skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for the reply.

According to your example about the night sky, a claim is merely an observation if everyone will make the same claim in response to the same evidence. This seems very porous and weak, but following that logic, I would argue that given evidence that "the brain generates our experience of self by merging information about our body from multiple sources, including the eyes, the skin, the ears, and even one’s internal organs" it does not obviously follow that by observing a visualization of your body and heart beat will cause one to experience the phenomena of dissociation with his body. Then it seems that claiming so and contriving repeated samples is scientific.

It seems to me, the point you're really driving at is that a claim must be couched in some systemic view. It must base itself on a collection of related reinforcing ideas and assumptions (and state as much), and refine or extend that system. These systems abstract irrelevant things. Neuroscientific work is not phrased in string theory. It builds on a system that includes physical assumptions. Should a theoretical physicist argue neuroscience is on shaky ground because we do not understand all the details of the underlying physics? Should a neuroscientist argue evolutionary anthropology is on shaky ground because we don't understand all the details of the underlying neuroscience?

To your broader point. The motives and actions of neither psychiatric pharma, nor society, nor academia even, do not invalidate the possibility that collections of reinforcing ideas and assumptions can explain human thought at some level of neuroscientific abstraction. For better or worse, Jung, Freud, etc have established such systems which can and have been subject to methodical examination and testing by others. That they have subsequently not held up does not mean that the possibility is invalid.

I think also that there's a tendency to conflate the physicality (non-qualiality) of phenomena and its ability to be subject to "scientific" methods. And yet entrepreneurs expand knowledge with this all the time, as they make predictions about customer behavior, statistically test, refine, extend... This might not be Los Alamos "science", but it's method is certainly "scientific".
They are actually incapable of downvoting you - you can't downvote direct replies to yourself.
Eek, that seems pretty racist. Though in Northern Ireland they do separate the schools (they've been trying to stop that), and there is quotas for public jobs (though mostly because they had a long history of having a quota of 0 for one side).

Remember, Europe and the USA are different and have had different histories. Europe has had a slightly different history of racial discrimination than USA. The have literally been wars.
It's not our top criterion. It's just one that I'm willing to talk about publicly, because there's no way to fake it.

We're not against funding people from outside the US, and we fund a lot of them. But 564 startups is enough to see patterns, and the empirical evidence about very strong accents is striking.

And I am talking about failure to communicate here. I don't mean strong accents in the sense that it's clear that someone comes from another country. I'm talking about accents so strong that you have to interrupt the conversation to ask what they just said.
Are you implying that mysql is not a relational db?
I think this is an important observation. Those who support the surveillance state are likely doing so for similar psychological reasons as the desire to believe in God: the reassurance that someone somewhere is watching, and meting out justice. And unlike with God, there is no disputing the existence of NSA; whether you have faith in their integrity and supposed mission is another matter.

See also this excellent Venkatesh piece on the relationship between observation and authority: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2013/03/22/social-dark-matter-on-s...
I'm seeing a lot of love for Laravel 4 at the moment and I'm not 'getting' it. Sure, the framework's easier to pick up than Symfony2 and not as over-engineered, but it doesn't feel as complete (forms, anyone?) or as well designed (what's up with all these static methods?)

Laravel 4 is becoming the CodeIgniter of the PHP 5.4 frameworks - simple enough for people to jump on as they can get something done. And the CodeIgniter comparison is not a compliment.
There are plenty of journalists in the world.
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Top 10 in Broodwar in Europe and a grand master in chess on FICS here. I don't think Starcraft can ever have the same impact on your brain and cognitive skills like chess. Unless you play Blitz chess, you have to learn to think at least 9 moves ahead, in Starcraft even your macro never exceeds 2 moves. The advantages to learn to concentrate are amazing in chess and non existent in Starcraft. On the other hand Starcraft gives you some understanding of process chains.
This works well and it's called shifting the overton window: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

It has been used by politicians quite successfully. Like for example if a party wants to make abortions illegal after 3 months of pregnancy, it's better if they start from an outrageous position, like criminalizing all abortions, after which their real target starts being seen as a reasonable compromise. This also works the other way too. Many people that are anti abortions have had abortions themselves or have family members that did - throwing jail time into the conversation or other outrageous positions like criminalizing pregnancies without a license, does wonders, but of course, politicians have to be more careful otherwise they risk losing votes.

If you pay attention, this happens all the time.
The English language word "segregation" means something like "a multi-modal spacial distribution".

But the most common (and very well understood by anyone educated here) use of that word is to describe the regime of laws in the US south designed to prevent racial interraction and preserve white priviledge.

Basically: it means something very similar to "apartheid", which is another word that probably had a neutral meaning once but now can only mean one thing.
The issue with insurance is simple. It is better to have a small, but guaranteed loss that you can survive than a huge, but unlikely loss that you cannot, even if the total cost of the smaller losses are more than the relative cost of the large loss.

That said the insurance system in the US is too broken and needs to be scraped.
You should read his personal emails[1].

[1] http://wikileaks.org/the-gifiles.html

edit: I am asking others to read his personal emails because he himself pays others to do the same. Do it.
Heh.

I wanted to be truthful and didn't know off the top of my head what, say, the median time for a claim to be accepted was.

I remember it being something like 2-5 months to get a response, so multiply that by the number of appeals (up to 4, I think) and my ballpark estimate is that the median time-to-acceptance for all eventually-accepted claims is around 6-18 months.

So, I figured saying "could take months" was a more honest thing than saying "could take years." If the median time were greater than a year, after all, "it could take months" is still true, but the converse isn't true! If I had said "years" instead of "months" and was wrong, someone could easily have replied, saying, "You're exaggerating. The median time to acceptance is 9 months, not years. The claims that take years are exceptional cases."

In any case, I didn't know, so I wanted to err on the side of intellectual honesty. That'll teach me. :P

Also, I don't know if you (and the other person who replied with the same comment) have ever heard of Wiio's Laws: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html

One corollary of those laws is this: "If nobody barks at you, your message did not get through." :)
Just out of curiosity what does "stay as schemaless" as possible that did not read right?
I mostly agree with you. The awkward syntax and a nightmare API is here to stay for backward compatibility though. The most important point is, there are a lot of languages which are better than or at least on par with PHP on every aspect you can think of. PHP is definitely not a disaster, but everybody just need to move on.
I don't necessarily disagree with your point, but that is a poor example.

Facebook uses MySQL, largely, as a key-value store.
The colon-based syntax was voted down.

What went live in 5.4 was support for brackets in lieu of array()

// Typical array syntax
$arr = array('key' => 'asdf');

// Supported in 5.4+
$arr = ['key' => 'asdf'];
Is true in physics as well. That's how stars are formed... Gravity is extremely weak, and so the affinity for one atom and another is extremely small, but after millions of years they still cluster together so hard sparks fly.
To me, that is a great reason to listen to him.

He builds big and complicated programs that people actually use.
Very cool. Don't visit on your phone though. Client side less will hammer it. (Not a critique)
PHP's worst problem is an exacerbated form of what strangled Perl for many years (and still does, though they're actively fighting it): lots and lots of existing code that's really, really bad.

Adding new features doesn't help that. Only gradually deprecating old ones (or waiting a few decades) does, and that doesn't seem to be in PHP's blood.
Valleywag shames HN Commenter on TSA
Http://mahamedelngar.arabblogs.com/index.html
If you're looking for a more color-friendly base Bootstrap (not 3... yet), check out Flamingo, which also uses SchemeLESS: http://rriepe.github.io/flamingo/

If you like 1pxdeep's stylings, start with a @seed-color of white, and then edit @color2, @color3 and @color4 in scheme.less to your liking. It will generate appropriate subcolors from those (which you can also overwrite, if you want).
Can you give some examples of those ways?
There's a bit of conflation between cause and effect here.

Seems he was just saying that those with strong accents were less successful in previous rounds. That certainly could be due to prejudice in society at large, but it still would be a valid predictor.
The implementation uses shared pointers to replicate as little data as possible. The memory management is there to maximize the amount of data you can process on a single computer with limited memory. There is a simple zmq wrapper that can be used to link bunch of these in parallel(or any other structure) on multiple computers. The same zmq wrapper can be used for other online learning algorithms. I just didn't implement the others yet.
If there will be more people interested, I could whip up a few test runs and examples.
Don't rely too much in my bad translation :)
With unlimited time, you have the opportunity to take little breaks here and there, even if it just means doodling for a few minutes, and this is a huge advantage if you leverage it well.

I run into this daily with my work life now as well...bang your head against a problem for an hour straight, go to the bathroom, come back, and the solution pops into your head like magic.

Edit: Also, the more time you have between answering a question and rechecking it, the more objectively you see things, and notice mistakes that you would miss if you were rushed.
Is there much PHP code that relies on this "feature" or could they have changed it to actually search in the enclosing scope if something was read, and avoided the silly "use" keyword? I mean it's not like PHP has an actual spec, so they can change it whenever they feel like it as long as it doesn't break much.
“I guess an exercise program is in order” - Neil Armstrong
Now days the only valuable thing a naysayer can say anymore regarding PHP is the inconsistent naming and needle/haystack placement, which really makes no difference other than to be a slight annoying having to go to php.net/function_name and just make sure it's right.
The person that I originally responded to, whose statement you're apparently defending said:

"Microsoft used to control the future of computing. Now they are yet another enterprise software company with no apparent mission except to make money.

...

Meanwhile Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook/etc look toward the future"

I disagreed with the part where they said "just another enterprise software company". I also happen to disagree that they have no apparent mission, but that's another story; please forget that I said it :)

So, would you argue my point for a second? Why is Microsoft NOT just another enterprise software company now or in the next decade? I think I can come up with more, "bigger" and more provable reasons that they are NOT than that they are, but could be wrong. And who knows the future? Right now, they're surely not just another enterprise company and the future is not static, it's based on the now.
Speed will always matter. You'll never find time to address technical debt; you have to make it.
This is easily the most insightful post in this thread, it is unfortunate that anyone downvoted you.
How about because CodeIgniter is one of the worst frameworks around, which provides little support for separation of concerns, avoiding spaghetti code and general maintainable programming practices.

I spent the start of 2008 migrating an agency off CodeIgniter - it definitely improved their projects afterwards (developer training helped too, but not as much as a well-designed framework did for code reuse).

What gets me is CodeIgniter is how I was writing PHP code back in 2003-2004, 4 years after picking up the language as a hobby. And people still think writing it like that is a good idea.
There's a lot of noise about PHP becoming a better language by adding features. Isn't it well established that adding features to a dud product is not the path to a better one?
Cool- I'll get those books.
"Explaining why communism always fail without faulting communism even slightly" is a very rich genre. It is also disingenuous in failing to consider the single most likely (by way of Occam's razor) cause of communism's failure, which is the ideology itself.

But to apply some historical facts to the theory:

From its founding, the Cheka was an important military and security arm of the Bolshevik communist government. In 1921 the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic (a branch of the Cheka) numbered 200,000. These troops policed labor camps; ran the Gulag system; conducted requisitions of food; subjected political opponents to torture and summary execution; and put down rebellions and riots by workers or peasants, and mutinies in the desertion-plagued Red Army.

The Cheka existed from 1917 to 1922. Even if the US was scared of communism, nothing like the CIA existed to undermine the revolution in Soviet Russia. And yet, violently putting down riots by workers and peasants was necessary. It takes a special kind of ideological arrogance to blame the USA for that.
I agree, given the type of issues they are addressing (very high throughput application servers), I don't think a general purpose allocator (garbage collected or not) will ever get the performance they want. Recycling buffers is not a bad strategy for this type of application, no matter the language.
Nobody needs to move on. PHP is here to stay and isn't gonna disappear anytime soon, it controls a large portion of the internet, if you don't like it, don't use it. Nobody is forcing you to use it.
That's not a progress bar though; the visual metaphor of a progress bar is a container/tank that goes from 0% 'full' to 100% 'full'.

What you described is a more general status indicator, bytes received, which I would display along with a transfer rate. That should not be shown as part of a progress bar because you don't know the percentage. However, I do agree that it's very useful information, and I always watch that kind of status indicator on FTP/SCP/torrent/copy+paste file transfers.

Unfortunately, browsers don't provide great feedback info to javascript even for that basic information about an ongoing request, if they provide any feedback at all. Usually you just get 'started' and then 'done'.
> 0-day exploits aren't tossed around like candy corn

They are if the zero-day isn't what you're after.

Something like this is like candy corn to a site like HN. You need an exploit and a reason to get your targets to visit your hacked site. When something like this hits HN's front page, if your target is in the tech world, odds are very good that you'll catch someone in the company/companies you're after. This is not theoretical. See, for instance, the Java exploits employed in those hacked iOS dev forums that successfully compromised computers at Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Microsoft[1].

[1] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/02/web-forum-for-iphone...
That's not a balance. That makes the cookies effectively unusable since 99% of people stick with defaults, and even more so in this case because they'll see the boilerplate so often that a spinal reflex will kick in before they even see the box with their conscious brain. This will, in turn force all websites to force users to accept the tracking in order to use the service.
Why do RET instructions have a REPZ prepended on x86?
People will likely freak out about this but I don't see anything wrong with it. Making more accurate predictions is a good thing. Why does it matter what the data used was?

Unfortunately I expect this to become another "illegal datapoint" that is illegal to take into account. People hate the idea of being judged for seemingly arbitrary things. Which makes sense. But if it actually does correlate with the truth, if it actually makes predictions more accurate on average, why shouldn't it be used?
> we can hire lawyers, doctors, and surgeons on the back of a CV and an hour interview.

You can do that with programmers too. And depending on the type of work you are hiring for, this can be sufficient.

Menial product maintenance is suitable for one-hour interview hires. Routine legal and medical work likewise.

But some work is so demanding that it requires a team. Hiring for a team means recognizing group dynamics. Whether you're starting a new law firm, or hiring someone to join your surgical department, or building a development team that must be able to respond quickly and effectively to changes to a startups understanding of the landscape, you don't settle the hiring question on a one-hour interview.

Not all work is the same. Please refrain from acting as if it was.
I've been using the xmonad window manager, which is roughly 1000 lines. While not a vastly complex system, it's non-trivial, especially solving things like gui interaction in a side-effect free world. I believe they had to use some sort of zipper structure for the mouse detection to overcome things that are easy in other languages.
The SDK is not in Best Buy. The ChromeCast works great for the advertised functions that it comes with.
How Many Of Your Ads Are Being Blocked?
Innovation of loneliness
I meant generators, as in yield
I've always loved that fractal of bad design rant. Many of his gripes follow really neatly from his initial analogy of the hammer with claws on both sides.

Let's say you want to hammer in a nail. You reach into a tool box and pull out something that you think is a hammer. Instead it has claws on both sides, and is in fact a nail puller. You don't know much about tools so you use it to beat in nails, all the while grumbling to your friends that it's a bad hammer.

For instance, I don't see how you expect to "solve" most of the "issues" in that. The fact that the author does not like the way == works in a weakly typed language is not a bug. Sure, it present bugs in code when programmers don't know how implicit type casting works, but it's really nice if you do.
I've written a lot of PHP, and while I can think of a number of ways you might use PHP to provide the backend for websocket-like communication (writing a long-running server, using multipart responses, adaptive polling), it seems pretty fair to me to say this isn't the place where PHP is strongest out of the box. Particularly compared to nodejs.

If you know of a PHP runtime-host, library, or even just a development approach that makes supporting it as easy as nodejs, though, I'm all ears.
Strange that Bootstrap 3 Final seems slower than the RCs...
Ftfy 3.0 — makes Unicode text less broken
There is a problem with this analogy.
How is paying me money any different if my only option if I quit was live on the streets and starve?
Perhaps not so strange if religion is taken into account, which the article completely neglects. People will do a great deal if they believe it is for a higher cause - and especially if sacrifice is an ingrained social imperative. Between the society living very close to the edge of survival (no matter how prosperous, they were one season from possible pervasive disaster so everyone's contribution counts), and service to their gods going so far as human sacrifice (societal maintenance deemed so important people are ritualistically killed, instilling devotion to the system), people become quite content living in an abundant theocracy.
What 73,024 Opinions Tell Us About Yahoo's Logo Parade
Yes, there are a few issues, but the OS is really promising and I like the device.

At first I wasn't sure if I was leaving behind my Android phone, but I'm going to do it and trust things will improve although right know my smartphone is not as smart as it used to be.

For me the biggest issue is the email app not supporting self-signed certificates. I've been self-hosting my mail for the last 10+ years and this is the first time I regret it ;)

EDIT: ate a word
> But more so, the general state of the web and the big brother on everything. It's a slippery slope :)

I couldn't agree more. I was posting on Usenet before there was a Web, so I've seen the entire sequence of events. Rather depressing overall. But it could be worse -- we could be hunted down and killed for expressing dissent, for protesting, for supporting unpopular causes. When I say this, I'm thinking of this man:

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/narendra-dabholkar-shot-d...

This man, this doctor, was an activist against unscientific quackery. He became too well-known and too effective, so his enemies hired a hit squad. And this was in India, a country and people that revere democracy and free speech.
> what's up with all these static methods?

http://laravel.com/docs/facades
> ...I don't see myself using much Haskell precisely because its tools for modularity seem limited.

> Dynamic languages are naturally more modular

Why is that? I'm pretty convinced pure and especially lazy languages allow for great modularity.

See http://augustss.blogspot.nl/2011/05/more-points-for-lazy-eva... for an interesting view on this.
One of the things I love about Symfony2 (other than the framework) are the following bundles:

-FOSUser
-FOSRest
-Sonata Admin

In a few minutes, I have a multi-user website, complete with REST server and a user administration interface. As someone without a lot of hands-on experience with Laravel, is there a similar combo of Laravel bundles that can get me up and running with a multi-user website?
The only feature I miss in PHP is un-gotcha-ness. Does it have that yet?