skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That blogger has a very specific mindset about a subset of problems in parts of the general field of psychology that he is hellbent on applying generally to the entire broad discipline.

Which blogger would that be? Perhaps you're thinking of Thomas Insel, director of the NIMH, who has taken exactly the same position I have, and for exactly the same reason:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."

"Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. Indeed, symptom-based diagnosis, once common in other areas of medicine, has been largely replaced in the past half century as we have understood that symptoms alone rarely indicate the best choice of treatment. Patients with mental disorders deserve better." [emphasis added]

For the above reasons, the NIMH has recently ruled that the DSM may no longer be the basis of scientific research proposals, on the ground that it has no scientific content.

> ... parts of the field do have some serious issues, but to paint with such a broad brush and be so sure of yourself in casting dispersions [sic] on fields you have no formal training in is really gross to encounter.

Fair enough. Let's see how your viewpoint stands up under scrutiny. Do you think astrology is a science? No? But you don't have a degree in astrology -- doesn't that disqualify you from having an opinion on this subject? My point is that, in science, authority counts for nothing, only evidence matters. To put this another way, in science, evidence means everything, reputation means nothing. The greatest amount of scientific eminence is trumped by the smallest amount of scientific evidence.

Also, the expression "casting dispersions" isn't quite what you had in mind (s/dispersions/aspersions).

And finally, Allen Frances, editor of DSM-IV, has recently written a book that makes the same points I do (http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Normal-Out-Control-Medicalizati...).

If NIMH director Insel, or Allen Frances, tried to post to r/askscience, they would get the same treatment I got -- scientific censorship.

More here: http://arachnoid.com/building_science
Angel Etiquette
Ask HN: Any experience with a Udacity's ML class?
If you have taken Udacity's Machine Learning class, what have you done since finishing? Any projects or open source contributions? Do you think this is a worthwhile course?
This is a better summary then I can hack together: http://namecoin.info/

I have issues with their implementation, but in general the message is right.
That's a public key/private key issue (I think!): the key he sends to Verisign will be the public key from the ceremony, not the private key.

If I'm mistaken about this, I hope the secure channel is very very very secure!
Great strawman.

Parent post didn't mention physical cash. He mentioned credit cards, which have chargeback/purchase protection, and bank accounts, which have deposit insurance.
this exists: https://github.com/thallium205/BitcoinVisualizer
Startup Idea vs. Startup Execution
I would never carry around, or own, more than a couple of hundred pounds worth of physical cash or bitcoin at a time.
don't know about popularity of typescript outside of MS land

But:
here's the npm
https://www.npmjs.org/package/typescript

nothing stopping you from running TS on linux.
I have a blue belt in Krav Maga.

I am my own mugger protection.
It will be interesting to see if/how this evolves. It popularity is being driven (at least partly) by the "not controlled by a bank" aspect of it, but we are seeing that it is a double-edged sword. Is it possible to find a happy medium between traditional banking/currency systems? Will something similar to FDIC come to bitcoin, and if it does, will it be via private industry or government regulation?
Funny you should mention persistent data structures in C++. That's exactly what I've been working on. Here's my blog about leftist heaps translated from Okasaki directly to C++: http://bartoszmilewski.com/2014/01/21/functional-data-struct... . It follows previous ones about lists and RB trees.
Anyone know how quickly they're adding people to the beta at this point? Should I hold my breath on the invite I requested, or should I stop reading these articles that are making me increasingly jealous? :)
Isn't that even more of a reason to remove the article?

It was posted to more than 1 default subreddit, including /r/worldnews which is larger than /r/news. That means you're going to have multiple submissions of the same article on the front page. Duplicate content on the front page doesn't give a good first impression, it looks messy or even spammy. It also takes up valuable space for people who may not care about the topic.
Can anything they say or do be trusted at this point? I mean regardless of exactly how it happened weather it was theft, insider theft, incompetence, or blackmail Gox is not a party worthy of implicit trust any longer.
Fuck Bluetooth
jokesters like Coinbase? the CEO of coinbase wrote the article you just agreed with.
Well on the extreme end of things you have ruby ridge and waco. Then you've got the addition of militia groups to Domestic terror lists.

And then you have the IRS specifically targeting right wing non-profits.
I imagine a lot of machines running XP won't be able to run 8.1

Your imagination is completely wrong. Here are the minimum specifications:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/system-requirem...

IIRC even the minimum screen resolution of 1366x768

Your memory is also completely wrong. Windows 8.1 does not have a minimum resolution of 1366x768. In fact, if you review the system requirements link above, you'll see that it works at less than 1024x768 but that certain features require 1024x768.

Can you help me understand the purpose of your comment? I mean, obviously - you had no idea what you were talking about. You even knew it because you used weasel words like, "I imagine" or "IIRC". It makes me think you had some agenda to spread FUD about Windows 8.1 not working on older hardware.
Stripe vs. Paymill
This is going to be the general public perception, and their pdf documenting this would set bitcoin back possibly 5 years is accurate I believe.

Already, for most people bitcoin does not meet a level of security in terms of recourse* Until bitcoin has a proper centralized method of recovering stolen bitcoins it will remain to be seen as an unsafe investment.
Pr nightmare? The only nightmare here is your IQ level.
There are actually 2 reasons why that would have shown up...

1. It's automated based upon the keyword you searched for which is an ad function within Adwords
2. They did it to raise their ad quality score in which their URL is shown twice as we'll as was approved by the Adwords team.

The only bad PR here is for your blog and your lack of knowledge.
Who the hell said 'biased journalism'? It was an analysis piece. Plain and simple.
I couldn't help but read this in Patrick Bateman's voice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3gQJMMlt_E
What Your iPad Knows About You
that is an awesome idea, cant wait.
Uh...
"Brian Armstrong is the co-founder and CEO of Coinbase"
They're also wrong, open networks can die out.

Usenet died out to proprietary forums, to the point where we've been left without satisfactory replacement.

Email might not be dying out but it's being assaulted on all sides by proprietary messaging systems. Some of the largest recently acquisitions of companies have been proprietary messaging systems. One day we might be "stuck" without email in the way we're "stuck" without usenet and wonder how we got to that point.

Bitcoin is potentially vulnerable to a more easy to use (or more easy to scale) proprietary version.
>jokesters... Coinbase

LMAO. You're joking, right?
Wave was so awesome and so bad at the same time. We had hundreds of people sharing phish music in a wave and the performance got so bad to unusable
Here's the rub... I'm not aware of any Phd programs outside the Education departments that require formal teaching training. You might get an apprenticeship as a TA if you aren't an RA, but coursework in becoming a better teacher? Never. This is a prime example of the system being set up to support research more than teaching.

On the flip side, I've read research that says graduate degrees in education don't improve teaching results for high school. (Graduate degrees in the subject matter do.)

An open question on teaching... Do any liberal arts colleges have formal teaching improvement programs? If they're not trying to research and product Phds, perhaps their approach to the profession is different?
While what she is stating might not be the case for all law school grads, it isn't as far fetched to come out of school easily making 2-3 times what a starting teacher is making, depepnding on the degree you choose. As a software engineer in michigan, you can come out of uni with a BS in computer science and easily find a job paying $55k+ and make 2-3 times as much as a starting teacher ($35k if you're lucky and find a good school that has funding) in the same state after a year or two of experience.
Wow! Thanks. Did you just find that manually?
> it seems logic that statistically the more hours you work the more premature mortality will happen

But many of the most dangerous jobs, say fighter pilot and Alaskan crab fisherman, are actually very short bursts of intense work. The pilot might log several hundred hours in a good year and the fisherman works in seasons that are only several weeks long.

Trouble here is the mononumerosis, aka the need to boil a whole range of values down into a single number.
I actually believe Bitcoin will live on after this, but I just can't see myself using it. I have no idea how I would turn money in to bitcoin without getting totally fucked. Where I would put it that it wouldn't just get stolen through some crypto trickery I don't understand. Who knows if supposed "good guys" are really just playing a long con, or getting robbed themselves. This isn't just a flaky beta of an app that needs a couple months to shake out the bugs, people lost huge sums of money here.
I hope that belt is bullet- and knife-proof, and wraps your entire body.

My mugger protection is throwing my wallet south, and running north.
Indeed. Look at New York. They're closing down some of the best performing charter schools in the state. http://nypost.com/2014/02/27/de-blasio-administration-halts-...
I gave it the moment that it deserves, but I don't know if it's possible to over-discount what the CEO of a company with so incredibly much invested in said virtual-crypto-currency has to say.

He's looking for reach to console everyone sitting tenuously on their virtual piles. "Oh, we're all better off for the massive amounts of consumer loss. Keep calm, carry on."

Or, to put it another way, "Yeah, all those suckers with money at the largest exchange were stupid to be putting confidence in a stupidly run exchange. So glad everyone can feel better since a bad apple fell off. There are only good apples left now - trust me."
I have a decent code base written in C/C++. Now as I am thinking about mobile apps, I wonder if it is worth all the hassle on Andriod to go through all of this or if it is just better to do a rewrite in Java. Does anyone have any experience about this?
Utterly appalling that someone who took the nom de plume of cincinnatus would say that.

I'm someone who carries concealed every time I step outside my dwelling, unless I have to go to a "Gun Free Zone". Tell me exactly how my understanding of the world is "cartoonish". Use e.g. my past comments as a base. Other sources on request, but as a hint, my login name is the same one I've used since 1978 (sic), my initials.
If someone is being a pedantic asshole, it's enough to say that.

> I think if anybody's equipped to usefully judge how people deploy their nerdiness, it's other nerds.

I think my point is that calling someone a basement dweller or a neckbeard isn't useful. It doesn't help the point being made; it just insults the other person -- it stands out, in my mind, of nerd being thrown around as an insult in high school.

And, no. I don't think nerds will usefully judge how people deploy their nerdiness.
De Blasio starts his war on charter schools
Chainable mutating methods are not idiomatic Python; returning None is idiomatic for mutating methods. ISTR that the reasons here regard readability and clearly distinguishing mutations from queries, but in any case if you don't follow the idiom in libraries you create, they won't behave like Python's builtins and standard library, which, whatever you think about chaining on its own, will cause some context switching for most Python users when trying to work with it, increasing the cognitive load.
Interesting that even this post is dropping heavily on the frontpage. Posts that were submitted 6 hours ago that have less karma are higher up.
Satya Nadella on Live and Work a Meaningful Life
Clicked on home from here and styling....

http://geisha.io/site/index
I don't have to enter my password. I just put my finger on the home button.
I mean it's a fairly good, strategic explanation - nothing was stopping this guy from building the software himself. He just wanted Apple to help market and distribute it - but medical software is not Apple's business. I'm sure there would have been another software company perfectly willing to take up the cause.

What is annoying though? Jobs let him fly all the way up to Cupertino only to promptly turn him down. Certainly a "no" on the phone would have worked just as well.
Further Thoughts on Democratizing SSL Certificates
The number #1 requirement for a currency is trust and confidence in it. Why would anyone trust a currency which has no consumer protection whatsoever and provides zero recourse for when things inevitably go wrong?

What I mean is, everyone is hating on Mt. Gox but conceivably what happened to them can happen to any of the exchanges out there now. There is no mechanism to prevent it and there is no recourse for users when it does.

This is why bitcoin is interesting as a protocol but a non-starter when it comes to being a true currency. A currency requires backing by a central authority. No amount of code can make up for that.

EDIT: I would also like to add one simple thing. Here we are discussing a topic that falls into the field of economics. How many here are economists?

ok. How many here have taken at least a few courses in economics?

ok. How many here have taken 1 course in economics?

If a slew of people with zero knowledge of programming, computers, technology, etc. decided one day to start pontificating incessantly about code, programming languages, etc. hn would first sneer at them and then rightly ignore them.

But if people with zero knowledge of economics or finance write a torrent of vapid and completely ignorant articles about currency, bitcoin, macro-economics and their intersection hn seems to vote it up.

I'm really tired of this. I do get that the bitcoin protocol has some interesting aspects. But can we please ignore the total waste of space, time and pixels that is every single article about the bitcoin currency?
The Bizarre and Fascinating Nature of Duck Rape ... FTFY
I don't think so. Most of them give a separate housing stipend in addition to this.
Those of you fascinated by electrical manipulation of consciousness may find this interesting:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2014/02/23/di...

> Guillaume Herbet and colleagues describe the case of a 45 year old man in whom electrical stimulation of a particular spot in the brain “induced a dramatic alteration of conscious experience in a highly reproducible manner.”

Basically, when they zapped a certain point in his brain, it sent him into some kind of dream state. Very interesting.
Thank you for the thorough reply.

I do own another Felleisen text (Realm of Racket) that I do intend on reading. And I'm sure, since it's free, I will at least look through HtDP.
"... to prove how valuable governmental regulation can actually be to the system as a whole."

Conversely, if Mt Gox had been regulated more like a major bank, right now we'd all be getting out our checkbooks to bail them out. Then, a similar organization like Coinbase would have even less incentive to keep their house in order. In the worst case scenario, they'll just be bailed out too. And then there is the consumer, who will have no incentive to only bank with solvent institutions. Who cares? We've got FDIC. The amount of ignorance and moral hazard created by this style of system adds up pretty quickly.

The current bitcoin system is definitely messy. But when something goes wrong, the damage is largely contained. Mt Gox died. People who had value stored there lost it. But people with bitcoins are Coinbase were fine. And the average tax payer didn't have to spend a dime.

All in all, I find the whole thing to be a fascinating test case for unregulated finances. I could be totally wrong and bitcoins exchange rate with dollars could drop to zero because of this. However, the biggest "bank" just failed and the system itself seems remarkably stable.
An armed classroom is a polite classroom.
For me it is Java + JavaScript. The only difference between now and the future is I expect server-side UI generation (Servlets/JSF/etc) to decline and all UI to be handed client-side by HTML/CSS/JavaScript with a RESTful/JAX-RS backend. Java is your data/transaction/communication engine.

I know it wasn't one of your choices but while Ruby/Scala/Python all have their merits I don't see any of them replacing Java (even on the JVM). The only reason I think PHP every became as popular as it is is because it worked better for shared hosting and Java hosting was expensive. Now with the Linodes and Digital Oceans of the world getting a VPS is cheap and easy allowing you to slap on something like TomEE really quickly.
> It is probably better to say sub-Reddit moderators, they are given a free hand.

Yes, true, but what Reddit moderators do reflects on Reddit itself. But if I had the power to choose, I wouldn't change anything -- the risk of one sort of suppression of freedom of expression must be balanced against another.

I think the outcome should be decided by the public, and (as with the topic of this thread) the Streisand Effect will resolve these kinds of issues.

For me, the problem with r/askscience is that the moderator doesn't understand science. He thinks science has no formal definition, that philosophers haven't decided what is and is not science -- therefore psychologists can call what they do science. That's false, but it's just someone's opinion, unfortunately he's running a subReddit that influences how many people think about science.
It's all well and good until governments step in a regulate/destroy it. Which will happen.
Removing a feeding tube, when consistent with the patient's wishes, is not cruel; rather, when appropriate, it is one of the most humane ways to permit a dead or dying brain's body to die.
Do you really think that the sort of people who would shoot up a classroom will have second thoughts if they think someone else might have a gun?

Bullies are almost always cowards. So it seems plausible to me.

On the other hand, I think I understand where this piece of satire is coming from. I was a military wife and full-time mom and homemaker for a long time. My dad was career military and grew up on a farm. I grew up with shotguns hanging on the wall of my parent's bedroom. I have been around gun culture but I insisted my husband get rid of the handgun he had for a time because I am clear that if you are not prepared to kill someone when you pull a gun, you best not pull it because you are likely just arming your opponent and escalating the problems.

Escalating the arms race rarely leads to promoting the peace. It is unfortunate that satirical pieces of this sort so rarely follow up with commentary on how on promotes the peace after they lambast the idea of arming people to promote peace. But it seems to me that many people who recognize that more guns is not the solution do not know what would be an effective solution, so presumably they simply cannot offer anything more than criticism of the proposed solution. If you do not have an alternative solution to bring to the table, it usually isn't very helpful to shoot down (so to speak) the solution being proposed. But it happens a lot.
NY Startup Varonis IPOs on NASDAQ
You want to choose to pay insurance for security. That is fine and a valid option.

Other people want to choose to accept responsibility for their own security and lose the overhead from all the regulation and insurance. This is the concept of libertarianism and bitcoin.

The problem is that a small group of individuals wants to force everyone to purchase their insurance and security, and they are fighting tooth and nail to make that the only available option.

This is not a free market. This is not an efficient market. It is a corrupt artificially created monopoly.
How long is it taking to get an invite through the normal github signup? I'd like to try this out to see if it is accessible with screen reading software although the answer is probably not really.
I hope to see exchanges transparently demonstrating their solvency on the blockchain regularly
Logo seems a little off, I would also agree that they shouldn't call their app Hookers. Good thing that isn't what Geisha means or represents. Might want to hold off on pop-culture international stereotypes and do a little googling.
Did Russia Just Invade Crimea?
"A currency requires backing by a central authority."

Citation needed.
You say XAML in jest but once you get over the learning curve, it is incredible expressive, it will make you hate HTML and CSS.
Why should a currency provide those things? Institutions using the currency can always provide those services better than the currency itself.

"Why would anyone trust gold when it has no consumer protection whatsoever and provided zero recourse for when things inevitably go wrong?"
Bitcoin are also vulnerable to physical theft and the OP isn't talking about physical theft of currency -- I'm pretty sure you know that and are electing to be snarky in spite of that.

A credit/debit card when stolen, regardless of physical or electronic purloining, is backed by a set of consumer protection laws, regulations and policies -- some obviously required by government but some provided without legal obligation. Further a bank account, a brokerage account or any number of real money stores are insured against theft and loss (bankruptcy). BTC are not.
mybbor: You appear to be shadow banned. All of your comments since December 2010 are "[dead]".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7320083
Well, I guess I phrased it badly, but I didn't mean a guarantee of returns, but rather just anything even suggesting it being an investment - that is to say, suggesting that it might possibly produce returns.

Madoff did not say "give me your money and you'll later get back the exact same amount, just minus some fees", I suppose? But that's what MtGox did - there was just no investment aspect to it.
Coinbase certainly appears to be a more reputable player, but I would still like to see them embrace transparency by helping to create and use the inherent properties of the blockchain to prove (preferably continuously) that they have not been the victim of a large heist nor engaged in fractional reserve bitcoining.