skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really need to sit down and write that essay, but I always have better things to write and design essays are difficult to sell. A lot of the FP programming that goes on is just weak OOP with some immutability, closures, and list comprehensions. The real hardcore FP avoids not only mutation, but also aliases and identifiable objects. Object thinking is impossible in that context because nothing can have a name (beyond rolling your own GUIDs); it really is different.
Now you're just being silly. Yes, other models may perform better, but Naive Bayes is a simple model that performs quite well, especially in the fields mentioned.

The statement is completely uncontroversial.
If the iPhone actually does become very popular, particularly with terrorists, it will be hard to imagine that the NSA doesn't just go develop this capability internally.

"enough cash and bricked test phones" - the great thing about this, is you can just buy the $650 phones - you can get a thousand of them for less than a million dollars, which probably is under your typical line managers budget in the NSA techOps group.

And, lets be realistic, Apple isn't trying to defend against the NSA or Nation States, just your average hacker without access to $100mm+ in hardware.
I have considered not accepting every job I've had since graduating college 10 years ago for this exact reason, and I have ended up being one of the top performers at each of those jobs, which has led to better job opportunities, each of which I don't believe I'm qualified for.

One thing you have to accept is that you will never know everything, and that's okay. One of the most important skills you can have is the ability to communicate effectively. Customers and coworkers don't expect you to know everything, and when you tell them that you are weak in some area and want to have your expert friend/coworker assist because you want to make sure you get this completed correctly for them, they see you not as an expert on all things, but instead they see you as something much more valuable: someone who they can trust to get the job done correctly.

There is value in knowing your limitations. If you know you can't complete a job on your own, and you can't line up the right people to assist you, then it's a wise move to pass. Like the important/unimportant-urgent/nonurgent quadrants (from the 7 Habits book), there are the competent/incompetent-secure/insecure quadrants which let me say that I am completely incompetent when it comes to brain surgery, and I am not the least bit insecure about it. I am also very competent at my job, but ironically I am somewhat insecure about my ability to do that job.

I am a generalist in my field, and I think part of the tradeoff is, there are always people around me who know more than me in some areas, but in return, I always know I can get a new job in about a day. If you take the generalist path, it's important not to get into adversarial pissing matches with the specialists. Win them over as friends and it's of mutual benefit. As a generalist you have exposure to more opportunities, which you can throw their way, and they will be glad to help you when needed. And by "help you", I mean paying them to help you (usually).
Wow, what you described is not at all what I was looking for when I supported Light Table. I already have IPython IDE where I have all that text editing, and all other stuff I need to type in and run my code. I was looking for something completely different, not yet another text editor! I was looking for something visual, where I can see what my code is doing without me having to insert a bunch of print statement.
In fact, I found some of that here:
http://pythontutor.com/visualize.html#mode=edit
but I hoped that LT will do it even better.
Maybe it was to preempt something like this. Seattle City council calling out Amazon to treat its security guards better and to let them unionize. http://www.geekwire.com/2014/seattle-city-council-amazon-sec...
It's cause enough to make people want to volunteer.
Also check Microsoft research U-Prove (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/u-prove/) or IBM Identity Mixer (http://www.zurich.ibm.com/security/idemix/), both are Identity systems that allow casting electronic votes anonymously.

I wonder if we will ever get to a point where that kind of crypto is explained enough that we collectively trust it as much as pen and paper.
Once you become an expert in one technology, what happens when that dries up / becomes irrelevant?
A survey of the current state of Golang ORMs
PDFs are not really meant to be converted into HTML. The converted formatting would suck, especially for the double column ACM format used.
The advice I've always been given is that speed optimization is a second step after writing your code in the idiomatic, easy to read and maintain way. The optimization is done after profiling to find out where the real bottlenecks are for your application.
> It was too hard to juggle everything. Her manager had pressured her to return from leave early, and was pushing her again to take a business trip and leave her nursing infant at home.

Chose family over career. Had to make predictable work sacrifice in order to have time for family.

> I was the first and only person at my small company ever to take maternity leave. They had no parental leave policy previously even though they had been around for about a decade, and, having under 50 employees, weren’t covered by FMLA. I (cluelessly!) agreed to go back to work part-time starting when my daughter was six weeks. There was no set place for me to pump [breast milk] while I was at work, so it was perpetually inconvenient and awkward to work at the office for longer than a couple hours at a time.

Was aware that her small company didn't have structures in place, yet seems surprised they didn't have structures in place. Was accommodated about maternity leave, then quit because they didn't also have an extra room just for mothers.

> She is one of 484 [67% of the sample] women to cite motherhood as a factor in her decision to leave tech.

Two third of the women choose a larger family role over a more demanding job, yet complain about the work place consequences of doing so.

> Rather, it was the lack of flexible work arrangements, the unsupportive work environment, or a salary that was inadequate to pay for childcare.

According to the article, most women seem unwilling to accept that they have to make sacrifices associated with a family, and seem to think that its the obligation of the corporation to make their life choices work, rather than just continue to employ them if the situation is mutually workable.

> Of the 716 women surveyed, 465 are not working today.

Indeed, about two thirds of them opted not to return to a job immediately following their decision to place family over career. This strongly indicates a sampling bias towards women who would have left /any/ industry with a demanding work load in preference of family duties, and calls in to question if this is anything particular to tech.

> Some women felt that their work environments were discriminatory, but most reported something milder: the simple discomfort of not fitting in in an otherwise homogenous setting.

In fact, the article admits that it's not actually about any kind of discrimination in tech, but rather, that companies aren't going out of their way to favor women enough to get a critical mass of them employed and overcome this effect that trickles the qualified women back out of the field, keeping them from ever reaching that mass on their own.

This article seems to mostly complain about a lack of privilege, and not actually complain about anything actionable on anyone else's part.
Why would unprofitable mining cause a upward pressure on price? There is a fixed amount of bitcoin distributed per day cumulatively to all miners regardless of their number.

I doubt the recent price drop is due to people buying and selling in bitcoin since it's way too steep a decline.

I'm guessing that most miners themselves also happen to be investors as well. After all, if you believe in bitcoin enough to purchase equipment to mine it, you must also believe that the price will at least stay constant or rise. So it seems natural to keep some of your profits in bitcoin.

So people mining and investing together are heavily dependent on price, more than those doing one or the other. With the constant slow decline, it left a lot of miners languishing, and they not only need to convert all their current profits to their local currency to pay the bills, but their bitcoin investments as well. This creates a feedback loop and an ever increasing rate of price decline until enough miners run out of bitcoin to sell and/or close up shop.
Couldn't the change simply be included in one of the regular .x updates? They don't need to mention it in the changelog. It's not something significant enough that people would really notice.

I don't think Apple would want that capability either, but just for argument's sake.
Zen Buddhism and Alan Watts
> Elite institutions like Stanford and Berkeley now report that about 50% of their introductory computer science students are women

In the discussion of this story at Reddit [1], there were some interesting comments pointing out reasons that the article might be wrong in surmising that 50% women in introductory classes means they are entering the tech-as-a-profession pipeline at the same rate as men.

Computing has become sufficiently important in other engineering fields, science, finance, social science, and even some of the humanities that people interested in those areas can greatly benefit by introductory CS and programming. Introductory CS has become a course you can reasonably expect anyone to take now, and so it should have demographics that are close to that of the campus as a whole.

What you'd want to look at to see the real rate women are coming into the CS pipeline in college is the demographics of the first CS class that is generally taken only by people going into CS.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2ibeqk/why_women...
> What makes Trader Joes Trader Joes is that they carefully curate the entire experience and having a loss of control over how they are presented to the customer is a big deal.

Apparently not in Germany, where you can buy a small selection of Trader Joe's products at Aldi (they are owned by the same parent company / foundation).
To 1) and 2) That was kind of the point I was trying to make here: Being a woman and being 40 or being a woman and being black is a characteristic of someone - having blue eyes is one, too. You only feel different when you look at it specifically and point out it is "important" (for example "being a woman" compared to "having blue eyes"). And then you feel alone because of it. So why make it "important" in the first place?
Objects are a poor man's closures.
Closures are a poor man's objects.
-- Guy Steele
I'm actually quite surprised by this.

Having worked as a contractor for Google, my impression is that they consider being an employee at Google as a brand in and by itself.

My contract stated several times that I was not a Googler, and I was not hired by Google and I was not allowed to say "I work for Google"and if I start a company I am definitely not allowed to send out a press release saying "Ex-googler makes new start-up to solve ..."
We can argue about what "well" means I guess. On many problems the gap will be small, but you should never expect NB to out-perform the better models. And on lots of problems, the difference will be substantial. NB is strictly worse than MaxEnt.

Why settle for "quite well"? Just use the better algorithm, always. It's important to understand when solutions have been superseded.
Even in US settings, compliance with basic hygiene protocols may be below 50% [1]. This happens mostly in overcrowded facilities where personnel has been cut to run at or near capacity most of the time.

The most salient factor is indirect contact. Health care workers are aware that they must wash their hands after having contact with a sick patient, but it is extremely hard to remember to take similar steps after touching any surface such patient might have touched himself, even if it looks clean to the bare eye.

[1] http://prosperouswaydown.com/ebola-game-changer/
Donation pages for Médecins Sans Frontières:

http://www.msf.org.uk/make-a-donation

https://donate.doctorswithoutborders.org/
> If, say, a man broke his leg skiing he'd probably get some time off and the guys would joke about it and smile. The typical vibe of a tech office won't make him feel guilty.

I'm not sure choosing to have a child and accidentally breaking your leg at the same thing, since you were so critical of people making false analogies. One is certainly much more of a choice than the other.

That being said, your point isn't even true: I've been pressured to start working from home, answering calls/emails for consults, etc by more than one company while recovering from various illnesses or injuries. It's even been hinted at smaller companies that not working from home while sick is not "being a team player" and that it might negatively impact my prospects there.
zoomy checkerboard by summing a few sinusoids

http://maxbittker.github.io/Mojulo/#NDAqKHNpbigoeC01MCkvKDQr...
I think I may be able to connect you with some worthwhile opportunities. Information is in my profile - please feel free to contact me :-)
Cross-border takeovers: The Germans are coming
They could, but that's not something that law enforcement can just ask them to do on the fly.
No match for "ART-ART-ART-ART-ART-ART-ART-ART-NFL-ART-ART-ART-ART-ART-ART-ART.COM".
>>> Last update of whois database: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 08:32:08 GMT <<<

Looks like the exciting opportunity arose again!
E voting could be made safe if the machines printed the users choice on a little slip of paper which was then put into a box, to be counted once the election is over.

You could have the machines tally the votes a few seconds after the last poll location closes, but the election result isn't official until the votes has been counted.

Any trust in the machines at all and you might as well have the election take place in NK.
Given the definition of 'object' used, things like modules, namespaces and first class functions can be (in some languages: are) objects
David’s Health Tech Newsletter: No. 28 – Digital Health Funding
iMessage has nothing at all to do with the baseband or SIM. And carriers definitely can't push updates to the OS. Only Apple has the technical capability to produce updates to the OS, if for no other reason than the fact that all OS code must be codesigned with Apple's certificate, and only Apple has the keys. But since the baseband can't update the OS anyway, that's a moot point.

I don't have a link for a technical analysis of this, but I shouldn't need one. It should be self-evident that updating the OS is a process that is very obvious to the user. It's also something that Apple has never done without explicit action by the user to perform such an update. It would in fact be incredibly dangerous to update the OS without explicit action, if for no other reason than the fact that this would not give the user the chance to back up their phone in case something goes wrong.
Because it's done with the purpose of eventually giving some one a shake down ergo eventually might have a use for the domain.

Only reason they they let this happen is because it's good for business. I'm sure domain like 95 percent of domain registrations are done by these so called "domainers" or people protecting themselves from then.
You can put faith in the modeling accuracy, while at the same time noting that given the current conditions, it does not have great predictive ability.
We probably (broadly) agree more than disagree. One reason FP/OOP comparisons are difficult is that FP is closely related to a mathematical formalism while OOP isn't and can't be. I think the tack he's taking is 'can we explain the popularity of OOP in terms of "technical" or really, "practical programming/software engineering" advantages'. It's a tricky needle eye to thread.

The objection 'that approach can't lead to useful insight' is a reasonable one but I don't think he's taking the approach out of ignorance or because he spaced out on something while typing it up - it's a deliberate choice, whatever its merits.
Give one example
Out of curiosity, what's difficult about that mutable array implementation?

I'm a relative Haskell novice, but was able to write some mutable array code with only a cursory read through the documentation.

Granted it's extremely verbose compared to most imperative languages.
HN is about tech stuff and things that interest people. These kinds of stories gets killed, because they never contribute anything new. At best you learn that otherwise reasonable, intelligent people completely lose it when stuff like this gets introduced.
I'm kinda surprised these companies feel they can afford to treat their employees poorly despite the labour market being so competitive.
> A quadcopter changes direction by spinning up or down the appropriate set of propellers.

To extend on this further... a quadcopter uses the motors to quickly change the speed of the blades rotating. This requires a lot of power, depending on the inertia of the rotor. The inertia of the rotor is roughly proportional to the fifth power of the blade length. Double the blade length, 32x the inertia. The power requirements of this forbids scaling up.

Contrast this with a traditional helicopter, where the rotor is spinning at stable speed (low engine torque requirement) and the helicopter is controlled by changing the pitch of the blades. The pitch of the blades changes during every rotation and is controlled with a mechanism called a "swashplate".

There have been "hybrid" helicopter designs involving a variable pitch propeller in a quadcopter as well as supplementing a quad with a large propeller for lift.

But the most promising research on quadcopters is focusing on using several independent quadcopters co-operatively.
Also electrical rotors have much finer control than a piston engine.
By the same token, don't worry too much about writing "maintainable" code before you actually start solving the problem at hand.
Navy: Self-guided unmanned patrol boats make debut
As long as the doctor (A) did not have any cuts on his hand and (B) washed it immediately after checking the skin temperature, and (C) the individual was not symptomatic (No Diarrhea, No vomiting) the risk is pretty minimal. Probably more risk from being coughed on.

(Note - doctors should be washing hands continuously regardless - when I went in for a checkup in Kaiser/Mountain View a few years ago, Doctor washed his hands upon coming in the room, washed his hands after checking my heartbeat with a stethoscope, and then washed them a third time before leaving the room. This was to check someone who had no symptoms whatsoever. I asked him about it, and it was Kaiser policy - he said he washed his hands about 20 times an hour. )
A Work in Progress, Siri Cheat Sheet
* Mod, can you fix the title and then strike this line, I spelled Siri wrong, sorry!

There were so many of these Siri Guides and Cheat Sheets https://github.com/5c0tt/Siri-Cheat-Sheet/blob/master/siri-cheat-sheet.md and they all get out of date. I wanted something that would be kept up tp date.

Please be gentle, I am so new to git it is still a crazy place for me to mess around in, but I am truing to learn. Ideally others help me patch this one up.

For example, table support in MarkDown has a bit to be desired, or there needs a good converted that understands max tabs and such to convert the html to MarkDown.

At any rate, file bugs, so that pull thing so I can learn how to merge, etc.

Thanks for getting me into this stuff, in an odd way it is fun.
That is not relevant - sample all the stories posted to HN over a month and we might seem something interesting, but if you put all samples into one beaker, except for one all we will see is how different that story is from the norm.

Take the ebola thread posted earlier - there is clearly no ebola words in your first sample, while there would be in one taken soly from that story.

Look women just aren't mentioned that often on your average HN story because we assume them to be humans.
Damn, that was complex. Would a simpler "What would be the wrong answer to 'which door goes to hell?'" solve it?
Common sense suggests that this way should be cheaper, too. The contractor is often twice as expensive as their salary, so if you want them for an extended period of time it would make economic sense for a rational actor to hire directly.

This is however offset by economic realities, where two equal cost may have a very different impact of valuation. So it does make economic sense to pay more for a cost that is not counted as a fixed cost of doing business on the accounting sheets.
Unification of webdesign and originality
> EDIT:....and boom, off the front page in like 5mins.

I flag stories like this precisely because they create the threads that you describe.
" Health care workers are aware that they must wash their hands after having contact with a sick patient"

Take that a step up - Health Care workers must wash their hands after having contact with any patient and before touching any patient (and themselves for that matter).

http://www.cdc.gov/features/handwashing/

It takes 20 seconds, and is probably one of the most effective ways of preventing the spread of various infections/diseases.
Over a certain size it starts to make sense to vertically integrate your business. If you are big, say Apple, creating your own hardware allows you to do better and differentiate against your competitors. It may also allow you to cut off resources for your competitors (see for example oil companies).

A company such as Valve is probably on the fence on this. They dominate a small segment of the market, but is not really big enough to do something their competitors can't replicate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8406912
That point about manufacturing looking like agriculture hit me hard - it's brilliant - thank you.

Worrying too, but insightful.
The VERY important detail is that the question dealz with randomness. From here the conclussion is more or less reasonable and not surprising (the residur formula gives most of the information). Essentially a matter of symmetry, I guess.
" hopefully we will close air travel for anybody who has been in west africa" - CDC advises against this. It does more harm than good, and makes it difficult for supplies, and medical staff to travel in/out of the area. Also, once you put in travel restrictions, you enter an adversarial rather than cooperative phase, and people start to fight you, rather than work with you.

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/10/ebola-us-border-111581...

What I don't understand, is why don't we enhance screening for anyone who has travelled recently in West Africa? I get pulled into secondary every time I note I've visited a "Farm" - you would think the impact on the system wouldn't be that great to just ask a few questions (and take a temperature) of people who've visited ebola impacted regions.
App Marketing News
Post-It's New App Blurs the Line Between Real Notes and Virtual Ones
I don't know where to start.... Telling people to not write fast code for the sake of other people checking that code is absolute madness. The code is ran thousands or millions of times per day and is the obvious choice to lean toward when optimizing instead of leaning toward optimizing for some theoretical idiot who likes to read lines of code in a fast and efficient manner to do his job.

This job may be ran once or twice a year which is nowhere near the amount of savings in various computational power / hardware etc compared with the wages of some geek who simply can't be bothered to do his job well.