skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of this thread, to me, has analogies to modern music. Its WAY easier to record music these days than it was 30-40 years ago (20 even?) but progressively, the easier it has become to record music through the use of technology the less interesting music has become overall.

As is the case with CGI. The easier it is to render a scene the less interesting that scene seems to become in many cases.

At least with the film industry, they tend to overuse new technologies/techniques until they learn how to use it properly and then it just becomes another tool in the film makers toolkit.
> You're thinking of mutual funds. Hedge funds as a class do outperform the market, even after fees.

False. Lousy studies of hedge funds show they outperform, but the second you take into account survivor bias, the opposite is true. There have been huge numbers of terrible hedge funds created and liquidated that swamp the few successful ones that everybody hears about.
> Whereas you repeatedly stated how 70 million people is a huge number in itself.

I haven't claimed that at all. I've said over and over that context indicates whether it's important.

> Whereas you repeatedly stated how 70 million people is a huge number in itself.

No, I've said 70 million people is a lot in terms of medical and social policy. It would be very possible, for example, for 1% of people to account for 10% of medical expenses--an amount you would probably care about at tax time. I think that's a number that matters to almost anyone's political goals.

In contrast, you've been repeatedly stating how 1% is not a large number. Based on what?

> E.g. If I told you there are 70 million people that have blue eyes, is that "a huge number?" No, it's actually a small number. One would expect blue-eyed people to be in the 100s of millions or billions.

Science doesn't give a shit about your expectations. "Expectations" are entirely irrelevant to whether a number is big or little. A number is big or little depending on what effects it causes and what effects you're trying to achieve.

You're accusing me of arguing that 70 million is inherently a large number, but you're arguing that 70 million is inherently a small number, completely arbitrarily. I'm not even saying 70 million people is a big or small number inherently, I'm saying that 70 million people is a huge number when the properties of that group have medical and social implications. 70 million blue-eyed people isn't a small or large number, it's an irrelevant number, because whether or not someone's eyes are blue has almost no implication that I care about. If you understand why it's not a big or small number, but an irrelevant number, you'll understand my point.
Minor remark: one major selling point of (some) hedge funds is low correlation with other investments, not huge returns.
Hedge funds do indeed underperform the market: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-12-13/hedge-funds-underpe...

Same with mutual funds. With both mutual funds and hedge funds, investors are paying a ton of money for nonexistent skill.
This is wrong. Whether "host reveals car" leads to win, loss, or replay, once you are faced with the choice the odds are 50/50 if the host picked randomly.
We may also have super tiny lens free cameras that avoid these issues entirely: www.technologyreview.com/news/525731/lens-free-camera-sees-things-differently/
In a somewhat related issue, many of these financial firms will recruit top science & engineering talent at competitive universities. In some sense, it would have been better if these people had just studied finance to begin with since that would have opened a spot for someone who really wanted to practice science and engineering as a profession.
What's up with the "pure" keyword? Has someone managed to work on this area so that the default is pure, and the opt-in keyword is "impure" instead?
If society wants this to change then the answer is to stop treating schools as a free baby-sitting service, allowing both parents to go out to work and contribute to a nation's GDP, and start treating schools as an investment in a nation's future.

I think society is getting exactly what it wants: free baby-sitting service. I imagine that most teachers chose their profession because they want to educate, inspire and shape young minds. But it seems like the primary expectation is that they keep children safe and occupied during the work day. It seems reasonable that smaller class sizes would allow teachers to connect with more students, but that would involve structural and logistical changes beyond just hiring more teachers. It would be very expensive, but entirely possible for most countries to do. There is a perception that the primary purpose of school is 'education', but people vote with their dollars and effective teaching seems to lose out to baby sitting every time.

This might be because the function of managing children is more beneficial to society than rigorously educating them is. Allowing both parents to work may contribute more to a nation's GDP than giving as many children as possible a very thorough education. I don't know of any studies on this topic in particular, in part because it seems to be a bit taboo to question the value of a traditional education. But it's entirely possible that we should be spending less money on primary and secondary school education and more money on things that will make life easier for parents. It certainly doesn't seem likely that this will ever be seriously considered, but the question of what it means to "fail" our children is one that we should keep bringing up.
Agreed, but this is true in any of their countries. Content licensing really gets in their way.
Winning moments of truth

We strive to win more of our members’ “moments of truth”.

Those decision points are, say, at 7:15 pm when a member wants to relax, enjoy a shared experience with friends and family, or is bored.

They could play a video game, surf the web, read a magazine, channel surf their MVPD/DVR system, buy a pay-per-view movie, put on a DVD, use a piracy service, turn on Hulu, or launch Netflix.

We want our members to choose Netflix in these moments of truth.

---------------------------------------------------

This nails it. When I get home (especially if I had a long day at work), I first go to Netflix and see what's on my list. This is because Netflix app is beautiful, it always works and they have my list of things to watch. As someone who loves to watch documentaries, I am happy with the selection that Netflix offers.

If I don't like anything on the list, I just watch an old Friends or Breaking Bad episode.

I think Netflix has absolutely nailed the user experience and depending on your taste/location, their selection is great as well.
Let's not get too hyperbolic here. Lenovo compromised user security for profit. There should be consequences for such gross misconduct.
Show HN: I built a Twitterbot to post Peter Kim's XSS payloads (walkthrough)
> The identities of the speaker and audience are part of context.

I cannot in general assume that information on the internet.
Those are pretty reasonable rules for "startups" too.
So, you using it seems like validation that this is a good contribution?
> Which is nothing this thread of discussion was about.

> Nobody said not to study or legally hep those people.

> Just that 1% is not enough to describe the total of cases as a "spectrum".

Assuming that your medical and social policies are at all data-driven, failure to include people in your data is a guaranteed way to ensure that they are not studied or legally helped.
Can you clarify what you mean? How does a curve cause a 95% to get scaled down to a 43% failing grade?
> Why would you think the host has the option of not opening a door?

Because the actual TV show of Let's Make A Deal worked that way. Here is Monty's own take on it (click to page 2.) http://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/21/us/behind-monty-hall-s-doo...

This is the source of all the confusion from vos Savant's original column. vos Savant got the math right for her version of the problem where the host always opens a door, but that isn't how the show worked. She presented a simplified "spherical frictionless cows" version of the problem.

The actual show did not compel Monty with any rules on opening doors. He had free rein to do whatever he wanted. He could reveal an incorrect guess right away with no opportunity to switch. He could and would offer the contestant cash to switch or not switch. Monty could try anything to trick or bluff or deceive the contestant, all for the sake of producing entertaining television.

Of course, there is no correct mathematical answer at all to a game of bluffing and outwitting. At best you might find a Nash equilibrium in game theory, but even that is hard to pin down. You need to know Monty's tendencies precisely, but even that is hard when his goal isn't to maximize expected value but to produce entertainment.
The one I linked? Yes. Did you? What did I misrepresent, exactly?
I've never had any issues at all when it was supported. If anything, lack of motivation to update POS terminals has been the only thing keeping me from using it at more than the handful of stores I regularly visit where it's available.

Just tap, type PIN, receipt scrolls up the screen of my phone when it goes through and I get an email copy.

Interestingly enough, it was actually supported at more of the places I visited until the Apple version came out and brought increased attention to the concept...prompting many vendors to block it and try to push their own inferior solution.

I really wish that crap would stop. There's already a fairly compatible standard option that is working with both Apple and Google offerings (who would have thought!?) and offers the added convenience and security these setups provide. And rather than make a better app or gizmo that also works with the existing setup and competes on features or usefulness, they just block the competition before customers have a chance to start expecting them to work.
YES!! And on top of that, I don't want an app for every damn site that I visit. I hate that! I go to a website and the first thing that I see is "DOWNLOAD OUR MOBILE APP!" usually gets me mad and, if I can choose, I go elsewhere!
Rust used to work that way several years ago, but it proved too inconvenient and was removed.
I've tutored kids in math for quite a long time now. I get a lot of homeschooled kids who I'm tutoring because they know more math than their parents and the math is getting too difficult to learn only from a book. Of course, there is some self-selection involved -- they are from families that would seek out tutoring, etc...

As a group, I have to say they are the most mature, well adjusted high schoolers I've known. Virtually all of them schedule the tutoring sessions themselves. They are self managing and self directed.

I've never heard horror stories of socialization from people who homeschooled. It's always people who haven't homeschooled their kids and quite often people with an axe to grind against them (people employed by public schools).

Most towns have homeschooling groups where kids meet each other for common lessons. They will have greater flexibility in schedule to meet a wide variety of kids and adults outside of a small group of kids their age and the teacher. Most importantly, I've found they have learned to interact with adults as people, where not every adult interaction involves the adult telling them what to do.

Over the years, I've known a lot who have transitioned to public high schools due to the variety and depth of course material being beyond the parents ability. I've known of no problems. These kids are probably better equipped to navigate high school than the average incoming freshman.

I send my kids to a great public school, but if I had the resources, I'd definitely consider homeschooling and wouldn't give socialization a second thought.
Probably the same sort of strategies that would narrow the pay gap between males and females and make post-college salaries more gender neutral.

Using your child as an anecdote makes it just that - an anecdote. I teach male students who are forced to engage in 2 hours of Physical Education every week, and have to endure failure after failure in the subject.

As I said in my initial comment, if we want boys, or any group, to succeed we need to be tailoring our lessons to those students. Resources are finite however, and this is the real issue.
Chrome needs 30MB to constantly listen for me MAYBE someday saying “OK Google?”
True, May be Google is still stuck in old ways of Internet. When early adopters drove the adaption. But Internet, specially Web has become too mainstream and there is a lot of noise. So being dependent on just early adopters might not cut it.
It needs to have a Growth-Hacker type mindset.
The economist article makes it seem like there's a lot of rigorous empirical evidence behind this result, but it is a fundamentally theoretical result.

Basically, the authors come up with a toy model that, given a long list of assumptions, produces the reported result.

They then test these results by running a simple cross-country regression with no time dimension and a sample size of around 300.

I don't place much stock in these kinds of studies. Empirically speaking, there are just too many confounds in cross-country studies for them to be convincing. Theoretically speaking, the assumptions are highly unrealistic for all the reasons that have been said before. With a little bit of ingenuity, these models can be made to say just about anything.
What annoys me is when it is treated as a money issue. The US spends more per student than any other country, and among the most as a % of GDP (7.3%) well above the average of industrialized countries of 6.3% -- there are countries that spend more (Denmark, 8%) but not in absolute terms, only as a % of GDP. We spend upwards of $15,000+ per student per year and still can't get the job done.

This pervasive myth that it is a "not enough money in the system" does a great disservice to everyone involved and means we never discuss the REAL issue. There is tons of money, but the systematic problems are immune to money -- we could double spending and it wouldn't fix the issues. Parents don't care, teachers are protected by a powerful union so they don't care... student are treated as "must move" assets, standardized testing is held up as the be all, end all of measuring progress.

Instead of continuing to throw money down a blackhole that seems to not generate better outcomes, maybe it is time to rethink our approach... or admit that schools are tiny people prisons and useful filters and have very little to do with educating children, and more to do with segmenting and ranking them (which is useful, but can be done far more cheaply).
Agreed. I cannot agree more.
I similarly build a system using the routing capabilities of pgRouting with OSM. While the outcome has bbe absolutely awesome (managed routing on the entire OSM dataset with pretty fast queries) and was done in quite a short timespan, chugging through the documentation was horrible - especially when I ran into errors.

Do you know of any other alternative routing libraries that can be used with OSM data similar to pgrouting?
You might like to check out Brandon Sanderson's work (if you haven't yet). It's all fantasy, but it tends to avoid the "and then something magic happens" problem.

I'd interpret the thing you dislike about fantasy as a violation of Sanderson's first law: "The author's ability to resolve conflicts in a satisfying way with magic is directly proportional to how the reader understands said magic."

http://stormlightarchive.wikia.com/wiki/Sanderson%27s_Laws_o...
Rust doesn't currently enforce pure functions at all; there is no 'pure' keyword. Here is an old mailing list post related to this decision - note that because it is 2 years old and Rust has been in a state of constant flux for most of that time, it may not fully reflect current thinking.

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-January/002...
I think that might just be survivor bias. You don't remember, or have never watched, the bad pre-CGI movies.
#insert StdBarbieDigsOnOpticalMedia, StdISoldMyBackyardKilnAndNowDoFCGLitho, StdWarOnShinyDeadlyBooksJustGotReal

Hence, not BD with Photo/ECC tracking tricks to follow on -large F -focus -small dots, but with the same (entire floor of) few-layer DVD cleanroom litho, make a run of discs with -lower bitrot 5 ways -tolerance for laser aging -capacity nerfing from quantum phase encoding that really begs the question 'why is this not better used, in service of semiconductor (diamond or otherwise) vertical activity rather than introspective disc PHY?'
Neither curved nor uncurved grades remove points that a student earned from the student's score. Uncurved grades obviously just give you what you earned, and traditional curved grades give you more than what you earned. This "hybrid" gave me *fewer( points than what I earned.
The points raised are good, but I think web vs. native is a false dichotomy to be honest. It is quite possible for both to co-exist. The problem I see here is that, by losing the shackles of backwards compatibility, native vendors are able to move much more quickly and that upsets developers in much the same way kids get upset when their sibling gets a shiny new toy.

The pragmatic kid will try to find ways of sharing the toy, or get one of their own, but the stubborn kid will convince the others that their toy is batter, faster, smarter, stronger, and all of the things. The analogy breaks down a bit, but I hope my point gets across.

The web, for all its warts, is a wonderfully resilient system. It can break any which way and it'll still probably mostly work. Most other systems simply don't work that way, because it's damn difficult to build such systems. By working within the constraints of the web, you're almost forced into it.

What we can do to help developers better leverage the web, regardless of whether their UI is native or HTML, is to not be religious about the things that don't really matter – which I think is what James is trying to really say. His points are clear and good, but the underlying (and in some parts quite explicit) message is one of: let's not be kids.

Our toys are sometimes broken (DOM, CSS layouts, single thread execution models) and we should consider changing them for better models or even new ones, that aren't so broken. But we have to stop the in-fighting, zealotry won't get us anywhere.

---

It should also be noted that James' post while talking about the web is actually more about rendering than anything. There is so much more to the web, architectural principles that transcend platforms – such as hypermedia, stateless message transfer, metadata. Let's not pretend rendering is the end-all be-all that the web has to offer.
I don't remember the exact details now, and this was at a British university that did neither extra credit nor curving. I think they weren't a particularly good teacher and just wanted everyone to get higher marks so things kept getting biased up for gratuitous reasons. And the result still called a percent.

Students are far less likely to complain about teachers, course work, etc the higher the grades they get, making this an easy cop out for the teacher.
It's fine, go ahead and fix it. And thanks for your hard work on Rust! =o)
Yes... just seen that recently with the mobile site of scribd. If anyone of the scribd team is reading this: Why on earth do you think you can force us to install your native app by blocking reading the full content someone else gave you in order that _I_ can read it?
True, but only on a limited basis. It's not scalable, and in keeping with the GP's point, it's important not to draw too grandiose a claim out of this. It doesn't take too many people trying to do this before it would stop working and become much less like "scavanging off an affluent society" and much more "nature, red in tooth and claw". To those who are willing to do this, god-speed, but you haven't found a universally better lifestyle that all should look at in awe and agree that it's a trenchant criticism of the unnecessary nature of the rat race of society or something; you've just found a niche that works for you, but you're still consuming the output of the "rat race" and you really shouldn't forget it.
I could've sworn it worked the same when I was running 4.whatever on my old Nexus 5 prior to the 5.0 update. From an end user perspective I haven't noticed much of a change in at least a couple of years (aside from some vendors disabling support in favor of their own tap to pay).
I doubt this is a big advantage because you would capture everything that is close to the sensor (dust, fingers, scratches etc.). A lens effectively applies an extreme low-pass filter to these things because they are massively out of focus.
Years ago we had pure functions that have since been replaced with our current function model. I'm betting that we are still reserving "pure" from that time. I haven't heard of anyone proposing to use it for something, so should probably unreserve it.
Someone see if Samuel L. Jackson is available.
True, I had some teachers who were just reading from the book, like my health teacher.
I know where it's going. My neighbourhood in Vancouver BC is covered in "for sale" signs. There are minivans full of Chinese investors paroling the sidestreets looking for houses.

The downside is that, by my count, more than half of the houses are vacant or under construction. I smell bubble.
Well, for you, a 100 year old watch is awesome.

For someone else, a gold plated watch designed by Apple is awesome. Everyone has their own taste.
This. And don't forget fastclick.

https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick
I'm one of the people behind this project. Yes, the custom key shapes + low activation force are the primary reason we're interested in creating these key switches.
Superfish is an American company. Lenovo may have been dumb enough to be suckered by it, but they weren't dumb enough to create it.
The opposite of an idiot
Thanks, will try it out!
I personally don't really like the setup Netflix uses as much UI-wise. It seems as though nowadays services need to be all about personalization, where ratings, reviews, and content watched all factor into the new content that is shown to me, the user. I might only like one movie or tv show of a particular genre, give it 4 or 5 stars, and then there's a pretty good chance I'll keep being shown similar ones that I know I'll never be interested in watching.

For myself, I think it would work really well if they had the more standard list of available shows, movies, etc in alphabetical order, or some other more sortable format, perhaps by release/airing year, or similar.
Telescopes also require high optical efficiency, because the entire point is to capture as many photons as possible. It seems likely that any application that uses diffraction has higher-order effects that send part of the light in unwanted directions, even if there is a distinct focus.
The people who made the decisions involved here essentially hacked hundreds of thousands of PCs and defrauded their customers. I don't expect anyone in Lenovo to be punished for a crime, but there's no doubt they did something clearly unethical and borderline illegal. Their best possible defense is that they were just incredibly negligent.