skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, "VALIS" was alright. I'd definitely put it ahead of "Minority Report" and "A Scanner Darkly", but far behind "Ubik", "The Three Stigmata", and "Martian Time Slip"; and even behind some other lesser works like "Maze of Death" and "Eye in the Sky".

Of the "VALIS" trilogy, I enjoyed "Divine Invasion" much more.

I did enjoy "DADoES", but just found it to pale in comparison to the movie and to Dick's best works. Dick's evocation of compassion for animals in that novel was quite compelling. Compassion for the underdog (literally and figuratively) is a strong, ongoing theme in his work.

I've been meaning to read "The Man in the High Castle", but have kind of shied away from it because I've found that Dick is best when he writes straight scifi rather than books set in the "real world", as it were. Though TMitHC being set in an alternate history does make it somewhat more attractive for me.
Well, prior - there were apps you could download that would save Snapchat images that would work on non-root devices. At least by enabling this encryption that's now only available to the relatively small amount of root users out there.
Focus on divorce rate rather than happy marriage rate (I like that term!) describes pretty much every article on what makes a successful marriage.
>We're seeing an up-tick in automation.

We're actually not. Current trade policy discourages automation by pushing manufacturing to low wage countries attempting export led growth instead. Those jeans you're wearing? Those toys in the store? Mostly assembled by a person I'm afraid.

Those menial jobs are not being done by robots they are being done by cheap factory workers in Bangladesh, China, Vietnam, Mexico, etc.

The US has actually had an uptick in the number of menial jobs created since the recession and a downtick in the number of skilled jobs.

I think this "automation has accelerated since 2008" meme is simply a convenient excuse for the lost jobs that shifts blame away from the people who actually caused it. Similar to the "banning redlining caused the housing crisis" meme.
I'm on the board of a small private high-school and I'm going to forward this to the headmaster but ...

Sitting all day [1] passively listening to a droning professor [2] and feeling like a nuisance [3] if you don't grasp the material, pay attention and avoid causing disruptions [3] is an important skill for college survival. If we change the curriculum to engage the students more (which I tend to believe will increase their retention of the materials), will we make them less capable of successfully performing 1, 2 & 3 in their college classes?
Not really. Most people couldn't care less about the 10 second thing. They use Snapchat just as a means of sending a quick photo. It's just more fun than texting. I know very few people who actually care about the privacy aspect of it.
Would the same apply to a server I rent? If not, how is that different from paying for Gmail?
Tracking Refugees with Machine Learning
Are you using any sort of acceleration data-structures to manage your voxels or just storing everything in plain 3D array of positions? I imagine you can run into memory issues there if you don't account for spatial sparsity in your voxel data?

I'd be curious to know if you're something something like run-length encoding (RLE) or something hierarchical such as a B-Tree?
A lot of Africa also suffers from Dutch disease and the resource curse.
Obama’s November Surprise
I chalk it up to curiosity on my part and survivor bias on the stories part. Folks who have known me for a long time know that I am a very curious person and I spend an inordinate amount of my spare time reading and "investigating" things (which my wife calls puttering). But there is also a bit of survivor bias here, it only seems like it is true because I don't have any stories to share on a lot of things here and elsewhere and don't. Oh and I'm "old", so I've got a lot of time between when I started doing crazy stunts and now, so even doing only one every couple of years I've got double the number of crazy stories than a "young" guy :-). That said, I'm sad that during my high school and college years the (late 70's early 80's) it was so much easier for me to explore things, whether it was the high school district's shared mainframe, or home made high concentration HOOH than it is today. No doubt if I were one of my own kids growing up in the 90's I would have been arrested and my parents assumed to be poor examples of responsible adults.
it had exactly two, and neither leaked classified documents
Built in html5, motherf^c^er
There are gov't benefits to being married. For example, when one spouse dies the joint assets don't need to go through probate.
Fourthing the Culture series.

I've read most of them now and the highlights for me are Look To Windward, Player of Games and Fearsum Endjinn (stick with that one). I also rate Excession and Matter though I know a lot of other people think they're weaker.

Atlas Shrugged has been called the 'second most influential book in America' so I can understand why it gets mentioned a lot. I found it an unimaginative, tacky bore. It's at least three times the length it should be, the characters speak in diatribes and are impossible to empathise with. At best it's interesting as a thought experiment and it did affect my outlook on life but, really, I read it because I thought I should, not because I wanted to.

I also found Red Mars a bit of a struggle in this way too. It seemed similarly ideological to Atlas Shrugged but from the other direction. It was worth reading for the sheer attention to detail and imagination though.
The White House Joins Medium
As per the specification of this test, the data has to be committed on disk before it is considered sorted. So even if it all fits in memory, it has to be on disk before the end.

So you have 100TB of disk read, followed by 100TB of disk write, all on HDDs. That's about 100GB/node; and since Hadoop nodes are typically in RAID-6, each write has an associated read and write too.

This does not even include the intermediate files, which (depending on how the kernel parameters have been set), could have been written on disk. Typical dirty_background_ratio is 10; so after 6GB of dirty pages, pdflush will kick in and start writing to the spinning disk.
Minecraft 2.0? :)
Live Q&A Session Happening Now (10am PST) –  Fiddlewax Pro
WW3 UN TO TAKE OVER WORLD AS EBOLA AND ISIS TAKE CONTROL
First of all, these are two distinct claims:

1. The market undervalues science and scientists

2. Science is sub-optimally close to the "extremistan" end of the "extremistan-mediocristan" spectrum

I believe both (why do you think I would "not want to admit" #2?), but the claim I have been making is #1. The existence of well-compensated scientists is not evidence against #1 because #1 is an aggregate statement and #2 should guarantee the existence of well-compensated scientists regardless of #1.

Now let's talk about #2.

> There have been an ample number of scientists that have produced spectacular work on a consistent basis. No luck involved.

Examples?

Before you try to p-hack this one, let me specify the null model: scientist as prospector. Like gold in the ground, ideas cluster. Skill and resources determine your rate of sifting through earth, but at the end of the day initial positioning matters a hell of a lot. The founders of a new field are all but guaranteed decades of consistent productivity, but in order to maximize the amount of gold dug out of the ground it still makes sense to devote considerable resources to surveyors who haven't yet hit paydirt.

What would I see as evidence of the "skill" view? Einstein before 1906. People who are able to consistently make breakthroughs.

What do I see as counterevidence? Einstein after 1906. An overabundance of one-hit-wonders. Hundreds of theoretical papers in the arXiv that make the construction of GR look like a rite of passage rather than a singular achievement -- with the exception that Einstein happened to be right where they happened to be wrong or useless (it's not like either could tell ahead of time how things would turn out). Epistemology: correct useful ideas are very, very sparse in the set of plausible ideas.

> I don't see anybody complaining about the market dynamics of athletes.

Doubling the number of competent-but-not-superstar basketball players would add little marginal value (more games, maybe).

Doubling the number of competent-but-not-superstar scientists would about double the marginal discovery rate of science, assuming the scientist-as-prospector model.
The "it just happened naturally" relationship is a bit of a myth. They do things their way; you do things your way. There's so much to be negotiated! But before that happens and a couple lives separately everything is fantastic 24/7!
Agreed! It's not the wedding per se, it's that both spouses embrace frugality.
Was your college experience a lot like high school in that regard? I don't feel like mine was. My schedule never involved 6+ hours of sitting without breaks. Even in semesters with a heavy workload, some of the classes were always labs or very interactive, not just lectures. If classes were back-to-back, they were still often in different buildings, so there was a bit of an exercise break between lectures as opposed to walking down the hall in the same HS building. Virtually all professors were open to questions before/after class or had office hours or a TA with office hours -- asking questions was not seen as being a nuisance. Laptops/phones were allowed in nearly all lectures, which breaks up the monotony of sitting passively even during a lecture.
Why high-powered magnets in toys are hazardous for kids
How Did We Build Successful Customer Support for Our Enterprise Customers?
I am so glad someone other than me took the time to google this and post it here. People want everything spoon fed these days. They don't even want to take a few moments to say "Let me see if this guy has a point" and do a little research before running their mouths through the keyboard. Thank you for posting this limk.

How about it folks? You are not going to take back all those down votes and nonsense counterpoint posts, are you? You are not going to apologize and say, "Sorry, you were right", are you?

Of course you are not. You probably won't even take the time to read the PDF this person posted. No, it's much easier to hate those with opposing views and smash them down as hard as you can than to make an effort to understand and learn something.
Is there anything else than the video? Some homepage or so? Is this an Open Source language or a commercial one?

I guess this is not related to this? http://kayalang.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaya_(programming_language)
Why shouldn't college education be more engaging as well?

I'm teaching at the Interaction Design programme in Malmö, which is very much centered around project based learning and because of that inherently avoids the problems mentioned to a large degree. Although I admit that interaction design lends itself better to such an approach than some other subjects.
I read just about every Heinlein story I could get my hands on as a teenager. The funny thing is that the one's I thought were sort of stupid - e.g. Have Space Suit Will Travel and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - because they were only about the solar system, I've found to be among my favorites as an adult.

Then again, I couldn't get through Friday back then, but found the description of the role that big data would play in the future prescient a few years ago. Likewise, understanding Stranger in a Strange Land in the context of Heinlien's relationship with Hubbard was beyond me in high-school [Hubbard's BattleField Earth is worth a read or at least a try, even if the movie isn't. He was a talented writer among other things].
I was wrong. We do know how to deal with Africa.

By consuming the bounty and leaving them scraps.
Greg Egan will explode your brain.

PERMUTATION CITY http://amzn.com/1597805394

And here's some ultrasharp online science fiction

RA, FINE STRUCTURE, CAUSAL NOOSE ETC http://qntm.org/fiction

FRIENDSHIP IS OPTIMAL http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal
Step-by-Step bot infection process exploiting bad password
Watch ANSI art be created in realtime
I love it! Lovelovelove!

I thought "what a nice wind sound effect" until I realized it was the CPU fan in my laptop. Heh. But that's not really a big deal, at least for now, and I'm sure you can optimize.

Experiments like this show us that graphics and VFX are overrated. It's true for games, and it's true for movies too. Primer is still one of the best sci-fi flicks I've seen in the last ten years, and they used what looked like surplus air conditioning equipment as props. Sometimes too much FX actually gets in the way of your imagination. When I visit a virtual world, I kind of want it to be unlike the physical.

I tried a Rift the other day too, and that has its appeal as well. But it's a different appeal.

Noticed it was a tad laggy and then tracerouted and found that it's in London and I'm in Southern California. I suppose that's understandable. I guess if things take off you'd be able to geo-locate a bit via other cloud services.
Many of my friends married because of visa restrictions. You cannot bring your girl friend unless married to the US for example.
You're going to want to work on your communication if you want to evangelize your new tool and not alienate people. For the rest of the world, the value of Kaya is not a given and you're going to get a lot of practice explaining it.
I finally got around to reading it. It was mildly enjoyable in the way decent fast food can be enjoyable, but I don't understand how people can claim this immature one dimensional story and okay writing constitutes a great book.

I enjoyed it because I'm a nerd who grew up in the 80's, but it's bubblegum entertainment with the depth of puddle.

I love SF, but the lack of distinction (by both fans and critics) between entertaining stories and good literature kinda turns me off and stops me from reading more. I constantly get disappointed when some highly praised SF book turns out to be nothing more than nerd equivalent of chick-lit.

Fuck, I even love SyFy channel's B-movie crap every once in a while, but at least I don't get duped into watching it thinking it is great cinema.

I would probably have enjoyed the book more if I had more realistic expectations.
I've personally watched an essentially-non-programmer take VB.NET, drag-n-drop, write some event handlers, and have a functioning little app. So while VB6's IDE is faster than the ".NET" Visual Studios, most of your other complaints are really not valid.
I'd like to step back from this from a moment and get a little more abstract and ask if this idea of shadowing applies to software products (or any other business, really).

Has anyone really sat down and shadowed one of their users for a whole day? I know small usability studies are pretty common. You get someone in a room, ask them to perform some tasks, see what they do. But if you have an app that people are going to spend their whole day in, e.g. email, office suite, productivity, does anyone really sit down and shadow a user for a day?

There might be things you don't notice if you only do it for an hour or two, or is it just not the same when the user isn't required by an authority to be present?
"You're idealizing Access for reasons unknown."

Well, you might accept that I'm "idealizing" Access because, you know, I had a decent experience with it 20 years ago, as described in my first comment. No need to go searching for mysterious ulterior motives when they're explained in the post!

For what it's worth, I do remember significant flaws in Access. For one thing, it was an absolute pain when we wanted to modify the database - we had to get everyone to log off, and then upgrade all of the clients at once. This is one of those problems that the web solves elegantly. Also, Access had major issues with concurrent users. Performance fell off a cliff, and from memory, certain operations were unsafe (I think you could set up a SQLServer which would address the concurrency problems, but we never bothered).

But these days we have better options available to us - app stores fix the updating problem, without introducing the css + html + javascript mess. We have decent, free web servers, and web application frameworks such as Django and Rails that make writing the server side code that drives the RESTful APIs used by the client relatively easy. But what we don't have is:

a) an easy way to create a server (this needs to be as easy as sharing an Excel spreadsheet)
b) a coherent development environment from client to server code. Something that allowed you to write apps purely in Javascript (no css or html) with a GUI editor, and which also let you write the server code in node.js would be a close match to what I'm thinking of. Bonus points if most of the node.js code is derived from the client-side code, so that the novice programmer doesn't need to be aware that a server even exists, it just works.

The problem is, that's the kind of application that's really hard to write. It's big, an IDE in fact, and really Microsoft is the only game in town for making that sort of stuff. But they won't write Android / iOS / Mac clients, so it doesn't happen.
It was ... though I didn't notice as much in my EE/CS classes (perhaps because I was so interested in the content?).

On the other hand, my Chem 12 section had about 400 students in it - there was no chance for the professor to engage us during the lectures. This was pretty common in the classes that were BDRs (Basic Degree Requirements). Econ 2/4 (Micro/Macro), Math 160/161 (Differential/Integral Calculus) and Film 190 and most of the beginning humanities/social sciences were all taught this way.

In theory, recitations were smaller groups where you could be more engaged with the TA (generally a grad student) but half of them spoke such broken English they couldn't be understood (I had a higher-level math TA that described two-thirds as "three under two" - when you're taking notes at the pace required, your pen naturally writes three-halves for a few weeks).
I think the data is a fascinating point for lively conversation and conjecture as long as you understand that you can only draw so much so much in the way of specific causation from it.

I didn't look at the raw data, but it also seems like some of the info might be inherently linked. Eloping might imply you don't regularly attend church, or if you do that you're marrying outside the church consent. Regularly attending church can bring with it a relatively stable set of defaults to invite to a wedding. A large attendee list also might imply affluence, or having taken longer to plan the wedding, implying a longer pre-marriage relationship. All just flippant conjecture, of course, but interesting.

I wonder if there's anything in the data you could use as a sort of halfway proxy for whatever you'd consider a 'happy' or contented relationship.

I grew up in a church environment as well, and I saw my share of marriages held together by social pressure, but I also wonder if some of the other marriages are better because a lot of people I knew very much had the idea that "this is forever, so I don't even have to think about it anymore." It wasn't even a point of consideration anymore. I wonder if that can relieve some level of psychological stress in a marriage that's not absolute Perfect, but pretty decent, instead of wondering if you missed some distorted version of "the one". (again more conjecture)
To address your points:

[1] My college schedule was considerably more broken up, including a 10 minute break in classes that were longer than 90 minutes. In fact, I almost never had a block of classes longer than 3 hours which didn't have at least an hour before more classes happened. During the time I wasn't in class, I was unsupervised and able to walk around a large campus, stop by the gym, go off campus, etc. All of these serve to considerably break up the day versus high school, where I had something like 4.5 hours of classes a day, in 90 minute blocks, with two 10 minute breaks and a 30 minute break which was my only chance to eat food all day.

[2] Even sitting in the classroom, I was allowed considerably more freedom in college. I was (generally) allowed to eat, use my laptop as I saw fit. Further, my college classes were generally more interactive, with strong group/class discussion components, exploring examples in class, etc. The whole process was much more dynamic than my high school classes were on average.

[3] It's certainly true that you shouldn't bother other people during the lecture (such as making loud noises), but my experience in college was again that it was actually easier to ask questions when I didn't understand, either within class or during office hours/tutoring times. Partly, this is just a maturity thing: you get more used to asking people for help as you get older and place more value on your understanding of the topic.

I think the dual role of teenager babysitter and education facility negatively impacts the school's role in education at times - such as when they keep students more controlled and have more instruction time than is likely necessary so that way teenagers aren't just free all the time to wander around town. Colleges (and the experiences of the students) benefit from only having to do one of the two things.
End the U.S. Embargo on Cuba
I had almost 400 guests at my wedding and it cost < $10k.

Venue: grandparent's backyard. Had that not been available a local church's community center would have worked (usually free or "free" with a donation of like $500).

Food: simple catered food. The wedding had a picnic theme (summer wedding) so we went w/ sliders and other finger foods. $8/head

Chairs and tables: Rented, but set up ourselves.

Photographer: Flew in someone from out of state. Much cheaper than a local LA photographer.

Dance Floor: Rented ($800)
DJ: iPod with a playlist

Decorations: made our own decorations, borrowed strands of lights, etc.

It was a great wedding, wasn't terribly expensive and had a lot of guests.
Dunno. There's certainly a large appeal in being able to drag-n-drop controls out, double click a button and write "someControl.BackgroundColor = Red" and having it all just work.

I agree it isn't a great way to develop for the web, as in embracing web tech, but it's a very convenient way to make forms. Even having your controls keep state (the terrible viewstate) is quite convenient.
Apple's New iPhones: Ho-Hum and Controversial Too