skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What a sad and terrible loss, my heartfelt condolences to Sheryl and her family..

I wanted to add my thoughts about false positives and executive health checkups, which fall under the larger umbrella of screening. I conduct executive checkups fairly regularly, but i’m not promoting anything here. I just want to share a personal philosophy that you, as a patient, could adopt to reduce risk.

Firstly, it should be stated that the utility and performance of any diagnostic test that has a binary outcome (eg. diseased/healthy) depends on 1) its intrinsic test characteristics 2) the prevalence of the disease in the population being tested[1], 3) the available diagnostic/treatment options for positive people, and 4) the threshold chosen to call something ‘positive’ since you are virtually always measuring a continuous variable.

People talk about false positives often, but you should know that there is some room for judgement here. The typical threshold for PSA has historically been 4.0 ng/mL. Above this is considered a positive screen, and you are recommended further testing to confirm prostate cancer, which can be invasive and lead to complications (bleeding, nerve damage, etc). This kind of two-stage testing is a common theme. The issue is that PSA values in people with cancer and people without cancer are normally distributed and have some overlap. A value of 4.0 is in the overlap zone, and the vast majority of people with 4.0 will not have cancer. However, lets say hypothetically that guidelines changed and we now use 20. At this level, most people who test positive probably have something bad, and the risk:benefit ratio is in favor of confirmatory testing and probably in favor of treatment too. I won’t bother going into it, but there’s a fair amount of liability, psychology and economics at play when choosing thresholds. Biochemical tests like PSA do have some variance, but are mostly reliable. It’s more complicated with imaging and amorphous things like mammograms that have some operator variability in judgement (and hence more liability).

This was a long-winded way to say that information is not necessarily bad, but it’s what you and your doctor choose to do with it. There’s room for discussing probabilities, and the various available pathways. Trust is huge. Your doctor will act in your best interests when he feels safe from lawsuits, otherwise he'll be focused on not missing anything regardless of likelihood or cost. The financial misalignment of our system doesn’t help in building trust either. Most first-stage screening tests have very minimal risk involved. Things like checking your blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose, doing a treadmill stress test, reviewing your meds, vaccinations, etc which are part of these annual checkup programs are, on balance, usually good ideas.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitivity_and_specificity
If Dutch is anything like German, gaan means "go" and rijden/fietsen are along the lines "go by vehicle".

In German at least, you tend to use "go by vehicle" where English would just use "go". That is the preciseness English doesn't have.

Interesting that the "I must <x> to the Bla" construct exists in Dutch, English has it, but it's antiquated.
Ask HN: Arima – Quora for Polls. How should we promote our website?
We recently launched our site, http://arima.io. Basically, we are similar to traditional Q&A sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers in the sense that users can ask, answer and browse questions curated by other participants. What makes us unique is that we focus on multiple choices questions and we aggregate data from users all around the globe and display data visualizations in a personalized way.

We launched 3 weeks ago, and our traction so far has been mediocre. We get about 500 visitors person, with around 1000-2000 answers submitted. Our primary strategy has been posting polls on Reddit, and that has been inconsistent (some days we get close to 2000 visitors, some days 200). Does anyone have any good suggestions for us? What should we do to increase traffic?

Thanks in advance.
You seem surprisingly confident in your knowledge of classic Chinese literature, for someone who doesn't know Chinese.
Verbal way.
Interesting. But mobilizing any percentage of the electorate requires awareness. There is a reason the Democrats and the Left spend so much time talking about "inequality" -- the last thing they want is for black people to focus on the fact that the institutions closest to them, and most important to their daily lives, are controlled by Democrats. Baltimore and Maryland, after all, have been governed by Democrats for decades.
It's hard to reconcile, yes, so typically one relies on 'basic laws'. In the end, however, it falls on the majority, strictly speaking. If 95% of the voting public wanted to they certainly could change the Us constitution, and there is very little the dissenting 5% could do about it.
I think these are symptoms.

I truly believe the root of all of these problems is over investing in financial instruments like equities, which in turn give power to financial industry, economists, and CEOs.
I may be missing something, but it seems as though QV is associating how passionate a party (specifically a minority) is about a topic with the importance that their view be equally represented against an apathetic opposition. The problem inherent to this is lack of education of topics that will be well know to a minority party but unknown to a majority. The majorities ignorance is not the same as not caring, and the impetus to gain knowledge may not always be clear. Beyond this its seems like minority opinions no matter how impassioned should not become the center of debate merely because they have spent more money. The act of voting involves far more than the act itself as evidenced by the prolonged campaign periods in the US. The national attention span is short and is already dominated by the extreme and the rich.
Sounds super cool! I like the new Microsoft :)
> But I wanted to appear smart, so I didn’t express any confusion.

In fact some interviews are intended to flush out behavior like this. Give a candidate an ambiguous problem statement, and see if they ask the necessary clarifying questions.

This meta-problem (ambiguous problems/unclear goals) happens all the time in the real world and bringing clarity to situations like this is a good skill to have.
Great article. But this a symptom of the bigger problem of government workers wanting extra rights above and beyond what a normal citizen has. This will only get worse as governments (local, state, federal) grab more power over the people.
If anyone reading this is genuinely interested in a perspective on how many core government functions (law, police, defense, roads, etc) could work in a society without government, check out The Machinery of Freedom [1] by David Friedman.

Even if you don't agree with removing government 100%, it gives you a new way of thinking about these services. There are a lot of fascinating examples of societies in history where many of these systems were not primarily controlled by the state. It is also a great mind-bending thought game to try and figure out how you would structure, say, a defense organization or a road company if the government disappeared tomorrow.

I had a lot of fun reading this book, and I think it provides a lot of useful ideas for thinking about how government should function.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capita...
I think conflict resolution is key. Police need to concentrate on de-escalating problems whenever possible, even allowing suspects to get away when the alternative is using deadly force. (Presuming, of course, that the suspect isn't an immediate threat to the public.)

Take for example the recent shooting in South Carolina, where a policeman shot a man who was running away from a traffic stop. He could have just let the guy go.

Ferguson is another example. The officer said he feared for his life and that's why he shot Michael Brown. The officer was in a running police vehicle at the time. Why did he not simply drive away? A quick stab of the accelerator and you're at a safe distance where you can take a moment to figure out what to do next.

There was a recent incident in Virginia where a 17-year-old refused to get out of a car during a traffic stop, believing he had the right to have his parents present before interacting with the police. The police tried to force him out, which he resisted, and now he's naturally being charged with assaulting the police. Why could they not simply either get his parents as requested, or wait him out?

Take Eric Garner. He pushed away attempts to handcuff him, at which point the police put him in a choke hold and pushed him to the ground, which killed him. Why not talk to him first?

It seems like almost every incident where police misconduct gets national attention could be solved if the police had been willing to simply stop and have a little patience when dealing with problems.

I'm uncomfortable with things like rubber bullets and bean bags, because they perpetuate the idea that force is a reasonable first resort for the police to use when dealing with trouble. They're also not guaranteed to be non-lethal; used on the wrong person, or just get an unlucky shot, and the target can still end up dead. We're seeing the same stuff in play right now with tasers. They were supposed to be a way for police to subdue people without killing them in situations where they would have previously had to resort to a gun. Instead, they're being used to subdue people when deadly force is not at all justified, simply because it's convenient for the police to stun people into submission. Every so often they tase somebody with a heart condition or something and kill them even though they posed no threat.
I'm pretty sure the president did criticize the police. So had the mayor of NY, among others.

The fact is, police have gotten so comfortable in their untouchable-ness that they've stepped over the line that defines the amount of corruption and abuse "we" are willing to look past. Apparently it is somewhere around cops straight up robbing (civil forfeiture) and killing us.
English has politeness grammar, dude; it is just highly nonstandard dialectical.
Circa has some great ideas but its news lacks soul
-- "I mainly want to know how you think." I totally agree with you on this. I hope my case could help contribute to the implementation details.

People have very different working styles. Since interview as a process can't be tailored to all of them, it is rationally refined to suit for the majorities. For the minorities left, I have to say one has to adjust, trying to go through the 5-hour drills.

I, unfortunately, is one of the minorities. Given a hard question, one has to think first. I am the opposite of thinking aloud. In real work, I either stare at walls, or look at the vast void far away, silently. I might have a piece of paper, drawing odd shapes and graphs, because I am primarily a visual thinker. In the interview, it would definitely look odd. It could be awkward as well if I completely fall into silence, ignoring the interviewers.

So I would face to the white board, wrote a few lines of pseudo-code, uttered some words, while trying to get my inner self into my real work routines. Sometimes it works relatively well, sometimes it failed completely, especially the interviewers kept talking that requires my interaction. In many cases, I understand the interviewers were trying to help, giving my hints, while the effect was the opposite of their intents.
> In the first link, the case is about a memo written on duty as part of the employee's role; a uniform is irrelevant (and the word 'uniform' is mentioned zero times in the document).

The facts are not identical, but the facts are sufficiently similar that you could cite that case as precedence for arguing that the facts in question here should be treated similarly. The lawyer I linked to certainly thinks so. Are you a lawyer?

> In the second link, the article explicitly states: "Wearing a badge doesn’t forfeit the free speech of the person".

You took that out of context. "Person" here means the private person, not the cop representing himself as a cop. The paragraph goes on to say, "the speech of a person who presents himself in his official governmental capacity is no longer the individual’s free speech, but the official person’s speech. And the latter is not free."
I must've been working in a much different environment than you. I've never had to solve a difficult problem in 15 minutes while someone who knew the solution watched over my shoulder and did their best to answer my questions without answering them too well. Ohh yeah and the results of my performance had potentially life changing consequences.

The adversarial and extreme time boxed nature of a coding interview is something that is truly outside the day to day experience of the vast majority of programmers.

>Having control over your nerves when s* hits the fan is a valuable quality, which we should all strive for.

That may be true, but think about that for a minute. Go back to college and think of how many people in the class were comfortable going up to the board and solving problems in front of everyone.

When I was taking Automata, we could get an extra point on our final grade by going to the board and correctly working out a problem that we hadn't seen before. Only myself and 2 other people ever did it--in a class of 60.

Do you think that your company is solving problems so hard and paying so well that you can can only consider 3 out of every 60 developers (or whatever the real ratio is) who are otherwise qualified who have also mastered control of their nerves far beyond what is required 99% of the time on the job? Maybe if you're Google, for the rest of us we need to find a better solution.

By the way, even though I was able to solve problems at the board, I hated every minute of it, and I refuse to work for companies that require this kind of interview.
Is that something like "Ich muss nach der Zahnarzt . . ."?
Maybe one day we'll have technology which gets embedded and self-reports us whenever we transgress whatever laws we agree to or are born into.

Say what? You really want some kind of robocop-chip embedded in you that reports you?
It's essentially the v model [1] for software development. It's commonly used in systems engineering and the industries that implement it, so military, avionics, medical, safety engineering etc. I work on industrial safety systems, and would echo the other posts here - it's a requirement of the industry, but it's rarely done well due to the cost to implement, and the difficulty in implementing tools like Doors.

NASA and the U.S. Military have good guides and white papers on it, which you should be able to find online with a bit of digging.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-Model_(software_development...
The Nexus Silent Mouse. It has a mechanism that makes as little sound as possible while still having a good feel.
Maybe I'm missing something, but why is it crucial that you hold on to a reference to the contents of the vector, and not the vector itself? Because, to me, the obvious "C++ way" to do it would be something like

struct FieldInfo {
//
const std::vector<ast::Attribute>& attrs;
}
Agreed. It's their site, let them run it.
How often are you asked to solve a problem in 15 minutes while someone watches over your shoulder?
"We must away / We must away / We must away ere break of day / . . ."
Ask HN: Would Java make it if introduced today?
Given the meteoric rise of Java, I started using it in 1995; would Java the language and platform enjoy repeat success if it had instead been introduced today?
In the US there is already a separate class of people that cannot be touched. You just need money to be part of that class. The criminal system is designed such that if you have no money you'll go to jail for the smallest of the offenses. But if you have good lawyers, it is almost impossible to be convicted, because either you can pay fines and escape jail, or the prosecutors will be too afraid to go to court against you.
Do you have a link to that NYT article you mentioned?
Without violating the 1st amendment, how would you prevent the company you've subcontracted to from lobbying legislators for perverse incentives?
Consider donating the money to a third world country initiative. It will create a lot more happiness there than it will in the pocket of your employer.
Thanks for answering my question! I hadn't thought of using random samples. So maybe a good solution is QV for representatives, with only a small random sample of the population being able to vote. The representatives should also use QV, of course.

I just read a big chunk of your paper "Voting Squared: Quadratic Voting in Democratic Politics", and I really enjoyed it. For a long time I've wanted to do an open source project related to characterizing an optimal government, or at least simulating the outcomes you could expect from different types of governments. If you know of a useful way to go about doing this I'd love to hear it.

By the way, I reside in a coliving space with 50+ people, and we've struggled with voting on certain issues that minority groups feel strongly about. I will definitely be suggesting QV!
I think the author may be missing the point of this exercise. Solving this problem requires the following things:

1) Decompose a number into digits. Less experienced candidates will likely convert the number into a string and then the characters back into numbers while more experienced candidates will tend towards a small loop using div and mod.

2) Use some kind of library to insert and test membership in a set data-structure. Less experienced candidates may not be able to do this without stackoverflow, big red flag.

3) Some basic flow control wrapping it all together. Less experienced candidates may fail here similar to fizzbuzz.

The interviewer likely thinks these things are a good proxy for the quality of a candidate. For example, the author would have failed #1 even without miscommunication/stress/time constraints.
The first amendment doesn't apply to my employer as I work for a private company, so you are right there. But is that true for cops who work for the government? I'm honestly not sure.
I think that's a key difference then.
Opinion pages like this are exactly where these articles belong. The national president of the Fraternal Order of Police is a pretty important position, and I see no reason not to let him have his say in the opinion pages of an important publication.

You seem to be implying that they shouldn't have published this. Personally, I'm much happier with having powerful nutjobs like this get attention for their views than keeping them hidden away. Mr. National President of the Fraternal Order of Police is going to think that police need their own separate "bill of rights" whether or not he gets space in the New York Times. By publishing him, the NYT is merely making us aware of that fact, and I think it's good for everyone to know.
Here it is:

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/29/baltimore-an...

It's linked from the popehat.com article, but not made completely obvious.
Although I am a gamer, I dislike having a mouse with too many buttons no matter what type of computing I am doing. I've been enjoying my Steelseries Rival for a while now. Good feel, adjustable DPI so you can tune it to your liking, has a reasonable number of buttons.
I'm on the East Coast right now, and I think Stanford can gain our respect exactly as it always has: by publishing great research.

Frankly, outside the Silicon Valley start-up bubble, nobody cares about the internal gossip of the Valley clique.
Can't you just establish the parameters in the legal contract between the jurisdiction and the service company? Just like it's my constitutional right to express myself as I please, my employer could decide to fire me for voicing something either they disagree with or something their customers disagree with and reflects badly upon them.
"I love it when white people ..."

It's unclear to me why race has anything to do with this. Are you implying that you expect non-white people to handle "their first arrest" more casually, as if it is something they are familiar with and know will happen?

If we really want things to improve, we need to stop complaining about how "white people don't see how bad it is for the rest of us." Focus on what we have in common, not what you arbitrarily perceive as what makes us different. The system is shitty for everybody. Your argument would have been just as informative and a lot more pleasant to read if it didn't begin by partitioning your readers by race.
We’ve Moved Our Website Officially to WPRichSnippets.com
Your statement doesn't sound familiar to me. It does seem to be true for the military, which enjoys pretty much universal devotion from all. I think it's because we've finally figured out how to disentangle being pro-war from being pro-soldier, so that both warmongers and peaceniks can embrace members of the military. But I don't see anything remotely like it for the police. Respect is common, but far from universal. Where it exists, it tends to be mild.
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Local police are locally funded which creates huge issues even for private companies. IMO, removing all local police funding would 'solve' most of these issues much more directly.

PS: Ditto schools. Also, this is about funding nothing says control can't remain at the local level, but traffic ticket revenue for example should not end up in a small towns budget.
Well, if the object that owns the vector is destroyed then that reference will go dangling. The compiler can't (soundly) check this.
We won't, they will find us and they won't come in bio form.
That operates under the assumption that no FieldInfo will be accessible after the original vector is deallocated, and similarly requires auditing to ensure this property holds (while making no guarantees about the future).
Can't beat good ol Intellimouse.
Check out this study: http://www.vaoutcomes.com/papers/JAMA2975.pdf

The conclusion:
"Although 5-year survival is a valid measure for comparing cancer therapies in a randomized trial, our analysis shows that changes in 5-year survival over time bear little relationship to changes in cancer mortality. Instead, they appear primarily related to changing patterns of diagnosis."
Yes, of course. The technical way is to say that financing pushes the equilibrium price upward. (Because it's just pure inflation, since it's new money created by the bank, and now people have more money to buy houses. The housing market then of course tries to correct, so the price goes up.) What you wrote is a hypothetical overcorrection when financing suddenly stops, the price crashes. (Sound familiar?) And then the supply of new houses reacts eventually, which then sets a new equilibrium.
Check out the tasks on Rosetta Code (rosettacode.org). That's a good way to get started with any new language, and you may find that one of the tasks inspires you to do something more complex.
I hardly use my phone for calls either, but I'd still call the amount of text I can stand to enter into a touchscreen "minimal". A couple of sentences at a time, maybe.

I think the fact that I have been touch-typing since I was eight or nine actually makes it much more difficult to put up with touchscreen keyboards, because it's so difficult to make myself look at the keys instead of the text.
Same here. I am always the first guy in a group to ask the stupid question. Almost never do I get a snide response.

If I did get a snide response to a clarifying question in an interview, it would be an almost certain signal that I should run away from this company. Their rudeness is actually a favor, potentially sparing me months or years of unpleasantness in their company.
This is really exciting, and clearly more powerful than what you get in C/C++. That being said:

>In a language like C++ there’s only once choice in this situation; that is to clone the vector.

What about a shared_ptr to the vector?
Always nice to see the evolution of design.