skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What is the scientific basis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

The observation that, in reasonably-controlled (albeit retrospective) studies, societies that hew closer to them than others tend to do better over the longer term.

> What is the scientific definition of "human"?

If philosophy isn't meant to answer questions, why do you think science is meant to provide definitions?

Science is about figuring out how things work, which informs philosophy and, therefore, politics, to the extent that even if you ignore reality, reality won't ignore you: Having a philosophy that says rattlesnake venom is healthy won't make it not kill you.

> Science is a knife. We use it poorly, and we get hurt. We use it one way and we make art, and homes. We use it another way and we kill.

I agree with all of this.

Here's my take on philosophy: In order to figure out how the world should be, you first have to have a cogent and well-informed grasp on how it is. Your philosophy must be founded on science or else you're trying to derive Is from Ought. Figure out how the world works first, and then attempt to derive Ought from Is, if that's your thing.

> If we were an absolute dictatorship, then our Glorious Leader (praise be the Leader) could require sterilization of anyone with poor genetics, and it would happen.

Which, incidentally, would likely be the result of an unscientific policy, because science says we don't know enough about genetics to do a very good job of it.

Science tells us old-fashioned eugenics is nonsense. Stop trying to use it to discredit science.

> What is your scientific explanation for that?

Cognitive biases in humans are also studied by science, and science is a prime way to overcome cognitive biases using a stringent methodology.
Speeding up science through Facebook hacks
I'm using efx to share files after all other sites went down
what do you use?
Have you considered getting provider-independent address space and using that instead of ULA? (Or, if it's too difficult to switch now, would you have done that if you could go back and do it all over again?) You sound like a big organization that could easily justify the allocation. I understand small sites, who can't justify the allocation or just don't want to pay the fees, using ULA+NAT to avoid renumbering hassles, but if you're big enough for PI why not use it? It's just as convenient as ULA but is also globally routable so you get to take NAT out of the equation.
I agree that parsing can be easily done, although I don't think it is necessarily equal... but I guess that would depend on a case by case basis since a lot of API's are terrible. What makes it not an API IMHO is that you can't consume it when needed, but rather you have to consume it all the time. I guess you will call that a streaming API though. :)

HTML APIs to come with the added benefit of being less prone to change

Really? I don't think that does hold in a lot of cases. Using HN as an example, it broke a year or so ago when PG changed how the job postings were listed. Again, the quality of an API can vary, but at least you would know what changed in that case.
Billion-Dollar Flop: Air Force Stumbles on Software Plan
If memory serves, and it often doesn't thee days so please don't hesitate to correct this, the US government once drafted similar guidelines for protection against IT vendor lock-in. The acronym was GOSIP, and it was somewhat well adopted when Sun and IBM were popular choices. Unfortunately, those 2 big vendors along with Apple utterly failed to capitalize on the opportunity, addicted as they were and still are to hardware/software tie-in and associated high margins. Microsoft just filled the gap left by it's competitors.

Sadly, no Unix or Linux vendor has shown particular aptitude at it either, much as RH and Ubuntu have at times shown promise. But heads-up, this is the same gap that was filled by MS and it is still open!
> It's about the complete reversal of the counter-culture commentary that made Office Space and Idiocracy popular... If King of the Hill was doing that then the commentary appeared to be "Isn't this nice. See how wonderful life can be when you don't question your place? Learning won't make you happy, conformity will. Good hard work and ignorance can be fulfilling".

But it's really not. Another reply put it better than I could as far as the reversal of commentary:

> if you really think KOTH "carefully reinforces the traditional power structure", your irony sensors are so irreparably broken that you should have all of modern culture explained to you via a translator.
Android 4.2 random reboots: What's going on?
this has the potential to progress much faster, and much more completely than WINE, after all OSX is already a POSIX system, so many of the elements are already there.
You're proposing an entire tribe throw off the culture that they grew up in, social bonds that could mean the difference between life and death, and just... go all John Galt over in Afghanistan?
I'm not sure. They seem to be in the right space, but they are also aggregating big media, as much as independent publishers.
Bootstrap was going to ditch Glyphicons (and IE7 support) with 2.2.2[1] but it looks like they're either holding off on that or they changed their mind. I recommend using Font Awesome[2] instead of Glyphicons.

[1] http://blog.getbootstrap.com/2012/11/09/glyphicons-font/

[2] http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/
I beg to differ. What you are describing is scientific dogma, simply another kind of symbolism. Totally natural though: when confronted with too complex a situation, we seek abstractions so we are not overwhelmed with the enormity of the information.

The kind of abstraction that works is greatly influenced by its surrounding context. In more complex issues (say in law), appeal to common sense is sometimes more preferable than using the most fashionable 'scientific theory'. You don't like your spouse? How about teaching her evolutionary biology/psychology?

Dogmatism breeds the act of taking these out of context. Some parts of math works in their internal framework(i.e. math), but taking it out of context is at best, dumb, and at worst, harmful. Having theorems giving infinite-length messages yield certain events of probability one makes all 'realistic' outcomes probability zero. Same for theorems too sensitive to perturbation in axioms that removing a single point turns things upside down.

We don't need 'institutional science', or dogma, or 'mathematics strictly contained in universities', all we need is science, is mathematics, is reason, and understanding their application context.

Such debate often occurs with confusing science with 'opinions of the majority of scientists in academia of what's right'. No, science is not the latter.

[TL;DR] Science and math are useful in a very specified context, and as such is a framework of thinking. Those who take some of their context-dependent results universally and urge everyone to accept it is dogmatic, not scientific.
Do Devs Need Custom Linux Laptops? Dell Thinks So
I've long suspected that having OS X compatibility for Linux would be easier and more useful than Windows compatibility for many people. Due to their similar underpinnings and less legacy stuff in OS X.

Being able to run XCode , Photoshop and Sequel Pro under Linux would certainly make my life easier.

Whether Apple wants to kill this , support it or be indifferent would I suppose depend on whether they feel threatened by Linux on the desktop.

They may even be happy to push people who are unhappy with the "iOSification" of Apple towards Linux in the future.
Lock-free programming, first steps: mostly lock-free fixed-size vector
HNSearch is great and I use it for my Wayback Letter project, but it hasn't been around that long so I couldn't use it before. When I started Hacker Newsletter about 2.5 years ago there was nothing, so scraping was the only solution. One of these days I will convert the application I built to build out each issue, but there also is a risk of HNSearch going away just like the last search engine did.
Apologies for attacking what is your career, but I think your explanation for the tasks handled by the humanities is self-defeating.

> There are areas involving qualia that could probably be handled by science eventually but the tools at our disposal are too crude for the moment so the humanities get them.

Please give examples of these and explain a) Why, if science cannot be done with these questions, is anything else worth doing? What is the good a method you know does not achieve satisfactory results?

The example I would give here is Freud and the study of the brain. I do not see the point -- except for entertainment -- of psychoanalysis being carried out just because there were not yet good tools for doing science. The better effort would have been to develop those tools rather than talking junk for 100 years.

> There are also ought-questions in ethics and aesthetics that science isn't built to answer.

This is not true, though I agree it is commonly assumed. Other people on this thread have mentioned Sam Harris's work on morality as a counter example to this claim.

If you are going to make decisions about what you ought to do, you had better be working from an accurate model of the world, at least if you want your actions to have the desired consequences. This is a scientific project.

As for more complex subjective questions, I do not see how the humanities are better equipped to deal with these as compared to just basic good reasoning. The same goes for poking holes in arguments. Try putting forward a psychoanalytic theory (not to keep stomping on that already crushed horse) in front of chemists and physicists and see what you get. They will have no trouble at all shredding it.
I wonder if they could use anything from the Magenta project, an attempt to make an iOS-compatible Linux implementation.

Website: http://crna.cc/magenta.html + http://crna.cc/magenta_source.html

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4087224
It just wants to bite that thing.
Yes or at least VM's :)
Crash-only code sounds good.

It is worth remembering that the convention in early c development was to check for null values whenever doing memory allocation. In most PC programs, this convention added considerable overhead more or less for nothing since once a program runs out of memory, recovery really possible (oh, and Linux doesn't even return zero even when out of memory, it just boot programs).
I've written an authorization server for CloudFront using Python/Flask and have wondered whether just writing the same functionality via Lua could be a better/faster replacement. I'm just not clear on how to use Lua to make the calls to our API. This is a good pointer in the right direction though.
Making things with Maths (Great Math Visualizations)
I don't believe we have enough knowledge about the strong force to be able to use it to provide meaningful answers to this type of problems (yet). When you don't know the parameters to use in a model, computer speed does not matter. And when you don't know parameters in a model ... no one can predict how long it will be until we know them.
Thanks for the feedback, Jesse. We're experimenting with various types of content and hear you on the general direction.
Pretty much all of the game devs I know (and I work with quite a few) play games all the time. Both games by others and by themselves (lunchtime playtests).
<< The problem is that our expenses for that network are all recurring. We can get occasional injections of money for things like gear and generators, but it is hard to find someone who is willing to pay for the bandwidth or Afghan salaries on an ongoing basis. >>

You could organize regular fundraisers in a systematic way to cover monthly recurring costs... although the feasibility depends on the amount of the costs. Can I ask how much (ballpark) the monthly costs are for bandwidth and Afghan salaries?
Hmm, very different perspectives; personally I think a big advantage of reddit over hn is that on reddit, if I see harmful bullshit or toxic garbage, I can do something about it without having to take up everyone's time. I don't downvote based on mere disagreement; surely there are some people who do, but I haven't seen that much of it.

That having been said, I mostly read the programming section of reddit; I'm prepared to believe standards might be lower in e.g. the politics sections.
RFC6296 (NPTv6) makes a reasonable case for address independence and points out some issues with PI.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6296#section-1.1
I make "dozens of comments" because people I've never met come out of the woodwork to disparage me and they honestly have no idea what the fuck they are talking about.

Saboteur is a better metaphor for the execs who came up with this shit than terrorist. They are maliciously destroying a company for amusement, but they're doing it from the inside. It's sabotage, not terrorism.

That said, I wouldn't mind seeing the people who came up with the calibration-score and transfer-block nonsense at Google getting "a boot in [their] ass, it's the American way". Anyone who thinks it's morally acceptable to make political-success reviews part of the transfer packet deserves no less.
Dell Ubuntu laptop Developper peaks About Future Plans
> CloudFlare typically reduces bandwidth usage and load by about 70%.

How does it do this? I'm going to be flipping our content-service from IIS to CloudFront soon so I'm familiar with CloudFront on a theoretical level. Not clear on what you mean.
It would be interesting to see this data broken down by genre. For example, rockers vs. jazz vs. classical. I have no real idea who of those three makes the most / least and whether there is much variation among the genres.
> "does the federal government belong in the business of telling auto makers what equipment cars must have"

> it seems quite clear to me that this is an improper role of government in an open, free society

i'll bite.

from a practical perspective, the federal government should have the authority to say what kinds of vehicles should be able to drive on public roads paved by us tax dollars. maybe you think you should be able to drive a car with no headlights, but the other people driving on the highways at 60mph could get hurt. it seems pretty clear that federal government should be in the business of telling car makers that street legal cars have to have headlights.

from a theoretical perspective, the commerce clause, taken at face value, seems to give board powers to the federal government to regulate any commerce that happens across state lines. cars are certainly sold across state lines. i don't understand why you think its so clear that the federal government doesn't have this authority.
It isn't even on by default. I signed up recently (just remembering that Feedburner did this thing with feed statistics, not knowing that they had removed the API) and it had a specific warning along the lines of "enabling this option will modify the content of your feed"
I've found it useful lately as it shows me all the tracking information on my packages that have tracking numbers in my email. With how many packages I had coming due to Christmas shopping, it was very convenient.
MIT professor: Windows 8 is a Christmas gift for 'someone you hate'
I find it hilarious that Idiocracy wasn't mothballed because of its message (dysgenic threat) or potential for being seen as insensitive regarding mental retardation but, instead, because it disparaged large corporations.

Idiocracy was good but not as good as Office Space. I think that there was an extremely dark humor (see also: Borat, Bruno) that hit the spot during the Bush years, but now seems less funny. Or maybe I am just older and less into schadenfreude.
very little. 96% of all new cars already have the boxes.
iPad Creation
Is it? Google does not seem to be spending any resources on improving the product and they recently disabled the ability to show ads in your feed (which is presumably the whole reason Google got into this business in the first place).
I'm fascinated by the theory of increased variability in males being caused by brain-related genes in the X chromosome. I'd highly recommend checking out pages 18 and 19.
>> Method #4: Apply External Vin Power Backwards

I know this one isn't true, because I did this last night with no ill effect. I accidently connected a 9V power brick with the leads reversed. Nothing happened, the Arduino just doesn't turn on until you reverse the leads.
You're quibbling. I can trivially turn the first into a non-policy question by "Does directed sterilization improve the general social condition?" I didn't do that because the previous commenter's statement placed no restrictions on the types of question I could ask. But it doesn't make a difference.

The scientific answer, 100 years ago, to this reworded question was "yes." Quoting from the Wikipedia article on eugenics: "Many members of the American Progressive Movement supported eugenics, enticed by its scientific trappings and its promise to cure social ills." Again I point out that there were academic posts in eugenics, conferences, and funded scientific research, and the result of this work guided government policy decisions, including government mandated sterilizations in Sweden up until 1975.

Remember, the topic I'm responding to is "Name one question for which a scientific answer no matter how inadequate was once the best, but for which now a philosophical or religious one is the best one?" The premise to the topic allows inadequate science, so I'm justified in using this case even though we had a poor understanding of genetics 100 years ago.

Oh! You should read the comments to Galton's "Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims", for The American Journal of Sociology, Volume X; July, 1904; Number 1 at http://www.mugu.com/galton/essays/1900-1911/galton-1904-am-j...

There are two dissenters, Benjamin Kidd and John M. Robertson. Kidd gives another counter-example for this thread:

> Many examples of a similar kind might be given. It may be remembered, for instance, how a generation or two ago Malthusianism was urged upon us in the name of science and almost with the zeal of a religion. We have lived to see the opposite view now beginning to be urged with much the same zeal and emphasis.

And I completely don't understand your statement about any confusion I might have in recognizing the differences between science and technology, or between basic and applied research.
The (Legal) Marijuana Business
The most popular author claiming natural foods are better is Michael Pollan (who is admittedly a writer rather than a scientist, but whose views appear to be widely shared in the scientific community).

Googling will show as many links as you could possibly want, but you might start with

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t....
You should probably mention this is Windows only on the README.
Ruby 2.0 VM improvements: Koichi Sasada's RubyConf Taiwan presentation [pdf]
Isaac Asimov - The Foundation Trilogy
Having a very high paying job after right after college is also a success that can be handled in interesting (not to say wrong) ways. Earning very well (just regular IT software engineering salary) when you're in your very early 20s is a thing.
Game Maker is a fantastic tool for beginners in the world of game programming; an open source alternative is always welcome, especially given the crap it has become in the recent versions.
Should Developers Start Learning C++?
Show HN: Hacker News for Windows Phone 8
Hacker News for Windows Phone 8 just passed the certification and is now available in the Marketplace.

You can see it there: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/hacker-news/89024c43-fa94-463a-a560-ee5c8825225c

Let me know what you guys think.
Building a Keyboard
This is good advice, but I would ad Request Policy (if using Firefox) or Ghostery (if using Chrome; I would also suggest using Chromium instead of Chrome). I believe NoScript is also a must, but it does take some work to whitelist the sites you trust.

It took me a half hour to explain how to use NoScript to a non-technical person the other day. This stuff is not intuitive, and it will take time to educate our friends and family. Now that Facebook has made it acceptable for normal folks to be social on the web, we must be persistent in teaching these people to protect themselves.
you should check out the Lifestyle Business Podcast / TropicalMBA community. They talk a lot about travel, lots of folks there are running businesses from Southeast Asia. cheers

http://lifestylebusinesspodcast.com

http://tropicalmba.com
Mike Judge and the other writers stopped by our offices at Tout.com (startup in SF) and were asking us about startups and being a developer. We told them about meetups and open source stuff. Probably won't affect the show, but it was fun talking to them and seeing they were really into it.

Here's him asking about ruby: http://www.tout.com/m/t0x6dh

judge drawing on one of our desks: http://www.tout.com/m/q8ppc1

here's the full stream: http://www.tout.com/hashtags/MikeJudgeToutHQ
Call It Antisocial Media: Even Twitter Has a Dark Side
Clickable link: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/hacker-news/8902...
@MrDrone - I hear you. And it took me a while to frame the discussion (@PG's email was sent to me on Oct. 16 & post was created Dec. 5).

I wanted to share the experience, because it would be helpful to others and also uplifting that we can make personal connections on the web. However, I was not proud that I was once banned and I didn't want this post to generate backlash from the community at large.

Ultimately, I decided it was a story worth sharing.
Full support for Photoshop is one of the main things that keep me from being able to be fully linux
Ah, but much of the original source and documentation for Ruby had Japanese section or was much more comprehensive in Japanese. This was even more true for early Ruby libraries - I can testify to it as of 2001-2003 when I was maintaining several English language libraries and writing a chapter for one of those unfortunate Syngress compilations (I was young and bad at saying no). If you're conflating Ruby and Rails, yes Rails is pretty much English-only - but though it's a common mistake, it's dead wrong if you're discussing actual languages. Even now I occasionally run into libraries with significantly longer Japanese documentation by character count and given relative density that probably means quite a lot longer in terms of actual content.
Apple hires former Microsoft hacker to bolster OS security
I also can't see the scrollbar or scroll the page with OS X 10.7.5 and Google Chrome 23.0.1271.95. It works in Safari and Firefox.
This is too cool... there's just no way i'm not learning Python next year...
This book chapter is an interesting read. It illustrates the importance of considering sample size, especially, when looking at preliminary research findings.

After looking up the book from which this chapter is excerpted, I followed other recommendations from Amazon to another very useful book,

http://www.amazon.com/When-Can-You-Trust-Experts/dp/11181302...

When Can You Trust the Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education by Daniel T. Willingham, a very astute psychologist with an interest in education policy.
https://tech.dropbox.com/2012/12/welcome-guido/

Or do you mean what he's going to be doing at a Python-heavy company like Dropbox that's trying to scale hugely performance-wise while building a lot of new features? (And yes, the link is in the original post as well as everywhere else on the net.)
How can you know if it's *really* "research-based?"