skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the vain of generally appreciated papers, I really like "Whitesides' Group: Writing a Paper" by George Whitesides[0][1]. It gives a strategy for collaborating research based on using a paper as a living document. It seems like a lot of work, but it saves untold days in the long run. This is the first paper I give anyone I mentor.

There have been derivative works on giving presentations, that I also particularly like: Editorial: Effective Presentations—A Must. [2]

[0] In case you don't know of him: he is the most cited living chemist, or something to this effect

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.200400767/ab...

[2] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201209795/ab...
Foundation is actually open source http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/CF/CF-855.11/CFString...
thanks for the constructive feedback. The reason i created the site was i realized all the tools out there (eg. spiceworks) are the ones you have to install on your lan and they would give you all the information and index your network. However, with my personal experience working at a startup and at a big bank, the teams all share a excel which gets emailed around and has multiple versions etc. I tried to make this site simple and target the small shops where they want to manage things from anywhere. This is just a first draft and i'll be adding more features as people request them.

personally i think the main value this gives over excel is that it allows you to edit it from anywhere, run reports (it's coming!) and get notifications on upcoming renewals for maintenance on gear etc.
Before somebody else asks me on my blog, I have no idea. I have not posted this, I'm not entirely sure if it's relevant at all nowadays, I don't even use Firefox any more...
Apple does prohibit other browsers on their (iOS) platform. You can ship a "browser" app, but it must use their engine. You cannot bring your own. Alternate iOS browsers are basically just reskinned copies of Safari.

As for the others, they're more open because they see it as a competitive advantage. That's something Microsoft didn't have to think about, since they owned 95% of the market and nobody would figure out how to break in for over a decade.

I wouldn't say that bundling IE was bad. What was bad was so thoroughly crushing all of the competition that "Windows" and "PC OS" became all but synonymous, and then that lack of competition causing terrible stagnation and the terror-filled reign of IE6.
If you're making 200k a year and manage your finances well you could retire pretty early, anyway.
How to handle thankless assignments?
Only loosely related, but I'm curious: What compiler optimizations have the biggest impact on scientific / floating point computation? Integer (audio/image) ops? With modern CPUs performing speculative execution, register renaming, and all the other magic they do, the CPU is acting like an optimizer in its own right. x64 is mostly just a byte code that gets JIT compiled at runtime. I'd be interested in seeing how much specific optimizations (including classic ones) contribute to speeding things up.
More syntax makes things harder, but the amount of hardness introduced by the craziest syntax is dwarfed by the rest of hardness involved in introducing a type system. It's like saying "Steve was able to walk 20 miles, because his driveway slopes down a little". It may be true that his driveway slopes down, and that may make that stretch easier, but other things are more important.
I'm surprised why this upsets you? You are making a fundamental assumption that price is somehow connected to input costs. This is not true for anything other than commodities. An experienced marketer was giving a talk in one of my biz classes in school when someone asked him how one much one can sell X for. His response was ... however much you can sell it for :-p

So tldr ... pricing for all non-essential goods is a game played by the seller and buyer. No one should be upset :)
> Yes, Microsoft was engaged in very anti-competitive illegal business practices

Fixed that for you. It's just business applies to legal business, not illegal anti-competitive tactics. Competition is beating the other guy, not preventing him from being able to play by locking him off the field. So no, it doesn't play a factor here, not at all.
Indeed. One of the wisest pithy quotes I've ever read is from Dave Barry: "A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."

If someone is nice to people when it's advantageous to them, all that means is that they're not an idiot. You can learn a lot about someone's character by how they treat people they don't have to be nice to.
How to tell a transportable story in a thank you card
Although there are a certain amount of psychopaths that can be detected, I'm almost positive that there are a huge amount psychopaths who go through life undetected.
We generally consider things something like human rights that you need in order to participate in general public life. As such, postal mail and telephone very much would be, ham radio not so much.
I'm glad someone gets it. Morals aren't math, goods don't offset bads.
Optimistic Replication - YASUSHI SAITO & MARC SHAPIRO, 2005
http://pagesperso-systeme.lip6.fr/Marc.Shapiro/papers/Optimi...

Why: RPC and its ilk make a lousy model for mobile data, since mobile devices are only occasionally connected, not permanently. Similarly, in the face network and server failures, servers can be modeled as occasionally connected as well. The "replication" mindset is far more productive when dealing with those issues. The linked paper gives a broad overview of a great number of approaches to replication, and is a great way to get the lay of the land.
A colleague of mine put together this site on The Economics of the Office:

http://economicsoftheoffice.com/

One of the creators of the Seinfeld site got his PhD in our department, so it influenced the Office site.
LSD is less toxic than aspirin
A decent idea, but the anecdotal evidence of success seems like feel-good fluff, and not actually relevant.

CounterPAC seems like it's trying to create a spending arms race, but with the basis in simple disclosure, rather than political views. However, that the corporations have vastly higher resources and incentives to spend. Unfortunately, it seems trivial for firms to create a Counter-CounterPAC with the aim at depleting the resources of any successful PAC with these intentions.

From my perspective, this is a long run failing strategy, but has the possibly to succeed in the short run. It would need to hit the reps, and hit hard. Then immediately (within a few election cycles) turn and pass strong disclosure laws to create a change in the way the game works.
LSD is the one drug where if your test kit shows you have the actual substance, then contamination isn't really an issue. There are only a handful of drugs that are active in the dose levels that fit on a square of blotter paper, and if the blotter has actual LSD on it then the chances of someone bulking it out with something else are basically zero.

Basically the risk of getting 25x-NBOMe or DOx instead of LSD is very high, but the risk of getting NBOMe mixed with LSD is negligible.
Are you really this obtuse?

> Change "apologize to 10 people" to "save 10 African children from starvation" and I don't see how you can possibly argue this hypothetical person is "bad"

Quite easily, let me fix your badly changed argument back to what it was, equal, because your change is an intellectually dishonest attempt to make the good outweigh the bad so much that it obscures my reasoning.

If I kill someone, and then save 10 African children from starvation, you're damn right I'm still a bad person. Helping people doesn't make up for hurting other people. Morals aren't math, doing good deeds doesn't balance some scale that makes the bad deeds go away.

> Your moral philosophy makes no sense.

It clearly makes far more sense than yours.
I'm saying the presentation is a symptom of the purpose. In my opinion, social media are not designed to share ideas or experiences, but rather, as a means to seek approval from others. I think that somebody who Instagrams his trip is more likely to be doing so because he wants others to see what he's doing and judge him on it, rather than so that he can document the trip for himself.

But that's only my opinion and not a matter of objective knowledge.
"Suppose it is the 1890s. Artificial flight is the
glamor subject in science, engineering, and venture
capital circles." -Intelligence without representation by Rodney Brooks http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/representation.pdf

It's accessible, and it's a good intro to thinking about AI. The field oughta be called even more nifty algorithms.
I assume this is true of most alcohol-related deaths: DUI's, people tripping/falling or just doing something plain stupid.
I agree with you. Netscape (4.0 iirc) was a horrible piece of software. MS originally went off on its own with IE because the standards bodies were so slow. It wasn't embrace and extend so much as it was ship working software. XML/XSL transformer in the browser, IE had that. Invention of AJAX, yep, IE also.

The problem was the combination of IE6 (at the time, the best browser out there) and MS business tactics simply crushed everyone else. At that point MS decided to work on other things and let IE waste.
If it's a strategy, then you're still evil no matter how much charity your do when you're old.
Ask HN: Working in finance
Hi

I was wondering what the opinion of the HN community was with working in finance. Are there members here who work in HFT? Front office? Back office?

I am considering a move to NYC and most of the software engineering (c++) opportunities are in finance. I come from a very tech background and generally was biased against working in finance. Are there people who moved from tech to finance? And from finance to tech? Would you recommend working in finance?

Would love to hear the opinions

Thanks!
> The government has aggressively banned all highs, which are clearly a pretty standard part of human behavior.

Amusingly, we keep inventing new drugs to "fix" the old ones, discovering that they're just as bad (if not worse), and rinse/repeating.

Believe it or not, heroin was originally sold by Bayer (yes, as in "aspirin") as a "safer, less addictive" alternative to morphine. Both drugs were very commonly used as cough medicine (as was morphine's predecessor, laudanum).

Now, of course, we know that heroin is actually rather addictive, and instead we treat heroin addiction with other opiates that have a similar effect[0]. And so the cycle continues.

[0] Usually which bind to the same receptors, to reduce issues of withdrawal.
Try to compete with this if you want to be serious, Collins is fantastic stuff:

http://tumblr.github.io/collins/

Also does this integrate with any accounting software such as Great Plains? Tamit is a several million piece of crap asset and po management system that is not impossible to create a better version of. Look at both of these for ideas on how to grow your product.
Clime – smart sensors that monitor everything you care about
Isn't ruthlessness just a type of meanness?
That's a false dichotomy. One can certainly have an automated build pipeline and use a higher level of abstraction, thereby ensuring portability. Also, if you think docker style containers cancel the risks of unreproducible builds, I believe you are wrong... since in many cases, they depend on external network resource availability.
> But that doesn't mean that the people working within this arrangement are good people.
Just working within that arrangement doesn't make them good/bad nice/mean. But I see the on-demand events to collect winter clothing for people in need. I've seen them do similar things over the past few years. I've seen them work hard to provide economic opportunities for tens of thousands of people.
I'm not giving them any awards just for participating. I'm seeing a company working hard to change the world and doing it in a way that doesn't seem "mean". I see competitors crying about things being unfair (but I don't buy the argument because I'm of the opinion that private contractors should have all the opportunities they can get, not limited by non-compete agreements like we see in other industries). I see blogs masquerading as real journalism posting attack articles (which happens to coincide with reports that one of their competitors was upset that they weren't acquired by Uber and had threatened to go "nuclear").
What I don't see is enough to make me think they're "mean" or "bad". I guess I take the obvious attack pieces with a grain of salt (spurned competitors who are struggling are going to do everything they can to dirty Uber's name, that makes me think less of their competitors not Uber). It's possible that I'm missing something, but I haven't seen anything that would suggest they're actually mean, and I haven't met anyone who has an actual report that would suggest such a thing either.
The key here is "if intended for human consumption." This is why legal highs are frequently sold as "plant food" or "bath salts." Some vendors are more careful than others, in the height of the first "wave" of designer drugs around ~2004, some vendors were as brazen as to offer "sample packs" and the like. And then Web Tryp [1] (my favorite codename ever) happened.

Many designer drugs are close analogs of schedule I substances.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Web_Tryp
By this logic they should sue the computer manufacturers, the power companies, the contractors who built the houses the pirates live in. Where does it end? Banks should sue towns for making roads that bank robbers drive on.

It's not the ISP's job to enforce another company's copyright.
I'm wondering if most American readers here understand that the USA publishers have been trying to do this to Australian isp's for a while.

sorry I'm not up to date on the legal process but its been going on for a while.
Thanks for posting this. I've never heard of it before, but a brief look at its Github page/repo looks seriously impressive.
I come from philosophy where the standard is to do full page text. It doesn't seem to harm readability there.
New features!
- difficulty increases over time
- motivations on correct answers
- slightly adjusted question difficulty
- sliders are disabled while scoring :)

Feel free to test it and let me know :D
http://www.mental-math-trainer.com/
No, it doesn't mean that at all. It means when you wrong a person, you have to make it up to that person. Doing good deeds for others doesn't excuse your past sins, you must make amends to those you wronged.
An why not? The economic cycle has been known since biblical times (7 years of prosperity, 7 years of famine). The preaches of "saving for the rainy day" have been present in most fables/folk stories in many cultures.
BTW, the US is not in a cyclical recession, but a structural one and it may take years to get things fixed (see Japan).
Gecko Gloves Let Scientist Climb Sheer Glass Walls
Interesting that they mention individual IP address. Unless Cox does things differently then most other ISPs. Theoretically this could be more then one subscriber. I know that both the ISPs I have used in my area will issue me a new IP address whenever I unplug the modem for more then 10 seconds.

Couldn't Cox make the case that the information being provided could be from multiple subscribers?
> How many more people are employed in, say, southeast Asia doing MS support work and development than were "destroyed" in Microsoft's heyday?

Morality isn't math, good deeds don't excuse bad deeds simply by outnumbering them. The very foundation of your thinking is flawed.
eevblog is wonderful! During a recent side-track into electronics, I've been consuming all of Dave's (EEVblog) videos, all of Mike's (mikeselectricstuff) videos and all of Ben Krasnow's videos (Applied Science).

EEVblog is very specific to EE, Mike's Electric Stuff is electronics as well, but tends much more toward tear downs/obscure components/reverse engineering and Ben's channel is just a delectable collection of DIY everything. Ben became famous for building his own (and probably first DIY ever) electron scanning microscope, but has videos where he builds all sorts of amazing things in his home shop.
Claude Shannon 1948, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Commun...

This paper kickstarted the concept of information theory, and was hugely influential on many fields of research. Signal-to-noise ratio, the bit, information entropy, etc. are all theories and concepts presented by Shannon.
+1. This is especially true for "Experienced #5" which required me to figure out about 4 letters out of 16 using the regex, the rest being obvious from the clue and the other 4 letters.

All the hitchhikers ones are pretty obvious though.
Condoleezza Rice has been instrumental in pushing for the US government to bypass personal privacy on the internet, and they hired her to help run a company that stores people's private documents on the internet. How does that make sense?

Her involvement in the Iraq war, the Bush torture program, and so on are also reprehensible in my personal opinion, but in this case we can leave those aside; I would think that her position on warrantless wiretaps alone would be sufficient for anyone who cares about privacy to want her kept far away from Dropbox.

(And there's nothing about being liberal that requires one to mindlessly support everything any woman or minority says or does. It does you no credit to hold such a childishly simplistic view of your political opponents.)
Man, studied those at the university, those things are very complicated...

I mean, simple ones are easily explained, but they sound awful, so to get a usable one it takes lots of theory.

Unlike speakers, which you can build at home and can sound OK.

That said, wikipedia is a surprisingly good source on this. Also, this circuit simulator (http://www.falstad.com/circuit/) comes with some DAC/ADC circuits builtin, and you can watch them live.
The Mexican Valley of Startup Death
Ember CLI 0.1.3 released
How to Use Videos to Increase Growth and Retention Rate
Note that using Ember CLI is the 'right-way' to use Ember moving forward. Sanctioned by the core team and many veteran users.

Worth noting that this version they have switched to using Watchman[1] to monitor assets.

[1] - https://facebook.github.io/watchman/
Debian forked over systemd to create Devuan
Could you imagine the fallout if the copyright holders were able to get the US mail to stop delivery to your house because you ordered a bootleg CD? Or have the phone company cut off your service, if the suspected copyright violation took place using a dial-up internet service?
If you generalize labels so that they become first class, then call/cc can be written in terms of goto. http://ssp.impulsetrain.com/goto.html
> ... gcc 5 changes ...

I'm disappointed it says literally nothing about auto-vectorization. I had to do an incredible amount of hand-holding to get GFortran 4.9's auto-vectorization to work worth anything. A few experiments with C code showed that GCC 4.9 was just plain bad at it compared to even Clang, much less ICC. If I work on that project again, I'll probably look into getting DragonEgg [1] to work so I can get decent optimization without contorting the code as much.

The OP mentions an important case with loads and stores of 3D data, but GCC needs to up its game in more ways than that.

[1] http://dragonegg.llvm.org/
Commentary on the RSD Julien Pick-up Artist Controversy
This is beautiful.

For me, Carl Sagan's voice is incredibly inspirational. He knows just what to say and how to say it to elicit a beautiful and optimistic feeling of wonderment.

And the visuals were stunning. A tantalizing glimpse into the next century or two of human exploration and experience.

Thank you for this.

Edit: Reddit thread at http://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2nseb3/wanderers...
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, 1979 "The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme"

Some biologists may cringe (especially the Gould haters), but I don't think I've ever been so engrossed by any other scholarly paper. It is a joy to read. Very approachable for non-biologists. The papers critique of sloppy "just so" reasoning, could easily be extended to Data Scientists/Engineers/Entrepreneurs. Highly recommend!
Pets Allowed
This is funny because I was heavily skeptical yet completely reversed my opinion within 10 minutes. I correctly predicted the results, but I program R professionally. Then I asked my partner who's a non-programmer to read the snippet and her prediction was that the program would stop. That led me to reflect back on your statement. I think the key word is "sharp". I correctly predicted the result, but that's only because I trust lazy-eval heavily. Even then, it's hard to really cement trust in lazy-eval (for me) as it's difficult to mentally map. That's not exactly sharp after all!
William P. Thurston 1994, "On proof and progress in mathematics"

Gives a good amount of insight into how academia works for mathematics, and gives a good contrast with how CS works. Don't be scared by the abstract, it's a completely non-technical paper. The academic/research culture can be more important than the results.

http://arxiv.org/abs/math.HO/9404236
Wow you beat me to it! This paper affected my college major, my career in my twenties, and my current career. Such an important paper, although, I must admit, it is not easy to decipher at first.
Sony's e-ink FES smartwatch unveiled as a crowdfunding project
I've been using this to write a book and really enjoy it so far (though I also enjoyed the desktop version, for what it's worth).

One thing I've noticed (and that I tweeted earlier) is that having my github hooked up to my book, every time I save (via cmd-s, which I do out of habit every minute or so) it automatically pushes to my repo. So without realizing it, I had something like 50 commits after working for 15 minutes. Not a big deal, but it might be nice to separate the two.

The other thing I've noticed is that saving also builds the book. So in this same 15 minute period of working, I went to the status page of my book and noticed I had 50 or so builds currently being processed, with almost all of them failing in a flurry of emails an hour later. (Side note, any reason for this?)

So the only thing I would say is that I'd like to see a separation of the saving, committing, and building, much like the desktop version had. I'd like to build my book (and commit it) at the end of the session, not on every save. But maybe that's just me.
I think your comment is a good example of why talking about intelligence is hard.

Note that nobody here advocated forced sterilizations (or killing off ugly babies).

All we said is that it's pretty much settled that intelligence is inheritable.

PS I will contend one point - and that is whether Jews were marked for mass sterilization. That is false.

Jews were marked by Nazis for extermination. However - people who advocated eugenics in other countries (like US or the UK) had no issues with Jews (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States).

If anything, Jews (or more precisely Ashkenazi) are a poster child for eugenics - since really that's what they went through in the middle ages, which is used to explain their enormous achievement (see http://www.economist.com/node/4032638)