skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is a very interesting idea, and I look forward to the results of the experiment!

Allow me to take a moment to reiterate some of the comments I left on the Georgia Tech master's thread [1], specifically as a student who has taken graduate level computer science courses at Brown University with the majority of his experience working in industry.

* I went directly into industry in 1998 working at a software/systems engineer for a telecom working on Solaris deployments. I worked full-time and paid for my undergraduate education which I pursued part-time and which took me 9 years to finish. I majored in "information technology," as there was no computer science online program at Northeastern University. I didn't take any theory courses at all, and the majority of my course work was programming in languages like Java, C++, and C# (also COBOL, and the like...)

* I applied at Brown University after talking to the admissions and computer science departments multiple times, in which they told me I wouldn't be able to pursue a master's due to lack of independent or undergraduate research or an undergraduate education in computer science. The process of being told this was rather unfortunate, as the responses I received via e-mail telling me it wouldn't be possible were ended with "Sent from my iPhone."

* At the time I talked with them, I had been working at Basho Technologies for a year on Riak, an open source distributed Dynamo-style data store, as well as serving as a maintainer of rubygems.org.

* I was finally able to get accepted as a "non-degree" or "special" graduate student, which is allowed to take courses at full price. This role exists primarily to allow students to determine if they would be a fit for graduate school, at which point I would then have to re-apply for degree seeking status. This was possible because of an independent meeting I scheduled with Shriram Krishnamurthi, who, based on my industrial experience expedited the process along.

* Since starting as a "non-degree" student, I've been heavily motivated to attempt to stand out from other candidates for when I eventually re-apply to be a degree seeking student by independently publishing papers, publishing a blog, organizing a podcast, and speaking at conferences.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6510142
Convention? I guess it does comedown to function hoisting in the end, so the expectation is the body of code after the functions are defined / function variables created. I think a lot of people prefer that convention over boilerplate code, and the tide of language development seems to be heading in that direction.

OT: script tag soup is, for first party stuff anyway, avoided with a single script for a module loader these days.
> In the answers I do not see any mention of the Second Time Around Problem, which conclusively answers the question with "there is no way to know".

No it doesn't. You are assuming the existence of a recording device, and worse excluding the recording device from your definition of universe.

> Then make a deterministic universe that just plays back the recording (this is the "second time around").

What does play back even mean in this context? When you play back a recording the events in it do not actually occur again. All you are doing is perusing a memory.

Your recoding doesn't even need to simulate the laws of physics - it simply places objects where they were - if you wanted to you could make any changes you like. So you could make the recording do anything. i.e. a recording is meaningless - it's not actually a universe. (By universe I mean something that follows a defined set of rules.)

> From the viewpoint of someone living inside the universe, there is no way to tell whether it is the first time around or the second time around.

In the the second time around they are not actually living in the universe.

> make a faraway point "go forward or backward in time"

No you can't. You can make it traverse time faster or slower, but you can not make it go forward and backward.

> The crazy thing is that for angular movements the relative speed is amplified by distance, so when you are moving around at everyday speeds the "now" on planets across the galaxy is going back and forth by thousands or millions of years.

That is simply not true. Angular movement has exactly zero effect on relativity - it's not true motion which requires a relative difference in energy (AKA speed).
Of particular note for distributed operational data stores is the focus on "significantly higher [network] performance (in terms of packets per second)". This (and High I/O instance pricing) has been a major obstacles to getting great results for these type of systems on AWS.
I understand the point of this post and the original one. Further, I agree wholeheartedly that innumeracy drives bad policy (housing in SF anyone?) and mathematical models aren't used enough. In a nutshell, I would love for mathematically-able people, like Chris, to be in charge of policy everywhere. All that said, this whole exercise seemed a bit futile and kind of pointless.

Given enough parameters and assumptions about it, any model can be made to produce one or another result. (I know, I know I should shut up and just code to make that point, but bear with me) In this sort of policy debate, the harder part is actually finding the assumptions that are consistent with reality[1] and sorting out the moral and ethics questions behind whatever policy.

In this case, it is far less interesting to find that a hypothetical implementation of basic income or basic job would cost the government N trillion dollars per decade than it is to answer associated the moral question: Given that the GDP of the US is M trillion dollars, and that the Ginni coefficient is g, and that these candidate implementations would cost N trillion dollars, should the government redistribute wealth in some capacity as to guarantee a basic income? a basic job? Tinkering with the models doesn't really help there. All it does is change N. That helps when trying to answer the question, of course, but not too much.

[1]: Another example where this is the hardest step: It is easy to "explain" why there are so many more male STEM professors by noting that the distribution of <your favorite math standardized exam> has a std deviation slightly higher for males than females and assuming that a professor needs to be > 4std dev above the mean to succeed. The trickier part is measuring the distributions accurately and testing whether professors really need to be > 4std dev above the mean to succeed. fwiw, I believe that it is likely that the distributions are good enough and one does need to be that smart to be a prof, but testing those assumptions is the difficult and interesting part, not doing some numerical integrals of a gaussian.
I've found it interesting how many people in the Bay Area, particularly veterans of the 90s boom, discount a lot of the ideas pushed by GitHub and 37signals. Anedotally, one of the common responses whenever I reference either company is, "Yeah, but how big is [GitHub|37signals], really?" It's actually somewhat surprising to me how consistently I've encountered this response (so consistent, it feels as if it was distributed like a political talking point). As mentioned in the slides, publicly announced funding definitely serves as a signal, and I haven't heard anyone say that about GitHub since then, though someone said it to me regarding 37signals within the past few months.

What I think it really has to do with is that GitHub seems to make an effort to hire doers, whereas many companies develop processes to deal with non-doers, eg, having staging servers so non-technical staff can check the work of "their" developers. Remote work also doesn't serve the interests of non-doers, since they want to Have Meetings and Make Decisions.
Thanks, that's helpful.

Any hints on the declining margins?
Google Races Quantum Computer Against Its Own Web Empire
I wish I could tell you, but as soon as the page finishes loading it completely freezes up and eventually crashes the tab.

Chrome 29.0.1547.76 m on Win7
I'm applying as we speak, but in Bioeng.
When I email professors and get to talking they always coach that they do NOT have control over the admissions process, that a committee acts as Maxwell's demon. Though I am not applying to Brown and do not know anything about the internals of their process, this seems to indicated that professor Huang has at least some control over the admissions. If I were professor Huang, I would be very very careful about this, as sparks of racism, sexism, and homophobia can quickly ignite into a fire. I want to be clear, I am not accusing professor Huang of this at all. Heck I don't know the guy a bit and I do like this alternative approach to the application a lot. Still, he needs to be careful.
Consider that copyright originated as system with which to control people. The types of control sought were those of monetary, and thought/expression of thought.

Monetary control goes back to antiquity, where copying a book required expensive literate slaves to copy a book for about the same price as publishing one. Thought and expression control goes back to the censorship systems of the church, who sought to prevent critical dissent via restricting publishing using licenses - later termed a "monopoly".

These two systems were then combined in practice. Not only were the printers/publishers restricted and licensed, but what they could print or reprint as well. This control over what was published not only served the church and/or state's interests in enforcing dogmatic or state law, but also the monetary interests of the original publishers of a work. In essence, the publisher and the government form a pact to ensure each other's mutual interests, at the expense of the common citizen.

It wasn't until 1710 that the game changed. The Statute of Anne ushered in not only the destruction of publishing monopolies, but the argument (in form of law) that "protecting" a work from copying was primarily an incentive for scholars to keep churning out more works - the argument summarized as: "Why would learned men compose and write useful books unless there was financial incentive?" Flash forward to today, and that's basically still the same argument used by anyone lobbying for copyright of anything. If it's copied and nobody gets paid, nobody will make anything [intellectual/creative/etc] anymore.

Consider how amazingly specious this argument is today. Look at Wikipedia. Look at YouTube. Look at all the works being published under all the subversive licenses that are intended to surmount the aged limitations of copyright law. Do we really care to restrict what content you can produce, or if someone gets paid for it? More and more the arguments are about simple attibution, or freedom of use, than anything else.

All this decision finds is that the copying of books is by and of itself no longer a harmful act. But we've known that for decades.
Only developers would read that title and be certain of the meaning :).

I agree with the bit about developers looking at software skeptically. Most of us do indeed think it doesn't work, it's a gimmick, and it could have been built better.

This isn't the first time people have said making developers happy was important... Anyone remember Steve Ballmer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE
I believe the coin app will only put cards on the Coin that match the name that is on your account.
How does this work with the typical credit card setup, ie chip and pin? Do they duplicate the pin of each credit card?

In Canada I haven't' seen a place that doesn't use chip and pin for about 3 years now.

Can someone shed some light on how they get around this?
In my experience, the people who can do the D are better at the R.
A wallet is a single point of failure device. It's a lot more of a hassle to remotely wipe my wallet (remember all the cards, cancel them all individually).
Love these talks from Zach Holman.

Brilliant work happening at GitHub, of course. Seeing the rise of the "primarily responsible person" is huge for us in our small company - we've found it's natural to work this way, without a label.

Keep on putting out these fantastic slides, Zach.
Yes, credit card duplicators have been available for a long time, but the average minimum-wage worker doesn't know that. This changes the game -- kinda like how how the prevalence of high quality camera phones changed the game for sexting. You could do it before, but it happens a lot more now that it's so convenient and the technology is available to the masses.
All company blog posts are adverts (or they're doing it wrong)
Use Educated Customers to Your Advantage
As far as I can tell, the best tactic for me would be to create a product that seems so stupid that I couldn't possibly ever picture using it myself.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the good taste of the American public, as they say.

Most people who have the ability to create professional apps and websites, such as those of us on HN, are so far removed from this segment of audience that we don't have much of a chance of understanding and creating whatever products they actually want.

I can't think like the average 12 year old with a 103 IQ. I wasn't in line with average kid thinking when I was 10 or 12 and certainly I'm not now.
If Google would not require real names, it would not be an issue (I am not saying that nobody share the same real name, like Google seem to imply).
C'mon guys. Let's ease up. It's an elegant product in a physical package that I think most everyday people would use, especially if they're able to get the price down to free like square.

The real issue I see is that I don't want to carry a phone AND a card. I just want to pay with my iPhone 5S + thumbprint.

Or, if I'm in NYC and want to go running through the streets slash central park, I want to pay with my iPod Nano for the train, for some water, and even some food.

Heck, take it a step further. Just imbed a bluetooth chip inside my thumb so I just have to press it to a payment terminal anywhere.

It's just a roadmap, but you have to start somewhere.
It's not uncommon in this sort of situation for them all to get upvoted. Firstly, different people will upvote different ones, so if there's a popular story then a large number of upvoters split by 3 is still a decent number on each. Then there are people who will upvote more than one, either because they think it's important enough to deserve multiple links, or because they think the links offer enough difference in content, or because they upvote the first one they see, then see there's a better one (e.g. "oh shit, I upvoted blogspam, better upvote the official one now")
Crafty, I see what you tried to do there! UP-voted for the lol factor and the fact that I don't have a down vote button. ;)
Yes, duplicates, I think. Looks like the partition key can be set to whatever you want, so maybe you log, I dunno, hits sharded by page, and your homepage gets a ton. I'd lean towards sharding randomly to avoid that, but, eh, they're just giving you enough rope to mess up your logging pipe with.
The problem lies in that not everyone agrees on what are mistakes and what isn't. I know a lot of go programmers who do not want generics. Many also disagree that manual CPS is a mistake.
I'm really unsure how this is any different than the multiaccount product here https://www.dynamicsinc.com/Corporate/Products

of course with the exception of it altering you if you left it at home, however that is a bit creepy, and, well let's just say I won't be getting a coin for my wife anytime soon
... I did not know that. Obviously, from my post above. Yay, I have a Plus page with a nickname! So, can I comment as Pxtl? Can I do that on Android play store reviews?
100% agree except that I think courses like this are great for people who want to bluff their way through a job interview to get one of those $150K-$250K big data jobs that are the rage right now (watching Andrew Ng's machine learning lectures beforehand as well would be the pro move in my book). In my experience so far, most of these positions appear to be Java programming gigs where, sadly, issues like SIMD, cache locality, and the GPU are actively ignored or dismissed. Autoboxing alone to use Java generics pretty much destroys any hope of efficient cache use.

I've walked out of job interviews over this sort of thing wherein it's been described as a "performance programming" position for big data and/or machine learning except that everything has to be in Java. And sure, Java performance programming is a thing, but compared to what one can achieve with SIMD, attention to cache-locality and/or running on the GPU for the 20% of the code that eats 80-99% of the cycles, it's laughably uninteresting to me, big bucks aside.
How we failed to "Hack" Hacker News but ended up on front page for 30+ hours
They get around it by being in the US, where there's virtually no chip-and-pin cards or readers.
Obamacare's Effect on Small Business
Small businesses are expected to cut back nearly 30% of their workforce to avoid Obamacare mandates for businesses with 50 or more employees. Are there more unexpected consequences?
Don't forget there is also Loop, which reached it's Kickstarter goal already:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/loop/pay-with-loop

Personally, I like the idea of using my phone over the coin thingy.

Also, I'm curious about how sturdy this thing is. Maybe it's my wallet or maybe I just shop too much, but I tend to wear out my debit card really quickly (< 1 year).
My sentiments exactly. If they have a well-built internal library that is heavy on specific design patterns I'd expect them to give me a hard time over it because I could break some serious stuff or waste a ton of money writing ineffective code. Or maybe if they use heavy black-box builder tools that require some delicate coding to leverage the power of the internals. (In this case again, though, it's still dangerous to hire based on experience with a specific tool because you may get spaghetti code that happens to work within the confines of that tool -- trust me I've seen it.)

But open source frameworks & js libraries are much closer to the realm of pet tech. The internals aren't too heavy & conceptually difficult, and most of the classes I see being written by developers are pretty run-of-the-mill regardless of the language/framework. The strange thing is that often the fact that companies are so up-to-date with current trends gives away the fact that they are writing tons of throwaway code. Nobody is maintaining a really mature library that depends on a framework that has been stable for 4 months. Employers would never admit that though, lol.
Wikileaks publishes "Internet Chapter" of TPP (SOPA's back)
> Why bother swiping to steal when you can run a smartphone app and take all of the cards on all of the coins in range?

Because it doesn't broadcast credit card data over Bluetooth.
Definitely agree with your points.

> I wonder how this would fare in an ATM. What happens if the ATM accidentally presses the card selection button?

This might be solvable by making it a capacitance-based button.
PostgreSQL costs more than MySQL according to http://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/ .
Interesting that no one has mentioned Loop: kickstarter.com/projects/loop/pay-with-loop
Looks like the cover used for comparison is subjected to significantly higher pressure, or it might be substantially less rigid.
A few years ago i went to this talk where the founder of Kiva Systems (automated warehouse systems) was giving a talk. He was mentioning how he came up with the idea, and it was actually quite a structured approach. He altered the parameters to the theoretical maximum (what if the warehouse was an infinite size) what would the solution be? What he eventually came up with is the system they have today.

Structural thinking, the way Musk talks about is really useful. It is not intuitive to move the shelves instead of the warehouse picker, and thinking by analogy probably wouldn't have lead to that moment of inspiration.
Google+ Android App version 4.2.3 released • vlogg.com
This is very cool. However, in Jamaica where I live. An id is required to use a credit card, so they can check your name and your signature. Is there are way to displaying that info on the card.
> They get around it by being in the US, where there's virtually no chip-and-pin cards or readers

Really? I'm very surprised. Canada has moved over many years ago. I thought we'd be following the US here.

Is chip and pin in the works? ie is this a stop gap for the next year or two until its rolled out or is the US just not bothering with it?
I've done a project in Dart and another in TypeScript and like them both a lot more than doing straight JavaScript. I appreciate the optional type checking in both and the IDE support that each enables. TypeScript is appropriate if your project is more quickly completed with existing libraries like jQuery UI and needs to run on older browsers. Dart is appropriate if you don't need to use older established JS libs and IE9 and above are your target requirements. I like having them both in the toolbox, but I prefer Dart slightly more than TypeScript for various reasons.
WhatsApp for Firefox OS released
Caviar’s out to make ordering food online a first-class experience
Universal Copy+Paste for TV News
(Sadly, i can't comment on the decision itself, but i can comment on the meta-arguments here :P)

Eight years for large, insanely complex litigation involving hundreds of thousands of pages of documents does not seem that thoroughly broken.

Also, judges have a large number of these complex cases on their dockets at once, because the US in general thinks lawsuits are great way to resolve normal disputes.

This is why most courts order mediation/settlement talks etc in these complex cases (and there was a settlement, it just wasn't approved).

TL;DR If you want serious efficiency, asking it from a bunch of overworked judges trying to oversee a large number of complex cases seems a bit much. They do what they can, and try to get folks to resolve out of court, but often parties just want their day in court, and that takes time.
Reasoning from first principles is a symbolic approach. Reasoning by analogy is the intuitive approach. Both have their place. Intuitive thinking works especially well on fuzzy problems with incomplete and/or conflicting data, where a statistical approach is likely best. Reasoning from first principles is indeed hard, but the reason it's so little used is because it often doesn't produce real world results.
I was really disagreeing with the post I was responding too, and it seems you're more disagreeing with that than with my statement.

I don't think anyone can ever get fully accustomed to the presence of toxic chemicals in the air. Your body and mind are doing their best to make sure you're aware of them.
try a different browser. i'm on chrome.
Disclaimer : I'm as concerned as you about data privacy, money etc. I'm not technically a Renault employee, but it just happen that I'm working for them as a consultant (in a non related field).
So I'm not representing Renault [insert legal terms here], I'm only trying to transcript the response when I expressed off record some of the concerns to one of Zoe's engineer.
Here is more or less what he said about:
- Data privacy: Renault worked with the CNIL (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNIL) to legally comply with French/European data privacy laws. All data sent to Renault remains anonymous, Renault does not associate the "ID" of the car with owner's personal information.
- Battery: He used the same gas pump analogy. When I asked him why a renting system for a part of the product, he replied "simply to make it cheaper": Renault could have added the price of the battery (around 8000 euros) to the price of Zoe, but this is not a smart marketing move.

Meanwhile, I'll forward the conversation and your concerns to Renault's communication team. Let's hope they make a public statement about all this.
Cheers.
Blippy Reborn - GIF's on your iPhone
World’s oldest animal is 507 years old