skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Despite writing at the turn of the last century, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cosmicism is something with which no major narrative of humanity’s journey through the stars has dealt.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep tackled this very subject decades ago, and with far greater poise than Mass Effect did. (And I say this as a fan of the series.)

I suspect the author's reference pools are not as deep as they should be, and I say this because a lot of the topics that the author claims ME to be the first to address have in fact been bandied about in science fiction for a long time. Mass Effect is great in lots of ways; it brings together a lot of plot points and concepts from other series and synthesizes them together into a decently coherent whole. But the series is far from original thematically. (minor spoilers) In particular, the third game tries to address the idea of transhumanism in a way reminiscent of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, another game which came out a year before, but does it in a particularly cack-handed way. Even the ending choice in ME3 is thematically similar to the one from the earlier game.
The point is to have a caloric surplus. Because then you can guarantee maximum recovery.
> For example, a new user coming to emacs can't search for help on C-x C-f by invoking C-h C-x C-f

That's true. It's C-h k C-x C-f. :)
Strange Loop 2014 Sessions
As someone who works in development for a university, I am sure they don't. University endowments are all about good returns so no way.
I could see this. I am somebody who has never drank, never done any form of drug or anything like that. Completely straight and narrow. I assume most people don't trust me.
How I shot up my Quora credits with a little trick
A mature discipline means highly experienced experts. And the thing about experts: they can tell you what can already be done, and tend to reject anything different than what can already be done.

It's a well-known caveat. Experts would rather focus on the flaws of the alternatives in order to "disprove" their viability, rather than try & find solutions for said flaws.

This solar panel technology may not have all the benefits of traditional roads, but it has benefits which traditional roads don't. It's not possible to really know which set of pros/cons is better for us today, before the technology is tested and iterated upon, to weed out the inevitable issues that will pop up.

Any new technology in the history of humanity has failed the "thought exercise" experiments of those deemed experts at the time. Cars, computers, airplanes, heck, even computer mice were called "impossible" at some point.
This won't work. Yahoo credentials are stored for later use as "XYMCOOKIE" which is some kind of hashed authentication mechanism for SMTP and IMAP. And yes, I tried. I also attempted to monitor SSL communications through SMTP and saw the XYMCOOKIE exchange firsthand. This sucks :-/
If you remove thermal cutoff you will:

a/ burn the heater

b/ melt whole thing

c/ burn your house

a combination of those things.
Agile Methodologies- alternatives to traditional project management
Engineering consensus. The math doesn't pass the smell test, not without some incredible materials breakthroughs.
"The reason is this: Mass Effect is the first blockbuster franchise in the postmodern era to directly confront a godless, meaningless universe indifferent to humanity."

Really? That seems like a bold claim. The story of insignificant humans who ultimately are controlled by eternal, hyper-advanced species, seems a repeated theme. I actually found that aspect of Mass Effect rather boring (this again?) Both 2001 and Babylon-5 featured completely alien cultures and insignificant humans, who were unwittingly guided to evolve the way the god-like races wanted.

A few years ago (2007-ish) I wrote up a space-game design that was like a combination of Minecraft and Elite in space. The main (hidden, exposed in glimpses) plotine was that the universe was actually being run by a vast, very old species called The Alphas, who actually had no interest in other species at all, but were committing mass genocides, based on a Frank Tipler's _Omega Point_ concept (which was the title of the game, OmegaPoint). The Alphas were doing Kardashev scale Type-V galactic engineering, moving stars, blackholes, and interstellar dust clouds around to permute the geometry of space so as to control the collapse of the Universe in order to extract infinite energy and computation from it.

In game, they would have ships the size of planets, which would disassemble and surround stars, creating photon rockets to move them over eons. Think of how in 2010, the monoliths overtook Jupiter. The younger races would try to stop them, but would be ineffectual in the face of self-replicating Von Neunmann probes.

Only by races banding together, and allying with the second oldest race in the Universe (the Gammas), could they hope to take down Alpha Ships.

But the gist of it is, the older race doesn't give a shit and has no goal with respect to other species. They see you as nothing more than bacteria or ants, and are only interested in manipulating stars, whether or not your have a civilization dependent on that star.

But God-like races who want to control evolution, or play "Order vs Chaos" games seem quite common in SF.
Given how much some urban planners have denounced parking lots as being detrimental to cities, I wonder if there is potential for legislation to mandate that any new lot larger than a certain size must be equipped with some corresponding acreage of roof-mounted panels. It might force developers to think more carefully about building lots and mitigate the environmental impact of those that do get built. (Although, given the controversy that erupted when incandescent bulbs were banned, I don't see this proposal as being politically palatable.)
I get the feeling this is something that may evolve language by language. Maybe a Meta site?

BTW There is "The Ruby Toolbox" site which does this (I think pretty well) for Ruby (and of course Rails)

For example Rails Authorization
https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/rails_authorization
You can try to submit it on Stack Overflow and hope the deletionist don't notice it.

You can look through past Stack Overflow answers when moderation was better.
I spent some time reading through that list and it just depressed me even more about the current direction of Wikipedia.

Other than the reasonable deletion of two promotional articles for books ( 'Formation of Postcolonial Englishes: Theories' and 'Secret Fantasies' ) that list consists of people arguing about 'notability'.

That is begging the question, since notability is what Wikipedia defines and which is the core problem. What the outside World is saying is: remove the notability test. It has become so abused by the administators that they should forfeit it; they are not responsible enought to be trusted with it.

~~

Here's an example of one that was deleted for 'non-notability':

Former minor league baseball announcer. Has not received any well-known award or honor nor has he made any widely recognized contribution to broadcasting.

Which just illustrates how amorphous this 'notability' concept has become; it can be redefined at will to sataisfy any argument. So that individual was notable, but not notable enough on a global scale? Might as well rename 'notability' to 'is as famous as Tom Cruise' in that case.

~~

Here's another one, this individual had references in media but subjectively someone felt that wasn't good enough:

The Plymouth article goes a bit deeper but its more of the "local boy living the dream" variety which isnt enough to satisfy GNG.

There should be no opportunity for subjectivity. Was the individual referenced by independent media articles? Yes? Good enough.
If there's not a very specific context for "Chinese", then it means Mandarin (this is true in Chinese itself: you can refer to Mandarin by its official name 普通话 putonghua, "common speech", but the most common term is 中文 zhongwen "chinese", the language of 中国 zhongguo "china").

Saying Chinese is more of the language and Mandarin the dialect is somewhat akin to calling European the language (lest you think that ridiculous, note that this precise phenomenon occurs in Africa, where european languages are often referred to generically as white-ese[1]), and Greek the dialect.

[1] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20
How is someone who builds software to sell digital goods any different? They deliberately put a border in between the user and the content (music, ebooks, software, etc.) I don't see many people complaining about that.
Hacker Group Lashes Out Against Informant
A nice, cogent explanation.

It's good to remember the ANN's input offset comes as vector data. The ANN isn't directly transforming those vectors directly, rather it is transforms these input to a higher dimensional "feature" space and performs the linear transform. If you take the separating plane that's drawn in the feature space and reverse the map, you'll the ANN has drawn complex surface between the points it want to recognize and those it rejects.

So it's basically a heuristic and no more intelligent than Taylor's series.
I could hardly contrast the operations of a NN to those of the human mind because we most definitely don't understand the later. I have already described apparent properties of human minds that NN and SVN definitely don't have. But I'll repeat and expand:

The artificially constructed intelligence works whether or not we understand how

The operation of human intelligence is very dependent on the fact that we human have operational understanding of each other's mental processes. Moreover, it is well known that human beings process language and can re-evaluate past experience in light of present understand.

Oppositely, we know enough about the properties of the various non-linear recognizers to know that constructs can't do and won't ever be able to do these things.
Thank you, ggchappell, for the thoughtful post. Your response, the fact that someone put deep thought into this, made writing the article worthwhile.

You raise some great points.

Articles about research aren't typically written by researchers. Sure, they write articles too, but their articles are laden with industry-specific lingo and aren't generally written for the public.

So who writes the articles which go viral? PR people. Marketers. People who are talented at describing technology in a way that it's easy to digest and share-worthy. Perhaps they've figured out that positive articles are more successful.

Regarding the regulation...

I agree, there are many ways regulation can go wrong. But I see a way that really could work. It just requires a new infrastructure that would be relatively easy to build!

Technological advancement is MORALLY RIGHT. That's my stance. I guess I'm the antithesis of Amish. :)

We just need to wield technology less recklessly. The need to do so is increasingly relevant.

Consider how much power we'll have very soon. A human from 500 years ago would look around today and think we've become gods. What do you think we'll be in 500 years? Gods, by today's standards. We need to be careful. Not fearful. But diligently cautious.
oh yes it is. example:

"Can anyone tell me if Optoma is the best brand making projectors?"

Best Answer Selected by Voters: "Nigga, I saw in a previous question that you havin a baby. what the fuck you spending money fo bitch, save that shit"
+100. A Fire Upon The Deep totally predates this. Many of the main characters in the story aren't even humans, they're hive mind wolves and plants, and hyper intelligent AIs. And the Blight doesn't even have any goal, it's more or less a virus that wants to survive, other than that, we don't know it's motives, and the hyper-intelligences don't really care much about humans. The humans in the story are portrayed as fools who don't have the wisdom of the older races and end up digging up stuff they shouldn't be messing with.
I blog quite a bit on a bunch of different platforms, but I never understood the utility of medium.

I could understand it as a secondary marketing tool in addition to a personal blog in order to reach a wider audience, but I think anything you post primarily on a service that you don't control yourself, you're making a big assumption that they won't drastically change the working relationship somewhere down the road.
The early days of Android were really something else. Today we're fortunate enough to be able to take Nexus devices, one line bootloader unlocks and production devices shipping with CyanogenMod for granted.

What are you working now that you're no longer spending inordinate amounts of time unlocking phones?
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=no+soap#!/story/forever/0/no%20soa...
I agree with the others saying that the themes in Mass Effect have already been done many times in the past and that it brings nothing new to the table. Furthermore, in my opinion they are very mediocre as videogames (well, with the exception of the first one).
It saves money by eliminating expensive infrastructure engineers. Enterprise IT spends more money on PMs than tech.
Note that this is a beta. Here are the "health" stats: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/60887/software-rec...

In the area of software recommendations more generally, there is also AlternativeTo.net, which I am usually very pleased with. It's not really optimized for development tools, but it technically does have sections on, e.g., C++:

http://alternativeto.net/software/c-/
Yes. Most mail from corporations at this point is spam. That is completely true.
> Broadly stated, computer science involves designing hardware (such as laptops) and software (such as Microsoft Word).

No. Computer science is not about designing hardware. It is not about designing software. It is not about design.
Querying my full name brings up my Quora profile as the top result on Google, even over my G+ and Facebook profile. No idea how it happened.
Using the API you can get both the Segment altitude data and the Segment Effort altitude data. The segment data is what's displayed on the website and can be bad. But the Segment Effort data would be a subset of the data from the activity. So you can get many many versions of the altitude for the segment and do any type of analysis you wish.
Estimating Coefficients in Linear Models: It Don't Make No Nevermind (1976)
It'd be hilarious if the bounty got so high that Samsung just does this themselves
You may have hit on my fundamental frustration with Unix command line. Every tool is designed around the basic assumption that the user has a couple of decades of experience and wants the tool to get out out of the way and let them work. That's great for veterans, but actively hostile to newbies.

You'd think there could be some sort of middle ground.
Not being snarky at all, but why is this so important to people? Why not just buy a Nexus 5? Or a Play Edition phone?
was i reading the onion or something like that, this is completely outrageous, "i was 36... she was 9-12."
I live in Michigan and the roads are repaved what seems like every other year. After each winter, there are potholes the size of craters on the moon. Very dangerous when everyone is swerving into incoming traffic and slamming on breaks to avoid them.
Try Codementor https://www.codementor.io - I'm the founder.

You'd get more personalized help and suggestions based on your specific situation.
They consider UCS a private cloud in the can, which was introduced at a good time when IBM's f-up of x86 was enough to scare away even risks adverse enterprise customers. So they've seen lots of traction.

They also consider webex and some UC stuff (Jabber, some voip, etc) "cloud".
At this point it's like beating a dead horse, but it's so strange to trust people having an history of severe alcohol abuse in the past, but distrust people that would preemptively stop themself from drinking knowing they'd go the wrong way.
In this case, it's a Verizon phone. Verizon (quite illegally, to my understanding) keeps most devices it doesn't sell itself off its network.
How Paypal and Reddit faked their way to traction
From Machine to Confidant in 5 minutes
If solar signs are what you want, just put up a leaderboard with a solar panel. Done.
I am not very familiar with mobile security and/or the differences between carriers. Right now the bounty is $10k for root@vzw and $7k for root@att. How likely is it that someone wins the bounty for VZW but is unable to apply the method to ATT or vice versa? Are VZW and ATT the usual contenders for last to fall?
> The worst thing you can accuse Quora of is being very, very granular as to what you can turn on and off

I just don't see how having a good granularity is incompatible with having an easy way to turn the whole thing off. Neither do I see a point in having the settings revert back once in a while.

> Hence why I call it confirmation bias. People have been told the site is crap and so go looking for reasons to confirm it.

> All of this Quora hate is really, really unjustified for the simple difference of having a registration requirement to view their content

You seem to have strong opinions about why other people's dislike of Quora is unjustified. But this amounts to just putting words in people's mouth.
It is in some cases.

In some cases the fear of being caught and punished is sufficient to stop some crimes.
The thermodynamic limit cited (Landauer's cost of erasure) to show that 128 bits is enough (barring algorithmic advances) doesn't strictly apply. Charles Bennett[1] pointed out that any irreversible computation (i.e. one that involves erasure) can be made reversible by saving all the intermediate results (rather than erasing them), printing the result, then running the computation backward and letting it eat up all of the saved intermediate results. While this approach to computation isn't directly applicable here, it does show that you can't count on the thermodymanic cost to keep you safe.

[1] C. H. Bennett, "Logical Reversibility of Computation"
_IBM Journal of Research and Development_ 17:525-532 (November, 1973), http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall04/cos576/pa...
Charles proxy only does HTTPS, not SMTP via SSL. I tried it so I know.

Anyho, I did end up writing a Theos Mobile Substrate tweak to syslog SSL communications and it turns out Yahoo authenticates via a XYMCOOKIE only usable with SMTP and IMAP. So pretty useless for actually logging into yahoo.com

Here's the theos code if anyone else wants to log SSL on their jailbroken device:
http://pastebin.com/K6nDG39Y
"University endowments are all about good returns so no way."

You mean low volatility right? Because Bitcoin has had high returns and high Sharpe ratio (i.e. return compensated for volatility more than most investments), which is good, not bad.
Good enough for YCombinator?
I'm currently working on http://www.jellyblub.com
and was hoping to get some feedback, it's a little embarrassing because of how simple/silly it may seem but I think it can be helpful. Especially with the user reviews(avoids scammers)
Weather conditions it is, then. It doesn't snow here, though it rains a lot. But if snow is a problem, then a solar road makes much less sense anyway.
Court orders ex-lovers to delete sexy pics
Following Microsoft, Sony's PlayStation business officially enters China
Honestly the entire time I was under the impression that the author is being sarcastic.
Have you ever met a few rich kids, who today effectively live in a post-scarcity world ? I am not saying there isn't anything but spoiled, cruel brats, but it's pretty damn rare (and the non-spoyiled ones tend to be the ones that weren't rich when they were kids).

There are other forms of post-scarcity. E.g. the long-term unemployed of Western Europe, in England, Holland and France. People who have been unemployed for 2-3 generations. They don't have any real way to improve their situation, nor to make it worse. They spend their time being bored, watching tv, and generally doing anything they possibly can to avoid caring for their kids (just like those rich guys, just less over-the-top).

I would add that this is what any intelligent algorithm would do when confronted with the situation. Outside of completely ridiculous things (like winning the lottery, or committing murder) there is nothing they can do to improve or worsen their situation : they will enter into a self-reinforcing random walk through their options.
This did not work because the Yahoo password is not stored on the device after being entered. Apparently Yahoo has something called XYMCOOKIE authentication for SMTP and IMAP which is basically just acceptance of a pre-sent hash/cookie. The iPad discards the actual password the first time you enter it and instead stores a XYMCOOKIE.

See here: https://www.google.com/search?q=XYMCOOKIE+authentication
Authorities: Hackers foiled in bid to rig Ukraine presidential election results
For real. Just cost myself $400. I have anger problems.
There are 2 things that drive people in my experience. Wealth and power. If you close off one (e.g. by making people poor, or very rich, they go for the other one). If you do what capitalism does, and make real power very hard to come by, they go for wealth.
it wasn't aimed at you but it's nearly always directly transcribable that way. i have a grudge against the term 'pc' -- i understand that it typically refers to an archetype of a ~hyper-offensible liberal that lives in seattle~ or something but it's nearly always invoked against people who have genuine reason to have grievances with the language and implications used. i won't go into detail because it frankly doesn't matter, but that is the case here with me.
Does Samsung offer an unlocking tool for the GS5? If not, they should. Google is making Android harder to root, which makes "official" unlocking all the more important, and hopefully people will keep asking for it whenever it's not available.
I feel like Wadler was pretty straightforward in his whitepapers about the role he envisaged for monads. See in "Monads for functional programming", the second sentence of the abstract, or the first sentence of the introduction. He's pretty clear that he's talking about monads as a tactic to represent impure notions into a pure functional program.

My point is to take the concept beyond theory and talk about application, and the application is making something useful out of functional programming.
A dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7793305.
Yeah, I tried to be clear that "I’m not going to explain monads."
NodeRT – Use WinRT/Metro APIs from Node.js
smoking (or vaporing) makes much more sense in a social situation. eating pot food takes a while to kick in, sometimes hours. it's not ideal and the experiences are not identical.
Peter Watts on the Harms of Surveillance
That's assuming we'll find inhabited planets. Current research seems to indicate that we'd have to be quite lucky to find 5 terraformable planets (not supporting life, but could be if artificially managed) in a 10-lightyear cube.
Does no one check their page layout on anything but 4k resolution any more? Here's what the page looks like on one of my 1280x1024 screens: http://i.imgur.com/w6WXYF6.png

Since the screen is physically on my left, it's very annoying to try to read the text.
I was thinking about starting a site dedicated to the questions/topics that don't suite StackOverflow. The site could have one sub domain for each StackExchange site, e.g. `coders.open-questions.org` for StackOverflow, and `writers.open-questions.org` for `writers.stackexchange.com`.

Is anyone interested in this? I've built a discussion system that I'm hoping would be useful. It's a bit like a hybrid Questions/Answer system + threaded comments. Here's an example discussion: http://www.debiki.com/forum/-61859/forum-software-for-the-fu... (please note that the 2d layout is optional).

The forum topic list page (http://www.debiki.com/forum/) is inspired by Discourse (http://www.discourse.org/).
:( I wish everyone else did.