skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Taxi lobby" makes it sound like Uber is disrupting some megacorporate industry who control government in smokey back alleys. Taxi corps are small, many are essentially sole proprietorships. The drivers are essentially all running their own business, but the medallion owners tend not to be huge corporations.

Medallions are required because cities regulate taxis prices and policies. Doing so distorts normal market forces. So medallions are a sort of conciliation prize for taxi drivers having the business model dictated. Govenment limits price, but also lowers competition to ensure they can make a profit.

Uber isn't beating some mustached villinous Taxi lobby. They are beating cities who wanted a regulated car service.

I think Uber is probably better than the status quo, but it's not fighting big business, it is big business.
Strong enough for space elevator core?
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How did you verify you were bitten my memory corruption?
I'm sorry but group think is a serious issue. And this is a major attack on basic science. We are swapping in wife's tales for fact.

You mightn't think it doesn't matter on this issue, but it does. Sleep is an incredibly important part of our lives and has major health ramifications.

This split sleep idea, comes up again and again and again and is stated as fact without even question, there's no 'one theory thinks'. This is an insane way for us to be acting in the age of science.

It is obviously fiction. There's 7 billion people on earth. 2.5+ billion people on less than $2 per day. Over a billion without electricity. You don't get much more medieval than that but we have to rely on cold reading documents hundreds of years old?

If it was a one off then I mightn't care. But it's common form on the web for many topics. We need to find a way of stopping it.

If I sounded mean to be heard, then so be it, I'm happy to be downvoted, that's what downvoting is for, changing behaviour.

Hopefully people will see there's upvotes to be had and move in with nicer ways of saying it or prove me wrong and get even more up votes. Anything that's gets us out of these topics based solely on magic.
Because they'd make a profit by selling it for more than it costs, which is their entire business.

I'm pretty sure they do provide this insurance, Uber drivers just don't pay for it.
For those of you who hire junior developers, how many of you hire them remotely? Do you consider them capable of that? What would you need to see to convince you?
I thought they were using NeXTSTEP, hence all the NS API calls in Obj-C. Back in 1989 I am guessing NeXT would be built on some kind of Unix system first. Considering that OS X is a descendent of NeXT, I would think that before OS X, they would use it to run code, servers, etc.
There was a similar distinction between the SPARC T1/T2s and the UltraSPARCs.
It seems this is how the most remarkable scientific discoveries happen, though -- purely by accident or as part of a wild trial "Hey, what if we just tried this...?"
I think you are confusing two things here.

- calculating the n-th element of the Fibonacci sequence
- representing it correctly in code

The first one is (assuming the second is present, see code above):

(nth (fibo) 10)
You don't have to get a mech that is loud.
I find it interesting most exchanges just don’t work. The fact the person who is being questions is the ‘best’ response is not a good sign for a skeptic exchange :)
I love the browns! But Blues are a lot more fun (and loud!) to program on ;)
Interesting. At some level things like income could be considered a proxy as well... arguably the absence some of the more stringent consumer lenders, like Chase, on one's credit report might predict membership in a disadvantaged group.
If it's going to look like JNR's FFI that'll make me very happy. It's nicer to work with[0] than existing tools (that I've used anyway).

[0]: https://github.com/jnr/jnr-ffi-examples/blob/master/qsort/sr...
Movies are movies. but you can't know or prove that, even if you happen to believe it.
> just a phone call from his mother.

Anecdote of one. Everyone is different.

> you need to make them see the BS-ness of those things

No, I don't need to make anyone see anything. And if they're anywhere near suicide, they don't need that message from me, they need professional help. Things are not rational, by definition, and they're dangerous. Don't fuck around with this, it's not a rationality petri dish or a debate.
A beautiful demonstration by people who like macs and don't understand geometry or economics.
There is something a bit ironic about a web site which claims to be 'the most effective way to communicate with new users' showing me a YouTube video to explain what they do ...
It is more apropos to use chemistry to hide Nobel medals than say hide them in the walls.

Any mention as to how the lanyards were disposed (acid)?
"In the IT world, regular expressions searches justifiably have gained a reputation for being fiendishly complicated. Instagram’s regular expressions for finding emojis may be the most complicated yet."

This stack overflow post [1] and Perl module [2] both come mind.

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-...
[1] http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html
I totally agree that there exists people with sleeping patterns of all different types, it is interesting you sleep this way, thanks for sharing.

I’m not sure on the light pollution thing matching though. I thought the ‘theory’ wasn't about while sleeping, but more about before sleeping .
Isis opens 262-room luxury hotel in Mosul
(I'm being a little vague here, but given the still-extant stigma around "mental illness" and the amount of data collection that is now commonplace, I'm a bit paranoid about revealing enough to identify myself even under a throwaway account)

After ~20 years of on-and-off psychiatric treatment (some fairly intensive, some not, none especially effective), I found a psychiatrist with enough sense to strongly recommend that I get the relevant lab test. He had to tell me to request it from my primary care doc, because according to the worldview of American health insurance a psychiatrist is not qualified to order said lab test. My primary care doc gave me a questionnaire. My score was just below the threshold where the lab test is considered warranted. He told me he'd figure out how to make it work. I guess he did, because I got the test, got it interpreted by ${DOMAIN_EXPERT}, and got a prescription for treatment that seems to be working pretty well (albeit not perfectly).
Evolutionary History of 50 Years of Music Charts Using Big Data Analysis
By analyzing the end result. Apparently single bit corruption is not that uncommon. It's striking what it does to a CBC encrypted stream...
>Because of incumbent banks’ endless surcharges, late fees and other abuses, “there’s room for a product by young people for young people,” Levchin, 39, said in a phone interview this week. “That’s what Silicon Valley’s good for, and that’s what we’re doing.”

Levchin is not young, so I guess his startup is DOA.
> So we (or, more precisely, FiveThirtyEight’s lead lifestyle writer Walt Hickey) ran a simulation that flipped a weighted coin with a 97.9 percent chance of landing on a Jennings win. Every time it did, we “flipped the coin” again. We did 1 million of these simulations.

This is just a binomial distribution. Did they seriously estimate the answer instead of solving it analytically?
We're sharing our company's core values with the world
This [1] is a pretty good description of the spider silk stucture. Turns out it's a self-assembled liquid crystal composed of oriented rods of a hydrophobic protein (an alanine/glycine co-polymer for those who care). It's not hard to imagine how a carbon nanotube could substitute for one of those if it's around in the soup...

[1] http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/spider/page3.htm
C/DGPS has been around a long time. The US Coast Guard has DGPS transmitters all around the US and you can use it anytime with off the shelf receivers.

The main issue is getting the hardware into consumer devices - and as the team has said before it's going to take consumers demanding high precision geolocation before that happens. I think the state of mobile geolocation for 99% of users is "good enough" for them not to care about cm precision stuff.

My hope is that some of the new AR software coming to mobile (including our own) will drive consumers to want higher precision location.

edit: I should take note that I don't think high precision GPS will actually be the way AR wins - in fact I am almost 100% certain it isn't. The way mobile AR/VR wins is with large scale monocular SLAM, which is what our lab has implemented and is expanding on today.
> I understand that this might make Jeopardy less fun for the audience, but I feel it would be a better test of trivia instead of buzzer timing.

Other game shows work that way as well, and it has its own degree of fun for the audience. For instance, the contestant buzzes in and answers after a few words of the question, gets the answer wrong, the host is grinning like a possum, and after they read the next part of the question, it makes the contestant's answer even more hilariously wrong in context.
To be fair, I do think that a small project is a better indicator of a potential candidate's success, but doing that much work for free is a big red flag as well.
We can do diagnosis now. All that is needed is a medical nurse to take symptoms and run them through Watson to get a diagnosis. The idea is that people in poor/remote regions could do this whole process themselves, with the help of a mobile phone and some medical sensors. There are already regions where it would be more beneficial to run with the current medial AI rather than leave things as they are.
TalkPay Twitter Bot – Anonymously post your pay details
Predicting a Billboard Music Hit with Shazam Data
These days, Jeopardy shows the full question as an overlay graphic immediately, before the host even starts reading it. So the audience would always know the full question even if the contestants don't.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if the target demographic of Jeopardy is often doing something else and listening without actually watching.
A spam bot written in Go
I like how Joss Whedon put it:

(Paraphrasing) “Lots of people talk about workaholics, but hardly anyone mentions workaholism”.

Once you couch it in the latter term, it loses its patina of virtuousness.
Not a single word, but http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html is related.
It can be a combination of factors:

- The CPU fan might be controlled via ACPI.

- The operating system is supposed to run ACPI code provided by the BIOS.

- A BIOS can specify different sets of ACPI code for different operating systems, so Linux might get different code from Windows.

- The ACPI code provided by the BIOS for Linux might be broken, or lacking fan control.

- The hardware vendor may have decided not to provide APCI controls for anything, relying instead on proprietary interfaces.

Section 1.9 of https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols/2005/ols2005v1-pages-59-76.pd... looks like it might be related.
Show HN: 6 must-have startup tools, they're free
A guess at the mechanism: the silk protein selection algorithm is an accept-first filter, the silk ducts being somewhat like human mammary glands. Anything the spider isn't specifically pulling back into its own blood as needed would then end up as an impurity in the webbing. (Easy experiment to do in its own right, but from a quick search I can't find evidence to support or refute it.)

Past that, the nanotubes just have to get locked into the matrix of the silk in the right orientation... which could just happen to anything of the right dimensionality in the silk as it anneals into shape.
Xtensio is a toolbox startups. Interactive templates help you organize your thoughts, make decisions and present ideas.
the neoliberal project as organized by the various branches that sprouted from the mont pelerin society have had much more concrete impact on policy for the last 30 years than rand's acolytes alone. they're from the same tradition as many of rand's beliefs but they're the apparatus that engineered the neoliberal order.
Your business can be in something technical, difficult and not currently in vogue. If you hire people who can already do the work, you're looking at a narrow band of very skilled, very expensive senior engineers. You'll hire every one of those you can get your hands on, but that'll still leave a gap that gets wider every year as that older generation ages out. Hiring in the 3-7 year range can be a bit dicey too, because the mindset you pick up building mobile apps isn't quite what you need to write a database, operating system or compiler. But nobody needs those anymore, right?

So you hire out of school, build up a huge intern program and you pay the cost to train and teach. I'm not saying it's the norm, but it's why you do it when you're not just trying to save some money or compress wages further up the food chain.
Without communication between the competitors, why wouldn't one competitor's algorithm "cheat" and slightly lower its price?
Export Project Data to Primavera MPX and Setting Start Date for Gantt Chart View
Not a word, per se, but this mechanism of discovery tends to correlate with being the sort of thing that wins an Ig Nobel prize.
Container Security: Just the Good Parts
Can you elaborate why (from a software engineering perspective)? I don't know too much about it but I did hear of people from places like FB/Google moving to Uber.
The gold medals themselves were the problem, not their lanyards.
> Economists typically assert that cartels dissolve naturally after members cheat or become irrational. When computers are the actors, though, detection is faster and not prone to human errors or failings, making defection less likely. Automated participants can identify price changes more quickly, allowing defectors who lower prices at the expense of the group to be sifted out earlier. Given this dynamic, participants have little incentive to either “cheat” the group or to leave it.

What is the penalty for defecting from the group to clear the market? An actor gets kicked out of a group in which he was a voluntary member?

Suppliers take a risk by price-fixing in that they may be underutilized, or be left with excess supply. Breaking even occurs when a few customers paying the collusion price net the same income as many customers paying a spot price. Clever suppliers can profit, but all actors are still independent. The only recourse for clearing the market is being left out of future collusion, which means nothing if you're clearing 100% of your supply and the adversary is clearing 0. The only choice of all actors is to compete for satisfaction.
We did this when I was a jeweler years ago and the process happens very quickly, it is literally minutes so I would assume that at worst they are looking a a 5 to 10 minute window to dissolve one medal. The real issue is that the gasses given off are lethal and if not done carefully in a very well ventilated location you can do serious harm to yourself and anyone nearby. They would have known this and been fine, but someone just reading the article and thinking, hey, I have gold and some acid laying around let's see what happens, could end up dead.

The gas given off is Nitric Oxide (which combines with Oxygen in the air to create Nitrogen Dioxide) and Chlorine and even a small dose can cause serious damage to your lungs if not be fatal.
This is a really important point that I'm not sure I've seen before in a discussion about the adoption of FP. You're completely right, but I can't imagine FP language advocates would get very far by leading with the history of type theory.
The next leap second will be added on 30th June 2015
Haha okay fair enough. Thanks!
Basic was what I started with, as did a lot of people from that era and after, just because it was simple and available. FORTRAN I tried on a lark, then got serious with it when I moved to the University mainframe. That's where I picked up the first of many assembly languages, after finding out it was the only way to take full advantage of the OS and achieve the best efficiencies. It's also where I learned Pascal, which was an up-and-coming teaching language, and it soon became my go-to language for many tasks. Between Pascal and assembly I was good through about 1990, when my job required me to use a Unix server, and of course the natural language there was C. That led to C++, first on my own time then at my next job in 1997. There was a short period where I found myself applying OO concepts to assembly code! C# was a recent addition for a job-related task where it was an obviously better choice than C++.

Python is the interesting one of the bunch. I was exposed to it about 1995, when a coworker selected it as an embedded scripting language for our product. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time, as it was outside of my immediate responsibilities. It was selected again as an embedded scripting language at my next employer around 2003. This time I paid attention, and came to love it. It's the language that lets me turn my thoughts into results the fastest.

Thanks for asking the question, I've never stopped to think about my programming history in this much detail.
Punching up vs. punching down.
What's "double business taxes"? With relatively minor exceptions, if two countries have a tax treaty among them (which is usually the case in the western world), there are no double taxes.

(Although you are likely paying the higher, rather than the lower, of the relevant two).
Not specifically medicine, but here is an overview of successful SPRs: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gv/statistical_prediction_rules_out...
And, with a better understanding of cognition, we can help pave the way toward other, more benevolent applications (e.g., curing psychological ailments).

An example of progress would be equally intensive research on how consumers could tip the balance back in our favor. I'm skeptical that it will happen for a couple of reasons:

1. Research supporting business and marketing probably has infinitely more generous funding. We are hopelessly out-gunned.

2. Research into how people respond to abuse (manipulation) doesn't necessarily translate into benevolent applications.
It is entirely possible that they do use ObjC and Swift on Linux.
I'm not certain about 538s target demographic these days.

I'm gonna guess that they did solve it analytically, but for the sake of exposition and readers that might not know what a binomial distribution, they bring up the coin-flip as an illustrative example.
In China, Pigs Are Flying. Almost
>I'm all for automating jobs that technology deems unnecessary. The solution isn't to push everyone into some multi-disciplinary creative class. Many people would be very happy as uber drivers, or any other menial job, if they were treated with respect by their employer. I'd say the solution begins with treating workers with dignity and respect.

I agree, but the problem is not a moral problem but a business problem. How do you design a product, and then the process of making that product, so that you can afford to treat employees well in a competitive, global market? I'd even put it like this: How can you turn paying employees more into a competitive advantage?
Our software could do this for us automatically, e.g., a browser plug-in that detects prices in a web page, and automatically rounds them back up, then adds taxes and shipping.
What Bagging Groceries Can Teach You About Web Performance
Uber is nearing $10 billion in bookings, or about 50-100x as much as the largest cab companies. The need of some people to see every tech company is the underdog is ridiculous. By and large the whole point of tech entering these traditional markets is to use capital and technology to achieve scale and efficiency the small businesses playing in those spaces can't hope to match.
Right, except I can't imagine that it wouldn't help to work in a resume-padding company to get 'access' to a much wider range of companies. I'm in the USA on an H1B for one of the big companies, and honestly, for people outside the US, US employment choices are quite limited. Many companies won't do an H1B sponsorship, or won't even respond to an application. If I did apply for jobs now, I can't imagine the resume-padding wouldn't help as a form of pre-selection.
It gets worse, because humans are intelligent. If they spent all that effort co-opting these regulations, might it not be better to write the regulations in the first place? Much less effort for something even more adapted for them to do bad things.

If the regulations raise the cost of malfeasance such that bad actors have to expend more to maintain their badness, then even fully captured regulations can still be a net positive. In other words, the bad actors are still bad, but there are fewer of them left, and they can't be quite as bad because it's more expensive to maintain the regulatory capture.
An easy way to build your vocabulary
In terms of how they behave, yeah, they're pretty similar—have a population of individuals, evaluate them for fitness, perform copy / mutation / crossover for highly fit individuals, repeat until fitness is high enough, or you get tired of it.

But, the arbitrary nature of the code being executed in GP (vs a fixed set of parameters in a GA), gives the GP system a lot more flexibility in finding an effective solution. The potential solution space is a lot larger.
> A town, city, state or country can provide its community with a basic income that is backed by the value created by that community.

It's not clear to me why the value created by people living inside those types of communities should be aggregated into a single monetary device. In a town, there are various groups of people working together to produce different products in different kinds of economic activity. Some make profit and thus can distribute the produced value, some don't make profit and can't distribute anything.

Those groups are usually called companies, corporations and so on. They already have a system of exchangeable tokens representing both ownership and decision rights regarding the activity of the group and the redistribution of its produced value. Those tokens are called shares or stocks. It's a nice system that does not work too bad, though I'd agree that a bit of decentralization would be welcome.

But fusing those tokens from different companies into a monetary tool that would represent the activities of a larger group controlled by political structures such as a "town, city, state or country", seems to be a gross loss of granularity that would probably result in dramatic economic inefficiencies.
Presumably, Affirm is an application of the same "all-encompassing many-sources-as-possible Bayesian-analysis engine" behind both Paypal's anti-fraud and Palantir's anti-terrorism technology. As such:

> Also, is there data that shows that someone with a long commit streak is more creditworthy than someone without a Github profile?

That data doesn't exist; the precise job of this sort of correlation engine is to create it. In credit analysis, you start with a decent credit-worthiness model of all your customers—derived not from predictions, but from how people with a given feature-set did historically. Then you go looking for new feature datasets to incorporate into your model which decrease its RMSE at predicting split-subsets of your outcome data.

Github commit history could easily be one of these. I would guess it would be a good prediction of both average employment tenure, and of the Big 5 Conscientiousness personality trait.

But I don't have to be right—I just throw the feature-set into the engine, and it either finds signal in it and turns up its weighting in the model, or finds that it's noise and turns it down to zero.
UK Election coverage with a twist
How long will it take to amortize the costs of the hardware based on EC2 g2.xlarge savings?