skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even distribution is not the goal. Finding like-minded matches is the goal.

From a purely statistical standpoint - their claim is false about the roughly 1 in 16,777,216 chance. But the goal is to find like-minded people.

Let's create a 1 question True/False test. Let's assign the probability of answering True on the question is 70% and answering False is 30%.

You give the test to 100 people. You now have 35 pairings for "True" and 15 pairings for "False". Would it make sense to pair the "True" people with the "False" people to approach an "even distribution"? Only if your goal was to match people with "1 out of every 2 people" from a purely statistical standpoint of weighing 2 options.

The importance in this case is not distribution - but rather if these 8 questions determine who is "similar" in thinking to another person. If you asked someone their favorite color and their favorite pet - you might get a lot of matches. But many of those matches might be terrible with the people having little in common beyond that.

In the FAQ they take a step back and don't really guarantee good matching, even in the event of a match. However matches should be statistically rare (even if biased towards a specific 8 answers on the questions) and might still produce "good results". This makes it an interesting case study and one that can be tweaked and redone if we ever discover a way of asking only a few questions (I'd say no more than 10?) and accurately defining someones personality.

That's the way I see it at least. More of a case study than a statistical claim, even if they're trying to spin the statistics to spur people to take the 8 question quiz. Who knows, it may end up with a lot of good matches based on just-vague-enough questions and the likilihood of similar answers (even if, in some scenarios, fewer than the projected 16~ million and in other scenarios even more)
Let's grow old together
George Lucas Talks About Star Wars (1976)
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch called the death sentence a “fitting punishment.”

Ignoring the difficult question of whether a death sentence is appropriate/civil/okay: I cannot believe that this sentence made it past any sane editor. Not with that name, not with that (hopefully out of context) quote.
5 Lesser-Known Gems in the World of Information Security Conferences
"the downright Fascist porn restrictions (no I'm not bitter)" doesn't say anything about teenagers specifically.
That's really a detail of the implementation, something that you could expect to be improved upon, not the language.
My target is a Cortex M microcontroller so its always statically linked :-)
Why is this any better than protonmail.ch?
Excellent, I was hoping for a better auto-complete. Atom is fast becoming one of my favorite editors. Great work everyone, keep it up!
Part of the treatment is restricting consumption of the fats that would compete with it. Once it's in place, its stronger bonds might tend to keep it there.
those were the fastest 20 posts.
Haven't made any direct comparisons (and that would be hard) but from my experience from working with both I would say that you probably won't notice a big difference in RAM usage (< 10% difference).
We Need More Polymaths
Nothing about you personally. You said that Americans do not like subsidizing private industries. I pointed out one glaring couter-example that many, most(?), Americans seem happy enough to subsidize.

I'm not making any other point.
Wow, that Registered Reports thing sounds like a fabulous idea. I think it could be an interesting solution to the problem that it's really hard to publish things that don't work. Several times I've read papers thinking "hmm, this might be worth trying", and then talking to the authors you hear "no, no, it's a crappy method, try that other thing instead".
Sorry, mistyped and can't edit anymore.
Not a lawyer, but this seems like trolling (I could be perfectly wrong here, it just feels this way).

Was there a patent there?
This site's usage of browser is ridiculous. Every time you move forward or backwards it adds another history entry, making your back button pretty much useless.

If they want to provide deep linking to a particular map location they should change the URL without writing to the history.
This just feels so wrong to me. Not to mention the resulting pain from the ensuing appeals.
Whoops, I meant GWU.
I'm curious what the differences were for naval support fire between the various combatants.
Collecting Time-Series Stock Data with AT&T M2X on Heroku
Government is just as unstable. Doesn't the OP say that trains were better funded in the past than now, and other posters have said the same about Federal interstates? The political climate changes so funding for projects change.
Which CMS?
That's true but not very meaningful. Imagine the difference if only US citizens would take USD (and only so much of it) instead of it generally being preferred world-wide.

So yes, a government could set up an e-currency and make us use it, but there's no way a government could (intentionally) set up a currency like bitcoin. Truly algorithmic e-currency is fundamentally incompatible with the concept of governing. Anything by a government would allow reversals, currency injections, invisible transactions, etc.
I've been using it for the past week and have been happy with its performance. I'm definitely going to be sticking with it for awhile.
I appreciate that they didn't. I don't like jQuery. I'm forced to use it for work sometimes, but on side projects I won't touch it. However, I do like D3 a lot for visualization work. If D3 piggybacked onto jQuery, I would find it a lot less palatable.

That said, the way D3 does selections/grouping is much more complex than jQuery. Sure, on the surface level they do the same thing (selecting DOM nodes), but where D3 diverges is the ability to represent DOM nodes as data you tie to it. So your array and your <circle> elements are 1:1, or perhaps your array elements have sub-arrays...D3 can easily tie those sub-arrays into sub-DOM-elements, all while letting you address different pieces of the tree easily.

They are two different beasts. One is a DOM library, one is a visualization library. There is really not a whole lot of intersection beyond some basic operations.
I think you would appreciate the language better if you understood that it is just Lisp with a slightly different syntax. They do everything using symbols, and all functions are decomposed into symbols for head and arguments. In my point of view, Wolfram language is a combination of many of the great concepts from Lisp and Prolog, which makes it very useful for knowledge representation.
Creating an AngularJS AutoComplete Tag Input Widget
while cool those types of locks are more quickly solved with a hammer and large screwdriver, well the screwdriver just makes it easier
I've used Sublime for a number of years now and have recently (over the past few weeks) been making a concerted effort to use Atom as my daily driver (mostly because I appreciate the open source nature of it and am familiar with Node). My experience thus far has been good. I use a Windows machine and half a year ago Atom was practically unusable; it's come a long way since and now I'm comfortable using it as my main editor.

I do notice the occasional performance hiccup -- I'll try jumping through settings and the application will hang for 20-30 seconds. I would say this happens probably 1-2 times per day. Other than that I don't really have any complaints. The package/theme community is vibrant and updates/improvements arrive frequently. Sublime is still a more stable and capable application, but given Atom isn't even at a 1.0 release I think that's acceptable. I think it's only a matter of time before Atom overtakes Sublime in terms of stability and performance -- the current velocity of V8, Node and Electron have it well on its way.
It's a Sublime competitor. Not an IDE. I'll just speak for myself doing Scala development:

It in no way replaces IntelliJ. Atom doesn't host SBT. It won't compile in the background, it doesn't parse your code and build an AST. It doesn't execute tests, etc etc.

With that out of the way, it seems like a really nice text editor with the really bad UX of shoving most commands into a "command palette" (which seems somewhat popular these days, for reasons I don't understand) instead of just giving you shortcuts to the common ones.

In practice this means I'm typing CMD+SHIFT+P to open the palette, type "grammar" to open the language switcher, and type "scala" and enter to select the language. Every time I create a new file. It's passionately lame. Also, "grammar"? As opposed to using the muscle memory everyone whose used a text editor any time in the past two decades has developed for "syntax"? What jerk thought that up?

But maybe I'm just missing something.

Also, because it's a cross platform node.js thing, nothing is native and all configuration is done in JSON ala Sublime. If this was a Windows application they'd be making you set all your preferences, even changing font size, through an .INI file.

Of course there aren't a lot of native apps that do a whole lot better IME. Textastic is great, but it's syntax parsing is lacking. ChocolatApp never bothered to get visual selection right. Sublime suffers some of the same faults as Atom and does the `subl .` work to open a given folder on the first try without Sublime already being open yet? Textmate is dated. Visual Studio Code is actually probably my favorite, but it's just Atom with a different skin and command palette and it doesn't support Scala yet.

I dunno. I flop between different editors weekly it seems. Maybe I'll give UltraEdit a shot. I liked that on Windows back in the day and it seems like there's a Mac version.

My 2c.

EDIT: Nope. UltraEdit is the worst of the lot. Feels like it's running under Wine. No Theme support (you have to choose background colors, highlight colors, etc manually), no Scala support that I can tell. You'd have to be a forever-time UltraEdit user on Windows to want to subject yourself to it on a Mac.
Whilst I agree it'd make sense in that particular context for the back button to take me back a page in the results list, I'd rather the search results page made use of actual links which I can use via my browser to make a new HTTP request for another page of results. I dislike sites which insist on loading primary content with JavaScript, breaking the browser's loading feedback (animated icon, hidden favicon) in the process. These sites usually don't handle failed requests properly, either. If I were to post a form in Firefox to a site which happened to be temporarily down, Firefox would display a message explaining what went wrong and giving me the option to resubmit the entire form as many times as I want.

I also worry about the pushState function being misused to hide URLs in XSS attacks which involve query string parameters. It's clear you can also stop a user from going back from your page too, something I imagine could also be misused.
Here's a 2014 paper from Qubes,
http://www.invisiblethingslab.com/resources/2014/Software_co...

"Many people believe the Holy Grail of secure isolation is to use two or more physically separate machines. This belief seems so natural, that we often don't give it much thought. After all, what better isolation could we possible get than physical "airgap"?

I would like to discuss two exemplary scenarios involving isolation: one for securing the Tor process and another for securing email operations, and compare the pros and cons of using the physical isolation vs. the software compartmentalization as currently possible on Qubes OS."
If Halpern really did share his prototypes etc with Kalanick then it is quite unethical what Kalanick did but I doubt there is legal recourse. Then again I wouldn't be surprised when it comes to Travis's ethics.

This does give founders food for thought to be less open and protect their ideas until they have something solid. NDA's don't work but you can try to keep a low profile as much as possible.
>Very much agree. And Wolfram used to be a university professor; he darned well knows how to give credit to others when it is due.

And he should know that science is supposed to be done by collaboration, transparently sharing information, not by peddling proprietary libraries. But he doesn't care, and he never has.

Here's a good write-up about it from 2003: http://chem.tufts.edu/science/Shermer/E-Skeptic/SkepticsOnWo...
> “Authors still create journals in prose-style — do we really need to produce all that text?”

I used to think that the answer was no, but recently I've become convinced that the answer is yes, we really do need to produce all that text. First, 'all that text' is really a misnomer, scientific papers are pretty dense (c. f any letter to Nature). Second, the audience here is not a machine, it's a human, and humans are inherently biased toward stories. The best papers have a story (in the journalism sense, no the fiction sense), and they use this story to make a convincing argument. Without the story, you have data and data is not an argument. As much as I'd like to believe that the data would be enough, we have to remember that we're not producing arguments in a vacuum. The audience comes to the table with a lot of preexisting ideas, biases and beliefs and unwinding these is non-trivial. Think about evolution and Origin of the Species. Looking at the data now, it seems so obvious, but even the data along with stacks of arguments was not enough to convince people for a very long time. It's work to re-write a person's mental models - all that text is needed to get the information in there.
As a first impression, I found it very easy to add a bunch of sites at once to my page.

Although I'm not quite sure I understood how to add content from a new site, one that's not in the curated collection.
are you saying, that, without government, the East India company wouldn't be stealing people's lands?

Most likely. Of course it's all hypotheticals, but since we - for the most part - define government as that entity which has (mostly) a monopoly on the use of force, a private company would not generally be considered empowered to do that without the sanction of a government.

Or are you saying that, without government regulation, the East India company wouldn't have formed their own private army?

Correct.

Do you think private armed militias, that are legal today in the US, be allowed to exist?

Of course they can exist. Now, of course, we're at the bottom of the stack, so to speak. What if one of these private militias "goes rogue" and commits unspeakable atrocities? Who's to stop that, right? And I guess your answer would be "the government"? I'd argue that the answer is "some other voluntarily assembled mutual defense entity, or no one". Anyway, all we've really shown here is that if you drill down deep enough, human conflict is inevitable and at some level we may never get away from "force vs force". But I argue against institutionalizing the idea of using force to compel people to do things, and keep the use of force reserved for self defense.

You're going to have to reconcile your position of "less government" with "leads to more private armies".

I'm not opposed to private armies in general. I'm opposed to private armies, operating with the sanction of the State, and essentially becoming one more arm of the government, and being used to violate people's rights. Or, you could even omit the "with the sanction of the State" bit, and the rest would still stand. The problem is, when we accept the presence and authority of something like a State, and then it endorses or sanctions "evil" (for lack of a better term) acts, it's that much harder to muster opposition to those acts, since they're nominally "legal".
I wonder if a purely functional language would have been more appropriate, given the fact that programs written in such languages are more amenable to automatic rewriting and reasoning.
A buddy and I once attended a performance at The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. Embarrassingly, we're were pretty drunk, but we were also enthusiastic,friendly, and front row, stage right. He graciously played a tune we kept shouting out ("Nobody loves me but my momma, and sometimes I think she's lying too...") and shook our hands at the end of the show. He even gave my friend his guitar pick. I think he had family in the from row that night as well. Makes my face red to even think of it now. A tremendous talent and gracious man, he's been in my mix for over 30 years and for some more to come. Thanks B.B.
Why would you even care if this was standard or not. People value their privacy differently.
As for the puzzle on the page, has anyone found out the pattern of the number sequence?

[3, 6, 9, 21, 22, 47, 78, 89, 134, 225, 368]
Give it some time to mature. Today is the day of the language specification, not the finalization of the toolchain.

The Rust language offers low-level access with amazing security guarantees, and is working on an optimizing toolchain.

Let me take Python as a comparison. It has fundamental[1] roadblocks for being fast on current and probably future hardware, because its dynamic nature requires many indirections which are problematic for CPU cache efficiency.

Will Rust always be faster than C? Probably not, but that is not needed to be blazingly fast. What is important is that there are no fundamental difficulties to be as fast as C.

[1] I know, you can work around some of those indirections.
http://www.reddit.com/r/redditgetsdrawn
Which other private companies have been given the authority to more or less declare war and occupy territory as they see fit? I guess you could argue Halliburton comes close, but the point is that most private companies aren't given those powers.
This whole thing has been done before and in a way that allowed the questions to be crowdsourced, not just one person coming up with what he/she thinks are meaningful.

On OKCupid, There are thousands of questions, many of them penned by users. You choose which questions to answer, then mark how important this question is to you. You also choose the answer you want your partner to have. For example:

Are you looking for a partner to have children with?
[] yes
[] no

Answer(s) you’ll accept
[] yes
[] no

Importance
[] a little
[] somewhat
[] very

If this question were not at all important to you, you would just not answer it.
> I suspect some of the Linux and OS X users dual-boot.

Hard to tell: how many install Steam under their dual-booting (or dedicated game machine) Windows and don't bother to install it under alt-OS as their games mostly don't run on it because the developer didn't bother supporting it?

> there's almost no laptops that support the Rift / the narrow market segment of people who own the Darth Vader Trash Can

Given the requirements, be realistic, there's not much PC either. It doesn't matter, as this is a nascent market. It also seems that everyone assumes that the games run must be of the Crysis or whatever the latest heavy-duty shiny AAA thing is. Hearing you all, I wonder how I even can possibly be enjoying gaming on my HD4000† under OSX. Turns out I do, and this is what infuriates me about those requirements. I do understand the requirements about latency and real-time scheduling constraints, yet I am convinced we can build innovative, great VR things satisfying those constraints even on "reduced" hardware.

† yes, games can be fun without SSAO, DOF, or even real-time soft shadows.
That, some mylar[0], and a blanket[1]!

[0]http://i.imgur.com/kdNOe5u.jpg (founder of thepiratebay.org)

[1]http://security.stackexchange.com/a/82374 (Snowden)
Do software engineers really have a 40 hour work week?
I second Namecheap. I use the same SSL certificate for my web service. I used to use free cert from startSSL but they declined to renew the free one and the cost was too high so I switched to Namecheap.
To say that the positions lobbyists are lobbying for "virtually all have majority support" is a much bolder claim than the one that I making, which is merely that they are untested opinions that run counter to the spirit of democracy. Lobbyists are in the business of keeping them untested. Why try to engender grassroots support or genuinely benefit constituents when you can spend the money more effectively (i.e., a better ROI) on a handful of representatives? For example, can you say with a straight face that Gramm-Leach-Bliley was genuinely supported and understood by a majority of the population?

If achieving policy based on majority opinions was actually the end game of lobbyists, why would they need to exist in the first place? Majority opinions would elect majority abiding politicians who would enact majority policies. Where's the step that necessitates lobbyists?

[1] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Gramm-Leach-Blile...
NDA's do work if used correctly, but they are not a catch all.
I guess you either missed, or chose to ignore, the "as we know them today" part of that?

Countries today do a lot more than just self defense. So to answer your question - "no".
Yes, exactly, especially in the context of "my girlfriend and I", "playing with", etc. Low-(brow|hanging fruit), even for me.
New word for my vocabulary: polymath

I was confused when "knowing a broad array of mathematics" wasn't the focus. The article ended and I paused to ask myself "what did this have to do with polymaths?" - Trying to follow my intuition from "polyglot" to "polymath" failed me here.

I think the article is fairly succinct and well-written. To the extent people should become specialized is a concern.

The idea is striking a balance between specialists and polymaths. Polymaths can benefit for society as much as specialists can - as the shared examples of "combining two ideas to invent something new" shows. If you invent something new, people can specialize in that new field and improve upon it and build from it.

Both are equally valuable and equally self-serving as well as society-serving. It's what the individual values that matters the most.

I'm an autodidact and would consider myself a polymath, or at least interested in learning many fields well above a "generalized" level - but not quite at a specialists' level. A jack-of-all-trades approach.
Thanks to the crackdown on business method patents, the Uber concept probably isn't patentable in the US.
Oh hey, they're writing a PLT Group rival to Software Foundations and Certified Programming with Dependent Types.
Don't you have to kill your clone ?

I liked this until they said "soulmate" it works much better as a weird sort of atsy project.