skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Ethical data mining/machine learning jobs?
I am working on a master's degree in computer science; my research/studies are all related to machine learning and text mining. When I graduate, I would like to find a job where I can actually use these skills. However, I am strongly opposed to the ways ML is used in NSA and government surveillance, and I do not want to work for a company supports or enables these activities. Are there jobs or fields out there where machine learning is used for good? If so, what and where are they?
> Very scary and very aggressive.

I would not want to work for a company whose explicit strategy is locating other successful businesses, copying their model, and leveraging economies of scale to undercut them. Wringing out margins also decreases innovation, lowers wages, and drives out all but the biggest players.
I think "I started playing video games and now feel fantastic and am more productive" could be generalized to "I allowed myself to unwind after my daily routine and now I feel fantastic and more productive"

Anecdotally, I've recently started playing TF2 again after work instead of exclusively working on a side-project, and I'll be damned if I haven't slept better in months and have had more creativity and stamina to put toward my projects after work. For me, the takeaway from Jack's post was to just make sure you're giving your brain enough time to recharge. and think about other things.
It doesn't look like there is much sun in that area. And generators are extremely expensive to run, how are you getting fuel to that island?

Not sure about wind on that island either.
http://thefunded.com comes pretty close to solving that issue already.
I used to play video games a ton growing up (most of the ones mentioned in the article). I have tried picking up modern games as an adult, but don't get quite the same thrill/zone as I did as a kid. I haven't felt immersed. I get that feeling now from rock climbing, cycling and skiing. I think it's because after spending all day working on programming, staring at a screen and working through challenges seems too much like work.
The assumptions here seem a little urban-centric. Maybe in a downtown area, the only places you shouldn't show potential customers is in the middle of bodies of water; but what about a more rural or wild location - are you going to show a business that you can find them potential customers in the middle of fields? mountaintops? military testing ranges?

A better approach might be to use block-level census data to give you a probability density function to where you should plot your random made-up fake 'potential customer' icons. Less risk that when a roadside truckstop in alaska brings up your site you wind up making the misleading claim that you can find them fifty customers within walking distance...
Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy
What do you mean? I am FLAT. What don't you people understand about that? I AM FLAT WITH IMAGES!!

-- iOfficeSpace
Then hydro, which is very do-able on a small scale. Do I seriously need to list all possible options here?
Disproving theories is as big (if not a bigger) part of science as it is to come up with theories that support certain results. After all there could be many such theories but which one is the true one you can only find out by setting up experiments to explicitly make the decision which theories are false and which are not (or at least, less so).
Yes and No :-)

Most utility apps that aren't supporting an existing brand will often support both themes. However I've noticed that apps that are already branded will go along with only the theme that works best with their brand.
> The auction house mechanic might work on a MMO style game, but Diablo 3 isn't a MMO

What's the meaningful difference? I mean, what specifically makes auction house work in an MMO, but not a game like Diablo?

I thought auction house as a feature either works, if done right, or it doesn't. I thought auction house as an idea is great, and now this... I haven't played Diablo 3 yet; I played a little World of Warcraft back in the day and I liked the way I can sell unneeded gear and buy exactly what's right for me instead (buth some pretty cool items are Soulbound and cannot be sold!). I thought an auction house in a game like original online Magic the Gathering is pretty fabulous: auctions there are full of player-run trade bots which are tolerated by administration, and all this in a game that didn't start out with game currency to begin with (they appropriated tournament tickets as a de facto game currency). I can't play the game itself, unfortunately: interface is just too clunky for me.
Talking about self-driving cars, a friend said:

"They will have to be proven as perfectly safe. One accident and people will go crazy."

And though that's true, it of course made me think about the countless accidents involving human-driven cars through distraction, drink/drugs, weather, medical issues, confusion and whatever else.

We haven't proven our driving abilities as perfectly safe, not by a long shot!
If you find this article interesting, you should check out the book 'designing and engineering time'. Aside from having a great title it is filled with interesting tips regarding perception and user interface design.
A ponzi scheme is defined by the fact that the only profit to be made comes from people who buy in after you. If companies don't return capital to the markets (through dividends or buybacks), then it absolutely fits the definition of ponzi scheme.

The proper cycle of a publicly traded company is that it trades equity for capital, uses said capital to invest in itself, then returns capital when it reaches a certain maturity. Anything else is a scam.
If you take a look at a list of countries ranked by foreign-born population:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-bo...

USA is ranked #1... by a huge margin. The fact we rank so low on your cited Wikipedia page is a evidence to my assertion that we "get along". Unlike so many other countries, we integrate and assimilate our immigrants.
In that sense the 'flip flopper' insult from American politics should actually become a mark of distinction. It is as if changing your opinion due to additional insight/input/thinking is a bad thing instead of a good one.
2x Senior Unity 3D Devs for SpaceGlasses.com – Meta (YC S13), Los Altos
We're building Tony Stark's computer and Unity is our platform.

Our hardware gives users the experience of holographic visuals floating in front of them and anchored to the world around them. Interaction is via hands without the use of gloves or any other components.

We achieve this with a real time 3D scanner coupled with a see through 3D display, all built into a pair of glasses. The capabilities are extended with various other sensors such as our IMU (9 degree of freedom sensor)

Your Unity 3D expertise will allow your to build a robust and developer friendly SDK for app developers. 1200 developers have pre-ordered our glasses after just a few weeks of availability.

You'll be working alongside industry legends such as our Chief Scientist, Steve Mann, (the father of wearable computing) and our Lead Advisor, Steve Feiner (pioneer of 3D UI and augmented reality).

please email r.lo+jobs@meta-view.com if you'd like to work with us in the south bay of San Francisco.
I am trying to understand you.

You might be genuinely interested in helping others but other people might not. People are not equally determined in overcoming any obstacle in their way to help someone in need. So making it easier for people to help would let more people receive help.

Do you agree this would be helpful to more people?

What striked me as interesting in your comment is how passionate you are about it. It's the kind of comment someone honest and genuinely caring makes after they've been burned. If someone treated you unfairly it can become an impetus for you to do great things.

I also wish HN readers tried to be more understanding.

(Note: I did not downvote you.)
No, because to get to that level of difficulty, you have to run through the game on 'stupid dumb easy' first.

I don't really understand complaints of difficulty when you've already experienced the game several times, and then when you pick the 'really, this is crazily hard' setting, it's too hard.
OSv, an new operating system for the cloud
This is because Bezos is going for the endgame from day 1 rather than to get stuck in the middle. It definitely is aggressive but it also is where things will end up eventually anyway so entering the game with that in mind is a definite strategy to avoid having someone else do that to you instead. Capitalism is brutal, just how brutal you can see in that quote.
Does anyone know how this compares to wordnik's Swagger [1] ? I think Swagger is incredible, would love to see more API tools which promote good habits and make it easy to be beautiful.

[1] https://developers.helloreverb.com/swagger/
Yes, as evidenced on slide 8 of that link.

"""
Solaris Porting Layer
- Adds stable Solaris/Illumos interfaces
* Tasqs, lists, condition variables, rwlocks, memory allocators, etc
- Layers ontop of Linux equivalents if available
- Solaris specific interfaces were implemented from scratch
"""

It doesn't (currently) use the Linux page cache, which causes quite a few ancillary issues. The idea is awesome, but this will simply never be able to be "natively" in linux without a rewrite of much of the core.
The sharing economy fights back against regulators
10 Principles of 3D Printing - Presentation by Melba Kurman
Those comments are self selecting and don't represent anything meaningful other than that all three OS's no longer rely on textures.

Given that most people say that WP8 is radically different from Android, it makes no sense that people would say that iOS7 looks like both of them simultaneously, unless it has somehow captured the best of all 3 operating systems.
"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."

This is exactly what you are supposed to do in high-level RTS strategy. In Starcraft for example, you should know ahead of time what 'tells' you are looking for, and disregard the rest. It lets you focus only on the information that influences your decisions, and minimizes distractions from "scary" things the opponent may be doing.
As in young forever or in Woolworths?
But shares are traded because there's an assumption that the company will distribute earnings (as dividends or buybacks) eventually. Otherwise they would have little (voting rights?) or no value.
I liked swagger a lot, but could never get it working with my API because it's too opinionated. From the little I tried to do, there was no way at all to tell it to document the API the way I had designed it, rather than the way it thought APIs should be designed.
Looks good. How do I know this isn't a virus though ;)
I remember back in the days of HTML 1.0 or 2.0, they suggested not using the words "click here" in a link since some day you might be able to indicate other ways of following a link besides clicking (or you could already through non-graphical browsers). I think this is the first time I've seen "tap here" when I had to click. It was kind of a weird feeling, like I was pretending to tap by clicking. But my point is "tap here" and "keep tapping" is just as incorrect as "click here."

And as Donald Norman would point out, you shouldn't have to put instructions on your interface telling people how to use it (e.g. "push" and "pull" on doors).

It seems that everyone who uses this site to create a presentation is going to have to put "tap here" and "keep tapping" on the first two slides to get anyone to understand what's going on.

It looks like I wasn't the only one confused by the user interface. Losing the ability to go back and forward is also kind of annoying (tried right click).
I just got an email from them saying "We would like to remind you about the near expiry date of your services at OVH". Apparently my server will expire in "less than 60 days' time".

I wonder if this is part of there new strategy to keep people on their current plans. I only ordered my server for 3 months so they're very eager.
Just remember, Bitcoin is far from anonymous. In fact, it's pretty easy to track, unless you can source the coins anonymously.
Winning the SOTD on Awwwards or how we got 27k of qualified UV in a week
You shouldn't be coding things to be so tightly coupled. You should be able to build and test your API without communicating with a 3rd party.

Sure, there are cases where you have to use a proxy to see a request. I'm surprised there's a market for people who pay for that.
Open Source Tools for Firmware Development
And they still didn't implemented a visualization for SVG ?
What do you mean they don't make money that way? Do you just mean that $100m isn't a hit? If that's all you mean, change that number to $1b or $10b or one hundred... billion dollars (pinky to lip). But I think what you mean is that investors make money by finding companies that are grossly undervalued, to the point that an order of magnitude change in valuation shouldn't affect the decision. I'm still skeptical of this claim. How many companies valued at $10m do you think have a 10% chance of ending up at $1b+?
> This is truly one of the gaping holes in human cognition, this idea that a single participant in a larger system can make a change and then model the results of that change without accounting for the reactions of all the other actors

The parent's sentiment may be a tired old theme in the context of a game company that produces a long-awaited sequel to a much-beloved classic, meddles too much with the winning formula, and ends up killing the goose that lays the golden eggs, but I feel that this idea needs more airtime in politics.

The best, surest way to get a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works and make a series of many incremental changes.

This should be a fundamental axiom in politics -- that anything you do, from creating a top-secret surveillance agency, to sweeping healthcare reform, to the war on drugs, to the legalization of gay marriage, is not guaranteed to have the effect its creators intended, at the magnitude they intended, without any other potentially larger effects, some of which may range from undesirable to catastrophic.

Therefore, when possible small and simple changes should be made, and we should think twice before proposing complex changes, and ponder three times again before implementing them. It's the only possible way to avoid getting buried under a relentless onslaught of unexpected consequences.

Not enough people are even talking about this idea. AFAICT it's neither conservative nor liberal nor libertarian; it's literally conservative in the sense of "we don't understand the problem space very well outside the status quo, so let's take care not to get too far away from the familiar in case we fall into a hole we can't climb back out of." Imagine a decades-old project which gets dozens to hundreds of commits a year, but whose authors always reject any commits smaller than 1000 lines of code. What's surprising isn't that it contains bugs, what's surprising is that the end result does anything resembling what it's supposed to.
Obama administration urges FCC to require carriers to unlock mobile devices
You forgot to mention choosing a country that doesn't have an extradition treaty or similar with your own. So for me in the UK, it would rule out most of the EU and North America.
You can bet it's thousands of US dollars, if not tens of thousands. Just a single seat of Solidworks is $4000 without any extras. Believe it or not, that was actually crazy cheap for parametric CAD back when Solidworks started becoming popular ~15 years ago.
I have no first-hand experience at it, but it seems like the best approach may be to set up and fund an organization which operates an exit node, rather than doing it in your own name.

e.g. http://tor.noisebridge.net/

This might not work so well at a small scale, and it might be difficult to quantify how well this approach worked for them for reducing how the operators personally get harassed in this case -- at least one of the founders of Noisebridge has been harassed a lot about other things (Jacob Appelbaum).
I highly doubt that. What's way more likely is that even if they are just slightly more safe, you will be able to get cheaper insurance for them. Eventually, over time, this will push all self directed cars off the road.

There is even a disruption potential: Put together a new insurance company that only insures self driving cars and make it meaningfully cheaper. The ones that still insure self directed cars and self driving cars both will have a tough time to compete because their blended economics don't allow for the super cheap rates.
You can't seriously expect that link to be meaningful. These were questions asked by 11-13 years olds to local politicians. There's no actual analysis there, and the only mention of money spent on prisoners is:

"Varför får fångarna på fängelser bättre mat än oss i skolan? frågade John Edin." -- "Why do the prisoners in prison get better food than we do in school? asked John Edin"

The response by the local politician Christer Lindström was:

"Jag har ingen aning om vad internernas mat kostar. Men i skolan kostar en portion 30-35 kronor. Det är ointressant vad andras mat kostar, det viktiga är vad vi erbjuder." -- "I don't have a clue on what the internees' food costs. But in school a portion costs 30-35 kronor. The cost of others' foods isn't interesting, the important thing is what we offer."

So from that dialog we don't know: 1) is John Edin correct? 2) what does "better" mean? and 3) is the price difference unreasonable?

Regarding the last, children on average over the 12 or so years of school need fewer calories than adults, so I would expect that less money is spent per person in feeding a child than an adult.

As for "criminals are taken care of better than [law-abiding] citizens" .. okay, that's where I know you're being deliberately obtuse.

How good is the public road system for the criminals? How good is the mass transit system? How much parental leave time do criminals get, and how much are they paid for it? Do prisoners get paid sick leave? And so on through a long list of public services that prisoners don't get or can't use.

Or more concisely, why not also complain that prisoners get free housing, free food, and free heat, while law-abiding citizens have to pay for those themselves?
and there is no way of telling if the presentation is 17 or 159 slides. this site sucks.
What software was used to make those graphs? Or did I tap through it
Funny means funny.

LOL is just unnecessary punctuation.
> why do they need to be reformed?

Because they are human beings, and we don't want to show the same callous disregard for human life that they did.

When you drag out murder, you should also keep in mind that murder has one of the lowest reoffending rates of most crimes. I don't know what the current reoffending rates for murder is in Norway or Austria, but in the UK it stands at around 3%, and 1% commit a second murder (the rest carry out some other crime).

Murder is most often a crime of affect where it clear from the outset that the offender is highly unlikely to be in the same situation again.

So these "numerous" cases you refer to are still a tiny proportion. Yes, it sucks. But conversely, it'd suck for the 97% that won't commit another crime to be punished more because the remaining 3% will commit another crime, or because 1% will kill again.

If we accept that it's ok to keep people locked up because they might commit another crime, where is the threshold where we pre-emptively lock people up because they may commit a crime sometime in the future? It's easy to find population subsets where the likelihood that someone some day will end up in prison is vastly higher than 3%. Why not lock them up the day they are old enough to be criminally culpable? How would that be any different than keeping people locked up because they might reoffend.

> the victims and their families should come first. you rape, kill, maim? consciously? ok, face the consequences. this reformation BS is ignoring the plight of the victims and their families.

How does locking someone up forever help the victims? It does not repair the damage.
Frontiers of Planned Obsolesence
Ultimately, if a company does not do that at all (in its lifetime) then it does not provide any benefit to it's shareholders except the share price gains - and for a company which starts from 0 and ends at 0, share price gains are essentially zero sum.
So what you are arguing is that a company should not provide a positive payout to its shareholders. Well, I beg to disagree.
Big House hackathon set to break record
All About Birds
In a world of faulty and inflated job descriptions, what's yours?
Bit annoying that they took the name of a startup I used to work at:

http://www.tapestry.net/
There are so many scenarios for debugging APIs that don't fall into the "I control both ends, so I should be able to see everything." camp. SDKs, poorly implemented or documented APIs controlled by a 3rd party (frequently even across a company where the people producing are far removed from the consumers), differing environments (works locally, not in staging, etc), UI-less machine-to-machine interactions (debugging webhooks is especially annoying) and many more.

If you check my bio, you'll see my bias toward these problems. But there are a lot more of them and a lot more variants than you give credit to.
The Best Responsive Metro Theme – Metronic
How Insects Fly in Space
"Chinese time travel fiction usually follows a similar plot that involves protagonists traveling back to past and showing off their knowledge of 21st century history, literature, art and science to win the heart of their lover, who is invariably a well-known historical figure."

I can imagine why someone would like to ban stuff like that ;-)

It makes the whole genre look bad.
> Ultimately, if a company does not do that at all (in its lifetime) then it does not provide any benefit to it's shareholders except the share price gains - and for a company which starts from 0 and ends at 0, share price gains are essentially zero sum.

Corporations rarely either start with a stock price of $0/share, and only end at $0/share when they end insolvent, which, while many end that, isn't the way all end.
Sounds like he just needed some stress-relief, rather than video-games specifically...
PredictionIO is an open source that you can download form github.
I am all for discouraging patent trolls, but am having trouble fitting my mind around a RICO deal here. I don't even play a lawyer on TV, but perhaps some of the grownups here on HN could weigh in on whether this makes sense.
Hi Max! Have you looked into taking the style of cipher-stacking you use for symmetric encryption, and applying it to key-stretching? For example, you might replace PBKDF2 with PBKDF2^bcrypt^scrypt. Similarly for public-key encryption: is there a good reason not to stack RSA and multiple elliptic curves?

I personally think it's very unlikely that any of these algorithms have been broken, but it'd be a good way to restore some faith in cryptography, and introduce a safety factor.
From my mostly second-hand knowledge, in practice even lawyers specializing in IP wouldn't have a solid answer for how to make this distinction, without looking at a specific case in detail. If it came up in a trial, the two sides would make a version of the arguments presented here: one would emphasize that the sources have now been "added to the kernel tree", a unified project managed with close integration etc. etc., while the other side would argue they were merely placed alongside the kernel sources in a version control system, like collecting short stories in an anthology.
On the Apple M7 Motion Processor
Microsoft no longer a top Linux kernel contributor
Or the company is bought out for cash, as in the case of Dell, or bought by another company for cash and/or shares.