skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've engaged in discussions of various topics over the years and developed a few guidelines and practices which I try to adhere to. Starting with the "training-wheel" arguments typical of high-school and college age, and evolving through many of technology's "religious wars" (vi vs. emacs, Microsoft vs. Linux, etc. -- particularly the latter).

Among them:

• Go Socratic. Sometimes the best way to convince someone is to let them argue their own way out of their position. Ask questions rather than make assertions or pound facts.

• Realize that often the game isn't to convince. I have positions I hold strongly, most on the basis of experience, evidence, or logic that's convincing to me (and I'm occasionally persuaded to change my mind). But in discussing them with others my objective is often to understand what the basis of their position is. I might learn something. Fairly often, I'll find that the views aren't well-founded or aren't convincing (strengthening my own conclusions).

• Distressingly often your'll find that a person's primary argument is "it benefits me to claim this belief despite no rational or factual basis for it" -- it's Upton Sinclair (and Al Gore)'s observation: "It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

• Rejection of concepts is often driven by fear. I ran across this passage re-reading Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: "You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt."

• Psychology is a hell of a drug. There area all sorts of weird aversions people have. I've met pathological liars. I've met people who simply deny obvious truths. Who feel "it's not a lie if I simply don't say it" (the lie of omission) or "if I only try to draw your attention from it" (lie of distraction). People are rather less rational than you might hope.

And for all of that, I've had some pretty amazing, interesting, and productive exchanges, often in the oddest places. Pulled into a highway rest area in the deep south a few years back, started talking with another man there. We both verbally circled for a few minutes trying to suss each other out, then realize that, actually, our views were fairly similar despite the miles that separated us. That was one of the more interesting 45 minute conversations I've had in years. Possibly decades.
English major.
I'm tempted to say nations and states that support homosexuality (which is by far the most colossal structural opposition to reproduction) have "a net negative on the individual level at least from an evolutionary standpoint." What do you think?
The discovery mechanism looks clumsy to me.

There's no way we'd rely on a public discovery service, for example. If we're going to hardcode configuration information - such as the URL of a discovery service that may or may not be up or reachable, we might as well hardcode the addresses of a few peers.

And running a second etcd cluster to bring up the main one seems pointless. Either it's turtles all the way down, or you then need to hardcode config information for the second cluster, in which case it serves little purpose.

I'd rather have a mechanism where each peer takes a list of possible peers and tries to connect, with a method for deciding when there is quorum to elect an initial leader and start allowing writes (that's easy enough by introducing a config option to decide if a peer is "blessed" to be part of the initial leadership election, and how many blessed peers must be connected to have quorum - just needs to be enough to form a majority of blessed peers to prevent more than one subset from electing a leader before they manage to connect)

Am I missing something?
Wasn't meant to be snarky. The title is tiresome. I expect good content from Wired and they deliver, but after all the effort put into the article I hold out hope that writers can construct thoughtful headlines without giving in to the admittedly viral bottom of the barrel.
How well could LLVM be converted to the mill intermediate language?
> Why are certain religions much more successful than others?

Evolution. I know this sounds like a punch line for a joke, but consider that a religion's doctrinal choices represent natural selection -- some choices are more effective than others, and a dominant religion in a world of competing religions equals a dominant species in a world of competing species -- the same rules apply.

And what are the successful species traits? One, a reverence for authority, a time-tested way to attract and hold people who cannot think for themselves. Two, a prohibition against having sex without the intent to breed more miniature believers, a prohibition that the Catholics have raised to an art form. Three, a prohibition against independent thought or constructive criticism, in which the masses are described as a flock of sheep, and they eat it up.

The great irony is that many religions (not all by any means), while very clearly exploiting the strategy of evolution by natural selection to grow their submissive flocks, reject the very idea of evolution, describe it as an evil idea.
I'm not very into the whole atheism/religion scene, but I think there are many people who basically don't care one way or the other about "the great questions", but when asked might have said that they're religious or spiritual in vague terms. I think it's these people that Dawkins has been helping, by essentially letting them know that 'unbelief' is a totally OK category for them to fall into.
Will I be able to use a Firefox Account in Google chrome ?
Overriding Unicorn process names in Ruby on Rails
I Walk To Work, Therefore I Am
It's a clone.
I agree that formal debates over evolution are counterproductive - they give the impression that evolution and creationism should be taken equally seriously, and anyway they're more about who's a better presenter than who has the better evidence.

I appreciate Dawkins' writing, though. If nothing else, it contributed significantly to my shift away from evangelical fundamentalism. One of the benefits of Dawkins' choice of material is that it can communicate new ideas to the very religious (not "always does" but "has the capacity to"), whereas arguments about historical accuracy or studies of religious behaviour can't - because, from a fundamentalist perspective, that sort of evidence is necessarily secondary to communication directly from God.

For me, Dawkins first presented the idea that it might be possible for evidence to be more meaningful than faith, that everyone who wasn't a fundamentalist might not be lying or deceived. I consider that a justification for his work, though perhaps I'm wrong about its effectiveness (though I was a fairly strong believer when I read it). I don't know on what criteria you're basing your own judgement.

(Of course, I'm speaking here from my own experience and observation just of the community where I grew up. I'm glad that he existed at that time, but this is ultimately just an anecdote with a limited perspective.)
القنوات الناقلة لمباراة تشيلسي ونيوكاسل مباشرة اليوم
If this really took off, I'd be excited to see more locations than just Miami.
Some background about the relationship between Persona and Firefox Accounts:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Firefox_Accounts

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.mozillians/pv5VN2dNY...

tl;dr: it's coming, and this is an important engineering milestone on that path. I'm sure Lloyd and callahad will be chiming in with more details.

(Source: Mozilla employee, not on the Identity team)
Looking at the most successful religions, a few candidates spring to mind:

* Proselytism: if you don't go looking for converts, you probably won't get them. In particular, a lot of religions are inextricably linked with ethnicities; they tend to stay small.

* Syncretism: your religion can get a lot of followers if it co-opts existing beliefs, and doesn't try to immediately displace them. For example, look at how Taoism fits in neatly with a lot of folk religion that predates its arrival in the area. Similar examples can be found for most (all?) major religions.

* Political fortune. Catholicism, for example, happened to spread through the world alongside European colonialism, especially by Spain.

* Luck. There are an awful lot of dead religions that used to be pretty successful.

There are probably others, but those are the most obvious ones.
yeah was wondering about that. very strange, should know better from Google, etc. about the value of the universal login.

I wanna love Mozilla (even bought a Firefox OS phone!) but this is pretty low-level.
The answer is that, in a world steered more by ideas than children (or more by memes than genes), one's sexual orientation is much less important, so accepting homosexuality doesn't reduce the true fitness of the species, which is a composite of ideas and genes.

To those who doubt the significance of ideas compared to children, I ask if they can recall the names of Einstein's children. No?
>but realize how long it takes for humans to learn to speak/comprehend complete sentences.. heck to be potty trained even.

interesting that a kitten or a puppy gets potty trained much faster than a human child.
Their business model is predicated on externalising many of the costs forced on taxi drivers. Claiming they have no responsibility for crafting and operating a business model that's designed to socalise costs is horseshit.
SIMON COWELL: A letter to my shallow, reckless, cocky younger self
SEO Friendly Single-Page Apps with Batman.js and Rails
Coke Engineers Its Orange Juice – With an Algorithm
Better release notes for git and how it removes the need for GitHub releases
I'm surprised by your enthusiasm for evolutionary psychology. My admittedly limited experience of it seems like it's just a story telling contest with no actual science. The stories are often very interesting and plausible, but is there any sense in which they can be tested or have predictive power?
> Hiera is a like a hierarchal property list that puppet chef etc can use to pull its state

Like Etcd. Or LDAP. Or DNS / Hesiod. Or a directory structure on a network file system. Or about 100 other solutions, many of them decades old (see DNS / Hesiod)

So if you have no arguments for why Etcd is a "bad solution", then why do you claim it is one?

From your little description of Hiera, it doesn't sound like it provides anything particularly interesting for the use-cases I want Etcd for. The appeal of Etcd is simplicity, that Hiera is built on Zookeeper and has multiple backends does not make it appealing.
> To be fair, thats like asking you to explain why gravity works. (without saying that it just does) There are a lot of things that seem simple which smart people have only theorized.

Be careful when you say "only theorized." A well-supported scientific theory is the highest form of human knowledge. A scientific theory isn't just a hunch (the everyday meaning of theory), it's a combination of observational evidence, a careful explanation of the evidence, and some predictions based on the explanation that can be researched to expand the domain of the theory. And (very important) a basis for falsifying the theory, an observation that would prove the theory false.

The recent discovery of the Higgs boson is an example of theory confirmation -- it's based on the "standard model", the theoretical structure of modern physics, and the Higgs was predicted on theoretical grounds long before we had any chance to detect it.

As to "smart people only theorized", gravity has an explanation, and a very good one -- general relativity. Relativity is one of the two best-confirmed scientific theories we have (the other one is quantum theory, that makes our computers possible).

Please remember this when you want to say "only a theory".
ipo's keep making my rent go higher. Can't afford a house.
Ah you're right. Sorry if it was a false alarm, Sssnake.
I LOL'ED SO HARD! ROFL
This blog post has some screenshots: http://takezoe.blogspot.com/2013/09/gitbucket-15-released.ht...
Social Media's new frontiers – AI, Deep Learning, Predictive Marketing
> Why don't you sequence a few deceased atheists and a few deceased religious folks and by way of simple diff isolate the "religion" gene. There might be a Nobel prize in it.

It's been established that there's no single religion gene, and there's no single stupidity gene. But I repeat myself.
Also not to be under estimated is that he was driving drunk people when his rating was tanking; they rate lower.
You have completely missed the point. The debate is not (or at least should not be) about what is and is not science. That is merely quibbling over terminology. The debate is (or should be) over the process one uses to arrive at the truth. Empirically, if you use experiment as your arbiter of truth, you are led to make VASTLY more accurate predictions about the world, and hence obtain vastly more power to control the world, than any other criterion that man has yet managed to devise (and in particular, you do better than using any holy text as your arbiter of truth).

It doesn't matter if intelligent design is or is not science. What matters is that when you put ID or YEC to experimental test, it fails. When you put Darwinian evolution to experimental test, it succeeds. Whether or not that makes evolution "true" is a debate over the meaning of the word "true", not the meaning of the word "science." You can choose to believe that the universe is borne on the back of a turtle. You can even call that science if you like. But if you put your turtle cosmology to experimental test, I will bet you any amount of money you care to wager that your predictions will be wrong. In the long run, I will win and you will lose. THAT is what matters.
> It doesn't coordinate the transition of services to other states.

It's not intended to. It is way outside the scope. But you can easily coordinate transitions on top of Etcd by waiting on key changes.

> Configuration management is as much management order of operations as well as what files should contain what.

Outside of scope. Nothing stops you from using a configuration management engine like Puppet and triggering it on state changes by waiting for Etcd keys. It'd be trivial.

Or use something other than Etcd if those are your needs. But those are not my needs.

For my configuration needs there are exactly no places where I have any interest in the complexity of Puppet, but plenty of places where being able to easily set and query configuration values via a simple REST api that's trivially to access even from a bash script is nice.

You're right that scp can do that. But then you're suddenly in the job of maintaining hairy scripts to push out config changes and ensure they are in sync. So Etcd provides a solution that provides that synchronization without the complexity of far more featureful solutions. To me, that is a feature.

You seem to try to evaluate a handsaw as if it was a chainsaw and give it bad marks for being cumbersome to cut down trees with. Not all of us want to cut down trees.
I have to object that there is seriously more to project management than keeping the "mediocre programmers" in line.

I mean, there are overly ambitious programmers that do have to be reigned in, there are people held back by whatever structure you might and many variations of this.

And code has to be appropriate for it's purpose. I'm sure the code for Doom is great for Doom. If it is "cowboy code", it's probably not what anyone would want for an inventory control program that will be passed to someone else in six months.
The statement you quote is not on point, since there is no "module B" here. What they are trying to describe in that is the situation where someone takes a GPL piece of code, and writes a wrapper module (module B) that adds some kind of interface that their proprietary module (module C) knows how to interface with, and then they distribute this whole mess.

As far as I can see, Capistrano has not wrapped SSHKit or modified it. It just invokes SSHKit through its public interfaces. In particular, Capistrano does not seem to be a derivative work of SSHKit. If it and SSHKit are distributed together, this would be what the GPL calls mere aggregation.

Conceptually, it is no different than distributing bash along with a bash script that is not under GPL.
San Francisco is unevenly distributed. The western 2/3rds of the city are low density. The third of the city where people are fighting to live (SOMA, Mission, etc.) are already high density. So people are talking about "building up" and thinking of high rises in the Mission, but the real "density problem" in SF are the western neighborhoods.
It seems a strange situation. Both packages have the same author. He chose MIT license for one and GPL for the other. He claims his lawyers told him this was OK, but in fact legal opinion is divided on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Lin...

Of course, from his point of the view this really doesn't matter: he is the copyright holder of both packages and he can hardly violate his own copyright. The problem is for other people who might want to distribute modified copies of Capistrano under MIT but who can actually only do so under GPL.

If he really does want the whole package to distributed as MIT with no ambiguity then the solution is simple: change the license of SSHKit to LGPL. If the company won't agree to that, then change it to GPL plus written exception that we won't sue you for linking to Capistrano.

However, he could be deliberately sneaky. Tell people "our lawyers think this is OK, but check with your own lawyers". Then if any competitor does fork Capistrano and the fork becomes too successful he could say "whoops our lawyers have changed their mind, you've violated the GPL and we are now suing you."
> Then the first substantive statement out of his mouth was: the question tonight is, does Ken Ham's creation story hold up? Is it viable? No no no! The question is: what is science?

Apart from the fact that the debate gave the Creationists unearned attention and was therefore a mistake, no, trying to summarize science to these religious people would only have piled one mistake onto another. Consider the basics of science:

1. Skepticism toward everything, and the assumption that an idea without evidence is assumed to be false (the "null hypothesis") -- the opposite of a non-scientist's attitude toward an unsupported idea.

2. The idea that any worthwhile idea must in principle be falsifiable by the right empirical evidence, or, to put this a different way, all ideas must pass muster by means of a reality-test. No reality-test, no validity.

3. The idea that all theories (ideas) are temporary and dispensable, that no scientific theories ever become true or beyond challenge by new evidence.

To simply describe this foundation of modern science would strike religious believers, people whose lives are ruled by blind belief and a severe lack of critical thinking, as monstrous. The scientific outlook cannot possibly be more opposed to the religious outlook, and to simply present it to a group of religious believers would bring down any house of believers.

What science actually consists of is on a long list of things that religious people don't know about the modern world -- it's too painful to contemplate. To try to break through this barrier would be a mistake. Better to do what Nye did -- show a fossil that's obviously older than 6,000 years. Something small and manageable.

But again, I think the debate was a mistake -- it gave the creationists unearned attention.
There might eventually be an API available. Right now, we're focused on getting the actual grading interactions for the peers right. Richard's etcml already has an API.
You may be interested in TAL/ZPT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_Attribute_Language
Common App for Startup Jobs
I wouldn't call myself a creationist, but I think there's a substantial chance that our current understanding of the physics of the universe will seem as backwards to people in a 200 years as people's under standing 200 years ago does to us now. I even believe that there's a small chance that our understanding of the universe now will seem as backwards as creationism in 5000 years.

As there is so much we don't know yet, it seems crazy to say that creationism absolutely cannot be true, even though it's crazy to say that creationism is true.
Kudos! It drive me nuts how people who are supposedly devoted to rationality accept the premise that rationality will win simply because it is rational, despite the fact that you can show rationally (via Darwinian evolution!) that this premise is false.
It's great advice not to be that type of asshole when you've done nothing, but it's also true that one of the pillars of YC success is someone who doesn't necessarily know your niche telling you what you're doing right/wrong.

Sometimes advice is about the niche, sometimes it's about time management, time-to-market, hiring, firing, whatever. The answer has to be about balance - sometimes you know better, sometimes you don't.
Configuration management transactions.

Puppet has the notion of stages.

Yes because it's marketing an unproven technology as a solution when better things already exist. Someone I know from (OpsCode||Puppet) even further the recommendation of zk as basically the only proven consistent KVS. A better approach should be to do what other cloud shops have done and ship ZK appliances. Pushing new tech on customers is using them to beta test unproven tech, which is reinventing the wheel and risky.
Localbitcoins.com Users Face Criminal Charges in Florida
Will it still work with the self hosted sync server? Or will there be a self hosted one for Firefox Accounts?

And I hope they will implement it on Firefox OS very soon, otherwise the whole syncing is not really that interesting.
Quoting the post:

In previous releases, a human had to pick a leader, pass a list of -peers to all of the followers and maintain that list going forward.

Presumably that method is still there?
The Man Google Hired to Make AI a Reality
It actually uses Persona inside, and it's an email-as-ID as well.

Also, this is a new occurrence of scrypt used in the wild.
Would be great if they port the whole Calligra office suite to Windows: http://calligra-suite.org
> In short, any set of criteria you choose to demarcate science from non-science will either simultaneously include or simultaneously exclude both intelligent design and 'descent from common ancestor'.

No, not if you actually understand science. Science requires empirically derived evidence and falsifiability (or tests against reality -- meaning if reality disagrees, the theory must be discarded).

Descent from a common ancestor passes the above test, because there is copious empirical fossil evidence supporting that conclusion as well as present-day tests of evolution and natural selection, derived from both biology and computer science. The idea also could easily be falsified by new empirical evidence, if any existed.

Intelligent design requires the intervention of a supernatural agency, it is therefore not empirical, not falsifiable, therefore it's not science.

Very simple -- one is science, the other isn't.
or gitbucket, a single war file clone of github. I run gitlab for work, and gitbucket for personal and the latter is far easier to upgrade and maintain.
No, because you have to choose between Wi-Fi "phone mode", Wi-Fi "remote control mode" and off[1]. Navigating the menus on the camera is pretty annoying - I always get mixed up which button is back and which is "Ok".

[1] http://gopro.com/support/articles/how-to-pair-your-hero3-wi-...