skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, and what happens to all these people that have basically just learned programming from a couple blogs or a RoR bootcamp/YouTube when the market is flooded? The article very, stupidly, if I may use that term, implies that programming is a panacea to solving the "job" problem. It loves to tout silicon valley is the savior of the workforce; but isn't this also the same valley that we know and love of articles discussing extreme Logan's Run style ageism? So combine a bubble awash of programmers with very simple skills combined with the fact that humans tend to start at a certain age and increment from there, and stir in ageism and you don't seem to have a great solution to the employment problem. Just being honest about it.
My hometown in New Zealand has been working to ban open fires for over a decade, due to their contribution to the city's terrible winter-time air quality. (Not helped by a temperature inversion that causes the smoke to stay near the ground rather than rise and blow away.)
Apple offers a search API for the iTunes store: http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/documentati...

Are you saying it can't search on keywords? I find that sort of shocking.
World Of Classcraft
Please go back to reddit/4chan.
JQuery plugin to style checkbox. It uses icon fonts and it's scaled great.
Why Doesn’t It Exist Today?
Sell your downloadable items: Music, eBooks, Podcasts, Videos, Photos, and more
I'm not sure if this is meant to be an attack on fireplaces that uses an analogy with religion, or an attack on religion that uses an analogy with fireplaces. Maybe it's both. In any case, I find the analogy rather distracting. All those paragraphs could have been better spent on comparing the energy efficiency and polluting effect of fireplaces with those of other methods of heating, and similar information.

The danger of air pollution from fireplaces (in addition to the obvious implications on CO2 production) is an interesting and important topic on its own. There is no need to give the article an extra "edge" by dragging in the issue of religion vs. science -- which we already know Sam Harris is obsessed with. And he's really beginning to sound like an Emeritus professor who talks on and on about his pet theory in the Q&A session of everyone else's colloquium, whether it's related or not.

Harris, Dawkins, etc. are very smart people, and they could do a lot of good in the world by doing their best to purge biases, politics and superstition of all kinds from undeniable facts. But I often feel that their pursuit of controversy for the sake of controversy actually does a disservice to human rationality. Burning wood is bad for the environment, and here are the numbers that say so, so let's stop doing it. Is it really so difficult to get that message across without adding any unnecessary politics to it?

Disclaimer: I came from a country where real fireplaces are rare items that you only occasionally see in upscale coffee shops, which is probably why I find it easy to believe that they are indeed nasty things.
Anyone wants to make a thread here on the long and the short carbon cycle? (The small being trees, animals etc growing old, rot, release the carbon, the long being trees, animals etc growing old, getting sealed under layers of soil and finally converted to coal or oil/gas?)

Not meaning to take anything away from the toxicologi part but in a whole lot of places wood is still an energy source and would need to be replaced. Where I live we use (hydroelectric mostly) electricity for heating mostly which seems liek a genuine waste of high value electricity.
Huh?

The point was that because literacy is commonplace, then annindividual altering a published piece of writing for personal preferences (making it more suitable for a daughter) is also commonplace.

My contention is that code literacy should / will be at the point where a "trivial" change to existing published code will not get on the front page of HN because it is as commonplace as it's "English writing" equivalent
> High Fructose Corn Syrup [1] didn't become a staple of the human die until

AFAICT HFCS didn't become a staple of human diet, it just became important in the US, the rest of the world still uses _way_ more sugar than HFCS (e.g. a 60:1 rate of production in the EU).
> Nobody likes to feel the rug pulled out from under them. (Okay: I like it just a little.)

Me too. Although I find it dependent on what rug I'm standing on. I have a feeling it depends on how core that belief is to how I base my personality and life decisions. In short, it probably breaks down to the amount of time I have invested into it. (If I've recently adopted some belief, I imagine it's easier to accept change or even invalidation than if I spent 20 years with it).
I looked up "heel" since it was used to describe someone, and seemed more specific than just "bad person", and wasted another 30-60 minutes learning about Kayfabe, Mexican wrestling, etc.

It's this kind of thing Wikipedia excels at, vs. Quora or forum sites or really anything since USENET.
It seems a bit ironic given their audience. So they are basically advocating for a reduction in their future subscriber base. Interesting tact. :)
Wow, this is probably the best doodle I have ever seen. Or maybe I just love Douglas Adams so much.
Firstly, none of my wood-burning-loving-friends would refuse to accept the truthiness of the wood-burning-is-bad theory after they look into the sources. They'd do the same of any other argument that interests them. I guess I'm luckier than the author is with respect to the openness of our friends.

Secondly, when he says that the resistance you feel to new ideas is itself bad, I detect a suggestion that you ought to be less questioning than usual when someone claims something as "science", especially if it goes against your taste/interests. This is a dangerous suggestion because being an unquestioning science-fanboy is no better than being unquestioningly religious or being an unquestioning brand-fanboy or brand-hateboy.

Among a lot of my facebook-friends, it is sacrilegious to suggest that global warming is perhaps not happening. I'm not drawing your attention to the truthiness of that idea but the fact that it is considered unacceptable to be ignorant or misinformed about that topic - you are instantly understood to be "unscientific" if you question it. OTOH, it is completely okay to be ignorant or misinformed about say, the runtime complexity of dijkstra's - you just "didn't know" and it can be explained to you.

Thirdly, I didn't get the wood-burning thing at all because we don't have fireplaces in south india. At least I've never seen one here. Obviously I don't mean that you shouldn't talk about fireplaces but I wish more people and magazines realized that their readership is no longer purely american. I distinctly remember a statement by NASA a few years ago that said that nobody needs to worry about this upcoming meteor because there won't be any harm caused to anyone, everything is fine, there's an insignificantly tiny chance that it would hit north america. I know NASA is funded by the US govt. and all that but by now a lot of people in a lot of countries look to them as the forerunner in space research and I wish they'd realize that.
Breaking news: people do immoral shit on the internet.
Luckily you can read all about it on arstechnica, including lots of voyeuristic photos you can look at "for research".
Paleolithic Diet aka Caveman Diet
You said several words here but nothing really contradicted the parent. The parent is correct. Are there some difficult exceptions, sure, but these are ... exceptions. If you don't believe, see the gigantically complicated chart for getting a green card in the U.S. I guess, game, set, match?
Why should I waste time sleeping when I can be posting scarcely relevant comments to occasionally inane HN submissions, for example the suggestion that people not stay up so late?
Decoding the word "Hacker"
Discussing gun policy with a friend, I mentioned the Freakonomics statistic that having a pool on your property is 100 times more dangerous for your child's welfare than having a gun in the house.

If you really want to see a certain subset of your friends squirm with cognitive dissonance, mention this.

(I hope this doesn't start a flame war. The reason I bring up this particular example is because guns seem so ridiculously evil, while having a pool seems like every child's dream, yet the numbers tell a very different story in terms of perceived vs. actual danger.)

Edit: I regret posting this; but I won't delete it so people know the context of the replies. Sorry HN!
Students, and others in this industry in general, tend to make such a big deal about using the latest hyped languages. I think too much so. It's "impressive," I guess. Having a foundation in computer science means you understand that most of the concepts in these "new" languages have been well worn since the 60s, just packaged in new ways, incremental improvements. There's also something to be said, in my view, for Turing completeness. This is not anything about your story, just a related tangent.
From what I understand with Apple you need to specify the country in which you're searching and you may get different results for the same query based on that. There isn't a way to get back a single link to which you could redirect all users that want to download the iOS app, regardless of where they are from.

Edit: so yes, I was wrong to say "none", but Apple has its own set of issues making it difficult to do
Got it, too and found it quite close to some ideas I wasn't sure how to write.
I understand author is concerned about religious people hurted feelings, but just to be clear: is the point, here, that we shouldn't rectify obviously wrong people because we are sometime obviously wrong ourselves ? Sounds like a chewbacca defense to me.
I think you missed the point a bit: the article was about scientific/religious discussion. The author was trying to make the reader (presumably an atheist and/or skeptic) feel the same emotional response that the religious feel when their beliefs are challenged. The whole woodsmoke thing was just an illustrative discussion: most people reading it will feel an instinctive negative reaction against having something they cherish so attacked, even with solid evidence.

So, it's neither an attack on fireplaces or religion: it's an attempt to make skeptics empathize a bit with those they're trying to convince.
Someone please edit the title: it is "Swartz", not "Schwartz".
It's a sign of the times: "(name anyone) admits it was a hoax -- film at 11."
People do want to have their batteries at the destination as well. The typical business traveler would be so severely inconvenienced by this that it would reduce air travel significantly.

Note that the water bottle scam isn't really profiting the airlines - it's benefiting the airport operators, in collusion with many national air regulators.
I'm talking about Apple in 1977, not Apple in 2007. At the time, most of the innovations that made them popular (Woz's wizardry with color displays, the floppy disk controller, the strategy of selling for large discounts to schools, and certainly the Xerox PARC visit) were way off in the future.

Google and DropBox were also laughed at because it was what a number of other companies were doing, not because what they were attempting was technologically impossible. Most outsiders had no idea that what Google was doing was technologically impossible, because, well, they heard "search engine" and thought "AltaVista".

It's the nature of innovation that you figure things out as you go along. If you have all the answers when you start, you're not innovating. And that implies that you have to start somewhere, usually where a bunch of other people are starting, and so of course things will be crowded when you're just a startup. It's all the stuff that happens in-between being an Instagram clone and going public with a wildly different product that matters.
Define dangerous.
I don't like the aggressive rhetoric of the likes of Harris either, but on the other hand "here are the numbers" has unfortunately a rather poor conversion rate.
It was pretty obvious he was saying that humans, instinctually, are afraid of change. Changing beliefs is a hard thing to do (internally or externally). When someone "chooses" a way of thinking they have a lot of trouble accepting anything but.

Hypothetically, if coffee were directly linked to heart disease after 10 years, would you still drink it? If someone casually mentioned it to you in a cafe would you believe them? Would you want to know the truth? Does it matter how bad it is for you?

Religion has, in some ways, been a plague on society. Not so much for the belief but rather for the resistance to anything but a person's belief. That is what religious persecution is and it's not far off from wood smoke.
Heinlein has used it. "By His Bootstraps" is quite enjoyable for it's recursive time paradoxes.
Thirdly, I didn't get the wood-burning thing at all because we don't have fireplaces in south india.

Aren't wood-burning stoves pretty common? Like these,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution_in_India#Fuel_wo...
I think he's trying to provide a reference point. "Here's a way that you may behave that is similar to the way you bemoan others behaving." It's my believe that reference points help further useful discussion, so I think this is a good thing.
It's actually the very opposite of depression. Depression is generally a lack of hope for the future. This would be a case of so much hope for the future and himself that he is unable to live in the present, as what he is currently doing simply cannot live up to his hopes.

It's interesting how similar to depression the effects would be.
Well, and then there's this funny word, "anomaly." We all might as well cite Ramanujan as the quintessential reason why no one needs to go to college; why does anyone even bother with Gates and Zuckerberg? There just seems to be some basic statistics at work that people have difficulty grasping.
The comparison is very bad: something like burning wood gives you small psychological comfort but no benefit, while something like religion brings quite a lot of benefits for a large segment of scientifically illiterate or psychologically "unstable" people (and besides basic school knowledge of science, most people are quite "illiterate" unfortunately, they lack the most important parts of experiment based reasoning, the skills to build clear and falsifiable hypotheses, a "true" understanding of evolution and why it works and so on...).

Also, to make wood burning unnecessary, you only have to give people access to electric or gas heating, and after this only a few nostalgics will occasionally burn wood for "recreation". To make religion unnecessary, you'd need to educate people to quite a high level (scientific knowledge and reason can only replace religion once somebody gains quite a deep and intuitive understanding of both) and you'd also need to have a "socially healthy" society that promotes "healthy" relations among people (a completely unsolved problem imho, although we like to think otherwise!), replacing part of the socio-moral function of religion (basing morality on religion, you get an ugly but working system of "no-think ethics" that has a lot of bugs but works on "all platforms", not matter how irrational they may be). It's much harder to bring people to a high enough level of education, psychological health and "social health" than to just give them central heating. Religion is quite an ugly hack, but it solves quite a bunch of problems for quite a lot of people, although these are mostly "hard to measure" problems.
Whats the point in posting this?
I always find it curious how the true number is only revealed at some page that almost nobody normally visits.
>>> I'm not sure if this is meant to be an attack on fireplaces that uses an analogy with religion, or an attack on religion that uses an analogy with fireplaces. Maybe it's both.

Nah, it wasn't intended to be either.

He assumes religious people reject atheism because of an emotional response to atheists' arguments, so he's trying to provoke the same emotional response in atheists to give them insight into the minds of religious people.
And so the gender gap in computing begins.
I honestly thought this was another one of those "Let's post a 10 year old article to reminisce" posts...

To be honest, i'm semi-impressed this is still a thing. I assumed it had died in the late 90s.

It's also scary of course, that these people seem to have antivirus running and it hasn't stopped it. Seems like a pretty trivial thing to detect?
> Believers and non-believers alike cement ideas in their head which are indifferent to reality and hard to dislodge.

When such ideas acquire a (more or less) self-consistent philosophical theory to back them up, and social institutions to promote them, that's what most people call religion. Sometimes we also call them ideologies or traditions. Some have supernatural elements and some don't, but their cognitive and social functions seem to be mostly the same.
I would suggest it's the medium in which you choose to question it. People "questioning" global warming on Facebook are making a statement and appending the ?.

There is any number of outlets or resources where they could've sought to become informed on the science, the consensus and the weakness or blindspots of current research. Instead they decided to "just ask questions" in a forum which cannot possibly support complex explanations.

http://www.realclimate.org/ is a good place to start if you actually have questions about what is, inherently, a very complicated topic (that is also very interesting when people don't have an agenda with it).
Care to elaborate for the ignorant among us?
Well done Minnix, you've just made yourself totally blacklisted from what I'm sure is a large percentage of people reading this blog.
I have, including on flights inside EU. What shoes do you have?

(Really, this has an impact - many shoes contain some metal reinforcements that beep at the detector.)

(I've also been asked to take off the shoes for screening, inside EU, without any detector issues - I suppose the security people have to take in a quota of white middle-aged and old men and women, in order to avoid accusations of racial, age and gender profiling.)
Moneta - A user timeline visualization tool
dangerous as in death by drowning vs death by shooting
http://www.freakonomics.com/books/freakonomics/chapter-excer...
I'm pretty sure it's meant to be what it says at the start: it's a reminder to atheists of the feeing of a cherished belief ("fireplaces are good") being destroyed. Some atheists have a hard problem with rejecting false beliefs even if they've gotten over the big one. I agree it's not that great of an analogy, though I'm not really offended at Harris doing what Harris does and bringing religion into everything. And if you just care about the message about fireplaces getting out, rhetoric (i.e. marketing) such as "creating controversy" is useful for that purpose...
Building a desktop app on web technology
They want to interact with them because the 'slaves' are above their social position. It's the only way they have to interact, if you can call it interacting, with that 'hot girl from facebook' who wouldn't give them a look in real

It's that same reason most forum posters go crazy when a girl posts.
I recollect that the German law was written in a way that would logically classify gcc as a hacking tool, i.e. the definition was very broad.

I'd be interested in the definition/ law being used here.
Looks like very flawed analogy to me.

It's one thing to believe in something when there is no rational reason for the belief (religion).

It's completely different to not believe something just because someone says so.

I don't know if burning wood is as harmful as the article says.

Prior to reading it I had no data and if I were asked, I would indeed think that it's safe given that people were doing it since the dawn of human race and no one drops dead because they sat near fire.

If a random smart aleck accosted me at a party and started telling me how it's sooo bad (which seems to be the article's author MO), I would brush him off, and that would have been a rational reaction.

After reading this article I'm inclined to accept that burning wood is dangerous but I'm far from convinced - it's a single data point.

The author is clearly so in love with his "clever" analogy that he can't help equating apples to oranges (a skepticism about a claim due to lack of expertise to evaluate whether it's true or false and an active, irrational belief that is internally inconsistent and whose many aspects have been refuted by science and at a level that is comprehensible to regular humans (like finding carbon-dated human remains older than the age of universe according to bible).
Yesod is great, especially its quasi quoters, such as Hamlet.

However, two things that I constantly bumped into maintaining a small Yesod app is that there was a fairly constant stream of API changes and that deployment on different machines was annoying because of version conflicts installing packages.

If you use Yesod, you are probably best off using a Cabal sandbox (e.g. via cabal-dev) and making specific package versions dependencies. Of course, that may be questionable from a security perspective.

I ended up rewriting that particular web app to Play, which offers some of the same benefits, but was a lot easier to deploy. You can create a stand-alone version of an application with play dist, which includes all the required jars, and the only thing required on a server is the Java runtime environment. Also, Maven/sbt seems a lot more mature than Cabal. As an added advantage, you can use tried and tested Java or can go all-functional via Scala.
Nice, my application which is not even on page one in Google Play search appears as the first result for the same keyword in Google Applications.
USA: Legalize Phone Unlocks
State governments in North India distribute wood during winter. See http://urbanemissions.blogspot.com/2012/11/pollution-in-delh...

>I guess I'm luckier than the author is with respect to the openness of our friends.

I am sure many running state governments up North(India) are aware of wood smoke being a bad thing. But I think the argument author is going for is - people are willing to set aside their scientific training/knowledge when confronted with something they have been traditionally considered okay. My Dad for example has Bachelors in physics and almsot finished masters - But I can see his argument going on the lines of, "Our body can tolerate some amount of these chemicals, it has been doing that since 10 thousand years and so it is okay".

Let me give you another example. Ayurveda . There are government run colleges in India, training people to practice Ayurveda as alternative medicine. Winter may not be same in India everywhere, but Ayurveda is. Now it has been scientifically proven that, many Ayurvedic medicines contain arsenic, lead in dangerous proportions. Beyond Yoga, their usefulness as medicine is also questionable. Try having argument with someone who believes in this (I used to be one). So, I think I understand authors POV of traditional beliefs sometimes overriding our scientific training.
If dumping the ROM required him to work around something considered "copy protection" by the manufacturer, he could go to jail for DMCA violation.

In the land of the free, at least.
but what does it have to do with hacker news?
He didn't tell you that you couldn't post it. He asked what was the point.