skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going through half of Swift's ebook rewriting an old objc program in the process and the amount of syntax special cases is just mind boggling. So far the worst offender to me feels the use of the where keyword inside branched let assignments. Example: ``if let a = optionalValue where a.someFieldString = "hello" { ... }``. In general the ``where`` keyword signals they ran out of ideas designing the language.
What's more likely: a nationwide and unrevealed conspiracy to flip votes in favor of Romney, or that Republican voters in larger/more populous precincts favor Romney more often than voters in smaller precincts?

Edit for clarity: by larger/more populous I mean the x-axis on the graphs in the paper, though I forgot that this is only Republican voters and Republican/Democrat split in the precinct is also a factor. The x-axis doesn't necessarily mean rural to urban.
Virtually there – Students react to VR
Yeah, they do- and it's an offense many sites commit. As if people are supposed to just sign up blindly w/o knowing what they're there for. Don't make the same mistake.
In SF, aside from the great coffee there are many who love the startup aspects of Blue Bottle. They went from selling at local farmer's markets to small kiosks to full shops.

I think that, in addition to what others have said, Blue Bottle has pretty big plans for itself. Aside from SF, BB runs cafes in NYC and now Tokyo. They've acquired an LA based coffee shop and now also have LA shops, Tonx Coffee and now do mail order subscriptions. Those two were maybe a year ago? Recently they acquired / merged with Tartine Bakery which is also a lovely SF establishment.

So, I don't know why, but I've got to assume someone giving them money knows something. ;)
So if Strange Loop were a conference with presenters chosen totally on technical merit, you would still prefer they dis-invite a presenter with Yarvin's racial views? I think you're arguing that it's a trade-off regardless (sure) but do you have any idea where a political line is, Left or Right, where we should start expressing disapproval when those on the wrong side are excluded?

I'll take your word for it that Yarvin is way on the far side of any such line, but I'm still pretty curious about roughly where it is these days.
I agree. More layers of complexity than short term memory slots is a mandatory property of belief systems -- as more effort will be required to find the contradictions then is likely to be allocated.

And certainly handling such individuals with kid gloves is important to mitigate the intransigence reflex. I only ask because I wish to discover some more effective strategy to aid some of the more zealous individuals to improve their moral consistency. Fear is far more powerful than reason, however.
> Your first sentence implies that technology and politics are divorced. I disagree with this.

I find that perspective strange. Machinery does not particularly care what end it's put to.

> Second, I've been aware of Yarvin long enough that I am not particularly aware of how I came to know the psudonym. I don't remember it as being particularly private. I did not go out of my way, I saw his name on the program and instantly remembered. I'm not in the habit of digging through histories, but when I see a name I recognize, I recall a history like anyone else.

You try to minimize your association, but you took the effort to get him banned from speaking about a neutral topic because you dislike his political views. You ARE a censor. Frankly I think you're way worse than him, because at least he'd let you talk.

Amusingly it appears I have been slowbanned because of my participation in this conversation. Oh well.
Bite Python: Weekly Python Newsletter
I'm not sure how this is a fair question to ask Klabnik, since the issue in Yarvin's case isn't whether somewhat obscure namedropped French philosophers think his views are racist. Edit: It seems to me like there's no controversy about whether Yarvin's views are racist; it's barely controversial to suggest that he's a white supremacist (if that's something he wants to distance himself from, he's done himself no favors by overtly nodding to white nationalism in his own writing).

I'd also suggest you keep in mind that Urbit is, as technical ideas go, both marginally impactful (at least today), and extraordinarily idiosyncratic (see: the Nock ASCII pronunciation guide).

It is not remotely unreasonable for conference organizers barely acquainted with Urbit to be concerned that Yarvin's strident philosophical views might be entwined with his technical ideas, which one could fairly argue are --- unlike his politics --- obscurantist. If Urbit was more important, I'd understand more about the controversy. But this doesn't seem like a difficult call.
"Letting a person speak" isn't the only impact of inviting that person to your event, particularly an event that facilitates social gatherings and an ongoing dialogue between its attendees. If we just wanted to exchange information as efficiently as possible, we wouldn't bother with the time and expense of in-person conferences. The event provides a social context, and that's why we put so much monetary and cultural value on attendance in comparison to, say, sitting at home and reading an academic paper or a blog post.
21 Inc and the future of Bitcoin
FTFA:

> Some argue that more liberal candidates are more popular in urban than in the rural precincts. To verify this hypothesis, we drew geographically random samples
of precincts and computed partial correlations to filter out the population density factor. We will demonstrate in this paper that this factor has no impact on our
conclusions.
Open source contributions are in general acceptable, as long as it's not to a competitor's product. You should reach out to legal, they'll probably OK it.
> I've heard some managers seriously suggest that they would not be able to manage people who got paid more than them

This is just greed/pride. As a manager, the only person who knows that an engineer makes more than you is you. And it's pretty common these days for companies to have an engineering track that has a VP-equivalent top position, so it's pretty common that the most senior engineers will make more than most of the managers at the company.
> Without historical context this analysis is meaningless. Is this one election the exception or the norm?

Why is it meaningless? It is still interesting and important to look for fraud during a single, particular election. Especially, one could argue, in the most recent one, since that presumably means bad-actors are more likely to be active in the next presidental election. I agree that it is interesting to see if voting fraud is common or widespread in primary elections in general, but studying individual events is not useless.

It occurred to me that you may have meant to say that the analysis is not robust without historical comparisons to establish that such anomalies are not just statistical fluctuations? That would something worthwhile to explore. It seemed (from very quickly skimming the pdf) that they did try various statistical tests to ensure their results were robust. But comparison with other datasets would likely provide a good test of the robustness of their findings.
Looks to be the same idea as Cycle.

https://github.com/staltz/cycle
>This is emphatically not how the free market of ideas is supposed to work.

I don't think you appreciate what the "free" in "free market" refers to...
I was cheering for NASA's Robosimian. They was it was transforming was truly captivating.
The bits used to represent each register in 8086 machine code, when sorted as binary numbers, come out in this order.

Where the bits go depend on the instruction and addressing mode. They generally follow this pattern; some addressing modes don't support some registers though.
they're the ones being persuaded (to varying degrees) by scientific evidence of a man-made threat

Personally I am in the camp that global warming is almost certainly real. What I haven't seen is an estimate of what percentage is due to human activity. Do you have a citation for what that might be? It strikes me that appropriate action differs depending on humanity's contribution, e.g. < 40%, do nothing to alter consumption, it won't appreciably alter the result, > 100 % (Hey, without human intervention we might actually experience cooling) throttle it down as best as practical.
So where was the engine?
All we saw was simulation of flow from a triangular area that wasn't shaped anything like an engine nozzle.

So yeah... was expecting an engine. Saw a 2-dimensional triangle. Dissappoint.
It's been a few years since I was there but I definitely knew of a lot of engineers who were flouting this rule. I just assumed it was contract boilerplate. Definitely understand you couldn't write an iOS app in your spare time however.
The Shunt is great, but there are some potentially dangerous gotchas in its operation. Never use it with ropes of different diameter. As a rappel backup, the shunt can fail if you place it above your belay device. The risk is that a panicked operator will hold the device open. In the correct mode of operation, you place the shunt below your belay device. If you're disabled, the shunt will lock off. If you panic and hold it open, the force you apply to the device will arrest your rappel.
> If Al Gore were so profoundly afraid of climate change, he wouldn't fly in a private jet

That's incorrect. He could easily and profoundly believe that using a private jet increases his efficiency in promoting climate awareness.
Unfortunately, it seems my comment was taken with an assumed connotation. I simply wasn't aware that DARPA opened it to any one outside of the US since, well, it's DARPA. It probably wasn't the most insightful comment in the world, but, yes--now I am aware.
Yes, but I am reminded of what people in 1990 would think of "In 20 years, all your software [1] will be randomly downloaded from the internet and run on your computer. That software will store files on your computer, access the low-level language of your graphics card, connect to other computers, and run calculations in the background."

Seems impossibly insecure, right? Yes, it has risks, but we all accept them.

The good news is that people will finally be able to communicate to each other without the intervention of (several) giant megacorps.

[1] https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games/v2
Does a smaller MMA cage mean more finishes? [2014]
The paper refutes the argument that Romney was more popular in urban areas (see page 20 and following).
Some pictures and more color would help
All I long for is logical consistency and empathy...

Various comments from the discussion:

> Whatever happened to "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."?

Getting dis-invited from a tech conference is not losing the right to say anything. The state is not punishing Yarvin for his speech. Giving a talk at a private tech conferences is not a right protected by anyone.

> Kicking people from your tech conference because they were racist outside of it hands veto power to whoever determines what racism is and when something is 'too racist'.

I'll defend Alex's right to organize a conference. You are free to organize another conference. (More generally, the market of conferences will decide whether Alex is doing a bad job.)

> In the end, if you're a straight white male, you will fall prey to it because you're not a protected class. You can see this playing out in video games, movies and SF&F publishing right now.

If you are a straight white man, accept that the world isn't perfect (you suffer the consequences of being a member of an identifiable group) and count yourself lucky that you don't have to face the other (often deadlier) forms of oppression faced by other groups.

> My personal opinions would get me called racist, sexist and homophobic by Marxist standards and I was exhausted by the political mask I had to assume just to find and keep work.

I imagine it was a lot easier to wear that political mask than it would have been to change your skin-color, gender, or age. Your way in the tech industry will be quite difficult if you get any of those wrong.
I don't have anything to add to this thread except to say that this is a gracious response and thank you for chiming in even while being at the center of controversy.
I don't know how to answer your first question.

I'll leave it at this. If I was Strange Loop's organizer, what I might have written is:

I don't know exactly how to articulate where our line is on providing a stage and a microphone to people with ideas I find repellent. I've never been in a position to need to draw that line. I'm not interested in spending a lot of time surveying it further. For now, it suffices to say that wherever the line is, advocacy for apartheid and genetic predisposition to slavery crosses it.

Incidentally, the use upthread of the term "Stalinist" is telling. Yes: if Yarvin had been a Stalinist, I do think we'd be having the same discussion, Yarvin's views seeming approximately as far to the right as "Stalinism" would put him to the left.
UN “Death Targets” Means Depopulation for Elderly
Maybe not mind-blowing but life-altering: The Turing Omnibus, by A.K. Dewdney. I read it while in high school and it made me decide to learn computer science. It has 50 short chapters on things like RSA cryptography, the halting problem, logic circuits, perceptrons.

For fiction, Ted Chiang is my go-to author when I want my mind blown.
Yes, I saw that. The authors ruled out one possible explanation (urban vs rural).

Perhaps it's due to gerrymandered districts, republican vs democratic districts, large farm districts vs small towns, small towns vs large cities, or some other factor we can't think of in a few minutes.

The authors should rule out a lot more possible explanations before alleging fraud.
They claim to address that, specifically:

Some argue that more liberal candidates are more popular in urban than in the rural precincts. To verify this hypothesis, we drew geographically random samples of precincts and computed partial correlations to filter out the population density factor. We will demonstrate in this paper that this factor has no impact on our
conclusions.

I'll have to look at this in more detail when I have time.

Note also that just a few races have to be flipped, "momentum" is really critical. For instance, if they're correct and Romney didn't win New Hampshire, it's very easy to imagine him never getting decisive traction no matter how much money he threw into the campaign (one analysis I recently read noted he campaigned for dollars rather than votes, which of course was telling in the end).
I would add the Get invite textfield on the middle of the botton part, and use the upper part to show a bit of a more graphic explanation of your page purpose. The font is a bit too small IMO, it makes me not want to read anything. It looks great on mobile, desktop needs some tweaks and you are done. Seems like a great idea though :)
State clearly what you're doing and why this will blow me away.
There's another type of hybridized consultancy/product business to consider: have a product and provide value-added consulting around the product. This tends to work best with B2B products that require implementation legwork, customization, or just general thought on the customer side to get maximum value.

For example, at Guidearama.com, our platform lets businesses turn marketing assets (videos, white papers, case studies, etc.) into a resource center on their website with lead generating landing pages. We've often ended up managing the entire program our clients are implementing around our platform. This can be packaged at a fixed cost and is much easier to price based on value than normal time & materials work. To our clients, we look like heroes because we can produce results very quickly using guidearama.com that in their minds should take 10x longer to complete.

There are a few benefits to this hybrid approach:

* The consulting work becomes decommoditized. You gain an unfair advantage because you developed the product the client is interfacing with.

* Your product builds your pipeline for you so you spend less time on sales and marketing.

* Your consulting work becomes more efficient because you can automate many tasks in your product that would otherwise take time if you were doing straight consulting work

In patio11's case, I don't think there wasn't an opportunity to do this because his consulting work and Bingo Card Creator didn't overlap - the case might be different with Appointment Reminder.
Given the incredible finish rate in this weekend's UFC event, this detailed and thoughtful analysis seemed relevant.

Part II is here: http://fightnomics.com/category/blog/small-cage-analysis-par...

I surmise that non-fans might not realize that MMA has become a very data-driven sport. It's not uncommon for a fighter to simply dominate because of a better plan - some gyms now have data science teams that focus full-time for 12 weeks in advance of (and on) a particular fight.
I don't know. I remember hearing about this in 2012, but never whether it was accepted or rejected by anyone independent of these two authors, such as Andrew Gelman.

Googling now, all I seem able to find is various media articles and no independent statistical responses. The only followup seems to be http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article171398... but, in a version of 'proving too much', that raises more questions for me than it answers by indicating that they've found the phenomenon to be much more general than 'Republican primaries in one year' (for starters, rereading the paper, I'm not sure I buy the foundational claim: why would there be any trend of vote bias with precinct, why wouldn't these supposed biases be simply implemented as a randomized flip on each vote, which would rig the election without leaving any noticeable sign? And think of the logistics: how can all these states and races have been rigged - what, did they all buy the exact same model of Diebold voting machines back in 2007?) This sounds like some sort of demographic or statistical artifact; they say they control for the obvious demographic and precinct-level issues, but of course, you never measure or correctly model everything.
Maybe people aren't signing up because theres nothing to signup for ?. The only reason I (sort of) understand the product is because I'm familiar with a similar site [0]. There isn't much information on what you do, how you do it and who it would help.

Have a look at the reference for some inspiration.

[0] https://www.crowdmed.com/how-it-works?category=patient
Need a Front-End & Back-End Developer
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I am looking to hire a full-time front-end (Jade, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap) and possibly a full-time back-end (Node.js and Mongo)developer for my company. we are based in NYC and are creating an app that helps parents, teachers, and therapists coordinate care and education for children with special needs. If interested email me job at kidhoo.co

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Megs
re this:

> The better strategy is a bottom-up approach. Start with
> a monolith or small set of coarse-grained services and
> work your way up. Make sure you have the data model
> right.

the part about "or a small set of coarse-grained services"

I like this advice, but this is effectively starting with SOA! - just coarse grained. So the drive of this post should be so start with a simpler SOA, don't pre-optimize etc, not build a monolith.
When it comes to reactionary beliefs, there is a significant contingent on this site that believes one ought to be able to hold them publically with no consequences in any other space. This happened with that Mozilla CEO that resigned, the scientist who wore the shirt with scantily clad women on it, and a number of other situations where the privileged paid nominal costs for their mistakes. It is very upsetting to a subset of our fellow hners that you can't express antisocial ideas consequence-free.
The guy obviously has some rather ugly views, but as far as I can tell he submitted a conference about his technology and unless there's some other evidence that he's not able to separate his politics from his work, why not assume good faith?

Maybe you know something I don't know, but what evidence is there to assume that he couldn't put his viewpoint aside and be a positive force for the social context?
> you try to minimize your association

I did not, I am saying that when you claim I'm putting in a lot of effort to dig through someone's history, that's wrong.

> you took the effort to get him banned from speaking

If by 'took the effort' you mean 'sent a few dozen tweets over a few hours', then sure, that's effort. I didn't even particularly strongly argue that he should be banned, though I am certainly happy about the outcome here. I never even directly contacted the organizers, just stated my opinion in public, just as you're doing here.
Interesting story. If I were there, I am sure I would shell out $50 faster than anybody else. I hope $1,900 request would trigger some kind of a block for me!
Ironically, the St. Louis hacker who first suggested urbit would be a great fit for Strange Loop (hi Justin!) is an African-American.

An obsession with collective identity and collective characteristics - all proletarians are noble, all Germans are masters, all rednecks are racists, etc, etc - is common, perhaps for obvious reasons, in the democratic era. And in particular, all parties responsible for the atrocities of the 20th century - Nazi and Communist alike - were thinking very much this way.

This insistence on generalization would seem very strange to most of our ancestors, who would find the leap from collective differences to collective uniformity quite irrational. For instance, Cardinal Wolsey, who governed England for Henry VIII, was a butcher's son. Englishmen of his time did not find this at all strange, though hardly any of them agreed that nobles and butchers were statistically identical.

Also, for some reason which is perhaps less obvious, not all of us have to "represent groups." It does not seem likely that either Alex Payne or Alex Miller sees himself as representing white males, for instance. Perhaps this freedom to see oneself as just an individual is the most subtle form of privilege - but I think everyone should have it.
Probably because his blog posts are like millions of words of meandering stream of thought and links to public domain books and you would have to spend the next few months of your free time to read most of his posts? Occasionally funny and insightful, but concise and well-written they are not, burying the real content under mountains of fluff.
Edit: It seems to me like Yarvin is pretty overt about the racial stuff. His isn't a Rand Paul-ian "we don't need the Civil Rights Act, let the market take care of it" posture, but rather one that leans heavily on the just-world hypothesis to draw conclusions about the inferiority of Africans.
Historical results would be a better "control" against the possibility that this is the result of something other than systematic fraud.

This is a general problem with statistical analysis: all you can do is whittle down the space of possible explanations, you can never "prove" any one of them. I don't mean to nitpick about highly improbable statistical fluctuations. You can always make a "straw man" null hypothesis so shitty that it's trivially rejected (p<0.05 whee) and then claim that this supports your crazy alternative hypothesis. A robust review process should reject this kind of "p-hacking."

Controls are one of the best tools for cutting down the space of potential alternative explanations and avoiding p-hacking (intentional or not). It's not unreasonable to ask for one here. I haven't read deeply enough to know if the existing controls are convincing or not but the opinion "they aren't convincing" isn't silly.