skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That could not be more true. I went to a high school that didn't offer any programming or CS courses, and I didn't even know what coding was until I bought myself a Java book on a whim the summer after my senior year of HS.

At college I started as a Bioengineering major, because I really wanted to make medical devices. I took a CS class in the Spring of my Freshman year and realized that it "clicked" for me and I could go forward with it.

I am now graduating as a Bioengineering and Computer Science dual major and moving to a full time software engineering job at Google next year. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn something entirely new, and I worked my ass off to catch up with the kids who had been coding since they were 12. I don't think that I'm an impostor in the world of CS and I have the additional perspective of not always having known that this is what I want to do.
I had meningitis when I was 2, and I clearly remember a flash of when I was in the hospital bed, with all the gear monitoring me, trying to reach out for my blanket. My mother confirmed my story when I was ~20.

It's pretty vivid actually, and not only do I remember the "scene" but also how I felt and what I thought.

I have a few others like that, but this is the most ancient.
I think that's absolutely reasonable that they remove your premium if you want to remove other people's safety just for your own fun.
I think you're either very selective with your sources or very selective about who you give the "expert" title to. I don't know that I've seen implicit joins used by a speaker at a SQL event in the past couple years, unless it's for cartesian joins.
> I feel pain when the atoms in my brain are in certain configurations. Why is that?

That's tautological.

You feel pain when your brain is in a particular set of states.
Your brain is in one of those particular states.
You feel pain.

There's no underlying "why", it's the definition of pain itself.

> You simply can't explain that with physics.

You can explain the mechanism with physics. What I think you mean is that you can't describe, subjectively, how you feel with it.
So, you think the punishment should fit the revenue rather than the crime?

It should be whatever the law says it should be.

In an ideal world... it should be in proportion to the pain and suffering caused by JPM's "willfully" (as concluded by investigators) failing to adhere to its legal obligations to report on Madoff's activities, once it became aware of them internally. Perhaps then some, given obvious indifference (on the part those responsible at JPM) to the potential for harm caused to unsophisticated investors while they were busy looking covering their... annual bonuses.

Quoting from yesterday's NYT article[1]:

On two occasions, in 2007 and 2008, JPMorgan’s own computer system raised red flags about Mr. Madoff, according to prosecutors. But both times, prosecutors say, JPMorgan employees “closed the alerts.”

“JP Morgan failed to carry out its legal obligations while Bernard Madoff built his massive house of cards,” George Venizelos, a senior F.B.I. official, said in a statement.
The F.B.I. and prosecutors traced the problem to JPMorgan “willfully” failing to create sufficient controls against money laundering. “There was no meaningful effort by the Bank to examine or investigate the Madoff Securities banking relationship,” prosecutors said.

The fact that the SEC was also asleep at the switch does not in any way absolve JPM of its own culpability in this disaster.

Even so, in human terms, the worst of the penalties "suffered" by anyone at JPM is unlikely to begin to compare to the losses suffered by Madoff's non-institutional investors as a result of JPM's actions.

[1] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/jpmorgan-settles-with...
So, as a cyclist that commutes to work everyday on my bike--are any of these manufacturers making sure that their vehicles don't squish pedestrians, or even worse, people on bikes?
What's the point of life if you die? I don't want to die, therefore I strongly suggest we make it illegal for humans to drive vehicles on public roads. The trade-off is in my opinion really small compared to the millions of lives saved.

If you want to have fun, have it at places where it doesn't kill people. It's like smoking, outside is fine - you are only killing yourself - but don't do it in bars/the office/hospitals/other places where you might kill others.
I agree. It's nearly impossible to appreciate Haskell as a first language unless you have a strong Math background or you have an exceptional teacher. However once you've done a little programming in another non-functional language the beauty of Haskell is pretty clear.
Many, many redditors calling it clickbait. http://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/1upfw8/mother_jones_at...
Chiming in to say that SAFE has been "ported" to France thanks to the awesome folks at TheFamily, it's called AIR: http://www.meetair.co/
so what you're saying is that there will be a free market demand for a huge amount of different software projects

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that there are currently millions of people of working in an industry that was unheard of a century ago because the modern day computer was invented. There are millions of people who have jobs today related to cars (manufacturing, sales, repair, driving, etc.) because the car was invented. There could be some new invention we haven't thought of today that spawns an industry that will employ millions.
How revolutionary is that, exactly? Any decent online banking service should allow you to see your payment history and filter it by the entity you paid, even if you have to export to csv to run the filters.

Of course many people would value a a pretty UI layer on top of that with categories, notes and charts and graphs that offer much more interesting graphical indications of which people and companies take up the highest portion of your monthly spend, where your bills are going up and which shops have you not visited in a while ... but then you find yourself in the position where you're really trying to build an open source alternative to mint.com rather than a bank.

...Which actually seems like a much easier ambition to realise, not to mention a niche which the likes of GnuCash have started to fill.
I did a similar thing earlier last year mining litecoin on a few dozen computers in my school's lab. What I did differently was I had a script running finger every few seconds which killed the miner if someone else was logged on to be nice to other users/avoid detection. I ended up making about $5 over a few days before stopping it out of guilt. In retrospect it was a really stupid thing to do; too much risk for too little gain.
Racket? I said real life! (just kidding :P)

As I said, when you really need them they're useful (e.g. in typed Clojure). Most (if not all) DRY patterns can be fixed using only functions.

The problem is, the macro mantra has been parroted for so long now it's part of the Lisp culture and its external image ("Lisp is homoiconic! You can modify code! Macros! MACROS!"), when it's actually one of the ugly (but powerful) parts of Lisp you should avoid most of the time. This confuses beginners and people interested in Lisp.

I see macros fitting mainly in DSLs (which is probably a code smell most of the time) and extending the language, as typed Clojure does. What other real use cases do you see for macros?
> That is a very common claim from people posting misconceptions that could only arise from second-hand info and a lack of direct experience.

Do you think that I, and an apparently large number of other people on the internet, spend our time insulting Haskell without having used it? That some great anti-Haskell conspiracy is being waged by evil groups unknown?

I haven't written large enough Haskell programs to have performance problems myself, but I work with people who have. People who have to keep an empty monad around because removing it doubles the run-time of the program, and make substansal changes to get programs into an acceptable (<16GB) amount of memory. Also, there are plenty of horrible error messages. Having a random google, here's the first one that comes up. While I can just about figure out what it means, it is several levels more complex than anything that would ever come out of Java. Stackoverflow is full of Haskell questions which are "I don't understand this compile-time error I am getting".

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-August/04...
> we need to establish a good culture that doesn't abuse macros

I'm sure everyone who has ever looked at C macros has thought the same thing. It's a great theory.

In practice, having macros will lead to someone abusing them and eventually, that abuse will be become institutionalized.

Don't say "it could never happen here" because it can and it inevitably will.

I don't have a specific problem with all of this, except I keep thinking a better solution would be to hammer browser manufacturers to keep their shit up to date or explain why they are not doing so.
mining BTC without an ASIC is just pointless, you should have tried litecoin (LTC), with 100 CPUs you would made a lot of profit, someone recently posted how he mined LTC in AWS and actually generated a profit (it's not possible anymore AFAIK).
What's the point of a life wasted when someone loses control of their car and injures someone who was driving responsibly?
If you want to model a user's transactions you can create a List<Transaction> rather than just a List, and then

- The compiler will fail to compile your code if you put anything in the list apart from a Transaction

- The compiler will fail to compile your code if you try to do anything with an object from that list which a Transaction can't do

- It also makes the code more readable as if my function takes a List<Transaction> you know what you can pass to it. Does it take a List<Transaction> or a List<TransactionId>? It's obvious.

- If you try to pass a List<TransactionId> then the compiler won't compile your code. (Otherwise you'll only find out about it at runtime.)

This means a lot fewer fails at run-time.

Which in turn means a lot less time writing (and maintaining) unit tests.
Asking for a better level of explanation is not at all similar to staking out room for an extra-material homunculus type consciousness. "Put enough protons, neutrons and electrons together, and bam, bread" is a poor explanation of baking, but not so poor as to warrant skepticism on which fundamental particles we are eating.

Nagel has an almost myopic view of the 'experience' in my estimation. His classic claim that a human could never experience bat flight starts by pondering about the possible structure of bat consciousness, and is in the end justified by the physiological differences. Yet somehow he mysticizes the impossibility of experience transfer. As for your grandpost about experience, perhaps you are conflating the experience with the description (thought experiment: have you ever been able to isolate the feeling of an electrical signal in your brain?).

I have a similar background to yours, and for a while I was kind of stuck in a Nagel-Dennett-Russell sort of place that felt like it was probably correct but lacked any sort of richness that living through consciousness provides. My recommendation is to dive into the rabbit hole of continental philosophy. Deleuze has a great radical materialism (inspired by Spinoza?!), and wonderfully blurs psychology and philosophy in A Thousand Plateaus. Heidegger has an exploration of the experience of language being the bootstrapping tool of consciousness in Being and Time. And some psilocybin never hurt.
The site has a ending tag showing in the top-left corner of the screen. See your meta description...
> Let me ask 2 questions: 1: Is what we have now working, e.g. is there still homelessness, and poverty in America? 2: If our system is already failed, how does trying something new that may fail, hurt anything?

There's a pretty big gap between a government "working" to the extent of eliminating all major social ills like homelessness and poverty, and "failing" so completely as to not require any more argument than "our current system is failing, so trying something new, no matter what its obvious weakness, can't hurt anything".
Correct. My computer pulls ~250 watts idling. It can easily go into 750 watts mining with a video card. I would imagine it can pull 320-375 watts at max cpu load.
> - Get the students genuinely interested in listening to the teacher. This is critical. If a student has no interest in listening to you, they will most likely under-perform. On the other hand, a not so high IQ'ed student might over-perform if they actually become interested in listening and learning. Inspiration and motivation are the key.

This assumes that the secret to the student's success is the teacher, not the student him/herself. The article's view of the teacher's role is to push/inspire the student into putting in the required effort to learn things on their own (mostly by reading books, doing exercises and thinking independently). Students shouldn't get their knowledge from teachers, but from books (I think it's dangerous to establish teachers as gatekeepers of knowledge and as authority figures).
Something I've been thinking about is an Excel frontend with an R backend. Each worksheet becomes a data frame so you can edit it in Excel and quickly apply some formula but you can also jump into an R console to do something more complicated.
Only true in the most pedantic sense.

For monads to work, all your code needs to be pure (in the FP sense). So if you want to do anything substantial with monads in an imperative language, you need to rewrite the entire ecosystem of libraries. That would cost quite a bit more money than your average organization can afford ;)
While I do think "real offices with doors" might be a component of the "right" solution, I still think there needs to be more thought and experimentation about other components such as shared spaces, rotations, etc. I also think easily reconfigurable cubes, possibly high-walled, might be another component.

So, yes, very serious.
Arduino-Based Bathroom Occupancy Detector
Ask HN:Launched a community for doctors, but..
We have just launched http://drlinked (Dr linked in) a community for doctors currently featuring a question answer platform(like stackoverflow) and news discussion platform(like hacker news). But we are stuck on finding users.
Can you guys suggest me how should I proceed to find users.
We are a two guys startup with zero funding, we want to get things moving forward any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks
Rohith
"Permissive" licenses like MIT and BSD literally permit you do more things with the software. In particular, it is not legal to combine GPL software with GPL-incompatible software (e.g. anything proprietary) and redistribute the result. This is why we cannot distribute a version of Julia pre-built with Intel's MKL even though we have MKL developer licenses that were generously donated by Intel. The fact that we use some GPL libraries makes the combination illegal to distribute. With permissive licenses like MIT and BSD, that isn't a problem.

In terms of choosing a license for an open source project, I think you should choose the most permissive license that will sufficiently encourage people not to make proprietary forks. The GPL was designed on the premise that it would be necessary to legally force people to contribute changes back, but the success of so many projects with MIT and BSD licenses shows this often isn't necessary. I think the choice depends on how "infrastructurey" or "producty" the project is. For projects like libraries, compilers or programming languages, it turns out that proprietary forks don't happen because of simple economics. Why would anyone pay for a forked proprietary version of a library when the original open source project is available? And if no one wants to directly pay for a forked version of some library, why would any company bother maintaining a fork when they can just contribute their improvements back and let the open source community maintain them for free?

With a self-contained product like Light Table, on the other hand, there's a very real danger that some company could come along, fork the code base, make a bunch of improvements and start selling their version. Using a viral open source license like the GPL makes this illegal, ensuring that only the original author can sell forks of the product.

tl;dr – GPLv3 is a great choice of license for Light Table because it is a product, but it's overkill for most open source projects which provide much lower level functionality.
MPEG are currently in the exploration stage of two patent unencumbered video specs -- one based on baseline H.264 with patent grants, to be part of MPEG-4 (Web Video Coding), and another, its own standard (Internet Video Coding), based on unencumbered technology (via expiration or otherwise.) Doubtful either will be competitive with H.265, but these do exist and you can find the working drafts on MPEG's site.
Alberta woman dies in first ever human case of H5N1 in North America
Sure, but what's the alternative?

Should the government ban stupid stuff in order to force people into "more satisfying pleasures" though a "moral ecology" that discourages addictive/pointless things?
Congrats, my rough calculations say you burned through at least $25 of energy to net $2. You are as bad as the people who shatter car windows to steal a stereo or those who rip copper wiring out of houses. It's a shame they don't withhold a degree from you. Reassess your life.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a story about this.
Clickable Consent at Risk in Internet Privacy Lawsuits
I remember a few things that happened to me when I was 2 years old. Mostly some events when I used to play with my cat or with legos in my room.

I'm fairly sure those aren't constructed memories, not sure why some specific memories have stuck with me compared to others from such an early age (they were nothing particular, really, no special events). The human brain is such a fascinating thing.
If you simply want multiple account support to easily switch between them inside the browser then adding it to any website is easy -- Chrome User Profiles (Settings-Users-Add new User).

Super easy to set up and switch between the instances. You can even set an icon for the user that is always shown at the top right corner. Saves lifetimes if you have multiple twitter, FB etc accounts to manage and don't need a special marketing SaaS.
We use it because juries can't write laws, enter judgements, or execute laws/judgements, or, really, do anything on their own. They serve -- particularly in the criminal sphere -- as a brake on government.
I expect a homepage to have a brief description of its product on the front page of the site. Barring that, I expect a similar brief description and feature set description on an "about" page. This has neither.

I am eventually able to find out more, but only after assuming what it is and extrapolating what problems it's trying to solve.
My earliest (or one of the earliest) memories is of a guy in a mascot costume coming to our preschool to promote a bank. I think they gave us some money boxes, and I guess they were trying to teach us about the importance of saving money. I would have been 3 or 4 at the time.

35+ years on I can still vividly remember the mascot, which bank it was, etc.

It saddens me that my earliest memory is of a form of advertising.
Ah, sorry for being unclear, I wasn't aware that this was such a loaded term. I am not against the GPL, and I don't mean that in a negative way. I meant that in the sense that it dictates conditions for the "combined work", not only the source code directly under the license.
Except that never ended up happening. I live in a rust-belt city which was booming during most of the 1900's and ended up dying off when the 60's and 70's came around.

Today I was at lunch in what's left of our downtown district, and there were old photographs on the wall of business that used to be in the area (mostly manufacturing). I was amazed that some of the photographs showed huge rooms of women sitting at work tables assembling parts, folding boxes, and packing items.

That stuff is all gone. I could imagine a handful of machines replacing that group of people. When you go from a city having 50,000 factory workers to the 4,000 or so that we have now, it's a huge deal.
The topic of CTEs was recently discussed (with much vigor) on the SQLite users mailing list:

https://www.mail-archive.com/sqlite-users@sqlite.org/msg8119...
"I still have a few tricks up my sleeve that CU doesn’t want to deal with any time soon!"

Probably want to be careful about that. No matter how smart/clever you are, you'll probably get caught doing whatever it is you're talking about. The school has already caught you doing something they didn't want you doing, so if it happens again, they might have a place to start looking...
Here in Germany, studying at most public universities is practically free and Phd students (in the natural sciences and engineering) are paid for their work, while research groups are generally underfunded.

It doesn't matter if you just add a little more to an already large electricity bill. You are stealing money from an organization that is set up to benefit the common good.

I'm so glad that I never had to "give the bitcoin talk" to somebody when I was still doing computer admin as part of my Phd contract.
Yeah, for Trello, I have to switch Google accounts to go between personal and work boards. Kind of a pain.
their ideological purity, obviously.
I'd love to hear why you didn't choose Stripe -- feel free to drop me a line. I'm patrick@stripe.com.
I agree that could be useful. It's different then the claimed purpose of identity verification for prevention of malicious use, though.
FYI, Perl not PERL.

Perl -> Programming Perl & Perl Cookbook. Unsure how relevant these still are as "Modern Perl" is the big paradigm now.

Shell -> UNIX Shell Programming by Stephen Kochan. I got around in shell before this, but his book make me effective and competent.
Rung Raisers?
That same shit happens to me in my open office. The difference is that it's easier for me to dick around for 3 hours instead of 15 minutes since nobody can see my screen or even see if I'm here.
> For that matter, you could un-overload the + operator so that it only works with numbers

No you can't. First of all, you can't implement operator overloading, because Sweet.js is quite limited, as the macros have the form:

<macro-identifier> <expression...>

Also, because you don't have the types when Sweet.js compiles the code, it means that you can't distinguish between numbers and strings or what have you.
Bezos owns the Washington Post, not the Wall Street Journal.
interesting. Why would you be against an open source bank? Would you agree that banks aren't exactly cutting edge? If so, wouldn't it be better if they were? (More features, easier experience)? Thanks :)
Wait. Stripe has micro transaction support? I can't find it on their pricing page where is it? How does it compare to Paypal's micropayments pricing (5% + 5¢ instead of the standard 2.9% + 30¢).
US to extend the International Space Station funding to 2024
> The big advantage is that it would put an end to corruption.

More likely it would move the locus of corruption (as well as the locus of power) from the actual members to the professional staff, on whom randomly-selected members would be more dependent on -- and less skilled in controlling/evaluating -- than professional politicians.

(To a certain extent, term limits do this with the locus of power, as well.)
But then it isn't really "non-profit", it's "doing work for a big shady corporation without making any margin on it"...
Winter 2013 Crawl Data Now Available
There's no reason why you can't drive it to the brink of a crash and then have it recover for you. The 'brink' in this case is the latest the computer can reliably recover - not a point 100ms before an unavoidable collision.
Web-mode.el v8 is released
Market Research at Scale: The Amazon Whisperer
This must be done.