skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very good article. I don't know what the aspirations of Health Kit truly are, but I would not underestimate Apple. They changed the phone/mobile operator relationship. And similar arguments were made about the enterprise ( too complex, not enough management tools with iOS). But Apple finds a way to get consumers to change the dynamic in a way other companies don't.
I actually think more people should act as if their career is going to end in 20 years. Thinking in these terms really drives home what you need to do if you want actual financial independence. Even if the goal is not realistically attainable, it shows you exactly where you stand.

Let's say you think $1M is good enough for your notion of financial independence. Well, how can you accumulate that amount in 20 years? One way would be to invest $2750/month. If you can manage an average annual return of 4%, you'll hit the $1M mark right after 20 years. If you start at 25 (giving you a buffer period after college to grow some roots), you'll be good by the time you're 45.

Note that in this case, "financial independence" doesn't necessarily have to mean that you're wealthy enough to live your picture perfect life without ever working a day again. It could simply mean that you've reached a point where you don't need to save more and could take a 50% paycut without any serious long-term implications for your retirement. An example might be that you make low six figures up until age 45, surpass the $1M mark in investments, and then you get hit by ageism and your income drops by half for whatever reason. You're not going to be saving much anymore unless you make lifestyle changes, but you've still got the million bucks in the bank. The drop in income has impacted your ability to save and invest more, but it has had no effect on the savings you've already amassed, and it's still good enough to sustain your comfortable lifestyle with more modest savings.
You're mostly right re: knowledge transfer, although it's really as simple as you imply.

First, Vim emulation widgets vary a great deal in quality, supporting different, disjoint subsets of Vim functionality. Just as an example, ideaVim doesn't support Ctrl-W for navigating between panes. The deeper your knowledge of Vim, the more diminishing returns you get.

Second, Sublime Text's Vintage mode supports enough of my Vim workflow that it's actually made me faster with Vim and other Vim emulation widgets. To the extent that any Vim emulation mode overlaps with Vim, I have improved across the board. Of course this is true mostly for the less deep features IME.
Keep in mind, many interviewers are purposefully giving you ridiculous questions to try and trip you up. Calming your nerves is a very common problem, and can be challenging to overcome. It sounds like your problem is not a matter of knowledge, but a matter of delivery. Here are a few immediate things to try:

- Practice makes perfect: find someone to give you a mock interview. Do this as often as necessary until you conquer your problem.
- Caffeine, adderall, etc, can make you much more anxious. You need to be calm.
- Don't feel pressure/rushed, and don't panic. Slow down. If your mind races under pressure, that's completely normal, but it can be controlled.
- Its ok to not entirely know the answer. Start by responding with what you do know. Once you begin speaking, the ideas will start flowing. Many technical questions are "loaded". To actually solve the problem in the best way possible, you need way more information than they give you. This will cause your mind to race. Try to qualify your response with your thought process, "if this or this, I'd do this. If something or another, I'd probably do this."
- Practice speaking with confidence. Take a deep breath, all the way down into your belly, and then use that air pressure to make your vocal chords "sing". Having a strong vocal tonality will resonate confidence inside your head, and inside theirs. Also, don't be monotone/boring. Find/express energy and enthusiasm without sounding fake or cheesy.

Being nervous for an interview is normal. I've interviewed a lot, and I always get nervous. Its just something you have to deal with. Public speakers and pick up artists (approaching women to ask them out) are two areas that you can find a ton of advice for calming your nerves.

Introverts can have a hard time finding their inner personality. Practice makes perfect. Try to start as many conversations as you can each day. Don't force it, become natural at engaging conversations with other people. This will help all areas of your life, including interviews.
Ah, python's itertools available in c++, at last.
The short answer is, practice. Literally, interview more. Apply to jobs you'd never accept an offer from to get the practice.

The long answer needs more information. Why do you think you suck at technical interviews? How do you know that? If the answer is "because I haven't gotten an offer," what makes you think it was the technical portion of the interview you failed? What parts are you not good at? When do you freeze up? Why do you freeze up?
While this may be largely true at the level of results of individual experiments, STEM is plagued by equally significant issues around funding. i.e. selection of which experiments will get performed. Consider the politics required to fund LHC and the necessity of there being a "God Particle" to discover. Or the reasoning applied to research in astrophysics, where at the end of a chain of tortuous logic there always should be something like "this could help us understand whether we are alone in the Universe". Or the quota of experiments needed to justify the budget for Space Shuttle. I am not objecting to these researches per se, rather highlighting that in STEM research funding at least, the Emperor has no clothes. As you say, experiments are largely sound because not easily faked, yet the distribution of research actually performed is driven by political expediencies more than it should be. Good researchers are those who understand and work within the distortions inherent to the funding landscape; a form of self-censorship.
And for the things over which we do have control it is unhealthy to take blame when they go awry. It's actually a kind of therapy to make people attribute more of the effects of their own failings on their environment.
Not OP , but your story isn't even anecdotal really it verges onto a friends of a friend story.

Plus rather than saying undergraduate thesis say assignment. Because that's what it really is, not at all related to peer review papers or a doctorate.
> Passing through exceptions means not trying to fool anyone into thinking they can work with the high-level abstraction without understanding anything about what's going on underneath.

Except this is not what happens in reality, very few people see an internal exception type and go investigate the details.

Sure it's shitty practice, but it seems orthogonal to whether the internal exception types are exposed.

I'm not saying people should just ignore what is underneath, I just think that as a library developer, you significantly constrain what you can do without breaking API compat by exposing internal exceptions.

You could take a hard line stance and say that it should be a breaking change and people should go and re-evaluate the library after the change, etc, and then rewrite their code to deal with new exceptions. But in reality it just means that library will no longer get updated, and will effectively become stale for no good reason.
The protocol by the series author is explained in more detail at http://www.filfre.net/2013/08/seven-cities-of-gold/ , which I copy here:

> That said, you’ve surely noticed that I continue to refer to Dani as “Dan” and “he” in the article above. I understand the logic of those who would say that Dani was always a woman, merely one who was by an accident of birth born into a man’s body. Certainly this is the argument most advocates for transsexual rights would make. For myself, I am all for transsexual rights, but also believe that gender and sexual identity may be more fluid than much transsexual rhetoric would have it. In the end, I have continued to opt for clarity and reality as all of Dani’s friends and colleagues knew it in the 1980s: of her being the man Dan Bunten. Referring to “Dani” and “she” in these articles would be confusing to the reader and at least at some level anachronistic, opposed to the consensus reality shared by everyone around her. I understand that this decision may not seem ideal to everyone, and even that it runs counter to some journalistic style guidelines. If you disagree with it, I can only ask you to believe me when I say it was made in good faith, with no intention to slight. For what it’s worth, reports are that post-op Dani was never offended in the least about being referred to as a man when conversations came around to her years of living as Dan.
A wiser course to unhappiness. I volunteer to give up some rationality to gain some happiness. If I can get less procrastination in the deal as well, then that would be great.
If Steve replies, I'm bookmarking this :D
It's hard to say really about protocol. I guess whatever the legal name is (current or at time of death) is probably appropriate, but I wouldn't pretend to know how she felt about it without something written about that specifically.

She did have this to say about her transition though: http://web.archive.org/web/20110725030149/http://www.anticlo...
Google, Facebook, Amazon paying significantly more is a myth, even if you include all the "benefits" (most of which most of us would never use).
Why can't I update this comment. I keep trying to reformat and click "update" and it doesn't work.
HL7 is an abomination, and everyone involved in getting it into place and standardizing on a transport format and not a data or semantic layout should be punched in the face.
Please do bear with me .. 23:50 here and I need sleep.
It's your dream to be free than be. Hire new replacement for yourself. Create whatever position (CEO, Country manager etc) is needed.

Earn with no-calls enjoy your freedom. You deserve it man, it's your right and your universe.
You need to leave. I had a similar predicament before, and selling out was the best thing I could have done.

Confide in your business partner, and discuss with them the most graceful way for you to exit.

You're not doing anyone a service by staying. It's bad for you, and for the business.

For your next venture, consider your goal of maximizing your free-time, and focus on endeavors that will give you that. Personally I know I'll never be a Steve Jobs, but I can have a beer at 2pm! :)
"Yet the prospect of fine-grained, digital monitoring of workers’ behavior worries privacy advocates. Companies, they say, have few legal obligations other than informing employees. “Whether this kind of monitoring is effective or not, it’s a concern,” said Lee Tien, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco."

"worries privacy advocates"

You have to wonder how objective all these "advocates" really are.

I mean they most certainly must try pretty hard to insure they have a job and a cause by finding any and all situations where they can rally around this issue. Without respect for whether it is really a problem or not in a particular case. (I'm not saying it is or isn't it just bothers me that they pop up to make an issue out of everything).
They found violent movies decreased crime 5% or more on their opening weekends, and that each violent movie that comes out probably prevents about 1000 assaults. Further, there’s no displacement effect – the missing crimes don’t pop back the following week, they simply never occur.

This is a very naive view of the idea that violent movies increase violence in the population - the author is acting a little surprised that the results actually show that crime goes down a little on opening weekend and doesn't change from normal in the weeks before and after. It makes no long-term analysis of the baseline; the culture of having violent movies so prominent affecting levels of violence in the population. It just shows that violent people like to go to violent movies, not that the baseline violence is increased or decreased from those movies.

Reading over it again, the author is just guilty of bad journalism. The article he's quoting for this section is "Does opening weekend of violent films have an effect on violence rates?", which is a really very specific view, but is painted by the author as an incredibly broad "Violence In The Media Prevents Violent Crime". The irony is that it's the very first example given after a screed about how sloppy the field is.
Happenings in SUPERVERSE
Listen to Eiffel 65's Blue (Da Ba De) song and when you here this:

I'm blue da ba dee da ba die...

Think this for one pass through the song:

I'm blue,

I bleed, I will die, I be-lieve I will die

I bleed, I will die, I be-lieve I will die...

Now rewind and try NOT to hear that.
This experience reminds me of when I looked up my credit report the first time. You know, that 'free' deal to see the score and all.

Turns out I was unwittingly put into a monthly plan, after an undisclosed-as-trial period with no refund. In order to cancel, I waited for about thirty minutes for an agent, then said "No, I would not like to continue" for another thirty minutes. These guys were ran by Experian.

I wonder how "chargeback" would be received by such a company.
Life's too short to live miserably every day: Dani DiPirro
I'm not sure if refuting point by point will be seen as a sign of good faith, or getting bogged down in the details.

As you say multiple people have had similar ideas, including people such as LuaDNS.

That said:

1. If you check back you'll see my blog posts mention you, and LuaDNS, and others. But yes I've heard of you. e.g. The post previous to the one you link to says, in short "People will pay for Git + DNS" - http://blog.steve.org.uk/some_things_on_dns_and_caching.html - Which clearly gives the motivation, and before I saw you.

2. I guess we'll never know how that could have changed things.

3. Genuinely not intended to be anything other than the obvious thing that popped into my mind - I will absolutely get that changed in the next while.

As for the server falling over, it's a little heavyweight on the front-end, using some Perl CGIs, so the fact it died when having only 512Mb of RAM isn't a surprise.

You'll see that I've just setup both dns-api.org, and dhcp.io, both of which are handling decent amounts of traffic - and both of which are free. I hope that I'm capable of doing DNS stuff.

I'm glad your service exists, I'm glad you implement all the records, but .. apart from the word-collision I'm not sure that I'm doing anything particularly bad here.
"Great example of something good for the restaurant owner"

You could also argue that pushing desert is bad as well (sugar, fats etc.) Where do you draw the line though? What about the entire meal at the restaurant - it's not exactly boiled potatoes and steamed green beans.

Separately, something that is "good for the restaurant" is not necessarily bad for the patrons. The fact that people drink at a restaurant (or buy dessert which I'm told has a high profit margin) adds to the profitability and allows it to lower the price on food (in theory) and makes it a going concern. Also the check is higher so the tip (which the server makes) is larger so someone is earning a better living.
The issue with HL7 is absolutely correct. There are lots of solutions to this problem. My favorite is http://www.interfaceware.com/iguana.html

The issue with a truly shared electronic medical record is hugely important. Apple is trying to give the user the ability to have their medical issues listed so that they can receive proper care in the case of emergency.

I believe that Apple intends to integrate with devices that record health information. The problem that the author brings up is how to integrate this into the systems that hospitals are currently using to provide patient care based on the app's data. In other words, how can this data be transferred to the healthcare provider?

I believe that no third party solution can be implemented due to the fact that the largest EMR systems don't want to interface with their competition.
> Here's another way to think about this: imagine you invented the lever. The thing that allows you to move heavy objects you could not before, is the prior art of a log and a rock. The beam-and-fulcrum arrangement "only" tells the rock and log what to do.

I found a small rock and a stick and I told them to move a big rock but nothing happened. I think you need to do something more than communicate information to them to get them to produce leverage.

That's the fundamental difference with software. A computer takes an algorithm and an input and produces an output. For example, you might take an image decompression algorithm and a compressed image and produce raw pixel values. The important fact is that the algorithm and the compressed image and the uncompressed image are all purely information. It's the difference between knowing something and doing something. Computers cause information to be created, but information is not supposed to be patentable, and there is nothing else there to patent other than information.

> Non sequitur. Anything can be abstracted to an arbitrary degree. A very specific type of a screw with a very exact shape made of a very specific alloy can be abstractly defined as a "fastening component." That does not mean nothing is patentable.

No, but what it means is that if you're going to say "fastening component" instead of providing anything more specific, that should not be the only part of your claim directed to patentable subject matter.

> My point was precisely that the "abstract" that the court has in mind is very different from the "abstract" that we have in mind when talking about algorithms.

Even if that were true I'm not sure what it's supposed to prove. Algorithms are all different kinds of abstract. And as soon as you make them specific you're straight into mathematical formulas and laws of nature.
1. Good :)

2. What you call "lifting our copy" I call "Making the obvious comparison" - given the implementation. If it were a whole page, rather than one identical sentence, I'd be more apologetic.

That said I am genuinely sorry that this has caused annoyance, and I didn't mean to imply this was a genuinely new idea - just a new implementation of a good idea.

Hopefully this is .. better?

That
Ask HN: Please explain ("controversial penalty")
This article

http://hackflow.com/blog/2014/06/22/why-every-language-needs-its-underscore/

contains the following text:

> P.P.S. Please stop commenting on Hacker News, a controversial penalty is killing this post. Use reddit thread instead. Sadly, HN is not a place for discussions anymore.

I do not understand what he is talking about. In particular, what is meant by "controversial penalty". Explain?

BTW, the HN post apparently being referred to is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7927578
I agree with some of what this said. But disagree with quite a bit. Great point on the prize, having massive prizes leads to a startup demo day rather than a good hackathon.

Paypal does offer a $100k to the winning team at the end of their “hackathon season”, but does a good job of combatting startup demo day by having a theme like their current one, making an app for social good and checking to see all work was done during the event.

Disagree on sleeping rules. If you want to sleep, go for it. But to have rules that I have to sleep because you’re tired is ridiculous. We aren’t kids. Funny enough Paypal has sleeping rooms for those who want to sleep and they encourage it. When I competed at HackMIT they gave out an inflatable bed, penn apps gave out blankets and pillows. So many different hackathons help out with both energy drinks or sleeping its almost crazy that you want formal rules setup for this. Sorry but Id rather attend hackathons that are open and let hackers choose what they want to do.

Lots of college hackathons have lightning talks. They are great. Sadly not a big % of the hackers attend. I personally like to create and learn while doing. When I have questions i go to the mentors which is nice.
Don't spend your entire computer budget on a just a computer
ArrayFire looks very interesting, as a novice a drop in enhancement of the nn (or nnx for dropout) package for torch would be very useful.
I need to just say M.U.L.E. is profoundly brilliant. If you have not played it leave HN now and work out how to do so, play it, then come back. It is one of those games that teaches you about things, in this case economics, brilliantly indirectly.
Bronze and stone-age gods knew about the blood or meat of certain animals making you sick.
Show HN: scalable text mining in 300L of Erlang
I'm curious how much of the authors Go speedup was Go's typically faster single threaded execution or if it was from using Go's easy multi-threading primitives. Of course I imagine it was some ratio of both, but I'm curious about it.
$20M proof that the U.S. government doesn't understand incentives
Many of you will already be aware of this, so it'll come at no surprise. Recently, I received a packet in the mail from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The cover page explained that since I purchased a home in 2013, I was being asked to complete a survey about my experience regarding the mortgage application process.

Then I noticed a five dollar bill folded around the survey. Awesome!

Yes, $5 is small - so small it's practically insignificant. But then I decided to check some numbers.

According to census.gov, over 5 million homes were sold in 2013. Even if we account for 20% of home sales not using a mortgage/loan, that's still roughly $20 million potentially spent for this "small token of appreciation”.

But that's not what infuriates me. After all, $20 million is practically a rounding error in light of the U.S. government's total annual spending.

The thing that gets me is the fact that the cash is given before you do anything in response. Why would any rational human fill out the lengthy survey (which offers no further reward or even chance of reward) when the "reward" is given - either way - upfront?

What rational, competitive company would use this strategy (giving away money with absolutely no commitment or effort required) to somehow encourage customer response?

To be honest, I actually would have felt slightly more inclined to fill out the survey if no money had been included at all - merely out of a sense of respect for my country. Instead, the money is just a slap in the face and a proof of ineptitude by those sending it out.

It proves to me that the people running this show have no competency when it comes to incentivizing behavior.

And then there's the irony of this coming from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

(full text at http://pastebin.com/r7ZkeGbz)
ET Jaynes is the best! Read the whole book!

http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/prob/book.pdf
Image the absolute worst application of a technology that simultaneously benefits the rich and powerful, then dial it back slightly.

Seems to work pretty well.
You don't have to be against taxation in general to think a specific tax is ridiculous.

Ok, a 3.6% tax is fine, I agree. How about five 3.6% taxes? Oh, now it's just being ridiculous right? Except that's exactly what the tax creep ends up being when you have politicians drunk on spending just to spend.

The US tax code is a perfect example of how this works.