gh1

When people have to judge something, but they have no expertise to actually judge it, then they use price as an indicator for quality. People use price as indicator when buying clothes, jewellery etc. all the time. Isn't this the same effect, but applied to food (where healthy is considered to be correlated with quality)?

I would argue that BabelNet (http://babelnet.org/), combining the power of WordNet and Wikipedia, is a more powerful dictionary.

You have completely missed the point. A developer should not have to take packaging into account when writing their first line and adding dependencies. You are prepared to do it, good for you. But not every developer is like that. If you force your developers to do that, your packaging system is broken. Check out the Snap [0] and FlatPak [1] projects. They have emerged as a response to this problem.

[0] http://snapcraft.io/

[1] http://flatpak.org/

This is a good point. However, if a Python application depends on a lot of packages which are not on Debian, and I guess this is often the case, then this can seem like an Herculean task.

A much more balanced take on the subject is offered in the link at the bottom of the article https://seti.berkeley.edu/bl_sdss_seti_2016.pdf

I am quoting from there: "The international SETI community has established a 0 to 10 scale for quantifying detections of phenomena that may indicate the existence of advanced life beyond the Earth called the "Rio Scale". The BSRC team assesses the Borra-Trottier result to currently be a 0 or 1 (None/Insignificant) on this scale. If the signal were to be confirmed with another independent telescope, its significance would rise, though an exhaustive analysis of other possible explanations, including instrumental phenomena, must be performed before supporting the hypothesis that artificially generated pulses are responsible for the claimed signal."

I know of a startup in Berlin that was working on the ability to focus sound at any given point in the room with minimal leakage. The application allowed three people in three parts of the room to listen to completely different music without any interference. I thought it was uber cool! Now with this innovation, this just got even cooler. I wonder when these technologies will become affordable for the masses.

Chatted with a few. Everything was going well until I said "Are you here from HN?". I was greeted with "Your chat partner has left".

I wonder if privacy is a strong enough motive/need for such a paradigm shift in technology. @guptaneil, what are your thoughts on this? Is there any other benefit of having a decentralized web?

In order to innovate, one usually needs to get familiar historical progress. While Einstein had to master mechanics, electrodynamics and thermodynamics in order to build his own theories, a Physicist working in today's day and age has to also master the explosive progress made in the last 100 years. The only way to mitigate this problem seems to be (at least in scientific fields and a bit in computer science too) is specialization, which is not always a good thing.

While a sabbatical year might be very beneficial for the person taking it (for the multitude of reasons mentioned in the article), it can be detrimental for the organization. For example, if the person taking the sabbatical is in charge of (or playing a lead role in) a project that is time sensitive, then this is a big setback for the project. Similarly, if the person is mentoring someone else (who is dependent in some way on his presence), then taking a sabbatical is unfair to that mentee.

This is why it is important to plan the sabbatical year so that it is personally beneficial and also not detrimental to the organization and its people.

Could you elaborate on how you did this? What was your niche? How did you get in touch with the influencers? What kind of payouts were involved?

I have heard that facebook also adopted a similar strategy in the very beginning. I have no doubt that it works.

It seems like only new accounts using Tor are hellbanned. If an account has sufficient karma or age or some combination of both, then it is not.

A friend of mine (who signed up recently) tried to use Tor and got hellbanned within an hour. Another friend tried using a VPN provider IVPN and was banned from the get go. But it is possible that this is happening because of IP rate limits. Would appreciate it if a HN mod can confirm.

I think Hacker News also blocks Tor users by hellbanning them. Anyone here can confirm?

I think you should go for Python.

1. Python is definitely future proof. It is most likely going to be THE language in the near future. Machine learning and AI is most likely where most new breakthroughs will happen, and Python is well positioned to leverage this. Read more here http://blog.hackerrank.com/emerging-languages-still-overshad...

2. Python has a good standard library. It has been around for a while now, so it also has a huge number of high quality third party libraries.

3. Python is slow and this is a serious disadvantage. However writing Pythonic code is an aspect of Python that I absolutely love. I think Guido's guiding principle "code is read more often than it is written" is quite true and writing beautiful code is a thing worth learning. Other people will love you for it.

On a different note, I have heard it being said that it is better to overestimate than underestimate. This is apparently the best way to manage other people's expectations and maintain credibility.

I think it boils down to this.

1. If you are doing something that people have done before, then it is possible to come up with a reasonable estimate. How? Just talk with someone who has done something similar before and they will help you understand the complexity involved. Example : Rubik's cube.

2. If you are doing something that no one has done before, then it is more difficult to come up with an estimate. Example: Unified theory of forces. In the 1970, people assumed that we are very close. It's been 45 years since then and we aren't any closer.

Of course, I have often made the mistake of underestimating tasks of type 1 because I didn't talk to anyone with enough experience. Maybe this has to do with self confidence. I am very confident of my abilities so I usually tend to underestimate things rather than overestimate them.

So happy about this. I absolutely loved the first two seasons. While the episodes are very dark and disturbing at times, the imagination and world view of the series is way ahead of its times.

My favorite episodes so far:

S01E03 : The entire history of you, S02E01 : Be right back, S02E02 : White bear, Special : White Christmas .

My atom crashes every time I try to open a huge text file (containing data of some sort). Other text editors handle them just fine.

This time they added a configuration option for the large file warning threshold. This isn't enough.

Anyone else have the same problem?

I guess you are referring to this. http://www.myersbriggs.org/

This is a valid point. If the version that most companies are using needs a binary classification, then this is a meaningful criticism of the test.

However, note that this is just be a criticism of the test. It says nothing about whether the tests are effective or not, which is what the article tries to prove.

This article is as unscientific as it claims the Myers-Briggs test to be. It does not prove the Myers-Briggs test wrong, but instead claims that there is no evidence to support it. Well, in science, if you want to claim that something is wrong, you need two things: the theory must be falsifiable and you need to falsify it. Just claiming something has no evidence is not enough.

Some more critique on the article.

1. The Myers Briggs test result does not need to be binary. There are variants of the tests that give you a score on each of its 4 axes (Introvert/Extrovert, Sensing/Intuitive, Feeling/Thinking, Judging/Perceptive). For example, see https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test

2. The test results do not always talk about positive qualities. For example, here is a discussion of strengths and weaknesses of the ISFJ personality. https://www.16personalities.com/isfj-strengths-and-weaknesse....

Finally, on the point of falsification, I would like to suggest the following test. Take a group of people and let them take the test. Now let the close friends of the test taker read all the personality type descriptions and chose one for the test taker. Find the correlation between the friends' choices and the test results. If the correlation is significant, then the test is meaningful. Otherwise not meaningful.

There might be correlation between workplace stress and the amount of swearing. Health care coming out on top at 64 % closely followed by finance at 62 % suggests this pattern to me.

This article doesn't make sense at times. It says young women are more likely to swear in the workplace and follows this up by saying millennial men are more comfortable with workplace swearing compared to millennial women (hypocrisy alert). They follow this up with a histogram that shows that men are more uncomfortable with workplace swearing. Huh?

TL;DR A deep learning algorithm for searching words ("freedom", "Obama" etc.) in a recorded audio/video clip.

The title is clickbait, but the claim is rather interesting. It says that it has 80 % accuracy for transcribing an audio clip compared to 20 % for speech-to-text.

You are right. I changed it. Hopefully, its not confusing any more.

Thanks. I actually meant eccentricity = craziness, not in the mathematical sense. You are absolutely right about the Eddington experiment.

1. I was referring to the fact that the observable matter of the universe is not enough to generate the nearly flat and accelerating universe.

2. I am quoting from the article.

"In addition to the Chandra observation, the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the Magellan optical telescopes were used to determine the location of the mass in the clusters. This was done by measuring the effect of gravitational lensing, where gravity from the clusters distorts light from background galaxies as predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity."

Since they are calculating the mass by using General Theory of Relativity (indirect measurement, you have to trust the theory for this), I don't see how this can be called direct detection.

3. We don't seem to disagree on this :)

First we had Newton's laws of gravity. It worked quite well in the solar system scale and everyone was happy. Then Einstein formulated the special theory of relativity and Newtonian gravity was found to be incompatible with that. So Einstein formulated the General Theory of Relativity (Einsteinian Gravity) which solves that problem. As a bonus, his theory could also explain the eccentric behavior of Mercury's orbits, which Newtonian Gravity couldn't. It also predicted that galaxies should be able to bend light (lensing) and this was confirmed by Arthur Eddington. However, for many galaxies, the amount of lensing is way off from what the Einsteinian theory predicts. Similarly, rotational velocities of stars in a galaxy are also way off from what is predicted by both Einsteinian and Newtonian theory. In addition, when you apply the Einsteinian theory to the entire universe, you can't explain the observable geometry of the universe. That is also way off. Dark matter and Dark Energy are just a very clever way of saying "we have no idea what's going on with gravity in the large scale (beyond solar system scales)". No one has ever observed any dark matter or dark energy so far. It is entirely possible that Einsteinian theory of Gravity is just an approximation that works well for small scales and that we need a new theory of gravity at the galactic scale or the scale of the universe. It is also entirely possible that Dark Matter and Energy don't actually exist.