skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Denmark.

The Law of Equality: https://www.retsinformation.dk/forms/r0710.aspx?id=20929 (could not get google translate to work)
I'm trying to be less hyperbolic
I'm married to a doctor. I could not agree with this comment more.

If you're sick, modern medicine is far and away your best hope. It is not kind. It is not wise. It does not maintain the standards that practitioners would like us to believe. Nor are those practitioners as knowledgeable and wise as they would like us (and themselves) to believe.

It is still your best hope. Flaws and all, you should depend on it for your life.
The first step is to establish a shared understanding of what is acceptable (i.e. code of conduct). Without that code of conduct, there's nothing to enforce.

Bingo. Furthermore, any of the stuff in the CoC seems pretty reasonable - don't express prejudice, don't harass people. It's really "Social Graces 101" level stuff, not some bid to constrain free speech.
Mypy: an experimental Python variant with optional static typing
This is a major blow to usenet. But more importantly this could be the start fo something very very bad for usenet. It, and it's users of who I am sure there are plenty on HN, have so far been able to fly under the anti-piracy radar of the big media companies. This clearly demonstrates that they know exactly what is going on, and may be on the war path to shut down more indexes and search engines.
The point of a sports platform
Ask HN: Programming Project Ideas?
Do you have any project ideas for medium (say a few kloc) programs that would be good for learning? I want to work on something for a few weeks to just focus on programming (i.e. not trying to build a product). Examples I've heard previously are a BitTorrent client or IRC client, but something not networking focused would be cool too. I'm especially looking to work on something where I can learn a lot from the design (code, not UI) phase. Thanks!
His advice is great. She might not take it, but lutusp's audience is the entire internet.
He's in Sweden.
You may have skipping reading all the details. Some of which include that local law enforcement may become involved at any point. This can be requested by the accuser, the conference staff - or even the accused should evidence be in dispute[1].

The actions of conference staff are a route for dispute resolution for things that may not warrant law enforcement involvement, and if law enforcement should be involved, it will be and will obviously supersede any decisions by staff. More importantly however, is that law enforcement involvement is painful, potentially ruinous, and does not take into account the actual conference nor its other attendees.

Hypothetical: corroborated harassment incident; law enforcement is called in at the request of the accused/accuser. Action is taken. This does not remove the harasser from the site, nor does it trigger further sanctions against him or her within the community or conference unless such a set of explicit rules is codified.

[1] https://us.pycon.org/2013/about/code-of-conduct/harassment-i...
> So in cases of simple illness...placebo is a somewhat valid medicine.

Not if there is an implied but nonexistent cause-effect relationship. And especially if money changes hands. And most especially if a real treatment is passed up in favor of the placebo.

> Placebo can help alleviate discomfort and pain to some degree, because that is something the mind has some sway over.

The above sentence doesn't mean what you think it does. It starts out claiming that placebos work, then it undercuts its own premise.

The above claims about placebos only apply to real, genuine placebos, not cheap imitation placebos. :)
Interesting to hear that rsync.net is based on FreeBSD. Just from curiosity, why don't you use a linux distro? What benefits does FreeBSD offer for you compared to Linux distros. What disadvantages would you count. (I mean if you ever had a chance to make a comparison).
Are "the guys" the LLVM people or the Rust implementers?
There is a flaw in the obesity chart. If you will note, the highest obesity countries are actually based on measurements; the rest of them as self-reported. If you ask a person (especially a man) if they're obese, quite a few will say "no"[1]. Mixing different measurement techniques is a no-no, and makes for flawed conclusions.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
The license would live on without any BSDs around though - most new big projects seem to use BSD or a similar permissive license.
There is an unofficial API: http://www.hnsearch.com/api (Provided by the very search engine referred to in the OP, haha!)
We need it for conferences we sponsor just as other sponsors require it from PyCon. Requiring it from conferences taking our money, our logo and our name (nee: endorsement) means that protections are in place for our investment and community
Do you happen to have a summary of your story on the web somewhere? Not that you should feel obligated to share it, but if you have shared it before I would like to try to understand.
Tell HN:  My theory explaining the Fermi paradox
The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and humanity's lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations.

One common explanation is that all advanced civilizations develop nuclear capability at some point, and shortly thereafter wipe themselves out.

Here is my theory: Future technology and understanding is so unpredictable. I feel it is more likely that we will discover different dimensions of reality. Perhaps advanced civilizations don't even communicate in "our reality".

There are unpredictable phase shifts that happen in all complex systems, there's just no way for us to predict what advanced civilizations will look like, or how they communicate. Look at what's happening with the internet, and how that has changed our social interactions just in the past 10 years. Some people don't even leave their house anymore, they're literally living online.

Anyway, that's my theory. What's yours?
You have exactly the same legal protection you had in the past. Conferences are private events, and conference organisers have always asserted the right to exclude attendees for any reason.
Murder's also illegal in Denmark. Does that mean no murders occur?
A song played on 8 floppy drives controlled by raspberry pi
Orignal song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvxG3zl_WhU
>> Homeopathy has never kept anyone alive.

> I bet there are an awful lot of dehydration survivors that would disagree with you, there.

But those who survived dehydration didn't survive because of homeopathy, they survived because of the accompanying water. If an astrologer pulls someone out of a burning car, does that support the scientific standing of astrology?
You can fix your own body without visiting a doctor, and you can fix your own car without visiting a mechanic. Sometimes a doctor or a mechanic will fuck up, and sometimes those cases intersect with the cases where you could have fixed the problem yourself.

This is not an argument against either doctors nor mechanics.

You probably get dismissed as a quack when you suggest that all doctors do is "nuke your body with toxic chemicals". I would say that 90% of the times I have ever been to a doctor the doctor has either told me "walk it off" (read: let your body fix itself), or "here are some stitches, now walk it off". (And I am the sort of person that heavily leans towards ignoring the problem and avoiding doctor visits...)
Where does that demarcation line fall? Is there anything to consciousness besides the experiential phenomenon?

To illustrate: there is no such thing as the movie "It's a Wonderful Life", just a series of individual frames that our eyes and brains perceive as a whole unit only because of perceptual and cognitive limitations (basically, compression). We know far less of anything beyond the present moment - speaking of individual experience - than most believe. I posit that "consciousness" exists as nothing more than a cognitive compression artifact.
Isn't it also the case that while they may not have donated cash they have certainly donated code.

At least in some instances. Clang comes to mind.
Sheesh, there's just so much that's wrong, disingenuous, and outright hilariously silly about these couple of sentences that I hardly know where to begin. Let's see...

* You don't have a right to attend a private event. The organizers of any event - a conference, a concert, whatever - have the right to ask you to leave at any point for any reason. You are, in fact, more protected with a code of conduct in place because it articulates the process instead of leaving it up to the whims of the organizers.

* You don't have any right to due process or "legal protection"; the conference organizers aren't the police! They're not deciding what's "truth" or not; they're deciding whather to allow you to stay at an event they're responsible for.

* If you're talking about PyCon, it's hardly "a few local programmers". PyCon is a conference with a large staff, a budget of over a million dollars, and an established NPO (the PSF) behind it.

* If you can't trust the organizers of an event, then why the heck are you attending?

* People don't just randomly make up harassment. In reality, harassment is vastly underreported because of the way victims of harassment are routinely ignored, shamed, and blamed.

* Wanna know a really good way to not be accused of harassment? Don't harass anyone! If you find not being a harasser so hard, then yeah you probably shouldn't go to the event.
>That exactly WAS the GP's point about the difference, I think, and exactly what he said: There's no "vanilla Linux" you can run. There is a "vanilla FreeBSD" you can run. That's a huge difference.

Linux is the kernel, vanilla Linux would be the Linux mainline.

>That's NOT vastly exaggerated. While it is usually possible to do so, it is usually painful unless you start from a source package. If you have a binary rpm or deb and want to install it on a distro it was not intended for

The one you are responding to was talking about binaries, why are you conflating that with rpm/deb package formats? Like the aforementioned poster said, as long as dependancies are met there would be no problem running binaries across Linux distributions.
I posit that no distinction lies between "the sense of self" and "self". Where would you draw the line between these two instead?
7 Former Presidents, 10 Nobel Prize Winners, 1 Message: End The War on Drugs
If I create 1000 predictive models, with random parameter settings, some of those models will outperform others. In fact, the accuracy rankings of the models given a single hold-out validation set will form their own distribution. It is difficult, if not impossible, to tell if one model outranks another b/c it is actually better or just occupies a different place in that distribution due to the random properties of the hold-out set.

So, why do you believe this isn't happening when hundreds of people submit their models to be scored against a secret hold-out set? Is there any evidence that the hundreds of entries are forming a better distribution of accuracy scores than random models? Is there evidence the winners of these competitions truly have better models and don't just have a luckier placement in a random distribution of accuracy scores?
WRT b:

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=freebsd+v.s+linux (and g! doesn't help any more)

The "best" resource I could find between those two searches resulted in:

http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/FreeBSD_vs_Linux

I'm not sure of the quality of the results of that page.

Regardless, we've gone well beyond "a second of googling."

> Comments like the GP can alternatively be phrased...

Comments like yours can be phrased "I'm a hateful liar who reasons that unless you blindly accept certain opinions as fact, I'm going to assume that any questions is bigoted. I'll also knowingly require that you search using Google, claiming that you'll find an answer there, though when someone does search, it will immediately discredit my comment. After all, if it only took a second, I could have provided the link that answered the question."

So, by all means, provide the search we should have used that explains what and why the technical advantages of FreeBSD over various Linux distros. It only takes a second.
Respective linker flags are:

ASLR -> /DYNAMICBASE
DEP -> /NXCOMPAT

From Wikipedia:

Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server
2008 R2 have ASLR enabled by default, although only for
those executables and dynamic link libraries specifically
linked to be ASLR-enabled.

That's by default. You can also force ASLR to be applied to any app by installing EMET and configuring it respectively -

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30424

EMET also allows changing DEP protection from Opt-In to Opt-Out, which is obviously a good thing.

[1] ASLR -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomizat...

[2] DEP -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Execution_Prevention
"I think homeopathy is fine, and not harmful."

Extremely diluted water isn't harmful. Replacing real medicine with homeopathic treatments is.
> If this recording truly is public domain today, I should be able to type a transcript as a novel and sell it, right?

No, that is not what "public domain" means. A public-domain work is still properly attributed to its creator. A person can't take credit for it on the ground that it's in the public domain.
The real world is somewhere in the middle. Many people do excuse their own weaknesses by becoming the victim of everybody else's evil. It is important to recognize when you really are a contributing factor. Sometimes, you really are at fault.

On the other hand, I read this part and realized the OP had jumped the shark:

Someone was rude to me today? My fault. I could have lightened their mood beforehand.

It's your fault if you aren't psychic? It's your fault if others can't have common decency? No, at that point, you are looking for a way to say that you control the entire world. I completely agree with my parent's choice of wording: solipsism.

Spend time meditating and introspecting. Talk with objective third parties. It is important for you to learn when you screwed up and how to not screw up in the future.

But don't forget that people are agents unto themselves. Sometimes they do stupid, mean, and ignorant things. If you don't learn to forgive those actions, you will either carry a lot of guilt (How could I let my friend be mugged because I didn't catch an earlier flight home? It's my fault!) or a lot of anger (All muggers must die!). There is a peaceful middle ground that enables you to work on solving the systemic problems without idealizing away the smaller percentage of outright bad actors.

So, no, it's not your fault.
There are really huge problems with the entire current system. That is why so many people seek alternatives. When I turned to "alternative treatments", doctors were calling me crazy and denying me treatment. Had they offered me real treatment, I would have gladly taken it. This is not a journey I desired to make. Not at all.

But the problem with this being posted here is that the entire discussion will revolve around dismissing alternative medicine and not on what is wrong with the bigger picture that I and other people would consciously choose to take our chances on unproven methods rather than accept what little was offered us. I was in constant excruciating pain. If my own experiments had resulted in sudden death, I felt that was better than the slow torturous death modern medicine offers people like me.

I know you are a mathematician. I imagine this piece hits a nerve for you. But bashing alternatives doesn't fix the real problem and will help close off avenues of escape from a larger system which is not working. That larger failure includes conflating "health care" and "medicine" when they are not the same thing but it is hardly limited to that issue.

Thank you for replying.
Certainly not in the culture I identify myself with, but I'm sure there are plenty of countries where sexual harassment is accepted to some degree (if there was not, why would we even talk about implementing this code of conduct?)
Agreed. It was like reading a part of the 7 Habits book.
BeautifulSoup is in fact still actively maintained. “The current release is Beautiful Soup 4.1.3 (August 20, 2012).”

http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/

I hear it recommended the most among Pythonistas, and it's plenty clean and fast for my use. But if you're skeptical, I'd still look for a more up to date benchmark (or run your own) rather than rely on results from >4 years ago.
Quite so, but most people can control more than they give themselves credit for. Think again before you give up on some things.

You can effectively control the weather you get by moving to another city/country. The companies sending you checks are 100% in your control - it's your career choice.

Not sure why you'd want to control the people in the streets - sounds a wee bit tyrannical :-)
This is one way of enforcing these standards. Think of them as "interfaces" that everyone is exposed to and encourage to implement. It's up to you to go along with them or not, but for the benefit, sake, and sanity of your team members, it is recommended that you stick to them. If one doesn't and things start to get buggy or not compatible, then other would ask you why you didn't follow the implementation.

It is unfortunately that something like this has to be implemented because it is common sense, but if PyCon or any other organization has to be policing their attendees like children until the learn, then so be it.
If you have a problem with a market, like the cable industry, your first question should be 'Why is it the way it is?' not 'How do I disrupt it?'

Asking HN, for good sources that explain the economics of the cable industry or media distribution, or for a list of the key players in the space would have resulted in a much more positive response.

Asking HN about how YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, etc. successfully competed against established cable industry would probably have resulted in current or former employees and/or investors in those companies providing some direct insight.

But asking 'hey, how do I disrupt the cable industry?' is just lazy and resulted in the negative response it deserves.
Unfortunately there is no API for getting access to personal information on HN (i.e. comments I have made, or stories I've upvoted). You're relegated to scraping if you want that information.
As an American I found the update quite interesting. Americans have a 35.9% obesity rate versus 28.5% for the most obese European country.

I'd like to understand why that is, but would guess that the US obsession with cars, parking lots and suburbs is one reason. Another might be related to the fact that Americans tend to, on average, do more poorly, on standardized education tests, which could imply that we have more people here who are ill equipped to understand how things like nutrition, calories and physiology work.
Putting a wet blanket on someone who had gotten sick from a downpour is not homeopathy. Unless the wet blanket is, statistically speaking, less than a molecule in size.
Encouragement which builds up from experience is also a sort of intangible capital.

People are getting their feet wet for experience.
you are assuming people get put into a position overseeing X because they are competent in X, which is, most likely, a factor with minimal influence in the complex equation that determines who does what.

I mean, by definition someone who's specialization is "being a politician" can't have it as "being an expert of medicine & healthcare".
Speaking of ambitious ideas and 'middlebrow dismissal', I'd like to see the algorithmic dismissal detector that PG wrote about. I'm sure the denizens of HN know a thing or two about computational linguistics. Is this sort of thing (algorithmic detection of middlebrow dismissals) possible?
Well the ZFS is a particular case as it was deliberately licenced to be incompatible with Linux licencing as Solaris was suffering from competetion with Linux and Sun obviously didn't want to give away a competitive advantage to it's main competitor.
Excellent advice - of course everyone is sifting it through their own personal lences hence everyone perceives this advice differently.

Rather then debate the merits of working long hours, what I really liked is this

>> Lack of motivation fundamentally comes from fear — you are afraid to do things since you don’t think you can do them internally — which is 99% true.

I think that using this as starting point everyone shall ask thyself what projects has he started but not finished/abandoned and why - and look into the mirror...
In similar vein, there is cocotron - a framework that implements Cocoa (OpenSTEP), and other things - http://www.cocotron.org
speaking of this, there should be one. And a "http://Archive as well.

only a handful of topics make it to the top everyday, but the majority of content is high quality stuff, which if applied at a proper place would help many. What say?
A comparison of Linux and FreeBSD is a legitimate, interesting question, but I don't think this is the place to raise that issue.

The open-source community is strengthened by its diversity. Linux may be more popular, but that's no reason to weaken another, similar project by not supporting it financially. Personally, I use FreeBSD and I like it. I also know that Linux is available as an alternative, and I like to know that should I ever become dissatisfied, I have alternatives I can switch to. Supporting the FreeBSD Foundation is one way that you can feel safe in the knowledge that there'll always be an alternative to Linux should you become dissatisfied.

Please don't let one project be hindered by another project's success.
This stuff happens in all countries, okay? It's a real problem. It's not just "some countries."
In short, "It sucks, but it's the best there is right now".

This actually pertains to an awful lot of things in the modern world (democracy, for example). It's good to remember both sides of that sentence - if you're sick, seek modern medicine. But if you're a scientist/politician/practitioner, remember that there's a lot left to improve.
In the video, Prof. Widom mentions that the platform they are using now, Class2Go, has been developed at Stanford and is open source. A quick look at http://class.stanford.edu/ shows that it depends on external components - YouTube for video, and Piazza for forums - but it's good to have an open platform, and one of the aims is to avoid lock-in of content.
> when you start poking around you not only find out there is absolutely no evidence to back them up, but there is plenty of evidence that they man made.

You have no capacity to determine if something is true without the process of trial and error. This is the founding principal of the scientific mindset and is the basis of the scientific method. Form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, repeat.

How do you "test" a religion? Not with any feeble investigation by your primitive rational mind. You try the belief system.

If it makes you happier, if it makes you a better person, you've found a winning formula. If it gives you good results, you win. It is entirely irrelevant whether it passes some "truth" test concocted by your imagination.

It either has real, relevant results in your life or it doesn't. Religion is a way of life, a guide for living ... not merely a creation mythology.

If you bother asking, you will find the overwhelming majority of human beings on the planet get this, understand it, and will actually tell you just how it improves their lives.

Unfortunately, engineers seem to be brain-damaged in some specific way that prevents them from thinking in this manner. You need to work on that. It's not very scientific.
> Craig Thornton is a talented, hard-working kid

I think you're understating how successful of a chef he is. And being a successful chef is a lot about marketing.