skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> This is very true, and I can't believe some religions that people think are the same. They happen to use the same words, like "God", "heaven", etc, but the concepts are completely different and incredibly incompatible.

What's more, the definitions of the religions themselves are so slippery, we can barely begin to compare religions. For example, suppose we take the author's advice and try to dereference the term "afterlife" in a comparison of Christianity and Islam.

Our first step would thus be to ask: What happens to an individual's consciousness after death, according to each of the two religions? But here our inquiry goes right to pieces, because we won't be able to agree on how to define the set of beliefs constituting each religion.

Is Christianity defined as the set of beliefs expressed in the Bible? And likewise for Islam and the Koran? But if so, then what about adherents of those religions who are not fundamentalists? Are we to ignore people who call themselves Christians and Muslims, yet believe that only some, or perhaps none, of the scripture is literally true?

But if we define Christianity and Islam so as not to exclude those people--which seems like the intellectually honest choice--how can we possibly agree on a set of beliefs that constitutes each religion?

Perhaps we could administer a scientific poll of self-identified Christians and Muslims, asking them to agree or disagree with various theological propositions. Those propositions which are supported by a majority of self-identified adherents become part of our definitions, and the rest do not.

That may allow us to continue with our project of comparing afterlife beliefs, but it still seems incorrect somehow. Now we've greatly oversimplified the actual beliefs of Christians and Muslims worldwide. By establishing an arbitrary threshold (>50% belief), we've painted over a lot of distinctions that matter to real-world adherents. Equally badly, the arbitrariness of the threshold makes our definitions suspect. Had we chosen a different threshold, we'd probably have arrived at radically different definitions, suggesting that our definition has little authority.

Thus the problem of comparing religions seems intractable.
We've been working on Houston since originally building it for the Meteor hackathon this summer, and it's starting to be fairly robust and presentable. Would love more Meteor hackers to try it out in their projects and send feedback/requests.

Also, I'll be at the Meteor Devshop this afternoon - come say hi!
Web newspaper recreates paper newspaper
Unfortunately the URL prolly requires a subscription, but if you can get a free trial give it a shot if only for a lesson I see in application design: Visicalc worked exactly like a paper spreadsheet, only better. The old NY Times interface (still accessible, I am sure) was perfectly sensible and somehow a PITA to this long-time reader of the paper version. The new app feels just like the paper version and I will now read about three times more every day.

Great design lesson, I think. (Sorry if every other on-line paper has the same app. <g>)
It is a shame how silo-ed each K-12 system is, in regards to data/integration. It is also a shame as to what some/most vendors call an API (sorry, a nightly CSV is NOT an API). Only in education do you see such poor APIs and programming on a whole making tens/hundreds of millions of dollars. I've seen source code from several major players that would cause shivers in both the lack of quality and holes in security.

These are HUGE hurdles for districts. They often realize it too late and end up getting taken to the cleaners by some freelancer or company who milk the hours trying to do integrations/data-warehosues (I've seen 60k/1yr jobs that were solved with 10k/2wk rewrites).

Congratulations on the funding, I am excited to see any company that can help break down those barriers. Sorry that I sometimes take business away from you as a freelancer doing integrations sometimes (you do get mentioned from time-to-time) ;)
Duke's Cutcliffe Walter Camp Coach of the Year
The Copenhagen Wheel - official product release
Swedish-American surveillance of Russia
Easy to program, but how do you get it off the ground? It has the same chicken and egg problem every two-sided marketplace does. 37Signals can do this because they've built an audience.
The unbroken path of your life, as seen by your smartphone
This is app.net to Push. There are several was to get data on app.net and as well out of App.net. Mainly via 3rd party software and their open source PourOver app.

I've written an IRC and IMAP bridge to get data off app.net personally.
> so calling on people to be ethical as a response to the NSA leaks only work if "ethical" is understood as "you can't build surveillance tools for the NSA..."

It also works if enough other people believe it. For example, the medical doctors who helped design torture at Guantanamo. Would you join a practice with them? Allow them to admit to your hospital?
Thanks :) Feel free to contribute if stuff's missing for you. We are already using this system for a lot of things, but there is a wish list of some relatively low hanging fruits.
On the other hand, if you wanted to recreate modern Computer Science from scratch, without knowing it (e.g. all the programmers died from a zombie plague and you need to stop an alien invasion; or you're stuck on a desert island with a computer and lots of batteries and know that if you can program a new wireless radio driver you can put out enough interference to catch a plane's attention) and TAOCP was the only book that was accessible, it might be enough.
This is very true, and I can't believe some religions that people think are the same.

As an atheist, superstitions have no relevance to me. That is to say, as an outsider, I don't care what it's called - and that goes for all religions/superstitions. Because they all are based on belief without evidence, they all look the same to me (ie, irrational).

That being said, I'd appreciate if people didn't use weasel words to try and hide their agenda, eg, "intelligent design" as really just another form of creationism.
I failed to explain myself clearly.

I am arguing that front end innovations, especially software innovations, shouldn't be patentable. Or at least grant them a shorter 5 year patent.

I don't believe patenting things that are easily reproducible, like software, benefits society.
Drone strikes may be new, but killing "Americans" isn't.

See: Trail of Tears, Civil War, and many, many, many other instances where the US government sponsored the killing of "Americans" (citizenship hasn't always been this cut/dry thing it is today).
> "Why don't we teach effective nutrition and cooking in school?" We do. It's called home economics.

I don't know of many schools in my state that still have the budget to provide a home economics class/pay a teacher to teach it. The most my school went into nutrition was in the 1 semester of health class that everyone took.
Have they been around since 2010, or 2012 like Crunchbase says?
Isn't DropBox's data api more granular (record-level). Where App.net is more coarse (file-level) and not really ideal for changing data. In fact App.net only has one primitive that you can edit and it can only store up to 8k of data.
It depends on what you want. I've only read the first volume so far, but I would say that it's definitely appropriate for an intro to CS since you have the math background. I would definitely not recommend it to most people since the math is pretty dense and not all necessary (though very interesting). If you're familiar with combinatorics and stats, then it won't be too bad.

As a CS book, it teaches a lot of good CS concepts and techniques very thoroughly, and it analyzes the performance of algorithms very precisely. You'll not only use Big O notation, but you'll also figure out some of the constants. So, if your interest is in computer science proper, then this is a great introductory book.

On the other hand, if your goal is to be able to write programs, then definitely jump into using a language. Go find a book on a language and just start using the language to solve problems. After you get past the basics of programming, you'll start to see all the applications to math (especially discrete math). I've heard Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs is a good book, and I plan to read it next semester, so maybe that's a good one for you. It uses Scheme (a Lisp) as the programming language, so the parallels with math are very clear.
Obfuscation at this level is such a dead-end. People already reverse engineer optimized native binaries. Microsoft faced the same "problem" with .NET and even went so far as to put a "no not disassemble" bit that their ildasm tool honoured. (That flag was removed because it's such a stupid idea.)

This kind of lightweight obfuscation only works if your product is of very low value. At that point, you're better of spending the few minutes of obfuscating on making your product more valuable.

The only real useful obfuscation is on malware (which always has a negative value to the user), and on games to gain a couple of non-pirated days after launch.

The only real prevention is to not run code on the user's device (like Diablo III).

Most developers complaining about this are just surprised to learn that reversing is relatively easy and it reflects more on their lack of knowledge than an actual problem.

Disclaimer: In 2004 I actually wrote a decent IL obfuscator, etc. I never shipped it because as I got better at writing it, I got better at reversing, until I realised it was a stupid, pointless battle. I guess that makes me less of a business person.
Are SCIFs terrible work environments for software developers specifically or does that assessment apply to other roles in the same environment? What made it so terrible?
> Yeah, but you have to think of the precedent: if 23andme doesn't have to provide proof that their results are accurate, there's nothing stopping me from starting a company that reads the lines on your palm and tells you if you will develop cancer

Hate to break it to you, but this is already the case, and it had nothing to do with the "precedent" of 23andme. Go walk into a church of scientology or go read "The Secret" and tell me that's not what they're offering. Sure, they don't use the word "medical", but it doesn't matter. You are suffering from an educational bias, your worldview is completely divorced from that of the people you are trying to "protect". Most people don't understand that the term medical is no a mere colloquialism, nor do they understand that the lack of that term is a negative implication on the substance at hand. I speak from experience, my aunt died because she went to see quacks instead of a real doctor, despite all the information in the world available to her. Its perfectly legal to tell someone that doctors are full of shit and crystals are the real way to cure something. And you know what? At some point you need to just be OK with that. If not its just white man's burden all over again rebranded as "rich man's burden".

> The FDA was started because companies were making medicines that either didn't work or weren't safe and people were relying on them.

Hilarious. You want further proof of what I'm talking about? Go to the supplements isle at a grocery store. All that stuff is bullshit and often even specifically says "not approved by the FDA". Guess what? Its still a billion dollar business, and there are people who swear by that stuff and don't trust doctors. No one notices, cares, or understands. Again, your problem is that you are attacking this from a rational position and think that that is how other people operate as well, its not. You are kidding yourself if you think the FDA has succeeded in this goal.

> I understand that it's expensive, difficult and time consuming to fulfill this higher burden of proof

Ah and now we reach the best part about the FDA: that it effectively makes even educated people worse at making decisions. Despite the fact that the FDA has repeatedly been shown to be corrupt or in bed with certain companies, "approved by the FDA" is still a considered a trusted metric not requiring much further thought. Its not. The FDA has no competition and, like any government agency, incredibly rarely suffers consequences for being corrupt or making mistakes. Most people don't know "the burden of proof" required (and if you read about how bad doctors are at understanding statistics you wouldn't trust that burden of proof anyways).
Had a pretty nasty bout with this earlier this year (if anyone is interested, I could post more) when our runway ran out--it's fucking horrifying if it happens.

One of the biggest problems I had was that there simply is no useful roadmap for this region. If you're a doctor or engineer, schooling is hard, residency is brutal, but society knows what you're going through and almost anyone can provide moral support or at least have a frame of reference. Parents know how to help kids that grow up to be doctors.

Entrepreneurs, though, especially in tech and especially in cities without large communities with experience have a rough road to hoe: most people don't even understand what your business is (assuming, even, that you understand your business), and furthermore don't get how much it sucks having the thing on your shoulders.

"You get to be your own boss? That's awesome!" but management can still be terrible, right? And there's no benefits, and no salaries, and mostly just work.

"When're you getting funded?" people ask, but they either don't know or pointedly ignore that it just isn't that simple, especially if your local investing community is aloof and out-of-touch and useless.

So, you bootstrap, yay, but now you're burning through funds you and your cofounders may or may not have. That has a price too, and the only advice you get is "hey, maybe get a job or take on client work" but that also ignores the fact that that takes away time from your startup and can also lead to its own complications.

When you stop eating out, when you stop leaving the house, when you sleep during the day when you finally pass out and wake up in the afternoon to watch the sun set, when you do all the things that are the stigmata of being a young tech entrepreneur, nobody is there to tell you that it's okay or not okay, that what's happening is normal or not normal.

You lose your bearings, you lose the telltale signs that you aren't going mad, you become adrift as only someone obsessively focused on a single product can.

It gets harder to talk to normal people, too. They bitch about their jobs, and you wonder why they don't just quit, and they wonder why you'd try something as crazy as you are. You are either pitching and hyping your project, or trying to sell customers--you don't socialize as such anymore, because you don't have the time or resources to.

It can get pretty gnarly, pretty quickly. :(
If the branch target is an address loaded from memory, and there is no cached result for the branch instruction, then there's no way it can predict which instruction to execute next. The target could be anywhere in valid memory.

The reason the measurements don't show it is the micro-benchmark will be predicting very well. In fact it's quite difficult to defeat prediction even for giant codebases, and you probably have bigger issues with L1 thrashing at that point. The more subtle problem is even with prediction, there's a (quite high) limit to the number of unretired speculated instructions. Again, a micro-benchmark won't show that up - you'd need a large function in the inner loop.

I'm making it sound like there's no cost to virtual functions in real applications, but it's there, usually measurable and every little adds up. If anything, I think a better reason to not simply spray "virtual" everywhere is it demonstrates that the author didn't understand the data structures they created.
Minimum order size: 2. We didn't really set a maximum, but so far, nobody has asked for more than we can handle.

All of our current customers have a repeating weekly order. If they want to change it, they have to tell us by Friday the week before. That's really all a 'commitment' means.

Right now, only 1 meat meal and 1 vegan meal a day. We're thinking about adding a GF option.

I was supposed to add a feedback button today, but now my email inbox is overflowing :)

All chosen for you. Current customers love the 'surprise factor' and haven't had any complaints about food choices yet.

Yes. We did have our delivery schedule run 15 mins behind one day and apologized with a 5% discount for our customers.

Hope that answers everything :)
SmsFree Vumilia: Send Free SMS to anyone in Uganda
Ah. It does look like a crystal ball on a stand, once you know what you're looking at.
There are a lot of things here that I take issue with. Some things I find relatively insulting. I wrote up a list, but I'd rather you spend your time answering the following challenge:

Describe to me any particular infinite process which does not derive or presume the existence of an actual infinity (e.g. an infinitely large set). You may also want to specify the details of your model for an infinite process to prove that your example isn't circular.

---------------

I promise that I will not simply quantify over all the results of the process and call it an infinite set.

You may use time as part of the definition of your process, but you may not prematurely assume that there is an infinite process for enumerating timesteps. If you did, the example would run the risk of being circular. If you can construct it, then you can use it.

Likewise, you may include a finite number of atoms, but you can't sweep any actual infinite objects underneath them.
Interesting napkin math for We Work Remote:

(131 + 25 + 12 + 12 + 4 + 2 + 2) jobs * $200/mo = 37600 MRR.
I think the more accurate term is migrating their job board.
Why is that your biggest problem? Why do you need to start a company? I can almost guarantee that the reasons you come up with can be solved with alternatives much easier than starting a company.
I meant the person released to pill to the public, but never revealed the "secret formulate". Though, I never actually said that. Again, silly example.

Said another way, I believe the purpose of patents is to get innovations documented rather than kept secret.
Your analogy is such a long way from modern consequences that I wonder if it really applies. But we have made modern war so expensive, nobody can afford another one. If there is a reason we are not at war with Iran, I'd say that's it.

"Emasculating," or unintentionally beneficial?
200,000 people haven't been silenced, as there are ways of challenging an NSL in court.

Also, 192k requests were sent, not 200,000 people silenced.

Sensationalism ruins this debate. Please stop.
It doesn't require a 3rd party app at all. For an invite an 3rd party app will give a bonus to the person that invited you.

http://blog.app.net/2013/02/25/introducing-a-free-tier/
Some of those killed were designated enemy combatants. Many of those killed by drone strikes were not, and were simply nearby.

Regardless, the protocol for declaring someone enemy combatant should not be opaque to all but the executive branch. I don't necessarily have a problem with our government interceding to prevent a terrorist attack, but the taking of a life that might be innocent should be more informed than just adding a name to a list -- we've seen the efficacy of that with the No Fly List, where someone whose name was only similar to an actual terrorist was disallowed the ability to fly (to hilarious results).

The ability of a single person to add someone's name to a kill list that will be carried out with zero Congressional oversight is a cessation of ultimate power to the Executive Branch. There is simply no arguing that point whatsoever. The only 'check' on that power is that we trust the Executive to be forthright. Perhaps that's good enough for the current administration, perhaps it isn't, but it certainly bodes poorly for the future.

> If someone like me can't stand it, just imagine the feelings of someone in actual power, capable of doing something about it.

I interact with people in power, and demagoguery is the norm, even behind closed doors. That I happen to actually believe the points that I'm making is probably the only distinction between what I'm saying here and the words of the average politician.

That you, in particular, find it infuriating isn't terribly surprising. Having looked through your comment profile, the pattern I've noticed isn't one terribly indicative of someone tolerant or especially well-mannered.

In the interest of community preservation, I'm happy to just agree to disagree, and suggest that we should discontinue further conversation.
Really. You're trying to compare Gitmo to North Korean prison camps?

Certainly, Gitmo is no picnic, but I have to question if you actually RTFA.
He means the validation of your sign-ups' email addresses is too restrictive and disallowing the '+' (which is valid).

In fact, an awful lot of characters usually excluded are valid. There's a spec somewhere.
If only they'd give users the option for 1-click encryption before uploading/syncing. It could work especially well with Dropbox since it has only native apps anyway. We already know they are "next" on NSA's list for companies to target (at least in an official manner, they've probably targeted them for a long time unofficially).
First: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

Then, once he is frothing at the mouth: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

Then for the love of god protect him from Emacs: http://www.franz.com/downloads/clp/survey

hth
Hourly usage data for everything in Wikipedia is now available in S3
Photos show scale of North Korea's repressive prison camps
Yes, I admire their resolve in staying truly lean as a company with focus on making a great product rather than making a great profit. After more than 10 years, it's still a compact team of 36 people. I wonder what happens when they hit 37 - maybe it's the limit :)
> ...there's a significant number of companies in various niches of education earning great revenues selling to schools and districts.

The spending trends in the K-12 space are not positive[1], and while I'm sure there are companies in "various niches of education" with respectable revenue, the bankruptcies of companies like Cengage Learning[2] and School Specialty[3] are hard to ignore.

There's a strong argument to be made that education as a market, particularly K-12 education, is in secular decline.

[1] http://thejournal.com/articles/2013/09/12/report-most-states...

[2] http://thefutureofpublishing.com/2013/07/inside-the-cengage-...

[3] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-28/school-specialty-de...
How is mbox a broken format? It's a bad idea to use it in a multi-writer environment, and it's horrible because there are competing versions of it. But for plain storage, I thought it worked quite well.

What am I missing?
How to successfully increase your SaaS prices
> The relationship they have with the DOD/NSA is simply unreal. their offices on the east coast are full of high-ranking officials, generals, etc -- all the time.

Silicon Valley in general has always, and will always, be heavily intertwined with military technology.

http://www.inc.com/eric-schurenberg/inconvenient-history-of-...
Merely making a tool that is used in an atrocity is traditionally not enough to condemn a toolmaker.

Consider the extraordinarily extreme case of Bruno Tesch. He was hung because he provided his pesticide for the express purpose of killing humans, knowing that this is what it was for. This was evidenced by the sale of the pesticide without the standard warning odorant, and witness testimony. Conversely, I am unaware of anybody that was hung for manufacturing train cars.

An NSA employee may claim ignorance, and assert that they were told the systems they helped develop were only to be used for legal and ethical purposes. If this is work that they did before various NSA revelations became public, they might even be believed and therefore excused.