skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A long but very shallow article.
- interviewed authors of paper that used the phrase, "silent pandemic" when claiming widespread behavioural and cognitive problems as a result of 12 compounds. Evidence presented in the article itself? "Rates of diagnosis of [autism] and ADHD are increasing..." [diagnosis is not necessarily preponderance], an increase in "subclinical decrements in brain function" [as measured how?] , and "genetic factors account for no more than 30-40% of brain development disorders" [based on what exactly?]
From this thin stuff the authors then get plenty of column space to expound on their opinions.
Re: the IQ experiments.
If Bellinger's own lead-IQ model is correct [from the linked Environ Health Perspect. Jul 2005; 113(7): 894–89] , a decrease in blood lead concentration from >10 ug/kg [1970's] to 1.8 ug/kg [2009] should have resulted in 3 point increase in IQ scores. Where's any discussion of this?
- FMRI reveals effects of methyl mercury in 3 [?] adolescents. How can you possibly determine loss of IQ points due to methyl mercury exposure on this set while controlling for other factors? Talk about small sample size.
-The article asks, "Impressive as all this research investment is, the larger question remains: Why are we looking at these hazards now—instead of before we introduced these chemicals into the world?"
80k chemicals mentioned as being on "the market" although what this means isn't specified.
"It would cost $5 million and 5 years per chemical to run the full battery of tests" according to quoted researcher.
400 billion dollars if done on the full set.
1) Who pays?
2) Why would any chemical company have a research presence in the USA if their product had a several year lead time for rollout due to testing requirements?
I'm talking about contacting them to help get the word out about your startup.
Slightly off topic, but I was hoping these were satellite images and not just shaded maps. Also showing 180 individual images seems like an awful way to present the data, maybe an animation or have a time slider?

Regardless, it's an interesting dataset, and I honestly didn't know that the drought was so severe, having only heard it mentioned in passing.
Parking shouldn't be a difficult task for a self-driving truck; but I suspect there will be a 'driver' along for the ride well after the task is mostly automated, just to deal with exceptional circumstances (eg. flash flood has made road impassable in some way the automated truck cannot deal with) and also to act as a security guard so nobody robs the robo-truck.
I just received a patent which protects each tablet from being counterfeited, the actual tablet, not the label or packaging
Holograms and expensive printing are nonsense, drug orgs have millions to spend on printers
The man who can see the Internet
The author also wrote historical fiction set in antiquity with plenty of engineering: The Arrows of Hercules and The Bronze God of Rhodes (and others with fewer machines or that I haven't read).

I liked this book too. There's another section though where he confidently attributes 19th- and 20th-century progress to a strong patent system. (I don't expect newer books are more accurate on the whole; but it's harder to see their biases.)
Fair point. The spacing and margins are totally wrong, for sure. But that's just spacing & margins, and I assume that's easily adjusted (and they should do that, so their demo doesn't look ugly). But nonetheless, the widgets are native Cocoa widgets, so they not only look native, they feel and behave native, something you can't say about Qt (at least not to the same degree — although I develop with Qt, love Qt, and have zero issues with the way Qt applications look and feel on Mac).
>The course you recommend (it's good, I've read it)

Sidebar to everybody else who might this thread: don't just read cis194, that's a terrible waste of time. You have to do the exercises, including the very first ones.

This is why I'm always tempted to drop non-comment prose. People just starting out think reading will do something for them.

It won't, generally.
I take it you weren't around at that time. Well, there was software all over the place in stores and on BBSes, some that was entered from magazine listings, and much that was pirated on tapes and floppy disks.
Right. It's not an economics problem, even! Just math!
An idea for a lightweight PHP CMS with .txt files and query strings
http://www.latimes.com/la-me-g-california-drought-map-gif-ht...
>Sometimes it turns out you need to do something with IO somewhere, and now you have to change all the functions down the way to use it.

Que no!

Bloodhound, which is expressly about talking to an outside database, has >500 type signatures. Fewer than 40 have IO in them. You most certainly do not need to add IO to pure code just because something in IO invokes it.

This is why we have things like Functor, monad transformers, etc.

Want to know more?

https://github.com/bitemyapp/learnhaskell
What’s a module system good for anyway?
Statiscally, where you want to be seated on a plane if you crash
>True explosives (dynamite and all) was his thing... But on the moral side of things it's the same.

Without getting into the morality of gun technology (since the morality of a gun rather depends on whose hands you put it into), I'd say it's rather different because guns are used primarily as weapons whereas most of the world's explosives are used for peaceful purposes, in mining. Dyno Nobel is, to this day, one of the world's biggest suppliers of mining explosives.
You must go beyond FLP impossibility. The problem with just stopping at understanding FLP is that it assumes too little about what is available. No assumptions of synchrony, no assumptions of clocks, then sure, consensus is impossible in the presence of faults. The real interesting question is, what realistic assumptions can I make to overcome FLP? I believe the CAP theorem is similar.

Also, if you're interested in cryptocurrencies or distributed systems with "greedy" participants, that's another class of problem that goes a level beyond byzantine consensus. The difference is that you cannot assume that even the "good" participants are running the officially sanctioned software, but rather you must assume that there may be colluders who attempt to game the network.

Byzantine generals problem + game theory -> ?
Speaking of: Were the anon.penet.fi days REALLY 20 years ago? Good lord. they were.
While this looks interesting, the main premise that oh-my-zsh is slow doesn't seem to hold up for me. I have a decently quick system, but nothing extreme and I don't notice much more lag with auto completion than I did with bash or fish. And I use auto completion excessively, and I'm not sparse with my oh-my-zsh plugins:

plugins=(git golang archlinux catimg common-aliases compleat dircycle dirhistory sudo systemd urltools)

and also use other (non oh-my-zsh)"plugins" on top of that. Startup also isn't an issue and isn't any slower than it was before, and I'm using terminator which isn't exactly "light" by itself.

That being said, it looks interesting and I plan on fiddling around with it a bit.
The Atlantic has great brand capital, which for some reason doesn't erode much when they regularly print sensational clickbait like this, or do things like print PR stories for the Church of Scientology (http://archive.today/vca4i). I'd take this article and most of what they print with a grain of salt.
I've been to Lake Shasta, and the drought is apparent and appalling. The shoreline has receded a few hundred feet.

This report [1] shows that in 2010, Palm Springs was using 736 gallons of water per residential customer per day.

It almost makes me sick.

Sources:
[1] http://www.water.ca.gov/urbanwatermanagement/docs/Report%20t...
I don't understand what you're asking here.
My friend picks up high end foreign cars at the port and takes them to the different dealerships. They're very high priced vehicles and the company is extremely fussy about every step of the process. Most of his fellow drivers are college graduates by the way.
Planet Earth is our home and will be. I would like to see we spend our resources to control pollution, contain global warming and save species from being endangered first before looking to outer space for help.

And yeah future generations will be looking at us how we act because they definitely would prefer living here imo.
They'd have had to start a new implementation from scratch, since Microsoft bought their existing work, and if the timeline of the original project held true for the new one, it would have taken years to build.
or, as explained quite clearly in the article, a simple misunderstanding of symbols: the kid interpreted it as 12/7 instead of 7/12.
This list is really awesome. Every time I try to start these projects, I somehow forget about it. I need to figure out where to find the motivation to actually finish a lighting project or something. Maybe this list will give me that.
Lovely idea, but the FB connect is a mess. When I see that I assume I don't need to create a login. Instead, I'm prompted by Chesscademy that my username (one YOU created for me) isn't a good one because it has a period in it (you made it) and I still have to enter a password...why have FB login at all?

Hope this feedback helps.
Voyages of a CEO
The links from the paper are broken, and the above regehr.org page makes references to Internet Wayback Machine archives.

Where has the Deputy material gone?
They could, but that is something that Amazon is trying to change with their new contracts.
Are there any (new) technical info on this? I recall it's been discussed here before[hn] -- and as then -- I don't really see what's wrong with anonymous remailers (the old kind). I suppose DKIM and DNSSEC might form the foundation for additional standards to augment mixmaster remailers: DKIM should allow for rudimentary SPAM filtering on the "in" side of the remailer network/onion -- and DNSSEC might be one way to at least get "any" domains "remailer" public key (so that you could send eg all gmail mail to eg: reamailer@gmail.com, with the actual mail wrapped inside) -- and "any" standard mail client could wrap up mail like that (as a minimum, optionally with an additional remailer added).

I don't know how big the need for is DKIM (from an anti-spam view) -- how many receive gpg-encrypted and signed spam anyway?

As I've mentioned before, I think this has similar problems as remailers -- as far back as 1996 intelligence agencies were running quite a few of them[1] -- and I imagine that would be the case going forward as well (ditto for tor nodes). I don't think that makes these things a wasted effort, just not a silver bullet.

Either way, having eg Apple Mail, Thunderbird and Gmail (yes, the webmail) automatically wrap any outgoing mail in a remailer-like envelope might not be a bad idea at all. And once wrapped, everything smtp (with the exception of content-based spam filtering at the intermediary servers) works just like it always has.

[1] http://www.hypertekst.net/misc/anon-remail/

[hn]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6642106
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6671219
Thank You! This definitely helped me visualize it. It's interesting that it seemed to "move" locations over time. At the beginning the hardest hit area was the north eastern part and towards the end it was (is I suppose) the Southern part of the state. Does anyone know a particular reason for this? I'd think that the driest parts would be mostly consistent, but my knowledge in this area is non-existent.

Edit: Looking at the article again I see this link is at the bottom of the text, not sure how I missed it the first time around.
I think the author is confused.

> Writing cool code in obscure languages or rewriting industry-accepted libraries is great as a hackathon project or when you’re at Facebook-scale, but it’s dumb and dangerous otherwise.

On the face value, this is quite agreeable. But what is "cool" code? What if someone just writes "a code" in an obscure language - because that language happens to be the best for the code? As for "industry-accepted libraries", those libraries can't be considered the word of almighty while everybody else agrees we have a crisis in the area of software engineering.

On the other hand,

> There’s a time and a place for innovative custom-written code that advances the edges of engineering and computer science.

Again, well said - but what is "innovative"? Solving the same problem for the hundredth time - but doing it well while explaining why - can or cannot be innovative, depending on the definition. Yes, there is time and place for that - so should it be thrown away in a young startup just because it should concentrate its efforts elsewhere?

The whole idea of the article is great - the code is written over and over, with small variations because of platforms, infinitisimal changes in requirements etc. Indeed, engineers first learn to produce linked lists, then taylor them for their particular problems - it's like an art of pottery, when the next customer has slightly different requirement because, say, his shelves have different width. But the blame seems to be put to the wrong place.
I hypothesize that droughts never feel quite "real" so long as there is water coming out of the tap.

Perhaps there could be "rolling blackouts" for water?
No, you're being downvoted because your comment was neither constructive nor civil. While I'm sure the reasons you stated might have been a component of that, if you look at various other threads you will note that a lot of other comments in a similar vein--ones that lament the subject being brought up again, or just expressing vague dissatisfaction with the subject matter--also get downvoted.
> Ladar Levison, creator of the Lavabit encrypted email provider...
Here's one paper on the intersection of Byzantine fault tolerance, altruiusm and rational behaviour from UT Austin: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/lasr/download.php?uid=63
I just went to the talk and they have renamed it to DIME. Possibly for the reasons you have stated. Levison stated that all big projects go through a name change when in development.
Why would people who want to work less get replaced, instead of just accepting lower pay?
Scheme to stop cyber bullying
yes. and the science is very exhaustively on my side: time and time again, it's been shown that workers (especially knowledge workers like programmers, designers, etc.) are more productive when working less hours.

* http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---pro...

* www.eurofound.europa.eu/pubdocs/2002/07/en/1/ef0207en.pdf

* http://sciencenordic.com/we-should-only-work-25-hours-week-a...

* http://news.illinois.edu/WebsandThumbs/Lleras,Alejandro/Ller...

* the list goes on...
PCA is basically just SVD and computing an SVD of that size is not unreasonable, even of it's dense: 0.5e6^2 = 0.25e12 = 1TB of 32-bit floats. That's a lot of memory but there are reasonably priced machines ($50k or so) with that much RAM these days. If it's sparse, this can be done on a laptop, and it might not even be necessarily to materialize the matrix at all if you use Lancosz iteration.
But I should see a blur or something, unless it happens to be vibrating at exactly the frame rate of both of my eyes (and even that would cause some weird effects, see helicopter blades spinning.)

Almost missed your comment btw.
I believe in climate change because I trust the experts who have done analyses of global temperature (and to a lesser extent, climate models).

Individual events like this could be cherry picked, so I don't know if they are good evidence or not. If I wasn't convinced by the science I described above, I don't think I would be convinced by this, unless it was accompanied by a similarly rigorous statistical analysis.
I think you mean 'subject to further studies, we think that .... x and y levels of these substances are safe'.
I read the comments. Don't read the comments.
I'm assuming it's open-source. Any clue how can one get started as a contributor?
Would like to pitch in.
I think lead is especially nasty in that even small doses have been shown to have proportionately damaging effects.
Excellent point. It happens again in the article with the 55MPH example. The original answer of 18 miles in 15 minutes is clearly wrong because it's more than a mile a minute, and a mile a minute is 60MPH.

I saw this sort of thing a lot when I tutored physics in college. My students would crank through the formulas and come up with an answer. I would point out that their answer says the roller coaster is seventeen light years tall, or the bowling ball weighs less than a grain of sand, and this couldn't possibly be right. I always tried to get them to look at the shape of the problem first, and then look at the details. Otherwise you're just pattern matching, and don't know when you've gone horribly wrong.

It's tricky, though, because you need to strike a balance. Seeing the big picture really well doesn't get the job done if you don't have the mechanics to back it up. If the goal is a precise answer, then knowing that 7/12 is around 0.5 and is definitely not greater than 1 doesn't get you there. But it seems that schools have gone way too far the other way, focusing on the mechanics almost exclusively. The "word problem" seems to be the one concession to the big picture, but even those are taught as pure pattern-matching exercises.
Reduced labor (per output value) and increased profit are the same thing.

There is always a trade off between time spent working and wealth. Only through automation can we keep our current quality of life while working less, increase our quality of life without working any more, or do anything between those two possibilities.
There is no such magical hash. Any hash splits the space of words into equivalence classes and unless there's only one equivalence class, there must be words that are edit distance one apart that are in different classes since you can get from any word to any other by a sequence of single edits.
We are working the same hours as 50 years ago because we want to be able to purchase cell phones and modern cars bad stuff. You could work a lot less and live with 50s level technology, but almost no one chooses to.

Also, if a shareholder makes more money, they buy more, creating new labor requirements elsewhere.
Well, there can't be all that big a shortage anyway.

Last time I went to the US I found that supermarkets were stocked with food, gas stations with fuel, and lumber yards with lumber, so it seems that stuff is still getting from where it is to where it needs to be quite effectively.
Rapportive
I noticed my Rapportive only really finds emails linked with linkein now. Is there any other programs out there I can find use to see what emails are connected with peoples facebook and twitter accounts?
Cosmic radiation: the dawn of new physics or statistical slip-up?
Just for the reference, with AdblockPlus enabled, the Youtube link images on that page are hidden (at first I couldn't find any videos).
I was working in academia at the time it got axed (2004), and you'd be amazed at the number of people quietly depending on it, with no idea that they had actually learned some scripting. Professors I had never even suspected of using a computer were absolutely bereft. Some people had poured vast amounts of work into creating HyperCard stacks, and there was really no viable alternative to point them to. It was heartbreaking to watch.
One of the major advantages of trucks over trains is precisely that - they're not trains. Making them trains would take away all the flexibility they currently have. If you're taking coal from the mine to the power station then you're probably already using a train. Anything less predictable needs individual trucks.
The issue is that platform packages are in the global package database, which doesn't play well with the (amazingly useful) sandboxing that cabal provides. And may cause other problems too.
RSA is difficult to make constant time, but there are plenty of constant-time elliptic curve implementations out there. Curve25519/Ed25519 is one of them, and this paper suggests that they will be strongly resistant to these sort of attacks.
Oh, correlation does point to causality. What you don't immediately know is where to put the causal arrows. A and B occur together with a high probability: does A cause B, or B cause A? Or do they have a common cause?

Mere statistics cannot do that detective work for us, I'm afraid. But when a pure cause-and-effect relationship is uncovered and reproduced, the correlation will be 100%: remove the cause, the effect disappears. Restore the cause, and the effect appears reliably.

For instance, if we stop the flow of electric current through a coil, the magnetic field will collapse soon afterward. If we start the current again, the field comes back. Moreover, if we place a coil into a similar magnetic field, that field doesn't produce current. These things are 100% reproducible. It's not some weak statistic like "in coils where current was present, the magnetic field was observed to be 3.5% stronger on average". That kind of situation shows that some effects which are not being controlled for are masking the underlying causes and effects.
> "withdraws a product from household use, and that product continues to be used in farming?"

There are lots of things that would be potentially dangerous inside of my house that are at home on my cousin's farm. Those use cases are considerably different.
What version of toga are you running? I'm on Ubuntu with Python 2.7.6, toga v 0.1.0 and cassowary 0.5 and your oneliner works fine.

Edit: In fact, OptionContainer is just 15 days old, so I think you've got an old version: https://github.com/pybee/toga/commit/262efbfc00fae0a96e09666...
Why would 736 gallons of water use per day almost make you sick? Presumably the water board continues to charge very little money for water, and so people use it accordingly. Increase the cost of water, people stop using it as much. Increase it enough, and people will decide they no longer need emerald green lawns, and, hell, maybe they will have make big sacrifices and put a nozzle on their hose when watering their car.

I've never understood why the California water boards don't just using pricing as a mechanism to moderate people's water use.
Shoup's NTL library is also a great resource.
> Any two words within a Levenshtein distance D of each other will have the same hash (you pick D).

Wait, what? Doesn't this transitively result in the whole dictionary hashing to the same value?
Indeed. Mozilla Persona support would be nice.

https://login.persona.org/
>But rather than compromise the privacy of his other 400,000-plus email users, Levison says, he shut the entire project down.

Shouldn't that read "he shut the entire project down, and then handed over the records of 400,000-plus email users?"
Curve25519 was designed specifically to be leak-resistant, by one of the world's foremost experts in leak-resistant cryptography. Most elliptic curve software is not. Like RSA, elliptic curve also involves exponentiation and modular reduction.
Lets put it this way then, we disagree on what's a reasonable expenditure. 1TB Ram ? $50k ? Could you fund me please :) ok adding pretty please.

Note its not just memory, its computation also. Every entry of that matrix is a solution to a dynamic program, if you dont store it you have to recompute it. The DP scales as product of the lengths of the string, those things have a fat tail.

You could still get away with it if this matrix was close to a low rank matrix and with large gaps between adjacent singular values. Its not and thats a problem. Note you have to store the SVD factors too.

EDIT: Interesting ! my comments seems to have annoyed someone. Did not expect downvotes on my comments here, thought they were pretty uncontroversial. If you dear reader can leave some clues it would be helpful and appreciated. I upvote those who explain what they found unpalatable about my comments, regardless of agreement.
I was asking if anti-trust laws still has this issue today. Thinking about it, I think it probably still does.