skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you want general results, you need to abstract away from standard preschool algebra and build up models that then let you get said general results. That might appear ‘weird’, but I don’t see how else you could get even to calculus, not to mention, for example, the algebra driving a sensible description of quantum mechanics or differential geometry.

You called it a rant, but could you maybe still make a suggestion on how to better think about problems?
Give it a few years and a few lawsuits and Tesla will have a solution that makes you want to "kill yourself" as well.

This is a bit like PayPal versus other payment vendors (what an appropriate example!) -- it's easy for other payment vendors to talk big when they're at a small scale or dealing only in a niche, but once they're generalists those ideals tend to fall apart.

Rear-facing seats are illegal in many areas, for one, leading to export issues. The second is that anything dealing with children is a legal nightmare in general, and faces by far the most regulatory scrutiny: Having four young children, I've gone through probably half-a-dozen child-seat recall issues for various relatively minor things. Integrate that in the vehicle and you suddenly have a major corporate liability.

Tesla is an amazing company, but as they grow they will get the layers of protection that every other company eventually gains (e.g. "the most we'll do are some frame-anchored LATCH anchors that we are forced to install by the government...").
How mature.

Your lack of knowledge of Midwest startups doesn't equate to there not being any.
Create web forms in under a minute with JotForm Instant
SLS fabricators don't actually produce equivalent quality to real guns. Real guns are made with precision machined metal components that are extremely strong. SLS "guns" are made with tiny bits of metal and binder fused at much lower temperatures than metal forging and thus have much weaker bonds. You can't really compare the two.
Why do students dissect frogs?
> In Germany there is the so called "Recht am eigenen Bild" which means you cannot just film random people and share the images or even exploit them for money. This is a law specific to Germany

I don't think that law is unusual, in Argentina we have it too, and sounds like something very basic anyone would want (though creeps don't seem to understand it, and act surprised when they realize such law exist, and start complaining on their lack of freedom and whatnot, lol). I thought it kind of came packaged with the IP laws that the US pushed everywhere.
Firefox for Windows 8 expected to exit beta in November
Works well.
http://clippingmagic.com/images/15861/a22417d1c2cc94b5d0efb8...
Windows 8: forget 100m licences 'sold', here's how many PCs are running it
If you want something newer, try Aurora[0], it's the nightly build, pre-beta, of Firefox. But should work in Firefox Beta.

[0] http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/aurora/
> Flying the aircraft requires a lot of energy. Gore says, “If we’re going all out, I’m pretty much drained by the end of a minute and a half

Seems like this isn't a helicopter, more a human-powered-helicopter-challenge-winning-machine.

I mean, if it can't fly for more than 90 seconds it might technically pass the requirements but is it in the spirit of the prize?
App store trials
What does this mean for the Raspberry Pi? Will Raspbian's default browser be able to handle it?
My thinking is this:

If you fire the customer, then in the customer's mind (s)he was right to be concerned, and you just proved it by running away.

Contract in place, signed. Keep all records of the unreasonable request and attempt to change the contract conditions. Do the work. Bill the customer. Sue if they don't pay.
Ask HN: New Technology, Needs Advisor
Hi HN, I need your help. I created a new language whose paradigm I'm calling Declarative Reactive. It's quite strange, but the benefits are both wide and deep. There are five or six ways I could introduce it, either as an application on the technology or the technology itself.

The problem is, I'm too close to it to judge well. I could really use a fresh pair of eyes to help find the best path from its raw state to something that's clearly consumable. I can explain more via email. (My email is in my profile.) Thank you!
You've got to know when to hold 'em. Know when to fold 'em.
Know when to walk away. Know when to run.

This clients sounds like they would be a world of pain.
Designing this gun was clearly an asshole move

I, for one, welcome any asshole moves that make governments afraid of their citizens.

DefDist's Bitcoin: 1Gb5GNxrVGMT8e9uoJ8CmamrdVz9o8fAEa
( http://defdist.org/bitcoin/ )
See, I would build my company so that your at-work chunks are alone.

I don't buy into this "people are best in teams" cargo-cultism that's actually an excuse to buy shitty, cheap office space. People need a little bit of social interaction, but the actual work must be done alone, preferably in a private office (I fucking hate open-plan). So, if your work time wasn't satisfying your need for privacy and being alone, then I'd be failing.

If a specific person's needs for alone time were such that the person desired to eat alone, that'd be fine. I just wouldn't want a culture where everyone eats at a desk.
Dude, antidepressants do absolutely nothing for a lot of depressed people.

- http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/18/new-research-on-the-an...

Concerning XTC, LSD and Psilocybin: they are surely not the silver bullet, but could be valuable for treatment. Maybe you'd like to fact up:

- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/9565026/Can-LSD-cure-depr...

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/apr/07/magic-mushroom...

Had you read what I wrote, you would not claim that I implied current antidepressants are dangerous nor addictive. They are, however, suspected of facilitating suicidal thoughts in adolescents, so I would not exactly call them harmless

- http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/child-and-adolescent-m...
Calls for shutdown of Ask.fm after suicides won't solve the root of the problem
It's generally the habit of blocking feeling, unpleasant feelings you don't want to feel - you repress them - which then leads to the habit of all feelings starting to get blocked, as it's the action of reenforcing blocking of feeling, which you don't have the ability to control which would get blocked or not; The healthy thing in certain situations that are too tough or don't allow you to deal with them in the immediate or all at once is through suppression - though suppression turns into repression if you ignore it for long enough, or don't have the tools to work it out / talk it out with yourself or someone else.
I think the term you are looking for is depressive realism.

I forget the study (its been a while - please correct me if I am wrong), but depressed people were checked for accuracy in their self assessment/ understanding their world/environment.

The thesis was that their thinking skewed them towards overly negative assessments of their ability, chances, and position in life.

Turns out that several people had a more accurate understanding of their state than the base line.

This fact actually bugged me for a while. If being depressed is more accurate then isn't my mind being the most honest with me.

It was useful for me to think about it in these terms:

The issue with depressive realism is that it tells you a very prosaic truth - that the world doesn't care. As you said: we already know that the universe has no inherent meaning or purpose.

So why does it matter that base line people are more optimistic about their chances? Or their aims? Why does it make a difference?

What matters fundamentally isn't the way the world is - Its a crummy place.

What matters to me is the world I can imagine and want to be in.
When I worked at a place that sold ammo as far as I can remember we didn't have to track anything special. Guns had all kinds of tracking and restrictions, magazine sizes had restriction (for at least 5 states) but ammo seemed to be just fine.
Since it was an internet store most of the orders were CC but even then we'd have the address we shipped to but it isn't like the ATF came in and asked about ammo. They would ask about the guns and make sure we were compliant there.

I get the nagging feeling that I had heard of some sort of tracking before but I can't recall any detail to search on. For all I know it might have just been a rumor and that increased our sales and that's what I heard.

Wal-Mart limits sales per customer per day[1].

[1]http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732329370457833...
I love mathematicians. They give a complicated function, explaining how they derived each term, and then consider the problem solved, without bothering to give a number.

It's correct, of course, as the problem is solved, but most people would attempt a ballpark approximation in the end!
Given that this was posted in Sept. 2011, I don't think he's waiting for suggestions from us :D
So creating apps for an OS that controls 40% of the market share is limited value?

Open source is good, but I don't condemn software that's closed source. I use OSX and dualboot Windows, for one.
>The fact that 3D printed guns control is infeasible doesn't mean that leaving them uncontrolled is a good idea.

Actually, that is exactly what it means. Infeasibility is a good place to stop, as it means that what you are doing is not reasonably possible.
You are clearly very talented, this is a truly excellent post. It made me understand an extremely complex subject better, as well as making me laugh. Well done!

Some people find the idea of positively affecting many peoples lives encouraging. If you happen to be one of those people, congratulations - mission accomplished. The tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people that will read your post today will have enriched lives and will likely treat those that they meet who have depression in a more appropriate way. If 100k read your post and interact with 5 depressed people over their life span you have positively affected 500,000 people. I am willing to bet that this is more than most people will ever meet.

Once again, you are clearly talented and have acheived something great here. I will stop gushing now, as I hope not to be a dead fish taunter!
I had a boss who was a bit too ... stressed ... for a while. You just couldn't reason with him about it.

In the end I solved it. I wrote in an email that he was just too stressed and really needed some time off, so he started to attack me personally.

I wrote to him then that he should take what he just wrote and show it to his parents or some other persons he had trust in, and ask them how he was doing. He finally realized he had behaved as a complete asshole for a while.

No, it wasn't a permanent solution. But he took a long, long, long vacation half a year later.

I might work for him again, but I'd keep a reserve plan and be out of the door quite directly. Life is too short.

Edit: Too small company to have an HR department. (I might add: I don't know if I succeeded, or he got himself under control when a quarter of the people quit and the rest had the CV out or at least updating it.)
Yup. Sometimes you have to just bite the bullet and fire them.

We had someone approach us a few years ago we really didn't want to work with as everything they did screamed "moron in a hurry", so, rather than telling them to naff off, we gave them a quote that should have caused cardiac arrest.

They agreed to it.

Two years on. Still working with them. No amount of money makes it worth it. Particularly given that they still haven't paid said insane quote.
I suspect you didn't read the article.
Yeah, it is supposed to be in sync, and it should be work in both those browsers. What OS are you using?
Introverts of the world unite... in spirit, while they eat lunch alone. (For the record I do the same thing)
You edited your reply.

> Colin has very patiently reasoned with you about what may have happened

And I patiently reasoned back. It's a discussion. Yes, he has been somewhat helpful, but it doesn't explain how, a seemly increasing, number of submissions are disappearing from the front page.

> I agree that lists of three-letter domains, or four-letter domains, with this or that top-level domain suffix make for dreadfully boring submissions

People were voting it, people were using it to buy domains for projects. I don't read 100% of the stories on the front page either, but calling reasonable submissions out seems to be getting somewhat popular.

Are you saying, objectively you can't see how that list is useful to anyone? Or is this about the submissions not being titillating enough?
How a comment cost $10,000 and a car cost $5: I got you all to read this, wasting your time and electricity, computer costs, etc. In contrast, I got a cab yesterday and it only cost $5.

I don't generally insist that everything posted be transcendent, but I fail to see even a fair point being made in the post. If the point is "buying things for an aerospace corporation is more expensive than renting an hour on EC2", okay, but we sort of knew that already.
You seem to have fallen into undertaking some productive activities by sheer dumb luck. Congratulations. You are in a minority. I knew lots of pot-heads at school. All of them had lasseiz-faire parents and none of them amounted to much.

EDIT: To clarify, I do not understand your argument at all. In my experience, excellence and ambition are traits that need to be cultivated. Sure, you can find them in-the-wild, but this is not a reliable approach.
Wow. Thats taking it in a whole different direction - the brave depressive or feeling depressed is OK.
Apart from the fact they're metal. I don't think (but I could be wrong) that a design for a plastic bullet has been perfected.
Yup, just using audio tags, I wrote a short blog about it here: http://th3james.github.io/blog/2013/05/10/browserloop-remix-...
First admentment triumphs ITAR, that is why you can export crypto programs.
while I think cody is a repulsive regressive snot, I would risk my life to defend his words. I feel his files are his words.

As for cults, the USG just played directly into Cody's hands... the files have now spread father and wider than if the USG had just ignored them in the first place.
Did we add to the corpus of human knowledge from people trying to win the challenge? I'm guessing we got something for the $250,000 prize money. There are larger Kickstarter projects.

Someone should start another prize for 3 minutes.
While likely a good start, I don’t know if this checklist (the dropbox link) is fully sensible – if I put a 4 in ‘Criticizing yourself or blaming others’, another 3 or 4 in ‘Loss of interest in sex’ and maybe a 2 in ‘Worrying about your health’, I am already labelled ‘unhappy’ or even ‘mildly depressed’, whereas all three are – IMHO – perfectly acceptable things to be found in any somewhat perfectionist, health-conscious person who finds entertainment in their work.
If I ever end up calling the shots in a company (which is unlikely, because I'm +3 sigma of anti-authoritarian) I would make it a place where people would generally rather implement their ideas there (with the resources and people available) than on their own. Of course, they'd be free to do either one. But I'd try to create an open-allocation environment where people would rather go to work and build something with the great people there and capture a smaller percentage of the gross profits, than go off on their own but have to corral resources and people all over again. If I'm not providing synergy and making them more productive/effective per unit of effort than they would be on their own, then I'm failing and they have right to leave (and should).

Employment has multiple equilibria, I believe. You can invest almost nothing in employee career advancement, and then they (metaphorically) take whatever isn't nailed down. (I'm not saying they're unethical, but that they focus solely on their advancement because no one else will, and will spend 6+ hours per day on side projects or Coursera if they can. I'm the same way, so I'm ethically OK with this.) Or you can invest a lot of their careers and, yes, some of them will take what they learn from you and go off and do other things-- that's a good thing, because not everyone is built to stay at the same company for 30 years-- but the people who stay are likely to pay you back multiply.
I guess you've never actually used gimp.

Because this is exactly how the gimp tool works - you highlight the foreground, background areas and it shows you in real time what it's picking.

It's so similar to it I was wondering if it actually IS it (behind the scenes).
MLA Citation Format
I don't agree. Something impossible can be a good idea, i.e.

"The fact that inmortality is infeasible doesn't mean that dying is a good idea".
It's The Little Things Which Make An App
I would not consider myself a Clojure expert, I started playing with Clojure from 2012, in the last 6 months I shipped a jQueryMobile+Compojure+ClojureDSL website in the Netherlands (as a remote consultant) and developed a server for a mobile app (as a tech co-founder) in Clojure.
What kind of skills are you looking for beside Clojure?
So Smalltalk is gone?! :(
Use smart playlists to monitor your library sanity
If they haven't paid in two years shouldn't you be suing them?
There's a big difference between cyberbullying - using the internet/mobile phones etc to bully people - and physical bullying that's happened as a result of being recognised from the internet (or from newspapers, TV etc).
That is kind of like how you can take a class in number theory, and not actually use any concrete numbers (like 7, say).
You are wrong. It is reality what drives mathematicians to work, not a pure abstraction. It is because of reality that maths is interesting. It is because of Geo-metry that algebra is so relevant.

Not to speak of Calculus...
Can you expand on your last sentence?
Without any disrespect to the pilot, if they're close, why don't they get a slightly faster person to pilot it?

Their elite racing cyclist (according to the bio page) is this guy: https://www.usacycling.org/results/?compid=286471

Not bad at all: it takes a lot of time and dedication to race at that level and also having a life outside racing. However, you could probably improve on his strength to weight ratio by getting a professional cyclist. For instance, in this hill climb time-trial, he came in over a half a minute down from the guy who won his category, in a race of under 5 minutes:

https://www.usacycling.org/results/?permit=2012-2687

That kind of event is fairly similar to the kind of effort getting the helicopter off the ground entails: a short effort where, due to the climbing, weight is against you.

These guys, for instance, got a cyclist who had been in the olympics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Daedalus
Techno Viking on HN... It made my day. His guy is a legend.

They say he's "The only man who could kill Chuck Norris", to me that is an understatement. I'd say "The reason Chuck Norris does not dare to visit Berlin" is more accurate.
Sorry - sarcasm never translates well in writing. I totally agree with your point. Apologies for confusion.
It makes reading the code much more difficult.

"I am inside the function, the function passed into the function or the function returned from the function?"
Biometric Database of All Adult Americans Hidden in Immigration Reform
I think the main issue limiting flight time is that the propulsion system uses pedaling to unwind a cord around the main shaft. When the cord is fully unwound, more pedaling does nothing. I think they do this because its lighter than using a gear transfer system.

If you are trying to win a challenge, it makes sense to optimize your solution for it. And fundamentally, it's just never going to be possible to make a human powered helicopter that is compact and can run for a whole. Hovering just requires too many RPM.
> Here's a little known but closely related fact about Congress: its membership has long contained a disproportionate number of car dealers, which leads to "wins" for America like this: "Last summer...Congress approved a financial reform bill that specifically exempted auto dealers’ financing from regulation."

I'd never heard that before, but somehow, that Congress is full of used car salesmen is the least surprising fact I've learned in a long time.
>don't just submit raw data and expect everyone instantly to agree that it's interesting and of value.

It was of value. People were taking action over the data.

You may not be looking to start a business, or do projects:

(To quote you from earlier) "And if I were starting a business again..."

But a lot of people on here are. And the very people who needed the data the most had it taken away from them.
Prevent your institution from being an unwitting partner in DDoS attacks
Easyjet to conduct volcano ash cloud tests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zE1LbC4Fvs
Big Data - Why the rise of machines isn't all it's cracked up to be.
The same law exists in France, it's called "Droit à l'image", which is the exact same meaning than "Recht am eigenen Bild".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5685671
Even the Pirate Party (at least the UK one) only wants to reduce copyright length, not abolish it.
How could Apple extend AirPlay
I've just finished making the changes you suggested, give it a whirl and let me know what you think :)
Yeah, Mobile Is Just a Fad
Cybercriminals 'drained ATMs' in $45m world bank heist
> Are you asking us to judge webapps as opposed to non-web apps (for which anyone could give you a detailed response), or are you just trying to insult webapp developers?

I'm (I would have thought quite obviously) wondering aloud if everything we do needs to provide a net positive to society.
$100,000 'not to go to university'
It's not, we developed it from scratch w/o knowledge of the gimp feature. (I'm one of the devs).
Because it would be uncomfortable the other way around.
What is typically contained in the master contract? Things such as payment terms?
Something I dealt with a lot in oil & gas engineering, and have never personally witnessed in software engineering, is a "change order".

The contract is signed. At this point, if you deliver on your end of the deal, they have to deliver on theirs†. If they want anything other than what is in that contract - additions, changes, removals - you send them a change order. This is a new document for both parties to sign, covering the new request, and comes with its own price tag on top of the contract already agreed.

These are essential when you are engineering an actual physical product, because changing the specification of a natural gas compression plant when it's half built is very, very expensive. Change orders are an excellent tool for ensuring not that scope creep doesn't happen, but that scope creep doesn't turn a profitable project into a loss.

† Of course, practically, no-one wants to take on a client that they will have to sue to get the money from. But you should know where you stand when that contract is signed - you deliver your part, they deliver theirs. You can simply say "no" to additional requests and deliver on the original.
Best version, in case you haven't seen it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dIUM4LRVsE
http://www.neatorama.com/2013/02/21/Technoviking-Sues-Filmma...
So can HelloWallet :-)
Yes but I'm sure you can get better answers from statisticians. (from people who know better about probabilities)