skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I generally agree with you, but the counter argument would be something like, If you opened a soup kitchen downtown to provide food for the homeless, should you be required to install accessibility facilities (ramps, elevator, bathroom, etc.)?

I know the law says yes, but is it what we want? Have the extra building codes discouraged potential altruists?

I wonder if there's a government subsidy for that part of it, and if so could a similar provision be allowed for educational institutions opening their courseware.
Is this because they offer certification or degrees through these programs? I think you create something on your own with no measurable achievement it wouldn't matter. That's the only reason I can see this being a suit.
> the sum of samples from a Lorentzian distribution will again be Lorentzian, not Gaussian

Lorentzian? I had to look that up. Oh. Cauchy distribution. Right, because it doesn't have any finite moments, because the tails are too heavy.
What about project orion and using nuclear weapons to propel the ship once in space + a mass driver to put the ship itself up there. Humans can go up via traditional means.
Oh for fuck's sake, not this again.
(I don't and have never worked for Facebook...this is my interpretation based on watching several technology cycles - Windows => Java => Web => Mobile - go by.)

They want to own the next generation UI layer that the rest of the technology industry writes their programs on. That's why they've focused on making React cross-platform with React Native, and it would give them enormous leverage in adapting the platform to their revenue-generating products' needs.

If you look at the difference between Google's and Facebook's strategic moves with the shift to mobile, a lot of it can be explained simply because Google owns a browser and a mobile OS, and Facebook owns neither. So Google puts out Polymer, and builds it into Chrome, and uses that as a carrot & stick to move the browser ecosystem in a direction it wants. Facebook can't build their needs into the browser, and so they put out React, which has to function as a layer on top of the browser (or native platforms, now). That means you pay for the download cost, it can never be as fully performant as things that run natively on the GPU, it won't integrate well with the rest of CSS/HTML, etc.

I bet that if React becomes successful in the UI space and a majority of apps start using it as their framework, Facebook's next move will be to put out a mobile OS that runs it natively. Right now, Facebook's phone plans have been thwarted because there are no apps for it, and so no consumer would buy a Facebook phone. If they could instead say "All your favorite apps run twice as fast as they do on competing phones!", people would switch in droves.
Well, in Europe the tradition of mobbing is a serious problem, and its definitely something that occurs on a regular basis in the real world, and not just on the Internet. In Germany, people have been fired for instigating the mob - not necessarily for saying things that offend others, but rather for rabble-rousing and trying to get the pitchfork brigade riled up.

I think Europe has a keener sense of the history of this activity, because the artifacts of prior historical mobbing are abundant. You only have to take a walk through Prague, Budapest, Berlin to see just how this is reflected in European sensibilities - whereas in the US, its a less overt historical fact. Americans are very loud about things, Europeans often very reserved and conservative, but there is fundamentally no difference between the cultures: both are capable of succumbing to cannibalistic, collective-reactive urges. I witnessed this factor countless times in my experience living in the US (I'm not American), most severely during the Rodney King riots. People form a kind of super-being in a mob, a near God-like entity, which can perform powerful acts - go to the moon, solve humanitarian crises, and so on. But it can also turn vicious and heinous as well, and there seems to be some sort of scale upon which the tone of activity can be plotted. I don't think there is a difference in scales for European versus American societies; just that the fact of observation of the energy of the mob is louder in some cultures that have evolved to profit from that loudness - America, in this case. Celebrity/Entertainment culture being what it is in the US, I think its just a brighter shade of pale than, for example, the French may be used to - but its the same basic color.
The wiki article then contradicts itself right in the next paragraph:

Not all discrimination is based on prejudice, however.
Reading the comments in your [0], I'm confused about the relationship between thermodynamic entropy and information entropy. In thermodynamics, I've always thought of entropy as randomness, with the 2nd law saying that eventually the universe will turn to static. That is, entropy is increasing and information is decreasing.

But in [2] and [3] I read that information entropy is information, and it has the same formula as thermodynamic entropy! Am I missing a negation or reciprocal somewhere? Is entropy information or lack or information?

Reading those Wikipedia pages isn't helping me. Can someone explain why my intuition is wrong here?

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28information_theory%2...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_i...
Another reason to mimic the process of human cognition with approaches in data science, ML, AI etc.
Follow-up to “Quiet Ladies. Wadhwa is speaking now.”
Cyber-bullying is a thing, with real consequences (depression or suicide).
Actually, all consumers of free online courses are charity cases. Deaf people are suing because MIT's and Harvard's largesse doesn't always include them.
> illustrated by his response to the whole drama, in which he explicitly clarified his stance of female developers.

I mean, obviously he's going to say that. I'm not sure how much stock you want to put into after-the-fact PR damage control. I think actions speak louder than words, and I'd reserve judgment before hearing from some of the women developers who he's hired (he has hired women, right?) about how he was to work under, what he was like as a boss (not as a co-founder).

You accuse me of "exemplifying the worst of the Twitter lynchmob problem" but I'm trying hard to be as neutral and generous as possible. I listed three possible implications of that tweet, only one of which is explicitly negative, and you claim I've "decided that the author is a racist, sexist psychopath". If anyone is guilty of twitter-like hyperbole in this conversation, it's you.
I would expect the car is a much more harsh environment for the battery than my house. I'm not talking about vibration or temperature, though those matter, but electrical demand. A model S has a 310kW motor. Nothing in my house comes anywhere close to demanding 310kW. Of course the Tesla will rarely require the full 310kW, but its charge and recharge cycles are at the mercy of your driving.

You could smooth out the peaks in my home demand with probably just 10kW. Perhaps smooth out many of my neighbours peaks with 50kW. But my point is that there are no hard bounds that the battery needs to satisfy, unlike in a car when you have to supply the drive current or sink the brake current. You can tune a home battery's charge/discard cycles for maximum battery life rather than maximum performance. I don't have data for how much difference that would make to battery life, but I would guess it may be significant.
As a fellow Cubs fan, you're dead wrong.

The play Bartman disrupted didn't advance any runners. It was a foul ball. Cubs were up 3-0, with one out. Had Moises Alou caught the ball, there would have been two outs. The Marlins proceeded to score 4 runs before the second out occurred, and another 4 before the third.

Bartman didn't throw a wild pitch, or commit a fielding error, or give up 5 hits and eight runs. The Cubs did.
P Vs. NP isn't just of consequence to cryptography. It's extremely relevant to scheduling and resource use optimization. E.g. FedEx want to deliver parcels as fast as possible. Factories should be laid out optimally, chips should have their internal wiring minimized etc. Those all have NP problems underneath them and improvements to computing in that category would have huge economic benefits (although it ain't gonna happen)
I don't know why specifically, but I can point out some benefits that make creating/releasing React "enlightened self-interest" (i.e. doing something good that is a net-positive for the company).

1. Facebook uses it. Instagram runs on it, and it's used in some other parts of Facebook. If the community tests it, fixes bugs, and creates a generation of young people who are already familiar with it, it's great for Facebook. They have a rock-solid library and a huge pool of potential developers to work on it with no ramp-up time.

2. Great programmers like to invent. One of the most-lauded perks at Google was the ability to spend free time on anything, whether it helped Google or not. Facebook has to offer its engineering teams fun, cutting-edge projects, or some of them will leave. Money alone doesn't retain tech talent.

3. As you implied, Facebook ups its "cool" factor by offering a high-quality product for free, especially when it's at the cutting edge. A recent HN post said "Facebook just taught us how to build web apps" (meaning their recent announcements were a major evolution in the way we build them). That's huge for Facebook as they hire. Again, they can't pay every engineer $30M/year, and even if they could, they'd still have people who wouldn't join the company. They need the intangible stuff, as well.
I'd say for a mob it may even be understandable (if you decided to roll with us, you're in for a full trip), we are talking about deeds after all, not empty words.

Here, it's just ridiculous.
The communication needs to be made accessible by the person or group who produces it. Not by some outside organization that goes around cleaning up other people's accessibility messes.
> The ex-Mozilla CEO knows this well. An online bullying campaign was launched against him and he was forced to quit.

Hahahahahahaha no. Eich paid money to political campaigns to ensure that some of his own employees and fellow citizens would not have basic human rights. Then, he refused to apologize for it and dodged the question when asked if he would do it again. That's not "expressing an opinion," that's nearly sociopathic. He was clearly working against his employees' best interest. Even ignoring his employees' feelings, he was bad for the company. Many productive employees threatened to quit because they didn't want to be represented by a person who explicitly expressed hatred towards them or their friends.

That kind of person does not belong in a position of power, full stop. Expressing homophobia in 2015 is going to close doors, the same way expressing racism or sexism does and should. There was no "bullying campaign" except the one supported and perpetrated by Eich.
> So to answer your question, nothing (in this context), because the Turing machine is a more useful model for thinking about computation itself.

This isn't obvious to me. It seems to me that a TM is more useful for thinking about computation from an operational perspective. But this isn't the only, or arguably even the most effective, way to think about computation. The lambda calculus is much more useful for thinking about computation from a denotational perspective.
Public figures can afford "online reputation management" firms.
I like that this person challenges aspects of online marketing. The value of the blog post is zero the movement you state a/a testing a/b testing "doesn't matter". A/B testing always matters. Its not even an opinion, A/B testing is the root of scientific method - that fact is an axiom that needs no evidence of proof or disproof - it just "is". Now if you have a marketing tool that is outputting the unexpected, then take it up with the marketing tool. Even Optimizely recently stated they updated the way they output their results to reduce false positives.
ahh more blockchain spam
Tiger Woods Needs to Rediscover Joy of Golf
When the motivation is more personal fulfillment or better pay/conditions, and less "Can I put food on the table and a roof over my head", there's a lot less pressure and nervousness about the interview as well.
Is this legal to scrape linkedin? What's the legality of obtaining + selling this information?
When it comes to WebRTC, Chrome on Android works just like Chrome on Windows/Linux/Mac. Safari is the browser I'm worried about. Even IE implements a couple of WebRTC APIs, though they're not very useful by themselves. Safari has absolutely no support for any WebRTC stuff.[1]

1. http://iswebrtcreadyyet.com/
What was the purpose of bell labs making unix or linus torvalds linux? Why is apache free? open source C compilers? python, java, mysql, go-lang, rust, angular the list goes on.

Open technology helps evolve the type of applications we can build. There doesn't have to be a "play". Facebook made something good that makes their lives easier and their product better. By open sourcing or sharing react whichever it is they allow other people to contribute which in part makes their product better but also increases the quality or reduces development time of the applications that anyone else using it builds.
Technically it could - but I felt Datomic is particularly strong as an aggregate view. Adding transactions that just have events attached to them isn't a particularly useful aggregate to query.

Having the eventstore separate means that you can keep Datomic focussed at what it's really good at. When you find good aggregate views for your events, you can scan through old events and populate Datomic.

This separation also means that you can make the events as rich and plentiful as you want without burdening Datomic with stuff that you don't have a good way to query anyhow.
Show HN: Portal - Run apps on your own easy to use cloud server
Twitter, in particular, is awful. There's no context and very little thought possible in 140 characters. So you either get marketing from corporations, jokes/memes, or full-frontal assaults by the pitchfork-weilding mob, with no effective defense possible in the medium.

At least on Facebook you can elucidate your thoughts, defend your opinions, and otherwise make an effort too look like a person who appreciates nuance, rather than someone whose entire intellectual capacity is captured in 140 characters.
This makes me wonder if PR is actually effective, and not a massive money sink. Would that company really lose any noticeable amount of customers over that Twitter shitstorm? If so, how come that no one apparently got hurt over ACTA/SOPA and Snowdengate? I don't see companies losing significant business over trying to destroy the Internet itself.
When it comes to individual works, I don't see how this would have any bearing on your product. You're not beholden to the ADA in your creative works, from what I understand. Double the exemption for making something for free.

It's the institutionalization of education that is being called out here, in that Harvard et al receive compensation (advertisement is a form of compensation - see: radio airplay) for these products and do not maintain quality standards respective of existing laws. No musician has to include a print out of their lyrics in the liner notes, it's a completely voluntary transaction without stipulation of such ADA compliance, in that the terms of the relationship are different than this case where Harvard is a 'service provider' of sorts (the service being the transmission of knowledge).

This is different than the occasional lawsuit trolling where a person in a wheelchair finds small businesses not in compliance with the ADA and brings a case...this is...well, an educational institution with the resources and capability for compliance, but they aren't complying. Seems pretty workable from a high-level standpoint to me.
Was it really just one stupid tweet? It looks like a lot more than one to me.
As with programmers, it's often hard to tell the lazy from the great, because economy of motion runs with competence. Sometimes copy-and-paste gives you the wrong agreement for your deal, but it's cheap and easy for the lawyer. A different lawyer may glance dozens of alternative precedents in their mind's eye before choosing which form (or pieces of forms) to compose into an agreement for you.

When you dress for an occasion, you start by picking items out of your closet. If you don't have what you need, you may go to the store and buy off the rack. If the occasion or your needs are very special, you may have ready-made items tailored, or may even have something made for you. Good lawyers work similarly.
I have some pretty serious objections to summing up people making a campaign to remove a bigot from his role leading an open source, community friendly company as "an online bullying campaign"...
Web Design Contest – Calling All Creative Professionals – NOUPE
It is the same routine, because he is describing the USAA iPhone mobile app :)
Rural South Carolina. The apartment complex where I lived was apparently at the end of the transmission line, so we were one of the last in the area to get power back. My sister lived in Charleston at the time (where Hugo made landfall) and her VCR wasn't even blinking "12:00" when she returned after evacuating. Go figure.
I didn't know that! Thanks for sharing.
Then the whole edifice is inherently unstable and will collapse at some point.

I will still post economic or political-ish things, under my real name, but they're generally not very controversial, they're references to articles, book or blogs ( usually that I'd like to see read a bit more ).
It should be absolutely illegal to revoke visitation and communication rights for longer than 2 weeks.

How does the US system expect inmates to reintegrate into society after they have spent years without human contact?
I think this is very well stated and I'd like to see this idea presented more frequently in dialogue surrounding internet zealotry.

Simply put, a great deal of what drives the extremist behavior on the internet is straight up narcissism. The people participating in pile-on internet bullying campaigns feel good about themselves when they do so, and receive praise (from the internet mob that they have aligned with) for doing so.
The problem with low voltage power is power loss during transmission. Power in a circuit is voltage times current:

Watts = Volts * Amps

Power lost in transmission is current through the wire times the voltage drop across the wire. The voltage drop is easy to figure out with Ohms law:

Volts = Amps * Ohms

Rewriting these with V = voltage, I = current in amps, R = resistance in ohms and P = power in Watts and simplifying one gets:

P = V * I
P = (I * R) * I
P = I**2 * R

So power losses are proportional to the square of the current flowing through any given piece of wire (that will have a resistance independent of the voltage or current).

My house has 20 Amp circuits at 120 Volts. The same power transmitted at 5 volts needs 24 times the current (i.e. 480 Amps) and 24^2 times the copper in the transmission wire to have the same power losses. So I would basically need a wire with 576 times as much copper to have the same power loss in that one low voltage circuit.

This is why it isn't practical to run the whole house on low voltage. High efficiency transformers can step up or down a voltage while losing only a few percent of the power. When their output voltage is 10 times higher their output current will be 10 times smaller and can be transmitted over the same wire with only 1 percent of the original voltage's transmission power loss.

This is the reason that power transmission lines run at 120,000 volts--a million times lower transmission line losses. (It actually is a bit more complicated due to the alternating current interactions, but it's the basic idea.) Power transformers can be 99% efficient. I have no idea of the power losses that would occur between DC current from solar panels to 120 VAC and then back to 5 VDC for USB, but you definitely don't want to transmit 5VDC over long distances.
All public online videos published by Harvard and MIT, including such gems as "video of students welcoming Lady Gaga to the Harvard campus".

[1]: http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimi...
I don't think anyone got truly offended, just that they saw an opportunity to do something interesting with Twitter - which is mostly a very mundane activity - and went with it. An opportunity to rally the pitchfork brigade can feel very empowering to people who spend a majority of their time 'socializing' with a facile society such as Twitter provides. If you ask me, the root cause of this cannibalistic mob desire is, fundamentally, dire loneliness.

When can you get 15,000 people to hate something you've decided is worth hating, its quite a buzz.
Just curious why this is getting downvoted. Are people actually buying the whole "Eich is a victim because as a white multimillionaire he lost his job because he cared deeply about taking away the rights of others"...?
This can use a software fix:
1) everyone agrees that having captions and transcripts is a good thing
2) requiring schools to have them is problematic because it increases the cost of producing the videos--we want the cost to be low because the videos are a social good and we want more of them.
3) with software maybe we can make it inexpensive to add transcripts and captions to videos. Suddenly the world is a better place
Harvard scientists found way to turn sunshine into liquid fuel
Check out our 2nd product line SPRINT if you want a really effective 'stay-awake' pill. We think it compares really well against alternatives like espresso, red bull, 5-hour energy especially for working.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/sprint-declaring-war-on-a...
Absolutely, people will not buy / old buildings in buildings older than ADA passage date because there is so much money that needs to be spent to retrofit it to code. Building a new building is cheaper long term, but how can you start a soup kitchen to gauge demand.
That's a very simple way to look at human interactions and it doesn't give you a licensce to go around saying whatever you want.
Fair? Do you really think so? If so you terrify me.

I've done plenty of really f*cking stupid things in my time. I'm very thankful most of them were offline or pre-internet.
Start looking for work, but keep your current job if you can stand it. Leave them before your boredom effects your performance and they leave you. You have a great explanation when interviewing at a new place as to why you want to leave your current job.

I once took a job doing server development -- hired by the CEO to sort out all the problems and technical debt surrounding the companies backend.

The VP of Engineering returned from pat leave and ordered me unto front end work while the CEO was on leave. I had no interest in that work and had to learn while doing using their crazy framework that was an absolute mess. I regret not walking 2 weeks into that, but stayed another 5 months resulting in total burnout.

Do you think there was an effort to deceive you? In my case I believe there was (after seeing how the company went about business). Chances are if they lied to you about the job description, they'll lie to you about other things.
I understand that the law may not strictly apply to me. I am making a statement on the principle of the situation. I don't think MIT or Harvard should be forced to provide captions for their videos either.
I don't know of one, but using PAM to add auth methods is actually pretty easy.
Try writing a complex program in 1960s era COBOL. Then you will understand a large part of Lisp's claim to fame.
But if they reintegrate they're less likely to become repeat customers, and who would want that? /s
Hard to cite sources if we don't link to it!