skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And the brain knows that. Yet, our evolutionary selection criteria, eh....let's just call it what it is... the desire of people to have sex with you, hasn't caught up yet.

I disagree. There is a tremendous selection pressure going on, constantly.

I always chuckle when I read something by some disaffected 19 yr old whining about how girls don't like him. And what does he do? He talks about going to the gym. Even if that were to work, how likely is he to stand out among all the other thousands doing the same, some of which are almost certain to be more advantaged than he (genetics, whatever) ?

He'd do better to get a good job and start looking responsible. So few do, that even if he isn't perfect at such, he'd succeed just because he's in a seller's market (in that niche, at least).

> There is a reason big breasts and biceps arouse desire when they logically shouldn't.

There is. But I contend that this is because of a psychological defect in the human species: we want what other people want. Why do we want this?

It's advantageous. Let's assume that there is a guy called "Bob". He's not very bright, and while he does have his moments where he figures out something clever, these moments happen on a year-to-year basis, rather than a second-to-second basis (or even hour-to-hour). Figuring out what to want is a difficult intellectual problem, with thousands or millions of factors to consider.

So if Bob tries to figure this out himself, he will have to expend enormous effort to do so. And even then, he might make the wrong conclusion.

He can instead just "want what everyone wants". This takes minimal effort. You observe what seems to be popular, and want that. And even though it requires very little effort, the results are very, very close to as good as those had he expended enormous effort himself.

And so, we want what others want.

In small hunter-gatherer societies, this is very optimal. It almost never backfires. But as societies get bigger, this behavior becomes odd very quickly. We get runaway feedback loops in short order.

This doesn't mean that the behavior is now disadvantageous... in many scenarios, it works as well as it ever did. So the selection pressure to tamp this behavior down is lowered or suppressed completely.

So, if even a few people want something, with the right timing and the right random events, everyone will start wanting it. The novelty can even help, at first.

And everyone else wants it because they thought others did at some point. And as soon as they decided they wanted that thing (gym muscles) they added to the perception of others that this should be desirable. And the more people buy into it, the more extreme the desire becomes... after all, the only way to stand out among all the rest is to be the most X, for whatever X is.

The hilarious part though is how sterile this behavior is. None of the people participating in it are particularly successful from a reproductive point of view. Hell, how would they go to the gym if they had a bunch of brats to take care of?
> So who do you blame, the people who signed up to fight fires (possibly abroad, with good reasons), or the people starting the fires?

What if they're the same people?
The ironic thing about this is that the nature of Bitcoin (specifically, the fact that all transactions are recorded in the blockchain) means that auditing a Bitcoin exchange is an eminently solvable problem. To my mind, given the ease with which Bitcoin wallets can be created, any exchange that commingles its clients' Bitcoins should be viewed with suspicion.

Yes, it's easier to dump everything into a few wallets, instead of maintaining individual wallets for every client. However, if the team behind an exchange isn't capable of dealing with the complexity of individual, segregated wallets, you have to wonder whether they're competent enough to run an exchange in the first place.
I'm not 40 or anything, but I know personally I love fitness. It's great to feel like you've accomplished something and the feeling is great after a stressful day at work. It doesn't have to be about the opposite sex if you don't want it to be.

It's something you can't understand unless you try it.
See "A Quick Summary" on page 8/vi.
I can't find it now, but I remember a brilliant comment on reddit that described the theme of TOS and TNG as being about “what it means to be a hero in a utopian age”.
I took a job as software engineer at a SF-based startup right out of highschool. 2 years in, I make some serious money and now that my "gap years" are over it's been interesting to look at what would happen if I continued working instead of returning to school. I have decided to return to school for the following reasons:

* School will be more "fun" in a lot of ways than work.

* I will meet many more people of the same age and interests at university than I would meet / have met in the "real world".

* As much as work experience is looked for on a résumé, a diploma from a legitimate institution looks better and will help me find work.

It's a tough decision – thinking about $60k/year tuition is like staring up at a figurative Mount Everest of impending debt.
>For example, what if the girls are being killed if they can't be married?

If this were the kind of culture that a person lived in, why not just marry them to save their lives and then not consummate the relationship?

>Are you sure that is usually how the story plays out?

In cultures that allow children to be married to adults, yes, this is usually how it plays out.

Also, I realize there is a possibility that this particular story is fabricated. I just responded to the oft-repeated claim that we should try to be more understanding of pedophiles if and only if they are from a different culture. I can't imagine a circumstance where people should be forgiving to any 36 year-old man that has a sexual relationship with a 12-year old.
All of the Star Trek series of the '90s/'00s overlapped quite a bit (in writers/universe/stories/cast) and some of the later ones fill in some of those missing details.

The Federation has a currency, "Federation credits" -- they discuss a deal priced in credits for control of the Barzan wormhole, and Federation crew use these credits to make purchases at the Ferengi-run bar on Deep Space 9. The Ferengi keep all their wealth in the form of latinum, precisely because it can't be replicated. Presumably the only reason they need these credits is to facilitate trade between species; I don't remember them ever discussing how the crew get the credits.

The replicators' energy comes from the ship's warp engine, the same thing that powers everything else, and from recycled material. They can both convert matter to energy and energy to matter. We know they use the ship's energy because when Voyager is stranded with limited fuel, the first thing the captain does is ration replicator usage by the crew, and pick up a chef to start cooking fresh food instead of replicating meals. The energy source for the engine, in turn, was controlled annihilation of matter (deuterium) and antimatter (anti-deuterium). The ships all had Bussard ramscoops with which to collect deuterium from interstellar space for use as fuel -- that was the red part on the front of the nacelles on the Enterprise D in TNG for example.

In an episode of ST:DS9, they discuss the fact that the Federation does restrict the ability to replicate dangerous objects like weapons without authorization. Trade in weapons is always implied to be heavily regulated.

All that said, most of it is really left to our imaginations. I was hoping Star Trek: Enterprise, the prequel to the rest of the series, would shed some light. Unfortunately it wasted 3/4 of its time on weird time travel plots that could've taken place in any of the series, and only tried to get back to explaining how the Federation came about at the very end... just before being cancelled.
Protogrid – Rapid Application Development in the Browser [6:57]
My destructive habit, and how I'm fixing it
The Diamond Age also predicted Bitcoins to a certain extent. Its a great book.
Add a bit of color and you are close to a late 1980s racing game [1].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jatdv0EszIk
Because it goes against the orthodoxy here. Namely: the USG is a hegemon that exerts a disproportionate and negative influence on the world and is hypocritical in its foreign relations.

Of course, these opinions are maintained by people who never risk their lives, their income, or their social strata to effect change. They don't vote. They don't lobby their representatives. I'm willing to bet that a bunch aren't even American and are simply using this forum to air their opinions on US foreign policy.
Apparently it is not exactly what happened, because the government was threatening to shut them down. Your scenario does not include anything like that.
I always subscribed to the view Starfleet was actually one of those mafias, with most participants deluded into thinking that it was doing good for the universe, when in reality it was as bad as everyone else.
False,I know of a large Australian bank who was looking into S3 late last year.
> Sure and two of the biggest factors in preventing/treating diabetes are exercise and weight maintenance.

60 years ago, your grandfather's generation had no problems with this at all. They didn't go to the gym.

While exercise is a factor, these people have taken the required level of exercise and kicked it up 10,000%.

> Nope. He is performing weight bearing exercise to, not only become better at performing those exercises, but also with the goal of achieving better body composition,

Better in what sense?

Again, you're being tautological.

> mental well being

Huh? The only way it increases his mental well being is that he believes that if he doesn't meet some abstract ideal he'll have failed... an ideal which he chose in the first place.

The hamster doesn't run on the wheel because it thinks that being a fatty is deplorable, but because it's become mentally ill trapped in its cage.

> You've established that you don't value longevity

My maternal grandfather weighs 300 pounds. He turns 81 this year.

How much longevity would it buy me? Any number of years (realistically more like months) that I'd get will be at the end of my life, when it matters little.

> and quality of life,

My life's quality is already pretty high. What is it that I'm missing? Being able to hike up a mountain?
Err, doesn't a hosted solution reduce capex and increase opex?
I adore the common double standard, wherein making a statement like "I accept your concession" when both parties know that wasn't the intent is considered OK, but calling out that behavior is not.
Driving demand for full stack developers
Air quote "hacking" but yes.

I've commented on this in the past, but I saw a bitcoin miner in a supposed SimCity torrent over a year ago, so this is nothing new.
I had the impression that Google penalizes websites for giving its crawler substantially different information than a visitor would receive, and that it has done so for quite some time. I wonder why Quora is not penalized in to irrelevance.
Sony's PlayStation business officially enters China
I think the best explanation to this is akin to the explanation they had for the transporter (with it's "Heisenberg compensator"): they simply didn't know. They couldn't explain it, and they didn't want to throw out some bullshit detailed explanation -- they just asked "what if this was a thing?". Now since it's a thing, I don't think you would expect people to routinely exploit it (that would have been figured out by then), although that might have been interesting.

Someday one author came about and proposed that they simply have no money. Instead of saying "Well that couldn't work!", they just went with it, leaving interesting voids to be filled.

Altogether, I agree there are so many things left unexplored, but they could only do so much with the limited time and while actually telling a compelling story. Remember, this is a TV show, it's meant to draw emotions, be compelling, and tell political stories about people.
"As a conscientious objector I've done plenty of thinking on the subject."

e.g. COWARD.

You abhor violence, eh? That's rich.
>I keep wondering when the powers that be at HN will finally remove the Scribd autolinks

YC owns part of Scribd. (Scribd took part in YC S06.)
They rather prove the point about conflict being necessary for narrative though. The Culture is a genuine utopia - so most of the pagecount is spent not on the Culture or its ordinary citizens, but on its boundaries, its neighbours, or the Contact specialists that are supposedly a miniscule fraction of the population.

(I still greatly enjoyed them, mind. To anyone looking for similar stories I'd recommend Neal Asher's works, particularly Hilldiggers)
Thanks for the feedback! We fixed the issue. You can now use hyphen or space in your name. Please try it again at www.nvest.me. If there's any other issue, please let me know! Thanks.
Yes, I have just moved from iOS to Android in the last few weeks, and I was thinking about giving up and moving back until I found this keyboard. I'm glad it was helpful! Best two dollars I've spent recently.
Topics appropriate to HN include anything that gets enough votes to make the front page. That's it. If you want a purely objective, mathematically computable definition of "intellectually interesting," I wish you good luck in finding it, and I'm sure a lot of people will be very interested if you can manage it.

Phpnode is right: most of your posts seem to be complaining about what other people post. You're clearly getting very little value out of HN, so why are you still reading HN instead of a site that suits you better?
US Air Force Vet Goes From Inmate to Entrepreneur
Hi. You appear to be too smart for your own good. "git diff A..B" is synonymous with "git diff A B" (i.e. just compare the two points in the tree without regard to their history). "git diff A...B" is equivalent to "git diff $(git-merge-base A B) B" (i.e. ... does what you think .. does). The manpage is very clear about this.
Yeah, that's a great idea if you can.

I was pulling data from a medical system that I knew full well I would not be able to get changes into for YEARS (and I got to meet the vendor, who was working on a shiny new XML export system - I wonder if that has quoting issues too - it wasn't released by the time I finished working the project)

So I wound up writing perl that knew enough to fix all the common problems with the source data, and emailed me any odd lines it couldn't cope with, so I could go in and update the regular expressions. It kinda sucked, but the end result was better antibiotic coverage for a bunch of people. Worst case of a line it really couldn't handle was that person didn't get the benefit of an expert system checking that they didn't have doubled-up medicines, which is no worse than they would have had without this system.
If your body is healthy, you're going to avoid that nursing home. My father was in such a home in his seventies, yet family friends of the same age who stayed active and fit were going on kayaking vacations around the world. If you disagree that someone who keeps their body in great shape is going to be healthier than someone whose body is out of shape, then I suspect you're either trolling or you're not old enough to recognize the ill-effects of a sedentary lifestyle.

Also, the article calls it a craze but what, objectively, is a craze? Google tells me it's a widespread but short-lived activity; a fad. This is certainly true of specific fitness programs, but the general desire for people to not be out of shape is anything but short-lived.
Set your cookies settings to not block but delete on exit all cookies from NYT.
Yea, exactly. I'm not suggesting you do it to be cheap and to save money. In fact I'm pretty sure most girls could think of something to do with the couple of grand you save, so why spend it on making people unhappy.
You're 17; get to work understanding it! The more you learn now, the more you'll be able to do for the rest of your life. Plus, diving into random topics and understanding them more deeply than anyone else is a ton of fun.
Is this legal after the can spam act??
Scammed unless he knows this and just wanted the machine fixed to at least recover everything
You've never seen the show have you?
I don't fully get Bunnie's point. I got my 3gs' screen replaced for £30 here in the UK (over the post though)
It isn't that any particular file is difficult but that the variations that you haven't even thought about might catch you out. It is the deceptive simplicity of the samples that you have at hand that may catch out your code when it hits a different (also simple but different) example in the field.
[I'm not an accountant]

I think spydum's comment refers to the difference in the effect on the balance sheet. If you outright buy servers, you incur a capital investment in a fixed asset, which increases your balance sheet but doesn't hurt your EBITA. If you instead contract out to a 3rd party cloud provider, you incur an OPEX-- which shows up on your income statement and lowers your EBITA.

I'm not sure how investors favour this difference, but I do know that airline companies love to move aircraft purchases off their balance sheet, probably for cash flow reasons. They do this by leasing a/c instead of outright purchases.

You've now gotten me curious as to why firms behave different when it comes to buying aircraft vs servers.
Spoken like a true narcissist.

The only correct viewpoint is the one you hold.
The only just use of violence is one you approve.
The only moral code is your moral code.

I suppose that the good news here is you'll never fight for your beliefs, so we don't have to worry about you at all.
Then your reading comprehension is probably lacking. You do realize that the article is a strong defence of classical barbell excercises?
Ok, as a true coward befits I'll bow out of the discussion here. Thanks for playing. By your definition, that means you win.
Purchasing hardware is generally put in the 'capital expenditure' bucket, as far as I know.

Paying someone to rack it, sure.
Its a flippin' CSV.

Of course you can come up with scenarios where it doesn't work, but anyone who considers themselves to be a competent programmer should be able to deal with these issues, use another data format, or just talk to whomever is giving you the data to correct their data issues.

Seriously, The overhwleming CSV_bashing in these comment really makes me worry that coders just can't handle the basics anymore.
"I contend that this is because of a psychological defect in the human species"

Oh, I don't disagree with you. We seem to have no shortage of psychological defects as a species. 100,000 years of evolution and we are still selecting for big breasts and dominating non-cooperative personalities. Fortunately most of our "selection" doesn't actually result in procreation anymore.

Now, about all those "increase your penis size" ads in my spam folder....
Deadlift of 507lbs raw (no belt, just chalk) here, been training for 4+ years.

When I started, I lucked out when I started training and got a trainer who started me on light squats and barbell bench. Then after a while I made friends with the strongest guys in the gym who have been training for 15+ years.

I dont think you need to find a hulking trainer - my advice would be to find a trainer who has been training for a long time. By that stage they have realised that slow, steady, consistent progress is much more important than just quickly posting huge numbers. They are much more likely to know the benefits of maintaining good form because they will have suffered, and recovered from, injuries.

P.s. I know a trainer who can DL over 500lbs - though he trains mostly women, he does get them deadlifting. They dont do anything like SS because they have different goals.
Thankfully from what I have seen sqlite is maintained with that old-school style of library development, the one you scarcely see these days, and don't hear much about on HN: the one where "thou shalt not break existing code" has some weight. I'd be nervous about depending on a library where the whim of the developer thinking "I find this sad" breaks my program.

sqlite4 OTOH seems to be the "let's break things" phase. Probably healthy to have both attitudes at certain stages.
That's not strictly true.

Go read "Inside the Red Circle". The author is a friend of mine.
It's not 1996 any more- people have higher standards about hires.
It doesn't have to be the subject or author of the article. Someone unusually close to or knowledgeable about a story (compared to the rest of us in the thread) also counts.

Perhaps I'm naive, but I give jameswburke the benefit of the doubt, and think the thread is much better with his contribution at the top. (The top comment otherwise would be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7796987.)

You're right that the story is personal in a very messy and unpleasant way. It also seems obvious that it has historical and cultural significance. On the other hand, the thread (sadly) isn't exploring that, so we're going to demote it.
The Secret of Deliberate Creation
Segregated wallets doesn't work, that would mean every single trade would be a transaction on the block chain. It would absolutely flood the network and result in massive fees. It literally can't be done that way.
> Any 36 year-old man ... that finds it acceptable to marry a 9-12 year old and then start raping her when she's 13 is a piece of shit

I would assume she fully expected to have sex with her husband, 13 years old or not. To suggest this was rape, against her will, is a bit preposterous and an incorrect usage of the word. At the same time I find it reprehensible that a 36 year old American, whose culture says underage is below 18, would get involved with what we'd consider a child.
Many credit hours can be gained at a community college at lower cost, then transferred. The "brand" of your degree will be with the final institution. You have to be very careful about credit hours transferring.

This is probably not without risk but saving up to two years' debt @ $60k per year is pretty good motivation.
See the documentary and judge for yourself.
A great book on this subject is The Law of Armed Conflict and International Humanitarian Law in War by Gary Solis (related to nrsolis?) I think it's currently used as a textbook at West Point and other places. I have a copy here. Solis is a clear advocate for rules of conduct in war and for the punishment of those who break those rules but he also does not shy away from pointing out the frequent cases when, as you note, guilty soldiers on the winning side escape punishment. E.g., here is a quote from the book concerning the trial of Ernest Medina, implicated in the My Lai massacre:

The prosecution urged that Medina knew, or should have known, of the massacre, but, in addition to inciting it, he took no action either to stop it or to subsequently bring to justice those who committed crimes. “Even if he did not personally commit any crimes in My Lai, Medina clearly failed to maintain control over men under his command who were committing scores of them.”42 Despite apparently meeting the von Leeb–List standard – knew or should have known – and, for that matter, the Yamashita standard – must have known – Medina was acquitted.43 One civilian nonlawyer who viewed the trial found the case poorly prosecuted.44 Another calls it “a striking example of the extent to which a domestic . . . tribunal will devise a restricted formulation of the superior responsibility doctrine in order to avoid the prosecution of its own nationals.”45 But that ascribes a sinister motive to the court-martial that did not exist. (p.422)

http://www.amazon.com/The-Law-Armed-Conflict-International/d...

I hope this information is helpful.
Cool. Will check out. I'm surprised he doesn't get more of the unsung hero fanfare usually reserved for people like Tesla.