skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Is that relevant?

Only when a misjudgment of stopping distance is a factor, in one way or another. I'll bet that the car driven by actor Paul Walker's friend -- the car that crashed and killed both of them -- was an example where the friend thought he had enough distance for a safe stop. But at the estimated speed -- "more than 100 MPH" -- more than 500 feet would have been required and just wasn't there, before a sharp turn they didn't manage.

> Most fatalities are not because the car drove straight into a stationary object directly in front of them on the road.

Yes, but all such accidents involve cars hitting each other or objects along the road, or rolling over during efforts to stop them, and similar causes. All these examples involve energy management, and in each case, the driver couldn't safely dissipate the car's kinetic energy.

> Collisions mostly happen because of the actions of car drivers who are going roughly the same speed as you.

Not in any number of cases, like crossing over the center divider, or hitting a roadside object, or losing control in bad weather, or fog collisions, etc. etc..

And even if two cars have a relatively low-speed collision while both traveling at high speed, then the problem becomes controlling the cars after the collision and avoiding hitting other cars or obstacles, many of which are are stationary.

> Not saying that speed is a factor, just that stopping distance isn't the thing.

Of course it is. If you want to avoid crashing into another car, you have to maintain a safe distance. If your car is carrying too much kinetic energy, you can't dissipate the energy in advance of getting intimate with the other car, or a tree, or a center divider through which you roll your car uncontrollably.

> Perhaps you should discuss kinetic energy instead?

Say what? How did you miss the kinetic energy equation I included in the post to which you're replying? I even included the words "kinetic energy" to avoid any possible confusion.
You are confusing the "derivation rules" with the "derivation concept".

The rules are an easy way to calculate the derivative of a function, for example (f+g)'=f'+g'. They are important, because using the definition is tiresome and error prone.

The main idea of derivation is that each function f has an associated function f' that is the slope of the tangent lines. This is new function is useful to describe some properties of the original function. (Approximation by the tangent line, increasing and decreasing intervals, ...)

It interesting to use the intuitive idea of derivation to understand some of the rules, for example (f+g)'=f'+g'. Something like:

If when x increase 1 unit, f increases approximately 3 units and g increases approximately 2 units, then the sum increases approximately 5 units. If f or g are too curved we need to analyze smaller steps like increasing x in 0.1 units. Now f increases only approximately 0.3 units, but the rate of increment is still approximately 3, ... (It's much easier with a graph and hand waving.)

And in an advanced course it's important to transform this intuitive idea into a formal proof.

Another interesting example is the discussion of where is the minimum of x^2+16/x. The general form of x^2 is well known (graph) and also the general form of 16/x (graph) and then it's possible to draw x^2+16/x approximately (graph). The minimum is where the rate of increment of x^2 is equal to the rate of decrement of 16/x, so x^2+16/x is "horizontal" in that point. This is an intuitive idea, and is exactly what 0=(f+g)'=f'+g' says. In a class you can do the formal calculation of the derivative of x^2+16/x. Then find the exact value of x. Show it in the graph. (Explain that the graphs are approximations, so it's not strange that the minimum in the graph is slightly bigger. Ask if they have a graphic calculator?) If there is enough time evaluate x^2+16/x in a few points near the minimum to see "experimentally" that it's really the minimum.
That's a nice looking razor, looks like it takes standard blades. I use this one and it gets the job done: http://www.amazon.com/Parker-22R-Handle-Butterfly-Double/dp/...
'Probability waves” spark a new revolution of understanding
Mine doesn't come out watery.
I agree that his may be part of the difference, but here is my experience.

There IS a gender gap, but with it a matching skills/abilities gap.

I have experienced this first hand with dozens of women. A rare couple of them were top notch developers. They were ambitions and had a real passion for development and technology. So did about 20-25% of the men I worked with (vs less than 10% of the women). The other woman and men had base skills, but rarely showed ambition or passion to learn new thing and improve their skills, habits, tools, ETC. They were kind of just grinders. They never excelled or impressed. They weren't the kind who would tinker on the weekends with OSS or read development or tech blogs or books when they had free time.

The top notch women were promoted and made similar salaries as the top notch men. Overall though, the women lagged behind the men percentage wise because of the reasons mentioned.

I would be curious to know if others have seen this pattern. This is based on my 15 years in the software industry.
I've talked with people who sell finance, and they make bank off of people with a poor grasp of mathematical fundamentals. And that's just a small bit of what it will cost a person to not master it.
Wherever you go, whatever you do, do this: quadruple your effort and input into your relationship with your wife.
OK -- I've pushed a slide-show of screenshots showing IB in action. It's accessible via the "IB in action" link on the homepage. I'll add a bit more (and I like the animation idea) but hopefully this will give you a better idea of what IB does. Thanks again for the feedback. Very helpful!
> It doesn't mean that obscure scientific research has the same market value as almost everything.

Of course not. Food, for example, has much more immediate use.

But it does mean that science is pretty valuable, and more valuable over longer periods.
Show HN: MeshNetNews (staging) site is live - HN inspired
It's a small project out of the ChicagoMeshNet community. We're still pretty young and barely getting started.

Link: http://staging.meshnetnews.com/

A few things to note:

---------------------

* It's just running on an EC2 micro instance, so...um, try not to crash it, I guess?

* VERY beta - basically you can sign up, log in, submit articles, and vote - that's it

* I put a few articles in there, feel free to add

* Since it's a beta, I may just wipe the database occasionally, so don't get too attached at this point

* It's not SSL secured, but the production site WILL be SSL secured

Coming soon:

------------

* Only shows newest 30 articles right now - will add sorting by popularity, and article backlog later

* A production deployment

* Other things that come up
> It sounds like you're advocating for building abstractions before you actually have a reason to use them.

If it sounds that way, I've over-simplified the examples in the blog post in the interests of clarity. I'll take more care in future! The specific interactor in question is used in 4 separate places.

From the post:

> You obviously need to choose the patterns that fit the problem you’re trying to solve – it’s rarely one-size-fits-all, and some of these principles may be overkill in a very simple 15-minute blog application.
> - a driver in foggy weather crashes into a traffic jam

This is a particularly dangerous and often misunderstood case, because staying several car lengths away from the car ahead won't do any good if that car suddenly collides with a stationary car in front of it that's hidden by the fog. When the car you're following comes to a sudden stop, all the rules about safe following distance go right out the window. This is why professionals sometimes recommend just getting off the road when fog prevents a reasonable amount of visibility.

> These types of accidents are the most lethal, and they are all due to stopping distance (and could be avoided by driving at a lower speed)

Very true.
Open source web analytics powered by Hadoop, Hive, Redshift & Postgres
It's just become a running joke for me to dive into very technical crypto details and have one of the two of you follow up behind me cleaning up my errors. :)
Learn to write clear sentences first. Then you can add big words and concepts.
People say this kind of thing when they don't have experience of what it's actually like.

A PhD is not a continuation of undergraduate or independent study in a subject. It is a career with the tedium of other careers, and then some because so many other people are trying to do the same thing you are. You may love the subject now, but that doesn't mean you are going to be able to do the research you want. At various points in your career you have to do what your adviser wants, manage departmental politics, get funding and crank out publications. Maybe love of the subject helps you stick to it, but more likely it doesn't make a lot of practical difference once it's a tedious job you do every day.

The pay after spending an equal amount of time in any other career with the same background is likely to be better.
Make your own cloud in 2 hrs (10 mins of actual work)
That's a very American way of thinking about things.

I assume you're American (or British), because voice-based systems are nearly useless for non-native english speakers.

I'm a fluent english speaker, but due to my non-american accent, and the fact that my language is not one of the top 10 used in the world I still cannot operate Siri (or other voice systems) properly, and the dictation feature is nearly useless to me.
Household debt in the UK averages around 8k excluding mortgages.

The UK government has purchased £375 billion of assets as part of its Quantative Easing (sometimes known as 'printing') scheme, which is around 14k per household.

I have a lot of confidence that QE would have been much more effective in the UK if it had started by allowing every adult the ability to claim say 5k against existing debts (e.g. credit card, bank loan, mortgage). If the claiming individual had no debt or less debt than the amount offered, the remainder could be claimed as income. This would make a massive difference to indebted people, and by allowing people who weren't in debt to claim it as income, it avoids the moral hazard of people saying 'well I should have borrowed money'.

This is of course a separate matter to basic income, but I just find it interesting how comparable those numbers are - the personal debt and the amount created by quantitative easing and poured into assets mainly held by wealthy people.
What are JavaScript's builtin strings?
Conhecendo a NFS Professional Services
... with lies
That seems like an unusually low salary, then. Let's pick a major public research university in the US and a department, say Physics UT Austin (feel free to play the same game with data from another public and another department, like CS at UC Berkeley). Browsing through professor salaries [1], by the time Professors hit tenure they are approaching or breaking 100K a year. Five to seven times this is 500-700K a year!

[1] http://www.texastribune.org/library/data/government-employee...
> POROs are great, though. Our app/models is full of them. We even added app/services too. The trouble I have is with people who, like you, fall in love with the flawed notion that their application is such a special snowflake that it deserves "advanced techniques".

The main difference I see between the Rails philosophy and most of these "Use SRP and Interactors and things!" blog posts are that Rails is way more interested in using the correct tool for the job, and most of these blog posts are of the "use this for everything and every one!" variety.

I have one project right now that I decided I wanted a Command for one action. I'm accepting input from a webhook that I can perform asynchronously, it interacts with like 5 different models, and I wanted to beat up on the tests pretty thoroughly. So I did that.

Elsewhere I'm using concerns to make like 4 different models easily sortable.

And other places I'm using Module#concerning to keep models organized.

ONE TRUE WAY is overrated. I'd rather use whatever works given the context.
No offence meant but that is like saying "Kia is also a car, does the same work. Why the hell even BMW exists"

May be BMW is doing things on the back that make it a better choice. Same is the difference between twitter and its thousand clones.
It hasn't? Check the price of milk. Check the price of beef. Compare the price per ounce of packaged food in 2008 vs. today. Compare the price of anything that isn't included in the "official" numbers for inflation and you see a much different story about inflation.

Put another way, it used to be a mystery: "Why do hotdogs come in packages of 10 and buns in packages of 8?" now you should be asking "Why do hotdogs come in packages of 8 and I still pay the same amount as 10?"
Is mobile messaging possible without data or wi-fi?
I found this startup's site www.bridgefy.me but is it possible? They may be on to something
Great point, thanks for the comment.

I think the key missing insight for me was that a continuous process and a discrete process can both point to the same result.

A pixellated word on a screen ("cat") conveys the same meaning as a perfectly smooth vector of the same word. The math idea, to me, is "can a discrete description/process" point at the same result that we get from a continuous one?

The idea of limits, is essentially figuring out when a discrete epsilon can still lead us to the true value of f(x) (if this trick works, we call it a continuous function, and can use calculus with it.)
I don't see your point.
I'm no economist but from what I read in the article, are you disagreeing with the premise, that aggregate demand is low, or the solution, that giving money directly to citizens will increase increase spending?

I understand your point about the purpose of money, but don't see how the idea of bypassing tax credits or tax breaks and directly giving money to people is stupid.
Last time one of the big tech companies made a sci-fi reference for a new product it was a failure :( remember Google Wave?

One of these days, someone will build our dream Sci-Fi future. At any rate, Cortana is a good name.
There is, if you don't again hash the passwords on the server. This is why new password-hashing proposals like [Catena](http://eprint.iacr.org/2013/525.pdf) include an official "server relief" mode where the majority of the hashing is done on the client side, but there's still a final server-side transformation step.

Until such time as these things are readily available, recommending that people do client-side hashing is absolutely going to result in trivially poor implementations.

You might want to consider that if these problems were as trivial as you seem to believe, there would already exist a library vetted by cryptographers to do exactly that.
Income inequality (savers are from within the big earners group) coupled with automation of low-skilled work will lead to a society where capital is concentrated in the hands of few (the high class), intelligence defines the middle class workers but a significant part of the population won't have neither the capital nor the work aptitudes to contribute in meaningful ways to the society.

If most of our needs are covered by capital and robots, we will evolve to ensure a minimum level of services provided by the society to every human person alive (or else people will starve to death). Even their potential transition into niche areas with low skills and poor robot automation (e.g. arts and entertainment businesses) would require assets to sustain their education and living facilities.

While I can see how the idea of minimal income might be controversial, I doubt you could fairly label it "incredibly stupid".
I'm Going To Prison For Working At A Pot Shop That Was Legal In My State
You have a point (valid every time someone details the structured behavior he expects of other human beings), but you need people with initiative and positive thinking who can assume control of a situation outside their comfort zone. I'd go nuts working with someone who responded to issues with just "I don't know".
Sanest if you already trust Apple with root, which if you are using an Apple computer, you do.
I hate that. And after I worked as analyst, I started to hate that even more.

Just say "I do not know" and do not waste your and my time with monologues full of guesses and sort-of-related-but-not-relevant info. It does not help. It just wastes time.

If you say, "I do not know" we can work on it. We can file it as an open question until you know. We can ask somebody else or search for information.

And btw, the answer to "Will mistakes sometimes happen" question is: guesses cause them very often and they slow analysis a lot. You just do not see it, because I can not go to you and show you all your wrong guess mistakes. I have to smile and pretend that I trust you while triple checking everything you say which again, slow down analysis.

Working with people able to say "I do not know" is way easier and faster.
Do you feel that Google has ever done anything so flagrantly over the line before? If so, when?

I'm not sure they've had the chance to do anything this flagrantly over the line, because I'm not aware that they've ever had access to this kind of data before. To be clear, if they didn't know they had this data, I don't think it's fair to blame them for anything anyway. That would clearly be unreasonable. But I think once notified they should be required to delete the data immediately, and I don't trust them as far as I can throw them not to abuse any access they do have if they can come up with enough legal sophistry to convince themselves it's somehow justified.

To answer your original question, for other over-the-line cases relating to privacy specifically, I consider some of the Google Street View practices seriously shady, for example. Not to mention some of the creepy things they have been known to do on just the normal Google web sites, where most people probably assume what they're typing doesn't get sent to Google until they hit search/send/whatever. And of course the whole attempt to unify everything under the banner of Google+ and real names is pretty much second only to Facebook in terms of turning everyone into a database record. Then there's Google Glass.

I'm firmly of the view that technology is neutral, and not inherently good or evil. It is how the technology is used that counts. And in that respect, I think Google have now proven to have evil tendencies many, many times.
Generally, any situation where a charge is intended to reduce demand / disadvantage the payer, rather than to maximise profit / benefit the payee.

At the moment in these sorts of cases usually a payee just keeps the money; the advantage would be in reducing perverse incentives.

If spammers kept opening HN accounts, HN could say "burn $5 to open a new account" to reduce demand. That would avoid HN having an incentive to ban people for profit.

Or the state could say "speeding fine? burn $200" to discourage people from speeding. That would avoid the state having an incentive to increase crime to generate fine revenue.

Or a college could say "want your exam paper re-graded? burn $50" to discourage requests just for the sake of it. That would avoid the college having an incentive to grade people badly.

To resolve a disputed transaction on an auction site, the site could require the buyer to destroy the goods and the seller to burn the money, so there would be no profit from filing false disputes.
Apparently, its not possible to leave academia unless you write a detailed blog post about it.
Maybe it's being served by Glacier?
Unfortunately this guy doesn't posses the motivation and focus to even run a lemonade stand because he'd rather be hacking on cash registers instead. CEO was not his calling, and neither was CTO.
Growing Exploitation of Small Office Routers Creating Serious Risks
That was exactly his point, I guess. If an advanced user strugles like this to securely download some piece of software imagine a regular end-user.
I know many colleagues who got into academia and were able to find plenty of funding.

Since the crisis struck in 2009 the quality of candidates that are being interviewed at my second-tier state school is just astounding. They are expected to bring funding in, or else they are out, but they will not manage, and considering the quality of graduate students there, they will not be able to be any productive.

Academia is in a state of transition, and it seems that no one knows what the endgame will look like. University presidents throughout the country are betting on growth as the way out of the crisis, more students means more tuition, and more professors means more grants. It doesn't look sustainable, and personally I see no way forward. It seems wise to stay away.
What to do if you don't get a summer internship
Check your privilege with an antimatter beam
Reborn Dolls
As much as I find many of the past decade of Web / tech companies underwhelming, innovation can come from unusual places. Duff's Device, a method for unrolling loops in C for better performance, was created at Lucasfilm.

The challenges of scaling to very high levels has presented engineering challenges and solutions. I'm not sold that they're net beneficial in the greater order of things, but to say that there's been no significant innovation would be false.
From what I understand the Microsoft contract is cancelled, the new company stepping in has a real time OS, and they are testing once again to enable single CPU configurations.
Cortana, Siri ... Who comes up with these names?
Thank fsck for Watson.
This kind of article shows why we need more women in tech. Many, many more. Critical and insightful but also respectful and modest.

One thing that was missing, though, was politics. Politics in the true sense of the word, namely, the power struggles in the tech society which give rise to the current status quo.

Also, she says, "No one pretended tech was a meritocracy". The thing is, tech is a meritocracy, and that's part of the politics of tech. Meritocracy, of course, is a joke. It is not a desirable state of affairs, because it should be obvious that "merit" is a false currency used to justify what is, rather than work toward what should be. It is the quintessential naturalistic fallacy.

It amazes me time and again how people can take the term seriously, which only demonstrates how dangerous it is. Such a blatant, perverted joke, a dystopia that some intelligent people mistake for a utopia. Wikipedia says this: "Although the concept has existed for centuries, the term "meritocracy" was first coined in the 1950s. It was used by British politician and sociologist, Michael Young in his 1958 satirical essay, The Rise of the Meritocracy, which pictured the United Kingdom under the rule of a government favouring intelligence and aptitude (merit) above all else... In this book the term had distinctly negative connotations as Young questioned both the legitimacy of the selection process used to become a member of this elite and the outcomes of being ruled by such a narrowly defined group."

I still can't fathom how meritocracy can be taken as anything but a negative. I mean, the first question that comes to mind (or, rather, the second after "what is merit") is, "who has merit and why, and who does not?" Once this question is asked, it is immediately apparent that any attempt to paint "meritocracy" in a positive light is ludicrous.