skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But there's a problem with that analogy: law enforcement is allowed to speed in order to catch up with speeding vehicles only because that reduces the total amount of vehicles speeding (which both sounds contradictory and should be obvious). Flying a drone over a crowd of people does nothing to reduce the number of drones flying over crowds.

A better analogy would be that law enforcement is allowed to speed in order to reach the scene of a crime faster. One could argue that having a drone hover over a potential crime scene has similar benefits. I'm not sure about the costs and benefits in this case, but it's certainly a possible argument.
Not to me. It sounds like they want people who have a wide variety of shallow-ish knowledge (but still an actual understanding of whatever area it is), while also having very deep knowledge in one or two areas in particular.

> It also makes me wonder about their ability to manage people with different skill levels and areas of expertise. And of course, having used Steam, I'm not at all surprised.

Weird that that's the conclusion you come to. Valve is an incredibly successful company with over a billion dollars in the bank. They've produced some of the most influential games of the past two decades (Half-life, Counter Strike, TF2, Left 4 Dead, Portal, DoTA2... it's actually hard to name them all).
fwiw - appexpress.io - shows me almost nothing. I can’t even see what types of application components you have available or how they could be utilized…
I like your example quite a bit, but to make a side point:

Do you really think it might be hard for guys to believe?

I absolutely don't. There is a tiny loud minority that might argue this disingenuously but even they don't actually believe it, they are just engaged in a political battle in an attempt to protect themselves from a perceived potential threat. Or they fully endorse identity politics and feel they need to do some PR for their "side".

Everyone knows this happens, the issues are specific facts in individual cases and the prevalence overall. This rhetorical technique is consciously being used to avoid the actually issue as it's messy and difficult.
A reasonable near-term goal is to get OpenWorm [1] to work well in simulation. That's the simplest known organism with a system of neurons, and the connections have been fully mapped out. Until that works, there's little point in trying anything more complex.

The "the next step is the human brain" people have a poor track record. Rodney Brooks tried that once. He'd done a good reactive-controller insect, and then immediately tried to jump to human-brain level with Cog.[2] When he gave a talk at Stanford proposing Cog some years ago, I asked him "Why not try for a mouse next? That might be within reach." He said "I don't want to go down in history as the man who created the world's best artificial mouse". Cog was an embarrassing failure.

The Human Brain Project should be put on hold until OpenWorm works and that technology has been advanced to at least the lizard level. The Human Brain Project is likely to turn into an expensive supercomputer boondoggle.

[1] http://www.openworm.org/
[2] http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/c...
Inter-Exo
Why I Rented My Car to Strangers for 30 Days Using Y Combinator Backed FlightCar
This seems to be the original discussion.

http://jasonrudolph.com/blog/2011/08/09/programming-achievem...
How Big Can Quantum Weirdness Get?
When I started programming I was pretty bad at it. I didn't get good until I focused on "really" learning perl. I mastered perl fairly well quite a few years ago.

At some point I was no longer learning anything from perl and I tackled something different. Erlang was my next deep dive.

What Rich is saying has less to do with how many languages you've absorbed whether a lot or a few. What he is saying is that leveling up requires taking the time to truly absorb and understand what you are working with.

I'm fairly polyglot these days. But the number of languages that I know deeply is less probably about 3. With the time spent learning them measured in years not months.

Peter Norvig is actually saying something similar. He's advocating a slightly different route to the same goal. Learn the foundations of programming deeply. The 4 broad categories he lists are foundations of programming that any developer needs to learn deeply.

Both Rich and Peter advise investing the time to learn something thoroughly. They just came at it from slightly different directions. I imagine they would agree with each other though.
Routing on OpenStreetMap.org
I guess the point is that discussions like the linked github issue (https://github.com/igorw/retry/issues/3) should be over after 2 comments, not after a 196 comment flamewar. If we criticise some programming technique we should first ask ourselves if that technique is actually harmful in that context.

And then there's of course the greater narrative about the state of the industry, people chasing easy mantras instead of computer science, programmers ignorant of programming history, cargo cult programming etc.
We have to implement the rest of the core library, and we have to implement a lot of the standard library as well. That's a huge task with thousands of methods, but we're using the code from Rubinius for a lot of it and making good progress, so we hope to be able to run some of the simpler web frameworks by RubyConf this year. It may be another year beyond that before I recommend anyone uses it, or it may be sooner.
This is me. I do love it.
RefreshBox is trending on PH, check us out
I simply did:

sleep 5; while true; do xdotool click 4; sleep 0.01; done

(The sleep 5 at the beginning is to have time to switch to a different window and put it fullscreen.)
> The industrial revolution was the same as other technological revolutions and not distinct from them in that it reduced the exertion and strain put on workers. The industrial revolution gets a really bad rap, but compared to the work and life expectancy that preceded it, the condition of workers improved dramatically in the 19th century.

I think that is a bit over-enthusiastic. Life was extremely tough for the new industrial workers. I think if you look at measures of health/nutrition like BMI and height, they are static or even slightly declining throughout the 19th century. In the UK it's only after 1910/1920 that you start seeing dramatic increases (that's about the time of the introduction of old age pension, and when the Labour movement started to gain serious traction).
I completely agree, unfortunately. Still fighting not to get Mac for my job (programmer). But I don't know for how long.
Those were mods, and the decided to hire these ppl AFTER they've become successful.
The Importance of Face-To-Face Meetings in a Tech Crazy World
Glassed-in DNA makes the ultimate time capsule
Recipients of a basic income would still be able to work and improve their situation.
Do I understand you right, that you should add something to the user-generated usernames? This seems like something that would be rejected by users to me.
Uh no they don't. Developers do.
Interstellar's fake black holes are helping actual scientific research
Assuming it is, in fact, actually experiencing life, and not just appearing to be.

But if it is, imagine what happens when, in 50 years, it becomes cheap to reproduce. Any bozo can get a copy of it. The potential for mistreatment is beyond anything seen yet on Earth, as bad as that's been so far. Check out the Christmas special of Black Mirror, for just one example.
I love all those phone numbers.
I've never felt it was particularly difficult to swim in the sea. I wonder why that is.

Two reasons come to mind:

1) Since I was a kid, sea-side vacations in the summer were common-place to the point that I actually learned how to swim in the sea. I still remember how surprised I was at the difficulty of swimming in a pool where you are much less buoyant. No salt in the water and all that.

And 2) Maybe I just haven't swam in choppy enough water. But I do remember that when waves are a certain height above your head, having a surfboard at hand suddenly makes life so much easier. Although even then I didn't feel a particular propensity to inhaling water.

edit:

3) I learned several techniques for swimming in place and resting when you're tired. If push comes to shove, you can also just lay on the water pretty much indefinitely. This one doesn't work if the water is too choppy though.

4) I probably haven't swam in a super cold sea yet. Think the coldest I've done without a wetsuit was Monterey Bay last summer where I managed to skinny dip for some half an hour or so.
Gamamia – Find, Share, and Discuss Indie Games
With minor changes, much of this post could have been written before iPod about mp3 players, or before iPhone about smartphones: the competitors have launched things in this space for years, the products are (from a technically savvy reviewer's perspective) neat and work fine, but Apple is ignoring the competition with no sense of urgency, etc.

Based on those historical examples, here's a likely outcome: Apple takes its time getting all the branding ducks in a row, so that a bunch of people with disposable income do buy the product; after which, the fandom of that product will rewrite history to say that nothing comparable existed before because none of the competitors cared enough about design and user experience.

Or some other euphemism for the fact that like everyone else, they bought it because of the feelings it gave them to entertain buying it. Apple is the master of the unboxing video, the implication of what buying their products means about you. Jony Ive doesn't have to do anything except be Jony Ive (why do I know his name again? Not because of design)
E-Commerce and Machine Learning
I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. It's bloody obvious when your hand is on a breast. It doesn't tend to happen by accident, and if it does, the usual reaction is to pull the hand away suddenly and profusely apologize.

I'm not sure what kind of accidental contact you're referring to, but if your hands are frequently coming into contact with breasts by mistake then you need to sit down with some trusted friends and discuss this issue. I assure you that accidental hand contact is not common. This is body language/physical contact 101, and it's something you need to address.

Note that I am not usually this strident in Hacker News comments.
Yanis Varoufakis: No Time for Games in Europe
But if the author didn't "thought experiment" about that, how else would he bait you into clicking...
I stopped reading sam altman's blog after he equated Purchasing Power Parity as a measurement that China has surpassed United States' economy.
> Why should anyone ever be put in such a position where they even have to think of saying something like that? Your entire framing of the situation is exactly why it is a cultural issue.

IMO, saying "it's a culture issue" is just wishful thinking, based on an assumption that there can ever exist a culture where all members are completely conformist and nobody is a "jerk". In reality, people will be selfish, and you will be put into positions where you need to stand your ground (in some way). The only thing that "culture" can do is exactly this - call out the jerks (in person or online), and other members of the "culture" agreeing that the behaviour is shitty.

> Why is it "worth exploring" potentially discrediting aspects of the victim's stories, but not worth exploring the events that lead up to the story with good faith interpretations?

I didn't say that. I just said that it's worth exploring both.
You keep referring to only a single use case of iBeacon - retail & shopping. This is the biggest market for beacons and retailers surely will use beacons to gather data. But so does Amazon, and I'd say that more people like Amazon because of offering products they're likely to buy, than hate them because they store their shopping history.

Anyway, there are lots of other uses of beacons. In other cases, no one claims you're getting anything for free. When it comes to dining apps: if they deliver great experience, restaurants will be more likely to use them to keep more clients coming. If Robin's smart office software works well, you will pay them to use it, because they're a SaaS company. If a museum's app makes an exhibition much more entertaining, you'll come back to see the next one. There is no 'hidden fee' anywhere: they use your location data to improve their services. Surely there will be violators, who want to take advantage of this data without offering value in return, but iBeacon is opt-in by design: you need to download the app and give it permission to access your location. What's the chance you will keep using an app that isn't useful and violates your privacy?

Basically, it's a bit like with Uber: yeah, you do share your location. And thanks to that, Uber leverages users' data to adjust fare rates and number of contractors, optimizing their business. But your benefit is clear - you get a great service, much better than huge majority of taxi corporations.

As for advertising: from what I've seen, beacon vendors are pretty visible in AdSense and do a ton of retargeting. We do at Estimote, I've also seen banners from Radius Networks, Kontakt.io, Urban Airship, and at least a couple of others. But I've seen their pages a bajilion times, so that makes me a good target for the ads :) There was also a lot of press about beacons in the last few months, especially with Facebook and Groupon entering the space with their pilots.

Cheers.
I went to a pretty good school in the 90s, but didn't go to university. I would say that they left me with the mental tools to realise that I couldn't evaluate science on my own. If I hadn't received any education, I might be more confident in believing any old rubbish. Instead, I hear the words of my science teachers talking about testable hypotheses.

I believe that education has improved. My parents both quit school before the age of 16. My Mum was taught mostly how to sew, cook and use a typewriter. My Dad did well enough in science, but my grandparents couldn't afford for him to go to college after 16. When I hear the 'education has got worse' argument, I believe that the average pleb today doesn't receive as good an education as a rich joe 50 years ago, but overall the system is much better.
Part of the problem is that we all live in echo chambers that tell us what we want to hear. If I believe that grass is blue, then I live in a neighbourhood of people that believe grass is blue, and all my friends are thus people who believe grass is blue. I watch news that says grass is blue. My Facebook and Twitter feeds frequently show updates that prove grass is blue, and rarely show anything to the contrary other than to scorn it. All these reasonable people that I love and trust all agree that grass is blue. I'm a reasonable person. So if I meet someone who says grass is not blue, my immediate assumption is that they're a wacko, unreasonable, not to be trusted.

It kind of makes total sense. If you don't do this, you start questioning everything, and it's really stressful. You start to become 'that guy', nobody wants to spend time with you because you're so disagreeable, and you prevaricate on every decision. So you simplify the world by limiting your inputs to those that agree with you. For example, "Should I get my child vaccinated? I've read 3 books for, 3 against, asked doctors and health advisors I found on Google, and talked about it on multiple forums. Opinion seems divided. " vs "I know I should get my child vaccinated, because everyone on Hacker News says so."

At some point, the answer is to have trusted in-person relationships. As I said, I believe in vaccinations because I know our doctor quite well. I know he's not a quack, and he says vaccinations are a good thing, and so I believe him. Similarly, if I want to get some good beef, I go to our local butcher who knows my name. I trust him not to sell me horsemeat, in a way that I don't trust a big supermarket chain. There's no way for me to guarantee that either the doctor or the butcher are right, but it feels a more certain way than trusting /r/cleverusername on Reddit. How do you sort the wheat from the chaff in a society of billions?

I often recollect Aristotle's comment that "it is difficult - perhaps impossible – for a city that is too populous to be well managed". At some point, large societies seem to eat themselves, and the result is a lack of trust in everything around you.
>The point of research is to gain knowledge and not to make money.

Hahahahahahaha.

Joke aside, I haven't seen "science just for the sake of science" ever.
I would generally agree, even for a fairly limited definition of AI. An aside: IIRC, what you're laying out is the "history" of the Dune universe (and I'm sure many others).

I think that computation <i>tends</i> to replace <i>relatively</i> unskilled labor, relative to the skill of whatever created the AI/algorithm/whatever. So right now we're in a situation where software people are automating jobs which are generally less skilled than their own. Which is a little scary when viewed from the haves/have-not perspective I laid out above, but is much scarier from the AI/meatbag perspective you're talking about. It's not so much a difference between skilled & unskilled labor as it is a question of where on the skill totem pole the algorithm's creator resides.

Regarding order pickers, I think that's just a question of economics. When lots of semi-skilled jobs have been automated away and you have thousands of people clamoring for any chance to be paid, it is frequently cheaper to have them do the work than to have a robot do it. Although Amazon did have robots pick orders this last holiday season, suggesting that perhaps economies of scale have finally caught up on that particular type of manual labor:

http://time.com/3605924/amazon-robots/
The update confirms it is the NSA.

It is incredible, even the most generous estimation of the NSA's capabilities before the Snowden disclosures now look conservative. This is the stuff conspiracy theories are made of.
A poor man's named data networking and distributed deduplication.
How Big Data Is Like Dumplings
And also apparently sign a petition and sign up for some sort of mailing list (most likely).
Lump of labour fallacy
Empirical study: “goto does not appear to be harmful in practice”
On the topic of branded alcohol and mixed drinks, I got interested in the rise of both a ways back and did some digging, much of it by way of the Google Books ngrams viewer.

The part that wasn't particularly surprising was that mixed drinks and cocktails, along with associated terms ("cocktail hour", "cocktail party") largely date to U.S. Prohibition, when bootleg (and low-quality) hard liquor had to be mixed with other ingredients to become drinkable: http://goo.gl/EBXM87

What was more surprising was that the vast majority of branded alcohols dated to no earlier than the 1950s. Baccardi Rum is a notable exception showing up in the 1920s (http://goo.gl/it9vOc)

Schmirnoff: 1950, on the nose: http://goo.gl/j0yle3 http://goo.gl/YxXJ9i

Remy Martin, Beefeater, Gordon's, and Bombay Gin: 1950s: http://goo.gl/qX6JEY

That "traditional old Number 7" Jack Daniels? 1970s: http://goo.gl/JWVLG6

And an "Irish pub" is really a 1990s phenomenon: http://goo.gl/vLwvTn

And if you look at many of today's "trendy" brands, most are creations of the 1980s, 1990s, or later: https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120306152857A...

"Mixology" itself -- also largely a creation of the past 20 years: http://goo.gl/1hVsEU

And whiskey, the American version at least, was largely created to allow movement of an otherwise unusable product -- frontier grain -- to the population centres of the East Coast.

Your "sophisticated drinks" are an ad-man's creation.
My Startup Made 200k in Its First 2 Months. And I'm Embarassed
Great article, but I wonder if Meyer signed off on the title's clumsy metaphor. Sampling a noise signature and feeding the profile back into a room is nothing like any Photoshop application process I know of. Besides, if we're talking about retouching, then isn't it pretty common knowledge that professionals now use Lightroom?
I was doing laps in college one time when an ROTC class was practicing this. At the same time they were learning how to use their M16s(or something in the family) while swimming.
Hit "<esc> k", then it's like vi, k/j to go up down the history buffer, l/h to move right and left (and of course, w, b, fx etc...), cx/dx/ etc... to change/delete (x if a movement command) etc...

"<esc> /pattern" to search back in the history buffer

The only tricky one for bash is "<esc> =" for file completion.
Show HN: Calc – A fast and intuitive command-line calculator written in Go
I love how much it feels like the MacBook keyboard so there's a consistent typing experience when I'm using my computer at a desk or in my lap.
> If anyone trusted is a bad actor and gives you a bad blockchain, you are not in consensus, thus any system using this cannot be considered a consensus system.

If anyone trusted is a bad actor and gives you a bad [BITCOIN WALLET CLIENT], you are not in consensus, thus [BITCOIN] cannot be considered a consensus system.
Interesting. What algorithm is this using to make recommendations?

If you're not already, you should consider an algorithm that places less weight on more commonly used tools; right now, a huge number of people add "git", for instance, so it shouldn't carry much weight when looking for similar people and recommended tools.

This could also use a "not interested" or "actively don't like/want this", to filter out unwanted recommendations.

Looks like there are two copies of "Google Chrome".
Post everywhere! Let everyone know you are trying to freelance.

Go to meetups and meet other freelancers.

The larger your network, the better you will do.
To be fair to Microsoft, they are fighting these requests, especially when it comes to requests outside US jurisdiction: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-court-us-warrants-don...
They also haven't put out an entirely in-house game since the Orange Box.

The management failures at Valve have been pretty spectacular, and expensive, of late, it's just that because they are a private company, and because Steam makes all of the money, they can continue to have large expensive failures like the VR or the Steambox until doomsday.

Valve is not other companies, and their position is such that it's not advisable to take any too serious advice from how they run things into the real world.
Cuba is top country searching GNU/Linux, followed by China
Well grammar causes pain if set different than integral to your determination. Irrelevant, if strictured.
Pi Top: The 3D Printable Raspberry Pi Laptop Anyone Can Build
Why Africa may be on the verge of an Internet boom-featuring Nigeria
Private Mars One Colony Project Cuts Applicant Pool to 100 Volunteers
It seems like cost should at least be mentioned.

It may not be the sort of thing your average SF tech worker can relate to, but for many Americans the choice between a $10-$20 mixed drink and a $2 double shot of a well liquor (with more ethanol than the mixed drink) is no choice at all.
Webpage to PDF Generator
> they want people who have a wide variety of shallow-ish knowledge (but still an actual understanding of whatever area it is), while also having very deep knowledge in one or two areas in particular

Sure; every employer does. But it's dodging the more interesting question, which is: faced with one candidate who has broad but shallow knowledge and another who has deep but narrow knowledge, which do you pick?
Sorry I wasn't trying to draw a perfect analogy, but rather think about the fact that there are things law enforcement are able to do because of special training which is unavailable to the general public.

I imagine this would be extend to drone use for law enforcement - they will have certain exceptions to do things the general public cannot in special circumstances and will also likely have special training available to them which is also not available to the general public.