skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The presumed original intent of the test was to assess the military risk from a bacteriological attack upon a U.S. city.

You couldn't build an empty mock city and test with it. Humans are a necessary element of biological contagion.

You couldn't get voluntary, informed consent from the inhabitants of an actual city, because behavioral patterns might change in response to the knowledge that the test was being conducted, and a lot of people would refuse to participate. Public knowledge of the test would screw up the test and make the results unreliable.

So there's no way to ethically perform such an experiment. But many soldiers also consider it their ethical imperative to protect the civilian populations of their country as well as they are able. Therefore, the rationale would be that in order to protect the lives of 300 million, the experimenters must trespass upon the rights upon 1 million, in a manner that most of them probably wouldn't even notice.

Of course, those people, having entirely too much trust in the essential goodness of their government, didn't consider that the same data could also be used to make bacteriological attacks on foreign populations more effective. They didn't consider whether their "harmless" bacterium was actually harmless. And they refused to take responsibility for the actual, demonstrable harm to unsuspecting humans.

This is why we have international conventions against certain military activities, and why we should not tolerate such tests to be conducted upon us, or anyone else. It makes no difference whether the humans are the subjects or the test medium, because the purpose of the test was to study biological warfare upon humans. And a biological weapon is one of the few weapons creatable at our current technology level that have the potential to annihilate our entire species. Any data gathered at all in this domain can only serve to make such weapons more effective, and defenses against them more complex. None of us can afford a human-versus-human arms race in this, as the one conducted between us and other species is a difficult enough struggle already.
For those interested, the monthly report the article refers to is the NOAA/Climate Prediction Center ENSO discussion:

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/en...
> When someone actually has built something, and it could be used by someone, they only get feedback about the size of the pages, how slow it is and that they should have used some other technology after all.

I know of a certain community where this seems to happen a lot. Instead of commenting on the actual content or the idea, it's always "Their web page doesn't SCROLL the way I like!!" and "What amateurs--they should have used Angular React Ember js with Docker!!" and "I didn't read any of the article but the title is CLICK BAIT!"

People are often quick to make the easy critique of something based on irrelevant surface characteristics.
>> "If my employer made this level of information available to everyone"

...I would stay well away. I guess it's different for everyone but I don't want this kind of information available to my colleagues never mind the general public.
This is brilliant, and I love that they aren't holding back.

I think if society govts/corps/ngo's operated like this the world would be a much better place. Or perhaps I've just gone hippie.

Buffer keep it up!
Amazon accused of 'Big Brother' tactics over customer reviews
I think a strong argument for 'no' comes from the No Free Lunch (NFL) theorems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem

The NFL theorems have been misused by advocates of 'intelligent design' -- they do not factor against evolution since evolution doesn't demand a global maximum, only a local one. (There are other reasons but this is the most fundamental.) But the theorems themselves are incredibly interesting.

In short they show that averaged over the space of all possible search landscapes, no search algorithm performs better than any other.

Obviously the universe does not provide "all possible search landscapes," since the universe has structure. Some search landscape structures and meta-structures are pathological and rare in nature. But nature does provide a huge diversity of them. The NFL theorem is to me powerful evidence that something as general as human or even animal intelligence must be a superposition of multiple "algorithms" rather than just one.

It also, I think, explains why all single-algorithm or single-approach methods of AI end up being domain specific. Obviously they'll be domain specific -- they only work against search landscapes with a certain structure!

The NFL theorems are a big reason I am a short term AI skeptic. I don't think human-level or beyond AI is impossible, but I think we are quite far from realizing it. I'll become more optimistic when AI researchers start studying biology more closely and deeply, since biological systems are the only existing examples of truly intelligent systems.
1) 2) 3) Are I think research goals of robotics. None are simple but I don't personally think they require anything that isn't possible to accomplish with computer + physical objects beyond the computer itself.
I'd imagine that more infrastructure (in the form of more charging stations) would make route planning and navigation a much less painful affair. If there was a charger in every town over (x) population, you wouldn't need to take those much longer routes or deal with drastic detours and backtracking if the range needs to be recalculated due to changing circumstances (air conditioning use, ambient temp, driving speed, etc.)
Author here. This is a grad school project built with D3. You can also see it embedded in our model database http://bigg.ucsd.edu.
Another Philadelphia area resident, I see!
Here's a direct link to the Google doc with all the info: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AgrWVeoG5divdE81...

Edit: I find this hugely inspiring. I love that they're sticking to their transparency promise.
I really appreciate a guide that takes you through the process, giving me a chance to understand all of the steps, before sharing the pre-packaged solution at the bottom.

I was a little surprised by the cost as well. At the rate that I'm gaming these days it would be like $10-20 per month, that's pretty damn good (price of games not included obviously).
The company I work for does something similar. Everyone at the same level gets the same salary, with percentage variations based on geography. It completely removes the competitive and secretive nature I've seen elsewhere. And it also pushes each individual to live up to their title due to the extra transparency.
Entertaining and terrifying article. Now I get to loose a bit more sleep on this. (sighs) Going to pass that favor along by forwarding the link to other inhabitants of this power keg (read: death trap) that is the Mid-South.

More seriously, the situation isn't unknown over here. Many of us are told what happened as campfire stories and such. Running the "Mighty Mississippi" backwards plus creating Realfoot Lake [1] left us in shock and awe. Especially after fishing at Realfoot. Then we tried to calm down by asking when the next one is coming and what they did to prevent us from being buried in rubble. The answers... didn't calm us down one bit... The New Madrid fault's potential is so devastating that people either leave the area or just put it out of their mind until some asshole writes another article lol.

The worst thing is we have bad storms, tornados, and potential for a major earthquake. The protections against the first two tend to make the other one worse. And vice versa. Tapei 101 has an interesting solution but Mighty Madrid would probably throw that sucker right out of the ground (or sink it). Not being in the area is literally the only safe strategy. I just hope the Big One doesn't hit during one of the many tornado invasions...

[1] http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3713836
Nah, fluxbox with custom control scripts.
May I ask why? What's wrong with people knowing how much you make?
How I Escaped the 9 to 5 and Built a $270K Freelance Business by 27
In my idiolect, those two words are homonyms. When I worked construction, you couldn't ask someone for caulk without raucous laughter.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/caulk

this link seems to agree, with the word represented in IPA as [kɔːk]
I have only 2 1/2 years of experience so far - I have generally gotten up to speed in companies' stacks in 1-2 days (I work on the frontend). My average tenure is 9-10 months at a company when omitting my employment at one company (3 months, very poor fit - even then that company was sad to lose out my talent, having been called the best engineer at that company).

I would probably fail that criteria, even though just about everything else is considered stellar to most companies (high quality open source work & contributions, hard & extremely efficient work at companies I have worked at, Marine Corps infantry experience, 4 years at a prestigious math PhD program, etc.).

Many other extremely good developers I have encountered would also fail that criteria - this is because the industry does not reward loyalty, and the developers get burned for showing any.
Semantics may not be a solvable problem, but the system doesn't exactly have to answer existential identity questions to render a list. A restricted subset of English would probably be necessary to deal with abstract algorithms.
I wonder why this works better than the Steam In-Home Streaming. I could never get it to be close to 60fps. The video suggests 60fps.
The only thing I dislike about this is that the salaries are literally public -- not just known to each other in the company, but your friends and family could also look up your salary. I'm not sure I understand the purpose of this. Is it really necessary to have names in the public listing?
My problem with that argument, which I have heard quite often, is that we cannot do anything useful with a term (awareness/experience of yellow in this case) that has neither extension nor intension.

What you experience when you see yellow is what you experience when you see yellow. Nothing more can be said about it and it cannot be compared to anyone elses experience of yellow, human or machine.

So if you make that experience a condition for calling another being intelligent, you are effectively saying that nothing but yourself can ever be intelligent.

You need to break down that thing you call experience of yellow or awareness of yellow and explain what properties it has (intension) or you need to be able to show that it influences the behaviour of humans in a way in which machines cannot be influenced by it (extension).
Have you ever considered why you feel that how much you earn should be a secret?
Automation is not a step forward. It increases the resource burn rate.
It can lead to uncomfortable social situations. Although I would like to believe people don't get jealous of how much others make or change their opinion based on that they do, even if they don't mean too.
The egg made the eggs. The DNA said "make an egg". That's the idea. Like a paper tape that you feed into a factory, with one punch, labeled "Man/Mouse". Punch 'Man' and feed it in, and the factory makes a man. So, a man is encoded in one bit? No.

Cells are factories, incredibly complex ones. DNA is a set of punches in a tape.
I might be wrong, but it seems silly to try to get a lot of mileage out of an purely electric vehicle.

I mean... Most trips (probably over 90% of the distance ran) are very short, for city people. It seems that you could get pretty much all the enviromnental benefit, and nearly all the savings, using a smaller battery pack. And authonomy would come from an ICE to rechange the pack

So, maybe the volt (or at least the idea behind it) is more resonable than tesla?
What I have been noticing is that a large number of people seem to be redefining "racism" and "racist".

"Or even worse, we’re told that we are being racist (Does any intelligent person actually believe a systematically oppressed demographic has the ability to oppress those in power?)"

People are adding the requirement that to be racist or racism that an oppression element must coexist with the thought or behavior[1][2]. That's not completely true. An element of superiority or inferiority must exist. An oppressed person can still be racist is they believe they are superior to their oppressors.

The comment from the story above turns people off and away from hearing what is being said because it is offensive and a fallacy.

EDIT: formatting

EDIT: Clarification "(Does any intelligent person actually believe a systematically oppressed demographic has the ability to oppress those in power?)" No. But you're conflating two issues; thinking of oneself superior to another based on race and oppression. One can be racist without [directly] oppressing others. In fact, that's what the article is trying to point out.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=racism
the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

[2] http://archive.adl.org/hate-patrol/racism.html
Ask HN: How to become an effective Citizen scientist
I have my own successful startup but I often think about what I would like to do when I retire or have more free time besides potentially starting other companies.

I really enjoy cosmology, astronomy and physics but my skills are unfortunately programming related (I would say computer science but that would be an abuse of the word science).

Everyday in the morning I read wikipedia articles on advance math and science. I probably only understand 10% but I trudge onward in hope that I some day will be better prepared and more likely accepted to be given the chance to help (in the previously mentioned disciplines).

But I'm wondering if maybe I should actually get involved earlier. I see lots of opportunities but some of them are close to mechanical turk / rote (like continuously monitoring road kill). I was hoping to apply some creative programming skills instead.

Are there HN users that are Citizen scientist that were or are programmers? If so... any tips?
That's extremely awesome. So many desperate people get caught out by claims like that.
They're still small. While they could probably keep their formulae public, I seriously doubt that the personal data exposure will be able to continue if/when Buffer matures into a company with more than a handful of employees. There are many good reasons to have some opacity around personal income, and at scale, people will expect that from their employer. It's one thing to find a couple dozen people in SF who don't mind, but it's another thing to hire hundreds or thousands of employees this way.
An Insider's Look into Incident Management: Keen IO
The MEME commercial license is at http://techtransfer.universityofcalifornia.edu/NCD/Media/MEM... . How is this "unspecified terms that would need to hashed out with the tech transfer office"? The license is US$2,500 for a license, which as Pachter correctly points out is a small cost for most companies.

Also, while it would be a significant improvement to you, would it be a significant improvement to the science?

For example, I can't speak to MEME but I know of a couple other projects where the software is at low/no cost to academics and has a license fee for commercial use. This money is used to fund future development, which gives a funding source that is independent of grant funding. Pachter also points out this possibility.

It can be frustrating if some people cannot use a package due to license terms or costs. But it can also be frustrating to use a package where no one is available to answer questions or fix bugs - which is something that funding can address.
The discrepancy in equity is huge
Grain consumption will vary by local industry. Livestock and biofuels consume more than humans do.
It's pretty rational for a proof-of-concept in something as innocuous as chat software to completely ignore security. That doesn't mean the author wouldn't spend time on it for his actual business, the one that generates actual money.

Most people pay attention to the requirements of their specific problem when designing software.
They did not believe it would have any effect and believed that in good faith. It's easy 60 years later with dramatically advanced science to say "well of course it would and should" but that misses the point.
No, they want the companies to voluntarily weaken security by adding backdoors and then giving keys to the government when needed. Of course the government wants the company to be in charge of holding the keys, that way when the government leaks them they can point all fingers at the companies (because once the government is given a key, they are going to hold onto it even if it isn't immediately linked due to already compromised systems).

There is only one professional fitting response: No. (There are a lot of fitting but less professional responses, but I'll leave those to your imagination.)
A thread waiting on a barrier/joining other threads seems like reference counting by another name, to me. (Except, much more manual.)
Did it drive the price down?
The one reason I have not to just put empty anchors on pages is that people might write comments saying your story is a "dupe" if you don't make it obvious that was intentional.

(But then, they may do that anyways).
Hacking Team Leak Unleashes Flame-Like Capabilities into the Wild
To get the question really interesting, we could try to weight the pollution of the bigger battery pack (production and discarding) versus the pollution of the (relatively few) trips with more that 50 kms...
LINQ lambda expression vs. query expression
> So, this is just a simpler way of doing

Exactly. A simpler way of doing something which is already not that challenging, adding some functionality that is not so great.

It seems pretty unexciting overall and switching is not that compelling, since it requires more typing most of the times and the old formatting is not going anywhere any time soon.
One method would be to have an informal heuristic you use when you're about to call a library: are the performance characteristics I need guaranteed by this library? If yes: proceed, if no: use a different solution or proceed with caution.

So, if you are implementing something that deals with a large input string, and creates a large number of substrings, you know there could potentially be a performance impact depending on the way the implementation works with substrings. The API makes no performance or memory guarantees about substrings. If your application has strict performance requirements, you know you either need to find another solution, or "proceed with caution."
There is no such thing as a bad program. If it works, it's fine. Really...
Since this post is having a discussion and the previous one didn't, we've un-duped it.
> if conscious observers didn't exist, in what sense would anything else exist?

> [A] universe can only exist in the sense that some conscious observer in the future will VERIFY ITS EXISTENCE.

> So, in what sense would OUR universe exist if humans never arose?

I think things exist independently of whether anyone is observing them. That's because "observing" is just a description of a bunch of particles interacting with each other. Some of those particles are part of a larger pattern of particles we call human brains. There's nothing particularly unique about our brains in terms of physics.

At a higher level, we can look at the interactions between our brains and the environment and think about brains as a different kind of thing. A pattern recognizer, a prediction maker, an effective evolutionary adaptation that leads to the propagation of the genes that create it. But there's no reason to suspect it creates universes.

I absolutely agree that a lot about our brains is mysterious and there are a lot of questions that need answers. The next few decades are going to be very interesting as we discover many of those secrets. I just don't think we'll discover that among those secrets is the ability to make universes real or not.

Certainly, we can only observe the universe we are in and phenomena that are within our light cone. But that's a limitation on us, not on universes.
I had a similar experience back in 2011 when an earthquake hit the very not-earthquake-prone Washington, D.C. region, where I live:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Virginia_earthquake

It took me a little while to even understand that an earthquake was what I was experiencing. My first thought was that someone had just set off a hell of a bomb in the city -- which sadly seemed much more plausible, until I realized there had been no loud report, bright flash, pillar of smoke, etc.

Once I figured out that it was an earthquake, I pulled myself together sufficiently to take shelter in a door frame, which was the only remotely useful piece of advice for surviving an earthquake I could find in my memory. Afterwards I read up on the subject and found that this was just an indication of how out of date my understanding of the subject was (see http://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/megaqk_facts_fantasy...), so I guess it's a good thing it wasn't that serious of a quake!
If whites were
1) running the country and 2) racist

then the immigration policies of this country would have kept the USA as a white majority country.

Instead, white people are becoming a minority in the USA and European countries.

"As Of Today, California No Longer Has A White Majority"
http://thinkprogress.org/immigration/2013/07/01/2238421/cali...
The author doesn't mention hack.chat as a PoC anywhere. Additionally, it's in the same “Projects” section as pawnmail on his website [1]. So yeah, that's not a PoC in my book.

[1] - http://andrewbelt.name/
Sure it has. Copyright has worked reasonably well for a variety of content creators. Authors are on that list. By extension it's worked well for content consumers because those creators were enabled to create more content to be consumed.

There's plenty of discussion to be had on improving copyright. Making it better. I think it's definitely been an net benefit.
lobste.rs is only accessible through invitation, can you send me one?, echo bUBqYXZpZXIuaW8K | base64 -d
Yeah, perfectly understandable. I'm sure Buffer's intention here is largely to attract people who will fit the environment they want to foster and this draws a pretty hard line.

And it is a double-edged sword - an employee could look at that formula after a year and think, "Well, I know where I am now and where I could be in two years, no reason to stay here for that."

I also can't even imagine what it would be like trying to implement such a policy if it weren't in place from the start, hah.
I believe MS Word (or some components in office) already has some sort of PGO applied to it:

http://llvm.1065342.n5.nabble.com/Capabilities-of-Clang-s-PG...
The city's name is Downey. Here is an article that kinda talks about it, half way through: http://www.dailynews.com/environment-and-nature/20141203/how...
This is entirely based on the people you work with. I'm sure some of my co-workers make more than me, but I would never think for a moment they don't deserve it or haven't earned it.

The future is radical transparency; we should be prepared to embrace it.
Also seems like 'highly optimized' is another way of saying 'obfuscated' in this case.
My personal top reasons are the culture, the people and what we value as a company. I believe it's a phenomenal place to work as an engineer and the remote working setup has been one of the most fun, interesting and liberating ways to work in my career.

Dan, Engineer w/ Buffer for 1 1/2 years
Interesting. Was working on something similar but more focused on streams with no identity. http://malten.me/
I know. I'm cousin_it on LW and have done a ton of math work on this exact problem :-)