skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Behaviour in some animal species is indeed genetically determined, he says, but with humans "that certainly isn't the case". He argues that culture sets us apart from animals in that respect, and points to the huge variance in social norms in different countries, and over short periods of time.

There's no clear line here. Many animal species have been shown to have certain elements of culture, that are learned rather than inborn. Findings that local dialects can be found in different species are examples of this.

And on the other hand, many culture elements can be rationally explained as natural responses to different circumstances.
It's also that you lose any ability to step-debug at the moment. You still need to know Javascript to debug Coffeescript by and large.

That mental context-switch overhead is the whole driving philosophy behind NodeJS in the first place - don't switch languages so often. CS/JS is enough of a change that the overhead is not insignificant.
The point is that this type of stuff doesn't belong here regardless of the political ideology of the article and regardless of what political ideology the majority of users here hold. This thread appears to have been flagged into oblivion, so the system worked. I complained prematurely.
I wonder what happens if the IRS categorizes your filmmaking as a hobby as they can with documentary filmmakers? Does that cancel out the FAA's categorizing a filmmaker as a commercial interest (or vice versa)?

More a rhetorical question concerning stupid policies from two separate government agencies.

ref:
http://www.indiewire.com/article/ida_issues_amicus_brief_on_...
I never saw it but I think that would be a really good idea, I would love to "archive", "mute" and my facebook wall, twitter, etc... If that could work as GMail that would be perfect.

I'm the kind of reading every post on Twitter and Facebook and unfollowing/muting people that post too much useless things so that would be perfect for me.
This data is mostly (completely?) based on personal usage.

chrome://predictors/
This is a HUGE outlier among birds capable of long endurance flight, if the data turn out to be accurate. The Alpine Swift is tiny, 2-ft wingspan and 0.2-lb weight. In contrast, the Albatross stretches its wings to 12 ft and weighs 20 lb, and can fly for up to a few days straight (longest known endurance). Similar for the Condor and Stork. The large wingspan minimizes induced drag and lets it glide extremely efficiently, just like the U-2. As bird wingspans decrease, flapping frequency increases and flight endurance decreases, as with pigeons, hummingbirds, and flying insects. Aerodynamically, flight is vastly less efficient at smaller scales because the air molecules remain the same size. There are physical justifications for long-endurance birds being huge, just as there are with long-endurance aircraft.

Data collection seems highly suspect. Collecting v_dot every 4 minutes seems insufficient for takeoffs/landings that probably take a few seconds. I wonder if this polling rate satisfies the Nyquist criterion for typical acceleration changes of the bird? Then they mention relying on the pitch angle to determine flight. How clear is this correlation? Birds attain pos/neg pitch in climbs and dives. They adjust their pitch on the ground as they walk, while picking up bits to build nests, and ducking down to feed their young. I look forward to seeing this undergo peer review as alphakappa mentions. This type of flight seems very unusual, but perhaps they manage to feed off insects enough to sustain themselves.
I also use zoho for my personal mail (for about a year so far), and I've also had a good experience.

I'll definitely consider it for a larger project. After Google closed the free tier of the Apps for Business service, I think they are the way to go for side projects :) (which will hopefully convert to paid if they do well!)
Really? Those three words cause you such distress that you abandoned an entire forum?

And to be clear, someone mentioned a moon and a space station.
Simple answer -- I didn't know they offered a Windows SSH server. And I just checked and -- whoops -- they don't.

The problem isn't an absence of SSH clients, the problem is a shortage of SSH servers.

I much prefer to have all systems serve SSH -- that way they can all talk to each other as equals. If I accepted putty as a solution, I would have to sit at the Windows machine to make transfers. Thanks, but no thanks.
They buried the lead. Also promotes weight loss.
At the risk of saying anything nice about GoDaddy, this seems like it was the right move. Known compromised keys should be revoked. This key was clearly compromised.

Now what other Microsoft/Skype/Yahoo/etc keys can we demonstrate were also handed over to the government?
Well, I have a US passport (naturalized).

Yes, I want to live in China and I am actually going to.
As a CF developer (among many other languages) for bordering 15 years now I have come to accept the blanket rejection of the platform. I had to smile at the stats above because I have to wonder if the number of people who have marked "dislike" have even used it (or at least any time recently)

As I write this there are about 2200 votes apiece for both PHP and Python, two languages most people will have an opinion on, so lets make an assumption that's somewhat representative of the voters to date. Also at the moment there are 500-ish down votes for Coldfusion. From my experience it seems suspect that 1 in 5 developers, or even 1 in 6, has worked with Coldfusion enough to have an opinion on it outside of external influence. This type of trend probably also applies to other languages, in both directions.

That said, on Coldfusion, it's far from perfect but it also gets a pretty unfair judging in my personal opinion. Just my 2c.
Mission Control and Flight Recorder on HotSpot JVM
To be fair, the government isn't "taking control" of healthcare - they haven't assumed control over every private health insurance company.
Google's going to pay for GCC toolchain improvements?

Good for them.

But a normal company would go broke doing these kinds of things.
I have a trust in Amazon that goes well beyond the rational. If something isn't for sale on Amazon, I probably won't buy it. If I purchase with Amazon, it'll show up, it'll work, and if I want to return it, it'll just happen. I've had one or two issues with their Indian customer service via chat, but any real issues where I ended up getting on a phone, it got solved straight away.

I deeply and truly believe Amazon is on my side, where I believe Paypal is actively out to screw me.

I will use this service wherever I find it.
The interesting thing to me is why? What would cause this evolution? Most swifts fly all day and can barely perch, but they do perch for the night since they require sight to locate aerial insects and the effort of flying all night is a big energy drain on a small bird.

I can think of only two possibilities: First possibility is that insects are dense enough that they are feeding themselves at night. Second is that the safety of being off the ground plus abundant daytime food makes this a better survival strategy.

Can't wait to see what the ornithologists come up with to explain this.
Why does Ruby get so much hate? I know it's not the most performant, but the delight I get from Ruby code is still unparalleled IMO
Something like Trillian could work. https://www.trillian.im/ It's more of an IM client but it includes email integration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism
This same old boring, worn out comment? Let's just skip to the end, shall we?

A: omg you're piping curl to bash! so insecure!!

B: well wait a second, i) you can just curl the script & inspect it before running it if you want ii) step-by-step install instructions still require that you trust the source of the code and iii) how is installing a precompiled binary any more secure? All scenarios short of personally auditing the source code require you to trust someone.

A: Hmm ok well I guess so.

~the end~ This is how this conversation has gone down the last 5 times I saw it. Can we please discuss the tool itself now?
Tobacco companies perfected the propaganda of doubt. Climate change denialists use the same tactics. They might even be the same scientists-for-hire.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalli...
I would go so far as to argue that we've never succeeded in composing anything better for the task either (since VB6 is hanging around).

The Linux desktop desperately needs something that easy to use, but which works with SCC and gently encourages some structure. Glade with a built-in Python IDE which hides the boilerplate could probably do it (along with a bit more clarity to how you build up an interface in Glade).
I understand the problem of rising wealth gap in China, but I missed the part in the articles you linked where it says that a very small and tight group of connected people owns a substantial part of the country.

Obviously guanxi and party membership are unfair and create such inequalities in China, but it seems to me that in Russia the issue is a mafia-like situation, while in China it's more of a system-related issue. (I am not trying to minimize the problem in China, I am just not sure whether they can be compared)
Earlier discussion (of the same post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6523434

Ah, the wonders of multiple country-code TLDs for the same blogspot page (also submitted under Australia)
It's great to have smart people discussing the science. As you say, it's interesting and tricky.

This thread isn't full of those people - it's full of shrill deniers.
oh I would just be as happy to label anything case sensitive as something I don't like. Easy as that.
The problem is that there are very few people with "reasonable, scientific grounds for being skeptical of anthropomorphic climate change". There certainly aren't any represented in these comments.

I welcome skepticism. But what people call "skepticism" in the climate debate is nearly always blind contrarianism.
Is there much weather at 65000 ft?
When I said "owner can load BTC in machine to convert to cash", I meant that people from street will put in cash for his coins.
find collaborators. If you can't, that's usually a sign the project is not interesting/challenging enough to keep YOU working on it for a year.

Don't just ping your friends because they're your friends, collaborators should share the passion that got you to start the project. Sometimes that's best found outside your normal network.
I think we call 'em smartphones. THose are the only things I know of that give a unified inbox view: at least for WP8 and BB10, they tie in contacts and conversations across mutliple social and email platforms and give you combined views.

However, you raise a good point - a nice cross-platform solution for desktop use would be a great thing to have. It's kind of odd that it's been done so well for phones, but barely touched for desktop.

One problem related will be the constant influx of 'services that may be interesting', with disparate APIs - any solution should have a good plugin system.
Aren't they worried that people will inject open-source vulnerabilities for free, then have Google to pay them when they are "found" and "fixed"?
I paid for Kippt early on because I thought it was such a nicely designed and well thought out tool. I'm really happy to see them pivoting like this because they're such a talented team. This seems like a potentially useful reorganization of their core strengths.

On the consumer side, I've since cancelled my subscription for two primary reasons: (1) it wasn't fast enough for my core use case (saving links and finding them later); and (2) none of the other features provided me with any value (indeed, they often distracted from the core case). There are simply other tools that do this better. The pivot to enterprise provides a much more unique value proposition.
That's the difference between a 'hobby' and a 'side project.' One is a professional job you're just not paid for (yet). The other is something you happen to enjoy doing, on occasion.
And why is ipv6 needed for that? I works perfectly on 4. I have hosted numerous Serious Sam and Quake games on my PC.
How to Lie With Statistics (1954) predates Tufte by quite a bit.
What to really celebrate on Columbus Day
I like Ruby and have been programming heavily in it for the last year.

However I still think Java and C are really good languages. I appreciate the niceties of both strongly-typed compiled languages, along with the 'coolness' factor of the dynamic languages.
I have used all of these during my professional life so far,

Almost all Basic, C, C++ and Pascal IDEs from Borland for MS-DOS and Windows

The initial releases of Delphi IDE

Visual Studio, only after 32 bit support, not earlier

The first releases of C++ Builder

KDevelop

Anjunta

Eclipse

Netbeans

Smalltalk environments

Lisp environments

Native Oberon environment

And a few more not worth remembering.
Probably because the people who buy the systems aren't the ones using them. Price and feature checklists become the main factors, rather than how suitable the software is for actual use. It's the converse of the point about Apple from that article that's been going around (http://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got-wrong/).
Helicopter completes autonomous landing
As if Obamacare is state-sponsored. Its a government program that helps people buy private health insurance. At no point is somebody's doctor taking orders from the government. Naturally the Republicans messaging on Obamacare resulted in Americans being against it, yet simultaneously being in favor of every actual aspect of the law provided it didn't include President Blackenstein's name with it. After all, our seniors have been enlightened with Fox News, and in their all-knowing wisdom seek to protect us from being a vassal state led by a rogue Kenyan.

The vastly more efficient thing to do would be to expand our current socialist single-payer medical system (Medicare) to cover all. However, we live in a country where large financial interests our capable of preserving themselves, irrespective of the value they provide. The health insurance companies ensured that any solution to universal coverage included them, which is an automatically bad thing. They financed ad campaigns to scare the senior citizens into thinking that any expansion of Medicare would mean less care for them. Health insurance companies (in their current role of acting as payment middle men as opposed to a necessary role of covering catastrophic costs) provide no value. They interfere with the free market, and are less efficient than a Canadian style single payer/private provider model.

Anyone who thinks the current system is acceptable has never experienced the current system: they likely are covered by a large company's health insurance company, and haven't had to watch a family member try to buy themselves insurance.
If you're looking for a business solution, try something like Desk.com. It doesn't handle text or IM, but it works well for email, Facebook, and Twitter.
I don't know of a service that includes everything, including email... but someone I know made this aggregator for twitter, facebook, and instagram.

https://dwibbles.com/
I'll probably regret this sort of response, but what the hell.

What's inappropriate about the word? Godwin struck awfully quickly with you, but OK, let's go with the Holocaust comparison. While denying the Holocaust is bad, it doesn't directly kill people very much. On the other hand, if climate change deniers have their way, it may result in a calamity that will kill vastly more people than died in the Holocaust.
An evil, lightless place, where Elder Things dwell in their blasphemous cities of impossible geometry...
Maybe TDD emerged from dynamically typed languages because it is so much easier to write tests in a dynamically typed language?

When testing a statically typed language, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to create mock objects, shims and things like that to satisfy the compiler, especially with legacy code that wasn't written in an easy way to test.
I wrote a book called Winning Isn't Normal
As long as we can agree that Java is cool whatever this poll says ;-)

Based on this poll Java is not cool and most likely doesn't offer real advantages...
Jeff Bezos’ biological dad didn’t know his son was Jeff Bezos
Cinnamon 2.0: What’s new for users
It seems to me like the set of people who (a) can make a static HTML site and (b) can't figure out to use Amazon S3 or GitHub Pages or a traditional host like http://nearlyfreespeech.net is quite small. But it seems like this is the set of people static hosting services are targeting, or am I missing something?

It's worth noting that you can get more or less the same functionality hosting a static site on Amazon S3 with a free CloudFlare account for CDN + JavaScript/CSS minification. Unless your site has tens of thousands of visitors a month, S3 will be essentially free -- it would take a LOT of traffic to cost more than $10/month.

Uploading the site to S3 is marginally more difficult than uploading to Forge, but if you can write HTML you can probably use one of the many GUI S3 upload tools.

I'm not trying to be a jerk about this -- I'm genuinely curious who the target customer is and how Forge (and similar sites) differentiate themselves from existing services. What problem is Forge solving?

(One way Forge is definitely different is great UI design. Props to whoever did their design work!)
In our experience, even though amazon has a huge customer base, that doesn't translate into people deciding to pay with amazon.

On our site, we only monitor Paypal sales, as those are by far the most abundant.
Responsive Web Design for Complex UI Widgets
Ouch. I've been on the receiving end of Heroku outages during heavy traffic, it's zero craic. But it happens.

Give the guys a break lads, it's hard to anticipate this. Still, maybe hosting the static front page on... err.. S3 might've kept it up ;)

-Edited for end of day stupidity-
The spiritual baggage comes from the fact that in these traditions meditation is a tool to develop concentration so that the meditator can focus his/her full attention on some form of the question "who am I" - that is, "what is my true identity" - sometimes aided by focus on a koan (a puzzle meant to spur an insight into ones real identity)

Spoiler alert - you're supposed to discover by direct experience that your real self is neither a homunculus looking out through your eyes, nor is it coterminous with your body, and this direct experience that your true self is everything that is, is intended to lead to compassion for other beings.
What's most interesting to me is the amount of people that have mindshare about each language. Python clearly has the advantage over ruby in overall exposure to those who answered.
The pathway they study is conserved from mice to humans so the results may be relevant. That being said I don't know whether this pathway is involved in Alzheimer's disease. What's more interesting is the mechanism of the curing. One often proposed model for dealing with neurodegeneration is to enhance naturally existing pathways in a cell that deal with misfolded proteins. The authors of this paper do the opposite. They found that this natural response was being overinduced in mice with prion disease and inhibiting it actually made them better. Certainly worth trying in other mouse models.
Maybe. But you can't make directories that you don't talk about on a public repo, because anyone could go and look at those.
And how many of those "private" insurance companies can still write "major medical" high deductible catastrophic coverage polices that so many of us have used in time past as ... gasp, insurance, as opposed to a tax advantaged benefit + originally a way to get around WWII wage controls? Etc. etc.

In a system that's structurally rather close to Original Formula Italian fascism, how "private" nominally non-government companies are when so much of what they can and cannot do is highly debatable, to the point where I think your quibble is very very minor.
HTML5 Super Mario Brothers Implementation
Probability applies to everything. I'm not going to buy stock in some company just because I can't "prove" it won't go up by 5,000% tomorrow. The scientific method is just a special case of probabilistic reasoning where you try to get so much evidence that your probability estimate is very very close to 100% or 0% (but it's still never completely certain. The evidence could have been faked or just a coincidence, or there could be a better theory out there that also explains the evidence, etc.)

All beliefs are just probability estimates of how certain you are that they are true. If you are very certain of something then you must have a high probability estimate that it is true. If you aren't certain then it must be lower. If you say "I'm 90% sure this will happen." Then you should expect to be right about 90% of the time you say that.

If what I'm saying isn't intuitively obvious or if you just want to learn more, read this: http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes/

In any case the idea that religion isn't disprovable is completely false: http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprova...
There is one and it's called...wait for it...http://unifiedinbox.com/ :)

But they are in beta still afaik.
>>Can somebody who disliked Python please tell me their reasons for doing so?

Well, for one thing -- the programming language culture seems to have something rotten [as in cult like] in it, if people really find it surprising that anyone can dislike the language... 1/2 :-)

A question like that from your 12-karma account as its 9th comment is a typical example of the start of a baiting session from a troll. I'm frankly not surprised to see that re Python anymore. :-(
You misunderstand me, I like git, but there are lots of people who don't like it, and would much rather be able to do everything with their mouse.
Thanks! Definitely helped me figure out which languages people voted on overall, as well.

Love the language or hate the language, there seem to be some languages that are much more on people's minds.
Hardware Startups: What you need to know before you start
That was very informative, thanks.
I've felt the same way -- it makes more sense to have ChromeOS on phones / tablets, which are intended to always be connected, and put Android on laptops which are sometimes connected.
What CTOs Fear Most
> While there are products out there like Convo, Yammer and Evernote for Business, Saarinen said he views e-mail as the main competition.

Yes, they have that right. Email is definitely the competition, and I'm glad this team is upfront about it. Lots of group chat platforms brush this off.

> But these kinds of discussions are not best supported by long chains of e-mail.

Ah, you can't end on that TC! Why are these kinds of discussions not good on email? I've tried a bunch of group chat/discussion/collaboration platforms. I use them for a while, and they're fun and exciting during that honeymoon stage, but I always end up going back to email. It's dependable, robust and evergreen. And everyone has it. I don't know if it's ever not worked. Seriously.

I want to believe that something is better than email, but I have yet to see it. I had HUGE hopes for Google Wave, which was supposed to kill email. Didn't work. Checking out Inc, and it feels a lot like Wave. I hope it doesn't suffer a similar fate.

What's the huge problem with email?
Agreed, I would think that Python would have more haters, given its syntax such as spaces and need of self on each object function.

IMO Ruby has all the advantages of Python without the ugly bits.