This is part of the creeping one-sided "professionalization" of low-wage work. Employees are expected to arrive pre-trained, stick within specific constraining roles, and be available at all hours. Employers are demanding all the responsibilities of white collar salaried jobs while offering none of the benefits. For many people it's not even possible to juggle two of these jobs thanks to "improved" scheduling technology.
> The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today unveiled … a Web portal that will link to full-text papers a year after they're published.
> Open-access advocates such as University of California, Berkeley, biologist Michael Eisen slammed CHORUS when publishers announced the program it last year. They prefer a full-text government archive like PubMed Central so it is possible to "text mine," or search across the entire body of papers. “Under this [DOE] plan, the public's ability to download, text/data mine, and digitally analyze these articles is severely limited,” SPARC’s Joseph agrees.
> But Frederick Dylla … says there is little demand for text mining. He says AIP has never gotten a request for its more than 1 million articles; Elsevier, the publishing giant, gets only about six requests a year, he says. Text mining journal articles is “a field that's just beginning," he says.
12 months is a joke in the timescale of scientific research, most papers already went through up to a year of prep time before publishing. I would like to see a plan that isn't just paying lip service to the ideals of open-access. And Eisen is right about data mining, most journals are terrible in that regard. Even the wonderful arXiv.org doesn't provide citation/reference metadata in their API and they are a groundbreaking leader of the movement. I had to write a scraper to map out an arXiv citation network and there are only a few subfields with enough info to do that. Maybe scientists would make more requests if the APIs were better and the citation information wasn’t copyrighted or obfuscated.
I have been meaning to setup an arxiv mirror (they have instructions on how to do this) and then run all the papers through elastic search.
I'd love to run NN on the abstracts or similarity algos on the equations. It would be fun to do SIFT on the equations an then some deep learning to detect branches of mathematics. Or extract molecular symbols in figures.
The primary focus of Meep is simulating the interaction of light with Photonic Crystals (periodic materials that control light based on both their shape and composition).
You may have heard of optical metamaterials (aka "invisibility cloaks"). They are sometimes made with photonic crystals, but photonic crystals aren't always considered metamaterials. Butterfly wing coloring is a good example.
This is a cool example of solving a problem by developing a general purpose tool, then programming the tool to solve the specialized problem. It's cool for a couple of reasons. First, many aspects of the tool's behavior can be confirmed at the general purpose level, i.e., does it behave according to the expected laws of electromagnetism. Second, it provides the entire community with something useful.
> Despite being banned, Unidan has already made a new account, called UnidanX, and has been posting for most of the day under that username. It's looking like he hasn't been banned with that username yet.
What's the point of trying again, he's already lost the trust of the community and his name is a red flag. Is that subreddit super-forgiving? Or maybe the turnover is so high people will just forget?
All of his posts in his new account[1] have been massively downvoted. So they are not forgiving right now. His account shows 6k+ comment karma though. That's strange unless gold gets you some karma?
I'm not 100% sure how the total karma is calculated, but IIRC if you downvote someone from their user page, it does not really count. The idea is that if you're hunting to downvote/upvote all posts from the same user, you're probably up to no good.
Not to be cynical, I don't think he did. He was doing what he was doing till the time he was caught. It's not like he told the community himself.
He is just trying to play the nice guy game to save his image. His doing this is dishonest -- plain and simple. Don't get me wrong. He is really good in his field and knows a lot. I learned a lot from him and if he posts stuff, I will read it again. But this behaviour is dishonesty.
> He is just trying to play the nice guy game to save his image. His doing this is dishonest -- plain and simple.
If he was being honest, would it look any different? Or is the pitchfork mob just demanding blood?
On the one hand a reputation takes years to create and only a second to destroy. On the other hand, holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
Personally I think if you want to be angry at something there's much more insidious manipulation going on. Unidan makes great content and gets people excited about his biology research... remember him for that, not for his amateur inability to execute a proper astroturfing botnet campaign.
At the very least, let him be reborn with a new username and see what he can build. Isn't the ability to bounce back from failure and mistakes what we celebrate here on hn?
He actually lied, straight-up. He said he only downvoted misinformation, but it turns out he downvoted others' submissions (to make his own submissions look better).
Some people say this is "missing the point of traveling" but for certain experiences it's an amazing idea. Going to a quiet museum, exploring a cathedral, or attending an intimate live show could be a lot cheaper and accessible if you synched with a surrogate wearing high-quality cameras and microphones. You can still go in person for the real deal, but the remote version would be at least as good as most chill-out tv shows.
Hesse is timeless, there's a reason he resonated with so many people in the 60s movements.
Siddhartha is a great meditation on life in its entirety. For startup-focused professionals it can be hard to imagine satisfaction with a life lacking "accomplishment" but Hesse paints a thoughtful picture.
"Activity was strongest in the U.K., where companies raised 28% of the total amount in the second quarter, followed by France with 19% and Germany with 15%."
How long until Berlin startups can expect reguler SV-level exits? The city is amazing and there's a lot of positivity, but venture capital needs to be there as well.
People have been expecting Berlin to have huge growth economically, in population, real estate value, etc since the fall of the wall. This has not happened yet (at least, not at the rate that was expected). I doubt it will happen with startups.
Berlin as a city is doing just fine and compared to just after the wall came down the difference is nothing short of amazing. The amount of money pumped in to the city shows up everywhere, infrastructure and public transport, the quality of the houses and apartments, the number of businesses and so on. This is not correlated at all with start-ups, which simply relates the the size of the home market (to a first approximation, Germany, Switzerland and Austria) and the ability to subsequently expand internationally (which is actually quite hard). I was in Kreuzberg (Berlin neighbourhood) this week and I could barely recognize it compared to what I remembered.
Compared to other former east block cities Berlin had of course a head start (half of it was already western), even so the progress is strong. By comparison, London today and London 2 decades ago are not that far apart, whereas Berlin today and Berlin 2 decades ago are worlds apart.
As the spoils from Berlin percolate out through the surrounding countryside Berlin will achieve yet another growth phase, what took 50 years to destroy will not be fixed overnight but you can surely rely on Germany to be able to fix such things as fast and thoroughly as possible.
Berlin has a debt of over 60 billion euros, with an annual budget of 20 billion, 5.5 of which comes from the other laenders. This is huge, the other laenders have complained multiple times that they need to cut costs. Its GDP is 80 billion, compared to frankfurt (70 billion) or munich (60 billion) it's nothing as its a much bigger city. Berlin doesn't have a financial sector or any major industry really. Population has stayed (more or less) the same for the last 60 years.
Yes Berlin looks amazing considering ww2 & cold war, but is nowhere near the major european capital it should be.
Also, London today from London 2 decades ago is very different, a simple example is canary wharf that didn't have a single sky scraper 23 years ago.
Sure, but neither Frankfurt nor Munich had as much backlog as Berlin. Not even close. I remember counting 50 construction cranes in Berlin at some point in the early 90's. The rate at which stuff was being fixed was nothing short of incredible. And that's work-in-progress, it will take 100's of billions before you could even begin to call it complete.
Ah, the new Airport. The butt of many a joke for decades to come. I'll see your airport and raise you a lock, the dutch envisioned another channel in the North of the country (the 'dollardkanaal') and pre-emptively made a gigantic lock complex. Which they then had to demolish again because the channel was never dug. At least they managed to re-cycle the lock doors (these are now in the Nieuwenstatenzijl locks a few km to the East).
Fortunately Berlin already has three airports (but Tempelhof is closed) so for now the crisis is not imminent (and I think that is one of the reasons the new one is delayed, delaying it is not going to cause any disasters other than waste money, which is of course bad enough).
Just looking at the architecture of the airport compared with Charles de Gaulle, Oslo Airport and Shanghai Airport you can see that they all try to get a large surface for their terminals to make space for a lot of aircraft. The BER airport terminal buildings are built in a square, with little obvious room for expansion. I guess they could build in that square which looks like it has nothing in it, but a new and separate terminal building cluster is not optimal either. No, in combination with the fire gas thing it seems like this is the PHP of airports - bad design all around.
> How long until Berlin startups can expect reguler SV-level exits?
At a guess, never. There will be the occasional outlier (see recent big acquisition) but the advantages of having a 300M plus people mostly unified market with associated economies of scale can simply not be beat.
Thanks, there are a lot of overlapping packages out there and it helps to see a working collection.
And does anyone have suggestions on D3.js packages that aren't just code snippets? Sublime Text 2 has been great so far for JS but it could be more specific.
"Perfume" by Patrick Suskind, and the movie is great as well. The main character is a horrible person but so is everyone else. Possibly the funniest nihilist book ever written.
Also interesting to those of us with no sense of smell.
These examples are by D3.js author Mike Bostock, who currently works at The NYT. http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4060366 http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4360892