skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A strong negative correlation does not support the claim that intelligence is modular (which I interpret as "made up of somewhat independent modules"), it would in fact support the claim that a common factor is responsible for high performance in one area and low performance in another.

We do know that the brain itself is quite modular, with various areas of the brain having specific functions. I had a rather disturbing experience that vividly illustrated just how specialised the function of different brain region is. It statrted with a short episode of hemianopia, which was a really bizzare experience in itself - I lost the ability to see the right half of my normal vision. In both eyes. Then, after normal vision returned, I noticed that when looking at text I could make out individual letters, I could see the words as a collection of letters, but I could not put the letters together and understand any of the words.

I had a pile of tests afterwards, including a brain CAT scan, that fortunately found nothing terribly wrong, and the episode was diagnosed as a vascular spasm. But apparently the brief interruption of blood flow to some particular region of the brain had interfered with the "module" that made words out of letters, while leaving other brain functions unaffected.

I have since then formed a belief that our minds are assembled from numerous modules, rather than being a monolithic whole.
That's selling Google a bit cheap.

Google Fiber, the Internet on hot air balloons and driverless cars are all fairly innovative projects with no known competitors. There's also the secret project that Andy Rubin's team is working on and who knows what else we don't know about brewing at GoogleX.
Michael, great work as always. Your tutorials helped me to get up to speed on Rails quickly. Just curious, is there any particular reason you switched from GitHub to Bitbucket in your tutorial?
7 Ways to Use Campaign Monitor as a Lead Generation Tool
So you're saying that curation can triumph over crowdsourcing.
I used to do it on my lunches in my car. Load up an mp3 I made from rainymood.com and some oscillating brown noise on simplynoise.com, put on a sleeping mask and a 45 minute alarm it was great. First few times I didn't sleep much but I did essentially meditate, later on I was sleeping within 10-15 mins.
Google, making the world a better place. together.

http://youtu.be/J-GVd_HLlps?t=14s
What struck me about this design is that the drone is a lot less susceptible to end-user interference / damage / theft -- the drone hovers way out of reach and drops the package from a quickly-retracted line.
My understanding is that if you feed the results of the research into the system then it would be there when the algorithms are run in future and from that point on, the results would be taking the research into account and it's answer would change.
Jason,

Just dropped you a request on Skype.

Looking forward to chatting.
Gravit – open source design tool
Yes, notice in the first article the copious justification and lack of denunciation or demonization. Completely different from MH17.
No matter how you feel, the end result is everyone using GIFs when targeting iPhone. So you end up downloading much bigger files.

Doesn't seem like a win for anyone.
Just like you said! Start a project with it, and learn what you need along the way. Obviously your code will not be all idiomatic on the first try, but that's OK. Along the way you will run into situations where you'll think, "There's got to be a better way," or "If only I could use X feature from Y language." Or maybe you need to debug something with a library you're using but you don't understand how it works. Those are perfect opportunities to learn more advanced concepts.
Chris Date, Database in Depth

No idea if legal...

http://uk-corp.org/Books/Database/Database_in_Depth.pdf
So this is a clear issue of misaligned priorities between content seekers and content providers I guess. I'm very very glad they went with the optimum for content seekers in this case.
One question: How loud is it? The quad rotors that I have been around are disturbingly loud.
Brilliant.

First, I want to thank you for the thoughtful reply. Just like many of you here on HN, I love the internet. It's my life and I've seen it evolve since I was 8. That feeling of never getting the opportunity to even interview for companies you're passionate about is hollowing. I'm glad to see that I am approaching this all wrong.

I really like this approach, I don't mind putting in the work to do some building for each company I choose to apply to. Will start this immediately.
Perhaps slightly OT, but this is a friendly reminder to everyone here, especially those freelancing or running their own business: keep an emergency fund

You never know what will happen, but you can be very sure that within a year you're going to encounter a variety of unforeseen financial hits. Not having the money to pay for them leads to stress and sometimes a vicious cycle.

For many Americans, an emergency fund can be an agonizing choice between feeding their family and planning for the future. But for most people reading this forum, an emergency fund it not a challenge once you decide to do it.

Yet for the first couple of years starting a business, I didn't prioritize this. It felt like I was putting more money into growth, but really I slowed myself down as I now and then had to hustle to meet relatively small unforeseen expenses.

After you get an emergency fund, you then ought to think about 3-6 months living expenses in a relatively liquid asset.

After that's done, you can sleep much more soundly.
Not very charitable to either dismiss as a lie this section of the post[1] or else to comment without having read the short post at all.

[1] (If you’re curious -- in our tests, removing authorship generally does not seem to reduce traffic to sites. Nor does it increase clicks on ads. We make these kinds of changes to improve our users’ experience.)
Damn for a minute I thought it might have been over the 80% price increase for Civ5: Beyond Earth for Australian residents... but it's the 'oh no refund!' thing instead. Valve really needs to behave better to it's Australian customers.
The UX of Google maps for routing when driving is 7-10 years behind Garmin or built-in car navigation systems.

Very rudimentary lane/intercharge information, no waypoints, no POIs along the route.
Is it just me or do their fees seem incredibly high. I've never had my car towed but my not-small city charges $110-140 to tow the car and another $28/day to store it after the first 12 hours.

http://www.calgaryparking.com/web/guest/impoundlot/requiredf...
I learned Rails with this tutorial (for Rails 3), which was good, but I thought it covered too much testing which is a bit overwhelming for someone starting off. Its everything-at-once approach also made it harder to reference topics afterwards. The changes in this edition like they'll be pretty helpful. It's also cool that he'll be using a default Cloud9 environment so people don't need to worry about installing anything.

However, I still think there's space for a fully modular approach to learning Rails instead of covering so many topics at once. For example, users could first learn how to use Active Record to interact with data on its own, and only later learn the other steps to building an app. This would also make it easy to look up topics later or just jump into the parts you're interested in. It would also be cool if users were given tasks with pre-written tests (but without solutions) so they would need to figure out the solution on their own and immediately see if they got it right.

(I even thought of creating a small Rails tutorial on http://www.learneroo.com but I can't currently run Rails on it. I guess one could either use an online IDE like Cloud9 or setup a custom Docker environment.)
Interesting that 'desktop' success is relative to android. If you were going to design an OS for phones and pads, would a sane person have come up with android?

Seems like a shoehorned solution, a phyric victory.
Andrew,

Thank you for the advice. This is all very new to me.

You mentioned visualizing a dream role, this is a fascinating thought. Since I wore many hats over the years as an entrepreneur, if I were to create this dream role, could I market/suggest it to companies I am applying to?

Surely this would probably only work with smaller companies, of course, but do you think this is a possibility?

Thanks
We treat everyone pretty miserably.

I spoke to a professional in a pretty powerful job who almost died because for various reasons he didn't have the money to go to the emergency room. This person works for a Fortune 500 company, and a visit to the ER could easily cost $3k out of pocket.

He ended up having an emergency, which required an ambulance... The total bill was $8,000 after insurance!
From waterfall to Agile slowly
Hal Finney, Bitcoin Pioneer, Dies at 58 from ALS – WSJ
Both when I read this and when I heard amazon's announcement, I, like most people I see here, thought about the "get whatever I order off the internet to my doorstep, asap" use case--and I think that's still a ways off (because of the 0.01% edge cases, the regulation, etc).

But the use case that this article touched on, which to me was a "ah ha! we could do that today" is the case where the sending and receiving parties are more fixed (not just any random person's door), where they could actually build a drone-pad (like a heli-pad, but much more basic), where you could program in all of the specific obstacles on the route (exactly where, if there are electrical lines, what flight pattern to take, etc), and where you could train both the sender and receiver, and cord off the landing area (so you'd never run into the random guy or dog tries to grab the drone problem)

examples:

* delivery of medical supplies/medicine to a facility in a very remote area where it would not make sense to stock the items there permanently.

* very expensive restaurant at a ski resort in the middle of Colorado that gets a drone delivery of fresh seafood from a CA pier every day (an existing business transaction they do anyway that could be done faster, more efficiently than a human operated aircraft)

* the delivery of anything else to a ski resort (you have very wealthy people wanting things in a very remote location)

* something on top of a cruise ship, for medical items or whatever other thing a passenger really needed while at sea.

* something at the Ebola treatment areas right now in Africa.
This event, while tragic, was reported by CNN and BBC: http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/03/world/europe/ukraine-luhansk-b... and http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28292338
this article is set in san francisco. it is a completely miserable place if you do not have enough money.
Done: https://github.com/rxin/db-readings/pull/2
I do. The US invasion of Iraq was not legitimate, and those who knowingly lied to the public to get the US involved in this war should be prosecuted as war criminals.
Many cities bid out towing for revenue purposes.

In my city, in addition to paying an usurious fee, you need to get a form at the police traffic division HQ, pay at city hall (30 minute walk through the hood), then bring some slip to one of three scum hole tow yards.
http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/cs286/papers/anatomy-redbook2005.p...
The world's biggest shakedown
How to make infographics: a beginner’s guide to data visualisation
There is a company called "Breather" offering this sort of service. You get a small meeting/lounge room for %15-25 per hour. See HN discussion and article from a few months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7618818
Yes, it's something new that we've never done before, but circumstances are forcing us to learn how to.
Try implementing something that has a real world use case. It may not matter that your use case doesn't have much of an audience. My first Python web app was a syslog search/filter app that I only used on my home network machines.

After a couple of tutorials you really need to break out and try something on your own. I got quite proficient in C++ by specifically using it in programming competitions such as those hosted by TopCoder or CodinGame. I wasn't in the competition for the top score I was there to learn. I knew about core C/C++ syntax but not much about the standard library. Now I do, as I needed to quickly use the stdlib to get the data structures I needed to solve the problem.
Because users are idiots.

"Our map works best in these cities and the experience isn't the same outside of them" is answered by "1 star, sucks, needs bus data in Ohio".

Mobile apps nowadays need a lot of good will to drive usage, so if any part of the experience is even slightly substandard your users will rake you over the coals.

So, completely reject any user for whom the experience isn't great - it's the rational move. Sadly, supporting your edge cases is harmful to your own health.
San Francisco is for the rich. Anyone making less than $100k+ can't really afford to live here and even that is cutting it close. I honestly don't see the appeal but I guess some people like it here. This place is like Hollywood but instead of entertainment it's technology.
Psfft, tiny violins. The author apparently wants me to sympathize because his car was towed only 15 minutes into the no-parking period in downtown SF. Probably all of the people who were on delayed buses waiting for his car to be towed out of the way thought that the fine should have been a million dollars, plus having his car dropped into the Bay.

Fact is that authentically poor people do not drive. The population of people who drive and park cars in cities skews hugely toward higher incomes.
It's San Francisco, the towing company there charge the fee not to cover their cost, but to make a very hefty profit. Along with SFMTA and their parking tickets bullshit (once I argued for a ticket with photographic evidence of the misplaced meter and a long written letter, but they just simply replied "nope, we don't care, pay up"), together they are nothing less than a government sanctioned cartel.
A recent experience in Ottawa was inline with the article's prices.
A much fairer system would charge people based on their income. Parking tickets, speeding tickets, towing charges, and really fines of any kind, would be much more just if they took into account how much money a person has, so that it stings the same for everyone.

As the article mentions, a poor family getting their only vehicle towed could devastate them, while it's only a mild inconvenience for someone that can afford a limo to pick their towed Ferrari up. That doesn't seem like the optimal system.
It's also pretty miserable even if you make decent money (mid-100s). Thankfully, I am headed for greener pastures in less than a week. Goodbye to the most dysfunctional and disgusting city I've ever lived in. Amazing place to gain work experience if you work in tech, but a horrible place to live.
one study can (almost) never be conclusive but hopefully you realize that your alternative hypothesis is less likely given the data presented.

your desire to espouse that alternative hypothesis is another subtle form of bias that discounts an otherwise uncomfortable potential conclusion (and it's uncomfortable for both genders). which is not to put it all on you because many people (all?) carry this bias to some extent. it would really help if folks were simply open to the likelihood of bias running through us without feeling like we're all bad people because of it.

(this is the same subtle bias that urges media to "balance" the climate change issue by giving the deniers equal airtime. sure, the conclusion that climate change is due to people has a (very) small chance of being wrong, but let's spend our energy finding solutions, not trying to poke little holes in what is likely a real and serious problem.)
This idea is horrible since it is plutocratic and elitist. It encourages the lives of affluent people living in the finance sector/stock traders but empowers nobody else. It punishes those who don't participate in the stock market, fail to correctly predict trends. Remember the damage caused by the finance industry in recent years: the 2007 depression, the bursting of the housing market, as well as the initiation of austerity policies around the world. We should be concerned with eliminating the finance sector's control on society - not increasing it.
I knew exactly what you meant when you said "walk back". I've never been able to describe that effect, but you've nailed it on the head. It took some practice to develop after I discovered on accident, but it is very effective.
That is total bullshit, did you not read the article? Plenty of people work in the city and have to drive, because they cannot afford the rent to live there, or needs vehicles since they are part of their livelihood.

What do you know about "authentically poor people"? You think everyone drives BMWs and Teslas in SF and our amazing public transportation (note: sarcasm) manages to service everyone with a low-income job in the city but don't live there?
Forgot where I heard this, but this world is made to take your money.
After $150M Raised, What Went Wrong at Fuel Cell Startup Lilliputian
Wikipedia's article on clinical death[0] seems to go into a lot of the boundaries involved and is worth a read. I have read about information-theoretic death before but forgotten the term. I first heard about Alcor quite along time ago (10-15 years), and have considered signing up, but haven't so far.

As much as I'd love to cheat death I can't get over the feeling that having myself frozen would be a selfish and arrogant act. I worry that the world will continue to struggle with limited resources and wonder how people will feel if the technology to revive cryopreserved people becomes available but it's a struggle to provide the unambiguously living with food, water and shelter. That said, I find it difficult to fault those who choose to try to escape mortality. I would be interested to hear how people justify it from a resource allocation perspective.

Perhaps we'll figure out how to do mind uploading and solve the problem that way? That's a whole other rabbit hole though, and there's plenty of potential for that to suck[1].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_death
1. http://www.tomscott.com/life/
But if your "sting" is, let's say, a percent of your 100,000 salary, yeah that's going to not be fun but to get your car back, you'll do it and learn your lesson.

If it's a percent of your $30g salary and you're living paycheck to paycheck while trying to feed 3 kids, the effect is going to be substantially worse. I'm not saying we can just waive penalty fees situationally but the inequality is definitely going to be there regardless.
I once blocked a driveway in SF by accident (tiny garage door and the curb was still there), and I ended up having to pay near $1000 to get my car back a few hours later. Where does the money go? I remember being disturbed that the towing lot appeared to be privately run.
Well fair enough. Houston's downtown is pretty boring but not too much blight although that abandoned Days Inn needs to go. My point was just that downtown Houston is the center of a much stronger and larger economic area.
Algae Street Lamps Suck Up C02, but How Exactly? (2012)
I'm curious what their metric was for "user experience."

I did read that portion - but anyone who's done any work in search for very long knows that's google's response to most thing (the recent removal of exact match in ppc is meant to make the platform more accessible, but really just increases impressions / clicks by default and removes the fine tuning that you could do on an advanced level).
This sounds insensitive (I don't mean it as such), he should have taken an uber.
I work on a C/C++/Lua server stack, so this is right up my alley. But as a MSVC native I'd have to spend hours trying to decipher your Makefile to port it to Windows before I could even evaluate it.
You may be incompetent
The authentically poor do drive.

They drive over an hour and a half a day to their jobs, praying that their car doesn't break down that day. Because it has before, and they're still paying off the payday loan.

Some are commuting daily from as far as Tracy. There are places there you can rent for as low as 800. With a roommate or three you can afford the car to get in to the city or the east bay to work.
You can call it bullshit if you want, but it's a fact. First of all, you are absolutely right, BMW and Porsche and Tesla and all other luxury marks are hugely over-represented in SF.

Also, I have data and you don't. Mode share to work, by income:

< $30k: 10% by car
> $100k: 26% by car

Mode share, other than work, by income:

< $30k: 15%
> $100k: 33%

Parking and towing fines are practically irrelevant for the lower income people because they are highly reliant on transit and walking. Lets see an article that complains about injustice in transit fares.

http://archives.sfmta.com/cms/rbikes/documents/SFMTA-ModeSha...
Many of them live in the central valley and commute via car.
Those people drive to Pleasanton and take BART. All actual data (not your ridiculous anecdote) points to the fact that poor people use transit.
(from the article) "energy drinks are disgusting.."

I disagree. Monsters in particular I find delicious. (I try not to drink them often though... they tend to really hype me up then wear me out not long after).
An airfoil that will never stall, no matter the angle of attack
Agriculture is probably a better petri dish for all this technology. Farms are already dangerous, you need to cover large swaths of land, and it's unlikely that you're going to hit anything, or anyone if it falls from the sky.

That said, I could imagine a world where a FedEx drone is permitted to provide last meter service from the roof of a truck, taking the package from the street to the doorstep. Additionally, widespread use of drones may reshape where core resources are stored and allocated. In Manhattan for instance, maybe lightweight warehouses are placed on rooftops for quick deliver of common products within a few minutes of ordering.
* delivery of anti-venom to snake bite victims!
Where are there any android phones sold w/o google apps besides an estimate of 35K Amazon Fire phones, and china?
Once the VC is burned through, profits will normalize close to zero as they compete on price. Uber is hoping to avoid this by getting access to Google's self driving car tech.
Baretta said it best. "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time."
We buried it because it turned into a flamewar about cryogenics instead of being about Hal Finney, and there was another post about Hal (this one) on the front page at the time.
Hi Rich,

I would definitely take that approach, as long as it aligns with the company's own vision. Employers tend to like the idea that you have goals of your own - as long as you stress that you're happy with the entry level role and working your way up. All the best and keep persevering!

Cheers,
Andrew.
In 2007, I had my car stolen from the Richmond BART parking lot. The police recovered it at something like 2:30am the following Friday night. Since I slept through the call, my car was taken to an impound lot. I had to pay something like $225 to pick it up at 9am the next morning, which included a towing fee, a storage fee (rounded up to 24 hours) and a "fuck you its a weekend" fee. I was only working part time while going to college and it was a painful amount at the time, but I was fortunate enough to be able to put it on a credit card and pay that off from my savings. These impound places seem to be run by people totally devoid of compassion who are more than happy to ruin someones life if there is money to be made doing it.
The Ferrari is probably safe, it would take a while to rig up for towing, and with a high risk of damage at that.

Towing the Civic is a safer bet for the towing company.

My perception is that when towing cars unnecessarily (ie: in places where a fine is more than sufficient and a main thoroughfare isn't being blocked), the mid-range cars are preferentially towed, they can pay and they're not hard to rig up.