skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>geniuses of this world have very often been afflicted

Maybe so, but don't forget, there is no "normal" human being. We create the criteria of genius, normal and mental illness all in order to fulfill our social needs. It's possible we categorize certain individuals as genius and afflicted just so we can deny them the fruits of their labor. It's possible we create the concept of normalcy just so we can leverage techniques of mass manufacturing and social control.

It's possible that innovation without being identified as a genius is a smart way to escape the disadvantages of being labelled afflicted. It's possible Dennett's newest change-of-mind is just an update to the fairy tale that tells those in charge how to handle workers for the maximum effect and least disruption.

After all, who wants anarchic disruptions in the social order? We want reliable electrical networks and food delivery, not creative, experimental protests. So instead of heeding the words directly of those with insight, appeal to their ego, call them geniuses, strip their innovations to the bare minimum and label them as crazy or problematic to keep them separated safely from others. (cough) Torvalds (cough) RMS.
The real question is this:

If all of this collection stops another 9/11 style attack where thousands of lives are saved, will it be worth it?
The First Mover Disadvantage for Tech Startups
I've seen these types of customizations worked out with /some/ rental property owners, depending on lease terms. Akin to commercial 'tenant improvements'.
>the cost of owning a house needs to be compared to the cost of renting

Emm, the linked articles get into exactly this.
My parents moved us to the US when I was younger, then to England, and finally back to Israel.

There are pros and cons to moving around. Experiencing other cultures, learning new languages, and so on are all things I'm very glad happened. On the flipside, having less permanent friends, starting to study in another language when you're 13, and so on, are fairly hard.

I don't think I'm able to honestly bet on which of these is better for children.
Link to Ken Thompson, link to Quines and that one dude who always goes 'When I wrote Apple Writer...' - all in the first few comments.. thread complete?
Or, companies could do user tests, functional testing, etc. This service is pretty affordable: http://html5testing.co/
The display switch is a fun hack, but even a decade ago I think there were already programs where you could just wag your mouse over to the other screen of a computer. It doesn't need a display switch at all, just an app on both computers that passed the input from one to the other over the network under certain situations. Such apps are still used frequently today where people will bring a Macbook Air and an iPad to a hackathon and just use the iPad as a second screen. This became a big thing when everyone had to throw out their old PS/2 KVMs for USB ones or just use a software solution.

This is true of me too, a lot of times I have fun writing something already done, although it is kind of a sad waste.
Microsoft launches $40bn share buyback
Anyone care to explain the cons of using this?
Agree. And where are the indications that interest rates will rise substantially any time soon? I'm not saying that's impossible, but this piece seems to take it as an article of faith that we're in a period of unsustainably low rates.
A few things come to my mind/search:

- http://www.elasticsearch.org/ - self hosted and open source but easier to setup than standalone Lucene from what I have read

- http://acquia.com/products-services/acquia-network/cloud-ser...

- http://www.netaphorsearch.com/

- http://aws.amazon.com/cloudsearch/

- http://websolr.com/

- http://www.opensolr.com/

Hope this helps
a low probability, high impact tidal wave could be the switch to remote working. If remote working catches on in corporate america, it will wipe out the value of a lot of homes in higher priced areas.
True programmers are passionate by what they are doing. People in another job which is also passionate, will concern about getting better too.

I'm not sure about other professions, but people that actually don't like programming and works with it, quits very soon. I don't saw people with 5+ years of experience that don't love doing it.
Mortgage is 11% of my salary (post-tax, excluding bonuses and my wife’s salary). We are spending a good amount of cash and time renovating, so our real housing expenditure is somewhat larger than that.

Broadly speaking, I consider numbers up to ~20% sane. Much beyond that starts to seem ill-advised (but personal preferences are important here, too).
60 Minutes did a piece on the salvage effort a while ago. You can find the video here: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50137223n
At the expense of permanantly undermining your earning power and raising other living expenses by committing to live in an extremely rural community. There's a reason those houses are so cheap.
The artist didn't agree to you taking his product without paying for it.
The article is old, but timely, since today is Constitution Day.

Here's what Justice Scalia had to say about the NSA issue last night: http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2013/09/scalia-chides-acti... ("It has gotten to the point, Scalia said, that the current 'national debate' over the power of the National Security Agency to track private citizens' phone calls will be decided 'not by Congress, but by my court, because of the court's arrogation to itself ... [the power] to determine what privacy rights ought to exist.' The court, he said, is 'the branch that knows the least' about issues of national security.").

There is an interesting and relevant blog post about how the NSA spying creates an internal conflict within conservatism: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/postmodernconservative/2013.... Basically, it's hard to reconcile originalism, which many conservatives espouse, with the idea that the 4th amendment should be reinterpreted to encompass digital privacy.
I'm Norwegian. Norwegian doctors at least used to be extremely careful about anti-biotics. I now live in the UK, and the doctors here often prescribe anti-biotics after telling us we most likely have a viral infection.

I think the main thing is to challenge them to explain why. If they can't give a coherent explanation, ask them to explain to you what they think the risks are of waiting.

Most of the time when doctors here want to prescribe anti-biotics their answer is pretty much "just in case I missed something and it's actually a bacterial infection", and usually they'll then concede that if I'm ok with it, I can wait it out a couple of days and only take antibiotics if things doesn't start to improve with minimal risk. A couple of times the explanation has been that they've often seen specific symptoms exacerbated by a simultaneous bacterial infection, but again their response has been the same: if I don't keep getting worse, I'm fine to wait.

The only time I've ended up taking the antibiotics on offer was when I came in once spitting blood and with massive white lumps at the back of my throat (from whence the blood came, as they were ripped open when I coughed). Yay. Even then the doctor assumed, probably correctly, that it most likely was a viral infection that was making the rounds - she had a steady stream of the same symptoms that week -, but pointed out that given that my throat was so swollen and painful that I could hardly even drink, and the coughing of blood, if she was wrong and it got worse without antibiotics, next stop might be the hospital.

But of course few people care - they don't question the reasons for prescriptions at all.

Part of the high level of prescription of antibiotics in the UK is because of the health system here - they're paid per roughly per patient (adjusted for patient age, morbidity levels in the area they operate in, and a number of other factors meant to adjust for the cost of providing service, but the point is they are not paid per patient visit). If they get me out the door quickly and I don't come back, that's a win for them, so they are incentivised to get me well, but there's no downside to them short term from doing so by prescribing me something there might only be a 5% change that will make a difference to me at all - that's five percent fewer repeat visits at no real risk to them.

Few patients will complain, as the prescription cost is low, and when they get better in a few days, many of them will assume it was the antibiotics and so assume the doctor was right.

It's hard to set rules that prevent these kind of incentives, other than monitoring of whether or not they are in line with guidelines and/or whether or not they prescribe grossly more than the baseline.
The tricky part is getting people to understand what really drives their business and at the right level. It's not even just picking the right metrics, it's understanding them enough to take action on them.

My metric for metrics is to track things that will change your behavior. If a metric changes and you don't, then it's a pointless metric.

I've seen many companies track reasonable metrics, only to do nothing about them when they change. They just try to "do more" of whatever they were already doing.

Doing the right things with the right metrics is not a skill that everybody has and not everybody can learn.
True, a sad story , but i'm impress that they have been able to do that. But the salvage is expected to cost more than a billion , and italian taxpayers will have to pick up the tab... the question is , was it worth ? what about just tearing down the ship and dispose of it ?
I'd like to be able to tie blocks in block diagram to the cells in a spreadsheet.

The use case is to view which specifications are required per functional block in a large system.
Just curious, why would you argue that you shouldn't have wanted it the first place? Monads are one thing, which you can approximate somewhat via LINQ, but there are other simpler patterns such as Monoid, that really makes sense to use as programming construct, that just somehow never works in C#.
You are right that it should be used the proper tool for each particular problem. And Hadoop world is harder than single machine systems (like pandas). So, you shouldn't user Hadoop if you can do the job with simpler systems.

But I have something to add. Hadoop is not only introducing new techniques for distributed storage and computation. Hadoop is also proposing a methodological change in the way a data project is approached.

I'm not talking only about doing some analytic over the data, but building an entire data driven system. A good example would be the case of building a vertical search engine, for example for classified ads around the world. You can try to build the system just using a database and some workers dealing with the data. But soon you'll find a lot of problems for managing the system.

Hadoop provides you all the storage and processing power that you want (it is matter of money). Why if you build your system in a way where you recompute always everything from the raw input data? That can be seen as something stupid: Why doing that if you can run the system with less resources?

The answer is that with this approach you can:

- Being human fail-tolerant. If somebody introduces a bug in the system, you just have to fix the code, and relaunch the computation. That is not possible with stateful systems, like those based in doing updates over a database.
- Being very agile in developing evolutions. Change the whole system is not traumatic, as you just have to change the code and relaunch the process with the new code without much impact in the system. That is not something simple in database backed systems.

The following page shows how a vertical search engine would be built using Hadoop and what would it be its advantages: http://www.datasalt.com/2011/10/scalable-vertical-search-eng...
What I want is for people to stop using spreadsheets for anything but numbers.

There's a terrible habit just about everywhere computers are used to use Excel as a catch-all table generator for whatever grid-like data someone wants to capture (task lists, for example). It's a terrible tool for that - the cell editor is actively hostile to entering text. And frankly, I think the majority of Excel use is for exactly this sort of clunky, awkward crud, not actual spreadsheeting.

Rather than trying to build a better spreadsheet, build a better grid-oriented text capturing device with some spreadsheet functionality.
I beg to differ. I think it is an asinine question (hence my "then just nuke it" quip below.) What's the alternative for the people that live here / have lived here a long time. They have history here, livelihood, businesses, family, roots... The people that live here will rebuild it, and they/we are. Armchair social engineering isn't really required or desired.
Not a list of cons exactly, but it's trying to take an innate property of CSS and browsers and make it seem like a breakthrough, an innovation. It isn't.

With the linked article's methods one can create a horizontal expansion tool. But we can already do that by horizontally stretching the browser's window. In fact, using Chrome, I can horizontally stretch this HN submission window and produce the same effect.
It's never obvious why a technology is valuable before someone invents an application for it. No one knew what to do with broadband before VoD and digital delivery (Steam, GoG, app stores, etc.) came along, and we're only a few years into widespread adoption of those technologies. Anything could happen on the 5-15 year time scale we're talking about here. Gigabit Internet and the places that have it could look very appealing once the technology that puts it to work starts to gain traction.
How many lives are lost by the increased range that people drive because the TSA is obnoxious, or because of ever so slightly reduced preference for telecommuting because of surveillance state concerns?

9/11 was horrible but it was also noise compared to boring sources of death that we struggle with every day, and whos risks may be increased by our overreactions to 9/11.
Imagine hiring a manager who expected their reports to be in at 9am sharp, when the current company culture is to work whatever hours people want. Or someone who very strongly preferred a more methodological approach to development to a "ship fast and break things" approach in a company that values the latter. Or someone who wanted five weeks of vacation in a bootstrapping company where everyone was working 60 hour weeks (even if they were willing to accept less). Or someone who wanted 60 hour weeks in a company with a core value of work life balance.

In no case is the person wrong in what they want, but it might not fit in with the current culture, which can be bad for everyone involved.

That said - I agree that this can manifest itself as a never never land (the culture is drink till 4am on weekdays!), but I do still think that it is an important aspect of any organization, and properly applied can be beneficial.
Discussions about "rent vs buy", and the corollary of "mortgage vs cash", rarely address the problem of you MUST make that payment every month. Pay up or lose it.

The notion of paying every month, pretty much for life, is deeply ingrained in society to the point of not renting/mortgaging seems downright weird. (It's kinda like the recurring threads where living on $1/meal is met with outrage by most, despite many doing so with great satisfaction.) Few start out with a primary goal being owning home & property outright ASAP. This normalizes the dependency factor, reinforcing a social dynamic where people can't take long vacations or high risks, and live in fear of financial devastation from sudden unemployment or disability, precisely because that massive monthly payment ever looms.

The normalization of rent/mortgage also means social expectation of costlier dwellings. Where our culture(s) were satisfied by much humbler abodes a few decades ago, we've now grown to expect vast variants on the McMansion theme as a minimum - shocked at any suggestion that buying a brick shoebox (which our [grand]parents were content with) outright might be financially sensible. I expect downvotes based on "you can't expect anyone to live in that! cash purchase of real estate is absurd unless you're rich!" Well yeah, if you insist on buying multi-thousand-square-foot floorspace in quasi-urban settings with lots of options, sure it's gonna cost ... but you can choose to live somewhere less expensive, in a smaller space, and own outright much sooner - giving you the freedom to take a sabbatical, or risk investments, or not worry about layoffs.

In retrospect, and stuck with a large mortgage (bought at the peak), I strongly suggest anyone entering the housing market focus on hoarding cash until they can buy something, anything, outright. The freedom full ownership bestows is remarkable. Pity society sneers at it.
I'm surprised Noflo and Subtext haven't been mentioned. They seem like they have very similar goals.
Sea Change - Oysters dying as coast is hit hard
> what about just tearing down the ship and dispose of it ?

That's exactly what they're planning to do once they clean it up enough to be towed away. They seem very worried about the surrounding ecosystem which is, my guess anyway, why they're not just doing it where it lies.
50% of a tech industry salary going to rent is pretty scary.
Your outlook is only correct if jerking applicants around with meaningless trivia questions and irrelevant tests actually, somehow, probably accidentally, results in the selection of world class developers.

If there were 20 plumbers and only 10 plumber jobs, I could get away with jerking them around forcing them to do crossword puzzles before hiring them to fix my toilet. That doesn't mean the selection pressure would magically result in the guy most likely to fix my leaky toilet; much more likely it would result in the guy best at doing crossword puzzles. Unfortunately I now have a concrete deliverable of a leaky toilet to fix, and the best crossword puzzle solver in the market trying to fix it. That isn't going to end well. Especially when the best leaky toilet fixer in the world knows he can refuse the crossword puzzle test and get a job via his rep or connections so he never even applies. So its not just a random selection of applicants, but a random selection of an inferior population.
Interview after band reunion exceeds Kickstarter goal by 500%
It's also quite possible for this type of functions to get a polymorphic type, in which case the compiler generate code that will pass along essentially a virtual table object for the particular instance of the call site. Hardly black magic.
The insurers are said to be picking up the tab, and the ship will be scrapped, but it had to be moved in a proper place first.
Hi,
I had already seen some of these, but that definitely helps !
Will check them, thanks !
That is most likely the funders goal of the original research.
Why you should never use AirBnb and why hotels still rule
New Link: http://pastebin.com/QqMbAgsF
Can faith ever be rational?
The reports I've seen say that Costa (and Carnival) are paying the bills but their insurance company will be reimbursing them for much of the cost.
>Your landlord may elect not to offer a lease renewal.

Funny you say that: I'm strongly considering buying, and my landlord elected to not offer a "heat pump renewal" when the A/C went out. Hello window units, goodbye rental hell. Rental markets are not all alike, and this one's not too healthy.
Not "need", but if Valve wanted to submit patches, they could. Secondly, they could make their own distro for their own hardware which they are allegedly doing. Then they can do whatever they want with the kernel.

See also: Android.
> I see programmers are mostly concerned, over any other profession, of how good they are at what they do. How to be best.

IME, that's not even close to being true. Sure, there are programmers that really care about their craft, just as there are people that care about their craft in every profession, but I've never seen any evidence that programmers in general have more than the average degree of drive to find ways to be the best.

IME, professions where the average professional doesn't make very much and/or where the opportunities to make lots of money in the profession tend to come with a fairly short time clock tend to be the most driven -- athletic professions (not just the sports where the "big leagues" are well known like football, etc., but things like dance as well) are very much like this. Programmers in general, not so much.

Quite possibly people drawn to the startup world (whether its software startups or biotech startups) are more likely concerned than average about being the best -- that certainly seems consistent with my experience -- but that's different than the particular profession.
If it was spying alone, I think you may have a point. My concern is that this is part of a larger trend in which the federal government ignores checks and balances in "wars" of various kinds - and those wars have cost most lives than 9/11 did to begin with. So the spying in isolation? Probably worth it. The general ignoring of checks and balances and human rights generally? Definitely not worth it.
> The closest I've seen to this working is maybe games written in C++ that can be fairly easily built for different mobile platforms with a few native language bits done via a bridge where needed.

Speaking for the game industry, C++ is probably the only thing you can use almost everywhere. Some handhelds/consoles have certification gates and their own weird compilers. And almost every platform that runs games can run native code to some extent. Even browsers lately, if indirectly, with stuff like Emscripten and PNaCl.

So languages that compile to C (like Chicken) or have embeddable lightweight interpreters (like Lua) are similarly portable.
Why you should look at Google and not Facebook as a model to stay ahead
Platform or VoIP Engineer? Join us and take on the Big Telcos
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VoIP nice to have: Languages: Python, Go, Scala, and BASH. Experience with WebRTC.

===

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Platform nice to have: Postgresql and NOSQL data store experience. Familiarity with Redis tradeoffs is also a plus.

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Rent pays property tax, too. It's indirect, but it gets paid.
Global Greying