skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "popular fad" aspect of string theory has certainly lost much of its luster, no question, particularly as far as the general public is concerned. (The early excitement about the theory in the 1980's was apparently rather over the top.) The fact that folks like Peter Woit and Lee Smolin were able to publish popular books about their distaste for string theory reflects that (and those books in turn did a lot to establish the "string theory is overrated" counter-meme).

But within actual physics departments, as far as I've been able to tell string theory holds much the same position that is has for many years: it's the direction that most people interested in pursuing a "theory of everything" seem to find most promising. (Plenty of physicists have other interests, of course, even within particle physics: the phenomenology involved in interpreting LHC data and predicting new phenomena to look for at that scale is a big deal these days, and string theory really isn't relevant to those questions.) As far as I can tell from the inside, that's primarily a genuine process of ongoing scientific judgement rather than pure groupthink.

As a string theorist, I can see to some degree why you'd say it reminds you of epicycles: I think most of us would agree that there's got to be some deeper underlying truth that would make the structures of string theory seem more unified and elegant. The difference between that and epicycles, at least to a string theorist, is that we're optimistic that string theory as we know it is a valid, well-defined approximation to the underlying theory, whatever form that may take. Epicycles, on the other hand, were (as I understand it) sort of a hack, without any intrinsic connection to the true heliocentric model.
I believe that vetoes are seen as a sign of political weakness in the modern system.
What Event Planners Can Learn From Instagram
please email tarballs to rektide+anongit@voodoowarez.com if you have code you have no aspirations for but wouldn't mind kicking out into the wild. i will eliminate author headers from the code and seed over p2p and make available. thank you for any sympathy you might have towards this request to let us syndicate your work.
That sounds very good, good luck! Why not use ZRTP, though?
Especially because of the content of his music, some of which is extremely progressive for the genre.
I wouldn't call Meraki a consumer product though. Their cheapest AP is $400 and you have to buy per/AP license at $150/year. Not something I'd put in my parent's house.
As you live in Australia you are, assuming citizenship, as much "Australia" as anybody else can claim to be.

Currently the only blocking happening all across Australia at the country level is that of Interpol listed actual child porn sites and that debate about whether or not that is the right approach is still ongoing - take part in it.

Should the US request the blocking of a non US site that is trading US copyrighted material but not breaking International law I wouldn't assume that Australia would comply with that request. iiNet has already declined to comply with US industry requests to rat out the free trade of US copyright material and various russian sites that charge for access to massive databases of US copyrighted music and movies haven't yet been blocked either.

I live in Australia, yes, I've also travelled the world extensively and I've first hand knowledge of just how backwards many countries are; I'd urge you to maintain your rage and nuture it to maturity and become engaged in Australian policy as that's all that prevents us from being as backwards as you think. Australia has problems, yes, but they are, with various exceptions such as Aboriginal health and community relations, pretty much first world problems.
I think it might be fairer to look at AMZN's price to revenue ratio and compare that with other big companies which have margins AMZN might reasonably have when they start trying to make profits. That would maybe give a reasonable understanding of expected upside. Looking at their profits when they aren't trying to make a profit is a little silly.

GOOG on the other hand I think is a fair enough comparison. Actually GOOG has pretty much failed at all their attempts to make money off anything but ads, which I consider kind of worrying.

PS FYI you posted this twice and the other one is marked dead. I recommend deleting it.
I've had a lot of fun playing Sokoban before.
I've been pretty impressed with TP-Link's stuff. Seems to be cheap and good.
BlockSum
http://infotech.rim.zenno.info/products/blocksum/en/
Tetris meets addition.
I'm not too familiar with the Austrian take on monopolies. Care to enlighten?

Mainstream economics does argue that monopolies enable excess profit, and I've never seen reason to question that part of it. But I'm genuinely curious and open to other models, even Austrian ones.
> They probably could have made this with an Apogee Mic and nobody would have known the difference.

I highly doubt that. Every single microphone is different and the high end mics (Neumann, Schoeps, AKG, even the Shure SM-7) all have unique tonal characteristics that make them desirable for different types of recordings. Vocals will sound noticeably different through a shitty integrated USB microphone than they will through a $25k U47 connected to an API or Neve preamp.
This looks more interesting as a competitor to the Parallella than the Raspberry Pi.
I'm loving MC Frontalot! Thanks for the pointer.
1. It's online gambling is easier to ban than affiliate marketing networks.

2. Attacking traditional vices like gambling can be a political slam-dunk. Just the same as counting the number of convictions under your belt to appeal to 'law and order' types of voters.

3. US casinos probably make some amount of political contributions. Banning foreign gambling sites cuts competition.
Okay, I understood it as the CA certificate was signed by a "trusted" root CA (one already present/trusted by user's browsers). Glad to hear I'm wrong. Thanks.
I've had significant problems with netgear kit.
He didn't say "and achieve the same results" he said "and nobody could tell the difference". I'm listening to the song on my macbook right now, there is no way I could tell the difference on this thing, ditto to most people.
I feel like coffeescript largely exists because of early mistakes in javascript, like no heredoc and places where they weakened the language to make it more convenient, like this one I just discovered today (with workarounds) http://stackoverflow.com/a/14510952/539149 and js has a ton of problems because it separated Array and Object, but overall I think it's still probably my favorite language right now. I like lua too but it's less pure, so aspects of it remind me of older languages like pascal.
Too Short is the original hustler. Like his music or not, 50,000 records and tapes SOLD (literally, not digital, send a link to a friend). That's not counting copying, which a lot of people I knew did from the record or a friends cassette tape. Takes guts to hop out on the block and get people to listen to your music.
My friend who went to Yale had a pretty bad back injury, and I heard that Aleksey actually fixed it. No idea if that's accurate, but it kind of adds a little character to the whole mythology of the guy.
I made ns_shiva for the original, so that should speak to how much I liked it. :) I am completely in love with the sequel. It is fantastic.

Here are the main differences:

* Commanding is much less stressful. Giving the marines their own resources and the ability to buy their own weapons means you can focus more of your attention on just coordinating attacks and getting upgrades.

* Stalemates are much less common. In NS1 taking down the turret factory would mean that there's an opportunity for everyone to rush it to take the rest of the base, now every room has a power node in a fixed location that powers down all the structures when it is destroyed. This makes it much easier to force a beacon, and to end the game once the marines are down to their last base.

* Each class is much better balanced. Excellent Fades are no longer the sole backbone of a good team. Lerks now are useful at all skill levels. Exosuits are extremely powerful but very vulnerable when alone.

* Gorges are now a nice-to-have when building instead of absolutely necessary. This means they can be on the front-lines more often.

* Graphics (obviously) and very dynamic environments. The infestation spreading is beautiful, and taking the power down makes for some very tense moments.
I don't think they're going wrong - its just a different model to Amazon's.

If you pare back the reason why Apple is a profit leader in the markets it sells to, you might come up with design, quality and brand. In the end the competitors can eventually catch up on design and quality. But brand is something that's build over a long time, and takes a long time to change.
There's the problem right there: "as long as". If I give you candy, I should have no say who gets to eat it - or even cook with it if he fancies. I don't like gifts with strings attached, so I don't cause others to suffer them.
It was a lot nicer when the dollar was strong and I got a pair of brand new TLM-170s off musiciansgear for $2500. The $1300 pair of KM-140s was nice, too. Those were the days, I guess.
Basically same problem different developer. There is an online community of developers who seem to enjoy devaluing another persons self worth.

Listen to your mother, she was right. If you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all. If you have someone do this to you, politely remind them that they have no right to devalue your life nor your self esteem. Give them some rope, let the people hang themselves.

Also realize the bigger the name, the bigger the ego.
To me, this highlights that the Congress has done so little successfully that they have barely ever even had the chance for Obama to disagree.

I'd like to see a similar chart of # of total bills signed into law by presidents. I'm guessing we'd see Obama to be similarly low for the same reason.
The FSF hasn't had developers for GNU projects on staff in decades, if I remember correctly. They aren't letting it languish, they're actively trying to give it exposure and find new hackers for it -- that's the point of it being a high priority project as far as I can tell.
Then it prints money.

Reminder: monopolies are totally legal.
Hmm, for me, chrome is a much bigger memory hog than FF. Its memory usage is somewhat more controllable because of the process-tab thing (which is probably also responsible for its greater memory usage), but while actually in use, it uses a lot more memory for a given set of tabs open.

Speedwise, they seem pretty much neck-and-neck, although chrome is faster at some of the advanced webgl 3d rendering stuff...

[The competition with chrome has been a great thing, as it seems to have lit a fire under the FF devs, and resulted in many, many, improvements in recent versions.]
I'm running the latest Toastman on an Asus RT-N66U. Great firmware and awesome hardware.
The WWW didn't exist until I was about your age in the story so most things I did before then were not recorded in any sense. I'd like to think that this lack of evidence made such situations less important in my head, as they only exist now in the Siberia of my mind, and surely only as distorted versions of their former selves.
There was a fair amount of AAA gaming support around that timeframe (say 1996-2000). Almost a golden age. Games based on the Quake engine were the most obvious example. Besides them, Loki ported maybe 20 games over to Linux. The ones I still have CDs around for somewhere are Railroad Tycoon 2, Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and Myth 2.
Jesus. Can someone explain why FDR's is so high? 635 vetoes, gah.
The Current State of Music
Or simply ask the major ISPs to block it. They are already opting into 6 strikes and throttling certain types of traffic (e.g. torrents). It wouldn't surprise me at all if they "voluntarily" (or really, voluntarily) blocked such sites.
I think it's interesting to compare this to Rebecca Black. "Friday" became viral mostly as a mockery, but she seemed to take it all in stride and make the most of it. I was actually really impressed with that. In her case, the shares/retweets/etc. weren't hurtful to her in the end.
How much bandwidth does Antigua have? Depending on whether they can delegate their "piracy" privilege to companies in other countries, that might be the limiting factor.
Amazon's goal is to be a bigger version of Visa, taking a tiny slice of a ridiculous large pie.

Anyone thinking that they are going to wind up as the Standard Oil of retail is going to be hugely disappointed. First they have plenty of quality competition that isn't going to just keel over and die. Second their tax advantages are gone long term. Third, as the internet erases frictions, Amazon is just another middleman begging to be cut out of the picture if he takes too big of a cut. Fourth Amazon has to deal with real antitrust in Europe and protectionism in Asia. Fifth even US antitrust wakes up and does something from time to time.
Can you give a high level overview of your stack?
a wire protocol for named context patches: you'd do better not writing your own wire serialization format, and instead adopting an existing transport: websockets, stomp, and MQTT all strike me as sufficiently stupid simple & end to end enough, or anything from thrift to zmq to flume for transport would be slightly more inter-linkable than your "length/json-payload" ad-hocracy.

it's JS but you might enjoy node-webworker, which uses websockets to implement inter-Node.js message passing: your specific case is debugger being an outbound messaging port, emitting context programmatically.
| interpol list of serious child porn sites

If they are so serious why are they allowed to operate? Are there really jurisdictions that allow them to operate with impunity? Or are these sites really in legal grey zones[1]?

[1] e.g. Country A says that you must be 21+ to appear in porn, but Country B says that you only need to be 18+.
Twisting the definition so it benefits one person is not helpful here.
Yes. If you accidentally say "stealing" the word police will be all over you, but for some reason the misconception that downloading and uploading are equivalent goes uncorrected.
Vine Just Made Twitter A Stronger Social Network
It does this for me too... I use Ghostery. The google+ & analytics requests fail, so you end up calling "gapi.plusone.go();" on an undefined gapi.
Just want to say that this is super useful for me. Pinboard is a great bookmarking site to do this with since it's a paid service I find I trust the pin-er more than, say, the average StumbleUpon user. Kudos.

What are you plans for the future / Why won't you give me a way to sign up for future updates and news!?!
Yup. Just noticed the extra post. Thanks.
I think the difference here is that Antigua is going to sell the pirated material, while usually it's distributed without fees. It's hard to say how successful such effort would be for Antigua (competing with the same free pirated content), but some can support it just to make the point.
Another blackeye for Carmen Ortiz. Heh.
Actually, there is a physical mechanism in cellular life that sets a lifespan limit, by roughly constraining the number of replications most differentiated cell lines in a body can support. Thus the correlation between slower metabolism and longer lifespan. The 'number of heartbeats' observation is a consequence of that correlation.

The mechanism is a little too complicated to describe accurately here. You can find a great deal on it with google search terms "telomere fraying" or "telomere fuse".

Very roughly, every chromosome has a 'telomere' structure at each end that acts to prevent the DNA double helix strands from 'fraying'. In the single cell embryo these structures are several thousand bases long. In every cell division after that, some random number of the telomere bases fail to be replicated. So the telomeres get shorter and shorter with each replication. In a cell where the telomere is all gone on a chromosome, genes at the end of that chromosome get progressively destroyed - thus (depending whether it's an active gene) wrecking some aspect of the cell's metabolism. With many different chromosomes (eg 26 in humans), 2 ends per chromosome, shifting gene arrangements, huge statistical populations of cells with individual telomere failures, and multiple lines of differentiated cells all replicating at differing rates, it's no wonder 'aging' shows such complex and variable symptoms.

I suspect if someone did a study of multiple species examining embryonic telomere lengths, average telomere loss per cell replication, replication (metabolic) rate, and average lifespan, there'd be a function of those factors giving a much more precise connection than 'number of heartbeats'.
RebelMouse Hires Talents To Build Its Content, Partnerships
I can't really answer this question.

The two major areas I can think of are health care and capital equipment.

Health care because surgeries and even basic procedures can be really expensive, especially for the uninsured. Already we can see hair transplant robots [1] that take the cosmetic doctors almost entirely out of the picture and I'm sure surgery robots are being developed. I don't see how this kind of industry can create more jobs than it eliminates. However, better education and awareness of chronic illnesses caused by lifestyle I think would help free up hundreds of billions of dollars that would then stay with the consumers (or non-healthcare corporations which might then just hold on to it).

If you decrease the cost of capital equipment by automating their production (aka, by making automation easier and cheaper), it will allow many more people to buy them and drive their price down further because of increasing volume. This could then lead to a diaspora of small time manufacturers and service providers who replace large entities, become more local, and drive down the prices of everything through competition. The consequences here would be wild and unpredictable. Maybe the sum generated economic activity would be much greater than the whole (as it often is with manufacturing industries), but we can't say that for sure because of the limited value add that these manufacturers can provide over their equipment (as it currently is with manufacturing...). The other consequence would be the devaluation of the equipment causing a devaluation of the service contracts, which would probably lead to more automation through modularity, machine learning, and data driven remote diagnostics of equipment.

But honestly all that above is wild speculation. The future is damn near impossible to predict and I think the presence of economic incentives going in all different directions for all parties involved just makes it a lot more uncertain.

[1] http://restorationrobotics.com/
Human minds are much more diverse than most people accept or realize. For example, consider these comments from someone who has no visual imagination: http://lesswrong.com/user/lindagert/overview/

Also see: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Typical_mind_fallacy
I briefly worked for Barracuda support a few years ago. I don't know how they market or publicly document the boxes, but it seemed common knowledge that we had ssh access. None of the customers I talked to blinked an eye. Most of them outright expected it. So I'm not sure it's so much "backdoor" as "feature".
Whoa, this is the first time i'm hearing of "Factual" but playing around i'm impressed! There was a side project I had a while ago, which i eventually gave up because I couldn't source some data. These guys found it!
Microsoft reports record revenue, mixed earnings
> Sometime, maybe 20 years from now, you are going to be able to say "I was there when everyone was figuring out copyrights and patents and stuff."

I love your optimism that this issue will be resolved in 20 years, but I don't share it. In 20 years patents issued today will barely be expiring and copyrights issued today will have ~90 years left, depending on the author's date of death.

I find the conversations you mention interesting, but frustrating, since most deep philosophical questions regarding law are resolved not by the moralists or philosophers but by the lobbyists and the pre-lobbyist politicians.
The girl from the creepy ex-girlfriend meme actively capitalized on her stardom. It seems that the sociological phenomenon of involuntarily going viral is becoming more well-understood.
I have no problem with lockin to specific app stores, consoles that only run approved games etc. A company can sell what they like; it's their product

... but ... once purchased the owner should be free to do what they like with it. Jailbreak, hack, whatever. It's their physical device to do with what they like. Sure, this may not suit some business models (like consoles sold at a loss) but too bad. Those companies are free to make hacking/jailbreaking said device as dificult as they like, but if someone can bypass that then good. I don't believe the goventment should be involved at all, on either side
Beginner's Guide to PyCon 2013 Part II
Personal observation: data makes history much more interesting. FDR's big lead compared to other presidents among them. Quick searching turns up only minimal information on the context surrounding FDR's vetoes (e.g. Wikipedia[1]), but Google has a book hit with a whole chapter that's on-point[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
[2] http://books.google.com/books?id=B4cwTEJIUBQC&pg=PA171&#...
Why sarcastic, the question is sincere. It's nice to see Valve pushing for more native Linux games, but on the other hand I'm not using Steam because of its DRM. So that's why I asked if it would be possible to buy the Linux version somewhere outside Steam. Buying CDs in the age of digital distribution sounds crude.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5113557
Aaron Swartz on the Open Library [2007]
Tim O'Reilly: "Why we spun out Maker Media"
The reason there are no vetoes anymore is because congress is basically told it's going to happen beforehand, and both sides can then do the math on whether the veto will be sustained.

I think Congress used to be more unruly, unpredictable, and less partisan, so as things got more cut and dried over the years, vetos just stop actually occurring as a practical matter, unless there are points to score politically by making the president go through the motions.
"Pirating" is the act of acquiring a copy of a copyrighted work in a way that is contrary to existing law. "Downloading" Copyrighted works can be done completely legally, the simplest example being to buy a copy of a movie on itunes and transferring it to your phone or tablet. This is a 'third' way of legally downloading content which is sort of like buying property with a tax lien on it, the government (in this case the WTO) has stepped in, set aside the rights of the property owner, and is sanctioning an action to make whole the person or entity who is wronged.

So the WTO sets aside the rights of US Copyright holders and allows Antiqua to sell those works, allowing it to recover damages that the US Government has failed to pay. The government could "pay" the $21M fine and the WTO would rescind this, but if they do that then they show that they are wrong in denying access to the US market for Antiqua gambling interests. If they don't pay it, they are bound by membership in the WTO to abide by its decisions. It is a delicious paradox.
MAKE Division Spins Out from O'Reilly Media as Separate Company
Share price is supposed to reflect growth potential. The skepticism around APPL at the moment reflects the suspicion many of us have that Apple's phenomenal growth spurt has peaked.
well, FDR was the only President elected to more than two terms (and some pretty historically significant terms). Grover Cleveland might be more of an outlier, especially as both his two (non-consecutive) terms appear much further from the mean of his era.

EDIT: wikipedia has a section on Cleveland's vetos: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover_Cleveland#Vetoes