skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Did any philosopher do better? ... By "do better" I mean in an equivalent few pages to advise a new graduate about how to discover things that are true"

Philosophy of science is less about telling scientists how to behave than trying to understand what actually happens when scientists do what they do, what science accomplishes on a theoretical level, what the difference between science and non-science is, etc.

It's less of "here's how to get to the truth" and more of "can science get at the truth at all?" or "to what degree can science get at the truth?" or (much like Feynman's essay) "what makes these particular actions or beliefs 'scientific'?"

Karl Popper's criterion of "falsifiability"[1] was once a popular one, in regards to what makes something 'scientific'. But that's fallen out of fashion[2]:

"Sir Karl Popper is not really a participant in the contemporary professional philosophical dialogue; quite the contrary, he has ruined that dialogue. If he is on the right track, then the majority of professional philosophers the world over have wasted or are wasting their intellectual careers. The gulf between Popper's way of doing philosophy and that of the bulk of contemporary professional philosophers is as great as that between astronomy and astrology."

And so the debate continues...

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability#Criticisms
I remember having to install a gazillion chat clients, each with it's own peculiarities and it got fucking annoying. There were redundant connections galore with one person, but no guarantee that they would be available on all the services all the time, which turned into a chat whack-a-mole.

Decentralization sounds great, but it can be a pain in the ass, sometimes. And if you've somehow managed to set it up to feel like it's centralized then 1) it probably is and 2) you've made it easier for someone to create a one-stop-shop which is centralized, built on top of your decentralization.
Is it your skill at StarCraft, or could it be that you developed strategies for learning, resilience, etc while trying get better, and those are the actual success factors?
Its stack?

Just because it is Turing complete does not imply that it uses a stack.

Consider:

look_for := "some string";
n := len(look_for);
send_out := "other string";
i := 0;
while(true){
c=getInputChar();
if(c==None){
i=0;
continue;
}
if(c==look_for[i])
{
i+=1;
continue;
}
if(i==n){
output(send_out);
i=0;
continue;
}
//else
i=0;
continue;
}

(Pseudo code. No specific language intended.)

I see no reason that the above would require a stack (provided that the input and output features are hardware built ins rather than function calls. Just reading or writing from/to a pair of registers.)

I see no way that such a program could be exploited (short of flaws in the machine).

Causing the stack to dump wouldn't work, as it has no stack. It just cycles through a small number of states based on input.

Now, some other program which is much more complicated could be written for the same machine, as the machine is Turing complete, but this particular program would not be vulnerable.
Unfortunately a large percentage of this increase has been from detecting early cancers which push out the time to death by pulling back the time of detection - we are not having an impact on the course of disease that the numbers would suggest.

I hate 5 year survival as a metric. We should be targeting 10+ years survival (or death from any other cause) as a metric. Five years is just too short a time to know if you have beaten cancer.
It's a tragedy of the commons situation.

Even if you understand the downside of centralized systems (and most people really do not), you cannot individually do anything to stop them. So you use them out of convenience.

"Decentralized" people are out of touch only to the degree that they believe that they can change the world based on collective altruism. That is an uphill battle. They are not out of touch in realizing the dystopia that we are heading towards.

I imagine two possible scenarios for decentralized systems to take over:

a) Dystopia goes mainstream -- one scenario: "social credit scores" become common practice and people start to fear using the web to an extreme degree;

b) Someone comes up with a decentralized system that is able to do something, only possible with decentralization, that everyone really really wants.

I hope b) happens first.
It might sound strange saying this in 2016 but during development markup generation speed can be an issue for projects of certain sizes...
Why not?

Many good tools are paid. And developers need the good tools to be productive.
Yeah, basically it's a good practice to start field name rows with commas as it makes it quicker to comment them out as you're tweaking the SQL code (though there's no harm in putting multiple fields on a single row, especially if they come from related tables).
is there any place online where people hang out like irc used to be in the 2000s era? i've been looking for so long and desperately need to idle and /slap people around with a large trout

..asking for a friend..
Because you could swap off irccloud at any time, to another IRC services provider or self-hosting, and not lose touch with the people you're chatting with, because the network layer is independent from your interface (irccloud).

By contrast, if you want to switch off Slack, can you still talk to people who stay on Slack, or do you have to get them to switch too?

I like IRC over Slack for the same reason I like email over Slack: I can just use my client with the interface I like, and the network takes care of getting my message to someone using a different interface, that they like. It doesn't require we compromise on a shared, fixed interface, a la Slack.
I dunno, "you're great, I would love to work with you again" and "come pay a day of vacation time ($500+ cash; actual value much higher value due to scarcity) and jump through these hoops like everyone else" are somewhat hard to square with each other as a pitch to my former coworkers.

I get why a calibration process is useful to the company, but it's not particularly useful to the person who pays the costs.
Who now have nothing better to do than down vote comments like this. Like anyone important doesn't already have access to one of the thousands of black market stingray type devices that came out a couple of years ago.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-black-market-dealers-se...
Is there any reason to not trust DigitalOcean's back up system?
I am going down a similar route with my project RemoteBase.

But I am realizing that my scalability is limited because I can have only so many sponsors on the site. If there are too many sponsors at the same time, they start to lose value.

I think it might be worthwhile to diversify the revenue source from sponsorships in my case, and perhaps yours too.
Well, in the grand scheme of things, yes. Really, the most pragmatic argument for preserving the environment is saving ourselves. The universe doesn't care.
If people are moving to other tools, you really can't say IRC is "superior for obvious reasons"
Digital aspire altitude system scam? or not Warning before start
Just be happy you and I are not one of them (yet).
With some of the things online, I can see that its going to be some kind of a glass for sure. They talk about photonic lightfield chip which seems to be almost like a pair of glasses(to be more precise lenses) but it can control light similar to an electronic chip which controls electrons flow. Basically they project images into those glasses which get directly projected into a human eye at various focal lengths which gives you the sense of depth (far and near objects etc.,). Basically the photonic chip should have multiple layers to render images with different focal lengths. What I've read online interprets that it will be a pair of glasses (even Abovitz mentions in one of his talks, thats it going to be a head mounted display like a pair of glasses) which has the lightfield photonic chips for each eye, which then gets fed from a computing unit which the user might have in their pocket (similar in size of a cell phone). With cameras mounted on the HMD (glasses), and doing some SLAM(Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) on those images, they should be able to sense the environment around you and then allow for virtual objects to be placed appropriately to interact.

Check out the article below which gives an in-depth interpretation based on their patents and whatever information/demos magic leap has shared in the past.

http://uploadvr.com/magic-leap-how-it-works/

Magic Leap's CEO also shows the light field photonic chip which looks like a normal piece of glass, but has the property of projecting images from a fiber optic source at various wavelengths.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/19/11457880/magic-leap-photon...

I am wondering whether the technology developed can be rendered in such a form factor where its very easy to wear like grasses and use in a day to day basis. The guys at Magic leap seem to be very confident that they have got most of the complex pieces figured out and its already materialized. Even a developer kit from magic leap next year or so should blow every ones mind of, if they have got the projection of images directly to the eye working even with a tethered system to start with.

Also read that they are planning to showcase their product sometimes the end of the year and in CES 2017 (http://vrworld.com/2016/04/25/magic-leap-unveil-technology-c...).

Hololens from Microsoft seems to be doing something closely similar where they are projecting images through a glass like medium. Read somewhere that hololens was rushed to be first before Magic leap delivers its technology though. Some recent videos form wired on Magic Leap shows some impressive demos taken through their technology and should have a large FOV as hololens has a very limited FOV it seems. Magic leap's CEO Abovitz seems to be very confident that their tech is way superior to whatever exists and are not worried about some products like hololens hitting the market earlier than their products release.

Some refs on teardown of hololens stuff

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-hololens-componen...
Uber Aims to Unseat Ola in $10B India Ride-Hailing Market
What's your citizenship though? US citizen or did you switch to Panamanian?
When I work from home I tend to be more productive: I start earlier, finish later, and take more breaks away from the keyboard and screen so my work later in the day is better than it would have been otherwise.

In my case I save an hour a day commuting, I'm not subject to the bunch of network operations staff in the next aisle who punctuate their day with loud conversations about computer game, politics, pranking and trolling each other. The office I work is in a noisy, crowded environment which is entirely distracting and frustrating to me.

The computer I have at home is ideally suited for the work I do (I bought it specifically for the task). The computer I have at work is about six years old, underprovisioned for the work I do.

My employer should consider it a perk to have me work from home, and should pay me extra to do so since I'm happy to provide a comfortable work environment with adequate infrastructure for the work I'm doing.

I think 10% extra for working from home is a suitable compensation given everything the employer gains.

We used to enjoy work from home at the discretion of our immediate supervisors, but due to a falling out between senior management and one of my colleagues who was working from home when one senior manager wanted to drop by their desk to talk about an issue that was being actively discussed on email and HipChat, all staff lost their work from home privileges.

Which highlights another benefit of working from home: more of my communication will be via email and other recorded formats, so it is harder to forget what I've communicated to you, and you have to take time to formulate your questions rather than simply walking into my personal space, interrupting whatever I'm working on, and asking a question I already answered yesterday.

Allowing work from home indicates that management is competent. Retracting work from home privileges already granted indicates the opposite.

No I'm not bitter, why do you ask?
Then I would say you haven't heard much. Natural selection is a horrific process whether or not humans are involved in it. By definition it implies the death and suffering of countless creatures so that a few are selected.

This is nothing. We're concerned about it because we like elephants, but as far as nature is concerned, there's nothing wrong with killing off ~75% of all species once in a blue moon. [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#List_of_extin...
Even for an "Ask HN" question that explicitly asks if they are female? In that case, negative attention makes even less sense as it is the point of the discussion.
So this 10x bullshit you're talking about is about people being leaders. Higher up the ladder you are your power to increase productivity or hamper is multiplied.

Comparing impact of regular line developer with leader is comparing apples to oranges.

Becoming leader is a different thing - not everybody wants to or have what it takes to do it.
https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat.RaspberryPi
Yes, your Trump scenario is fair, because he already paid taxes on that $1B that he holds, but you have not paid taxes on that $300k yet.

You should not penalize people for being frugal and saving by taxing accumulated wealth. There's already a strong incentive to pump money back into the economy via investment - interest/yield, to counteract the constant erosion caused by inflation.
>I say nothing supernatural, because the precise meaning of "naturalism" is contested in philosophy. For rather complex reasons, you can accept evolution, accept that modern physics is essentially accurate (only inaccurate so far as we're still discovering things and refining theory, etc), deny that there are immaterial souls or Cartesian dualism, yet not count as a naturalist. I am not sure if naturalism is necessarily a majority position.

As far as I can tell, it's not a majority position, and that's a damn shame upon philosophers. They still want to cling to their Platonic Forms, even while claiming not to be Cartesians.

Well, it doesn't work that way. We scientists are going to keep asking to see the Form of the Power-Set, the Form of the Good (oh boy does that one ever cause fights!), and of course the Form of "Materialism" (scare-quoted because the "materialism" so pilloried by philosophers tends to bear little resemblance to the content of any science post-Newton). If you can't show them to us, we're not going to accept that they exist in the same sense as books, chairs, and alpha particles.
I wish most cancers treatments were tested in rats in the lab - most of the time they only get tested in inbred mice which are a terrible model for human cancer.
Arrgghhh... yet another set of rules with no rationale or justification.
It seems like the PR engine is on overdrive for this drug. And it looks the BBC are spewing it out without giving it any thought at all. Or perhaps the reported was paid?

I'm not saying it has no value, I'm saying that their PR is wildly out of control and it's reflecting on the poor state of journalism more than the efficacy of the drug.

Here is a scathing review of it and the PR engine behind it from the NYT just a month ago, ironically: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/cancer-drug-ads-vs...

OPDIVO is another name for nivolumab.

No one should call a cancer treatment drug a 'game changer' unless it literally cures cancer in something like 90% of cases. Otherwise it's spreading false hope and it is actually immoral - if you consider that nearly everybody has been affected by cancer either directly or indirectly.
What 18th-Century Paris Sounded Like
One benefit of virtualization is that it's reasonable to run small, single-purpose VMs.

Single-purpose doesn't mean single-user. Lots of services divide their code into "privileged" and "unprivileged" components in order to reduce the impact of a vulnerability in the code which does not require privileges. As far as I'm aware, there's no way to have an sshd process which is divided between two EC2 Containers...
On a side note, Riot is a site with really annoying animation.

Whatever else it may be, the animation banner just killed it for me.
What's with all the single-character name programming languages? It's almost as if they're trying to make it a pain to search for.
It doesn't require an active network at all.

> It would feel extremely awkward to now, years later, send them an email

If you ever have a reason to send that email I hope you do. Most people enjoy a chance to help someone out and they'll often get a bonus for it. I've gotten emails from people I didn't actually know and just sent them on to the recruiting team. For people I did know or had a trusted recommendation for I'd follow up with the hiring manager directly.
You'll always find studies both ways, and in a field as big you'll also always find junk, but i think you make rather bold claims (undeclared conflicts of interest, etc) which seem unlikely to hold true for a significant portion of the large number of studies (eg meditation is really not a big business, certainly something that anyone can learn for free). Can you point to any meta-analysis or other evidence to back up your viewpoint/claims?
See the #1 HN article today about returning the web (or the internet) to its decentralized origins.

The existence of Twitter and many other technolpolies that dominate with what could basically be a shared protocol is what's holding back decentralization.

Actually I think all of the giants will eventually fall hard because of (re)-decentralization. That includes Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, the United States, etc.
> For example, you cannot get to Google or Facebook's level of artificial intelligence research and performance achievements without truly vast amounts of data.

This argument is self-defeating. If any significant plurality (e.g. a third) of people opt into the "privacy for analysis" setting then you still have "truly vast amounts of data" and there is no trouble. Whereas if so few people want to make that exchange when the choice is made explicit that it can't even work properly then it doesn't matter how well it works because nearly everyone doesn't use it.

> The performance and reliability would also be difficult to manage without centralized servers. You're not going to be maintaining the same uptime guarantees.

Uptime is just math. You decide how much service uptime you need and based on the average device uptime that determines how much redundancy is necessary to achieve it. Consumer devices have lower uptime so you need somewhat more redundancy. And in practice not even much of that, because you want "close copies" (to improve latency/efficiency) anyway, so if you have enough copies for that then a failure doesn't reduce uptime, it just requires you to use a far copy that once.

Moreover, if you have something that really does need specific uptime guarantees or is unusually likely to incur a DDoS, nothing stops you from pinning it to a P2P node hosted on the likes of AWS or CloudFlare. Then to lose uptime you have to lose the entire P2P network and CloudFlare.

> Finally, how are you going to motivate development in a decentralized manner?

Much the same way as we motivate development of Windows, Linux and Wikipedia.
This is super interesting; how does it compare to other sampling algorithms? While the problem is indeed reducible; it also has a lot more structure than TSP, especially if we note that natural images are forced to come from some nice, underlying manifold which is probably very well-behaved.

I'd be inclined to believe that with some assumptions on the problem itself (e.g. the images satisfy some smoothness assumptions and of course, assumptions on the objective, itself), we can always come up with a PTAS for this particular instance for any accuracy, ε>0.
Scenes from Hurricane Matthew’s Capricious Path
It is a product/platform/community's failure if you even have to ask such a question. Remember the days when "a/s/l" used to be common like "lols" or "IMHOs" of today? Well, nobody cares about gender, age or location. But these attributes make all the difference in how one communicates, and how communities (authentic communities) are formed anywhere.
In order for a medication to even begin human testing, you need to show that you've done a ton of lab work to show that a medication works, and that the side effect profile is probably minimal. So, by the time it's offered to you, the risks of the drug having disarming side effects, or of causing you to join the caudal class, are pretty damn minimal.
The proprietary companies already do this looking for hidden stuff. Mostly patent violations, though, so they can scheme some licensing revenue out of the product they're inspecting. Here's the company that does much of it:

http://www.chipworks.com/about-chipworks/overview/blog/apple...

In that one, you'll see the other end of the process where many mobile chips will get extremely specialized. Notice this one has several RF chips instead of an integrated one to attempt to hit some size/price/energy/performance tradeoff. Plus Apple sells premium stuff whether they can put in more, nicer parts. Notice there's 10 different chips involved in just the RF front-end part. :)

Here's a nice PDF with illustrations of the RE processes themselves plus what things look like:

https://www.iacr.org/archive/ches2009/57470361/57470361.pdf

I like Fig 3 especially as a lot of people forget there's circuitry inside their PCB's rather than just on top or bottom. That cell phone has 9 layers of wiring. :)
For measuring survival my old lab championed the Kaplan-meier estimator for its ability to censor non-cancer causes of death. The 5yr survival can be heavily skewed if patients are dying from secondary causes such as heart attacks, getting hit by a bus, etc. Oftentimes patients with cancer have other serious comorbidities.
There are several arguments against it:

If you depend on a small number of people for the majority of tax revenue, you will end up with unstable revenue. Look what happened to California's tax revenue during the 2008 recession. It dropped because the small number of rich people who pay more than half of the taxes got hit pretty hard by the recession.

Besides, do we really want to live in a society where only a small group of people has a financial stake in the funding of the government? Voters would probably be a bit more informed if they had some skin in the game. We really don't want to live in a society where the majority of voters will always approve spending increases because they know their taxes won't increase, and the cost of the increase will be borne by the top few percent. That will get us a runaway train of government spending.
WhatsApp isn't real time?
I am a bot which posts to Hacker News
The solution is to make the anti-vaxxers liable for any outbreak and make them take out insurance to cover this risk (treat it like a we do car insurance). If the average anti-vaxxer had to fork out $20,000 a year in insurance then we might find herd immunity is quite a lot stronger.
My initial reaction was similar, though slightly tempered. However, at least for me, once you try to think about what it is that you're actually objecting to, there's nothing left when it's a language-feature and supported by your tooling.

With that support, why's it worse than `'{}'.format(expr)`?
> disrupting their life might just be the right thing to do.

Never the right thing to do.

> we are complicit in silencing them.

This is akin to calming a baby crying really hard for attention.

I understand that you want to partake in a protest from really far away, but you must have better ways of doing so than hurting them.