skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I get the sense that what he wants us to walk away with is "look how hard the truth can be to accept if you don't know it",

I felt his point was that people have a position, and when they listen to you they accept things that support their position and automatically question things that undermine their position.

(Although I agree the article is unclear and not particularly well written.)

This is problematic because smart people tend to know they're smart; tend to believe they're rational; and tend to feel that they cannot fall victim to the same irrationality that allows people to believe in astrology; and that when they explore ideas they're not going to come up with weak, unscientific, flawed, explanations.

Some things are clearly nonsense, and we tend to reject those quickly. (Homeopathy; ghosts; astrology; fan death.)

But other things have a veneer of respectability. They're presented by real doctors in real hospitals and they have a sensible plausible mechanism behind them. Knee arthroscopy is a great example of this. Many people went through operations (with the risks involved of infection and anaesthesia) when there wasn't any good science showing any benefit. When controlled trials were done, with one group getting the real surgery and the control group getting a sham surgery, we saw that knee arthroscopy had little benefit above placebo.

I strongly agree with your post; especially the parts about persuading people that they might be wrong. "Huh, you're a scientologist, and thus you're an idiot!" is satisfying but futile. (If the desired result is to weaken scientology by reducing their numbers and converting people back from scientology. (And where scientology can be replaced by creationism or anything.))
Yes, peeping on someone is equivalent to the torture and murder of human beings.
I know HN is typically anti-seo and I understand the reasons why, it's an unregulated industry that gives an impression of witchcraft rather than stable practices..

But worst than that, there are many people in it just in it to make as much money out of people in the shortest amount of time without thinking of the long term relationship or the consequences for that business.

I wrote this so that the next time someone says, I'm thinking of taking on an SEO company, I can point them to that and they can at least think a bit more about what they expect and look closer at what the company is doing
Probably the stub found that you already have Chrome installed.
Ultra HD: After 3D, here comes 4K
Of course, we know the difference between arithmetic average and life expectancy upon achieving some age, do we?
While it seems unlikely that relativistic effects would play a role in the brain, the original argument also said that the same logic should apply to anything in the universe, e.g. a solar system or a galaxy, which is why I mentioned it.
A gun has no other purpose, so yes.
>Guns are for "safety", but they actually decrease safety:

Well, that's just like, your opinion man. Other people have other uses for guns, like recreational shooting. Kinda like motorcycles increase traffic deaths but are hobbies for some people, and useless to others.
I have a win7 laptop with 4GB of RAM. After using Chrome from the beginning, I also was forced to switch back to Firefox because recent builds of Chrome began thrashing with 10+ tabs open.

Firefox has it's issues. It still doesn't silently update when run under a normal user account. Also the UI freezes when running heavy HTML5 pages.

Chrome is beginning to feel like FF 3. Google needs to take a page from Mozilla and start their own MemShrink program.
Doing some basic research regarding dairy and paleo - the message I got was "if you can eat it, then eat it". Lots of people do not tolerate dairy very well, which is the main reason it has a generic black mark against it. But if you can tolerate it, then go for it.

I began eating a quasi-paleo diet at the beginning of February including the removal of all dairy. I reintroduced dairy to see if it had any noticeable impact and it didn't, so I kept it in.
I'm sticking with firefox for most of the same reasons as the author notes, but I do wish the mozilla team used some common sense when they think of new features.

A good example of the lack of common sense (imho) is the addon bar. Why do I want an extra bar with 2 or 3 icons? Most people will probably remember the status bar in browsers and they ditched that because it was not needed and you lost valuable screen estate. What was the best solution mozilla could come up with to handle the extension icons? An extra bar in the bottom of your browser. Just implement an omnibar already and put those things there...

If anyone from mozilla is reading this: you've done a great (GREAT!) job at making firefox faster and use less memory, and if you're ever in the neighbourhood I'll buy you a beer. Now please also start thinking about those little things that just don't make any sense.
You must have missed my emoticon.
"Did I just win the argument?"

YES. Let's just assume from this point henceforth you win all internet arguments. You are the goddam internet argument champion and deserve a trophy and a ribbon that you can wear around town!
I use Firefox on KDE with a dark theme (obsidian coast). Parts of some pages, like this very comment input on HN, specify either text color or background color, but not the other, and so you get dark text on dark bg or light text on light bg. However, these are relatively rare, and I have little issue with this setup.

The KDE integration is also not that bad. I use ArchLinux and never installed any special packages, and while tabs and menus do not look exactly like Qt/KDE apps, the difference is barely noticable. And they are the correct color.
I think the person you responded to meant that you could go to a public pool. So the answer is: privacy while using a pool for its normal purpose.
Sometimes regulations are simply the right answer.

The tragedy of the commons is a thing & communal regulation is the response that works. I can't think of anything that fits the definition of 'a commons' better than the air that you and I breathe.
I recently switched back to Chrome because I felt Firefox was too slow. Strange how we experience the exact opposite :\.

Also, the feature I most appreciate with Chrome is the synchronization of tabs across all my devices (PC, laptop and phone). Firefox also has this but it never really worked for me (it was slow to update the tab list of my PC so I could access it from my phone, or it didn't update it at all "Ubuntu 12.04 - 4 days ago").
> Chrome doesn't require to restart when installing an extension (even if Firefox starts moving to this too)

Mozilla did introduce an api to do restart-less addons about two years ago, as a side effect these addons don't depend on specific firefox versions anymore.

The problem with firefox addons is that they have always hooked directly into XUL, a layout language used inside firefox, which changes (nearly) every version. This means addons needed to be updated regularly. However it did allow them many capabilities (that I suspect the new api doesn't give them).
Is CrowdFunding A Good Option?
Programming and Order Theory
I think unreadable websites entirely deserve not having their content discussed.

This particular one isn't such a bad case, though.
> I know people who claim that eating a mainly paleo diet makes them feel better.

Well, there are people who claim fasting makes them feel better, too. Or living on allegedly nothing but sun light.

I am not sure this is very good proof since e.g. not eating for a couple of days makes you feel good because it's your body trying to make you more active to gather food... so, as logical as some correlations might sound it seems flimsy to me. The best way is probably to go by blood and medical exams, to see if you actually are healthier.
I should have been clearer with my post.

Lens flare in photography and videography tends to be seen as a defect and something to be avoided. That's why lenses have use expensive chemistry for anti-reflective coatings.

When lens flare is used it should be a conscious choice.

Lens flare tends to be reserved for scenes in space. And most of these scenes are not real, but created in a computer, and the flare is added to create "realness". Well, that's fine. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's mocked. ('NEEDS MOAR LENS FLARE' has some useful web search results.)

But, for games, I tend to like lens flare, and it tends to help immersion. (If used carefully.) I have no idea why. It's probably a good idea to allow users to turn it on or off.
Hardly - Google's main objective has been achieved in Android, and that is diversifying their inbound search traffic from mobile devices. Any money Google make from Android beyond this is a nice to have.
That is an issue of meal timing. Individual meals doesn't matter. Transient insulin spikes are irrelevant, what matters is your overall expenditure vs intake.
I thought the meta experiment in this article was interesting as I am religious and resented being compared to those who think wood fuel is clean. I would like to find a way to explain to the author that he is the analogous romantic defender of wood burning, but as he says, getting through the incredulity and irrationality is difficult.
You're not alone. It's become extremely hard to figure out what is right to be eating and since everyone has different tolerances to different foods it's hard to come up with the one truth.

I figure the only real way to know what is right for you is to stick to a particular diet for awhile and see a doctor. A doctor should be able to tell you what you're deficient in and what any problems you might be suffering from. Then adjust.
Chromium doesn't greet you with an ad. ;-)
There are people who claim that homeopathy cured their cancer.

This is exactly the kind of bias that rational people should be scared of. This is exactly the kind of thing that we have double blind controlled studies to eliminate.

EDIT: Because if you do something, and it makes you feel good, well - that's fine. But don't go around telling other people that they're wrong and doing harm to themselves by not doing this thing.
I hadn't considered Information Theory when 'debugging' things gone wrong and the summary here is pretty good.

When I have to summarise my idea of 'good communication', I usually break it down as: Who needs to know What and by When. That helps somewhat.
Honestly I think the entire notion of a fixed bookmark hierarchy is outdated. I'm an avid Opera fan, but I can't fathom by it doesn't support bookmark tagging yet. It's just a much more fitting model of how I archive documents (many-to-one relationships?).
Yup, or pharmaceuticals or a variety of other topics.

Programmers and engineers are not a bastion of rationality, no matter how much we like to think we are.
And the president can help to influence policy. For 100,000 online signatures, the White House gives an official response. It also tells the government what people everywhere want That seems a lot more effective than calling your congressman in Montana.

Maybe you'll recall this petition: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/make-unlocking-cel... and how a bill was announced soon after. Sure, the petition didn't cause the bill to come about, but it helped to show the will of the people and open up government a bit. Is that ineffective?

The government is far more complex than the Constitution would have you believe.
Horrible infant mortality, and also horribly dangerous lifestyle (chasing after wild game).
Antivirus is much less effective than most people believe. The problem is that the AV is "entrenched" and the malware is "mobile"

Malware authors can simply tweak or repack their code until the AV engines don't detect it anymore.

Getting around behavioral detection is harder, but possible. If malware is privileged it becomes an arms race of who can hook lowest and who can disable who.
I am amazed people even see Lift as in the same balpark as Play. When I last used lift It appeared to be a relic of the J2EE stack ported to a new language. This goes beyond any technical capabilities of the framework and down to how it expects you to work in it. Even the author says that just getting started can be a pain, doesn't that tell you something about your framework. It its hard to understand what to do its hard for people in the future to understand what you did. So who cares if you can make pages with just a few "snippets" no one else can figure out what you did.
Not sure why this was downvoted, it may not be nice but it is fairly accurate.
The law of excluded middle is not sufficient for proof by contradiction. What you actually need is ex falso quodlibet (principle of explosion).

For instance, paraconsistent logic has the law of excluded middle but not ex falso quodlibet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraconsistent_logic

--

addendum

Specifically, notice that in classical logic the axioms law of excluded middle and law of non-contradiction can be substituted for one another (they are equivalent). However, that is not the case for all semantics.
Wow!

I would have guessed that j++ ++
was not legal syntax.

So, I was wrong: There are two ways
to parse that mess. So, there is
ambiguity. And the way they resolve
the ambiguity is their 'greedy'
rule! Wow!

Net, that tricky stuff is too tricky
for me.

There was a famous investor in Boston
who said that he only invests in companies
only an idiot could run well because
the chances were too high that too soon
some idiot would be running the company.

Well, I want code, or at least language
syntax,
that any idiot can understand,
for now, me, and later some of the people
that might be working for me!

You are way ahead of me on C, and you
leave me more afraid of it than I was.
But then I was always afraid of it
and, in particular, never wrote ++.
The 390 is the annual average number for those 3 years, not total. According to wonder.cdc.gov, for ages 0-14, there were 334 pool deaths in 2008 alone.
The web wild west isn't just limited to SEO, most of the web has no standards or bodies associated with it. Sometimes that works out well, other times unsuspecting customers end up spending tens of thousands for a template WordPress site. In the absence of regulation, the only answer is education.
What about peeping plus mind torture, bullying, public humiliation, blackmail,...

The (exclusively) peepers are probably just teenagers. The evil ones are those who don't do it for quick, funny sexual purposes.

The evil ones are those who do it for the fun of torturing the "slaves".
The evil ones are those who use the collected material for profit (or silly cyber-cred) at the expense of a young girl's mind.
There are two things at work: Paleo diet works (not much disputed here) and Paleo diet works because it's like what we ate 10k years ago and we haven't adopted to our "new food" yet (a lot of people dispute that).
About high school computer science teachers
"Many people live with fireplaces, so their reality is that they are not harmful"

That's not reality though is it? And it could be compared to smoking - the reality is that it's very harmful, but for a very long time nobody really believed that.

"I find that many rationalists put little value in peoples' opinions because they are "unsupported", ignoring the mountain of personal, anecdoctal evidence that the person has gained over their life, which is much more likely to be believed than the foreign research of far-off scientists."

That's because in the modern world we know that there is actually little value to these things compared to a dispassionate analysis. I understand that this is why many people are slow to 'believe' research when it confronts their ideas though.
Script for tidying up Git repos
I get where everyone is coming from when they say Firefox is getting better, but I really don't see Chrome getting worse and I certainly don't see Firefox surpassing Chrome.

Firefox dev tools in Nightly are much better, but still don't beat Chrome's. Firefox is still ugly. Firefox still won't let me open Nightly and Aurora. Firefox's Javascript performance is getting faster and memory usage is getting better, but when running tight loops in Javascript doing lots of calculations (specifically rendering fractal flames) Firefox becomes unresponsive and unusable, where as Chrome is fine and I can still browse normally while it runs in the background. Chrome might use a but more RAM but that's not a problem for me. I have buckets of RAM. Firefox needs restarting all the time when I change extensions or get updates.

I'll stick with Chrome for now. :)
Do you never find a page and think, "ah, this will be useful for project X later"?

Keeping them all in my browser session for six months before I put it to good use is just unnecessary, so I bookmark it and find it later when I need it.
Google shows off "talking shoe" at SXSW
Or people often have their decisions made for them by slightly more tech savvy friends. "Oh, you're using IE? Don't you know that it gives you viruses? Here let me fix that for you.."
That has nothing to do with anything. Do you think countries are consulting scientists before making these kinds of decisions?
I think the stat that got me was staircases (we had a particularly nasty one in our house at the time). That said, it doesn't mean that gun control isn't a good thing, just that there are other things to consider. And I'll never look at a domestic staircase the same way again.
Spot on, OP. Spot on. Firefox is a great browser and its truly open.

Unlike you I always been a Firefox user mostly because I still can't the basic addons for Chrome which I use on Firefox. And privacy concerns. I still use Chrome for cross-browser checks.

The one thing that Chrome was been said to be better than Firefox was the memory management. Over the past years, Firefox's memory leak issue has almost diminished and Chrome's has started.

Mozilla was and always is making Firefox for web browsing, they never pulled in any other feature/add-on/plug-in which would side track their motto.
For good reason, Google (ditto other search engines) makes SEO as impenetrable as possible. Unfortunately, that makes it difficult to disprove anything a self-appointed SEO says. Honest error and charlatanry both follow apace.

I'm seeing the same thing in the world specifically of Amazon search rankings, as self-published authors strive -- perhaps not wrongly -- for high Amazon rankings without knowing either how to get them nor how to measure their effects.
Crockpot Corned Beef and Guinness Beer Recipe
> Burning wood is also completely unnecessary, because in the developed world we invariably have better and cleaner alternatives for heating our homes.

This assumption seems to be at the center of his argument (about the fireplace, not the analogy-part). However, in my modern apartment here in Norway it is regularly so cold that I am unable to heat it properly without using my wood-burning stove. So it is not recreational.

With regards to environmental impact, Norway is no stranger to legislation and have mandated that all new stoves are catalytic [1] since 1998. I am not sure how this impacts the findings referenced in the article, but I am sure that this is one of the possible things to consider other than "ban everything" or "legislate nothing".

In conclusion: Of course smoke is bad for you. Bad air quality is a big problem in winter in my town. But I need the heat!

[1]: Or "clean burn". Unsure about the English nomenclature here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood-burning_stove#Catalytic_an...
You can easily be exposed to diversity and choice without going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt.
Sandboxed tabs was planned with Electrolysis, which was dropped, and will hopefully be delivered with Servo. But it seems a while off production.
Interesting point. I would pick B because a game's virtual camera doesn't necessarily stick around in the head of your player avatar the whole game, but can shift behind, beside, overhead it as well as flying around the scene cinematically.

If someone is going to start to nitpick about the unreality of B versus A, then they ought to also address the lack of a dynamic focus and changine depth of field that our visual system handles so automatically that we are unaware that it is even happening and that CG doesn't do this.
I believe Firefox now has mostly silent updates, just like Chrome does. At least, I don't usually notice it updating. It does however require (automatically) installing a service (in Windows), since it's installed on the system, and not in the user directory, like Chrome is.
3D Display Reimaging
> Does Miller really believe that people who eat paleo do so because
> the diet is from the paleolithic?

With the recent eco-natural-organic-whatever fad I wouldn't be surprised that some do. Line of thinking would go roughly like this: long time ago->before current technologisation->natural->good.

> What convinced me was its simplicity and results.

Did you try anything else before without results? It is likely that just starting to care what and how much do you eat will provide results, no matter the name of the diet.
"What would make it ideal is a usable keyboard with a usable trackpad built into it"

http://www.amazon.com/MeshWe-Bluefin-Seamlessly-metallic-sil...
Reading the article, what surprises me the most is that they had to search the mail in the first place.

For the information they were after, any relatively primitive mail tracking system would suffice. To be fair, even most outbound spam/virus scanners would log the level of info being looked for.

I can't help but feel as if it's a bit of an overreaction. A very targeted search was done on the mail headers to try and track down a leak. It seems fairly routine work. The lack of notification is a big issue (soon after the event) but even so.

To see the reaction you'd assume that the administrators were going through each persons mailbox reading every single mail.
Is that really a symptom of Facebook deliberately trying to wall its users in, or just that the the majority of its userbase really would get phished/infected/anally-probed without the warnings?

Then again .. I didn't know YouTube did that ..
SXSW Summarized
Yes but motorcycles tend to kill their riders not other people.
If you go to Nandos that'll happen, because its their model.

Do you live in Canberra? Maybe there aren't many staff in Canberra because nobody lives there. Never encountered this in two and half years though, it's nonsense.
The elusive third great mobile OS
You do understand there is no proof eating like a caveman (table manners excepted) will prolong your life. At least not unless your alternative is the suicidal diet many people have.

Also, the argument based on evolution and selection is ludicrous. We have not stopped evolution.

I strongly suggest you ingest more fiber and avoid sugar, but I also remind you the plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence".