skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow is that a terrible article.

The comments on the spectator website get to the point, but 'Scientific Consensus' isn't one single person reviewing a dozen papers and deciding climate change isn't a big deal.

Cherry-picking a few areas where humans will benefit doesn't just negate the rest of the (mostly unknown) impacts. Fewer people will die in the cold? The presence of cold doesn't kill people, it's the lack of protection from the cold caused by failed governments and failed economic systems. Flooding doesn't matter since we can just build dykes? Ugh.

There are actual existential threats (looking at you ocean acidification) to the survival of humanity, but it'll be warmer and we can build dams, so NBD.
"The claims made by psychonauts are frequently extravagant and unjustified; the tangible benefits are either unrelated to the truth of the experience (such as lessened anxiety of death)"

I don't think this is accurate. The key mediating variable for reduced anxiety is having a mystical experience, and one of the defining characteristics of the mystical experience is that it feels more real than real life. C.f. csp.org/psilocybin

"Physicalism, by contrast, could be easily falsified. If science ever established the existence of ghosts, or reincarnation, or any other phenomenon which would place the human mind (in whole or in part) outside the brain, physicalism would be dead."

I know he's just quoting Harris here, but this is BS. There is literally no known phenomena which you couldn't explain away with some as yet undiscovered materialist phenomena. C.f consciousness, spooky action at a distance, etc.

"Many years later, I have yet to have a mystical or religious or peak experience which could either convert me or leave me unmoved, and thus empirically settle the issue as to why I am an atheist - absence of experience, or reasoned belief?"

Given that 80% of people have these experiences in the lab while on psilocybin, if you are judging without having had these experiences yourself then that's just lazy. Even if you don't want to go the drug route, the vast majority of people also have chakra type experiences within the first few days of taking up meditation in a retreat setting.
Well you're honest with yourself, and it seems like you know what the answer is. It's great that you're following a 'marriage-driven development' methodology, so pick a language and stick with it, be it PHP, Python or Ruby. None of them is universally better than the others.

Most languages are better at solving specific types of problem. Choose what types of problem you most enjoy working on, and pick the language that suits those problems.
Save Airbnb in New York
Just had this email through from Airbnb:

Dear XXX,

I'm writing to ask you to help save Airbnb in New York.

As a guest who has stayed with a New York Host, you know how unique and local an experience that is. And you also know the majority of our hosts are just regular people making ends meet by renting out their own homes.

Now, that experience is under threat.

The New York Attorney General has subpoenaed the records of almost all of our New York hosts. We are fighting the subpoena with all we've got, but poorly written laws make for even worse enforcement. Unless you help to stop it once and for all, the laws may never get better and the threat to our New York community will continue.

A petition to change New York law already has over 40,000 signatures, and an Airbnb host, Mishelle, has pledged to personally deliver it to the New York Senate. Our goal is 50,000 signatures. We think with this many signatures, they will have to change the law.

Sign Mishelle's petition to change the NY law and Save Airbnb.

Thank you for standing with our New York hosts. We can create a new world where people can feel at home, anywhere. Let's create that world together.

Thank you for signing,

Douglas Atkin
Global Head of Community
Playing with CSS Regions in Edge Reflow
"street art" is the white commodification of graffiti. anyone decrying this "vandalization" of banksy's work should just buy it in coffee table book form so all the legitimate art isn't sullied by uncultured scribbling
Wonder if they will develop the game with the oculus rift in mind.
Notice that none of those are video games. It's great that lots of creative work is being licensed under CC BY-NC-SA, or even CC BY in a few cases. But most of those have something else they can sell later, like a physical book or cards, or are otherwise able to completely fund the entire process from the pledges. So they were able to open-source the product, have a free version, and still make enough to survive. That's not quite the same thing as completely releasing an entire game for free, although they may appear similar at first glance.
Precisely why you should all be using Xero! :)
I've used typescript on a few projects now. What I've seen is that when first hacking on some code I use almost no types. Maybe some are inferred, and that's nice, but if not whatevs. As I'm playing with the code though, like when I'm re-reading a function or if I'm trying to debug something, I'll often add in types to see if the compiler can point anything out.

In practice this has meant that code that doesn't change much but is called frequently is fully typed, while code that's under more active development is less typed, unless it's tricky.

I've only just started playing with the noImplicitAny setting, where the compiler complains loudly about any identifier that it can't figure out a type for. Not sure what I think of it yet. I'd kinda like something that lets me do a targeted noImplicitAny, but it might be enough to just do it at the file level (i.e. these files should be fully typed, these files shouldn't).
I've seen tags which I'd call art and full of imagination. Your statement reminds me of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

I've also lived in a house which constantly had a street side wall shittily tagged. Our solution was to organize a few of our graffiti artist friends to do a full mural. It worked, the little shits stopped tagging the wall.

http://i.imgur.com/zMdJpAK.jpg
I think in one of the web performance talks by Addy Osmani he said it should be used sparely at best. Maybe I'll look it up to check
They're hard on my attention span too, but I think the style is better than the catchy inverted pyramid of NYTimes and the like. It's a bit more like the Economist in that it builds up arguments, getting "fat" in the middle rather than a bloated digest (or even worse, a hook) at the start. I don't think his goal is to appeal to everyone, and I think that's okay.
>So women really just prefer to not work

That's what the quoted study appears to suggest, yes. Disputing those claims requires slightly more effort on your part than "ya right".

>Really disappointing to see pg link to this.

pg didn't link to it.
ASB. How did you get a long password? It just deleted the characters at the end when I tried (6 months ago).
Try xero.com -- it's basically mint, for businesses. No copying & pasting unless your bank is still clinging to the stone age.
Ease of deployment? Nothing really compares to mod_php
'Local street artists' are still vandals, as is Bansky. The difference is if you like the vandalism or not.
Google’s Ray Kurzweil on the quest to live forever
Thoughts on Bias
Fellow grumpy old guy here. Executive level summaries with the ability to drill down to points would be great.

As for voting up -- it also adds to your profile's "saved stories", so that might be a motivation too.
so your sister got in because she's not arab? or because she has an awesome beard? ;)

(joke! i live in chile; the us embassy is famous for charging so much and doing so little)
300-400μg? Lower threshold?
Bet you that 12.04 will not be a LTS and will be delayed to 12.10 all because of Mir.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/390880998386184192
It's about the intention. Banksy's intention was to create art. The other guy's intention was to destroy.

You can see art in destruction if you want, but the guy's intention clearly was to vandalize.

Same reason why Jackson Pollock's pieces sell for millions and I couldn't sell the stain in my garage for a dollar. Even though one could see art in that stain (just like one can see art in nature) having a car with a leaky exhaust doesn't make me an artist.
How to see through the Cloud
Show HN: Support the EFF and Others with ThriveLinks
It's in a paragraph about KDE Software Compilation 4.11, which has indeed been preparing for Qt 5 and Wayland by porting additional shell elements to QML and further work on X11-independence in the window manager. The Kubuntu team specifically has also been looking into packaging the stack bits that will eventually be needed; I don't know how that translates into packages in this release.

Specifically in the context of a Kubuntu announcement it might be mostly there to reassure people Kubuntu isn't having a problem due to Canonical's work on Mir.
The point of my example was to isolate "boring" as a trait to demonstrate that, all other things being equal, "boring" doesn't matter. If someone's boring and also an asshole, the problem is that they're an asshole. If someone's boring and also doesn't contribute ideas, then the problem is that they don't contribute ideas. And so forth. The actual problem is never that someone is boring.
...and there we go. I chose this example to illustrate that all languages have individual strengths (yes, even PHP) and it doesn't make any sense to go and shit all over something you don't like while advertising your favorite stuff. It's bad style.

I don't see any PHP people coming into RoR security vulnerability threads just to have a field day, but vice versa this happens all the time.

Admittedly, I could have chosen C++ and Go instead of Python, but in the end it doesn't make much of a difference.

I've used a large number of languages and environments over the years, and I liked a lot of them. Stop forcing people into one camp only.
a thank you to paddy and Garry for something that may not be new to the world but is new to me - a nice experiment with a counter-prevailing-wisdom result.

My intellectual curiosity is satisfied thanks
In a 2013 national poll on modern parenthood, the Pew Research Center asked mothers and fathers to identify their "ideal" working arrangement. Fifty percent of mothers said they would prefer to work part-time and 11 percent said they would prefer not to work at all. Fathers answered differently: 75 percent preferred full-time work. And the higher the socio-economic status of women, the more likely they were to reject full-time employment.

It might sound crazy, but when you are a little older, married, and have kids, it will make more sense.

And for the ~40% of women who want to go back to work - AWESOME. Go hire them. Make it easy to leave and come back. But stop judging and just let women do what they want.
Granted, government-run computer systems have not impressed lately, but a claim that they are this outrageously awful should link to a reputable source. Otherwise it just seems like you pulled it out of your ass. No private corporation would tolerate an A/P system that fails to provide a prioritization and approval process.
Sadly, no. Nice break down on the why not here: http://peakoilbarrel.com/worlds-largest-oil-producer/

Further to the questions on cost, The "boom" of domestically produced oil is not cheap oil. Fracking for oil costs much more than conventional drilling. More rigs, more steel, more fluids, more people, more water. All requiring much more capital float to frack and re-frack. All for lower yields per well compared to a conventional oil well. Fracking places a new - higher - floor under oil prices. If a glut does develop in supply (i.e. the economic doldrums continue to suppress global consumption rates) and the price were to drop, the companies fracking for oil would be in economic trouble very quickly. The companies fracking for natural gas are struggling to stay afloat for just this reason - a fracked gas well produces a huge initial rush, a glut of gas in storage and market prices below production costs. They're all selling assets and pimping for new sucker-er, investors to stray afloat while they push for export permits to sell off the backlog and drive up prices. Should the economic picture brighten and global consumption rates return to say 2006 levels, we'll see that the production rates and production scaling capabilities of the fracking fields, tar sands, etc., are not in the same league as the conventional oil fields on which our economy was built. Supplies will tighten as they did in '07-'08, prices will rise, drawing in more frackers and the economy will tank. Wash, rinse, repeat.
How science goes wrong
I don't think there are ways to get rid if the Metro UI completely or at least I haven't come across any. Probably because I wasn't looking for one. The sequence of pressing Windows key and typing the name of the program is what I was using in Windows 7 anyway and that just works. One of my annoyances was how the control panel was still old UI and that has gone Metro in 8.1 which is nice. Also now since links from within IE open side by side and you have more control over how to layout windows in metro, I actually see myself using it more and more.

one of the reasons for liking Windows 8 way more is getting a touch screen laptop. Metro is just so much nicer in a touch screen.
Regardless of strychnine, LSD remains very volatile. I wouldn't term it "uncertainty", I would term it "near total lack of certainty" given small sample size and lack of (any) proper verification that the drug was even active anymore. At the very least, he could have taken a dose to serve as this purpose after the experiment (so it would not interfere, and would provide a "later" bound)—it's fairly easy, given certain high contrast imagery, to create certain visual effects that a placebo (or degenerated drug) could not.
Google’s terms and conditions are less readable than Beowulf
Ask HN: Pls review my start-up Leads Genie.
Anyone who reviews my startup and would value the service can have a free 12 month subscription.

"Leads Genie increases the volume of website leads generated from a B2B website."

On average 2% of B2B website visitors complete a CTA. Leads Genie lifts this insight and identifies 10-15% of Companies that visit a B2B website. These visitors/leads are presented via a web interface for customers to follow up.

Our site is: www.leadsgenie.co.uk and you can email me directly for a free login at nathan@leadsgenie.co.uk
that's what all tags in nyc look like. and if you see the more 3 dimensional pieces from this set, they don't have a fraction of the self awareness that it would take to make a statement like that
the traditional Windows desktop experience is much faster.

Could someone speak briefly to the "faster" part of the parent's description?

I'm currently reinstalling and have the choice between 7 and 8.
My thoughts too.

"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.

There is a small mailbox here"
Fair redistricting? Who gets to define "fair"? Unless we just lay down a grid and subdivide quadrants by population, there will always be stark differences over what constitutes "fair redistricting".

Campaign finance reform, as commonly understood as you describe, is anathema to the fundamental right of free speech. Any attempts to regulate, limit, and document facilitation of free speech will be subverted. Better to go the other way, ensuring nothing and nobody actively hinders anyone's political speech: small players aren't stymied by high costs of compliance, loophole tunneling, or short-run big-cost campaigns. And again, what constitutes "fairness" in the badly-termed "fairness doctrine"? a lofty-sounding regulation, it empowers someone biased to decide how much of which view is promoted by what outlet - to wit, telling speakers what they can say when. "Freedom of the press" is a fundamental principle: you may buy a printing press (however broadly defined) and you may use it to facilitate whatever speech you choose at whatever cost you can raise money to fund it with; don't subvert that, or we'll have to repeat what enumerated that right in the first place.
Quantum cryptography, the devil and the details
Orchard: Docker as a Service
Consider getting your kid a touch screen laptop if you are still in the market for one. I wasn't a bug fan of metro until I got one and now I use it more and more.
There are many religions now and in the past that have dire consequences for non believers and doom to those who do not follow the religious laws dictated by the particular god of that religion. My question to you is which one should we follow? To be safe should we follow all of them? and what about the many religions that forbid other gods? what do we do at that avenue? In case you reply "Christian, of course!" Which sect? Which version of the bible? From what I can see, we will have to cycle through all the hells, or possibly none. Can someone tell me the best hell to shoot for?
Join Exec as a PM of Growth or Senior Engineer (SF)
he probably did this test

The only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down.

If the author's goals were less lofty, I might be inclined to make this assumption, too. That said it's equally likely, given that he recorded so many other aspects of this experiment, omitting this from the record indicates that the test was not performed.
This shutdown was not caused by lack of compromise. This was a hijacking of a run-of-the-mill spending bill to do an end-run around all accepted legal and legislative challenges to Obamacare championed by a miniscule fraction of fringe politicians. The spending bill is merely approving money for things that already passed, not a forum for legislative challenges. There were no negotiations or compromises to be had, and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out in the next election cycle.
Ask HN: Which CRM/Task Management System works for you?
We switched from Trello to Podio about a month ago and our small teams productivity has gone down the crapper.

Before making the switch we read review, re-read then. Based on the articles we read, including a HN post a while back. But based on our experience, it's absolutely overcomplicated, useless SHIT! (excuse the frustration)

Thinking about going back to Trello but, the main reason for leaving it was that once we started having a lot of cards and boards, it became a task and a half to manage.

Would love to hear some opinions on other task/CRM systems which have been effective for your small team... (no, not Sales Management System, actual Customer Relationship Management system which help you do just that & support the customer).

We're a fully distributed team and that has it's own set of challenges. Trello went a long way in helping us succeed and how we don't know what to go to next...
With some care, you can get very close to the native look and feel, to the point that the average user won't notice.

It does require some work and familiarity with OSX UI idioms.
I stand corrected. Regardless, your original comment added nothing to the discussion.
Agreed completely about how awful dynamic languages can be in this respect. I've found what helps a lot is consistent naming of parameters. For example, numberOfWidgets (an integer) versus widgets (a collection) or file (a file handle) versus path (a string).
Programming as a Marketing Weapon
"Ubuntu 13.10 will only be supported for 9 months. Non-LTS releases prior to Ubuntu 13.04 were supported for 18 months. "
HipChat Replacement Icons
This of course assumes you have enough time to do this.
why has this been posted to general news when the question is pre-fixed with Ask HN: ?
Image Quilts
Some people see a conspiracy everywhere. Get help!

The more likely conclusion is Microsoft is open-sourcing a tool the found useful internally when building large JavaScript apps.
I guess so, both are vandalism, but banksy's vandalism is preferred one if there was a choice
I was under the impression you were exempt if you have under 50 employees. I don't know how this effects traditional startups.
I'm inclined to agree with you, generally speaking simplicity is security. Also, I believe that the "secure JS in-browser crypto is impossible" argument is entirely bunk in this context-- people need to stop reciting this compulsively and take the time to think each situation through.

Realize that the SecureDrop document submission client is a web application. The browser of the document submitter will run whatever the SecureDrop Source Server provides it barring the edge case of the submitter verifying the source page source with GitHub before allowing JS in NoScript.

The security of the document submitter is already prone to compromise by way of a malicious web app provided by malicious Source Server or MITM. Moving the project to something more JS heavy on the client side would in no way worsen the threat model.
I think local commits are pretty useful, and local branches sometimes are as well. But "using branches heavily" is a pet peeve of mine. Git encourages lots of branching that in most cases is unnecessary (e.g. making feature branches for everything, never committing directly into master). When working with a team, everybody should be working on as close to the same codebase as possible, to prevent difficult merges later on. In my view, merging has a very non-linear cost based on how far apart the branches are, both in terms of time and amount of code changed, because it's more likely that the merge will have more tangled dependencies, and the code will be less fresh in the mind of whoever's merging.

Merge commits can also hide lots of information, like exactly how any merge conflicts were resolved, since they're buried in what is basically a squashed commit of everything in the merged branch since it diverged.

And finally, they make the commit history much harder to understand. I had to bug everyone on my team to run "git config --global pull.rebase true" just to have a somewhat sane, linear history without tons of merges in day-to-day development.
I am not fond of most members of the House or the Senate. The tea partiers are nuts, the republicans are divided and out of touch, and the democrats are weak. Contrary to what you might have gleamed from that one sentence, I am not a democrat. Not that it matters here, but I believe the job of the government is to provide safety for its people: safety from hunger, poverty, sickness and foreign threats. I would love to see the US get its social programs right, expanding some of them to provide a broader and more sane social safety net for those in need. At the same time, I'd love to cut the spending on the military to fund the social programs. Then, I would want to get rid of things like the IRS in favor of a much simpler system. Basically, dramatically reduce the cost of running the government, but boost things that are actually important.

The problem is that there now really are three parties: Dems, GOP, and the tea party. While historically there have been many nutcases that got elected, our current problem is that the tea party consists of people with extreme far right, even anarchist views. Moreover, they have enough people in the House to cause trouble. The thing is, they win in either case: if they manage to shut the government down, or hinder some of its functions, they are doing what they promised. If they do not, they can still cause enough trouble and blame the system they are a part of.

In the long run, I actually hope that the republicans divorce themselves from the tea party, and become slightly more centrist. This will be a short term loss, but in the long run they will then appear to be the most reasonable ones.
Hey, I am the Sword author. Harp development and Sword development have begun almost simultaneously. You should stick with Harp if you use typical NodeJS tools for templating (like Handlebars and Stylus), and use Sword if you prefer Ruby ones.
It is silly and wasteful. It is just possible.