skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's because food should be grown where it's economical to grow it, not where government subsidy is the fundamental thing allowing it. In a manner of speaking, California's chief source of fertilizer is Washington.
Quick piece of advice for anyone looking to get started: DO NOT TRAIN USING PAPERCLIPS. The first thing you should do is buy yourself a real set of picks.

When the MIT lockpicking guide started me down this road I thought "I'll teach myself to pick using paperclips and then I'll be REALLY GOOD when I get to the point of using actual picks." Turns out that I'm not alone; most people I've encountered "in the wild" with a casual interest in picking thought exactly the same thing. None of us were able to make significant progress towards reliably picking anything tougher than a wafer lock using paperclips. I don't know anyone who managed to "get good" using paperclips; everyone I know who did eventually "get good" did so by learning using proper tools and then moving to paperclips (if that's something they were interested in).

In hindsight, it's obvious why this is the case: learning to pick requires learning to understand and interpret subtle and unfamiliar kinds of mechanical feedback. There's enough "noise" to make this a difficult process even if you do have proper tools. Using paperclips adds a few more layers of noise (paperclips bend, they have weird shapes with bumps in them, etc) and the simultaneous combination of paperclip "noise" with the usual mechanical "noise" is much more difficult to decipher than the sum of the difficulty that you would get from deciphering each noise source individually and then synthesizing that knowledge (i.e. what you would encounter if you trained yourself on proper picks and then moved to paperclips).

Also: there aren't many hobbies/skills that you can effectively practice while watching TV, but picking is one of them. If TV is already a sunk cost, you get a bunch of picking practice time "for free" :)
I cut out reading (24 hour) news this year. I no longer read bbc news, my local papers etc. I figured (and it's true) important things tend to get mentioned (either on HN, or just in conversation etc.)

There's also the idea of the "circle of influence" (i.e. worry / do something with the things you can _actually_ influence, forget about the rest - slightly comes back to the 24 hour news thing for me). Perhaps you might enjoy reading "The 7 Habits of Highly effective people"

Good luck :) You're certainly not alone.
My mind is the same way inside. It's never quiet, and it's terribly annoying.

To start, minimize intake. When I tried to stay on top of things, I found it weighed me down, limited productivity, and didn't _really_ help. Skimming topics is almost as useful as actually reading them. The benefit there is that you acquire a lot of assorted bits of background info, which might come in handy. But you don't need to deep dive and worry about getting through all the material. Just knowing it's there is enough. And even then, consider limiting the scope.

The whole "being informed, having an opinion, arguing" -- it's really not productive. I look back over all my HN interactions, and the vast majority of it isn't really productive. Your opinions don't matter, and nor do the arguments. If I spent the time I've wasted saying shit on HN doing something useful (even reading fiction books), it'd have been better spent. (Now reading threads I've learned a lot, and getting some of my statements corrected has been useful.) But there must be some low-level psychological drive, since here I am. Mostly it comes from periods of boredom or depression, where I can't get over the initial impulse to work. Eliezer covers it here[1].

When I've taken HN breaks for extended periods of time, and I don't fill in that gap with another "news" source, I start to feel more peaceful, focused, content.

1: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3kv/working_hurts_less_than_procrast...
From the first paragraph:

> FlighCaster

Later:

> FlightCaster

If you can't even spell the name of your own company consistently within a self-promoting blog post like this, why should anyone give you money?
I can't answer the question but anyway:

None of my customers have ever asked for that. I have not seen a printing house that demands XPS. So I doubt that it plays any role in the market (Germany here).
In a lot of GA applications the effects of mutation are negligible. Given a large and diverse population, crossover provides enough variation already. Mutation will only be necessary to escape if the entire population has converged to a poor local optimum, but that doesn't tend to happen often in practice, and even if it does, there's no guarantee that mutation will help; hence the lack of focus on mutation operators in general.
I personally feel like all the causes you list are secondary. Primary, at least for me, is abuse of trust and power. People seem to earn trust in our culture only so that it can be "spent" later in abusive ways. Our relationship with our political and business leadership is the classic "abuse, then make up, then abuse again" pattern seen in abusive family relationships, but writ large.

Every event of large-scale deception -- or even incompetence that gives the appearance of deception -- has a huge negative effect on the overall level of trust in a society. It's sort of like the "bad neighborhood effect." If you experience one mugging, that location is forever a "bad neighborhood" even if 99.9% of its inhabitants are perfectly peaceful law abiding citizens. It takes one act of official misconduct to undo the goodwill of thousands of noble and responsible acts.

I think the term is "elite deviancy" -- the condition in a society when that society's elite no longer believe the rules apply to them and no longer have any sense of shared pride or loyalty to the society at large.

But these things have a way of being recursive-- it's possible that this elite deviancy is a response to growing alienation. This condition could also arise if our elite think they're on a sinking ship. I wonder sometimes about things like the Limits to Growth and what effect that had on the belief systems of those at the top. The timing matches pretty well-- it seems as if everything went to short-term hell shortly after 1970. "Get as much as you can and get out" is a rational strategy in a civilization one believes is dying.

I wonder... did you make a throwaway because of the ethnic/race part of your response? I don't think you're wrong. People do tend to cooperate far more readily with people who look like them and have the same cultural values. It's something I find deeply depressing though... what are we, social insects? Can we only cooperate in homogeneous hives?
This is the right way. A system allows you to unload your brain and get all the crap out of the way, so you can stop thinking about it and focus on the task at hand.

As overplayed as it is, GTD really is pretty good. It basically boils down to: keep lists, use them religiously, and focus on one thing at a time. But the book itself is good and goes into significantly more detail, all of which is useful.

Any system will do, as long as it's trustworthy, and you actually commit to using it.

As W. Edwards Deming said, "A bad system will beat a good person, every time." Couldn't be more true. You can try try try to be as good as you will yourself to be on your own, but regardless, even a poorly implemented system can do better than you can on your own. This applies to many aspects of work, and your own system is just the beginning.
They shouldn't ask, which I would explain; if they persisted, I would give a low rating for that.

In terms of stars, drivers get dropped if they are below around 4.5 on average, so 5 stars basically means "keep this driver" and anything less means "fire this driver".
I don't think learning XSLT made me a better programmer, but it is an amazingly useful tool for dealing with large amounts of XML (which is what it was designed for). That said, the way XPATH works is -- to put it mildly -- counter-intuitive.

My biggest gripe with XSLT is debugging. It's just not very much fun. Insofar as it forces you to reason very carefully about your code, that's probably good practice if you haven't already had plenty of practice -- e.g. developing websites before we had decent browser consoles, or writing INITs and TSRs in the 80s.
Oh, maybe I mixed up GA and GP myself? In terms of favouring crossover vs mutation.
Show HN: A simple script to spam your Facebook friends with pictures of kittens
The Million Future Nows
The expressive power of a language is definitely based on what's in the standard library. If the C standard library came with default dictionaries and other common data structures (while still allowing you to build your own) it would be a much more expressive language.

I love C, I love that I can keep most of the standard library in my head, but a greater built in eco-system would make portable code a lot easier, provide a standard reference to beat, and make the language more useful from the get go.
TaskRabbit is a startup in which you can dispatch human agents to accomplish tasks. See https://www.taskrabbit.com/
http://selfcontrolapp.com/

Works well. It cannot be turned off and you can set it for a specific amount of time. You choose the websites you would like to block.

Your phone is obviously a weak point, but it's a start.
Ugly? No way. That plane is beautiful. Particularly when on your side of a battle.

I hope to be able to build a 10 foot wingspan RC model of the A-10 next year.
I use a page on a tool like OneNote or Evernote to write every day the notes that pop up on my head, or interesting information I read. Then, during 1hour of the weekend, I grab that page and a) trash the info that actually doesn't matter b) save the info that I think it's useful, in a certain section (Startup ideas; Biz Dev strategies; etc)

I also use Pocket to save articles to read later, but overtime I became more agressive in filtering what to read. If I don't feel to read it, I just trash it. Now it's kind of a habit. (I still do have articles saved in Pocket from several weeks before. But they are MUCH less.)
This is an interesting perspective, but I think the author has made too much of it. OO is one of several developments that have added ways to put abstraction to work, and they are all double-edged swords, providing additional ways for a confused coder to express his confusion and work around his initial misconceptions of the problem he is attempting to solve.

The problem is not in the programming language features, any more than they are panaceas: the problem is in how we approach problem-solving. Guessing at the solution and then debugging it into acceptability, or 'guard-rail programming', as Rich Hickey has described it, is not the optimal approach in any language.
The issue is farming. They waste massive amounts of water because it's cheap. We don't need to give them water priority.
Dividends are taxed immediately. Stock buybacks are unrealized gains.
Shops allow Amex because wealthy people use Amex. Not exclusively of course, and I certainly don't consider myself wealthy. But Amex cardholders charge far more than the industry average.

Also it's not just the ppl paying with cash subsidizing card usage. Cards that offer >1% cashback are usually more difficult to get, and targeted toward higher-spenders. These benefits are subsidized by the people using cards with no benefits.
I'm a bit ashamed to admit that I'm pushing 30, and I'm only just starting to realize how insanely weird this is.

The tech industry is, pretty much by definition, at the forefront of modern. It's an industry that thrives over the entire world. In pretty much every other measure of diversity and equality most mature tech companies do quite well. For so many people technology skills are a great equalizing force. Why is it then that over the entire industry, over the entire world, women are underrepresented? It's a little embarrassing.

More importantly - how do we fix it?
Thank you!

I severely limit what's on my phone - no social apps, for example, and it's enough of a pain that I don't browse the Internet on it much. So I've mostly solved that problem.
To me, it sounds like your problem is that everything that you have at this very moment, isn't enough. Thus, you feel like you have to look out into the world to fill yourself.

I agree with others, I would definitely recommend you try to meditate several times a week. Start at 15 mins every day & work your way up.

Also, exercise more!
Ironically, many folks have said the same thing about Coleman, except for the French bit.

I happen to enjoy free jazz, but I can't claim to understand it well enough to defend it.
"Ease of testing" is positively hilarious.
Ask HN: Okay to use the same name as existing service? (I came up with it first)
I had an idea for a side project/service late last year and but haven't had time to implement it yet (busy with $DAY_JOB). I did get the .com domain and the major social media properties for it. They were all unregistered so I registered them all. All of it is still empty as I haven't started work on it.

I recently noticed that someone else has created the exact service I was envisioning with the exact same name. As the .com was taken (by me) they registered it with a different suffix.

Ex: I was planning foobarservice with the domain foobarservice.com and they registered (and went live with) foobarservice.blah.

I'd still like to pursue this idea and I really like the name.

Would it be wrong to do so? Answers for both the moral and (IANAL-qualified...) legal question would be appreciated.
It's an app that doesn't work in the specific way that you wish, but I have found leechblock to be a wonderful addition to my internet life: http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html

You can eliminate large swaths of the internet from loading in your browser and control what sets of sites are blocked when.
GMO is the laughingstock of the HF community... trying to make a name for themselves with a permabear outlook.

Their index and commodity projections are truly hilarious and they've been claiming this sort of shit for years, generating bottom-decile returns.
I trust Joe Random Coder enough to install new software on my machine all the time. But if the U.S. government wanted me to install an app, I'd really be suspicious of that.

Consider what that says. I don't think my attitude is atypical.
> I cut out reading (24 hour) news this year

I did this too, and it feels great. I can't remember where I heard it from but I'm stealing it:

"I would rather be uninformed, than ill-informed"

A lot of what you see on TV and read in newspapers is either advertisements from PR firms disguised as news items or propaganda. This is even more so if it's election season.

tl;dr: Turn off your TV.
Obama Is Giving Cash Benefits to Illegal Aliens
Sudden, catastrophic leak of an operational QC would definitely be a cryptogeddon scenario.
This Watson Analytics effort is flawed. It has a very limited market. It takes massive investment to run. Very few people will ever try it. They will also get very questionable benefits.

Bottom line, it is hard to see IBM getting anything close to a positive return from it.

Judging by how IBM has gone on to destroy itself in the last few years, I predict that this will be another nail on their coffin.

We won't be talking about Watson Analytics past Summer of 2015. Of course they will have 1000 people still working on it.
I'm not sure what's going on here, and would love if anyone informed could chime in (looking at you there, tptacek :-)

Google search for "operation cleaver" brings up mainly mainstream news, and few infosec websites besides Cylance's own website - this could be an indication that the report is mainly marketing and hype. Discussion over at Reddit does seem to agree that there's a large marketing component to it, although there's good technical analysis alongside:

http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/2o1kdu/operation_cle...
I know that feeling. Check out this book, which talks a lot about focus and discipline: http://www.amazon.com/The-Practicing-Mind-Developing-Discipl...
How my mother made me a better programmer
If humans are the scourge of the planet then it's difficult to see why population density is of value. There must be something else at play. Density simply improves the availability of goods and services. Some of the more snide ( myself included ) might accuse those "liberals" of simply preferring a wider variety of restaurants - sort of the Anthony Bourdain school of liberalism :)

Suburbs are a compromise with positional land rents ala Ricardo/Henry George. People who want to make more humans will probably always head there.

While I can more or less understand the distaste for automobiles, I doubt they're going anywhere. And it might even be possible to have suburbs as an artifact of public transport - Bourdain did a show on The Bronx, which according to his show ends at a relatively rural setting.

I get more than enough "culture" through my cable wire in the form of cable TV and Internet. That includes Anthony
Bourdain :) As a practitioner of live music since Carter was president, pardon my cynicism w.r.t. "culture".
I bet the deck crews will love that.
Especially since it sounds like most of the calls were for people who didn't understand how uber works and wanted to pre-book a ride. I'm not sure that it would ever be worth having a listed phone number just so someone could answer and say "actually you can't pre-book, you'll have to buy a smartphone and download the app".
Google's new ad strategy could delay a bunch of tech IPOs
Are you suggesting that Dennett is a continental philosopher?
People keep saying that. Yet, in the last decade in the Bay Area alone, we've had

- a major new dam in Fremont.
- a new Bay Bridge eastern span
- a second San Mateo Bridge alongside the first
- a fourth bore at the Caldecott Tunnel
- a new major tunnel at Devil's Slide
- a new sewerage plant at San Jose
- a third Hetch Hetchy water pipeline
- an automated tram between BART and the Oakland airport.

Under construction are the new Transbay Terminal, the SF Central Subway Line, the new Golden Gate Bridge west approach, more light rail and BART stations...
Excellent observation! In this video, Dr Christos Papadimitriou lays out a compelling argument for why genetic algorithms are poor at optimizing individual fitness when compared to simulated annealing. The video is about asexual vs sexual evolution and how it connects to multiplicative update/weighted majorty type algorithms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWv-s6KuDlM
On osx and linux, you can edit your /etc/hosts file to "uninstall" domains (e.g. reroute them to localhost). The barrier-to-edit is involved enough (prompt for root password, invoking an editor, etc) to at least slow you down before you undo the block.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449488
Meditation can be a powerful tool for dealing with information overload and reduce stress. Even just spending a few minutes to consciously be still and clear your mind can help.

Kevin Dewalt explains it better than I can.
http://kevindewalt.com/2013/07/28/8-ways-meditation-makes-yo...
Hello! Chris here. I wrote this after being inspired by a GA+JS implementation by Jacob Seidelin, (attributed). Unfortunately his blog is returning a 404, but I think he in turn attributed Roger Alsing. I am absolutely not claiming the idea of genetic algorithms and art to be my own, but the code is, so I think it's unfair of you to call me a thief.
Except that Lyft apparently doesn't have a listed phone number either. I guess i don't see how that's a downside. It sounds like most of the calls were from people who wanted to book a car in advance. It might not make sense for either company to have a phone number and pay someone to answer it all day just to answer the occasional call from someone who doesn't know how the service works.
Throw your computer and phone away. Here, you are welcome. There is no other way. Low tech or die, everything else requires the amount of self-control only chosen few possess.
Most of what you actually quote, rather than what you add as commentary yourself, says that most of the United States efforts are designed to use persuasion counter radical movements that would sweep away freedom and democracy where those movements are active. That's a good thing, in my opinion. It would have been very good for the world, for example, if something like that were happening in German in the 1920s. That would have spared the world a lot of trouble.
> One thing I think we could have done better with Code Words is added short bios

I'm rather glad you didn't.

Sean felt justified not reading it because he believed the writer was "a novice", and I think he have acted differently if he knew this was an experienced and successful commercial programmer.

But because he didn't, the rest of us can learn something really interesting: That twenty years of research-experience cannot immediately recognise itself blub to twenty years of commercial-experience.

Maybe those guys writing software that does things have figured something out as well?
Rescuetime, notes/documents for offloading and this talk helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAwDWe7OIF8 (John Cleese on Creativity and the Open and Closed mode). Basically you are on Open too much.
Here's another Javascript version http://alteredqualia.com/visualization/evolve/
Relax, it's okay. :-) I went through the same thing. I realized that it is neither possible nor important to know a lot of stuff. It is more important and a much more satisfying experience to follow one's own interests and learn what one needs to in the process, as this kind of knowledge stays with you and does not clutter your mind. Knowing stuff is not at all as important as being able to apply logic and ask the right questions in any context.

If possible, try to work on something of interest that will take time, focus and patience to achieve, like a painting or writing poetry or coding something way beyond your current skill level. That would help your mind to calm down and focus. Hope this helps.
> you can represent anything

If you represent something, you need to interpret it later... i.e. both client and server need the same interpretation in order to avoid errors.

> Dates can be encoded as strings and so can most of the other more 'awkward' types.

You say 'encoding', I say 'serialization'.

> It's not that complicated

It isn't as long as you use the same platform for encoding and decoding.

Maybe our experiences are different. I remember one time I had to unencrypt a string in Ruby that had been encrypted in Java. I thought, this will be simple, it's a standard AES encryption, I'll just stuff the string into the corresponding Ruby object and decrypt! I mean, both of these objects were implemented according to the same industry standard right? Boy was that a learning experience. :) Framing, padding and seeding was not implemented the same way -- it was left as a platform implementation detail that only someone trying to integrate across systems would ever notice.
>The Apache ... for some reason ... hasn't obsoleted the A10

I think the Apache's are not able to take being hit nearly as well as A10s, plus have less fire power and take longer to get places.

There's an article here on the problems http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/...

And a story here where Warthogs saved 60 US soldiers in 2013, where "because people were shooting all over the place, the JTAC didn't feel safe bringing in helicopters in to evacuate the wounded personnel."

http://www.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/223/Article/4667...