skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is solid and thoughtful feedback. Thanks.

Our documentation has advanced since this was posted. I'd be interested to talk more out of band, but can't find your email. If you're up for it I'm galen at tlon.io.
Will MOOCs be Flukes?
This article really stretches the idea that myths are "busted".

1. Absent dads are the problem. Sixty percent of low-income dads see at least one of their children daily.

Seeing one of your children at least once a day doesn't prove you aren't an absent father.

2. Single moms are the problem. Only 9 percent of low-income, urban moms have been single throughout their child's first five years.

Just because you weren't single during some small part of your child's first 5 years doesn't mean you're not a "single mom".

3. Handouts are bankrupting us. In 2012, total welfare funding was 0.47 percent of the federal budget.

Welfare is paid for at the state-level generally. Of course it doesn't make up much of the federal budget.

Yikes!
Why would you write a new Nock back-end at the same time as a compiler for a new language? Even if you did, you'd want to test the new interpreter with the old language, and the new language with the old interpreter, before going any further.

There is certainly no free lunch in this system. If your CPU is radiating heat, it is spending a bunch of time in Nock formulas which could be better optimized. For instance, maybe you rolled your own decrement, so the interpreter can't match it with the jet it uses for stock Hoon decrement.

That's okay, because the jet matching mechanism is not in any way specialized to the code. All you have to do is (a) get your compiler for the new language to emit a proper jet hint for your things-you-want-to-be-fast, (b) write correctly matched C implementations, and (c) add them to a static array.

Or to put it more briefly: a well-designed Nock implementation is not in any way coupled to the Hoon or Arvo layers.

One of the not-quite-finished things about our interpreter right now (other than that it interprets the tree directly and so gets about 1.5 Nock mips, which is pathetic) is that jets have to be compiled into the kernel and aren't opened by dlopen. Ideally we'd even load something like a PNACL/LLVM object, and we'd get it the same way we get the Hoon source, ie, via Urbit itself.
Sometimes I have tried to use the scientific method to resolve hard to reproduce bugs.

Write a hypothesis or series of them. Consider what implications this hypothesis would mean about the behaviour of the bug or code. Design an experiment to test the hypothesis, continue with more experiments. List methodology in bug report so others can repeat the experiments. Finally a proof of the cause of the bug is found.
Best Practices for Scientific Computing [pdf]
Healing people and giving them food and water does exactly nothing. A country with bad politics that does not grow and produce does not have a positve impact. If we can get these people into the market economy then it will of course produce massiv positive impact. If they live in a country that has bad policy, it might even have negative impact. Making it easier to substain a army and fight wars against other nations.

By far the simplest way of doing this would be to change immigration policy in all of the western world. All the tools we have, forign aid, pease misssions and so on, the most effective is immigration. Even most extream anti immigration economists, can only come up with numbers like "5% pay retraction over 30 years for uneducated americans" looking at the past.

However, sadly, the in general the west congratulate itself on the bit of forign aid (that is counter-productive about half of the time) and prefers to keep living with no 'outsider' that 'destroy' there culutre and language.
There's certainly economic truth in this position. But putting doctors and CEOs in the same category seems a bit off to me. Certainly, CEOs and consultants aren't stupid, but it seems that there are other skills in play as well, some of which can be expressed in words with both positive and negative connotations. Being a "thinker" isn't sufficient to be a CEO.
the other thing to do is just go through the code base later, fixing those kinds of things. i.e., let it go on the pull request, but go through all the code and fix every instance once a month or something.

a few years ago, IIRC, Josh Peek did that for the Rails code base and that one commit got like five thousand "thank you" comments.
ouch! I mean I've never fancied myself an awesome programmer but I didn't expect getting an MBA would make me mediocre at best :)
"Everyone does, surprise!"

Not true. You need a deep understanding of the workings of the system and a logical mind to be able to work backward from the symptom to the cause. (Patience helps too.) Lots of programmers who don't have these traits just try fixes at random. Either they find the solution (after a long time), or they give up and ask someone who is better at debugging to help them. I frequently get asked to debug problems that other people have failed to debug.
On the other hand if someone told me that a certain angel is funding Urbit, I would probably have guessed that it was Peter Thiel. It seems like just the kind of ambitious/ridiculous and politically loaded project he would be interested in.

I have no idea whether Urbit is as significant an idea as Mr. Moldbug suggests, but it's too interesting not to try out at least.
Meditations have already been discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5160713

There are great recommendations in there if anybody wants to dive deeper into Stoicism or understand Meditations better.
Is it professional for a professor to ask “surprise” questions on a test?
Interesting article, but hard to tell where it was going.

Turned out to be about how DRM is a bad idea. I'm not sure what the title has to do with the article though....
Cool to watch, though this is a fairly straightforward model of complex contagion on a finite grid. It's similar to Conway's Game of Life in that there's a grid and local rules, but beyond that, the nature of the rules results in a different kind of behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_contagion

http://www.ladamic.com/netlearn/NetLogo4/DiffusionCompetitio...
Very nice, could you display the best output result? So that we don't need to compress again ourselves.
> If you need external fuel tanks to launch from the Earth, then you need more external fuel tanks to escape the other planet as well

I'm not sure you understood what I wrote.

They didn't need external fuel tanks to launch from the Earth. They just chose to use them so they'd have more fuel later on. As demonstrated latter, the little craft are perfectly capable of achieving orbit without external tanks.
I think it's most important to prove the idea, even if you do that with a stack you later throw away for another.

I doubt that the .NET stack is the "best" for anything. But that's something to consider later down the road once you've proven your idea is good enough to warrant more sweat investment.
ICANN self-appointed permanent member of 'UN Security Council for the internet'
That article merits its own submission, it was a very interesting read.
No great fan of DRM myself, but I don't think the economic case is very strong here.

If strong DRM so obviously reduces sales, then are the publishers just ignorant of that? Of course not. It's because DRM is mostly about legal licensing and legal hardware standards, as discussed exhaustively in the OP here [1] and comments.

In my most cynical hours, I imagine that behind closed doors, the publishers are looking for ways to encourage piracy because of the boosts to overall enthusiasm that results (ie. free advertising), which is documented in the article.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7751110
I'd be interested in reading more along those lines too. Anyone recommend an article or book?
When uploading files, you can just download the one with the best compression. When inserting text, your text is replaces with the best compressed version. I understand I need to make that clearer.
Thanks for the feedback, I will improve it!
Is this the article you're talking about?

My Summer As a Professional Pretty Girl in the Hamptons
http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/07/my-summer-as-a-professional-...
It's interesting dumping groups of cells into different parts of the board and seeing how it reacts - a group in the middle of one color gets absorbed quickly, a group along the border of several colors hangs on for much longer, etc.
Can you provide more information? How do you determine which paper is patented?
I liked Hamilton's watch in Interstellar
> That's because the Snowden leaks are not a real threat. None of the documents contained anything about the "real" classified technologies; they only confirmed what everyone knew anyway.

This opinion is understated.

While I wouldn't go as far as to make guesses as to what the real classified data is now-a-days, I would like to point out that nearly all of the reveals thus far from the recent round of whistleblowers read basically like the transcripts to the cypherpunks mailing list over the past twenty years.

My fear is that everyone will gloss over that, and then continue discrediting such lists and their users far into the future as 'tinfoil hattery' and the like.
> Why don't we have cod editors yet?

I was going to snark that we do, they're called IDEs and they're horrible, but then I realized something.

In between an IDE and a text editor, there could totally exist a bona fide code editor, an in-between kind of system, but we (devs) tend to cluster our solutions under two categories, namely text editors (raw, simple, direct) and IDEs (complex, featureful, enormous).

This reminds me of a weird thing about testing frameworks - staggering numbers of testing frameworks get written, yet nearly all of them tend to either use "assert"-style syntax or "should/expect"-style syntax.

There could totally exist other families of syntax, but there don't. (Actually, there probably do, but if so, I'm not aware of them, and it could be because they're far from the mainstream.)

So with both these examples, you have this incredible diversity of implementations which can be divided really easily into just two basic categories. So even though there's an enormous amount of diversity at a very granular level, just one conceptual level up, there's almost no diversity at all.

So because of all this I have to say that I think your question is actually a much better question than I initially thought.
I ordered a key not having known about this situation in July of last year. The order was eventually (August 2013) cancelled and I got my money back, but definitely do not order from the website expecting to actually have an order fulfilled. I heard many good things about the product from people who managed to get one, though. While I'm talking about it, I have had the strongest instinct that they stopped shipping product for an unusual reason instead of just an our-business-is-failing kind of reason, but I don't know why I feel that way.
This is an excerpt from his new book; the article headline is the book's title. I agree this is not a good title for this excerpt.

Later his argument goes "Information doesn't want to be free--people do" and this story is just one bit of supporting evidence.
If anybody have any questions, just ask and I'll answer.
except the pictures aren't anything like your example.. snakes, babies, seagulls, lamp, dog, etc.

Rainbow, parade, and farm house weren't even on the list.
I think the classic analogy is "grep." But they are commented, at least:

++ pimp :: traced request
$: ful=? :: | === HEAD
fur=(unit mark) :: type goal
hen=duct :: event trace
som=seam :: logical request
pez=pest :: request state
sip=marl :: injected scripts
== ::

I think this is not at all an unusual data structure for one to find in an HTTP server, no?

Now, this style (four-letter lapidary arm names, usually not nonsense strings but nonsense words) works in some places but not others. Frankly, %eyre is not exactly a triumph of the lapidary style...
I'm not sure what word you're looking for, but the opposite of conservative is liberal. Libertarianism is a pretty vague and complicated concept, as the Wikipedia page on it will tell you.
It depends on the work mix. I know at my current job, I am MUCH more effective at writing actual new code than the offshore team (for one thing, I actually like doing it, whereas they seem to put it off for days in favor of other make-work activity the company generates).

OTOH, I'm no better at filling out random paperwork than they are, maybe even less effective, since they will readily gamble that a sketchy answer in a form won't bounce back for clarification.

So, if there is a lot of low level busy work, you might as well hire entry level workers. Just don't let them build stuff that perpetuates more busy-work, or it can become a tough pit to climb out of ... and now I'm off on a tangent.
It would be a neat feature to allow us to upload an image of the right size as a seed for the game
Interview with Florian Effenberger: The LibreOffice Crusader
10x or 100x or whatever is probably only true along a certain dimension. I don't doubt that there are programmers who are both 10x and 100x above the median at writing a high performance journaling filesystems, or fast, stable, multidimensional PDE solvers for example. But If you average it out over every conceivable programming task you probably won't find many 10x programmers.

The other aspect is that just being good and fast doesn't make you money. You have to be good and fast at solving the right problem in the right way and then convince people to give you lots of money for that solution. If you can't do those last bits, you'll always end up working for someone earning more than you, no matter how good you are.
by bitmap-structured you mean bitmap indexes?

any opensource db that schedule their own io? I guess postgresql, innodb?

what is your opinion on tokudb fractal-trees ?
Doesn't Postgres rely on OS caching? Would you say it's missing out on large performance gains based on that?
It would seem to me that the exemptions in 17 USC 102(b), reading its text, could certainly be interpreted so as to apply:

"In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work."

I could easily see an API being an "idea" or "method of operation". I have no idea how this squares with precedent.

Do you know, off hand, what excludes mathematics from copyrightability?
Yeah, there's no way they'd spend the billions of dollars it's cost to surveil everybody "just in case", then use stupid keyword searches to target individuals...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/24/blueprint...
Understanding that we are all confident idiots and what you can do about it
Thanks for the recommendation (really) but please don't use URL shorteners.
A Subjective Comparison of Germany and the United States
RBC to Partner with Toronto Based Bionym
A single dimension of political ideology is ridiculous.
Most of the time a plain text file is good enough. Databases are overrated.
Postgresql also uses Shared Buffer Cache which seems to be what he's talking about ?
The Lone Wolf of Wall Street
> China took responsibility for itself and built itself into a superpower

I don't agree that China's power has anything to do with development or 'responsibility': Saudi Arabia's economy produces around 4 times as much per person as China's, but due to population size China's economy is over 10 times the size of S.A.'s. That's why China is (becoming) a great power, and S.A. is not. We could say the same about South Korea, Taiwan, and many, many other countries who are wealthier per capita than China but lack their global influence.

China's 'responsible' leaders killed tens of millions of their own citizens, probably the most murderous and disastrous regime in the history of the world. After they burnt down their own house, plowed under the ashes and salted the earth, since ~1979 they've done a decent job economically for many Chinese, and especially for the leaders themselves.
Designing Information Dashboards
How Detroit was reborn
That premise is definitely true. It is a result of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. 'Physics' certainly satisfies the constraint: 'of sufficient complexity to encode the natural numbers'.

See: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~jrlucas/Godel/implic.html
[particularly "reality outruns knowledge"]
So I dug deeper and looked at Thoughtbot's guidelines [1] and found an epic guideline for Javascript:

> Use CoffeeScript

[1] https://github.com/thoughtbot/guides/blob/master/best-practi...
I believe that active data is stored twice (once in the Postgres buffer pool, and once in the FS cache). This is not ideal, because it is not making optimal use of RAM. To minimize this effect, PG recommends a relatively small buffer pool, which is not great if you believe the DB can do a better job than a generic OS.

I think this is quite fixable as well (I think I've even fixed it myself once) - just use O_DIRECT. Any PG maintainers able to tell me if PG still "double-buffers" and whether this patch would be useful if I could recreate it?
How “Gone Girl” Was Edited Using Adobe Premier
My understanding is that the water planet was closest to the black hole, as it was the only one they had to be super careful with re time dilation. Eg, every hour on the planet is 7 years on Earth, and some amount longer even just back on the orbiting mothership - Romily aged 23 yrs while he waited up there. That wasn't a problem with Mann's planet, further away from the black hole.
Stop. Just stop. This is why we can't have nice things.

Of course your application's icon should always be visible in the notification area. Everyone thinks their application should always be visible.

Your application should also always be pinned to the user's taskbar and start menu and should have an icon on the Desktop. It should start at Windows startup and pop up notifications randomly about insignificant things the user doesn't need to take action on.

Your application should also be topmost at all times. Even more topmost than other application's topmost windows.

Here's a great article about why you shouldn't do this:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/11/01/92244...
Of particular interest:

[Gone Girl] now becomes the first major feature to have been edited using Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Industry insiders consider this Adobe’s Cold Mountain moment. That refers to when Walter Murch used an early version of Apple Final Cut Pro to edit the film Cold Mountain, instantly raising the application’s awareness among the editing community as a viable tool for long-form post production. Now it’s Adobe’s turn.

Incidentally, Gone Girl is also one of the best movies I've seen recently: http://jakeseliger.com/2014/10/05/thoughts-on-the-movie-gone...
Berlin has a lot of vacant or underutilized housing stock compared to other cities.
I expect we'll see gentrification like we've seen in NYC, but not SF, or Vancouver style housing booms. I.e. neighborhoods get popular and get expensive, driving the poor, aspirational types to cheaper neighborhoods.
Sure. He funds Eliezer Yudkowsky through MIRI; "friendly AI" futurism is at this point a branch of the "Dark Enlightenment". Thiel himself has famously said "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible".
The point of contention on this is if you are doing something approximating continuous deployment. In that scenario, the tests and build are part of operations, since they are prerequisites to being able to ship code. As such, in an emergency scenario, you do not want to be in a situation where time to recovery is impacted by someone committing a hotfix that has improper whitespace, etc. In the best case, you end up spending additional time having to to 'sign off' on the broken build being just due to the linter (which also introduces a real risk in a high stakes scenario, in that you are shipping a red build and now have another place for human error to creep in) or in the worst case, the system blocks deploys until a commit is pushed to undo the whitespace problem.
Yeah. Eliminate possible causes until you've found the real one. There aren't many other reasonable approaches to debugging.
Without pausing, just by rapidly adding pink cells at the borders between two colours, it is possible to make one of them go extinct.

http://i.imgur.com/q2OIJNh.png
World Chess Championship Day 02, V. Anand vs M. Carlsen: Carlsen Strikes First
First, the German government claims that the fingerprints aren't stored in a database, but only stored on the passport (using a different key than for the regular data, to restrict access) and otherwise destroyed during the production process. The stated purpose is to verify the authenticity of the passport.

No idea if that's actually true and if it's implemented sanely - if not, I can only hope for a whistleblower to report the difference between claim (and law) and implementation, which is an issue.

Second, the national ID card has no fingerprint requirement.

Third, as a German you need a passport only for international travel outside the Schengen zone: travel to the US, and _they_ collect another set of fingerprints (and photo) on every entry. Other countries have similar policies. For all I know, those fingerprints _are_ taken for the express purpose of keeping them in a database.

I'm not a friend of the fingerprint policy, and it's hard to prove that there are no databases generated as a by-product. But it's not the full blown disaster that people make of it.
Most successful religions have a small dose of insanity and identity carrying a payload of genuinely good moral and practical advice. Stockpiling food is a rational, practical thing to do. The "insanity" in LDS has more to do with things like transdimensional space gods or dodgy, ahistoric ideas about where the American Indians came from.
I really question your experience with databases. Because blindly grouping all SQL databases together is a sure fire way to get yourself into a world of trouble. They don't store data the same way. They all have subtle differences in their support for the standards. They all have proprietary features. And their operational characteristics couldn't be more wildly different.

I do agree that SQLite is an excellent choice for most small applications.
Yeah! That's it. Thank you.

I would bet that the sounds and smells of riding a camel across the desert in China are similar to riding a rich old fat guy in a hotel room in New York...
This is simply not true, otherwise we would all be using text files. Text files can work in some situations. I disagree that this is "most of the time."
Regardless of what you think about it, plenty of people disagree. As a plural, sure "guys" can generally mean a mixed group, but as a singular noun used in a generic sense (eg, "we need a devops guy"), I challenge you to find any native English speaker to whom "guy" primarily denotes a woman.

In a professional setting, it's important to use language carefully. And in a situation like this where you have evidence that at least some people feel using "guy" and "guys" is a poor choice, and where there are plenty of equivalent alternatives ("folks" is my go-to), the only reason to use "guy" is to be a jerk.

Don't be a jerk.
Not true. If Apple took "100%" of the risk, GT would not be bankrupt. GT was a viable operating concern prior to these events.

Taking only what's available in the article, GT's job included running the factory, part of the process pipeline they had zero choice over, even to the point of selecting or even communicating with subcontractors (the line I quoted). When those machines in the process pipeline wholly dictated by Apple proved inadequate -- and I am not saying those are the only problems -- by necessity GT assumed at least a good portion of that risk.

You are oversimplifying the situation greatly, to the point of being disingenuous.