skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Customary measures make a lot more sense to us.

Did they make any less sense in UK where they originated? Yet UK pushed through with switching to metric and went way further than US did. So this excuse isn't really valid.

The real answer is, that in US politicians were too weak to push this through, because all kind of manufacturers and unions were pressuring them to stop the effort. In UK they just ignored the pressure. In US they budged.

I wish US would already push this through, but so far it doesn't look very promising.

About natural. Take for example Celsius and Fahrenheit. Celsius based his scale on water freezing and boiling points, which are quite intuitive borders. At 0°C weather changes significantly since water freezing / melting has a noticeable environmental impact. So if you see -1° or +1° you can expect quite a change. On the other hand what are 31° and 33°? Fahrenheit took his scale without any pragmatic or practical goals of common usage. He did it for his scientific purposes. People more naturally operate with two digit numbers, which in Celsius case covers most of the normal range temperatures. It's good that at least Kelvin's scale didn't become commonly used in some countries...
Wow, Bob Barker sure looks young!

I can't believe I'm watching The Price Is Right from 1973. But I have to know whether Jean will win the $995 organ.

A couple of suggestions:

You have the name of the shows under the video, but a person channel surfing in 1973 wouldn't be able to do that. Could you make that 'off' by default?

Also, there's no way to make it full-screen. I know it would lose the vintage rounded corners on the screen, but I think that's ok.
Assuming:

1) every variable you calculate with follows the law of large numbers (also known as the central limit theorem) (this means amongst other things, that if you find correlation, you can't tell anyone involved in the variables, even yourself, because you'll act on it and change it, at which point the correlation won't hold. Also it won't work for chaotic variables, like pretty much anything involving human actions)

2) the correlation remains intact over longer time periods. The variables must be sampled without bias. You have properly separated your concepts, and made sure they actually represent what you want to be looking at. Etc. Etc. Etc. (this is essentially stating : don't fuck up the math before you calculate correlation) (obviously don't fuck up the math afterwards either, in other words : correctly check for statistical significance)

3) You have to check with every time offset, and even with variable time offsets. This is too complex to go into.

Then correlation implies a "causal relationship". Meaning corr(A, B) > 0 IFF

1) A causes B

2) B causes A

3) there is some external factor C that causes both A and B

Now keep in mind that there is no such thing as a root cause. There is simply a chain of events, and if the next event wouldn't have happened without the previous, the first event is said to be the cause of the second. "I shot him because his bees annoyed me", this "algorithm" would find the bees as guilty as the perpetrator, they are both causes of the death.

Also keep in mind that this only works AS LONG AS YOU LEAVE THE CAUSAL CHAIN ALONE. If you calculate correlation, and find, say "BAC" always goes up 2 days before "JPM" goes up, and then you proceed to buy JPM when BAC goes up, you've just invalidated your conclusion (translation : this works better the smaller an investor you are).

There is also absolutely no guarantee that killing of one chain of events won't simply lead to another. Say you have a harbor with 2 entrances, and because one is wider, every ship uses it. Therefore "getting to that harbor" correlates perfectly with "going through entrance A". Obviously blocking entrance A won't lead to no more ships in the harbor.

So this DOES NOT match the human/legal idea of "cause", and can never yield useful actions to take. It is nevertheless a useful metric.
Amazingly, people live where rail is not an option. The interstate system offers more possibilities than rail. Rail also does not deliver to your door.
Find or make a website that explains the problem with detailed information, and then quickly post a link wherever needed.

Example (from a totally different issue): http://begthequestion.info
The best teachers I've had throughout school (preschool to uni) were the ones that were A) passionate about students learning and B) didn't let the curriculum get in the way. Looking back, the inverted-teaching model was what worked best for me (lessons/readings at home, in-class time is used to work on problems & troubleshoot w/ teacher). Unfortunately all the teachers now are following curriculum that encourage specific lesson plans with specific homework to pass specific tests. I don't think that's a great way to learn, for me at least.
This is what Bandwagon (http://www.bandwagon.io) has been focusing on in NYC—to and from airports. I think Flywheel is also an airport focused app for SF (https://www.flywheel.com/).
Would Elite on the Vectrex be possible?
Oh, I see how to make it full-screen. There's a bunch more options under 'Menu'. It doesn't make the video full screen but it makes the app full screen.
Hmm, this seems to assume that we only have access to collected data (e.g. epidemiological studies) rather than being able to generate the data ourselves (many other types of scientific studies).

There is a key difference. A million surveys of smokers and cancer patients will never definitively prove causality. But if we could (legally and ethically) construct a randomized experiment in which we assigned a random half of the participants to smoke, we could easily conclude with very high confidence that smoking causes cancer.

(If this is not self-evident to you, the reason is straightforward probability. Suppose smoking does not cause cancer. Then when you take any given person and have them start smoking, their probability of getting cancer does not go up. Then the rates of cancer in the smoking group are exactly what they would have been had they not smoked. Then, since the people were placed in groups at random, with very high probability the rate of cancer in the smoking group will be almost the same as in the nonsmoking group. So if we find in our experiment that the rates of cancer are much higher in the smoking group, we must reject the hypothesis that smoking does not cause cancer.)
Are you talking about something like Glassdoor.com? They let people report their salary anonymously, then you can see the average salary for each job within the company.
“Ironically, we have been protecting the stuff that they’re not collecting,” Callas said.

Or, they were collecting it because it's not protected. If not by encryption at least by the law.

That said, I have a feeling the NSA was also checking out the message bodies. Wasn't there one leak about analysts sharing nude photos from intercepts?
I actually think that IBM just did more to fight aging than any aging science can do in the foreseeable future. Biological cells are "designed" for failure, they can not live forever (except in some simplest forms). What would happen eventually, I think, is this: biological aging research will progress until some practical limit and we will live until like 150 years or something, then we will dump backup to some future S3 and restore from there to ever advancing neuro-chips. So if I were Larry I'd invest billions into neurophysiology, developing means to actually do this backup. The first restore would be to device the size of the Google datacenter, drawing megawatts of energy and with the run rate of $10.000/hour. That's okay, we've been there before and we'll fix it rather quickly.
What's really interesting is what would happen next: let's say I died, my last backup was restored into some device and it costs a mere $5000/month to support. Of course I need to work to earn these money. I don't need sleep, I don't feel tired, I'm directly connected to the Internet (I don't need to type into Google, I _know_ everything Google knows) and I have 250 years of experience developing, hm, C++ applications for, hmmm, Windows. Now, what are the chances for a mortal, organic fresh grad to get a job (even if he can connect to Google directly too)?
If you're in NYC, Bandwagon is on android too
you should read the comments in the link you provide.
They specifically mention "time orientation" as a "culturally sanctioned desire" that was "ideologically driven". At no point in this post is there an attribution of this behavior to genetics. In fact at no point in this post is there any mention of genetics.

Unless you are personally of the opinion that all characteristics of a group are genetically driven?
Yes, neonicotinoids are implicated. They are certainly not the only factor, as your (partially) points out, but the evidence seems to indicate that they weaken bees in ways that interact with mites and climate stresses to lead to colony collapse.
Then the automation doesn't solve the staffing problem, it just perpetuates forced pseudo-downtime that drivers get underpaid for.
Yes, I was surprised there wasn't even a timestamp.
Neonicotinoids, the class of chemical pesticides most commonly blamed for CCD, were introduced into widespread use around the time CCD appeared. I don't think anybody has definitely proven causation (and see the various posts, even today, about problems in deriving causation from correlation). But there appears to be neurobiological evidence for some link between the way the pesticides work and the way bees behave. As far as likely suspects for the cause of CCD go, it's high on the list.
Good point. I think A2 can be distinguished from A1 if the writer is willing to put in a little work. Some of the best lessons I learned were from people saying, "Oh, yeah, I made a mistake like that once. Here's how I think about it now. And let me tell you the story of an even bigger mistake I made."

But that sort of compassionate oral tradition only takes us so far. The number of people who will ever approach the level of a professional engineer is small. I think if we want to squeeze the full value out of digital technology, it's going to have to be approachable to the non-expert. Being compassionate in discussion can help there, but I think it's even more important to be compassionate in construction.
Jellyfish Use Supercomputing Strategy to Search for Food
>But, in the end, we'll never be absolutely sure that one thing causes another.

Maybe so, but in the same pedantic sense that we'll never be "absolutely sure" that the universe didn't pop into existence five seconds ago with our memories already programmed in. This level of pedantry is great for impressing your fellow freshman philosophy students, but not actually useful for real life.

For actual practical day-to-day purposes knowing whether something causes something else is really useful, so what can we do? Controlled experiments. If you want to know whether cyanide is poisonous, get a hundred undergrads, randomly select half of them, feed 'em cyanide and see which ones drop dead. If you observe a strong correlation between the variable you're interested in and the one you think you're controlling then you've established causation for all practical purposes.

The pedant will point out there are two other possible explanations:

1. A massive coincidence -- those fifty undergrads just happened to drop dead for unrelated reasons. You can compute the probability of this as something like the average rate of spontaneous and inexplicable human death in undergrads to the power of fifty and multiplied by 1/(100 choose 50) [or something].

2. A slightly less massive combined with a reverse-causal process. Fifty of your undergrads just happened to be about to die anyway, and some aura emanating from them affected your coin-flipping process. The probability of this is harder to quantify, though since the scenario still requires fifty cases of spontaneous undergraduate death in a short space of time we can put an upper bound on it.
Captain? You mean servant to the machines.

Why would the robot's pet be armed? Only the stupidest bandits would threaten the poor meatbag instead of paying them to cause the breakdown in the first place.
Ask HN: What celebrities read emails about startups?
What celebrities/successful entrepreneurs read their email when you send them info about your startup?

So far:

1) Mark Cuban

2)
It is super cool that Nunuavut will end up with better internet access because of this.

Says Cunningham, “It is made possible by climate change.”

Would love for climate change deniers to attempt an alternative explanation. Gentlemen, start your contortions.
Lets celebrate World Lion Day
Chrome Web Store – AddThis – Share and Bookmark (new)
5 seconds is fast to acquire a GPS fix...
Why wouldn't I claim a bond on every e-mail I received from e.g. google and twitter?
> But, in the end, we'll never be absolutely sure that one thing causes another.

This is incorrect, because all knowledge is contextual.

For instance, it will always be true that gravity causes things to fall to the Earth. Future knowledge can't invalidate that, in can only expand the context.

Another example: Suppose a primitive tribesman climbes a tall tree, looks all around as far as he can see, and proclaims, "The land is flat." The eventual discovery that Earth is round does not invalidate his claim; it expands the context. The context of "the land [I can see]" is not the same as the context of "the entire Earth."
I like quartz.com. They have interesting stories, and they are short, so I can read them when I have a few minutes of downtime.
Computers can distinguish between human and deer with 100% accuracy in microseconds. Human brains aren't even close. You might as well compare a sprinter to an F1 car.
Micronation declares war on Wikipedia over page deletion
Maps reveal extent of CA drought
4. It does not account for Selection Bias. Just because some particular sample show a correlation does not mean the true distribution is correlated. This is almost certainly true if you look at lots (say 10+) relationships.

It's just too easy to fool yourself. For every time someone claimed no causality there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of cases of false claims of causality. There is a huge bias.

The true test of causality is reproducible experiments. If X causes Y then making X happen should make Y much more likely. Unfortunately reality is not so easy to arrange.
Understandable, but we shouldn't assume that this is the only thing that hurts the poor.

We could say that fast food is somehow predatory, causing obesity in the poor, but of course many of the poor rely heavily on fast food providers, which provide food which is no more calorie-laden, salty, or sugary than anything you pick up at a fancier restaurant. If you fuck with fast food, many people will feel it in the wallet, and these are the people who need the most not to feel it there.

You could say that these toxins unfairly target the poor(although I have a hard time believing they do), but exposure to fluoride means that their dental health is significantly better just from drinking tap water, cheap industrial pesticides mean food is cheaper, healthier, and more reliable.

You have to ask yourself, what is more important to your average impoverished american? a 50-100 dollar a month difference in family food/medical expenses, or a tenuous, debatable 0.2-1 point IQ difference out of an atlantic article talking about a single study?

It would be nice to reduce the impact of these industrial wonder chemicals on human health, but before throwing them out the window, we have to assess whether we will be doing more harm than good by doing so.

Also, most municipalities that I know have atmospheric pollution restrictions as a public health service, and they regularly test air quality, although it's rare or unheard of that there is an actual issue in my particular city that would be reasonable cause for outright evacuating people from their homes, although

I can think of one instance where ground pollution was measured and reported on by the city, causing them to shut down an area to replace the topsoil(which had traces of various things dumped decades ago by the previous users of the land: an automobile service shop).

Following that, again, who are you to say that a couple years of exposure to traces of atmospheric lead is going to cost them more livelihood than not being able to live there? The only ethically-sound thing you can do is inform them of their risks, and let them make their own decisions.
>How will the trucks refuel?

Full serve gas stations.

>How will they handle loading and unloading?

Do long haul drivers typically load/unload themselves these days? I would have thought that would have been the task of the warehouse staff on either end.

>How will they handle inclement weather?

Probably better than human driven trucks why would you think they couldn't?

>What is the insurance liability for putting them on public roads?

Probably less than human driven trucks since you don't have to worry about a lot of things that will cause problems for those such as tired/impared drivers.

>Who will be sued when a driverless truck crashes into another car (at fault or not)?

The trucks insurance company. Same as it would currently happen.
How can I punish a hacker?
> I suppose another deviously brilliant solution would be to send some CIA fixer types out to the Somali warlords, bribing them to avoid ships with X, Y, Z symbols on them (whoever's paying the Navy Tax). Probably less money spent doing this than building and keeping loads of gunboats in the water at all times. Again, though, this creates its own negative externalities and perverse incentives. Plus, you're now in the business of keeping certain warlords in power, and we all know how well that usually works out for us.

America has been down that road before.

After the revolution, American merchant ships lost the protection of the British navy and had to fend for themselves in the Mediterranean against pirates from Barbary States of North Africa. At first, the young republic tried precisely what you advocate—send over some fixer with a big bag of cash. In 1795 the tribute came to 1/6 of the nation's entire budget, leading to the creation of the American Navy in order to end the problem by force rather than with cash.

This led to the First Barbary War. Some historians (like Michael Oren) even claim that the issue of piracy was one of the catalysts for revising the Articles of Confederation and forming a stronger central government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War
$0.01 is just arbitrary. Some people might find that too expensive, and some spammers might find it cheap enough to profit from anyway. The problem is that the threshold for affordability is in NO way attached to the profit margins of spammers, let alone the true value of the email.

And your last point is really just a specialized form of a web of trust anyway.
BrownList
I agree with you in my own experience, but let's face it, we were (I'm just gonna guess here) among the smart kids, and what works well for smart kids isn't necessarily what works well for the average or dumb kids. Maybe dumb kids learn more effectively through different methods.
I'd call it the phone for grownups, who don't need a nanny appstore or company deciding for them what they can or can't install.
May not, not does not.

Correlation and causation can be implied if you have a control. Or if you can rule out external factors. Saying it does not is not accurate.

The parrot wakes and sleeps with the sunrise and sunset. Does the Parrot Cause the sunrise? No. This happened BEFORE the parrot was born. Does the sunset cause the sleep? Throw a blanket over it's cage it goes to sleep. TADA! Causation!

When you have two things which you can't control, and that have been going on longer than you can observe it gets to be harder. Proving the Moon phase causes the Tides, not the Tides cause the moon phase. That's a bit trickier. Not in today's age, but at one point. There is a reason we thought the Earth was flat, and that you could throw a stone in to a pond and get a Turtle.
It is the fundamental process of life and is natural and beautiful.

What could be more amazing than transcending death?

How about transcending our own desires to control nature. Maybe learning to leave things be? That would be a real feat.
Pity nobody here seem to be interested in doing anything about English spelling. Propose a practicable solution [1] and it is ignored :(

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8158579
There is another sweet Node based robotics framework. It's called Cylon http://cylonjs.com
Hmm, they should update their front page than. It is pretty clear in stating "Toga uses the system native python GTK+3 bindings for display purposes."
That sounds like Owner Operator wages to me, which mean the $1.10 per mile must pay for the Payment on the Truck (which costs anywhere from 50K to 100K+), Maintenance on the Truck, Normal Business expenses as a Owner Operator is a small business, Government Fees, Road Expenses, Health Insurance, Self Employment Taxes, and the list goes on and on.
Well, who knows. You may be deriving money from a different correlation than what you thought. In other words, the cause of money-generation may not be the correlation you thought it is.

For example, you may be making money from your customers' lack of understanding of correlation and causation. You may convince your customers that your product leads to revenues for them when it doesn't. And now the money you derive may be correlated with the strength of their beliefs in your product being correlated to their revenues, but not with your product actually being correlated to their revenues.
“No Maps for These Territories” – Documentary on William Gibson
I believe those were Yahoo Messenger (chat) intercepts:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/gchq-nsa-webcam...
Hi everyone. Author here. Gotta say I loved all the comments. My blog followers are all so nice. It feels good to get some real criticism for once :)

Relying on Twitter was a truly bonehead move, to be sure. Truly a "bang head here" kind of moment.

However, if trusting Twitter was the only "poor engineering decision" I had made I'd be a very happy man. It was just one of dozens of bonehead mistakes I made in building and operating my first aquaponics system.

Aquaponics is one of those things where the path of least resistance is definitely following a set of plans that are known to work. You can find one of those on my site, and some other places too. But I've never one to follow the path of least resistance (eg. Screw the round wheel - I'm making mine with fractals).

In case anyone's interested, I'm a former electrical engineer who used this as my first attempt at something with Arduino. More of a power-systems and lighting guy, software development was and still is a foreign land to me.

I could have tested and researched the reliability of different notification platforms, but at the time I was building it I was already staying up late fixing plumbing problems and trying to get those d*&$ one-wire sensors to work consistently.

Thankfully I eventually got my plumbing and sensors working, and bungled along into into Zapier which has been absolutely bulletproof.

I think the truly useful lesson here is that if you ever meet anyone in aquaculture who can tell a good story at a party, plop yourself down and ask them if they've ever killed fish in any bizarre and interesting ways. Don't get up for drinks either because you won't want to miss anything. You'll be there all night.
1. Hazardous drivers have a shit load more regulations on them, and I do not believe it would be worth 80K to haul some of that shit

2. You have to be an experienced driver with spotless driving record for most companies, I would hope these companies are not hiring newly minted 6 week school drivers to haul HazMat.

3. this specialize area of trucking should be used to gauge the wider industry.