skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I actually do believe in a factual God.

I was brought up in reasonably traditional Christian family(in the faith sense, rather than the cultural one), but always given the choice & encouragement by my parents to explore and find my own answers.

As a teenager, a lot of my friends at church were very strict hard-line evangelicals, and a lot of their attitudes irritated the crap out of me. However, my atheist, agnostic, new-age and Buddhist friends consistently were supportive and friendly to me. I felt far more at home in that environment than amongst those who (ostensibly) shared the same faith as me.

I became very disillusioned with the church, and investigated the beliefs of my friends, co-workers, and what I believed, trying to figure it out. I came to a personal belief that either

a) there is a personal/relational God, not a vague force, nor some angry judgemental law-stickler

or

b) there is no God, the limit of existence is physics. Love, relationships, meaning, etc. are all merely chemical reactions inside the 'clockwork' (for lack of a better term) bodies that we, by some weird happenstance believe that we have/are.

All the other alternatives (dualism, polytheism, paganism, Confucianism, Buddhism, etc) seemed to be either total nonsense, or wishy-washy without real answers (apologies to anyone of those positions - I'm speaking of my feelings at the time).

So with those two positions, I found that I couldn't accept that everything was meaningless - or in a "positive" light, that everything was equally meaningful. That my parents loving me was as "meaningful" as someone else's parents abusing them out of some misguided sense of discipline.

I couldn't make myself believe that. So I believe that there is some kind of moral framework that makes love "better" than hate. That makes everyone alive actually of worth, rather than simply an arrangement of atoms of equal value to a chair, or pile of primeval slime.

Either there is some kind of external person that gives meaning and relational value to people, and to the "higher" concepts of love, faith, hope, trust, acceptance, loyalty, or else there was nothing. Men who run away with younger women who meet their sexual desires could be complemented on having found satisfaction, rather than accused of disloyalty - for loyalty would be nothing more than an outmoded evolutionary advantage for helping survival.

So, I found a faith. I asked God - if he/she/it were there, what the hell the point of it all was, and if he/she/it did exist, how I could actually do something worth while with my life, and I believe they answered me.

I've been working unpaid the last 8 years for a charity (OM), raising my own sponsorship from friends/family/churches to work with this God, who I believe is trying to save humanity. I believe I have a relationship with him, that my life has purpose, and that there is a reason to exist: God loves us, but allows us to have free will (under the restrictions of physics, etc...) so that we can have a free relationship with him, un-coerced. I believe he loves me, that I love him, and that the best thing I can do is introduce others to him.

So, that's my story...
Right, but how do you define the halting state for a physical system? A stable state? No free energy left? Is it arbitrary?
That makes it doubly ironic because there was an issue with the chargers that could start a fire resulting in a recall.

http://www.smbnation.com/content/news/entry/hp-and-google-re...
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7694436
My old school district bought chrome books for all of the kids in the district. They just had a recent report saying they have a 30% failure rate with them. The majority are screen breaks from heavy books on top of them. They are great machines but the cheap materials come at a cost.
Multithreading: Semaphores
Couldn't agree more, which is what makes what I said ironic.
Net Neutrality Walks Into a Bar … (Comic)
I shouldn't have used the word "horrible" when describing a codebase because "horrible codebase" has very different meanings for different people. The code of well-known companies is typically great from a business standpoint, otherwise they wouldn't have become well-known. By this definition, Mt. Gox's codebase was fine right up until they imploded, because the only reason they were large enough to matter is because rolling out features was the highest priority. But you can see how, to some, this is a distasteful definition of "good codebase."

First mover advantage is one of the most powerful forces in the startup ecosystem. The only way to exploit first mover advantage is to be the first to market, which sometimes means skipping many of what programmers consider best practices.

The general principle is that it's hard to grow large by having a bunch of principles, because principles slow you down. Idealism tends to be the opposite of pragmatism, and being pragmatic seems one of the most important qualities for success in business.

There are exceptions to everything, of course, and I'm not claiming that all well-known companies have codebases that most programmers would consider bad. I've heard Google's codebases are pretty good, for example. Viaweb grew large, and I know how obsessive pg is about code quality.

All I'm claiming is that unless the culture of the company has valued code quality from day one, the codebase of a well-known company will generally not be very good. I.e. there's a correlation between being a well-known (read: large) company and having a codebase with more hacks than most would be comfortable with. So it seems to be the default.

Maybe it has nothing to do with the size of a company or how well-known they are. Maybe it's simply that most codebases aren't very good. But it seems to have a grain of truth that business forces tend to push codebases in a negative direction by default. Additionally, it seems like most codebases you see on github are actually pretty good; better than what you'd see at most companies.
If the only value you add is 'I can do it cheaper than the other guy' then yes it is a race to the bottom. However, I would strongly urge your consider what type of signaling 'I can do it cheaper than the other guy' sends to serious people who have serious amounts of money to get it done without too much involvement from them.
Me too. Suspended after years with the same page up. Suddenly the page violated standards and payouts ended with Google holding nearly the $100 minimum.

Google did not say there were "invalid clicks"--only the "risk" of such. Google did not return the money. They are still holding it years later! But they refuse to unsuspend the site.
There is also http://nimrod-lang.org/db_postgres.html.
But I agree that documentation is an area we need to improve on!
That kind of freelancing is yes, however, finding local clients who you can meet face to face to genuinely provide value to their business and you'll make decent money. Do a few talks at local business meetups on something really simple, like "5 Steps on how to win business online" or something, then just run through things like, get a website up, sign up to social media and update it, get involved in online trade forums, put "how to" videos on youtube and get listed on google places, etc. Theres your talk, and theres easily more than 10k - 15k a year, theres a full time wage.
In front of me, there are three great mountains:
1. The pleasure as you described.
2. Determinism.
3. Nihilism.
I don't know why pleasure is valuable to consciousness. To determinism, if we are free to think, we can just observe our life without real pains or real gains. To nihilism, I just don't know everything, including nihilism.

I just wonder why I should jump to a conclusion. For my intuition?
You should look into Startpage[1]. It's basically a Google proxy that anonymizes your queries so they can't track you.

[1]: https://startpage.com/
Shadow Campus
Mongo's internal storage mechanisms are a mess. BSON is incredibly inefficient as a storage format (for instance, it stores arrays as string -> string maps with a literal index, ie ["1" "first element" "2" "second element"]), it relies on mmap / fsync for read / write scheduling (see [1] for some issues specifically with regards to database usage), and its "linked list of documents" approach means that any appreciable number of removals or updates badly fragments your storage space. Oh, and key names aren't interned, so better use the first N unicode characters rather than sensible names if you need to fit everything into the page cache (and due to the lack of caching algorithms beyond the OS's LRU-by-page, you definitely need to fit everything into the page cache). "Everything" really means "both data and indexes" since the OS doesn't know the difference between your index & data - it will quite happily evict index entries from cache in favor of a data scan.

[1] http://rhaas.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/linuxs-fsync-woes-are-ge...
A Comparison of Article Search APIs via Blinded Experiment and Developer Review
Studies: Blood from young mice reverses aging in old mice
Edited/inaccurate title. The actual title from the article is: "Chromebooks on Fire! The Coming Consumer Cloud Revolution."
I guess one day Google will give out Chromebooks for free in exchange for all the data going through them
The missing step in that post is: "Step 0: Write very popular and useful thing"
My elementary school bought 30 iPads last year. For about the same price, they bought 85 chromebooks this year. We can check out iPads to one classroom, or chromebooks to an entire grade level. With similar capabilities, this seems like a no-brainer.

On the other hand, there are a lot more exceptions than you describe. Many end users need beefy hardware, not just to encode video, but to run games or to crunch data or to compile code. For people whose main use case is web browsers and documents, sure, chromebooks (or tablet-dock combos like the ASUS Transformer line) are a great fit.
Title from the article: "Chromebooks on Fire! The Coming Consumer Cloud Revolution."
buy something... Sell it for more than you paid...
You were probably downvoted because your feedback was not given in a polite manner.
>They are the best selling laptops in the U.S., yet no one dares write about their rise.

Or perhaps they're not. If they were, you'd see a big rise in web browsing stats. Amazon doesn't sell all that many laptops, and there are relatively fewer models of Chromebooks.

Take the top 1000 best selling laptops on Amazon, total up the numbers as Chromebooks, Windows and Macs, and I seriously doubt Chromebooks would be selling better even on Amazon. Talk about cherry picking statistics and then say "no one dares to write about their rise". Actually no one with a reputation right dares to write such unresearched garbage.

The writer might as well declare Nexus phones as the best selling phones in the US because they are #1 on the Play Store. I was expecting better from Mossberg and Kara Swisher's Re/code and I am sorely disappointed about the misleading flamebait.
Misleading headline aside, the article's sentiment is on-point. It's where the low end of the market is going, and the use cases are becoming common enough that they make sense for a lot of different kinds of consumers.

I replaced my wife's netbook with a $199 Acer Chromebook about six months ago, and it's simply a better experience. It does less, but it does less well. I'm still way happier with my MBP, but I know that I'm not the target audience.
Thanks for adding the link!

Here's the latest version:
http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...

A part I'm concerned about:
"(d) Any request by a government agency to interrupt communications service utilizing a technological solution required by this section is subject to Section 7908 of the Public Utilities Code."

Skip to 7908 here:
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=puc&gr...

So, this kill-switch may not be 100% controlled by the device owner.

I'd be OK with a required/opt-out kill-switch only if I was the only person that could possibly brick my device with it. (That's a hard problem to make user-friendly and educate people about. A private key I create and store physically/securely somehow?)

Otherwise, I don't really own my device.

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing
"TC is controversial as the hardware is not only secured for its owner, but also secured against its owner."
It's pretty much the very edge of modern synthetic biology. Repurposing biological materials and tools to entirely designed uses. A much more realistic approach to atomic-resolution engineering than shrinking our metallic macro world.
I think people like Jerry Fodor define computation as the manipulation of logical symbols by some algorithm. The idea is that you use a standard functionalist analysis (see someone like Putnam 67) to analyze the inputs(X) and outputs(Y) of a cognitive system. So you have (schematically) something like: X->?->Y. Where the "?" defines the project of cognitive neuroscience (i.e. figuring out the physical instantiation of the manipulation of intercalated proteins & neurotransmitter). So, in this picture cognition is not a "state" that needs to be defined a priori but a "black-box" process that needs to be spelled out empirically. At bottom, stuff is continuous, not discrete.

But too much ink gets spilled over this philosophical issue. It seems much more fruitful to analyze the mind as a Turing machine (contentious) and apply computational complexity theory to define limits on human computation based on the hierarchy-- my two cents.
I do not think that you have too many options. Part time job, develop an app, start a SAAS project, contract work. All of these things are easier to type as an answer to this question than they are to actually do.

If you cannot change jobs now, why don't you add to your skill set over the next year with the view of using these enhanced skills when you can look for a new job?
It's not literacy, it's more like knowing car's engine error codes. Arcane knowledge which is very useful if you're mechanic but would be mostly useless trivia for anybody else. Guessing "example.com/2014/04/18/the-great-quux" is a date-based URL is a nice parlor trick but most sites don't even have this URL scheme or any URL scheme at all. Next to none of the phishing-relevant sites does. No print ad would have URL of any complexity - if it would have anything beyond domain name it'd be a single keyword.
This phenomenon is also visible in Korea, except the way to navigate to popular websites is to search Naver, Daum, or Google with the Korean name of the website and then hit the top link. I found it very strange at first but completely understandable given they typical just know the name of websites via their names translated into Korean letters.

e.g. Facebook -> 페이스북 (페북); Pretty interesting.
That seems to be the result of Github's recent wiki redesign (https://github.com/blog/1828-wikis-now-with-more-love)
I just came across the Book Depository a few weeks ago and tried ordering a couple of books.

On the downside, the books didn't ship for a week and I wasn't told there would be a delay (I just double-checked the order confirmation) or that a delay had arisen; I assumed the books had shipped until they told me a week later that they had just been mailed. When I asked why, they said they were having trouble sourcing them with suppliers. While these aren't best sellers, they are leading books in their field and commonly used in college classes on the subject. Also, shipping from the UK to the US takes a little while.

The upside is that shipping is free and that their mission sounds encouraging: (from their About page: http://www.bookdepository.com/aboutus#helpContent)

"Founded in 2004 to make 'All Books available to All' we focus on selling 'less of more' rather than 'more of less', differentiating ourselves from other retailers who increasingly focus on bestsellers."

"The Long Tail: why are we making as many books available as possible?

Of the 30 million titles ever printed in the English language only a few million of these are in print. We are seeking to make available as many of these titles as possible (and working to do the same with foreign language titles). This way, we will have the largest breadth of titles available in the world. Where books are no longer in print or poorly available we are seeking to make them available again by republishing. We do this through our Dodo Press imprint."
hey why the two points less!! the biochemistry that takes place in our cells is kind of a hack no? So if we invest more in the cannabis investigation maybe we could check why the CDB in the sativa strains helps in the apoptosis process which in turns destroys the bad cells. This is more natural and cheap than a lot of robots inside ourselves. or I'm wrong?
So you're asking where my ignorance came from? Well, I don't know. But I don't think I have any real reason to believe the author. :( Am I self-abased?
Anyway, I like this joke: "Life is hard." (Sorry.)
Be careful with definitions (sets of necessary and sufficient conditions) to any concept... counterexamples lie around the corner.
Why are you speculating when numbers are available?
http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/12/29/chromebook-sales-sur...
No, it just reads as more try-hard-ism. One of the guys interviewed pretty much admitted he tried insulting women to their faces and for some CRAZY reason it didn't make women want to sleep with him (the implication being that he wasn't turned off by the sleaziness of being an asshole to women, just the fact that it didn't result in sex). Women can spot these techniques a mile away and it's always a bummer.
This is the thing - without an external (to ourselves) frame of reference, all actions are equal. Killing someone, or ignoring a beggar on the street, or kissing a friend, are all equal. Whichever gives us pleasure is the best to do.

We can easily argue that we only do that which brings us pleasure with the understanding that acting on our personal morals even against our purely animal bodies gives us a greater or 'higher' pleasure...

I think this is the kind of hedonism being proposed as normal/natural/good by some people here.

I believe that there is a moral code outside of our limited personal experience, and that most of us have some sense of that. Most of us instinctively feel that killing someone is "bad", and helping an old granny across the street is "good".

Not all do, and in a purely hedonistic amoral philosophy, it's right and proper for a psychopathic sadist to hurt others, if that gives them the greatest pleasure. And then it's purely right and proper for society to stop them. But both the sadist and the society are of equal "rightness" in this wordview.

And I reject that. I believe there are moral and immoral actions. And no matter how we feel, or what we believe, there is an absolute "good" and "bad".

There's also an awful lot of gray areas. And most of us are far too judgemental and see things from our own perspective.
That should probably go in the Guidelines if true - it's not there now.
The other difference is that Facebook is unlikely to change who controls "facebook.com/BigBrand". On the other hand, search phrases can be gamed.
I'm pretty sure Kool Keith would not be okay with that.
Many here seem to be interpreting vocabulary size as a signal for quality. When it comes to rap I completely disagree. Firstly, the repetition is rap's main ingredient. I read an article a while ago where researchers found that listening to a spoken phrase that is looped activates the same part of the brain as music, which helps explain this phenomenon.

Personally, if I want food for thought I read. Rap is not an intellectual pursuit. I've been perusing rappers on this list, and the top artists have not been good at all to my ears. It seems that the best rappers are in the middle, and being on either extreme is a negative signal.
Obligatory xkcd.

http://xkcd.com/505/
Chromebooks are great, and for the same money most Windows computers seem bigger, uglier, and worse. That being said, this sort of hype and praise reminds me of netbooks. They were all the rage and they really took off. Now they're almost all completely gone.

Same price point, similar usage patterns. I wonder if it will be a similar outcome.
How about a 2d visualization with a sliding 10000 word window, with the y axis as unique words out of 10k and the x aaxis time. Are there cultural trends that are time dependent? Did young mc and Del use more words than contemporary artists? Did their trends as artists follow the global trend over time?
Good point. A population that effectively decided to die out like the Japanese by definition has no future.
He has a good point .. why is it "Search Google" .. the internet isn't Google, last I checked anyway.
Honestly it isn't that hard to save 7k and make an additional 7k. Do something mundane, like write a craer that assembles vote data on different issues in various municipalities in your state then sell it to a newspaper.
I agree. Hovertruck quoted a piece from the Bower documentation, which I can see the reasoning behind, if you're working on a web application then committing the library removes the possibility that the dependencies cannot be resolved because a library has been removed from the package manager. There are benefits to both options, but my personal preference is to keep third party libraries out of the VCS.
I think it was easier at that time to get a good, pretty complete picture of underlying hardware and software. A kid could do that. Many of us did :-P. It was an incomplete picture, because it was not including, say, algorithms used in BIOS/OS. Or, say physics of the underlying semiconductor technology. But from the engineering standpoint, yes. It was a full picture. Think this way, a complete IBM PC manual was a very readable, pretty thin book which included a complete description of 8086 processor, hardware and APIs (BIOS). And K&R was another pretty thin book, which gave enough to start hacking away and get you pretty close to the point when you could develop code that is genuinely useful to someone! And with that comes an opportunity to start actually selling that genuinely useful software (and hardware).

I think now, it is maybe easier to get started writing something, but it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible to get the complete picture. Many components are designed using technologies that require PhD level understanding - basically being current with modern research in computer science. And that comes with a very heavy baggage of scientific notation and ability to work with research papers. Definitely not approachable by 8-year-olds :-/ And I'm not sure if one just can be a good engineer without having that kind of understanding of underlying technologies. Sorry kids :(
He'd be Kool with it.

http://www.koolkeith.co.uk/personas.html
I get paid ~$150/hour for freelance work I perform on the side of my Big-Corp job. If you sell yourself as high quality you can get paid as high quality.
Why LinkedIn is morphing from a social network into an online newspaper
> They are the best selling laptops in the U.S., yet no one dares write about their rise.

What? There's certainly no lack of "daring". There have been a ton of people making arguments about how Chromebooks must be doing incredibly well, based on the Amazon top sellers list. Or some other tiny slice of the market. None of the articles, including this one, has made a good case for Chromebooks having any significant market share overall.

If they're really selling well, you'd expect either Google or some manufacturer to brag about the numbers. (In the early days of Android, senior Google leadership couldn't go for a month without coming up with new numbers on Android sales). If they're selling well and being actually used, you'd expect people to actually use them for web browsing. It's not like they can do anything else. But nobody is reporting a significant proportion of ChromeOS users. The most recent report I saw had desktop Linux as 10x more used than ChromeOS, and growing as fast in relative terms: http://chitika.com/insights/2014/chrome-os-long-term