skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This is just untrue. When presented with a hugely precise and successful theory that has never been demonstrated wrong in even the slightest degree, that is certainly evidence (not proof, but evidence) towards whatever claims that theory makes.

Nonsense -- perfect nonsense that the history of science repeatedly falsifies.

1. Science is empirical -- it must be. If it's not empirical, it's not science.

2. GR succeeded with every challenge that was put before it until it was compared to quantum theory, at which point it failed. Your position is that, because it had passed any number of difficult tests until then, it should have been assumed to reflect reality in all respects.

But this is not how a scientist approaches theories and experiments. Any aspect of a theory that has not been tested, is assumed to be false until there is evidence to support it.

The ether theory of the 19th century was successful until it failed one crucial test. The Phlogiston theory was successful until it failed one crucial test. The Ptolemaic theory of orbital mechanics seemed correct until Galileo looked through his telescope.

All scientific theories are assumed to be false until there is evidence to support them, then, after evidence supports them, they are assumed to be perpetually falsifiable by new evidence. An unfalsifiable theory is not a scientific theory.

> If you don't understand this, then you don't know what the word "evidence" means.

Science is not law. Learn about science.

> When presented with a hugely precise and successful theory that has never been demonstrated wrong in even the slightest degree ...

You need to learn about quantum theory, which falsifies GR. Start here:

http://library.thinkquest.org/04apr/01330/currentphysics/con...

The present enthusiasm for superstring theory is that it might -- might! -- replace both GR and quantum theory, with a more comprehensive theory that would resolve the conflict between the two earlier theories.
Play by Your Own Rules
Well that should be true more or less with Steam. With the exception of mobile, you'll only have to buy a game once to play it on your Windows, Linux or Mac PC, or on your Steambox console.

But I agree, and I also expect to see much nicer games when mobile hardware has gotten a bit more powerful, and most of it supports OpenGL ES 3.0, and developers can just make the same OpenGL ES 3.0 game across Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac.
http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/106...

Harry Yeide. Fighting Patton: George S. Patton Jr. Through the Eyes of His Enemies

Patton was also a keen student of translated German military literature, such as the World War I memoirs of Hans von Seeckt, the chief of staff of the German 11th Army, and Adolf von Schell’s Battle Leadership. According to military historian Harry Yeide, Patton’s style of commanding comes close to the German concept of Auftragstaktik, or mission-type orders: In German, whereas ein Befehl is a direct order, eine Direktive, a directive, is something broader and less detailed, where the commander states what he wants to achieve but leaves it up to his men how to go about it.

“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity,” runs a famous Patton quote. On meddling generals, he noted, “The tactics belong to battalion commanders. If generals knew less tactics, they would interfereless.”
CALLING ALL QUADCOPTERS PLEASE FILM THE BAY LIGHTS TONIGHT
http://thebaylights.org/
Very cool find!

But wow From an advertising standpoint that brochure made me cringe.

You can tell neither sides heart is in it - the cartoons are stiff and the corporate copy interspersed feels so forced and out of place - ouch. The end product feels almost like a parody of how terribly out of sync corporate marketing language is with "outsider" comics.

The "dorm" poster, on the other hand, is awesome.
Wonder if they just reused bits of now dead Google Accelerator...
In this day and age:

maintain a happy flock of chickens/cows/turkeys,
and makes sure it stay healthy and in appropriate
size

is practically non-existent. E.g. even "free range/cage free" chickens:

- Have their beaks burned off because they live in crowded conditions where they will attack and main / kill each other.

- Are sorted male from female as chicks, where the males are then immediately killed in bulk. The 'industry standard' way to do this is to put them all in garbage bags to suffocate them, or to toss them all into a wood chipped en masse[1].

[1] Note: Even the chicks sold to people raising chickens in the city go through this process. E.g. in Portland, you can only raise 6 hens on your property. Roosters are not allowed.
> Case in point: pointer punning. Somebody takes a 'char ', writes some stuff through it, then casts it to an 'int ' and starts reading that stuff back.

That's only a problem when the "stuff" is indeed machine-specific bytes and not something that has type tags already. That happens when you're writing binary data from memory and reading it back in again, and mmaping files, neither of which is portable C code. There are some rules about ints being a larger number of storage units than chars in the C standard, which Vacietis does violate (everything aside from arrays and structs is 1 storage unit), but aside from that the two use cases I mentioned aren't actually required to be supported by C compilers, and they're surprisingly not frequent.
The big issue is usability/convenience. Gmail and Facebook are just so much more comfortable to use than open source alternatives. In my opinion the whole open source movement is way too much focused on features and not on easy functionality. Otherwise PGP emails would have become a universally adopted standard.

Unfortunately my only hope is on services such as Mega and their ambition to venture out in something such as becoming a paid email provider. Maybe they are able to combine privacy and convenience in an appropriate way.
Thanks! We had been practicing on test servers and so we had the commands ready to be repeated, but you're right -- for reproducibility, a script would have been the way to go.
I quit my well-paid, normal, boring job two weeks ago because I realized I fell into this kind of trap. It's been just two weeks and I already cut my spendings in half - no more expensive stuff when cheap would suffice, no more electronic toys which have zero ROI, no more spending just to make myself feel better. No more buying stuff because I'll be traveling a lot soon and just won't be able to take it all with me. I actually ended up putting lots of stuff on eBay because I realized I won't need it anymore.

When you get a paycheck every month, there is zero motivation to save. When you know there'll be no paycheck, you finally get your brain going and you start inventing ways to make money instead of slaving away.
Cool auto-fill (easter eggs?) in Google drive
Or even a user interface which is not totally alien to anyone under 30 :)

I am 21 and the game interface is not alien to me!
They should call it Sim Neighborhood. That's more like it.
When Product/Market Fit Fails
The vast majority of those cases apply to topic-oriented internet forums. Real-name policies are obviously not a good idea there.

In what situation would it be advantageous to be pseudonymous on a social network that's for talking to people you actually know in the real world like Google+ or Facebook? I know people in the real world who use pseudonyms on Facebook in lieu of privacy settings, and all it does is lower the quality of everyone else's interaction with Facebook by causing confusion, and give those people a false sense of security that their unsecured profiles will never be associated with them.
> Building something interesting requires a surplus of time and money. Salaried jobs provide neither.

Standard negatory bullshit. You should be able to achieve building something interesting, using someone elses time and money. If you can't, maybe you've got an attitude problem, not a job problem.
"Pay what you think it's worth" might be a good way to mentally offset this? That way, you're not affixing a price to your work but instead just asking for a demonstration of what they value it at. It's probably a unilateral upside if the entirety of your payment process is 'post me a cheque if you feel it's worth it!', for the following reasons:

1) By not affixing a price to it, people will pay what they think it's worth. By affixing, say, $20, those who think it's worth less may not pay but those who think it's worth more won't pay more. There's a small risk that people may stretch to make your price tag but instead not bother but my completely untrained gut would say that'd be minimal?

2) You're already relying on people to go out of their way to send it based on goodwill. You're not going to lose customers simply by floating the amount they can choose to send.

3) Your conscience doesn't tell you 'hey, are you SURE this is worth $20? What if something breaks for someone? You forced them to pay $20 rather than $5, you owe them more than this!'. That's got to be liberating.

Of course, PWYW works mainly if it's a supplemental income and you're not relying on it to feed yourself :) That said, I'd expect it's pretty confidence-boosting to see someone voluntarily pay for something you made, since it basically says 'hey, I think you're worth this, thank you!'

The OP and this discussion is incredibly inspiring too, it makes me want to build and release stuff in my spare time that people are completely free to pay as little or as much as they want for, just to see what happens :)
Ah....I see now.
I might be crazy, but because of this I never negotiate salary. When it gets to that part of the job offer, I just tell them what I'm currently making and leave it to them to decide a reasonable increase. As long as they actually go up, I always accept.
Oh noes, conspiracy-related posts. Closing the tabs to his site right away... or not.
Okay, it sounds like your course managed to sour you on Haskell without teaching you anything. Your entire tirade feels like a straw man born from ignorance. You even managed to misspell "monad".

You're simply not in my audience at all--you have too much of a predisposition against Haskell. It's not worth trying to convince you, or anybody similarly biased, because there are so many other people willing to hear me out.

So yes, maybe I won't get any further than your professor. No big loss.

Anyhow, why do you think Haskell--the language with libraries dedicated to managing state--pretends that state doesn't exist? If anything, Haskell is the only language that takes any sort of mathematical approach for modelling (and thus managing) state at all!

There's a reason why some of the most progressive and mathematically sound ways of dealing with state--my favorite example is functional reactive programming--take root in Haskell. If all you want are mutable references and data structures, we have that too. Cleverly integrated with the type system, to boot. We even have some of the best concurrency features (which are naturally based on mutable state!) like STM. STM that's not only actually usable but actually easy.

As for software written in Haskell? There's already plenty. Pandoc is simply the best in its class--I don't think it has any real competition, even. XMonad is a great window manager. Darcs is a dvcs that existed before Git took off, and has a clever model. I use Hakyll for my website, as do some prolific HNers like gwern, and it's great. Gitit is a nice, lightweight wiki. Git-annex helps you manage files on top of Git. The backend for DeTeXify, which everyone using (La)TeX should be familiar with, is written in Haskell.

And these are just the things I could think of from the top of my head, mainly things I personally use.

All these are practical utilities that you might use. If you're willing to look further afield, there are all sorts of more specific tools like Agda and a host of DSLs for everything from SMT solvers to realtime embedded programming.

Then there are the rich and relatively impressive web frameworks like Snap, Yesod and Happstack. Yesod in particular is very fully featured and useable; it has some very cool sites built on top of it including the recently released School of Haskell.

What about stuff I'm personally working on? If you're playing around with the GreenArrays chip, I currently have a simple simulator for the F18A instruction set as well as simple system for synthesizing F18A code using a randomized hill-climbing algorithm. Unfortunately, both are currently limited to one core, but that should be easy to fix. I was also working on a DSL for generating F18A code, but that fell by the wayside recently.

So clearly people are writing tons of useful software in Haskell. And people are using it. But that obviously won't satisfy you. Which, as I said above, is fine.

But if you're actually somebody else--preferably either a startup founder or somebody with control over what technology to use--you should definitely give Haskell a whirl!
Wow, the amount of homophobia on twitter is staggering...
> It's a red herring because the original claim was not "Haskell can compute function Java cannot" but rather "there are many libraries in Haskell which aren't even possible to write in Java".

That's false. It's as false as the other claims.

> The argument is that there are libraries you can write in Haskell that you can't write in Java.

Still false.

> Similarly, since self-modification is something a library can do, possible on one model but not another, it isn't a red-herring.

It's a red herring because libraries do not ever self-modify. Not. Ever.

> Hopefully that cleared things up a bit.

Oh, it definitely did.
Are you sure you would want a psychiatrist rather than a psychologist? Personally I would feel very uncomfortable having someone under my employer prescribing me psych meds. Also, while it might work well for sports teams, in knowledge work the majority of what I'd need untangled by the psychologist would be work-related, and a full time psychologist/psychiatrist would have a conflict of interest since he/she's being paid by the company. I would not be able to open up to them on that subject.
Yeah, the "back-end" is basically 3 pages of code. Most of the C control structures can be implemented with PROG.
Warning Graphic Crime: 18-year-old Female Shot Dead in Drive By
It makes me sad that all the Dwarf Fortress imitators are not only quite shallow (they're management/building games rather than full-on sims), they also have fairly terrible interfaces. Towns' UI is poor, Gnomoria's is godawful.

I don't really know what they're thinking. Sure they have graphics, but that's about it.
I think the parent was explaining why "don't eat humans" exists as a social faux pas.
Well, what he is likely referring to is the fact that the Air Force has majorly cut and consolidated support fields in the past decade. There used to be finance personnel at every base to help you if you had any problems with your regular pay or travel costs; now that function has been centralized to one center, which is not a horrible idea in itself except that it takes forever to get any paperwork through. Not to mention that if there are any errors, you have to wade back into the mire to try and get it fixed. (I once went on a TDY [temporary duty assignment] for six months and spent the entire time fighting the AF finance machinery over errors in their reimbursement for my travel costs that were not my fault) I would compare it to starting your own company (not that I have done that, bear in mind) and trying to be your own lawyer and advisor for paperwork, taxes, local regulations, whatever. In the military these days, you have to know the intricacies of every rule and regulation inside and out to make sure you don't get screwed.
If you look at the requests from other governments from other countries, they are in the same order of magnitude, on a per capita basis, except japan, but that's normal since Goog services are not popular in JP. So, 'moving' things elsewhere isn't much of a solution, it would seem.

Also, people do build social networks in China --they have to as most SN from outside China are not predictably available without proxies, etc.
They are talking about terahertz bands that aren't suitable for distance communication, the ranges are practically measured in centimeters.
wondering if this means I can bypass the GFW in China to visit some blocked sites(facebook.com, etc) ?
I have done some work on odesk and other similar sites. The big problem for me is that almost none of them have real budgets and I live in the United States. Real meaning, money that will pay for people to live in the United States. While working for someone on odesk or vworker or something, at those times, I was barely able to pay my half of the rent.
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "eat your vegetables".

This is what I'm going to hell for.
It's an application of the "semantic web". The hope is that one day it will be possible to give a computer the link (or a successor) that you cited, and the computer will in some way be able to "understand" what victory means.
Why don't we stop working on petitions to the whitehouse to let us have more fun with our cellphones and start putting more effort into holding our politicians accountable for things like:

1) letting massive bank fraud slide at the expense of the taxpayer

2) murdering innocent civilians through massive amounts of drone strikes

3) allowing indefinite detention of American citizens

4) spying on all of us via internet and soon to come drones

5) all of the other countless civil liberty and constitutional violations happening

We're the people who affect the most change in our country right now, but we often focus more on the easy issues that benefit us directly and immediately while glossing over the ones that slowly eat away at the principles our country was founded upon.

edit: wanted to continue this rant a little more... I far more often hear stuff like "OMG, I can't believe Instagram changed their user policy and now they technically have a right to use a photo I uploaded in an ad for their company! This is ludicrous and they should be ashamed!" than I do ones akin to "I can't believe the government murdered an teenage American citizen without trial or due process because they believed he might be connected to terrorism." It's a bit sad, this echo chamber we live in.
Discrete simulation of every agent has been done before in 1996: Roller Coaster Tycoon. Each visitor would visit the park with a set amount of money, and would only spend their money if a ride interested them enough. Rides were modeled on intensity (among other factors). If a ride was too intense, some visitors wouldn't be happy. While if a ride was not intense enough, visitors would complain. All the while, your staff is out mowing the lawns, policing vandals, cleaning up vomit, and dealing with discrete interactions between every agent. It was a marvel in the 90s.

Other titles that model individual behavior are Tropico, Caesar 3, Pharaoh, and Dwarf Fortress (which has already created its own sub-comment thread).

I admit though, Sim City has always taken on a much larger scale. While Roller Coaster tycoon would scale to thousands of visitors, Sim City needs to scale to hundreds of thousands of citizens or even millions, on a much larger area than just a single amusement park.

I'll have to try it out, and see how it compares to the other simulators.

EDIT: For those curious, Tropico, Caesar 3, Pharaoh, and Roller Coaster Tycoon are all available DRM free download at "Good Ol Games" for ~$5 to $10. Dwarf Fortress is an ASCII-art free game with a niche following, but definitely deserves a mention in this category of "discrete agents".
TDD is often a waste of time. I worked at some place that had taken the TDD philosophy to the extreme: every getter and setter had a test.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, I worked on software that processed millions of dollars in daily transactions and there were maybe 5 "tests" in the whole system. This was about 500,000 lines of C and C++ code in the early 2000's.

My personal philosophy is to write unit tests where I think it's important, not test everything.
I didn't rule out showing off, I ruled out worldwide fame. People find communities that they believe to be important and then seek to gain status in those communities. You don't care about who won the best rhubarb pie in the greater Kansas bake off, but there is small contingent of people who care greatly about this prize. (After all, Kansas is center stage for fruit-based pies worldwide, and everyone knows that rhubarb is the true test of the purist.) This effect is even stronger in academic fields where it's easier to convince oneself of the importance of your community even when most people haven't heard of you. (The masses just don't understand the importance of our work, obviously.)

It's not always easy to distinguish between status motivations and the more socially desirable motivations. In fact, one measure of how well our institutions are constructed is how well aligned these motivations are; ideally, they would be indistinguishable. But there are ways to tease this out.

For example, when some exogenous input (e.g. federal funding cut) knock these people out of a high-status career, do they still work long hours in their spare time on the subject? Very rarely, especially as it becomes clear they won't regain former respect.

The incredible power of fads in academics, even among those with tenure, is more evidence. The best group strategies for maximizing impact call for diversifying research routes, but academic researchers clump very strongly because this is often in the best interest of an individual's status.

Human motivations are complicated and this makes it very difficult to compile indisputable evidence of anything. This is compounded by the fact that we want to appear to have other motivations than our actual ones. However, I think if you take a careful look and try to model academics as robots you'll find the "tries to maximize status" is a better first order approximation than "tries to maximize academic contribution".

For the record, I've been strongly influenced by the views of economist Robin Hanson on this subject.
| In my opinion the whole open source movement is
| way too much focused on features and not on
| easy functionality.

Even if there was an open-source version of Gmail, it would still mostly be a centralized solution. Even if there were millions of email providers running this OSS Gmail, the government would just knock on their door, point to (e.g.) the PATRIOT Act, and surveillance would begin. All it would do is remove the idea of "one stop shopping," but the government would still get access. It would just be slightly more work.

| Otherwise PGP emails would have become
| a universally adopted standard.

That's a poor example, because security software is the one place where you do want attention to technical detail over user interface. If the UI to PGP was good, but any script kiddie could break the encryption, then what would be the point?
Open source does not do anything about surveillance of specific individuals the government is interested in. If they can't ask Google for your data, they'll come into your house (or datacenter) and read it off your hard drive.
> The 'industry standard' way to do this is to put them all in garbage bags to suffocate them, or to toss them all into a wood chipped en masse[1].

In England the standard way is to gas the chicks. Killing off the males is a problem for dairy cattle too. Cows produce milk to feed their young.

Beak trimming is normally reserved for egg laying birds. (Meat birds are slaughtered for meat before pecking becomes much of a problem).
Washington Post is smart to try sponsored content - others should too
http://i.imgur.com/u4DVg94.png

Always on DRM overloaded. Please come back in half an hour to play your single player game?

As my friend pointed out: "see if you can spot who got paid off by EA"
http://imgur.com/E9Nkgyo
InnerText vs. textContent