skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This actually strikes me as the #1 limiting factor for this technology and interactive fiction in general. A good story depends very much on causality. If the viewer in a virtual environment can get stuck in the corner (ie failing to direct attention/activity to key narrative elements) then the basic options are to a) move the viewer along automatically, as in some videogames or b) wait for the viewer to get un-stuck and pick up the story again. Unfortunately the first approach ends up more as a ride than an interactive experience, while the second baldy undermines the suspension of disbelief.

This is not to say there's no way to do it - if you establish the basic narrative grammar early you can certainly tell an interactive story, but probably at the cost of limiting complexity. The most effective examples I can think of are from ThatGameCompany, especially Journey.
The Paradoxes of Starting Up Your Hardware Startup
Maybe we simply don't get to test this one.

Even if untestable, the Multiverse Hypothesis is immensely valuable in that it serves as a rational replacement for religion. It gives people who have a certain mindset something to believe in. And not just any something, but something exciting that inspires the imagination.

Testable or not, here is the thing. The hypothesis being not testable means that it cannot be shown true, and that it cannot be shown false, either! Moreover, hypothesis is quite persuasive: more so than its negation, to many people.

All arguments against the hypothesis based on testability ("you don't have proof") are also weapons against the negation of the hypothesis. They do not attack the source of its plausibility; they only attack something which it has in common with it negation.

Both the hypothesis and its negation postulate the existence of something: one postulates the existence of an infinite plurality of universes, whereas the other postulates the existence of hidden variables and inexplicable coincidences.

So, even though belief in MH seems to have some of the trappings of faith, it is at the same time rationally convincing to those who find hidden variables and coincidences less plausible than a plurality of universes.
I strongly disagree that the high cost of living is beneficial for startups.

You're absolutely right. High COL is good for well-connected people who get funding easily for stupid startups, because it makes the labor pool more captive. It's bad for the quality of startups.

Take a look at a modern SV company now: Apple. It creates lots of jobs in SV, but far more in China.

And then the murderous, unionbusting thugs who run the sweatshops buy real estate in California, pricing the locals out of their own housing. It's the circle of life... ?
It always cracks me up when every high level education administrator is referred to as a "reformer." It's like referring to members of the Chinese government as "revolutionaries."
This sounds like a fairly idealized vision of what working in medicine is like. I have heard doctors say the same sort of thing about being a software developer. Is the grass really greener?
Shouldn't, on the other hand, the fact that "all the top math students also went into her class" be counted as positive for her? I mean, based upon your description, those who attended her classes excelled. That is good.
So I guess parents didn't want to put their children into her classes because that wouldn't have worked out; but maybe the reason for that is that their children were simply unfit for the level?
I think there is a huge difference between having a measurement of time be affected by gravity and detecting that such an effect influenced your measurement. After all that implies an even better standard to compare against and that's the whole problem here.

So even if this difference is undetectable for geological purposes it could very well screw up really accurate time measurements. It all depends on whether or not those effects compound or cancel out, in the case of gravity they will likely only compound.
The post was a demonstration of exactly that: cljs incremental builds with live-reload and cljs browser repl.
BTW, other countries can and do start to apply the same rules against US companies.

China started to have a lot more rules and regulations regarding to the importation of products with any kind of crypto.

They are becoming bigger IT/Mobile product market than US.

I can see in 2-3 years - as soon as the Chinese home grow Mobile SOC are mature, they will start to require Intel/QComm/Apple to disclose everything they do in the Chip/Software level relate to crypto before any of the next gen product are allowed to be sold in Chinese market.

The choice for AAPL/QComm/Intel will be do what the Chinese government wanted or loss access to 30-50% of customers on principle - like Google did a few years ago.
I missed the Alzheimers detail until this post, and realizing how old these dudes were//are.

I still remember them receiving phone calls from the space station ["Well, I've called everyone else, so..."] and from above//below the Arctic circle ["Yea, so, our warmest is about -50 and we have this odd problem..."].
Summary of international crypto controls
Odd. I don't get the behaviour: http://imgur.com/a/zbZGE

Firefox on Linux
I love this page on that subject:

http://amasci.com/elect/charge1.html

It's not exactly 100% current (pun intended) but it makes the point nicely.
The error message in your screenshot says "invalid key", not "untrusted certificate". If the browser can't do the encryption, how do you expect it to continue?
Taking the census, with cellphones
You want to start focusing on low-level programming: learn about C++ and assembly languages and cache behavior. Or possibly get into functional programming. I could see Haskell getting bigger in trading. Learning some statistics and math won't hurt.

I don't think there's a "too late", but there's a different skill set you need, especially to get a good job in finance.
I grew up in Cambridge, MA and always got a good laugh walking through Harvard Square and looking up at the sign for the firm of Dewey, Cheatem & How[0]. The third story window is where the Magliozzi brothers had their office. RIP Tom and his amazingly contagious laugh, still makes me smile thinking about it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey%2C_Cheatem_%26_Howe
>Soo… Apparently the show as you all have known it for the last two years will be unaffected. Alternately, the show died two years ago and you never noticed.

>There was no offense intended.

The use of ellipses for dramatic silence , elongated words, and the personal targeting of your statements ("YOU all have known..." "YOU never noticed") indicate that "There was no offense intended." was really just a statement made for the sake of indemnifying yourself from the backlash of impersonal comments made about the death of another human, rather than a statement of ignorance and apology.

I don't honestly believe you when you say that you felt this thread was about the radio show going off the air rather than subject/topic line itself (the death of a person). I think that's an excuse to make your actions appear more excusable.

RIP Tom. You shaped much of my youth.
You're making an assumption that has no supporting evidence :)
your scenario to the extreme: a spacecraft is traveling at 0.5c in an circular path around earth at 1/pi light days of distance. From your (non inertial) frame of reference it's not moving at all. Yet the spacecraft is experiencing time dilation of about 15%.
List of public signage typefaces
Okay, that's an interesting take on the matter. I think in a world where money buys the legislature you'd end up with basic income repealed (or not passed in the first place) and as a result, it doesn't serve the intended function.

That's actually why I'm really in love with mayday.us; Lawrence Lessig's PAC to get money out of politics by supporting people who want to do actual reform rather than just saying that want to. If we can actually vote the bastards out and get better people who won't be bought in, we've got a chance to shake things up and maybe fix some of the underlying problems that basic income seems like a solution to.

I maintain that everyone could stop working and prices could rise enough such that basic income is a joke and everyone has to work again in order to eat, which kind of defeats the purpose of basic income.

But I do appreciate your response.
BlackHalo: two-party btc-based contracts
And how can you tell if the particles are no longer entangled without observing both? It's not like there's some outward, observable property of the particle that says "I am entangled". It's simply a statistical correlation between the states of the two particles.
I saw this phenomenon myself years ago in a completely different domain: machine learning. There are indeed many cases where people will rave about your demos, tell you what you made is awesome, but... they will not come. They'll give you great feedback and stroke your ego and tell you how amazing it is... but they still will not come.

It's really a mind screw.

I wish I had some pithy answer or magic formula, but alas I'm not sure that such a thing exists. You'll find many people who will say otherwise and will try to convince you that this or that methodology or marketing principle is the sure fire One True Way. I don't buy it-- I've seen every approach to figuring out business fail in some cases. If there were some 100% effective formula for doing market research or finding product/market fit ahead of actually making the product, you'd have a significantly higher success rate for new startups. Actually, I bet if such a thing existed you wouldn't need startups. Companies and venture investors could just run that formula and cook up endless successful new ventures without all the gambling on the crazies called "founders" and their unproven plans. In reality most ventures cooked up by "professionals" under such circumstances fail quite spectacularly.

Good luck with all the things you do next!
We all have different things that we're looking for in life. For instance, most of the things that I commonly hear people complain about in software development have never once bothered me (bureaucracy/incompetent managers, deadlines, long hours, etc.).

A doctor who isn't interested in any of the benefits of the career that I listed may indeed end up resenting their choice to take on a lot of debt (and study for at least seven additional years) just to end up in a big city alongside programmers with no debt making a similar amount of money.

Like I wrote, if you're motivated by money, medicine is a fairly bad choice. How many doctors are neurosurgeons? About half a percent. Of those, how many are department chairs? Just a handful.

If you want few working hours, medicine is probably a bad choice. How many doctors are radiologists who co-own a business and take half the year off? I don't have a percentage for this one, but very few. Most will work 50-60 hours a week.

How many programmers know that their startup is still going to be around in 40 years? Very few. How many programmers have the option of working where they want without taking a pay cut or working as a contractor? Very few.

The grass certainly isn't always greener. If it were, then I might have picked law, or architecture, or construction, or any of a vast number of other options. But none of those fits the list of criteria that I now know are important to me in life (but may not be important to you).
He's really bored.

And death valleys ticks slower. He's at sea level, which is higher than Death Valley.
Dancing protocols, POODLEs and other tales from TLS
You would know when you have two particles entangled at the moment of entanglement. You could know you have a half of a pair of entangled particles when the other half is sent away. But you could never know when the pair has become disentangled.
> If it sounds as if it doesn’t make a lot of sense, that’s because it doesn’t.

To me, it sounds like it makes absolute sense. If you want to evaluate how good a teacher is, one of the things you need to measure is how well their students performed vs. how well those same students would have performed under the hypothetical average teacher.

The particular VAM system used to estimate this metric may be flawed or even completely broken. But at the point in the article this pull quote is located, that argument had not been made.

> VAMs are generally based on standardized test scores and do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes.

> VAMs typically measure correlation, not causation: Effects – positive or negative – attributed to a teacher may actually be caused by other factors that are not captured in the model.

These are criticisms of the VAM system, but I imagine they are equally valid criticisms of other methods of teacher evaluation. I find it hard to imagine a practical system of evaluation that accounts for all background factors.

> The lawsuit shows that Lederman’s students traditionally perform much higher on math and English Language Arts standardized tests than average fourth-grade classes in the state.

This argument uses the same standardized test scores and confounding background variables that the VAM system is criticized for! Further, it seems obvious that a set of students doing well does not, in isolation, indicate their teacher is a good teacher. Students in a top set or from a great school or from a wealthy neighborhood might be expected to outperform state averages regardless of teacher quality.

My biggest problem with the article is it doesn't describe alternate methods of teacher evaluation. VAM may be flawed, but how does it compare to the other methods? If we accept that teacher evaluation based on student performance is necessary (is it? I have no idea!), what's a better way to do it?
There is a draft for pattern-matching in C# [1].

[1] https://roslyn.codeplex.com/discussions/560339
In love w/ Ember. i kind of liked habdlebars tho..
> Yeah, they're not sensitive to magnetic fields. But they do drift with temperature

Also, gravity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zILwgQhjC_Q
If I use the IMAP feature, do all my non-gmail emails get sent to Google?
Are you doing any kind of throttling on the scroll events? When I was optimizing transitions based on scroll position, I found that pulling the scroll events off of a queue of size 1 was really effective in reducing dropped frames [1].

[1] https://github.com/circleci/frontend/blob/master/src-cljs/fr...
I already have an Ikea standing desk. Well it's an Ikea book shelf sitting on a desk.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3z473x9kco92c8f/standing%20desk.jp...

The key ingredient is the adjustable monitor pole so that I can sit on the odd occasion that my legs get tired.

The beauty of this setup is that it works in with the fitted desktops that my company has. I wouldn't be able to remove a section and slot in a normal adjustable desk.
Ah ok! I agree that there are those type of developers as well.

Me, I tend to focus on the JVM/.NET/C++ ecosystems at work, and depending on the project types, I do a mix roles of architecture/development.
My understanding was that Sly sounds like Slime, but isn't.
This is only tangentially related to "Why Silicon Valley Works", but am I the only person who is frustrated by "famous" VC's saying that "founders should stop worrying about their valuation"?

I can't get over this. This is like a used car salesman telling you not to worry about the cost of the car, just to remember that there are free weather mats included!

I feel that there is a connection here as to "why Silicon Valley" works from the perspective of VC's in a position to influence founders. However I'm not feeling particularly eloquent today and haven't fully formed these ideas.
I'm not so sure. I think instead the panic might be more acute due to the exhorbitant cost of living. The salary difference is significant, but it's not necessarily enough to confer a rate of savings sufficient for the typical American household (2.5 kids, mortgage, student loan debts, etc.) to withstand more than a few weeks of unemployment, let alone months.

Right now I'm reasonably confident that I can go from being dumped out of my contract to having an equal (or higher) paying contract in a matter of a 2-3 weeks. If (when) that changes, I'll pack my family up and move, probably to Chicago. It's easier and less stressful to save a few months' worth of runway earning $120k in Chicago than it is earning $150k-$180k here. If other personal issues weren't impeding it, I'd already have done so, but circumstances are more likely to keep me here for at least a few years. The hot market here won't last, and it seems to me the hottest parts of the job market now are becoming even more narrowly focused on a segment of the labor market I'm simply not a part of (young, willing to work 50-60 hours a week for no overtime, below-market compensation + an equity lottery ticket and kitschy foosball-table nonsense).
Read the description carefully:

> the only teacher of highest track Algebra II class at a local HS

Being the only teacher of the highest track Algebra II class in the school means that anyone who wanted to take the highest track Algebra II class--which plausibly contains many of the best math students--would have to take it from this teacher.

The whole point of the kind of value added modelling that is the centre of this case is that it attempts to factor out things like the quality of the student to estimate the quality of the teacher, precisely so that bad teachers who by dint of circumstances are associated with high-performing students don't get high ratings.

The problem is that if student background counts for the greater part of performance even a good teacher may have difficulty scoring highly if they happen to get a "good" class (one that scores highly on student quality.)

On a larger scale, the anecdote we are discussing here suggests that teachers as individuals may not make that much difference to student's performance, since this bad teacher was still able to turn out the best performing students thanks (one is supposed to presume) selection effects alone.
Here's a link to the phoronix article on the change. There's a bit of discussion about it in the comments as well.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgyNDI
I think it was only being used to load policies into pf, and that was no longer needed as the useful policies were all included. That may have been a comment from the latest episode of bsdnow.tv, or a discussion I had recently I forget which sorry...
I've been using this service lately and it's pretty useful.
I'll get a thread-ball rolling by linking to source code. Some day soon I may be doing something like this myself.

https://github.com/fivedogit/hn2go-chromex

https://github.com/fivedogit/hn2go-backend

Code is copyrighted, non-reusable and non-redistributable.

Also: do you see yourself perhaps making more of a suite of HN interface improvements / functional interfaces on top of APIs and browser capabilites, or do you have no intentions of working beyond this one functionality?
A good course. There are MOOCs that are good courses. This one is so-so. I don't understand your question.
Christian Bale drops out of Steve Jobs biopic
You seem to be as good a person as any to ask:

What are you building? Are these apps? Are these just blog sites? Portfolios? Admin sites?
Not just in the EU - I hear this a lot in Canada too. My use of their services was even considered a red flag on a recent consulting gig.

Another odd case I ran into is parents trying to prevent their children getting into the Google ecosystem until they're mid-teen level. This is manifesting in resistance to their education stuff being adopted by schools.
Economists. Lol
Oh, neat. I didn't even realize that Control-drag was the same as a RMB drag. That should make my life a little easier.
I find it really odd that I would need to plug in my desk into the power grid.

Having crawled under enough office desks searching for a free power socket, the idea of a hand crack is very appealing.

Though the other commenters do make good points, I do imagine an electrical version would potentially be lighter.
It is very far from simple anywhere, especially in the US: It isn't perfectly clear if you should treat bitcoins as commodity or currency. See [0] for more details.

As a general rule, if anyone tells me "but taxes aren't complicated" or "but what's the complication", I know they are talking from ideals and not experience.

The Federal US tax code, last time I looked at it (2009) was over 71,000 pages (add a few more thousands per state). It doesn't get shorter with time. Of those, "only" 20,000 or so apply to every individual (not the same 20,000). Other countries are better, but the shortest country tax code I've had the pleasure (?) of dealing with was only 4,000 pages of printed text.

Intrastate/intracountry transactions are usually complicated, but somewhat tractable. Cross-border transactions are usually ill-specified, can be classified in multitude of ways all technically legal - and yet, if the tax authorities in either country things you've done it wrong, you are assumed guilty until proven innocent.

Anyone who is not scared of the tax code has not had to wrestle it. You may win some battles after working hard. But you never want to go into this war.

[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tax_compliance
Various folks, such as this site: http://geodsoft.com/howto/harden/OpenBSD/kernel.htm have suggested turning of loadable kernel modules to harden a kernel.

The two things that loadable modules provide (runtime configuration, and third party proprietary code support) are not that valuable. I've always turned off loadable modules when I've build custom BSD kernels for servers for exactly that reason. I get around the propietary code issue by making sure the server I configure has hardware for which non-proprietary and/or source available drivers exist. Which for servers is generally network and disk drivers so pretty easy.
Nice looking trailer, but where's the technical info? Where's anything about what they are releasing?
Thanks for sharing this! A desk with an electric motor is a little odd to me too.
> If you want to evaluate how good a teacher is, one of the things you need to measure is how well their students performed vs. how well those same students would have performed under the hypothetical average teacher.

But you can't measure that.

> it seems obvious that a set of students doing well does not, in isolation, indicate their teacher is a good teacher.

True. But in this case, at least, we're not talking about "in isolation". We're talking about a 17-year track record of a teacher's students doing well.

> what's a better way to do it?

When I went to school, the people who made these judgments were my parents. You can't make these judgments by formula, and you can't make them if you don't know the details of each individual case. To me, the fact that so many schools are fixated on "data-driven" student evaluations means that parents are not engaged.
I don't see that he is delusional, even if you disagree with the approach taken. The key bit of the piece he wrote in the FT:

> [Tech services] have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals, who find their services as transformational as the rest of us.

His responsibility is not the foreign policy, but to deal with its fallout. And terrorism is not just Islamic fundamentalism; the threats change over time.
I recently wrote a blog post[0] on this topic. Heads up my website is painfully slow ;)

[0] http://www.bram.gg/post/how-to-get-ideas-for-side-projects