skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would say you are wrong. You could reproduce someone else's research. But doing something novel requires that you understand a lot about which pitfalls make the simulation results unphysical, which I'd say takes at least 6 months to learn for a grad student working full time on a new topic.
Hey... wait a minute... something seems oddly off about that Ted Talk. I mean it's really deep and my life was irreversibly changed afterwards, sure, but something seemed off about that particular Ted Talk you linked.
This is just a subjective feeling blending personal and second-hand experience, but it seems extremely unlikely to me that a joke in presentation context would drive someone over the edge.

Being unable to joke about it, however, is stifling. The reaction to clamp down on the joke suggests that suicide is something normal people don't do.
Honestly curious here, could you mention which TED talk in particular and what you found to be inaccurate or misrepresented?

I just want to get a feeling for what level of distortion we are talking about. As it is, I assume the talks are hardly accurate by specialist standards, but I have no idea if we are talking "science news in mainstream news (say, BBC) publication" distorted or "Reddit conspiracy theory" distorted.
...or, you were fooled, and your methodology for BS detection isn't perfect.

I've seen, first-hand, kids who were coached to perfection at this sort of thing. And they could easily pass your test: one common pattern is for the kid to be handed a "project" that is pre-conceptualized and nearly complete, and have them do the last 5% of work in consultation with a senior researcher (typically a post-doc).

The kid basically flails around for a while, struggles a lot, and learns to talk the talk, but doesn't do much of anything in terms of productive work. So they'll struggle like crazy and hang around brilliant, hard-working people (and therefore be humbled and able to pass your test), but that doesn't mean they did the research.

Doing a research project end-to-end takes years of concerted effort. It's almost completely unrealistic to think that a high school senior has put in the time.
I just wanted to extend my appreciation for your work. It's by far the most used app on my iPhone; even occupying a spot on the main navbar.

Occasionally, I've noticed scrolling performance degrades when viewing comments (only for articles with many comments (>100). But force closing seems to resolve the issue. Otherwise, it's rock solid and beautifully functional.
If you have no control over requirements and a bunch of people who can't work together towards a common goal, I'm not sure what, if any, methodology will work.

The main complaints against Agile by developers are:
1) I want to hide in my technology rathole and never come out.
2) I'm allergic to accountability and can't take people asking me once per day what I'm up to.
3) I don't want to have to talk to other people.

So, if any of those apply to someone you're going to implement Agile with, they're not going to be happy.

Agile is as much a cultural agreement as a methodological agreement.
> if something was a great idea, and could improve mileage, the oil companies with their power would kill it.

This is incorrect by inspection. As my father (Air Force) told me, if there was an invention that substantially improved mileage, the military would be all over it. They would not let anyone stand in their way.

(Fuel consumption is a severe limiting factor in military machines.)
Satoshi Nakamoto is/was the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. He voluntarely disapeared a few years ago. Gavin Andersen is the lead developer of the open source Bitcoin project since then. In this video he talks about the past and the future of the cryptocurrency, and touches some parts of Bitcoin history and his relationship with Satoshi.
He has:

http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/about-me/

> Its narrative and themes are inspired by the works of Jorge Borges and Umberto Eco, and its gameplay by Dwarf Fortress and Dark Souls.
I'm struggling to understand why anyone would pay this. What is the perceived value?
> Programmers as a blue colar job

?
Presumably the shebang at the start of your script would cause it to be executed by bash directly.
Make it about proving something to yourself. You know that mindset you get into when you're playing a really hard level in a good game? Try channeling that and see if it works, it definitely does for me. :) - One of my projects from two years ago is now worth about $500k.
Makes me sad reading comments like these.. You fail to understand so many things. People like Richard provide a much needed balance, and honestly I applaud his efforts.
I am learning public speaking, now that school is all over.

It turns out that my first speeches weren't very good. I didn't understand that writing and speaking are different. When it clicked, I wrote: "I have deciphered the master key to public speaking: use Vanity (idolz) or Pride (topic translatable to lowest common denominator), but not Envy (my endeavors)."

So in my opinion, TED by nature of being oral presentations would skew away from the dry wit, and piercing insight of writing.
When I was 17, I pranked my high school's website by replacing homepage content with a rickroll video through some creative hacking. The school turned around and hit me with a felony charge due to it being computer related. So I can definitely understand where this is coming from.
I think not all the time everything goes by Grunt Fund. I didn't read the book, but know the concept a little bit.

Sometimes people contribute more than money, they believe in your startup and give you strength.

That is my personal opinion.
I think what icebraining was trying to say is:
A fact is not a opinion that is proven to be true.
A fact is a opinion that is true and can be proven to be true even if we don't yet know how. In which case we simply don't yet know that said opinion is a fact.

I'm not sure if this definition is correct but I'm fairly certain this is what icebraining meant.
I feel like there's something missing from this story.

Brian stopped Jason from receiving emails, then Jason broke Brian's wifi for an hour, then Brian calls the FBI.

Do these two have previous history? Was there some sort of escalation between the second and the third event?
Now they will be Periscope tweets :-)
Al Gore's talk was missing anything meaningful or new.
There's no shortcuts in science and knowledge. TED is in the business of presenting shortcuts.

TED seemed interesting from a lightning-talk perspective, but it's clear the goal isn't to whet your appetite, the goal is to deliver the promise of enlightenment before dinner time.
Nice Hack
I don't think I ever really understood what a descriptor was until reading this, and now I feel really stupid but at the same time grateful!
The price of something has nothing to do with the content. The data that represents the price is a pointer to the content, akin to affixing a new price sticker to the jacket of a book. Perhaps the original published content could have a recommended price embedded in it.

This applies to the names and categorizations of things as well.

As for updates, imagine you're a shopkeep and in the morning you publish a table of prices, titles and content-addressable hashes.

Now, for the whole naming-of-the-things... take your pick: ICANN or Namecoin-like.

Claim ownership of a top-level name and then you can point it at whatever you want.
> We (and by we I mean Popperians) want to believe that science is a series of universally positive logical assertions that can be cut down by a single negative observation, as logic would dictate. But we don't always know what the criteria are for successful negative observations. The criteria are less rigid and well defined than we would be willing to admit.

Bayesian reasoning helps here, I think, because people are wrong, and different people are wrong with different probabilities. For example, overturning mass-energy conservation because someone said they saw a professor turn into a small cat or a strange spacecraft appear and disappear is not reasonable: The probability of one person being wrong or insane is a lot higher than the probability of something really well-verified being completely incorrect.

Is it political at times? Yes. Can it be improved? Sure. But it is flawed, not completely broken, and I think Kuhn makes too much of the flawed-ness which encourages people to imagine that it's completely broken and therefore the next paradigm shift will validate homeopathy.
Interesting. I wonder with github today projects gain contributors significantly earlier, since doing a PR on github is soo much easier than contributing to a project in the days before github.
Yes, this is not a good example of an intrinsic structural bias against older programmers in interviews. Plenty of older programmers also hopelessly captivated by the current NoSQL-du-jour. :)
rcl (invoke R inside lisp), cl-num-utils, cl-mathstats, cl-variates, cl-randist, antik...
Not sure this warrants a felony charge, but not sure this petition is particularly inspiring either.

Both parties behaved amazingly immaturely. But this petition is a heavily reality-distorted mealy mouthed justification of hand-waving away of what he did. Every action by the other party is blown up "many DDoS activities keeping him out of important business meetings", while the things he did are just hand waved away like so: "Jason decided to play a friendly prank on him in return and performed three twenty minute stress tests on one of Brian’s wifi hotspots" - not sure how one person's actions are a DoS, but another are not).

Hyperbole abounds, too: "Conviction would guarantee the rest of his life to be spent in financial insolvency and as a third-class citizen with fewer rights and only the most unfulfilling employment prospects."

Really, convicted of a felony, you're guaranteed lifetime financial insolvency?

"a conviction would spell the end of his professional career and aspirations to serve the nation's Foreign Service corps as a diplomat."

A little snarky, but I'd wager the State Department is looking for diplomats who'd avoid getting into petty situations like this in the first place...
The sense of smugness you will achieve is worth it to some people.
I had a look at the relayd man page, but it's not actually very useful. I wanted a document that would demonstrate the use of relayd as an http proxy server. The man page doesn't even mention http. If you would like to suggest a better reference, i will happily edit my post.
No one likes spam, but invitation channels are certainly drying up. I sometimes wonder how fast Facebook would have grown if email spam filtering in 2004 was as aggressive as it is today, especially considering that its early growth was among .edu addresses.

(Remember that this was back before Gmail and often your email client did the bulk of spam detection, if not all .. though my memory is a little rusty)
Great programmers use source control, integrate often, and communicate with their team. They basically do all the the things we know we're supposed to do, but most only give lip service to it.
Good question. Who calls the FBI over something like that? Granted, I haven't heard his side of the story, but with the information I have now I don't ever want to be friends with Brian.
(Balanced co-founder)

Hi Keith, sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you and the Storefront team. Feel free to email me if you need any help with the migration: jkwade@balancedpayments.com.

I sincerely appreciate the faith you placed in Balanced. I'm sorry we couldn't keep it going, but you're in good hands with Stripe.
Robot learns to use tools by ‘watching’ YouTube videos
Duh. The current topic was fueled by a peering disagreement between two companies, fighting over who gets the bigger piece of the pie.

Nobody is ever going to give you change; you have to make it yourself.
Can someone give an explanation of how this works?

In order to get this to be seamless, I would guess that this only works when you are sending from one yahoo account to another one correct? Unless they have found a clever way to share the public keys.
I AM a 10x programmer! [1][2]

[1] When writing code to solve problems I've encountered frequently in one of the languages I've used long enough to thoroughly memorize all facets of the syntax and most of the available libraries.

[2] Consistently using those 10x powers would quite possibly be the most boring life I could imagine as a software engineer ... give me a hard problem to solve once, then never ask me about that problem again!
> It may not be a religion, but TED definitely has a cult-ish feel to it.

I think the best way to describe it is as having elements of a religion, as Bob Jesse would say. It is worth keeping in mind though that the NYT is competing for the same sponsorship dollars as TED, and has most of the same issues. E.g. I'm sure we all know people who don't believe anything is true unless it makes the print edition.
Felony charges are obviously ridiculous, but I don't quite see the humor in the "funny prank" of shutting down someone's internet connection. It's at least as much a "denial of service attack" as flooding someone's email account.
Glad you found them useful, i was mildy surprised mainstream media (the bbc) was publishing them.

There's a digest and comments more eloquent than i can muster from the guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/jan/26/bitter-l...

But yes, quite an eye opener and in place beautiful and haunting. If anyone has any similar pieces i'd be interested in them though Curtis himself seems to tackle some quite interesting topics: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis
The "best" of light grey text on a white background!
Apple's 12-inch MacBook vs. Windows Laptops: Fight
I agree, this is awesome. I hate dealing with bash but it's pretty common when you're DevOps.
Why I Don't Do Science Fairs (Anymore)
I'm put in mind of Neal Stephenson's dog pod grid.
If Scrum is so mega simple, why do we see endless cases of it failing to being implemented correctly?

It fails because the problem it is trying to solve is so hard.

There is no silver-bullet methodology that make delivering quality software on time easy. Scrum does make a decent job of it though in an environment where Scrum can be implemented correctly. If it can't be implemented, then it won't work.
I've read this petition three times and I still have no idea what happened. Also, what in the holy fuck is the author thinking giving everyone enough information to find the "bad guy" in her story (I knew who she was talking about even without it) but keeping the identity of the person we're allegedly helping obscured?

The difference between me and whoever the person advocating for this guy is, is that I know how to use PACER and am willing to pay to investigate claims like this. Honestly, I wanted to read the indictment because the horribly-written petition left me confused, but indeed, the petition leaves out quite a bit of the story. That includes the guy signing back up for Hacker Dojo under a false name after being banned, his grand total of one day being a member of Hacker Dojo, and completely omitting the attorney that he retained privately (and who quit not long after due to a "breakdown of communication"; puts perspective on raising a legal defense).

By the indictment, which went before a grand jury, by the way, it sounds like he signed up as "Ad Min," got banned, signed up as "Dallas Smith," got banned again (probably), then threw a hissy a month or so later and packeted Hacker Dojo. Poor guy indeed. Who attacks Hacker Dojo?

5:14-cr-00114-EJD, United States of America v. Jason David Miller.

Grand Jury Indictment: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6121606/hackerdojo/indic...

Order to Seal (since lifted): https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6121606/hackerdojo/seal....

Continuance so Miller can retain counsel: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6121606/hackerdojo/subin...

Status hearing where Miller's attorney subs in: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6121606/hackerdojo/couns...

Withdrawal of Miller's attorney ten days later: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6121606/hackerdojo/withd...

Full history: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6121606/hackerdojo/histo...

This is all public information. I paid $2.60 to look it up, and you can too -- sign up for PACER. Federal court is really simple if you know how to look, it's the state courts that tend to be harder and require a physical presence.

EDIT: I edited out my speculation once I had the indictment, and extend apologies to the commenters who wanted to engage it.
As a kid, I remember science fairs being an enjoyable time to run around a gymnasium learning about cool things with my friends and classmates. There were two projects that I actually remember vividly. One involved measuring distance using laser pens. The other was about how to make different sounds with wine glasses filled of water. If I dig deep into my memory, I think that I probably had one that involved plants, the light spectrum, a vinegar plus baking soda volcano, plus a few more that all probably came out of a science fair book I found in the library. The point is that none of them were scientifically ground breaking as say a new method for pancreatic cancer detection, but I still got almost perfect grades. I never did win any awards, certainly not any monetary ones, but I learned a considerable amount from the hands on experience.

Since that time, I've gone to a top 10 engineering school, have written research papers, and even have a patent. I'm applying for PhD programs now to study Artificial Intelligence, which I think is as noble a cause as any, and I haven't thought about my science fair experiences until reading this article.

My opinion on the science fair is that it should be more about playfulness and exploration than competition. After all, science should be a team effort rather than a battle royale, and we should worry more about helping one another than whether Sally won because her parent's helped her cut construction paper while Timmy was on his own.

If you are a parent worried that the science fair system is too corrupt, perhaps steer your child towards the rise of high school hackathons. I mentored high school students at MIT's Blueprint and was amazing to see high schoolers deploying machine learning solutions after less than 24 hours. The best part was that the hackathon itself was run by college students who are there to help any way they could, which could be one way to level the playing field.
Little known fact: Google's End-to-end encryption extension already works on any site. It is not limited to Gmail. In fact it's not limited to webmail either. If a PGP blob is present in a web page, End-to-end can decrypt it. If a text input area is present in a web page, End-to-end can encrypt it.
I enjoyed the article, and wondered what are the queries you support? Something like "SELECT * FROM world WHERE (distance_from_me < 500 meters);" ?

I ask because a lot of what you discuss seems to resonate with folks in the graphics business who are, for example, culling object geometry from a render scene by doing what is effectively the above operation. Its also what a 'whisper' or 'yik yak' type of App does trying to find people near itself although in that case the problem is greatly simplified by assuming a sphere and testing for containment in the sphere (or the circle if being planar)
hi icelander, Sorry to let you down. If you're a Balanced customer, I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about the transition: jkwade@balancedpayments.com
This is an interesting remark:

"Technology development is certainly tough. It's that you need to realize that the enemy of productivity has been siloing people and specialists that want to hand-off their work to others."

What if the type of challenges that need to be solved involves: embedded device all the way up to cloud, big data, and devops automation where some of these things require specialties?

Some sprints might be heavy duty on a specific area of specialties, how can Scrum balance the productivity within a team?
It looks like they forked Google's end-to-end Chrome extension. Best place to look would probably be the docs for google's e2e. https://github.com/google/end-to-end/wiki
Well, the correct answer to questions like that is something like "I don't keep that stuff in my head, but the last time I had to do [foo], I looked at what kind of data was likely to be coming in, took down my copy of Knuth/CLR/Sedgewick, and decided that [bar] was likely to give good performance given that kind of data."

You won't get the job, but that's the correct answer nonetheless. :-)
Printing from the browser has far more to do with the fundamental error of allowing a site's designer to specify formatting than any inherent limitations of HTML. It's possible to create semantic content from a browser page (e.g., with Pandoc or Calibre) and print that. I actually resort far more often than I care to admit to re-tagging content and rendering it either as simplified HTML, Markdown, or LaTeX, for readability's sake.
An RFID tag would require an obnoxiously powerful transponder to be read from a great distance, and could not be read without alerting the owner (given appropriately equipped cars). A telephoto lens can read a license plate from a great distance while alerting no one. In the normal case, one would have to be in close proximity to read a car's RFID tag.
The value is in networking (meeting other like-minded people who can afford the $8,500 price of admission).
"Microfinance for the sharing economy" => this could be big :)
"An app to enhance the insurance-industry"

Not actually a bad idea . . .
Is your satellite link oscillating? Improving goodput using network coding
Thank you for this link, here's a great quote from there:

> The Stakhanovites were responsible for organizing the two-hundreders movement (Russian: двухсотники, or dvukhsotniki; 200% or more of quota in a single shift) and one-thousanders movement (Russian: тысячники, or tysyachniki; 1000% of the norm in a shift)

The idea of "one-thousanders" movement is numerically identical and almost linguistically identical to the "10xer" movement.
At this point, it might sound like graduate student bias; but I am also a graduate student, and I also think plenty of high school students can understand the math necessary to do cutting-edge scientific research.

I'm actually a math graduate student, and I've been thinking about how capable a high school student would be of doing math research. This started because two years ago, I was asked to facilitate a summer program for gifted high school students that opens up the possibility of math research for high school students. Interestingly, this too suffered from some of the problems highlighted in the article. Many of the students who got into this program were clearly parentally guided, and they floundered. But many were not, and did really well.

This last summer, I had a pair of students particularly interested in cryptography [I'm a number theorist, and some of my bias comes through]. There is plenty of intersection between content a high schooler can understand and cryptography research, especially if it's interest-driven instead of industry-driven [I don't want to get into trials and travails of cryptographers here].

Would their ideas make money in the "real world of cryptography?" No. But they would make fantastic science fair projects, and they would especially benefit from several months of work instead of the 6 weeks that we had.

tldr; I agree with you. A good number a of high schoolers are capable of performing research.