skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same here. I'd love to have a smartphone, but I don't want a smartphone that relies on any of the major mobile OS platforms today. I don't trust any of them not to do some combination of spying on me and/or forcing unwelcome changes on me later. Until someone credible comes along and breaks that pattern, I'll stick with cheap and cheerful Nokia feature phones and the like.
This is actually a very timely article to pop up for me. I'm currently a Sales Analyst at a big Telco in Canada. I landed the job with no previous analyst experience, but years of programming behind me. I never had any formal programming experience, and everything I know is from years of experience. Because of this, I'm fairly confident that I can get anything done, but I have no schooling to support me. Don't get me wrong, I don't consider myself a highly skilled or knowledgeable programmer, but I know how to break down complex tasks and produce results. I've been writing functional PHP my whole life since I'm unable to focus on learning a new language long enough to actually do so (and because of this, I have lots of self doubt that I'd actually be able to learn a new one if I wanted to).

I consider my 'Sales Analyst' role an intro to data science. Essentially, we're collecting all types of data from different sources and producing reports on them. How many products were sold? From what channels? From which sales persons on which team? How many customers did they talk to? How many of their booked installations failed? Were successes? Whats our market penetration like? Where are we seeing trends in disconnections or connections? Why? We're dealing with millions of records, from half a dozen data sources, often with no unique key matching the data up.

It's a very interesting job, but without any previous experience in the field it's all been self taught. I've looked into a few data science programs and books, but I've felt that everything I see and read is so far above me that I can't even get started on the books or courses. My math skills are pretty basic, but that's never stopped me before as I've always been able to find the results that I'm looking for. I know that with the proper knowledge and experience I'd be able to land a data science job and get a 30-50K raise at the same time, but just don't have anything on my resume to qualify me. Nor do I know what an -actual- data scientist does, so I lack the confidence in even pursuing any openings I see around. I'm getting married next year, have a seven year old daughter, and bills to pay like anybody else, the job security I have in my current role definitely acts as a deterrent from taking a leap into the unknown as well.
Great post, Dan. You might not have hit your original goal on the head, but nothing you did sounds like failing.

Small steps on a long road!
Coldtea got my point pretty well. Everyone else gets a whoosh.

I'm not saying abandon Python for Java, I'm saying if you'll optimize Python, first optimize single-thread Python performance, before we get to parallel processing, because extracting performance out of parallel is hard, while languages like Java (and JavaScript recently) show they there's plenty more to be gained yet from that single thread.
:D thanks buddy, that's very encouraging!
Pretending to be a scientist without doing the academic work means you are essentially a trade worker. Autodidact? Fine, but you better have put yourself through the equivalent of at least a masters or phd in statistics along the way.

We need vocational education to let semiskilled workers use statistical modeling tools in an informed way, but why do we then call them "scientists"? They are technicians.
>And certainly not quickly enough to be qualified to get a job as a data scientist before the data scientist salary market comes crashing back down to earth.

Do you think it's worth it to pursue if you're legitimately interested (as opposed to primarily attracted to the $$$)?
terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary totalitarian future

To put it into perspective, more people die walking across roads in the US every year than died from terrorism in 2001. Most years other than 2001, the difference between them is staggering. Yet, you would be hard pressed to find anyone that we should take drastic measures to curtail the freedom of car drivers because of the pedestrian deaths.

How little people care about the deaths of 4000+ people a year: most drivers that kill a pedestrian are not punished at all. The Freakonomics guys even did a podcast on how to commit the perfect murder, where the method was killing the person with a car.
Me> Can whales fly?
Him> Is it your hobby to ask little poor Jewish boys such tricky questions they don't have an answer for?

Turing Test failed.
The Biology of Risk
It seems to be many failing cases. Is it really passed turing test?
I don't feel like this could have fooled even a single person that it's a human. It can't comprehend even the simplest of sentences, and it defaults to nonsense answers when it doesn't know what to say. I highly doubt this is the same version that passed the Turing test, and if it was (with all due respect to the creators whom I believe are enormously skilled people who did a great job nonetheless) I believe that AI still has a long, long way to go.
Pretty lame. In 2 questions it fails.
Try doing nothing.

You wouldn't be able to even if you tried. Your mind would start wandering to topics you haven't let it.

Set as a goal that you'll accomplish less every day, and with zero expectation about what to do with the free hours that open up. Just as you pressure yourself to do more, pressure yourself to do less.

Try doing nothing and suddenly your subconscious takes over. You discover thoughts you didn't even know were brewing. The fundamental principle underneath is one of balance, and you can trigger it with constraint. Constrain yourself to do nothing and your subconscious will find a way to pull you to something you like. Limit yourself to less, and you start overflowing to a new direction.

Like other people said, you look like you are trying to suppress the fact that you don't like what you are doing. The power of a drifting mind can be used positively just as much as it can be used negatively.

A writer told me "I didn't get anything done today".
Answer: try to do nothing. The best way to have only good
days is to not aim at getting anything done.

Actually almost everything I've written that has survived
was written when I didn't try to get anything done.

- Nassim Taleb

Make sure you give it enough time. You need at least 1.5-2hr blocks of time where you can shut off the world and play uninterrupted, and you also need to schedule such unstructured play lots of times. Don't worry about feeling unproductive in the meantime. Worry more about noticing the pattern to your thoughts, and do that at the end of each block of time so you don't feel pressured to be noticing.

I'd love to hear what you discover.
Or just click outside of the newsletter subscription box.
The best invoice terms to get you paid faster
If I asked you your father's name and you gave me his occupation instead I think I'd be confused too.
iOS 8 randomises the MAC address while scanning for WiFi networks
The site's served over HTTPS and the assets over http. That's mixed-content
Very unrelated but biting me hard due to procrastination: Does anyone know any tax preparer in the US with reasonable rate?

I'm a non-US citizen/resident. I incorporated a C-corp in Delaware exactly last year through an agent (remotely). The company has been dormant since its inception.

Its fiscal year is March 31, which means the deadline should be June 15 this year. I need someone who can do e-filing for me. One guy I found online quoted me $500 which I think ridiculously expensive :(
The Local Innovator’s Dilemma (2011)
>No, not my dick as you might have thought! Just my guinea pig

Jesus Christ...
I think the Slate author is wrong and it's very easy to prove that by considering the performance of immigrant blacks in America vs native blacks.

Since both groups consist of people of same race, the disparity in outcomes must have something to do with culture of the groups in question.

For example http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/what-drives...:

"There are some black and Hispanic groups in America that far outperform some white and Asian groups. Immigrants from many West Indian and African countries, such as Jamaica, Ghana, and Haiti, are climbing America’s higher education ladder, but perhaps the most prominent are Nigerians. Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites."

Same argument would deal with 'discrimination' - as a black Nigerian is likely to experience same sort of discrimination as black American (probably more so as they're also foreign).
Thanks for the Tip on Stanley's Parable, never heard of it. Sounds very interesting, will try the demo now. Thanks.
I agree with the article's opinion about errands, and believe it's true these small boring tasks end up killing inspiration for the more interesting stuff we'd rather be working on.

HOWEVER, am I the only one who thinks Paul's redefinition of procrastination is nonstandard? When people advise you not to procrastinate, they are usually telling you to do your damn job (or to study for an exam, you get the idea) instead of doing something else that could clearly wait. Most people understand that procrastination means doing anything -- no matter what -- instead of a mandatory task that is boring or too hard. Nobody will ever tell you to do your taxes instead of working on that rocket science project, which is what Paul seems to be implying...
I remember in PASCAL with the sound() function:

sound(100);
delay(3000);
nosound;
I'm not a Chomsky fan, but I agree with at least the premise and the beginning of this essay. As usual, he wanders far afield in trying to find the roots of the problem, digging up what probably was a huge moment for him personally -- the academic opposition to Reagan -- but wasn't really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. (It worries me that people seem to understand why the surveillance state is bad, but immediately after acknowledging it, go back to their usual boogey men and political arguments they had before they figured this out, but that's a discussion for another day.)

Three things here are mention of further note. First, the enemy here is the population of the western democracies themselves. Because terrorists blend and mingle with everybody else, they have no uniform or base and everybody must be suspect. Second, not only is this a huge grab for information, it's also being done in secret. So the folks doing this are determined for the public not to have a discussion about it happening. Third, and most importantly, this discussion is not about the NSA or the US. This is about the role of technology in our lives. If we allow the tech to track us, then it's going to be abused. So it's either no tracking or tracking and making everything public to everybody. I don't see a middle ground.

On the final point, it's a terrible injustice to the tragedy of what's happening to continue to direct outrage at the NSA. The NSA is the good guys. Just imagine what some of the other intelligence agencies are up to. Or what a sufficiently corrupt executive could do working at a place like Google, Amazon, or Facebook.

So kudos to Chomsky for jumping on the badwagon. We're happy to have him. But let's always keep our eyes on the context here. If we're going to fix it, we need to be laser clear on what "it" means.
That's true, but it's also the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a testament to the fact that they launched their Maps app well before it was ready.
For some values of "passed" and "Turing Test".
I can help out with marketing/business strategy. If you're in London, we can go and grab a coffee sometime.

You can find out more about me on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=70827722
I remember reading the first chapter on an AI book during college which laid out the objectives of AI research into two schools of thought.The first school of thought believes that AI can be achieved by mimicking real conscious beings. Remember when man first tried to fly, most devices mimicked birds and failed horribly. The other school of thought believes that intelligence has well-defined principles, when discovered, would produce real intelligence (not mimicry), having the effect that the final product may not resemble what we see on day to day basis. Compare planes, which use the principles of flight, to the early flapping machines. A bird and plane both fly but they are very different in the way they do it. Approaching flight from the mimicry angle is hard, it's only recently in the last 10 years we have made light-weight flapping machines that fly well;yet we have had planes for over a hundred years once we knew the principles.

Transcripts would be handy. I doubt a conversation with a 13 year old boy is a good way to measure AI? It's not the best metric to have but it is the most universal and most widely agreed on that we have. It seems like we are happier with small gains in mimicry for now, since real intelligence is hard. Really hard.
Addresimg the issue of key availability could be perhaps achieved by OS compatibility. Eg. If two Mac users send each other an email to iCloud addresses it can be encrypted by default and have iCloud manage the key exchange. This is just a thought on using the cloud as a part the key management similar to what Exchange does. It does not mean that is not hackable since compromising iCloud would compromise both clients but it could be a good start. Encryption by default among same cloud users.
There are some people around here that think a downvote is the appropriate answer to a post they disagree with, what's very unfortunate.

Looks like I misunderstood you, that's why my reply does not make much sense. But it is possible to verify such kind of constraints statically if you accept a certain amount of false errors, what all static type systems generate, to varying degrees.

Your example and the equivalent pycontract are static types that miss a static time verifier, not dynamic ones (pycontracts can only create static types AFAIK).
"a computer programme that simulates a 13 year old boy [...] If a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of five minute keyboard conversations it passes the test."

In short they did nothing.
Of course it is a lot easier to tell it isn't a human when you are told it isn't before hand...
I have a friend who used a sex chat bot to sell things to people. It was something very basic but incredible effective.

It made me think that we need to divide the turing test for different people: by age, by need, etc.
> Can I ask where are you from?

> OK

> Glad you liked it! Glad you liked it!
We really must be living in an idiocracy if this passed Turing test.
me: what have you been up to?
bot: No, I haven't been up to! How could you imagine such a trash! Did I forget it or you really haven't told me about the place you are from?
Do you have to have google+ to have an Android?
Joining YC with a tourist visa, is it okay
In pretty much any statistical model with more than a handful of parameters (and almost all machine learning models do require more than a handful of parameters!), those parameters are represented as vectors or matrices. Linear algebra (and multivariate calculus) then become very important for reasoning about those parameters, fitting the models, making predictions and so on.

The multivariate Gaussian distribution is a great example of this. It's probably the most fundamental and important distribution in statistics, and working with these distributions is pretty much pure linear algebra -- quadratic forms over vectors of parameters, eigendecompositions of covariance matrices etc.

Even for non-statistically-motivated data mining: any time you're optimising over a lot of parameters, it's likely that linear algebra (and, as before, multivariate calculus) will help. Linear algebra is as important to calculus over multiple variables, as plain old high-scool algebra is to plain old univariate calculus.
You are indeed bitten due to procrastination, but it might not be for the reason you think you are. If the company has been dormant since its inception, why are you worried about paying taxes? The IRS doesn't come after dormant companies that don't have revenue. There's nothing to come after.

Are you using paying taxes as a way of procrastinating from real work? A much harder problem is making something people want. Worry more about that.
You could adopt a company policy that mandates PGP for everyone as it's not that difficult to create, distribute and revoke public keys for your employees. Problems arise when you try to apply this process to the larger public, as that means having people self-sign their certificates for their public keys or having one user vouch for another. But that's where security breaks. Even with CAs on the internet you're never 100% sure you're talking to a legit entity; any scenario where CA aren't even present is just a nightmare that doesn't improve security by one bit. It's not just about making sure nobody except the recipient can read emails it's also about making sure that the recipient is legit, and that's the problem.
Can someone make a web interface which get's people on the internet talking to each other but thinking that the other could be a bot?
It was a fan-made video, none of us could really make our own. It was pretty good so we decided to put it up on the front page.
The Serval Project is already working on this: http://www.servalproject.org/

Unfortunately, they are limited by Google's very long standing lack of response to requests to support peer to peer WiFi on Android. See https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=82
As I understand it, the LLLT systems in question are usually focused on a fairly narrow range of wavelengths (this times into the postulated cytochrome mechanism: it only absorbs light energy at a few wavelengths), not smeared all over the infrared and visible and UV like sunlight.
'Calvin and Hobbes' Creator Pens First Comics in Nearly 2 Decades
It reminds me a lot of ELIZA. Very disappointing. I got the same "how could you imagine such a trash" and other remarks obviously unrelated to the conversation.
I have been coming round to the once-crazy-sounding idea that the only way to protect consumers from unwittingly bugging themselves and others around them is to require all devices to state a prominent warning about any components they include that can be used as sensors or communication devices, and to include at least a hardware-driven indicator of when any sensor or communication channel is active and preferably a hardware switch to force it off.

Whether any government would ever support such a move is a different question, of course. I suspect not in the current climate, because they'd fear losing their own intelligence capabilities against targets they wanted to single out legitimately. However, I also get the feeling that the tide is finally turning against the "mass surveillance/database state" in the general public consciousness and not just for geeks and civil liberties campaigners. Probably not at the next major electoral cycles but maybe in the ones afterwards, I suspect preserving personal privacy will be a political issue with some real weight, and this kind of issue will be part of that debate.
We've talked about making a GPLv3 release to at least open up the patents we control to all copyleft software. But there are important details to work through, and like most FLOSS projects we have more things to do than people to do them, so it hasn't happened yet. If someone needed it to happen it should be a pretty easy conversation to have.

Keep in mind also, our goal is generally to stay out of court. See above about having too much to do.
In practice I find the bigger problem is from analysts/actuaries/statisticians who have a disdain for programming, which sometimes is viewed as a task for mere technicians.

Typically your excel model/analysis has not even solved half the problem of a datascience system. It needs to be repeatable, it needs to be open to change (source control!), it needs to be integratable with the wider system.

These things need to be considered upfront. There are plenty of reasonable software tools for this. Yes hadoop shouldn't be your first step, but taking 5 minutes to put something on a server in ec2 (omg, the cloud) is not unreasonable.

There is a swallowing abyss between excel and production. That is where datascience projects die, its a shame.
Did they also run the experiment with an actual 13 yo kid?
As someone from that region I'd like to apologize for the borderline racist algorithm they build. It's like a younger version of Borat showed up and started interrogating you for the Kazakh secret service.
Basically every text based chat in existence?

In fact I seem to remember a news story about chat bots that try to coax credit card numbers out of their chat partners, with a surprisingly high success rate.
Generally it involves using "average people" [...] it
should consist of computer science experts instead

I don't agree. The prominent reason for "dumbing down" the judges follows the same reasoning behind decisions made regarding what constitutes "adequate" encryption. How can we gauge what will honestly happen out in the real world, today?

Consider DES. It was deemed inadequate, but how to prove it? The EFF came up with a budget estimate based on what was reasonably affordable for a group of attackers, and built a machine capable of cracking DES within those budget constraints.

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTML...

So, let's apply similar reasoning to the concept of AI. If a group of people were to build an AI, and use it as an adversary against ordinary people, how difficult is it to manipulate and deceive ordinary people into taking action, and is it feasible to do so with AI?
Money Doesn’t Talk. Why Most Startups Aren’t Announcing Their Seed Financings
I think you grossly overestimate the conversational skills of the average human. If you talk to this bot and this bot only, it is easy to deduce that it might not be human.

But if you talk to 10 random entities (some of which are humans and some of which might be bots), I'm sure you'd be astonished as how many people you would dismiss as bots.
About usability. Well, I'm not an expert but runbox.com (with their roundcube interface) or unseen.is let you use gpg keys in a really easy way. They generate (or you can import) a pair of keys in the browser so they never have access to them.
The only catch is that if you erase your cache or their cookies, you lost your keys and have to import them again.
By default, runbox sends your public key as an attachment.
It's not a random guess though is it? It's a sample of results.
Then you'll probably enjoy this. The Trixie episode of High Maintenance:

http://vimeo.com/56895025
Nice setup as well. This being HN I expected a "This is how I made a fortune" when I looked at the link/title. The story starts with the admission of failure though and now I expected the (just as common) "Hire me please" post.

You made a different point and I enjoyed reading the article.
Congratulations, it seems you found a nice middle ground.
See, I don't see that as a user. The bad comments sections used to be full of bad puns and arguments, but now they're just smaller and full of contentless "watch this" mentions. On channels where the comments used to be good, they are now rare and inaccurate.
Why Notifications Are About to Rule the Smartphone Interface