skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was a throwaway sentence by the article's author, one that perplexes me, because it has nothing to do with the article or Dr. Simon. It is a complex combination of usually disparate skills, all at a very high level, that allows him to do what he does.

I think Dr. Simon's point is not "if I can do it, so can you", but instead that the things we normally value, quickness in thought (see: whiteboard coding) really aren't the best or only measures of a person. The ability to organize talent in others, for example, or the willingness and curiosity to endless ponder on a question for a very long time, have payoffs. For example, Oppenheimer produced almost no new science after his early career, but his absolute brilliance at running research had an enormous impact on science, probably greater than his research.

For some reason we don't seek out that kind of brain. I don't know why. Is it because they are rare? I don't think they are. I see 'clever' people, and then smart people. The clever people dominate the meetings, make decisions, but often times it is the person brooding over a problem that sees how to better advance efforts. Can't implement a smart pointer off the top of your head, under pressure, in a interview? No hire. (this is something the friggin' C++ committee got wrong, for years, with auto_ptr). I see Ph.Ds chasing stupid ideas that will never be practical. Smart is good, but so is pragmatic, and seeing the 'right' thing to do, and doing that. They are different kinds of intelligence; we need both, but often only shop for the former.
Show HN: Disaster preparedness kit
We're back again.
You are appealing to emotion.

Elite athletes are already outliers within the human race however within athletics there are extreme outliers like Bolt and Phelps who have astronomically rare genetic advantages. To be representative they need to be discounted. Not even the Olympics is N number of Usain Bolts racing against each other. It is N number + Usain Bolt.

Donnie McFayden may have trained as hard as he thought he could. That does not mean he was in the optimum training environment, he apportioned his time correctly or he trained with focus required to be better than he is. His training habits may have become effective simply too late in his career (Maybe he took training seriously at 8 years old but his competitors (in team and other team) took it seriously at 4. Maybe he is absolutely outstanding but the team failed him.

The factors are numerous. It might just be he is unlucky; his coaches didn't recognise his brilliance or they played him out of position. The point is not why is Donnie not the absolute best in history. It is 'Can anyone with the basic requirements reach the level of playing international rugby with the right focus and training and luck - the answer is yes, yes they can.'

They literally just have to want it enough and have the resources (time, money, family, coaches) in place to achieve it.

Anyone can be a Chess Grandmaster with enough study. Proven by Laszlo who specifically taught his children chess in order to prove geniuses are made/trained, not born."

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200506/the-grandmast...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r

Also proven by the Williams sisters whose father decided* they would be tennis champions and worked them mercilessly towards that goal using any equipment to hand. Unless your hypothesis is that -

Two genius tennis prodigies were born with the gifts required to be a tennis prodigy and their father just happened to settle on the sport of Tennis? I think those odds are considerably more unlikely than "anyone can be a Tennis champion with the basic requirements and dedication which is what the Williams sisters had."
I was once in that situation, and I learned that yes, you do need to validate that others have the same issue and that they're willing to pay for the solution and that there are enough such people to make this a viable business.

The product I created was a tool for a small niche of artists (of which I was a part). It solved a major problem I had, and I knew that others had the same problem. I even ran it by a few other artists and they loved the idea. What I failed to validate was whether they'd pay for the service. As it turns out, most artists in this niche can't afford to pay even $18/month for a service, and they're just as happy using a manual alternative.
one or two out of how many? That's like Usain Bolt saying "if I can break the 100 WR, so can you" in a forum where Asafa Powell also hangs out.
I imagine statements like yours are why Google has the user base it does.

[Sscene. PM_Tech has phoned his truck driver father]

"*Yes Dad; just build a simple installer to get an email address. An email address...it's like a phone number but letters instead. You know...so the cable company can message you. Well I suppose you could just call them...I don't know, it might take a while to build. You will have to learn programming for a start. I know you are 56. Yes, it will cut into your time for watching sports. I know I am "good" at that "computer stuff" but some guy on HN said this is how you should get an email because he knows how to do it...OK. I will be round for the game. Love to mum."

FYI Any service I have to use that starts with going to GitHUb will be ignored unless

[a] I am trying to learn something from it
[b] It is 2048.
Looks interesting. We used to call them 'Product Cards' in an early prototype. Will have a look at this
While he's 'wrong' in the strictest sense that there might be someone reading who'll go on to make billions, anyone reading that comment and thinking "I will be!" is much more likely to be wrong. The chance of one person in a pool of thousands becoming a billionaire is a great deal more likely than any individual making it happen, even though both are very unlikely.

So probabilistically he's right.
Everyone has a vested economic interest in his own career.

Every industry has participants who are just in it for the money. But that doesn't mean some of those people are not also passionate about research and scientific integrity. On television, truth doesn't matter. All that matters is whether you can command people's attention.

Just like advertisements for prescription medication, the goal is not a direct sale. The goal is to convince the viewer to learn more from someone well educated in the field. And then get their money.

My hypothesis is that opportunities to challenge establishment thought increase as new sources of funding flow into an industry. For software, more funding means more startup failures, and more disruptive tech that somehow avoided failure. For research, more new funding means less reliance on the university hierarchy or government grant proposals, and enough new publications that not even Elsevier could possibly swallow all of them.
I find it extremely difficult to avoid interacting with Google products:
- a LOT of the web employs google analytics to track you
- very many of my contacts use Gmail, so perhaps the majority of my email ends up on their servers
- Friends take photos of me that are uploaded to Google+
- My home and car have been captured by the GoogleMaps surveillance van

I agree that it's important to distinguish Google vs. governments. But let's not pretend that you can "opt out" of Google's surveillance on you, even if you aren't using their products.

Edit: Let's also acknowledge that whatever Google collects, the governments have access to.
Not mentioned in the article, but probably familiar to others on HN, the Simons Foundation also supports Quanta Magazine (e.g. see their recent article about pilot wave theory [1]) and arXiv.org (an archive of pre-publication papers, mostly in physics and mathematics).

[1] http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140624-fluid-tests-...
The secretive billionaire who built Silicon Valley
Atomix Virtual DJ Pro v8.0
Look there https://creativemarket.com/angelo.studio/53883-FLAT-KING-One...
To any prospects, RenTec is made up of mostly PhDs.
New Practice Exams for AWS Certification
> Most modern games are not transferred over networks on a regular basis. The block chain is transferred over the network just about every time someone installs.

Like steam.

> Even using one of the torrents (which are way faster than syncing via the bitcoin client), this has to be done overnight on my home cable internet. If you're in a third world country, the time involved becomes completely prohibitive.

Third-world or not, if you live in a place with unreliable or slow internet, it makes no sense to run a full bitcoin node. Just run an SPV client like electrum - it's what most users should be doing today anyway. That way you do not need to download the blockchain.

Same thing for phones - all the mobile wallets I know of are SPV, and only use a few MB of storage.
I don't believe in some magic "market equillibrium mechanism" that always reaches some optimum and doesn't need intervention.

If people and especially employees, can screw other people, they will. Laws against slave and child labor, and women inequality in pay, are also some ways in which we introduced protections against those abubses. For some people those protections were "artificially defined" too (e.g "why take the children out of the labour pool and artificially inflate the value of adult labor").

>The same thing occurs when you artificially define minimum wages: home owners stop renting their properties because it does not make sense for them anymore.

The correlation doesn't make much sense. As long as there are people willing to rent their properties, they'd rent them. If anything, with people getting some guaranteed minimum wage, instead of being paid less, there even be more people that can afford to rent.

Or is the idea here that people would not be employed because of the strict miminum wage? In actual life I haven't seen that. It's more like employees are paying people less just because they can, than paying them less because they cannot afford to pay them more. Minimum wage at least puts a cap to that.
Until you talk to other people, you're rolling the dice. Trust your gut and go ask a bunch of people if they have the same need (and if it's going to be a paid thing, whether or not they'd pony up for it if it existed). If the answers come back positive, high five yourself and go make it!
Why would you ever need to convert a timestamp? You typically parse a timestamp like "1999-03-29 20:02:04 CEST" and return a number of seconds since a given point in time (e.g. UNIX epoch if it must be). The returned time is obviously +0000 == UTC. If it's not your language/os/software sucks and its no wonder your hair is on fire.
Reproducibility: The risks of the replication drive
> It's also impressive how well these games have aged. You can pick up any of these titles on ScummVM and still be entertained for days/weeks.

Yeah, but remember that when they were released, there was no internet, and you could get stuck for days/weeks on a puzzle you could not solve. That was sometimes very frustrating, no matter how good these games were.
Thanks, great to hear a different opinion. It is expected that giving access to Gmail is a concern for some and not for others. Luckily, there are many ways you can build out this area. Agree that the space has a lot of potential, it's currently very broken!
This is only a problem if the user structured their code horribly. The library handles HTTP requests, it should be on the edge of the architecture.

Side note: C++ is fantastic in this regard because it makes you suffer every time for excessive coupling. The compile/link times act as a recognizable metric that devs have an interest in minimizing, and the process of doing so produces better code. I love that it is ruthless in punishing poor design.
You love GOTO for as long as it takes you to find your love for the (almost always) superior GOSUB.
The Open Source Snowball Effect
> For those not in the know, Double Fine Productions was founded by Tim Schafer, who is ex-LucasArts and was lead on Grim Fandango and heavily involved in the Monkey Island series too.

Ron Gilbert was also involved in Broken Age, as far as I know.
Sounds like you last used ubuntu in 2006?
There's a whole book about this and its boring as fuck: http://www.amazon.com/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists-Work/dp/0307...

Everyone in the book sleeps, eats, drinks wine, and finally works for a couple hours when they can be alone. Later a little bit of opium.
Thanks for weighing in. It would be interesting if you could elaborate your thoughts a bit.
What if you had used a freemium model and delivered your product as a free app with IAP or ads and such? Or was the market too small in such a case?
The bit about the large repositories reminds me tangentially of something I read about Amazon: when tuning for performance, they don't look at, say, the median response time. They look at the 99.9% level.

If I recall rightly, their example was a customer searching their old orders. The customers with the slowest response times were their very best customers, and they wanted those people to have at least as good as an experience as the median customer.

That definitely change my attitude to performance tests: now whenever I'm picking metrics, I think hard the real-world implications of the levels I'm setting.
One of the things I appreciated with the Lucasarts titles was that they didn't seem to have as many obscure puzzles as the Sierra titles.

I recall getting stuck in King's Quest games for hours looking for something (or trying to type in the magic phrase [Seriously? SULEIMAN??]), whereas games like MI were usually more straightforward. The mouse interface helped things along somewhat, but Sierra games still felt too puzzley for my taste.
Absolutely can't wait to go home and try out the latest version of DF, which has been two years in the making if I'm correct.

Apparently the entire dwarf motivation system has been redone, so almost every aspect of the game will be changed. I am looking forward to all of the bugs, especially the ones relating to trying to wash difficult to reach areas with globs of sentient-fat soap.

I highly encourage anyone who likes extreme detail and gaming to check out DF. DF is probably one of the most creative and most fantastic games ever made, and certainly one of my top five games of all time. The learning curve is easy enough to climb if you watch a series of youtube tutorials and have a mentor to ask questions to. Once you've got the basics down and can build a fort without flooding it or having a tantrum spiral due to not enough rum, then the Fun really begins. The minute to minute can also be very entertaining. I laughed really hard when one of my elite militia captains went into a martial trance while fighting off an invasion of goblins and promptly gave birth to a boy while still swinging her axe.
Personally I feel like you could just offer them side-by-side until you wean off of one onto the other. But because there are no replacement protocols (at least that I know of) that have a chance to replace email who knows how feasible that is.

As a developer when I approach a system that needs to be completely redone to be improved I try to look at how to best accomplish the goals, work out an implementation then figure out how to best provide backwards compatibility because I'm always worried going the other way is going to hamper the final product. It doesn't have to but that's how my mind works.
> Some pools will prioritize transactions with higher fees, some will prioritize first come first serve after a minimum fee.

Are there really any pools that don't prioritise higher-fee txn?
Great bug, congratz!

I saw that request when going through iphone.facebook.com, but never tried anything there... I assume it worked on all x/mobile/m/touch/iphone.facebook.com?
Deep Learning, NLP, and Representations
What if a competitor has already validated the market for me? For example, they exist and have existed for a few years, but still don't service my need. Is it valid to assume I can attack their market share?
Start a temp agency and rent out other people's labor by the hour?
> Something is going on in the languages I mentioned - and from my perspective, distinctly isn't going on with any Lisp (including Dylan or Clojure), isn't going on with the array languages, and mostly isn't going on with Erlang. So it's not a functional language thing by your definition of a functional language

Um, no. Lisp and Erlang are still functional. They have always been and will always be functional. The definition of that word has not changed. You seem to want to redefine "functional" to make Haskell the end-all and be-all of functional languages, but that's just not how it works.
> The correlation doesn't make much sense. As long as there are people willing to rent their properties, they'd rent them. If anything, with people getting some guaranteed minimum wage, instead of being paid less, there even be more people that can afford to rent.

Wrong word used up there, it was not "wages" I was refering to, it was "rent prices".
How many current dead links are pure spam and/or harmful?

[dead] Atomix Virtual DJ Pro v8.0 (forumarabia.com)
[dead] [video] Soccer Players Need to Toughen up (youtube.com)
[dead] WTF Is An Algorithm? (nodemotion.com)
[dead] Using Nested Sass Maps for TypeSetting (elijahmanor.com)
[dead] Apple vs. Facebook: What Signals Do Industry Giants Send to the App Market (appdevelopermagazine.com)
[dead] Nokia Lumia 1520 Video Playback Review (encoding.com)
[dead] Build Your Brand By Embracing Your Personality (startupprofessionals.com)
[dead] Retail shop without a mobile app? Think again (bit.ly)
[dead] Sitemap Tips: Planning, Implementation and Optimization (imforza.com)
[dead] Success Story: Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) (wealthygorilla.com)
mtl has been around for a while now and using any the monads from the mtl transformers library is very inferrable, although like any inference it returns the most general type possible and it's generally just good practice to forward declare the type.

example = do
a <- ask
modify (+ a)
b <- get
tell [b]

GHC correctly infers:

example :: (Num s, MonadState s m, MonadReader s m, MonadWriter [s] m) => m ()
Police Investigating Star Tech CEO Over Multiple Rape Allegations
Developing Cross-Browser Extensions
Rethinking money
My problem with stumbleupon is that while you may get many visitors (in the thousands per page), I noticed that very few - if any - actually cared. Did some analysis on it and I wouldn't use SU again: http://ssdpress.com/when-it-comes-to-blogging-readership-its...
This is great for systemd integration! http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/socket-activation.html
Over a suitably finite series a person with more practice will beat someone with less practice.

In actual fact, studies have been done whereby sports athletes with greater levels of practice were asked to play less accomplished opponents whilst carrying out a simultaneous task unrelated to the sport (foot tapping X times in a minute, mental calculations) etc.

Even under a completely new cognitive load the atheltes were so well drilled in their sport they consistently beat amateurs who were focusing on nothing except trying to win.

Soldiers can do similar feats regarding drill and drivers do similar feats constantly. An accomplished driver can navigate a busy and hazardous environment whilst listening to music and daydreaming whilst a newer driver will struggle even if solely concentrating.

People who practice less very very rarely ever beat those more practiced and even then environmental factors are likely playing a massive part.

Once again, native attributes are largely myth. Barring disability almost all humans start on a relatively level biological playing field. The true modifier is self determination and environment.
Well, the Navy SEALs are taking applications. And it's not that difficult to get in, if you're determined enough and in a healthy condition.

People on HN work in ever more prestigious and/or difficult to get in companies that this.
My tone is not intended imply necessity -- more that several of those figures ARE in fact parents. Darwin and Dickens both had 10 (10!!!) kids. I'm not interested in a discussion of good vs bad vs absent parents, I was trying to point out the kids and parenting are a significant time chunk.

I'm sure that we could go through the list of "creatives" here and enumerate the progeny for each one. In the way that the viz breaks down various other categories around "creative work", I jokingly suggested that a parenting vector is also warranted (though obviously impossible to produce) given that many of these figures had kids and in significant numbers.
Some of the highest quality science journalism I've seen.
Tim Cook vs. Steve Jobs: management style differences explored
Apple Patents A Way To Make All-Glass iphones, ipads, Monitors And Tvs
A block is not an anonymous function. Try using `return`, `next`, etc... in an anonymous functions. Ruby has anonymous functions, they are called lambdas.

I'd say that blocks might be easier to grasp for a true beginner that hasn't been "contaminated" by the notion of anonymous functions as fundamental objects.
Using Phantom Types in Haskell for Extra Safety
Another sorting oddity: you can't correctly sort proper names in Danish without knowing if the name is a Scandinavian or foreign name, e.g. via some big lookup table (or maybe heuristics). If it's a Scandinavian name, 'aa' is an alternate rendition of 'å' (retained mainly in proper names), and is sorted after 'z'. But if it's a foreign name, 'aa' is just two 'a' in a row, and is sorted at the front. Therefore the city of Aalborg goes towards the end of an encyclopedia, but the city of Aachen goes towards the front. Also the case with personal names, e.g. Kierkegaard (a Danish surname) is sorted as if it were Kierkegård, but Haas (a German and Dutch surname) is sorted as H-a-a-s, not H-å-s.

On the other hand, people are getting more used to just sorting 'aa' as 'a-a' rather than 'å', because many computer systems do so. Encyclopedias still use the traditional sort order, as do hand-ordered lists of people, but if you get a printout of students registered in a course from the registrar, it's pretty likely it'll be sorted the way an English speaker would expect. Either that, or the reverse: the computer might use a collation method where all 'aa' pairs are treated as an 'å', which isn't quite right either, and maybe actually more confusing.
By all means believe and cheer. As we can observe from the sports industry, people like having things to believe in and cheer.

But if you are somebody making business decisions based on sunshine and rainbows rather than the observed failure rate of startups, then please make those decisions with your own money and your own labor.

Because otherwise, you will end up creating a bunch of cynical employees and investors.
Not many painters or visual artists mentioned... mostly writers and composers. I've found that, as a painter, I get most of my work done late at night -- and so do many other artists I know. Just another 2c...
Here's the paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1552526014...

Re your comment: "accuracy 87%, sensitivity 85%, and specificity 88%"
Maybe they should classify as exercise throwing stuff around in a rage when you're interrupted.
Slackware has always used BSD init scripts and it's one of the oldest distros. You used to be able to choose any init system you wanted but it seems that systemd is becoming entwined with "Linux" in some nasty ways. I wonder how long Slackware (or any other distro) will be able to avoid using it since software like Gnome is starting to require it.
Why not? Human beings can be taught to think mathematically through practice. Language learning is practice.
Tools: dlvr.it, bufferapp.com, ifttt.com
Muscle-Powered Bio-Bots: Soft biological machines take a step forward