skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Copenhagen interpretation is arguably the most popular interpretation of quantum mechanics and is nonlocal.
I'm not sure random will is equivalent to free will. Is a choice still a choice if it's made randomly? Couldn't you say that the photon in the experiment has free will then? What's the difference?
> There's nothing in the comment you replied to that indicates any cavalierness about "gay rights"

You missed the point. The GP's comment, by dismissing gay right's relevance to mozilla, implicitly treated the matter in a "cavalier" manner.

Let's do a little find/replace to prove the point. Eich donated $1000 to the KKK. The GP notes that lynching niggers has nothing to do with the day to day operations of Mozilla, so what's the big deal. The parent is dismayed by how trivial black person's rights are considered by HN. What's your comment, tptacek?
It's not wrong to think of stuff in terms of whether it's worth the price, though. See: the Mr. Money Mustache school of thought, in which every dollar you don't spend is a dollar closer to not ever having to work again.
If you run a kennel, and someone is a few days late collecting their dog, do you call them or shoot the dog?

Yes, I know the margins on pico dollar backups don't justify a call. But for a $50 / month plan, it's a lot more feasible.
I don't know what you mean by "freeze it". Could you explain?
I also used to think of Japanese toilets as weird , and overly complex for the task (that may be partially true) but after buying a 35 dollar bidet attachment for my apartment toilet, using any other bathroom feels barbaric. I've resorted to carrying moist wipes when out of town, but even those are a far cry from the efficiency and cleanliness afforded by a washlet/bidet.

I would love for the rest of the country to get over whatever biases or anxiety keeps us from mainstream adoption of an objectively superior system for bathroom hygiene.
If you're thinking about buying one of these, I can highly recommend the Toto S300e (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009IJ2LM4) or, if you live in Asia, the TCF4722CS (http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?id=23047236820).

These 'washlet' toilet seats can be retro-fitted to normal toilets. It's really easy as long as the flush-water inlet to your toilet has a standard fitting. Oh, and assuming you have a suitable power socket near the toilet. The manual recommends a GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) socket.
Until the few-day novelty of having a high number of visits wears off...and you're left with an insanely high bounce rate, a low conversion rate, and no customer engagement.
I don't know. Law without principle seems hollow to me.
Diversity and tolerance are two way streets. You can't pretend to be tolerant, then fire people or demonize those who don't strictly adhere to your political beliefs. That's a genie that can't be put back in the bottle, once you release it.

You can, actually, and it's required. This is known as the paradox of tolerance.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tolerance
Especially in rural areas, where I would say 9 out of 10 people leave their shoes on inside the house.
"...just remember that political winds can shift and that in a few decades you might be the one receiving this treatment."

I know you mean this statement in a cautionary way, but to me that's unbelievably optimistic.

Historically, minority rights are political issues people are willing to kill for. Those who fight have to be willing to die for their cause.

Now the worst I can expect is to be forced to resign as CEO, to go on and play with problems that interest me and find a new job at leisure? Wonderful!

This is why I really don't get all the counter-uproar here. What happened to Mr. Each was basically nothing. He wasn't killed, or hurt, or blacklisted, or run out of town. He didn't even lose his CTO job, which he held for years after the controversial donation came to light. All that happened was that once he was made CEO, the public said this is a bad choice, and then the board basically said, you know what, you're right.
Aww, the "Tesla Gigafactory" sounds awesome, I was a bit disappointed when I found out it's just batteries. I wish someone would invest that kind of money into research for a better alternative, not much change over the past few...decades?
He was not under any obligation to this "reconciliation." One could also argue that not answering in a situation like this is a principled stand on his right to privately hold a political opinion. In the US, it's legal to hold opinions that are "wrong." It should also be socially acceptable, otherwise we are creating a social climate where rational discussion becomes impossible.
Eeeeh, not quite "free will", but "choices that are not structured relative to the thing being measured", which is a much weaker assumption (though still an assumption).
The Truth Behind Customer Loyalty
Turns out you can get fired for your speech.
This one felt different, though, since it's one of the biggest people in tech and one of the biggest companies

Yes. That's what I didn't get at first, and needed feedback in order to see. It seems obvious now, of course. But I'm not really reading the stories or threads for content—I'm thinking about the site, and don't have the time and/or the brain cells to do that as well as process the news itself the way I used to. This is a bummer—especially when the "news" involves kdb+ or a new paper on JIT compilation—but it's ok, as long as we can actually make HN better. In this case, though, it caused me to miss something that actually mattered for HN. Dang, as we say!
Although The Communist Manifesto rails against capitalism's devaluing of art, philosophy and anything else that can't immediately be converted into ka-ching.
Just looked at the website, and had a very "small world" feeling:

They're located in my town O.o
Or if you can't afford a 1000 dollar heated/programmable washlet, you can get a no frills cold water attachment for 35 dollars on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B001KKRCFA/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=...

I have a similar one and it works great (though it's not as luxuroius as a Toto).
What does "really ready" mean when it comes to Rust?

That's the kind of vague goal that people will keep using as an excuse for not focusing on stability, and providing a product that's actually usable.

When it comes to programming languages, it's dangerous for their implementors to not produce something that's seriously usable as soon as possible, even if it means accepting some imperfections in the early stable versions.

With each passing day, Rust becomes closer to being something like Perl 6: anticipated, probably useful, but never actually "ready" enough to be usable. While I'm more optimistic about Rust potentially having a far brighter future than Perl 6, the lack of stability does cause unease.
According to Wikipedia, the MESSENGER mission to Mercury used a complicated series of fly-bys of Earth, Venus and Mercury to slow down.
"people are entitled to have opinions about public figures and to voice those opinions"

Sure, people are entitled to their opinions, and that is what this is all about. The problem here is that someone lost his job because of his opinion.

"This is literally how every boycott or other similar action happens."

Boycotts are typically about corporate policies, practices, or lobbying. For example, I know people who refuse to shop at Walmart because of the company's anti-unionization efforts.

What we saw here is very different. At no point did Mozilla take any kind of anti-gay-marriage position. At no point did Mozilla do anything that was hostile to homosexual employees, users, or people in general. This was a boycott over the CEO's personal beliefs, despite the complete lack of evidence or accusations of him using his position at Mozilla to advance those beliefs. What happened here is that Mozilla's public image was attacked in an effort to punish Eich for his opinion.

"What you call "thoughtcrime" has another name: public discourse."

No, public discourse involves people calmly stating their views and arguing for those views (e.g. what we are doing right now). It is not public discourse when someone loses their job because of their opinion, all the more so when that opinion has no relevance to their job. It is not public discourse when people band together to ostracize anyone who disagrees with them.

Eich was punished for having an opinion that people do not like. He was told that he has no right to be a leader in the tech community because of that opinion, without regard to his contributions to the community, without regard to his behavior in a leadership position at Mozilla. There are only two terms that are appropriate in describing what happened: thoughtcrime and bullying.
I had the opposite reaction.
What if the person with the opinion also sincerely believed that his position was not bigoted and was not denying anyone happiness?

Supporters of slavery used the Bible to justify their beliefs. They did not believe it was about bigotry. They thought slavery was in fact providing economic opportunity to slaves, and they believed their own livelihood depended upon it. Supporters of slavery thought about it in economic and religious terms. If the CEO of my workplace believes in slavery but truly doesn't believe it is immoral, do I not have the right to speak out?

If you believe in slavery or nazism, that's fine. You're allowed to believe in those things. But we are allowed to express that you are wrong for holding those beliefs, and we can choose whether or not we support bigoted viewpoints by purchasing your products. Using one's right to free speech to oppose bigoted speech is not impeding anybody's rights.
There's a big difference between donating $1000 to a legal political cause and being a leader in an organization known for violent and illegal activity. If someone donated $1000 to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's legal fund, would that mean they could not be the CEO of a non-profit organization that might employ religious people?
I really think this is something people have to try for themselves. Also, people should travel more. Japan is such an amazing place.

Using an American toilet in 2014 is like programming your next web app in classic ASP. Time to upgrade.
That's basically how I feel as well. Almost anyone has a skeleton or two in the closet that some enterprising journalist might dig up, just to ruin his career. We Americans are scandal-happy and rather intolerant, including those who think of themselves as "more tolerant than thou" which in fact is an insidious form of intolerance!
John Bell himself wrote an entertaining paper railing on the orthodox perspective: Against Measurement.

http://www.tau.ac.il/~quantum/Vaidman/IQM/BellAM.pdf
Sensationalist title,

"... in a letter posted on Nest’s website that it would stop selling the product, Nest Protect, until it fixed a problem with a feature that lets people temporarily disable the alarm by waving their hands in front of the detector."

It isn't even like they're halting production, just sales.
You can campaign for change without the need to destroy those who disagree with you, on the face of it appears to be contradictory to what you are trying to achieve.
lots of positive sounding stuff comming from msft in the last week.

But, I dunno. I'm extremely skeptical of Microsoft's ability to put long-term momentum into any of their non-core strategies. All these things are one re-org away from becoming basket cases.

Case in point: XNA
Bigots almost never seem to believe themselves to be bigots.

Also, the powerful unjust never believe themselves to be unjust.

That's what is so insidious about bigotry, it's not a Lord of the Rings thing where the villain (who conveniently wears black and lives in a scary castle) stands up and says "Muhahaha I'm going to make everyone miserable!". Instead, the villain says "I'm going to help all of you out by forcing you to be just like me, trust me, things will be better this way!".

Seems to me that the same level of insidiousness applies to insisting that everyone else kowtows to your particular opinion. Isn't insisting that Brendan Eich express some particular opinion effectively insisting that, "I'm going to help you out by forcing you to be just like me..."?
There's a pretty good essay from Scott Aaronson [1] that tries to disentangle the question of randomness from unpredictability, by saying that unpredictable events (which he says are the only things we know of physically that might permit something like free will) are events to which we can't assign a probability distribution.

It separates out the notions of "random" events like coin flips, which we know will go heads with p=.5 and tails with p=.5, from truly unpredictable events, where we can't say even in principle what the probabilities of the outcomes might be. These latter events are where he finds some wiggle room for free will.

[1] http://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/giqtm3.pdf
Forgive me, but I'm reaching back into my recollection of this subject from when I was a physics student. The presence or absence of true randomness has to be turned into a testable hypothesis, or it's not a scientific question. I think the point of the experiment as described is to find such a test, where randomness, or its absence, produce different outcomes. Whether it achieves that goal is for people smarter than me to figure out.
OK, that's an interesting concept, and when I'm more awake, I'll have to read about it.
It can. The boost is proportional to the cos(final exit trajectory in relation to the planet, velocity of planet) -- so if the probe leaves the planet opposite to the direction it goes around the sun, it slows down.

(that is, the probe as whole can still orbit the sun in the same direction as the planet, it just needs to do it slower.
Yes, the overwhelming majority of Americans in the USA do wear shoes in the house. I myself did it too, until age 19 (when I moved to Japan).

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Consumer/story?id=5177409

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/18ekqf/as_a_canad...

http://www.quora.com/Do-real-Americans-wear-shoes-indoors-as...

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20101011193926A...
Yeah. If you say "my manager is a prick" and he finds out about it, prepare to get fired.
The weirdest about Joel's method becoming the gold standard was that FogBugz around that time (I last used it around 2004) just wasn't that great. It was clunky, weird, and required a Windows server. It was served through a browser at a time when presenting GUIs through the browser was a slow and tedious string of refreshes.

Trello and StackOverflow are so much nicer now than FogBugz was then so I guess he hired better people. But I think a lot of his advice became vogue more because he was an entertaining writer than a great software entrepreneur.
That's certainly something people would like to believe, but it'd be interesting to see whether the data backs that up.
However, there is a degree of belief in the interpretation of quantum mechanics that you choose. It's odd that the author of this article espouses the Many Worlds interpretation without pointing out that it's not a consensus viewpoint. Also oddly, the Many Worlds interpretation is known for being a deterministic interpretation yet the author promotes it as a non-deterministic interpretation.
It does, the light ring changes to indicate you're seen by the Nest Protect and when you wave to silence a smoke alarm the Nest Protect says "Smoke alarm hushed."

http://support.nest.com/article/What-is-Nest-Wave-and-how-do...
I remember my first visit to a Japanese toilet. I noticed all the buttons after I finished my business and stood up.

Wow! What do these do? I bent over the toilet bowl and pushed a button at random...
However, it turns out we can introduce actual physics into kerbal. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/68502-WIP-Princi... + real solar system + realism overhaul.
There are two different kinds of randomness [1], one is lack of knowledge, the dice you could calculate or the precise times of keystrokes which could be easily measured. The other is 'true' randomness, that is the claim that no experiment or calculation could predict the value of the random variable. Bells inequality can (sometimes) distinguish between the two. And it turns out that quantum mechanics allows to measure Bells inequality. The result of these experiments is, that there is no straight forward way to introduce 'hidden' variables such that the randomness would just be a lack of knowledge. And it does so in a way that allows for experimental errors. (Sorry for being quite vague, it is quite late here and it would take some time to remind myself of the details.)

So if you want to claim that there is no such thing as true randomness, then you are essentially calling for another revolution of physics on a similar scale as the quantum revolution at the start of the last century. It is entirely possible that this happens, but it contradicts the most fundamental theories of physics we have.

[1] Actually three, it is not obvious what optimal strategies have to do with either of the definitions above.
Jeff, I am familiar with your work, I lurked on the PostgreSQL hackers mailing list for years when I was hacking on that database. :-) I am not dismissing the coordination of OS and database, it just has really deep limits because the OS must hide information critical to optimizing database throughput.

While the increased throughput is a complex function of hardware, workload, etc, it is also consistently substantial. The reason why it works is simple: the database processes have nearly omniscient view of hardware and state and there is only (in modern designs) a single process per core. Consequently, even if you have thousands of concurrent high-level database operations, each process can dynamically select and continuously reorder the low-level operations to (nearly) optimally maximize the throughput for the execution graph at that moment because the execution is completely cooperative. You can do the “synchronous scan” optimization for CPU caches that you do for disk systems. You can schedule around any conflicts in the execution graph and even the impact of outside CPU interrupts can be detected and optimized around. And it is easy to track the aggregate costs of these choices. To the extent possible, every clock cycle is spent on end-user database work instead of database internals overhead.

So minimal processing stalls, micro or macro, and no context-switching or coordination overhead. All combined with incredible locality knowledge (by inference) that is not available if you let the OS manage things for you.

On your other two points:

- Bypass is generally more resilient partly because the software has more explicit and immediate knowledge of the nature of the fault and can do something sensible about it. Obviously you have to handle faults when they occur. A lot of OS behavior when faults occur is pathological from the standpoint of optimizing databases. It is like memory management in C; it requires extra effort but also adds extra power if you handle it well.

- Postgres has expensive capability add-ons to an existing, useful system so it is more incremental in nature. The problem with OS bypass database kernels (and I learned this the hard way) is that (1) they are huge in terms of LoC long before rudimentary functionality is available and (2) it takes many years of atypical software design experience to be competent at trying to write one. It could be done, but it would require a critical mass of a tiny demographic willing to do a lot of work. My argument in this regard was less about inevitability and more about statistical probability.

I spent a lot of years hacking on and customizing Postgres. I recommend it to anyone and everyone that will listen because it is a great piece of engineering and would still use it for many OLTP systems. But it does leave a lot of performance on the table for a variety of reasons that probably make sense for a portable, open source project. The fact remains that I can design and have built bypass kernels that are substantially faster largely by exploiting the optimizations bypassing offers.
Introduction to De-duplication
I find it amazing that the books and manuscripts are still around hundreds if not a thousand years later meanwhile the dye medium of my data CDs from the mid 90s is probably rotten.
How do you replicate such an overnight success with games? What is the most common trait for such titles? It just sheer luck of the draw?
There are three production deployments of Rust that we know about.

The language won't change a whole lot, but the libraries will.
IHover – CSS3 hover effects
"disinterested"

>:(
are you trying to spin prop 8 as a "difference of views"? let me break it down for you:

side a:
- straight people have rights
- gay people have the same rights
- the law does not discriminate in any way

side b:
- straight people have exactly the same rights as in side a
- gay people have fewer rights
- the law discriminates between people depending on who they love

there is literally not a single negative consequence for straight people if gay marriage is legalised, and yet eich spent $1000 in the hope that gay people would continue to be legally seen as lesser. of all the hundreds of causes out there, one motivated by pure spite was what he picked to actively work for.

now as for the "technical people aren't people" strawman, perhaps you aren't familiar with mozilla? it is a tech company - a significant fraction of their employees are technical people. and the company culture (which is shorthand for how the company treats and interacts with its employees) is definitely something the ceo can affect. the company technology stack is more in the cto's purview, and no one ever doubted that eich was competent at that.
That's a good point, I'm not quite sure how to answer that. I know almost nothing of quantum mechanics. My logic is simply that if you had a large enough calculator and nothing was truly random that you could predict us having this conversation from the moment of the big bang. That's incompatible with true freedom of will (which someone is sure to ask me to define, I swear metaphysics suffers from death by definitions). But given true randomness:

1) Person faced with ethical decision

2) Random events somewhere in the brain

3) _____________

4) Unpredictable autonomous decision!

Or something like that.

Edit: moyix's is a much better response than mine
How is that not the right thing to do?

Having a flame way on 4chan, or HN benefits nobody - it just feeds the mobs, and rapidly degenerates into the lowest common denominator.

If you were genuinely interested in having a dialogue, and engaging as one human being to another human being, then what he suggested is exactly the right thing to do.

If you just want to get up on a soapbox, or mouth off at somebody in a public forum to inflate your ego, then he's not interested - and I applaud him for that.

And look, I'm not even in the US - but if I wanted to engage in a dialogue with him - I'm sure a Skype or phone call might suffice.
Clear Off the Table
No, no. This is what makes Bell's Theorem so amazing. It conclusively proves that local hidden variables is impossible (given some simple assumptions).

I know you asked for a better explanation, but it's rather long so I won't give one. But the general idea is that you can show that no system of hidden variables can simultaneously satisfy all the experimental results we see.