skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think familiarity (or lack thereof) is a big part of the puzzle there. Assuming I'm in the US, and I'm asked "how are you?" by a random sales person, my first thought is "you have no business asking me that". But if, say, I'm greeted at the hotel, I somewhat enjoy the display of fake interest and answer with an automated "fine, thanks". I get the different contexts, but it still leaves me with a lot of ambiguous situations.
We use it in production and it's open-source https://github.com/dimagi/commcare-hq
Seems like another example of "Baptists and bootleggers" [0]. Well-intentioned people trying to protect citizens from financial malfeasance support the same regulations that the big financial players use to keep competition out of the market.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists
I think things like autism and other mental things are hard to diagnose externally; the self-diagnoses are probably "Yes, I feel the same way" - not so much "I have autism" but "I am similar in some ways". Like identifying as intro- or extroverted - there's self-tests for that (Myers-Briggs or something). But the personality traits in that one are spectrums too - you can be a bit or a lot of all of them.

TL;DR it doesn't really matter much IMO what someone says they are, but it does help if they understand themselves better and know that they're not the only ones with those traits or difficulties in life (if they perceive them as difficulties).
A Microsoft Edge Review from a Developer's Perspective
So C has closures now?

#include <stdio.h>

int x = 1;

int f(int y) {
return x + y;
}

int
main(argv, argc) {
printf("f(2): %i\n", f(2));
}

The reason they are called closures is because they close over the, lexical, environment where the function was defined.

Python doesn't have lexical scope, hence it doesn't have closures.
Help us build MemChest and get a premium account 80% cheaper What is MemChest?
Python supports closures even when the variable isn't a container. For instance:

def add_double(n):
x = n * 2
def add(y):
return x + y
return add

f = add_double(1)
f(2) # -> 4

What python versions prior to 3 didn't support is rebinding a variable from an enclosing scope; not because of any fundamental feature of the implementation, but because there was no syntactic way to differentiate between a assigning to a variable in an enclosing scope, and creating a variable in the current scope. So x += 2 is short for x = x + 2, which python interprets as creating a new variable x in the current scope and then trying to access that variable before it's been assigned.

Python 3 introduced a syntax to specify that you wanted to assign to a variable from an enclosing scope, the 'nonlocal' keyword. So your example would be:

def even():
x = 0
def add():
nonlocal x
x += 2
return x
return add
count = even()
count() # → 2
count() # → 4
8 Types of Girlfriends
Man sues Etihad over back injury from sitting next to obese passenger
Someone here must be working on domestic anti-drone self-targeting weapons as we type? Surely firing potatoes/beanbags above your own property is legal, if a drone just happened to be passing and got hit then wouldn't that be a shame.

Or perhaps we'll have patrolling sentry drones that physically tackle and enforce domestic airspace?

Will be interesting to see how sophisticated lawmakers get in pre-empting such actions.
If authorities ask you/demand with a court order "who uploaded this file" you can hand out his ip. I also believe( haven't checked his one) you must retain a copy of all files for a short period of time even if they inaccessible to end users.
If this is where the things are going the time may soon come for someone to launch a GitHub clone that deliberately only bans illegal content and provides technological means of protection against Twitter mobs.

Meanwhile, it would be nice to have a reusable code of conduct written with the same attitude. E.g., it would only forbid personal attacks, credible threats of violence against other contributors and violations of the law (like committing warez to the repository). It would deny any responsibility for what the contributors say elsewhere on the Internet and state an unwillingness to discuss their speech on the project grounds. It could include anti-blackmail clauses like that agitating people on social media to "support" your issue by shaming the maintainers will get you banned and the issue closed immediately and irrevocably. The latter would have to be carefully written, though, to not be exploitable.
"I urge you to write something much simpler."

When I was younger, I thought that the OpenBSD folks were backward and unsophisticated when compared to Linux. I imagine that a lot of younger people feel that way. But after working with various systems over the years, I can now really appreciate that simplicity. It's really the heart and soul of OpenBSD, OpenSSH and all the other projects (libreSSL, etc.) that they release.
I think you are misunderstanding; robotjs is written in C but it is a module for Node.js which means you implement it using Javascript.

Node.js modules can be written in C or Javascript but implementing new features like this requires you to use C so there is no "making this available for other languages".
I blocked the domain. If the site presents me with a re-captcha, I don't even have to think whether to use that site.
The Rise of Open Curriculum
Pft, I only buy kickstarter and indiegogo stuff. The shirt I bought last year is getting delivered in 3 months.
>We use the public GREYC keystroke benchmark database

Yes. That's their own database which they're talking up, the one that they made to do this research. That's what I was talking about.

>In order to reduce the bias due to this high quantity of male information, we only kept the first n male samples( where n is the number of female samples).

It happens that I didn't read this part.

On reflection, what I understand now is far worse than what I originally understood:

- They have 35 females and 98 males, they take many handwriting samples from each.

- Since the participants provided many samples, these samples appear both in the training set data and in the test set data.

- I use the training set data to figure out if I can recognise the handwriting of the 35 female participants.

- Then I look through the test data to see if I can identify those participants again.

Basically what you've shown is you can identify the handwriting of 35 people if you've already seen it - 88% of the time.

Splitting groups into 'female' and 'male' is a red herring. This method would presumably work, even if I split them into two random groups.

If I'm right, this is not even state-of-the-art. In 2006 they could have been scoring 96%: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=97978&page=2
Or text Magic to get you a shirt.
This was so well written
Having worked in banking/finance/technology for a decade+, the first time I remember registering hearing the term was around 3 months ago, from a lawyer I contacted regarding opening an office in the UK, who was quite proud to say "technology in finance is called FinTech, which is becoming a big thing".

This led me to conclude it is a fad/scene word.
Tech recruiter here:
I have seen so many companies that lose out on good developers because they ask them to do a take home test.

Obviously you want to vet the person technically but you should be able to do that through talking with them. Most developers put off take home tests even if they are excited about the company and by the time they do it they already have finals/offers from other companies.
I already explained that below, but let me elaborate. (But beware I am not a big fan of Zen of Python, precisely because I think it's misunderstood.)

The thing is these rules do not really give much guidance on how to design a programming language. These don't hint whether or not the language should be functional, or should have small library, or should have classes, and bazillion other things that programming language designers tend to argue about.

We can pretty much agree on these rules. And that's the point, these rules are all about making tradeoffs.
Foursquare check-ins show the pulse of cities
Why We’re Still Seeing PHP 5.3 in the Wild
Harvard scientists have turned fat cells into lasers
"Python Scope is still broken[0] btw"

Yes, it's working as designed, and I see how it can be considered broken, but it's not due to a scope issue. The "except X as x" is specified (with Python 3.x and PEP 3110 at https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3110/ ) as doing a "del x" at the end of the except clause, and that was done for garbage collection reasons.
This is what happens when you combine Alka-Seltzer with water in space (NASA 4k)
> Is that why you relate a world that essentially means "dumb" (not physics) it to hate crime.

Perhaps this is a cultural issue, especially for people who do not speak English as a first language and especially if they watch US media where the word is more used.

Retard does not mean "dumb". If you want to call someone dumb use dumb, stupid, idiotic, etc. Avoid retard. Because retard is not much of an insult to the person you're using it for, but it is to people with LD or their carers. By using the word retard you're not particularly insulting your target, but you are insulting a wide range of people who you probably don't mean to be insulting.

Retard historically means person with a learning disability. It will continue to mean that for a while, although the use is gradually changing, and it's not officially used apart from one narrow situation (A US user group).

Hate incidents based on disability are very common.

https://www.mencap.org.uk/blog/four-things-you-probably-didn...

The UK crime survey is part of UK national statistics. This means they use robust methods and that the numbers are reliable.

> The number of disability hate incidents (not all necessarily crimes) is higher than the number of homophobic hate incidents and religious-based hate incidents. The Crime Survey for England and Wales – the most authoritative picture of crime in the country - estimated that there were 124,000 disability hate incidents in the past two years alone.

MENCAP, a charity working for people with learning disabilities did some survey work in 2000.

> Almost 9 in 10 people with a learning disability surveyed had experienced bullying or harassment in the past year - an incredible 88%

> Of these, two thirds (66%) of people were victims regularly and one third (32%) were being bullied on a daily or weekly basis
Three quarters (73%) of people had experienced bullying or harassment in a public place

> Half (47%) of the people surveyed had suffered verbal abuse, and a quarter (23%) had been physically assaulted.

The "Living in Fear" report is here: https://www.mencap.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/2009...
"Mental retardation" has been a medical term since relatively recently. The "retardation" means nothing more than "being held back". But people did pick it up as a derogatory term, and so it was replaced with "intellectual disability". A classic euphemism treadmill.

In the context of medication, "retard" is still in use: it describes medication that is released steadily and continuously into the bloodstream.
Just wanted to add my voice: this matches exactly my perception. I used to really like Python, but I've come to the conclusion that there's a certain point in terms of the complexity of a Python program where everything just blows up and it's next to impossible to keep it from becoming a tangled mess. This point is reached incredibly soon, something like five classes with some inheritance, some interface/virtual/abstract class. Ugh. Now I avoid Python as much as possible, much preferring C++ or Java, which I think work incredibly better for larger programs.
>> Could anyone imagine if the government let the banks suffocate in 2008?

I've heard from multiple sources that Iceland let their banks fail, and they're actually doing better than most now.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/11/key-lesson-from-icela...
Quotes+by+APJ+Abdul+Kalam+for+Students
Any plans for spider chart? Geo charts?
Don't work for assholes. Don't work with assholes
Some numbers to compare:

They got 20uN with a 700W magneton, that is 20uN/700W = 0.03 mN/KW. (Probably some energy is "lost" and the "real" efficiency is higher, but when you claim to break the physics law the measurements must be foolproof.)

The maximal theoretical output of a device that don't break the currently accepted physics laws is 1/c = 0.0033 mN/KW. So this measurement is 10x bigger than the theoretical maximum.

The 18-month-to-Pluto calculation use 0.4 N/KW = 400 mN/KW, that is approximately one half of the maximum claim of any of this device family, but most experiments get much smaller results. The 0.4 N/KW is 130,000x bigger than the theoretical maximum and 13,000x bigger than what they got in this experiment. So if a device with the same output of this experiment, the trip to Pluto will be much longer.

(Disclaimer: Just to be clear, I think this is only an experimental error.)
So basically, you want to (1) pay less for (2) a faster product that is (3) simpler and (4) less buggy, but also (5) implements most features that customers ask for.
http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Cheap-plain-black-t-sh...

Enjoy, monthly supply of black t-shirts.
The Calibrated Cosmos (2013)
> Most (if not all) behavioral profiling systems check your mouse movements too. However in my experience, mouse movements do not provide sufficient metadata to accurately identify a user

I would love to know more about this. Online ad networks have access to mouse movement patterns on web pages, but users (usually) don't enter data through keyboard on such pages. And I would expect they already use this mouse movement data to catch fraud... I wonder if it can be used to identify users?
I don't claim to be the most socially clued-in person in the world, but as an American I hear people say things other than "fine, thanks" in response to "how are you?" all the time and think it's pretty normal.

Although it's true that any answer other than "fine" tends to invite a response -- like if I say "yeah, it's been a long day" the other person would probably say something like "well, at least it's nearly over" or something to acknowledge my state before moving on. But still, you can answer the question a number of ways in normal conversation, as long as it's a fairly superficial answer as you say.

What trips me up is that in the UK (where I'm living currently) it seems like it's pretty common to ask "Are you alright?", which in the US means something like "You look terrible, is anything the matter?" but in the UK seems to be more or less equivalent to "How are you?"
CNNIC applys for membership in the CA/B Forum
+1 I'm not adapting either.
"Python doesn't have lexical scope"

Can you explain why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_syntax_and_semantics#Cl... says:

> Python has had support for lexical closures since version 2.2. ... Python's syntax, though, sometimes leads programmers of other languages to think that closures are not supported. Variable scope in Python is implicitly determined by the scope in which one assigns a value to the variable, unless scope is explicitly declared with global or nonlocal.

?
"Neuro-diversity" just means "mental illness". And I don't believe there are many assholes around. Most people that act like assholes regularly are just affected by some illness, even if it's only a depression. Nobody wants to be an asshole, believe me.
I did 37 too. I'm not officially autistic, but I think I have some of the traits, or maybe it's just that I'm a big introvert.
You have to be a very amateur athlete to try doping with old compounds.
Womens wear
hi i love sarees collcetion,suggest online shops for sarees?
> there's no need to use switch statements and their associated complexity to map integers back into addresses, when all that's really required is for the "caller" to supply a where-to-go-next address.

Do note that on 8-bit microcontroller ISAs it can be very cumbersome to load an absolute address and do an indirect jump into it, because code addresses could be 16 or 24 bits wide, with only 8-bit general purpose registers.
The observation that some usernames are changeable, doesn't contradict the claim that passwords must be changeable, nor does it contradict the claim that usernames need not be changeable.
Calculate How Many Times Your Personal Information Has Been Exposed to Hackers:
MeFi comment about public libraries
The EM Drive is here to get us to the Moon in 4 hours, without fuel
Facebook Coders Compete to Build the Ultimate Mario Level
Some of our biologists use plot.ly. They seem to like it.

Those that know it still are using ggplot2 and R. This grammar of graphics plotting library really seems to gold standard of plotting.
Basic Geo charts are already there, but not documented so far.

In future we are going to support all type of visualizations from Grammar of Graphic, so it includes spider chart as well. In fact it is Polar Parallel chart and it will be possible to create it when support of polar coordinates will be added.
The opening line made me feel OLD:

> The last time I played Nintendo was years ago, on an original Wii console.
If you were to follow the same argument, you could also argue that the continued popularity of Top Gear is an equally interesting statement by society about it's stance on (persistent) racial slurs.
I heard it 4 years ago. You've been living under a rock. :p
Do you ever use the word "European" or the word "Asian"? If the founders of the USA were programmers they'd probably avoid that unnecessary namespace collision.
"Note that I sell OpenBSD CDs to fund our project. That contract right
there says in term 7:

If Theo accidentally sells a CD to
North Korea, the US can fuck him.

Thanks OSI. Thanks for being so damn patriotic.

It also says in term 4:

Sell this in a product in ways which "we" do not like, and the
contract you have accepted says you can be fucked by anyone
who owns this license later and who decides they want to fuck you.

Who is "we". You don't read term 4 that way? ."

Is he for real ?
I stand corrected. I looked closer.

I never knew node modules could be written in C.
I hope these services have an opt-out. I know, I know, this will get infinitely more accurate at an arbitrary point in the future, and that I won't have complaints then.

But I get screwed constantly while travelling to other countries, getting repeatedly locked out of Gmail. Again, most users won't face these issues. But I don't want to live in a world where if you're not a nominal case, you're screwed.

The people who think passwords are hard will keep getting older and will be washed away. The generation coming in thinks paper is a broken iPad. So exactly, why do we need to solve the problem of passwords, when even slightly savvy users can handle it. Is it so hard to figure out that not too long in future, you can expect all your users to be comfortably savvy?

Also, passwords are deterministic and are a better UI. The Android Lollipop's on-body smart lock, for example, is pure non-deterministic headache. Haven't we gone through this with automatic sliding doors already?
Ask HN: How much ram and which cpu for virtualization
If you were going to buy a laptop today and you wanted to run some form of virtualization on to host linux, what would be the minimum hardware in terms of ram, cores etc you would be comfortable with?
I don't have enough knowledge to evaluate MIRI's productivity, but I've noticed an interesting thing in this subthread. On the one hand, it is widely understood (especially here on HN) that the "publish or perish" culture of modern academia is a source of lots of bad science and pointless work, and yet here we are, using number of papers as a metric for productivity. So which way is it?
Masdar City, a place unburdened by roads, traffic and pollution
Yup. Fascism, like all ideologies isn't completely neat.

It contains those reactionary conservative elements (organic community, national tradition, criticism of modernity as shallow - i.e. very Tolkein but found in many fascist and even Nazi authors - i.e. Junger, Schmitt) alongside hyper modernist ones (eugenics, mass industry). Fascism contains criticisms of capitalism alongside praise for the most aggressive market competition. See Ishay Landa's work on this.

Proto-fascism is probably the best term.
This is incorrect for at least python 3.x

I.e.,

Python 3.4.3 (default, Apr 7 2015, 08:05:21)
>>> def mk_generator(initial):
... var = initial
... def increment(count=1):
... nonlocal var
... var += count
... return var
... return increment
...
>>> a = mk_generator(3)
>>> b = mk_generator(10)
>>> a(1)
4
>>> b
<function mk_generator.<locals>.increment at 0x1040a7d08>
>>> b()
11
>>> b()
12
>>> a(3)
7
How to Generate Content for Your Website on Autopilot
Keyvi the key value index, a newcomer to NoSQL technology
Ask HN: Is there a term for a startup in “AiTech”?
It is convenient for investors to be able to categorize startups w.r.t. the IP they are building up. Nowadays, you have FinTech, GreenTech, CleanTech, BioTech, NanoTech, etc.

We're in algorithms (machine learning, AI) that we apply to a range of applications, let's say the current physical automation challenges, such as building automation and robotics.

There are now many companies applying interesting algorithms. We all saw startups on HN coming by which focus for example on deep learning, support vector machines, or other machine learning fields that are maturing.

Do you know a term for startups like that? SmartTech? AiTech? I think having a good name can boost the number of startups in this direction, which I consider a good thing even if it's more competition. :-)
What data says about doping in the Tour de France
Master the Art of Website designing with these 5 tips
Fascinating. Thank you.

The implications of this part, if true, caught my attention:

"In one experiment, a group of children with Williams syndrome showed no signs of racial bias, unlike children without the syndrome. They did show gender bias, however, suggesting separate mechanisms for these biases"
Would be great.
Official Docker Image for Postman Newman CLI
Probably most relevant is the work of Simon Baron Cohen, a respected researcher into ASD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Baron-Cohen

There's a test for "Empathy Quotient", and there are probably self test versions around. (I found a few using Google, but I didn't try them so I don't know if they're harvesting email addresses or need payment) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy_Quotient

He also developed an Empathizing Quotient / Sympathizing Quotient test, and there are probably self-test versions available. http://personality-testing.info/tests/EQSQ.php

See also this (heavily caveated) test http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/autism.htm

These tests are probably better than reading DSM / ICD diagnostic criteria, but still a proper diagnosis should be done by a proper doctor with some experience in the topic.

That does have a couple of problems. 1) It can be hard to find a doctor prepared to give you an assessment and diagnosis. 2) It leads some people to think there's an industry of doctors diagnosis bogus conditions in order to prescribe medication. (See for example how dismissive some people are of ADD / ADHD).
Keep in mind that this does not sidestep the biggest practical concern with AIs, namely misalignment of values. You don't need a self-aware, conscious being to have a system with wants and values. In context of AIs, it's good to understand intelligence (including that of ourselves) as a very strong, multi-domain optimization process.
How Fake Data Could Protect Real People’s Privacy
That's a pretty dismissive attitude. We recently added reCAPTCHA to our sign up flow at Codecademy and it helped combat spam a lot. The site was harder to manage and moderate before we took that little step.

Assuming all websites using reCAPTCHA are not worth using seems ridiculous to me.
Fintech Female VC talks about pursuing excellence in a male domninated field
React UI Builder is now raising funds on Patreon