skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not calling you a morally inferior person (I set a very low bar anyway :-). I agree that "ending poverty" cannot be achieved by handing people a cheque each month. Ending poverty is (or should be) a long term cross governmental policy issue. How it is achieved is an important, possibly the most important question in economics.

However "welfare" (note not the purely US term but a wider more European term) is in my view a smaller usually short term provision. IIRC The majority of non-retired welfare recipients recieve help for less than 14 months, and by far the biggest portion of welfare spend goes on retirees.

I am suggesting that welfare is mostly either a short term handout to prevent a vicious spiral of debt / problems or is a long term care for elderly.

Welfare is not a means to cure poverty but is a means to prevent the unlucky or vulnerable from falling into poverty.

I see the "scrounger" as a cost to be paid for such a system. Perhaps means testing can remove that cost, or perhaps not. But I know we shall not fix poverty this way but then a surgeon will operate to save me from a heart attack, even if he knows the real solution is better diet and exercise.

Edit: as for European countries having broken people, yes it's very true here in the UK as well as elsewhere. I also know from personal experience (and lots of well done studies) that the majority if the broken are either I eligible for help (often migrants) or far more common mentally unstable and often having substance issues.

Giving them a cheque helps far far less then the same cheque to a welder and his family who just got made redundant after his wife fell ill.

Lots of welfare in his case gives time to find new jobs or retrain and prevents a family joining the ranks of outcasts. That helps. We could even reduce the impact by extending welfare to immigrants (despite the likely consequences). But far and away, the biggest visible poor in our society are mentally challenged - and we have no fixes or cures there. Handing out welfare or withholding it is not going to help if the reason you can't hold down a job is the voices in your head.
Next step: synthesize Skynet!
FWIW, Google doesn't particularly like it when people use APIs outside the terms, either. Having to take down an app is never fun or enjoyable for anyone involved. And the cases in which the terms aren't programmatically enforced right away isn't necessarily a choice; often it is difficult to differentiate at scale between legitimate usage and disallowed usage.

And while I don't know how every other company writes their developer Terms of Services, I do know that in Google's case we measure each word carefully and try hard to strike the right balance between offering as much as feasibly possible, while trying to create something long-term sustainable (so even if the usage grows far beyond our initial goals, we're still in a position to keep them available). We're hardly perfect at it yet, but we're certainly getting a lot better over time.

Also worth noting, often times these terms are designed to honor upstream data contracts, so if for no other reason, it's worth trying to respect them because it's the right thing to do for the other relatively small parties, too.
This is exactly my dilemma. I've come up with numerous novel ways to live cheaply but all of them require a plot of land which always ruins the budget. Further compounding the problem is few banks will loan money for unbuilt land. Strangely the land is worth more than houses but in the eyes of a bank the house is what you secure the loan against.
I agree wholeheartedly and I have contemplated writing a blog post similar to the OP. One thing I've noticed a lot of is developers (or managers who are ex-developers) who feel like being very nice 80% of the time makes up for their horrible rudeness and lack of empathy and inability to communicate 20% of the time. I think a good analogy is if you're a violent criminal and a felon you're likely not committing felonies 98% of your waking hours in society, but the other 2% is a big enough problem that it's more important than your acceptable behavior at other times. If you melt down when the work isn't easy, or people have questions or there is the slightest bit of disagreement, it doesn't matter how nice you are when things are going well.
I sympathize a lot with the frustration here and can agree on some of the points (especially the rankings/h-index/etc mania), however...

Much of what is bemoaned here is simply a consequence of the fact that science is done by humans and generally costs money, so there is a necessary component of business-type activities (networking, fundraising, marketing, management). Scientists also have human qualities such as egos, desire for money, power, respect and the rest. Why should we be different, or held to a higher standard?

Additionally, it's really hard to do original research. First off, really original good ideas are hard to come by; this problem is also not restricted to science or scientists. Then when new ideas come, they are often difficult or impossible to translate into scientific output, because of other constraints, such as lacking good enough data to test hypotheses. And then they typically fail, despite being great ideas. Really good, original, CORRECT ideas are far more rare.

Furthermore, science would be much worse off if researchers worked like the author would prefer. If everyone spent 10 years without publishing, working on a completely original problem, there is zero replication. Additionally, if the experiment or approach fails, as they usually do, little is left. So do you publish negative results, and then move on to the next decade's problem?

Instead, it's better that the system works the way it does. People do 'bandwagon research', which really is replication. They take the same idea, and apply somewhat different methods, or different datasets, or whatever. And they publish this as often as they can get away with.

Then, one can look at the aggregate body of work and evaluate the ideas and methods better. There is more redundancy in the system, and because the papers are smaller, the setbacks are much smaller in the case of failure, and there is a paper trail (so to speak) marking progress along the way. These smaller, more digestible, incremental papers are also more useful to other researchers, who may only be interested in a small part of the work--the methods, or some of the data, or whatever. It would slow everyone down if the only publications were these giant monographs that came out once or twice a decade.

It may feel like people are only working on small, unoriginal ideas because many papers look like this, but it's really important to zoom out and see how things fit together. Science is basically a Monte Carlo simulation, and having lots and lots of small and fast iterations covers the space much more efficiently.
@brucehauman
Truly exceptional work. This post literally made my day; I can't thank you enough for spending the time to write and share it. I especially like the smart utilization of 4x8 panels with minimal waste and the tiny BOM required for construction. As someone with a fair amount of construction experience myself, the amount of engineering thought you've put into this project clearly shines through.

It's innovators like you who make this world a better place; keep up the great work and don't ever let the critics get under your skin!!
This technology is awesome! If it's half as impressive in real life as the demo suggests you have done a fantastic job creating some really innovative technology. I wish you the best of luck in turning it into a real business!
As usual, the answer to questions in headlines is "no." The hyperloop is super-fast; even the most efficient traffic light will not make your car go faster.

That said, it is astounding how stupid traffic management seems to be in most cities and towns. Lights are on fixed intervals and/or sensors. At best they are synced or timed to a few nearby lights along busy routes. The timing is adjusted rarely.

Meanwhile, I can look up real-time traffic reporting on my iPhone and choose my route based on the most open route. Why can't traffic lights read the same data and prefer some traffic over others, to at least balance delays throughout the system?
chrome doesnt allow to redirect the github login page to extension page, it makes this feature buggy with the chrome app. you can simply go to http://koding.com/Register and login with your GitHub account. Then reopen your terminal, it will be opened with your registered session.
None of these include the ABCD keys (FLASH OVERRIDE, FLASH, IMMEDIATE, & PRIORITY) used by AUTOVON which started in 1963.

It's interesting that all of these layouts are presented on a round background.
Very cool! I live a couple blocks from the N, take it downtown all the time.

Random look/interface ideas to consider if you continue to tweak, no particular order:

• different colors for inbound/outbound

• different colors or line thicknesses for when the slope is/is-not on 'ideal' schedule

• suppress interior (scroll-wheel) scroll-event capturing: slow and unintuitive on its scaling/shifting effect

• always show +/- 3 stops slopes extending from current vehicle positions ('prediction'/vs-ideal)

• allow selection of stop; decorate arriving vehicles with estimated arrival times (either as numbers or line-extrapolations)

• suppress refresh countdown - distracting, uncancellable, so doesn't add much

• when selecting (or even hovering) over one path/vehicle/stop, and thus showing more info for it, dim all others
McKinsey says there will be a huge shortage of college graduates:

http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/economic_studies/talent_ten...
Yeah that's a really good point. I'm not sure it really matters, though. The law allowed you to shed college loan debt through bankruptcy up until 1976/1978 and people went to college for at least 100 years prior to that law.

Furthermore a cheap college degree might be so inexpensive that the hit to your credit isn't worth the expense dodged. Banks can loan on cars worth as little as $5k even though their cost to repossess and auction it might approach the cost of the car. For small debts the shame factor can't be underestimated.

From this what can we conclude? Prior to the change in the law college had to be fairly cheap so that banks could make uncollateralized loans for people to go. Because students could only afford so much, colleges had to figure out how to deliver an education for that amount. If a college wanted to charge more, it had to pull risk out of the loan to the student so that a bank would issue it.
Imagem do Dia: Reabilitação do Pavimento em Daytona
I'm sorry, but you are wrong. L1A are granted for one year and then you have to renew it on a yearly basis.
The pervasive third-party payment in higher education results in many distortions in incentives. Consultants to colleges advise setting high list prices, and offering "merit scholarships" that simply roll back the apparent price of the college to near its actual value as a revenue-maximizing strategy.[1] Very few parents shop for colleges with the free online resource from Education Trust, the College Results website,[2] which allows comparison of what various colleges actually spend per student on instruction. On the whole, most people assume colleges are more similar than they actually are, and that list price is a reliable guide to which colleges are somewhat better (as a value proposition for the student). Neither assumption is correct.

[1] http://www.maguireassoc.com/services-challenges/optimize-net...

[2] http://collegeresults.org/search1b.aspx?institutionid=166027 (See the "Finance and Faculty" tab on the page comparing similar colleges for any college you are curious about.)
Oh, I see, generate two different binaries of the same compiler with different compilers, and you know something is up if the same source compiled by those two separate binaries of the same compiler differ. Assuming the compiler is deterministic, that should work pretty well.

I wonder how well that would work in practice. There are actually quite a few bugs in C compilers[1], and compilers are complicated enough that I could see them hitting some of them when they are compiled. Has anyone done this before?

1: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs343/resources/finding-bugs-c...
Why does Evolution look like Intelligent Design?
Easy guesses: 1) Most income growth went to top brackets 2) More women in the workforce meant both less power to workers as worker supply went up, and also two incomes bidding on homes/products.
Jesus you're right I always use the community model where one can be added to the project and submit the changes that way. I wish there was an easier way to use the proper branching model because that's what it truly is, a branch.

That's not even really my beef, it's users that fork and never intend on making any changes because they don't understand how to clone. So when you search the name of the project you get a ton of results.
I was thinking about creating this sort of service the other day... is this Docker under the covers?
Glad to have helped :) Do try out Screenhero too, and if you have any feedback on it, please let us know [I'm one of the founders of Screenhero]!
I know that a lot of the "unkempt shacks" you see in India are like that because they are on illegally squatted land, and if they build a more permanent-looking structure they will be forcibly removed. If you look from above you can see many with TV satellite dishes.
I'm 31 and my family home had nothing but a rotary phone until ~1995. We didn't get a TV with a remote until around the same time, and it only got 3 channels. My parents still only have 3 channels living there.

I grew up in Australia :)
What "government policies" are you talking about?
Anyone with experience with both Shen/Qi and an HM type system (OCaml, Scala, Haskell family) able to comment? I'd love to learn a bit more about what Shen/Qi do.
You would have thought San Francisco's crime rate would have been higher with all of these unauthorised API usages... (Yep, the data was pirated by a guy in San Francisco. Ironic.)
I think you are making a very good point.
A lot of credit card debt has no collateral either, but that can be discharged in bankruptcy; why not student loans? And I suppose credit card companies could try to re-possess the goods purchased with credit cards (obviously not the services), but they don't. (And it makes sense not to; not worth it financially).

FWIW, I have no student loan debt so I'm relatively neutral on this.
I see no reason for them to say that. Given that she have already had L-2 visa issued and she should have had a marriage certificate with her.

And may I ask why did she go to Moscow for a visa and not to Kyiv?
That depends entirely on what you do instead of finishing high school.
NSA Affair: Germans Conduct Helicopter Flyover of US Consulate
Rift owner here as well, I haven't tried Sturmovik but I have been playing a similar game called Warthunder which I found to be really immersive. First 15 minutes of playing brought that child like wonder out of me that I haven't had since I stood in an aisle of 'Toys R Us' watching someone play Super Mario 64 (first 3D game I'd ever seen).

The last few days I've been having an absolute blast playing Half Life 2. Hands down the best experience I've had in the Rift so far. While some say FPS are a difficult fit for head tracking I'm finding it to be very natural/immersive.

And this is all with the first generation low-res dev kit so I'm really excited to see what next generations bring.
not only that but students usually have negative wealth upon graduation. Declaring bankruptcy is way more attractive than it is supposed to be at that stage.
And the US had budget for things like asteroid strikes (at least until the sequester).

But it can only be taken seriously if the actors with sufficient power actually care about said future and not, for example, present profits to the exclusion of all else.
You are correct that some private firms are beginning to hedge their bets (or in Tesla's case, directly offer a competing product), but I was referring to government...as you guessed.

We've seen numerous examples of abuse of the free market - I don't think that a few companies pushing us past the point of comfort with respect to oil production is a far-fetched scenario. Personally speaking, I would like some level of government intervention.

The identification of my argument as being analogous to Pascal's Wager is interesting (that was a great read, thank you for linking), but is not compelling enough to dissuade me. If I'm reading the tone of your posts correctly, you do not agree that peak oil is something to be concerned about; what is your counter-argument?
It's kind of hard to get through this, not because the points ring untrue (I agree with many), but because they seem a bit naive.

I think there's a certain type of person that is particularly attracted to advanced work in science and technology -- the systems purist, who believes strongly that the world "should" work in mostly objective ways. This is a strength in that the world doesn't change very much without these idealists pushing for their vision, but it's also a horrible weakness because these sorts of people don't tend to internalize that any project among groups of humans is going to be messy and inefficient and frustratingly subjective. The successful people adapt, and learn to bend the messy ecosystem to their will. The others...don't (they do things like writing dramatic, self-important missives about how the system is failing them, and cc it to the entire department. ahem.)

If you make it all the way to the end of a PhD program and you haven't realized that it's mostly about how to make steady, measurable progress in a messy, complicated, political world, you haven't yet reached the end of the process.
I am confused because you cant avoid atudent loans, theee is no bankruptcy - they will take your money before your employer pays you. How could it burst if studentsl will eventually pay all of it off?
People will simply link to the picture and tell their viewers to like it to counter act that effect.

You should have a 'report' button or better yet, ask people if the picture is NSFW and segregate.
I know the credit cards companies have cut back on this, but. . .credit cards for students don't require credit. . .and are specifically crafted to be obtainable by students with no income or credit. Students with income and/or credit can get better deals with "non-student" credit cards.
How many people go to real schools, and how many go to fake 'for profit' schools?

And isn't the median student debt something like 25k? Not really "much much more" in my book. Anyone with a real degree should be able to handle that sort of debt.

What we should be doing is allowing lenders to discriminate by major and school. Good school with a good degree? Lend. Good school with a shitty degree? Lend with extreme caution caution. Fake school with any sort of degree? Tell them to kindly fuck off.
In most cases it wasn't even PHPMyAdmin's fault per se, but the people not taking 5 minutes to harden it or upgrade it. In many cases, no offence to the makers of this tool, finding a phpmyadmin instance (especially not up-to-date) was a tell tale sign of trouble ahead. Phpmyadmin has caused trouble for people you can't even begin to imagine (ok you probably can). Oh the memories.
He's one of those people who's name you can't avoid repeatedly tripping over.

I took UC Davis's graduate Intro to Cryptography class from him. It was fun to see how much of crypto history he has been involved with.

Interestingly (given the subject matter of this post) he is also well known on campus for teaching a very good Technology Ethics class. (Sample material here.[1])

[1]: http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/
I am about to finish my PhD, and you clearly state the difference between my view of academia and the author's. While I agree with most of the things the author mentioned, and they are a large part of why I will not be going into academia once I graduate, I also recognize that academics acknowledge theses problems and try to mitigate them.

It is useless to complain about problems without giving a solution. Maybe, as you imply, the current situation is the least bad possible. I think that there is at least room for improvement when it comes to sharing of data and reproducibility, and I plan to work on reducing the technical barriers to both of these things. However, I don't have a solution to the social problem of how to rank academics and how to prevent academics from colluding in order to artificially raise their ranking.
What percentage of the issued student loans were taken out by those attending for-profit institutions?
Tinfoil hat time.

Let your imagination run if someone had done this at some point to a build of GCC being used by Linus...
No argument it's built better - and to code, no less.
I was thinking the same thing. Lots of people get the first part. But not so much with the second part.
If we are going to be pedantic I will point out an accepted dictionary definition of 'decimate' is as follows:

> to destroy a great number or proportion of: The population was decimated by a plague.

If the acceptance criteria of for use as 'the perfect word' is that it matches as precisely as possible to its definition then I think the OP was on track.

I think it is interesting trivia that the origins of the word come from the violence of the Roman army, but to assert that is the only way the word is used in modern English is wrong. I blame Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast for the recent surge in smug people 'correcting' the use of this word.
Twitter acquires MoPub
Does anyone know what Koding.com actually does? I watched both videos, read the "NOW PUBLIC" blog post, and I feel like it might be awesome - but I don't know. Is there a page that details what the product actually is? Kinda feel dumb for even asking, but I can't seem to find out?
There are directors who have scored one or many of their own films, such as John Carpenter, Robert Rodriguez, and Clint Eastwood. It's true that excepting the ones who have a strong music background director-composers usually produce somewhat simpler and critically not-acclaimed scores but they also often end up working well. Look at the Halloween theme; it's a very simple melody but it somehow captured the mood of the film and people's imaginations.

I agree with your general point though, a collaboration between the "user" and "expert" will generally produce something superior; but sometimes there can even be a little bit of a liability having the other party around.

The school teacher thing is a poor example though - that's just marketing trying to make an appeal to authority. Something like if a teacher had designed a desk or chair would be better because their job gives them insight into that as opposed to say, a mail carrier.
I think the notion of "bubble" simply comes from people's understand that the amount of money poured in for something doesn't amount to very much.

For example, say you go to top elite 4-year liberal arts college and receive a degree in gender studies dropping $40k a year. Is that really worth $160k + interest for you? If the perceived value of the degree is substantially lower than expected, you mostly likely wouldn't want to pay back the loan. Consider this sort of scenario for tens of thousands of people. Banks that were expected to get the money back will be left with tons of debters just defaulting on their debt. Principles lost.
> ensure_conforms_to(int)

Why int? What about adding floats? complex numbers? rationals? quaternions? matrices? dimensional quantities? etc. etc. etc.
Challenges For Machine Learning In Computational Sustainability
It is pretty impossible and probably unreasonable to expect your average college freshmen to have a good credit rating.
NSA: Economic espionage helps prevent financial crisis
Thanks for sharing. A lot of good points I don't mind being reminded of. Especially the much more minimal than you think. And once you confirm it'll sell, sell it, its ready!