skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You realize that "lack of bias" comes from the thesaurus, not the definition of the word, right?

What distinction do you think you're making? Theasuri list synonyms and antonyms. Also you're mistaken:

Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/objective

Quotation: "not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased: an objective opinion."

Source: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/objective

Quotation: "undistorted by emotion or personal bias".

> If you want to use an unusual definition of a word ...

I just proved that I am using the definition of the word. If you're not happy with what dictionaries have to say on this issue, then begin a campaign to change the meaning of "objective".

> There is no point disputing definitions.

So stop doing that. I'm not disputing the accepted definition, I'm simply posting it. Copy, paste.
How immigration reform is the latest battle for gay rights
Also, do not send file:/// to anyone using iMessage on their computer.
The key paragraph comes toward the end:

Reid also said binational gay couples should be allowed the same family preference privileges under the bill that heterosexual couples would receive, although this might make passage more difficult in the Republican-controlled House.
There should be no copyrights, period. They are based on the idea of most people working in coalmines while 2 people are out there 'innovating' because they had rich parents and the fantasy in which we are all unique and all have unique ideas. Nowadays we can all be 'innovators'; or rather, we have enough wealth to be able to afford not spending all of our times slaving on our hands and knees and give our brains a little stroll in the park coming up with 'creative' ideas.

Lets face it, we are not unique and every idea you have was already had by someone else, or someone is having it right now, ideas are sluts that way. A big software project is just a stack of ideas. Rather than having to reinvent everything, and risk plagiarising anyway, lets just accept that the way we have come so far as humans has been to build on knowledge created by others.
Woz has also been out of the picture in Apple since before the Mac. He's been an outsider for close to 30 years, and has publicly stated that he was not close to Jobs.

It's not clear that his involvement means much in terms of making it an accurate portrayal.
Elementary OS - a blatant copy of OS X
This is wrong on so many levels. Psychology uses indirect measurements of cognitive/behavioural phenomena just like particle physicists. This idea of "real" versus "pseudo" (or "soft", as some people say) science is intuitive but does not hold up to real scrutiny. All scientific measurement is an approximation, an abstraction, etc., and good theories/measurements give us the opportunity to explain/model/predict phenomena without holding it in our hands. Has a string theorist held a vibrating string? Did Einstein travel the speed of light?

The problem with comparing p-values between psychology and particle physics is statistical. In psychology, there may be 2 groups of 30 participants being examined with a crucial manipulation. So there's ONE Fisher-type statistical comparison with a relatively few degrees of freedom (because there aren't millions of subjects). In particle physics, they make millions of comparisons (same with genetics studies, etc.) which, by random chance, will result in many statistically significant findings at the 5% level. So they use incredibly low p-values to restrict these Type 1 errors, and still have frequent unreplicable, false findings (see http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=181647). Discussing p-values as if smaller p-values == better science is incorrect, and does not reflect either field or their statistical contexts accurately.

Read this article. It's a model that makes testable predictions about cognition. It's one of tens of thousands. http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/Gentner8...
Why I made GitGutter
Gvim has a lot of awkward hangups, in my opinion. Selecting text is still weird, there's no context menu, etc. It's vim outside of a terminal, which is great, but most full-fledged graphical editors take better advantage of their environment than Gvim does.
It just occurred to me that Evernote has become, for me, a form of Lifestreams. I use the app on my droid to capture lots of pictures, scan important paperwork and documents, record interesting and potentially useful content on the web, etc. My only issue with Evernote is a small concern that all of my personal computing devices use SSD drives, and Evernote'ing a lot of stuff makes me hope for more and more storage capacity.
Reading C++ code always gives me a weird feeling something is inherently wrong with the language. Header files containing nearly all the implementation because that's the only place where you can define templates is so odd... (https://code.google.com/p/cpp-btree/source/browse/btree.h)
Moon+ Reader booted from Google Play Store due to questionable piracy claims
IOS Developers:  Philosophy First
Whoops, yes of course. Still pretty easy to setup.
Accessing vim from ssh is a definitely a benefit for those who use it; especially with GNU Screen since you can suspend, resume or even share a terminal session with someone else.)

I do like sublime text when I'm working with others, so they can take the driver's seat from time to time. But when I'm working alone, I stay in the terminal because screen+vim allows me to stay in a single environment for all of my work.
Open access journals, based on authors paying $1,000-$3,000 to publish a paper, are going to be a temporary stepping stone on the way to the decline of the journal.

We need new reputation metrics to encourage the sharing of data-sets, videos, code, and generally the full range of a scientist's output. 75% of the world's scientific data doesn't get shared because the rewards aren't there for the scientist to share it. Journals aren't going to start publishing data-sets (or code, or videos, or blog posts), and so we need new reputation metrics, and reward systems, to encourage scientists to share this kind of information.

The other problem with the journal system is that the peer review system is slow and surfaces the opinions of only two or three scientists about a given paper. If you have a community of 20,000 people in the DNA sequencing research community, asking two people what they think about a paper is not going to deliver a statistically significant result. Furthermore the typical time-lag for the system to surface those opinions is 12 months.

We need a more robust peer review system which surfaces opinions from the entire scientific community in real time. Reputation metrics are the key to building that system. We need to provide the rewards for scientists to share their comments on papers, so they can build their reputations off the insights they share on each other's papers.
You can't switch to Verizon or Sprint with a GSM phone.
> because Capitalism is a system that has put millions/billions of people out of misery and starvation throughout the world

And meanwhile, it has systematized the misery and starvation of millions and billions of people itself, while – cruelly – being so opportunistic, so seemingly advantageous to the resourceful individual, that it teaches us to despise those who suffer, to see them as somehow beneath us. The contempt that was once the property of those few at the very, very top has become democratized, so that we may all join in in feeling it.

I'm not purely anti-capitalist, but your dismissal of the possibility that capitalism could have possibly done anything as horribly wrong to the world as its critics claim is pretty one-dimensional itself. There's a good argument to be made that capitalism hand-in-hand with the mass-production mindset of the Industrial Revolution led to a society in which the value of individuals is reduced rather than enhanced, and that this is one of the central crises of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Your abrupt dismissal of that possibility doesn't make it go away; it just makes you seem like you don't know what you're talking about.
A Shakespearean scholar who doesn't remember any of the works of Shakespeare? Does he have some kind of memory problem? He's spent years of his life examining the works of Shakespeare in detail, reading around the subject, probably watching play after play, travelling to see new interpretations being put on, and he can't quote me a single sonnet? Either he's incompetent, or he has some kind of memory problem.

Now extend to algorithms. I wouldn't hire a programmer like this Shakespearean scholar.
The business models that will emerge in science will be as diverse as the ones on the web at large. There will be advertising businesses; freemium models; and enterprise sales models.

I'm not sure who the author thinks the customers for these services will be. Perhaps universities will pay for access but I guarantee you faculty and students will not. I also can't imagine advertisers paying much to target academics, a small and not particularly unique demographic. In short, I just don't see how these sites hope to generate any revenue. Academia is an incredibly difficult market to get money out of and even if you're going to sell at the university level you're talking about a massive sales effort that is going to take years to yield results (think Blackboard). As other have said here journals are going to end up being open-access and free. Many of them will probably end being run by well endowed university presses (e.g. MIT press).
"For those that deny the possibility of spiritual experience within a naturalistic world view. A lot of atheism that is public today misses empathy with religious experience."

Aldous Huxley, "The doors of perception". Warning: it's debunking the experience. Just as modern science starts to explain (and reproduce) why/how people are seeing "the light at the end of a dark tunnel" when they have near-death experience.

Let say it puts many things into perspective.

Btw I'm not an atheist, I'm more of a militant agnostic in the: "I don't know, and you don't either" style ; )

Regarding atheists lacking empathy: for centuries atheists have been tracked down and exterminated and there are still religious people, today, calling them atheists "disciples of Satan" and calling for their extermination.

So at least give them some credit if they lack "empathy" with those that have relentlessly been purchasing them.
Brilliant!

I was just asking about that! http://travel.stackexchange.com/q/11620/

I hope you have plans for implementing it in Europe sometime!
ST also has split window support.
http://d2wwfe3odivqm9.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012...
or

http://d2wwfe3odivqm9.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012...

etc. You can even define custom layouts.
Not to mention the fact that diamond is very flammable, being 100% pure coal. Any fire in such a building would devour it within minutes.
Very cool. Can you support Canada?
I thought the international top 20 equal the U.S. top 20.

Seriously, think about it, it just cannot make sense. Nobel price winners come from all countries. A university does not need to belong to the U.S. Ivy League to have smart alumni.

However... The Ivy League is really expensive and well-known. In fact people like George W. Bush studied there. It is almost like a self-amplifying loop.
If you turn the data off on say, an iPhone, it's as good as say, an iPod touch with calling capabilities, which is really all a lot of people want.
Yes, I get that's the sales pitch, but you didn't address gamification at all, which is what you're promoting, and will positively harm science, not improve it.

In addition, peer-review at well-run open access journals, which are the model I think we should be moving towards, does not take anywhere near 12 months, and in CS there are no publication fees (I gather this differs in biology). I typically get very well-thought-out reviews which help to improve my papers in about 6-8 weeks, and if accepted, publication is completely free of charge. And, it's becoming increasingly common to circulate preprints ahead of submission, on places such as the arXiv or at conferences or workshops, to get the feedback of a larger proportion of the community before publishing the final version of the paper.

I agree peer review does not settle the correctness of a paper; it's a system for ensuring a high-quality discourse, not to publish only papers which are the last word on a subject. That's what reply papers, replication studies, etc. are for. I am skeptical that attaching a bunch of points and badges to the discourse is going to improve the quality of that discourse, and suspect it will harm it. I'd rather look at how to improve the discourse by improving the journals. But that won't make money for VCs, so I'm not surprised that we're only seeing it from nonprofit organizations like JAIR and PLoS.
Free Quebec!
Why do people accept these stupid patents?
It's a testament to the power of media that so many people not involved in the military automatically bequeath them with such impenetrable technical capability and diligence. One of my best friends served as a sniper but had slighty less than 20/20 vision. So they had a military surgeon fix that up and now, several years later, my friend is wearing glasses. It's not that this was substandard care, but that for someone who already completed elite training, they opted for nothing-special care.

So why should we expect great diligence when it comes to building informational websites. Does anyone remember the ease with which Bradley Manning performed his hack*?

edit: I think I'm getting downvoted because people disagree that Manning "hacked" something. I don't know why there is disagreement here...he himself disclosed the methods he used to get over the "air gap". Just because those methods were trivial doesn't undercut my point, in fact, it underscores my point that the military's information security is not without flaws:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning#Diplomatic_cabl...
Sorry, pico/nano.
Hmm...It did not work for me. It says flight from New York to Orlando is just $128 but when I clicked to buy it - it sent me to Kayak and it was $210.

Great idea tho...
You don't hate Java. You hate the decisions that ultimately led you to working with it. :)

(Joke)
Show HN: Wtf should I hack this weekend? (from MHacks)
> and the primary reputation metric in science is being published in prestigious journals, such as Nature, Science, and The Lancet.

Absolutely not. The primary metric is citations.

Where do people get these ideas?
As much as I'm happy with my T-Mobile experience I'm not sure I'd call them nice. According to Consumer Reports Verizon is the clear leader in customer service overall, with T-Mobile and AT&T not that different for most people.

What separates T-Mobile is that they're much less evil. Things like making pre-paid cards easy, giving you a discount if you're not on a plan, not going to bat in Congress for SOPA etc. They may be stupid or unfeeling sometimes, but they never seem to be actively opposed to one's freedom like the other big carriers are.
Secure per-site passwords with no encrypted blob
Capitalism has also annihilated entire species from the face of the Earth and is a leading, driving force in causing global climate change. Summarizing it as having put billions of people out of misery is not doing it justice.
Paul Kedrosky on what’s gone wrong at Apple
Isn't "burned" a superlative?
Is there an objective way to measure the flexibility and expressiveness of programming languages?
Just to let you know, #1 is somewhat insulting, since you don't know how the implementation works on the backend. Perhaps the entire system is written with the diamonds spawning first. If you read the code and found that it would be easy, I apologize, but it also wouldn't hurt to mention that.
> I don't think anyone will be confused because suddenly YAML.load doesn't execute arbitrary code.

An example of where people would be confused because YAML.load doesn't _instantiate arbitrary objects_ (which is what it really does, which results in ability to 'execute arbitrary code' as a poorly thought through side effect) -- is people using ActiveRecord::Base.serialize . Which would become broken if you were serializing any objects that weren't string, hash, integer, array.

While we've realized that allowing de-serialization of arbitrary objects ends up being incredibly likely to result in 'allowing execution of arbitrary code' -- referring to the problem simply as the latter confuses about the nature of the problem and the efficacy of various fixes.
Ask HN and PG: Views on parent companies
I was wondering about parent companies, specifically from an investor's perspective.

Companies like Atlassian own a lot of what could be deemed as separate companies (JIRA, HipChat, BitBucket, etc). Say for instance an investor only wants to invest in HipChat. Would Atlassian have a separate legal entity for HipChat that allows that investor to only invest in that product, or is the investor forced to invest in the parent company and all of their products?

If you have a lot of products, would you list them on a site like AngelList separately or only list the parent company?
That isn't irony.
Thanks for the reference. I enjoyed reading some of the reviews on Amazon that summarized the book.

Edit: I just bought the book.
CP - Children’s Privacy | BCP Business Center
Did you actually read the comment you replied to? It doesn't base anything at all on said productions; it was just a cute way of saying lack of exposure to US police.
Politicians won't care because corporations own them.
What is exactly the problem with "(...), woman claims" ? She IS a woman, isn't she?
Show HN: WTF should I hack this weekend? (From Mhacks)
As a Drupal dev of several years, my team recently started working on a rebuild of our sites (magazines/blogs) in a custom node.js framework.

I appreciate certain notions embedded in Drupal, still: abstracting away technical requirements, flexible data models (content types), huge number of pre-existing modules that cover a tremendous range of cases. Still I found the modules mostly served as guides to create our own custom solutions, and less as plug-in-play options. I was really able to build some good functionality, abstract enough for the core elements to be shared between 6 websites, with superficial theme-level changes for each.

That said, anything awesomely written performed so abysmally that the great work really felt like it was a waste in the end. In that sense, Drupal strikes me as a true dead-end. The basic heart of the app, and elements of the philosophy make a beast that is bad for anybody with skill who wants to feel good about what they've done. Other criticisms would be the excessive integration of administrative-type functionality with end-user functionality; an almost incomprehensible (Fields) system for building custom data extensions; and the big one for so many here, the tight-coupling of the database with the code everywhere, which is part of what makes it so slow and a nightmare to develop with.

As to job security; I suppose I have that, and I often get offers to work on Drupal projects beside my main employment, but I find the work so lacking in joy that I need to charge punitive hourly rates.

For a certain type of project I'd definitely choose Drupal over Wordpress. Still, I wish there was some middle-ground. A more performant CMS, ready-to-go for small-to-medium size vanity or content projects, that doesn't make the insane compromises Drupal does to be "user-friendly" (read: code-averse).
My own solution is to have two different passwords for everything - one for banking and credit cards, another for crap like twitter/linkedin. I haven't changed my passwords for years (no point really, as you're likely to have the breaking as soon as they get your password).

I think there are risks with all solutions to the password problem.
Isn't it obvious that the departure locations need to be sorted? Or do people who want to go somewhere now not care from where they leave?
Yes and no. The Bologna Process, as I understand it, is a harmonisation of academic qualifications designed to allow someone with a degree in Italy to be qualified to do a PhD. in the Netherlands, etc. I'm talking more about a FOSS-style curriculum that doesn't necessarily address economic arguments, but acts as a basis for what modern European school children should know and learn. Some common cultural grounding that clearly states an accumulated sum of knowledge and learning techniques that defines what it means to be 'educated'.
The Bible, boring? I mean, it drones on with boring passages sometimes, but the stories are far from boring. I'd say terrifying, sickening, tragic at times.

I'll bump your Feynman Lectures (watch the videos), and add everything else (his books). Even laypersons can understand him.

Feynman wrote some lectures on computation too which has some gems in it. http://books.google.com/books/about/Feynman_Lectures_On_Comp...

I will try your William James The Varieties of Religious Experience. I feel it is one of the problems that works against a wider adoption or acceptance of atheism that there is no "community"

I keep trying to finish Pepy's Diary, but so far I've failed. http://www.pepysdiary.com/

With regard to The Prince, I was advised that there are many translations and most are not done well. YMMV. Unfortunately, I can't remember which one my philosopher friend recommended.
Peter Joseph on resource-based economies
I disagree with your second point. I manage a financial services portal that uses what looks like this same system (from RSA). We deployed it to satisfy regulatory requirements. Any time there is a hiccup in the system (such as RSA's servers going down or slow) we are flooded with calls asking if it is safe to login. Our users are not tech-savvy, and many are 40+.
No, not "objective", because languages fill different roles, and it is the language's role that determines its "flexibility and expressiveness" for that specific purpose. This means comparisons cannot be based on shared criteria.
The Hairdresser
Idea #9. Build a device that can verbalize our thoughts. Something like a helmet that captures brain activity and translates it into spoken language. Next time I'm having an epiphany I don't need to rush to an input device (pen and paper or touch screen or keyboard) and lose half of it on the way there. Not to mention the potential of having our dreams recorded for our pleasure. Plus we could communicate with disabled people, from mutes to those in comas.
If you had a bacteria and its descendant thousands of years younger - the younger would wtfpn its predecessor.

The same applies to pests and their targets. There is a continuous arms race between attacker and victim. Any combination of older variations of same creatures would play out in favor of younger creature/plant.

I read somewhere that it is pretty much the same between sexes. A man of 2000 years ago would possibly be unable to impregnate todays woman (e.g.: www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090908125137.htm)
Acer launches its first smartphone with Intel processor in Asia
This is true. Pathogen, a vim package manager, is mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

Although not as smooth as Pathogen, installing most vim scripts is as easy as extracting the download into your .vim directory.
Nazis are on the dark side of the moon. Duh!
PiceBOT Crimeware Kit targeting Latin America Banks - Hacking News
A post criticizing MongoDB for being "broken" goes down? I believe it is.
I've tried them and I found them too constraining. In Vim I can split any window vertically or horizontally just with a command, without ever having to reach for a menu. Also, with the Zoom plugin I can fullscreen any of these, and then go back to the split. I'm pretty sure that Sublime has really good split support, I guess I'm just spoiled by the plethora of options that Vim offers.