skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is interesting that Pascal gets cited in this. With Pascal's Wager there is no leap really. It is very internal idea - an individual's relationship with God. "I might as well believe, there is no risk if I do so. If I am right there is a great reward. If I am wrong the result is what it would be anyway."

This is what I believe is a distinction between atheism and agnosticism. Belief vs a pragmatic ethic.

Pascal is identifying a throughly modern disconnect between what we privately might think and believe and how we act in public. His idea is radical because that split would probably not been conceived in the same way before. Over time this idea would become more socially grounded. Weber in "The Protestant Ethich and Spirit of Capitalism" would put forth a similar idea in terms of 'visible forms of God's grace'. Thus I am more blessed because there is an Audi A8 in my driveway and you are driving a Jetta...

Another perhaps more relevant case is Kierkegaard in "Fear and Trembling". I am probably misremembering political threory classes from 20+ years ago but the idea I retained is:

Think of Abraham and Isaac. In a nutshell Isaac is the much loved (and only) son and God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He takes his son up to the mountaintop and builds an altar. At the last second an animal is substituted. (Hmmm just occured to me that Miyazaki could do an interesting treatment of this)

The key idea is Abraham's resignation - which is different from passivity. He is willing to follow through. He hears God's voice telling him to do something batshit crazy. Because it is God he is willing to follow it through to its logical end. He has belief and resignation to God's will is the first step of that belief.

Now to the outside world Abraham is the worst kind of criminal. You would imagine him thrown in a dreadful prison and the guards looking the other way while that staple of tv dramas - prison justice is meted out. That doesn't change.

And Abraham doesn't even know if he is hearing God or if he is just crazy. And no one else knows either.

Back a decade or so ago when Intel's 'Trusted Computing Platform' was cause for debate, I remember someone saying "Just because Richard Stallman is paranoid doesn't mean that Microsoft is not after you"
which I thought was hilarious and true and adopted it as my email footer for a while...

When I think of Stallman - I have enormous respect for the man, for his beliefs and his courage in following out his convictions. In my everyday life I use a Mac and install nonfree packages on my Linux servers so my actions are not consistent with that respect. It is too hard for me to browse the web in emacs and I enjoy twitter and the various inane 'Distractions from distraction by distraction' that are the internet.

I think Stallman is more right than wrong. I also believe in a Kantian imperative sense that we would all be better if we aligned our ideas of freedom and use of technology with his ideas. Without his ideas and his actions which broght thse ideas to life, we would be in a very different situation.

But I am much more 'pascalian' in my everyday life choices and actions.
I like supermoon. It sounds tasty.
Cloud Computing Bible
The One Secret Thing All Successful People Do
Have you retried with a more recent image? After I kicked them about the USB Ethernet situation Ndec enabled a few more drivers for the kernel in the Ubuntu images.
Both my ancient Pegasus USB1.1 and a newer USB3 GBit card then worked out of the box.

The WiFi situation is indeed annoying and I've complained about it, they seem to be since looking into it, but as the driver is open source, someone else could check too and send patches. There even is a debug tool to intercept the proprietary QC driver commands (used in Android images). It should just be reconfiguring the filters away from their broken default state.
Really? How much is dorming?

I'll relate it to Stevens by me (closest I can get to a similar cost of living).

Single Room Rate: $5,035 per semester

Cheapest rent I can find is 3K a month for a 3BR in Hoboken (same town as the college).

Sure you can live outside town for probably around 2K a month rent for a 3BR until you get so far that it isn't worth it anymore.

Add in utilities and food (meal plan may no longer be effective since you're off campus) and let's say it is 3500 per month for three people. Let's say about 1100 a person.

You need to do a year lease, at least, generally. So that's 13K + per person for an off-campus by several miles (so a 20-30 min train or bus ride) VS 10K for two semesters.

You do have more control so maybe you can save a few bucks, but I don't see thousands?
Chrome for Android’s incognito mode saves some of the sites you visit
Unimpressive. The author of this article obviously didn't have a compiler class where one learns how regexes are basically glorified NFAs that are deterministicly convertible into a much more efficient DFA state machines (read: PCRE JIT), instead of assuming regexes are processed by O(N^2) algorithms.
On "Should I press point 'x'", do a divide and conquer on it. Try to reduce the number of degrees of freedom from that decision point to a minimum.

IMO, you have to live with the ambiguity, but try to craft strategies that cover both with minimal ... perturbation. Waiting helplessly is not an option :) If all else fails, strawman the least cost solution first.

I also think there's value in having some measure of dissent from within the team. Done right, you'll synthesize solutions you would not otherwise have come up with. But you want this to be without rancor and without sinking large amounts of time.

On "... where and how to involve QA processes in the build/deploy process" - make a complete list of steps, then balance which gets included as the risk profile emerges. Good risk analysis includes a comprehensive and complete plan for what happens when a step fails.

Finally, you simply have to manage perception. Quantify, quantify, quantify. As if you don't have enough to do....
The board should be prepared for current measurement instrumentation.
Details can be found in the schematics, that finally got published after they were sitting around on them for a few months.

Not publishing the schematics and a couple of other things are actually violating the grand LINARO 96boards compliance spec, but nobody there seems to really give a f...art.
Hipchat does screensharing and voice/video (although not yet group).
Most apps link against PCRE.
"We think we can be the Uber of buildings".

Righttttt ... makes total sense.
I don't agree with that. The real anti-Facebook is a combination of email and well formatted RSS feeds. Email for actual legitimate notifications and mail, RSS feeds for news and news type bloggy stuff and blogs.
Questions raised after shock belt used at Texas murder trial
Sid – Static Intrusion Detection for NetBSD
Reminds me of my favorite story from my favorite chemistry professor (who has a number of them, or at least bon mots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_S._Kemp#Quotes).

He related how a chemical company, using the pot method (smaller quantities done one reaction at a time in a vessel, vs. mass quantities where each reaction is "a factory"), had the yields of one of their products go to hell all of a sudden. They searched, and probed, and just could not find the cause, until they video monitored it 24x7. Upon which they found that a night watchman was relieving himself into the vat.

The yield problem started when he semi-retired and worked fewer nights, the good yields happened when he did his thing ^_^. Like this Nobel prize winner who had to retract/repudiate a result from 1960 when he didn't realize nickle contamination was a key to the reaction, this company didn't realize everything in their process.
> Contrast this situation to the invention of calculus which was simultaneously created by Newton and Leibniz.

There were plenty of precursors to calculus, coming from the likes of Descartes, Fermat and Pascal. For example: http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/The_rise_of_c...
Sure, but the thing is... when cleaning house you've got to start somewhere.
In Search of Moebius (BBC 4 Documentary) – Comics
OVH is one of those companies that are great.... if you never have an issue with their service. Had a ticket open for over a month now (routing issue) and they continually deflect and blame everyone but themselves (even though you can see the problem on their network weather map).
> You don't have to go to Africa and distribute mosquito nets to save lives.

No, but if the criterion is effectiveness, you do have to know that distributing mosquito nets is the most effective thing you can do to help those people. How can you know that if you don't know them? What if it would be more effective to teach them how to make their own nets? Or to make something they can trade for mosquito nets at a profit? (In other words, to teach them how to create wealth, instead of just giving things to them.) To know whether or not that's the case, you have to know the people.

> What matters are aggregate effects.

I don't agree with this as a blanket statement. I agree that in certain cases, aggregate effects may be the best measure to use; but to say they're what matters in all cases is going way beyond our knowledge. Individual human beings don't average; every single one of us is a unique individual. Reducing 7 billion human beings to a bunch of aggregate numbers is ignoring so much information that the claim that those aggregate effects are "what matters" seems incredibly presumptuous to me.

> I may care about my "close circle", but thinking they are worth more than everyone else is just nonsense.

First, the reason we have an instinctual drive to help people close to us is not that they are worth more than everyone else; it's that we know much more about them, so we know much more about what they need.

Second, "worth" is not an intrinsic property of a person. It's a property of relationships between people. My family is worth more to me than someone I don't know in Africa because I have a close relationship with them. But the family of that person in Africa is worth more to them than I am. Saying that every single person must be "worth" exactly as much as every other, once again, ignores so much information about the individual people and their relationships that it seems incredibly presumptuous to me.

And just so it's clear where I'm coming from: this whole viewpoint of insisting that we have to apply exactly the same standards to everyone, seems to me to be a cop-out; it's a way of allowing oneself to feel good while avoiding the actual hard work of knowing individual people and their needs, so that you can actually help them. People want an easy solution; they want to be able to just send money and believe that that's enough, that they're helping in the most effective way they can. They don't want to face the fact that helping people doesn't scale; one person can't effectively help millions of other people. One person should be focused on helping a few people that they know well; for millions of people to be helped, there need to be millions of people willing to help and willing to do the work of each getting to know a few people well in order to help them.
Clarifications about Redis and Memcached
And today I learn about Terry Davis, TempleOS and showdead. Moderation and censorship is a travesty online. Fortunately showdead allows us to bypass it somewhat.
Use it as an HTPC/Streaming PC? A lightweight desktop replacement? Digital signage? Home automation? Home server? Built in b/g/n is a nice touch but most prefer the ease of installation, reliability, and goodput of ethernet over wifi for anything important.

I suppose you could use a USB ethernet adapter, but now you're just sacrificing a USB port to have a less capable XU4. I'm not sure what market they're targeting here. I suppose you're just supposed to build mobile devices around this.
I run convnet-benchmarks, and also work at Facebook.

Unlike what the public perception is, NVIDIA, Facebook and other companies collaborate very very closely. NVIDIA's latest R3 release has FFT-based convolutions inspired by Facebook's work, and Facebook integrated some of the optimization suggestions for fbfft that NVIDIA gave. Further optimizations on the FFT approach (like tiled-FFTs) have been suggested and prototyped at FB and carried over by NVIDIA. The relationship is more of a deep collaborative effort.

At the end of the day, we want cuDNN to win, as it is a baseline system for all software.

However, if you want to do research, you want to have open-source code, because you often want to do funky changes to the base algorithm. NVIDIA falls short on this, and we at Facebook pledged to always keep our code open source (bitten by the fact that we had to start with closed-source blackboxes for our initial FFT work).
I think many people see the Box performance: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/box/interactive-chart?timeframe... and they see how challenging it is for Box to hold its 1+ billion valuation in the public markets, and look at the $1.1B DropBox has raised, and think "hmm, its getting close to being unable to even meet liquidation preferences."

I know Box and DropBox are different, but for a lot of people they have the word "box" in their name, they provide cloud storage, and that is the extent of their understanding of the offerings.

So the question is, what will be the 2016 news from DropBox? And yes, there are doubters who have put them in the deadpool.
Ah appreciated. It was a lot going over my head.
Show HN: Funk – a toolkit for using PHPSGI stack (middleware, http servers)
> What is the point of Opera

Opera up to version 12 was a great standalone browser with UI and performance characteristics still surpassing all competitors even at this point in time. (As long as you exclude JS-heavy things.)

However at some point MBAs managed to take over, decided to continue making most of the company income with their mobile ad network.

Developing Opera 12 further was expensive, so they figured out a way to keep most of the users (for the ad revenue), while radically slashing the dev expenditure on the browser: Fork and rebrand chrome, while adding a few token features, pretend Opera 12 doesn't exist, and push people heavily to "upgrade".
Commun.it is bad, and you should feel bad
I got mine from Arrow(US) in July. They suspended shipping at some point after that due to missing FCC tests, but you could still get the board if you signed a waiver.

The HiKey board has different pros and cons.
Pro: It's received a lot more engineering time, as it was the first 96board. Actual open source first stage bootloader, from what I can tell.
Con: WiLink8 WiFi; Initially unobtainium as "produced" by Circuitco in homeopathic doses; HiSilicon also needs quite some proprietary blobs for things.

So far ALL 96borads have their problems and surprisingly all of them seem to violate the LINARO/96boards spec in multiple ways.
Going from 0 hotels to 2 AirBnBs sounds like a massive improvement to me.

>serfitude economy

Really? That's a fine description for the terrible 'contractor' jobs, but it doesn't fit renting a room at all. AirBnB makes their hosts less serf-y, with a completely different set of externalities.
Brain processing shouldn't affect apparent size. Apparent size can be measured easily. I'd guess the difference in apparent size between something at zenith and on the horizon is less than a percent.
Back in the time of Gauss, mathematicians needed logarithm tables, and the only ones they trusted making them where mathematicians. So, mathematicians computed logarithms 'in their spare time'

For example, Gauss actually spent time to write a review of a table of logarithms (http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//full/1851AN.....32..181G...).

He also had to compute prime numbers so that he could study their properties. (http://science.larouchepac.com/gauss/ceres/InterimII/Arithme... claims he extended a table listing all primes up to 10,009 but never got as far as a million, but he must have spent lots of time on calculations we now call mundane
Which Works Faster- Null Coalescing Operator or GetValueOrDefault
It doesn't sound like it's meant for private social media, it's an alternative to the ultra-public social media that's gotten popular in the last few years. It's about broadcasting yourself, not contacting a small subset of people (hence why you can only publish to the entire set of subscribers). If you need secrecy, then a system billing itself with the term 'newsletters' is probably not for you.

The real benefit, as the article points out, is that the empty room problem is solved. Everyone already has an email address, it's your online identity, and email addresses aren't tied to one provider like a facebook account or a twitter account. If gmail dies, TinyLetter still lives. If TinyLetter dies, there's nothing stopping someone from creating an alternative version that imports old newsletters to reconstruct everything.
Why not both? I would prefer to have my emails and feeds in one place, just no status updates.
Maybe the names are poor.

Strong/Weak typing refers to Conversion Typing. Or Type Malleability. It is about the implicit conversions or transitions between types.

Static/Dynamic refers to Variable Typing (or Identifier Typing). It refers to the type of an expression.
An interesting analysis:

https://medium.com/@KingFrostFive/citation-games-by-the-unit...

Using the metric of removing duplicate citations, not counting broken links, those with little to no effort shown for those missing links (as in, not even bothering to check the website), and removing anything that didn’t seem to exist, only 64% remained.
TFA seems to come close to arguing that certain businesses should plan to provide value, then fold within a few years. The idea had never occurred to me. It seems to have some difficult implications. If you're the founder of a business and your mission statement involves having "failed" within five years, do you tell your employees that? Or do you pretend to want permanent growth and let them buy houses close to work?
Neat! This sort of thing also is a really nice project for playing around with logic programming languages.

One missing feature is enforcing a unique solution, which is something you'd generally expect from a word search puzzle.
Ah, so as I thought. There is no difference in apparent size.

>A simple way of demonstrating that the effect is an illusion is to hold a small object (say, 1/4 inch wide) at arm's length (25 inches) with one eye closed, positioning it next to the seemingly large Moon. When the Moon is higher in the sky, positioning the same object near the Moon reveals that there is no change in size.
Why not choose an Intel ecosystem board, something like:

http://www.minnowboard.org/meet-minnowboard-max/

Traditionally they have been behind on development boards like this but things have been improving. Unless you must have lowest power I'm thinking that you are in many ways better off:

64-bits? No problem.
Performance? Intel has a matching Atom for every Arm.
Compatibility? Run desktop Ubuntu.. heck, run Windows
Drivers? They are all open source and work.

There are a bunch of extremely cheap Z3735F based systems available also, for example: http://www.geekbuying.com/Search/?keyword=windows+mini+pc ("pc stick" and "mini pc").

(I do like ARM, but at the Cortex-M0 level as a PIC replacement).
In both (classic) Python and JavaScript, there is no static typing and you can change the type of existing objects, access all their fields, and add/remove methods and field any time.

The only languages with "weaker" typing are languages with no concept of types at all.
It's not a right, it's a privilege. And the competition is in no way unfair, the only thing that makes it "unfair" is that they did not pay to the city for the privilege. There's nothing "fair" in being forced to pay exorbitant sums to the city in order to do business. I could get it if the price was commensurate with the service one gets from the city - after all, roads must be maintained, cops and street cleaners must be paid, street lights must be fixed, etc. - but 250K goes way beyond that and is clearly just made to extract money "because we can" and to limit the access to the market.

If the city has an unfair practice of restricting business and charging for the privilege of doing something that should be a basic right available for everyone, and somebody relied on that unfair practice to extract rent, and it stopped working, I don't see how one has a claim for damages anymore than Mafia racketeer can claim for damages when a racket victim refuses to pay protection money, or one victim could claim damages because the other victim does not pay anymore and thus has "unfair advantage".
The real anti-Facebook is Sublevel. But I can forgive Wired for not knowing about it.
Apple Computer was also trivial when it started - it was a circuit board without a case, that hobbyists had to assemble itself, and needed an external TV to display any output.

Amazon had big ambitions, but they started selling books via Perl script. I remember when it first started attracting media attention in 1996, I wondered why the hell people could get so excited about selling books. If a similar startup launched today - say, call it book.ly - would you consider it a "change the world" company?

Edison's laboratory isn't a fair comparison: at the time it was established, Edison had already been inventing things for a decade. It would be like looking at Google in 2005 instead of 1995. (Google, along with Elon Musk's companies and Pixar, actually are the exception that the article talks about, where they seem crazily ambitious from the beginning.) Edison's first patent was for an electric vote recorder, which a.) sounds a lot less impressive and b.) didn't exactly change the world.

The WHO is an entirely different beast: it's an arm of an international organization, established under the umbrella of the United Nations. I would say it qualifies, though - it's under the "do something crazily ambitious" clause in Sam Altman's article. Indeed, even then it took 25 years to go from founding to the eradication of smallpox.

To find examples that actually contradict the point, you need to find companies that a.) appeared to outsiders, not just their founders, as crazily ambitious b.) at the time of their founding and c.) actually did change the world. There are relatively few of these; there are some, but it's a definite minority. Most of the time, if you think of an invention as having changed the world from the beginning, it's because your "beginning" was actually several years into its development, and your perception of its importance is colored by events & adoption that have already happened.
But if it is indeed Stallman v. Gates ( which I doubt ) then Gates won the big war, while Stallman continues to win small skirmishes.

This is just all too convenient and narrative for my tastes. IOW, "It's complicated." That's my epistemic learned helplessness.
Interested in joining hands to clean npm a bit?
Antlr is shit; it will waste your time for anything real. Bison+flex (once you figure out the quirks, undocumented assumptions and flags) and treetop are usable.

https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/

http://flex.sourceforge.net/manual/

http://treetop.rubyforge.org

Disclaimer: A long time ago in a galaxy, far, far away, I wrote an optimizing Java-to-MIPS compiler (sans GC, so leaky heap) in C++ using Flex/Bison and again in Java using JavaCC.
You're This Close to the Best Sleep of Your Life
> Medallions used to be almost free, which is why the waitlist was 10 years.

I imagine the waitlist was 10 years not because medallions were cheap, but because there wasn't enough of them issued to satisfy the demand.
Marriages, cars, houses, computer programs and businesses all take work, are subject to rot, and can be rebuilt. If every bump in marriage doomed it, nearly no marriage would survive. The viability is a combination of all the negative and positive pressures.