skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
All I'm saying is a bias against Islam in considering sectarian violence and its sources shouldn't be sufficient to blind oneself to the US role in fomenting sectarian violence, given that the US role has been particularly prominent in directly fomenting Islamic sectarian violence, both directly and through proxies.

> There are very, very few atheists in Congress calling for the bombing of Iran,

There are very, very few open atheists in Congress, whether or not they are calling for the bombing of Iran.
True. And until then if you resist such things you're labelled as a crank, luddite, anti-science, etc. etc.
Much like the dichotomy between violence and obscenity which is the subject of the article, the public and private distinction on the ethics of censorship is extremely American.

Consider, a "privately" owned company that opens its doors to the public is absolutely not allowed to refuse to serve someone on the basis of their skin color.

The fact is that when you open your service to the general public then you are no longer strictly speaking a "private" organization: you open yourself up to be regulated by the governments of those people you invite into your service. When you operate what can be argued is very close to a natural monopoly, you have even more duties.
Earth Temperature Timeline
If it takes an afternoon, no reason not to start early.
The web isn't the internet. Someone else posted a quote (by Alan Kay?) about how the internet was an example of brilliant design, while the web was an example of amateurish engineering.
Will ET Drink Water?
You do understand the citizens of North Korea are effectively captives, and victims, not enablers of the regime, right?

And from where does the Kim regime get its enforcers?

From the same pool of citizens that will be starving.

There may be some trickle-down of food and medicine to those that oversee the dirty work, but when things get dire enough even they will see the writing on the wall.

Helping North Korea merely prolongs the status quo, and has been the case for decades. What would the Korean peninsula look like today if the international community had ignored the DPRK during its 1994-1998 famine?
Another aspect that seems to be glossed over is the "Incorporated By Reference" (IBR). Just as in programming, the fact that I refer to something in a pointer doesn't mean that it remains constant.
What prevents the writers of a standard from changing it after a legislative body approves it as IBR?
If a standard is determined to be better served by a change (due to safety, correction, or some other metric), does it need to be re-approved by the same legislative body? Or does the legislative body need to be informed of the change, and determine if it needs re-approval?
Modern phones can play audio for days without recharging.
Instead of "deliberately", you might as well say "necessarily".

As I argue in [1], "in order to keep verification cheap, hash functions in Hashcash must restrict their resource usage as well. That’s why scrypt is configured to use only 128KB of memory."

To achieve ASIC-resistance, one should avoid Hashcash in favor of asymmetric proof of work systems, where proof attempts can take huge amounts of memory even while verification is instant and memory less.

[1] http://cryptorials.io/beyond-hashcash-proof-work-theres-mini...
Lots of things surprised me when I first started working as a developer after university, including version control. For me, he biggest surprises were:

- programming is a team effort

- writing (non-code) is important

- software is never done

- few clever algorithms used in day-to-day work

- the complexity comes from aggregation of many simple things, not one complicated thing

https://henrikwarne.com/2012/08/22/top-5-surprises-when-star...
Building “Bootiful” Scala Web Applications with Spring Boot
I think after the last few years of these kinds of things coming out, the takeaway is pretty simple: be fairly sceptical of 'advice' coming out of large governing bodies and instead just be sensible.

Don't eat too much food. Limit processed foods. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables. Eat a large variety of foods. Be active.

These rudimentary guidelines are clearly difficult for a lot of people to follow, but I think it's pretty easy to avoid negative diet effects by just doing what most people intuitively know as the right thing, even if we consume some of all types of food. It seems to me this is more about self-control and effort level than any scientific knowledge, at this point.
Sadly, I think the best thing to do is to say no.

North Korea makes decisions that constantly harms it's people. Conducting nuclear test after nuclear test, for what? To say you have one? To have another toy to saber rattle with? All while preaching that it exists in a sheltered paradise. All while its people starve.

Giving them aid even though they defy what pretty much everyone in the world asks them to do (even China is getting towards their wits end), only allows them to defy even more. To abuse their people even more. Not aiding them at least gives their people a chance to see what is really going on. Sadly that means some people may starve, and I'd hate to see that happen, but honestly, what else do you do?
Amazon's chief Jeff Bezos unveils new rocket design
American here. As always there can be a middle ground. I 100% agree that the female body (or male body for that matter) is not the end of civilization but there's still a line to be drawn with regards to what children see. You never see the human body depicted in media as simply the vessel we exist in. It's always sexualized almost always with the aim of selling a product. My kids don't need to be seeing that until they're a certain age.

By the same token, violence is a part of human nature and we shouldn't go around acting like everyone is holding hands singing kumbaya but again, kids probably shouldn't be exposed to ridiculous levels of that at an early age.
Whenever I hear this argument, I think of those guys out there on the freeway laying asphalt in the middle of the night. Or those people who are dead - inside the dam's cement. They probably wish they didn't have to use tools or try new techniques or combine skills and continue to learn new ways of building complex structures. They probably wish things didn't go wrong. They probably wish there was a task manager that just put all the dirt into the wheelbarrow and rolled it where it needed to go. As we move to a computer-based way of building things, it seems that we have already become spoiled and self-deserving. It seems like most 'developers' took a "rails for zombies" tutorial and are angry that things aren't as easy as that. That's why front-end developers get paid 4 times a much as most people / to make crappy software for other developers to track their time or catalog their toys or rants with their friends about how much they hate programming. I think everyone who doesn't like writing code, should get a job on a contractor's team for a summer - if they'll have you. Then while you are thinking about how much that job sucks, dream up a new box-model CSS type thing and be the hero.
For the typical reviewer, replication is probably downright impossible.

http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236825193_Street_Ri... covers almost precisely the same material as that podcast episode, for those who prefer to read.

The paper is from 2007 and podcast 2014, neither covers potential of ending individual car ownership and human drivers for getting the streets back for people - not that they should have - the history is more than enough material.

The concentrated interest of car dealers and their leverage as advertisers in newspapers is mentioned by the paper (and I think podcast) as important for driving people from the streets. How close are we to destroying local dealerships now? Why has the internet not done this yet? I've seen headlines about Tesla fighting with dealerships but haven't read. Can we end this powerful but reviled sector?
There hasn't been a study showing that calorie controlled fruit diet will cause you any harm (except potential malnutrition if fruit selection is not as varied).

Just like excessive consumption of protein (but with a calorie cap) in healthy people shows no harm, or similar studies on healthy, physically active people.

Diet is just a part of a healthy lifestyle and a huge variety of diets can be healthy. This blaming of particular ingredient or macronutrients is unscientific, I as a skeptic dislike it very much.

Fruits are rich in fiber which slows down the absorption of their more "potent" sugars, not to mention that digestion of that fiber is far more taxing than digestion of something else.

Of course, if I were to eat excessive amount of calories it's quite probable I'd get the same symptoms as those people consuming the equivalent in refined sugars.
Making a reusable sub-orbital rocket is a solved problem. We call them airplanes.

There are probably two orders of magnitude in complexity between making a reusable sub-orbital, and a reusable orbital rocket.
Mega Bloks (which seems to be the biggest compatible competitor) also has a surprising range of licensed franchises, targeting both kids (e.g. Despicable Me, Spongebob) and adults (e.g. Halo). Still nowhere near the market power of Lego of course.
> Even those that do don't 100% know how people back then trained and fought because the surviving manuscripts are not complete and even if they were would not contain all the information a modern audience would need

My wife and I did HEMA for a bit, and as I understand it, most of the knowledge in longsword combat comes from Liechtenauer, who - and he was not unique in this - would write down his training techniques, but almost as a riddle, to ensure that it would not be enough to just read his book and apply it - you'd have to actually have to pay him, or his students, to come and teach you.
There are a lot of unknowns. Chances are it's not going to be Bluetooth, but some toothpaste additive, cellphone case sealant, or something else nobody really thought about that we are going to look back and cringe.
I think it is important to make a distinction between the regime and the people. In this perspective, it is wrong to start mocking their country.
and don't forget about vegetables, I swear every year carrots get sweeter and sweeter, it feels with some carrot cultivars they are nearly as sweet as corn used to be (now corn often just tastes like candy basically to me, some varieties I can't stomach due to them tasting way too sweet)

note I do not eat any sugar or sweeteners and haven't for years, so maybe that's why I am more sensitive to this
I'm a TA at my university. We teach python in the intro course and from what I can tell my boss is similarly displeased with this reality. We are currently trying to replace IDLE with some other IDE in our curriculum. I've pestered my boss to require PyCharm or a similar IDE but he says it is likely too complicated for beginner programmers.

While I respect their opinion I feel that pushing people into a difficult environment immediately will better their develop their confidence for future situations like this. It's all to often that I encounter fellow students who are "afraid" to attempt to use tools, algorithms, language features, etc because they haven't been trained in their usage.

As someone who taught myself to program that's pure crazy talk.
>Also, the only thing that will end mining on this planet is if all humans are dead.

No, we just need to stop depending on metals and fossil fuels, both of which are possible and desirable. We've already come close to achieving the latter; the work of this century will be doing the former. Unless we waste all of our time trying to get into space, that useless, airless desert.
My wife and I rewatch the obligatory Lustig lecture about once a month to re-anger ourselves at sugar. Nothing motivates like a bit of biochemistry mixed in with political intrigue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
Funny, first thing that came to my mind was Comic Sans...
heathens! computer modern uber alles!
Also checkout David Nolen's "Clients in Control"[0]. He approaches specifically those points mentioned, and pilfers ideas from Relay and Falcor.

[0]: http://www.datomic.com/videos.html
It's all just fluctuating fields in the vacuum?
I'm going to date myself here, but my first book was "Learning to Program in C" by Plum. It was an incredible beginners guide to C, but predates C89, so is a bit too dated at this point to recommend to people.

The same author also wrote "Reliable Data Structures in C" and I would love to update it for at least the features in C99 (C structs became a lot more useful at that point), as that book is a great read in that it walks you through the reasoning for doing things in a certain way, as well as providing the final result in code.
The opposite where I work - literally no one has a CS degree, but there's plenty of people who've studied Humanities or the arts.
No, we decided that what was important was interoperable implementations: it doesn't matter how you achieve that goal. What's needed is specs that define how to handle all input (it doesn't matter what the spec says: it can define how to handle every single last possible case as HTML5 does, or it can define a subset of inputs to trigger some fatal error handling as XML1.0 does) and sufficient test suites that implementers catch bugs in their code before it ships (and the web potentially starts relying on their quirks).

The problem with IE6 was the fact that it wasn't interoperable (in many cases, every implementation was conforming according to the spec, and there were frequently differences in behaviour in valid input that the spec didn't fully define) and the fact that it had lots of proprietary extensions (and being strict and disallowing any extensions makes it hard to extend formats in general in a non-proprietary way; one option is strict versioning but then you end up with a million if statements all over the implementation to alter behaviour depending on the version of the content).

Some of the worst issues with IE that took the longest for other browsers to match were things like table layout: IE quite closely matched NN4 having invested a lot in reverse-engineering that as the web depended on the NN4 behaviour in places; Gecko had rewritten all the table layout code from NN and didn't match its behaviour having been written according to the specs which scarcely define how to layout any table even today.
Honestly, the universe would easily be able to sustain our rapaciousness if we had the tech to actually go and claim it. I actually really like Bezos' idea of moving all industries off-planet.
They've been developing the BE-4 engine for five years already, and the current plan is for that to be the first stage engine on the next ULA launcher. By the time they get round to launching the New Glenn, the BE-4 that it will use on the first stage will have already been tested courtesy of ULA. If I understand correctly, the second stage engines will be a development of what they're currently using on New Shepherd. This means they'll have already done much of the testing and development in other launch systems, so perhaps the step to a heavy-lift launcher is not quite so outrageous as it might first seem. Still, a lot can go wrong that isn't related to the engines, as SpaceX has discovered.
Pretty relevant, happened to me, that's how I came across this. I was using "drive" utility and my IP was banned. However I just power cycled my router and changed it and back I was.
The most beautiful Latin typeface? Do these hold a candle to semitic calligraphy?
That's actually technically the law in the US as well, with the addition that the falsehood has to have caused harm (and I think be malicious or grossly negligent -- sorry my journalism training is super rusty). It's just that we're so biased towards letting people speak that in practical matters the outcome is uncertain for the wronged party and litigation is expensive.

The recent Gawker case should demonstrate that you can successfully sue a media outlet.
Another good discussion of Yudkin's work and how it was received: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-co...
Should say "Server-Side Request Forgery", damn mobile.
Motherboard shows us how surveillance software works
True, but there is carb count and percentages on labels and it is not hard to figure out that something that is 4700% your daily limit for carbs is not something you should be eating.
Currently, there are no alternatives to Facebook. Is your mother using Diaspora? Full stop.
Today Zuck censors for America, tomorrow it's the royal saudi family. This isn't a reasonable compromise. Reasonable is having the offended disconnect their internet and resign from society so they can live in their curated bubble of an existence.
> His problem then, I think, was that he mentioned what he'd earned elsewhere, so some policy dictated we couldn't offer more than 20% than that, or whatever. Stupid, silly policy, and just goes to show you should never divulge information the other party just isn't privy to. (I've never told recruiters what I earned before, that's not their business.)

Actually, that sounds like a great reason to volunteer my current salary. As long as I'm not desperate I don't want to work for a company that maintains such an idiotic policy, because it tells me something about how they view and value their employees.
For instance, For a long time diesel has promoted in Europe as greener than petrol. This is soon to change, because: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/27/diesel-engine-fum...
Interesting definition. Does it have a basis in fact?

It also operates with some weird time lags.
Well done on the deer analogy- I'm in over my head there. I appreciate and agree with your point, and think my original response was glib and not clear. Clearly, extremophilic archea have evolved to inhabit nearly every niche of the earth (Deinococcus radiodurans is a great example). The point I took from the video was not that bacteria are rapidly able to adapt to antibiotics, that’s been known as long as antibiotics have existed, but the observation of the instant in time when a bug figures out one of those discrete changes and its offspring thrive.
I believe the scale and breadth of adaptations required to observe evolution of meaningful resistance to a universal denaturant such as bleach would be prohibitive. Bleach destroys at the level of protein chemistry, where as antibiotics are specifically toxic to bacterial structures. The wholesale changes would be required of the organism, rather than discrete mutations in the ribosome, cell wall, or other mechanisms known to drive antibiotics resistance-probably what you can see changing in the video. My awkward comment was intended to say I don’t think the scale and time frame of the video assay would not be amenable to the scale of the study for bleach resistance. You illustrate that same point in your comment. That said this is all knowable first-hand, as generating or isolating bacterial strains resistant to toxins is science one could do at home with probably less investment that homebrewing beer, although without the fancy movies.
Can you elaborate? There is no requirement for an email sign up or any kind of registration.
This ( and TreeStyleTab (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...) ) is the main reasons I keep preferring Firefox for leisure-browsing before Chrome. Every time I use Chrome, it's impossible to find previous pages based on the title or URL, while in Firefox is super simple and works really well.

Which is kind of ironic since Google is all about search and data but can't handle a browser address bar...
Switch to Firefox and only use fully reviewed/approved addons if you're serious about this. I just put a ported chrome extension through the full Firefox add on review process (thanks to web extensions they're easy to port now), and those guys rejected my extension twice because they couldn't replicate my minified code from my dependencies to the exact byte.

Chrome web store doesn't care what I upload and push down to my users. I've had numerous requests from spammers looking to buy my extension based on the number of users and their geography. I guess once they buy an extension they push malware down to the users, so even if you can trust the extension developer or source now, you can't keep that trust up indefinitely.
I run low-distraction windows or even just show the desktop next to my half-a-screen browser.
Don't chrome extensions automatically update themselves? Assuming no permissions are changed I think they do. It would be nice if there was some sort of version pinning.

After some investigating, this extension doesn't have an update_url in the manifest.json, so I think that means it won't/can't auto-update.
I agree. People always spam the "eat fruits and veggies" meme but come on, what is in fruit? Sugar and some fiber, maybe some vitamins. You are still just eating useless sugar. Let's not delude ourselves that fruits somehow contribute to fulfilling daily macros in a significant way. I consider them a treat, not a staple.
That URL spec is just "this is what chrome does, everyone repeat that".

They’re unwilling to modify anything, or standardize anything, but just want to cement the current piece of shit that URL parsing it for the future.
Rent control spreading to Bay Area suburbs, to economists’ dismay
What about full on web components? Then the designers can just target components, and leave the programming to the component makers.
No worries. I think the philosophy is rooted in the fact that you can't control what other parties will send you; you can only control what you send in response. So that's the main thing to keep in mind.

It's sort of like the good life advice you hear occasionally: you can't control other peoples' actions; only your own. Emotional maturity, etc.
> That's a valid point. But why couldn't all of these local governments get together and collectively come up with the standards.

Because these standards are highly technical and local governments lack the expertise.

> If they can't figure a way to come up with the standards without outsourcing it to a for profit organization, it must not be a very important law.

These are non-profit organizations. And the part after the comma does not follow from the part before the comma. It's often very important for things to be done according to accept standards, but the government can recognize that without having the expertise to develop the standards itself.
Completely agreed. I have been avoiding using anti-bacterial soaps for years, because something didn't add up. I am perfectly happy washing my hands with water before meal. Sometimes if I feel that my hands are really greasy/dirty I would use a natural ingredient based soap.

I have friends who would chide me for that. And now FDA bans sale of many anti-bacterial soaps: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/03/science/fda-bans-sale-of-m...

I just went to gym and someone who used the treadmill just before me doused the treadmill with 10-12 pieces of anti-bacterial wipes. The treadmill was wet when I started and was giving out fumes for almost 10 minutes while I was running. I am wondering what is worse for me: potentially germs from a reasonably healthy and hygienic person vs vast array of chemicals from this cheap anti-bacterial wipe.
This is one aspect of sugar and fat that I find confusing. Is sugar in and of itself bad? If I like to eat sugar but am otherwise healthy (healthy weight, plenty of fruits and vegetables, plenty of exercise, etc.), am I still damaging my cardiovascular system?
But they will take a corner faster because they don't feel as vulnerable.