skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're downplaying it too much. Social Text was a leading journal in the field. You can't compare it to minor CS conferences. 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.

Moreover, Sokal didn't target "the humanities", he targeted postmodernist "critical theorists". As a scientist it pissed him off to see careerist intellectuals appropriate the terminology of science (like the term "theory") in an effort to lend weight and credibility to their work while utterly vacating it of its scientific principles. You give way too much credit to postmodernism in broadening it to all of the humanities.
I build my own. You can see it at http://elbil.forum24.se/humantest.php?todo=%2Fprofile.php%3F.... Works great.
At least it's not C++, where out parameters are often written as references, which appear exactly the same as normal arguments, rather than usually having a telltale &. :)
Nomly - A New Way to Discover Things
Ask HN: On OS X, why does Firefox render fonts more readably than Chrome?
Comparison:

Firefox: http://drop.emily.st/s/Screen%20Shot%202013-09-15%20at%2013.34.33.png

Chrome: http://drop.emily.st/s/Screen%20Shot%202013-09-15%20at%2013.34.14.png
> Nuclear weapons serve a purpose in war

Not really, in a tactical sense in any war short of WWIII. No one can really use them without the threat of massive reprisal. No rational player would use them to take out an air force base.

Strategically, they're only really good for holding a gun to everyone's head (including your own). That can apply on a scale from the small and crazy (North Korea) to the huge, dysfunctional, and bankrupt (USSR).
Saw Pamela speak at an HTML5 Meetup at Yelp a couple of months ago. She was smart, funny, engaging and genuine - exactly like she sounds in this article. Love her honesty and how she wears her heart on her sleeve.
The mistake a lot of people make is thinking they're on holiday. Just because you're travelling, doesn't mean it's a holiday.

If you've got a job to do, do it. Don't go wandering around exploring the city for half the day, or lie on the beach chatting with backpackers. No. Sit at your desk and do your job.

Once you've done your work, in your properly setup work environment, then go explore your new and exciting surroundings.

Then get to bed on time, and work a proper day the next day.

Whenever I see people in hostels, lazing back on couches, tapping away on a laptop and saying they're a digital nomad, what I see is someone who's not serious. They won't last.
Ignition also comes up regularly in Derek Lowe's "Things I won't work with" blog, which is highly entertaining in its own right.

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with...
downvoted? seriously? perhaps it would be informative to explain why? in all seriousness, I'd like to know
I've never been to a hackathon. Could someone explain the fresh code requirement to me? I assume you can use open source packages and open source snippets. What if you're one of, or the only, author of the code? What about snippets of code that you wrote that aren't open source that you often use in projects?
SaaS startups: what you need to know about VAT in EU
Holy Trinity of Pop
It's probably the equivalent of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Thomas Watson in one interview.
Investing in bubbles- Bubbles are good
Perhaps there's an idea in there about those stuck with mining equipment that can't get an ROI due to difficulty increases.
Oh-my-emacs: Provide an awesome dotemacs.
Some of the posts here do fairly decent justice to Derrida's concept of deconstruction, but I always find it funny that that its still brought up as being the cutting edge of continental philosophy.

In the UK at least Derrida couldn't be more unfashionable, pure toxic waste if you want to publish and/or have a career as a philosopher of this school.
I don't know about anyone else, but the simple fact that a large portion of human beings would elect other human beings with the capacity and resolution to press the button in case of a MAD-type event to be completely asinine. The people with the drive and resolution to press the button that would cause assured destruction of you and your kind are the absolute last people that should ever be in a position of leadership. How we, the Russians and several other countries reached the conclusion that such people should be leading us is frightening and reflects quite poorly on the capacity of our species to scale.

Is there any other social, colony-creating species out there that has developed a similar mechanism for retaliation against some threat that also guarantees the wiping out of their own colony?
>What shines through is that you believe in segregating ethnicities because they just can't live peacefully together.

And what also shines through, is that from an ivory tower of ignorance some people advocate forcing people to "live peacefully together" through their social engineering, enforced borders and when that doesn't work violence.

Because, those outsiders know what is proper for those "savages" that "can't live peacefully together" better than they do themselves, right?

>Which is bullshit, looking at almost any country that is not currently embroiled in a civil war. Many of them combine tons of ethnicities... USA, Canada, Australia, India, even countries like Germany just aren't that "ethnically pure" as they are sometimes stylized...

USA decimated and confined the natives into "reservations", then had the blacks as slaves or second rate citizens up until the sixties. Oh, and they had a big nasty civil war, because two groups had different views on such issues. Blacks still have a huge over-representation in prison sentenses and poverty and still live pretty much seggregated. As for the rest: Australia killed the natives and closed them in concentration camps and has had rampant racism against non-anglosaxon immigrants. In Canada there is the francophone and anglophone divide and tension, which is even worse for Belgium and it's two national cultures. The same goes for Catalonia and Basque country in Spain. USSR and Yugoslavia, examples of getting "different nations to live peacefully" all blew up in consisting nations after 1989, with civil wars and tension. Same for Chechoslovakia. Heck, even Italy has tension between the North and South parts.

As for Germany, it might not be ethnically pure, but it's not all fun and games either. Germans are still quite racist with immigrants, even those that live there for many decades (tons of hate crimes, neo-nazi groups, casual racism and such). Oh, and they have eliminated some million jews back in the 40s.

But it's putting up India as an example that really shows up the total lack of understanding of the issues and a bad command of history. India, if anything is the perfect counter-example: national, ethnic and religious tensions there broke the country into Bagladesh and Pakistan, and they still ran rampant in each of the new countries between sub-groups.
because apple is much better.

its not even a new os launch... and you still cant star a download or compile, close you laptop and move to another cubicle.

have to walk around with the damn screen on.

and not even complaining about defaults. there is no way to turn that sleep on closed lid feature.

and a few decades to have second mouse click...
KDE releases Plasma Active 4 interface for tablets, other consumer electronics
Yep, I was the doofus that posted to django-developers, rather than security@. Sorry if I complicated anyone's weekend.
Sigil, the open-source epub-editor, moves to github
My question is addressed to benologist. He is something of an expert on this subject.
I think the idea here is that we worry too much about the rich getting rich, as if that's an evil to be prevented. As long as some underlying benefits hold true (poor get richer, society gets richer), we shouldn't worry about what's going on at the top.
uow! I haven't even ever seen this streak thing (too busy commiting all the time). Mine is pretty big and I'm ashamed to make it public hehehe

Anyway, you MUST make commit an habit. If you're into gamification, force yourself to do that and you won't regret.
JonesForth at least seems in the same spirit as SICP, though what it accomplishes is different.

It explains and implements a Forth environment from scratch, initially in literate assembler code (yes, that exists) and then, once that's bootstrapped enough, in literate Forth that it runs using itself.

http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wstein/www/home/wbhart/...
I think this is a good idea in theory, but AngelHack Boston Spring 2012 tried this and it didn't work very well logistically since many participants were not familiar with the chosen version control software (git).

Also I'm not sure it would cover all the bases for more complex hacks that involve hardware or more unique setups/dependencies.

Ultimately, I wish a solution could be found that doesn't work to limit the types of hacks, since that freedom is one of my favorite parts of hackathons.
No, he is right.

They don't believe in nations, they believe strongly in their own country as a "nation", but not in the common meaning of a nation which is ethinically based.

If they believed in nations (in the way other countries believe), irish-americans would identify more with being irish than with being americans for example (and the same for other ethnicities).
Always take trains overland. Flying should be reserved only for trips that cross water.

Besides, travelling by train is much more fun.
Unlikely. Metro software is extremely thin on the ground, and there's no indication that this is changing in the near term. Microsoft has a long, long history of goofball widget UIs (Active Desktop, Sidebar Gadgets, Metro, various Shell plugin technologies, and to a lesser extent MMC and control panel applets). Each in turn has had its moment in the sun before being marginalized or removed outright.
Unpacking works great when it's clear what the tasks are going to be. In my experience the bulk of the work does not go into the project or tool itself, i.e. completing the tasks, but rather into resolving issues.

I usually estimate that writing the code is anywhere from 10-20% of completing the project.

Some research shows that 1 kloc of code contains between 15 and 50 defects, and that code reviewing will pick up only 70-90%. This still leaves a lot of bugs. I sometime ago wrote up some meta research on estimating code reviewing: http://specialbrands.net/2011/10/24/code-review-in-scrum-xp-...
it seems to be relatively simple to brute-force, because the used set is small compared to possible keyboard letters. but for most real world scenarios it should work, if there are only spammers who don't investigate and just ignore it. thus maybe not for high-traffic sites.
My test is obsolete, AND is likely designed to get a different kind (class?) of programmer than you need (statistically speaking; I have no idea what you do).

At the time I was doing video game development. I still am, but WHAT you need to know as a game developer is different now than it was then. For instance, I still wanted people to know SOME assembly language concepts (and Berkeley EECS grads were required to take an assembly language course, so that wasn't unreasonable).

Game development is still harder than most kinds of software development ("most" defined in terms of number of people who practice each kind), but the specific knowledge required has changed a lot. There are probably awesome developers today who have never tried to code a line of assembly language.

This fact makes me sad, actually, because I feel that my grounding in assembly language gives me a perspective on WHAT the computer is actually doing that developers who have never seen a language lower-level than C can't really have. And I feel it's a healthy perspective to have. But I'm not filtering out applicants based on whether they know assembly language. At least not any more.

Seriously, though, one of the questions was "What do you not like about your favorite programming language?" At the time the question may have been "What do you not like about C/C++?"; I can't remember when I changed it. This is a question that is designed to gauge what programming concepts the developer in question is challenged by, or what corners of the language they have trouble with.

If they answer "Pointers give me trouble!", then they're too green, but if they answer "overloaded template and normal function selection priorities in C++ are too hard to remember," then I know they've been doing relatively complex things with the language. So it's a question designed to give me a glimpse of their current skill and expertise; none of the answers I imagined people would say are "wrong," even though some might make me not want to hire them.

But to answer "I can't think of anything wrong" showed such an amazing lack of imagination (or fear of revealing the above) that it was the only time that I felt they'd managed to give a "wrong" answer to the question. If you can't come up with anything wrong with a programming language that you are saying you're skilled in, then you're not sufficiently analytically minded to work in games. Or at least not in a small indie studio where everyone needs to be awesome at something.
Sorry, I don't know the answer on OSX. But I do know that on Windows, Chrome still does not include DirectWrite support, so font render much worse than in Firefox. But hey, it's only been about four years since DirectWrite became available.

This is one of the chief reasons I've never been a Chrome user. The font rendering is bad. It doesn't use a subpixel letter positioning algorithm and the kerning is just plain poor.

See http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25541
Well, look at the centuries of violent war that preceded most modern, stable nation-states. Europe was pretty much in a constant state of conflict from the fall of the Roman Empire until WWI.

Nationalism is also an interesting phenomenon, in that over time it tends to transcend ethnic groups, but only once the thread of common identity has established itself. Take a look, for instance, at the post WWI Middle East, where the imposition of arbitrary zones of influence (the origins of many modern states) disrupted a budding pan-Arab nationalism in favor of keeping a balance of influence between the colonial powers.

The United States is a completely different case in that the nationalism that took root here was based on a shared identity among immigrants of (relatively speaking) diverse ethnic groups-- but even so, our early history had no shortage of atrocities committed agains native populations, as well as conflict among the constituent religious and ethnic groups that comprised the nation.

That being said, nation states seem to be a very stable and agreeable governance paradigm once they become established, but a shared identity amongst diverse groups (ethnic or otherwise) takes time to develop, and as history has demonstrated, it certainly can't be imposed from the outside.
I don't know why you'd say French writers in the mid-twentieth century wrote books without citing him. Of Grammatology, the ur-text of deconstruction, has 28 references for him in the index, and that's not including the introduction.

He's a major influence on post-structuralism and is generally accepted as such.
I like that the focus of your hackathon is hacking, and the resulting hacks seem really cool. I'd like to participate in your hackathon if I ever find myself in San Antonio (I'm in Palo Alto for now, though). Do you have a website I could bookmark?
I'm fairly sure that was a joke.
I first saw a reference to Ignition in the "Things I won't work with" entry on chlorine trifluoride - the stuff you can use to set fire to sand...

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_sa...
It may transition into that, it's definitely something I enjoy studying and revealing for the last half decade heh. There's a market for something better than CAPTCHA.
Note that GMX Mail likely is hosted in the US (according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmx#Growth). The same is true for FastMail, unfortunately.
There was a contention that the government subsidizes humanities research. I demonstrated that, barring the rounding error that is the NEH, it does not. You reply that yes in fact the government does subsidize humanities teaching. I don't even know what to do with that.

Anyway, if loans were given out on an ability to repay standard then the biggest losses would be to health professions, criminal justice, early childhood education and other non-prestige career degrees toward which low income students tend to gravitate.
"Naturally, the government made her and her family agree
never to say, or even speculate aloud about why it was
done when they paid for the surgery..."

I find it shocking that we afford the government the unilateral right to gag an individual from talking in exchange for treatment owed. I would hope that our judicial system would review such an arrangement and nullify a non-disclosure clause in this incident. Near as I can tell it sounds like your friend's aunt never entered into a binding legal relationship with those that contributed to her cancer until after it had been demonstrated that they were at fault. How those responsible can get a judgement or arbitration that includes such a non-disclosure when that party is so obviously wrong and at fault is simply mind-boggling.
And who identifies them as incorrect? Not the editor.. Wikipedia looks for expert opinion published in reliable outlets to avoid the problem of people enforcing their own point of view.

At least in theory.

HN comments are usually interesting, but lack any form of editorial control :)
I'm surprised no one in this crowd has yet drawn the parallel to Feynman's adventures in philosophy class (as set down in Surely You are Joking)
As big a story as the NSA's data mining seems to be here, it is amazing that the CFPB's actions have not drawn more scrutiny. They are telling you they will be capturing 80% of all credit card transactions next year. This isn't phone meta-data...this is your actual credit card transactions for whatever purpose.
$1 per meal? What are the ingredients? Did I miss this from the article?
Well to be honest I think that the jury is still kind of out in that regard, at least somewhat. I mean in the case of 3 of the countries that you listed, Canada, the US, and Australia, are still very much majority European descent white. And even with this majority you can still see what happens when other ethnic groups become large enough. In Canada, the francophone minority has repeatedly tried to separate and form their own nation, and in the 70s created disruption to such a degree that the government declared essentially martial law in the province of Quebec. In the US the treatment of the African-American ethnic group has been terrible to say the least. And we'll see what happens as the latino ethnic group continues to increase in size, there is already some reactionism in the form of laws passed in Arizona, etc. The fourth nation you listed, India, had to separate into two separate nations that have been repeatedly on the brink of war on basis of religious groups!

So I think it is easy to say that western nations have been able to work and experience peace, but in most cases there is either one ethnic group that is a clear majority and all other groups bend to its will, or there actually is a bunch of friction and conflict when those minorities become sizable enough. Obviously not to the point of civil war, but I don't think we can say that things are just "working" elsewhere.
Right behind you with 230 days: https://github.com/zsiciarz

The contribution graph is in my opinion really a great motivational tool. Seems to work better for me than projects like Julython, however I'm guilty of a few single-commit days fixing a typo or updating some dependency packages. Looking forward to 365!
"Nearly every university loses money on sports."

That overly broad statement was made without citing any evidence. The handful of anecdotes that follow don't support the claim of "nearly every university". If there were any studies that support this claim, the author should have cited them. Otherwise, we just have to assume that they're making it up.
Keep an eye out here: http://alamohackfest.eventbrite.com/

I haven't announced the next one yet as I'm going to be out of town for much of the rest of the year (Houston -> Japan -> Seoul -> Boulder) so I'm not entirely sure when I'll have time to do it.
That "wheel" remark was quite poignant, though :)
Sorry, I meant to say "still hasn't authorized".
>Why is the economy small? Answers like, "because they are poor," are forbidden.

Most Western economies grew larger by looting (the crusades, the Americas, Africa, Asia, black slaves, etc). Without this huge boost of stolen or acquired for pennies resources, slave labour, stolen land to build on, etc, they would not have funded their industrial revolutions and their subsequent prosperity.

Zambia, being poor and with little might, had nothing to loot. They got looted themselves, first by third party countries directly and then by their companies (and their pals they placed in power).
This is great, I've been looking for something like this, to refresh and build on a class I took in college. To my surprise, this is my professor's actual book I look forward to reading the book again. Thanks!
Statistically, real threats are rare, but ambition and corruption are
common. Overwhelmingly, the purpose of censorship is not the protection
of national security, but the protection of individual careers. That's
not ideology, but mathematics. Because there are very, very, few true
national secrets, but a huge amounts of information that someone would
like to bury for one reason or another.
-- Seth Finkelstein, at http://grep.law.harvard.edu/article.pl?sid=03/12/16/0526234&...

Finkelstein writes "censorship", but you could put "classification" in and get exactly the same result.
"We know that the California-centered Maker Culture is gone. There are still a hell of a lot of great people in that region– it might be the most talent-rich place on earth– but, with a few outstanding exceptions, they’re no longer the socially important ones."

Dynamite. I love this guy's analysis that people are paying for connections. I recently saw an MBA's LinkedIn Graph, with a huge ball of MBA contacts dwarfing the other business parts of the graph: strong data.
the guy is called bayesianhorse. you shouldn't waste so much breath on him.
Seems like plain old upsale, a little similar to Apple's pricing for extra storage on iCloud.
they didn't fix that issue since 2009. - another reason to use firefox. I've encountered that while designing a pixel-perfect website where firefox just give me the expected results while chrome hadn't the same results, didn't look good. sucks, but as a webdev you just have to accept it and work-around.
Hal uses this as the textbook for his undergrad machine learning course. Having recently taken that course (in the spring 2013 semester), I feel justified saying that this book needs a lot of work before it's usable as a textbook or even a learning tool. Most of the time this text served primarily as an initial "dereference" of ideas yielding not concrete information, but a series of other pointers that I'd need to chase on Google before getting anything usable.

He clearly has high hopes for CIML, based on all the infoboxes and chapters that are still incomplete; it's a shame he'll likely need to get tenure before finishing it.

(This should in no way be taken as a slight on Hal's teaching; his class was the best sort of challenging in that it required a large amount of work, and yielded a correspondingly large amount of insight. He's also a fantastic lecturer and a fair grader.)
I just installed Win 8.1 on my 2006 Dell e1505 laptop, and while it performs admirably (1gb of RAM!) I was surprised to find that the trackpad gestures were not in fact baked in.