skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think you're missing the entire point I tried to make that the definitions (and traditions, and methods) of training and education have very little to do with the cultural goals, like people with vocational lives need educations.

I think you are conflating "useful" with "vocational." Targeting education to relevancy in the real world is different than just teaching people how to use a specific tool. To illustrate the distinction, consider different areas of the humanities. Nobody would say political science is "vocational" but I'd argue that it's a lot more useful to teach that at the high-school level then to teach about ancient civilizations. Both are educational--they help people to learn to think about the world around them, but the former does so in a way that's more directly useful and relevant.

> What could even remotely be educational about learning the traditions and regulations of annual company reports or recent fads in employee evaluations.

Have you ever taken a class in business writing? They don't teach you "recent fads in employee evaluations." They teach you how to make points in clear and concise ways while supporting your arguments and tuning them to your audience. They teach in fact precisely the skills teachers use to justify the existence of creative writing classes, except they do so in a direct instead of roundabout way. My empirical observation has been that people in the real world are spectacularly bad writers. I had a very painful experience in engineering school where I was in a group writing a project proposal for a competition entry and literally couldn't understand the ideas some of my teammates were trying to communicate. But who can blame them when they've never been taught to write with an eye towards communicating ideas, but instead spent a lot of time learning about the use of alliteration, etc.

> Of course "this is how to use R, this is how to use excel, this is how to make a graph for a presentation" is purely vocational.

Sure, but you can also teach a chemistry class as "this is how you operate a titration column." But neither subject needs to be taught in a vocational way.
Is it possible to hash an image so that you can partially match it with subsets of that image (like cropped regions or resizes)? Or a slight modification of that image (colors shifted, image flipped, etc).
I'd pay for Greenwald-level investigative journalism in the topics that interest me. Sports fans, finance guys, politicians, etc, take rabid interest in their respective fields, for the most part. If Omidyar can staff this new venture with journalists like Greenwald across all topics, I think he'd have a very, very valuable offering. Think of it like a TMZ for reality.
Interactively compare a map of the world of 1812 with 2013
Erlang is really good, especially for engineers with hardware background, who may find FP & Message Passing are more intuitive than OOP & Context Switching.

But it's quite difficult to hire.
I wonder if this means that the leadership in the House will bypass the Hastert Rule to allow the Senate bill to be brought up for a straight up/down vote.

They've supposedly had the votes for a clean CR for a while, but the Speaker has not permitted a vote to come to the floor due to the GOP's adherence to requiring a "majority of the majority" to approve a vote to reach the floor. If you exclude the Tea Party caucus Republicans, the majority of the majority just isn't there.
sigh Fine, here are more articles. If you don't want to believe in peer-reviewed academic literature, I'm not sure why I'm bothering. Statistically significant results can be obtained with few participants. Behold the power of math.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23926261

Nocturnal light exposure impairs affective responses in a wavelength-dependent manner.

>Our results demonstrate that exposure to LAN influences behavior and neuronal plasticity and that this effect is likely mediated by ipRGCs. Modern sources of LAN that contain blue wavelengths may be particularly disruptive to the circadian system, potentially contributing to altered mood regulation.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23358248

Out of the lab and into the bathroom: evening short-term exposure to conventional light suppresses melatonin and increases alertness perception.

>Subjective alertness was significantly increased after exposure to three of the lighting conditions which included blue spectral components in their spectra. Evening exposure to conventional lamps in an everyday setting influences melatonin excretion and alertness perception within 30 min.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21298068

Non-visual effects of light on melatonin, alertness and cognitive performance: can blue-enriched light keep us alert?

Exposure to light at 6500K induced greater melatonin suppression, together with enhanced subjective alertness, well-being and visual comfort. With respect to cognitive performance, light at 6500K led to significantly faster reaction times in tasks associated with sustained attention (Psychomotor Vigilance and GO/NOGO Task), but not in tasks associated with executive function (Paced Visual Serial Addition Task).
[...]
Our findings suggest that the sensitivity of the human alerting and cognitive response to polychromatic light at levels as low as 40 lux, is blue-shifted relative to the three-cone visual photopic system. Thus, the selection of commercially available compact fluorescent lights with different colour temperatures significantly impacts on circadian physiology and cognitive performance at home and in the workplace.
HIPAA Physical Safeguards Explained, Part 1
So essentially a Huffington Post esque scope of coverage to lure the masses hoping to ultimately redirect their attention to internally produced ProPublica quality investigative journalism?
> How do you detect behaviour before it happens?

Didn't Minority Report answer that question?
I love this. Very cool.
What this tells me is that if you've reached a six figure salary point, it's time to branch out if you want your income to continue to grow.

If you were entry level at $70k, and now you're making $140k as a senior engineer, you're going to have to either do a start-up or add a new, significant skill to your resume if you want to double up again, because you've peaked as "just a developer".
The Matterhorn like you've never seen it
If you are able to sell your product before it's ready, that is a great sign that you've found a customer's pain point. However, selling vapor-ware can be very hard. And you don't want to start your relationship with a customer with delays and buggy software.

Instead of pre-selling, consider talking to customers about what you're working on, having them take a look at the prototype and getting their feedback. You might not get the clear signal of a buy/no buy decision, but you will get help understanding what really matters in your product.

As always, depends on the particular business. Good luck!
> Threads are the WorseIsBetter approach to concurrency;

Threads/Actors are the obvious way to do concurrency. Just like a sibling comment I think you comment confuses the comparison. The semantic difference is between threads _and_ actors vs callbacks.

An actor is a sequential context, ideally isolated, but it can run concurrently with other actors (that are themselves actors). Think of group of entities in a game. Each one executes some simplified sequence of operations. Do x, do y, do z, then go back to x. But there multiple such entities in parallel. Another example is handling web requests. A web GET request is dispatched a new actor is spawned. They read the request body, process it, read some data from database maybe and return the response -- very sequential. But there are multiple potential such requests running concurrently.

Callbacks also form sequences of calls but there is no explicit concurrency context, and if sequence is simple it works ok, but it if it is not it is very easy to get tangled. You are processing one sequence but another piece of input comes in and a parallel sequence of callbacks has started, unless the data is immutable and you have pure functions at some point it becomes a tangled mess.

> With higher-level concurrency models we end up screaming at our IDEs as we try to contort our code to fit the paradigm.

That is why you'd want to run isolated concurrency contexts (actors). You can do this by making copies of data and storing it locally. Talking to threads via queues only. Spawning OS processes. That is how you decompose a highly concurrent system. Using callbacks is not going to fix the problem is only going to make it worse.
I recommend reading gwern's response, as it refutes the major question in Eliezer's thesis:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_a...

When someone asks "what's different now?" the answer is sometimes "thresholds, sweet spots, and tipping points." So often these things are overlooked in so many areas of life; things don't always turn out the same way _because the state of things (environment, economy, culture, laws, development, wathever) is not the same._
People have been using Netty (Java) to handle over 500K connections with NIO on one server. http://urbanairship.com/blog/2010/08/24/c500k-in-action-at-u...

That's 3 years ago. I'm sure more can be handled now, with more memory and more cores.

Bundled Netty with a distributed system like Hazelcast, you can easily scale out to more machines.
I can see being angry about their marketing tactics, but MongoDB has been around for a while now and it's arguably the best choice for a NoSQL database simply because it's so popular. I wouldn't let the notion of code cleanliness or "proper engineering" get in the way of making a sound business decision for your tech.

Being the most popular database means you've got lots of large companies using it, satisfied with its reliability, and you get plenty of extra features written by 3rd parties when you need them. And web searching will find answers to your problems, when you have them, way better than with a lesser-known database.
Hoo-fucking-rah! I hope these guys make traction and get where they're hoping without falling off the rails, I truly do. This was what I hoped for yesterday when the rumours began circulating.
I don't think anyone has ever claimed that "the war on drugs is based on racism" full stop. The word "racism" has become passe for many academics and writers. i.e.:

"Just as the capitalist system is not a capitalist plot, so racial oppression is not the work of "racists." It is maintained by the principal institutions of society, including the schools (which define "excellence"), the labor market (which defines "employment"), the legal system (which defines "crime"), the welfare system (which defines "poverty"), the medical industry (which defines "health"), and the family (which defines "kinship"). Many of these institutions are administered by people who would be offended if accused of complicity with racial oppression. It is reinforced by reform programs that address problems traditionally of concern to the "left" - for example, federal housing loan guarantees. The simple fact is that the public schools and the welfare departments are doing more harm to black children than all the "racist" groups combined." - Noel Ignatiev, http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html
I don't remember Democrats ever using threats over the debt ceiling. It seems to be specifically right-wing phenomenon [1]. In fact there are some for whom the endgame seems to be to force the government to default and assume it won't be catastrophic for the economy (one wonders if these folks have significant short/call positions).

[1] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/for-many-hard-l...
There are two components to GS, grade and step. Step is based on time, grade is based on position. It's also possible that this person came out as a GS-14 rather than a lower GS-12 or GS-13 due to the attempt at merit based pay (NSPS) that was canceled 3 (4?) years back. Their pay may have been improved via merit increases under NSPS and GS-14 might have been the closest equivalent to their pay or they could have been miscoded as a GS-14 equivalent and it wasn't corrected. Most of these were left as-is rather than fighting to "demote" them to avoid the hassle. Especially since most of them would be retiring within 5 years or so, or would have been promoted to that same level in the near future. Rather than demote them they just won't get the promotion just a lateral move.

GS grades tend to correspond to scope of work, degree of education required and scope of responsibilities. If the work doesn't require a college degree, don't expect anything above GS-9, and probably no better than GS-7. If it's "business ops" that requires a degree but has limited responsibilities you might be a GS-11, engineers are (after their "apprenticeship" period) between GS-11 and GS-13 (essentially, education + depth of knowledge, most GS-13 engineers will be SMEs, subject matter experts). Supervisors will typically be one grade above those they supervise, maybe on par with SMEs, with a typical minimum grade of GS-11. So a supervisor in charge of 40 engineers might be a GS-13, their boss would be a GS-14 and that persons boss a GS-15.
Our Panda mascot answers some tough questions
BS Tech Job Title Generator - Ninjas Only
As the saying goes, common sense isn't.

That said, we definitely had "checkbook" type lessons in jr. high math class when I was there (early 90s).
My thought when I saw the price differential.

Over-simplified and off-the-cuff:

Many iPhone users seem to personally be on a 2 year cycle. Depreciation circa $300 / year.

Many others seem to be on a 3 year cycle, about as far as one can go before starting to really notice their handset lagging to the point of being unacceptable to them. Depreciation $200/year.

5c: Year old tech, in what for many will be "less pretigious" packaging, for $100 off the price of new tech in "more prestigious" packaging. You're immediately "out" $100, or $200, depending upon whether you are on the 3 year or the 2 year cycle.

$100/$600, for a savings of 17%. For 17% off, you're taking year old tech in a less prestigious package.
That's good to hear. It seems like the www.tesla.im server is hosted by amazon in virginia. I am not familiar with tesla's architecture, are the servers actually powering the chat rooms etc located outside the usa?

I have been having a lot of issues with cryptocat and am evaluating other options.
1) This can't be true in terms of FaceBook profit

2) Facebook app on Android is a joke. It drains my battery about 70% faster. I get 10 hours with it uninstalled and 3.5 hours with it installed. On A Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Happens on different ROMs also.
> the problem with threads is that everything is shared all of the time, which makes it incredibly difficult to enforce invariants.

Your entire commet comes down to this, and my point is that this is not a problem. Design your threaded code around a simple principle: one thread's code must never touch another thread's data. Now you have safe threaded code. If you want to add some limited well-documented cases where you break that golden rule, go for it and reap the performance benefits.

There are some things that some threading models can be criticized for. For example, POSIX threads cannot be killed if they get stuck. However, threads are a powerful tool. The idea that you can share the in-memory code between all your threads is great. Additionally, you can share state and you control how and when it is shared. Want complete isolation? Communicate via queues! Want some shared state for performance reasons? Go for it! Want complete and utter chaos that will blow up as soon as you look at it funny? Let threads access other thread's data at will.

Your argument is similar to one that table saws are terrible because one cannot guarantee that they will never cut off your fingers.

Edit: one other problem with callbacks. AFAIK, no implementation of callback-based concurrency is able to take advantage of multiple hardware cores for true parallelism. In the meantime OS schedulers already take care of distributing OS threads between CPU cores, and some green thread implementations do this as well.
> The week after Christmas, we drove our entire lives up to our new apartment in NYC, got my wife settled in the city, and then I flew out to San Francisco to live on the other side of the country from her for 3 months.

> And it was, without a doubt, one of the best experiences of my life.

Out of context this wording is kind of funny/sad.
I guess I was a little confused about what this actually does. This does not do any calling, right? It just issues a command to Plivo to call Mom's number and then, when she answers, call a second number (assuming this to be the house where this device is located). At that point the RasPi is totally out of picture as the conversation happens phone-to-phone (possibly getting Plivo out of the picture too?). So you've created an external one-touch speed dial. Is that accurate?

Side note: Is there something that prevents me from building this and putting in two numbers I am not associated with? Push button. Two random strangers get calls from each other. Hilarity ensues. That type of thing is kind of scary.
>> CPC ads on iOS cost $.40, while they are only $.18 on Android. However, with negative ROI, it would appear that Android ads are expensive at any price.

No...they would be expensive at or above the price where ROI = $0. And ALL ads on Android don't have negative ROI, even if they do on average.
A feedback loop is probably the best analogy.

I've been wondering about the living cost disparity for a while. So far, there's no evidence of trouble. I think it would be a reasonable move, however, for several big companies to all open offices in a (single) different area. This would allow employees to migrate without feeling locked in the current employer.
"step" is determined by how long you work, GS number is determined by the job description.
> The Dems have a pretty good PR department, and are doing a good job of spinning it as though it is a problem with the (Republican led) House, though.

This is funny. Even funnier is that the Republicans don't realize that most of society doesn't share their values or opinions.

http://www.taylormarsh.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Obama_...
Paywise they're peers to Colonels and Brigadier Generals, position scope tends towards being equivalent to Colonel (AF, can't speak to other services or departments), with SES employees being the civil service peers to General officers.
Soft Spaces: The New Glue for Science Education
"Whoever will be reinventing our knowledge will probably be so different from us that this discussion won't make any sense anymore."

You're going to make contemporary archeologists cry, saying things like that. And the future ones are likely to be even better at it.

That might make an interesting very long term startup idea, in a million years it may make a heck of a lot more sense to hire archeologists to "discover" new areas for business profit than to hire primary creators to try and re-invent the hard way, the same way the first 345 times "it" was invented. And I'm only slightly tongue in cheek that this is already how contemporary IT works.
"I much rather have a working solution that might or might not be broken in the future"

What does it mean for Bitcoin to be "broken?" That is my entire point here: if we do not have a clearly stated definition of what security means, then we cannot even talk about whether or not a system is broken. To put it another way, I would call any cryptosystem that can be attacked in polynomial time "broken," yet in the case of Bitcoin there is the 51% attack which apparently does not bother you -- and like I said, despite the fact that I call it broken, I cannot actually point to anything that would have required Bitcoin to be secure against such an attack.

To put things in scientific terms, we are talking about falsifiable hypotheses. As an example, here is a commonly assumed hypothesis: the block cipher AES is a pseudorandom permutation. This is a claim that could be disproved i.e. we can falsify the claim by presenting an algorithm that efficiently distinguishes AES input/output pairs (with a secret key that the algorithm does not receive as input) from the input/output pairs of a random permutation. Consequently we can speak about the security of AES in a meaningful way, even though have no theoretical proof that it meets its security definition (only heuristic evidence and a lack of known attacks).

My point about Bitcoin is that we do not have such a hypothesis, so we cannot even be sure that we mean the same thing when we say, "Bitcoin is secure" or "Bitcoin is broken." That is the point of having a security definition. Without such definitions, you can always make the claim that Bitcoin is secure, not matter what sort of attacks are carried out, because you can always just say that Bitcoin is not supposed to defend against those attacks.
Show HN: Safest site on the web for storing your text
annnnnnd that was depressing.
> You get at the degree to which all human knowledge is limited by the central nervous system that humans possess.

I think that our current revolution, the Internet and computers in general, is allowing us to overcome these limits.

The question is how to integrate them better, how to improve the link between humans and computers, and how to improve our own cognition in the most natural, most human way to get the most out of the whole of human knowledge that is now available everywhere.

And for this, we need generalists.
Defaults are as much a matter of perception as of fact. Nobody blinked in 1979 because it was a technical glitch that did not reflect a lack of willingness to pay. Refusing to increase the debt ceiling is tantamount to saying "we're not going to pay any more money," which is not generally the kind of thing that makes debtholders and potential future debtholders very comfortable.
I can tell you right now that if I take time off my current job to go sit in your office for an interview and you ask me basic questions like "What is MVC?" or "What's the difference between a POST and a GET request?", I'm going to thank you for your time and walk right out.

Oh yeah? Well, if I'm being interviewed, and someone doesn't ask me those questions, I'm going to walk right out!!

This is how we debate interview tactics, right?
I'll point out why I don't find this a credible hypothesis.

I imagine someone highly-placed in the NSA speaking to their superiors:

"Yes, we have built this alternative form of money. It can be used almost-anonymously for the purchase of drugs or for online gambling, for the funding of terrorists and anything else that people want to hide from the government. It will allow users to skirt money-laundering laws and avoid payment of income and sales taxes. But because of our ubiquitous surveillance, we think we can (probably) track anyone using it... well, MOST people using it."

"It is a completely innovative idea -- few in the world have even had idle speculation about the idea of a currency like this and no one is currently working on building such a thing. Yes, it will probably spur development of similar crypto-currencies."

"So, Mr. Director, can we have permission to release this into the wild?"

I cannot imagine someone in charge saying, "Yes: release it."
Your comment is extremely disingenuous. House Republicans have failed at all efforts at blocking the ACA/Obamacare, and are now attempting to play chicken against global markets in order to effect the outcome they desire.

They should be dragged to a public square, tarred and feathered.
Similar to the question "Do you want to know when exactly you are going to die?"

I think I'd prefer not to have checked this out.