skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> 2) The "robots.txt" argument misses the point because the publishers never gave permission to use their content, so the presence of an "opt-out" mechanism is irrelevant. The mechanism must be "opt-in", i.e., Google must ask to use their content.

The crux of the matter is that you're missing the newspapers motive. They don't want Google to ask their permission, they want google to pay them, which is a huge difference. They DON'T want google to ask for their permission and then delist them from Google News if they had to pay for it.

I am on Google's side on this matter, this sounds like extortion. Google should be free to delist them if they want money from their link, in a capitalist society you should be free to chose who you deal with in your business. I live in France, our government wants to tax google to help the newspapers and they didn't take google's answer (that they'd delist the newspapers) well, because they don't want google to respect their IP and ask for permission, they want Google to pay up no matter what.
This reminded me of the Vooza webseries [1]. Some of their skits are corny, but I think they show that there is potential for a good startup oriented series.

[1] http://vooza.com/
> It seems clear that good people need to band together, get some serious firepower, and create a safe haven where the One Rule (no destruction) is strictly enforced.

This almost exactly describes what the Taliban did. Except in their moral system, the One Rule is different than in your moral system.
>For example, why don't we start by enforcing intelligence sharing between the various TLAs? After all, that's why we couldn't stop 9-11.

Agreed. While this is the first and most important step, attacks will get through, and we need a credible response.

>There's a HUGE difference between Israel's position and our's.

Yes, of course there are differences. But there are similarities too. The key similarity is that neither the Palestinians nor the Afghans have a strong central government that can keep it's promises to the outside world. The core pattern in Israel's interactions with Palestine has been: Palestinian authority (used to be Arafat, now Hamas) promises not to attack; some random Palestinian faction decides to launch rockets into Israel; Israel says to the world, "See?" and then viciously counter-attacks. The Israelis argue that if Palestine can't control it's people, then it gives up the right to sovereignty. And this, essentially, was Bush's justification to invade Afghanistan. He knew the Taliban wasn't directly responsible, Al Queda was. We attacked anyway.

P.S. I have very mixed feelings about Israel, so I'm not justifying anything, just describing the situation the way I see it.
You missed the good part. You can replace the 'CPU' on your $30 mainboard for less than $3. That's why I like the socketed versions.
Hey, if you want to increase your chances of not being around for that dystopia, don't use the seatbelts.
I appreciate your responses in this thread, I feel I have learned something from them. I want to make sure I am reading you correctly here:

>>>as long as the reduction [of Methodological Naturalism] remains provisional, it has tremendous explanatory power. In practice, it far too often becomes a de facto metaphysic, unwarranted and unproven within its own assumptions.

It seems like Karl Popper is saying something identical here:
>>>"A naturalistic methodology (sometimes called an "inductive theory of science") has its value, no doubt.... I reject the naturalistic view: It is uncritical. Its upholders fail to notice that whenever they believe to have discovered a fact, they have only proposed a convention. Hence the convention is liable to turn into a dogma."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#Karl_Po...

I will try to synthesize the two previous paragraphs here: "Methodological Naturalism assumes that what humans can observe is the only way to gain more knowledge about the observable AND unobservable world. It is helpful for addressing immediate concerns of the observable world. However, let's not pretend that its usefulness somehow makes it true. Predicting the FUTURE is difficult, so let's hedge our bets in case things start getting weird."

Do you agree that your statement and his are equivalent, or are there some differences? If there are no significant differences, is my statement a reasonable synthesis?

Popper seems to express my (and I'm assuming yours and his own) sentiment about naturalism with his concept of falsifiability, which science seems to have accepted. In my opinion that is science taking a very good thing from a modern philosopher.
It was a much smaller scene though, nothing like game carts for the GBA or DS.
Not yet, but it's coming.
this is waaay more scary than itu standardizing on deep-packet-inspection ;)
That is not what I said. I think these developments are toxic in the long term however well-intentioned they are when they're first introduced.

I was pointing out their implications are even worse for countries without a tradition of freedom because they'll allow for an even tighter control of information & around the clock surveillance thus enabling the security apparatuses of those regimes to nip in the bud any revolutionary movement.
Bootstrap 2.2.2 is out
Definitely not, especially among the crowd you aim to write for.
And it works! I have been using this method since 2009 and am quite comfortable with Kanji. When I started, I did 20 characters per day and was done in a little over 3 months. Though the real acquisition was in the years that follow.
What do you want to eat for dinner? (legitimate question)

How about pizza? (no scientific evidence involved in this response)
That's not really what he/she asked for. What your parent is asking for (and I would love to see this too) is a tool that treats RSS feeds as sets of articles, then lets you do set operations on those sets (i.e., get me all articles a \in A such that a \in HN \and a \notin rpolitics)
Was waiting to see someone to make the distinction between ingestion and digestion.

Most people would consider me skinny... and I always eating and often things that most would consider fattening or unhealthy. People will remark, "How do you stay so skinny?! You're so lucky!"... Except, I would be willing to bet that I have a digestive disorder. Which one? I don't know and I don't care to find out. For the most part it hasn't/doesn't adversely affect me.

It seems that much of what I eat doesn't get digested and/or absorbed by my body.

tl;dr; There's a difference between ingestion and digestion. I ingest a lot but probably don't digest much of it.

Update: I have strong reasons to believe I have a digestive disorder since they run in my family. Also, I wonder how many calories I burn from being a "leg shaker".
Google Wave would've been great for this too.
CodeRetreat 2012 - Notes
This is an article on the limitations of science, but it contains no science. Isn't that interesting?

For example the author concedes, in the first half of one paragraph, the existence of "genuinely scientific" evolutionary psychology. Then he spends the second half on the abundance of unserious -- not just philosophically unserious, but scientifically unserious -- material in the same field. And that's all he has to say about the actual content of evolutionary psychology.

But good science speaks for itself:

"""The left side of the [neanderthal] skull had a large dent, apparently from a ferocious blow, and the rib cage -- also on the left side -- had the head of a spear lodged in it.... [He] had died roughly 50,000 years ago, the earliest known homicide victim. His killer, judging from the damage to the skull and rib cage, bore the lethal weapon in his right hand.

The fossil record of injuries to bones reveals two strikingly common patterns (Jurmain et al, 2009; Trinkaus & Zimmerman, 1982; Walker, 1995). First, the skeletons of men contain far more fractures and dents than do the skeletons of women. Second, the injuries are located mainly on the left frontal sides of the skulls and skeletons, suggesting right-handed attackers. The bone record alone cannot tell us with certainty that combat among men was a central feature of human ancestral life. Nor can it tell us with certainty that men evolved to be the more physically aggressive sex..."""

...and even if they could, our ancestors habits offer limited guidance on how we should act today. Stabbing people with pointed sticks is now frowned upon. Do we need to be told this by a tenured philosophy professor?

But note how much clearer the prospects and limits of science become when you know something about what it has already told us in the here and now. When your knowledge is limited, all you can talk about is the limits of knowledge.
Javascript was never really designed, but look how that ended up.
When will there be another update on the repository move!
I am not a doctor, but I am close to people who have undergone this.

Accutane works, but it is far more complicated for women in the US. They must sign a pledge stating they understand the risks associated with Accutane treatment and pregnancy. In fact, they require women on Accutane to take birth control concurrently.

If you are a guy, no problems. 6 months and you are done, usually.

That, and monthly blood tests as they want to make sure your liver take take it.
Speaking of Lobste.rs, has anyone an invitation? That'd be amazing.
Mallow - Sends you a daily mail listing your Twitter unfollowers.
I am someone who was diagnosed late in life with a condition which includes but is not limited to a digestive disorder. I have trouble with the idea that you can have a digestive disorder and see no real problems from it. From what I gather, they typically have serious problems associated with them. So it makes me wonder if you have some seemingly unrelated health issues?

You can email me if you would rather not say publically.
If we are being pedantic, the naive Fibonacci implementation isn't tail recursive. (And any tail recursive implementation is unlikely to need TCO before the numbers get too large.)
Strangest part:

>What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? ... Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

>Though physicists might once have been dismissive of metaphysics as mere speculation, they would also have characterized such questions as inherently speculative and so beyond their own realm of expertise. The claims of Hawking and Mlodinow, and many other writers, thus represent a striking departure from the traditional view.

It's weird that the author takes a non-scientific introduction to a pop-science book that is aimed to appeal to the layman's understanding of the world, and makes it out that Hawking and Mlodinow are departing from traditional views in their science.
I spend most of my days in an office indeed, as I work in tech. That being said, I've always worked out regularly (especially cardio) and biked to work for the past 7 years. I would say switching to "lifting heavy things" instead of focusing on running probably helped too (though it precedes my paleo diet).
On the Analytic side, take a look at
Balashov's and Rosenberg's "Philosophy of Science: Contemporary Readings"

On the Continental side, the classic essay is Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology".

I'd also recommend Jacques Ellul's "Technological Society".

And, while not dealing directly with science, I think Foucault's critiques of power in discourse are very relevant.

Earlier in this thread I'd mentioned:

"Naturalism and the Human Condition: Against scientism" by Frederick A. Olafson, whose critique comes from a phenomenological perspective.

and

"Scientism" by Tom Sorell, who's a neo-Kantian.

None of the above are postmodernists.
It has been asked whether science yields "better or more accurate answers" than other approaches.

We know that most published scientific research results are wrong.

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

Therefore flipping a coin and always guessing "heads" yields more accurate results than science.

Now what? Has this insight taught us anything?
Here is hoping this gets to the front page. LA most certainly needs more spaces like this and less retail space :)

I will definitely swing by in Jan when you open!
Did you know the average IQ is increasing over time?
I'm pretty sure the calories in/out model works to a certain extent. But the paleo diet helped me structure my diet in a way that lets me focusing on simple, healthy food, instead of quantities.
Torrrenting
An interesting counterpoint to http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/nassim_nicholas_taleb_the_fu..., which paid us a visit a couple weeks back.
I was referring to there being no way to access or manipulate the "master" set of sync data on their servers - other than to delete it. There used to be a bookmarks folder that contained it in the user's docs account, but it is no longer available.

It's problematic if you have multiple clients and had previously used something like Xmarks. My meticulously curated folders and bookmarks get messed up across devices pretty fast, even after deleting sync data and starting fresh from a clean backup of bookmarks.
oh my. this has the potential to be soo great.
King of the Hill is definitely one of the more underrated animated series out there. I actually think it's daring that it doesn't aim for 'gut busting' humor the way most American comedies do, and it's very nuanced in the way it portrays its characters.

On the one hand it's under appreciated, on the other as cartoon with a complex view of american life that isn't going for the "big laughs" I'm surprised it wasn't cancelled in a week.
going to take this on a slightly weird angle here:

Does your faeces float or have oily discharge around it?

Malabsorption of fat is essentially defined by the clinical features that can be easily determined.

Do you get bloated, have excessive flatulus, or discharge? All signs of malabsorption as well.

It is relatively unlikely that people have digestive problems long term without developing consequences as there are pretty much always side-effects from having nutrients running around a 20m track inside your body loaded with bacteria but not being taken into your body.

What you don't absorb, your bacteria will run riot on, with subsequent symptoms;

And if you have a fat malabsorption problem you will rapidly develop symptoms (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olestra or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipase_inhibitors for induced fat malabsorption)
KOTH is one of the best animated comedy series of the last 30 years, with a writing staff that included the co-writer of Idiocracy (and Tropic Thunder, which was also excellent), Wyatt Cenac, and writers from Mr. Show, Kids in the Hall, The Late Show, Parks And Rec, and the Simpsons (and during their good years). The voice talent is probably the best assembled ever for any animated show, including The Simpsons, anchored by Stephen Root, also one of the best character actors of the last 40 years.

I don't think Mike Judge has much to apologize for; also, 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.
Arabic Stage Name Choice Yields Foreign Following For Adult Actress
I don't understand this. Why is it necessary to pretend that running command-line programs is like accessing objects? Why is " git clone https://blah " somehow not sufficient? Why is it necessary to present that as chained object calls? How is this "saner?"
Well I have seen most of the episodes of King of the Hill and pretty much agree with that assessment.

It's not about the setting or the characters or even the jokes (which are both more dry and generally less funny than other projects, and I love dry humour).

It's about the complete reversal of the counter-culture commentary that made Office Space and Idiocracy popular. If you choose a boring hack writer setting (teacher wife, blue collar father, stupid son, etc, etc) for your show then you better make that choice the focus of your commentary, like the Simpsons did. The setting was chosen in order to comment on it. 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".

I don't think anyone is wrong for liking it, but you certainly can't complain that fans of Judge's other work dislike that level of support for an anti-intellectual outlook.
Ask HN: That website to see languages used per user on Github?
Some time ago, here on HN somebody posted a website where we could enter a Github nickname and it would give us a pie chart with the languages used by that user.

I googled and HN-searched for it, with no luck. Does anybody still have it? Thanks.
I love how these stories - and most of the discussion around them - simply choose to ignore the larger issue of "does the federal government belong in the business of telling auto makers what equipment cars must have" or even more, "does the federal government have the authority to do this"?

I would argue that the answer to both questions is unequivocally "NO" and that we should be raising absolute bloody hell with Congress over this. Despite what the SCOTUS and Congress have done to brutally butcher the 9th and 10th amendments, and despite their twisting and mangling of the "necessary and reasonable" clause and the "interstate commerce clause" it seems quite clear to me that this is an improper role of government in an open, free society.

I say let's quit nit-picking over details and privacy concerns, etc., and let Congress know - in no uncertain terms - that we simply don't accept this whole game, period.
It could have but it didn't. On balance is was very much pro traditional power structure and the ability to find happiness within it.
"Male energy is in crisis"

Yes, and thank goodness strict gender roles are considered arbitrary and laughable if they weren't so damaging.
"You've never visited a google restroom before?"

It may surprise you to learn that most people haven't.
24O has a half life of 65ms, so "24O isn't especially stable. If you look at that table, 23O has a half life of 82 ms, 22O is 2.25 s, and the isotopes gradually get more stable as you approach the stable 16-17-18 isotopes. If it were more stable than 23O, I would agree that it would be surprising, but that's not the case.
In fact, if you look at what they did and read the abstract for the actual paper, the claimed novelty here isn't creating 24O (as others have done so before) or about how stable it is, but rather that they came up with a new technique to characterize it. The article's title is misleading." Said chaos386 on reddit

http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/14hz9v/oxygen_nucle...
The title is 100% wrong. (Oxygen nucleus with twice as many neutrons shown to be stable)

O24 has a half life of 65ms. It is not stable.

There is a reason HN frowns on editing the original title. Sometimes it's helpful, sometimes, like here, you get it totally wrong.

The article title is: "Oxygen nucleus with twice as many neutrons as normal is shown to be surprisingly stable"

And even that title is very confusing. As best as I can tell, the actual research is that they measured the shape of O24 and found it to be round.

I don't see anything at all the shows it to be "surprisingly stable".
Excellent. Can't wait for 3.0
Come February, Some Tweets Will Get A Wee Bit Shorter
I thought that a site with the name "phys.org" would have at least some scientific basis. But this article is terrible!

This HN story should be deleted.
Well that was pretty clearly stated at Pycon 2012. Someone asked Guido that question he answered pretty diplomatically that it was a "political decision" _but_ you could tell it was a issue he cared by the tone of his voice.
5 Lessons for B2B startups... ...and why it didn't work
In what browser. There's scroll bar in Safari 6/Mac. And Safari’s "Reader" feature also seems to scroll it properly.
Inheritance. So many cool things can be done with it however it can be the recipe for sloppy code as well.
* > 2) We don't "burn" any calories whatsoever.*

- It seems like you would know this but we very literally do "Burn" all of our calories that go into heat production -

The Mitochondrial pathways very literally burn/react carbon with oxygen to produce H2O and CO2 incredibly efficiently. (67% of usable energy from this reaction is captured and stored in ATP, the remainder is given off as heat)

This process is significantly more efficient than any 'burning' we do in industry for example, but is exactly the same process as what is happening in a coal power plant, just on a much more efficient scale.

Even if we take proteins -> amino acids -> back to proteins, we are using energy in the form of ATP (the cellular battery) that was the product of the burning in the mitochondrial power plants, in order to have allowed the amino acids to be ready to be formed into new protein.

So we literally DO burn ALL of our calories (You could argue that glycolysis isn't burning, but this process is very inefficient and is responsible for <<<0.1% of ATP production) This is undeniable scientific fact.
Yes, that's my point. I'm confused.

Politics is partially an applied philosophy. Many of the views of a political party are based in philosophical viewpoints. The idea that everyone has the "inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is a philosophical viewpoint, and not a scientific one. What is the scientific basis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

The planks of the Republican platform, which include opposition to RU-486 and similar drugs because they "terminate innocent human life after conception" is a philosophical viewpoint, and not a scientific one. What is the scientific definition of "human"? Can we scientifically determine when a cell is 'human'? Are frozen blastocysts human? What about HeLa lines? and so on.

So when you say "science and politics", I respond with "yes, what's your point?" 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.

We have to decide how we want to use science. Eugenics does work for crops. It does work for livestock. It should work for people. If we sterilize the ~2.5 million Americans (and any new immigrants) who carry the sickle cell trait, then sickle cell disease - which is definitely inherited - will be effectively eradicated in the US within 60 years.

Why don't we do that? Does science tell us why not?

Well, it does in a fashion. We can say that it's an emergent behavior of free actors who are the descendants of a species of primates, talk about population dynamics, and so on. But that emergent behavior is a round-about way of describing philosophy, ethics, and religion.

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.

Science just doesn't care. We are the ones who care, and have have to decide what it is we want to become.

It is dangerous to go against science. We should not do so lightly. But the scientific input is only one of many inputs. Yes, Orion is estimated to increase mortality by approximately one lifetime per launch, averaged out over the world. What is the increase in mortality caused by burning coal? By building cars? It's much higher. Yet we decided to kill Orion and still promote (and subsidize!) the auto industry. What is your scientific explanation for that?
So why do we need computer driven cars? Let's just raise some parrots instead.