skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Conway's Law:

>Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

In my experience this is very true at banks. Perhaps it is truer at banks than anywhere else - although I suspect as much, I can't be sure. Bank software is basically about implementing in code, processes that were developed to be applied solely by humans 100 years ago or more. It's all the same stuff. There is nothing new. It's so bad that, after an organizational change, even if there is no logical reason that this change should affect the software running the bank at all, it will anyway, because some existing piece of technology was the old guy's pet project, and so the new guy needs his own pet project. And all projects are pet projects. And so on.

And that's just on the tech side. Of course, on the business side, technology is a cost to be grudgingly paid out and worked on, at best. And once the technical debt gets to be unworkable, someone comes up with the great idea to hand everything over (or in pieces, whatever) to a vendor. But then eventually the cost structure there gets too onerous as well, and so the business tries to replace it in-house again, after spending the last decade clearing out all their in-house expertise. And so the cycle continues.

Some banks are worse than others, but if this article has you thinking that maybe at Goldman Sachs, or Credit Suisse, or Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank, technology isn't an absolute shit-show, well think again. And these places run the world economy while their technological infrastructure is held together by duct tape.

The article is right, of course, that banks will still be around in 20 years. Obviously. But, the big banks have known they need to get their act to together for, at the very least, forty damn years. And not a single one of them (not one!) has done it. And they never will, because they are dominated by a culture going back two hundred years that will not ever let engineers anywhere near the levers of the business, which is where they need to be, and for that matter will most of the time not invest profits back into the business when they can funnel it into their own bonus instead.

If you want to disrupt banks, start a bank! Start a bank where you can do things and enter markets that the big guys can't, because their tech is half-assed and they aren't creative enough to do anything about it. Finance is in need of disruption, and the potential windfall to pulling it off is enormous, but you aren't going to get there by selling to existing players.
Sure but what's the point? Releasing, hosting, and maintaining a second app that doesn't have your USP?
These are all great.
I hate to say it, but I have a feeling that the non-string-theory camp (Rovelli, Smolin etc.) have a fairly large (probably justifiable) chip on their shoulder regarding the amount of funding and support that string theory research has had over the last few decades, in comparison to "competing" theories.

It's a pity to see this come out in some of Rovelli's statements in this interview, because the rest of it is so wonderfully measured and thoughtful.
Cape Town’s pop-up store for the homeless goes global
I can't see anything unethical in that, it's just highly impractical (which is why it might be difficult/expensive to find test subjects).

But my guess is that there isn't actually any "spherical" vs. "non-spherical" distinction at the level of processing that is (presumably) untrained in blind people, but rather some more general recognition of sharpness of objects' edges of which spheres are just an extreme case, and that would be pretty much impossible to control for, as you'd need the test subject to live in a "uniform sharpness environment", which would have to include their own body's shape(s) ...
I don't think adding the integration would be hard. For example, the Montreal bike system (and other Bixi deployments) has all the information you'd need to add the integration, including the lat/lon of all stations and their current bike count[1]. Citibike has a different endpoint[2] and data format, due to the contractual dispute between Bixi and 8D, so they had a different system deployed than other Bixi rollouts.

A simple implementation would simply walk between the endpoints of the route and the closest bike stations. A better integration would also consider more complicated multimodal routes (walk, bike, metro, bike, walk) and historical usage patterns to predict empty/full stations.

If it helps convince the PTB that public bike system integration is a must, I use it as my sole means of transportation during the summer months, relying exclusively on bike navigation (it's great!), then awkwardly fumbling with another app to find a bike station near my destination.

[1] https://montreal.bixi.com/data/bikeStations.xml
[2] http://appservices.citibikenyc.com/data2/stations.php
Good, but doesn't make Keurig a good coffee worth drinking ;)
Link to downloadable video lectures of this would be useful.
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Next time Keurig should stop engaging in lunacy like DRMed coffee.
I don't quite understand this.
A person's preconceptions is the collection of his previous knowledge about the subject.
What does it mean to have random preconceptions?
Failure is everywhere; we just can’t see it
Magical Drug Wins EFF’s Stupid Patent of the Month
> My parents used the last digit on a stopwatch to decide which of the kids got to pick the radio station in the car and similarly trivial decisions. (If 0-9 couldn't be divided evenly among the kids present, leftover digits would result in a re-roll.)

Easily solved by taking the [EDIT: seconds digits] modulo the number of children, but I guess that might be difficult while driving.

EDIT: People, please try to think this through before posting an innumerate reply.
We have a culture where taking action and causing a problem is worse than letting a problem continue through inaction. Things that could affect the environment are a big one. Another good example is overly conservative drug approval.
Ah, okay now it's clear why the parent was downvoted. Same reason my post was: some idiot didn't like the sentiment, but being unable to engage the thought or present a counterargument, downvotes instead, and convinces himself this is equal to the negation of the idea. Nice work, anonymous fool.
I think the article is from 2004 instead of 2006.
None the less, i'm wondering if this statement still stands:

Tcl is slower than C, but the network is slower than Tcl.
Delivery of lots of things for search and rescue operations would probably be pretty useful, if somewhat niche.

I've heard of quite a few S&R stories where they knew where the person was but couldn't safely get there until daylight. It seems like being able to drop off a care package in such situations would be useful.

In some situations like harsh cold snowy weather a drone is unlikely to be of much use, but dropping a couple of liters of water to someone stuck overnight in the desert could be the difference between pulling in a dangerously dehydrated lost hiker in the morning versus picking up someone who just needs a lift back to civilization.

Of course, drones (even sans delivery ability) seem like a good fit for S&R anyway -- relatively cheap (compared to manned helicopter searches) and safe way to cover last known areas of missing folks to try to locate them from the air.
Dear Kate's Ada Lovelace Lingerie Collection Modeled by Women in Tech
Re: references

I've had former manager (and friend) call me and ask: "Are you looking for work?" When I told him "no", he told me that a recruiter had called him to "check my references" as a pretense so they could ask him if he was looking to hire anyone.

I would be very careful about giving out references.
Ask HN: Do you recommend coworking space membership for remote worker?
Any thoughts or anecdotes out there from you remote workers?
The hardest part of that equation still remains revival from the cryo-preserved state, not treating the ALS.
Twitter analytics available for the public
Yorker – Cricket Scorer is live
Not quite sure how this will end poverty.
If anything, it will bring 15M people into the banks' debt and interest clasp.
This is a well known practise in Spain. I com from Spain and I have always seen my family (parents and grandparents) drinking coffee after lunch and, then, doing a nap on the couch. Usually, we sit on the couch, take the coffee together and then every person takes a newspaper or magazine and after a few minutes of pseudo-reading everybody is sleeping or in a state of deep relaxation. We sleep for 20 minutes. That's all. I guess this is very common in Spain.

This works well because we often take lunch at home. But, now that I have lunch at the office, I do the same. I have a 1 hour pause. The first half hour I have lunch, then I take the coffee and I go to the office to sleep on the floor, on a very thin mattress. If my brain is too active, I listen to a foreign radio station with my iPhone. I like to listen to ICI Radio Canada (in French). When I have lunch here, they broadcast the morning news and commentary. The news are about stuff happening in Quebec. It is interesting enough for me to forget the work stuff, and dull enough to induce me into a deeper relaxation state, which allows me to fall sleep fast. Being the broadcast in a foreing language, also helps to fall sleep. I often dream during this 20-30 minutes naps.

An interesting detail is that I had to learn this habit. I remember being a child and being pissed off because I wasn't allowed to make noise after lunch. Now, that I'm a father, the roles are changing and I'm the one sleeping after lunch.

By the way, at night, in order to fall sleep, I never take phones, tablets or computers to my bedroom. Instead, I take a shortwave radio and I tune the BBC world service news (fortunately, in Spain we can hear the broadcast directed to Africa). I put a 30 minutes timer on the radio and I almost never hear it stopping, because I fall sleep before. The day that the BBC will shut the SW broadcast, I guess I will take a bluetooth headset or speaker to my bedroom, but not the iPhone. It is very important to avoid computers in the bedroom.
Show HN: Set Cabin Porn Pictures as Background (Mac OS X)
How We Could Cool Quantum Computers
For Quantum Hacking's Threat, Startups Offer Futureproofing
I think the point is that you can't remove external constraints from a situation simply by willing it (make the people in the room disappear, make your AI independent of assumptions).

For example the type of neural net chosen, the reinforcement and other parameters, the rules of the game chosen by the creator are all constraints which are not randomly chosen, so randomly choosing the starting state is not necessarily going to remove preconceptions built in to the model, and it is still choosing some starting state, just not an arbitrary one chosen by the creator.

I'm not sure it really applies to this article though, which is about a different problem - saving the time spent worrying about unimportant decisions or those where you don't have enough inputs and choosing to take a random path.
The difference is that investors would like us to believe they follow a rational path to decide where to invest :D
"and china"

why are you excluding China? A few hundred million of Android phones without Google services isn't enough of a proof that Android is a great product even without Google services?

edit: add source: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/13/china-now-has-700m-active-s...
Putin Pops Russia’s Tech Bubble
I read Lee Smolin's book on this debate (The Trouble with Physics). I think what happened in theoretical physics -- to the extent that it's spinning its wheels with untestable theories -- is largely that there are too many theoretical physicists and not enough hard experimental data to chase after. When there is nothing much interesting happening in a field, it's always going to be tempting to point the finger at whatever annoys you. But if there were important discoveries to be made, probably string theory would not prevent someone from making them.
I think it means that:

(A) There are always "preconceptions" present, even if the programmer isn't working on a level of abstraction that lets them consciously realize it.

(B) Programming a system to be too naive can backfire.
Possibly for good reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8170246

Best leave it to the mods.
This is for poor and labor class people.
Currently these people earn hand to mouth and spend daily as per their need. Husbands spend on drinking and there is no money left for medicines or child care.
If they get bank accounts
1)They will start saving.
2)They will understand the benefits of saving and be the owners of their own money.
3)Any govt schemes or benefits will directly reach them which currently is going into the pockets of corrupt middle men.
$)Banks wont give credit or loans to these people without colatteral so no question of debts.
This way it will start a revolution and it will take some time to see the actual benefits but I am sure it will be very positive.
Do you intend to make use of new 4.2 goodness or simply make the tutorial 4.2-compatible? Granted, some of the improvements in 4.2 are out of scope for the book (like ActiveJob), some are performance related, but there is also web console. It fits the philosophy of the new edition perfectly and would be a useful addition to the book.
>Easily solved by taking the last digit modulo the number of children, but I guess that might be difficult while driving.

Well it's not fair. Take 4 children for example. random 0 to 9 mod 4 does not have an even distribution over 0-4.

It's also more difficult to explain to children.
It may not end poverty directly but it certainly can help.

With direct welfare payments over over other benefits in particular it allows poorer people to get money without any middle men in between.
The bit about bank revenues might be a telltale sign of where the real interest is, while the part about paying subsidies directly avoiding middle-men corruption makes the plan look more promising.
Whatever the way you look at it, 15 million people suddenly enrolled into the bank system are a huge market for some kind of startup that does not exist yet.
Err, thats a very old school thought. Its more that these people don't believe in banks or the banking system. In-fact most of rural India still has people taking loans from 'zamindars' who end up charging insane interest rates and forcefully taking away property/farms from the poor farmers.
Using modulo would actually bias the results making things slightly less random.
Really, so if he proves that it can remove CO2 from the atmosphere, which I'm confident he is right about, has he proofed it is safe to do so on the scale required, simply no.

Our models of real world are woefully general, I doubt we even have the computing power available to crunch all the variables.

It seemed a good idea to bring cane toads to Australia to combat the damage done be cane beetles, foxes were brought to combat rabbits. Hint, none of these attempts at environment management went well, even though they are relatively simple problems; foxes eat rabbits right?
Not to discount your experiences (obviously I have no idea about the details), but I know some faculty who are dismissive of all their students' ideas -- and deliberately so, based on the argument that until a student is able to stand up for their ideas, they're not ready to receive a PhD.

Personally I think it's an unnecessarily cruel approach, but it does seem to produce good results at times.
Google Chrome 38 Beta (inc. 64 bit OS X, New user Switching, Guest mode)
Additional link for the user switch feature: http://chrome.blogspot.de/2014/08/this-time-its-personal.htm...
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Sublime Text Build 3065
I just got an update from Sublime Text with the following log:

Release Date: 27 August 2014

* Added sidebar icons
* Added sidebar loading indicators
* Sidebar remembers which folders are expanded
* Tweaked window closing behavior when pressing ctrl+w / cmd+w
* Improved quote auto pairing logic
* Selected group is now stored in the session
* Added remember_full_screen setting
* Fixed a lockup when transitioning from a blinking to a solid caret
* Fixed a crash in plugin_host
* Fixed a crash triggered by Goto Anything cloning views
* Windows: Added command line helper, subl.exe
* OSX: Added 'New Window' entry to dock menu
* Posix: Using correct permissions for newly created files and folders
* API: Updated to Python 3.3.3
That's only fair if you have 2, 5, or 10 kids.
Are there any non-proprietary pod based coffee machines?
You don't want to modulo. You want to multiply the last digit by the number of children and divide by ten.
Jottacloud is a Norway based Dropbox clone. Their datacentres are powered by green energy and their Pro account offers unlimited storage across unlimited devices for $9,90/month (even cheaper than Dropbox's new lower prices). To be honest, it was a bit glitchy with regards sync-ing, when I first signed up about a year ago, but it's come on in leaps and bounds since and is now pretty much as seamless as Dropbox for me. Usual referrer link below gets us both some extra GB, when you sign up for the free account:

http://www.jottacloud.com/signup?referer=2166DD2B220919EFE10...
Yea certainly it would help, these 15 million people accessing bank accounts via mobile is also an initiative which has started by NPCI.
The problem is that in any decision difficult enough to make you resort to a coin flip, most likely either coin flip result will make you hesitate.
What are you talking about? Jon hasn't released anything since the end of 2013...
> random 0 to 9 mod 4 does not have an even distribution over 0-4.

That's true, but only because 4 never appears in the result. The possible results for modulo 4 are 0 - 3.

The first child is numbered zero. Shall I explain it in more detail?

n n % 4
-----------
0 0
1 1
2 2
3 3
4 0
5 1
6 2
7 3
8 0
9 1
10 2
11 3
12 0
13 1
14 2
15 3

> It's also more difficult to explain to children.

And rewarding, unless you want your children to grow up innumerate.
Interesting no one mentioned Huginn [1]. It's open, and perfect for "internet of things" stuff. I've done some of the basic IOT stuff that's mentioned in the article with Huginn (open doors at specific times, turn on lights etc).

Sure it might not be as pretty as IFTTT (and I'm sure however IFTTT implement interfaces for IOT stuff will look great.. $30MM great) but they're working on it.

[1] http://github.com/cantino/huginn
Like living in Tokyo?
> You don't want to modulo.

You haven't thought your reply through:

n n % 4
----------
0 0
1 1
2 2
3 3
4 0
5 1
6 2
7 3
8 0
9 1
10 2
11 3
12 0
13 1
14 2
15 3

> You want to multiply the last digit by the number of children and divide by ten.

That doesn't produce the result you think it does. Think a bit harder. If the last digit is 20, and there are four children, the result is 4 * 20 / 10 = 8. There is no eighth child.
One has an especially significant right to representation when they are subject to an adverse judgement by a court. This is not about whether the CxO has done something wrong, it is about who should be held responsible, and what process will lead to a just result.

In addition, if someone "broke federal laws and exposed the company to serious financial liability", the corporation(s) should be subject to civil judgement, and the individual(s) should be subject to civil and criminal penalties.

To be clear, I do not object to adverse judgments, I only object to unjust procedures.
And what's supposed to happen when it's an hour later and the mind is still wandering but not sleeping any more than originally?
What? Have you thought this through?

n n % 4
-----------
0 0
1 1
2 2
3 3
4 0
5 1
6 2
7 3
8 0
9 1
10 2
11 3
12 0
13 1
14 2
15 3
Not so. If the last digit on the clock is random, then the result is also.

n n % 4
-----------
0 0
1 1
2 2
3 3
4 0
5 1
6 2
7 3
8 0
9 1
10 2
11 3
12 0
13 1
14 2
15 3

EDIT: It must be really, really satisfying to be able to anonymously downvote posts that actually reveal such things as grade-school arithmetic -- thus contributing to the intellectual wasteland that most accurately represents America in the early 21st century.
I'm an Alcor member, and I don't really get how it's not a bigger operation yet. This place has people like Hal Finney and Ray Kurzweil as members and is the preeminent option in the field, but it feels like a tiny mom and pop shop. Seems to me like it should be funded with billions, and eventually I'd like to help make it much bigger.

It's a pretty long, annoying process to become a member, but I'd recommend it if you'd prefer not to die.

I have a $300K policy that covers the $200K suspension and a $100K fund when I wake up. I'd recommend insurance even if you can afford to pay the $200K out of pocket because there's less legal risk that the funds might be tied up in litigation. I got my policy through the only Alcor member insurance agent, Rudi Hoffman, and if you're interested in cryonics, he's probably the best introduction you can get. His number is (386) 788-3773.
Smash, Aftermath of Colossal Impact Spotted Around Sunlike Star
Not yet, the back-end is almost "ready" but the front-end still requires a lot of work.
You are a quick learner :-) ... Nice!
Watson Discovery Advisor, now available for companies to use as a cloud service
I wrote the software for the Mother Parkers RealCup brewer and am quite familiar with at least their knockoff. The real purpose of the brewer was really as a way to push their brand of K-cups (it's the razor blade thing). Everything is about pushing those cups because the margins on those cups are amazing. Keurig is desperate to try to maintain their licensing deals. The (patented) Vue cups aren't doing great, so this was their next attempt. Keurig's attempts aren't really focused on serving the customer, but rather on trying to extract continued revenues from them. BTW...$3.7B market in K-Cups. Crazy huh?
Nintendo once made a game system which only accepted floppy disks embossed with the Nintendo logo[1]. Which obviously can be protected by trademark law.

Perhaps they should use the camera to look for some pattern they can copyright.

Of course, for Nintendo I don't think it prevented piracy...

[1] http://www.glitterberri.com/developer-interviews/how-the-fam...
Linux Command-line Journey Day-4
It needed to be said. Nowadays theoretical physicists are often working on theories 100 years ahead of even the chance of empirical validation. I for one would like to see a greater portion of funding going towards experimental physics.

Here is a startup analogy. One is having a dream about building google and writing a paper about it. How it might work, eg. 20% time, etc. The other is actually building google.
I hope if civilisation has got to the point of reviving the long dead that they'd have better uses for the revived than tormenting them.
It isn't supposed to be a test of whether you know the modulo operator but in practice it works out that way.

True story; my wife was going over her (correct) answers to a coding test with the interviewer and he asked her "What's this?" in reference to the modulus operator. The interviewer didn't recognize it.

I use the modulus operator almost daily so it seems obvious to me but I realize that everyone has different experiences or things they are ignorant about. IMO, fizzbuzz is a test of whether you know the modulus operator "trick".
A pseudonymous trust system for a decentralized anonymous marketplace
Let's Build Two CSS Content Sliders
The Space Roar