skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Steam has a somewhat reasonable refund policy: http://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/ . And most online purchases are made with credit cards, and those usually have strong consumer protections. You could always do a chargeback if the game launch was really bad (SimCity, Dayz). Also, a lot of credit cards have return polices where you can get refunds for any reason within 60 days of purchase.
The Price of Nice Nails
>Cultural absolutism: us good, them evil.

>Cultural relativism: under these social circumstances, those moral preferences are likely to emerge.

This strikes me as the fallacy of the excluded middle.

Many people believe one culture is better than another without necessarily believing one is entirely good/without fault and the other is entirely bad.

The problem with cultural relativism as I understand it is that it denies me the right to make any judgement. I mean, you phrased as opposing "they're bad" but in practice it opposes "they're worse"
I take no sides in the cold-fusion discussion. The irony comment was meant as an aside. More enlightened souls like you and I will check the sources. However, Wikipedia pages are not made by "consensus"; they are invariably shaped by the most powerful group of editors on the page.
One thing I've not seen mentioned in the coverage so far: how much payload is sacrificed by the need to keep fuel in reserve for the return to base?

I'm guessing the sacrifice is roughly equal to the mass of unburnt fuel in the booster at the point of booster separation, but don't much trust my intuition on these things.
Automated Style Review with Linty Fresh
Most of the traffic I've ever gotten from AdWords has been garbage.
It's been investigated for 26 years. I do understand your and the author's point, it's just that it doesn't really get us anywhere. A few months ago I was discussing this on another forum and someone said words to the effect that "what the cold fusion people should have done was build a device powerful enough to run an electric car or heat a house", as if F&P cold fusion was a real thing that worked and the trouble was that nobody ever bothered to try and develop it. In reality dozens of investigators have tried to recreate it and scale it up. They didn't fail because they didn't try, they failed because it doesn't work.

Yes it's theoretically possible that someone might figure out a way, but as with the magic thruster drive, even the people working on the devices dont have the vaguest idea how such a device might actualy work. That doesn't provide much to go on in the way of reasons to be optimistic about their chances of success.
brad hargreaves (the founder of common, also co-founded General Assembly), is an amazing guy; super humble, really willing to help others. it's great to see him having so much success.
Do you think this is true for immigrants? I find most will obtain advanced degrees from US universities then apply for local jobs to stay in the country as skilled engineers.
Yes, that was exactly my point. And you are right abut the bar being very low! It drives me crazy
I smell NIH all over the post. This guy probably:

- Hasn't been through hard deadlines, proof-of-concept software, silly client requirements (like IE8 support) and other things that need to be done quick and dirty.

- Hasn't written against monolithic frameworks, legacy code or enterprise software. The web scene is fast moving, these software don't. You have to make do with what is available, most of which are old code and frameworks.

- This guy probably hasn't seen the horrors of the web past and hasn't been burned for failing to make some functionality cross-browser friendly.

- Doesn't have an idea of cross-browser support. How do you AJAX when `fetch` isn't cross-browser yet? How do you deep-clone when Object.assign isn't IE-friendly. Are you willing to waste time writing what libraries already do for you?

- Hasn't written a large scale app. I've seen terrible things written in jQuery. How much more terrible would it be without it?

It's not jQuery's, or Bootstrap's fault. It's all about using the right tools at the right time the right way.

Besides, jQuery and Bootstrap both can be custom-built to what you need and not include everything. But then, the author probably didn't know that.

There are also lighter libraries like Zepto and Pure, but the author may have not known those as well.
I think a harbinger of this was the fact that the latest console generation did not come with an upgrade in (physical) game medium.

Previously, each console generation came with newer cartridges, then with newer disc formats (CD, then DVD, then HD-DVD / Blu Ray). But this generation just stuck with Blu Ray. That signaled to me that this may very well be the last generation to even support physical media.

If this console generation lasts the typical ~7 years or so... do we expect people to still be using any physical media in the early 2020s?
I was around, and read the Pons & Flieshman paper before it was released (when the pre-prints were carefully guarded and numbered... do frauds carefully guard their papers to make sure they don't get out, or do they publish far and wide?) IIRC it was the university that jumped the gun at least as much as them.

I worked for a very well respected lab for physicists, the head of which should have gotten the nobel prize around that time (he missed out, but he was close). We replicated their experiment and then replicated it again with some changes that should have been innocuous. In both cases we were unable to observe the phenomena they observed.

We published a paper to this effect, and were branded "deniers" by Mondo2000 and other fringe science advocates who really wanted to believe in Cold Fusion.

We didn't disprove it, we didn't show evidence that P&F were wrong... and the fact that we spent lab time and money to replicate the experiment described in the pre-print shows we considered it possible enough to spend the time.

Remember, failure to replicate an experiment either means the paper doesn't describe how to reproduce the phenomena well enough, or the observations in the paper are in error (for any number of reasons.) But we were just a datapoint. To claim they were frauds is a much, much higher bar. But they certainly were minor leagues scientists from a lesser university, and it's not surprising they were ostracized they way they were-- and that was politics (these "little people playing our game, the nerve!") as much as anything else.

Big Science/Governent Science is very political and very corrupt. Genuine scientific outcomes are suppressed or ignored or rejected for publication because they violate the theories and beliefs of "peers" who "Review" them. I've been published and gone thru that gauntlet, and its very rarely about ensuring the integrity of the science, and much more about protecting grant receipts.
Sure, but that's pretty fair. If you've played two hours of a game, you know if it sucks or not.
No, I don't recommend it. It's definitely a book for adults. I personally found it had many long boring parts mixed with very interesting ones. Very introspective.
I had a project idea recently. It's pretty ambitious, but if I can just find the time and drive to complete it, I think it would be profitable. I think my new year's resolution, such as it may be, will be to actually launch the thing. We'll see.
> Producing even a little heat with fusion produces a lot of nasty radiation. As in kill everyone in the unsheilded room within a few seconds.

This is greatly exaggerated. The amount of excess heat they claimed to observe was really quite small, and D-D fusion produces a relatively weak neutron flux [0]. I'm not saying some shielding wouldn't have been a good idea, but instant death? No.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#Deuterium
Hmm...that problem that both Objective-C and Smalltalk don't have...
You're right not to trust your intuition! Good call.

It's actually going to be much, much less than that due to the nature of the rocket equation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
Me too. When you figure it out try to factor
641071800653367850802176606120792275422168080497001121
for me please.
While we're at it: everyone, check out MoonScript [1]. It's a great, succinct and featureful compile-to-Lua language, although sadly not very widespread at the moment. It features significant whitespace, syntactic sugar to reduce keyword noise in programs, table and list comprehensions, line (statement) decorators, classes, export and import for working with modules, implicit return, JSON-like table literals and much, much more. I, for one, absolutely love working with it.

[1]: http://moonscript.org
:( poor Jim and Jeff
int read(void);
void write(int);
void left(void);
void right(void);

read returns 0 or 1. write only uses the least significant bit.
More specifically the scientific method, but the scientific method is out the window in society these days-- it's un popular. A politicians pronouncing something true (that is conveniently in his self interest) is given more weight than a thousand peer review publication (or even simple phenomena that can be measured in any college lab in the country.)

Science seems to be dead, and what passes for it now is extremely politicized.

At least outside of commercial institutions. I'm sure Intel and the people who make fab equipment are doing real science.
By popular demand: http://patreon.com/betterexplained

:)
That must have been a true banana republic...
Sex, lies and arsenic: how the 'king of poisons' lost its crown
I've viewed it in the same light as all other enterprise software development & purchases--neither the developers nor purchasers of POS software are going to be using it, so bad things are built and bought, with some exceptions. It just takes a long time for the tide to change in the industry.
There are numerous horror stories about people issuing a charge-back on a Steam purchase and having Steam respond by permanently disabling their account (invariably filled with $3000 worth of games).
I'm not sure that argument against it holds up. For all we know some Deuterium and Palladium are hanging out in the cosmos undergoing fusion, and we would have no idea about it. There are real room temperature fusion methods[0] that can also happen in nature, but even if that method was break-even it doesn't mean Mother Nature would exploit it due to the difficulty of starting the reaction.

Getting paid for power and getting enough seed money to build more generators does involve convincing people, as well, and is pretty much what Rossi has been doing. He even started his own energy company, iirc, and has been selling self-contained "generators" to people.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion
The share of Americans with broadband at home has plateaued [pdf]
Awesome. I think it's a general principle (blurry-to-sharp) that works for many fields.
About 30% returning to landing site, 15% returning to a barge downrange. Note that the rocket's still perfectly capable of running an expendable mission if the payload requires it. The mass figure on their website[1] is for reusable.

[1] http://www.spacex.com/falcon9
Jet.com says it can't guarantee Christmas delivery
The USA has enough land to (still) let the car be king, even in many cities, and has enough wealth to let even the "poor" to own a car, and you think that's a case of "look how shitty america is"?

There are many people in the world who would literally kill for such a lifestyle, and you think it's a symbol of how "shitty" America is?

Why do you think that America's car culture could be perceived as a bad thing? And if you can understand why others think it's bad, why do you take such offense when they point it out?
Secret court orders are an attack on democracy.
Nice point. Yes, naming can prime people to understand or be confused by a topic. Renaming the "imaginary numbers" to the "rotated numbers" would make them orders of magnitude easier to learn. "What's so strange about the second dimension?" vs. "How do I understand the square root of -1?".
Saying it's cheap, tacky, and childish definitely sounds cultural, since all of those are emotional rather than practical reasons. A photo can add a lot of important information what you are buying.

I would say try to be more objective because you may be missing out on opportunities to actually improve things.
By the sound of it, your pricing strategy makes sense for the kind of product or service you sell. By comparison, a company selling a single product should (in my opinion) have pricing available for at least their smaller tiers.

Professional services and a single SaaS product are very different.
Yes. I often wonder what they could have done better with the UI to speed up the process for seniors or people who just don't have the patience or interest in all the options they have.
FSF to improve proposed U.S. Department of Education regulations
> we can do a bunch more with the non-gifted children than we even attempt.

We can. But it requires a lot more teachers. And nobody is willing to pay for that.

The public education system in the US is at a rough optimum relative to the amount of parental resources that people are willing to spend. If you want to overcome that, then you need to spend a dramatic amount more on teachers and schools (the Gates Foundation data is quite clear on this--25% expenditure increase only begets about 1-3% student achievement increase--you need nearer to 100% increases to get significant levels of student improvement).
That's what many people think, but it's actually not true (at least not in the states I've worked in). There's a cottage industry that provides advice on how to navigate through the RFP process, and a lot of the advice is based on controlling what goes into the RFP when it is written. Take a look at this set of slides:

http://www.slideshare.net/pmcloughlin1/how-to-help-your-cust...

The most important thing to understand about RFPs is that they aren't designed for making the "most fair" selection. They are designed for making the "safest" selection. An RFP is basically a CYA (cover your ass) mechanism for the procurement team. That's why collaborating with preferred vendors when the RFP is being written is a very common practice. Teams writing the RFPs rarely have the subject matter expertise necessary. So they receive help (which is a good thing).
From http://www.lua.org/about.html:

> "Lua" (pronounced LOO-ah) means "Moon" in Portuguese. As such, it is neither an acronym nor an abbreviation, but a noun. More specifically, "Lua" is a name, the name of the Earth's moon and the name of the language. Like most names, it should be written in lower case with an initial capital, that is, "Lua". Please do not write it as "LUA", which is both ugly and confusing, because then it becomes an acronym with different meanings for different people. So, please, write "Lua" right!
I don't think you could allocate all of the landing fuel load to payload as any addition to the payload also requires additional 2nd. stage fuel.
9 Post Apocalyptic Games Like Fallout 4
http://www.divisorplot.com/
The "metrics lag" you are describing is a kind of slack that occurs across industries. And, there is always someone who comes in, and often makes their career, by finding a new way to measure that is more precise or closer to real time-- basically they claim, "if this strategy worked for us before then just speeding up the whole process will make it better". But this is often false. That slack in the system is what lazy people use to relax until they make a move or coast into retirement. But its also what smart and productive people use to do things that the system would not have allowed otherwise.

People should stop following particular sources and start following individuals- reporters they can trust to uncover lies, tell the truth, and hit the street looking for a new job when their paper becomes "Rupert Murdoch's The Wall Street Journal" and "The Washington Post brought to you by Jeff Bezos".

There are good individuals whose names we have to become familiar with, whose careers we should follow, and whose work we should read.

But if you do want to talk about individual sources, there are still good ones out there-- theintercept.com, propublica.org, financial times, smaller guys like www.tampabay.com and civilbeat.com
Ads and analytics. We're considering adding a paid ad free version that won't need access to the internet. Also, the current version will just skip the ads if you don't have a connection.

By the way, are you on Android? It lists the permission in such a way that it makes it sound like we're looking at all of the local wifi network names (which we absolutely aren't!). I wish the permissions were more granular.
The scientific method is absolutely at odds with how human beings behave socially and politically. It's kind of strange that we ever came up with it. Our natural tendency is to use ideas to manipulate, to believe to belong rather than because anything is true, and to rely on a lot of sloppy heuristics in place of more cognitively expensive and time consuming modes of thought.

Ultimately I think the only reason science became politically favored at all is because it was good at making people rich and building weapons to make them powerful. Truth has no part in it. Few people care about that, and not because they are evil but because they are a product of a Darwinian process that barely rewards it and that rewards other shorter term things much more.
It is not true that unicode never was an encoding. It was originally a fixed-width 16-bit encoding[1]. This was arguably no longer true in the early '90s and definitely not true by 1996.

1: http://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf
> > But testing ensures no such thing

> Yes it does. Empirically.

Your claim was "Testing ensures that the knowledge is checked." And, yes, testing ensures that the knowledge is checked - by the test.

mrbrowning's claim is that "Static typing ensures that some sliver of that knowledge is explicit and checked." That's also true (despite your reply of "No"). And note mrbrowning's use of the word "explicit". Type knowledge is more explicit than a test. It ensures that this data structure is an instance of the specified type. A test proves that in this set of circumstances this data structure behaves the way we expect, which is a weaker proof.
Faraday Future: What if?
I worked in retail for a stint a long time ago, so here's my attempt...

Everything I Needed to Know About Writing Software I Learned While Working in Retail

1. The user does not always know why they are there and what they want to achieve.

2. The user cannot guess what something does, so they rely on the visual clues, such as reading the box.

3. Users will need to undo something at some point (sorry, no refunds).

4. Two customers wanting the last stock item on the shelf causes a concurrency issue.

5. Under staffed and too many customers helps you learn about queuing systems and load balancing.

6. Getting access to stock from the main warehouse on a weekend reminds you of the importance of correctly configured user roles.

7. Disparity of prices from the mail order catalogue and in store prices tells you the importance of data propagation delay.

8. Not all users understand the concept of an automatic door and which direction they need to enter and exit. Receiving an error in this instance causes the user to experience huge embarrassment.

9. Users will attempt to steal something that isn't properly secured.
Definitely a huge fan of GitLab, best open source solution and super easy to host locally.
Show HN: PhotoEQ 10 – Robust photo editing automation Windows software
Harvester is a mainstream chain restaurant in the UK, http://www.harvester.co.uk/content/dam/harvester/pdf/DN15/ma... shows [some] images of food. They have very similar if not identical menus in the restaurant AFAIR.

Higher class establishments don't do it in general but it's not like it's unheard of in the UK to use food images on menus.
In some circumstances yes, but I think actually that most of the papers out there disprove AGW, it's just that nobody reads them. I've read many papers given to me by AGW proponents that they claim support AGW, and in every case they don't and in most they actually support the opposite conclusion. (as do most of the scientists who have signed petitions.)

As a political movement, global warming doesn't need science, politicians and advocates just declare it "settled" and thus feel they don't have to defend their claims.
You're talking about people who arrive as students with the intention of staying here and know that the only way to do that is by getting a job visa and eventually a green card. Their lives are much more constrained.
Glad to hear it helped, thanks.
Wabi-sabi
You could generate bitcoins.
Implementing a vision is where it gets messy and compromises arise. I want to delay that as much as possible, in order for the vision to be as best as possible.

I can't be the only one that went through that process. It took me 12 years to get there. I have not written a single line of code for that project, only design. What I'm looking for is someone that went through that process and eventually reached the end. Someone that can tell me what matter, so that I can finally start getting my hands dirty.

As much as people here tend to claim that ideas are cheap and that only execution matters, clear visions or prescriptions of what the future should be are a very scarce resource.
Sumana Harihareswara Explains What SFConservancy Does and Why She Supports Them
And the OpenCL incarnations all have wretched performance relative to CUDA. Why doesn't someone do something about that?
Except UTF-8 is never less compact than UTF-32 (it is one to four octets, and UTF-32 is always four octets), and is often more compact than UTF-16, with the sole exception being BMP CJK text that is not embedded in an ascii-based markup language.
Until game companies decide to "game" their games by making the first two hours work perfectly, then have everything break apart after that.
The NSA/GCHQ/etc could crack a random person's attempt at "encryption" in hours. Even if they were to use AES or some other algorithm that actually works, getting end-to-end encrypted messaging right is hard.
I'm firmly on the static typing side of the fence. But I think you're ignoring what others are saying about where dynamic typing shines: Where you don't know what you're doing to the point that you don't know what the proper types look like. You can try things faster in a dynamic language in that situation, because you can sweep the "don't know what the types look like" part under the rug, and experiment with algorithms, and let that experimentation show you what the types ought to be. In some situations, that can be faster/easier/better than trying, from first principles and analysis, to determine what the types must be.

I think the difference is that I (and, I suspect, you) spend little of our time in that mode, and much more in the mode where static types can save your behind. (Nothing like working on a million-line code base in its second decade to make you value static types.)
I would regret if I had started "doing" at any point in the above thought process (which spanned over 12 years). I would have slowed down the evolution of the vision, and implemented something that's less than worthy of my dedication.

I have now reached the point where I believe that creating a new communication platform for human and AI seems like an important thing to implement, yet I'm not sure whether that will hold true when I discover the next better thing.
That's boring. Hopefully he's implemented "Lp0 on fire"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire
Software Freedom Conservancy's Year in Review 2015
It's a project management app, basecamp-like app
BART was intended to go there when they first started building it, iirc. Marin dropped out of BART, and then San Mateo county.

This is why there's the double decker tunnels downtown - one was intended to branch off towards Marin.
Agreed, latest iteration is very polished and oozes personality.
people keep bringing that up!