skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using deconstruction as a method is stupid, and misses the point entirely. At the same time, this article makes me simultaneously mad and sad, though I am sure it will serve to reinforce preexisting biases just fine, especially here.

Using deconstruction as a method, independent and decoupled of its own genesis, does not make sense and will yield little of use. The whole point of deconstruction is to oppose another strand of Western philosophy that, depending on country, has reigned for centuries: idealism.

Now, I realise it's cool to "show" how much superior and empirical engineering is, but idealism is a root of many causes. It has fundamentally shaped our ideas of the University, of statehood, nation, authorship, race and the sciences. Many of the subsequent movements, starting with Marxism, followed by Nietzsche, the New Left, and deconstruction (which, really, is called poststructuralism) are an undertaking to undo some of the damage idealist reign has caused during its reign.

Deconstruction aims to undermine the very hierarchies idealist thought has errected: the nation as the culture of a given, demarkated and distinct people, university as a structure of educating state servants, authorship as the translation of Geist into matter, science as the study of matter, leading to the ultimate victory of ratio and empiricism.

If people talk about advanced programming techniques without knowing anything about underlying compiler design, algorithms etc, they are ridiculed and set in their place. If people talk about history of thought without having any idea what they are talking about, they are applauded while people cheer for their (and their own) ignorance. Why is that?

Deconstruction without its history is worthless. That, however, also suggests that for a history of thought, for an understanding of our present, deconstruction is indeed relevant.
That's my life in a nutshell ;-)
I think it's intended as a satire of the "why aren't there any female programmers?" shtick, and the tendency of these posts to be written by men who don't necessarily appreciate the full gravity of the issue from a woman's perspective.

I think it was intended to be a thought provoking piece involving some reverse-paternalistic attitudes. I think it was intended such that a male programmer would read it and be offended, and thus have his eyes opened, or something like that.

I don't think it's particularly effective in those because it was just a little bit too predictable, and because the trick doesn't work in this case: there are shitloads of male programmers and everyone knows it, so the reversed argument just doesn't work.
Yes, exactly this. Every time I think I could work on my side branch it feels like this is not really "worth" it. Sucks.

Actually, it is not the master branch. It is the default branch. I have a repo with a gh-pages branch, this works as well.
What Does One Petahash look like?
Stopping burning money on economically unviable projects because otherwise boogeyman will come to get us would be a good start. There are billions spent on things having nothing to do with pollution or pollution control. In fact, many of the pollution factors (including soot) are cooling rather than warming.

If the resource are wasted on things that are not necessary, not economically viable and not producing any useful effect - the same resources are not available for being used on things that do produce useful effects - such as filters or better technologies. If, as president Obama said, the goal of the government is to "bankrupt coal industry", why would anyone invest in cleaner and more efficient coal technologies? Why invest in upgrading filters in existing factory if the government will destroy it anyway?
Occipital is launching something new on Tuesday...
Yeah for me they're ideal, they've got lots of guesthouses so there's plenty of competition and finding rooms for a month should be easy and pretty damned cheap. Tons of restaurants meaning you can more or less walk out the front door and find somewhere new to eat everyday cheaply.

I kinda suspect you're looking on the wrong continent or as you say you're just not suited to it.
Haven't you ever seen the lengthy screeds about natural gender roles every time a post on gender and the workplace hits HN's front page? This is a parody of those.
Because iCloud doesn't compete with Dropbox. It isn't file storage.
I'm not convinced a book in which two scientists attempt to polemicise against humanities academics not understanding science, and end up demonstrating that they don't understand a number of authors in the humanities, is a particularly useful contribution to a discussion of the relationship between the arts and the sciences.
This was out of date in 1996. I agree with others that if it was 1986 there would be an excuse, but in 96, then he was giving out bad info.

We had already seen the rise and fall of Cello and Mosaic. Trumpet Winsock was envy where. Here in the UK we had services such as Demon offering an Internet connection for £10 a month. Internet magazine had been running for a couple of years. Hell even my book had been out for a few years (http://www.amazon.com/The-Internet-Via-Mosaic-World-Wide/dp/...) and was already totally out of date due to the fast moving nature of things.

I think it was around then that even CompuServe were moving from the traditional CSi back end over to fully Internet based systems.

The UK was pretty Internet savvy in 96. Far more than this consultant was, anyway.
Keep in mind that HN comments are actually a fairly decent set of secondary sources: the discussion of expert-level commentators is exactly what Wikipedia wants to link to, rather than basing things off the first-hand claims.
Zambia wouldn't necessarily be a better place if colonialism never happened.
Thanks Ed! It's going in my stack.
I would say that is not a very interesting answer. When asking why people are poor, the answer, "because the economy is small," makes about as much sense as, "because they are poor." It doesn't add any information.

Why is the economy small? Answers like, "because they are poor," are forbidden.
His sentence was before prison was about rehabilitation. That didn't really kick in until the (late) 90's. Before that it was purely about punishment.

I hit someone with a golf club once. In the right circumstances this could have been any one of us.
IPhone 5s and iPhone 5c vs. iPhone 5
Capbreton, in the Landes region, best waves in Europe ;-)
Salvaging the Costa Concordia
I wonder if this means the end of their affiliate marketing.
Rationalist would first abandon that notion that cost of adjusting to different climate is infinite, as it flies in the face of all evidence - humans had adjusted to the very wide range of conditions - and would avoid promoting actions for which positive consequences can not be sufficiently substantiated but negative consequences are readily apparent.

Once you postulate that global warming is the ultimate boogeyman which justifies any expense spent on preventing it, rationalism is going out of the window. One can not operate rationally within the framework that postulates irrational assumptions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accide...
Gutmann's cryptlib, as well, I guess.
I like http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Programming_Tasks
Though I'd generally agree with your last statement (and relish in the amazement on one's face when I show them disassembled JVM bytecode for the first time), I'd have to say that this is still quite a "special" feat whether you've written a virtual machine/compiler/interpreter before or not. I haven't had enough time with the source as of yet, but I'd wager to say that there is most likely a lot more going on than just caching already-cross-compiled classes or basic opcode mappings. Not to forget that this project looks to be quite literally implementing from the JVM spec (a la Apache Harmony).
Bouncycastle does some of this stuff in Javaland.
It is interesting that sometimes being in a new environment can promote creativity and even discipline (for instance, it's easier for me to work continuously on a plane--which I'm doing right now--than when I'm in our home office because I perceive I have less choice: not sure what that says about me). And I agree that if I'm doing performance testing or adding a mellow feature, then sure, throw me in the middle of Cirque du Soleil and I'll be fine.

But I would challenge the idea that complex programming problems (cloud sync, NLP, etc, choose your poison) can be solved equally well in a suboptimal environment. Here is my "hypothesis": unregulated noise[1], temperature[2], and other travel-centric environmental factors (such as the need for vigilance in a new environment) distract from cognitive performance in the majority of people, if not all people.

[1] http://peterhancock.ucf.edu/Downloads/ref_pubs/Szalma_Hancoc...
[2] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0668.2004....

To be clear, I don't think it is possible to write my best code in a park, an airplane or a café, regardless of mood. But I would be curious to see relevant studies which demonstrate otherwise. I agree that changes in environment are stimulating and that stagnant workplaces hold their own dangers.

I also agree that 2-3 months is a good baseline for getting to know a place: you don't feel as jostled about by your schedule, and there may even be time for cursory grasp of the language (w/some prepping beforehand) and making a friend or two. Plus you don't have to cram your (potentially expensive) excursions into as short a block of time.
Personal best? 185 seconds
Awesome, thanks for the rundown richsin!
On the other hand I have to say it's still better to have some sort of backup system, rather than bundling a synch and miscalling it a backup.

One thing I don't get in this whole ordeal though: Doesn't Skydrive store previous versions and deleted items like Dropbox (I've never used it)? From experiences with Dropbox it's still not what I'd call a backup (too much can go wrong when synching), but I at least expect it to preserve versions and deleted items, such that in normal operation one can undo everything. If MS has omitted that I really don't understand what they're thinking.
Delicious Next
Thanks... I honestly didn't get the piece at first. It could be that I'm not the target audience.

I guess the part of this satire that didn't click for me is the discrimination against women in programming based on genetics or evolutionary traits. I don't think I've ever heard that argument used before as a reason to discriminate against female programmers.
http://libgen.org/scimag2/10.1111/j.1600-0668.2004.00305.x.p...
It is an undeniable, world-wide phenomenon that there is a gender imbalance in programming that can not be explained by pure chance. Since we have no laws and few social structures that force men into programming or prevent women from doing it, we have to conclude that the explanation is more likely psychological.

There are also gender imbalances in other fields; nursing, for example, has about as few men as programming has women.

The fact that we have not been able to reach an agreed upon explanation for this skewed distribution is an indicator of our inability to transcend gender issues for the sake of truth and betterment.

Using satire to sideline the possibility that millions of years of evolution may have shaped our brains in ways that affect our behavior is not truth-seeking - it's misleading.
What the Fed does and how quantitative easing works, explained simply
And of the abysmal Dave Winer article linked at the top of the blog post.
I think you missed that he was responding to this:

> so you can search your logs for it to make sure they aren't being evil.

This argument doesn't apply if the probe and the attack come from different IPs
Hold the LG Nexus 5 in your [virtual] hands.
Very possibly because of this: http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/12/the-big-ugly-affiliate-mar...

It doesn't look like squarespace offer an affiliate programme right now, but it seems they did and this is sensible if they'll ever want to again.
Totally, just like how black people are evolutionarily more suited to menial labor and crime.

(I do not believe the above claim, in case that is unclear to anyone reading this.)
I've been using ShadowProtect for several years. It's really great; I have it set to run a complete incremental backup every 15 minutes, and those backups usually take less than 30 seconds with no impact on system performance.

I wrote about it in some detail previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5656597
Xalt: Experimental OOP JS-only web dev (with nodejs)
This is a great example two fallacies in one post.

The first is a fine ad hominem example:
"This is just stupid" -> Links to the author -> He is not qualified. Does not refute his claims

The second is the Hasty Generalization fallacy:
Referencing a single instance as indicative of all areas
I try to read opinions from a variety of experts before taking a position. No climate change denier I've met shares this habit.
Evopsych is mostly esoteric. But denying a influence of evolution on psychology (nature vs nurture) and/or differences based on that is for the left wing what creationism is for the right. Evolution denialism seems to be very popular in the states.
It would be much more pity if it turns out we spent trillions of dollars (meaning those trillions of dollars weren't spent on healing people, feeding people, inventing technologies that make people live longer and suffer less from diseases) on something that turned out to be not much more than a blob of hot air expelled by attention-seeking politicians and didn't really require that much resources to be spent on it.

Take the example of rich people buying "carbon credits" that go towards paying poor people in poor countries for not developing their economies (and thus not becoming rich too). I think it is economically inefficient (since it in the long run decreases the overall value produced) but it is also morally reprehensible to bribe someone into suppressing their economic development so you could enjoy yours without guilt. It would be especially bad if it turns out the guilt was over nothing.
If i could downvote you, I would. Mocking a statement that says that mocking does not help to prove your point is pretty much the worst thing you can do in a conversation.
I recently did something similar to this short term (airbnb for a month in SF) and I'm curious: are all digital nomads strictly software guys or writers? I have physical electronics and carpentry projects I like to do in my spare time, so I had a trunk full of tools during my airbnb stay.

Is it possible to do hardware projects on the road? Maybe rely on hackerspaces for tools and such?
Colonialism destroyed all structure that was before in Africa. They had prosperous kingdoms that was destroyed. Then the colonialists left very suddenly and there were only chaos left.

It's not more than about 50 years since Africa was left to fend for itself after the European powers left. Considering that it took hundreds of years with more wars than anyone care to count before Europe became the peaceful and prosperous place it is today I don't think Africa is doing that badly.
Interesting issue: the Sokal affair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

How to publish a lot of gibberish in one of the "important" philosophical journal.

Not that this means deconstruction is 'stupid'. Only that one has to take it with a grain of salt. At least one.
I have fairly low tolerance for racism and sexism. I'm ok with mocking it, even if you dress it up as pseudoscientific psychobabble. If that bothers you, tough beans.
WebViews Are Not To Be Trusted
>It was Ada Lovelace who supplied the code.

That's incorrect. Lovelace's contributions have been blown out of proportion, perhaps due to a political agenda. She clearly misunderstood Babbage's computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#Controversy_over_...
Book link: http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illu...
Top climate scientists admit global warming forecasts were wrong
Where is the sexism in that post? Or racism?
I think "few social structures...that prevent women from doing [programming]" is the assumption you make that most people on the other side of the issue would disagree with.

The example you provide, men in nursing, is a poor one for your case, as men historically shied away from nursing because it was socially associated with femininity, not because of genetic predisposition. Through concerted efforts over the last fifteen years, the proportion of men in nursing has sharply increased. So the story of men in nursing is parallel to the claim you dismiss, that women are turned away from programming by its association with "masculinity" and that a concerted effort could increase the proportion of women in the field.

I do not know whether there is a genetic element to the skewed distribution of vocations, and I am actually inclined to agree with you that their probably is.

However, we cannot simply look at the present distribution and assume it is entirely caused by genetics. We do not live in a perfect meritocracy or a society that gives all people equal opportunity and support in following their callings. Other explanations for these gender imbalances are staring us in the face: the poor behavior of many men in the tech world, the subtle implications that girls should not work hard at math, or the teasing directed toward men who study nursing.

We should be trying to change these things, not for the abstract goal of having a perfectly equal gender distribution, but for the sake of individual people who are suited to these fields even though they are in the minority gender. I have a male friend who is a nurse and perhaps not suited to be a doctor who, had he been born thirty years earlier, would almost certainly have taken some other job and not lived up to his potential. I don't want that to happen to young women who are in school today and would make great programmers.

Perhaps some day we will overcome these social biases so that all people are equally encouraged to do any work they are capable of learning. On that day there may still be skewed distributions of genders in each profession, and we will fairly say that those are caused by evolution and other factors we can't control.

But while there are still factors in our control, preventing people from answering their callings? Let's fix them!
there are many places in the north that will see the sun setting well before 4pm on december 9th.
You didn't need a comma here:

"at times and it slowed"

Or here:

"can be tricky and I sometimes struggle"

Granted, you might want a dramatic pause or the comma might break up parts that could be misconstrued as together. Chiding Alex with superfluous commas? Generally speaking I recommend dropping commas where you can. Like you said, they're speed bumps.
It's not the user's fault when a service deletes their data off of their drives. Sync without version history is a terrible idea.

Edit: but apparently this article is wrong and skydrive does have version history?
You are right, it is indeed difficult and I never meant to say it is easy. My tripe was with the people who intentionally make it difficult. The thing is that you can learn ML with minimal (not minimum) math and that is what should be tried to achieved. I would be curious to know the textbooks you talk about - I have read quite a lot of those and struggled with them.

For example - Linear regression is just brilliantly tackled by Andrew Ng in his ML course (CS229 at Stanford Lecture Notes - not Coursera).
> When computational chemists got involved, their theories (surprise, surprise) provided support for these hand waving models. These folk "knew" what they needed to obtain - and they tweaked their models until they got it: the models are complex; there are lot of knobs to tweak. Incredibly, even on rare occasion when they got it right they dismissed their own results, ascribing discrepancies to model imperfections...

This is stupid. My research is molecular dynamics and ab initio studies of novel carbon anodes in lithium batteries. We don't "tweak" the model until it fits; if you did that you would be 1) an idiot 2) not a scientist.

All models describe reality only to an approximation. How well this approximation works depends on how good your model is. In computational science, we have algorithms that can almost perfectly match experimental carbon anodes. The only problem? These techniques (short of someone inventing a quantum computer) take essentially infinite time to run on a classical computer. So you cut down the computational complexity of your model by making approximations (e.g. removing electron-electron correlations) until you get something that can run on today's best supercomputers.

But you don't stop there! You have to actually assess these models and figure out how well they work! For instance, there's probably 20 or so MD models that describe water (TIP3P, TIP4P, etc...) Each model can accurately predict certain properties of real water, but is also very poor at predicting other properties. In other words, your model needs to fit what it was designed for and you will get good results.

It seems to me that most people who bash simulations nowadays are experimentalists that aren't up to date on the state-of-the-art algorithms that provide very good agreement with reality (for some situations at least).
But it's true. What do the poor typically lack? Financial buffer to afford to take risks, resources to build business and industry, and savvy to trade and compete with wealthier players on a level playing field. It plays out in persistently poor regions of wealthy countries too.
Perhaps the problem is with the question, not the answer. The Zambian economy has been growing fairly nicely recently, according to Google the GDP growth in 2012 was 7.3%.

A more useful question would be: was the growth of Zambian economy slow historically? If yes, why?
The uk defines the age of criminal responsibility as 10; which is the point at which the individuals actions can be viewed as theirs and theirs alone in the eyes of the law.

FWIW the US scale for this slides between 6 and 12 according to wikipedia
> I'm serious. Whoever the genius was that decided that swipes on a laptop trackpad should behave the same way as on a tablet (in this case, switching applications) should be shot, and the corpse fired.

Yes, they should be. Then, you should uninstall the custom trackpad driver that does that, because that's not a built-in gesture. That was probably added by Synaptic, or the OEM of your laptop, and you should disable the gesture and probably let the OEM know that including that gesture was insane.

The rest of your complaints are, well, I think they're overstated, but I can't argue with how using the OS "feels" to someone. If you think it feels poorly done, me telling you your feelings are wrong is not going to get us anywhere. But at least factually, you should know that some of your assertions might be rooted in what OEMs have done to add crap to Windows 8.
"The “summary for policymakers” of the report, seen by the Mail on Sunday, states that the world is warming at a rate of 0.12C per decade since 1951, compared to a prediction of 0.13C per decade in their last assessment published in 2007."

Not sure what the difference means.
I think one thing we don't do enough of is prototyping. When we've built something before, we can usually estimate how long it's going to take this time if the differences are not huge and qualitative. But if we're building something new, or doing something that we've never done before, just thinking and guessing is a terrible way to estimate. We should learn to take the time to try things to see how difficult they are.