skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This type of argument does not explain how to solve hard decisions, it simply says that if you know impact of each choice is similar, it is a simple decision.

There are endless ways for a decision to actually be hard. One is where the type of impact between options is different and difficult to compare. The difficulty may arise due to: uncertainty, complexity, lack of knowledge, value judgements, brutal trade-offs etc.

i) "Should I stay to treat to the ebola victim or leave with my family?" is hard because it involves value judgements, predictions, risks. It questions who you are.
ii) "Should our startup be tightly integrated with facebook?" is hard because the potential impact is massive and requires substantial investigation to understand.

The very attempt to compare options can involve costs and feedback loops e.g. should I pay for an investigation, should I prototype this, should I wait for more info etc. The actions you take to compare options can change the available options. A single decision becomes a nested web of other decisions.

In the most general sense, making a decision is like devising a strategy. Is creating a good strategy easy or hard?

p.s. I'm working on this problem
Three days ago I had the most amazing experience playing in playback theater for a room full of (~100) grownups of the autistic spectrum (living in hostels in the community, mostly with high verbal skills). The stories they chose to share were about couples. A loss of a lifelong partner, I want to see my best friend every day. I remember a story of a young man (in his twenties). He was advocated by his girlfriend to go up and share his story. She didn't talk but her body language was very convincing taking his hand waving it up in the air, smiling, looking directly at the host. He was very shy, and the host decided that it was not that she was pushing him to do something he didn't wanted, but that she was in some way representing him, and that shy people should also get their chance of telling their story. It took a while to understand his story, but in a nutshell her parents invited them (for dinner?) , and his parents did not. He couldn't answer some of the questions (such as what did they do at her parents house), so the host and him stood up hand in hand walked to his partner and she somehow helped him to feel good again (I think she said it was dinner, but they had this connection that was more than that). We played-back the story on stage (improvised play) in which they meet at work as they do every day, and then he talks with his parents over the phone and they invite them over for dinner. I can't describe the joy on his face. He no longer looked down, he was so happy. We were so happy! After the show, we met with one of their instructors and he explained to us that they rarely if ever get a chance to tell their story to someone that would actually listen, not to mention see their story on stage. After the show ended I went outside of the building to take a taxi and I felt in an instant how the war depression is weighting on me again (I'm from Tel Aviv/Israel everyone is depressed from the endless blood cycle). And then it hit me, that for the first time in a month, I was in a room with people that weren't depressed by the war. We are coming back a few months from now to another group and I can't wait.
I'm pretty surprised that that was made with like 200 LOC.
Open edX -- REMOTE (Worldwide), OpenCraft

Consultancy specialized on the edX project, and hiring to handle increasing demand. edX is a free software project, used by various universities and companies to run online courses. See edx.org, class.stanford.edu, france-universite-numerique-mooc.fr for examples of edX instances.

It's a large Python/Django codebase, with good code standards and architecture (a lot of the edX engineers come from MIT). You would work on different clients contracts using the platform. The clients list/references include Harvard, edX themselves, the French government, and various startups & universities currently running their own instances, or looking to create one. Tasks are varied, from developing custom features for specific courses (XBlocks), customizing instances, developing generic platform features, deploying instances, working on both client/server sides, etc.

A large part of your work would be published as free software (edX is released under the AGPL license, which requires clients to release modifications under the same license), and you would also contribute to the free software project, pushing some of your developments upstream through pull requests, contributing features, documentation or help on mailing-lists.

You would be able to work remotely from where you want, as long as you have a good internet connexion. : )

Stack: Python/Django, Ansible, AWS, Debian/Ubuntu, JS, HTML/CSS, MySQL, MongoDB

Applying: Email jobs@opencraft.com with: your github account, a short explanation of why the role interests you (no formal cover letter, please :) ) and a list of links to free software contributions you have made.
This one worked for me, the previous one didn't. Weird.
I would love to know also. I believe (gut, hunch, intuition) that it's an idea who's time has come of age. All we need are the right models, the right models are the hard part when it comes to society because you have to model the Earth's resources and geography and whatnot (society's environment) as well as take into consideration that the individual actors in society are autonomous sentient beings.

I'd like to know who besides Azimov talked about this in the past.

I think it would be fascinating to be able to predict the chance of political or economic instability or what have you.

A lot of people are resistant to this idea because they feel humans are either too special or too complex to model in aggregate, or at least their (our I mean, giving my robot self away there) interactions are.
I'm in the same boat, I was always looking for a way to get notifications when a new movie from a certain director or with actors I like is available, get a list with all the movies they were starring in or just get notifications if a movie produced in a certain country is available.

Ironically the solution which works best are the notification settings from Gazelle [0] based private movie trackers.

I blame the lack of sites offering this feature on the very restrictive IMDB API which isn't exactly fun to work with and expensive to get access to if you don't want to work with a dump which doesn't even include the latest data.

[0] https://github.com/WhatCD/Gazelle
I agree, some kind of permalink would be neat so it's possible to bookmark a selection you want to go through later.
maybe you want to reconsider lying in the description?
Trends like - What's the latest skills on the rise int he Job industry? What are companies actively looking out for?

Trends probable job candidates (active and passive) could use to improve their skills. Especially candidates who are not immediately looking for new work - but eventually want to.
One more thing - here's our repo if anyone wants to play with contracts with external inputs: https://github.com/orisi/orisi
I almost didn't even want to comment on this, but it really isn't a big deal. It looks like a screenshot taken out of context of someone who sent a private message asking someone to look at my account.
Adding some for context to the question since it sounds a bit vague - We were thinking of how we would improve the quality of conversation between job seekers (active and passive) and recruiters.

So Recruiters could share Trends like - What's the latest skills on the rise int he Job industry? What are companies actively looking out for?
Trends probable job candidates (active and passive) could use to improve their skills. Especially candidates who are not immediately looking for new work - but eventually want to.
Bitcoin ideas worth pursuing
Back in the day, crosstool was a solid way to build cross-compilers:

http://kegel.com/crosstool/

I haven't really kept up with the latest stuff, but I've seen mentions of crosstool-ng, which may be a newer take on it:

https://github.com/diorcety/crosstool-ng

So, no, it's not next-to-impossible. It's a little complicated, and that's why these projects exist, but my memory of crosstool was that it made it trivially easy: run the script, let it compile for a bit, and voila, you now have a brand-new cross-compiler toolchain.
It has been seen over and over again, that people don't want and don't care about decentralized systems. Major problem is that decentralized systems are basically mobile hostile. Some companies have used these solutions to limit burden on their servers, pushing to burden to clients, which are then unhappy about it. Clients can consume a lot of cpu time, memory, disk space, disk access, cause lot of network traffic, be potentially used to generate DDoS attacks, or malicious traffic etc. All are great reasons why not to use decentralized solutions.

Zero Configuration is also basically impossible because you have to bootstrap the network some how. Fully decentralised solutions still require bootstrap information. Which is unfortunately hats enough for many and therefore works add efficient show stopper.

Last nail to the coffin is that most people really do not care about security at all. User base is after all just a small bunch of delusional geeks.

Otherwise something like RetroShare would be widely used.

I've been considering and wondering these same questions for several years. Btw. About bitcoin style messaging check out bitmessage.
Hey that look awesome! It's been a while since I last tried Emacs (I'm a vim on Windows user) but I will definitely check this out.
What do you mean by "settled on just doing it in-house using downloaded data”? Did you build your dataset completely by yourself by parsing data from Google and saving it?
so... if you have trouble walking, and get cranky in your old age, you have a greater risk of developing full-onset dementia?
If you like this, then you'll really like the series currently running on the BBC about the crossrail excavation - they have some great video of the TBMs in operation.

http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/articles/the-bbc-goes-behind...

If you are in London, you might also like the Brunel Museum which is at the end of a tunnel under the river which was hang-dug using a human powered TBM. You can go down into the Rotherhithe shaft which was the staging post for a lot of the digging. The museum itself is pretty small but the guided walks are great.

http://www.brunel-museum.org.uk/history/the-thames-tunnel/
Yup. The concept of a blockchain is fundamentally incompatible with external inputs. That's because at any given moment you need two things:
- everyone to agree that the new block is valid (and you can't really do that if blocks contained functions that had to be verified with external/changeable outputs)
- everyone has to agree that all the past blocks were valid, which is even harder, because if blocks referenced external outputs, the sites/sources they relied on may have changed

That's why not only Bitcoin, but also Ethereum and all the other blockchain-based currencies need oracles for passing external inputs in.

By the way, here's our repo, if anyone's interested in the whole concept: https://github.com/orisi/orisi -- there are tutorials there explaining how to set up an example oracle, and an example client sending stuff to oracles to sign.

There's also one of the core devs explaining this stuff: gavintech.blogspot.com/2014/06/bit-thereum.html
Yeah, I don't think paulsutter's post holds up to much scrutiny, except in the limited case where you have to make a decision immediately, or in the near future before you have time to do any meaningful research or calculation on the problem.

A problem is difficult when its potential consequences are serious and the best option is not obvious. But the best option can be non-obvious for two very different reasons: either it requires a lot of information and thus a lot of work to gather that information (like choosing a medical treatment), or it depends on randomness or other variables outside your control and understanding (like choose your lottery numbers, assuming someone gives you a lottery ticket).

For the latter case, it's pretty clear that you can choose randomly and shouldn't worry about your decision. For the former case, it's reasonable to "worry" in the sense that you should feel an urgency to gather the required information efficiently. Of course, it's not really that simple, because you have to optimize the cost of gathering information against the potential cost or gain from the decision itself. Also, the two reasons from the last paragraph are more like a continuum, because "randomness" is often effective randomness, i.e. you can't feasibly predict the outcomes despite them being deterministic.
>a prospective doctor would be capable of getting a top paying job if he decided not to go to medical school.

This is not strictly true. To make an analogy, a marathon runner is not the best athlete for cycling, and most physicians would make lousy engineers. The biggest advantage of the medical profession is how secure it is relative to other highly skilled white-collar jobs, where climbing the ladder is a much less certain endeavor than medicine is.
http://www.bungie.net/en/Clan/Post/163975/67243879
Submit my first open source game to Google Play
Hi,
Just published my first open source game at the Play Store,
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.carlosvillu.invert

Here is the source
https://github.com/carlosvillu/Invert-mobile

:)
Start with something easy and fun. Don't worry at all what it is. Give yourself time to build up momentum again.
The GitHub API is extremely robust. You can export issues, including comments etc. to JSON with a script that will take you maybe 10 minutes to write, max.
Unfortunately "big engineering" is 10% fun and 90% filling out paperwork - and with a few exceptions the paperwork part is the only bit that offers any career progression.

Documentaries rarely bother filming the 200 guys who spend years working in office parks on P6 plans and CAD models to plan everything to the Nth degree!
Thanks for this. The gist of the talk is that each hard choice gives us an opportunity to shape who we are and decide who we want to be. Hence we should look at hard choices that way and not shirk away from them.
Work around for the limitation of the Default SMS App in Android
If you're curious about the subject, you might want to watch one of our (Orisi.org) tutorial videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boPW1FwNu4c . It's a part of a longer tutorial available here: https://github.com/orisi/orisi , and a part of the system described in this whitepaper: https://github.com/orisi/wiki/wiki/Orisi-White-Paper

As for your question - it really depends on the way the contract is structured. In theory you could have a 2 of 3 signature address and a timelocked/nLockTimed transaction sending money to an additional arbiter if the time passes without a resolution.
I suppose I can reluctantly agree with that, although self-reported happiness surveys and all other attempts at interpersonal utility comparison are problematic. But even if I agree with that, what's the conclusion? Surely the people with horses become less happy when cars come into existence, at least until they upgrade to a car. So unless you can ban or otherwise prevent any new technology from being created, I don't see what meaningful conclusion or recommendation can be made from this claim.
Well, except it did accomplish one key goal. Before Goole hangouts, Google could only estimate the identity of its users. Now, it knows exactly who you are.
And also there's the "click farms" where they have millions of fake profiles for selling likes and build followers.

Facebook estimates that between 5.5% and 11.2% of profiles are fake [0]. With 1.32 Billion user base that means that up to 134 Million user profiles are fake.

Someone is going to earn A LOT of stellars soon.

Talk about fair distribution... this has been a dumb move by the stellar team. Ethereum guys have been smarter in this one..

[0] http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2014/02/03/facebook-estimates...
E-Ticaret Siteleri
The danger of a proprietary centralized service is directly proportional to how irreplaceable it is and how difficult it is to get relevant data back out. By this measure, GitHub poses very little threat.

Because it's DVCS, the code already exists on the author (and likely dozens of other users') machines. With the change of a remote GitHub as a source host can be effectively replaced.

When it comes to the non-source-hosting capabilities of GitHub, sure they're proprietary but they too can be replaced. GitHub has gained dominance in the open source community because it's very good at what it does. If it ceases to be the best place to host open source projects, people will stop hosting open source projects there.

That being said, the authors of awesome open source projects have zero obligation to put their stuff on GitHub if they don't like it. They just might miss out on contributions of members of the community who don't want to jump through extra hoops.
Yes, but we wouldn't have cars or 1080p in the first place. Why would you develop 1080p technology if you were perfectly happy with 480p? Who would support your research and business by purchasing a 1080p tv, if they were already satisfied?

I never said any of this technology enhances our level of happiness. I just said as a species, being constantly unhappy could be one of our greatest strengths. Otherwise, we might be sitting in a cave, smiling at each other until an asteroid removed us from existence.
Excellent. "Offline" equals "safer".

Have you considered a detailed writeup on the risk profile someone would have with and without Key Lime Pi, considering things like hardware failure, theft, loss, user error, general or specialized malware infecting that SD card stuxnet style, backdoors and weaknesses in the various hardware and software parts etc.?
Samba 4.x affected by a remote code execution attack
I think it's naive to assume that simply making a random decision would remove or reduce anxiety. Anxiety doesn't only come from the fear of regretting your decisions; it also comes from the fear of receiving a negative outcome, even if that outcome was "chosen" by a coin flip or a third party. Hence people are anxious to receive news after a job interview, or a call about a loved one's medical condition, despite both having nothing to do with their own decisions.
Section 6 is an interesting incidental discovery of a performance regression in the scheduler due to the gcc->llvm switch (a missed inlining opportunity), which when fixed should provide a speedup on quite a bit of high-thread-count code even if it doesn't otherwise hit any of the performance problems postgres had.
I don't think encrypting an email address would create any issues. In fact, if I was to provide a service, I'd save the hash email address for easy authentication (ie hash the email given during a login and compare with the hash you have) and one encrypted version of the email address so I can use it if needed (to inform the user or whatever).

I started getting a lot of spam about one month ago too and even emailed LastPass a bit angry. But this Mozilla incident could well be the cause of the spam...
July Top links on CD, DevOps, AWS, Docker, Ansible, Monitoring, PaaS
"How people think about FB?"

They think about it with their brains. Brains are the ONLY part a human CAN use to think about ANYTHING. And if this wasn't what you were asking, maybe you should learn what the fuck the English word 'how' means, because apparently you just don't get it.

Damn foreigners, don't you have your own language to abuse?
C'mon people, are you looking for celebrities or good software engineers? Consider removing all those open-source and book authoring pitching requirements and I might consider applying in case you're as well ready to go above the upper limit without ticking any boxes...

Thanks.
> anything even remotely close to mainstream: Node, Rails, Grails, Django, Flask/Pyramid/Pylons/Whatever-it's-called-now, Scala+Play, Java+Spring MVC, Whatever-Clojure-uses, etc

The etc covers Go based servers nowadays. PHP backends are still fairly common, and maybe even Perl 5 is still used.
I think that the concept of "Zero Knowledge Centralization" is the key novelty of this article.

If the (sufficiently small) centralized parts can be made so that they're oblivious to the content and can't discriminate it; if their only practical choice is to work or not work; then most of the disadvantages of centralized systems go away.

Sure, you might disable such a system by destroying the centralized nodes; but it does prevent using them for the much more likely risks such as censorship or MITM attacks for eavesdropping or impersonation.
ORM Stands for Object Relational Mapper. ORMS are software packages that map objects (class instances) to relational database tables (among other relational structures) and vice versa.

So maybe I'm nitpicking here but this project is not an ORM. There is no relational database here. Also it doesn't do joins, doesn't instrument attributes, makes no effort to convert object hierarchies to flat tables, etc, etc.

This is a (de)serialization library for google spreadsheets. Not much different from a CSV, XLS or even html table (de)serializer.

It's a nice hack though and certainly got its uses.
Ask HN: Google+ Pages API Partner Program process
Hello, am wondering if any HNers have applied for the Google+ Pages API. What has been the process? Is it easy or do they charge money etc. I have a new site in which I would like to use it. But am not sure if I should wait till it gets a little recognition or just go ahead and apply. Your experiences will be helpful. Thank you.
Explanation: where is it? How fast can you doodle? Can you train people to improve their doodling? Does this improve memory? Can you doodle concepts like a random forest?
QEMU 2.1 is out
I take issue with the authors use of the word "patch". He's not actually patching the DLL, just decompiling and recompiling which are quite familiar for most programmers. There might be some black magic associated with this particular DLL that we non-.net programmers doesn't understand.

I would personally be very careful with the recompiling dance, at least in other languages, as alignments and such might come out of place. A patch feels much less dangerous if this is something that is to be deployed.

(I always also try to rig such builds so that the build bombs if the dependencies change. That way it doesn't survive version changes without forcing someone to take a long hard look at it.)
> Lipowski thought of Buridan’s ass: an apocryphal donkey that finds itself standing between two equally appealing stacks of hay.

> ...

> While Lipowski’s work received some immediate wide attention, it soon fell into relative obscurity.

> ...

> Schwartz would then popularize and rename as the paradox of choice

No wonder. It's so much easier to be told that you are experiencing a paradox than to be told that you are behaving like an ass. Buridan’s or not.
This article focuses on the choice you have as a consumer. Which brand, which flavor, which stack of hay?

But I observe a similar crippling effect when working on software. Every step along the way of producing a software product involves making an incredible amount of choices. Choices like, 'what platform?', 'what programming language?', 'which algorithm?', etc. I believe that the the freedom we have as a software engineers forces us to make more choices than in any other engineering discipline.

There is a certain anxiety involved in make such engineering choices. Will this choice work out in the end, or am I going to waste a lot of time implementing and later reversing this for the other option?