skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd claim that a lion's share of the top 10% of proposals are not worthy of funding. The best proposals are probably usually rated in the 70-80% range, depending on the funding agency (NSF, NIH, DOE), but most of it is utter embarassment.

"when weighed against the advancement of science (even if artificially inefficient)...I don't care." Well, no, we're talking about funding here. What if the structure of funding was causing a net regression in the advancement of science? Is it a safe assumption that funding directly correlates to advancement?

"And cutting funding won't make a significant dent in the problems you describe." If I had my druthers, I'd cut science funding to zero (there would be other ways to raise money for science - endowments, 501(c)(3)s, foundations, bake sales, etc. Keep in mind Peter Mitchell validated the chemiosmotic effect, a cornerstone of basic biochemistry and cell biology, by launching his own completely independent science research foundation) That would make a significant dent in the problems I describe.
> I, on the other hand, don't think its ridiculous that homicide is, in fact, an element of the offense of murder.

> Intent isn't "what matters" in the sense of "the only thing that matters". Both the mental state and prohibited substantive act/result of a crime are parts of "what matters."

I suspect we might just have an irreconcilable difference of framework in that respect:

I view the purpose of law to be to minimise the maximise the public good while causing the minimum restriction of freedoms. That being inherently a balancing act, freedom/security, the exact value of which is responsible for a lot of the problems with the actual application of law.

In that framework whether someone's acts resulted in death is dramatically less important than whether they were likely to, and whether the person who did it is likely to do so again unless restrained. (That their acts actually did lead to the death is evidence in favour of that class of act being more likely to lead to deaths than it would be without that bit of evidence, so in that sense it matters.)

Beyond that, whether someone dies or not, the drink driver and the speeder who didn't kill anyone but committed equally dangerous offences - they're all guilty of murder in the sense that matters to me. To borrow the way of phrasing it from the Christians: They've all already killed people in their hearts. It's just luck that no-one's dead for them, and luck's not a property of people, it's a property of limited knowledge; you can't rely on it.

In so far as we have knowledge, under such a system, if you lock the guy who actually killed people up, the rest should be locked up too.
It's really not OK to say, "tl;dr - dull, pointless". That's the critique of a particularly young child. If you want to critique - fine, go ahead. Explain why corporate life can be fulfilling. Explain why the stable career is good; point out philosophical flaws in the argument for going off and doing a start-up based on personal angst. I'm quite sure that to the thoughtful critic, there are quite a few more ways to break down and point out issues.

But it's really not a story about "why I left X to start Y". Sure, that's the narrative. But the point of the story - that so timeworn story so fresh for each person who takes that journey - it's about "why Z at all".
How about looking into paying this man for his honest bug finding work? The response from FB on this is disgusting.

"We are unfortunately not able to pay you for this vulnerability because your actions violated our Terms of Service. We do hope, however, that you continue to work with us to find vulnerabilities in the site.

We have now re-enabled your Facebook account.

Joshua
Security Engineer
Facebook "
"Using Zucks account doesn't make it more convincing from a tech perspective." - In this case, that's obviously false. The guy submitted the bug twice and the final reply was "This is not a bug." After posting to Zuckerberg's account it was subsequently fixed.

I'm sure the FB security team triages a lot of bug reports, and a few get away - hopefully they'll be better about trying to get more info (boiler plate requesting steps to replicate or a video), but beyond that no harm no foul. I can also see that they don't want to encourage researchers messing with real user data. However, if they paid him out and told him in the future, that he should provide more information and not use real accounts (or not get paid out, etc), that'd have the same effect (you know, since it already happened) w/o the bad will generated.

Instead, they didn't pay him, locked his account, and now we're reading that blog post, not only encouraging him and the people like him in the future to not submit these bugs in the future (certainly serious enough that it'd be worth discovering vs being in a 0-day marketplace), but generating way more visibility for no good reason. It's just not smart.
The northwest's homeless problem is a bit different from the rest of the countries; you'll see similar patterns in Seattle, Vancouver (BC), Portland, and even Spokane. There is something about "skid row" that has never went away in that area.
IIRC the Space Shuttles used in Aermageddon were not "the" space shuttles, but some hypothetical semi-secret project shuttles that the movie made up.

But yeah, the space shuttles were LEO only. IIRC the highest they ever went was up to Hubble, and I think that was pretty close to the most they could manage.

Though now that I think about it, I am pretty sure they generally jettisoned the external fuel tanks with a little fuel left over, maybe they could delay the jettison to get into slightly higher orbits than usual.
Picking N distinct numbers at random: how to do it fast?
I think getting hiring right is a process, we were certainly a lot more hit & miss right after demo day, than we are now.
Was this a pitch for her startup? She named it once, without a link. And it's a name that isn't easy to search for. If this is pitching, she's not very good at it.

Edit: It's http://letsmend.com/ - you can find a domain registration page if you search her name and the name of the startup.
Give us all a break. 'Technical people' are just as (if not more likely) to be biased than ordinary people.

Marijuana is safer than cigarettes and alcohol but it is hardly harmless and we definitely don't know enough about its effect on the brain especially amongst younger users. But of course you will often see such concerns dismissed.
The author states:
"There’s very little time spent developing operating systems and basic utilities anymore"

This could be a good thing, or it could be a bad thing - depends on your perspective. Maybe people "spending time" on these things would help advance the state of the art.

Case study #1: PC hardware was commoditized under the Microsoft/Wintel model which made hardware "open" in the sense of interoperability. On the bright side, hardware was cheap. However, the dark side of this is that hardware makers couldn't really profit and invest into R&D. So for a long time we got heavy, ugly, clunky, beige boxes that gulped electricity.

Case study #2: The web was a happening place of innovation when Netscape earned a profit. Microsoft felt threatened and promptly destroyed Netscape by releasing Internet Explorer gratis and bundling it with Windows. The web plunged into a dark ages period from which we are still recovering.

Is it a good thing that operating systems and utilities are being commoditized by open source? If your only concern is price, then yes. If your concern is also for innovation and advancing the state of the art, I'm not so sure. Sometimes, exactly what you need is a company that profits handsomely selling proprietary products, in order to push an industry forward.

Commoditizing things and making them cheap (so no one works on them anymore) is a double-edged sword that is not necessarily good. So maybe it's your civic duty to pay for proprietary stuff, build proprietary stuff, and not to give away your labor.
I understand the implications and the underhanded nature of this sort of tracking. However, could it prove more efficient that traditional, legitimate analytics? (eg: google analytics via cookies)

For example, could there be less bandwidth consumption using this method vs cookies?
That isn't what has happened with amendment 64 in Colorado. You can grow up to six plants for personal use, no licence required. Funnily enough, the current situation of having legalised personal use without legalising trade is very similar to what was proposed by Hunter S. Thompson when he was running for Sheriff of Aspen.
Prepare for a solid fisking.

> Well it's a hell of a lot harder to write a good verb than it is to write a good noun.

See, that's your indoctrination talking. Really both are about equally hard. The actual definition of zip is pretty simple; assuming you have trained yourself to think about it the right way. This is no different from OO. The idea that imperative programming is "natural" is sort of a myth.

> (how many books on Lisp macros do you know of?)

Quite a few, actually! But I'm not sure why this matters;. Lips macros have 0 to do with not only this conversation, but this entire family of abstractions. Macros bear no resemblance to what we're talking about.

> If I had to teach my Mom to code, I wouldn't teach her how to zip, fold, map & reduce lists-of-lists on the fly, I'd teach her the FullName noun.

Why? People think verb-first all the time, describe things in verb-first ways, and act in verb first ways. They do it all the time, an it's not unnatural.

> Callbacks are just gotos that return.

Not really.

> They can also pass along non-global context, like error information.

If they are implemented with continuations, they do a lot more. But see also coroutines.

> The industry moves slowly because they can afford to.

I submit that the resurgence of the small software shop and the incredible successes that small software startups have been seeing is a counter-argument to this. As backwards as the average Node.js shop is, they're still light-years ahead of the befuddled, ossified monstrosities that they compete with.

> A few million dollars can feed a hundred developers.

You should be ashamed of this remark.

> The codebases get so large, the teams so big, that lowest-common-denominator kind of code will always prevail.

Bridges are not constructed this way.

> Remember what I was going to teach my mom? Not lisp macros, no. Simple nouns, simple mechanisms.

Stop patronizing people. You're pretty smug for someone who doesn't know lisp. I thought being smug was my job as a lisp hacker!
The vast majority of Google engineers don't work on ads. The guys working on Google Maps, feel they are working for a mapping company. The guys working on Android feel they're working on mobile. The people working on search feel they're working on machine intelligence issues.

Frankly, as a Google employee, I like that the ads business subsidizes research into other areas that are not economical yet or which people won't pay for. The fact that Google culture overall aligns my my views on intellectual property, progressive ideals, and just not being a douche-bag cancels out any "taint" that the money is made on (IMHO, tasteful) ads.

I used to work at IBM T.J. Watson research. I had no love for the IBM consulting or mainframe business, but I never had to deal with it.

Google's main business might be advertising, but that business is mostly automated, it doesn't take 20,000 engineers to run AdWords.
I assume he means whitehat test accounts which are created in the whitehat console, and can only interact with other whitehat accounts
Last year we sold our things and left to travel around the world. We'd lived in a house for three years, I'd lived in an apartment for two prior to that.

It required two garage sales and countless trips to goodwill. It was sickening at times, how little you could sell your things for. We got back a thousand maybe 1.5k on our goods, the rest was a write off. Even still we had about 8 boxes of stuff when we moved out.

We came back from traveling sooner than expected and had to re-buy a lot of things, but we've been cautious not to get too many 'useless' things. That isn't to say there is nothing to adorn our apartment, just... much less.

In general I'm happier this way, we've got pictures we took on the walls, a few things we picked up traveling, kitchen stuff, and furniture. I hope never again to get to the point where we were before.

Worst part of selling your stuff: getting rid of our books.
Automated cold e-mails for sales people?
Can you disable ETag-based caching but allow If-Modified-Since? A quick check of a few popular sites shows that they're using If-Modified-Since instead of ETags, probably for this reason?

While we're on the topic of browser caches, do any browsers let you easily store your cache in RAM instead of disk? Without resorting to other 'hacks' like setting the cache path to a ramdisk, that is.
> The unfortunate part about thinking about problems is it that problems are relative - i.e. they are problems only relative to a context. Nobody even in the tech world has a clue how solving a simple problem just to satisfy some intellectual curiosity can affect life on the planet. What meaning does Wiles' proof of Fermat's last theorem have on the part of the world that's sleeping hungry every night?

Like the city you live in right now?

> Folks like Musk are an inspiration indeed for boldly thinking at the high level they do and seeing it through.

"Folks like Musk" are smart enough to know that the progress of humanity, the great and meaningful leaps of technology to strive for, are accomplished by people solving those hard problems under a common banner.

A consequence you've evidently yet to learn, or are afraid to realize.
LIFO is a stack, FIFO is a queue =)
One of the best things I ever did was get divorced and walk away from nearly everything.

I took:
- clothes
- laptop / server
- chef's knife
- cutting board
- kitchen table

Results.
My takeaway, a mid-life crisis at a young age. I'd also like to ad, #firstworldproblems ;-)
Why do you think New York legalizing weed would look drastically different from Colorado or Washington State?
They are panhandling for drug/alcohol money probably, given that food is not that hard to come by. The same is true in almost any big city, though.

Aggressive panhandling to me is having little kids grab onto my legs and try to drag me. That only happens to me in non-developed countries.
There is plenty of objective, non-sponsored research that shows marijuana to have at least in some cases a negative effect. But nice work blanketing all of the research you disagree with as illegitimate.
Perhaps you're right, although that law doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Firstly, that first definition uses "unlawfully," which sounds circular to me. And if I'm understanding that description correctly, basically, you can't inform anyone that they have any incentive to do anything you desire. Bosses wouldn't be able to threaten to fire someone if they continue showing up to work late. Restaurant patrons couldn't threaten to leave a (only one) negative review if their service is poor.

I'm generally not a fan of laws banning blackmail, when the threat is not itself illegal. I find it odd that it would be perfectly legal for me to tell my neighbor's spouse that he is having an affair, or to request money from my neighbor, but it would be illegal for me to request money from my neighbor and promise to tell his wife about his affair if he declines. I'm not generally a big fan of Walter Block's approach to libertarianism, but this is his argument, and I do agree with it: http://mises.org/journals/jls/15_2/15_2_2.pdf.
They were... I guess the word is rude? Hustling with an edge? A sort of enterpenurial, even. This is not common in my experience with beggars. No violence, mind you. Just real pushy to close their deal.

I'm glad to hear that the meals organizations are effective. There were so many homeless. :-/
exactly. my girlfriend asked me to agree to finishing at 6 on weekdays, and 2 in the afternoon on weekends. I couldn't believe that would be an improvement... was I really working 7 days a week on my own project? She assured me it was!
As a parallel, consider Alan Turing. At the time, he was convicted of an offense. Whether or not this led to his premature demise, we must leave for another thread.

Now, that offense no longer exists. There have been attempts to pardon Alan Turing, as yet unsuccessful.

However, I feel it can be sensibly argued that what truly conveys justice is the retroactive abolishment of the crime - that he would be, tragically posthumously, of an untarnished record.

Ought not such be justly applied in these circumstances also?
I decided to teach myself some ruby this afternoon. The idea is that using Mustache, and a list of names, a salesperson would be able to automate some of the targeted e-mails they send to a market vertical. ie: Imagine going after a single industry and having target material including attachments, white papers and a good template. The offer can include coffee, along with their name and company. Looking for some feedback on usefulness compared to MailChimp or tools.
I don't know the source, but I imagine they're comparing efficiency against a conventional plane flying at sea level. There's no way this can compare to flying at altitude - I mean, the fastest this thing can fly is far below stall speed at altitude - but its key advantages at sea (particularly for littoral defense against strike groups of surface ships) are that it's essentially a ship and a plane in one, doesn't need an airfield, and can hide from radar. (Given this, I'm actually surprised China hasn't been interested in this technology.)
I doubt this actually. I assume it would be more like how the laws are in Colorado with Amendment 64. Adults, over 21, can grow up to 6 plants and posses up to an ounce. Growers are regulated, similarly to distilleries, but they are not government run. Sales are still taxed, just as tobacco and alcohol. With this we will still see all the different strains that we see now with medical marijuana in states that allow it. So as long as you are over 21, and not smoking in public and have under an ounce there would no possession charges, regardless of the strength or strain.

That's how I see this happening, and what makes the most sense to me.
People who think interactive decision tree building is hard generally haven't done even basic research in the most elementary AI techniques.

It is not hard.

The real barrier to something like that is in finding the right way to infer context for speech recognition and natural language parsing. You could easily bolt a system like that onto IFTTT and Twilio and get good results right out of the gate.

Free idea for you, there. Go make a startup.
Yeah I was curious when it was mentioned in the article but I can't even find it by googling :P.
> Marijuana is safer than cigarettes and alcohol

And few people are seriously proposing that we regulated it less than alcohol and cigarettes, so where exactly is the irrational bias?

It doesn't have to be magical hippy juice to legalize it, being safer than alcohol or tobacco is reason enough to legalize it. Hell, the clear racial motivations for the initial banning and the continuation of it are reason enough to legalize it.
So this is the old E-tag trick? It's not new at all, but perhaps it hasn't been as widely published. This can also be done with the Date / If-Last-Modified header, manufacturing a cookie "date".
Cookies are absurdly long nowadays, if they were shortened lots of bandwidth could be saved. Especially Google's analytics cookies are long and sometimes even contain referring domains or something. I don't really understand why they do this, but it probably has some use that lessens the burden on their database infrastructure at the cost of user bandwidth.

Also this is more of a hack and sneaky tracking method than a legitimate way of identifying users. Whenever someone's cache is full or gets cleaned, the "cookie" (etag) will be lost.
Advice from a bootstrapped/non-funded entrepreneur. If you have funding or are scaling extremely quickly maybe none of this applies:

* don't hire anyone to do work you have not personally done. You need to know how long it takes and what kind of effort is involved or else on-boarding is difficult.

* unless your startup has revenue and is profitable, don't pay someone a higher salary than you are getting. Doing so can breed resentment on your part.

* don't offer equity if you can avoid it: no-one else thinks your company is as valuable as you do anyway.

* don't get hung up about a CS degree unless it is necessary for the work. For most web-development you need someone who is SMART and ENTHUSIASTIC, and who is a fast-learner with a track record of getting stuff done and an interest in web-development. Plenty of liberal arts majors have these skills.

* someone should know about 80% of what they need in order to be fully productive. This means you shouldn't sweat stuff like knowledge of MVC or particular frameworks. This is where the fast-learner and enthusiasm bit comes in, and it can be a good excuse for setting up a probationary period.

* interns have always ended up being more work for me than they are worth when asked to work independently, but if you are willing to spend time supervising and can work closely with them in a way that ties closely into your own workflow (I am working on X and need Y done now) they can be a real effort multiplier.

* if you can afford it, pay people well. This is not always possible, but it is so much easier dealing with someone who is paid decently, because they won't feel taken advantage of and will more likely give you the benefit of the doubt when you start freaking out under pressure or act poorly because of stress. Not that you should do this.

* finally - CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH - in the event of conflict, you need to deal with it personally in one-on-one conversation rather than through email. This avoids miscommunication and keeps both sides from internalizing grievances.
I never claimed it was new :). But I never heard about it until recently, while it works frighteningly similar to cookies and I generally know most common things related to website security.
Github is under ddos at least once a month, how is this still a news worth upvoting here?
This is one patent I really hope gets used in litigation.
That's very interesting, especially for people interested in using ROS as an educational platform.

It would be pretty amazing, considering the file resolution properties of ROS. I actually love it since I don't have to be in the same directory and it's easy to go through many projects.

Just curious what sort of work are you doing on ROS.
Earlier this year I was working on simulation stuff in Gazebo.
Most structured programming ignores this problem as unless you assume some best effort from the programmer, all programming is futile.

You don't exercise your Big-O thinking here, you exercise your Big-Theta.
I don’t know if this applies to other notebooks but at least Apple used to recommend that you do not remove the battery [0]. There’s a little more discussion on Super User [1] but there seems to be no definite answer.

[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20130615084258/http://support.app...
[1]: http://superuser.com/a/12842
It's a completely specious complaint, made with fatuous disdain.

Hi, I wrote that post. I'd appreciate it if you didn't attribute factors like "fatuous disdain" and "twitter-length reading abilities" to me.

My point was not that long passages of writing are a bad thing in every context, ever. That you've extracted that from what I said speaks more about you than it does me. Pretty much every length of prose is appropriate somewhere. My point was that this length of text was not warranted for this story. The extra passages do not add to the story, they detract from it.

"World famous, highly regarded literature of the 1800s was long, therefore no passage of text can ever be too long" seems like a spectacularly self-defeating argument to me.