skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you lap this up, they'll give you more of it.

"This" being "plans 20 years in the future."

I get that this is your first time getting your heart shattered. I'm the old crone who doesn't understand the true love you found with your soulmate who is promising you the moon, er, Mars. But if you repeat our mistakes, you will repeat our heartbreak.

The more excited the public is, the more NASA sees it as a blank check to cram more things as "necessary" for a Mars mission. The 90-day report is the perfect example. Today's press conference is talking about creating "solar electric propulsion," something that was never mentioned for prior Mars missions but is now suddenly a requirement.

That's the pattern. The public wants a Mars mission, then NASA says "yeah, we'll get there in 20 years, but first we need to spend time inventing <new tech>." It's a different <new tech> each time.
My claim isn't that the civilization will be wiped out. It's that it will no longer be in control of its own destiny.

If the private sector model of an economy is worse, then why has every first-world country begun to follow it? Because it's more effective.

You can argue that the private sector is a different tool for a different sort of job, but my point is that regardless of the job, small organizations almost always do it better. (Incidentally, that's the thesis of startup investing.)

The exception is with highly parallelizable tasks, like fighting a war. But space exploration isn't that sort of job.

I feel like I'm in an alternate universe. Strange day. It seems like it should be perfectly obvious that private sector control is more effective than public sector control in almost every area where people need to accomplish things. There is practically a mountain of evidence in support of this viewpoint, and it's hard to find examples that contradict it, unless it's also a highly parallelizable task like constructing a highway system. The most obvious counterexamples that come to mind are the justice system and monetary regulation. But those are two counterexamples in a sea of examples.
The problem is that everyone is trying to hire the best, partly because they know how good that looks when fundraising, partly because that's how you win in winner take all tournament type economies.

This ends up similar to NFL Quarterbacks. Even the worst quarterback in the NFL is exceptional, but everyone wants the best one because it's hard to win a Super Bowl with the worst quarterback in the NFL.

So it's not that talent is hard to find. There are 1,000s of of people that are very good quarterbacks. It's that the best talent is hard to find. And this is because there can only be a couple of bests at anything.
and the Hudson's Bay Company and the Roanoke Colony as well.
This he notes, repeatedly. The context of the post is 24/192 for distribution to end-users (Neil Young's PonoMusic)
You also have those in Underscore / Lo-Dash:

_.filter(fields, {multilanguage: true})
_.where(fields, {multilanguage: false})
Awesome to see this. We have a similar tool we built here at Heroku called "rearview" but right now the source has a bunch of heroku-specific cruft like out oauth service baked in.

We should release it too. Intelligent pager analysis is the key to operational improvement!
Ezra Zygmuntowicz Memorial Fund for His Son Ryland
The near-death of the novelist: Virginia Woolf’s Veronal overdose, 1913
I once spent ~2 hours explaining all of this (well maybe not all of it) to a friend of mine who was studying sound design at the time. He didn't believe me.

I even transcoded some 24/192 FLAC Pink Floyd I had lying around and made him do a double blind test to show him that he'd prefer the slightly louder song every time, even if the louder song was 192kbps vs the FLAC. He did. He still doesn't believe me.

He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 to this day. He works as a sound engineer now.

I don't think any amount of reasoning will make some people change their minds. Some people buy $500 wooden knobs to make their volume pots sound better. (or was that a hoax? i can't tell anymore)
In a Bay Area Courtroom, Lawyers Hit Replay on Apple’s History
A Unified Approach to Grown Structures
Nowadays there are more kinds of evolution. Cultural evolution springs to mind. ^_^
Ask HN: Does anyone doubt artificial consciousness is possible?
It seems to me that a lot of people just assume that we will be able to program machines that are "self-aware". We know so little about are own consciousness and artificial intelligence != artificial consciousness.

I am surprised by how hard it is to find any information from dissenters of this speculative claim.
Indeed. I rip everything losslessly and batch re-encode when I switch music players (man, I miss my Zunes)
I guess his exasperation with audiophiles must be leaking through. Since I feel the same way the tone actually resonates with me and only signals confidence in the correctness of the facts presented.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Explains Why He Bought the Washington Post
Direct link to algorithm showreel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HI8FerKr6Q
> Why do CEO jobs deserve protection

"About half of VC-backed company founders are immigrants"

http://venturebeat.com/2006/11/15/note-to-washington-about-h...

CEO jobs are not 'protected'.
>"These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported."

Sure, here's one study that supports that assumption: http://hkis.org.hk/ufiles/200512-bclam.pdf

Took a bit of searching, seeing as I don't have access to any Journals. However, I did find more references, and no doubt you'll find quite a bit of other studies in the citations of this one.

>"Their achievements are staggering;"

So has their budget. I just did a quick calculation from their wikipedia funding page. Since its inception, NASA has received 1069.323 billion dollars in 2014-inflation-adjusted dollars. That's a trillion dollars that could have been spent solving world hunger, poverty, disease, even income equality. Sure, there have been all sorts of side-effects from all that NASA R&D, but let's not try to compare apples to oranges here. Because you can't really compare public and private institutions' achievements. One has to earn the profits it spends on fancy R&D, and the other simply has to ask for it in the government budget.
Personally, as a prodigy boy-genius languishing in a shit industry, I can't wait to fill my belly with mentorship and live under a roof of self-actualization.
They'd have to be paying 2000 developers $150,000 per year to hit $300 million. Are there really that many developers working on this?
>The only real form of code reuse that OOP addresses is direct object inheritance.

Composition is far more useful and effective means of code reuse in OOP.
Where did you get the idea that a SpaceX launch costs $500 million? The entire Commercial Cargo development contract with SpaceX was $400 million. The subsequent commerical resupply service contract is for 12 missions for $1.6 billion. If you spread the development cost over all those flights, it comes out to be ~$150 million per launch. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX#Commercial_cargo_contrac...)
SpaceX is better at putting a pound of stuff in LEO than Nasa per dollar by a massive margin. But that's all they do right now.

I want NASA to build payloads and the private sector to build rockets. But to say that the rockets are more important than the payloads is backwards.
Did anyone else make it all the way to the word 'Franz' thinking this was going to talk about the distributed commit log service?
Traditional immigration proceedings? You mean the system where if you're from China or India, you have to wait 3-5X as long for a green card as people from western europe?

Yeah, that system sounds great. Dunno why people in software engineering of all industries would have a problem with that system.
What I mean is that, if just doing regular Newton, I'm not sure I've ever seen an example using the interface you show. I think that the vast majority of Newton's method implementations pass H rather than H^-1, and get the search direction via "solve_H_g(H,g)" rather than "solve_iH_g(iH,g)". It takes cubic time to compute H^-1 from H (after which you can compute (H^-1)g) and it takes cubic time to solve for x such that H*x=g, but the rather is said to be more stable, and so preferred.

I know this is irrelevant to the main part of the post, which is to explain LBFGS, I'm just genuinely interested if there are applications where its better to pass the inverse of H rather than H itself for some reason.
I am sorry, but I think you live in a different world than I do. Where I live, many government offices get all-new furniture at the end of every fiscal year, because if they manage to come in under budget, their budget gets cut in the next year, so they make sure to come out over-budget. This is not the behavior of an organization trying to "reduce cost or improve quality".

In addition, corporations which are closely-held have a very strong incentive to be efficient, as the officers/owners are the residual claimants. In larger, public corporations, their checks are shareholders, and their competitors, who (if more efficient) can drive a corporation bankrupt by under-pricing, or out-competing. I cannot recall the last government department driven to bankruptcy by a competitor.
> However...it would be completely impossible to sustain a population of 20 million people living at -20deg C for 3 months at a time, without spending significant amount of money on infrastructure specifically dedicated to making sure we don't die from exposure to the elements.

What is this fantastical infrastructure that goes beyond the infrastructure that goes into sustaining a Western country (with densely populated pockets)? Compare the infrastructure to, say, middle latitude USA (latitude equal to NYC).
Also, even with the best equity agreement, you can still get royally screwed when it comes down to the wire.
Ok, I have a 1k+$ of sound equipment, I listen to lossless, and my equipment is 24/192 DAC in hardware (so even if I pass 16/44.1, it will get up-converted). Now give me 24/192 music and don't tell me "you don't need it", because I need it.

But for my mobile phone and 29$ earpods, 96 kbps 16/44.1 mp3 from soundcloud is good enough.
What's so funny is to see yet another occurrence of basically "because Nyquist" yet fails to address that Nyquist only holds true over infinite time. Over a window of any finite length perfect reproduction is NOT guaranteed.

This paper, http://www.academia.edu/8412078/Is_The_Nyquist_Rate_Enough, for one, refutes this.

More reading material:

http://www.wescottdesign.com/articles/Sampling/sampling.pdf
I liked this book: http://www.amazon.com/Walking-Softly-Wilderness-Backpacking-.... Reading through it might not be a bad idea.

As for the actual "how to do it", I'd do some the following:

* Do some research on basic gear to take (tents, water treatment, first aid, etc)

* Hit up a place like REI, Mountain Equipment Co-op or similar and load up. Make sure your boots fit - most good stores will have an incline you can jump around on to make sure your foot doesn't slip in your boot. Make sure you get the correct size of backpack, although this is not as critical as properly fitting boots. As a general rule, spendier stuff will either be tougher material or lighter, but you don't need to go nuts unless you're overburdened with cash.

* If you haven't come across the 10 essentials of hiking in your research, Google it. REI has a page - http://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/ten-essentials.html

* I'd start with a simple out-and-back overnight hike. If you're being careful, which you should, you'll probably have overprepared and will have a heavy pack, so a longer trip might not be fun. Over time you'll probably start to tweak what you take, get better gear and so on, and and your pack will start to get lighter. You'll also presumably find yourself getting fitter.

Backpacking is one of my favourite things to do on this earth. All your concerns with work, possessions, relationships and so on fade away, and you find yourself just focused on getting to the next camp, enjoying the wilderness and whatever company you have, finding water, and so on. It's an incredible experience.
Do you have any proof to back these extraordinary claims?

If you have the faintest idea how "microwave technology" can mechanistically and physiologically read minds, you should explain your understanding.

My undergrad physical chemistry, bio degree, etc. make me question this. Microwave is for rotational spectroscopy. That gives you gas-phase or polar molecules. I assume you mean to say they're reading water? So... Concentrations? Blood flow? Seems incredibly low signal and dangerous.

If this is a joke, (which seems most plausible), this isn't a great manner of discourse for HN. It confuses, wastes mental cycles, and decreases signal:noise. Please think of everyone having to parse this stuff.
I brought up NextSTEP because it was a notable success that was not mentioned by the parent comment.

And arguably, NextSTEP is a success story because of its design which enabled it to crossover successfully into mobile through iOS. NextSTEP's blueprint allowed iOS to operate at a performance level that other OS'es and architectures could not match when it debuted.

BeOS was fine, but it was rightly or wrongly seen as a spiritual successor to Amiga, which only had a niche market.

NextSTEP wanted to be a spiritual successor to MacOS, but never really could until Steve Jobs forced it in there.

Even so, the technical design points of NextSTEP were well-suited for a resource constrained mobile platform, and that is one reason iOS has been such a success.
As someone who only works now and then with Postgres, this is what made it click for me:

"Loosely, it means that a LATERAL join is like a SQL foreach loop, in which PostgreSQL will iterate over each row in a result set and evaluate a subquery using that row as a parameter."
Posted today by Paul Barton, a video that lets hear piano sounds never heard before.

Like the moon that eclipses the sun, revealing solar flares, this mechanism helps hearing what's hiding behind the main notes hit.

Skip to 3'58'' to hear only harmonics sounding after dampening manually a C3.

Skip to 7'17'' for a demonstration of the sympathetic sounds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHWex94-mHg
I dont have any spare laptops, but I could buy you a chromebook off CL or Amazon if that is helpful. I know its not much....
kentonv ftw
Mother Earth?
Uggh no way. The AWS Web Console is a beastly enough UI to get around, I have no interest in migrating away from the very comfortable, friendly Github interface.
Starting with the first video of the series is probably a good idea, it's aptly named "a digital media primer for geeks"

http://xiph.org/video/ for the series.
if there isn't a talent shortage and there are workers in the bay area without jobs that work in engineering I would appreciate an intro to said workers.

also to clarify, if you mean there isn't a shortage and that i just have to offer higher salaries to poach from other companies I would categorize that as a shortage since it will just results in the equivalent of music chairs for jobs.

i don't mind paying top dollar for the best engineers but if the permanent state is music chairs for engineers that to me implies a shortage. Irrespective of the salaries you have to pay, there should be enough engineers to fill all job openings otherwise I would say there is a shortage.

not advocating excessive numbers of workers to drop salaries, ideally it would (job openings -1) number of engineers.
Fast Paging with MongoDB
Alien – Typeset in the Future
The trading companies of that era were a very special sort of company. They had armies, courts, prisons and sometimes even their own currencies. I have no idea why they would be relevant.

They're relevant because they raised private capital in order to explore unknown lands, sometimes very inhospitable ones (HBC). In their initial form they didn't have any of the trappings of state you impute to them, those came later, and are not really very far from the operations of large corporations nowadays many of which are supranational.

The parallels to private exploration of space are obvious, and costs of access to space have fallen dramatically in recent years.
Agreed, that's why I've always thought of it as an implied valuation. Investors are going into it expecting upside, and the terms allow them to have a floor (regardless of what happens with common/ prior rounds), but I don't think they would make the investment if they felt an acquisition/ IPO/ other liquidity event would value each share of the company at less than what they paid for it. I don't think its unreasonable to use this to get to an implied total valuation.
Impossible. Halting Problem.
Totally agree with your EDIT2. It is unfortunately why I am only using throwaway accounts now.
> These things happen in private sector organizations too; the assumption that the private sector somehow will do it better needs to be supported.

Regardless of which one does it better, NASA is funded through forcefully-extracted US tax dollars. They can be as stagnant and bureaucratically bloated as they want to be thanks to moral hazard. I'll gladly support space exploration, but it should be using resources that are donated voluntarily.
I've had an exactly opposite feeling - I've read a piece of text written by a guy who's tired of explaining people that more isn't better (and in some cases is worse).
You've only been on HN for 450 days (I've been here 2500+), I don't think you can claim HN has gone significantly downhill since you joined.

IMO, this is a troll comment. If you are making a grand point, I don't see it.

EDIT: I'm not replying to your point because I can't understand your point. Apparently it's obvious to you, but it is far from obvious to me what you are saying.
Fascinating. Was completely expecting you to say Braintree. So they look a little like a blended monthly fee and transaction fees with the benefit/incentive being to help you drive as many transactions as you can via non CC options so you aren't paying 2.69% and 30 cents etc.
The page's title is "24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed", what you quoted is the main heading.
This is hard to say; is it simply expectation bias? Because some instruments have elements with wacky harmonics, like bells, metallophones, xylophones, Jamaican steel drums and such. Notes do not have a fundamental which coincides with a harmonic of a note one octave below. That's just how the instrument sounds. If a piano reminds us of a metallophone :) then we conclude that it's awful and out of tune. Still, even that is appropriate to some genre, or for comic effect. A western saloon bar calls for a detuned piano. :)
Here is another good article about different audiophoolery and scams: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/10-01-06/#feature
Here's another explanation from the Postgres docs with additional examples:
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/queries-table-expr...
Gangnam Style breaks YouTube viewer count
I've been on the site since day two of its public launch. About 2800 days.

Why did this devolve into a number comparison contest, rather than addressing my main points?

EDIT: Oh, here we go. Now I'm looked down on with so much scorn that you won't even reply to me. Really? Edit wars?

My point was this: The average comment is becoming shorter, meaner, and less logical. Additionally, the value of the voting system is becoming diluted over time, as more people participate. Mainly I'd like algorithmic protection from people who downvote all of your comments regardless of how well-reasoned your followup replies are. Limiting people to one downvote per person per thread seems reasonable.

My thesis in the main discussion is that if you hand a job to the public sector and to the private sector, the private sector will accomplish it with fewer resources and more quickly than the public sector. The exception is with highly parallelizable tasks, like fighting a war. The counterexamples are the justice system and financial regulation, yet those are only two counterexamples compared to a huge body of examples.
In the UK HMRC (Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs) are stating that VAT on digital services [and so e-goods too by their definitions] is payable from the first transaction, there is no threshold you can hide under as their is for local UK VAT (~£80k turnover IIRC). Apparently a threshold couldn't be agreed and so there isn't one!

This means that if you sell £50 a year of knitting patterns you now have a liability to document the geography of your customers and prove that non are in other EU countries, OR pay tax to each country you sell to individually. HMRC are saying that companies (who may be individuals [sole traders in local parlance]) can not legally refuse to sell across EU borders to avoid this either. Along with that as you're now holding personal information on your customers there is a whole raft of new laws to attend including apparently a £35 registration with the UK Information Commissioners Office (ICO).

Foreigners already don't pay local VAT in the EU do they? This change is about sales to customers in the EU, there is no change AFAICT to transactions with customers not in the EU the VAT laws relevant to that are unaltered.

It's totally bonkers. The people involved have described "micro businesses" as selling < £2million GBP of digital services. They clearly haven't considered the impact on the many small businesses (now being termed nano businesses) that sell maybe a few thousand GBP of e-books or a few hundred pounds of knitting patterns or similar.
How about: give them a little bit more equity than just scraps?

Everyone want to found their company because they know it's the only way for them to be rewarded if the company is successful.

Right now it's more like: "the company got bought, the founder is a millionnaire, you get some pocket money and the awesome opportunity to be a cog in Google Adwords!"
Google’s IPv6 Traffic Hits 5% Globally, 28% in Belgium, 12% in USA and Germany
You sir just saved me a lot of reading (not that its a bad article). I'm currently working on leveraging the distributed commit log service so my mind immediately assumed that's what the article was about.
The article mentions this point.
There's lots of evidence out there. Probably the most obvious signal for you should be that companies are complaining about a lack of workers, but wages are stagnant. Or another signal might be the fact that 50% of STEM grads have to work in unrelated industries because of an inability to find work in tech. If you want more proof of funniness:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU

Or if you want proof of major tech companies in the US colluding to suppress wages, look up everything related to this:

http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f262600/262654.htm

If you want proof of US companies paying slave wages in the US, etc etc. The funniness goes on and on.
Yeah I've actually emailed support about the same question and got a quick response back.
You aren't really refuting anything said in the article.
Its comparable. Sure Mars is colder, but cold isn't an issue after you have a coat/insulated building. Its really all air food and water.

Air and water come from ... water and electricity. So that leaves food.

It can be hard to grow anything in a greenhouse in the winter - insulation blocks sunlight, which isn't any too bright out there already. So that leaves farming with lights in tanks, underground, or in insulated domes etc. Which will end up costing more than the human infrastructure. E.g. it can take a quarter acre of land to grow food for you; you can live in 500 sq ft. Orders of magnitude different.
Real audiophiles aren't offended since they totally agree with him.