skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I never claimed it could be more efficient. I'm completely in agreement that compiled DSLs are more capable. I'm even a big fan of eDSLs which produce compiled output. I don't find completely static, compiled exterior DSLs to be as frequently useful, however, due to the massive increase in maintenance cost---this holds especially true when you have a sufficiently expressive type system to embed the type system of your eDSL into.
Putting out a gas fire with a nuclear explosion... what can go wrong?
طريقة عمل البيتيفور سابليه والكيس والمقادير بالفيديو خطوة بخطوة
Well, me too. Never have been able to detect odors anywhere near to normal degree. So I'd fail the test for "peppermint, fish, orange, rose and leather" miserably.

FWIW humans rely much less on sense of smell than many other creatures. Interestingly, animals with poorer odor detection tend to have better vision. Raptors have excellent vision and aren't reliant on smell to detect prey.

Human vision is also well-developed, the only trichromats among the great apes.

Goes to show, "tests" don't always apply in each and every instance.
They actually use a payment processor and the full charge is 4%.

It states they also disburse the donations, which may actually end up being a rather good deal. That is, collecting money via creditcard AND getting that money to a local NGO in Mali is not going to be cheap.

But regardless, 4% does sound like a lot, especially if they disburse to e.g. US based organisations that work abroad.

If the bitcoin ecosystem matures it'd be able to help a huge deal in this regard. Circle just launched offering free and instant purchase using bank or credit, and Bitpay offers 0% payment processing in 33 countries.

Anyway, I hope people consider checking out the give well foundation. Giving well is extremely important, and I'm concerned that getting a daily email with some organisations, without any data, analysis etc, we'll be giving very ineffectively to the guys with the most magical story, and perhaps, to the guys with the most money spent on marketing vs aid. Now I definitely am of the opinion that this is okay (great Ted talk on this), BUT if you could spend better, I'd encourage that.

The best example for me was this. Millions of people worldwide are blind due to cataracts, often due to malnutrition. You can largely and often completely 'cure' these people from their blindness with a cheap $20 operation that commonly happens in countries like India. Alternatively, you have blind people who can't be cured, often born blind. We can improve their quality of life, but in say the US it'd cost $20k to completely raise, nurture and train a guide dog.

So we have a choice to either cure someone's blindness completely, or literally spend three orders of magnitude (1000x) more to improve a blind person's life.

As you can imagine, getting one million donors to drop $20 would be a hugely successful campaign. But if they all spent it on guide dogs, it'd have much less of an impact of merely 1000 people donating $20 to completely cure the blindness of a similar number of people.

That's why giving well is so important. I fear apps and services like these diminish that. I hope we all appreciate our influence and act accordingly by carefully considering who to give your money to.
This is exactly what I commented, though much clearer and more succinct. :)
Show HN: Crowdsourced Summaries of Facebook's Human-Subjects Research
I wouldn't call it a hack. Possibly exploitation of religious beliefs. Or a work of satire. Or both. Not quite to the same extent as the 'after the rapture pet care by atheists' thing.
Here is a longer, more detailed article on the Polgar experiment [1].

Unfortunately, since the Polgar sisters were all full siblings, it is possible that they were born geniuses, not made geniuses. Laszlo Polgar wanted to try the experiment again, this time with three boys adopted from a developing nation, but his wife talked him out of it.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that many or most kids would, if given the Polgar treatment in a field become world class in that field. Then an important and interesting question is how early do you have to start? The Polgars started at 4.

The problem I see with starting that young is that it is before the child has a chance to figure out what they are interested in. If you can wait until the child has developed definite interests, and then give the Polgar treatment in one of those, you might have a better chance of the child actually sticking with that as a career.

That's kind of how it was with Carlsen. His parents did not thrust it upon him. He was taught the game at 5, and showed little interest in it. Later, he developed an interest on his own, studied on his own, and started doing well. His parents then provided good support so that he could develop that interest.

[1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200506/the-grandmast...
A New App Called Offtime Lets You Unplug Without Missing Out
From their blog entry:
"Sway’s built-in design engine takes the hassle out of formatting your content by putting all of it into a cohesive layout as you create. ... This is thanks to a lot of Microsoft Research technology we’ve brought together in the background. As you add more of your content, Sway continues to analyze and arrange it based on the algorithms and design styles we’ve incorporated."

It sounds like they're doing some more complication computation on the fly than typical responsive CSS. I suspect that it's related to some of the "Reading mode" work that they've done with IE.
> this is the kind of shallow giving that doesn't create lasting change. I believe true impact comes not just from dollars but people having their hearts invested in causes they believe in.

I don't really agree with this. Whether or not this "shallow giving" creates a lasting change depends on what DaD does with the money.

It's true that "people having their hearts invested in causes they believe in" can have an enormous impact when they act on their feelings. E.g. I care deeply about the current spread of Ebola, or the war that is raging 350 kilometers from my home, but since I'm doing exactly nothing about any of this, my state of heart has absolutely zero impact on anything.

You said "the chance that you help create lasting change and a shift in thinking about yourself versus others is unlikely", but I believe it is important to explicitly separate those two concerns. When one considers donating to charity, one can have multiple reasons for that (usually at the same timie) - like a) "creating lasting change", and b) "shift in thinking about yourself". And maybe c) "positive emotions from helping people". All those reasons are good, but I endorse the idea that one should consider and maximize them separately, or in other words "purchase fuzzies and utilons separately"[0]. The post I linked is a very good take on this topic.

Dollar a Day is not a good way to optimize for a). There are definitely more effective charities out there. It can be an decent way to c) purchase fuzzy feelings cheaply, especially for those who don't have much experience donating or helping people in general. As for b), I think it might have a good enough effect given how strong the human need to stay internally consistent is. You find yourself spending money on charity, therefore you start thinking about yourself as a kind of person that donates to good causes.

> If you're willing to trust Dollar A Day to spread your money to charities, why not just cut out the middle-man and find one charity you trust and believe in to give to?

That was the point of my comment. Between people who don't give to charity at all and people who are willing to "cut out the middle-man" there will always be a group who would give if someone handled the cognitive burden for them. By reducing the process to just subscribing somewhere, Dollar a Day has an opportunity to capture this group, and thus increase amount of money that is given to charities.

So TL;DR: if you think this idea is too cheap a charity for your taste, you're probably not the target audience - you already are willing to be more effective at donating. So give to whom you think you should, and let DaD guys help capture people who otherwise wouldn't donate at all.

[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa...
Believe it or not, there are still people in the world who are victims of violence, abuse, and/or hatred, for whom revealing their legal name, or allowing their online identities to be revealed in searches for their name, might mean putting themselves in unnecessary danger.
No system is perfect, but Facebook's "real names only" stance does work for the most part. I would bet the number of fake users and accounts as a percentage is much less overall than other platforms.

Also as noted by others here, they only respond/catch you if you're reported/flagged by another user.
Well, it's got the word "nuclear" in it, so obviously doomsday is the only possible result.
SEEKING FREELANCER - REMOTE

Roll20 is looking for an independent contractor to help us work on a few new features. We'd want to hire you for 30-40 hours per week, and this is a long-term engagement (as in, at least the next 6 months, and possibly longer). It's 100% remote, we operate currently in Pacific, Central, and Eastern time zones so there's a lot of flexibility.

We're looking for a junior to mid-level person who has experience with Javascript, Canvas, and HTML5 tech such as WebGL and WebRTC. Your main job will be to help us expand the service by building new features under the direction of our Lead Developer (me), and then do a few other miscellaneous tasks such as basic tech support and possibly some very light Linux server administration (if you know how to SSH into a server you're more than qualified for that part of it).

Our stack is:

Javascript

Ruby (Padrino)

PostreSQL

NodeJS

Firebase

If you're interested in taking this on, send an email to jobs@roll20.net with a brief introduction as well as a link to your previous work (e.g. a Github profile) and your hourly rate. Mention that you saw the ad on HN and we'll put you at the top of the list.

Thanks!
Top Shelfie - the bookshelves of interesting people
That's actually unbelievably eye-opening for me. I'm dealing with a family member who, for the last three years, has slid into alcoholism head first. We've not been able to put an identifier on when or why it started, but it started. Looking at it now, though, he has always been the kind of person who has a 'project' going at home that he is unbelievably tied up in; woodworking, singing, hunting, metalworking. Always something. We've always assumed it was some kind of high-functioning autism or some other kind of tic caused by his childhood.

Looking at it with your lens, though, it's just an addictive personality. He's always gone full-bore into everything. Always. Now, instead of a socially acceptable 'hobby,' it's drinking.

Shit. That makes perfect sense.
Plus wouldn't there be some concern about the ocean floor collapsing due to the blast?
With Open-Source Software, You Don't Have to Start from Scratch
I really don't get this issue.

It's one thing if you present as your non-biological gender full-time. (Transgender, transvestite, etc.)

TBH, I haven't been following it closely, but this current issue seems to be about Drag personas. Totally different.

If you're John Smith at your desk job and Sister Roma on Saturday Nights, that's a persona. Same as if I did standup as "The Science Guy".

Setup a business page for that persona or whatever. (Unless you're going to allow anyone to setup any accounts they want to.)
They don't know, they guess, based on some heuristic algorithm.

In Google's case, their algorithm informed my son that the name on his birth certificate is not a "real name", and forced him to pick another one (he kept his real name as his nickname, and chose his more popular middle name as his first name, keeping his real last name). According to http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager, his real first name is the 280th most popular in the US. http://howmanyofme.com/search/ says there are nearly 10,000 people with his first name, and a bit less than 4,000 with his last name in the US. But Google says it's not his real name.
Corexit is a dispersant, not a bacteria that eats oil.
I read the New York Times and subscribe to the Sunday paper (grudgingly; the online subscription is perversely more expensive than allowing them to leave a piece of paper on my doorstep every Sunday!)

The Times puts up too many obstacles to becoming a subscriber in the digital age, as others have mentioned.

Also, either I'm oblivious or they're doing a terrible job marketing their spinoffs. I read the Times daily, on both my phone and at a desktop, and am definitely in their target demo for NYT Cooking, but I haven't even heard of it. I already subscribe to Cook's Illustrated and visit sites like Serious Eats regularly; how is it I didn't know about their new venture?

(http://cooking.nytimes.com/ looks amazing, by the way. I'm disappointed I had to hear about it in the context of these job cuts.)
One of the New York Times' problems of monetizing is relying on what is an essentially an honor system for accessing content. Anyone can just simply view all of the New York Times for free in an incognito window. To pay the subscription is an avoidance of compunction, but not a necessity. This is probably an irrational business proposition.
Dropbox - SF and NY - Fulltime and Intern

Dropbox is building the home for people’s most important things — their photos, docs, and everything else. We handle over a billion files a day for over 300 million users with a product that’s easy enough for your grandparents to use.

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----

Some of the expertise we’re trying to grow:

Engineering: distributed systems, computer vision, data scientist, android, iOS, web (front and backend), QA, and more

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Check out our jobs page (https://www.dropbox.com/jobs) for more jobs and full descriptions.

Apply with link https://www.dropbox.com/jobs/product?ds=1600dcfc59 and we'll get back to you within a week.
The fire is the least of your worries there.
Everyone can write but there are still professional writers. There is a difference between being good enough to get at work and good enough that thousands of people read and enjoy your work.

Similarly, basic computational literacy should include being able to knock together a simple CRUD app or running a simulation. That doesn't mean that Joe Plumber is going to be building complex distributed systems any time soon. It will certainly ease the interface between professional programmers and users though. Rather than having to provide complete appliances where every possible user action is accounted and coded for ahead of time, you can just supply tools that the user applies however they like.

The Unity marketplace looks a bit like this. It turns out there are lots of people who have the desire to make a game and enough skills to handle basic scripting but not enough to build their own physics engine. In the marketplace you can buy level editors, animation engines, pathfinding algorithms etc and glue them together.
> 10,000 hour rule is a rule of thumb, a saying, and a wonderfully fantastic one at that. It's stunningly simple

Yes, but is it true?

There are plenty of platitudes that are "fastastic" and "simple," but aren't true. Maybe you get comfort from believing things even if they're not actually true, but I really deeply do not.

> Why not tell people to try really hard at whatever they'd like to be good at? What's the alternative... don't try hard, because there's a small chance you won't get good at it despite your best efforts?

Did you read my comment? I am arguing that if someone really wants to feel the satisfaction of success, they should become deeply acquainted with their talents, because pursuing things you are talented at gives you by far the best chance of success.

I always wished I was better at drawing. I've put in some concerted effort at it multiple times (like not a ton, but enough to realize that I am frustratingly non-talented at it). If my parents had truly made me believe the 10k hour rule, I might still be trying to make that happen instead of following my true talents, which I've achieved a pretty high level of achievement at.

I'm not saying you should steer kids away from things they are interested in, or tell them they can't succeed. I'm just saying: help them to know themselves, and don't plant in them the idea that 10k hours will magically make them awesome at anything.
Awesome! This should save a lot of time.
Cryptocurrencies, drones
With az's you can at least have some fault tolerance and not have to pay the outbound costs or latency associated with going across the wan.
I was pretty unhappy with how Rackspace handled the maintenance window.

1. Rackspace's maintenance announcement was sent at 9:00 PM on Friday night (Pacific time). Seriously?! I had already left for a weekend vacation without my laptop, so I couldn't do anything to get my company prepared. Even if the patch wasn't ready until Friday night, Rackspace could have scheduled the maintenance windows and announced them to customers much earlier.

2. The maintenance window for all three USA regions were scheduled at the same time. We couldn't just move to a different region without going to another continent.

3. Each maintenance window was 24 hours -- that's just too long. Even though our servers were only down for 10 minutes, we had to be on call and ready for 24 hours.

4. Although we have redundant servers in every region, we still couldn't guarantee that those redundant servers wouldn't be rebooted at the same time. As it turns out, we did lose both of our servers in ORD at the same time.
Outernet launches in beta
Yeah, it's basically outsourcing effective giving. Makes economical sense for everyone involved.
It's partly structural; video content just takes up a lot more bits and bytes. Even if you could somehow find a movie and a novel of equal positive social value, the movie would take up orders of magnitude more network capacity than the novel.
I'm trying not to laugh but its hard.

My hobby sites have fewer bots than Facebook. The truth is, Facebook does this to market to and cater to advertisers. It doesn't actually care unless it affects revenue.
Interesting, I myself vaporize (I don't like smoke) but it is mostly for medical reasons (I live in California) as I refuse to take hard pharmaceuticals. My doctor agrees.
The problem is that with an auction site, you need buyers to trust it and sellers to want to list items there (and have an actual chance that they will sell).

Both of these take years to establish. I used to buy and sell for a living on Ebay/Amazon and no other site was even close.
Sorry, I was lazy. :P
Yea, but that's for print. Not operating a printing facility HAS to bring the costs down, no?
Thanks for the response. All of these pain points are definitely true, in my experience.

I'm working on a database-backed spreadsheet product too, and it sounds like we have very similar ideas about the weaknesses of the current spreadsheet model.

Our output product is still 'rich' spreadsheets rather than apps, though, and while we have a programmable VM and data processing language our language looks much more Excel than prolog or SQL. We also were really interested in the forms/3 research during our early development which is what prompted me to post.
> Are there countries that use slashes for d/m/y?

Oh yes, loads of them. Lots more than use m/d/y anyway. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

Canada looks the most hellish, eg:
"Immigration Canada Stamps use DD/MM/YYYY and Canada Customs Stamps use MM/DD/YYYY."
eek!
EBay, PayPal breakup an OpenStack private cloud split too
We really need to say more than just "N = 32". If you're tossing coins, and the treatment group gets 16 heads, that's a significant result. Not saying that's the case for this particular study, but general point is that N = 32 is not enough to dismiss a study out of hand.
A very religious serial-killer.
> Are there any real-world examples that we can point at of people who actually did spend 10,000 hours at something and did not become superb at it?

This is confirmation bias. If people plateau in their skill at 1k hours and then stop such serious pursuit, the burden of proof is on you to say that their gains would have resumed as they approached 10k hours.

I observe as a musician that most people plateau at some point.
But this way you get to flag yourself as an SJW.
That stuff's great. But do you know why he's on my list? He doesn't seem to think it's a good idea for a shell to parse its entire environment; he seems to think that its better to use the name of an environment variable than its value to determine if it's input to the shell or not; he seems to feel somewhat less at ease with the thought of millions of HTTP request headers passing through the bash parser, relying on its myriad of parsing rules to ensure that no part of them is accidentally executed as a shell command - now or tomorrow.

I must say that this shellchock thing has shaken my belief in humanity somewhat... Why is it that these are not obvious principles that we all agree on? Am I just too "oldschool" or something? :)
I don't get the point of this. It's like iPhoto but worse... or maybe like Powerpoint but less functional: loaders, bad UX, blurry pictures, clearly lacking features (eg. export?)

Is it their attempt at http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js?
Facebook should mark non-real-names as pseudonyms, and offer the ability to block pseudonyms. Most of them will be spammers, after all.
It also felt like you were getting a lot more, with a guy dropping a physical paper off at your door every morning.
TechCrunch Battlefield Startups Montage
I don't think depression is well enough defined for an unambiguous test to even be possible. Google defines depression as "severe despondency and dejection, typically felt over a period of time and accompanied by feelings of hopelessness and inadequacy" which is a reasonable definition, but it really just means "very very sad". When we say someone is suffering from depression does that imply that the cause is medical in nature (not because something horrible happened to them)? How sad does someone have to be before they reach the threshold of depression?
Business wise, i feel the product is not well targeted. Maybe MS has enough $$ to push it everywhere but for whom exactly this product is designed? for pro-consumers to create contents? i doubt. for the purpose of communication?seems overweight. maybe the best use case is for kids to do their course work. I'm a little bit of disoriented. Seems to me MS wants to re-invent the multimedia doc creation tool (which imho never really took off).

I think the big question is if people value presentation over contents. If people in general values contents (or refrained presentation) then Sway probably going to lose, and Medium going to win.
That's why they explicitly stated that they are excluding charities with religious and political affiliations. But there is only so much you can do to avoid controversies - there will always be someone who want to earn a quick buck on a scandal, or sometimes someone who just wants to watch you burn. Controvery is something people manufacture. At some point you have to stop caring.