skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If Hillary Putnam practices 'quack philosophy' then it is only because philosophy admits duck typing. And alas, it's duck typing all the way down to the turtle.

If we are brains in vats, then the hypothesis that we are brains in vats is only brains-in-vats-falsifiable, unless one includes the very premise of metaphysical reality that Putnam is suggesting is in need of justification.

Keep in mind that Putnam's paper substantially predates The Matrix and that the search for the premises of scientific rationality goes back at least to Descartes, and that so far the two best solutions are still basically Kant's model of mediated access to reality and claims relying upon a priori that we have direct access to a reality as it exists outside human experience [see Nagal's What is it like to be a Bat?]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_it_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
Shhh... Not supposed to talk about that.
Who would you tell?

I've had exactly one boss who understood (some) of what I do.

Managing others, I've been completely snowed by people who's work is outside of my areas of expertise (tech writing, translation, graphic design, etc).
This was a lot of fun [1]. I used two lightweight spaceships to pass the last level [2]

[1] http://i.imgur.com/LJLzOpc.png

[2] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Game_of_l...
Search Engine for Coupons, Chippmunk.com, Raises $750,000 in Seed Funding
LETTER: Too sweet for our own good
Does Yahoo have a Google Now competitor in the works?
Email Introduction Etiquette
Capitalism at its finest. If the Democrats have their way we'll be paying to send every single person to college for free too.
Announcing Support for Impala with Amazon Elastic MapReduce
>The claims that some crap like MongoDB (of all things!)
>service could replace skilled, productive, (but, yes, quite
>expensive) professionals is, of course, utter nonsense (what >else we could expect from MongoDB?).

The claim isn't that the service replaces the skilled, productive and expensive folks entirely, those professionals are still needed. They just work for the service provider.

The business entity that creates the actual product can focus on just that, and not complicated DBA tasks. It's a developers world. ;-).

Also, it's not a MongoDB centric concept. Rackspace and Amazon have multiple data products now, with more coming, and they all fall under this concept in my mind.
We did pass it around the team to make sure it sound right. That generator must be pretty good.
Well-reasoned.

I've always found framework overhead and especially tech debt to be the largest contributors to performance issues. Especially when said frameworks have lots of ways to do things and they're not all the best way to do it.

Modern JVM development starts to look a lot like Sinatra -- you don't get a lot baked in, but you probably didn't need it anyways.
There is a cool calculation in response to the top comment :)
Linux in Space - Goodbye, Microsoft
Sam's Club has a good labour reputation? I find that surprising because they're owned by Walmart.
I assume they discussed removing double-tap as an action but decided it would be too disruptive. I can't say I disagree with the choice they made.

I don't believe the problem you brought up is very important. Why do I care if there is a "constant, learnable latency", as long as each latency is reasonable? In the end I assume that the slowest response is the standard and any actions that happen faster are a pleasant surprise.

But more importantly this change doesn't preclude them from removing double-tap altogether in the future. I agree it is a half-solution now, but it's better than nothing if you are willing to grant that differing latency across pages is acceptable.

I do like the insight about stacking double-tap on top of single-tap, I'm just not sure how to apply it in the current world where single-tap means click/navigate and double-tap means zoom.
"Amazon Food Pantry" just doesn't have a good ring.
I have the developer prototype and I am hugely excited for the short term gaming and entertainment potential.

However, as a working device, something needs to be solved to reduce eye strain.

After using it for 5-10 minutes, I feel like I've been in A Clockwork Orange. My eyes are spread wide and incredibly tired after that short period of time.

Until you try it, it's hard to explain how close the lenses are to your eyeballs. I accidentally poked my wife in the eye by adjusting the distance improperly.

I'm all for the idea of something like this for long term work, but I believe a different approach will need to be taken, or a significant amount of work needs to be done to make it sustainable for 2-4 hour long shifts.
I imagine any rotational speed beyond a certain point is indistinguishable from other, higher rotational speeds in that you are basically heating the whole shell. I don't know how fast these shells rotate, but it seems like it would be hast enough that they are probably heating the whole shell anyway.

Additionally, if you are firing from close to the intended target, you may not have to deal with rotation at all.
What does that matter if it provides a great night's sleep?
The simple shapes (and many common large shapes) have canonical names.

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/List_of_common_still_lifes

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/List_of_common_oscillators

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Category:Spaceships
Assuming the un-promoted person is pretty good at judging people's expertise as well, as per the DK study. In your experience, do you think incompetents' promotions tend to increase or decrease the confidence of the competents'?
>> This sentence is false, since you do not have any basis to refer to a vat.

I know what a vat is here in subjective world, I am able to imagine a situation in which such a thing exists somewhere with something like my perceived centre of consciousness within it being fed false data. Should that (or some other solipsistic scenario as yet unimagined) actually be the case I am fully aware I do not have the terms of reference to accurately describe the scenario as I have been relying on false data for my entire life. However an accurate description of the scenario is entirely unnecessary to the thought experiment itself and dismissing the entire argument based on the statement that we cannot properly describe a vat is to fail to address the root of the argument and attempt escape on a technicality.

Or, in other words, you could be a brain in a vat.
Playing the Shell Game
ASP.NET Web API with Azure stack
The hangup with 802.11n is it's simplex nature. That's actually why I got the powerline adapters; SMB performance was poor for anything but sequential access.
Hence why dump phones are so important to drug dealers. Change, recycle.
I definitely get that. With automatic updates I bet that a lot of applications sit in that update queue on people's devices since they actually have to confirm the new permissions.
Isn't Dunning-Kruger simply stage one of the Four Stages of Competence? [1]

1. Unconscious incompetence - I think I'm awesome but I'm actually incompetent.

2. Conscious incompetence - I know I'm incompetent.

3. Conscious competence - I can do it but I have to concentrate really hard (probably with my tongue out[2]).

4. Unconscious competence - These aren't the droids you're looking for.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

[2]: http://jackmathis.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/concentrati...
But, to me it seems clear that they value customer service if they are directly responding to your posts here. The tools available on their website combined with the shipping and returns also underscore that.
Management won't take the blame but ... who allowed the architects/engineers to build two systems that failed the same way?
why not just run a DisplayPort cable and USB?

The "client" machine is on the 2nd floor, on the other corner of the house.

I'm with you for off-site rendering, but I am optimistic for in-home. The latency is good, and even if we can only stream 720p games around the house, that's still valuable to me. My media PC is pretty formidable for what it is, but there are still plenty of games that have to be run on at low resolution with very low detail.
I think it's a common misconception and negative stereotype that things like Ulysses or Bebop are difficult. They're just an experience. Calling them difficult would be like calling Yosemite difficult (and lamenting that you don't fully get all of the rock formations, geological history, social history, flora, fauna...etc).
After sleeping (for consulting work) amazingly, at the Marriott Financial Center in Manhattan, I ended up inquiring as to which mattress they use. A few days later I found myself ordering a Jamison mattress for almost a grand. My rationale was- I spend 1/3 of my life here (ideally). Why skimp on it? And everyone who has slept in it has commented on the comfort of it.

And as it turns out, I had an undiagnosed sleep disorder at the time, so the mattress ended up helping with that too!

So I just wanted to say that, regardless of pricing, thanks for focusing on making a good mattress. It is probably kind of a thankless job, and/or it's not particularly glamorous, but it matters.
As do I. Actually, if I have a mouse, I tend to right click, then hit back, it's the first option.
Correct, and it has been bull since at least the late 70s, when digital trunking of calls was virtually omnipresent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier
That was a decent read, but it's funny how meldium.com sounds like a cheap Medium knock-off.
I bought a used Macbook Pro for ~$300 worth of bitcoins a couple of years ago. those bitcoins are worth ~$20K. My argument for why he should accept the deal was, "they will probably go up in value". I'm happy I did it.
I mostly just used an R pentomino[0] - solved it more quickly than fiddling about with gliders or spaceships.

Shotgun approach, rather than rapier.

[0] http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/R-pentomino
Every webcam should have a hardware light that indicates when it is on, as the ones built into Apple laptops do. The light cannot be disabled through software, it's just wired into the power connection to the camera and always comes on when the camera is turned on.
I guess it depends upon what you consider. For example, when I first take a dance class, my attitude is "let get the basics straight, maybe I can learn to do some basic moves and hold my own."

I have seen way too many people who expect to be Fred Astaire within 5 weeks, and then end up dancing horribly.
Why ARM? What are the benefits of ARM compared to other architectures? Are there drawbacks to the architecture?
Ask HN: Is pdf.js ready for mobile devices?
I was just wondering whether pdf.js is ready to to be used on mobile phones and tablets? What are your views?
Over the past 3-4 years I've bought two products that were a LOT more complicated than they have any right to be.

One was a flashlight (who the hell knew flashlights could have firmware?), the other was my mattress. To this day, I'm not sure what the hell I'm sleeping on.
The pointer has been dereferenced, if you will.

I do not think dereferenced means what you think it means.
I'm on iOS so that's just cruel.
Thoughts on AWS Monitoring
Excellent! Thanks - I'll definitely check it out!
Amen. I wish there were a MobileSafari preference to ignore all the terrible viewport business (I am so fucking sick of websites with tiny type disabling my ability to zoom!) and send a desktop safari user-agent on top.

Even Motherfucking Website[1] cocks this one up and disables zooming.

[1] http://motherfuckingwebsite.com
Regarding the JVM performance:

> Under minimum load the best page rendering time was 233ms

Regarding the node.js performance:

> Under minimum load the best page rendering time was 249ms

What the heck are they doing that takes 250ms that could possibly be app code related? That's a lot of CPU usage if its actually doing CPU-bound work. Since these are web apps that's obviously not the case. The request time is going to be mostly waiting for external resources (DB, message queue, etc).

Without knowing how much time is spent on those external requests these numbers are meaningless.

Language choice is no where near as important as your DB-access patterns (and more generally DB performance, caching, etc).

If every request you process involves serially accessing a 50-100ms external resource four or five times then it will always take 250ms (though you could increase parallelism of multiple requests if done right).
I have never seen evidence of this. There is evidence to the contrary, that the real cost of college is rising, and that students and government have both been increasing spending.[1][2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:College_Tuition_State_Fund...

[2]
http://blog.collegetuitioncompare.com/2012/12/college-revenu...
Thanks! It did seem weird to me (sketchy website and what not). Thanks for clearing that up.
Apple II guy here. SWEET 16 was not used that much. The Apple II+ -- introduced 2 years after the original Apple II -- used up the whole ROM space for the BASIC interpreter, so there was no longer room for extra stuff like SWEET 16. The original Apple II only sold ~40,000 units, so the Apple II+ memory map became the standard one.

OTOH, it is true that, pretty early on, it became common for the ROM space to be switchable. Instead of reading the on-board ROM, you could have the system read from ROM (or, with the "Language Card", RAM) on a plug-in card. That means that a typical Apple II-whatever in the 80s would actually have had SWEET 16 available, although somewhat hidden, not well known, and without readily available documentation.

Still, I did a lot of low-level programming, and I never used SWEET 16. Nor did I ever run across any code that did, except stuff sold by Apple, like the Programmer's Aid #1.
Show HN: Deep Thought - Deploy smart, not hard
That's good to know. Ya, I understand it would be a huge time investment. Luckily I don't have any of those barriers, and am still quite young!
Dude! You should sell them both.

I want to throw out my entire "sleeping situation" and just fix it.

With the word-of-mouth you guys have going for you, you should see about partnering with someone who sells great bed frames -- even at a decent markup -- so people can order the whole shebang and solve their sleeping situation in one go.

Or maybe include links on your website to great bed frames. I mean, I want to buy something like what's pictured on your site but I wouldn't know how to go about it.

There's actual value in solving the whole shebang, for people looking to do that, so there'd be nothing wrong with adding that as a relatively pricey option.

Just a thought. Keep up the good work. :)
So you're telling me... in your country, making more debt financing available and then seeing people go into more debt doesn't trigger any thoughts of causality?

So you're telling me... after seeing an explosion in housing prices after more debt financing was made available, it's not conceivable that the same dynamic is at play in education?

Hmmmm.
Look, you're doing the equivalent of looking at a car and saying that every single one needs to be hand tuned.

Just because you're a mechanic.

I said there is a bar when you will need a DBA. It is much, much, much higher than you're making out.

And the things you're talking about, most of the people mucking around with them probably shouldn't be. They've probably made it worse. Any the tiny few who actually need to? They're a tiny few.
This could go either way really. Either you think that Google is such a monstrosity with all these parts that don't really fit together which makes for bad UX or you think that Google's services are something we should be thankful for and that this display of free stuff is the kind of really nice UX only Google can deliver.
The only difference between a "library" and a "full application" is that the "full application" has an entry point where execution begins, whereas a "library" does not.

Many large applications are implemented as a thin user interface (GUI, web, services/APIs) which glues together a bunch of libraries (which is where all of the real functionality is implemented). This doesn't only apply to F#, but C#, Java, Python, etc.

The reason F# gets used for implementing libraries is because that makes it easier to introduce into organizations with existing code in C# or VB.NET; a new component or plugin can be written in F# and easily utilized by the existing code, so the other developers in the organization don't need to anything differently than if they were consuming another C# or VB.NET component.
I think:

Yes, I could be a brain in a vat.

Is a better formulation, epistemologically speaking. Since I could be in meat space servicing your brain in a vat and denying that the world that each of us experiences has much overlap. In general, propositions that lend themselves to solipsism tend to form a better basis for discussions around philosophical skepticism.
User preferences != the market. They are half the market.

What this really says is that virtual keyboards have practically no cost, and so utilizing them instead of physical keyboards saves more in marginal (and perhaps per-unit) cost than the revenue from lost customers that require a physical keyboard.
The Top Ten In Venture Capital Today - Midas List
There are browser plugins that let you edit <textarea> elements in your $EDITOR.

I use "It's all text!" in Firefox for this purpose and it works well; the workflow is pretty simple: focus in textarea, hotkey to switch to vim, save & close buffer to switch back to the browser. (not affiliated, just a user).

You do of course lose rich text formatting.
Android's permissions are not granular enough and forcing the user to accept them all or not use the app is a security/privacy fail. I love that Android apps can access the telephony API but the permissions for that need to be more fine grained and the toggles to enable them need to be discreet over individual permissions.

Discreet toggles and the request dialogs are roughly the only thing I prefer iOS to Android on. Too bad the rest of iOS is a prison.
As much as I love Conway's Life, I always find it frustrating to play games based upon it since it depends so much on single-block offsets and the grid... it's so discrete. I mean it's neat, but I don't generally find it makes for fun boardgames.

I'd love to see it adapted into a physics-driven gridless environment - some kind of fusion of Osmos and cellular automata.
Here's a contrary opinion. Understanding that some managers are really measuring the wrong things, the lesson here shouldn't be "keep your head down and hope your manager notices how great you are." The "hey, my job is done, everyone else is stupid, management should see what a unique and beautiful snowflake I am, haha" attitude is misguided.

Nobody is so smart or so productive that they'll accomplish more on their own than with an efficient team. If you're the best one on the team and aren't devoting a significant amount of your time to helping other people succeed, you're being selfish and entitled.

If you can code more efficiently, then get your work done and find other ways to help other people be more productive -- without being asked. That's guaranteed to be noticed by all but the most incompetent managers. And if not, the reputation you'll gain as the guy-who-is-so-good-the-place-would-fall-apart-without-him will serve you in good stead in your next job.
That was my initial reaction as well when visiting the website; what is that? Can't imagine it would be any good to sleep on. Sorry, an all-foam mattress really is a blast from the past. I'm sure this is better that the ones we used in the 80s, but still... Good luck though, there looks to be a market for it at least! :-)
I don't think developers should do it, but there's no question that they're doing it.

For example, Facebook requests almost every permission under the sun. But if you look at the average user's permission profile for their Facebook app, they'll only show a tiny fraction of the overall permissions that Facebook originally requested.
Or PayPal programmers.
And another related piece:
http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/02/skyphrase-yahoos-latest-bu...
> The main obstacle to boot-your-own-phone in the US is of course the carriers.

Surely if it were profitably one of them would break ranks, right? I mean, we have intelligent businesspeople in telecoms at least occasionally?
It's an interesting point - it may be possible to have 'impostor syndrome' syndrome, where you think you have imposter syndrome but you're actually an imposter. According to the study, if you were an imposter you'd have to be incompetent which means you'd be unable to judge that you were incompetent and you'd rationalize that you were competent.

Terrible cycle, but it's according to this article if you were an imposter you'd probably think you weren't. Uhm. This probably isn't helping. Good luck with your imposter syndrome!
Ask HN: Do services need to store data / link that data to users?
Hi. I am just wondering how this works. Is one required by law to store user data in a database for a certain amount of time (for example, could snapchat immediately delete images from their server, or do they need a record?). Also, does the data you store have to be somehow connected to someone, say an IP address, email, etc?
Or a browser that leaves the font size alone and doesn't try and guess what size the font should be by some invisible algorithm that factors in things like the depth of the text node in the DOM.

You hit some sites, and fonts that should be the same size (and are on the desktop site) are just wildly different sizes.

I'm using Dolphin almost exclusively for this single reason.
For the same reason Apple is making its own custom ARM CPU right now - it can be highly integrated with whatever they want it to be, and it has exactly what they need, and none of the stuff they don't need. You can build solutions that are much more custom with ARM.
I suppose that if I had stuck with it long enough, I would have internalized the idioms and been productive with it.

Yes, and that's my gravest concern about most Perl tutorials. Perl's theoretical basics are sufficiently different from other Algol family languages that they should be taught explicitly. Expecting people to intuit them over time leads people to conclude that Perl is "a poorly integrated collection of features."

The language does have its warts, but it's much easier to work with when you understand its underpinnings and work with them rather than against them.

(I apologize for the late reply.)
SWI-Prolog 7.1.0
Let's say my numbers are off by a factor of ten, and each unit costs $10M, and the support is $3M, and the total cost is $40B/year over 10 years: that's still completely worth it, at $1600 per person per year, especially if Korea pays $20B and the US pays the other $20B.
Any chance of a California King any time soon?
Probably this monitor has bright set too high.
Something like SmoothLife sounds like it would be a good match for what you're thinking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJe9H6qS82I
What if you started your New Year resolutions for 2014 right now?
Most of them can be summed up with "Give Google More Details About Your Life and Relationships"
Yah I addressed in the article that one should choose a project wisely, based on factors such as recent activity and how useful it is to you (or others).
Maybe we should assume the best instead of the worst. We could assume that paypal has capable developers who are knowledgeable about both the jvm and node.js, and who have concluded that their specific featureset can best be built using node. That is not a value judgment of the jvm vs node in general, as their situation is theirs and theirs alone.
Here’s why disabled users are excited about a campaign to jailbreak the iPhone
the latest Counter-Strike version (Global Offensive) isn't ported to linux yet.
Intertwingle: Potential program for dealing with "vast volumes of email" [1998]