skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the best I can determine, he's a lawyer, not a scientist (no biography says what any of his non-terminal degrees were in). You're also welcome to explain what these bits from his Wikipedia entry have to do with "science":

"Hans Blix personally admonished Saddam for "cat and mouse" games and warned Iraq of "serious consequences" if it attempted to hinder or delay his mission.

In his report to the UN Security Council on 14 February 2003, Blix claimed that "If Iraq had provided the necessary cooperation in 1991, the phase of disarmament – under resolution 687 – could have been short and a decade of sanctions could have been avoided.""

He also famously got tricked by Sadam prior to the 1991 war ... any particular reason he should have gotten extra respect when he said the same thing again?
Why do we need to bother with repeatable experiments for social sciences? You've read Heidegger, it seems ("who is fucking brilliant if you can get through his ridiculous prose"). We are already geworfen into this world, a world that consists of Mitsein. This is your own Dasein, which is a fact, because it is the apriori of your Sein and first enables you to ask any of the questions you ask. Heidegger sees ontology as more fundamental, more basic than any of the sciences, because they only describe the Wie of Dasein, not Sein itself. We don't "need to have a fucking clue" why things happen, because we are already involved in them either way. If you indeed subscribe to Heidegger, then none of these questions are primary questions, they are questions that you can only concern yourself with after you have understood the conditions and structures of your own Sein. There is a good reason Sein und Zeit is a fragment, an aborted solution for the problem of ontology. Heidegger himself notices that his line of enquiry does not solve the overall problem of ontology, despite his optimistic start. Perhaps therein lies part of the reason why ontology has been seen rather sceptically by many of the people who followed him?
> Is this how people actually use their computers?

Yes, I see it happening fairly often on my campus. Especially in very large lectures for introductory courses.
Hoodie Allen and Hopsin are laughing because they have embraced new ways of making money with their music. Mostly via social networking. There are more that are doing this but these 2 are good examples.
> you'll still be way off, because you think you know all the problems that you're going to need to solve

Absolutely; but I think it's reasonable to assume that a more accurate estimate is a more valuable estimate. You can also track estimate error over time and use that to adjust future estimates.

> The elephant in the room: Debugging. I don't know how many times I've been asked, "When are you going to find that bug?"

The problem is that in any sample of n=1, variability is huge. It's like saying "I am going to pick one person out of the global population. How tall is he or she?"

Well of course I can't know that. The sample is too small. But if instead I am told "we are going to pick ten thousand people at random from the global population; how tall are they in total?" then I can use previously-gathered statistics to give a range of estimates that will probably be accurate.
Twitter Just Filed for IPO But Does it Have a Secret Growth Problem?
Yahoo Love 'Em or Hate 'Em Traffic Has Grown 20% Since Mayer Took Over
He means you can make that much by working full time.
I take issue with the connotation as you describe derivatives; they hide and obscure. They are a tool, nothing more.

Other than that, I agree. It was the lack of a central clearing house for the derivatives -which would have allowed issuers to determine counter party risks and price it properly -that was the failing. But that's a human error. There's no need whatsoever to blame the securities themselves.
In the Industrial Megaprojects book I quoted elsewhere, the single best predictor of every measure of project performance was "Front End Loading" -- how completely the project has been studied and specified before it is funded. There are at least three FEL stages. Companies that muck up FEL-1 are doomed to failure, companies that muck up FEL-2 or FEL-3 are doomed to poor returns.
I think the author said that in a spirit of self-deprecation.
Facebook Working with Congress on US Immigration Reform
I'm going to have to categorize that as being non-responsive.

Let's assume I know what a derivative is. We can go from there. The specific accusation made in the mainstream press was that by the time the instruments were sliced and diced a dozen times, risk was not made clearly visible to derivative purchasers, and that the buying and selling of derivatives got way ahead of the banks' ability to track the risk inside of them. At high leverages, it became such that being wrong by just a few percentage points could mean financial disaster. The guarantee that Freddie and Fannie made contributed to a general feeling that the market was mostly protected from huge systemic risks, when that wasn't the case at all.
And if they end up serving no practical use they end up discarded and ignored by scientists and engineers (if maybe not pure mathematicians). The author's point is that there is no such selective pressure on lit crit.

Practical use ≠ commercial use! Also, I have no idea where you got the idea of "disgarding" research, especially in regards to pure mathematicians. What is "practical" to you?

Also, poststructuralist lit crit is not the be all and end all of "the humanities".

No, it's not, and yet when I deconstructed the author's paper (I crack me up), I found that he made a generalization about all of the humanities following his limited experience with the given topic.
It's 2013, Airlines Are Just Now Catching Up with High Speed Wi-fi
Some perspective for those outside the Humanities:

A great article, but the basic ideas have been reiterated many times within academia itself. The date is important - its currently almost impossible to find an institution with a viable postmodern/deconstruction focus (outside of individual courses framed as a historical perspective and some oddball schools that aren't taken seriously in the field).

We've effectively 'moved on,' in many cases along with the critiques found in the article, although we've ignored some. New tools have been developed, yielding sometimes greater and sometimes lesser successes.
JCRA FPGA Programming Contest
They don't have to destroy our economy, just take out a city. Our conventional weapons would still dominate, but nukes are a great equalizer.
any cms as widely used as wordpress is going to have regular RCE vulnerabilities. Wordpress core is well-debugged, and no matter how much better engineered a replacement is, it's going to have more bugs, even security bugs, for at least a year.

A replacement would be valuable if it could provide a better templating/plugin system that reduced the opportunity for bugs in template/plugin code.
Oh. Sorry. I'm a bit tired and I'm a bit out of it. While I could make that much working full time, there are no jobs that pay that rate around here. Most jobs I've found around here pay minimum wage. The most I've found for someone like me pays $11.50/hr.
AngularJS Controller Tutorial
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.

That doesn't fly in an interview. At least, I don't feel it does. Interviewers expect mostly right and mostly very fast. I end up standing there trying to pre-think the entire problem so something correct comes out the first time, which, to them, is just dead time with me staring at the wall.

The other option is to "dive in" and backtrack a lot, but the people watching can't tell the difference between actual incompetence and just figuring it out.
No, not at all. In fact, we supplemented ground bunkers with airborne command and control systems at the same time we started building the Cheyenne Mountain complex. It's axiomatic that you don't place all your eggs in one basket if you care very much about survival, as we used to. E.g. sometime around 1970 I think we judged the Soviets would be able to land very powerful nukes with sufficient simultaneity at both of Cheyenne Mountain's exterior entrances, negating the passive defense of the blast door entrance.

Sub pens would be a much more difficult problem; note also the relative incompressiblity of water compared to air.

If you're really really serious about this sort of thing, you need a defense in depth of active defenses. For deterrence it doesn't matter if all or even any of them work in practice, just that the perception that your strikes will very possibly fail.

And/or if you maintain enough targets, enough systems, with interlocking constraints making a time-on-target for all of them well neigh impossible, well, that's why we still maintain the triad.
They say you shouldn't explain your own jokes. My comment was that github is built around a tool that makes it really easy and efficient to import and merge histories. Namely git. It's amusing that the value-add portion of github, the web bits, suffer from problems like this, that a tool like git could conceivably be applied to.
Interesting. That sounds like urban myth material - a special subway under the subway.

But from my limited knowledge, bigger and bigger nukes wouldn't make a difference against deep hardened bunkers since they don't penetrate before detonation. When you look at pictures of atomic bomb damage you don't see deep craters, you see a wide area of surface level damage.
Studied under Rorty? Ooh, do tell.

Funny thing, there is no way an average English Lit. major could tell if your average research-level maths paper is nonsense or not because it would take, you know, six years or more to get up to speed. Why it is that science and engineering types think that all they need to do is read a couple of primers and they're good to go is beyond me. I think it speaks to the arrogance and elitism of the scientific method as The One True Path To Truth.

I'll tell you the truth about truth. How long you got?

Vent more I say, this crap has real-world consequences -- humanities budgets are under fire. Whole flippin philosophy departments are being closed down because, you know, who needs philosophy anyway. Grumble grumble.
Did you publish the source anywhere, and if not, are you willing and able to? I'd love to see it.
Same here. I wrote about it here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/kinesis-advantage/ .
Do you think it's wrong to report about orangutans in this fashion even if it's true? I don't understand your point.

Edit: also, your mention that comments like this are "notably missing from this thread" makes little sense when there's currently only one other root comment against the post.
Ask HN: Are there "Hacker Houses" in the Bay Area that aren't trying to rob me?
Is there such thing as a "Hacker House" in the Bay Area that isn't trying to rob me?

It seems like the few places I have seen on AirBnB (Hacker House; Chez JJ) charge over $1000 to share a room with 4+ people..... which is just ridiculous.

I guess what I am looking for more is a place where people are there on a monthly basis as opposed to a place for entrepreneur "travelers".

Having more of a house/office feel and less of a feel as if it's some "incubator" (risesf.com?), there is a kitchen (with stove, refrigerator and cupboard space), there is a workspace where everyone living there has room to work, good WiFi connection, no need really for a couch or TV, and there is place to store your clothing.

Is this too much to ask for? Sharing a room with 2 other people (3 people per room) and paying $700 a month each?

That's what I'm looking for. Does such a Hacker-Utopia exist? Or maybe it's more like a Hacker-Commune? If so who do I call or how do I find these fellow comrades... In some ways it is a Catch 22, because perhaps these comrades do exist, and we decide to create our own house -- but very likely we would be unable to secure a house since I am assuming most of us wouldn't have full-time paying jobs on paper and are probably freelancers... which doesn't jive well with most landlords in comparison to the competition.
if all you need is a place to post personal musings, Jekyll is really al you need. the missing piece then is just a good WYSIWYG markdown editor.
It's spinning in the right direction. We're just inside the earth :).
Regarding ergonomics, I've been using a Kinesis Advantage for the last couple years (http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/kinesis-advantage/), and I would find it hard to return to a standard keyboard all the time.

The Advantage is absurdly expensive relative to other keyboards but for someone who spends a lot of time—too much, probably—typing, it's worth it.
I've been told by several people I''m a "heavy" typer. The old Dell keyboards I got from companies made my typing loud enough to hear like the author noted. The only way to suppress the clacking was to type slower and softer.

This keyboard looks like a good fit for someone with my typing style.

Edit: Thanks to everybody for posting links to their favorite keyboards, hopefully I can find a good one if this one doesn't work out.
What doesn't have these problems? Rails itself was not too long ago dealing with SQL injection vulnerabilities. Like stated by lukeschlather anything as widely used as either Wordpress OR Ruby on Rails is gonna have these problems.
Tell me if there are any weeks where some promise Google made doesn't go bust.
That was a wonderful experience of multiple moments of realization. "Oh, it's an ascii globe; it looks like it just scrolls a map through the circle. No wait, it's warping as it shifts across. Wait, is it using asterisks for antialiasing? What is all of this stuff around the outsi- ... oh. Oh."
Are there enough of them to make such a product viable? Remember, you're up against products produced in such volume they become their own commodities. iPhones may cost some $650 full price, but is there seriously any way a modular phone could really compete without deep optimization to such a massive supply chain? anyone willing to pay $1500+ for an underpowered phone just because it's modular? These are not rhetorical questions.

All that said, methinks here IS a market for a very well made dumb phone. Anyone carrying an iPad everywhere doesn't need an equal but smaller iPhone, just something like an iPhone nano (makes calls, great ecosystem integration, refined UI, and nothing else).
What you say here suggests a rather big lack of understanding of history.

> For a political statement, a nation could make it very clearly demonstrated you have, say, a dozen. ... It'll cost two working models and you need perhaps a dozen packed up and well hidden to be effective. I would imagine the reaction would never be declassified, and I'll be surprised if it hasn't already happened.

This is the logic of nuclear blackmail, and in general of brinkmanship. It has been used before, if the relevant Wikipedia page is to be believed.

It is a dangerous and unpredictable threat. The Cold War strategy asserted that only mutually assured destruction would be sufficient to bring about peace. A dozen nuclear bombs, under that logic, is not enough. If it were, the results of the Cuban Missile Crisis would have been a lot different. If it were then the US would not have built its huge arsenal of nuclear warheads - 12 per nation would have been enough.

You say "always think outside the box", but nothing you've mentioned is outside of the box. In fact, it's boringly in the box. First off, there's nothing special about containerized shipping. A 1 MT bomb weighs less than a ton, and you could bring that in via tramp freighter or even private sailboat.

It's almost needless to say, but we also had a lot of cargo ships in 1900. The Halifax Explosion of 1917 was equivalent to about 2.9 kilotons, and that was with conventional explosive. Blow up that ship at a wharf in NYC and it will take down skyscrapers.

For that matter, look to drug smugglers. A single speedboat in June was captured, with 3 tons of cocaine on it. Narco-submarines are believe to carry in several hundred tons of cocaine per year. A 49-foot sailboat was recently intercepted 400 nautical miles off the US coast, on the way from Venezuela to Canada with 621 kg of drugs on board. Any of these are enough to deliver a megaton bomb.

"More than a dozen years ago, how would Saudi Arabia knock down skyscrapers in NYC? That's insanity, they'd have to launch cruise missiles or build a battleship and successfully park it off the coast of NYC, or invade overland with bulldozers or something."

This is not true. You need only to look to the movies of more than a dozen years ago to learn about some alternatives.

"The Peacemaker" has a Yugoslav named Dušan Gavrić who comes close to exploding a nuclear device at the UN.

"The Sum of All Fears" has a group of Palestinians who set off a nuclear bomb at the Superbowl in Denver.

I pointed out movies to show that the alternatives were part of popular culture, but I could stick with real-life.

The W54 warhead weighed about 23 kg and had a yield up to 1 kiloton. It was used to make a backpack nuke - the Special Atomic Demolition Munition. This could take down a few blocks of NYC.

And of course the first attempt to take down the World Trade Center was in 1993 using car bombs. That failed, but in principle that could be used to take down a skyscraper.

So in real-life and in the movies there were many other options beyond cruise missiles, battleships, or bulldozers.
Yeah, probably to more accurately capture the noise of the keyboard. That's why the laptop is so freaking loud.
The amount of space after the sentence ends does not determine whether or not it has ended.

Let me re-phrase to clarify my point. Double spaces after a period more accurately distinguish the end of a sentence from other possible meanings. See bmelton's comments.

The sequence "period space space" is also not reliable for a computer to determine the end of a sentence

Not reliable because of some other inherent ambiguity, or because not everyone is using double spaces? If you are arguing we shouldn't do it because not everyone does it, I'm not sure how to respond... Is there some other case where a period followed by two spaces is acceptable, and doesn't mark the end of a sentence?
Very interesting thoughts there. I have an uncle who has taught Philosophy at the University level at one of those ivy-eating colleges in Massachusetts for over twenty years. He's fond of saying that Philosophy is a dead science, that nothing new has come from that world since the middle of the 1900s. I tell him to watch more of the older HBO comedy specials. Or read comic books.
Back when I was at university I did a lot of work on rent-a-coder, now vWorker.
Initially it was hard to win business, the first few jobs I did were worth almost nothing.
After I did those smaller jobs and built some rep I found that local contractors (I am Australian) preferred to hire me over some of the others due to language difficulties. Ended up earning more than $10K from projects, however not in such a short timespan.

In short, sell your skills and make sure to emphasise that you're a good communicator.
So gave them all the base necessities, yet took away any hope of actually having a say in how they live their lives. I would say the Soviets were far more brutal. Being hungry or homeless is one thing, not even the master of your own lofe is another.
I might have asked you this before (in a prior thread), but do you have the pedals that go with the Kinesis and, if so, how (useful) are they?
Thanks for that.

This is what I thought. Story goes. Key French texts are translated into English. They used "problematic" as a noun. Diligent students read texts, learn to use "problematic" as a noun and so it goes. Language changes, get used to it. I've seen tons of papers where someone argues about the problematics of this or that. I wouldn't use it so myself. But it may inevitably be on the way to assuming this new mantle.

My pet peeve is "foregrounds". Grr. I've a few more, I've always meant to make a list.
Sounds like that works for you. I don't think it would work for me. Unlike some in this thread though, I am not going to say that my preferences work for everybody.
Days of Christmas disney world
Always provide two quotes, the "shoot the moon" and the budget quote. The client will always cherry pick segments from the more expensive quote to arrive right at their budget. You can still loose to the next guy, but if you are in the ballpark, it won't be because you came in (a little) too high with this approach.
Horrible Horrendous Terrible Tremendous Mining Pool
I've actually contemplated the idea of doing a node CMS for use on client work. Wordpress lacks nothing, it is just a badly designed architecture with an inconsistent API (for example there are 3 different functions to display a 'loop' of posts, each one has options worded slightly differently with slightly different effects)

Some things that would be good:

1. Contenteditable from the frontend- for when the client just wants to change that one sentence on the third paragraph on the product page or whatever. http://createjs.org/ seems to be a pretty good ready made solution.

2. Repeating layouts- I design and code a repeating element (like photos on the team page or whatever), and the client has an interface to add or remove units, at which point they get updated wherever they are on the site.

3. NoSQL db. SQL is good when one is balancing the books of a large corporation, or doing a survey of the heights and wattages of every streetlight in the country, but it is not a logical solution for displaying documents on the web. It would also be really nice to have a database that could be put in revision control and deployed along with the rest of the site files, as the line between content and templates on CMS sites is a very thin one. https://github.com/felixge/node-dirty is intriguing, but I don't know if there are any unforeseen issues with this.

4. Blogging. Hopefully we could just integrate tightly with Ghost or something like it.
If nation X takes out a US city with nuclear weapons, we would dominate them with conventional weapons. I agree with that statement.

How then does the US having nuclear weapons change things?
Movement is relative.
I don't know how google has gotten away with such shitty font rendering on WinChrome for so long. The difference is instantly noticeable when comparing to Firefox or IE. Is there an official reason for it or they "just haven't gotten around to it yet"?