skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"She provided information about Lewin’s interactions with her, which began when she was a learner in one of his MITx courses, as well as information about interactions between Lewin and other women online learners."

So it wasn't an isolated incident.

"Based on its investigation, MIT has determined that Lewin’s behavior toward the complainant violated the Institute’s policy on sexual harassment. Following broad consultation among faculty, MIT is indefinitely removing Lewin’s online courses, in the interest of preventing any further inappropriate behavior."

There was an investigation, run by the head of the Physics department, and they determined sexual harassment happened through MIT online materials. The faculty of the department were consulted, and it was decided to remove his material, to prevent any future issues.

He used his online content to prey upon female students. They removed that content. I mean what was the alternative for MIT? Not tell anyone? Leave it up, with a warning that you shouldn't contact the professor because he has harassed women in the past?

Call me old-fashioned, but I think when people abuse their positions of power and authority in order to victimize others, the institutions SHOULD cut ties with those individuals. As far as I know, nothing prevents Lewin, or others, from hosting the videos of his lectures elsewhere.

But MIT is right to disassociate from somebody they have determined to have behaved inappropriately.
How do you delete a project?

Why do they make it SO HARD to even delete a project?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16710290/how-to-delete-a-...
Countering your counter-point: this seems like the most pessimistic comment about doing a PhD I've ever seen. There are many types of department, many fields, that don't operate like the type of setup you are describing. I'd be damn surprised if anyone in my department is waking up with "screaming nightmares" or is "on their way to the psychiatric hospital" - though maybe I'm just ignorant about my peers, or got a lucky roll of the dice.

I'm not saying this doesn't happen, or trying to diminish your personal experience, but you've presented your dark scenario as being as inevitable as the happy scenario you are railing against.
What algorithm is Facebook using for People You May Know that found my neighbour
I agree with the original poster. Until now, when coding intersects with other fields, the approach has been for someone skilled in coding to come up-to-speed on whatever field needs automation. In the course of my career, I've had to learn to basically be an appraiser, employee benefits broker, pharmacist, dentist and auto mechanic. And while I learned a lot about these fields, there's no way that I can know these fields as in-depth as someone trained to do that actual work. This pattern is unsustainable and leads to software that is superficial and never truly meets the needs of the domain. But as we create more and more abstractions between programmers and the underlying hardware, coding will become more accessible to people with less background in software development and the desired balance between domain knowledge and programming knowledge will shift away from coding ability.

There will always be a need for people who understand computer science, but those engineers will be like compiler engineers or hardware engineers are today...enabling a much larger group of programmers to produce the software that provides value to users. And as we're able to provide improved layers of abstraction to make software development easier, we'll see computing become more accessible to more programmers who will build software with a much richer understanding of the domain.

So I'm torn about initiatives like this. I see coding as the new literacy...it will be a skill required by almost every professional who is an expert in his or her domain. But they won't be coding in today's languages and coding will be significantly easier than it is today. So we need to find a way to teach children to develop using tomorrow's tools today. And that means extracting the part of programming in today's languages that is intrinsic to programming while doing our best to avoid the part of coding that is just pain inflicted by today's limited abstractions. That separation may be difficult (or even impossible) to achieve, but that doesn't mean we should try. Because anyone who doesn't learn how to instruct a computer to accomplish tasks is going to be automated out of a job (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)
There's no visible usernames in the app. I'm not sure what good taking over someone's account would do you.
This was a good thread. I was planning to file for US citizenship before moving back to Sweden but many of the comments here made me reconsider, especially with regard to the reporting requirements. I am willing to gamble with my permanent residency since I am married to a US citizen, and as many have pointed out, citizenship doesn't offer any discernable advantages except the ability to work in the US.
The article says they temporarily disable HTTPS to make a call to Flurry, which is an advertising/analytics company. They must be accessing the analytics side.
Can I ask what internal wiki software you guys use at Stripe?
I an not too sure about this. The debatable issue is should any investor give them any money or not? Since I doubt it almost never happens we probably don't have the data to know if it would work or not.
It seems like there was a short period of time when Uber & Lyft cars in NYC were just anyone with a car and the app but over the last few months that seems to have ended. I can't remember the last time I wasn't in a very nice, newish car using either app. My guess is the less nice cars got churned out by rider ratings.

That said I still try to use anything but Uber to get a ride.
Besides that my best advice will be when meeting new people switch from "I want" to "I can offer" this way you'll make yourself useful to the new connections you meet.
Think of your skills that can make you valuable.
Hope it helps.
Isaac.
Problem with this model. If you turn the bias way up (demand 80-90 percent of your neighbors be like you) the segregation drops to zero. That doesn't seem to make sense and I think it's because they're moving to random locations that have low probability of being "better" by the binary nature of the metric.
It's clamped to 4. You can't go lower than that.

There is `setImmediate` for making something run the very next cycle. However, only IE10+ supports it and the other browser vendors are against it. You can use abuse `postMessage` to get a similar effect.
1) Nothing can be proven to be "unhackable". Some programs (e.g. OpenSSH) have turned out to be hackable after as much as several decades in production on hundreds of millions of machines.

2) "Properly set up" is too ambiguous. Is the whole bucket public? Is the whole bucket private? Are the permissions more fine-grained?

3) Some registrars, like GoDaddy, have been hacked with social engineering. Are you using a registrar that allows password resets over the phone?

4) A password is not enough. You need to enable two-factor authentication on AWS.
Bitcoin Meetup. Every Thursday, usually in Roppongi.

http://www.meetup.com/Tokyo-Bitcoin-Meetup-Group/
"He used his online content to prey upon female students."

That's not what that statement says, and indeed it's sort of strange to think that's a plausible occurrence.

His lecture and notes didn't do any harassing. He did, through interaction on the online platform. That's not the same thing.
The only sentence in the press release specifically about the decision to remove the lectures, afaict, is this one:

> Following broad consultation among faculty, MIT is indefinitely removing Lewin’s online courses, in the interest of preventing any further inappropriate behavior.

It sounds like they're worried that just having courses up (even if not offered) might encourage future interaction between students using the material and the person listed as instructor (e.g. by email), which they don't want to provide as an avenue. They do have an archive of past courses [1], so one in-between option might've been to remove them from the current MITx site and stick them in the archive. But it's possible they were worried that would be insufficient. (It's also possible I don't understand how MITx courses are organized, and what the archive is for.)

[1] http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/33970
They already are, they partner with Ford and Toyota to offer drivers car loans on select models if they are an Uber driver.
Define validate. That is kind of the crux of my question. If it means "profitability" then that is a different threshold than "users." I am trying to figure out what PG is trying to describe.
Unless I missed it, he didn't discuss defense at all.

I'd expect that to be a relatively small factor, and indeed hard to tease out from other influences on points-against (e.g., if you get more tiles then your opponent gets fewer). Still, it could be interesting ...
Only 15 years since the first president to send an email! http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/laptop-used-clinton-...
> So when a cab driver, who is scraping by, needs to pay for the gas he used that night, if he has mostly credit card fees, he has no cash to pay for gas.

This may sound harsh, but... they're not earning anything past their daily spendings, right? Then this is going to happen the first day of illness, car not starting, or any other situation. Trying to avoid card transactions will likely just delay the result... so why do it at all?
But they're not saying that people only move for diversity reasons. They're saying that one simple metric at a fairly low level could nevertheless give you drastic results, which is a counter-intuitive conclusion - most people expect output factors to be proportional to input factors.

Don't get hung up on the explanatory power of the model for real conditions - for the same reason you would not get hung up on the simplistic assumptions of most economic models, which often involve two variables and all other factors being held equal ('ceteris paribus'). People sometimes dismiss all economics because micro starts out from these extremely simple foundations rather than being fully reflective of the real world, but that's a bit like dismissing math because arithmetic is so basic.
The Worst Business 'Pick-Up' Lines on LinkedIn
I agree. I just started to learn iOS development at my current job (around 4 months), and configuring with code signing & XCode configuration is a pain in the ass.
Thank you! That's great to see it laid out that way. Wonderful (at least from the point of view of someone not having to solve all these situations) to see email described as a problem which requires such continual and skilled care. I guess it's still a problem which scales (witness all the FastMail subscribers, myself included), but may not be the model YC-style business, at least as it currently stands?
Illinois General Assembly passes bill to ban citizens from recording police
Show HN: Hike at Home
Grass or grazing and hay and grain for feed are irrigated.
Your candidates are Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. The youngest one graduated from school in 1991, and none of them are accountants or scientists.

I'm thinking not.
I realease all of my open source work under copyfree licenses and I've never heen "hurt" by it. I don't have to trust anyone---I write code that solves problems of interest to me and I put it out there for others to use if they want to.

Adopting some complicated dual license sounds like a surefire way to stop people from using software I write, which runs contrary to my goal.
I sense a connection, for example, between Rust's `fn foo<T>() -> Result<T, E>` and Java's `void foo<T, E>() throws E` (this might be incorrect Java syntax). I'm not entirely confident though.
Sounds good and I would use it, I am online a bit concern with the design pattern as it seems like a company site rather than a community platform.

All in all, its a good thing :)
You should get a Ph.D if you want to change who you are. Doing a Ph.D gave me the strength to take chances that I would never have risked unless I had a Ph.D. It gave me confidence in my ideas and that if I single handly focused on something I can do it. This has proven to be very valuable.

I also had some of the best times of my life as Ph.D student (and also some of the worst), but it is not something I have regretted doing for one second since.
Meanwhile the average working stiff doesn't get paid for 2-4 weeks after he puts in the labor, and he gets the taxes withheld before the money even touches his account! Cry me a river.

I'm going to bet that a big reason for resisting credit card payments is that the payments are tracked and you can't evade taxes on them the way you can with cash. This isn't meant to impugn taxi drivers, as it seems to be typical for any cash work. I've had people, who seemed otherwise wholesome, tell me that I should tip waiters with cash instead of adding a tip to my credit card receipt because they can avoid declaring cash as income for their taxes.
Bummer: "It was a very simple program—all it does is draw a square on a screen—but that’s the point, says Hadi Partovi" I don't want lawmakers that think imperative programming is all there is to it. That seems to be how they make laws - if you don't like something make it illegal, if you like something offer incentives. They never try to create a simple system with a more emergent behavior.
Why are things like Mersenne Twister or linear congruential generators platform dependent?

To me, there are three classes of reasons you would need random numbers:

1. Simulation. Things like Monte Carlo. In this case, only the statistical quality of the numbers matters.

2. Repeatable simulation. Things like fuzzing tests or benchmarks, where you want them to be repeatable. In this case, you care about determinism and the statistical quality of the numbers.

3. Resource allocation. In this case, you have a set of things that you want to be unique, but to either make them unpredictable (process numbers, invoice numbers) or unique without sharing state (guids). You care about the statistical quality and unpredictability here.

The problem is that 2 and 3 are at odds with each other. 3 requires a constant source of entropy, and 2 requires there to be no entropy.

I think the following slides are relevant: http://www.openbsd.org/papers/hackfest2014-arc4random/mgp000...
1) Agree. Let's say 99,99% "unhackable", meaning known threats, meankng AWS would need to be hacked.
2) The whole bucket is public for open/download, all files are static resources (html, js and css). So hacking in this case means defacing or taking the site down.
3) and 4) Will double check but let's assume pwds cannot be broken.
From my experience, people in the corporate world tend to be all that and also low on IQ.

I see no reason to commit before you get to know your supervisor/boss well.
The "goal" of learning to program can be a myriad things, from simple hobby to being a CEO. If one presumes that the goal in some way hinges on being "good" at programming, then learning good habits is certainly a step on any of the possible paths.
> Haven't we learned by now that central planning is usually not an efficient way of allocating resources?

No, we haven't. Because it often is an efficient way of allocating resources. Like within a company. Or within certain governmental organizations. Central planning can be awesome.
Are mobile devices supported? I can't make the page do anything.
I absolutely hate how MIT's statement on the incident completely lacks any details on what exactly he did wrong, presumably in the interests of "political correctness" and all that doublespeak. I certainly do not condone sexual harassment, but with this massive lack of information I can't help but feel there is something else that is suspicious about the whole thing...
Well, for new developers they might not put together "we use this calling convention" with "and that means you can find things like self, _cmd, or the exception that was thrown in these registers ... which can ease debugging your app". That's useful information I wish they'd put up in their docs, is all.
For most systems, open /dev/urandom and read from it.

For pure C, use a secure hash function such as SHA-256.

For a simpler approach, just fail to initialize the variable for which you want random data, especially if you frequently want the value to just be zero when debugging.
Sure, pthreads and other thread libraries that include a lot of runtime functionality would probably be a better analogy.
Living paycheck to paycheck is sadly common. Sometimes it's because the expenses are unavoidable, sometimes it's because they're just biding their time until they get a better job, sometimes it's just bad financial planning (which often looks like the others).

Although living literally day to day with income is a new one to me. Most people can't do that even if they wanted to, what with only getting paid every two weeks.

In any case, this is obviously a situation you don't want to get into, but if you're in it, then the answer to your question should seem obvious: even if the fall is inevitable, you'd want to delay it as long as possible. Each day of survival is worth something, and maybe something will come along to help you dig out.

That said, I can't feel sorry for people whose money is delayed a few days rather than getting it immediately, when almost everybody else gets paid weeks after they work.
Data science without statistics is possible, even desirable
It would have been neat if the back tracked it. Water used to grow feed for cattle should have been attributed to livestock not corn/hay..
The difference between living within your means or just over can be insignificant in cash amounts, but the effect on your long term happiness very significant.
Foundation for Apps Makes a Big Bet on the Future of Web Apps
This is a 2015 New Year's Resolution, so the matchmaking doesn't kick-in until 2015. The purpose of the form is to accumulate a list of mentors and mentees who are committing to this pledge.
I've always loved that video, knew immediately what it was going to be before I clicked it :)
That dribbling and re-grasping? oh man.
Ugly bags of mostly water should be very afraid of the future. Meatbags are able to achieve similar level of skill, but not repeatability and endurance, not to mention the scale.
Think about any Jackie Chan movie. We have one Jackie, and it takes him >20 takes to get some things right, but in the future we can have an army of robot Jackie Chans getting every single movement right at the first try.

Forget Bigdog or Atlas, turns out future will be exactly like AMEE from Red Planet.
>math, which is much more fundamental and useful in the every day lives

I think this statement is only accurate for basic math. Nearly everybody I've known has had a situation where they wanted to code something or wished they knew how. Math is almost the opposite, I've heard more complaints about wasting time on "useless math" than I've heard regret for not pursuing it more. That's not to say they're right, but it's absolutely a strong opinion I've heard from a huge range of people.

I do disagree with the premise of coding being the new literature though (as defined by >99% of the population). Any point where that percentage is reached will be one where programming looks nothing like it does today and has been abstracted to a meaningless level.
equity loss (difference in score + leave equity between your play and quackle's best play) would be an interesting metric too.
They weren't getting paid enough, probably. And their vested stock will be worth nothing.
You've probably seen http://www.xkcd.com/1205/ -- if you're doing it monthly and it takes less time than an hour, you can't spend more than three work days trying to automate it, or you're wasting more time than you're saving.
I find Java's checked exception similar to Option type, because they are all part of the function's type. You cannot pass alone without checking the possible failure case.
They're probably worried about being perceived as supporting the professor by having his lectures online. It's silly, but that's the world we live in. There are people who will absolutely lose their minds over the thought of this guy's lectures being online after a sexual harassment claim.
Portland Sues Uber
There is no particular reason to think that N+1 does not have a wikipedia page. The next page without a number might be, I dunno, N+3454327.
Great commentary. Encoding high-level categorical variables as unordered integers, or even frequency count maps, is pretty common practice, but really only valid (as the author says) in tree based methods. Given deep enough trees (or enough iterations in the boosting scenario), it is my anecdotal experience that trees are able to parse out relevant values. The problem with indicator variables in general is the enormous potential loss in computational time and increase in complexity. My models have hundreds of vehicle/car types, U.S. state, etc., and so this type of coding helps quite a bit in performance without sacrificing (and sometimes improving due to curse-of-dimensionality) model performance (IMHO YMMV)
I got the impression before that the only people who really like Xcode are those that have never used any other IDE. Are you one of the exceptions?

> incomprehensible buttons everywhere that Xcode doesn't seem as feature full to them
My issues with Xcode isn't the lack of buttons, it's the lack of functionality. I started with Borland IDE's for Pascal and Java, then Jetbrains IDEs for Java, JS/HTML, and now Obj C, and through those, the tool became an extension of my person. I've been using Xcode now since 2009 and I find that it still gets in the way instead of helping me translate thought into code. It's gotten better in letting me know what I might need, but still falls short of actually letting me have it.
He used nano.
Are you sure? There were no comments in the videos, or the notes, for instance?
the domain is worthless. if there was a business attached to this that was generating revenue, there'd be value. don't be a troll.
> Particularly, innocence until proven guilty.

This is how courts work.

This is not how humans work.

Are you suggesting that no action can be taken against anyone by anyone for any reason until a court proves the charge? That's nuts. I am allowed to conclude that someone is guilty or not in my own estimation. Unless I'm a juror it has no force of law, but I can assume someone's guilty without trial NO PROBLEM. Obama's guilty of suppressing evidence of torture. Bush's cronies are guilty of torture. Neither will be tried for any crime. How exactly is my opinion a problem? Should I wait for a court to validate it, or what? Courts can be completely, hilariously, 100% in the wrong. Plessy v Ferguson. Citizens United (arguably, anyway).

As a person, I have freedom of association. If I think someone's a rapey asshole because someone came to me with an accusation, it is -well- within my rights to sever ties. Likewise, OpenCourseWare has no particular obligation to host this guy's stuff.

Nobody is stopping him hosting it himself if it's so useful, or CC licensing it, or handing it to Archive.org. MIT isn't stifling anyone. There is no persecution here.

I say this as someone who 1) probably wouldn't want to watch his lectures due to this but 2) think they should still be available for people who would find them useful. It's too bad MIT decided to take it down. But they're big boys and can make the decision on their own.
Talk to an attorney.

Also, if you are considered critical to any public safety systems your contracts likely have clauses in there that could make life really bad for everyone if you don't give them enough warning to your situation. Including forced insolvency/receivership, loss of investment, barring future contracts for named partners etc. Law enforcement has been way more aggressive about these types of clauses on contracts lately, but I have been involved a lot in Public Safety EMS/Fire and they have these too.