skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Hughes article is very strange, but the theme of the sentiment is remarkably (perhaps alarmingly) common among the university students I know who are not scientists, engineers, or mathematicians. This is enormously condescending to write, but I think this is born of frustration at not being able to make progress in discovery without the tools of mathematics and science. If you have not picked up and mastered these tools, you are left out of the game. Suddenly four years of college goes whoosh and you are no closer to the enlightenment you were seeking.

To give one ridiculous example, I had a graduate student in anthropology suggest to me that science needs to be democratized and taken away from the scientists and verified and decided upon by the common man. I asked by what method the common man could do such verification and make any such decisions, as the obvious answer to both is Science.

I do not think criticisms of this type are worth much, especially when they are written on a computer, posted on the internet, and then discussed on forums like this. In a dictum: "Science works, bitches."
Wonder if Coyne realizes the circular and non-responsive nature of his reply.

To rephrase this, science is the only thing we know. Show me something that's not science that we know. Of course, you can't. You've given yourself the answer before you begin to ask the question.

Effective science and humility have to go hand-in-hand. Otherwise you're just creating a new religion with the rubric "science" stuck on it.
2048x1536 displays were available on laptops a decade ago[0], and they were IPS. That's a megapixel more than 1920x1080.

I'm sure the inability of Windows to cope with the high resolution gracefully was part of the reason those never really caught on, but there wasn't much of an effort to market them either. Did you know they existed? I barely did, and I pay a great deal of attention to such things. There was no meaningful effort to market them. They were custom-order options that only a few enthusiasts and institutional IT departments would even be aware existed.

My mother knows what a "retina display" is.

[0] If you're curious, the models offering QXGA panels were the NEC Versa P700 and the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad R50p. Such panels can be made to work with several other 15" 4:3 Thinkpad models.
Zero evidence, no credible reason not to use it. Suggesting that Google might sell feedburner to someone who then shuts it down is laughable.
This appears to be a newfangled version of:

http://packetfactory.openwall.net/projects/libnet/

which route created / maintained.
Doctor here. I agree with you about being skeptical of physicians' nutritional advice; we generally aren't nutrition experts and internists, especially, are jaded by the vast number of hospitalized patients we see who have simply abused their bodies with food and drink for decades.

That said, you echo an argument that's as useless as me telling patients "calories in < calories out": that you switched to X diet and dropped weight, just like "several of your friends." That's doesn't provide utility to any public health stance. Of course, I will freely admit that I don't have the answer, either.

What I tell my fat patients who are starting out is this (and I use these exact words): eat the same shit you're eating now, just cut it in half. For educated, motivated people who aren't in denial (which I'm convinced represents < 10% of my patients), we have a more in-depth discussion about dieting ideas that might specifically work for them.
Gotta love any explanation and suggested resolution for being overweight and wanting to lose it that doesn't mention exercise.

If you exercise enough, your diet doesn't have to be so strict, and you're way more likely to actually lose weight and feel good. Some rough guidelines of eating higher quality foods helps, but certainly exercise or lack of it is much more the root cause of so many weight/health related issues.

Most of the time it's very simple. Basic healthy eating and exercise. The problem has always been people don't want to exercise, and there are consequences to that.
It is not as simple as doing some backhand checkbook balancing of the calories. Metabolic pathways are not the same for every single individual.
I wouldn't agree; this essay takes few examples of bad or half-baked science (which are disputed even among scientists, in specific fields such as behavioral ecology and evo. psychology, and behavioral neuroscience) and generalizes to all of science.
That's basically what physics is.
Well,

I would offer that the more productive industrial society as a whole has become, the more unproductive parasites of multitudinous sorts have arisen. A nation dependent on foreign aid and foreign drug-dealing could only exist on the economic periphery of a more prosperous nations, right? The evolution of Mexico is instructive here.

We're lucky that in the US, the parasites at least don't have as much of an incentive to engage in violence.
And Idiocracy, which was vastly underrated even though marred by what seems to be studio-meddling (the annoying narrator, for instance). Idicoracy is especially amusing because as the years go on, it only seems more prescient.

I'd also point out that King of the Hill was a great show, if a little too dry for most tastes.
Rather http://stackexchange.com/sites (as a side note, I've just made a map of their sites, here http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/157976/map-of-all-se... with a discussion, code on GitHub). There are very dedicated communities, from TeX to gardening.

The good thing is that there are great (just IMHO).

The bad thing is that, not everything fits in the question-and-answer scheme. There are many interesting subject, which are:

open-ended,

or requiring polling,

or - brainstorming.

Also, not every topic is covered, but it that case you can create your own SE site (with http://area51.stackexchange.com/); just it takes time and effort to gather the critical mass (at least 200, usually - much more).
If that is the strongest argument you can make, I think you've said all that needs to be said about intuition.
Parrot Learns to Drive Robotic Buggy His Owner Designed and Built
That's a good point. An unsolicited advertisement for something could be considered illegal according to CAN-SPAM but if the individual has a relationship with that company than an email like the one the sent to Sumit is legal. It could likely be argued that visiting a site could be considered establishing a relationship.

That's just a guess on my part. I'd love to hear from someone better versed on the law about the legality of that email.
This is exactly what people don't understand, these consumption mechanisms vary greatly from one person to another.
Isn't this just Atkins?
I'm inclined to think that since Windows 2000 or so, the OS provided the functionality a vendor would have needed to include some sort of zoom-and-smooth software so as to render vector fonts sharply and bitmaps at sane sizes. That nobody made the effort is yet one more symptom of the general lack of courage and originality in the PC market.
Slightly higher content: http://blog.functionspace.org/news/2012/11/28/know-more-abou...
The answers that you'll receive won't be supported by rational thought or evidence. If they were, it'd be scientism.
Consciousness, experience or the present moment are not a question. What about these? What in particular about them is answered better (i.e. more correctly or truthfully) by non-scientific answers. What answer can be satisfying at all if it is not tested at all? Or if it does not give correct predictions.

Feeling better about something or wishing it were so are not good enough criteria in my mind. Finding consolation in illusion is not a worthy goal either.

All questions are scientific questions. What is right, what is moral or what we should do follows from what is true. Science happens to be the only sure way to discover what is true on the other hand. All other methods fail us.
> Philosophy's purpose is to search not for an answer to the surface questions (and when you're doing it right, everything becomes a surface question) but to dive deeper into questions of what lies beneath those questions, what assumptions we make when we use certain words or claim certain beliefs.

I really see this as a problem. It should be possible to teach critical thinking with more engagement with the world. Anyone can poke holes. It's much harder and more worthwhile to submit patches.

Reminds me of something I recently read:

>If you had gone to Epictetus and said, "I want to live a good life. What should I do?" he would have had an answer for you: "Live in accordance with nature." He would then have told you, in great detail, how to do this.

>If you went to a twentieth-century analytic philosopher and asked the same question, he probably would have responded not by answering the question you asked but by analyzing the question itself: "The answer to your question depends on what you mean by "a good life," which in turn depends on what you mean by "good" and "a life." He might then walk you through all the things you could conceivably mean in asking how to live a good life and explain why each of these meanings is logically muddled. His conclusion: It makes no sense to ask how to live a good life. When this philosopher had finished speaking, you might be impressed with his flair for philosophical analysis, but you might also conclude, with good reason, that he himself lacked a coherent philosophy of life.
I hope this gets past a pilot episode.
He has to track down the person who originally came up with the status code "PC LOAD LETTER" and give them a cameo.

He has to.
This is a relevant and very informative video about the impact of sugar on humans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM&feature=yout...

I'd say that if you were to just dramatically reduce sugar you'll get results pretty quickly.
The Buffon Is Back: Silvio Burlesconi Makes The Final Push...Toward The Cliff
Hehe, I'm not trying to convince you. I suppose I shouldn't be posting, then.

Really, I'm not certain you would be convinced even if I did a better job, though. All I'm really looking for is less of a skeptical "explain it to me in terms of science" viewpoint, and more of a "huh, interesting" response. I've never seen someone even try to work with me when discussing these things. It's always shut down so they can claim their Internet points.

Not intellectually engaging in the slightest.
Valve: an Outside Contender for the Future of “Console” Gaming?
There are a lot of things to mock about it (and boy do I), but Kutcher is a pretty bright guy.
According to the documentation, it is, but I haven't tried snooping on the client myself. So I'm not sure if the data is obfuscated in any way.

"This means when a change occurs on one Google Chrome client, a part of the infrastructure effectively sends a tiny XMPP message, like a chat message, to other actively connected clients telling them to sync."

Source: http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/sync
Maybe it's just me, but I all I see is the strong parallels of "Scientism" in HN.
You don't need exercise if your diet is strict enough. Doing it all with diet might be the hard way for you but it was the easy way for me; fundamentally, it is calories in-calories out, but you do have to look at the details, and pick a specific plan to accomplish that goal based on the details.
How, specifically?

Given the incredible variance in available descriptions of "the conscious experience", I would posit that "consciousness" itself exists only as a mental grouping and nothing distinct.

As an exercise: explain what exactly constitutes a "car", including the point where such an item officially "stops being a car" during the process of disassembly. Show your work.
For too long, the vast majority of scientists have kept silent, keenly aware of the limitation of their knowledge, and leaving it to idiots (e.g. Bill O'Reilly's nobody can explain the tides...) to make sweeping and completely false statements. We don't have all the answers yet (and never will) but that should not stop scientists from voicing their opinion more vocally and more frequently.
9 is better (though not without its issues), 10 is actually halfway decent. If it had come out a year ago, it could be a market leader, but Chrome and Firefox doing the new-release-every-six-weeks thing generally means that at best, Microsoft is going to be a couple of quarters behind.

I can't wait for IE6/7/8 to die, though.
I think I get your point, but you need to re-phrase the zombie apocalypse part.

Afghanistan is a country that has been fractured by civil war or the fight against invaders for all of its living memory and is struggling to find unity.

A zombie apocalypse on the other hand is a fictional event in which a horde of brainless demons tries to kill all humans.
It's quite interesting:

I built a layer of clojure code on top of the JNI bindings to get
an entirely functional interface to vba-rerecording. This
interface treats state of the emulator as an immutable object, and
allows me to do everything I could do with the lower level C
interface in a functional manner. Using this functional code, I
wrote search programs that take a particular game-state and try
out different combinations of button presses to get any desired
effect. By combining different styles of search with different
initial conditions
That is a staggeringly childish view of how stable, safe societies work.
In C you have no exception handling. The closest you can get is seqfualts. With a segfault the debugger can give you a backtrace at almost the exact issue point.

The easiest way to get segfaults is by dereferencing NULL. In C dereferencing NULL is invalid. Thus returning NULL on failure will result in something close to what raising an exception in other languages does.

In any language with real exception handling it makes much less sense, ignoring optimization.
Am I the only one (I realise that is a trope in itself) that didn't enjoy Idiocracy? I kept hearing how great it was, but it felt like it bashed you over the head repeatedly with the points it was making.

I felt like I was watching an Idiocracy-era satire. "LOOK, PEOPLE ARE STUPID, SAY AND DO STUPID THINGS"
Google to stop offering free version of Google apps.
Now that I live in Austin, I only appreciate King of the Hill even more. I'll never forget the episode where Bobby proposes a town where there's music everywhere, everyone has cool things and drives convertibles, Hank replies: "Ugh, sounds like Austin"

Boy I got a good laugh out of that I tell you what. Mike Judge knows how to cut to the bone with everything he creates
My intuition says you have angry feelings.
The author believes scientific inquiry should not 'overreach' into subjects that have traditionally belonged to fields like philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, and religion, because, he explains in painful detail, science can't have all the answers.

Regardless of whether one agrees with him or not, his argument makes NO sense to me. The relevant question is not whether science can have all the answers, but whether science yields better or more accurate answers than those other approaches.
How can something that is not supported by evidence be a valid answer to any legitimate question?
The Steambox is Real
http://www.theverge.com/2012/12/8/3744314/gabe-newell-valve-console-living-room-steam-box
Supreme Court to hear "pay-for-delay" drug case
> etching the PCBs, drilling the PCBs, the cost to buy the pick-and-place machine and reflow machine

Your correct on the cost of the headers/ports being much higher than most would think (certainly higher than the AVR).

However, the arduino products are not even close to being in the ball park of volume needed to purchase their own PCB manufacturing equipment, nor P&P, nor reflow, nor QA systems. Its all outsourced, probably through multiple layers (they list SparkFun as a manufacturer and I can almost guarantee they aren't doing any of the actual manufacturing either).
I am happy to clarify!

By "blanket" I mean to say that there's no organization-wide policy. I don't know of any specific cases, but I would not be shocked if certain groups within Google have stricter policies in this area.

I was just trying to be specific by saying "currently"
I'm a big fan of NewsBlur (YC S12) -- it restored my faith in RSS readers.
If both this "Steam Box" and the PS4 would run on Linux (PS4 at least is rumored to use the full OpenGL), that would be a great push for Linux gaming.
>Idicoracy is especially amusing because as the years go on, it only seems more prescient.

Really? Come now.
Maybe we are thinking of "scientific" in different terms, but I know lots of things that are not scientific.

I'm speaking broadly here, but qualia are not scientific. My internal experiences aren't scientific. So I'd say that, on one sense, at least half of what I experience is not scientific.

No one actually knows what is going on inside of my head at this moment. Yet I know my own thoughts, emotions and experiences. Science may know that I can experience love, for example. But it can't tell me that I am experiencing love at this moment, as I write this comment, or who I fall in love with.
Dereferencing NULL is undefined -- on AIX the page at 0x0 is readable.
The little super-dense singularity of the future
Afghanistan was not always like this.

For reference, you might be interested to look at the following:

http://current.com/community/92514111_afghanistan-in-1950s-a...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id2XoHZIleE

http://www.google.ca/search?q=afghanistan+1950&hl=en&...
I don't think it was seriously trying to make a point, it was just a comedy, and it had what plants crave!
So science showed itself to be a powerful tool for determining truth about some subjects and exposed the ridiculousness of most pre-scientific ideas concerning those subjects.

Now that a higher level of certainty is available for some subjects people have higher expectations about what level of confidence they demand from an idea purporting to tell them something about reality. They also have a lot more scientific knowledge about the ways in which and the reasons why these other methods fail, often spectacularly.

I guess I'm guilty of scientism. I assume that if these "other ways of understanding" failed nearly completely at discovering truth in every subject that has been touched by science I assume this extrapolates to the subjects we cannot apply science to.

I fail to see why accepting our current limitations about what it's possible for us to know is anything other than the opposite of hubris.

Once another system of thought actually makes predictions that answer questions about reality then I will happily change my mind. Until then I'm not satisfied with the horrible levels of accuracy they have been shown to have. I'll just stick with the humble scientific opinion: "We don't know yet, we haven't figured out how to move beyond conjecture about this issue".
Null value is used to determine several things: missing value, incorrect value or unknown value (there are other semantics).

A program that transforms one value into another value, may return a NULL value to denote that program processed value is missing or incorrect due to error. That was what it was in C, which had no exceptions.

Your example is nice, but if you are thinking exceptions aren't a problem, keep in mind they add several branching paths in a code that seems non-branching. This hides the errors and causes all other forms of confusion. In fact I do remember an anecdotal story of a team working on a Java system of critical importance, forbidding use of exceptions in order to guarantee that code would be run smoothly.

Maybe Java 8 will fix some pain points[1] of exceptions.

[1]http://java8blog.com/post/37385501926/fixing-checked-excepti...
More people are killed by cattle or cars or cigarettes per year than by terrorists. What's the probability of a TSA agent doing something inappropriate? This only shows Bin Laden won the war on terror.
> "What, you don't believe in thermodynamics? What a crackpot!"

Come back to me when you've heard a few people say that it is physically impossible for them to lose weight regardless of what they do. They think they could be eating nothing but celery and water and still maintain an upwards trend.

Thermodynamics works. That means it is always possible to lose weight, not that it is always easy.

A weight-loss plan that works is an engineered calorie deficit. Calories in-calories out is the basic outline, but you need to get the details right to find a plan you'll stick to long enough to have a decent impact.

You can engineer a calorie deficit through diet only, exercise only, or a mix; personally, I had very good results with something that was mostly due to a major change in diet with no change in my exercise habits, which mainly consist of walking for a few hours a day. Other people are actually capable of exercising a huge amount more than they have been and making only a modest dietary change. And there are people in between.

And then there are specific foods. Ultimately, no food is bad in itself, and every diet has to meet all your needs, including emotional needs. It can be easier to lose weight and keep it off by banning certain kinds of food, but that is not necessary. Demonizing foods is psychologically unhealthy because it leads to a sin-guilt-redemption cycle that inhibits a rational approach to this engineering problem.

My point, again, is that once you get the details worked out, as long as you actually are in a calorie deficit you will lose weight. There is nothing more to it. The fad diet pushers can fuck off.
> "hachi, ni, yon, roku, shichi, go, ichi" isn't faster than "eight, two, four, six, seven, five, one"

Japanese has two sets of numbers. One is the one you gave, which is based on Japanese, and the other got imported along with kanji from China. Using the shortest forms of the kun readings, it would be "ya, fu, yo, mu, na, i, hito". I don't know if a typical Japanese speaker would memorize them that way, but since those forms are ingrained in the language, they should be able to do so without significant effort.

Now, to an English speaker, it may look like a wash; both appear to be strings of eight syllables. But the kun-based numeral sounds are in fact quite a bit faster.
Right, but since I'm trying to introduce Deleuze's terminology, it makes sense to use his language. That is the point. ;)
>Behaviors that are baffling to outsiders are almost certainly adaptive within the context.

Why do you believe this? It reminds me of people who think that just because something exists, it must be useful. Some things really don't serve any purpose, like nipples on men, or belly buttons, or fingerprints.

I don't think its tribalism itself that's the problem. Heck, if the tribe is big enough we call it a nation. It seems to me that it's possible to have a "good tribe" - one that defends it's borders well, and imposes something like the rule of law within it's borders. Perhaps most importantly, inculcates a culture of non-destruction - where initiating violence is frowned upon by everyone. This tribe, I believe, could thrive and grow, and prosper.

As for the economics of the thing, I think that such a tribe could do very well. Heck, if you're right about capital flows (and you probably are) such a tribe could get (covert) American aid, etc. I imagine we'd even look the other way if they wanted to grow poppies. But still, this would be a small island, and I'm not sure if there are enough people to really man the battlements and make it work.
This might come as a surprise, but not every philosopher is a postmodernist. Postmodernists aren't even in the majority. They're a relatively small minority in an ocean of different philosophical outlooks. Even many so-called postmodernists deny the label applies to them.

As for who alienated who in the Sokal affair, it should be remembered that Sokal was the original perpetrator of the hoax, and appeared to have initiated it with the sole aim of discrediting philosophers he did not approve of.
If Tim Burton did Pokemon
Artist profile: http://hatboy.tumblr.com/