skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Explaining my vote down:

(1) You make a lot of bold statements to refute a highly researched article full of references, with not so much as a nod to your sources

(2) Your first sentence makes an assumption that he's missed or ignoring the very thing that the article is reacting to. The _whole_ point of the article is to discuss first principles. The author of the article is pretty well known for his ability to do so

(3) I'm unclear on your statements about human evolution, all sorts of potential background for those statements spring to mind, but whatever it is, it is on you you to provide _strong_ references or original research in order to refute evolutionary science

(4) Godwin's law in the very first comment!
This is interesting, I love the idea of "rules engine" style development. It's basically just an external DSL for whatever you're doing.

I've been enamored by Cucumber in the Ruby testing world, but it is a bit too.... helpful (verbose / client oriented) for my tastes.
Comparing Clojure and Scala as 'Java replacements'
Hmmm... I always assumed those laws were there to protect police, firefighters, paramedics, etc... Protecting "burglars and other lawbreakers" certainly makes more sense though. :/
Google Goggles with OCR translation
The roots of Computer Science lie in Electrical/Electronic Engineering and Maths. Both groups contributed tremendously (as well as a great number of other disciplines that saw its potential as a tool). My first contact with computers was with a CNC experimental machine (as a Mechanical Engineer) and the Electrical Dept. assigned someone from the Department for the lectures (early 80's in the UK) and that hooked me onto Computers:) At the same time the Electronics Engineers had quite a few options to take on Computer Science courses.

However, just reading the disclaimers of liability that routinely accompany software bear witness to how far software engineering lies from the "established branches of engineering." No Engineer worth his salt in another Engineering discipline would ever dream of getting away with such a disclaimer! As such the field has been hijacked somewhere along the line away from Engineering:)
I would say it was more of a prevention/education type of course that all employees possessing some level of government clearance were required to take. Essentially different real-life scenarios were presented to demonstrate the extent foreign governments will go to gain classified information.

An easy example I remember being presented was a case where a foreign government may find out about a defense contractor conference and will send someone to nearby hotels to just sit around at the lounge bar and simply strike up conversations with those around. Needless to say, most people with a few drinks in them and a friendly person to talk to will be fairly candid with who they are, where they work, where they live, what they do, etc, etc, etc. All of this information would then be compiled into a folder on an individual and once enough data is collected it could potentially be used to blackmail or maybe even counterfeit someone's identity to steal government secrets.

To me, the main goal of the training was to demonstrate how easily another person or government could gather extensive personal information on an individual and potentially use it to gain access to government secrets. Teaches you to take extra care with the information you share publicly.
And thus this article, which revisits and calls for more revisit of evidence.
Writing hack: Ventilated Prose « A Programmers Place
Why would you need so much hardware to do what Intel does? What kind of software would they be running on these clusters?
I was under the impression that all humans were of the same race (i.e. species) and that humans are apes, which would make any common ancestor apes too. Wikipedia agrees, got any links to support your hobby horses?
How hot is she?
In danish computer science is called "Datalogi" (Data-logy; data as a subject of study)
whats wrong with this world? no ones forcing you to qik...
Agreed. I think the OP's point about the evidence being indefinite is good, but such questionable evidence detracts from an important question.
I think that the comments are confusing work for hire in the context of being an employee v. a contract worker. Your contract seems to say that if you do subcontract work it will be considered produced for the company (see Cmty. for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730). The question in re your case is whether the app falls within your scope of employment. If you really think it is worth something, you should talk to a copyright attorney.
Also worth noting is Dorian Taylor's amusing troll.
Money quote:

Yes, we've never actually experimented to observe the results over 50 years of artificially adding a large amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. But we know from physics that it's a greenhouse gas. It's not a privileged hypothesis we're pulling out of nowhere. It's not like saying "You can't prove there's no invisible pink unicorn in my garage!" [Anthropological Global Warming] is, ceteris paribus, what we should expect to happen if the other things we believe are true. We don't have any experimental results on what will happen 50 years from now, and so you can't grant the proposition the special, super-strong status of something that has been scientifically confirmed by a replicable experiment. But as I point out in "Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational Evidence", if science couldn't say anything about that which has not already been observed, we couldn't ever make scientific predictions by which the theories could be confirmed. Extrapolating from the science we do know, global warming should be occurring; you would need specific experimental evidence to contradict that.

We are, I think, dealing with that old problem of motivated cognition. As Gilovich says: "Conclusions a person does not want to believe are held to a higher standard than conclusions a person wants to believe. In the former case, the person asks if the evidence compels one to accept the conclusion, whereas in the latter case, the person asks instead if the evidence allows one to accept the conclusion." People map the domain of belief onto the social domain of authority, with a qualitative difference between absolute and nonabsolute demands: If a teacher tells you certain things, and you have to believe them, and you have to recite them back on the test. But when a student makes a suggestion in class, you don't have to go along with it - you're free to agree or disagree (it seems) and no one will punish you.
Which also largely obviates the need of relying on Twitter to gather any information in the first place.
"I used to hear people say good things about Perforce, but now the feeling seems to be that it doesn't have compelling advantages over Subversion, let alone the DVCSs."

Perforce still has better support for branches than Subversion does - in particular, it has robust support for repeated merges between branches. Subversion 1.5 added "merge tracking" which is supposed to address this problem, but in my real-world use Subversion still failed relatively often at repeated merges and the recovery process is tedious and annoying.

On that particular project we ended up switching to git, but I would definitely choose p4 over svn for use cases (like very very large repositories) where they are both better than git or hg.
Ask HN: What happened to CO2Stats?
I seem to remember there was a green certification link at the bottom of the page, but it seems to have disappeared.

What happened?
The study of computation.

What is computable?

How do we prove that?

How do we compute it?

Is it computable in multiple ways (different algorithms, different kinds of computers, etc.)?

Are there certain advantage to different ways of computing the same thing?

What are the basics of computation (is there a minimal concept of computation that encompasses all of the things that are computable)?

etc.
Seriously, wtf? DoD managed to get a root CA in our browsers? Surely this should not be allowed by any sane corporation, and especially the Mozilla Foundation.
Reading Online
Happy Birthday BBS
Sadly, in the real world, Roy would run out of bandwidth after streaming his hyperactive chihuahua and none of the rest would happen.
Can I pay with Paypal?
Interesting note: I'm using Cucumber on a side project. Did a lot of early development with no tests, then started tacking on Test::Unit/Shoulda and Cucumber tests.

In the process of writing Cucumber features and scenarios I realized that a feature I'd planned to write didn't have any good reasoning behind it -- I couldn't write a "As a ... I want to ... so that I can ..." section, so I was forced to rethink the feature.

That really sold me.
Tool support is another factor in uptake. If my IDE and my continuous integration server don't support the system, it's not even on my radar.
Community Will Power the Curated Web
If Evans was really thrown out of AP classes over this, that's essentially an extrajudicial fine of thousands of dollars for some angry words, assuming she had a good chance to do well on the exams and thereby get college credit.
Agreed. What would make this app REALLY insteresting is if it tried to automatically analyze all of a users geotagging, guess a home/work location, and then alert when the user is over an hour or two away.
Ask HN - OS(workstation)/Language/Editor
Mac(laptop)/all/Textmate(with vim plugin)
Linux(Desktop)/Java/Eclipse
Linux(Desktop)/else/Vim
Windows(School|Work)/C++,C#/Visual Studio
Im guessing the general idea is to brainfuck potential theives into simply choosing a different house without the whole gun/closet conundrum!
I read a brochure for the 3620. What's interesting it came with a laser printer. But did it come with word processing/DTP software?
A bus that always manages to lose your luggage.
All the ones that support pre-commit hooks...
Flippa would've been the better venue for this. They get 6-figure listings pretty often now, cost less, format the listings better for selling websites, etc. For the buyers, they have very detailed search ("give me sites that are 2 years old, make at least $10,000 monthly in profit, have at least 50,000 monthly visitors, and accept escrow for payment"), e-mail alerts, RSS feeds.

I have a site for sale there now:
http://flippa.com/auctions/84185/11000month-Revenue-No--1-In...
SANS: Make software development organizations "legally liable" for errors
If the code relied on behavior the standard doesn't guarantee, the code was always wrong. It just worked by accident (maybe only in the cases we tested), and we didn't have a compiler and runtime good enough to tell us the code was wrong.
On point 1 .US domains have to prove that they are being registered by companies or citizens in the US, at least in my experience anyway. Lot's of countries control registration of domains, it's a self interest thing it's not unique to China.

I agree with you on point 2 and posssibly 3. China tends to act unilaterally, bi-/multi laterally when it suits, see recent climate change talks.
Did you forget the sarcasm tags?
That's why I suggested them. Lots of illegal activity all at once makes for the best reading.
Thanks, we are working on the better version of landing page - with better explanations and some graphics.
Makes me think a twitter bot might be useful, that takes over the account and twitters mundane activities (cooking, watching TV,...). If you leave the house, you can switch on the twitter bot.
Also, if wikipedia becomes more reliant on Google funding as they continue to scale, Google will have more leverage to ask them to monetize their pages down the road.
So, my take aways from this interview:
He doesn't know how he got the attention of the press. He doesn't know why exactly his product succeeded. He has no tips on any secrets of what got Wikipedia going.

The one thing i got out of this interview: Reporters will not understand you and will not understand your product.

Interview is informative if you're interested in wikipedia history, such as how it got started. I like the idea of the series though, Gaining "Traction" can be a black art, would be interested in more material.
Developing for Palm's App Catalog: a review
Software: Sadly we did adopt from the construction analogy
The IT-world would be a better place if we adopted practices from civil engineering... Nonsense!
Well, I'm going to approach this from the political angle instead of the scientific angle, because I have my doubts about the accuracy of modern climate models. The Earth is really complex, and while single float thermodynamics equations recalculated on a grid map of the world are probably pretty close to reality, I have yet to see any reason why a few degrees error per century is unthinkable for these computer models.

That said, I have seen two political motions within AGW. One, to motivate people to consume less, to accept a reduction in their standard of living. Two, to motivate people to confront and resolve an issue in a sensible way with modern technologies. The latter actually makes sense, AGW or not, unless you really do like breathing exhaust fumes; unfortunately the former seems more common, and less acceptable.
According to their listing, yes.
New York Times has internal war over iPad edition prices
I agree. Also eBay is quite full of scammy "Ready made website for sale!!!" listings.
That doesn't necessarily mean that she is lying, it could very well be that someone else is lying, (I thought PR was all about lying to people?).

It could also be that no one is lying and the story simply was misremembered or garbled in transmission to respective PR departments.

If you are already being rude, why bother lying to cover your ass?
As much as I like Clojure (and believe me, I do), I don't see it ever replacing Java, simply because its syntax is too different from the mainstream. Hell, I know people right here on HN who don't like Clojure (or other Lisps) and simply refuse to even really look at them, simply because of the parentheses! IMHO thats a bit of a stupid reason to discount a (potentially - depending on the specific use case) superior tool, but its a real issue for some people.

While Scala is different form Java, being a predominantly functional language, its syntax is close enough, IMHO, that I could see it replacing Java.

tl;dr: I don't think Clojure will ever be mainstream enough to replace Java, but Scala might have a real chance.
They say "Texas nonprofit corporation". Does that imply 501c3? They certainly could do a better job at organizing the information on their site.
Not knowing much about electronics, I was surprised that it is actually possible to write things to the chip without removing it.
I agree with the sentiment in this blog post, but I can't help but wonder if regulations on telecommunications services require Google to implement the extra security.
What does fossil do that git or hg don't? I'd love to hear some real world examples.
c) hide everything in the ventilation system and leave false laptop/files out as decoy
Cool Tools review: The Art of Game Design
It's become that "Green Certified Site" logo instead.
lol no, it does not scale nor does it have to - person X commits a crime, they go looking for "evidence" and criminals try to avoid leaving this "evidence" and tend to be very paranoid about it, thus the joke..............................................................................
Hey You've Got Your Moblin in My Maemo
In the docs there's a parameter for attribute. From the docs it seems like you can use this param to replace the data-id with an XHTML valid attribute.
Even if CRU was full of evil. It's only one of three different sources of the same information. Which is only part of the weight of evidence towards AGW.

Given the sheer enormity of attention given to this; that a few non-peer reviewed items in the IPCC report and comparatively small number of bad emails out of years is all thats turned up should give more weight to the remaining evidence not less.

The idea that one part was wrong therefore we are allowed to not consider the rest is what the article is trying to remove. If CRU means we should reduce probabilities then do so. But after you update deal with the question again. Don't feel that it's then safe to ignore it until absolute evidence appears.
[spam] could also be nice
A Hacker-Like Look Under the Hood with MeeGo
You would prefer that .mil sites were secured by Versign?
I'm a big fan of Chrome so far, but I'm not quite sure Google's "everything is saved forever" approach is a good idea on a browser. I keep ending up with incriminating autocompletions, since there is no way to set it to not save your history.
Jure Leskovec on Memetracker, quantitative media analysis
It reads as cost of future inventory to me. The $15,000 was kept to cover the cost of printing of more inventory to sell.
I thought Oracle's sponsorship of btrfs was limited to the two employees working on it, or something like that. Contrast with probably dozens of folks Sun has/had working on Solaris filesystem stuff. Linux work is comparatively cheap, and has significant upsides when measured in community goodwill.

Obviously they have to keep supporting existing Solaris customers, as ZFS is a shipping product. But I'd be very surprised if they pulled the plug on a high-profile free software project directly. Maybe if they simultaneously GPLed ZFS, I guess.
The article is not available at the moment so I am flying a bit blind here.

H. Warren, Hackers Delight has a nice discussion of this problem. One of my favorite books, but I like to do code generators.

http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Delight-Henry-S-Warren/dp/0201...
They have a free plan, so it's far more likely that they have 95+ people on the free plan, and a handful of paying customers. $500k+ strikes me as wishful thinking :/
Yeah, at first I thought it would have been implemented using J2EE pattern-compliant servlets, JSP, and some combination of EJB/Hibernate/JPA mess.

I'm glad the author didn't go that far.
Funny that we aren't allowed encryption because we might be anti-government 'terrorists' and the Chinese aren't allowed it because they might be cheating on tax.

but then - I remember the days when we were oil rich capitalists and the Russians nationalised banks and sent people to secret camps without trial.
Scientist discovers PageRank-type algorithm from the 1940s
is there any kind of technical solution that would help flag abuse?

for example, something like the way ssh records and flags keys, so that you are warned if the certificate you have received, while validated, has changed from what you had received previously?

there would be false positives on expiry, but perhaps they could be flagged as such anyway.

would this help, or am i missing something? obviously it's only going to work if interception is the exception rather than the rule. and it only addresses eavesdropping - it doesn't do anything to stop china implementing some kind of firewall that refuses ssh connections for non-local certs, for example.
HP-EDS hands over £200m to BSkyB
Lalawag: Cluster Truck is for tracking LA food trucks
Why use Canvas over SVG for this? Is browser SVG support that bad?

I don't mean the to diss the project, it just seems more appropriate to use vector graphics for this.
Seth's Blog: No more big events
This seems to contradict Sean Kovacs' (the developer of GV Mobile) post at the release of the Google Voice mobile web app:

http://www.seankovacs.com/index.php/2010/01/im-in-love/

I don't know from personal experience, as I haven't tried to do any of this myself. Also, Kovacs' post was from a month ago, so something may have changed.
A Stanford student's interesting notes on the TED talks
The design is terrible

I mean it's VERY VERY nice :D
I Repeat Myself When Under Stress, I Repeat Myself When Under Stress
Welcome to the $20,000 copy of windows.

Do you know how much an FAA certified GPS costs compared to the identical one in your cellphone - the extra margin is just the insurance against getting sued.

Would the users be required that the software was isntalled and by an engineer certified by the maker? Would you like to prove that you had used it in accordance with the instructions?
Mac OS X, Macbook Pro, Ruby, TextMate
Work:
Ubuntu / Java / NetBeans

Home:
Windows / XNA (C#) / Visual Studio
Data structure and algorithm questions can be more or less like riddles though. For example, the question about finding a loop in a singly linked list is a bit like a riddle.

There is also one about writing out a binary tree layer by layer, which really amounts to: "do you know what breadth-first traversal is, and do you get the insight that you can do that on trees too?"
The laws are there for a number of reasons but mostly to protect the general public. If someone has to break into your house to save a life (like someone choking) they shouldn't have put their lives at additional risk by having to avoid traps.

The laws have to be apply to everyone for them to be effective.
...but he highlighted the TOS that the user agreed to when he began using the service? Its pretty simple.
Yeah... if you have a job. The high unemployment-rate these days makes this much less certain.
Trust Your Gut or Be Logical?
For those of you, including myself, that didn't know what this was a reference to:

"Trapped in the Closet" is an urban opera, R&B opera, or hip-hopera released by contemporary R&B singer R. Kelly in 2005.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapped_in_the_Closet
If you think of "git checkout" as "update the working copy", doing all those things with a single command makes a lot of sense.

The "create a new branch" functionality doesn't really belong in your list, since branches are created with "git branch". The -b switch is provided for checkout because _updating the working copy_ and creating a new branch is a very common sequence.

To be honest, I have yet to find anything I particularly dislike about git's approach. For some things, it took a while to see why it is the way it is, but in the end I find it fairly sensible. In my opinion, git just does things right on a fundamental level[1], which I find more important than UI issues.

[1] Compared to hg, especially the 'a branch is just a pointer' approach. I know of the bookmarks extension for hg but in the end I just used hg-to-git for the one hg repository that I follow.
[video] What's next for subversion?
Peak Tuna
Every Language War Ever
>"For most people this would be news"

If that's the case, I'm more out of touch with the world than I thought.
Plan Would Let Students Start College After 10th Grade
County Health Rankings
Selecting a Good Wedding Photographer
Memories of your wedding will always lasts forever, for creative wedding photos, you need to have a fine wedding photographer. selecting wedding photographer.
Treating Computer Science as a homogeneous, monolithic concept is probably a mistake. Asking whether lambda calculus or relational databases or compiler design are truer computer science is somewhat akin to asking whether algebra or topology or calculus is the truer math. The answer, in both cases, is "yes."

The main difference between maths and computer science in this respect, if there is any, is that historically math has a divergent evolutionary path, starting as one discipline and spinning off subsystems, while computer science has a convergent evolutionary path, starting from the very different folds of math and electrical engineering and incrementally bringing the two sides closer together. Computational theory and formal verfication belong on the math side, compilers on the engineering side (Haskell being used in production code may be the final merging).
You cant refute a single point. Not one. Ad hominem, troll.
Clearly the author knows nothing about enterprise software.

1) This is easy to install. Enterprise software should take at least 6 months to deploy and employ 50+ people for that purpose

2) This is free/open. Enterprise software needs to be at least $1,000 per seat per year

(I like the rules-based implementation though)