skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yes we can procreate in the presence of some radiation:
could you set a lower compliance bar for any pollutant?

beneficial impacts are pretty much fringe science.
FWIW, there has been experimental demonstration of minimal ionizing radiation causing mutation in a single cell.

and most regulatory standards around the world continue to reduce 'acceptable limits'. I think the most recent example is the reduction in exposure to radon exposure that has been recognised in a number of national standards. I read that as showing that people who understand the science more than myself are still, decades later, finding more cause for caution.
Blank canvases can do that sometimes ;)
We cannot put software on the kind of assembly line/stamping process we can with say door hinges or other metal works that used to require a skilled blacksmith. That doesn't mean it won't happen some day.

Stamping out software is what your Windows/OSX/linux installation CD/DVD is. Microsoft is making a lot of money stamping out (figuratively nowadays) copies of Windows.

Software engineering is the equivalent of the mechanical engineer combined with mold maker for plastic or stamped parts. There are a lot of tool and die shops around me that are making a lot of money[1] making molds.

[1] Well, they were before the auto market tanked, but they are doing OK again.
I am working on my own help authoring tool "with blackjack and hookers" :) It has a cool name: Helpinator.
Appengine now supports PHP runtime.
What if attacker infects unencrypted part used for booting? Do you have protection against that?

It's relatively easy on Linux, where /boot is usually not encrypted.
I wrote a Chrome extension designed to filter HN down to the more technical posts. It might help. You need to download/load it as an unpacked extension, due to the new Chrome security policies, sadly

http://bitbucket.org/kevinburke/better-hn-filter
I think the most likely answer is that your friend was not lying, but that the NSA is a massive agency with numerous different divisions and operations that do not all follow the same set of rules or have the same objectives.
I don't think he's suggesting they're overpaid. He's just wondering how much he's contributing to the world, despite his high pay and societal praise. If anything, I think it points out the fallacy of thinking that our pay and our personal interpretation of our "worth" are in actuality totally disconnected, although we may feel differently. He feels, I would imagine, some angst over the fact that his contribution to the world may not be worthy of the money he receives. It's an interesting point, and a tough one to wrestle with. Lots going on there.
This is great advice, paper prototyping is really under utilized technique. It is really good way to concentrate on the interactions without getting too bogged down with details.
Now my coworkers can't think i'm the weirdest coder ever for moving to Montana...at least i'm in a house!

Also to offer a prospective, while this sort of thing does change ones ability to interact personally I've found that it is also a hugh boost for productivity...I can code for hours, go climb a mountain to clear my mind and then keep coding.

It also seems like Thomas has found a great way to get publicity depending on what his target demographic is.
So, http://www.reddit.com/r/somethingimade+longtext+programming+...
Siluetas de familias gratis
radicalphoenix at gmail.com, thanks!
Show HN: Dropping pressure in Jacksonville, FL as Andrea approaches
People often fail to make the distinction between a logical argument and a persuasive one. The qualifications of the speaker, for example, are irrelevant when analyzing a logical argument, but are quite relevant when analyzing a persuasive one (why should I trust this doctor's opinion?)

I've always felt that a better set of rules for internet arguments would be the Federal Rules of Evidence, which are explicitly rooted in the mechanics of persuasion.
The Alternative is Nothing ∙ An A List Apart Column
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5830604
This isn't a negative, self-worth thing, it's a perspective thing.

What the OP here is describing, is exactly the mentality that leads to this nonsense: http://programmingisterrible.com/post/50421878989/come-here-...

A lot of people would agree that empathy is one of the large components of what makes us "human", and that's rather vague, but it does make evolutionary sense for why empathy is useful for societal progress. And guess what, perspective is crucial for empathy. If we assume for a minute that almost nobody really lacks empathy, then what could be the only possible factor that produces an outcome like the one described in that link above? I'm sure most of us tech people aren't narcissists/sociopaths, so the only thing that could explain it is a skewed perspective that makes it permissible to rationalize a lot of the nonsense around us as being 'okay', or 'not relevant' to us. Empathy is a function that takes perspective as an argument, and if we assume that our empathy functions are correct (no reason to think they aren't usually), shouldn't it be good when we realize it's giving us the 'wrong outputs', and then do something actionable about it like try changing our perspective (or input)? I've battled with a lot of self-criticism and depression myself, but I see nothing wrong with this. On the contrary, it seems like the healthiest thing we could do as we approach a possible 'bubble' scenario.

I think the problem is that the OP is labeling what he's arguing with as "web development" when it's really more of a subset of startup culture that he's referring to, not all web developers (he lauded the 'adults' that created Rails remember? I'd say they're 'web developers').

Also, it isn't that things are trivial to us, it's that they can be trivial, period. It just doesn't look that way from the outside, so we benefit (and are congratulated) for "daring" to look into the black art that is computer programming and actually producing something, anything... imagine if it were socially deemed adventurous to look into plumbing, it would have a similar outcome (albeit without all the VC nonsense probably).

Also:

> Jet packs and flying cars were always a terrible benchmark to measure human technological progress against.

Not really, because we do have jetpacks (albeit not exactly efficient/affordable ones), and lets not forget that Google is developing self-driving cars! I'd say the notaion that any vehicle could drive itself is an even crazier idea than having something that's redundant with a small glider/aircraft at this point, and I'm sure people from the 1930's would probably agree.

So then why wouldn't it be good to use existing ground-breaking projects as benchmarks for human progress and value? A lot of web startups sure do fall short of that benchmark too.
I wonder if this means we'll see the rise of huge botnets and networks calling each other and using flagged words just to saturate the data the NSA is picking up.
The performance graphs look promising, but the second graph in the Parallelism section seems suspect to me. Why didn't they plot the graph out to 8 threads, like they did with the first graph?

Edit:
I don't mean to sound snarky, I'm definitely impressed.
>Logical fallacies are only relevant in certain narrow rhetorical modes and contexts. Specifically, logical fallacies are only relevant in rational arguments.

The only quote that matters.

People who use logical fallacies generally consider themselves rational and try their hardest to maintain logical integrity with their positions.

When debating with theists, paranormalists, and others who have faith-based views that are inherently (and intentionally) irrational, you can't use rational arguments and expect anything to happen.

This is why I stopped having all of these arguments in general. You start with an evidence requirement and end at the exact same point, because for many "a voice/book told me so" is the highest form of evidence that can be offered, and such evidence is considered to "trump" all other sources, regardless of what they are.

Without a common foundation from which to communicate, nothing constructive is possible.
Loved the article, but there was this big jump between

1 - x^2/2! + x^4/4! - ...

and

cos x

(and similarly with sin x). Why exactly are these equal?

(Also, just a nitpick, shouldn't the addition be actually subtraction before both elippses to demonstrate the alternating sign?)
"The fallacy itself doesn't constitute a counter argument."

Why not? It doesn't prove that what the other person believes is false, but it does show that their reasons/evidence for their view are wrong. (Assuming the logical fallacy isn't itself a straw man against some minor point in the other person's argument.) And it's usually it's not necessary (or even possible) to prove that x is false, only that there's no rational reason to believe x.

E.g. even Richard Dawkins doesn't claim that it's impossible that there is a god.
Kemal. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n17/perry-anderson/kemalism. I feel that "dictator", while technically accurate, doesn't have quite the right connotation---his rule didn't have the same totalitarian nature that those of Stalin, Hitler, Hussein, Castro, the Kims, etc. do/did to varying extents. (Or maybe I'm being oversensitive to questions of connotation.)
Their homepage is a video showing a paragraph of text, one line at a time. No, thanks.
Elon Musk explains his vision at Tesla's 2013 shareholder meeting (video)
Low population density is almost redundant with "Cheap land"
some other things that might be useful

http://eferm.com/machine-learning-cheat-sheet/

http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~flach/mlbook/tmp/mlbook-iptr.pdf

http://rise.cse.iitm.ac.in/wiki/index.php/Introduction_to_Ma...

http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/creed/Notes/ML_Compendium.pdf
It's actually a point against CISPA. Its authoritarian advocates keep whining about how impossible it is for private companies to cooperate with law enforcement on security issues, yet here we are, no CISPA, and yet Microsoft and the FBI are cooperating.
Things seem to be getting worse there. A server we have there just went offline, and their management servers are not responding. I wonder it's part of the exploit or as a result of attempts to "fix" the problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylors_theorem
Just look at how much "oh my god I can't believe the public doesn't care about this" angst has bubbled up in the HN threads on the NSA's actions. Amusingly, you see the same sort of rejection of democratic consensus from some extremist feminists ("women can't be trusted to know what they want because they've been brainwashed by the patriarchy.")
What is Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory in the form of an equation?
Love hearing about these takedowns.
Murder is far more concrete than the war on terror, because definitions of terrorist or what counts as a threat to national security is extremely nebulous and data about such determinations are hidden from most people, whereas murder is typically defined in laws that are generally accessible to the public and is strictly related to certain kinds of killings of human beings by other human beings.
Personality Assessments: What's the Difference Between Myers-Briggs and DISC
Top Marketing Spanish
A Python-powered automatic glow writing device
I think he was trying to grab an example that would be easy to jump to conclusions about (calls to the KKK)
No, it means "A plausible but misleading or fallacious argument"
Nice to see. I played with LevelDB a while ago, and performance seemed great as long as you didn't want any kind of durability . . . but of course you would in real life, and as soon as you start forcing things to disk LevelDB's performance dropped to levels that were beatable by any number of alternatives with fewer dependencies. To say I was unimpressed would be an understatement. It's good to see someone bringing it to where it should have been already.
Ask HN: When do you index your logs?
Do you write your log-worthy events to a file, and then parse them when you need to analyze them (e.g., Splunk); or do you write the structured event to a structured data store, such as a SQL database, which maintains indices in real time? Both approaches can be configured to perform the parsing and indexing on a remote node.
Microsoft Plans Dramatic Reorganization
I'm glad someone is addressing these issues. I think I'm not the only person that have had some bulk-write and compaction related performance problems with LevelDB. I wonder if there is any chance the changes from this fork will be rolled back into LevelDB codebase.
My favorite:

1) Using Taylor Series, show that exp(ix)=cos(x)+i*sin(x).

2) Then the result is trivial for x=pi

This image helps:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Euler%27s_formula.svg
Is not knowing "what [they] might need in the future" really sufficient justification to just give them everything?
This seems to have been prompted by the criticism he recieved for this appalling piece of work: http://plover.net/~bonds/nolongeraskeptic.html#islamophobia
> The fact that Google hosts that data does not give them ownership of that data, nor does it confer the right to access that data for any reason. The data in my drafts folder is exactly the same as data in a paper journal that I have in my house, and is protected by exactly the same law, the 4th amendment.

This is what I refer to as the "romanticized view" of technology. Your gmail draft is not like the paper journal you have in your house. It's Google's data on its hardware that its engineers have access to (in clear text!). You want to construct this metaphor, where the "physical location doesn't matter", but that's not the underlying nature of the system.

You say that "representation" shouldn't matter, but you're making the opposite argument. You want different rules for digital representations versus physical ones. The rule right now is that once the information, represented as molecules of ink on fibers of paper, is in someone else's possession, it's not your information anymore. Well at the physical level, your gmail drafts are little flipped magnetic domains on a hard drive platter in a Google data center. If you tried to enter that data center, you'd be thrown out for trespassing. But you think that in this case, the law should construct a metaphor: those bits are "private" even though you don't have possession of them or ownership of the medium on which they reside.

Thought experiment: if I chisel my diary into a rock slab and mail it to Google, do you agree that it's their data now? What if I write it to a magnetic hard drive and mail it to them? No difference, right? So why should it suddenly be different if I send the bits over the internet for Google to write to its own hard drive instead of mailing them a hard drive myself?
I don't think you have that sidechannel with AES-NI. Besides, as a physical attacker cold boot attack would be much easier
Or if the server has any interfaces with DMA, like PCI or something, that's even easier.
Ataturk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mustafa_Kemal_Atatürk#Establish...
This is an incorrect history of Snapchat. Snapchat was a couple of college kids' summer project. It had a couple of thousand of users in the Fall of 2011, but didn't take off until it went viral in a couple of LA high schools.

They raised money in the Spring of 2012, and were still relatively under the radar of most tech publications. It wasn't until the Fall of 2012 that they started getting major buzz.

I'm not disagreeing that marketing can't sway products into success, but that was not the case with Snapchat.
Halifax, Canada. Canadian needed. REMOTE possible.

Twisted Oak Studios is looking for a strong developer interested in project management for our 4 year old worker-owned consulting company.

Our company's focus is high-tech interactive projects. Over the past year, our work has included game development (particularly in Unity 3D), graphics/shader programming, and language and audio processing. We’re mostly platform agnostic (mobile, desktop, embedded, custom hardware). We don’t do much web tech.

We're interested in working with people who care about their craft. Ideally this includes thinking at both the design level:

* data driven work estimation

* keeping long term technical requirements in mind

* thinking about how a piece of work contributes to product/project end-value

And the implementation level:

* code standards

* readability

* maintainability

* exploring new effective development paradigms & techniques.

For this position we’d like to hear a little bit about you, see something that you’ve worked on that you’re proud of, and hear about how you approach large-ish projects with a team.

We offer strong compensation, prioritize developer quality of life (limiting work-weeks, flexible hours), and do varied interesting work. Lots of opportunities and support for professional development and side-projects.

Lastly, if the relationship is great after 6-12 months, we’ll want to transition away from wages in to shared-ownership.

Hit me up at jobs@twistedoakstudios.com. I’m committed to responding to every serious note I receive.
Maybe they're using different names, but where are: Linear Regression, Logistic Regression, Neural Networks, and SVMs?
If the language was also dynamically typed, that could also lead to some interesting problems. What is the actual size used to represent a string, or an in, or a double in the language? What happens when you want to compare/convert different types?

Either the language provides these capabilities, in which case it's doing some memory management of it's own, or you write them, in which case it wasn't necessarily all that dynamic to start with.

I imagine it might look like what you get when you try to write a dynamic language in C (Perl, Ruby, Python), a lot of macros that automate what's going on to the degree you are mostly writing some macro based DSL.
That's how we know you're not really Alan Kay.
Guys, there's lot more here - http://functionspace.org/discussion/new :)
If you didn't cancel the credit card you used for linode.com, now is the time
I have been a victim of procrastination. Since linode have been compromised, i promised my self i would cancel the credit card and get a new one. Well I didn't, eventually I just stopped thinking about it.

On May 28 checked my card account and I see multiple charges for large amounts. (cash converters, groceries, cheese, and so on). Note this is all done overseas.

How do I know this is from linode?

For my online transactions I use prepaid cards that are easy to dispose of, and this card was used solely for linode.

Advice: If you are still on linode and didn't cancel your credit card, well you should.
Stamping out software is what your Windows/OSX/linux installation CD/DVD is. Microsoft is making a lot of money stamping out (figuratively nowadays) copies of Windows.

I think you misunderstood. The product a software engineer makes is not a CD that lands in a person's hand. It's the arrangement of bits that eventually ends up on that CD. The OP is saying there is no way for a machine to arrange those bits.
Don't want to sound too greedy, but I can't wait for your following tmux presentation ;)
Samsung Says New Superfast “5G” Works with Handsets in Motion
theserverside.com is almost dead and lambda-the-ultimate.org very limited in scope.

> And a lot of the more niche subreddits are actually pretty good. Stay away from /r/funny, /r/politics and the other "big" ones

esp. stay away from r/programing. It degenerated to the moderators' fanzine.
Central Illinois
I live in Central Illinois.
Phrack.org for security research and exploits
"Nobody who was presuming that when he said it"

That problem lies with the voters, and the candidates are not going to change their behavior until the voters own up to their responsibilities.

Voters prefer to be told these little white lies about great intentions, rather than be bothered to apply basic knowledge of our federal gov't that should have been gained in junior high school. Voters whine and complain that it is the politicians fault, but voters' own behavior reward that which they claim to dislike.
Very good point about single user/rescue, thanks.
Well, specific solutions would to be close various federal agencies, e.g. the department of education. Push law making wherever feasible to the state level or lower. Simplify the tax code - i.e. end tax breaks, reduce the overall tax rate so that the government spends less money.

The key thing is to not attack our freedom to associate and speak, which is what rootstrikers are advocating. Many of the policie they advocate will be used to silence anonymous speech/activities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootstrikers#Positions

At the end of the day, their cure won't fix anything, but it will hurt a lot.
Thanks for the link. That is sad news.

The key point seems to be:

> the court was saying that Absolute went too far in collecting the contents of the communications being made on the stolen computer.

So location tracking and snapping photos of the user is acceptable, but intercepting the users communication content is not. Unfortunate, and poorly decided, but not complete failure.

As usual, the government reserves rights for itself to perform specific acts that it considers criminal when private citizens engage.
Google experimenting with artificial intelligence
Given that the poster robomartin is less than 1.5 years away from asking what the best (undergrad) online CS degree is, I felt it was particularly apt in this case.
Thanks for the link. That is sad news.

The key point seems to be:

> the court was saying that Absolute went too far in collecting the contents of the communications being made on the stolen computer.

So location tracking and snapping photos of the user is acceptable, but intercepting the users communication content is not. Unfortunate, and poorly decided, but not complete failure.

As usual, the government reserves rights for itself to perform specific acts that it considers criminal when private citizens engage. (And of course, the government offers no replacement for citizens who are prohibited for taking defensive actions on their own behalf.)
Not is the case where resources are found under said land or the land is farm land.
But what if being a plumber gets you all of the things you want in life? What is this bar you are talking about? Not everyone wants to be or has to be at the absolute top of their potential.

There's a huge disconnect between economic value and, well, humanity, frankly. Somehow we've come to worship the economic return of everything over the actual experience of living.
absolutely - freelance work affords me the ability to remodel my house, take nicer vacations, new laptop, new phone, etc...

my day job is as a systems admin and i take care of the websites. my freelance is supporting some friends offices and web development so roughly the same thing.
Am I the only one troubled by the last example?

And then suppose you encounter a woman who tells you that because of the insults she has received from guys in the skeptic community, she has decided that the skeptic movement is fundamentally sexist.

Receiving insults from men that identify as skeptics does not mean that the skeptic movement is fundamentally sexist.

Telling her she just committed a fallacy doesn't seem so wrong to me.
Thanks for posting the links, I've forgot to mention it in all my wisdom, duh..
Silicon Bayou rising: New Orleans' drive to be the next great tech city
Furthermore, many deductive fallacies can turn into inductive, probabilistic theorems simply by moving to evidence-backed arguments instead of proof-backed arguments. (Authoritative claims can be evidence for a shift in probability, correlation is evidence of causation, absence of evidence is evidence of absence... How much that evidence is worth, of course, depends on the context.)