skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> While software and algorithms have become increasingly important in astronomy, the majority of authors who publish computational astronomy research do not share the source code they develop, making it difficult to replicate and reuse the work.

This is troubling. There's no field involving computation in which withholding source code is routinely accepted. The four-color map theorem proof (Appel & Haken, 1976) would never have been accepted without source code. Modern mathematics, to the degree to which it relies on computer results, also relies on the publication of source.

Another example is the recent revelation involving an error in an Excel spreadsheet and its effect on an economic analysis -- the correction wouldn't have been possible without publication of the spreadsheet alongside the conclusions drawn from it.

Also, replication is a cornerstone of serious science. Without replication, astrophysics becomes psychology, where replication is rare.

I hope this paper has the effect of correcting this systematic flaw in astrophysics publication.
You must be advocating that to confer real ownership, people need to invest by purchasing a stake in what they work on. Just like a real owner, they will not necessarily have a salary and may be required to dip into their savings and increase their investment in order to cover losses in the business.

Are you sure that's what most people want? Or do they want to make a substantial guaranteed salary plus have all the upside of profit sharing, while taking on none of the risks? Those who prefer the former should be founders in their own startup where the reward is proportional to the risk.
While on the topic, does anybody know any Heroku alternative that offers postgis, preferably at a more reasonable price than the 200$/month Heroku charge.
> Think of a person as being the offshoot, not of his parents, but of 1000 predecessors including his parents. Now think of that person's children also being the offshoot of 998 predecessors plus his 2 parents. Work out the probability of inheriting any significant percentage of the high intelligence of the 2 compared to the 998.

Maybe the 998 were above average too. Regression to the mean would be the way to bet if you didn't have any other data - but how heritable is intelligence?

> Yes, but as explained above and accepting that premise, statistics argues against the idea that a smart person will have children significantly smarter than the population as a whole.

Wouldn't that only be the case if you take the population as a whole as their lineage?

> Also, bottom line and in the long term, intelligent starving children are still starving children.

I'd expect smart people to provide significant better for their children down the line than will stupid people. If you're looking at the future of humanity a small, dominant group that better fulfils your preferences is going to be a lot more worthwhile for some people.
I think that having a large set of possible exams questions is a problem only if the exercises are too formulaic. If knowing the answer is as easy as memorizing 1A 2D …, then repeating exams is a problem.

If exams are more problems than exercises, and you are able to solve most of them before the exam, then you've probably learned enough and the exam is mostly unnecessary.
I think the summaries are the thing that make me stay on /., especially as HN has strict no-editorializing title policy. I've many times missed an interesting story on HN, then read it from /. and came back to HN for comments.
Hm, I'm wondering: How does your diet look like? IIRC you already supplementing vitamin D.

Love your work (esp. Talks at Microconf) btw.
I'm holding an introductory Rails workshop in Bangalore on May 4th
Do they? The cows are very skinny and malnutritioned, letting cows wander around through highly populated streets, eating trash and drinking sewer water is not what I imagine a cow enjoys doing.
"equivalent to about 720 years of current global lithium production"

In a best-case scenario, the 2,000-square-mile Rock Springs Uplift could harbor up to 18 million tons of lithium [http://www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2013/04/uw-researchers-lithium-d...]
Well, in your case I would be tempted to say that your API should send you mails about job to do.

Your customers will fell like they are modifying template, but behin you are doing the job yourself. :) You could set up some taskrabbit stuff for that.

In your case, I would also go to customers as soon as possible to avoid doing something that wouldn't match their needs :).

Good luck, and keep us updated!
Setting Up ProFTPd + TLS On Ubuntu 12.10
http://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/ is reasonably good imho.
if you have unread items going back for more than a year, chances are you are adding more to the list than you are removing. I guess hes right, i have observed this in myself and many colleagues from the days of delicious onwards. You bookmark/tag alot of interesting stuff because you are absolutely sure you will need it again and then forgetting about it after several weeks/months never looking at it again.
In the case that you need that knowledge again, you just dig it up on google (if you can remember it).

Might not be true for you, but i am sure its pretty common behaviour. I have given up on read-later apps because stuff just kept piling up. Noawadays i just leave the tabs open until i have read something of interest and if i figure that it isnt interesting enough after a few days i just close the tab and forget about it. That way i am managing my to-read list on a daily basis and it doesnt go back later than a week. With chrome sync its also easy to grab the open tabs on my other devices and read them there.

That being said things might be different if i had a long communte or had more freetime after work, but in that case i am usually reading a book, if i am reading anything at all. Giving the brain some relaxation time from the constant bombardment of tech "news" is nice as well.
What sort of sorcery has gotten this on the front page? The article is ridiculous and the website hurts my sensibilities. WTH?
That'd be it! Thanks, although it's too bad I can't use docker.
Parse becomes one of the many strings to Facebook's bow. Parse by itself was a single very good offering. Facebook can now "sunset" Parse whenever they feel like it. My feeling is that Facebook bought Parse for the talent and the mobile knowledge, and not the product itself. I see the Parse engineers being moved out to help Facebook's real mobile strategy move forward. I may be proved wrong, but I'd be scared to invest my entire business on a backend I don't control. I'd be shit-scared to invest my entire business on a backend controlled by Facebook.

Facebook have shown time and time again that they do not care about the privacy of their users. They are not going to get that trust back any time soon. In my opinion the assumption that they could "get away with it" was a long term bad mistake on Zuckerberg's part.

As an aside, I don't post on Facebook anymore once I realised that my deleted data was not really deleted. Even today, almost a year and a half after deleting all my posts, check-ins and photos, my profile still shows 3 "hidden" check-ins. Until a few months ago, a "deleted" (a.k.a hidden) album was still showing in the album count. Facebook has a few bugs when they do their entity counts, which show up their logical rather than physical deletes. Sorry, but when I delete something, I expect it to be deleted, not just marked as deleted.

I don't trust them as far as I can throw them, and I really can't throw a 8000 lb gorilla very far.
Ask HN: Promoting your web app on Facebook or Twitter
For people that promote their product via social media, do you focus on both Facebook, Twitter evenly?
Why isn't this article titled "Yahoo's Chariman thought to be the person who convinced Yahoo to enter into a disastrous patent lawsuit against Facebook last year is out"?

It's sad to see how much slack she's getting in comparison to male CEOs.
Facebook acquires Parse
Wasn't there a rumor that Sony would use the full native OpenGL for the PS4? Was that true?
Mcafee patents anti piracy filter
(edit the "code" I'm talking about is complex stuff like numerical simulations etc, if we were talking about the code used for plotting a simple graph or histogram, that's a different matter--although it wouldn't hurt anyone publishing a full paper open source as a make-file with some TeX sources calling a few plotting libraries)

> But they are presenting the methodology they claim went into the code and allowing you to agree or disagree with the methodology. If you agree, you take their answer--

No. And this is the whole point. You can agree with the methodology, but as long as you haven't inspected the code, you cannot just accept they actually implemented it right!

In fact, chances are, they probably didn't. The best programmers white buggy and incorrect code. And from what I've seen in the field of physics, scientific code is everything but an exception to that. I'd be surprised if it was very different for astrophysics.

So by publishing the methodology and the results, but not the code, they put up a nice show. But that's it, not reproducible. So all that's really brought to the table is the methodology and some "say-so" results that nobody can check are accurate.
> You clearly aren't the "computer whiz" in your family, who has to field all the "can you help me? Microsoft isn't working. I think I've been hacked, do you think it's a virus? Why is my computer so slow? Why is fixing it taking so long?" issues.

There's a limit of naivety beyond which everyone will need help, yes. I simply believe that you can get away with being more naive with Windows most of the time. I don't have to fix my mother's Windows problems, or my sister's - from time to time I have to fix my father's, but even then not just for setting the thing up.

> As for your ubuntu issues - you booted off a liveCD. Good for you. Now, how many liveCDs have you seen of Windows? How widespread are they?

I think I've seen two or three versions over the years, mostly as repair tools environs. Why?

> Anyway, the same problems apply in setting up the system regardless of Windows or *nix - you need a power user to get you through the humps. Good luck installing XP as a normal user when you run into the ever-present problem of no appropriate network drivers. Basically you're comparing apples and oranges.

Windows Xp network drivers - that's three versions out of date. And really, where are your discs? If you got it ready made they should have sent you the drivers along with their bloatware and if you didn't then they should save sent you the mobo drivers with the mobo.
Ruby Daily - http://rubydaily.org - for instant news about ruby and webdev.
Stackoverflow - http://stackoverflow.com/ - for dev questions and answers.
English conventions are inconsistent. "X is 2x slower than Y" usually means that Y runs at twice the speed of X. Since 90% = 0.9, "X is 90% slower than Y" would mean that X is actually faster than Y. Therefore it's better to state it in an unambiguous way, e.g. X took 2x as much time as Y, or just look at the numbers directly.
On seeing the name Mentii, my first association was with lying rather than mentoring because "menti" in French means "lied" (as in "j'ai menti" -- "I lied").

That aside, great service!
Of course, software itself ought to do it. I don't know if that's a hard problem, but that's a meta-programming problem. Not something you can do easily if you don't use lisp.
Good for Marco, good for Instapaper, good for Betaworks.

I believe Marco when he says he's not done it out of worry for the competition. He's never seemed particularly bothered about having rivals, as Instapaper was making money. It does seem that his passion for the project was waning though, there's not been a new version for a while, compared to a few years ago where new features were arriving on a reasonably regular basis.

I think it'll be a good fit, whilst Marco might be bored with the project he wasn't going to give his crowning achievement up to anyone, so I imagine Betaworks will be taking it onwards and upwards. Good for us as well, it means Marco can find a new project to interest him.
Check Martins talks on the topic too - http://www.infoq.com/author/Martin-Thompson. Very interesting indeed.
> This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients.

It seems mostly to assume that health follows rules that you can discover and which aren't particularly unstable.

To believe that you have a decent chance of hitting on it assumes that we have a broad understanding of what's in what we normally eat I suppose.

But, you know, this is why people mess around with this sort of stuff. If it goes great then fantastic, and if it doesn't then we only lose a couple of people here and there. The risk-reward is almost certainly going to work out in its favour. It probably sucks for him if he gets it wrong but, well, that's his look out isn't it? It's not like anyone's taking advantage of him.

I suppose to be strictly ethical you'd go and feed it to starving kids and feed the others your best natural diet, so everyone seems likely to get a bit of a win out of it even if eventually it turns out to give them cancer or something. But that seems a bit beyond DIY studies.
+1 for that, I've been using Shellycloud for almost a year now and the support has been great
Falsely accused student of Boston attacks confirmed dead
> ... doing the same thing twice is pointless.

That's what psychologists say (according to Richard Feynman in his now-famous criticism of the practice in "Cargo Cult Science"), but it's a fundamentally flawed view of science. Replication -- an exact duplication of a study and hopefully its results -- is a cornerstone of science. And without full disclosure of the original study's method and results, replication isn't possible.

> This is why the Hubble Constant started off being 150, then was 50, and now hovers around 69. Because everyone did the problem in their own unique way and didn't borrow each other's code and procedures.

That isn't an argument for the practice of withholding methods, it's an argument against it. Arriving at a realistic value for the Hubble constant wasn't accelerated by withholding methods, it was slowed. Imagine Einstein claiming that mass and energy are bound together in a clearly defined relationship, but not publishing the relationship or its derivation.

Arthur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Apropos the present topic, a result unaccompanied by the methods used to produce it is also indistinguishable from magic, and certainly isn't science.

> If I wrote it, I want first dibs on analysing it, I don't want someone else taking the results I created and publishing them before me.

We're not taking about someone beating the originator to publication, we're talking about the originator publishing his methods along with his results and getting credit for both.

> Politics is surprisingly omnipresent here.

Perhaps, but always at the expense of science. Science relies on full disclosure -- both methods and results. How can a theoretical consensus be arrived at if the participants don't know what they're agreeing about?
Tight investors force young entrepreneurs offshore
Those who say that this is wrong because humans should eat like our ancestors because we evolved to eat in this way are on the same level with people that say only man and woman should have sex because nature made it this way. Naturalists are wrong from the very root because of assumption nature makes everything on purpose and in the only right way possible. This soylent thing exposes all the ignorance of the people in this regard.
Ubuntu has no control over the Skype project. They aren't obligated to support every third-party product when it is impossible to do this.

That's an interesting attitude.

Backwards compatibility is a generally regarded as a feature. If you read Raymond Chen's blog about the length's Microsoft went to in order to support old software on new versions of Windows you'll see how important some operating system vendors regard it.

Linux generally seems to have an interesting attitude to backwards compatibility. "It works on old hardware" is something that used to be regarded as a huge benefit of Linux.

These days - especially for Ubuntu - it doesn't seem to be regarded as a feature at all. Additionally Ubuntu seems to introduce breaking API changes in every release. I find that to be quite a surprising route to take for an OS that is trying to build desktop share.

I'd be quite interested to hear why people think they do this. Is backwards compatibility just not seen as important at all or is there a bigger strategy here?
Hindley's Basic Simple Type Theory is accessible and comes from the horse's mouth: http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Basic_Simple_Type_Theo....
Spotify radio generally gives me sufficient variety - however I must admit I don't tend to find that much "new music", but I'm ok with that.
It's needed to expand a pilot program for dragnet surveillance by the NSA and defense contractors.

What horseshit! Even your own link describes the program as applicable to private networks of the participating companies. That's why there's a quote from an email wondering (emphasis mine) "Will the program cover all parts of the company network -- including say day care centers (as mentioned as a question in a [deputies committee meeting]) and what are the policy implications of this?"
I'm generally a big fan of film scores so whenever Hans Zimmer does something new I'm always excited to hear it. Otherwise new and relatively unknown artists are normally featured in TV shows which is another good way to find decent music. In the extremely early days of Pandora when it was available outside the US, I found that to be a fantastic way to discover new stuff.
Lard: after decades of trying, its moment is finally here.
In astronomy we are still fighting for public data. Verification of results comes from another researcher collecting his own data and running his own analysis.

Out of curiosity, do you work for industry or academia?
> ... Justin Biber concerts

I con't believe this. The submitter's title misspells the pop star's name, and so does the original article. Don't these people realize that by misspelling their subject's name, they make Web searches for their article impossible and thus consign themselves to the great bit bucket in the sky?
The tone of that letter reminds me why I left academic research...
According to display controller's datasheet[1], it does support analog (RGB) input too ;)

Edit: well, reading the datasheet a bit more, the RGB interface is somewhat digital. But fiddling with timing is still there ;)

[1]: http://www.adafruit.com/datasheets/ILI9325.pdf
It just means understanding what's happening at the lowest-level, whilst not necessarily working at that level of abstraction.
> "If you are publishing articles with no source code, how is that even science?" - We have a methods section in the paper, just like in the science fair.

yes but the pipeline goes METHODS -> (CODE) -> RESULTS.

you can read the methods and they check out. fine. you can't see the code. the results show something new and amazing. how do you know this is because of the methods used or because somebody flipped a minus sign in the code?

well, you don't. unless you reimplement the code from the methods and see if it's reproducible. except that nobody does this. but let's say they did and found completely different results, that are also new and amazing. who is right? the answer is: NOBODY KNOWS, because nobody is publishing their code!

so astrophysicist number 3 comes around, wants to know who is right, and has only these methods to go on, but no code. he has to start from scratch. because the universe hates us, he will find a third set of completely different new and amazing results that aren't even of the same datatype as the first two--but nobody knows who is right, because everyone is hiding their code and claiming it's based on the same methodology.

> doing the same thing twice is pointless.

No that's science.

What is pointless is doing the same thing twice, in the hope you're doing the same thing as the last guy, because you don't know what the last guy did. Also, hoping that if you make errors (like the last guy undoubtedly did, because hey this is unreviewed closed source code we're talking about), that they'll be different errors. Except you can't know, because nobody publishes their code.

All of this reminds me a little bit of the parable of the Stone Soup. And if the above behaviour is causing people stress and grey hairs about their job security, well I don't wish that upon anybody, but hoarding source code isn't the way forward either.
Of course, you tacitly skipped over the other helpful comments and instead chose to concentrate on the worst comment in that thread. However, that doesn’t render the message delivered there wrong in any way – read the whole article/how-to before starting, just as you read the whole recipe before starting to cook.

So, yeah, you

a) didn’t read the manuals supplied with your distribution

b) instead went directly to a random third party site via Google

c) blindly trusted said site without fully reading it

d) messed up while doing so.

You should have gotten a computer-literate friend to help you, just as you don’t fix your car by looking for an howto online and dismissing the manual you can usually find in the glove compartment.
Thanks for trolling
This is very impressive!

Letting people mix a newbie-friendly visual programming language and Lua is a great idea.

You should consider enabling mipmapping -- it would make distant objects stop flickering as much, and usually improves performance as well.
Isn't that what GPL does?
I don't understand what's "decent" about that. What do you expect the benefit of that information to be, in Consequentialist terms? That people get the opportunity to be dissuaded from clicking on a link they'd have otherwise clicked on--and thereby disuaded from purchasing something they'd have otherwise purchased--because clicking that link makes someone else money with no cost to them? Even though it was a link to something they already saw enough objective value in to click without knowing that?

Would you also like Dropbox to add disclaimers to all their referral links reminding people that the person who sent them the referral is getting extra space as well?
Main LMAX Disruptor site: http://lmax-exchange.github.io/disruptor/

Related Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/lmax-disruptor

API is not as easy as a queue, but the results speak for themselves...
There's every chance a Goon saw what the fund was on and made sure it went to a special number. A final tribute as it were.
Okay - quick test: would you feed your children (if you have them) food that was imported from China? Your average American citizen would say, "WTH is wrong with you? Of course not!"

Or how about this if you don't have kids: "Would you drive yourself across country in a Chinese made car with no other means for acquiring another car if there are severe problems with said car along the way?"

If you said, "Sure!", then I just really have no other choice to believe that you either have some bias, very little world/life experience (teenager, younger 20-something), a counter-bias against what you perceive as a bias, or an agenda going on. If you were of Chinese descent, for example, you might have an agenda/bias that would explain such a statement. If you were an idealistic teenager, you might be rebelling against the unfairness of the world with such a statement. If you were of Asian descent and felt some need to "protect" Asian heritage/reputations in America, you'd make such a statement. Any adult who has spent more than 10 years continuous time in the USA in the past 40 years just would not have such an opinion.
I thought that Exherbo was very diy-oriented distro with with the assumption that users will package their own packages if the need arises.
Rediscovering a cloud of the future