skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But if we could discover that we live in the matrix or at the whim of some deity, it would mean that that fact had some effect on the world. Even a tiny non-zero effect could be amplified, like you explained, to have gigantic repercussions.

However, I was only really thinking of fundamentally unknowable things. That is, my argument is basically (in mathy notation) `∀x: ¬disoverable(x) → ¬matters(x)`. That is, if you can know x, I've said nothing about it. All I'm saying is that if you cannot discover something to be true, it cannot have any effect on you.

The contrapositive is also very important: `∀x: matters(x) → disoverable(x)`. That is, if something could have an effect (like your examples) then it has to be discoverable.

Since your main premise is that disoverable(x) is true--e.g. we can somehow find this out--my statement does not apply (or, rather, thanks to the way implication works, it's true regardless of what effect x does or does not have).

Now, if we fundamentally can't prove whether we're living in a simulation or not, somebody could still convince the human population that we are and cause the same effects you're mentioning. However, the beautiful thing here is that this could happen regardless of whether we actually are in a simulation or not (since the premise is that we can't tell), so the truth of the fact doesn't actually matter.
No, he puts typing in the interface, and that's indeed typing in a sense, called duck-typing.
Ex-Webby boss Tiffany Shlain on how the Internet is revolutionising film
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But it is, at least from a bayesian perspective.
Even if I agree, please don't editorialize the headlines.
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The first filter
In the United States, regulations dictate that cars coming off of the assembly line must have a flat mirror on the driver's side. Curved mirrors are allowed for cars' passenger-side mirrors only if they include the phrase "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear."

Because of these regulations, Hicks's mirrors will not be installed on new cars sold in the U.S. any time soon. The mirror may be manufactured and sold as an aftermarket product that drivers and mechanics can install on cars after purchase. Some countries in Europe and Asia do allow slightly curved mirrors on new cars. Hicks has received interest from investors and manufacturers who may pursue opportunities to license and produce the mirror.
Interesting - I was thinking about this just the other day. When you look at the wealthiest people of all time (of which Jobs is certainly not even close, nor is Gates) most of them aren't exactly household names. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wealthiest_historical_f.... Thomas Edison is kind of a parallel with Jobs, in that many of his 'inventions' weren't originally invented by him, but he was responsible for their commercialisation and refinement. 100 years on Edison is certainly well remembered, but Edison was a much more prolific inventor that Jobs was, and perhaps his inventions were more significant. Electricity > iPad/iPhone/Mac. Hopefully I'll still be around to see how this one plays out.
No, we didn't have any experience with Scala/Lift/Play. We were aware of the learning curve of scala. But what we thought was in the the best interest of project. I've read about the problems ingoing with Scala, but the benefits outweigh the problems most of the times. And yes, learning a new technology will definitely slow down the development (especially Scala).
The API problem will still exist even if we switch to PyPy or Cython.
Perhaps to be remembered 50 years after your death you have to be a meta-meta-meta outlier.
so the question becomes, is his patent valid in Europe and Asia?
How to Manufacture Desire: An Intro to the Desire Engine | Nir and Far
Flash player for mobile was discontinued last year [1]. So, yeah, Flash won't be around on tablets or phones for long.

1. http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2011/11/flash-to-focus-...
Dear tech journalists, please stop saying stuff like "But we have yet to find out why nobody objected to them protecting 150+ million user passwords with 1970s methods." We do know why people use SHA1(unsalted password), and it's because the dev stack still doesn't support something like SHA-256 or better yet bcrypt/PBKDF2 at all levels.

So, right, I was a web developer pushing my PHP-based company to have a more robust-against-db-compromise password hashing strategy. You know what the huge problem was? The huge problem was, MySQL (and hence phpMyAdmin) didn't have a SHA2() function until mid-2010. Not only is SHA2() 'not enough', i.e. it's too fast and you want to do key stretching -- but even then, they didn't even have that.

So suppose you are developing an agile product, someone loses access to their account and asks for a new password, you type `head -c 9 /dev/urandom | base64` into your shell and get back `pYG3fvp9c06m`. If you don't have anything better built yet, you're going to go into the database and write the one-off query `UPDATE users SET pw_hash=SHA1('pYG3fvp9c06m') WHERE username = 'bob.bobertson'`, or, at best, `SET salt='tyDvBBHioUNS', pw_hash=SHA1('tyDvBBHioUNSpYG3fvp9c06m')`.

If you could get an interoperable PBKDF2 working in MySQL/Postgres, PHP, et cetera, devs would use that. It's precisely because it's not easy that it's not adopted.

EDIT: My apologies to Poul-Henning Kamp for implying that he was a journalist. I thought that would be a sort of compliment but I can see now that it's more of a sort of category error. (But I still think that the problem is precisely that the whole dev stack doesn't support any standard.)
Linode down? 
$ ping -n newark1.linode.com
PING newark1.linode.com (207.192.68.6) 56(84) bytes of data.
^C
--- newark1.linode.com ping statistics ---
16 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 15113ms

$ ping -n 207.192.68.6
PING 207.192.68.6 (207.192.68.6) 56(84) bytes of data.
^C
--- 207.192.68.6 ping statistics ---
11 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 10078ms
In this instance, I for one prefer FB's app center to that Apple page.
Please be careful about throwing around the "anti-competitive" phrase. It has a specific meaning that does not apply here.

Apple has every right (and obligation) to defend patents that were legally acquired. You can argue that the patents are invalid but that is a different story.
Pretty much all cars where I live (Finland) already have non-flat mirrors.

The most common type of mirror on the driver's side in new cars seems to be one which has a flat part (to show objects in their "true size") and a curved part at (to show a wider field of view).
I've only scanned the comments, but the chief reaction seems to be exactly what you want for a scientific approach--people are arguing about the scope and methodology of the study. A paper like this is not some broad-reaching conclusion--it's very specific and based on some potentially flawed methodology. You want people to qualify exactly how specific it is and talk about potential flaws in its approach. That's how you improve the general knowledge.

Also, I suspect there are a couple of reasons such studies are uncommon in computer science. For one, CS isn't really a science; programmers and computer scientists are not trained in the scientific method or experimentation (beyond their general education); almost no CS papers I've read have contained empirical studies. If anything, they are closer to math papers than science papers!

Additionally, this sort of study is basically sociology. (Or something similar.) These sorts of fields are considered a little shady by hard scientists, and CS people tend to empathize more with the latter. I think this explains the immediate attack on methodology.

All that said, having more studies done about these questions would be great. I'm just not sure who's the best to do them. Maybe HCI researchers? I can't help thinking that the really intense PL people I know wouldn't be very interested in doing this.
Even though I've done it before, it's worth beating this drum again.

The patent that might kill HTC is for a ridiculously obvious "invention": Find "interesting" items in some text using a regular expression and present them to the user as clickable actions [1].

As a non-lawyer why am I confident my patent summary is accurate? Because that's what the Android code at issue here (Linkify) actually does (plus HTC included the processor, memory and other components to run this on, of course). Apple originally applied for it based on some behavior of the Power Macintosh help system.

Examples of potential prior art (though I'll admit they didn't include the processor and memory):

Live URLs in Netscape Navigator 2.0b1

Highlighting misspelled words in Microsoft Word 95 (if Word 95 included the context menu for misspellings, which I don't remember)

Potentially impacts:

- Every modern web browser (note that one of the things HTC has lost on so far is the behavior of their default browsers)

- Every modern email client (detecting clickable anything in email)

- Every word processor that lets you click on misspelled words and choose how to handle it (I guess Google shouldn't have added system-wide spell-checking to ICS)

- The search-result sub-items Google generates for some sites

- ...

[1] Whether or not alternatives can be presented is an open item of controversy, I believe. IIRC, handlers for file extensions were common at the time the patent was filed, though, which gets back to obviousness.
that's one aspect of dynamic typing that i strongly dislike. you can't figure out what a function does by looking at its signature. if documentation is absent (which is almost always the case), a coding task turns into a reverse engineering task.
Poul-Henning Kamp is many things, but journalist?

He is allowed to say stuff like "But we have yet to find out why nobody objected to them protecting 150+ million user passwords with 1970s methods."

And this is Linkedin. They should know and do better.

I actually imagine that their very gifted developers are running around wondering how they themselves didn't audit this.
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I know what you mean. I only realised AFTER I had put in the all the effort to deploy my apps.

Actually one of the best ways to go is to find dedicated hosting providers in the same data center. For example Server Beach is faster at accessing Amazon SQS than Amazon EC2 is.
Hi! Since we get to know that you are from Amazon and listening, will tell you about another situation, which will help me a great deal.

I don't think as of now, I can reserve a smaller configuration and if my need changes can just switch to a bigger reserved configuration. And the billing accommodates for the reserved price which I already paid for the smaller one.

(As a real example, I have medium running all the time, but don't reserve it thinking I may have to move to a large one in the near future. )

Or can I already do this, and it is my bad that I have not noticed? If yes, then please point me to the information about that.

If not, then can you take it as a feature request from me please.
Dear tech journalists, please stop saying stuff like "But we have yet to find out why nobody objected to them protecting 150+ million user passwords with 1970s methods."

Poul-Henning Kamp (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul-Henning_Kamp) is not a "tech journalist."
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You should strive to not rely on type-checking, and trust and rely more on duck-typing. If at some point you need to ensure something is not None, test it and act accordingly in the alternate case. If something absolutely must not be None (or must have a specific method), ever, use assert() so that things blow up upfront where you can infer (or even read) the reason, and not deeper in the code where the actual error message, as you mention, has to be parsed according to the whole call stack to make sense of it.

Sometimes you may need to type-dispatch when you want to do smart functions. A typical example is a function that takes a sequence/iterable/generator of strings or a string. Since a string is iterable in python, you have no choice but to check for BaseString.
what do you mean? you cant get a working system without compiling some language to machine code at some point
Anti-competitive doesn't mean illegal. It is perfectly reasonable to describe gaming the system to block your competition as anti-competitive. After all, that kind of behavior is, quite literally, opposed to competition.
Patents are intrinsically anti-competitive (preventing competition is literally the point of a patent) even if they are legal and/or desirable. But I agree that "anti-competitive" has negative connotations that are clearly a matter of opinion.
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Why chef or puppet? Do you have a preference? I'd like to learn one so I'm curious.
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I think your point is important, and well made.

The only problem is, people have been doing these experiments for 30 years, and do you know what the net effect it's had on the world of programmers: none at all. Saying "no no, this time really listen to this study" seems to be having no effect.

There are a lot of causes for this, not least of all the things you mention (nobody cares about science, people like or dislike based on non-scientific evidence).

But it's also because people know that all these studies are flawed. As much as I hate to be the "nitpicker" who takes apart studies, EVERY SINGLE STUDY on programming doesn't even come close to real-life scenarios. In fact, one of the few studies that people actually believe is the "some programmers are 10x better" study, and that was actually fairly well conducted - many students were given identical tasks, and a fairly large amount of time to do them.

But take a look at the Dynamic vs. Static argument. For years, the Dynamic-fans have been saying "Quicker to program, so it's better", while the Static-fans have been saying "Quicker to program, but harder to maintain, hard to use with large teams". So now we have a study that doesn't even come close to addressing most of the issues that have been argued for years! Of course this isn't going to convince anyone.
imperfect. It doesn't follow that HTC's troubles are due to Apple's IP lawsuits.

It could just be that Samsung is better at the game.
Ask HN: [YC-Funding] : Will it work?
It is beyond doubt that YCombinator model is a successful one but will it still work if we take "funding" out of it? When startups apply to YCombinator what they want most - investment? guidance? or popularity of being a YC company?

What if someone creates a similar organization where a team of experts(Technology/Design/Marketing/Finance etc.) guides and helps promising startups to bring out MVP of their product and connects them with investors in return of 5%-10% shares? Will it work?
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Well, don't bother visiting that on a mobile. The entire page loads, and then you get redirected to a mobile version ... which is broken. Pathetic.
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Reasonably normal. I spent 1.5 hours at the gym & had 3 meals at the office. So more like 8 - 8.5 hours of actual work. Google also pay well - which as an intern seems like a bonus.
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No, govt paper is low risk because there is simply a very, very high demand for it. No one is forced to do anything with their capital.
No, you're arguing from isolated facts presented in a sentimental package from mainstream media. Do you know how many deaths there have been in protests in the US? Like, say, the Kent State shootings, were police shot 4 students dead. Or all around the world, for that matter? There have been 2-3 killings by the British police in the last 2 years, they even beat a guy in wheelchair ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11987395 ). And that's an "advanced western democracy".

Now, put this to perspective. The Kent students were shot doing a mostly harmless protesting, in a country that had sent troops to a third country (Cambodia), and that was in no danger itself. The tension in Iran, on the other hand, is in a country that feels threatened by the US, that has seen 2 other countries invaded in the region, and that foreign powers are known to support vocal dissidents and minorities against the state. In the name of "democracy" of course, and not crude oil. Same foreign powers do nothing for countries having even more extreme muslims, and far less democracy, like, say, Saudi Arabia.

What would the US police do if the US was feeling directly threatened, say like in the WWII? Well, we know what they did at the time: concentration camps for Japanese, for example.
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I won't argue about design taste. :)
yeah my old polo from the 90s has a drivers mirror that has a flat part and then a second, differently angled section that lets you see the blind spot.
"The information that it is the platform that failed temporarily is useful for the end customers because they don't have to lose too much confidence in the software vendor because their code is failing."

You're failing to understand that the overwhelming, vast majority of people have no idea what half the words in your sentence meant, have no idea what idea you're trying to convey, and even if they understood the idea, wouldn't be able to get it from your sentence.

Nobody cares whether it's a bug in your code or your host going down, because 99% of people don't know the difference.
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Ask HN: Google Chromebook - anybody using it for web development?
I would like to know the experience if anybody has started using google chromebook for web development full time(as primary development machine not just while mobile).

It might be with online IDEs or a rented EC2 instance and chrombook as terminal to access it. Please share your configuration for such.

Thanks !
HTC is specifically citing the US customs delay related to Apple's current lawsuit as one of the reasons they are lowering their guidance for the current quarter. I'd say that's pretty good evidence. There are consequences for lying to investors about this sort of thing, after all.
Mirrors for ignorant people who don't adjust theirs properly.

Your car does not have a "blind spot.". Fix your mirror position and move on.
Using students (especially undergrads) is a typical problem of programmer productivity studies. N=49 and 27h of experimentation time per subject isn't a lot either. Doing a study that can draw actually useful conclusions may just be prohibitievely expensive.
I just googled "PBKDF2 PHP" and the first page was full of free implementations. But maybe it's cheating, since I know what "PBKDF2" is. I tried to simulate what a totally ignorant person would do, and googled "PHP password." The second result was the PHP manual page on passwords, where it explains in eleven different languages, using simple words, exactly what the deal is with password hashing, and refers people to two built-in functions (crypt() and hash()) that handle both bcrypt and PBKDF2.

Exactly how much easier does it need to get? Shall we print out the manual page and put it under people's doorsteps?

It would take like a maximum of twenty minutes for anyone at all, armed with Google and Stack Overflow, to go from "I know nothing at all about password hashing" to "I am securely hashing my passwords" in PHP or any other language. I think it's fair to wonder what the fuck is wrong when, in companies full of tens or hundreds of presumed-competent programmers, nobody does that, ever.
I've wondered about languages that are "hybrid" in the sense that the type system can be turned on and off, because from an intuitive sense, whether the language is meant to be used as a dynamic language has an impact on its design, similarly with a static language.

You take Smalltalk for example, as it is the original archetype of a language that benefit from blurring the lines of the type system. A language like Haskell on the other hand was design with the intention that the programmer would use the type system to do a lot of heavy lifting.

Of course, no real-world language is "pure" in that sense. We've graft type systems onto Smalltalk's "way of doing things", and the GHC Haskell compiler now allows you to treat type errors as warnings.
I don't know. I have an equal (equally small :() amount of experience with both. And, amusingly, I've disliked both.

What I found after using Java, Gosu (basically Java but less stupid), Python and JavaScript fairly significantly is that all of them have their own problems. In that particular set, I'd probably value a static type system a little more than a dynamic one, but it gets eclipsed by other language characteristics (e.g. support for functional programming).

In fact, thanks to being scarred by Java, for the longest time I really liked dynamically typed languages more. However, I later realized that it was the lambdas and the higher-order functions and the clever abstractions and the terseness that I liked more than the dynamic typing.

Once I learned Haskell (and later OCaml), I've been converted to liking static typing quite a bit. The beauty in these two languages is not just that the type system catches more bugs than Java's while being less of a burden, but also that they type system can actually make the code more expressive.

My favorite example of this is the read function from Haskell. It is the opposite of toString--it goes from a String to some value. However, the really awesome thing is that you do not need to explicitly specify what type to parse to--the type inference can figure it out for you! Imagine being able to use "5".fromString() the same way you use 5.toString(). In a dynamically typed language, you would have to somehow specify what to parse to explicitly. So your fromString code would something like Integer.fromString("5"), which is less nice and throws away the toString/fromString symmetry.

I have about the same experience with dynamic (Perl, Scheme, JavaScript, Python) and static (Java, Gosu, Haskell, OCaml) languages and I like good static typing most.

Long story short: use Haskell!
In India, we have stick-on blind spot mirrors that you can attach on your driver side mirror.
Getting intranet website authentication wrong
That AMD chip would have a lot higher power consumption, though, probably 10x as much.