skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's inconsistent to state that we believe that the Big Bang theory is a theory about the origin of the Universe and in the same time state that before some point in time we don't know what happened.

If that rule were in force, mathematics would disintegrate because it's built on a foundation of axioms. But scientific theories are often predicated on axioms whose consequences are examined, but whose existence are accepted without explanation until a more encompassing, more global, theory is created. Like relativity replacing Newtonian gravitation -- the new theory still has axioms, but the theory explains and encompasses more.

> If we don't know what happened before some time t, then we don't know the origin, by definition.

A scientific theory is by definition a testable, falsifiable explanation of what can be observed. For each such theory, there are limits to what can be observed.

> Back then it very much is possible the Universe was still infinite in space anyway ...

Yes, unless (imagine time running in reverse) spacetime collapsed to a point, as is often claimed, and as relativity theory requires. In that case, an infinite universe would occupy no space or time at all. The notion of infinity doesn't require infinite size.
If you were to use a higher wattage bulb with a dimmer that lets you adjust the melting time and then deliberately set that time to 15-20 minutes, would people still try to beat it?

My guess is no. Once a person gets involved in picking the time, it stops being a fun thing to challenge yourself against, and starts being your annoying boss trying to micromanage failed builds.
Direct links to project:

* Website: https://www.getlektor.com/

* Github: https://github.com/lektor/lektor

Would be really curious to hear how people like it :)
I looked into split system A/C when I moved to NYC. The gist is that attaching anything to outside of a "historical" building requires planning approval, complete with engineering drawings and a public hearing.

But hanging a window A/C out into the street? Somehow this does not affect historicity and so no approval is required.

I'm vague on whether the rules apply to non-street facing installations (I live at the back of my building), but I don't know if I can be bothered to spend the money to find out. So window A/C it is.
I have no particular knowledge that would make qualified to proclaim the single best way for handling these problems, but from a historical and empirical standpoint, the world is full of examples of companies solving complex problems previously thought to be too difficult by the majority of people.

These companies already have internal processes and mechanisms for handling these problems, which they impose in addition to FAA procedures.

The purpose of the FAA regulations and the ban in this case is to address pilots operating outside of this system. Essentially all commercial pilots employed on passenger flights have hundreds of hours of flight time, as an implicit condition of even getting such a job. The air taxi startup would have allowed pilots with almost no flight time (~40 hours) to take on passengers, which is an untenable safety hazard, given that new pilots are the cause of most accidents. It's not that these pilots have no regard for their own well-being; it's that they don't know enough to even know when it would be dangerous to fly.
> Notably in that case, the Icelandic police did not even seek a court order, as they didn't need to since the server was owned by a US citizen.

And the trial judge didn't allow Ulbricht's challenge to suppress that evidence[1] on fourth amendment grounds as Ulbricht didn't claim or demonstrate ownership of the server[2]

Which is a shame, as it would have been an interesting case and could have changed a lot of that trial.

[1] and everything that followed per fruit of poisonous tree - which was most of the case

[2] http://www.wired.com/2014/10/silk-road-judge-technicality/
Show HN: Comparison of Go Vendoring Tools
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
>So please, take my advice, as I go into other concentrated endeavors. Fuck the Butt. Fuck it right in the ear.
For what it's worth, the majority of public US institutions are similar in cost. The outlandish prices are either private schools or out-of-state tuition rates.

It's been ten years, but my undergraduate tuition at a modestly well respected engineering-focused university was ~$2000-year. I think the rates at tech are now about $4000-year, but it's not too outrageous.
Ask HN: Is it worth it to write programming tutorials for beginners?
Hi HN!

I'm a developer that currently have a lot of free time. One idea that I've had for a long time is to write a series of tutorials on how to code for complete beginners. The goal of the course would be to be REALLY accessible.

But I'm now wondering: is this really worth it? Will people be interested in this project? It seems like "programming tutorials" is a crowded market...

So I'm interested in your input. Thanks!
Thank you! I liked point 2. I guess that means you see a future with a lot more medium-scale start ups getting founded and funded? I'll look forward to that. :) Kickstarter already taking us that way, so it makes sense.

What do you think we'll have instead of custom CSS?
An approach of "delete all personal data over X days old" would actually solve a lot of those companies' data protection issues. It would also make them less likely to be hacked, since they would be less tempting targets. Why try to hack some celebrity's chat app if you know all nudie pics are deleted after X days?
Compare and contrast with BP, an oil company that owns a large fleet of tankers. The BP fleet never has the BP logo showing anywhere lest there be some Exxon Valdez scenario or some hijacking.

With bananas the local wildlife would probably be rather pleased if there was a 'banana spillage'.

Point being that there are other reasons for a ship having company logos on it.
> Lisp functions and macros OTOH must be variadic to enable the homoiconicity of the language.

That makes no sense at all. Homoiconicty is a syntactic concept, variadicity is a semantic concept. They have nothing to do with each other.

The feature that enables Haskell's programming style is laziness, not currying. Lisp can be trivially curried, but it cannot be trivially made lazy, so idioms like "take 5 . filter p . drop 3" -- i.e. (drop (filter p (take 5 arg)) 3) -- are much harder to compile efficiently.
No, I didn't. That was the total tuition fee including taxes. Obviously that didn't include any sort of college accommodation or meal plan - as I lived at reasonable distance from the campus. It was just standard "classes & exams".

That said, because tuition and taxes are proportional to family income, I was in the highest and most expensive tuition fee. Most of the students in the campus would roughly pay half of it - unless they would start to repeat classes and not pass exams (for which you automatically jump to the most expensive yearly fee).
Hillary Clinton wants “Manhattan-like project” to break encryption
> ...the entire process never once it asked me for a password and while connecting to the database it says that invalid password and I can't reset password without connecting to the database!!

Well, because you have access to the file that causes Postgres to determine whether or not you need to provide a password to access a given database (pg_hba.conf), you could simply change the authentication method to one that doesn't ask for a password. :)

However. On every Postgres install I've ever used, there are the following lines in pg_hba.conf:

# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local all all trust

If we look carefully, we see that the Type, Database, User, and Method entries are present, but the Address entry is not. The comment also talks about a Unix domain socket connection.

Reading the "Connecting to a Database" section of the manual for psql [0] (the official command-line Postgres client) tells us that if we omit the hostname, psql attempts to connect over the Unix domain socket. So, try the following things:

* psql

When that fails, because 'role "$MY_USERNAME" does not exist', try

* psql -U $DATABASE_USER

(The Postgresql database user is typically postgres.) If that fails for some other reason, try

* sudo su - $DATABASE_USER

* psql

You should now be connected to Postgres.

If we enter help , we see that we can enter "\?" for help with psql commands. If we enter \? and look through the list of commands, we should see one that does exactly the thing that we're trying to accomplish.

Anyway, leave a message here to let me know how this all went, or to ask any follow up questions.

[0] http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/app-psql.html
I went to Boston University for my undergrad degree, one of the most expensive schools in the USA. Current tuition / room / board is $63k, and another $3k is estimated for expenses [1]. If you could lock in these rates, a 4-year degree would be $264k.

But that is assuming a lock-in. Costs increased 3.7% this year [2]. If there was a 3.7% increase every year during your 4 years, you would pay $279k for a 4 year degree. This is a $15k increase over 4 years.

What's even worse, because of the magic of compound interest, only 9 years after you graduate, yearly costs would be $102k per year.

I personally see this as insanity. It will have to self correct itself, because no one can afford those fees.

So how does BU get away with it now? Primarily through allowing any foreigner with the ability to pay in, regardless of their educational merits. BU has a massive amount of Asian, Indian, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern students who pay the full costs. Anecdotally, a man in my freshman dorm was the young scion of a wealthy family from Dubai, worth over $100 million.

US students rarely pay the full tuition, which is why the outrage isn't so large.

[1] http://www.bu.edu/admissions/admitted/tuition-and-fees/

[2] http://www.bu.edu/today/2015/bu-tuition-and-fees-to-increase...
Working on a project such Open [1] as OpenStack [2], IRC is the way to go for meetings & quick discussions ore following-up a bug or an urgent thing, that need to be synchronized.
For everything else (async), Mailing-List allows anyone to be part of any discussion in this Open project. It brings sanity and consistency in the way a community can communicate across different timezones & work schedule.
If you like and respect Open-Source, you'll mix IRC & Mailing-list carefuly.

Thanks Chris for this blog, I totally agree with you on this one.

[1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Open
[2] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Main_Page
Not that reddit nor its average user are specially concerned about quality in general.
Getting resource limit reached error
ironically, this line of dialogue is the biggest spoiler of any movie of all time.
> this may just be the way I have my client set up

Two explanations are either yes, your client is configured to show active and away people the same; or other people aren't using the 'away' feature, so they show up as active 24/7. In the former case, fix your settings; in the latter case, it is other people who need encouragement to change - but encorage them to make use of the built-in away feature, don't encourage them to change their nicks :)
Don't we keep our entire life's savings in companies aka banks that we don’t run, don’t control, don’t buy, don’t administrate, and don’t really understand.
I've beeen learning Elixir in the past few months and I can tell I'm definitely confident it's a good investment. Will use it fairly soon in production, first to implement ETL / streaming / batch processing of data (without Phoenix) then later for APIs (with Phoenix).
Actually there is a tremendous amount of research on the importance of genetics (particularly twin and adoption studies). My quick summary here is going to be overly simplistic, but at a very high level, so long as a child wasn't raised in an abusive environment, genetics are much more important in predicting things like intelligence and future earnings than a family's characteristics are. That conclusion is not merely anecdote. It's one of the most extensively studied questions in parenting research.
Thank you. Agree we've not yet seen mobile do its thing on the business side. Slack platform looks like a step towards new paradigm for business software, first of many I guess?

Do you see AI and ML as core skills for developers in the future or will it remain a specialism? What % of developers will have some AI/ML related skill on their CV in 2025?

(Funny how in all this tech the CV refuses to go away.)
Show HN: Siphon – Build and Publish React Native Apps Without Xcode
What's the reason behind the question?
Oh, i'm sorry, I thought your response also started with a >; I thought you were quoting something. My mistake.

And I agree that nickchanges can be annoying; I guess I've never been in a channel big enough where it was a significant issue.

And yeah, it's hacky - but given that IRC is fairly bare-bones, I think it's a good human-readable compromise. You can register your afk nickname as well, and notifications work just as well if you configure your client/bouncer to highlight them both (which I think most do by default anyway.)
> Clojure and Scheme are Lisps

Basically new languages with strong Lisp influence.

> very much towards simplicity

Scheme maybe until the early 80s. Later it grew to Common Lisp size and beyond. See Scheme R6RS which is a complex language with tons of features and still underspecified.

> The complex, do-it-all-in-one-huge macro is a Common Lispism, not a Lispism.

Not really. Macros appeared in Lisp in the early 60s and many Lisp dialects have used it in complex ways. For example the 'famous' LOOP macro of Common Lisp actually was developed in Interlisp in the early 70s (as a part of 'Conversational Lisp' / CLISP), redesigned in Maclisp/Zetalisp and then brought into Common Lisp. The original Common Lisp in 1984 did not even have that macro in the language description, it was standardized several years later - after a search for a better alternative failed.
Flux is tough. Master the fundamentals of React Redux today
Small point: this is how all popular languages once started. Much like the stock market, there's value in being balanced on the forefront of a technology along with a solid footing in an established technology. Having no balance in either direction is the only "risky" career move.
New apartments are built to be sold, not be lived in. If it looks good when it sells, that's all that matters.

For this reason, much of the sought-after stock in NYC are townhouses that were built for, and occupied by, particular families and then later subdivided.
This article doesn't really stand on its own; it comes across as a rambling diatribe by someone who is out of touch. If you have to know who the author of an article is to be persuaded by the argument given then it isn't very good. There are much better articles expressing this point of view.
Left alone to our own willpower, most of us would be less accomplished. We'd live in dirtier houses, wash the dishes less, and treat ourselves less well. It's the promise of others seeing our accomplishments, being around our mess, or seeing us naked that keeps us doing right by ourselves. Doing chores is a chore, but social pressure and acceptance is a powerful drug.
To be clear, when you guys say Prompt, you meant Prompt 2? This one in particular? - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prompt-2/id917437289?mt=8
You are actually talking about how you believe you should be able to profit selling the original movies, if you're complaining about copyright. Trademarks are what prevent you from making a new Star Wars movie and those don't expire on a schedule.
Or, in other words, some programs try to take their customers computers hostage.

Seriously, who would be willing to run software if they knew it would try to do everything to destroy your system (read the comments above about actual physical damage) when you try to understand it?

If you run the software on your system, it is yours. Debugging is, per ECJ decision, a human right. Your software, your right to take it apart and try to understand it.

I don’t get how people can accept to run such hostile software.
They are much more tightly regulated (legally), and insured, often by governments.
NSA suspected in Juniper Networks backdoor
Qihoo Goes Private, Joining Chinese Firms That Delisted from the Stock Market
> Well you can't have implicitly resolved typeclasses without a static type system.

Yes, but that wasn't the feature mentioned in the GP comment. He mentioned lazy evaluation, with currying, static typing and monads as a consequence. But if monads are just a consequence of the type system, then I understand what he meant.

> but most of the value of explicitly sequencing relatively minor effects is only there if you have an extremely low-overhead way of doing so, and a system that can verify the correctness of that sequencing at compile time.

Well, extremely low-overhead of just about anything is certainly achievable with modern JITs[1].

> and a system that can verify the correctness of that sequencing at compile time.

Why is that necessary? You might as well presuppose the necessity of types :) or, alternatively, say that you need a type system to verify that your monads are truly monads (i.e. obey the monad laws) at compile time, something Haskell doesn't do, either.

[1]: https://twitter.com/ChrisGSeaton/status/619885182104043520
Thank you. Very exciting to see IoT, Big Data, Cloud and ML working together to comprehensively know, predict, and act on our every move.

Reminds me of the Guide MkII. We'll never quite know who it's working for.
Time for a lawsuit, I guess?

Debugging is your right, and destroying your hardware is not something the software may do.
And us schemers would express it like this:

(cut take 5 (filter <> (drop 3 <>)))

or, without the cut macro:

(λ (pred list)
(take 5 (filter pred (drop 3 list))))

And yes, in most schemes, you can use λ as a synonym for lambda. Sometimes you have to define it first, though. Anyways, that looks a lot like the Haskell to you, doesn't it? It doesn't have the laziness, but other than that...

Oh! Oh! I almost forgot! you can also use the thrush combinator, if you use the clojurian package:

(λ (list pred)
(->> list (drop 3) (filter pred) (take 5)))

And yes, I think this is all the ways you can do this in scheme. CHICKEN specifically. With some various macros packages.

Oh, wait! I forgot we have function composition, too, but you'd have to use lambda or cut constantly to make the thing work because we don't have currying. So these are all the ELEGANT ways to make this in chicken scheme. With the cut SRFI. Or clojurian. And srfi-1, which is basically standard. and it's better than the examples given, because pred and list aren't pre-specified.
The issue is that most vendors don't want to converge on a standard. Stuff would be fine if that standard wasn't properly RESTful, as long as it was a standard, but many arguments towards RESTful IMHO present the benefits we would get from any standard as the benefits we would (only) get from a RESTful standard.

I agree that the current situation is crappy. I agree that HATEOAS/REST ideas implemented properly and with the intend to cooperate would help a lot, and that there are many worse candidates for a standard.

I disagree that HATEOAS/REST would matter that much, compared to the "implemented properly and with the intend to cooperate".
I love Armin's work, especially Flask, but this seems like lot of other products out there. I have no incentive to switch to this from the generator I'm already using, and for non-techy people I think it's still a big jump in terms of just opening up a tumblr blog.
Sorry it was late but I know what you mean. I meant "theoreticians" in the sense that the article is talking about, i.e. those who work on string theory or loop quantum gravity. Many of my colleagues are nuclear physicists who work exclusively in theory.
How interactive news and data journalism responded to the major events of 2015
> > it was a standard developed by a committee
> That's basically nonsense.
> The core of Common Lisp was designed by mostly five people

How is that different from what the OP said? It certainly seems fair to me to call a group of five people "a committee."
The HTTP 451 Error Code for Censorship Is Now an Internet Standard
blogspam for https://community.rapid7.com/community/infosec/blog/2015/12/..., already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10768720

and http://www.wired.com/2015/12/juniper-networks-hidden-backdoo..., see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10762929
People spend quite a bit of time on research when buying a home, and the law mandates a number of disclosures that the seller must make to the buyer about the condition of the house.

In other words, not even remotely comparable.
> The "UNIX philosophy" is good, it's just that UNIX doesn't really follow it.

It never did, beyond some examples in beginner books.

> Look at `cat` for example. It might as well be `str + str...`. Or look at `grep`, it's basically `filter` or `reduce` at heart.

Then look at the options of `cat`. On my Linux system cat has a -n option, which numbers the output lines. If it were following the 'UNIX philosophy', this option would not exist.
My mom was a mainframe programmer and says the cloud it is just like what they had 50 years ago with timesharing but a different name. I just smile and nod.

Is such a statement much different than saying PCs are just tiny mainframes with a screens attached?
I sort of find the idea of people who are so tired they can't get out of bed sending 'death threats' amusing.
Interesting case study. My background is high assurance security. Most attackers go for subversion there because it's powerful. You're the only one I've seen in a while to do it because it was easier. Often is if software source or config is available in a centralized place.

Btw, here's the Myer's paper in 1980 that fleshed out the threat and gave the field no excuse to have no seen much of it coming:

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/history/myer80.pdf

Written in era of time-sharing machines but many (most?) lessons carry over.
List of Flash vulnerabilities in 2015
Because my seldom-used Windows box sits on a zvol with snapshots.
I was a Netflix user but one day as I was looking at my credit card statement I saw I was charged twice three months in a row.

I called Netflix support and was told some excuse their computer had already billed me so their hands were tied.

Somehow with no interaction Netflix was able to sign me up for another account on my credit card not authorized by me. And they didn't seem the least bit worried and we're actually defensive or insulted.

I can't recall the end result but I think I was given a month free or something like that.

The support person was sorry I didn't want to stay with them I said you have no idea how I need up with two accounts! Why would I stay?

Anyway I guess this service wouldn't trim that duplicate account but it shows how easy we can lose control of our money.
I think it will be a confluence of:

* Flexbox being widely supported (a lot of css is just positioning/ordering content)

* Standard style libraries doing most needed appearance stuff in HTML.

* Most brochure sites being sublimated into Facebook for Business/Squarespace/Shopify/Facebook Messenger or some other chat interface. A "nice-looking" website beyond available templates will be worth less and less.

* SaaS continuing to grow and offer hosted solutions for specialized websites/web applications. Already seeing this a lot with restaurants.

* Available React components continuing to grow - you will be able to develop a heavy front-end application using 90% existing modules. React will be bigger than jQuery because of this and because minor use of jQuery for style reasons will fade along with heavily customized CSS.