skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reminds me about this Memory Palace (a short podcast) about lobsters: http://thememorypalace.us/2010/08/episode-33-lost-lobsters/ – not very long ago they used to be gigantic compared to now. Evolution of the moment often favors animals that aren't as easy prey for humans.

Somewhere else I read, I think a comment in AskScience about how insects used to be gigantic, an evolutionary biologist noted that over time species evolve to become larger. I would infer that given a set of ecological constraints, bigger is usually better for intraspecies competition (having already settled upon a successful niche for the species in general). But then things change, the species itself must compete anew as the ecology changes, and there can be resets, reverting back to smaller more efficient forms.

Another thing alluded to in the article is that there's some complexity to simply maintaining larger forms. E.g., breathing air is more efficient if you have to bring in large amounts of oxygen. The crustacean line simply hasn't explored these areas. So even if there were always advantages to larger forms, not everything can just get bigger. But it always leaves the question, what about dinosaurs? So odd that the only true remnant seems to be birds that went down such a different path.
The Scariest Ways Humanity Could Die Out Are the Ones We Haven't Thought of Yet
Reading down through the article kindly submitted here after first reading the previous comments, I see, "Certain key events, also highlighted by the study's authors, deliver an extra boost. Most obviously, at the stages when land animals like reptiles and, later, mammals returned to the water, the size graph lurched upward.

"It was the return of mammals, after all, that eventually produced the modern giants of the sea: whales.

"'You can see in the data, there is this trend to increasing size - but a real kick comes when you have these air-breathers re-entering the water,' Dr Berenbrink told the BBC.

"'Then you have a sort of a step change in size.'

"Breathing air delivers extra oxygen to an animal's tissues, he explained, allowing them to sustain bigger bodies beneath the waves."

Oxygen-delivery systems indeed have to be crucial for animal life on land or in the sea. Fish and their gills simply can't bring in as much oxygen for an energetic large-mass lifestyle as whales and their lungs can. It would be interesting to find out how much whale blood deoxygenates as it flows through the tissues of the largest whales. The duration of movement on one breath for whales is already quite impressive compared to what most land mammals can achieve, so whales probably have some good adaptations for efficient use of oxygen from each breath.
A better analogy would be if an software hacker paid for several starving EE students to come build an amazing Arduino project for their child's science fair, then bragged to everyone about how smart their child is.

Alternatively, imagine Larry Ellison paying for a shitload of comp-sci PhD students to comb through The Art of Programming to look for mistakes, only to submit them under his name so he could get his own cheque from Knuth?

Earnest hobbyism and trying to learn new things is awesome and should be strongly encouraged in everyone. Buying your way to the top and cheapening everyone else's experience is crass and a good way be shunned in almost any social setting.
While a strict interpretation of your statement technically evaluates as true, it’s worth noting that volume, enunciation and tonality can themselves carry information which alters the meaning of your communication.
(Ionic co-creator here): it's great for mobile websites. Most of all because we develop primarily in iOS Safari and Chrome on Android.
Vaccinating the World's Top Predators May Be the Only Way to Save Them
What if it gets sent through a mixer, then sent to an exchange, traded for an alt-coin, that's sent through its own mixer, then sent to a different exchange and traded back, then sent to another mixer? All you need is one link on the chain to not keep logs (which many mixers claim not to anyway), and you've hit a dead end.

Look at Tor. It's never been broken by tracing back each relay, even though there are usually only 3. All the hacks were vulnerabilities in other things, like browsers or websites.
> where the communication ways with politicians would be guaranteed to be equal to everyone, be they a citizen or a corporation or Israel.

So... everyone in America is entitled to about 52 milliseconds a year with each politician? That's how you'd have to split it up to be "equal" (assuming we force politicians to spend an unrealistic 12 hours a day satisfying the requirement to provide "equal" lobbying opportunities).
A SWIFT wire transfer costs $40 a pop and requires me to visit a branch (which is especially hard to do when I'm 10,000 km away from home). It's also much more annoying for the merchant to accept vs. changing one line of code in their Stripe checkout.

Western Union is also expensive and inconvenient (although somewhat less so than the bank).
Windows Defender Removes SuperFish
A massive database now translates news in 65 languages in real time
I believe in my friends year there was a man from Argentina ( = Latino != Mexican)

I personally lived in Monterrey, Mexico for two years. While most of my best friends are Mexican, I would hope that Y combinator would focus on the best ideas and the best teams and NOT where they are born or they would be in danger of loosing their "best status"as other programs would simple get the best possible people.

I think of Basketball where some countries, lets hypothetically pick Switzerland, pick the tallest/best 5 players that are Swiss. Other countries like the US, by comparison, pick the tallest/best 5 players from anywhere they can find them. The USA doesn't have the CONSTRAINT of having to pick just Americans.

I say pick the best from anywhere.
One might similarly say people in wheelchairs have no business seeing the view from a tall building, or that only able-bodied seamen deserve to travel around the world.
The proposed development doesn't expose people to nature any more than a shrub in the middle of a shopping mall does. It is simply trying to convert one of the greatest natural wonders in the world into a cash grab for greedy, short sighted developers.

Preservation of natural beauty like the Grand Canyon is one of the most important functions of government. Allowing this would be a disaster.
Quiet Linear Mechanical Keyboard Switch Designed by the Open Steno Project
Prototype ML/NLP Code Lesson 3: Bayes Theorem
Linux kernel and driver dev lab book (free-electrons.com) [pdf]
A Single Email Can Break Your Android Google Mail App
You're getting far off track here. Regardless of the reason for publishing to NPM, he does so knowing that it will break people's applications. You seem to be suggesting that he owes them nothing; I'm saying he owes them the courtesy not to poke them in their eyes.
I think you're both saying the same thing.
How is that any kind of a defense?
Scientists need to admit the possibility that their theories are wrong, but that cuts both ways. Just because a theory seems untestable today, that does not mean it is guaranteed to be untestable forever.

If a theory is internally consistent and its predictions match known empirical evidence, then the theory is supported by that evidence just as much as any other theory is. That does not provide a reason to prefer it over other theories, but by itself that is not a reason to dismiss it.
Its the "Forever" part that makes me not want to use it as much, because I'm afraid of actually liking it and coming to depend on it, and then it going away. I'd much rather just pay some modest amount and know that I'm contributing to a viable business than hope that the owners have a business plan that works with "Free Forever"
How to solicit feedback from users and make the best possible mobile app
Nor do I -- but I'm pretty sure that those shortcuts are pretty much the only good reason for caring much about having names that resemble CAR/CDR in the way FST/RST do. (For any other purpose, I think FIRST/REST are obviously better than FST/RST.)
Apparently the MBP runs super hot, weakening the solder links to the discrete GPU.

The problem is that there seems to be a design defect either in the chassis, logic board or both. Replacing the logic board basically just resets you to day one. If you're a heavy user, you'll soon encounter the same issue, which is why a lot of people -- myself included -- have had the problem recur.

While I'll be taking advantage of the fix (I can't even boot my Macbook Pro, even the post screen is messed up), I'm hoping they've actually made a fix to the logic board design as opposed to giving me a replacement logic board with the same problematic design.
Win32/CompromisedCert
Do we stop allowing home loans because the majority of those signing them honestly don't most of those clauses? Do we ban cell phone contracts because only 1 in 100 even read what they are signing?

I think that it is a very life altering precedent to say we ban adults from consenting to things because they don't know what they are consenting to. Maybe one that is needed, but it would be far reaching if consistently applied.
It's more like an "Everybody does it, but we got burned first"
I agree that that was the intended formulation of the original question. That doesn't mean it's fair to assume it's what everyone should understand from every (possibly flawed) attempt at restating it. I don't know whether I've seen the precise wording of the version that sparked the controversy, so I don't know how clear it was on the point.
I am preety good at programing, even know assembly. But still its really boggles my mind of how these folks acctualy hack?
Microsoft's AV products now detect and remove Superfish: https://twitter.com/marcwrogers/status/568804376577339392
Strange, the problem occurred on my rMBP 2012 right after I upgraded to Yosemite (literally the same day). I also thought it was more of a software bug, so I downgraded to Mavericks. I still had the issue on Mavericks, so I thought it was a just a coincidence. Also, at that time, Apple wasn't aware of the problem and I wasn't on Apple Care, so they didn't want to test more my laptop. The only option was a straight 600 bucks repair... I still find it really strange that a lot of us had this problem after a software upgrade...
"In Lenovo defense, the crap that is shipped in the default configuration of every modern windows computers makes something like this inevitable."

If only there was some way they could have known what was pre-installed on the machines they're selling. /s
Materials are not good or bad in itself, they have just different properties that are weighted by the 'architect' when choosing a material:

- some more objective (resistance, durability, toxicity, etc)

- some more subjective (costs, fashionability, desirability, commissions.., etc)

In this specific case, the material was imposed, changing the 'game': material comes first than the function and reaching an optimal solution is normally more difficult. Optimal solutions are almost never obvious and while there isn't one, 'architects' use some temporary/obvious solutions like this one.

What constitutes true creativity is the openness and adaptability of our spirit - Robert Green
You can normally special order them from office supply stores. Here's a 10-footer at office depot

http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/686424/Quartet-Melamin...
Thanks Joseph. What we are trying to communicate is that we haven't built a clunky piece of tech on top of WordPress - which is common amongst most site builders. Going to chat to my team about refining that line as we believe it's an important point. Thanks for the comment :)
Cross-Platform Apps Are Valuable, Not Cheap
I think he means the fact that the GW is man-made instead of a natural phenomenon.
Easier to commit the crime and subsequently ask forgiveness from overseers, than to ask permission publicly.
And you're still running the OS that it came with? Even if you want to keep Windows, always reinstall fresh. It's far easier than trying to hunt down every piece of malware they put on it
Underneath this is the simple fact that educational standards in Quebec are disgracefully bad. A frightening proportion of kids never graduate high school either, and making it into McGill is near the upper reaches of achievement for those that do.

This is going to provoke a lot of kneejerk "but it's worse in [x]". No, in the developed world it's probably not. There are lots of dynamics unique to the Quebec situation which allow this to perpetuate.

Edit to add a useful reference:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/dismal-dropout-rates-...

"Last year alone, only 40.6 per cent of the boys followed in the 2007 cohort at the French-language Commission scolaire de Montréal graduated in five years."
How I perform as a sole startup founder
I teach high school, and a colleague of mine went to an education conference a couple weeks ago. She was sitting at a table with three elementary school teachers. They were talking about how to gauge student progress when the students had taken a 100-question test, and a 50-question test. None of the three teachers realized that you had to scale the test scores before making a comparison between the two tests. These teachers thought you could just look at the number of questions the students got correct, and see if the students "score" went up.

My colleague pointed out that the questions on the 50-point test had twice as much weight as the questions on the 100-point test. One of the three other teachers realized their mistake - the other two just chuckled and said it didn't matter.

This isn't just frighteningly ignorant, it ends up having a devastating impact on many young people. One anecdote: I knew a bright young student who loved learning, but hated school. Why? He took algebra and french in 8th grade; he passed algebra and failed french. When he got to 9th grade he was placed in algebra again, and french 2. The school would not budge from its original placement; I don't know the rationale. He failed algebra because he refused to do any homework, and failed french because he couldn't make any sense of the class. I want smart teachers to take control of education so this s* doesn't happen nearly as often as it does.

Also, I've taught middle and high school math for 20 years now, mostly to students who struggle with math. I don't think I've had many groups of students who could come up with six different answers for a simple average problem.
I'm sorry you feel that way Joe.

The Room Owners have felt for a while now that it can sometimes get out of hand, that's why we had this discussion in our Room Meeting. As davidism has mentioned, we've put some extra guidelines down now. The main one being that unless it's necessary (something like spam, offensive, dupe, etc, where the OP isn't going to be able to improve the post) we're adding a 10 minute "grace period" before requesting a cv-pls. This gives OPs the chance to edit their question, to respond to comments, etc.

I disagree with a few of your points, but I'm not really interested in getting drawn into a debate here. If you want to discuss it further then drop by chat.

I know you've come into the room in the past to ask/speak about some particular cv-pls. If, in the future, you have anything to bring up, come and speak to us.
Little Known Fun Facts About George Washington
The time period where Superfish was included was a relatively small chunk of 2014, so you may not be impacted.

A good general guideline when buying an off-shelf Windows machine is to do a full wipe first. There may be some manufacturers who are immune to this, but assume everyone's included some bloatware. I find too many people who buy Windows machines start by attempting to manually remove this stuff, which is often a hopeless proposition. Clean wipe, reinstallation.

This isn't the reason why most startups/devs have moved to Apple, but it sure helps.
This guide seems woefully incomplete and optimistic. No coverage of submodule merge conflicts? No describing how to checkout a revision before the submodule was added or after it was removed, or how to bisect a project with submodules? No warnings about accidentally abandoning commits on submodules? (maybe: don't edit files in a submodule and for pity's sake never commit to one without immediately pushing?) Should also probably cover what your whole team must do when a submodule moves or gets renamed upstream.

Also, you might want to mention how git status is affected by submodules (& diff, log, etc).

Finally, I'm not sure you should make --init --recursive the default. If you don't realize a project contains submodules, you're going to make mistakes.
Start with simple concept like SQL injection or XSS. And keep thinking about how you can use your code in a bad way. Check my blog too - homakov.blogspot.com
nice try FBI.
I don't think a single server can do its task in just 5 GiB (48 GiB/9)
I warned all my friends and colleagues who use Lenovos, and their answers were all the same. "Who'd be crazy enough to use the default install? First thing I did was (a fresh reinstall of Windows|install Linux)."

(Edit: Obviously this is not representative of the general population, and I didn't mean to suggest it was. I was just noting that my efforts to warn people about the untrustworthiness of Lenovo were thwarted because none of them trusted Lenovo to begin with, not for software at least, and that seemed interesting.)
I always wondered if HSMs are at risk to be compromised at the core (read: the manufacturer) such as those frome SafeNet (in use e.g. with Box.com on their enterprise external HSM plan).

And guess what, Gemalto merged with SafeNet the other day.

http://www.safenet-inc.com/SafeNet-Gemalto-Merger/

Everything is compromised. Everything!

References:

https://www.box.com/blog/breaking-the-last-barrier-to-cloud-...

http://www.safenet-inc.com/data-encryption/hardware-security...
> I imagine that there could be an infinite number of such theories, if you are creative (and good at math) enough.

Really? This seems like a pretty significant thing to imagine.
U.S. Marshalls Announce Auction of 50,000 Bitcoins Seized from Silk Road Creator
> Enterprise seems to not fit with the Heroku brand.

Heroku aka Salesforce?
> Possibly because implementation will be delayed until the government who sign the agreement have left office,

I don't get it, why would the next government be any more eager to implement the proposals? Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't these sorts of agreements broken all the time because signors couldn't get the necessary laws passed?
What Influenced the Careers of Top Developers Early On?
In high school, every Monday my geology teacher Mr. Weinle would show slides from a national park he visited. One of them -- I don't remember which -- had an asphalt sidewalk running through it. He said "I was mad as hell when I saw this. This is nature! You should protect it!"

Then he switched slides to the next picture he took: it showed a man with leg braces walking through the park. He held up his fingers and said "at this point I felt about this tall."

These parks don't just exist in a vacuum. They exist so that people can enjoy them.

I'm not necessarily endorsing this modification to the Grand Canyon. There is value in preserving it for the future as is, and there is also value in making it accessible. It's a trade-off. Some parks -- and I don't just mean the flat ones, since the amazing geology generally happens where there is significant vertical distance involved -- should be accessible even to those with special needs. Maybe enough are already. Maybe not.
That's semver doing the job people wish it were designed for, not semver doing the job it was designed for.

If it broke actual user code, then it MUST be a major version bump: "Bug fixes not affecting the API increment the patch version, backwards compatible API additions/changes increment the minor version, and backwards incompatible API changes increment the major version." The idea with semver is that you can ask for 1.2.0 or any greater 1.x.y, and your app will still work. This was broken.

Maybe there's an argument that the break didn't matter that much, but it's still a spec violation. Which is why you get a bunch of annoyed people who care deeply about ABI compatibility, when asked to switch to semver, saying, "Do you really want me to release version 172.0.0?" If the rule is, bump major versions when the project maintainers think it matters, bump minor versions when they think it matters less, bump patch versions when they're pretty sure it doesn't matter, that's exactly what gets derided as "Sentimental Versioning" (http://sentimentalversioning.org/), just dressed up as semver, which is more harmful.

If you've got to pay attention to every release's changelog and run regression tests anyway, just in case the package maintainers disagree about what's important enough for a major version bump, then you have version lock problems anyway. If semver is just guidelines and not a spec, then it should make that clear.
A Hard Lesson About Planning for Scale
So basically, us people sre losing out to macho posturing between large countries that refuse to get along.
Is it a Thinkpad, or a consumer model? The Thinkpads were never involved in this.
I was under the impression that Lenovo supplies a lot of computers to government and enterprise contracts around the world. Was Superfish only installed on consumer oriented devices, like the ones typically found at Best Buy? I realize most large enterprise would re-image their computers before deployment. I'm shocked that Lenovo would release such a statement. The damage to its credibility is significant.
Send Mass Text Alerts to Your Group
The main points of it is that it increases arousal so it is much easier to focus on what is important right now (fight or flight state, you don't zone out if there is an angry bear in front of you).

The side effects comes from the increased arousal as well, for me it means my heart rate increased from 60 bpm to 80, I sleep 1 hour less per night and it is easier to miss meals so I have lost some weight. I have tried several other forms of psychoactive medications before and this have the least negatives and most positives so far.
Microsoft is currently doing Lenovo's work for them: https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/568800260111388672

The latest version of Windows Defender is actively removing the Superfish software and the cert.

The text of the definition is here: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=us7iXvkn
You live in a bubble. There are plenty of people who use Lenovo products that are not tech people. By saying this, even though you don't intend to, you are minimizing the effect of this and being an apologist for lenovo.
Search and view the latest instagram pics everywhere in the world through a map
I respect the design descisions that Scala made, but I don't find the syntax to be very clear or intuitive.
In Finland, graduate schools of Education admit students only from the top 10% of college graduates.[1]

In the US, nearly half of all new teachers come from the bottom third of college graduates.[2]

Evidently, Canada is more like the US than Finland.

Depressing.

--

[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands...

[2] http://www.mckinseyonsociety.com/downloads/reports/Education...
Before we get too smug, don't let the education majors challenge you to a writing contest :-)

A few years after I finished my BS in Comp Sci, I took both the GRE and the CBEST (California teaching test). The percentile ranking skew between the two populations was interesting.

A 98th percentile ranking in "verbal" in the engineering group only put me at the 50th percentile ranking in writing in the teaching group.

(OTOH, I was at the 99th percentile in math in the teaching group, but I had a reasonably high score at math in the GRE as well)
Algorithm Generated Song (from NYC income data)