skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a philosophy Philosophy PhD student. There can be a number of different reasons to read the original text of some older work of philosophy. But two central reasons that seem to be ignored here are:

1. Philosophy is closer to logic/math than science. And the reason to learn 'what Aristotle said about X' is similar to the reason to learn 'what Pythagoras said about triangles'. The pythagorean theorem doesn't become outdated in the way that scientific knowledge becomes outdated. (The difference here is just between a priori and a posteriori domains of knowledge.)

2. Explaining philosophical reasoning is, itself, doing philosophy--it requires careful reasoning and argumentation. The central thing we do (in UC Berkeley Philosophy classes) is evaluate philosophical reasoning. And so you can't simply rely on some interpreter's take on the original text--you must grapple with it yourself. Sometimes interpreters do get things right, but sometime's they don't. And telling the difference requires doing some philosophy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13340907
Show HN: Boilerplate for Svelte containing TypeScript, WebPack, Bootstrap
Spoken languages are inherently vague and open to interpretation and context. As an "engineering type", I would conclude that language is not a good mechanism for communicating concrete details without a lot of scaffolding around it to alleviate the ambiguity. Hence programming, mathematics, diagrams, etc.

On top of that, poems are meant to be "artsy". I.e. They specifically use certain words in odd ways as part of the artistry of it. It's actually a step in the opposite direction of what "engineering types" would want to do to language in order to make it less ambiguous.
Gee, thanks for giving us humanities people a voice. :/

As an artist myself, I have a huge problem with assessing qualitative analysis using something as mechanical as multiple choice. Authorial intent definitely falls under that umbrella. Rigid assessments would better show the students' ability to recognize the mechanics/techniques of a piece, such as the use of metaphor. And in general, you're really not supposed to speculate about authorial intent anyway.
We speak of technical debt at times here on HN and other places where workers struggle with complex systems. The Chernobyl incident can be characterized as a consequence of technical debt. The test that was being performed had been deferred since prior to the start of plant operations and the operators were attempting to complete it while under pressure from multiple sources, including securing their own annual bonuses.

Dr. Paul Josephson covered a lot of the inside baseball surrounding Chernobyl and other aspects of Soviet nuclear power and weaponry in his book Red Atom (2005).
I do believe there will be a tipping point if it really creates large scale unemployment even in a certain sector. Without an appropriate safety net people won't have enough money to buy food which will trigger substantial social unrest.
It's fine, it's fine. We'll just program them to never harm humans or, through inaction, allow humans to come to any sort of harm, no matter how minor.
BBC – Future – The best way to win an argument
It is interesting how sledgehammers like Risperdal and friends are legal and prescribed by doctors, while Cannabis is/was vilified for decades, in a infantile and ineffective "war on drugs".
Ask HN: Best way to secure and test MongDB database?
MongoDB seems to be having a lot of security issues lately:

http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2017/01/more-than-10000-online-databases-taken-hostage-by-ransomware-attackers/

So, what's the best way to ensure your database is secure?
From my reading, the volunteers were not actually informed of the true danger they faced. In multiple instances either no warning was given or the truth hidden, saying that the background levels were harmless when in fact they simply had no equipment that could measure high enough.

In addition, I'm skeptical that the biorobots and liquidators were true volunteers. If the Soviet government comes to your house and hands you three sets of clothing saying "we need volunteers", you didn't really have a choice.
Ah, that wasn't clear. Thanks for the clarification.
In places that are already dense and have no room for further sprawl, the cost of building in ways that add capacity can be quite high.

It's not just about the raw materials. It's also about labor, safety, regulations (many of which are there for good reasons like preventing people from dying in fires due to cheap construction or lack of escape routes).

Even the cost of trucking in the materials and paying for parking tickets/getting permits to inconvenience the neighbors for months on end can be a major expense.
Majority of web pages and blog posts I’ve read suggests to use /dev/urandom

Even the man page was updated to state that this is what you want unless under specific circumstances:

The /dev/random interface is considered a legacy interface, and
/dev/urandom is preferred and sufficient in all use cases, with the
exception of applications which require randomness during early boot
time; for these applications, getrandom(2) must be used instead,
because it will block until the entropy pool is initialized.
You know how, when your opinionated uncle reads a very high level description of some tech thing you know a lot about and then tells you how it will or won't work, you kind of sigh and don't even bother to try to explain just how much he doesn't know about the subject? Engineers who've taken a few philosophy undergrad courses should keep that in mind when drawing broad conclusions about philosophy. I'm not saying you shouldn't opine, but I'd suggest doing so with the appropriate amount of humility.
Deep Text Correcter
Fancy Bear Source Code Published on GitHub
I've always thought english class is actually cover for a bit of psychology class.

In english class you may discuss, for example, "the sky was rainy and sad stuff was happening, this is the author applying pathetic fallacy". Or, "the lady wore red, and she is the object of desire, so there is a color-idea running through the novel".

The immediate response was "no way the author put that in on purpose!". And a little debate ensues about how authors do often meticulously insert details to keep a thematic thread like that going. Famously, there's a character grid from Catch-22 floating around, that basically lays out the traits and how they were injected throughout the plot-line.

More commonly, though, what we write is imbued with the same biases that psychological studies try to extract. So an author may write a story where every male character speaks in a way that gets interpreted as "in this novel the men represent War". And the author may pipe in to say "I did NOT intend it like that!", and this is fine.

However, it wouldn't really be the end of it. Maybe the author revealed some subconscious opinions. So this is why I've always thought that "reading too much" in english literature was just doing a little bit of armchair psychoanalysis, where you are the doctor and the patient is the author, and their book their story.

(I'm a bachelor in mech eng and a masters in chem eng and haven't taken english since highschool though. take with handfuls of salt)

edit: A student a while back sent a letter to various authors and asked them if they deliberately inserted symbolism in their work. It's a cool read.

http://mentalfloss.com/article/30937/famous-novelists-symbol...
It's common to provide the year of publication if it isn't current as some additional metadata. Edit to add: This short, terse comment serves two purposes: lets mods or the submitter know that they may want to update the title, and lets viewers know the year in the meantime. While it's not in the guidelines, it's customary. Currently six of the submissions on the front page feature years. The "[pdf]" and "[video]" "tags" are similar.
I remember the first time I saw a talk on this stuff. I was fully expecting to see pseudoscientific bullshit, and it was really surprising / exciting to see a serious, semi-practical scheme instead.
I agree they have one formal boss but I thought that in practise they had one other person they reported to for their day to day work and results.
> I should be able to easily unsubscribe from anything without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. I don't want to have to speak with anyone on the phone, nor should I be forced to tell you why I'm unsubscribing.

As a consumer, I usually want the exact same thing, and it annoys me when I get prodded for reasons. Feels like talking to pushy car salesmen sometimes, and makes me tense & clam up.

More recently as a business owner, I'm surprised when people pay me money, and then later cancel and refuse to talk about what they were looking for before they gave me money. I can (and do) help save people money when they ask for things I don't have, and I can recommend other services that do what they're looking for. Sometimes people who cancel reach out to me to vent their anger for paying for something they didn't want, and still won't discuss what they wanted.

It's an absolute mantra of the startup business world to iterate your product based on customer feedback, so you can imagine one has to get creative to gather enough feedback to have statistical meaningfulness in the era where response rates & attention spans are dropping off a cliff and internet noise is through the roof. The majority of meaningful feedback I can get is limited to 'paid and hasn't canceled yet', 'paid and canceled' and 'visited but didn't pay'. I want to fix the problems when people cancel, I want to give them what they're looking for, but it's pretty hard to find that out. (Always has been, btw, and I believe the consumer has 0 responsibility to say anything, just noting my sympathy with both sides.)

I don't want to force anyone to say why, but I do want to offer the chance to give feedback. I do want to have a conversation about what you need, and it really does sometimes happen that people cancel because they think a feature isn't there that actually is there.

Anyway, I don't mean to defend Adobe in any way, their actions here are unreasonable IMO, but for smaller less monopolistic less bullying companies, where there's a reasonable chance the employees will hear & respond to your feedback, maybe even make changes for you, it might actually be to your benefit to use the annoying popups to ask questions before subscribing & after unsubscribing. I wouldn't expect Adobe to do this, but I usually give out coupons & extend trials anytime people ask, I frequently respond to feature requests with new features, and ever since my new perspective on feedback UI has been altered by my own business, and I've started being more willing to ask questions & share feedback, I've found a lot more business with people like me that will respond in ways that help me get what I want.
New microscope chemically identifies micron-sized particles
I can't believe no-one in the comments here or the original article suggest growing their own. It takes 10 square feet of space, about $500 one-time investment, a day or two to build and about an hour per week of maintenance. It can be done safely, discreetly and odor-free.

Sure, it would be illegal, but the chances of getting caught are pretty miniscule. Although I don't know how severe penalties are in place where the author lives or are there any secondary repercussions that make it not feasible (such as children taken into custody if caught).
And how would you implement a "sparse page"?

Without hardware support, the only idea I can think of is to mark the page unreadable and pass all memory reads through the kernel. Which would be readily detectable... among other problems.
> ... biological computations could potentially
> have vastly more parallelism than conventional
> ones.

I think it's all the same. There is no magic to biological?

> you seem to have dismissed this quickly, and I wonder if you've actually read and understood it

I think I did read it first time quite well, my problem is it's tiring to re-talk about old articles , but to be honest rereading things that logically don't make sense I don't do, so maybe I'm lazy.
I can recommend:

1. Mindful meditation [free] -> Daily practice (30+ minutes)

John Kabat-Zinn [0] masters the link between science and meditation and has published very valuable books (including guided/audio meditation exercises) [1]. There are a couple of scientific studies which prove effectiveness [2] [3].

2. LSD [$5-10/dose + $25/multi-use test kit] -> One-time experience (every 6 months max.)

Benefits (mid- and long-term) are similar to those of meditation. It however requires one to literally read/understand/know everything about the substance before applying it (minimum literature: "The psychedelic explorer's guide" by Fadiman). Also, order a test kit and test before you ingest. Certain "edge cases"/people should not try it. In addition, you may be able to access your spiritual dimension, which increases quality of life even further (it is less immediate with meditation).

You may combine micro-dosing LSD with meditation for accessing the meditative state easier (it's quite a challenge for depressed people).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Kabat-Zinn

[1] https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4180277/Mindful_Way_Through...

[2] http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to...

[3] http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9214697/meditation-brain-neuros...
First impressions on WeChat “mini programs”
That's funny, I've seen Stoicism making inroads in various places lately, including this very hallowed forum.
I have no oposition to people doing whatever they want but I wouldn't give my kid THC until the following happened:

* I could obtain it from a trustworthy source
* It's studies to understand it's effects on children (medical)
* Understand any long-term effects it has on children's memory/behavior (psychological)

I don't know if it not being patentable is accurate. You can patent your specificly mutated gene in the plant (like monsanto) to get exclusive rights. The plant is also presumably easy to cultivate as many untrained "farmers" do it. If you gave profesional botanists and farmers a crack at it I'm pretty sure they could come up with large scale and extremely cheap growth plans that are paralleled to the cost of tabaco. Lucky for them pot isn't as regulated as tabaco so they'd make out like kids in a candy store.
Not sure, if Nokia didn't abandon Qt as mobile SDK and corresponding OS, today it might have been in a totally different shape.
Once data is in the hands of uber, it can also be shared with the government.
You can answer it yourself, but here goes: Because the trivial investment you have to make to learn these ubiquitous abbreviations might (no general judgement made) be outweighed by the benefit of better readability once you made that investment.

"propertyCount" is 6 characters longer than "propCnt". In arithmetic expressions this can easily amount to 12 or 18 characters saved.

I suggest you point out a specific example and show how you would do it in a better way.
Poorly secured MongoDB databases being deleted and held for ransom
Woody Allen has covered this problem in one of his movies. This clip is under 3 minutes and worth watching in my opinion.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sXJ8tKRlW3E
I've used chargebee which is incredible, I don't think stripe or braintree will ever match a real subscription service
That's the best description I have heard.
Just corroborating your story.
> /dev/urandom is what you should use, unless you believe that the hash function is broken

And if you believe the hash function is broken, then the crypto you're using that random number generation for is probably broken too.
Perl definitely had its place in the world of scripting particularly sysadmin automation tasks as well as early days of CGI scripting. Since then do, other languages (with easier syntax - IMHO) have taken the lead.

I guess like everything in life, nothing is permanent and what is hot tech. today will be a legacy product Tomorrow.

Perl's story reminds of yet another language -- REXX. It's powerful as a scripting/text parsing language but due to it's Mainframe label, 99% of programmers Today haven't worked with it.
Did you also undergo multiple surgeries on your spinal cord as an infant, have a chronic pain condition and severe autism like the child in the article?
Yes, C-t for SIGINFO, works on all BSDs (including macOS).
I interpreted it as "commuting is a repeated manual process, and thus should be possible to automate"
Why read old philosophy? Why not read the work that's created now?

Why study programming languages? Why not just use the best programming language?

Just as we don't know or agree about the best programming language (or we admit there's no "best" for every purpose), one answer is that the ancients may be right.

That's a fine answer, but I think it's actually secondary. Just as you don't have to think a programming language is the best to want to learn about it, you don't have to think the ancients were right to study them.

What studying other programming languages/older philosophers gives you is insight into the different ways you can formulate ideas or see the world.

It's a struggle to enter into a new way of thinking, much harder than learning a new programming language. You have a tremendous number of assumptions that you can't even state that interfere with your understanding. When you start out, a historical philosopher often either looks incomprehensible, or like a modern who is constantly wrong.

With enough work you can come to understand how that philosopher conceived the world, so that their arguments begin to make sense.

Those different ways of seeing the world are themselves of philosophical value, but they also help you understand how our contemporary understanding arose, and therefore also help you understand which aspects of our contemporary understanding are accidents or optional.
Climate change may shut down the current that keeps the North Atlantic warm
I'm fairly sure the show you are talking about is "World's Toughest Fixes" specifically the episode "Nuclear Turbine".

It is available paid on Youtube/Amazon
How long were you working for before you decided to go back to medical school? I'm thinking about it, but the long schooling time is putting me off.
That's not an example of obsessive compulsion
I had no idea the rule is a classic. It's frustrating that with a little more education I would have spared plenty of time spent reinventing the wheel.
My favorite stoner had very cogent thoughts on perceived and real fears[0], marijuana usage[1] and our easily manipulated lizard brains[2]. Carl Sagan corrupted me for life.

[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_haunted_world

[1]
http://marijuana-uses.com/mr-x/

[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dragons_of_Eden
Are you talking about 'Amazon' or Amazon as in 'AWS'? If 'AWS', then I would go for it - it is probably one of the hottest platform/tech-company these days.

Don't know much about 'Amazon' outside of 'AWS' so can't comment on it.
When working as intended, nuclear is low on emissions and the main concern is the requirement for waste disposal. The waste can be deposited far from human habitation or particularly sensitive ecological areas. Big problems that kill or injure people are rare, but catastrophic.

Its main competitor, coal, is estimated to cause hundreds of thousands of premature deaths every year when working exactly as intended, and is the single biggest culprit with regards to human induced climate change, the results of which may be catastrophic.

I wouldn't say I am exactly pro-nuclear but it makes no sense to me to target nuclear when we have this fossilized wooden elephant in the room.
Take plenty of Euros, or exchange a lot at the local Western Union. I've been twice, and I have located a grand total of 2 ATMs in the entire city.

On the plus side, one of them is located within the university.

EDIT: I should say, 2 locations with ATMs. There are several in the Midi train station.
"I want to stop feeling bad about myself and the world around me" ...
Or one could just use the syscall[0] which does the right thing™. If no flags are provided it only blocks at boot until the pool is properly seeded and then becomes nonblocking until shutdown.

[0] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/getrandom.2.html
Actually, yes you can in Python - indirectly.

Most of the usual operators can be imported as functions:

from operator import lt

will get you '<' as a function.
Gotcha. That makes sense. Thank you.

> It's common to provide the year of publication if it isn't current as some additional metadata.

I haven't seen that elsewhere (on other sites), except in posting bibliographies, and where it is common, I've seen title-author-publication-date as a bundle. It's not in the HN Guidelines; has this become a community thing? Is it considered (by the community members) helpful?
Yes it has. I've been burned by Google so many times that if they came out with $1000 flying cars tomorrow I'd say "Meh. I'll wait for Tesla to do it."
"is no more effective than usual"

Hm, interesting phrasing.

Is this another way of saying "was found to be just as effective as the more expensive standard treatment"?

> There was no significant difference between usual GP care, Beating the Blues plus usual care, or MoodGYM plus usual care at four, 12 or 24 months.

No significant difference, so it's every bit as good.

> CBT delivered online or via a computer was thought to offer a potential low-cost alternative.

And it costs less.

So yes, they found it is less expensive and works just as well as the standard treatment, but choose to phrase it in a way to indicate the study had failed by saying "is no more effective" which misleadingly implies it might be less effective, rather than the more accurate "is just as effective", which is more clear and accurate given that there was "no significant difference".
Google's brand has plummeted since the era of blogger/google reader/google talk, etc.

It's just that they have powerful monopolies that fund pretty much anything they want to do and there are powerful network/lock-in effects for email, documents, calendars, chat, mobile app sales, etc and even YouTube.

You're free to join a different chat network but none of your friends are there. You can change to another calendar provider but you'll still have on in gmail and people will share things to it. You can upload your video to Vimeo, but it won't have anywhere near the ability to attract traffic as it would on YouTube and it probably won't do as well in search results. Feel free to write an app for non-Google Android users, but not many people will buy it or even encounter it (unless you're in a market like China and are on a local monopoly's platform).

Google has hurt their brand. They're just not that dependent on people liking them anymore. In a lot of ways it's like Microsoft was 20 years ago.
No, it assumes smarter people take higher paying jobs on average, which is most likely true.

https://pumpkinperson.com/2016/02/11/the-incredible-correlat...