skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No, I've read the whole paper. I agree that he does describe a key difference between the search for redemption through literature and the search for redemption through philosophy or religion; he says:

"[A] culture which has substituted literature for both religion and philosophy finds redemption neither in a non-cognitive relation to a non-human person nor in a cognitive relation to propositions, but in non-cognitive relations to other human beings... This sort of culture drops a presupposition common to religion and philosophy—that redemption must come from one’s relation to something that is not just one more human creation."

But if the point of this is to remove the need for redemptive truth, it doesn't work; the search for redemption through literature still tries to fulfill "the need that religion and philosophy have attempted to satisfy", it just tries to fulfill it without appealing to non-human entities:

"For the Socratic idea of self-examination and self-knowledge, the literary intellectual substitutes the idea of enlarging the self by becoming acquainted with still more ways of being human. For the religious idea that a certain book or tradition might connect you up with a supremely powerful or supremely lovable non-human person, the literary intellectual substitutes the Bloomian thought that the more books you read, the more ways of being human you have considered, the more human you become..."

Even at the one point where he does explicitly seem to say there is no redemptive truth...

"To give up the idea that there is an intrinsic nature of reality to be discovered either by the priests, or the philosophers, or the scientists, is to disjoin the need for redemption from the search for universal agreement. It is to give up the search for an accurate account of human nature, and thus for a recipe for leading The Good Life for Man. Once these searches are given up, expanding the limits of the human imagination steps forward to assume the role that obedience to the divine will played in a religious culture, and the role that discovery of what is really real played in a philosophical culture."

...he follows up immediately with something that contradicts what he just said:

"But this substitution is no reason to give up the search for a single utopian form of political life--the Good Global Society."

This is why I said that, although I understand where he's coming from, I don't agree with him. He claims to have "deconstructed" redemptive truth and put something better in its place; but all he's really done is fasten on to his own particular brand of redemptive truth. His belief in the Good Global Society meets the definition of redemptive truth that I quoted, and he appears to think that is possible; so whether he realizes it or not, he does think a form of redemptive truth, as he defines it, is possible. And he's wrong for the reason I gave: our lives are too complex for a "single utopian form of political life" to work.
I have thought about this as well, and with that in mind, I've tried to take notice of how typing affects me (I'm a pretty fast typist, but I think this experience is not dependent on any particular typing speed).

What seems to be the main problem is that typing dominates my internal monologue. I can't continue to keep my ideas fresh in my mental "cache" while I'm typing, because the part of my mind that would be used for that is busy uselessly sounding out the text that I'm typing. So every second I spend typing is a second that I'm not actively maintaining and refreshing my conception of the big picture. The more code I have to type in between thinking about a problem and finishing the solution, the more likely I am to have to stop, rethink the problem, and rework a piece of code I'm writing to fit some constraint I lost track of.

Put another way, typing is a process that forces me to think through the exact implementation of a problem at a snail's pace (compared to normal mental operation). Not more carefully, mind you, but more slowly.
Rwanda, Lesotho, Burundi and Swaziland are also four of the five smallest countries in Africa (excluding the little island nations). It's a whole lot easier to get 30,000 km^2 to agree (Burundi) than 75,000,000 km^2 (DR Congo).
If you want to engage independent contractor in the US, you need to solicit federal form W-9 which requires the contractor to provide a Taxpayer Identification Number (Employer Identification Number or Social Security Number). If you are engaging a corporation, they usually don't have to provide a W-9.

If you are a contractor trying to register as a company, you need to put a Social Security Number for each owner/officer on the registration forms (in most [all?] of the United States). Persons who aren't authorized to work can get an ITIN (Individual Taxpayer Identification Number) which is a restricted Social Security Number. Restrictions include no ability to collect benefits and expiration after five years.

EDIT: By "register a company" I meant that if you have an ITIN you at least have a number to put in that space on the registration form. Whether or not the jurisdiction will accept the number will vary. Whether or not banks in the area will let you open an account will vary by jurisdiction as well.
Wait, hold on. Exactly why is it legitimate to feel outrage over entities that assign bad prices for luxury goods like music? In our economic system, those entities should either (a) progress us towards discovering the real value of those goods to their consumers (ie, they were worth more than people offended by the price thought), or (b) be punished by the marketplace.

Exactly nobody is harmed by an entity that charges $100 for a single song. Where does the "outrage" enter the picture?

Are you sure you're being rational here?
This is the heart of it, and he says it well:

"We witness that there is a relationship between government, media and industry that is evident even at this most spurious and superficial level. These three institutions support one another. We know that however cool a media outlet may purport to be, their primary loyalty is to their corporate backers. We know also that you cannot criticise the corporate backers openly without censorship and subsequent manipulation of this information."
"I really hate this idea because it implies that one language is completely inferior to another in every way."

Since I never said or implied that (you did notice the quote marks ?) you must have plucked this idea out of thin air and then went on a rant ;-)
> but we are almost never performing fundamental research to achieve our ends

"Fundamental research" is a matter of perspective. If a developer does not know Rails, he must perform fundamental research into building a new blog engine. While the unknowns, and variability, are significantly smaller, they are still unknown until he does the research. If she were to trod off the beaten path, even slightly, he could run into a community known, but developer unknown, roadblock/design flaw that didn't show up in basic research. (ex. A Rails blog engine vs a multi-threaded Rails blog engine)
You'd think for people in academia, addressing socially and politically uncomfortable truths would be their du jour. How can the world fix the problem when it won't even look at possible causes?
Thanks! Last I checked (maybe a year back), something-or-other about CVC4 didn't work for me (I wholly forget what it was). I will try it out again.

I don't know if you are associated with CVC4 at all, but unfortunately the hashes of the amd64 Debian stable packages (cvc4, libcvc4-1, and libcvc4parser1) don't seem to match? It is probably just a package error however it makes me hesitant to install the packages…
At least in the US, most customers upgrade their phones on a 2 year cycle. The iPhone 5c is an upgrade over my iPhone 4s and the 5s appears to be a significant upgrade. Each generation may not be a huge improvement from the previous one, but it's always a pretty big improvement over 2 generations ago.

I would be amazed if folks were upgrading from the iPhone 5 to the 5c in significant numbers.
So You Want To IPO – Tips From An Investment Banker
Neil DeGrasse Tyson defending the US Space Program
A pilot for a series with Kevin Spacey and David Fincher attached is a waste of time, talent and money. They are known quantities with proven track records.

You either give them the money to produce the series or you don't.
I wish you could have written this without the ad hom implication that men who like certain colors are necessarily both effeminate and puerile. If Josh Kerr fucking loves pastels that doesn't make him any less of a man.
The analysis from patio11 is essentially correct. It is NOT legal to be living in the United States unless one has a citizenship or visa status that allows doing so. What forming an LLC does is avoid many of the enforcement mechanisms that reveal persons who are in the United States illegally. But if you are found anyway, nothing about forming the LLC will protect you from being deported. You don't gain an immigration status by forming the LLC--what you gain is a way of making a living. If you are making a living in the United States without work permission, you are still an illegal immigrant. Simply put, the newspaper headline is WRONG--there is nothing legal about working in those circumstances.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I am simply describing the immigration law of the United States as it is, not as I might desire it to be.)
> I am tired of the argument that we unique snowflakes amongst all professions

Aren't we, though? Zero marginal cost of production is at least very rare. It basically means that to the extent that our projects aren't novel, then we're wasting time duplicating something that ideally would have been copied from elsewhere.

And that not even getting into the very high rate of change in tools, techniques, and materials (e.g., http://www.jcmit.com/mem2013.htm), which, if not completely unique, is certainly unusually high.

> But when you see very wide ranges on an estimate, it's a signal that the problem is poorly understood.

That is occasionally a sign of idiocy. But at least on the projects I see, it's much more often a sign that it's an interesting problem. Indeed, if you're delivering software in a competitive market, it's guaranteed the problem will remain poorly understood, because your competitors will be doing their best to create changes in the landscape.
Yes and I appreciate it.

https://gist.github.com/rilindo/6576017

New toy to play with. :)
Android 3.0 was a tablet only release.
Great, but why can't we download it yet?
I welcome improvements in the iPhone flash, because there are cases in which I'm forced to use it. But the biggest problem is also the hardest to solve: the flash is too close to the lens. A flash right next to the lens will always look bad, no matter what you do. Being able to pivot and bounce it is even better, but just moving it a few inches away makes a big difference. Unfortunately, all of those things are fairly incompatible with the need to make phones that fit easily in peoples' pockets.
I love Russell but I can't help but feel like he's either constantly drugged up or has some kind of manic disorder. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. How else would you explain his uncompromising honesty in the face of bullshit (see: the MSNBC fiasco over the summer)
From my reading, this simply has nothing to do with the Matthew Effect. They are measuring volume of transactions, not necessarily value and certainly not wealth accumulation.

Naturally, those who engage in many transactions initially are likely to engage in even more transactions in the future (ex. a new exchange starts with many transactions and gets even more over time). This has no correlation with actual wealth.

If we were to apply this logic to the real world, one would reach the startling conclusion that delis are wealthier than high fashion boutiques.
The consumer driven economy is for people who don't naturally automate things
As an Individual Developer - i cant be building the whole backend.. anyways the Gigaom article talks about the alternatives who are for profit.. will likely be trying them
I believe that's his point.
Him calling you an idiot isn't an ad hominem. It's only an ad hominem if he's arguing "You're an idiot, and therefore you are wrong ". "You're being an idiot, and here's why: <reasons>" is just impoliteness.
Proving your identity and proving your right of residence are two entirely different things. Anyway, the question is now moot in CA, where the legislature just last week voted to approve issuance of driving licenses.
I am based in DC, $100/hr isn't unreasonable at all if you can actually deliver results.

You seem too focused on external factors like college student, average salary, etc. The real factors are how much value are you delivering for a company and how can you convince them you are the right person at the company to get the job.
Its not huge...
Umm, so?
> What kills me with Do Work While We Stare At You interviews is my process is all over the place. I tend to draft something, try it, find my five mistakes, try more things, etc.

Well yeah, that's exactly how those interviews generally go. You have to kind of narrate what you're doing, and that can be awkward at first but coming up with the optimal answer in the end is not the only goal of the interview. By all means show your work.
>He caused a bank run, which is all about balancing predictions with risks. It's all about evaluating economic impacts. He is entirely unqualified to make the statement above from that single data point alone.

Oh I won't refute that, perhaps he is unqualified. That doesn't however refute his argument. It only states that you'll have to look at the argument that much more carefully because he is not likely to be a great source.

What is common with folks justifying the ad hominem is that it is really just a short hand for the argument from authority fallacy. It is implicitly advancing the idea that the merits of the argument rest on the person giving them as though if it were someone else it would be more correct, which of course is wrong.

I think it is reasonable to assume that most people look at the person making an argument and if they are confident in the person, they will take the argument as a truthful assessment. To me though this is lazy and essentially delegates reason, so IMO it is always worth identifying.
Do you have any links for using Z3 in security proofs?
First off, I don't notice that Mashable loads THAT quickly, but it depends on what you are comparing too.

I suspect the quick loading your thinking of may actually be the question of how do they get images to load so quickly? This is the result of a CDN (Content Delivery Network) which specializes in caching images (or content as well, but let's just focus on images at the moment) to a group of servers around the world, and then serving those images (or content) based on which server will get you the content fastest (likely the one geographically closest, though their could be others that are faster).

If you are just comparing the load time to your server, it could also be simple server caching, network speed (as in the connection from their servers to the network is faster than yours), etc. etc.

Larger sites need to focus on these things, your site probably doesn't at this stage, but their are things you can do to speed up your site. I've never worked with a WP site, so I don't know how the average site is structured, but you could server your images from Amazon S3, make sure your javascript is all minified and loaded at the right time, use image sprites for your non-content images (logo, buttons, design flourishes). Then their is the speed of your server, etc. etc.

The big thing to think about is, does your site need to be fast? Mashable et.al, benefit from a fast site because a quicker site (I believe) gets better results in Google PageRank, and is less likely that a person will leave if it doesn't load quickly.

For your blog, people have likely come their for a reason, and can wait the 0.5-1 second time difference to Mashable. What may be a 1 reader difference for you, is a 1000+ reader difference for them. Therefore, for economic purposes, they NEED to be fast as part of their business.
My iPad keeps getting redirected to download their app. :/
> Many of the mining companies pay just 0.6 percent royalties to Zambia, far below the already-meager industry standard of three percent.

Is your comment a justification of this disparity?
Social Text received Sokal's piece, found it amateurish and unreadable, asked him to make changes, he got cranky and insisted it run as is. They sat on the piece. Later, they had a special issue on The Science Wars coming up, figured an amateurish and unreadable contribution by a scientist would be better than no contribution by a scientist at all, and ran it as a non-peer reviewed contribution.

http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html

Retellings by Sokal fans make it seem as if they received it breathlessly as great work and rushed to put it into publication. That is not what happened. The Sokal Affair is less evidence for the fuzzy-headedness of litcrit and more evidence that you can often get what you want just by lying, being a dick, and having some kind of finished product for people to work with.

And Sokal's submission wasn't some fluke, it was in the ballpark of a lot of the heady self-referential fluff in that field.

Only if you're very insensitive to tone, style, vocabulary and methodology does the Sokal piece resemble any legit article in Social Text. From the descriptions of it you'd think Social Text was full of maniacal gibbering about how nothing is true, everything is permitted, and quantum mechanics is a tool of the phallologocracy. But in fact, the quality of work is far more pedestrian, if a bit wordy. Here's the table of contents for the latest issue (articles behind paywall, abstracts are free):

http://socialtext.dukejournals.org/content/current

Is it self-referential nonsense? Maybe! Does it bear a reasonable surface resemblance to "Transgressing the Boundaries", if we're not being deliberately obtuse? No to me.

the terminology of science (like the term "theory")

The term theory pre-dates empirical science by a good bit, and the litcrit usage is not really orthogonal to the scientific one anyway.
In reality there's also a lot of politics (both congressional districts/states, and inter-service rivalry) to the Triad. Especially for the Army's piece (tactical weapons), which I think we've mostly phased out, and IMO manned bombers for the most part.
Because they promised early beta access to Kickstarter backers. The lowest tier of rewarded backers gets access within the next week, and the codebase will be open to everyone some indeterminate short amount of time after that. I'd be surprised if it the delay was more than a month or so.
Keys to a Balanced, Profitable SaaS Sales Model
My main trick these days for this problem is to discourage estimation by pointing out the costs of it and putting the burden on the requesters.

One great way to do that is to release early and often, allowing stakeholders to change plans in response to what they've learned. Instead of doing the work of (re-)estimating a bunch of stuff every week, their focus on what's actually going on lets them stop obsessing about arbitrary dates and semi-fictional plans.

People very rarely need estimates. They want a sense of control. They want to manage risk. They want to convince people that money is being well spent. They want to avoid looking like fools. If you solve those problems without using estimates, people generally stop caring.
What I'm focused on is finding the company. Even if that sort of company exists, what matters is whether you can find them, and whether they'll give you the opportunity to deliver results. Delivering the actual results is, by far, the easiest leg of that triad. (At least for me, and I suspect many others are in the same situation.)
I like your ideas, particularly collaborating on problems and giving candidates the ability to control their environment while problem-solving (such as giving them a week-long assignment). We've had good luck with the latter, and it's provided several valuable employees who, frankly, would probably not have passed a "live" interview.

Another tactic we employ is to keep the technical interviews very conversational. Rather than asking a very difficult question and putting the candidate on the spot, we try to talk through problems and do an over-the-phone "white board" session. We like to choose problems with many answers; some of these answers are easy to arrive on, while other explanations may be trickier. The candidate gains confidence getting the first part of the question correct, and seems to be more at-ease while completing the more difficult tasks.

There's no way that we can completely cut out the stress of a technical interview--no matter what, it's nerve-wracking to put your technical capabilities on the line--but it doesn't need to be a belittling, terrifying experience like the ones we so often hear described.
Masscan: scan the entire Internet in under 6 minutes, 10 million packets/second
This doesn't automatically do it on a schedule.
My first thought was that's kinda cool.

Then I viewed the source. Amazing.
I understand, but, if a driver's license is proof of identity, surely you need some supporting proof to obtain a driver's license, e.g. a birth certificate. How do you do that if you don't have one?
We did some experiments with HHVM and discovered that our heavy reliance on both redis and mongodb meant no HHVM for us - it supports neither of those things.

If they could get php.ini support working, I'd be very pleased to leave php-fpm behind.
> Give me programmers willing to learn and eager to use Lisp or Haskell (or Erlang, ML, OCaml, Smalltalk, Factor, Scala...) any day, even if we happen to be using C++, for goodness sake! Those are the ones one needs, scanty as they might be.

Does anyone hire with "eager to learn new languages" as a criterion? It'd be interesting to come up with a technical interview that would test for that. Maybe it'd go something like: "Okay, I trust you got the email yesterday with the syntax of the three languages we made up for the purposes of this test--Blub, Cruft, and Wheeze? Good. Now, we want you to code A* in Blub, and then translate this code sample from Cruft to Wheeze. You've got a half-hour."
What an interviewer will usually be looking for on a whiteboard interview is not knowledge of a library, but that the interviewee can reason that there's a better solution that works much faster than this solution.
FireShell - fiercely quick front-end boilerplate and workflows
I posted about this last night, but this discussion is significantly more relevant to my new project, so I figured I would jump in and post again.

This is awesome because it's actually exactly something I'm building – a portable, open source, file-based CMS with a NoSQL document store, backed by Git, hosted in the cloud for social management/deployment, also runs locally. Eventually I'm planning to add easy blogging features for "non-techies" though my initial target audience is definitely professional, interactive web site developers who work with a big team.

If anyone is deeply interested in this space, I would love to learn more about your requirements and share more about my project so I can develop based on real user needs. You can also check out a data sheet I put together at http://grow.io. :)
Freelancers: Four Tips for Avoiding Terrible Business Advice