skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some of that sounds a little dogmatic in itself. It's an interesting historical fact that the idea of there being a deep underlying unity in nature was originally a religious one. In a time before there were any examples of really successful science, the idea that the universe might actually be comprehensible to us on a deep level seemed pretty loopy unless you believed that it was deliberately constructed to be intelligible. After all, the universe isn't all that comprehensible to any other form of life on earth -- why should we be so special if we are not in fact special? So in a sense, the idea that science is possible has its roots in a particular sort of religious belief.

Anyway, that is not intended as an argument in favor of religious belief today. But it's worth asking whether any rational justification could have been given in the 13th century for a belief in the deep underlying unity of the universe, before we had available the fruits of the research based on that assumption. I think it would have been far more sensible in those days to believe that the universe is just a complicated place with a lot of different kinds of stuff in it, and a lot of different kinds of principle governing what happens to that stuff.

Interestingly, this sort of pluralistic conception of reality is coming back into fashion in some circles, under the heading of the "dappled universe". Nancy Cartwright's work on these topics is really interesting. (FTR: She is trained as a physicist and has no religious agenda.) It's actually shocking how little reason there is to believe in a single set of underlying natural laws when you consider these issues with an open mind.

edit: There's a good (somewhat critical) review of one of Cartwright's book's here [doc]: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/CARTWRIG/PDF%20various/Book%20revi...
I think it might be easier to look at the triangle from bottom-to-top; the "higher-level structures" build upon/are made up of the lower-level structures.

Or at least that's how this musicology-phile interpreted them.
Are you kidding? Education has made great strides if you don't need it shoved down your throat. Every person with an internet connection can take any class they want from MIT and Stanford for free! That's progress.
i work with a hacker startup focused on impact of these issues and there is a ton of info there: http://www.givewell.net
The (lambda calculus) Y-combinator as a tattoo
I think it's better to just know how/why all these tricks and tips work instead of having a huge list that's hard to read. It's much easier to apply that way.
> And then you turn to someone with expertise on the subject or obtain the expertise.

I think that it's possible and even reasonable to understand the fundamentals a couple of levels of abstraction either direction from your area of expertise.

In the cases where that's not enough, it's still very useful in helping you interact with someone who has relevant expertise.
Totally thought this was about MJ. You are, of course, absolutely correct.

I fear most of the population will not get it. Or maybe I'm stupid...
SSLC Question Paper and Answer Key
http://www.twitscoop.com/search?
You should give ReSubj a try: http://resubj.com
The Statistics of Chow Yun Fat's "Hard Boiled"
You just described 90% of the countries in the area. However, Costa Rica is the only one that has implemented this. The author's point still stands.
Indeed! Although, with the recent rise of Open Manufacturing, Knuth's distinction between physical and abstract patents is looking a bit dated though?

Thanks for the find fogus!
One software problem yo can try to solve: micro finance institutions are in dire need of good systems. Many of them run on excel and have a horrible time keeping track of data. If they need to generate a report, they often have someone doing it by hand and the data comes back jumbled up. This hurts their operations as well as prevents them from getting funding. Many of them are small and can't afford good systems or to hire any developers.
No, they're both the same book: both are second edition, with the same number of pages. Each page even has the same reviews (note reviews by Peter Norvig and pg). The only differences are the price and the ISBNs.
China might be a blackbox, but at least you can measure its inputs and outputs. It's a largely manufacturing economy: you have imported raw materials, and you have exports. You can get a good ballpark estimate of Chinese economy by just studying the receipts and invoices of importers in the U.S. (or the West in general.)
This is sort of a loaded article, since it glances over the benefits of DirectX. (Note: I'm an OpenGL developer, but I worked on implementing D3D10 on top of OpenGL, and I've worked with DX7+ over the years. I'm not a fan, but leaving these things out is misleading.)

First and foremost, it's wrong to compare OpenGL and DirectX, rather than OpenGL and Direct3D. OpenGL directly competes with a small portion of Direct3D, and requires several libraries (I'm a big fan of SDL, OpenAL, etc myself) to begin to touch the breadth of DX.

Second, with OpenGL you have many vendors producing extensions and implementing them at different times. With Direct3D, you have a single set of features you write for which are guaranteed to be there (in a given version). This means that when you write code for OpenGL, you have to special-case paths for many different available extensions and duplicate many pieces of functionality.

If you want to use shaders, you have to either make your own effects system on top of GLSL/ARB shaders or use something like Cg. The Direct3D effects pipeline saves a lot of time, but of course reduces flexibility.

In the end, the call on OGL vs DX really comes down to these things: How much do you care about cross-platform compatibility? How much time do you have to put into your engine? Do you want complete flexibility w.r.t. your rendering pipeline?

If you're an engine-tech-heavy firm, OpenGL will almost always be the right choice. If you're just making a game, DirectX will almost definitely save you time. Again, I'm not a DX fan, but it has its place, and this sort of article is woefully misleading.
Yeah, it does seem like he's got an axe to grind, but he never lets on what it is. I think it's too optimistic to think he's alluding to marijuana laws, he seemed more forward thinking than that. Banking industry reforms?
So, there's not really much difference, except that you get 1 free private repo on BB, and GH likes to drink more.
In this case we can be reasonably confident in the causal link between the switch and the light because we're controlling the switch ourselves -- this helps us eliminate the other causal possibilities (a) that the light going on and off causes the switch to flip and (b) both the light and the flipping of the switch are separately caused by some third factor of which we're ignorant.

In situations where we can't freely vary any of the parameters we're always going to have a lot more difficulty. Given a pile of correlations between, say, happiness and the countless other variables in the mere two hundred or so countries which exist (eg "average bovine thigh circumference"), it'd be impossible, in the absence of any good theories about what should make people happy, to determine what does make people happy.

Luckily we have pretty good ideas from our own observations and from those of others about what actually does make people happy: health, wealth, nice weather, absence of civil war, et cetera. But we'll never be able to get anything other than the vaguest confirmation of what we already believed out of statistical methods alone.
Nope. It wasn't caches, aliasing, or memory mapping.

I could write to any physical address in the slots with no DIMMs and get back what I read, just like I could with the slots that had memory.

I figured it out when I noticed that all reads (from the slots with no dimms), regardless of address, returned the last value written to any address. In other words, a read from 104 returned what I wrote to 100 if that was the last write.

The data bus was behaving like a set of capacitors.
Yes, the article says this is untrue. It specifically mentions features that OpenGL has had years before DirectX.
OpenGL only competing against a portion of DirectX can be seen as a plus or a minus. I like the fact that OpenGL focuses on one thing and tries to "do one thing and do it well."
Is opengl always harder? Aren't there any libs/projects that makes it way easier?
Using Stacked Git to maintain multiple patches is a useful alternative to keeping multiple branches for some workflows. Obviously it depends on what you're doing with them.
It appears to be a Chrome (and Opera) thing.
True, though there are loopholes there too: startups are almost universally corporations or LLCs, generally for the express purpose of insulating the owners from the liabilities of the business. And banks routinely write off uncollectable car loans by selling them to collection agencies; they aren't large enough to bother with enforceable legal action.

The homeowner protection laws are the same kind of thing. As a society, we decide that home ownership is worth encouraging (whether that's true or not is an interesting side question), so we implement policy designed to encourage it.
Personally I don't think there's anything inherently bad about acknowledging someone's membership in a minority group. Otherwise I feel like we're denying minorities, and majorities, an important perspective on how we got to where we are today.
As do I, but it certainly increases the cost of development on a production engine. Personally, I like that; it gives me about as low-level control as possible, which is great, but it's certainly not for everyone.
Know about Nanotechnology - Customization of molecules and atoms
Everything is made up of molecules which in turn are made up of atoms, now customization at these levels to get a useful product is what nanotechnology is helping us achieve
I'm sure they'll nuke it from orbit in one of the sequels.
Another one:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/science-tattoo-empori...
> Prior to 2007, the majority of Bankruptcies in the United States were a result of medical bills.

Not so fast.

The "study" that supposedly found that actually didn't. At most, it found that folks who went into bankruptcy had medical bills. They also had car payments, house payments or rent payments, and so on.

When you're going broke, bills for everything start piling up.
It's actually shocking how little reason there is to believe in a single set of underlying natural laws when you consider these issues with an open mind.

What's the alternative to a single set of natural laws?

Perhaps one set of natural laws that applies around here, and a slightly different set that applies in Andromeda, but only on Tuesdays? But surely the two sets, plus the Andromeda/Tuesdays restriction, put together form one slightly more complicated set of physical laws?

Perhaps an infinite set of subtly different natural laws which apply at different points in space and time? But that's still just one very large set of laws, right?
The Wikipedia page for the RSA Factoring Challenge has a nice chart that shows the dates RSA numbers have been broken:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_Factoring_Challenge
I don't think OpenGL is harder. For many tasks, OGL is just downright simple, especially when using SDL. But if you're producing a production engine, there's a lot of added complexity.

If you're interested in OGL development, I strongly suggest NeHe's guides ( http://nehe.gamedev.net/ ). Of course, the Red Book is also indispensable.
Awesome, I bought and printed a copy of his book this afternoon!
Our startup's takeaways from "Getting to Plan B"
> It depends on the state. In most states the bank can go after you in court. But California is an exception, and it also happens to be the state that had the biggest bubble.

CA's exception only applies to the purchase mortage. If you refinance, that lender can go after you for the difference.

Note that you owe federal income taxes on forgiven debt. I suspect that most states with income tax do the same.
"DirectX" is an umbrella term that covers a lot of low level APIs. OpenGL is just a 3D graphics layer (good one) while DirectX does many things including 2D, IO and sound. Now it seems as if the author is only comparing OpenGL to Direct3D, but he doesn't make that clear.
Well, no, the article points out a few specific cases where it's untrue, but there are a few things that need to be pointed out here. Extensions like tessellation aren't guaranteed to be there, and if they aren't you have to implement this yourself. It also ignores the shader/effect pipeline, which you effectively have to build yourself in OpenGL, unless you use Cg. As I noted in my first comment here, these are strengths of OpenGL in some cases, but are big negatives in others.
Nodebox 2 is cross-platform [http://beta.nodebox.net]. Unfortunately, IMHO, they achieved this by going with Java as the base and changing the scripting engine to use Jython.
I was hoping for a good comparison of the two, and instead got a typical fanboy rant. There are a few good points, too bad they are buried.
DirectX is an umbrella brand. Direct3D is the equivalent of OpenGL. Most of the Direct3D developers don't even bother to checkout the source code for the other DirectX components.
I work for a successful Angel Investor. Ask me anything.
I tried registering @vimtips, but turns out it's already been done: http://twitter.com/vimtips Hasn't tweeted in while though.
Video games and epic stories
It is worth considering that if you are inside China and sitting on a pile of money from foreign trade over the past few years the best place to put that money if you think things are going to go south is probably somewhere outside the country. Buy foreign real estate and equities while you can but make your purchases in places that you can easily visit/check-out/escape-to...
I rather see it as an attempt at a manifesto, a call to action, to point out the risks of blindly following MS too closely.
Affluent people are aggressively hooked on entertainment and stress-based productivity, which has dampened creativity and optimism somewhat, imo.

One field generating a lot of exciting discoveries seems to be materials science.
We have no basis on which to speculate as to how this situation might have come about. It would, however, be very desirable for those who are in a position to clarify this to do so.

The wikipedia page has some details on how this situation came about:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Hatto#Recordings_unmasked
Maybe everyone's is. If this sounds scary, perhaps it's true.
A common misconception, but you'd have to read quite a bit of Judea Pearl to understand how certain patterns of conditional statistical independence do allow us to declare causation.

See this page for a start:

http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/home.htm

Or the opening paragraphs of this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/qr/timeless_causality/
Neither me nor the four or five people I know who tried got through. They need to consult with the Macheist people about how to scale.
> If it was possible to know with 100% certainty that every criminal who will be put to death was really guilty, then sure I'd be all for capital punishment. But until we perfect a mind reading machine, I'll stay on the "anti" side of the argument.

Prisons are dangerous places. Putting someone in one often results in their death. (It always does for "life without parole" sentences.)

So, if it's really the death of innocents that bothers you, you can't support imprisonment either.

In fact, if you're actually innocent, you probably want to get sentenced to death because that's the best way to get reasonable review. If you're innocent, you're more likely to die in the prison infirmary than you are in the death chamber.
The danger here, though, is in writing a blatantly misleading article clearly targeting those developers that would be better suited by DirectX, generally. Developers doing the sort of complex work that OpenGL is particularly well suited for (tech-heavy engine development, wherein total control is useful) tend to know that they need OpenGL. Developers just looking to write a game would often be better served by using DirectX, and leaving out the (very real) benefits of DirectX/3D is just downright misleading.
Intersesting (and hackerish) side note on how the story finally broke:

"When Brian Ventura, a financial analyst from Mount Vernon, New York, put the recording of Liszt's Transcendental Etudes credited to Hatto into his computer, the Gracenote database used by the iTunes software identified the disc not as a recording by Hatto but as one by László Simon."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Hatto#Recordings_unmasked

Other sources claim this was "almost certainly due to someone deliberately planting the information in the Gracenotes database" because "the track timings are too dissimilar for the software to pluck Simon's BIS recording out of the many 12-track CDs it holds"
http://www.pristineclassical.com/HattoHoax.html
I always find it funny that more people seem to comment on this site, than the original site.
>What's the alternative to a single set of natural laws?

I take the point that however many natural laws there are, there is a set containing all of them. However, you did delete the important adjective "underlying" when asking your question. Isn't it pretty clear what it would mean for there to be no single set of underlying natural laws? It would mean, for example, that laws of chemistry would not necessarily be reducible to laws of physics, laws of psychology would not necessarily be reducible to laws of biology, etc. etc. You may think that this is wrong, but it's a perfectly intelligible idea.

Cartwright argues that there is no "ultimate", universal set of laws to which all other true laws inevitably reduce. From her point of view, laws are relatively local and specific. She goes through a lot of physical phenomena, particularly involving lasers, and shows that although physicists are able to make very precise predictions, they virtually never make these predictions merely by special-casing general principles. Her argument (which I don't have the space or expertise to summarize here) is that there is consequently no reason to think that the general principles are really true, even though they are fantastically interesting and useful.

Also, you seem to be tacitly assuming that all natural laws are necessarily going to be laws of physics, but that is one of the questions at issue. E.g., are we right to assume that all the laws of chemistry are "in principle" reducible to physics, even though we can never hope to make such a reduction in practice? Perhaps that is just a kind of unjustified faith in the unity of reality.

Anyway, I am sort of on the fence on these issues, but I found her arguments unexpectedly persuasive. It really is surprising how non-stupid the idea of a pluralistic reality is when you look at these questions in detail.
Andrew Carnegie would have agreed.
Going on the CIA World Fact Book figures as stated at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e..., Haiti, Bermuda, Guatemala, and Trinidad and Tobago spend less of their GDP on military expenditure than Costa Rica.

And Mexico, Jamaica, Honduras, Nicargua, Barbados and the Bahamas all come in at only 0.5% or 0.6% of GDP compared to Costa Rica's 0.4%.

With some minor exceptions (Belize needs a deterrent for historical reasons), almost the whole of central America is poorly armed and barely militarized due to the long arms of Uncle Sam. Whether or not these countries have boasted about complete demilitarization or not is just a formality when they spend so little on what they do have.
Have you noticed the inability of anybody under the age of 21 to spell common words?
Go for depth. Go for breadth.

agreed! what's to prevent you from going into depth in 1 (or maybe 2-3) things, and then going for breadth on a dozen more, getting decently at good at them as hobbies but not becoming world-class? seems like a good balance. 1-2 things in which you're an expert, and 6-8 more in which you're a proficient hobbyist
> Now, Intellectual Property is practically permanent, which I think prevents innovation.

Huh? Patents are 20 years.

Copyrights keep getting extended, but they're not the only form of IP.

Trademarks and trade secrets are permanent though.
A lot of these (at least in the beginning) appear to be regexp tricks rather than vim ones
Ahh I know which building you mean. Fun stuff though. You should rip the boards off the slides, get a video camera and post to youtube! Never let caution get in the way of fun!
Imagine that IT was a more mature field, where basic techniques formed a body of knowledge, a "state of the art" (perhaps in a "text-book" for IT), that is known to all "qualified" practitioners. Then, the few innovations that do occur would be truly new (and it'd be immediately clear whether they are or not). A problem with this maturation is the complexity of software, and the many ways to implement the "same" thing. Some fp academics (Smullyan) have gone some substantial way to categorizing different techniques, such as a list of "the" combinators, and ways to determine whether some code really implements that combinator or not. A theory of computation.

As it is, we keep "reinventing" the same techniques, because they aren't well-known - and many of us don't want to learn them because it's much more fun to reinvent [mea culpa].

But this is really only half the idea of patenting. Really, the point of patents is not to own new techniques, but to own new ways of solving practical problems. It's not the technique in isolation; the patent should only cover that specific way of solving that specific problem.

e.g. the patent on the telegraph should be on a particular solution to transmitting information over long distances - not a patent on connecting wires in a certain way. It should be specific to the problem.
Are you kidding? Let me rewind you to Y2K in case you were still nursing a collegiate hangover or two. Banner ads were everywhere, advertising was in your face, the marquee/blink tags had not yet been banished, and the only way to avoid it was to run an actual http proxy so that meant that only the tech-savvy could get away from it (and almost no one was blocking cookies or other "simple" tracking mechanisms.) In Y2K some of us were still worried about whether or not crypto would ever enter the mainstream (most people had no clue what we were talking about or why we cared) and while the crypto export laws had only been relaxed a couple of months earlier it was still recent enough that including strong crypto in a product was considered a political/legal risk. We were finally to the point where you no longer needed to use a generic crypto library API (so that users could link against a non-US crypto lib) but SSL certs were still rare for most web sites.

The tech industry has changed significantly for the better in all of these areas.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1038889
The leveraged short and long ETFs have built-in decay which makes them unsuitable for anything but daytrading.

http://seekingalpha.com/article/119316-double-and-triple-etf...
The reason I submitted it was because it contained a single counterintuitive fact: that growth in US GDP over and above EU15 GDP was primarily due to population growth, with per-capita GDP growth being almost the same. I wasn't aware of this; I had thought (a) that EU15 growth had lagged US growth, and (b) that structural rigidities in some EU15 economies were part of the reason why. This article shakes up that view.
Google Nexus One: How UK customers can get one ?