skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Children of Men here we come!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
This site's tracking is covered in another thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4891637
I agree with tzaman that there are serious privacy concerns here...
Let's look at this question:

What "truth" has mathematics itself produced from that search which is well-defined, non-trivial, and correct?

Is it a loaded question? I think it isn't, and it has a lot of valid answers. Here are some recent ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_ma.... Why the corresponding question for philosophers should be loaded? Are they exempt from settling things?
In one of my least favorite games of all time, Final Fantasy II, it was possible to reset the "steps remaining until random battle" number by entering the menu and healing a character without full HP.

The number was actually stored in the save file, so you could just count steps until you entered a random battle, reload the system, and take n-1 before healing to completely avoid encounters. I expect this was purposeful because the battle system was so tedious and the encounter rate was obnoxiously high.
Five Ways to Torture Candidates in a Technical Interview
Almost definitely, but it will be fun to watch him try!

We're working on an AirHorn that users can trigger if he falls asleep. Make a donation and press the button remotely!
Honestly I found Ghostery useless and ultimately uninstalled it. I am not paranoid enough to want to completely deprive every site of statistics, so I had opt-in by default, and it's difficult to block the especially nefarious packages because they're all lumped together with typical counters/stats scripts.

I think NoScript does an adequate job preventing most undesired analyzers, as they will often be on a separate domain that needs temporary activation. Ghostery was just annoying because it'd always be blaring that there were trackers tracking me, but include mostly things that I don't really mind, basically all counters. In fact, I usually want counters to register my UA/OS, so that their recorded Linux marketshare increases.

Would be nice if we could install Ghostery as a private-browsing-only extension and turn its default to block everything, but barring that, I don't think it's valuable unless you make it block everything all the time.
The Case for Governing by Lottery: Should we pick our leaders at random?
The best reading experience I've seen (by far in my opinion) for iPhone/iPad is http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/
Just personal experience. When I installed Xubuntu 12.10 (not an upgrade---it was on a machine previously running MacOS only), every time I started to type a URL into Firefox's location bar, the popdown list would include not only history and bookmarks, but results that you'd get from searching google and wikipedia for the sequence of letters typed so far. It updated after every keypress. In the Firefox preferences, the only relevant config option (that I found) was to suggest either/both/none of history and bookmarks, but turning that to "none" meant you only got the search results. Turning off the Ubuntu extensions also turned off the extra search results, so I'm hoping that it also stopped sending my info and didn't just start doing it silently.
The world’s first tuition free engineering degree-granting university
I use this in conjunction with an ad blocker and a NoScripts-like extension.

I always wonder how effective this combination is :/
Wait ... you said "dog", not "four-year-old", right?
Another way to increase the number of big data analysts is to improve the tools so that more people can perform the analysis without as much trainin or infrastructure building.
I agree, but see my comment from elsewhere in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890445
5 Questions To Think Through While Building For User-Generated Content
They did. Kinda ruined the fun of it though. Who remembers when those people extracted the debug codes from the ROM that let you actually get the eggs, on the n64 version? It was years after the game came out iirc.

I must admit I also clicked the link expecting something to do with eggs and crystal keys.
Can you quote the make and model of these monitors? The site you linked only seems to list 1920x1080 displays.
Startup philippines ecosystem updates
Comment-driven development
Which would be quite vile.
A longer interview with Joshua Foer on the same subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=jg3lUpYZ9g8
Yep. No magic tricks. Just substance.
Sorry, you are incorrect. GWT writing javascript is the whole point.

http://css.dzone.com/news/understanding-gwt-compiler

From the article: "The GWT compiler is really a Java source to JavaScript source translator."
I think The Atlantic's term "insourcing" seems pretty apt in this context.
User-generated content is quite difficult to get going. One model is to fake it initially but getting users to do the work also requires some work structuring the right incentives and priming the content generation pipe. What do you guys think?
A bit less pessimistic view is presented by Hans Rosling at a relatively recent TED talk. http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.h... Well worth watching.

Sperm count is unlikely to affect the population growth anyway, what we need is to get people out of poverty and proper family planning with access to proper birth control. Then we can "control" the population.
Original article: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-warn-of...
Ask HN: Why doesn't Github have file sizes?
I love Github source browser, is there a reason
or a way to show file sizes next to the files
in the browser ?
Science, as the broad quest for knowledge, scientia, is not dogmatic, or at least ideally it is not. But modern science certainly has dogmas, and gladly admits them. Methodological Naturalism is the biggie. It is useful as a kind of provisional phenomenological reduction that brackets some questions and some kinds of answers (formal, teleological, aesthetic), in favor of others (mechanistic, reductionistic).

In theory as long as the reduction 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. There are plenty of critics of this tendency in the last hundred years, but mostly they have been ignored: Husserl, Bergson are two of the most prominent. A more obscure student of both Husserl and Heidegger, Hans Jonas, has been extremely helpful to me personally, particularly his Phenomenon of Life, as a rigorous critique of reductionism that retains a high view of science on the one hand and doesn't founder and wander off into religious/atheistic debates on the other.
I think it just correlates with the presence if images. Also StackExchanges have excellent UIs, APIs and still very good content. StackOverflow itself could also be worse.
There's nothing wrong with building on axioms if you understand that they are stipulated rather than foundational, and much philosophy has been done tearing down exactly the beautiful structures you identify as problematic. That just is rationally testing "opinion", which I put in quotes because it's a loaded word you introduced in place of axiom to undermine the position of philosophy. I remind you that Goedl's incompleteness theorem, which gives analytical rigor to your point, came out of early 20th century logic, and was in direct response to the philosophical program of the Vienna Circle, which again is philosophers. How, do you suppose, you could establish Goedl's incompleteness theorem with the scientific method?

Rational testing is analysis with logic and deconstruction and, to the applicable degree, empiricism.
> As far as I know, there is no consensus in the philosophical community that relativism is right.

Yes, but only because the terms "consensus" and "philosophical community" are fictional terms -- neither exist within philosophy.

DO you really think philosophers sit down and come to an agreement about anything? That would be supremely unwise -- the very existence of philosophy requires unending controversy, therefore to come to an agreement -- a consensus -- is to commit professional suicide.

In science, you can design a vaccine, or by experiment prove that reality agrees with your most recent theory, and thereby survive the consequences of two or more scientists coming to an agreement. Philosophers don't have this option (because reality is an obstacle, not a source of validation), therefore to even suggest that philosophers might reach a "consensus" is to fail to grasp the essence of philosophy: verbal onanism.

> For example, if relativism is true, it might be the case that we can't judge other societies or other times, but certainly slavery and female genital mutilation are wrong, and objectively so. [emphasis added]

You just took both opposing positions in a single sentence, which validates your standing as a philosopher. In fact, there are no objectively wrong things, only those things particular societies and individuals judge to be wrong -- and disagreement between individuals and societies is absolutely assured.

Your child is starving, and a dolphin is available as a food source. Do I need to go on, or can you perform this trivial mental exercise on your own?

> Nature also doesn't "care" about math or science, because nature isn't a thinking thing that can care.

You're missing a critical point here. It is not nature's purpose to care about anything, instead it is a scientist's purpose to investigate how nature does what it does while not caring one way or another. In other words, nature's indifference toward science strengthens science's hand (it contributes to the objectivity of science's results).
How Greek startups are doing their part to beat the crisis
These record labels should realise that this does nothing to stop piracy and serves as a fantastic multimillion dollar advertising campaign for Pirate Bay.
> Speaking factually incorrect things if you believe them to be true is honest but incorrect.

That seems to be too lenient. If I honestly believe in God's healing powers or homeopathy, am I off the hook for failing to bring my child to the ER when he has a serious illness?

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-belief/
Parent company:

http://draugiemgroup.com/en
What we need is a 1 child policy like in China.
Rise of the Robots
TOR

https://www.torproject.org/index.html.en
The Death of the Web Page - Single Page Apps & APIs will change the Web
I hope that is not the sole reason you avoid IDE's? Cause any decent IDE can be configured to behave properly and get out of your way on the screen. The example I gave was just to clarify that apparently some people do not seem to bother about vertical space (or don't know any better)
Make sure they're both substantial and you won't be far wrong. Don't spend all your reading time just reading (without working through problems or otherwise engaging with it).
It looks as though this site is not able to track individual people, but only companies. I'd guess they're doing this by querying each visitor IP with a database of known IP addresses used by companies. If so, it's not particularly sinister, not particularly useful, and not particularly accurate.

The discussion being had here - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4891637 - deals with a site that is allegedly identifying visitors individually somehow, most likely through something to do with social media. However, I'm skeptical.
That's overly simplistic and you know it. There are pretty obvious ethical issues. Not that I really want to start a discussion on them, because if there's anything more played-out on the internet than the piracy debate it's the meat-eating debate.

That in addition to how inefficiently the nutritional value of giant animals is generated.

Disclaimer: I eat meat.
I guess the DRM was strong enough for this product, it's past its shelf life now. Or is this a case of no one really wanting to pirate the game badly enough to put in the effort to crack it?
Lack of constraints
Thanks for the link, I would have never known without Wikipedia...out of all places. /s

Sperm count falling by one third in 25 years is much scarier, suggests a horrible trend for us. As for overpopulation, people usually had /have a lot of kids because of high mortality rates.

By the way, who is going to work so that pension check gets to you ;) ?
That does lead to other problems, like putting a strain on the welfare system of countries when there suddenly is a huge decrease in the number of people that support those who have retired.

Look at Japan where there are fewer and fewer supporting more and more. It is kinda working for now but what will happen in 20 years? Who knows.
Can we keep a sort of page where we put all the commands to remove the bullshit from Ubuntu? I think it's starting to grow and stink more and more.
I hate them just for the website alone... all the scroll effects kill the experience
Awesome. With your interests and obvious clarity of expression, I'd suggest you pop the Discourse near the top of the queue! What's needful at this point in history, imo, is as many inquisitive, acute minds as possible re-engaging these debates in their original subtlety.
That was one of the most profound movies I ever watched, I also highly recommend it. It is moving, beautiful, and makes you rethink everything we take for granted.
The study was preformed on sperm banks in France. This means the results probably generalize to all developed/industrialized nations. What would be nice would be some studies to look for this effect in other societies. It would certainly help dial in on root causes.
Also, it it truly sustainable? The demand for low-cost animal protein has in part led to increased factory farming, antibiotic use, growth hormone use, etc.

(I'm also a meat eater, but I eat less beef than I once did, largely because of cost & health concerns)
Meat (or rather, animals) also consume a lot more resources to produce the same amount of available-nutrient output. I'm a meat-eater too, and I agree with your assessment, but it's a little disingenuous to pretend that vegetarians have no reasons for their actions.

(Also, IME there are as many reasons to be vegetarian as there are vegetarians---they all have a slightly different answer.)
Unfortunately (for the labels) this is completeley useless. Even if they managed to block it everywhere in the world, another torrent sharing site would appear right way (and that would be history repeating itself).
IP address alone isn't sufficent, browser info is also needed
I'm making my way through The Process of Creating Life. It's one of only two books that I've read in recent years that I can't read too much of at once – I get three pages in and have to stop, because of how excited I am about his arguments and its implications.

I bought the whole The Nature of Order series five years ago and have been ever since trying to find a person who has read it. A have returned to the books periodically, and again and again feel the same excitement that prevents reading too much at one sitting. I have not yet encountered another book that does the same.

In fact, I feel the same way about writing this reply. It is as the implications of the book are too - how should I describe it - something to be spelled out; somehow I do not feel I can do justice to the text by discussing it. I do not even know where to begin.

Perhaps it is best summarized by saying just read it. Yes, this is a lousy book review, and the price tag is not of the average variety, but this is a series of books for (of) life.
5 levels of media type - REST
Your browser still provides a pretty unique fingerprint.
The more common version is people who say "Life isn't fair" while taking advantage of everyone else and generally being asinine.
Cmd - A saner way to running external programs from C#
And the single take scenes were brilliant.
Oh, that's how you beat the game...
Electric Car Sales Hit Another Record
http://www.brycealcock.com/random/TriviaStats/ChinaPopulatio...

Because it's demonstrably successful at curbing population growth rate? Because during periods of the most aggressive enforcement of the one-child policy, China had its highest growth rate in recent history, 2-2.5x that of the US?

And now, during its period of least aggressive enforcement, but with a rapid pace of industrialization and wealth injection, the growth rate has fallen dramatically?

http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=24&c=ja&l=en

Or perhaps we want to look at Japan, which without forced abortions, property confiscation, and brutal acts of repression have managed to achieve a negative growth rate?

No matter which way you slice the data, the trend is clear: industrialization, wealth, and stability decrease growth rates, and do so far better than any number of guns and Bibles you can point at people.
> But this is similar to saying what is real is what corresponds to reality. Do you see the circularity here?

The circularity is in your wording, not in the thing itself. A scientist has an idea, one expressed clearly enough that two or more similarly trained individuals can understand the claim. The idea is tested against reality, in a way (again) that similarly equipped observers can agree that the result means what it seems to mean.

The outcome is either that the original idea is supported by, or falsified by, the comparison to reality. And the distinction between the idea, and its test against reality, is nowhere confused -- not among scientists, anyway.

> The philosophers who engage in questioning the "real" are not doing it for the reasons scientists engage in discovering "correct" phenomena.

That's for sure -- philosophers much prefer arguing about the meaning of reality, to dealing with reality on its own terms. Many modern philosophers, following this trend, slide into deconstructive postmodernism without ever realizing that they've crossed the threshold of absurdity (by posing the argument that all experience is subjective and there is no objective reality as scientists claim, but without realizing that their argument justly applies first to the words they've just uttered).
My take on this is moving the control flow of software to separate, visualizable graphs that you can monitor and manipulate: http://noflojs.org/
CERN students release DECAY zombie flick under CC license
This market also exists for a century.
HighlandDB, opensource database for Ruby apps
Hi, everyone!
During the last month I've been working hard to roll out HighlandDB, lightweight NoSQL database for Ruby applications. It gets installed in the application folder and provides user with a clear API.

Here are the links:

- http://mac-r.github.com/highland/ (official website)

- https://github.com/mac-r/highland (Github repo)

- http://vimeo.com/55018195 (1 minute video about Highland)

John Nunemaker (the creator of mongomapper) once told me: "I do not get it. When would you use highland over any of the other databases out there?". You may ask me that question as well. Further is the answer.

The simplicity of highland is the core advantage. Now I am working on the datamining framework called Ajaila (http://ajaila.github.com/). There is a wide range of Ajaila users who are not familiar with databases at all.

They spend a lot of time to install MongoDB and other databases. Highland is expected to be the first DB for such users (the default DB in Ajaila). It's extremely easy to play with it before getting familiar with other solutions.

I do believe that Highland can find its niche among existing DB solutions. At least it makes Ajaila users happy. Maybe there are other people who can get happy as well.

This is my first more or less finished opensource product. I am writing here to get your feedback. Maybe some of you will find this project interesting and will participate. There are many challenging issues.
This explains you haven't read the article in its entirety. Please read it again, he references it as the first link while citing examples about the superiority within the Indian Start-up eco-system.

That is a contradiction in a way that you cannot promote something as a valid citation while you stand to benefit from it.

>Sidenote: Vijay Anand has done so much to Indian entrepreneurs and Indian startup ecosystem.

There are many people who have done more than him (I personally know a handful) yet, don't advertise it explicitly as much as he does. He takes money for providing an office space in return. How does that contribute as doing 'much' to the Indian Startup Ecosystem? There are plenty of office spaces over here...
How I tracked my stolen phone to a charging station in Eastern Uganda
AMCC
APPLIED MICRO CIRCUITS CORP COM NEW <- Working on 64bit ARM chips

NVDA
NVIDIA CORP <- have already great ARM chips + graphics

Also, it is clear that AMD is leaving the x86 market, (keeping its APU chips though), and betting on ARM as well. They are shrinking their capital expendintures to keep them afloat during the transition.
If they do survive, AMD has graphics chips as a competitive advantage. Graphics will be very important in the future.

I think on the longer run INTEL will be the looser. The x86 market will not be as lucrative as it has been in the past, and the ARM market is very competitive. INTEL will have to shrink as a company (from the 95bil is worth right now). Also their graphics offering are not competitive/good enough even in x86. They have completely cornered the x86 market CPU wise, but that market is just less relevant.

Whenever there are seismic shifts like this, it is the smaller guys that usually adapt faster and survive.
I don't know, but Git is a DVCS: you can take a look at the source on your own machine. Github is nice and all but your local file explorer or Git client will happily show you file size.
Network Auditing Software
> Because during periods of the most aggressive enforcement of the one-child policy, China had its highest growth rate in recent history, 2-2.5x that of the US?

The fact that China would think to enforce such a policy should give one pause.
This is a huge reason for philosophy's ongoing journey into irrelevance. Both scientists and philosophers have become over-specialized and tend to presume competency in one gives competency in another.

They are not only different subjects, but require very different modes of thought and background knowledge that often cause the experts in each sphere to talk completely past one another. Each demands that that all arguments submit to the peculiar rigor within their own discipline, causing ground-level miscommunication and exasperation.
Can't you compile the source, run a checksum on all the files respective files and check if they're identical for both versions?
I wonder how many job offers this guy's going to get from security companies over the next 24 hours...
I've been told that, if you buy something online, some vendors sell your information (like email and postal addresses) tied to a 3rd party cookie on your browser.

Now, any site you visit that is able to check that 3rd party cookie knows all about you.

I don't know which 3rd parties do it, though.
Investor Finds Fertile Territory in Over-35 Entrepreneurs
While trying to find a browser add-on for the above, found that Facebook detects NoScript and adjusts links accordingly [1]. In other words, the list of add-ons is used proactively to try to bypass some of them.

[1] Excerpt: "Facebook seems to detect an active NoScript and replaces external links with tracked ones." from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-privac...
Google Maps edits are quite fast to change the world
I must agree with you and tzaman on this. In a time when we are fighting hard to protect our personal privacy online, companies like this are trying to take more of it away. I hope beyond hope that this company fails miserably!