skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lost me at "we've requested funds to employ a bioinformatician for the lifetime of the project". More realistic is "I'll have a grad student deal with the data".

One of the local institutes just dissolved their bioinformatics group because they couldn't convince enough research groups to hand over grant money. They'd be part of the grant proposal in order to secure the grant, but then the money would end up being spent elsewhere...
Ask HN: Mid career tech dude looking for advice
Hi all - I created a new account to post this but have been on HN for a few years. I'm feeling very lost for the past few weeks and would appreciate some advice. About me: I graduated around Y2K and worked for large tech companies for a few years as a software engineer. I decided to get a PhD (did one in systems) and graduated around 2007. Since then, I did a 2 year post-doc at a great industry lab and have been at another major research lab until now. Though I've spent my career in research, I have experience building complex systems alongside other researchers. I make a low six figure salary (no bonus). Now that I'm in my mid-late 30s, living in the New York area, I find that my salary doesn't take me very far. I don't really see it increasing at my current job. I tried applying for software engineer positions and got rejections at every place I tried (8 so far). The problem is that I am like someone with 3-4 years out of school in my software engineering skills. While I have full confidence in my abilities to figure things out and build systems, my failure at interviews speaks for itself. I love tech but I can't start a family in a expensive part of the country on my salary (I should add we had some large debts that have reduced our ability to save. I'm mid 30s and net of debt have maybe 100K saved so far). I've considered getting an MBA and get a technology related job. I've considered taking a three week vacation to just practice coding and keep trying to get a non-research, software development job. I've also spoken to a friend who is interested in doing a startup (similar age/background) but we have no business experience, no good ideas that we can monetize and short run ways. I'm starting to get depressed. Would appreciate advice.
How to dress for meeting a client. Web Designer goes shopping
I believe Nilay moved to Vox.com some months ago.
I read that a bit more tongue in cheek. 'pretend' in a parody way rather than convincing, considering the picture adjacent to that sentence.
Wait, so are you telling me that in 3 years no one noticed that taxes weren't being deducted from their pay?
Quitting on the spot may feel good short term, but long term it may have unknown repercussions dealing with your reputation long term. If you can stick it out, I suggest telling them that this type of work isn't your cup of tea, but you do want to make sure they can transition successfully.

If you can suffer through 2 weeks, I say try to do it. But if you really really feel impelled to quit immediately then you gotta do what you gotta do.
My name is Tommy McGuire. I am unaffiliated with Maj. Thomas B. McGuire[1] or McGuire Air Force Base[2] or any of the other people on the internet who may or may not use the name "mcguire" or "T. McGuire" or anything similar.

Tl;dr: This is the world's smallest violin, playing "My heart bleeds for thee."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_McGuire

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGuire_Air_Force_Base
Yes, but people also die because someone miscalculates something in science. A totalitarian world will never be the answer to either problem.
How we handle Do Not Track requests on Medium
I take your point. The semantics to me aren't really that important. Good doctors who have made a lot of observations and read the results of many medical experiments and research are probably pretty qualified people. In a sense when they do "pattern matching" they are performing micro-experiments. They take in synptoms as data, draw out a hypothesis and then treat as an experiment. If the treatment is a success it proves their illness hypothesis.
App.net's problem was that it was a philosophy, not something that people would actually want to use.
Rehabilitation Nation
It should be fairly clear intuitively that at least roughly increments, that is, arrivals of points, are stationary in time and independent.

Far from it, insofar as the (time-dependent) solar cycle modulates the storm rate [1]. Besides there is some evidence of dependence between the flares themselves --strong enough to manifest itself in a complicated waiting time empirical distribution [1,2].

Be careful with the common --but nefarious-- habit of adducing stationarities and 'nice' distributions unwarrantedly. In the meantime, y-you are not allowed statistics anymore, sorry.

[1] http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~wheat/talks/fstats_agu_2005....

[2] http://researchcommons.waikato.ac.nz/handle/10289/1382
I'm not sure if they've ever had a good record for accurate technology stories. I stopped reading them sometime last year when I noticed how often their articles were inaccurate or just outright false for the sake of click throughs.
"I think I'm going to start blogging about our business practices in a couple years"

You should do it now! Why wait a couple of years? Even if you don't know everything now (who does?), I'm sure I speak not only for myself when I say I'm always interested in new ideas how to structure or run companies.
It's called a parable. The universe allows them, and evidently so does Nature. Why would you be ashamed of publishing a paper you worked hard on anywhere? Are you implying you believe others would be judgemental of you because the magazine ran a parable that taught a lesson about dismissal of a concept without consideration?
Does that mean phrenology is not coming back?
Multi Armed Bandit Power for Continuous Spaces!
Look, science, you can't have it both ways. You can't release knowledge into the wild and also keep it caged up under your control. It is no more possible than setting the barn afire then ordering the flames to go back into the lamp.

If you cannot tolerate the idea that everyone benefits from science done well, even including those who behave destructively towards scientific progress, then why are you doing science in the first place?

Screaming from the mountaintops, "No! No! You're doing it wrong! All wrong! You idiots! You morons! Stop what you're doing immediately and do as I say!" is not likely to help your cause. That is, after all, what people have been yelling at each other for centuries, even long prior to the development of modern scientific inquiry.

There may even be a branch of science that deals with social norms and cultural shifts, and perhaps the intentional guidance of groups towards given institutional goals. You could probably take the socio- prefix and append an -ology to it. Maybe ask a sociologist what usually happens when you strip a person of the ability to make their own choices, even if you are certain they are making those choices based upon flawed premises.

Applying force or coercion does little but change the portion of the behavior of a person that is visible to you. You cannot use it to change someone's mind, no more than you can make a person love you by smashing their ankles with a sledgehammer. You have to coax them to it, convincing them to change their own minds. But you can't do it for a non-rational person using only rational argumentation. It does not compile. You have to use other means to even get them close enough that argument will work.

You have to advertise. Use rhetoric. Flash some sideboob. Blow dragon smoke from your nose using cookies dipped in liquid nitrogen. Write a catchy jingle. Go viral. Write a hoax about cool teenaged kids getting electrotetanized by their musical Tesla coils. Get Bill Nye slimed on Nickelodeon's Kid Science Awards Show as he introduces the new Mr. Wizard, wingsuiting down to the venue from an orange zeppelin.

You have to make people want science to like them. And you're not going to get there by acting like a condescending know-it-all prick--even if you do actually know it all, and the other person is a clueless, drooling moron.
Thank you! Yeah I want to add this feature https://github.com/sbussard/bmc/issues/2 - I want it to be so helpful that I don't need the book next to me to fill it out well.
It's not a question of accommodation; it's about accessibility. The anti-vaxxers offered better UX for many who felt shut out from scientific knowledge.

The fault does technically lie with the common man in the sense that he behaves the way he does. But we KNOW that he behaves a certain way, and further we have the knowledge necessary to mitigate the effects of those deleterious behaviors and grant the people knowledge despite them. And yet many in the scientific community still refuse to take those psychological lessons to heart, preferring to blame it on "the willful ignorance of the masses".

When you continually run up against failure, blaming the object of failure is not a path towards solving the problem.
I can scream "Futurestack.io sucks balls" all day with no legal consequence. (HN would kick me off, rightly, for doing so in every thread.)

That's different than "pretend(ing) to be them", which are his words to describe what he did. Until that point, he had the moral high ground.
Taxes! It is never too early to setup something like xero.com and bring outside expertise.

Knowing how much money you really have is the most important thing to know when you run a business.

At ConferenceBadge.com I spent a few days automating our accounting process with Xero API and brought some help from Xenaccounting.com (Montreal firm) to manage our books. It really helped us bootstrap the company and manage or tight budget month to month.

Accounting dept (not knowing where you are) is really dangerous and stressful.
> Sensors in the station measure the dimensions of the vehicle.. The robot adjusts its arms to fit the new vehicle

I wonder whether they considered classifying the make/model of the car, perhaps using a simple computer vision approach, and lookup the dimensions in a database of known models.
I suspect that it was deducted from their pay but didn't end up getting sent to the IRS.
So now a company is required to have it in their name in order for it to be a 'back catalog', and since IBM doesn't have it in their name, the fact that they do a hell of a lot of work with older tech doesn't mean anything.

It isn't about any insult, it's about the absurdity of calling GoG a backlog at all. What impresses me the most about your response is how my taking issue with a misunderstanding in the first place is pigeonholed as being insulted (because how could anyone disagree on the basis of the argument itself! of course I must be insulted).
I'd argue that there is also a 3),

3) Other divisions will get envious and seeing no way to emulate you they will try and stab you in the back or in other ways sabotage your work.

Maybe they will fail, if you're that good and/or have great political skills. But it's definitely something that might happen, and you have to be prepared for, and potentially prepared to lose.
>It'd love to see BC companies do well and then die off, so that we get reforms in banking without the unnecessary cruft of an intermediate currency intended for nothing except standing in-between fiat transactions.

>If I just want to transfer some cash to someone, I'd much rather go directly through my bank (quickly and without fees) than route through another currency just for the hell of it.

You've made that point twice in different comments, and I feel it has to be addressed. Firstly, the inefficiencies you've alluded to here are inefficiencies of the traditional banking system. Secondly, and most important, bitcoin IS money, it does not always have to be converted to something else.

Bitcoin is not necessarily an 'intermediate' currency. For example, if a person receives bitcoin and a store they want to use accepts bitcoin, then there is no need for an additional wasteful conversion step. And what if the store's suppliers also accept bitcoin or some of their staff are paid partly in bitcoin? What if these people are in different countries? Goodbye foreign currency exchange fees, remittance fees, bank charges.

This goal may be unattainable, and the current situation is certainly far from it, but each time a company like Dell or Newegg announces it accepts bitcoin payments or a company like Bitwage builds some other part of the ecosystem, bitcoin becomes a little more useful.

I don't think being paid 100% in bitcoin will be a good idea for most people any time soon, because they would just have to convert the bulk of it back to fiat currency. However, receiving a small percentage in bitcoin is quite practical in some places. A person who receives Bitcoin in the US actually already has a huge variety of products and services available, without converting to fiat. For example, have a look at https://spendabit.co and try searching for random products.
> Roko's Basilisk and Roko's Infinite Blowjob Machine are equally probable.

I agree. So what would they be so afraid of? My assumption is that the LessWrong community tries to come up with the best system of thinking, so by proving (by presenting a situation which shows that the best system is flawed, since we may be slaves right now) means that there really is no hope.

As far as LessWrong in general, they share some controversial opinions but some of their concepts seem very interesting[1]. However, learning and especially thinking about these concepts does not appear to have any positive effect in everyday life.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/
They would fail. He's clearly used it has his personal trademark as a professional for years before they came along.
How do pilots manage to keep aircraft on centerline during taxi
Wanna see if we can salt-call the servers to spin-up on demand. O_o
So it turns out there are a lot of people in the world. Name clashes happen... all.. the... time!

If you're that pedantic about a pseudonym, get a trademark.

A mate of mine just 2 days ago had a 12 year old bug him on twitter to sell his twitter handle for $12. The kid has a terrible YouTube channel under the same name with plenty of videos 'tea-bagging' people in computer games and just generally being incredibly obnoxious. You know what my friend did?... laughed.
Employees probably paid their half automatically, but the other half is on the employers' books.

The employer's half is what is commonly referred to as "payroll tax."
Where did the Britney Spears thing come from? It's not in the article... or is it the generally accepted "football-fields-long" of age?
That would be a viable medical reason, and could probably be exempted with a doctor's note or some other documentation of a medical condition (at least it should be). That's not comparable to deliberately denying otherwise-healthy children the means to stay healthy and not die of horrible and easily preventable diseases.
Coinkite Has an Onion for Tor
> In the early days I would often let potential customers think we already had a feature they wanted

What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
Wow - "Oops, we forgot to pay payroll taxes for three years" isn't good. How does nobody notice that?

But lessons learned and all that. I can't stress enough (at least from having run a small business) that accounting is the number one thing to get correct from the get-go. It saves such an immense amount of time, money and stress later on.
Is there a way to recreate the typical red/blue poster effect using Mathematica?
Robert Durst: From riches to allegedly peeing on candy
The Bank of America payroll system we used was automatically withholding the payroll taxes from all of our paychecks every two weeks. It then just left that money in our company's bank account instead of sending it to the government because I never discovered the "submit tax" button.
You didn't get the point at all.

"You can't explain something,"

That's exactly not it. The doctor wanted to explain the facts, with the leaflet. Sacha wanted a simplistic assurance that wasn't possible, and refused point blank to have it explained to her.
> When The Verge launched, it was creative and full of interesting articles... and for the past 12-18 months, it's been pretty close to a "Cosmo for Geeks".

I've actually noticed the opposite for me: I've enjoyed the articles more over the last 6 months than I have previously.

It might have something to do with how I read it: these days I tend to read Verge on my phone, whereas I used to be more web-only. Their homepage has always overwhelmed me, so maybe the simplified interface has something to do with it.
Previous discussion, including comments from the game's designer:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6412780
Pretty sure that was said sardonically
How To Make Tilt Scrolling That Doesn’t Suck
At least part of the problem was the resentment that people felt about needing to sign up to paid service to keep their identity and follow their friends. Their was implied social proof in the very beginning but with a pretty big arm twist.
Google Glass in the workplace: the business potential
Chicken Pox used to be a seperate shot, and in the 80s there was a well-publicized round of them that were defective.

I got hit by that one... I got chicken pox at 15 despite vaccination, and it was miserable, I was on by back for about 5-7 days.
This is incredibly common behaviour amongst sales people. Or what is also common is 'oh, funny you should mention that, we have a team working on that feature as we speak'.

90% of the time it is fine, contracts tend to be organised for several months in advance, long enough for you to get a feature in place.
So you torrent the movies, host them on your own server, and share them?

Also, any plans for a Mac app?
The Humbling Reason Why It’s Vital that You Encourage Autonomy at Work
What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.

Your optimism is endearing, but the vast majority of companies I've done business with do this. Often companies I've worked for have, too – sales people are very happy to overstate the available features and capabilities of any product. From their perspective, a shoddy, rushed implementation to an unhappy client is still better than having them walk away from the purchase entirely.
Ok, fine, then you're not allowed individual sovereignty.
What are best practices in data management/reproducibility? The research that I'm involved in has typically used make & git at best, and more typically, hacked together Matlab scripts.
So excessively young CEO often indicates problems (ie no one else would take the risky job) maybe its time to short there stock
I like their status page!
Most of that last post is taking sentences I've posted out of the context of the paragraph they were posted in just so you can argue an unrelated point I never made to begin with. Of course I think old games should be preserved and of course I think source code serves greater perpose than just for academic curiosity. I never claimed otherwise and don't appreciate you claiming I did just to win an internet debate.

Also, I have reverse engineered games before. Albeit on a very small scale. I've also ported existing code on a number of occasions. I'm aware of the positives and negatives of both methods. Sometimes though, it's just easier to reimplement something than port old incompatible code to a new platform because the old code might have the graphics calls embedded in with the core game engine, and what not. Thus meaning that huge chunks of the core game engine would need to be rewritten regardless. Or in instances where the core game logic is written in 16bit assembly, so couldn't be ported regardless.

I'm not saying having access to the source isn't an advantage, what I'm saying is that sometimes it's not always as much help to the port as you claim with your generalisations.

Edit, freeing the art and sfx resources would be a massive help in almost all instances though
> People are rational, and want to understand, but unless you make the information properly accessible in the UX sense, your exasperation is due to your own fault.

This is not accurate. Have you ever tried to discuss evolution with a creationist? The US Civil War with a "The South Shall Rise Again!" sort (the kind that call it "The War of Northern Aggression")?

Many people are rational, but people are also emotional. They get emotionally tied to their particular views for a number of reasons, but those emotions inhibit their ability to consider and evaluate the alternatives in anything approaching a rationale frame of mind. When you're trying to explain a concept to someone that shatters their present world view, you're pretty much always talking to a brick wall. The only approach I've found successful is to hit them in those same emotions, and work back to the rational arguments. Or play the long game, whittling away at it over the course of months or years. But you can only do that for a handful of people.
The Olivia Dahl case is tragic. The fact that measles can progress to an invariably-fatal form of encephalitis makes for a valid public service announcement. But:

* SSPE (fatal measles encephalitis) is very rare. There are even better reasons to advocate for vaccination. Which makes this particular PSA only marginally valuable.

* The importance of vaccination is, to HN readers, pretty much self-evident. Historically, the threads stemming from these kinds of stories have not been been high-quality; a mix of anecdotal concerns about vaccination, apocrypha, and (mostly) loud, chest-thumping concurrence about the importance of vaccination.

If every PSA that resonated with HN readers had a home on the front page, we'd do nothing but discuss PSAs, with perhaps an occasional rant against Node.js. So, I flagged this story, and think others should too.
"Medicine is an inexact and continually evolving science and a good doctor should always be willing to talk over the options with you and engage with you on a level beyond just parroting the current recommendations."

Exactly. The doctor tried to have that discussion, and tried to explain the pros and cons. Using a leaflet is a good starter and basis for discussion, because it contains those facts and pros/cons. Much better than just making things up as you go.

Sacha refused to engage, refused to be informed, refused to inform herself, instead wanting a simplistic black/white assurance that this would not harm her children, an assurance which is not possible given the facts. The facts that Sacha did not wish to be informed about.
You don't own the name unless you file for a trademark, feel free to sue if you think otherwise.
Nilay is more likely than Topolsky to make the Verge a lifestyle magazine. He has a very limited taste in gadgets and I've never seen him broach technology topics in a very insightful way.

He wrote a bunch of aggressive 'state of the internet' op-eds that were praised, but they didn't seem to be anything more than popular rallying-cries for semi-knowledgeable tech enthusiasts.
Also, Britney Spears is 32. Should they have said the CEO is one year older, and the CFO younger?