skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do you call out Rob Crossley without posting any of his responses? It sounds like he was really rude based on your description yet I have no way of telling whether he was just calling you out after he felt your email was fake.
This is why I'm not particularly thrilled about programs passing the Turing test. As soon as we have programs that can write credibly human-sounding comments on sites like this, many conversations will be controlled by whoever can afford the largest sockpuppet farm. Also, for every post on the actual threads of interest, there will be dozens of comments on every thread designed to increase karma. Automated karma whoring might even be more injurious than the direct intervention, because it will increase the groupthink tendencies already present.

Some might say we're already half way there. I disagree. Yes, Google or Apple employees might swamp an occasional thread here and there, either openly or covertly, but what I'm talking about would be a whole order of magnitude worse and constant.
I wouldn't worry about it. I've been living in semi-solitude for the past few years. There is an adjustment period, but eventually you get used to it.
Well, the real question this tool answers is not really "do you think X is Y", but "do you think X's comments show Y".

There's also a lack of documentation from IBM as to what the results mean exactly and how solid they are.
I think my comment may have sailed right over your head.
This is really fascinating. This part particularly struck me:

"[Americans'] sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins. Even among these there are prejudices of which I as a Jew am clearly conscious"

As a non-black person of color, this has been my access point to issues of race and oppression. Thinking about the (relatively) minor prejudices and indignities I've experienced made me a lot more receptive to the idea that things just aren't right for a lot of people. That oppression is real. And it's also made me aware of the privilege that I do enjoy as a college-educated male who's the son of college educated parents.

This is a very prescient and relevant piece by Einstein. I'm glad it's on HN!
What if the client would set the budget, and that's it. And the freelancers that propose to do the job, don't bid with lower (or higher) prices, but simply show their work. This way the client would choose between the most appealing portfolio, rather than the lowest (or highest) price.
1) I've learned that I'm NOT ALWAYS RIGHT. Furthermore, I'm almost all the time don't right.

2) I've understood that I absolutely know NOTHING.

... 20 age man.
"I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out."

Sadly on the matter of unequal race relations these words ring nearly as true in 2014 as they did in 1946.
platforms needed for blue water deep dives--who knew the future would be so poetic?
So good at what? (I run a WordPress-based site)
I believe a greater benefit would occur were we to have more mixed race couples, and with it the offspring that would tend to be produced by those relationships.
This is all nice, but lacks facts. I would like to point out a few numbers:

1) During the Atlantic slave trade period there were around 10 million African slaves sold. Around 500k went to the US, which accounts for 5% [1]. Where are the successors of the remaining 95%? Maybe America was not that bad after all?

2) It is a matter of fact that there is a statistical connection between race and learning skills [2]

3) I obviously don't have to mention correlations between race and crime.

People are racist because the facts justify it. It is a matter of applying Bayesian statistics to every day life.

[1] http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/2012/10/how_many_sla...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_achievement_gap_in_the_U...
Yes. But, due to powerful cultural influences, humans will tend to want to group together for comfort purposes. Diversity implies fractured culture. Humans are loathe to fracture their sense of community through shared culture.

I'm going with good, fair, and free mass education. All the way to college. If everyone gets the same level of education then no one will FEEL out of place in any culture as they will be aware of common cultural differences through education.

Good education repairs a LOT of social ills.
I believe it is a mistake to think that we're somehow smarter or better than those who have gone before us.
Why Flip Phones Will Supplant Big Data in 2015
Stage 1 Solution:
https://www.apple.com/support/ipad/repair/screen-damage/

and Stage 2 if Stage 1 will not work:

Better head on down to the flower and chocolates store (you do know her favorite flowers and chocolate or candy right?). Before you go, make sure you have a new iPad ordered and being shipped out to you. If you have an Apple Store or Best Buy near you, head there first to see if they have any available after checking online.

After you have those together get out those pots and pans and start cooking up dinner, cleaning the house, and do anything else she may have been asking you to do for years that you have may have been ignoring. If you cannot cook there is always Boston Market or the grocery store with stuff pre-made and cooked just pick it up and head on home and heat it up.

Goal here is to have something positive that out-ways the negative. If stage 1 will work that is wonderful, if not then work through Stage 2.
Rise of the Reverse Funnel (and health tech innovation)
I just need to put in a word for Kicad http://www.kicad-pcb.org . Unlike the software mentioned here, it's a FOSS project so it has no artificial limitations in its low-cost/free version, and it's being continuously improved on all platforms it runs on (Windows/Linux/Mac). The output (Gerber files) from Kicad is often directly accepted by inexpensive PCB fabrication shops.
That definately happens but is an underlying cause. I'm not sure what it is. I've lived in other countries where this natural segregation does not happen.
The problem is that by keeping it hidden from everyone but the surgeon and by still allowing the surgeon to have a say in who they operate on, they can still game the system. There are no external controls at that point. Now if it's only for their benefit what possible reason would a surgeon have to game the score you might ask?

You can provide all the assurances in the world that the score is a personal motivator, but we all know that could change at the drop of the hat. I've seen this far too often in the security field. Someone will come up with a great measure, will reassure everyone that all unintended consequences have been considered and then boom. A year down the line an executive, unaware of the ramifications of unintended consequences will want to use the metric for performance evaluations. I think any surgeon who believes the score is only there to help them and that they shouldn't plan for a future where someone pushes to make it more public is being a bit naive in the ways of the world.

This isn't to say I don't think there could be a solution. The scoring system needs to be built from the ground up with an offset risk equation which provides significant incentive to operate on at risk patients. Maybe a surgeon gets three points for operating on the patient and if they die they only loose one. However if they have a healthy patient maybe they start off with one point, with just one to loose. Obviously all the unintended consequences for this model would need to be explored at length.
Real-time simulations of muscle-based locomotion
Work:

Pick your co-founders by their honesty and humility. No matter what happens, you will build something together that you can all feel proud of.

Going through my fourth start-up now in 15 years. I feel so proud and grateful working with the people I do now. No fights, no stress, just good people who think logically and do their best to support each other.

Personal:

Starting a family is so much more fun than anything I've ever done. Jump into it and let it envelop your being.
I recall seeing a solictation on the kOS website for people who could get a Linux kernel down to a certain size. I presumed that meant the intent was to use Linux code; at least I was thinking he would end up getting responses from people with a Linux bias.

But I also recall reading the line "no linux", which really piques my interest. I thought that just meant no Linux userland.

Now I like this project even better!

Sounds like you have access to the kOS source. Lucky you. Enjoy.
Mathematical models can be used to argue for a wide range of viewpoints.

You could also write a model where people have different innate preferences over the lifestyle they want to lead, and so self-sorting is an unambiguously good thing.

I understand that everyone wants "math" to be on their side, but it's not really mathematics that is doing the work here, it's your assumptions.
I use the word "dodge" and that is one of a number of things people do to avoid having to deal with information they find difficult to process.

A while back, I decided to compile a list of these behaviors seen on a smaller, guilty pleasure type of site I enjoy. Here are the major ones seen very frequently:

1. Subject change

2. False comparison

3. Claim of too many opponents

4. Silence

5. Claim to either be a member of, or opponents of discussion being members of club, with said membership somehow required to complete what is otherwise a non-rational conclusion.

6. Claim of overall subject and or implications of subject complexity being greater than scope of discussion; therefore, it’s all a waste of time. (You would not understand)

7. Transformation of rational point at hand to emotional one.

8. The bible.

9. Redefinition of common words.

10. Personal attack.

11. Obsfucation. (however you spell it)

12. Excess verbosity.

What I did was post this, put names on it, including my own, and then start citing it when the behavior is seen.

I expected people to moderate the behaviors and perhaps improve dialog. What actually happened was the behaviors intensified! They created new ones, and started using them in combination:

Subject change, excess verbosity, silence was very common. Blow up the dialog to prevent realizations or consensus, then go silent to let it all fade away. Then do it again, and again...

Now, something good did happen. Participants who get it, tended to add their own observations to the list, and a bond formed between them. This helped differentiate the dialog some, and high clarity material, rational material was easier to identify and that dialog did improve.

But the noise makers also improved, making better noise, more frequently, division went up, and the overall tone of the place was harder to enjoy.

This led me to another realization:

We very often want to frame things as debate when the truth is we are often doing advocacy.

Advocacy has three components: Reason, character, emotion. Advocacy is a super set of debate.

Effective advocates employ all three and here is the kicker:

They will trump an effective debater in a dialog.

Interesting isn't it?
Even in this day and age, encrypting everything is seen as some kind of hacker's paranoia.

If a new OS install instead asked "In the event of physical theft, what would you like to grant thieves access to?" with checkboxes for "My email account", "My social media accounts", "My documents and photos", etc, would people feel it was paranoid not to tick all the boxes?
What makes this discussion so much more frustrating today is that the racial biases are inherent in the system. While the laws are structured to be. Entrap, their application is decidedly not. While I, a white male, choose to do as Einstein here suggests and live a life of example, and teach my children the destructiveness of racism, my actions do not directly help those in my country who are suffering from official and unofficial forms of discrimination.

I want to do more, but... "What can men do in the face of such reckless hate?"
8 Resume Accomplishments to Make You Stand Out
The public sector is under a lot more scrutiny than the private sector (in some countries you can track every penny spent by the government). Its inefficiencies and faults are on the media every day. That, I think, is why people usually see the private sector as better than the public sector.
I first read about the "Big 5 personality Traits" in this Economist article last year. Very interesting read on how some researchers were using Twitter writings (specifically some keywords) to gauge a person's personality - http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/05/ec...
Some cool Python language constructs
The API we used has a limit of 0.5MB data, so pushed all the recent comments up to that limit.
Further, that section seems to imply that Crossley was convinced from the beginning that the story was fake.

"...he accused me of being 18 years old with no job, right off the bat..."

It's interesting that he calls out Crossley as unprofessional when Crossley seems to have done his job rather well. I know we like to equate "professionalism" with "politeness," but it's not Crossley's job to be polite to people---especially people he suspects of deliberately wasting his time.
One of the best shows ever. The whole Stand Alone Complex concept is kind of unique to GitS, is it?

Edit: Oh and btw, ghost in the lisp: http://medias.ircam.fr/x03b42f

RPG talking about his work on the mass media manipulation machine of DARPA.
More details: http://www.goatstream.com/research/thesis/index.html
Written by the EPSU, from the last page:

EPSU is the European Federation of Public Service Unions. It is the largest federation of the ETUC and comprises 8 million public service workers from over 275 trade unions; EPSU organises workers in the energy, water and waste sectors, health and social services and local and national administration, in all European countries including in the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood.
You missed MediaCrush ;)

https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush

Building your own is easy and fun, though, I don't blame you.
Amazingly great thinker with a great heart too, we are so in need of people like him..
An increase in diversity is a goal, it's not a course of action. We should be trying to root out whatever the underlying causes are that lead us to segregate ourselves into the groups that we end up in. Forced de-segregation (as in the case of bussing kids around in public school districts) is only temporary, as the people who want to be in their groups will take action to achieve that end.

For whatever it is worth, I think income inequality (between rich and poor, all races) is probably the biggest inhibitor to this problem. Motivated-yet-poor people cannot easily break out of their groups, with no money for college and (alot of times) a criminal record preventing them from enlisting in the service. If you have resources you have choices, and the poor have very little in the way of choice. And the affluent who do have a choice will almost always make the choice to not live among those who have nothing to lose, whatever their color may be.
this is an idea that I've seen used many times in the past.
One of the first refs I saw to this mashup of the keys of a dict and the values in __dict__ was on Activestate in 2006 or so. There are also multiple versions on Stackoverflow.

I'm reminded of the web designer example here (https://gist.github.com/fmeyer/289467) line 89.

I know that people use github for many things, including tracking their config files, etc. However, this seems to be a post by the owner of the repo. Would you ever, I mean _ever_ be happy if someone required this sort of 'library' as a dependency in a project? I know I would not.
I also went to a very diverse highschool (recently; class of 2012), and saw the same self-segregation. However, when I saw the census dotmap that was on here a while ago[1], it was obvious that even though the school district was diverse, each of the neighborhoods was clearly a "${race} neighborhood". I'm willing to believe that the self segregation in-school reflected the segregation outside of school; that more diverse schools and neighborhoods might solve this.

[1]: http://bmander.com/dotmap/index.html though it seems to be down now
1) Back yourself.

2) People don't read. People don't read. People don't read. (Everyone: Customers, Co-workers, Business partners etc). So don't rely only on text based conversations.
He supported Labor Zionism. Like other Labor Zionists, he opposed the right wing of Zionism. Also, like other so-called cultural Zionists, he was more concerned with establishing a homeland where Jews could express their culture, but was less concerned with having a sovereign state. Indeed at that time, the land was a "mandate" under British rule, neither Jewish nor Arab. (In those days, many lands were ruled by European empires. The notion that each non-European nation needed its own state only solidified later, partially under Israel's example.)

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/12/how-eins...
I had assumed ameister14 was talking about the avg shown on user pages:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kolinko
> The ancient Greeks also had slaves. They were not Negroes but white men who had been taken captive in war. There could be no talk of racial differences.

As Slavic I find this inaccurate and bit offensive :-)
The first comment on the article's page is interesting. I wonder if the building is acting like a Faraday cage and blocking cellphone signals.

As for the question posed in the title, no, this is what politics looks like. This is what happens when developers get together with investors and politicians and tech startups and they all decide they want to renovate an area of town and build some new building and bring in a bunch of companies that generate jobs and tax revenue and, happily, provide a place for media photo ops with the dignitaries -- it all looks good, it makes everybody look good, but what has come out of this place so far?

Innovation is not real estate development, it's not a building, it's not politics. If the teams inside this center create new technologies, new ways of doing things, optimizing existing ways, then perhaps there's innovation.

Otherwise it's just a political/media buzzword.
Somebody please make a browser plugin that uses this data.

I know the data isn't perfect, but it would be nice to be able see who in a thread is a top HNer and which character traits are outliers from the norm. You get insulted by somebody ranked low in Sympathy? No need to worry.

I'm serious. Somebody do this. It would look great on the résumé.
I'm not sure how alarmed I am by this. I certainly have seen this in action on Wikipedia at least, if not on the scale described, but I have little doubt it occurs and I can think of a couple events whose online conversations show evidence of this sort of manipulation.

To some degree I admit, when I see the overwhelming online conversation swaying in one direction, it does influence. On the other hand, partially because I know online conversation manipulation is out there, I become less prone to read comments. I used to always read comments to Economist articles for example, now I rarely do.

Ultimately, if there is online conversation manipulation but people barely pay attention to it, it will be overwhelmed by all the other random sources of influence in our lives. Whether, traffic, etc. all play some influence on our opinions, if the impact of the online conversation manipulation is less than that, I am not alarmed.

There are two other aspects of this worth thinking about:

1. What is the problem we have with online conversation manipulation? Is it the sock-puppets alone? If you replace sock-puppets with volunteers, is that different enough? If you take volunteers who otherwise wouldn't participate in that online conversation, is that different enough? What are the aspects of this that are different from a legitimate campaign to change the opinions of others about a position you think is profoundly wrong.

2. One sad aspect of this is that it dilutes the impact of anonymous or semi-anonymous voices on the web. This was a short-cut to influence for ordinary web users. On the other hand, this is in a way natural, whenever the impact of a medium becomes popularly recognized, more people will try to utilize that medium, and its impact will be diluted. In the same way, just having a website used to be a short-cut to influence, but now has little effect.
Drinking less increases my productivity. I don't drink that much, max of a couple drinks a night, a few nights a week. Not binge, not so much that I'd be drunk.

There was a period over the summer where I cut it back to about 1 drink per night on friday/saturday. Looking at my github activity, it's _obvious_ when that was.
Ask HN: How do you sketch out your software ideas?
Is UML where it's at? Simply pseudocode perhaps?
it's basically tptacek and mpyne against the world. for the most part i welcome contributors who aren't entirely biased.

unfortunately as even my own worst paranoia was not predictive enough, paranoia that has had me laughed at to my face and behind my back, given what's come out: it's very hard for me to react reasonably.

so people with a different bias to myself or others can greatly contribute to such discussions.
Great point, even considering that Einstein seems to be taking Aristotle and ancient Greek dogma totally out of context. Perhaps, as was and is a tradition in academic circles, he was advocating that contemporary scientists were in fact better and more enlightened than the Greeks. Or, maybe it was a reaction against Hitler's fascination with the ancient Greeks.
Yet, Aristotle did not present a clear belief system on slavery, especially considering that even Socrates dialogue Meno, he makes the case for the equality and infinite capacity of all humankind.
I agree. For such a simple script, requiring all these tools (npm, bower, composer, grunt), it just doesn't seem practical.

Is this how people develop and deploy PHP stuff nowadays?
A great companion to this article is the "Limits" episode of Radiolab. It features a low-speed, long term bike race with interesting results - both in what the athletes can endure, and the ways in which they endure it.
You seem to be missing the point. They can't use a programming test on people who don't know how to program.
Surgeons, at least in first-world countries, and not only there, already operate on a skill level which is hard to measure at all.

In procedures where there is a high probability of success, many surgeons would need to collect data points for years to even reliably tell they are better or worse than a particular other doctor.

Very challenging, statistically...
this is definitely my favorite reply so far

i know lots of people personally and professionally who will go their entire lives believing with absolute fervor that they're almost always right and that they're smart.

as a result, these people stagnate like nothing you've ever seen. their world views, technical aptitude, attitude, and intelligence end up frozen in time, unbending and ungrowing. i've noticed that literally the most dangerous thing someone can admit to themselves is that they're smart or a worldly person.

by actively recognizing and admitting your imperfections, you give yourself the room needed to grow.

there's probably a Marcus Aurelius/Socrates quote hidden in this comment somewhere but i cant find it for the life of me
We will never see 2014 again in our current time system.
I had a small giggle at my rankings, not going to lie.

Without a definition for what each of these things are, it's a little unclear what this is actually saying. I'm assuming there's some documentation on this somewhere?
tptaceck, someone's talking about you.
Hughes and is cronies seem like a bunch of disingenuous buffoons.