skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Title II (read it, it has a lot of baggage) is feared for a variety of reasons and "Net Neutrality" as a term is so confused that I heard someone argue with a straight face that it would be the Fairness Doctrine[1] for the internet.

Some conservatives seem to believe net neutrality was always about the Fairness Doctrine for reasons that escape even me [1]. I think they tend to hear "neutrality" and stop listening at that point, ignoring the real threat of tiered cable TV-like impositions on Internet services.

I think at this point it might be necessary to abandon neutrality efforts (in name at least) and fight for legislation that would serve to specifically to protect the openness of the Internet. I myself am not especially crazy about pushing for reclassification. And I don't really trust the government to do the right thing at this point. Bills that start off as generally good ideas have a tendency to grow in scope sometimes using language that conflicts with their original intent. The idealist in me would argue for political reform first, then worry about the Internet.

[1] Disclosure: I'm a conservative.
I feel like the author is ignoring a giant caveat. The liberal educational ideal has always been connected to a certain degree of elitism. The author quotes Jefferson about broad access to liberal education, but Jefferson himself expected his university to be for only the cream of the crop. Something like the top 1% cognitive elite. Jefferson's argument about breadth was more about building a feeder system that would educate each person up to their maximum ability -- with the expectation that only very few would go all the way through college.

If instead you want to build a system where most people can successfully get through college, you need to meet very different economic and social constraints.
FWIW, it's safe to say that (like many countries in that part of the world), Iran isn't particularly fond of Israel still being around.

I think it's safe to say that it's no coincidence that Saudi Arabia is treated favourably by us ("the West") than Iran, when Saudi Arabia generally doesn't object to whatever Israel does while Iran would prefer to see it gone.

Also, while we're talking theocracies: Iran (and Hezbollah) is a Shia while Saudi Arabia (and various groups we like to think of as terrorist organizations) is Sunni. Shia and Sunni generally don't get along very well and Saudi Arabia hates Iran's guts.

But googling for "Iran Saudi Arabia" I just noticed the Guardian went ahead and saved me the trouble of spelling this out any further: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/28/iran-sa...
I would say that lines of code is not a useful metric. From a developer standpoint, what I care about is how much "surface" a library adds, and in how many places. The React API is relatively small, easy to understand, and confined to a single place - rendering my views.
seriously? no one in AI is looking at the human brain to try and understand intelligence? this is the most inaccurate comment I've seen in 2015, although it's a little too early in the year to call it a winner.
I had no idea it had been so long! Time surely flies
Ah, very nice. For those interested, another site with similar goals that launched last year (i think) was http://sixteencolors.net/
The only construable "turn towards the better" in Iran is that the dictator allowed Rouhani to act as figurehead President, which is meaningless. The dictator is still the dictator, Rouhani is an old hand from the inner circle, and he says exactly what was said before. Now people are suffering under economic sanctions and the wonderful peacemaking Rouhani is still stalling on a nuclear deal years later. By the way, nothing ever happened to rectify 2009, and they keep kidnapping Persians to put in Evin. Rouhani is proud of Evin just like the rest.
I'm going to assume the hot tub has waterjets and reject the possibility the picture was taken after the taco salad, calzones, and wine were served.

Beautiful setting -- very different from 45 years ago.
There's a whole branch of CompSci/AI exactly to do with this, known (sometimes) as "Bio-Inspired Systems". It is as false to say that nobody is looking to nature for inspiration as it is to say that human-level intelligence is a trivial problem.

If you can substantiate your assertion then there are people waiting to give you enormous piles of money!
Obama lets NTSB exploit widespread tire vulnerabilities
I was in Costa Rica, and conflicted between building the SaaS and...well, surfing, mostly.

I built the app. Took most of my spare time for about a month.

I have fond memories of Costa Rica, that month included.
This is a terrible idea for several reasons, the chief of which is the fact that the difficulty of protein folding simulations is not easily predicted. One consequence of this is that if someone were to develop a more efficient algorithm for protein folding, they could easily dominate the mining market and pull off a 51% attack. You could argue that this might have a positive societal impact, but it would also probably destroy the foldingcoin network.

The reason Bitcoin (and most/all other good proof-of-work systems) use repeated application of a cryptographic hash is that it's A) very predictable how long finding a solution will take (on average) and B) unlikely that someone will destroy the proof-of-work system by inventing a more efficient method of calculating the hash.
Is that true? I thought the rule was first to file, not first to invent. And I have never heard of a blog post counting as "prior art".
Letter to a startup, from an employee
Dear startup employer,

It's a workday, but I'm not at work. I'm pretending to work from home. Company policy says I should file for PTO, but I won't. You'll never know; I'll feel guilty.

But I need this day. You took a lot from me. I didn't hesitate for a second when I dropped all my weekend plans and rushed to fix what was broken. I worked all weekend, late into the night. I was there first thing Monday morning, and again on Tuesday. Then I stayed up all night Tuesday because it was release night.

I didn't do any of this because you pay me to. I did it because I take pride in my work. Things were broken. I'm responsible for them.

Now I'm taking time to eat a meal. I'm having the day I should have had last weekend. I'm breathing. The stress is ebbing away. I'm recharging so I can do great work for you again tomorrow.

Startup employer, I need this day so I can be awesome for you. But you want to take this day from my PTO, and that's just not right. You took my whole weekend. You took dinner with my spouse. You took a whole night of sleep and I came to the office anyway, because my coworkers depend on me. I'll never complain about these things because I'm an internet engineer and this is my job. If it's down, I'm up, no questions asked. In the morning we'll do the post-mortem work to see how to make it better.

Startup employer, we need to talk about our vacation policy. I wish you'd read this article about Netflix: <https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr/ar/1>. Please read it, because when I read it, I want to send them my resume. I love the idea that we can be honest and reasonable with each other about my time. I'm flexible for you. Why can't you be flexible for me?

Startup employer, please stop tracking my PTO. There's a lot of other things in that Netflix doc I'd like to talk to you about but let's take this first baby step together.

We can do this. We'll both be better for it.

-exhausted tech worker
Indeed, but this perspective comes from the large number of people that make up an enterprise and the interwoven net of responsibility. One person can choose to fight for liberty and risk ruin, but its much harder to justify risking the other hundred people in your company.
World hunger is a $30 billion a year problem? Americans spend $15 billion on bottled water. If we stopped that we'd fix half the problem:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/12/bottled-water_n_374...

In fact, $30 billion is a rounding error in a $15 trillion economy.

Women's luxury market is $250 billion/year.

http://discover.umn.edu/news/arts-humanities/university-minn...

Anyway, I really don't understand why you'd add noise to this conversation.
CuriousInventor (video)
Public Authority: The End of Public Higher Education in Wisconsin?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_areas_of_t...

Lists NY as ~23 million, LA as ~18 million.

It's amusing -- in Australia we list cities populations like this by default. I never consider the population of Melbourne to just be the area covered by Melbourne City Council - it has always included the greater metro area.
>Most damaging, I think, is the ability of governments to keep secrets

Hear, hear! But propose that the government be open and transparent and people complain about all of our military secrets being public. Fucking good, that's the point.
> This makes no sense. An ISP could block VPN traffic... and there are millions of people with access to only a single ISP.

How? They could block access to a specific IP, which might be a VPN server, but they have no way of differentiating encrypted vpn traffic from encrypted anything traffic.
Semolina is durum wheat (same stuff for dried and fresh), so I don't think there's a difference there. And I don't think I agree with regards to the flavor of a bolognese or ragu.

Then again, good fresh pasta is pretty easy to come by where I live (across the street from Raffetto's in NYC).

Anyway, thanks for the clarification. I don't think I really agree with you, but I'll make it a point to cook something with some high quality dried stuff and check the difference. Cheers!
I wouldn't be comfortable staying in a house with strangers when I'm already stressed out for being away from home and worrying about days full of difficult interviews. I think the social pressure would crush me and I'd rather stay in a hotel and take time to recharge. It looks like a nice idea for extroverts though.
A decentralized digital currency where the proof-of-work has a second utility having a great commercial value (such as folding proteins) would be quite frankly revolutionary and would have a good chance at displacing Bitcoin.

But FoldingCoin is not that currency, because there is a huge downside in their design: they had to completely give up decentralization, which is the primary innovation and differentiator that block chain-based currencies like Bitcoin bring. Instead, FoldingCoin relies on the Stanford University Folding@home network, on the stats reported by this network, to distribute units of the currency proportionately to the amount of work. This means the Folding@home network could alter the distribution of coins at will, if it is attacked by hackers (likely), or if it operates maliciously (less likely). This means FoldingCoin would be unable to continue operating the day a single entity (the university) decides to stop running the Folding@home network. And so on. All the inconvenients and risks of centralization exist with FoldingCoin.

Trust me, I really wish it would be possible to design a decentralized digital currency built on a protein-folding proof-of-work, but so far nobody has found a way to do this in a decentralized way.

Edit: they openly acknowledge the fact FoldingCoin is not decentralized, see http://foldingcoin.net/fldc-vs-alts/ : "With Counterparty there is no current way of doing decentralized asset creation and issuance"

Edit #2: in theory a decentralized currency based on a protein-folding proof-of-work can exist and would work this way: compute a hash of a block of pending transactions and of the previous block hash (like Bitcoin). Use the resulting hash as a seed to deterministically generate a set of protein-folding problems. Miners try to solve them. Once a sufficient amount of these problems is solved (depending on a "difficulty factor"), broadcast the solutions and the transactions on the network, hence creating a new hash for the next set of protein folding problems. I don't know very much about protein folding, but as I understand the open problems are: (1) how to deterministically generate a set of useful protein-folding problems according to rules that should stay immutable for decades (you can't ask the participants to have to frequently update their mining software because consensus on these rules is hard to change), and (2) how to reduce the size of the solutions data published to the network every block without overflowing it (it is my understanding that protein folding would generate way more than a few hundred kilobytes every 10min which is the current average Bitcoin block size).
>Imagine if all that computation time were put to good, scientific use while still providing the same proof-of-work benefit.

Cryptographic hashes have the unique property that their difficulty is quite predictable, which is an absolute necessity for PoW based voting systems (like Bitcoin). I don't believe there are any known scientific computation problems that have the same desirable PoW properties as a cryptographic hash algorithm.
> Since 1990, the number of women entering careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or commonly known as STEM, has basically remained stagnant.

That's inaccurate. The number of women since 1990 has increased in STEM. The ratio relative to men however has become worse or stagnated depending on whose data you wish to use.

People keep repeating the "women in STEM are decreasing" myth because others keep intentionally using misleading graphs that show % of women in STEM and then a nasty downward line. The reality is total numbers of people in STEM has increased, and so have the total number of women, men's participation just increased at a greater rate.

So the question is: What happened that made men's participation increase faster than women's participation? I don't see anyone asking that.
This will be dominated by the price, which has been going down in the last 2 weeks [1].

[1]https://www.poloniex.com/exchange#btc_fldc
Here is my point, the parent I initially replied to said this:

"Despite the foreign politics a few years ago, Iran is reportedly rather moderate in practice."

I disagreed. There is nothing moderate about Iran's oppressive theocracy or their support of terrorism. Iran is at the extreme far end of the scale when it comes to not being moderate, among countries.
SAP HANA: Loading Data from Flat Files via SAP HANA Studio
Are there tax advantages of donating old equipment to certain good causes?

It seems easier than the alternative of selling the hardware on ebay.
Yes, indeed. I actually tried for a bit to get React templates in their own files separate from the JS, and I just couldn't do it. I know the React team's reasoning for why it's this way, but I still think it should be something devs can do if they want.
Near the bottom, project bluebird description: "Guided twitter messages for surveillance prototype.. " Not a reassuring description. Or a very positive one.

The project is, afaik, a flu survey that tweets an encoded set of answers. Like, both piggybacks off twitter's infrastructure and benefits from its wider userbase: http://www.phiresearchlab.org/?p=2781

Considering what the project actually does, might be a good thing to rewrite the description entirely - if of course, it wasn't retired since it was a prototype and the test ended successfully.
Write the Docs 2015 Announcement and CFP
Two remarks:

First, for non-technical founders,
get technical yourself or at least get
started: Get a computer, settle on
Linux or Windows, get documentation,
read, type in code, get it to
work, and then build at least something
simple.

Second, for technical people
considering being a technical co-founder,
here are is a threat you should watch for:
Basically, the people in the start up,
especially the non-technical people,
may believe that it is in their interest
to block your entering the company
or, if you enter,
throttle or block your contributions
and push you out of the company.

Here those people may understand that
what they are doing is bad for the
company but believe that it is, still,
good for them in the company.
In the B-school subject organizational
behavior, such behavior is
called goal subordination because
the person places the good of the
company lower (subordinates it)
to what they see as their own good.

In particular, a non-technical person,
might work hard to hire
a technical person
with the intention that the
technical person will fail
so that, then, the
non-technical person
can have an excuse for
not being more technical themselves.

Can such wacko things actually happen?
Heck yes.
This is an egregious comment. It's extremely biased with an N of 1, and it doesn't accurately represent the experiences -- either educationally or socially -- many liberal arts students in the US traverse through their time in college. Sure, there are subsets of students who are just there for sports fanaticism & partying, and there are professors who are liberal ideologues, but it's unfair to paint these as truisms across the board. Speaking personally, it isn't what I experienced at UVA In the mid-90s (as a history & religious studies major), and it wasn't what I experienced a few years ago at NC State (earning a masters in industrial engineering). To posit a counterpoint, if you look at the mess UNC is in right now regarding it's African American Studies department & "fake" classes for athletes, sure, that's a travesty and punishment should be swift and firm, but that's still only a tiny part of a large research university.

College athletics as it is in the US is globally unique. It has its good sides, but it there's a darker aspect, too (see UNC). This should be addressed systemically (not via Title IX) but that's beyond the scope of your grievance.
No reason to hate Ahmedinejad more than the rest of the masks that Khamenei puts over his face. Mismanaging universities is a fine old tradition of the Revolution.
Just what does the 'powered by Telefonica' bit mean?
Oh yes, I'm sure the major issue for the largest corporation in the world is "complicated tax laws." They just can't figure out what all those darn big words mean!
Does it include IM rather than just video/audio chat?
The problem was the iweb smart layer - they just needed to recreate the smart layer.
Thanks, I'll run a test to see if it's possible to request an encrypted stream by timecode, then buffer it for composition with another encrypted stream.
Would have been a bit more realistic if the program had been stripped of symbols before disassembly. Still, the call to strcmp would be pretty obvious.
I have been working on adding other countries as well but right now it is US only, the new importer would let us bring code from many more orgs...
Sounds a real odd memory. First cause I was almost ten, sick from a strong flu, and resting in my grandma bed to let her assist me as a child. Got my first Polaroid camera as an anticipated birthday gift, and being inside the same engineer i am now, i was ready to shot the Shuttle with an instant. And in a matter of seconds, it blows up crew included. An incredible sad day.
You get out of it what you put into it, period. Those "loaded" kids aren't trying to get out of uni the same things that the aspirational middle class kids are. The upper crust just need the social network, not the coursework, to thrive.
As a person with -0.5/-0.75 I frequently switch between wearing and not wearing glasses. I usually wear glasses at work, when watching movies, at lectures while if I'm out at night, hanging out with friends, going out or doing anything like that I usually leave the glasses of.

I often forget my glasses at home in the morning because I don't really notice that I'm not wearing them and when I'm not wearing them I sometimes think that I'm actually wearing them (this is especially common when I'm accidentally using the computer or watching a movie without glasses).

However if I've been wearing my glasses for an extended period of time (say a couple of hours) I do notice a quite marginal difference when comparing having them on to not. I don't know if it's imaginary but it's almost like my vision without glasses gets worse if I've recently been wearing glasses extensively.
Needless Inefficiencies in R – Head and Tail
React + express rendering initially on the server and bootstrapping on the client is awesome.
A switch is irrelevant now that we have evidence that even accelerometers can be used to reconstitute speech.

I'd bet that CCD elements have some level of sensitivity to external voice.

Pulling the battery/putting it in a Faraday cage are the only real options left.
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/10/16/mozilla-and-telefon...

Presumably offering routing servers and transit. Plus Telefonica bought TokBox[1], whose tech powers the backend

[1] https://tokbox.com/
Telefonica has many developers working on Firefox OS, it probably means that the want to show up.
> Referencing contemporaneous legislation is not unnecessary.

Its entirely unnecessary when there is no specific relationship drawn other than vague temporal associations and references to "mindset".

> They include rate setting, petitioning agencies to make changes to rates or plant, internal cross subsidization (USF), etc, just like Title II.

Title II does not require:
(1) The FCC to adopt rate-setting regulations, or
(2) The FCC to adopt regulations requiring petition to make changes to rates
Title II permits such regulations, and (barring forbearance) requires covered carriers to publish rates, including publishing advance notice of changes.

> Title II is going to make it a lot harder and a lot less profitable to be a telecommunications carrier.

Given that most of what Title II is permit the FCC to adopt certain kinds of regulations, and given that most of the exceptions to that that impose direct statutory rules are also expressly subject to forbearance, I don't think there is any real basis to saying anything about what "Title II" will or won't do in general terms, rather than in the context of a particular package of regulations that come along with a Title II determination. While you don't actually make any specific references to what specific source of this "a lot harder and a lot less profitable" is, everything you've referred to seems to suggest you are operating on the basis that you are assuming both that every "the Commission may issue regulations" in Title II will be exercised with the most onerous possible regulations, and that the Commission will choose not to exercise forbearance for every provisions subject to forbearance. This is out of line with pretty much everything Wheeler has suggested about Title II use, and everything everyone advocating Title II reclassification has suggested the FCC should do as part of that.
I saw the tag line, liked what I saw until "powered by Telefonica".

Seriously, I've lived in more than half of the European countries for a while, and never ever EVER saw such a shitty internet service as in Spain over their network. Lack of service for hours every day, substandard speeds... It made me anticipate a move to Portugal by one year because of their shitty service.
A hereditary meritocracy
I almost made it into iCE when MiRAGE (formerly DREAM? I think.. Shihear Kallizard ran it) merged, but I think I was inactive at the time and I really wasn't an iCE-level artist). But I have no copies of my old art and I have never found any online so time to start digging through these.
Interrogation of an Alleged CIA Agent 1983 [pdf]
With css-flexbox, you probably can. Your DIV should have flex-grow: 1 which will make it take the allowable space along the "main axis" (shared with other flex-growers) and then align-items: stretch, to pick up all available space along the "cross axis". With some nesting, you can do pretty much whatever you want except for the grid layout. Grid layout is another thing coming but barely implemented in the today's browsers.

Anyways, flex-box is not available in IE < 10. IE10 requires ms- prefix. If React makes it available everywhere (IE8+) that will be really great.