skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I agree with this article, but think that by singling out social sciences it fails to reveal the bigger picture: that all scientific fields are subject to these same mistakes.

I actually prefer them writing about a single (or a group of related) field(s) of study. There have been lots of articles asserting that all of science has these issues, but it's not clear to me that they all suffer to the same degree. For example, It's not clear to me that physics or astronomy suffer as from this type of behavior. I'm sure it does happen, but it doesn't seem to be as pervasive as in the social sciences and medicine. For social sciences it seems like it is happening often enough that it's affecting the trajectory of the field. To my knowlege, this isn't the case for most of physics and astronomy (for example).

Also, a lot (but not all) of the "mistakes" noted in the article were deliberate fabrications or unethical tampering of data. So I think labeling them as "mistakes" risks being too forgiving.
I doubt it. I'm not a historian, but my sense is that absent the death camps and and silly wonder weapons, Germany would have been perhaps 10% or 20% more effective -- not 100% more effective. Stalingrad would probably have wrapped up a bit more quickly -- but Moscow, London, and points beyond would all have become the new Stalingrads. Which would not have been a happier outcome, on the whole.

[Edit]: Also, it's not entirely clear who would've been the "bad guys" in this alternate-history. The German death camps were certainly the evilest single element of the war -- but the Allied policy of mass-firebombing civilian population centres was arguably the second evilest element of the war, and the Russians were very nearly as nasty as the Nazis to whomever they occupied. Absent the death camps, the moral clarity of that war would have become significantly muddier -- although Germany would certainly still have been the aggressor.
The other six: VR hardware projects funded on KickStarter
There was a rumor on Secret a few days ago that they were pulling the IPO and getting required.[1]

[1] https://www.secret.ly/p/szlqfbqewvwevconzlbngtuzkt
My main response is that there's no "right" way to do TDD. There is a core definition, which is the red/green/refactor loop. New tests must fail; all tests must be green to refactor. Almost everything else is someone's interpretation. And, honestly, after enough time doing it you'll start taking careful shortcuts through the loop. (Am I allowed to say that in public? ;)

Pairing in person with someone who's done it for a long time can help a lot, but even then you're getting someone's interpretation. If you worked with the DHH of three years ago, you'd get a very different interpretation (slower cycles, integration tests, no isolation) than if you worked with me (faster cycles, integration/unit mix, biased toward isolated unit tests). We were both doing TDD, though! (Given that he's said that he used to do TDD, I assume that he was following the core red/green/refactor loop.)
Out of curiosity, which location was this for Schlumberger?
History does repeat itself, all this means is that US hight tech weapons and hardware will be useless against cheap Chinese missiles dime a dozen.
The price of restoring from old backup could be steep: some data loss. Or at least time consuming manual data merge with data from more recent, but compromised database.

It might be easier to check database for common vulnerabilities (admin accounts, suspicious content for web pages).
I take some deal of comfort knowing that an evil and criminal regime was also stupid and irrational. It is kind of like that bank robber that hands in the note to the clerk and the note is a his bank receipt with his address on the bank.

It is good that they sent rocket scientists to die in the infantry. Good that they spent resources building that stupid tank. Good that they didn't take too much interest in the nuclear bomb.
I think by definition it is a currency if it succeeds as a remittance mechanism - because you can really only send BTC using the bitcoin network, it can't track USD values directly (as a network.) Using the Western Union network you can literally "send dollars" (or euros or pounds) but the same isn't true of bitcoin. It's a remittance network tied to a currency, and that currency is bitcoin.

In this sense its use as a remittance network implies its success as a currency.

For this reason, I had no idea this is what you meant - I thought you meant it can succeed as an investment, without succeeding as a currency.
I know I was doing it badly, but I was asking for feedback on how to start talking about solutions instead of just bitching about the problem. These are real solutions, accessible to anyone who reads. But I don't know how to talk about it. Years of ugly attacks and dismissive remarks have left me at a loss as to where to begin. And I am just very tired today. But there are three articles about antibiotic resistance on the front page right now. I know this is a real problem and I know there are real solutions. Yet no one will engage me in those discussions in a meaningful way that helps me move forward.

I will get well and I will be fine. But other people are dying. It seems a shame that it is essentially impossible to share what I know. For me, that's a huge headfuck.

Anyway, I am logging off the day. Take care.
I get the sense that most of the article was to highlight the point you just made. That is, while cyclists with helmets may be safer, so are drivers with helmets, etc., so if the argument for cycling helmets is only "you'll be safer", without relative risk information, then it isn't that strong an argument.

That said, you are correct. A counter-argument based on that logic must include relative risk information, which wasn't given. I followed several of the links under "How bike helmets may be harmful". The author did not characterize some of them correctly.

For example, "Three separate studies have shown that bike helmets may increase the probability of certain types of neck injuries." links to a meta-data study that attempts to draw a conclusion using both positive and negative studies. It's wrong to pull out only the negative studies as any sort of evidence, especially when the abstract concludes "...but this result may not be applicable to the lighter helmets currently in use. In conclusion, the evidence is clear that bicycle helmets prevent serious injury and even death. Despite this, the use of helmets is sub-optimal. Helmet use for all riders should be further encouraged to the extent that it is uniformly accepted and analogous to the use of seat belts by motor vehicle occupants."

I also dislike the number of citations to news sources, rather than the primary literature. The University of Bath study links to a press release, and others links to the New York Times.

I conclude that this is not an essay I would point people to in order to convince them that the necessity of bicycle helmet use is exaggerated.

I've dug into the literature myself before. It's murky. That is, while there's clear evidence that helmet use can reduce some types of injuries, the incidence of those injuries are low, and one proposed solution - mandatory helmet use - has its own negative effects. I think an anti-mandatory bicycle helmet essay could leave it at that.
I have a feeling that the social context for veganism is extremely different, in a way that can be difficult to imagine, across different social groups (different cities, age cohorts, ethnic groups, social classes, religious backgrounds, etc.).

Most of my friends are well-educated secular urban middle-class 30-year-olds who are somewhat left-wing by U.S. standards. Most of them know dozens of vegetarians and at least several vegans. On average, they seem to view my veganism somewhere on a spectrum from "mildly eccentric" to "extremely admirable".

When I go to other countries, I'm more likely to meet people who are surprised that I'm vegan. Some of them say that they didn't know that that was possible (!) or that they have never met a vegan in person before.

I have also met some vegetarians and vegans, mostly from immigrant families, who said that they had to hide their dietary practices from their families because their families would be so upset about it. (When I went vegetarian 26 years ago, my grandmother expressed a fair amount of concern for my health, although she'd at least met other vegetarians before.)

I think it's easy to generalize from our experience about how other people "normally" react to particular dietary practices, but our experiences with people's reactions (positive, negative, confused, hostile, indifferent, curious) may be a narrow local view.

One time I had a discussion in Latin with a Catholic priest who worked at the Vatican. (I don't speak Italian and he doesn't speak English, so Latin was our best common language.) When he learned that I didn't eat animals, he cited Genesis 9:3 as a reason that vegetarianism was faintly ridiculous. It took me a minute or two to understand that he was absolutely, completely serious.
Django did update their auth app, it's very flexible now
Statemachines are an excellent way to get deterministic behavior of complex systems. Doing this using co-routines would be a lot harder, if it can be done at all once you reach a certain level of complexity.

I've tried to do something very similar to this in a library I wrote two years ago, in the end we reverted back to state machines because they were so much easier to tame. They're boring, but sometimes boring is good.
$10 for upload? Pricing is $0.050 per UPLOAD request plus $0.000 per byte. That means that your backup system made 200,000 UPLOAD requests. I don't think I have that many files which I want to back up, and I would hope that any system using Glacier as a back-end would bundle smaller files into larger archives.

(Well, I guess it means that your request size averaged 1 MB. If I'm already using Glacier, I would be perfectly happy with archive granularity coarser than 1 MB.)
> TDD advocates keep telling me I am not professional

Well it's nice that they hold the keys to the kingdom ;) ! In your darkest hours, remember this powerful mantra: "There is no silver bullet", and proceed to systematically take down glib generalizations.
Well, there is an inbetween - pseudonymous pretty much allows you to have your cake and eat it too. It's a little bit ingenuous that people are pretending the only options are to use your real identity (aka real Facebook account) or be completely anonymous.
Didn't everyone trust Facebook to begin with. That's how the world works. You have to trust people to begin trusting them (or an organization) - else you're going to be paranoid of the world and become sick. Facebook has violated that trust multiple times.
don't understand. I pasted some text. Then pressed play. A couple of words were highlighted (out of 20ish) before the remaining darkened text flew off the page.
The author mentions "Type XII" U-boats several times...this should actually be Type VII.
You mean to say, granting more wide recognition for the collection itself, rather than the analysis stemming from collection?

Possibly, I don't know. Mostly this is just my understanding from talking to peers in the social sciences and asking why they don't have open access like my field.

I think the problem there though, is knowing what questions to ask (what data to collect) is the hardest part, but fits much more in line with the analysis aspect (ie forming a hypothesis) than collection (conducting a designed experiment). So an ideal researcher would show good work in both areas, not just one.
The text I was reading scrolled off the top of the page as I was reading it. Also, I found the scrolling kind of distracting. Though perhaps it's not meant to scroll so fast at all?

Edit: This was on the latest Chrome, on MacOS10.9.2 btw.
I can't.

There are accidents where even seconds matter and the effects of the jamming can mean the difference between life and death or even simply a shift in the a victim's odds. Or consider emergency services whose radios were affected: maybe paramedics were radioing in status updates to a hospital, or perhaps police officers were in the middle of receiving an Amber alert. Or, imagine that he's injured in an accident himself. He, and anyone else potentially injured in such an accident, are potentially at risk because people can't notify 911. If he's lucky, he's able to turn it off. If he's unlucky, and is incapacitated or otherwise unable to turn it off, well, that's quite the problem now, isn't it?

I hate dreaming up hypotheticals, but this story practically demands it. His actions were no less selfish than someone else's texting while driving.
Omnilinks, AppLinks and the State of Mobile Deeplinking
USPS used its coercive monopoly power to squash the digital mail startup Outbox
Are you sure that's in the source for the blog post? Because I don't actually see it in there, I searched for "so this guy" and "interviewed" too.
Ask HN: How did you get started with programming?
I got started because I always wanted to make games. I was just wondering how other people got started.
I think that's the entire point of the article. The premise is that designers have been given a seat at the table because of the perception that they have some advanced insight into producing products with market fit and betting on them is more likely to produce a successful product. The author uses these three apps, a sample of design driven products, to show that lauded designers have no better insight than anybody else. Maybe they're only better at making things shiny, not creating valuable products.
The format solves the problem of wanting to reread a previous sentence.

One of the main problem with speed readers is it can't handle user pauses. I may want to ponder on a point but speed readers can't pause. May be a eye tracking system can help but then how do you handle someone wanting to reread a passage. Maybe some other gestures are needed or go the KB/mouse/swipe interaction way.

The problem with your format is also that it takes space while spreeder app displays only a single word but has the problems I mentioned above.
It's a social app for people who vacation on cruises. You can create a profile, store cruises you've been on or are going on in the future, communicate with fellow cruisers, submit pics, reviews, etc. All of it is done through Parse. We also utilize Parse's Cloud Code to send data to the parent company's web site. I'm sure we're not using Parse to its full potential but we're a small group right now.
I don't think there is a known material that wouldn't be damaged by gamma rays but it's a statistical process and we just don't have that many gamma rays on our surface.
No paywall:
http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303...
Thank you for your response. I intend to use Python because I'm more familiar with object-oriented style, and already have learned more about Python than Clojure. So I assume I'll be able to build things faster with Python.

I was asking HN if anyone could see any future problems that were not obvious to me. I understand the project will change and adapt to improve, but I prefer to avoid wasting time converting to fancy languages or throwing money at the problem.
Woman-on-woman bullying is a big issue in the tech community. My closest friend at company I work at now is a female developer and she is constantly being bullied by the women on our design team. A lot of women who work in tech are threatened by female developers, especially when they are straight and attractive.

If you guys want to frame this issue in terms of gender that's what you should be talking about.
NASA – High Definition Earth Viewing
This rings true for me. I studied product design in school, in a program run by IDEO. David Kelley was my advisor. Yet, working in the web world, I don't call myself a "designer". Why? Because I'm not focused on the visual.

The training we received is still the core of how I think about everything. It was all about needfinding, methods for exploring the problem and solution space, iterating with low cost mediums and moving to higher cost only as needed for more information or production, things like that. Things that relate to human needs, understanding them, and seeing how the things you make relate to them.

Visual design was a minor part of the curriculum, we had a few art requirements. But it wasn't the core.

It is sad that design means visual perfection and smooth animations. Design is really about uncovering novel ways to improve people's lives, and doing so in the simplest way possible. It doesn't necessarily even relate to interfaces.
Very well-written, and interesting. I learned a lot about how haskell type classes are implemented through this paper: http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~mpj/pubs/pldi93.html

I've been working on a language which attempts to put type classes into a dynamic language. The implementation is a little interesting, because as I've tinkered with it, I've discovered essentially two cases of overloaded functions:

* Ones where you can choose which implementation to use based on argument type. Similar to interfaces in Java, Go, etc, and multiple-dispatch languages. Also (I think) Rust only allows traits of this kind, but that might not be correct.

* Ones where you choose the implementation based on the return type. This is mostly (from what I can tell) unique to Haskell and similar languages. It's what lets you write `return :: a -> m a` and be able to write `foo = return 3` and have `foo` work in any monad.

Both of these approaches have their advantages and use cases. Haskell's system is nice because it allows for both, but because of how things are implemented, there's no introspection, so for example, a list "objects that implement Show" isn't feasible, because there's no way to inspect an object at runtime to determine its type. Or this is my understanding anyway.

In my language, I treat each case differently, and can generate appropriate generic functions by inferring from the declared type signature(s) in the type class which case they fall into. Subsequently, its possible to mimic both behaviors in a dynamic setting. The only limitation (which I might be able to avoid) is that using the second type requires an explicit cast; as in you can say `foo = pure 2; bar = foo : [Num]; baz = foo : Just Num`. Of course, introspection has a performance penalty as well.

Just thought some might find this interesting :)
Agree!

You don't need to bother with old-school stuff like grsec, iptables, IDS, chrooted applications or any stack-protection technologies.

Get a WAF, audit your web-app source-code and use a pen-test tool regularly instead.

SQL-injections walk right in, through the front door. They stuff their pockets full of data and then leave the same way they came, unnoticed most of the time.
This is the big question. I assume it is telling Facebook and NOT the app developer, so basically it's all win for Facebook and all loss for the developer who implements it (other than attracting the few extra users who care so much about their privacy that they won't divulge their Facebook data).

I'm curious what happens to functions inside the app that need identity. Do they work as normal but the app developer can't see the information? Or does everything the user does prompt for a login, so the app developer can be pretty assured that nobody will go for any length of time using the app before they give up and log in?
If parent commenter already wants to require tethering your phone and your car in order to disable the phone, I have little doubt they're okay with what they would likely describe as a small inconvenience to save lives.
I didn't know that, I just unflagged the submission.
What kind of customization were you trying to do in Django that you couldn't? I know you can one-to-one models that extend the backend, you can customize the backend, chose custom templates for the login forms, create your own forms, etc. And the docs seem to indicate this was possible since 1.5: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.5/topics/auth/customizin...
Satellite Radio
At first I found the text scrolling to be distracting, so I turned it off. Then I tried turing on text masking. Frankly the whole process seems to be distracting because that did not help either. Unhiding the text just causes my eyes to jump around rather then focus on the text i'm reading.
I'm sure if you're well-versed in the issues surrounding revocation the discussion makes a great deal of sense.

I think you've summarized the traditional appeal of Hacker News: items for experts, written by experts, discussed by experts. Even if it's not a field that I understand (what better way to learn?) I'm always glad to see these articles on the front page, for it means the real HN is still alive, deep within.
I hear "separate but equal" was all the rage back in the 50's and 60's... I wonder how that turned out.
In the examples (Carousel & Paper) the design isn't coming from the very top. Instead, I suspect the designers were given requirements by non-designer PMs and told to make it look nice. It works about as well as programmers being given requirements by non-programmer PMs and told to make it maintainable.

I still don't know how much of that dysfunction is because creative people can't do their best work without freedom, and how much is because the briefs/specs are bad because they were made without deep understanding.

The ideal consumer software company has a great designer, a great programmer, and a great instigator at the top.
Ask HN: Anyone using DigitalOcean for production?
Hi HN,

I want to move the production server for a site I work on to DigitalOcean's NYC2 data center because Linode's Newark, NJ data center has been having a bunch of network issues. Is anyone here using DO for their production servers? I'm concerned about reliability since they've been growing so quickly.

Thanks!

Kevin
I've used the Rosetta Stone program for learning new languages and it's really cool. The software uses images, text, sound, and video to teach words and grammar by spaced repetition, without translation. It is used by the United States Army to help troops deploying to the Middle East learn the Arabic language for conversations and phrases important in a military situation. It was available to all US Army personnel, US Military Academy cadets, contracted US Army ROTC Cadets and other special guests with a sponsor.
Try: https://www.rosettastone.com/‎
Good thing Secret's a reliable source of info.
Feminism for Them?
Ah, this is a bug I thought I had fixed. (I don't have the resources to test on Safari unfortunately.)
The text is supposed to remain almost stagnant on the page while the text scrolls to keep it in place.
If you disable automatic scrolling it can function normally though.
If design is about "uncovering novel ways to improve people's lives", then the biggest leaps tend to come from technology/software-driven solutions (vs aesthetics)?
If you must go down that road, I'd suggest pulling the content off the compromised site and copying it manually and very carefully to the recovered site. You can never really be sure you got rid of everything otherwise.
Some people are vegans for health reasons, based on books like The China Study. Others just think we don't treat our egg layers and dairy cows very well. (I'm not a vegan, and don't want to get into a debate over whether they're correct. I'm just saying they have their reasons.)
Polio? Maybe not yet, but "vaccine resistance" isn't the same thing as antibacterial resistance. Antibiotic resistance is generally created through contact with the antibiotic but stuff like polio, measles, mumps, and rubella just need an unvaccinated host coming into contact with vaccinated people long enough. Once the unvaccinated host's disease mutates enough (and it never stops mutating), it will start jumping to vaccinated hosts whose immune systems no longer recognize the threat as one it has prepared for by the vaccine [1][2].

[1] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa060775

[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X02...