skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't believe that in 2014, web development is still getting this mindless, indiscriminate bashing. The kind of web development you might have seen, or done, may have been simpler, but please don't generalize it to everything. Every field has its low ends and its high ends.

I'm generally speaking a web developer, I work in bioinformatics and I can assure you that what I do is not "simpler" than most other programming, please get over yourself.

Your microwave example actually undermines the point you're trying to make. If microwaves are indeed so far more technically advanced, why then is it so hard to upgrade them? I know it's a stupid question, but so is the point that brought it up.

I've spent 15 years having to justify the worth and quality of my work to non-web developers, a lot of whom I wouldn't even trust with the most basic programming tasks. That included some of my teachers at University (!), who not only undermined me all the way through my dissertation, but actually proceeded to steal my work and use it as a teaching base for years after. This was after they admitted that they could not, in fact, fully understand my work, mostly because they disregarded it for the longest time.

I'm pretty damn proud of being a web developer, and even though I do or have done other kinds of programming, I'll stick to web development, if only to prove to people like you that we, too, are programmers.

Rant over.
Your unnecessary URL changing trick completely blocks the use of the Back button.
The point of Bayesian optimization is that, once you've evaluated your first parameter setting (or round of settings, if you're running in parallel), you no longer have a uniform prior; you have a posterior: that evaluation gave you new information, and you should use that to be smart about where you evaluate next instead of just continuing with a fixed grid.

There's also an argument (http://jmlr.org/papers/volume13/bergstra12a/bergstra12a.pdf) that random search is better than grid search, because when only a few of the parameters really matter (but you don't know which ones), grid search wastes effort on scanning the unimportant parameters with the important parameters held fixed, but each point in a random search evaluates a new setting of the important parameters.

All this said, certainly grid search is way better than not optimizing parameters at all. My guess is that was the spirit in which this suggestion was made, so I wouldn't take it as a reason to discount the guy.
Yes the notion is that we can throw away the idea that everyone must be ranked on a single number line. Instead each person would see their own view of who is wealthy, who is reputable, who is a hard worker, etc etc. And depending on my values, I might disagree with your view of a particular person. So the currency is meant to reflect that.
I'll answer since they didn't. Kindle Select is direct publishing only, so they don't have another publisher.

They get paid based on number of their reads (that's anyone who reads >10% of their book) as a proportion of number of total reads across the library, calculated against a money pool that Amazon determines month over month and tunes to keep the program attractive.

More details here:

https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A3BQJE2QV37M1B#kll_calc
Ah, Ousterhout. Guess he's at Stanford now; he was a prof at Berkeley when I was there. He had an amazing knack for presenting CS in an entertaining (and, at times, hilarious) manner.

Best professor I ever had.
Part of the idea is the commercial relationships you have, while being fairly weak, are also a pretty good proof that you are a person and not a bot. So spending coins provides a different kind of basis for public key trustworthiness. Which when combined with the higher trust activity of minting coins with your friends, could make maybe a deeper way to map identity to public keys.
There are already a dozen of these lat/lon encoding schemes. Please go support/evangelize one of the existing ones before making a fourteenth incarnation.
Wow. I just need to figure out how to relay messages from my Ooma phone to one of these devices for forwarding on and good riddance to cell provider services.
I'm not sure I grasp your argument here. Jobs at places like restaurants are themselves "extremely poorly-paying" and "physically unpleasant" because of economic coercion and the power imbalance between employee and employer; the employees know that if they complain or refuse to come in on short notice, their hours will be given to someone else and they won't be able to pay the bills. Many women actually say they prefer sex work because it doesn't have these coercive power dynamics and they have more control.

You seem to be arguing that women who do sex work are under "economic duress" because the alternatives are so awful, therefore we should make it illegal, forcing them into back those awful alternatives. That seems backwards to me. Surely we should be banning the shitty, coercive minimum wage jobs, not the sex work women are choosing in preference to them?
It is much better just to embed yourself in the country of the language you want to learn. My Chinese was very bad when I first came to China back in 2002, but I really had no choice because English was not an option in most contexts.

In contrast, I lived in Switzerland for two years and didn't learn a word of French (well, maybe a couple): English was always an option, and I was busy enough working that I had not much time for self study.
Sure. And don't get me wrong, I write a lot of bash scripts. =) I think any logic beyond string replacement is probably edging out of where it's a good idea, if only because other people then have to read my stuff later, but it's totally fine for that. I'm saying more that I think Ruby (or Perl) make more sense than Python given the tools it provides.
That's very broad question like "how do you become good at basketball?". I emailed you some starting points. We can continue the conversation there.
Reminds me of the progression in Asimov's "The Last Question".
I mostly agree with you, but worry that trafficking vs voluntary aren't so much two different things but a continuum, and worry where we should draw the line.

That said -- and it's amazing how many people are so stupid -- it's very difficult to successfully ban transactions that are, if not morally voluntary (ie the whore could be trafficked), at least voluntary in the moment. The same applies to drugs, prostitution, and sex. As Bill Hicks said: We had a war on drugs, and drugs won. (Though most republicans don't even believe their own bullshit; the number that have smoked a joint or who look the other way when it's their daughter knocked up at 17 or their mistress or their wife is pretty astounding).
I'm on the fence about those semantics. I think we're splitting hairs here.

Is there honestly a profound difference between the two? If prostitution were legal, yet regulated, failure to adhere to the proper regulations could still result in the same consequences for the cases that criminal policing targets anyway. Does legalization mean permissible with documentation?

What are the specific results of "decriminalization"? Does it simply mean that it's classified as a lesser misdemeanor, punishable by fines and community service, rather than felonies plea bargained to trespassing, that result in years in county lockup after repeat offenses? Or does it mean ordinance violations for things like disordely conduct, that do not accumulate as serious offenses on an individual's arrest record?

Does decriminalization mean that certain parts of town don't get policed as much on the weekends, and cops look the other way, when it comes to certain hotels and drinking establishments?

Does regulated legalization mean solicitation goes unreproached even in broad daylight on a sunday morning on main street, so long as you carry your laminated photo ID card on your person, while you loiter near the gas station?

Does legalization mean that johns experience zero repercussions for patronizing regulated whores, while decriminalization leaves johns open to petty offenses where they still cannot patronize under any circumstances, but if caught no jail time will result?
This is awesome man! How did you get the idea for this?
Not necessarily, it can also describe the slope, based on the timestamp of the projects.

4 years ago I did this, I did this last year, last month I tried my hand at this. However, it requires the interviewer to have the skill to extract this information during the interview and recognise the slope.
NP != OS, until proven otherwise :P
> I work in bioinformatics and I can assure you that what I do is not "simpler" than most other programming

it probably is though ..
I'd like to point out that every green plant you see outside your window is getting its energy from pure electro-magnetic radiation! Which I honestly think is a cooler accomplishment. And I would argue that light is just as pure a form of energy as an electric gradient if not more so.

Yes, the fact that a there are bacteria out there doing this is really cool. However, the ridiculous hype science and tech reporter feel the need to put in their articles is just annoying.
As far as culture goes, I'd like to see mass archiving. I'm unclear whether what the Library of Congress does suffices, at least for the US, but a copy of everything should exist somewhere.

As far as personal access goes, I hear you, but that's how I took myself into near-hoarder territory with media.

I'm not too worried about subscription services becoming the only game in town. As long as some people will pay for permanent access of individual titles, or for value-adds like movie extras, someone will sell them.

The bigger worry is the yanking of the access to stuff you've "bought," of course. But I suspect the first time someone with power either gets hurt or even scared by a DRM-related action, we'll get some mass decisions that come down to "if it looks like a sale and acts like a sale, it's a sale."

You may or may not be able to resell or transfer it (legally), but I seriously doubt the courts will stand for someone arbitrarily taking it away. EULA or no EULA, there's a pretty fat implied promise there, and "buy" is used all over the place in language. That alone would be enough for the EU's courts to seriously hammer anyone who switched it up for "rent".

The early software-related decisions around owning "licensed" copies were in the infancy of digital licensing, and there's plenty of room for reversal there. The VHS time-shifting/personal backup decision is much more in line with what I'd expect the theme to be over time.

In particular, I expect format shifting to become legal as soon as a format shift or service closure screws someone with money/influence.

Right now, the only real-world examples are video game console libraries, and they just don't garner the same sympathy because everyone's predisposed to the idea that software ages out with tech shifts. It'll be when iTunes, Vudu, Amazon, one of those does it that we'll see action.
Maybe if I wanted to save my screen shots. I didn't want that behavior at all and it surprised me that it had access things outside of the well-defined folder I had already known about.
I'm not convinced that's how the split works - I don't think I've ever heard the phrase ".NET programmer", for example, and it was originally a desktop tech.

See also: "App developer", "Java developer", "mobile developer", etc.
Contrast: "assembly programmer", "COBOL programmer".

Also, this guy is the authority, and he was talking to desktop devs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE
One hopes that the graph of life is linear and not a differential equation path-dependent on initial conditions...
DashNotes looks great, if you'd like to use Diffbot to generate summaries of pinned links, I'd be happy to hook you up with some free calls. Hit me up at mike@diffbot.com
If you want to get an objective value shouldn't you remove the outliers from the data?

>So what?

So what is not that they took them down because sales slumped they took them down because they were using them to justify the types of numbers that you quote immediately following that.

>BitPay processed $5k/day in May 2012, $18k/day in Sep 2012, $160k/day in March 2013, $300k/day average through 2013, and now $1.0M/day.

These numbers. It's easy for them to pick and choose spikes in the data and report that.

> It does not matter if they are doing $500k/day or $1M/day or $2M/day

Then why do you keep going on about them doing $1m/day if you're not convinced yourself?

>Growth is here, which is why they got bit VC funding.

Definitely. In merchant adoption. VC funding could just as easily be a speculative bet that that merchant adoption will eventually convert to sales not that it already has. Beenz and Flooz got VC as well remember(the first one almost as much as all bitcoin vc so far).

Anyhow. We're circling around around to the same points and using the data to suit our own needs and arguing over a figure that doesn't really mean anything(number of transactions) since it can easily be inflated and because we can both use it to show our own views. At least we're not discussing my wallet accounts or coinbase accounts.

I'll ask again. Do you know many merchants who are seeing strong and consistent sales in bitcoins? What are they? Do they specialize in bitcoin related products?
I actually like the rental model for ebooks. The books I usually end up buying are hardcover anyway.
It's actually fairly typical for cults to rationalize and explain away their cultish behaviors. That's not to argue that the lesswrong group is a cult, just that it's not any kind of argument against it.
Show HN: Yo. with cats
Im also mechanical background.the reason i involve programing because wanted to build something like ( statical process control(spc))..now building own accounting instead.math is a must in accounting system like rule 78,calculate irr ,calculate depreciation..
Four Great Data Dashboard Platforms
My first language is Russian. But I spent so long outside of Russian language and culture that my language of thought and speech is English. Not a citation, but a confirmative data point.

Still, I feel that my English speech and thought lacks the nuances I get when my mind and my mouth switches back into Russian.
Yeah. The movers and shakers in software are always the big companies. But there are quite a few institutions that feature functional programming in their undergraduate curriculum.

One of the main gripes that people mention with functional languages is that it can be difficult to find developers. Several good universities are pouring out competent programmers.
> "But saying "programming is math" is like saying "biology is physics"; it might be true at some level, but it is not often very useful."

I agree and actually thought about making this analogy. I think some people like to debate these things for philosophical reasons, and this kind of hierarchy of fields is of interest to such people. Others seem to approach it from a more pragmatic and anecdotal perspective and often take issue with the classification of their field as, e.g. "math-based" or "language-based", as though it reflects on their talents (required or actual) as an individual.

The reaction of the latter group reminds me of pg's essay:

http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
Tony Hsieh's Yesterbox
I wish you good luck with your project, but your materials so far skirt over the difficult problems (collusion, botnets, etc) and just discuss the easy parts of building this type of system. Nonetheless, good luck, there's definitely a market for a quality product in the niche.
Prostitution is NOT legal in Thailand, it's just that the law against it is not enforced. If you want an example of a country where prostitution is actually legal you have to look at the Netherlands, where there is very little if any human trafficking. Nevada is another example. (And, by the way, I'm not a libertarian.)
I haven't RTFA or any of the papers but couldn't you perhaps add a different nonce to each copy of the file you want stored before encrypting?
What does you bioinfomatics code have to do with web programming?

To me it sounds like you have a bioinfo library that you've integrated with a website.

If your bioinfo code is actually mixed in with your web code then this is exactly what real programmers talk about when we trash web programmers.
For this commoditization to be meaningfully damaging to women (which is what the GP claims), it must cover both prostitution and relational/emotional sex. The kind of sex you have with a prostitute (legal or not) is substantially different from the kind of sex you have with a lover.
So this person was not only unaware that the algorithm was aad, they also were unaware that one algorithm oould be worse than another? Unless that second part is true, you juat have an employee making poor decisons. More aaths won't help with that.
shewys are typically in fairly carbon-rich environments, so the answer is "probably a lot of things", from acetate to glucose, to more complex stuff like waste nucleotides.

AFAICT, shewys don't typically have CO2 fixation capability. It certainly would be possible to engineer the pathway in and I think people are trying.

Note that assembling most simple carbon compounds, e.g. acetate, glycerol, etc. into higher order carbon compounds is not energy-positive (except for some sugars and fats with the concommitant release of CO2).
Incredible incredible stuff. It will be so massively niche for such a long time, so you must have faith, but if you do, one day it will be very very huge.
>The vast majority of programmers write webpages in something like PHP or Rails.

The vast majority of programmers write webpages? I seriously doubt it.
And the Gold Rush! I like original stuff like this. Sometimes, if I feel like pulling off my head when I have
to read about another App. Yes, I know this is a Programers
site, so I expect to read about New Apps, and Websites, but
there seems to be a plethora of Developers just looking for the next big payday? It seems like the only people getting
rich are the one's who market to developer masses, or if you
get lucky Mark might buy your App for 3 Billion dollars.(I
still haven't recovered from that transaction. I believe
they only had one vague patent?)
300 Ways to visualize data
Agreed, your improvement is important.
Programming is mostly engineering. You are rearranging abstracted units. Usually, you are piping data from point A to B, in which case there exists one algorithm to do that. Sure, some devs have deeper problems, but the majority of us are simply building data pathways.
Getting a grip on robotic grasp
Filecoin uses what they call "proof-of-retrievability".

The thing about proof-of-work is that it is a proof. Assuming that sha256d is unpredictable, you will on average have use a certain amount of energy to find a low hash value.

With proof-of-retrieval, the name itself is lying. There is no way to prove that a piece of data went from one person to another. It should be called invoking-trust-in-retrieval-and-proof-of-having-the-file.

Along with that, because hashes have the property of being irreversible, blocks can be hashed and the winner cannot change the block without doing work again.

Because of these properties, filecoin must use PoW (which their whitepaper states they do).

According to their whitepaper, you must first construct the proof of ownership in the file, then you perform the PoW with that seed.

This leads to huge economies of scale because the startup cost of mining at equilibrium will include storing an abundance of files (probably all of them).
Do you intend to release the specifications for the protocol you are using? For example, would I be able to hook a computer with gnuradio up to a MURS radio and write software that could communicate with a goTenna?
Let's race 10 miles. I run each mile in 5:59 and you run each mile in 6:00. You get a mile head start.

Whoops—this fable is only true "eventually", if the slopes remain the same as t→∞.
Building assert() in Swift, Part 1: Lazy Evaluation
Disclaimer: I prefer to eschew labels and categorizations as they lead to heated & mostly unproductive conversations. These conversations often serve to close minds by creating stereotypes and ossifying one's often incomplete perspective on the subject matter.

That being said, this article's main examples are programming applied to domains that rely on mathematics. Domains that don't rely on mathematics tend to have less mathematics.

Programming is (mostly) about creating automatable systems or automating processes. Depending on the process, mathematics may or may not be involved. It's easy to imagine a programmers going their entire career without encountering mathematics. I personally like to automate mathematics, however it's not "necessary" to be a programmer. Mathematics will make you more "well rounded" just like a liberal arts education would.
Also related, the famous xkcd comic on purity: http://xkcd.com/435/

As programmers, we use lots of techniques and where many hats. We sometimes do engineering, design, math, sometimes we are detectives (especially when debugging or coming up with requirements), sometimes we are writers and communicators.

That is why I react to "programming is math" so negatively; it belittles the other tasks that I have to do much more often than math.
Collateral damage?

If an 18 year old girl consents to prostitute herself, she isn't a victim of a "crime of prostitution". But if she was kidnapped as a child from her home country and traffiked to become a prostitute, she is considered a victim of the "industry of prostitution".

None of the crimes against her were prostitution. But the crimes against her were committed in the name of prostitution.
I didn't (and wouldn't) claim that programming "is" math in any literal sense. The foundations of software engineering are heavily derived from math, but a degree in software engineering isn't necessary for all forms of programming.

I only claimed that programmers rely on the math skills of other programmers, even if they are not aware of it. Somebody wrote the compression, search, and encryption tools that even ordinary computer users use every day. Game developers often rely on 3rd party game engines to do the heavy vector mathematics that they'd rather not reinvent.

So some programming is heavily based on math, and it is often exposed only as a library or service of some sort. As long as it sits quietly in the background doing its tasks, it won't be noticed much. Declaring that programmers don't need to know anything about math is, to me, equivalent to saying that abstractions can be counted on not to leak.
موقع تسجيل رغبات المرحلة الاولى لتنسيق الثانوية العامة 2014 tansik.egypt.gov.eg
Hi! This is the Market Economics Fairy! I can't tell whether this is just a case of the journalist not understanding what properties make for a good unit of exchange, or if the actual creator of the currency has never heard of the Law of One Price! But we should always suspect the journalist first because they have poorer incentives! Let me know if there's any link explaining what the point of this currency really is! Sincerely, the Market Economics Fairy!
OP stated that a person person who did not value reason would hate the writing.

I just stated the converse, that person who valued reason might easily hate the writing too.
Fantastic insight into what makes Alexis so uniquely great. I think this is spot on.
I use to play quite a bit and helped out on a few websites and heard the same thing from a lot of the pros(I tended to get bored and make stupid moves so never had a chance). Once its a job it loses a lot of the enjoyment but its hard to step away from something paying you $1K/day at 19-20. Even if you are grinding for most of the day and never having time to actually spend the money.
I'd love to receive some advice on this topic, Qasar, any chance you could forward me your pointers, too? Plenty of specifics I'd like to know, if there's potential for follow-up.