skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The media and general public [...] tends to call widely-accept scientific theories "facts" and treat them as if they are proven true -- when in reality the best science can do is just not yet prove something false.

That Popperian view (published 1934) is itself somewhat problematic, and I'd say obsolete. The distinction between pure unambiguous observation statements and the edifice of theory on top (concepts, operationalisation, hypothesis, test, theory, etc.), stemming from Positivism even before Popper, is also problematic. Even the distinction between analytic (logical, "by definition") and synthetic (empirical, "by observation") statements is problematic, see Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951). Newer approaches see scientific theories as a "web of beliefs" - basically, "empirical facts" and "theory" and "auxiliary theories" are all intertwined.

The question, then, whether science can give us real facts about the real world (beyond what's immediately observable) is subject of an ongoing debate between instrumentalism and scientific realism.

Personally, I come down on the realist side - I think there are electrons and there were dinosaurs, even if I haven't seen them.

And thus, I think it's legitimate to call very well established scientific theories "facts"

(also, btw, because of the "oh, but it's just a theory" response of various anti-science trolls (not you, mind you!)).
Baloney. Just add a bunch of buses, with exclusive bus lanes covering their whole route. Choose the initial routes so they'll at least break even.

Bam, you have a good public transit system that is much faster than private cars due to being immune to traffic, and you didn't have to confiscate any property, build anything expensive, or do anything else exciting or risky.

Everyone's obsessed with rail, and rail is nice, but if you already have roads rapid bus transit makes more sense in the short run
Inside the Internet's War on Science
I can't up-vote this enough. As someone that started doing development in the late 80's, I find this style of coding to be infuriating. It completely destroys the ability to map lines of code directly to function calls without resorting to manual coding rules that require that each .function() be on a separate line, and makes debugging way harder than it needs to be. And, for what purpose ? To avoid a local, temporary variable ? Do these developers think that their code is faster this way, or...what ?

It's "write-only" code - good luck to the next guy that has to read it.

And, don't get me started on: if <Constant> = <Variable>... :-)
Yep, there's still a common belief in the UK that eating carrots gives you good night-vision, entirely because of that cover story.
Casually browsing the archive, I saw something related to injecting payloads into OSX applications. The application that did this required the latest version of XCode to compile, according to the installation and build docs.
And it does not matter - it is in Chrome's homedir, no other app can access it. Wrt. physical store, it is on FDE anyway.
Not only that, a subway station has value based on what is near it so it is not economical to build until you reach a certain density.
This is a really tough problem. Like many in the HN community, I try to fight against confirmation bias, but sometimes it feels like a lost cause. Compare it to a reasonably complex math problem--I'm talking an Algebra II / Calc I type problem. You are relying on so much previous knowledge to complete the problem. That knowledge may have been "earned", meaning you really took the time to build up an intuition, or "unearned", meaning you just took the word of the instructor or book (essentially applying a procedure to get a result). This is a MATH problem that has defined parameters and a definitive right or wrong answer.

Moving to something in the social realm, it's like a laser hitting a geode. When I see a talking head like Ann Coulter on a "news" program, they are often quite adept at providing facts and statistics to support their argument. But ironically, this usually does nothing for me to strengthen their argument or change my mind. To start with, are these facts and statistics true and accurate? Is there really some subjectivity in these "facts"? Are they just outright rumors? Even if these facts are true and accurate, does it tell the whole story, or does it simply support their position? That's a pretty loaded question; no one really goes to the effort of presenting all relevant information and interpretation--nor would you want to listen. Denying facts and falling back on beliefs, ideally wisdom, is a defensive mechanism against information overload. To aggressively change your mind again and again when presented with new information is similar to the problem of overfitting a neural network.
Maple syrup/sap harvest livestream
I've done a lot of little languages for game projects, at first poorly and unsuccessfully, but increasingly getting wins.

I made a postfix stack language as a scripting system to describe bullet patterns; I didn't use it to the degree I thought I would and it was hard to debug: Lessons Learned.

I made an s-expression parser and small interpreter(not particularly Scheme-like, though) for an in-game console. It added a lot of friction to make the API accessible from this parser: Lessons Learned.

I made a data language intended to allow for the composition of documents with varying node types. Subsequently I realized I had reinvented XML and started using that instead.

I made a small VM, "Ivy", intended to provide a logical abstraction for concurrency(e.g. game actor state machines), with subthreads spawned and maintained by running a special opcode(they get pushed onto a stack, and then terminated when the opcode at the base of the stack returns false). I then target the VM as the output of various data languages. The approach didn't really provide wins in practical situations as it turned out to be more expressive to have the VM spawn more instances of itself through an API call, but it has continued to be maintained and revised and the newest generation, renamed "Hedera", is mostly designed but not operational: It's shifted to a single-thread design and a new focus on clean, hot-swappable addressing of global data resources(think URIs) which I'm using throughout the game code now.

I made an XML-syntax GUI system to supplement an IMGUI. The document acts to represent the kinds of things that are normally stored in a retained-mode layout(positioning, nesting, relative scale, etc.), and it offers finer control with explicit stack push and pop and conditionals for quick disabling of elements. I'm still using this one.

I made a story engine scripted with an XML syntax. This one uses the Ivy VM described above, first compiling the data to a behavior tree system, and then to the VM opcodes. It supports concrete functions for gameplay(setting counters, rendering text, presenting choices, substituting names and personal pronouns) as well as their structuring in terms of which ones get called when, pushing story passages onto a stack, transferring outcomes to hardcoded algorithms, and support for recalling save games if the story content changes. There is a lot of customization that precluded working with Ink, Choicescript, Twine, etc. - taken in whole, the stack is probably overengineered and could have been built faster/cleaner with different approaches, but it works.
Money seems to incentivize people one way or another as I'm exactly like this and I'm sure others are probably too. I hate the toll roads and avoid them even though I can afford them. Lots of times it ends up costing me because I cross a toll road without paying accidentally then get something in the mail, forget to pay it, then end up with some fee. I really really hate toll roads however I can't control if they exist or not. If they are all over, I would really think twice about the type of transportation I take, especially if I didn't want to shell out the dough or had a smaller budget to work with.

Alternatively, the money obtained via the toll roads (basically a tax) should be then funneled to "cheapifying" mass transportation or subsidizing it to be more affordable and a better experience as well so it has greater appeal over just saving money. You then get ying and yang motivation.

This just reminded me of how taxes work, for example, you can shape the way companies pollute by having a carbon tax and promote green by having it subsidized, well, I'm just copying that idea.
It's the overall idea of wealth transfers.

We're talking about two things at the same time: 1) A method to reduce traffic, 2) A method to move money from people into toll-road owners.

Systematically transferring money from the overall population to a subgroup is generally thought of as a tax.
What you should know about the CIA hacking arsenal
Best anti-ageing exercise is high intensity interval training
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Sudden Coffee (YC W17) aims to stir up instant brewing with third wave tech
Timestamped logs, transaction timeouts, http keepalive timeouts, cache expiration/eviction, etc.

Apache and nginx for example, both call gettimeofday() a lot.

Edit: Quick google searches indicate software like redis and memcached also call it quite often.
"Conditionals, loops, and memory" is an interesting list of requirements, because "memory" can be abstracted into anything. Functional Languages rely on the fact that the same code shall always produce the same outcome, and thus the "tape" has been changed into a series of concrete blocks. That said, I don't think anyone would argue that functional languages are not TC, but it is interesting to consider that the Tape becomes code in Lisp...
I wouldn't worry. It sounds very similar to what's been in Apache2 for years: http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_clauses_in_software_licences...
In Batman Zero Year, Bruce Wayne has made his first appearance as Batman and is almost 100% sure that people will easily find it out that Bruce is Batman.

Alfred then tells Bruce that during his performance as an actor he paid far too attention to minor details of the characters played including dialects, diction, consumes, makeup etc. just because he was terrified that people will see the person behind the mask. Only after some experience he learned that people pay to see the mask and not the face. They very willingly will refuse to see the face behind the mask because in their hear they want that mask to be real. People will not want to find out who is Batman.

Of course this is all fiction but it does ring a bell especially in today's super-heated political environment where we cant even know if a fact is a fact. Even when something becomes an obvious fact or an obvious lie it does not seem to matter to most people because in their heart they have an alternate view of the very facts.
But nobody is forcing pharmacies to sell them at a loss so they must presumably be making a decent commercial return on them at £10?

[NB Prescription charges aren't the same throughout the UK and where you do pay there is a long list of people who are exempt from paying]
Internally at my company, because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_tenth_rule
Because it became cool and well paid and thus many guys decided to give it a shot, fake it till they make it. Some even succeed. Also, because many peoples confidence is much higher then skill. They get away with it because confidence tend to be confused with ability.
See "compressor stall", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressor_stall

A compressor stall can be severe enough to damage or even destroy the engine, though I don't think there's (usually, at least?) actually exhaust blowing out the front.
100% agreed. Coming to LA from Toronto, the biggest disappointment was the bus frequency. Toronto transit has some big problems, but on most routes you can get a transfer within 5-10 minutes.

When you need to transfer on the LA Metro, it's normal to wait up to half an hour for the connecting bus. If you have to transfer multiple times, it's not feasible to make that part of your daily routine so you are forced to take your car.
Not quite, but I've hacked on various programming language related projects:

* Helped write a C++ bindings library for Ruby. I was finally getting sick and tired of doing everything in C++, and paying the cost in undefined behavior and compile times, but hadn't given C# a proper try yet. Bugs in the C API for exception handling eventually convinced me to abandon the project IIRC, but we had something functional.

* Company-internal modifications to a C++ bindings library for Squirrel, Sqrat. Bugfixes for UB, adaptations for custom smart pointers, logging, replacing exception-throwing logic in later versions... was at a company using it professionally and was encountering bugs, compatibility issues (we couldn't compile with exceptions enabled for all platforms), and poor debugging support (which I 'fixed' by adding a lot of dumping options for callstacks and the like.)

* Wrote a flash bytecode rewriter utilizing RABCDAsm. This wrapped all method calls - and statements within methods - in additional logic to track the current callstack. Our flash embedding solution didn't let us debug flash very well, but these modifications let us get real callstacks for unhandled exceptions and other errors. As a bonus, I was able to reuse much of the logic for a simple tracing profiler of sorts.
Deporting millions of people means less rule of law, not more. There's very significant trade-offs - deportation on that scale can and will intimidate folks into not accessing the legal system, which creates a class of ready-made vulnerable victims and un-reported crimes.
I'm not convinced; I believe in the power of car pooling and tax credits.
on your landing page the example with the monthly comparison has "3nd" instead of "3rd" in the dialog.
I'm saying that the transit pressure should apply to the city and the people using transit, not the roads and environment.
Instagram Launches Geo-Stickers as SnapChat Cloning Continues
If you're referring to this paragraph:

> A recent experiment performed by Mercier and some European colleagues neatly demonstrates this asymmetry. Participants were asked to answer a series of simple reasoning problems...

then no. While I don't know the exact content of the experiment or the wording of the questions, a reasoning problem isn't an opinion, it's a process.

A process (a function) can indeed yield a different result when some parameters are tweaked or a different input is used.

But my theory is that opinions, once formed, are difficult / impossible to change, not for some unfalsifiable evolutionary explanation, but for a very simple structural reason that the brain is a WORM system.

Also, my theory is just that: a hypothesis, a thought experiment. I don't pretend to know how the brain works; I'm just asking the question, if we think of the brain as WORM, can we explain more behaviors?
Industry, and Apple, opposing “right to repair” laws
Hey that's a great list, thanks for the encouraging words.

So SEO is probably an important aspect of your passive website income. I have a site that's live now but it is totally javascript (clojurescript on the front-end) and there is absolutely no SEO yet because there are no persistent URLs or server-side rendering yet. Your message makes me throw this back up top on priorities. Make magic and make sure people can find it!
How female entrepreneurs can hack the Pygmalion Effect to their advantage
> The traffic in LA is soul crushing. I just finished a job where I commuted about 18 miles each way and the drive would take 50 minutes each way.

Amateur! :-) My Bay Area commute is ~50 miles and takes around 2-2.5 hours each way, all freeway. If tolls ended up being a significant cost of living expense, it would actually have the effect of making me move even farther away to an area I can afford taking the extra cost of tolls into consideration.

I'd be all for expanding public transport though. Currently no form of PT can beat 2-2.5 hours for me.
> Americans subsidize drugs for the rest of the world.

This keeps being said, but I've never seen any support for it.

It's probably true to say that Americans subsidise the massive advertising budgets.
I remember having these conversations with web designers so many times about Flash. I can't tell you how many times I was told that HTML4 was "obsolete", and why can't we just do everything in Flash already???

So what if Flash's bitmapped text isn't parsable, why would anyone want to parse it? And so what if it isn't scalable, everyone should be at the same resolution as what we designed it on! It's the users fault for not supporting our ActiveX controls! What kind of a weirdo doesn't use Internet Explorer??? Users like it when we play soothing background music for them. What? Who uses tabs anyway? Users like informative popups that offer them helpful offers from our advertising partners! Hah, Mozilla is obsolete. LOOK, this is just the way things are, OK? They can't be changed!

And the starry-eyed optimism that /this/ technological ecosystem was great, and utter certainty that this was the correct path. And how I was some sort of weirdo for saying that things could be done way better.

However, unlike 15 years ago, there is no Mozilla Firefox. The Mozilla foundation has been corrupted. If things had been the way they are back then, culturally, then things never would have changed. Ubuntu would have been obsessed with emulating Windows XP perfectly, and Firefox would have been trying to support the latest Microsoft standards.
> There's no notion of uptime, provisioning or managing servers when using lambda.

There's no notion of uptime, provisioning or managing Web sites when using Web sites; but the operators of the Web site certainly have to tackle such things.

Likewise, I'm sure the operators of AWS lambda are very much concerned about such things, even if the users aren't.

In that sense, wordpress.com is "serverless".
Being able to communicate via whiteboard is a useful skill. I'm not good at it, but I appreciate those who are. That seems to be what this author is advocating: jotting down ideas, designs, diagrams, temporary notes. If the team depends on everyone being comfortable at a whiteboard, then it's worth testing at an interview.

I don't think that is what most people are pushing against, but rather actual whiteboard coding. Taking the whiteboard out of the picture, the task is to write code in an unrealistically broken editor. You get a partially functioning backspace but no insert, indent/outdent, search/replace, etc. And the editor restricts your typing speed to 10% of your normal capacity. On top of that, strangers are staring at you.

If whiteboard coding really leads to better hires than other forms of evaluation, I'd like to see the data.
> the bad reputation of buses

Buses have a bad reputation compared to other modes of transit because they're so easily re-routable. A political whim could shut down a whole bus route in a day, leaving commuters stranded. Rail signals long-term investment, and neighborhoods will grow around rail because they can guarantee it'll be there for years to come.
Wikipedia says it's on the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines, and while the number in the US on it may be low, it's not like this can't be done with other medications.
I feel pretty stupid that my impulse purchases are now SaaS subscriptions.

Intercom's marketing is doing something right clearly.
What's the difference getting a good smart person now who can bring themselves up in a month vs waiting another month (or more!) for someone with the keyword?
>This article is a nice reminder of the truism, "don't do things in a shitty way and they won't be shitty."

But it has a non-trivial corollary: a tool is good, to the extent that it's hard to use it shittily (sic).
https://trunkbaseddevelopment.com/
This is what is done in Minnesota. Pricing is dynamically adjusted every 3 minutes to keep traffic flowing at a minimum of 45mph (in practice more like 60+mph). When there is more traffic, the toll is priced higher. Electronic sensors monitor the traffic density and tolls are changed every three minutes. The best part is, it works!
Does anyone know if there are any tax benefits to companies who allow telecommuting in LA? I used to deal with 2 hours of LA traffic per day for my commute and it was absolutely soul crushing. My current company allows telecommuting and even though I'm only 18 miles away, it's a blessing to not to have to deal with LA traffic on a daily basis anymore.
I Took 20 Chinese Students to Meet Warren Buffett. Here’s What Happened
Selection bias is a huge problem though. Statistics in politics basically have negative utility because people just omit the ones that contradict their favored narrative, and then you get this:

https://xkcd.com/882/

When all you have is that newspaper headline, your knowledge has gone down rather than up.
This kind of goes with something I said a while ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12761258

A good project manager[0] to keep on top of everything and pick up all the miscellaneous tasks can/will make or break a startup.

[0] Well the title doesn't matter but I used PM so I will stick to that title.
What you wrote about super computer vs cluster is quite right. Recently I attended a HPC meeting where we were the only DevOps of an HPC for a biological institute and most of the other people were from physics & chemistry. They usually don't consider the biology workloads as High Performance Computing but as big resource/data computing. The physics & chemistry guys run simulation using hundred thousands of cores and are mostly CPU bound. They use MPI and their nodes typically have not more than 64 GB and they consider 120 GB memory usage as a lot. Biologist on the other hand hardly use MPI because they can just parallelize the workload on the data level (i.e. sample or chromosome) and run them independently on each node. For that reason also high memory NUMA machines from SGI can relatively often be found.

You are also right that some of the comp bio areas (CryoEM, protein folding, molecular dynamics) are well suited for GPUs
OpenJDK has an open issue about this in their JVM: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8165437