skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do you mean by "neuronal activity"? If you're saying it's not just the electrical activity of the brain that constitutes the self, that seems to be true; electrical activity can come to a complete halt and be restarted without apparent loss of selfhood. If you're saying the self is something more than whatever the entire brain does--including neurons, glial cells, and all the rest--that's off in woo-woo-ville.
Not really. Most homeopathic placebos are diluted to the point that you'd need to take anywhere from billions of doses up to get even a single molecule of the 'ingredient'. They are literally just water. Not ot mention that in most cases, the 'cause' is based on a speculative or outright fictional 'link'. For example, one of the most well known placebos is Oscillococcinum, which claims duck liver/heart 'causes' flu. It is also diluted to the point that, to quote, "As there are only about 10^80 atoms in the entire observable universe, a dilution of one molecule in the observable universe would be about 40C. Oscillococcinum would thus require 10^320 more universes to simply have one molecule in the final substance."
As the answer on stackoverflow mentions, there is -ffast-math option to gcc that tells the compiler to treat fp operations as associative. I've done some testing:

$ clang -v
clang version 3.3 (tags/RELEASE_33/final)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin12.4.0

double pow(double);

LLVM bitcode Assembly

// a*a*a*a*a*a
%1 = fmul double %a, %a | movaps %xmm0, %xmm1
%2 = fmul double %1, %a | mulsd %xmm1, %xmm1
%3 = fmul double %2, %a | mulsd %xmm0, %xmm1
%4 = fmul double %3, %a | mulsd %xmm0, %xmm1
%5 = fmul double %4, %a | mulsd %xmm0, %xmm1
ret double %5 | mulsd %xmm0, %xmm1
| movaps %xmm1, %xmm0

// a*a*a*a*a*a -ffast-math
%1 = fmul fast double %a, %a | mulsd %xmm0, %xmm0
%2 = fmul fast double %1, %1 | movaps %xmm0, %xmm1
%3 = fmul fast double %1, %2 | mulsd %xmm1, %xmm1
ret double %3 | mulsd %xmm0, %xmm1
| movaps %xmm1, %xmm0

// (a*a*a)*(a*a*a)
%1 = fmul fast double %a, %a | movaps %xmm0, %xmm1
%2 = fmul fast double %1, %a | mulsd %xmm0, %xmm0
%3 = fmul fast double %2, %2 | mulsd %xmm1, %xmm0
ret double %3 | mulsd %xmm0, %xmm0
There are so many automatic stabilizers built into the US economy which move wealth from some states to others when economic disruption occurs (stuff like unemployment insurance, military spending, federal minimum wage laws, social security, Medicare, DOE transfers, etc) that you rarely see explicit bailouts of failed states in the USA because they're mostly unnecessary. The EU simply has nowhere near the fiscal integration of the US, so member states can really go off in their own direction despite all the supposed safeguards such as Maastricht.

I get that you're pointing out that culturally Finland has less in common with Greece than Oregon has with Louisiana, but that was not always the case. The US just has had the benefit of a couple of hundred years of deep integration since the Louisiana purchase. Cuba is not part of any political association with the US, so naturally it can't be compared.

Also... The US did bail out the Mexican government and save it from default in the 1990s, quite quickly and decisively. The fact that most people don't even remember that, and yet so much ink has been spilled and so many teeth gnashed over whether, or how, or whether to break up the union instead says a lot about the fragility of the EU (to be expected of course, it's still such a young institution). The integration and benefit to the states in the US has been enormously successful. Many would like to see the EU get there but it is still more correctly analogous to NAFTA which even though it was only a few years old and much less ambitious, played a big part in justifying the Mexican bailouts.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_economic_crisis_in_Mexic...
MIT Engineers Design Hybrid Living/Nonliving Materials
They are an interesting Europe-based (Finland) cloud server startup. Apparently doing pretty okay already, so you can trust they don't disappear overnight.
My point was about Interlisp, Smalltalk, Cedar and their respective environments.

A plain text editor cannot reproduce the live code experience from such environments.
Well, that's not common anywhere as far as I know, but you didn't say why is it a bad analogy.

I any case let me clarify what was my purpose as it seems I'm not good at analogies. The point is that you're attacked using compromised computers so it is incredibly stupid to retaliate to the source of the attack.

Hope that clarifies!
Any Danish care to comment?
Why do so many homeopathic remedies contain ingredients? I mean they have multiple things listed on the label that are actual things. Doesn't that make them not homeopathic?
Whenever I hear about homeopathy I think of this wonder rant ("Storm") by Tim Minchin :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U
alternative alternant http://siliconpr0n.org/archive/doku.php?id=azonenberg:ninten...
0/10 - learn to loading screen, wtf is this 1994
After I maximize, and check something in the window, I really like to be able to minimize without moving the mouse. One needs a panel with window buttons for this.

Yes, Gnome has panel addons, but they are ugly and rudimentary, and can only be placed at the bottom of the screen.
To be honest, their demo's seem confusing and don't feel "right" in an ux way.
Does anyone know why homoeopathic remedies are so common in India? Even my very educated Indian friends seem to use them with a surprising frequency, sometimes over actual medicines.
Unlike some natural remedies which are later proven to be right based thousands of years of use in ancient times, Homeopathy is completely and totally bogus. It's based on absolutely nothing. Not science, not observation, not tradition. It's based entirely on one guy, who, in ~1800, thought that 'like cures like'. So, if you have a fever, why not take something else that causes you to get hot? It's also based on the idea that water has a memory of things it comes in contact with. So, they dilute it thousands and thousands of times until the water or sugar pill has no molecules at all of the thing that is supposed to be treating you. In the end, it's a sugar pill that has a placebo effect on some people. There's no logic, science, or medicine to it at all.

Pro tip: If water really did have a memory and diluting things made them stronger, then all water everywhere would cure everything. Including terrorism since Bin Laden was buried at sea.
"It's a miracle! Take physics and bin it! Water has memory! And whilst its memory of a long lost drop of onion juice is infinite, it somehow forgets all the poo it's had in it."
I think everyone deserves a chance, and thanks to the internet this developer got the chance to work for a paying customer in a country with a higher pay rate and higher standard of living. Then he stole and got caught.

There are a lot of people living in poor conditions in the world, and a programmer in any country is near the middle-to-upper end of the spectrum. His situation is unfortunate, but he messed up.

On a similar note: my current lab-mate lives in a pretty bad apartment in Boston right now. It is habitable and up to code, but run down and occasionally the heat goes out... He provided me some prospective by telling me about the one-room, dirt-floor house he grew up in where his parents raised 11 children while working as subsistence farmers in Nepal. That makes luke-warm water and 5Mbps internet seem much fancier.

I pray that some day everyone can live the life of a poor to middle class American, but we are not there yet. I also don't think that being fired is an excessive punishment for fraud/theft at work. I would feel much differently if the story ended with hime being jailed or abused by the police, but the whole point of Odesk is to give everyone a chance and I feel that he got one.
25 Web Design Tips To Honor 25 Years Of The Web
I'm sure it causes a lot of bad things to happen to people too.

>"Marshall says that cases in which trusting vulnerable consumers have believed the claims of homeopaths and "forgone real medicine" in place of "these overpriced sugar pills" are "too numerable to count" and "often with unnecessary and tragic consequences."

I knew someone who took homeopathic remedies instead of going to a doctor and she nearly died (saved by actual doctors). She still believes in homeopathic remedies....
Sorry, that should say "PETSCII and ATASCII"
I haven't read that article (yet) but I strongly agree with the title. I've been thinking about this for years and have come to the following conclusions:

* Physics will never be able to explain consciousness. That's because consciousness is fundamentally subjective and therefore out of the scope of science. This is very counterintuitive, because science was able to explain almost everything so far, why would consciousness be different? One way to answer that would be that consiousness has a "meta" relation to science, it's one level above science (in a sense, don't take it too literally).

* The Descarte's mind-matter duality model is correct in principle.

* The solipsism theory is about right too.

(I'm a very rational and sceptical percon btw.)
Saddens me how low people can go for one or many bucks.
It's nonsense, but people pay $100 more for differently labeled bottled water too, so I guess this takes advantage of similar non-sensical behaviors.
If you have a restricted timeframe & the information that the US government would be interested in knowing details about an event that happened in that timeframe, then that might well be enough information to identify the company involved, or at least reduce the list of candidates to a very short one indeed.

The OP probably has a contractual duty to protect their client's identity & therefore can't take the risk that revealing more details would result in their client being identified.
Bookmarklet to emulate colour blindness
I love that Google Translate converts this to "Do It For Ireland"
And in the process, killing people it's not helping.
The non associativity of addition is obvious, but for the multiplication, I understand why it does not give always the same answer, but I do not see why a change of the order could change the accuracy.
All these demos perform remarkably bad for 2 million.
I don't believe homeopathy works. However, I have seen studies mentioning that a placebo effect (which has a real measurable impact) can be triggered just by knowing you are taking a remedy, even if you know the remedy is bogus. So somehow, you are tricking yourself that you are going to get better. So in a way, you could get better by taking homeopathy even if it has nothing to do with what is (or rather is not!) in the pills.

I don't see much harm in taking homeopathy for a common cold for example, however for anything more serious, you are probably endangering yourself.
> ... could we simply expand the board size a few spaces...

People occasionally experiment with other sizes, such as 21x21 boards. The size of the board has a strong impact on the nature of the game, though.

The obvious change is that larger boards take longer to complete, putting humans at a disadvantage if fatigue comes into play. Less obvious is that 21x21 changes the value of tradition strategies. It is generally considered equivalent to play for board-edge territory as for central influence on a 19x19 board, but on 21x21 playing for the easily-defended outer regions is too small. The value of the center means that it's more valuable to play for central influence instead.

To answer your question in short: it's possible, but expanding the board size could make the game unfamiliar and decrease the effective ranking of pros.
Near real time --> "real time" for web apps.

How would you implement "real" rt in JS?
Is it just me, or is mouse wheel the ONLY way to scroll in those lists? Not even "page down" works.
An Epic Ride through Monument Valley – Surprise Ending
Along the same line, I always think about this Mitchell and Webb bit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
Your understanding of what the article says has gone beyond what the article actually says.

The article discusses medical practice and knowledge. Which in past centuries has clearly been inferior.
I counted four CS majors on their page...
twitter message:

"Take a Spies city-trip. Make a baby. Stop Denmark's declining birth rate and win baby gear. #doitfordenmark http://do-it-for-denmark.dk/"*
One who actually died of this BS was Steve Jobs.
Thanks, that definitely helps.
It is considerably ironic that after 4 years on HN, the first comment I've ever made that been voted down past -1 (it was at -5) is one that I don't even have any strong feelings or opinions on. Also, I'm not even insinuating there's some kind of religious or spiritual connection here (I'm not religious).

Indeed, I'm only quoting a renown expert in this field, who has been responsible for many of the developments in using cold saline flushes for cardiopulmonary arrest resuscitation.

Clearly, there's a group of people here on HN who have unusually strong emotions in response to any suggestion of phenomena that go beyond current scientific understanding. Not sure why that is, since this is where the most interesting science will take place over the coming centuries.

I had no idea this was a flamewar topic and will assiduously avoid commenting on the issue in the future. It's too bad, since I enjoy thinking about the implications here, and have long had an amateur interest in the brain sciences.

Edit: OK, my post above was upvoted from -5 back to 0. My faith in HN's commitment to fairness and rational discussion is restored. Thank you.
I was expecting a simple explanation of some maze generation algorithms, but was very pleasantly surprised with the path-length based visualization stuff. What I mean is that there is more to this page than the title suggests!
I watched a dilemma like this unfold first hand when my landlord had his bike stolen by an illegal immigrant. He didn't want a drunk stealing the bike off of his porch, but he didn't want him to get in so much trouble that he got deported either.
An Unexpected Discovery in the Brains of Autistic Children
For someone here criticizing C style, I'm surprised you can't read unified diffs. The lines starting with " " are context. The lines starting with "+" are the ones the author of the patch added.
Europe != European Union. The ECJ is the EU's highest court.
>> You can see how Google did this with G+/YouTube integration.

This is exactly what comes to mind. Seeing how Google transformed post Eric Schmidt, makes me consider that even IF Zuck has absolutely all the good intentions of letting Oculus do its own thing, CEOs change, and corporations tend to get worse as they grow older (IMO), for some reason.

It could be all good, Oculus could be a great hit, a wonderful platform, all that everyone hopes. Then comes a new CEO with a grand U-turn vision, pulls the rug from beneath their feet and absoluty sinks the ship.

There's just no security, if Oculus kept control, than great, the company is the product, it depends on it to carry on. But Facebook just has the product, its just a leverage, second grade citizen within the corp.
It's a commercial for a travel agency, Spies
The water forgets the previous substances that were in it, when a trained homoeopath hits it with magic paddle. Yes, that's really how it's suggested to work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy#Preparation
Nice clean design. However, I'm not sure about the use-case you present on the website. If you're developing websocket enabled apps, you're going to have use get a socket server at some time, so why put it off?
It's impressive how Nintendo can continue selling heavily underpowered processors to gamers and nobody complains.
Nothing is assumed to be happening, that's why we're talking about probabilities. We are discussing the possibility that the NSA could be infiltrating and subverting the Huawei support infrastructure. That's what the article is about. We're not discussing whether or not the NSA directly hacked Huawei. While that is also a worrying piece of news, it isn't the same thing.
12 VR Headsets That Predate Oculus (Don't Tell Facebook)
Emacs hackernews.el
Easy way to get news from hackernews: M-x hackernews
> Why do so many homeopathic remedies contain ingredients?

To bulk out the pill until it is visible to the naked eye.
I've never seen the 1qaz2wsx password pattern. Does that mean there's also 3edc4rfv and things like that in your 'logs'?
true that !
Ask HN: Best graphing/widget libraries for dashboards?
Over the past few years I've seen a ton of new graphing libraries and widget libraries come out aimed at creating sleek dashboards. What libraries are you using, what are their licenses/costs, and what is your favorite part of the library?
I wouldn't. And here is the problem JS folks are having.. Real Time does not mean "happening as fast as possible" but "deterministic". If I tell the process to turn something on and off every 1ms, the rt system will do everything in it's power to do it.
The saddest thing is that in some countries (like France...) Homeopathic medicines are actually reimbursed by social security (and therefore paid for by everyone who pays taxes). We're still waiting for double-blind, vs placebo, clinical trials to show how efficacious they really are.
Ugh yes, and someone just posted an ad for a travel agency to HN. I hope they're proud or at least in some sort of referral program. ;)
http://grafana.org/ opensource and free
Crowdfunders of the Maker of Oculus Rift Denounce a Facebook Buyout
This really ought to be hilarious; but then you realise that they're talking about penicillin. If one batch of one type of snakeoil distributed by one pack of charlatans has turned out to contain an antibiotic, how many others do too? And how many people out there are merrily munching down a couple of homeopathic sugar-pills when their piles flare up and making amazing new antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains?

Homeopathy is actively harmful.
The Best Internet Reactions to Facebook Devouring Oculus
Wacko in the Morning – with Wacko Bob and more 03/27 by The Wacko Network
> Actually no, homeopathic contains minute traces of cause of disease...

Above certain dilutions it goes beyond the Avogadro figure and there should be no molecules/proteins left of the original disease agent.
6 months is industry-standard quoting for auto insurance -- not sure why, but it is. What product are you talking about?
I was a huge fan of famo.us until just now. Testing in iPhone4S, most of these apps are super jittery (never continuously 60fps) and unresponsive to touch in the browser, especially Yahoo Weather, which looks to be the only one complex enough to resemble a full app.

At best, this is a very impressive "mobile web app" framework NOT a native replacement. I would never trade up obj-c for cordoba/js if this is the kind of inconsistent performance users will have to deal with... and btw I love javascript.

I think steve is a phenomenal entrepreneur but may have built this launch up way too much. Without their native wrapper and MVC this feels like it's going to be a few years before it can rival native development.
Apple: Add More Diversity to the Emoji Keyboard
Ephemeral privacy protected positioning
I'd like to point out that famo.us recently announced a public beta release date of April 9th, with respect to the "secrecy" criticism.
> They are literally just water.

Usually they are sold as granules, containing some form of sugar... to capture the magical water :) So technically it's sugar+water that you ingest.
> Such PL enthusiasts are the last ones to try and switch the language being used.

As a PL enthusiast myself, I agree with this.

By the time I had my first job out of college, I'd written programs in some twenty-odd different PLs, and felt comfortable with many of them. My employer needed me to learn SAS, so I did. They wanted some code written in Java, so I wrote it. Neither SAS nor Java is particularly fun to program in the way Haskell et al. are, but that's what they wanted, and I could do it.

There was a whole team of Java guys, and when asked to learn SAS they sat around bemoaning it and whining about how Java is so much better. "Why not just do it in Java?" they asked.

I've run into similar experiences at every company since. If people don't want Java, they want C++ or Perl. If someone writes a utility in Python, there are complainers. Some programmers will refuse to even use a particular program if it's not written in their language of choice.

In my experience, it's usually the people who aren't PL enthusiasts that are more opinionated about language choice, simply because they're less flexible.
Well, for one thing, it doesn't. Assuming the antivaxxers take this research to heart, which there is no particular reason to expect (how have they viewed other research?), watch for the message to become "save your grandchildren from autism by not vaccinating your children".

On the general question of "if one bad idea gets press, should we devote a bunch of extra attention to refuting it?"...

Daryl Bem managed to conduct some studies showing a "statistically significant" effect of ESP. He got those published in a respectable journal, which felt duty-bound to print them because Bem had followed all the formalities of the scientific method, and That Is The Process Of Science.

Obviously, ESP is not real, and this attracted several replication efforts. When they duly failed to replicate, they couldn't get published. Are you arguing that after publishing Bem's paper, the journal should have wasted further space publishing the inevitable refutations? Their position was that a paper demonstrating that ESP is not real has no scientific value, and they're completely correct about that (we already know!). So they opted to publish papers that might have something more worthwhile to say.

neolefty points out that the article's content has little to do with the title, and that's fair criticism of my complaint. But the title is so incredibly inane that it immediately sold me on the idea that reading the article would be nothing but a waste of time.
sub projects + incremental builds on a warmed up JVM make for a very quick dev cycle.

Deploying is another matter, full builds lag far behind Java, something that will not be changing anytime soon, scalac is doing a ton of work under the hood.
>since they can have no effects, they can have no side effects

Completely and totally incorrect.

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

In medicine, a nocebo (Latin for "I shall harm") is a harmless substance that creates harmful effects in a patient who takes it.

Basically, you think "I'm taking medication, that could cause side effects," that thinking it and of itself can causes side effects!! It's like a reverse placebo.

Also see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2hO4_UEe-4 (watch this short video, it give a great rundown on the nocebo effect, including examples)

and people are thinking they are getting specific side effects....at least they are searching about them.

http://i.imgur.com/lskvrtI.png
> However it is probably a very good placebo for people who believe in it,

OK, but then placebo shouldn't be allowed to make medicine-like claims.
Effective Tools To Stop Email Overload
The human response to disaster planning is offloaded to a committee who's responsible for disaster mitigation.

Call it a government.

Residents living on the banks of that large river in North Africa built a fucking awesome risk mitigation strategy for said government. Eternal life under a stacked pyramid of stones.
Ever had a close look at it? It is pretty much a mess tied together with duct tape. I've been sifting through it for a month and finally decided that you cannot use it to build a product on top of that.