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johnny313on Internal Facebook posts of employees discussing leaked memo

It is a bit disconcerting to hear FB employees say that the failure of integrity was to leak an internal discussion, not complacency around dubious business practices.

johnny313on North Korea Is Starting Up a Nuclear Reactor

It seems like there is some ambiguity around the purpose of the reactor:

"It has the potential to make 25 to 30 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a small town. The plant could also potentially produce about 20 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium each year"

A bit further down the article says:

"Analysts also found some evidence that could support North Korea’s assertion that the new reactor would be used for power generation. Satellite images appeared to show that power lines and a transmission tower had been erected around the site."

Without weapons inspectors, or some other outside group taking a look, there is no way to know for sure.

johnny313on Largest Animal Study on Cell Tower Radiation Confirms Cancer Link

PDF of the full article: https://ehtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/Belpoggi-Heart-and-Br...

johnny313on CIA chief nominee ran controversial 'black site' prison

Just curious, but why is this flagged? It seems like it is an article of interest to the community - just trying to understand what happened. Thanks for any feedback!

johnny313on [dead]

Very well written. I grew up in the evangelical church - learning the truth about the movement's role perpetuating slavery and racism took far longer than it should have because of many of the themes touched on in the article. This is a strong argument for people of faith to speak out against the evil being done under the cover of Christianity.

johnny313on Who's Missing from America's Colleges? Rural High School Graduates

I think the more telling statistic was a bit further into the article:

"Forty-two percent of people ages 18 to 24 are enrolled in all of higher education, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, but only 29 percent of rural people in that age group are enrolled, compared with nearly 48 percent from cities."

johnny313on Our memory shifts into high gear when we think about raising our children

According to Miller, the failure of the mating scenario may reflect our prehistoric ancestors not realizing that mating could result in children because of the nine months between mating and birth.

This seems to imply that successful evolutionary neural behaviors are consciously learned, as opposed to being "learned" over generations due to natural selection [0], in a similar way to how a neural network is trained.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/50/10/883/234025 William G. Wright; Neuronal and Behavioral Plasticity in Evolution: Experiments in a Model Lineage: Evolutionary changes in sensory neurons correlate with changes in learning phenotypes, BioScience, Volume 50, Issue 10, 1 October 2000, Pages 883–894

johnny313on Sedentary Behavior and Mortality in U.S. Middle-Aged and Older Adults

The headline result (sedentary behavior leads to increased risk of mortality) is not completely supported by the results shown in the abstract.

They break the test subjects into four groups ranked by activity level, and compare the the highest activity group to the rest. But in the results, only the lowest activity group has a hazard ratio where the 95% confidence interval does not contain 1. Translation: the data only shows a meaningful difference in mortality risk between the highest and lowest activity groups. For the other two groups, the data does not support show an increased risk.

johnny313on Ask HN: How are you teaching your children programming?

I agree, the setup now won't work for too long. He is using all standard libraries now - once he needs more, we will figure it out as we go!

johnny313on Ask HN: How are you teaching your children programming?

This has been an interesting topic for my wife and I. Our kids have very limited screen time, and do not have access to a computer / smart phone / iPad on a regular basis.

Recently, though, my 1st grade son, the oldest, found the book "Coding Projects in Python" (https://www.dk.com/us/9781465461889-coding-projects-in-pytho...), and read through it for about a week before asking if he could use my computer to try some of the projects out. I set him up on an old linux box with no internet access, opened a text editor (gedit), and showed him how to run his scripts in the terminal.

Honestly, I thought he would loose interest after a few days. But he has stuck with it for the last few weeks, working on the projects after school with minimal help from me (I work from home). So far, he learns what he is interested in, skipping around the book to find projects he likes. He has learned a fair amount in that time, and importantly for me, is learning a bit about how the computer works at the same time. Not sure where we will go from here, but the self-directed path is working well so far.

johnny313on James while John had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher

Title shortened to meet posting character limit. Full title: James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher

johnny313on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2016)

Planetary Resources | Redmond, WA | http://www.planetaryresources.com/

At Planetary Resources, our mission is to mine asteroids. Along the way, we are building Ceres, an advanced Earth observation system.

Help us build a robust and reliable data pipeline extending from the images collected by our satellites to a customer-ready product.

We are looking for someone with a mix of the following experience: Python, GDAL, remote sensing imagery processing, API development, data visualization. We work in a linux environment.

Email: jshriver@planetaryresources.com

http://webconnect3.atango.com/CN_Frame.aspx?ID=planetaryreso...

We are also hiring a Director of product, and mechanical, embedded, RF communications and software engineers. Check us out if you are interested!