is making a shift to shore up some things in house. Hopefully if that is the case, they return to a policy that allows more work from home.

This is a battle that Gen Y'ers are going to have with aging management who can only manage people they can see/touch/watch. I thought we as an IT culture were doing better moving away from those old tenants but news like this doesn't make it look good.
Pretty much all the current crop of smart tvs use HTML as their primary app platform. It's pretty consistently WebKit with a few custom integration points for TV specific functions. For all intents and purposes there is already a consistent open platform for apps on TVs

I own a small agency who builds apps for these platforms we can hit LG/Samsung/Panasonic/Sharp/Sony tvs with a single code base now. There are still a few outlier platforms like Yahoo Roku etc but HTML now gets us ~80% of the market.
Self-indulgence Alarm
I think of it in another way: The ship is sinking. It's bad. Time to throw out the gold crates. Time to throw out the limping crew.

Sure the limping fellas can spot land. Maybe hes even good at it. Better than others. However the ship is going down, its time to try whatever possible in hopes of saving it.
No train of thought takes half an hour to recover, that is massively scaled up to make my point sound ridiculous. That aside, if I feel it is important enough that it required an immediate response prompting me to go all the way to their desk, then it's most likely more productive for the entire company.

I should probably post-face this with the fact that I am one of only 2 devs at my company, the rest are content production / design / marketing.