skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's an offensive tweet.

It was offensive to you. It also wasn't offensive to some other people. Offensiveness isn't an objective property; the fact that something offended you doesn't make it "an offensive thing".
Why do we need to use a chemical battery for large things that aren't mobile? Why can't we store kinetic energy by, say, raising and lowering a big counterweight?
Thanks. That's nice to hear. I really loved the work environment, management aside, I am a little sad to have seen it fall so quickly in my lifetime.
I think the first half of the article showing how this works with a given sample distribution is pretty good. I don't think it's really doing much to build intuition at the end, though.

It's also worth pointing out that there are distributions for which the central limit theorem doesn't hold (e.g. the sum of samples from a Lorentzian distribution will again be Lorentzian, not Gaussian.)
Randomness Is Pretty Great
Link bait?
What's an "MRA loser"?
I never understood people who complain about computers rapidly and continuously getting better and cheaper. That's an incredibly short-sighted point of view. Your old computer would still run Windows 3.1 the same as it always did if you hadn't traded it up for something better. The creation of better machines didn't make your old machine any worse except through your raised aspirations. The poor have benefited immensely from Moore's Law and related effects. What used to require a corporate datacenter can now be had in a cheapo android tablet. The environment has benefited similarly through greatly improved computer-aided design and logistical efficiency. Wishing for that process to stop is a highly self-destructive line of thought.

If the problems of e-waste and computational access for the poor are issues you care about then go work for a computer recycle/reuse center. While you're there, cheer on Moore's Law for bringing better and better tech to the center's inbox by making it so cheap that people are happy to give it away for free!
Why do you close everything out every night?
I have some sympathy for a company whose Senior Director of Corporate Communications instigates a massive PR disaster by joking about Africans having AIDS on Twitter.
I agree. There goes free online courses from MIT and Harvard due to the impending legal fees implied. Thank you National Association of the Deaf.
>Either because I think it's culturally better accepted for private people (I mean not public figures) to have unappropriate expressions publicly

Based on my (admittedly very limited) experience with French culture, this is definitely the most important difference.

America has become extremely politically correct. People in France are much more relaxed about saying things Americans might construe as offensive. In particular, Americans tend to be much more wary of speaking about perceived victim groups (certain racial groups, homosexuals, etc.).
That seems like a huge disadvantage to me. The bottle neck in any software project (> 1 person) is usually the time it takes to read and understand source code. Some estimates[1] claim that up to 78% of development time is spent just reading code.

With that in mind, I would not want to learn a new language for every project I was a part of. I'd even go so far as to say: The majority of programmers cannot design a good language, and if Lisp gives them the opportunity to try then that's a BadThing™.

[1]http://blogs.msdn.com/b/peterhal/archive/2006/01/04/509302.a...
How we made employee referral as easy as a Slack cmd line
These articles inevitability gloss over a lot of the newer, higher risk, compounds that are used.
Do you not interact with friends on Twitter? Not having that takes a lot of the fun out of Twitter.
The reason why Google, Facebook, Twitter, NSA, etc, want to reduce online anonymity is so that they can do a better job in tracking your behavior and advertise to you. They are simply packaging it as an anti-harrassment reason, when in fact that's a complete lie. As you said, the only solution is complete anonymity.
11 Ways to Save Time as a Programmer
I see a lot of what you're saying happening, and subjectively, it has gotten worse. One interesting thing is that I see this popping up in comment sections and forums far removed from HN - neo-monarchists, redpillers, neo-objectivists, and their loosely related ideological ilk have spread far and wide. At the same time, the ILM does seem out of control, both on the SJW and anti-SJW sides. The Internet has become an excellent hate amplifier.

Another interesting thing is that the same thing happens on the other side. For many others (like myself) who are on the liberal / progressive / pro social justice side who couldn't take the influx of inchoate, unfocused rage (along with all the other fun stuff like oppression olympics, tone policing/anti-tone policing, fights over trigger warnings, slugfests over performativity, implosions over minor transgressions causing a space space to turn into an unsafe one and all the rest) that has become prevalent in various online SJ communities - they also left, looking for said greener pastures (or just hang around and don't comment - that's generally what I do in those spaces.) Michelle Goldberg wrote a good article on this a while back:

http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-twit...

Anyway, if you know of any places for technology discussion with a good signal-to-noise ratio and low on hate and warriors/conspiracy theorists from either side (and a liberal bent would be even better), I'd appreciate hearing about it. I saw Slashdot rise and fall. Sad to think it could be happening to HN, too. Where do we go next?
Quick question, perhaps: what's the maximum computing power, especially RAM, you're thinking of offering?

If it's just microcontrollers, my interest in somewhat limited. Something I reasonably put a Lisp on (code as data wants RAM, even if a lot can live on flash) ... well, looking at Wikipedia's list of Arduino CPUs, 96KiB is a very qualified maybe, 64MiB is a lot more like it.
To play devil's advocate, if you fund the captioning, fewer people will do it for free. But yes, the current option is distasteful.
I was under the impression that Datomic alone could handle everything involved with an eventstore, just by adding the domain event as an attribute on the "transaction" (because transactions themselves are also entities). I don't understand what this adds.
This is the end result of all those "No Tuition Hikes" buttons my classmates wore 10 years ago.

To all my classmates that wore those buttons, I TOLD YOU SO!
"It's a prank bro! It's just a prank! Calm down!"

Offensive people who do offensive things and then defend them saying 'it was just a joke, bro!'
"justice were being democratized" = mob rule

same as it ever was, now with a lot less effort from the mob
It's just a really long, complex, and hard to copy username. In many cases, that is much better than a username/password combination. But it's still just something you are/have and not something you know.
"MRA is short for Men's Rights Activist. MRAs argue that, as human beings, men should have human rights, due process in legal matters, and should not be subject to "reverse discrimination" in favor of other groups.

MRAs typically point to men's lower life expectancy in almost every country, higher rates of incarceration, more severe penalties for similar offenses, lower rates of health care spending and health research spending on men, higher suicide rates, higher rates of being subject to violence and murder including by women and when they are children, higher rates of genital mutilation, liability to conscription, higher rates of death at work, various disadvantages in divorce and child support, and higher school and college dropout rates, as reasons why men's rights should be on the agenda."

A lot of people feel that since men are privileged in so many areas, no effort should be expended on men's issues until every women's problem is entirely resolved. Due to that scapegoating Men's Rights Activists as people who hate women is popular.
The article doesn't specify who is suing them, whether it's a MOOC user or an enrolled student, and what lectures they're suing over. There's a big difference between a MOOC lecture lacking captions and required online lecture for an undergraduate course lacking caption.
"This is probably just a shakedown -- it'll be cheaper to settle than it will be to defend against this lawsuit, so the game is to find a mistake that could plausibly fall afoul of the ADA and file away."

Unless I'm mistaken, the article says that National Association of the Deaf requested Harvard and MIT provide options accessible to the deaf on multiples occasions. They're seeking comparable materials for the hearing impaired, not millions of dollars.
Is technology development outpacing regulation?
Thanks, I just found that Tesla has an adapter for it's cars to connect to SAE J17772 plugs: http://my.teslamotors.com/roadster/charging/j1772-mobile-con... . Too bad Tesla didn't standardise on that format so that other cars can benefit from their chargers.
I'm the opposite. I use my real name, or real enough, everywhere. It makes me think twice before hitting enter. Anything I say I'm backing up, for better or worse, with my identity. I may someday regret this decision. So far so good.
Linux Kernel 3.20 to support live kernel patching
Show HN: iCantHear - An app for communicating with the deaf
Further, scroll a few pages using your scrollwheel, then press the right key. You'd expect to continue to the right, but instead are scrolled all the way back to the left to page #2. Eesh.
Deaf people aren't a charity case. The content needs to be accessible from the beginning, not as an afterthought.
Someone at MIT's User Interface Design group is working on something like this, with a searchable transcript -- http://juhokim.com/lecturescape/
WARNING: Japanese B-series paper is not the same as ISO B-series paper!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_size#Japanese_B-series_va...
Five Facts About Housing That Will Make People in NYC and SF Depressed
Geoengineering: Smart Science or Hail Mary?
This and many other problems are instantly rectified when one stops using shit like twitter or fb.

Communicating with friends? fine, perfectly acceptable, PM or share with some reduced circle.

Trying to be funny in the world where someone could get butthurt over a joke that was snooped from the conversation not intended for their ears? You're asking for it (for the lack of better wording).

And yes I do realize the irony about this comment, feel free to downvote for 'victim blaming' if you don't understand the message.
Handsome, generous, great-catch-of-a-career seeking THE ONE
The Worst Part of the Job Search – The Lowball Offer
Why would you pay for LinkedIn?
Announcing Detailed Test Failure Reporting
What a terrible article. It takes all the interesting parts regarding psychonaut exploration / mind expansion, frames it in "revolutionary" terms because of an association with technology, and ends with the banal conclusion of "More research in this field is necessary." Could get about a B in a high school English class though.

Citing Reddit is interesting, if there wasn't something called Erowid that was trying to do research / public service for years and years and years...there's some great potential in learning more about the mind and the substances that can enhance talents or treat issues, but I'm inherently skeptical that the VC/SV environment is to be trusted with that kind of "disruption." Can't even re-invent the taxi service without protocols to prevent kidnapping and/or trust the leadership not to race-to-the-bottom by digging up dirt on critics. Yeah, anecdotal, but relevant to my trust factor.
I feel like most people realized the tweet was a joke. But a "HAHA isn't racism funny?" joke by a white person just isn't socially acceptable anymore. Personally, I'm in the camp where I believe that you should be able to joke about anything, but I know I'm in the minority. As a society, we have judged that certain things can't be joked about. This list includes "racist jokes made by white people".

Personally, this just shows that maybe people shouldn't be broadcasting their every thought out to the entire world. If you're not comfortable with it being on the front page of the New York Times, don't tweet it.
We're working with TechCrunch on a more in-depth series of posts, including one that will cover the classification and regulation around the three broad classes of compounds: 'supplements', 'prescription', and 'unregulated' research chemicals. We'll get into the world of noopept, piracetam, and DARPA-funded peptides etc. for you guys.
Tesla falls short on Model S deliveries as Elon Musk battles Mother Nature
It's near useless as a criminal. It's not as if there are real time updates for cops driving around, its pretty much like a "warning cop in the area" when people pin a cop down. But Waze does a lot more - traffic, road hazards(cars stopped on side of road, accidents, construction), and navigation.
I agree. Perhaps someone should step in and make the closed captions, braille transcript -- a third party.

This is why we can't have nice things.
Qualys seem to be getting popular but I've never worked with it.
I know HN frowns on this type of comment, but this is a first class response to a question I think a lot of people have, both in this area of cosmology and more generally about science as a framework for developing understanding. Thanks for taking the time, and to the parent for asking a question I wasn't brave enough to voice.
She gave death threats?
That is my issue with this. Daniel Tosh makes sexist, racist, and rape jokes on a daily basis and people at large aren't up in arms threatening to strike if he visits their workplace. To me this says these psuedo-activists care more about picking on an easy target than actually preventing hurtful speech. Not to mention the hypocrisy of many of those tweets when they call her a bitch, or send her death threats.
My wife said something similar about morphine: "Did you know your hand hurts really bad while you are just standing there right now? You have no idea until you have morphine and it gets instantly better."
New York City sets new record: no murders for 10 days
ParallelCI: Get faster tests by running your builds in parallel
Well, I don't agree [1]. Neither does Wikipedia:

"Discrimination is action that denies social participation or human rights to categories of people based on prejudice." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrimination)

Note the prejudice part.

[1] Not in this context; of course a visual communication discriminates among those who can and can not receive it, but what prejudice is there in just recording yourself talking?
What an excellent, approachable summary of the results of the experiment.
Located in the Caribbean during Hurricane Hugo?
Does anyone know when Curve25519 (encryption, not signing, I know Ed25519 is already there) will be implemented? I'm waiting until that happens to generate my new long-term keypair.
This is my opinion as one. Switching supplies are 90+ efficient, at nominal load and they are less efficient below and above that nominal load. So your 48VDC converter might by 87% efficient because its rated for 500W and you're only drawing 50. And your 5V regulator may be only 92% efficient while your device is charging but 88% when your device is 'idling'.
Replace "offend the wrong person" with "do something really f*cking stupid" - which is what she did - and the outcome seems fair.

No one deserves to be bullied or harassed but consequences need to exist to actions.
Sorry you feel that way. As TechCrunch / HN is a predominantly Silicon Valley centered community, we grounded the current work in nootropics with analogies and metaphors that make sense in the tech world today. I think this biohacking / nootropics ties into the broader context of the quantified self theme that many, many technologists are working on.
MassChallenge to launch its 2015 round in Jerusalem, Israel
Actually he hit it right on the nail. The takeaway is don't use twitter, and say nothing. That mob justice is just a secondary takeaway.
The Framerate Debate: Why Videogames Need to Take a Film Theory Class
Facebook Launches Internet.org App and Free Access to 38 Websites in India
That's crazy. What, they hate tax credits? I'm glad I live in middle of a smallish city, where the 20 panels on my roof don't raise any eyebrows whatsoever.
That's a confusing sentiment. So deaf people shouldn't be given something for free, but they should get something for free "from the beginning?" Which is it?
Advice for young graduates looking for a job
As a young graduate, I'm shocked by the positive feedback my application process has had with method B, compared to the depressing results it gets with method A.

Method A is of course replying to job ads. I think the people who post such ads experience the kind of tsunami you see when you post a job on Elance. Which means that even if you as a candidate carefully select ads where you truly believe you're in a position to add value despite your inexperience, you probably won't get a reply. And when you do get a reply, it's usually pretty generic. Don't ask for more specific reasons, you'll get on your contact's nerves.

And then there's method B. It gets you answers such as "we're sorry it took us so long to get back to you, our team would like to meet you", or the company cofounder trying to call you multiple times after reading your email. If those were girls' reactions to your texts, you'd get some positive adrenaline flowing and feel much better than with method A, right? And you'd be right to. Method B is finding smaller companies by yourself and browsing their website for "Jobs" pages. Those are the true hidden gems you're looking for, as they're often not published elsewhere and you're in competition with nobody. 25% of my applications have used method B and have resulted in: a PHP test where they found my code wasn't commented enough (a great error to learn from); a Java test for which I haven't had feedback yet but which I feel I rocked; an interview and a tough sys admin test where most of the questions were too advanced for me (still led to a position opportunity); an email asking for an interview; an email saying they already found somebody.

Even though the last one is the less positive of the bunch, it did feel good because they provided me an honest reason to not interview me. This is in contrast to my results with 60% of my time spent replying to job ads and which resulted in: anger, frustration, wasted time, pure opacity & meaninglessness.
How to Get Involved with the Apache Mesos Open Source Cloud Project
So how does any of that make you a loser? What's going on in this thread? As far as I can tell it's nothing more than a similar type of bullying the article is itself is talking about, which I didn't ever expect to see on HN, let alone tolerated.

At what point can you no longer express controversial opinions without being called a loser?
Precisely!

Financial institutions 'caring' about one's credit rating == confidence that one can handle the liabilities they want one to hold. :-)
Here's how worker protection laws work in the U.S.

1) For any given case, yeah, there's probably no protection. This is because we love freedom. No, really. Well, if you can get an honest answer from politicians and CEOs that's not the reason, but to the average "man on the street" who's against stronger worker protections, that's the reason. That or unemployment scaremongering. Really.

2) On the off chance that there is a law, and you know there is, can you afford to be without work and to pay lawyers long enough to fight to have it enforced? Do you even know where to begin? If not, nothing happens. (think minimum wage workers)

3) Is it worth even a small risk of a de facto blacklisting in your industry, permanently limiting your future employment options (and therefore how much you earn)? If not, nothing happens. This is related to the "everyone Googles you these days" thing mentioned in the article. (professionals, skilled trades)

In the end it's riskier for to individuals, on average, to fight these things than it is for businesses to break the law, so little is ever done. That's assuming there was even a law to be broken.

Collective action (class action lawsuits, for example) can help but is nearly impossible to organize effectively without unions, which we've been successfully convinced to hate on principle. Every so often there's a lawsuit, businesses are slapped with fine that's a rounding error in their account books, everything goes on as normal.
Alright, then who will pay for it, either in time or money? You are free to go caption videos all you want, but why should people be forced to caption videos they make in their spare time?
Microsoft acquires N-Trig, Israeli creators of the Surface Pro 3 stylus
If we assume that someone is giving the pass-phrase they've selected in their voice, then it does make the guess more expensive. Now there are two things to guess: What they sound like saying a particular thing and what that thing is.

Of course if you have a secure pass-phrase you're not gaining too much there. It's already very difficult to break. But ho-hum, it's not automatically a terrible idea.

Someone could record you saying it, but on the one hand I don't think that you're as much at risk from someone around you recording your password as you are from someone trying to guess it, and on the other this is a vulnerability that other forms of password share too - though I grant with a slightly different recording procedure.
A tweet is not part of a private conversation and the user in question should have known that - particularly considering their profession.

Twitter & FB aren't the problem. A lack of awareness and judgement is.
I would (almost) completely disagree with this.

C++ support in VS is horrible, that's correct, but having the ability to be supported by compiler services that can parse (invalid) code is a major milestone when it comes to handling more complex codebases.

It does not matter how smart you are, the easier it is for you to understand and reason about the code, the more will fit in your head.

Refactoring is just one of the many amazing tools that make me a much better and more productive programmer today then I was without when using vi in the 90s. Add in static analysis, intellisense etc... Every bit of complexity that tooling can hide from you is worth gold.

Reality for C++ is grim though in this regard. Let's hope we get better compiler services for it soon.
> We could have given referrers a bonus or a percentage of the recruit’s wage, but we found a way that not only is more fun, but also more in accordance with our company culture.

> Therefore, every time an employee refers someone who gets hired, he or she gets 2000 briqs — briqs are not yet indexed to dollar or gold. But let’s say it’s the equivalent of the latest iPad.

At my company, you earn $8000 per engineering referral that gets hired. But okay, I guess some virtual currency that you issued that might be equal to an iPad will do the trick.
I want to know how React performs at scale as well. So mind sharing? Do you have to use shouldComponentUpdate a lot? Have you tried omitting it?
I always liked this visual representation of the central limit theorem:
http://blog.vctr.me/posts/central-limit-theorem.html. There is a faster one here (I think written in R): http://vis.supstat.com/2013/04/bean-machine/

These are computer simulations of Galton boxes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bean_machine
I'll reply only in regards of french law here but be aware I'm no lawyer. The basis is the following. You can fire someone for repeatedly public attacks targeting another employee, or a client. Then if the fired employee thing you're wrong then a kind of court dedicated to work legislation will decide if you have enough element to have him fired or not.
Nobody's objecting to the swearing part, I promise you.

Seriously, what in the world made you decide to read and comment on a Scott Aaronson article if you don't believe in theoretical computer science?