skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But why is it dangerous, on balance, to make assumptions of causality from data and statistics alone?

Well it all depends on the actions you take based upon those assumptions. If the action is low risk, low cost then it may be the wise choice. You need to remain aware of the uncertainty and that you are basically guessing until a better understanding is achieved.

One of the dangers is that initial uncertainty is forgotten and wrong information becomes "common knowledge".

Another danger is where there is there actually is causation but running the opposite way to that assumed. For example if a chemical substance is a useful form of self medication for sufferers of a condition there may be a correlation between the use of the chemical and the condition but banning/withdrawing/warning about the chemical would actually worsen the situation.
I know it's ironic given recent revelations, but am I the only one who's super-reluctant to click on any link ending in .ru or .cn?

No jingoism here - probably just too many years on Windows have me paranoid.
Mankind is into space since what, 75 years?

Its too early to think of traveling to far points in space using the technology we have.

Imagine some thousands of years back, planning to explore the world using an ox cart. Yet today, airplanes have made that perfectly possible.
How to Make a WordPress Plugin School Blog Series
> "Last time I looked closely, I had better control with curl, and curl had better support for stuff. For example HTTP 1.1 was supported by curl, but not wget.

> "This makes curl a far better choice for testing HTTP servers."

Well yes. You're just reiterating what I said about curl being great for server testing. But this article is about download performance. When just downloading a largish binary file (eg a tarball), it's easier to just:

wget example.com/source.tar.gz

With that, you get a progress bar, it saves the file to disk and basically just does all the sane options you'd want for downloading by default (which I think is why most INSTALL / README docs tend to recommend wget in their instructions).

Again, I'm not saying one is better than the other, but the convenience of wget's defaults (which I think you also highlighted later in you post) does tend to make me favour it for downloading binary content (with curl being my go-to for any server testing or text resources).

> "And next, since I now know curl pretty well, and have it installed all over the place, it is my go-to HTTP command line client."

wget also comes as part of the basic install with almost all Linux and other UNIX-like OSs as well. In fact wget actually pre-dates curl (albeit they're both >= 15 years old, so there's not really much between the two relatively speaking) so I'd have expected even your oldest live systems would still have wget.

I can totally relate to the "know[ing] curl pretty well" point though. There is definitely an argument for reusing the tools that you're already familiar with.
Which are unknown, might be (currently) unfixable, and more than likely are completely irrelevant.

One of the reasons Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy states is for it being effective is essentially ignoring the "root causes" (that may as well be already gone) of problems in favour of actually fixing it.
Nobody cared then because they didn't understand it.

If all you show someone is a building with some equipment and say that they're monitoring you, it doesn't take much hand-waving to convince someone that these complex systems are only targeting certain people, etc.

Now, rather than just knowledge of a room with blinking lights, we have dumbed-down presentation slides that definitively show even the most computer-illterate person that their own personal data, not just the data of specific people, is being targeted, collected, stored, data-mined, etc.

It goes from a feeling of "it's probably legal, and targeting criminals" to "that's MY data they're stealing"

That's why people care. Moreover, it's just important that people DO care. If everyone adopted the same "why should we care now" attitude, then the powers that be have already won.
There's a very common theme on sites like HN or reddit (and I'm not implying you're using it here, but your comment may at least suggest it - if not, forgive me, my comment is not directed at you specifically) that although western governments can be dicks, they are still nowhere near 3-rd world countries' governments when it comes to human rights and other things you, western countries' residents, take for granted.

However, in my view, the thing to realize is that almost all achievements the west made came not from a system of governance, but from individuals continuously restricting those who govern and from the entrepreneurial talent that flourished when government didn't bother them. To say that western governments are somehow better than a Russian government is to be ignorant. They only thing they are better at is lying and deceiving its people about its own importance to the society.
all flies eat shit, do you eat shit too?
Wayland requires KMS. The closed source drivers do not support that.
Privacy-centric search engine Blippex launches with a new twist on ranking
Yeah, I've spent some time playing with libcurl as well. However I hadn't considered your point about wget being out of scope because this is about libraries rather than utilities. Good point :)
There is a little known alternative Turing test or competition if you will, between man and machine. It says that a team of robots will beat the world champions in football (soccer) before 2050. I think it will happen sooner. What do you think?
>>day side and night side temperatures on HD 189733b differ by about 500 degrees Fahrenheit.

Also, it's a gas giant...
There are a number of checks that can (and are) put in place in physical paper based elections that mean large scale collusion is needed to make large scale fraud work.

1) Observers at polling stations.

2) Sealed ballot boxes.

3) Observers from many parties and neutrals at counts.

4) Physical votes retained and recountable.

It isn't going to be completely secure but if you measure the systems security by how few people you could rig an election with it is an order of magnitude harder [edit: to rig].
Well, if we really wanted to we could probably hack something together along the lines of the Project Orion designs right now, but it would be hugely expensive and pretty messy so I can't see anyone doing that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propul...

I suspect if we do send out interstellar probes they will be tiny rather than flying battleships:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starwisp
I made a few simplifications for brevity and "these files" was one of them. What the .torrent actually contains is a list of the files and how those files are divided up into chunks of equal size (say half a megabyte per chunk). The bulk of the torrent is a list of hashes of each chunk, which allows your client to verify the data it has received from other peers. If you then take a hash of <<the part of the torrent that lists the files and the chunk hashes>> the resulting hash is known as the infohash. The infohash describes this particular torrent uniquely, and it's the infohash you send to the tracker when asking for peers.

Hopefully from this explanation you can see that you need it for two purposes, one so you can give the right infohash to the tracker, and two so you can verify the data you receive from peers.
A WATERSPOUT FILMED IN FLORIDA SO SURREAL YOU MIGHT THINK IT’S A FAKE
Sorry, I didn't mean to patronize your face off - was clarifying more for the benefit of other readers who are not so au fait with the infrastructure :)
We seem to be in full agreement. I only wanted to spell out my own reasoning for using curl and not wget, since you explicitly said you were interested in this information, and I suppose there are others that think like me in this regard as well :)

One popular UNIX-like OS that comes with curl and not wget is OS X. That might also drive adoption.

(I seem to remember having had to install both curl and wget on Ubuntu, but I am unable to verify this now)
Hey, radicale looks pretty nice, thanks for the tip.
Thats why any person can act as an observer if they so wish and oversee the person counting your ballot. I can not possibly do the same with a turing machine.
Convert your starred items from Google Reader to Pocket
That in itself is a problem because the ability for the voter to prove who they voted for opens them to coercion or bribery. Although doing it online (or by post) opens that risk anyway.
It Just Got a Whole Lot Easier to Fund Your Startup
Depending on your friends, facebook offers various advantages. You can see what they've been doing", see if they are online, send a simple 'hey' that wouldn't really be written if you were to use email.

People do use email still... But pretending facebook doesn't offer any value is an exercise in reality distortion.
Why Internet Marketing Surpasses Traditiona Marketing
Somehow I felt like network/usb disabled computers and typewriters would have sudden spike in sales. How long that will remain is the question unless there's an ink reservoir feed system for the print head (cause everyone hates ribbons).

Now there's a Kickstarter project waiting to happen!

Edit: Just found a very old model that had an ink roller system. http://machinesoflovinggrace.com/ptf/Sun.html (First one, Sun Standard No.2 )

Surely, some industrious person(s) can come up with a more elegant way to do away with ribbons.
Keep up with that
I doubt I have/had ADHD, but Modafinil did the same for me.
So, lavabit.com just got a whole load more customers.
Distilling in America requires paperwork and some taxes, and special construction, even just for personal use. It is pretty much a royal pain in the ass to do legally (http://www.ttb.gov/spirits/faq.shtml#s7), though of course some people do make illegal moonshine.

Homebrewing beer legally is trivial though, and a fairly popular hobby. Homebrewing beer legally for personal use was trickier until 1979 iirc, so there isn't a long tradition of it yet, but it is becoming increasingly popular as time goes on.
If quantum computing shows up, AES-256 will remain secure. Otherwise there is no advantage at all.
You will hate Facebook and keep using it
FB gives you a great way to stay peripherally involved in people's lives. It allows you to have numerous but low-cost touch points such that when you next have a chance to properly catch-up you already know what the major events have been.

It's the complete opposite of email where I think "I'll wait until I have something proper to say" and then never send anything. On FB, it's totally normal to leave one-line comments. Having said this, I barely use FB anymore (due to privacy concerns).

Edit: I should also add that I've never used email in the social way that people seem to refer to. I really don't understand how that would be possible. FB allowed new types of social exchanges that didn't exist before (for me, at least).
I think most UK people can find an off licence or pub that serves them at 15. We certainly did at my school.
What to Look for When Backing a Founding Team
>My experience with Nokia Maps was very poor, but I don't need to drive, so never got to try that out.

I'm amazed by that. In London the mapping is top notch, it has pedestrian paths and such which gmaps is missing. However for Soho where bars come and go in weeks, its often out of date for POIs. But as normally if I'm in a place that changes often, I'll have data, that isn't an issue (one can always fall back to gmaps data).

But outside of London Nokia maps are hands down the best I've found. This holds true in the countryside of England, France, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Vietnam... I mean in the middle of nowhere Vietnam, I've good offline all the directions I need to my cycling. Amazing, gmaps didn't even have a road there, and bing, well lets not talk about bing maps. The only one that comes close is the Open Street Map project. But they lack POIs pretty much completely. On my motorbike in Thailand, I had not just Fuel places shown, but also coffee places. With no mobile phone signal...

Whilst I use windows phone as my primary device, I have some uses (SkyDemon) that require me to have an Android too, but I will say that the Nokia mapping is so bloody good, I bought a 720 (as in the UK they were £120 off contract!) for a friend as a travel phone, only for the mapping.

However, I don't use it when driving in the UK, because it doesn't have 'accident black spot warnings' or speed trap locations.
Glass allows scientists to recreate superman's memory crystals
I'm paranoid about clicking on any links regarding these revelations on a site self-labelled "hacker"-news... even reading The Guardian!

And it disturbs me. I'm quite certain I'm on a algorithmically generated shortlist as a result of following this mess.

I know the internet hasn't been the 'wild west' for quite some time, but it morphed into 'panopticon' pretty damn quickly.
Yet if there was no content, there would be no product... so they are selling your content.

Which means they are just lying in their about page.
For me, it's not about the direct messaging - it's the feed.

Someone on the other side of the world posts a photo of something they've been doing, I comment on it and we have a conversation.

For this to happen without the likes of Facebook, they would have to explicitly share that photo with me, something that may or may not be likely depending upon what the photo is about, what their perception of my interests are and whether they think I want to be bothered with it.
Oh yes, the situation there is certainly better. I'm just pointing out that the drinking age is not strictly 21 across the US.
>> You are free to support those who can't meaningfully contribute, but where do you get the moral authority to demand that I do so as well, with my own money?

We're not quite there yet but what happens when all the food and goods a society need can be made by automation, run by a skeleton crew of (say) 5% of the population in facilities owned by 1% of the population? Nobody else can compete on price or availability, the makers don't need staff, and only so many can fit into the service industries.

Do the 1% continue to take the majority of wealth as rent, and the 5% live reasonably well, and f*ck everyone else? Or do we recognise that human progress has been a group effort and start to share the abundance with everyone?

Besides which, if you're asking where the moral authority to demand you help house feed and clothe people comes from... LOL. It's already here. What's not moral is the immature libertarian "I've got mine" attitude we see so much of these days. Tax to help the less fortunate and societal development is theft of my stuff by force and inherently immoral? That's a pretty stunted and selfish thought pattern right there.

>> isn't there a good chance that a permanent underclass with a guaranteed welfare income will overpopulate in relation to those who are "meaningfully contributing", to the point where the ratio is so bad that the system breaks down?

Oh no, the poor people will breed!
Why Can’t Offline-Borns Tell Difference Between Voluntary And Forced Actions?
Javascript lambdas, array equality, and advanced string replacement
A friend of mine worked for defence research center. He had two computers on the table, one with Internet access and one for intranet access. The intranet was a completely independent network with separate cable wiring. Even cables have different color.

I mindly remember that was based on some NATO requirements.
That doesn't verify anything. They are shuffling encrypted data between devices, but none of that is connected to the actual results. This isn't verification, it's smoke and mirrors.
Could you explain briefly what you like so much about SQLAlchemy? I've never been able to understand why it's so good.
He means that in the sense of the either-or fallacy[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
No, it's disingenuous to suggest YOUR content is unrelated to the value of THEIR product.

A reasonable analogy would be conferences, are you paying for the venue, or the access to other people/speakers? does that mean the people/speakers are the product?
I did mean to say "buy", not "drink". And in the UK you're legally allowed to drink alcohol from the age of 5.

My point was that the state imposes restrictions on him because the state thinks he's not adult enough to handle the consequences. The state doesn't allow him to buy alcohol because the state thinks he's too immature to do so. Thus, it seems unfair for the state to suddenly claim that he's fully adult and fully capable of behaving like an adult and fully responsible for his actions.
>> Correct, bitcoin lets YOU hoard and speculate - which is a healthy mechanism in a free market.

Not exactly healthy for something that's supposed to be either a currency or a payment method though.
I am not sure -- perhaps if the proposal is that it's directly based on only the residency or citizenship then children too would have it, although I would find it somewhat questionable if it is needed(because it's the parents who need the money, not the children themselves for example). Perhaps the system could work better if it was for adults only, or that the money goes to adults.
Of course it will ... with robots you have no limits on strength speed and endurance as long as the battery pack can support the unit for 45 minutes. You have instant communication and perfect positioning. You can also make superhuman shots with strength and precision.

AI has nothing to do with it.
This may be what you're looking for. I think it was developed my MS specifically for this reason:

https://github.com/Reactive-Extensions/RxJS
I'm a contract IT Project Manager, mostly working for banks. I found out about HN when Michael Arrington covered it on TechCrunch the first time.

Do I like what I do for a living? It has it's crap moments but I'd say it gives me a certain amount of satisfaction. I like the variety, and the fact that there is a tangible change that's evident after I complete my efforts. I'm not running a line function that is the same day after day.

However, if I ever win the lottery you wouldn't see me for dust...
(1) Even the simplest paper ballots are already counted by computer (central tabulators). Central tabulators that run on insecure computers and do all of their math using the most rudimentary microsoft access databases (no password protection, little user control, remote access via dial-up modem).

(2) Slot machines are already protecting millions upon millions of dollars from countless people who would love to be able to modify those machines' behavior.

(3) A backup-paper trail would reduce error and allow for recounts. You vote, a receipt gets printed, you confirm that the printed paper represents your vote, and you're done. (The paper stays with the election commission)
So, one argument in favor of web apps is that many of the common, tough-to-program operations are carefully coded by top programmers who are devoting their careers to fine-tuning that operation. Browsers are constantly being upgraded more and more of this important functionality built-in, including rich-text editing

Many tough-to-program things like rich text editing have also been implemented for you in native frameworks. For example see the source of TextEdit[1], it does not implement a rich text editing control from scratch, it uses NSTextView and the other NSText* classes.

Only slowly has Objective-C been seeing strings and hash-tables becoming more than libraries accessed like other objects. This means that handling of modern cases (e.g., characters taking up more than one byte) happens naturally, efficiently, and hopefully more bug-free

NSString has supported NSUTF8StringEncoding since OS X 10.0 (and I imagine since before that). Dictionaries and arrays did recently get some syntactic sugar, but strings have always had the @"" syntax, so I'm not sure what the author is referring to here.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#samplecode/TextEdit...
You can build in some tolerances of this to the system like you say cast vote at any time however surely at some point these people must call the police about their situation. Technology can't fix this issue it can only kid of accomodate it.
> "We seem to be in full agreement. I only wanted to spell out my own reasoning for using curl and not wget, since you explicitly said you were interested in this information, and I suppose there are others that think like me in this regard as well :)"

I'm grateful for your input. Sorry if I came across as elitist - that wasn't my intention but in reflection, in does read a little that way.

> "One popular UNIX-like OS that comes with curl and not wget is OS X. That might also drive adoption."

Ahh interesting point. I guess that would have an impact.
There's something sketchy about Jottacloud. I don't trust it. I installed the client a few weeks ago and it wouldn't upload my files. The program just froze. When I tried to uninstall the software it hung again (I had to manually delete it).

It's still in my start menu somehow, although I disabled it. And this is happening to a guy who religiously scans and cleans his Windows partition.

I recommend everyone stay away.
Or what would happen if people reported every similar "threat" they heard on Xbox live and similar?
Hi. I read the above job description and I don't seem to fit the qualifications. However, Im a QA Software tester for 5yrs. If you have any QA jobs opportunities open then please reply to my email at, zgal786@yahoo.com. Thank You.
flip (comparing whatever) is a neat trick! I'll have to remember that.

For \l -> (head l, length l) I tend to use head * * * length (without the spaces between those stars).
Sorry, I don't follow? Was that mentioned in the article?
> “A new species, Robo sapiens, are emerging,”

So... they breed true?
I imagine the first few people to e-mail that address from the U.S. are going to make some new friends shortly, as well.
This means that handling of modern cases (e.g., characters taking up more than one byte) happens naturally, efficiently, and hopefully more bug-free.

This isn't true at all, right? JavaScript is missing fundamental Unicode support, like normalization or testing for canonical equivalence.
It could happen sooner than you think:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4542210

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4834306
Austria allegedly has a problem with nursing homes getting many (mail) votes for the parties who have political influence on staff decisions. I can imagine that there are similar problems everywhere, but electronic votes might cause much bigger issues because it's too easy for ruling parties to manipulate the central systems where votes are stores/counted (they were planned to be deployed in the interior ministry here, the one held by Ernst Strasser [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Strasser#2011_cash_for_i...] for 4 years).
Solving the Riddle of Measuring Social Voice
I wish I'd taken Haskell seriously ten years earlier.

My SML lecturer told us the quip that "Haskell programmers don't write programs to run them. They write them to look at them and see how nice they are." which is hilarious but far from true (it may have been closer to true when he said it though).
Nokia's new 41 megapixel camera
> the alternative is for us to use products from large companies who we have seen will do whatever the US government asks them and call it legal.

> Your attitude seems to be that we should just roll over and let the NSA/GCHQ/etc take whatever they want. I disagree.

That's not at all what is being said. Many good cryptography products are open source. They have companies behind them because crypto is expensive - you need programmers and researchers and attackers and people to respond to security advisories.

"Don't use crappy kludgey crypto for serious uses; use established products instead" is not at all "Roll over and let GCHQ / NSA do what they want".
Why yousendit had to change it's name