skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The promise of self-driving cars is that they will be better and safer drivers than humans. Wouldn't that imply that they would be even now suitable for high-skill, dangerous driving?
Sure, but the entire 710 just needs to be demolished. They should be moving those containers out of the port on trains, but they've got it backwards. They move the containers out of the port on trucks, to intermodal terminals inland where they get switched to trains. Completely backwards. If they just punched the railroads through all the way to Long Beach then they wouldn't need those trucks on 710 humping boxes to the Inland Empire.
I'm just imagining what an app/website would be like, if prostitution was legal.

You would probably select hair color, bust, age, ethnicity, body type, and see recent test results for STI tests. Then you'd probably get an estimates time when they'd arrive to your place.

It would be extremely interesting to see anonymous user data from such a service.
Book review: The Ancient Engineers (2005)
Clojure stories are experiencing a slight surge, but not an unusual one. When I search on Hacker News by date, like https://hn.algolia.com/?q=clojure#!/story/forever/prefix/0/c... (UNIX timestamps format), I can calculate that there are more stories with “Clojure” in the title than last month, but it is within normal fluctuations.

In the last four month-long periods, beginning with April 9 to May 9 and ending with July 9 to August 9, the number of “Clojure” stories were [36, 41, 32, 41]. So the 41 stories of the most recent month is more than the previous month, but the same as the month before that.
If children could vote and direct funds then school would rapidly become a cross between a candy-store and a hotel Spa.
And it's not like trucking is a good job. For that princely (!!!) $41k / year, you are often away from home. I'd bet you don't get comped for all the meals you eat on the road either, so there goes a bunch of money spent eating out, even if it is just at truck stop diners. If you have a family, and and your partner has a job -- as he or she must, given that shit salary -- knock $4-$10k/year off for daycare as well. I mean, I'm just stunned people aren't begging for these jobs. Not to mention that from some reading, and I unfortunately forgot the link, it appears that truckers have to choose between keeping their jobs or obeying safety regulations. But never you worry, if they get caught violating sleep requirements only they get in trouble, not the companies.

It's funny; this story is a perfect analogy [1] for [2] something [3] but [4] I [5] just [6] can't [7] think [8] of [9] what [10]. Meanwhile, true story: a former employer not only completely lied to me about what I'd be doing, but then threw a fit when I quit two months in. And sent potential engineering recruits a python puzzle with a naked woman in it. It's a shock why employers have trouble hiring is all I'm saying...

[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB113210508287498432

[2] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/11/1201127/-Facebook-C...

[3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ayoomojola/2013/07/15/the-shorta...

[4] http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/11/technology/zuckerberg-tech-p...

[5] http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/240163468/nice-work...

[6] http://www.infoworld.com/t/h-1b/silicon-valley-leaders-unite...

[7] http://thehill.com/policy/technology/258985-microsoft-lack-o...

[8] http://www.sfgate.com/business/networth/article/Real-estate-...

[9] http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/08/07/gasp_sfs_housing_ma...

[10] http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/real-estate/201...
If a business owner raises wages, he solves his labor problem but spends more money and reduces profit.

If instead he complains about a labor shortage, then maybe politicians will pass a law allowing more immigration and he will be able to lower his wages and increase his profit.

It's beneficial for business owners for there to be a general belief in a labor shortage but it is not beneficial for people to believe they are stingy.
Also interesting, the cutting edge work lucene has done to make this possible in 4.x, using universal automatons to speed up fuzzy, regex, and other searches.

http://blog.mikemccandless.com/2011/03/lucenes-fuzzyquery-is...
This isn't really a great system for reporting causation. It's at best OK and is used from time to time (see any literature on Granger Causality).

As I linked elsewhere in this thread, if you really want to prove causality then you need to be making counterfactuality arguments. Judea Pearl's framework of causal networks is a good system for doing this.

At the end of the day, your claim of causality rests upon a network of assumptions about causality (and this is a formal description of your point (3), basically) and someone accepts this proof by accepting your assumption network and the strength of your new data.
I'm working on the lessons right now. I would like some further explanations. For example, in playing the first few moves of the "Ruy Lopez," I am very curious why protecting the hanging pawn is not the correct move (whereas castling is).
Shorter but less colorful Kirkus review: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/l-sprague-de-camp...
3 Things I Unlearned to be a Better Entrepreneur
I have a feeling that the energy boom is cutting into the supply of truckers. If you have any skills at all (welding, driving) you can top $100k in oil or gas fields, but even if you're a high school drop out with no skills of any kind you can pull down $60k just humping pipe from one side of rig to the other.
What's Hume's objection to proving causality? (Not that I intend to challenge it, I would just like to hear it characterized).
HyperCard was one of those rare products (along with Excel and FileMaker Pro) that made people into programmers without them knowing it. It was astonishing what people were able to put together in HyperCard, and how much sadness there was when Apple finally axed it.
The Problem with Minimalism
That distinction is likely to die out, given that lots of other English words that used to predominantly or only use the same form in singular and plural are steadily moving towards separate plural form.
How about this? Playing soccer causes broken hips, but soccer playing is in fact anti-correlated with broken hip incidence. Why? Because most broken hips occur among extremely old people, who generally don't play soccer.

[I'm not sure whether this is actually statistically true, but you get the idea, and I'm sure there's a similar example which actually is true.]
We have huge brains, jo

They must be there for a reason

I tell you, bro. It's war, you know.

"We/I thought about everything and this is what we came up with (interwined with very catchy words to hold your attention)"

Could you please do (representative) studies and not assume too much?! Very hurting are some of the cause&conclusion sections... very slim terrain (correlation=/=causation)
> It's an analogy to explain to people the prestige and honor that comes along with the prize. There's no official ruling to be found on which one is considered to be more like the Nobel prize,

Um, you really don't think that I know that? "like the Nobel Prize" clearly means that it is the most, or one of the most, prestigious prices in its field.

I continue to use the term in the colloquial sense that the article uses. What's so hard to understand about that?

EDIT: that's a decent amount of downvotes for a thread with relatively few comments. I'm impressed, people!
I remember listening to that podcast and being quite annoyed by it. One of the protagonist's who was obviously in favour of sticking with imperial units kept smugly saying the US is already metricated. Comes across disingenuous as best.

The US rarely uses metric in it's popular culture. Weather reports are in Fahrenheit, movies almost always use miles and pounds. By any measure of cultural output that they export that I've seen (and Australia is a huge consumer of US popular culture) they do not use metric.
You are correct if what you're implying is that correlation isn't a robust measure. Whereas non-correlation can be quite robust if your test isn't constructed badly (or as you imply 'constructed' badly) It's important to consider the meaning of such measures without regard to quality of the test; which can always be faulty.
Great! This is more fun that I expected. It's like a video shoebox for the things I thought were funny for a minute.
I've just recently discovered the power of MQTT. I think it's the best thing ever. I even decided to use MQTT as a way to interface apps/devices using SMS. Check it out at http://www.smscmd.net/
I believe he's director of AI research at Facebook.
Even when all three are satisfied, there may still not be a causal relationship since correlation may have been by way of coincidence. For example, if Google shows that the stock market change on a given day seems to correlate surprisingly well with search volume for a particular phrase on the day before, that may be just because the particular phrase was chosen from amongst a million others based on its correlation. Causation can still cannot be established (though a link cannot be denied either).

Note: If I recall correctly, Google did show one such study.
Probably your web browser and notepad for doing simple html and javascript files.
Archive.org wrote a post explaining why they are keeping physical copies of their digital assets, http://blog.archive.org/2011/06/06/why-preserve-books-the-ne...
I've got a good friend with his Masters degree who quit teaching school to drive a truck because it paid so much more. He makes a great deal more than $41 K a year. It must depend on the particular company and the alternatives where you live.
China in Africa: how Sam Pa became the middleman
$15+ isn't that ludicrous. For a fiction book sure, but what about a technical ebook? Something that saves a team of $150 per/hour developers multiple hours of work each - shouldn't that have value based pricing.

Amazon isn't just encouraging lower ebook pricing, they are actively penalising authors that try to sell books above this level. Try to sell something over that price and the revenue split flips to 70/30 in their favour! They are removing the choice.

To have such a huge retailer force authors into such a cheap price bracket really devalues the content and sets consumer expectations.
Annoying WSOD in Android Chrome unsolved for 3 weeks
If you'd like your music clean, you would be surprised of how little we have. Take for example dub reaggae. So far I managed to amass 10 albums that are studio quality. There are few hundred tracks that are CD quality. And then there are thousands of MP3 garbage.

Vinyls is the only way to get back to that. Remember, all new music is just samples of old. And there aren't that many good quality samples, so new music is limited to shit quality.
So the statement "correlation does not imply causation" says nothing more than the old "correlation does not equal causation", but is easier to misinterpret (accidentally or wilfully) due to the multiple definitions of the word "implies"?
Oh sweet, I can recover my 500+ videos from my old Facebook account that I deactivated.

Only problem is the Create Playlist functionality doesn't work for me nor does it list out any existing playlist either.

"Could not create new playlist."
> This is the problem with today's [...]

Yeah, right. It's like this since 5th century BC at least. Haven't you ever heard about rhetoric? About Sophists?

Go read transcripts of some ancient (and I mean ancient, like 2k years ancient) public speeches, from politicians and philosophers. Tip toeing? Yeah, sometimes; sometimes exactly the opposite, but always well chosen words for conveying a particular thing to a specific target audience. It was considered an art and was widely taught until 19th century. The difference today is that there are many more poor, unprepared speakers (and writers), not that it's harder to convince people or harder not to piss them off.
Haskell Platform feels a bit like Prelude; fine for people who are just using it for small self-teaching projects, but once you're supposed to do something "serious" then people seem to throw up their hands and say "No! never mind that.". I don't know. Maybe I've got the wrong impression.

Now that I know enough cabal to get by and not screw myself over (by creating dependency hell), I feel like Haskell Platform might not be relevant to my needs any more.
Hey James.
Awesome post!
Good to have a simple overview of these thing.
> It might be dismissably more likely than 0%, so little more that you might conclude it is basically 0%, but it still is >0% in the mathematical sense. Therefore seeing correlation should imply correlation.

I don't agree in the general case. A counter-example is that a purely random data set will have correlations, which by definition imply absolutely nothing about anything other than the random data set.

This is addressed in the last sentence of the OP:

> That is, correlation in the data you happen to have (even if it happens to be “statistically significant”) does not necessarily imply correlation in the population of interest.
Wants to be smart, but uses "begs the question" in the first couple of paragraphs. What else didn't get caught in editing?
I most often hear it from programmers who are not native speakers of English, so it always sounds wrong to me.
I am surprised that the FB app already doesn't have access to those phone objects already and like FB needs MORE data to mine...people freely give that up once you are the product opt out of the EULA all you want you are still giving them all they want anyway.
+1 for “spit goes ‘clink’.”
Please, this stupid stereotype has to die. People of all ages can be stupid and ignorant and pigheaded and whatever negative you want to throw out. If you read history this has always been the case. But the worst idiocy is thinking whatever age you are is superior to any other. You can find "proofs" by looking at some narrow slice of any age group to demonstrate whatever you think is true and I can show exactly the opposite with another. There is no way to lump an entire grouping of people and say they are all the same, young or old or whatever. I'm sorry people's attitudes aren't boolean they are floating point.
Poor title. "Skeptic" is considerably better than "illiterate", which comes off as condescending (as does some of your diction in general).
The concept is very interesting - apparently, each "doll" or layer is encrypted, and only the target can decode the message - so I guess the equivalent of the MX would be the outmost doll, while the equivalent of a To: field would be the innermost doll.

This reminds me of something else I've found quite interesting - the idea of publishing pubkeys or at least their hashes as DNS records (yes, unsafe unless there is DNSSEC etc, but that would be much better than now), so that the sender could encrypt the message automatically, without requiring the user to select say GPG target keys.

I wonder if that's what they will be using. Do they have technical documents or RFCs?

A new and non backward compatible email system using that (say even running on a different port) would indeed be quite interesting, but I wonder if there wouldn't be weaknesses that would make spam a problem as serious as in 2004/2005 (or maybe SPF is yet another of their "dolls"?)

Edit: about anonymous remailer and tor, it doesn't look the same to me. Say I publish 2 keys, one for my domain, one for my user. Everything one wishes to send to my domain is encrypted first with my key, then with my domain key, and then signed with the sender domain key (to add equivalent of SPF). Once it arrives, the equivalent of an MTA can try and decrypt that - if it suceeds, it can then put it in a spool of mail "not fetched yet" (so to as add a layer of protection against a malveolent sysadmin - the user could download all the encrypted mails in the spool and try to decrypt them itself)

The only thing that would be seen (besides the DNS lookups, but they could be cached by the client with a TTL) would be that domain A is sending a message to domain B.
Sorry, Swift's stock price is more about the horror show that is Swift's corporate governance. Especially CEO Jerry Moyes. The very fact that he'll keep his job after this dismal lack of forecasting is an example of how much corruption there is there. Honestly, I would not be surprised if it was intentional.

He had to step down 10 years ago due to insider trading with Swift shares. Now he's back after a they brought it private and then to a second IPO.

The stock tanked, in my opinion, because investors know they can't trust Jerry Moyes and Swift's board.

More fun stuff.

http://teamster.org/content/teamsters-warn-swift-transportat...
http://espn.go.com/nhl/story/_/id/9796076/nhl-lawsuit-jerry-...
> Cats are not domesticated in the same way dogs are. There is a wide genetic variance in cats, coming from hundreds or thousands of local strains. Dogs are two or three main groups, bred over 1000's of years to make the kinds we see today.

Also, count in the fact that dogs (and formerly wolves) were living in packs, but cats did not, and this is still in their genes. Dogs are used to, and more willing to obey someone considered the pack leader, while cats retained most of loner traits even after domestication.
FCC doesn't buy Verizon's throttling rationale
>There is so much life someone can live in 65 years. Do we really need more?

Can't you just replace 65 with 55 and say the same thing? 55 with 45? 45 with 35?

Conversely, if I can live through so much life in 65 years, couldn't I live through more in 75? 85? 95? Given n years of healthy, productive life, at what point does the n+1th year of healthy productive life give you a negative marginal value?
The other thing is that if everything is in powers of 10, then complex calculations are done that require multiple units, it's much easier to calculate. You don't need to keep a dictionary of 'conversion factors' to have these complex calculations make sense.
Given a shower and an infinite lifespan (no death from aging), you will eventually trip and die in the shower. Given enough time and a set of possible events, all of those events will unfold eventually. So I don't see what's so damning about the inevitable cancer, since you seem to hint at that we might get the technology to easily detect them in time eventually.
Wikipedia is a great example of data in an open format that is intended to be migrated forward as technology changes.

It does not protect against rewriting history, one could argue that Wikipedia exists to rewrite history based on the latest consensus and reduction of controversy. While anyone could review the change history, in practice most readers use the latest version. There is at least one research paper showing a steady decline in Wikipedia contributors due to tough editorial policies created to thwart spammers.

Books are decentralized from both a physical and editorial point of view. Look back at any major event in history and there will be multiple records and perspectives of the event. Decentralized locations record the subset of events that are locally most important.

At any rate, it's not an either/or situation. Digital will coexist with print and paintings and sculpture and architecture. Each has a different information density, diversity and preservation profile.
Nice to see.

I have integrated an RPi into my SmartThings setup. SmartThimgs seem to be moving really slowly, their device support is lacking, and their developers documentation pretty poor. This could be a nice fallback.
That's "the promise", yes, but delivering stuff is very different to promising stuff.

Planes are way ahead of trucks in this regard and could actually fly themselves from origin to destination most of the time, but we still keep a couple of highly-trained pilots sitting there to handle the rest of the cases.

A truck can kill nearly as many people as a plane, depending on its cargo and just how badly it screws up. In more common cases, though, I'm unconvinced by software's ability to figure out the best thing to do when it's travelling down the highway at 100 km/h and it sees something unexpected dash onto the road, with a better error rate than a human brain, which can at least immediately distinguish between humans and deer.
I don't mean to be abrupt, but did you honestly read all of the article? Your musings here are really the most rudimentary points of what the author talked about.

As the author states, "evolution is filled with contingent and convergent pathways of adaptive behavior". So yeah, the anthropocentric notion that we have "all of the feels" is bunk.

General intelligence is a fascinating field of neuroscience and is really making mainstream evolutionary psych seem a bit naff.
Another advantage is that a metre is a metre everywhere, and a litre is a litre everywhere (spelling notwithstanding.)

A lot of the imperial units are regional. A tablespoon may be either three or four teaspoons. Who knows how much a fluid ounce is.

One very real PITA is reading cooking recipes and having to do some deduction to figure out how much the units actually are.
UN = US.
Visualize before you analyse data
The most famous such library is wxWidgets; it supports "Python, Perl, Ruby, and many other languages":

http://www.wxwidgets.org
Digital Nomad Stuff
The table of digital nomad locations seemed extremely popular on here the other day.

You may want to check out this guide book too.

http://digitalnomadsguide.com
I watched that attitude over the years (people saying that death is "good"), and I think the reason is people believe death is inevitable. After all, this is how it has always been, and to them, dreaming about immortality is pointless and counterproductive. It's much easier just to find reasons why dying is "good for you".

Luckily, there are also people like you, who choose to do something about it. Personally, I work on AI, so that hopefully IBM Watson in 2050 will be able to help us cure aging.
This is a post on a personal blog by a brilliant young man who does not appear to be a native English speaker.

Assume that nobody edited or even fact-checked his post. Only judge the ideas there on their own merits.
Nah, I just couldn't picture anyone doing woodwork in hundreds or thousands of units (now, where did I get that idea...?), or dividing base 10 units. Since it sounds like wood is sold and worked in base 12, I'd use metric no problem. But that makes the difference between imperial and metric pretty arbitrary, doesn't it?
"Virtualization doesn't really add much of anything for that specific problem other than increased context switching and slightly lower performance."

This is BS. What if you have 3 physical servers with 30% utilization? DRS can _seamlessly_ consolidate _arbitrary_ application VMs to one server and shutdown the rest. With bare metal, only certain specifically designed workloads (stateless web farms and some distributed systems etc.) can be moved easily.

It seems that dismissing virtualization out of sheer ignorance is a fad these days. Virtualization provides important hardware abstraction to a much wider variety of workloads.
To be fair, 'pseudo science' is both a very sweeping and loaded term. Hate to be that guy, but we have to remember that scientism and 'new age' theory can be equally toxic.
I know I'm gonna get downvoted to hell, but I wish TelesurTV cared as much about the Human Rights violations commited in Venezuela by the Government as it does for the atrocities commited by Israel in Palestine. Instead , all it does is call "terrorists" anyone who dares to protest here.

After all, its a TV station running on venezuelan tax payers' money...
Wow, I would not have believed someone would make the argument that everyone needs to use metric because some day we'll all be in space until I read it. Thanks for broadening my horizons.
The doll concept sounds awfully close to either tor or anonymous remailers(which are much more private). But anonymous remailers had much trouble with authorities so i wonder how that will work.