skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth about the human animal than any of the world’s religions.

If some someone thinks that the history of humanity has always been one of progress, that's an empirical claim that can be shown to be false. But most of the people who I think promote the idea of progress are actually not like that. The idea of progress is an ideal, not an empirical claim. An ideal is something you aspire to, despite the fact that it does not match reality at this time, nor at any time in the past, and perhaps never even in the future.

Progress is something that you want to spend a lot of time producing, not something you just find in nature. It's something that you want to produce despite the fact that billions of people before you have failed miserably, not because of previous successes. If you want to help the kids in Africa who die of easily preventable diseases, you're a believer in progress. Just because you don't think it has a high chance of success doesn't mean that you don't want it to happen.

Now, people do disagree about what constitutes progress. But only a sophomore philosopher throws away an idea just because people disagree about it. If you throw the baby out with the bathwater every time you find a contamination in the bathwater, there will be hardly any babies left. And guess what, a life without ideals is like a world without babies. Without babies, our species will die out. Without ideals, our intellects will have nothing better to do than contemplate the grim reality. If that's all we're going to use our brains for, why have an advanced brain in the first place?

> We simply need to accept our fate, as they did in the classical age, before the Socratic faith in knowledge and the Christian concept of redemption combined to form the modern idea of progress and the belief in the infinite malleability of human nature.

It is not true that people simply accepted their fates prior to the invention of Greek philosophy and Christianity. Animals with highly developed brains never simply accept their fates. After all, they understand that if they manipulate nature in certain ways, at least some parts of their fate can be averted! Fruit on a branch that's too high? Get a stick to reach it. Too much weed and not enough grain? Burn the weed and plant some barley. River too deep to wade across? Build a bridge or a boat. Boat is too slow? Add some sails. No wind? Add an internal combustion engine. Anything else too inconvenient for your lazy ass? Find a way to make it easier. It's in our nature.

The paleo-conservative movement, which The National Interest seems to be a part of, is getting ridiculously out of hand. No ideal of progress? That's not even paleolithic. Cavemen lived in caves because they found it warmer and safer than sleeping in an open field or on a tree. They used stone tools because they found them more convenient than ripping things apart with bare hands.
Embracing Social Coding at Eclipse
PgParty Stockholm
I'm 30 and partying until 10am or having only a few hours sleep leaves me incapacitated for a few days. I'm healthy, have an athletic build, get exercise, etc. I just can't do without sleep anymore.

While my income has greatly increased in the last half a decade or so, so have my financial and human responsibilities.
Conan O'Brian had a segment several years ago. There was a tiny tiny buck-toof India-indian who drew superhero comics. He showed a couple examples and they were huge breasted women. Ridiculously huge breasted women and the Indian got giddle.

In the Dune movie, Sting says, "All I see is an Atradies I want to kill."

There's a Monty Python skit with a restaurant owned by Brits that is hosting a table of Germans. I think this was 1970's. The Brit Maitre D, kept saying the word "War" and obsessing on WWII.
this autoreload/live edit is sounding more and more like a REPL...
Knowing "a good plumber" is no longer knowing a genuinely skilled plumber. It's knowing a person you have an affection towards, one that has been marketed well to you.

Perhaps I am naïve but I believe that in the past people were more discerning about the true skill of an individual and less clouded by the appeal of the individual.
Don't forget they were already supporting the same things in Java and Flash.
Couldn't agree more (I am writing this from my own personal experience), Bandwidth is one of the (I think second) biggest internal reason for a startup to succeed or fail, way too many people (including me) tried to chew more than what they could swallow leading to waste of precious resources (time, money, human skills) which eventually leads to half baked product and loss of focus.

The number one reason is of course, you doing things which you don't like, are not good at and not enjoying what you are doing.
Pitching VCs: 10 Ultra Beginner Mistakes to Avoid
Well, in the US you cant. Defendants are demonized by the police even before they reach trial. Note how Snowden is already a guilty traitor before even arrest, let alone trial.

In the UK we are incredible careful about what is said in the press until guilt is found.
I wonder what the results would be like if you weighted votes with people's distribution of actual usage, e.g people who vote for python but have ONLY used python, their vote wouldn't carry much weight, but someone who had used python, c++, javascript, and ruby, their vote would carry much more weight.
In April there is the Revision demoparty (the biggest demoparty in the world), it's not a good idea to collide with it.
As a side note the solution to the Discard problem is quite beautiful.

https://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=4b61f121966b

As I read it makes a quick-try to acquire a pre-allocated buffer, otherwise makes its own. Then it makes a quick-try to give the buffer it used back (to be used by another goroutine).

That is a very elegant use of channels to create an optimistic buffer. Enjoyed that read :)
Stop looking for D3 developers
Yahoo's 'Dirty Old Man' Shareholders Remind Marissa Mayer She's a Woman
>code looks better than a lot of commercial kernel code

Sounds like we need another of Fabien Sanglard's source code reviews:) Normally I'd stay away from this sort of thing, but if it's a good as people say, I might have to check it out myself.
It means that the guidance system kept the rocket flying straight upwards.
While ubiquitous, this is not strictly necessary for a Linux system. For an example of a distro that makes a radical departure from FHS, see GoboLinux (sadly seems to be not updated anymore).
Yes, you are naive, and I don't mean that as an insult, but as characterizing what, IMO, is a flawed interpretation of how human interactions and assessment work.

How do you judge a skilled plumber? Some might judge that person on speed. Others might judge it on cost efficiency in fixing the specified task. And others might judge it on the ability to anticipate other problems in the system and provide reliable estimates and options.

What I might consider the best plumber is different than what...the Plumbers Society would consider it. But a friend whom I trust may have the same standards as I do, and in that case, the hired plumber benefits from knowing my friend. Despite the many, many instances of when this has led to cronyism, is that such a wrong way inherently for business to be conducted?
Why is the US tech community losing the immigration debate?
Tinker, Tailor, Whistle-blower, Spy
It's not quite the same. Karma/rep on HN, Stackoverflow etc are a core part of the site. Companies like Klout are parasitic. They are doing something with the content I generated and then trying to tell me to do something else "or else" (I'll have a low Klout score).

They draw most of their ire because the service is opt-out. Change it to opt-in and only the people who care about Klout will use it and the level of vitriol will go down.

Is your service opt-in?
I opted out some months ago, now I checked back the page related to my twitter account and it's present.
I tried to sign in to check what happened and was greeted with a "You already opted out from this account, do you want to opt back in and reinstate the account"? It seems that, at least in my case, the page is apparently permanent.
A related question to HN community:

Is there anyway to opt out of Wikipedia? Say, somebody created a profile page for me without asking for my permission. Is there anyway to delete my page?
The myths of the "self-made man" and meritocracy [2010]
What is safer in this scenario? Sealed fridge or coffee table in another room?

Car wise, well, that could be impracticable:
1) does one have a car in HK? Or did one fly in and hire a cab?
2) Has one just walked up a tower block to get to Snowden? All go down, and come up again? That would be annoying.
3) If I take all the phones and put them in a box, I know I have the phones. I have control.

In a normal apartment, I reckon a fridge is possibly the best place to put turned off phones to isolate them as best you can at short notice with out super spy resources. Not prefect, but looking round my place, I don't see something better than a fridge for the purpose.
Remind me Fringe!
Yeah, because jewelry, cash or electronics have no (resale) value so thieves don't touch them ;)
Well there is the case where you were redirected to a page you are not interested in (like popups). If confirmation is required, users will mostly close them without being exposed.
But thieves don't just take a laptop once in
Late 20s is not "getting older" by any stretch of the imagination. In the West, it's (though this varies by social circle and class) roughly where you start to count as an adult, perhaps akin to what 19-20 would've been in a previous era.

The social aspect also depends on a lot of things, like coworkers and living arrangements. Some people aged 30 have almost exactly college-style lifestyles: live in a group house, party daily, go into the office at 10 or 11am. I think one reason the view that it's hard to meet people post-college became common is that those kinds of lifestyles were not really seen, outside of some hippies and beatniks, until recently.
Most web development workflows emerged in an era of monolithic, server-side driven application development. Lots of server side code (as well as navigation logic and session state), relatively small amount of browser side code. In recent web app development, client side now has a larger proportion of the code and complexity. Developers tend to make incremental changes to their workflow rather than "starting from scratch" seem to miss the shift that has taken place.

One of the best examples of an efficient workflow (at least in theory) that I have seen is the Play framework, along with a browser plugin that causes the browser to refresh every time source code is saved (http://www.jamesward.com/2013/05/15/auto-refresh-for-play-fr...).
Yeah I felt the same at 27. But then... you don't hit 30, 30 hits you. I'm not kidding.
Voted for C++. Pretty high points. Unfortunately, this is not reflected in recent "who is hiring" threads. Lets hope for the best in the upcoming one :)
Seriously what about tincr?

I debug css that way. No more more memorization and you don't even have to start another program.
Anyone want to replace Google's SMS search feature -- that they cancelled. (I don't use it).
27? Pff! No much to talk about that age. Wait until you are 45, you will see.
Would that make Denmark the fourth nation to independently achieve manned space flight, behind Russia/USSR, USA and China? Or is it disqualified for not being government run?
Looking for a GPL-incompatible licence
As the Joseph Conrad story implies, there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative and as with all beliefs, all things really - fundamentalism and extremes can become harmful pretty quickly. So my fellow believers in progress, don't give up but be wary.
> If that we're not the case, HN would remove the usernames as well.

That doesn't follow. And, funnily enough, HN does deemphasise the author by showing the name in small grey text. There are plenty of reasons to attribute posts: the conventional expectation that one can be identified as the author of one's work, for one; the tendency of people to be more civil, for another.

> You're new to HN, so I'll let you in on something

Come on, I know I've only been here for nearly four years, but there's no need to be quite so patronising.
In general, anyone can edit or delete Wikipedia pages.

If you are a "notable person" then you can expect your edits to be reverted, however; on the other hand, if you are not very notable, a page about you would probably not survive very long anyway.
Beautiful! I've had a project like this in the back of my mind for a long time. Give me the ability to define macros/subroutines, and this would be the perfect way to study Elements.

Edit: I'm a bit stuck on Circle Pack 4 in 12 moves.
You have reduced the discussion to what, subjectively, makes a good plumber.

I will try to bring this back to my original point - One that is not necessarily a good marketeer may be far more suitable for the job, yet good marketeers but unskilled plumbers (to say unsuitable for the skilled job at hand) seem to be "successful" in terms of success and profit in their field.
I'm not really sure how the lightbulb metphor translates into real world code, what kind of situation does it describe?

In Java, I can very easily choose between mutability and immutability. If I put "final" in the variable declaration, the variable is immutable. So what I usually do is default to immutability but opt out if needed. Which is very often, usually because 1) it would make the code more elegant and easier to understand 2) for performance reasons.

You are performing no I/O.

Why does I/O make mutability useless?
My course on IL for C# Developers
There is only one law which says exclusively. The "primarily" thing is an interpretation of the law by IRS.
Scoring, ranking and sorting people is important for the future of the web. It's comparable to Google's pagerank. You need some sort of analyses/score/rank to value the content shared by someone.

Well, I for one value the contents shared by someone on the merits of such contents.

Why exactly should I trust a service, any service for that matter to make such judgments for me?

And if you want to argue that it's the same thing as pagerank; well, that analogy is spurious, at best.
I don't get it? Why would my employer care how many cat pictures I share?
Continuous Testing with NCrunch
Animals with highly developed brains never simply accept
their fates. After all, they understand that if they
manipulate nature in certain ways, at least some parts
of their fate can be averted!

Your argument has the appearance of something that's badly contrived (or derived).

You may have not chanced on arguments surrounding your premise on "highly developed brains" and natural limits imposed on such brains owing to a multitude of things including encephalization quotient (if not exclusively that).

It's verging on the conceited to make such claims without at the very least mooting the points and counterpoints surrounding such assumptions.

The following is a decent one:

Argument for a finite upper limit to human knowledge

1. The human brain consists of a finite number of particles
and energy states.
2. This matrix of particles and energy states is less than
what exists in the cosmos.

Ergo: The human brain has insufficient capacity to contain
a matrix containing the total map of all the particles and
energy states that exist in the cosmos.

Ergo: A human's knowledge is limited.

Further: All of the humans that exist, or will ever exist,
will always comprise a subset of the cosmos; Ergo, the
collective knowledge of humanity is also limited.

Argument dismantling the aforementioned

That isn't convincing. All you have shown is there is not
a one to one ratio of particles in a human brain and the
sum of the universe. This isn't an indication of epistemic
limitation. Although, I agree we have epistemic limitations.

If a natural upper limit does exist - that also stunts our ability to rise above certain petty disputes arising out of a set of very human instincts such as ego, vanity and
self-preservation - then progress could indeed be an illusory concept.

Source(s):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient

http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?s=8e29f5dcbb9c8b27...

http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?s=8e29f5dcbb9c8b27...

Edit: Additions
Steer your career (or how an appraisal form nearly ruined my life)
This would be much less of a problem if we could collapse comment trees like on Reddit. It would be just easy to minimize and ignore. I think someone made an extension for that.
define primary, I work on with Java at my workplace, however if i need to put something together in my leisure time, it will be python or some study of haskell
Planet Money: Kid Rock Vs. The Scalpers - Pricing strategy for tickets
> Still, they are the largely the result of people trying to defend the country from terrorism.

By reading everyone in the world's mail? No way. I don't believe that. It's an attempt at classifying people by their social impact and political orientation in order to manipulate them in elections and send police to harass the political enemies of whoever uses the database.

It's a grab for power. Information is power. They don't care about terrorism. It's not terrorism. It's more probable to die shot by a policeman than a terrorist. It's easier to die slipping in the bathroom, for pete's sake!
Why the use of Jira is painful
How come the united "states" of America still exists today? Or do you think that one day that will break up? (I do as it happens)
What about a RSS Reader + Twitter + HNews in one place?
FlowReader (http://flowreader.com) has already the RSS Reader and Twitter. It lacks it the HNews.
It can be a must, and the best substitute of GoogleReader.
Other idea of websites which are not only restricted to the RSS Reader and could be have a Twitter and HNews section?
> We're trying hard to keep Windows well-supported

As another Go developer on Win7, thanks, I think a lot of people really do appreciate this.

I've worked for years under Linux and OSX as well, but when I started dabbling in OpenGL via Go last year, I switched to Win7 for better nvidia gpu drivers (and Steam), simple as that. If you keep other MS crap I mean software off a Win7 system, it's a rock-solid developer OS with msys/mingw and Sublime Text and Go. I wouldn't touch Win8 but my 7 setup is absolutely working for me as of now. Ultimately I'll have to head back to a Unix seeing the direction Windows is taking, but I'm really happy to be able to work in Go as a first-class citizen for the time being.

Also given today's prevalence of Unixes in developer circles, Win7 is ironically the only OS giving off that "bad-ass underdog" vibe..
I did use it on Chrome and it worked perfectly well after I allowed the browser to use my webcam. For what it's worth my webcam is Logitech C270.

This is a neat project by the way. Thank you for your work.
I've been very surprised by this. I'm 37 and feel like I did at 27, but if I work through the night, like I used to do all the time, I am off-kilter for three-four days after. At the same time I cannot sleep past 10 am anymore, when I used to sleep in until 12 or one, given the option. Shit's weird.
Yes it has, it's one of the core things you adjust in most real applications.

It's a trade-off between exploration and exploitation. If you speciate then you have little sub-populations exploiting the local maxima, so they might do better. However, now you're not searching such a wide area so you're more likely to spend your time struggling to the top of the molehill that's next to the mountain.

In nature this also happens. Not having crossovers between ludicrously different things is generally a good idea because the landscape is full of tiny maxima. If you change a load of base pairs in your DNA you're less likely to be able to do things like form cells or process glucose than you are to add some awesome new power (unless we're in comic books).

One of the major differences for nature is that it can run all this jazz in parallel. If there are resources, it can happily have 10 trillion bacteria rather than 5 without any cost. When we're simulating, every fitness measurement on a piss-poor crossover is a waste that we should have spent on a more likely solution.

It all depends on the fitness landscape, but both approaches can be better on different real world problems.
I've also experimented a bit with this type of simulation quite some time ago, you can find the result here http://lifesoup.sourceforge.net/

This tries to simulate simple "swimmers" where the fastest survives and spawn new entities with slight variations.

(Note: this is not my best code :-))
You can generally get the page deleted only if it doesn't meet their criteria for a biography of a living person. Asking permission or being acceptable to the subject aren't in the criteria. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLP_deletion_process
Interesting approach. One criticism: The paper mentions that compile times max out at 1.1ms "for the most complex function" in the benchmark (AES), and therefore it is sufficient to just compile everything. However, those benchmarks seem too small to justify that conclusion.
Thirty-two checking in here, and yup, used to be able to knock back enough booze to kill a rhino when I was 27 and wake up feeling fresh as a daisy. I can drink even more now, but I pay for it by being dead the next day, no matter how much water or Gatorade I drink to help compensate.
Beautiful visualization to track flights in real time
Who would that be? I'm actually not seeing much difference between Ouya and basically every other company in the world right now. Their customer support sucks? Yeah, so does the majority of companies from people posting on these boards.
Chimps commit brutal murders of their own kind (is murder only murder when it's a killing of your own species?) and are very violent. Completely irrelevant to this story but thought I'd throw it in there.
NSA has it now. Who knows what other organisation is collecting data, going to inherit data collected by other organisations or just leasing access on a "per case" basis.

Once collected and analysed, this data is going to be like a kind of "credit rating". It will show who is a social influencer and what are his/her political leanings and their social network. Even if they are clean, a motivated party could blackmail them if anyone in their immediate circle has done anything illegal.

Imagine if mafia got a copy of this. What could they do with a blackmail database?
I'm 28 and I can't party until late hours without consequences on my ability to do anything complex the day after. :/

But then, how boring is partying?
Being 30 was awesome. I wouldn't worry about 30... I'm pretty sure I recall it being fun.
Yes. Also, they're not legally allowed to store or make a copy of your friend list.
Name Mix-Up Helped Snowden Leave Hong Kong
They may have heard a sound, assume they may be about to be discovered, and just scarpered with what the already had in their hands (which just happened to be the laptop).
I put a bounty on StackOverflow, but nobody answers, can you help?