skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone who has written his thesis in social psychology i have to say that social psychology is fundamentally broken, kaput. If you had a worker who fixed the pipes in your apartment the same way your toilet and kitchen would explode. But because we call social psychology a science we accept it somehow and hope for progress.

Issues i have:

1.) What would the practical consequences be if social psychology and it's knowledge would be erased. Not many that i can think of. Considering that the area has immense potential applications this is pretty telling.

2.) What have been the most important research breakthroughs of the last 20-30 years?
There are new fads for sure (behavioral economics, neuroeconomics and evolutionary psych i look at you) but they all coexist peacefully. No falsification is happening, just new profs need new theories for publication.

3.) There is NO theoretical rigor. If you do have tons of theories you would suppose that there is much theoretic work going on clarifying and contrasting this theories to enable empirical tests of their validity.
Not here.
The more theories the merrier. Why? Every researcher needs his own theory or not crowded field so he doesn't rock the boat. That has lead to the development that one experiment is done by two grad students and a significant result in one direction is interpreted by one theory and in the other direction by another theory.
Basically you give a sample of students a questionnaire and if it goes one way it proves that XY gave an evolutionary advantage to the prehistoric people if it went the other way it proves that the utility curves cringle on the right side. Both ways the researcher has something to publish. I do think that the 2 theories per experiment limitation is rather arbitrary and inefficient tough. There is definite room for improvement here.

4.) Many recent work try to address this by going theory free. All this different effects are the result. This is also practical because there is always room for more effects to research and if you happen to need one to explain a particular fact then there are always a ton to choose from.

5.) Cargo cult use of statistics. You could make an argument that most social science researchers are not able to understand the whys and hows of statistics and decision theory so giving them recipes to follow is better than the alternative. Might be. It just does not work. It really does not. Also the imperative of the researcher is not to generate knowledge but publishable significant results.

Basically i do think that we have to start over and scrap the work done so far. And no, i do not have a better alternative at hand. That is not necessary to see that the current process is broken and produces nothing useful and binds intellectual potential, tough.
They really need a demo link in the header.
Very interesting project, but I have to say I'm not a big fan of the fade-in/fade-out animations while navigating the forum. It'll get annoying very fast.

The forum home page is a bit cluttered imo, especially with all the latest post quotes.

And obviously the javascript hijacking the scrolling behaviour on the landing page is something which I always find quite annoying, but it seems to be en vogue at the moment.

I hope this doesn't sound too negative, just a few things I noticed while browsing the demo.
UI seems very complex
Given the spec of it, people with more money than sense, but apple already has that market cornered with the iPhone...
First time I giggled at a comment on here in a while (=
But only in US.
> But driving someone back to a website with an offer on something that they have added to their basket but not purchased, [...]

People like useful recommender engines (e.g. Amazon.com).

But not so personalized smart ads that follow them on every website the visit. What's wrong with the static ads that fit the targeted website category?
You will also spend more time waiting in traffic with a car. The time to look for a parking space is a lot shorter if you're with a bike.
Guide to Responsive Web Design Pt.1
No. Because my iPhone helps me to be productive. It's not a shopping cart (there's an app for that should I wish).
To think, all this time, I've been bringing non-organic carrots to interviews. Oh the shame.
Yes. I work for Amazon.
Oh dear, this look like the pinterest of forums. I find this layout very confusing.
Dunno if I'm too for this but.... Back in my days, a forum hat a clearly structured (table)layout which gave a perfect overview in a matter of seconds. Pepperidgefarm remembers! ;)
No, thank you.

I will never use a gatekeeper to access Internet.

For me Internet should be a network, not a top down centralized service.

Amazon Silk means every single page that you visit is registered by an American company and obviously the NSA.

At least when I use a conventional browser, they have to work harder to spy on me.
You would attach an acoustic coupler to the mic/headphone jacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

Also making a USB->RS232 adapter using 1975 tech should be possible (if you had the skills).

With the high bandwidth of a modern audio port you might even be able to make an audio->RS232 adapter and avoid the noise of the acoustic coupler.
On the other hand, it can be said to be premature for the kind of people who specifically seek out the sun, trying to get a deep and even tan, spend a lot of time sunbathing to that end, etc.

Maybe I shouldn't have said "premature". We don't really know what is more healthy, whether it is how people normally do things or whether they should take care to do something else. We've done some things historically, perhaps due to adaption or necessity, but that is just a testament to the fact that it works, not that the practice is healthy or optimal. So I'm not immediately sold on what is average or normal.
harsh words but true. "modern web" should not be synonymous with "ugly tile design" "annoying fade in / fade out whole page animations" "onscroll something happens stuff"
Yeah, column based UI seems pretty overwhelming at first sight.
I find any decent phone as good as the next one, all of them offering the handful of features and apps I really use.

Which makes my choice of phone more a matter of "lifestyle accessory", and being a sucker for great design, the Fire Phone just seems very plain and "meh" to me.
CherryPy shines in these use cases..
Is that because you'll get it for free?
It's huge. Normally, the curvature of the earth would make it impossible to detect anything at such distances. But the ionosphere's lower levels act like a waveguide [1], (and this tells you which frequencies you should listen on to take advantage of this).

The craziest phenomenon of this kind is whistlers [2]. Lightning strikes can be heard on radio at a point on the earth exactly symmetrical to the source, using the equator as plane of symmetry. In fact, the signal bounces around back and forth between the two points, following a line on the magnetosphere. The ones closer to the poles have longer paths, and their frequencies can get spread out over 3-4 seconds as they bounce around.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93ionosphere_wavegu...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistler_%28radio%29
I think I was expecting it to be a normal forum layout but faster. I must admit, it didn't feel faster. The fade feels like a cop out on speed and acting as a mask.

Also when going onto the forum, I was clicking links but nothing was happening? Then I would click the home button and the last button I had clicked would then activate, like it was a click behind?

The home layout reminds me of hootsuite, I find the layout too cluttered. I'd imagine you would get used to it and you would know where to look eventually but I must admit it wasn't very intuitive.

The plus points are that I do think the world needs an overhaul on forum software, it's tired and hasn't changed much in 15 years. I don't think this has been done in vain.

The feature set looks good I just don't think you need the fading transitions and so much information all over the place. It needs simplifying; in my opinion.
Looks like Nokia had some plans (or at least patented something related) in 2007 [1]. According to ComputerWorld "The invention involves the use of radio frequency receivers in mobile phones, such as FM radio and GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), to detect radio waves emitted by lightning."

Does lightning have any effect on the sensors that detect the geomagnetic field? Maybe even some small anomalies in the readings could be useful if many devices were working together.

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9021121/Nokia_to_add_...
The Google Maps public transport routing in London is often sub-optimal. It seems very hesitant to recommend taking the tube - an example recently involved it recommending that I took a 45 minute bus rather than a 10 minute tube journey.

I imagine that the problem is hard - in London you can easily have 10 different bus routes available. Start combining multiple buses in complicated routes and the number of possible routes grows exponentially. It may also be that the system places different value on the variables than me - journey cost, number of changes, the journey time, the likelihood of delay (buses in rush hour can be slow!) and acceptable walking distance all play a part in my selection of routes, but if the algorithm is set up differently then it might produce a different result. I think Google are trying to address this by gathering data about your habits and informing choices based on that (certainly Google Now makes route recommendations based on my location history, and tweaks that based on historical route preference). It will be interesting to see how this progresses.
Interesting - I know nothing about Silk; does it proxy through Amazon servers or similar? If so, yet another reason to never touch this phone.

Edit: Even worse, it actually outright renders the page on Amazon's servers. All the privacy violation of proxying with bonus MITM on TLS connections.
I am indeed referring to Dearborn. Is there a street that you prefer for north/south travel? While pedestrian extension is incredibly annoying and sometimes dangerous, it's still far better to me than biking in the middle of the road.

Can't say I've read any of Kass's stuff, but I actually think Emanuel's done a decent job at adding as many bike lanes as he has. When he entered office, he set a goal to add 100 miles of bike lanes to the city. He's been adding between 20-40 miles a year since then. They're not perfect, but at least they're steps in the right direction.
I solved this issue by never unmuting my phone. Not even for phone calls (unless im expecting an important call). My phone doesn't tell me when to use it. I do it the other way around. I check my phone maybe 2-3 times a day. When I wake up. Once a little after lunch. And once at night.

The main thing you have to do is not feel like its your job to immediatly attend to any contact. Treat your phone like a laptop. Emails you should reapond to in 24 hours. Text or phone calls don't need to be answered. Your phone saves your call logs for your convenience. Just get back to that person when you have a free chance. Our ancestors survived not being able to talk to any one at any moment. We don't have to either.
I bought the Kindle Fire HD tablet as an experiment a few years back, and found it almost useless for my daily tasks. It was OK for watching movies and reading books, but none of the productivity stuff I wanted from an android device was there.

Stock Gmail app on android is much better integrated with Gmail than a bare-bones IMAP client (multiple accounts nicely recognised, different sync policies for labels etc), I missed the nice Google calendar integration etc.

My business pretty much runs on google apps, so for that use case there is a huge difference between something running android and something running well integrated google services.
I assumed getting google apps on Fire would be just a matter of installing, but it would require rooting the device and rebuilding the OS from scratch, which I didn't want to waste time on. I assume Fire phone will have the same issue.

It is Android, but Android without Google services is pretty much pointless for me.
> So, not a very useful thing to have back then

Sure, if 1975 was the same as Idiocracy. Otherwise, you'd have a bunch of brilliant people going to this man from the future and his fancy gadgets and trying to figure how they worked and what society is like in the future.

EDIT: My two year old laptop does have a modem... is it still modern?
Must be very comfortable for employers.
No because Amazon is a company I never want to have anything to do with.
I'd buy it for $200 unlocked.

$649 is ridiculous. So is the concept of locking.
Yup, you are right: "To minimize latency and page load times, Amazon Silk routes requests through remote proxy servers powered by Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. These cloud servers provide high-performance connection speeds and computing power not normally available to a mobile form factor."

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/silk/latest/developerguide/introd...
No. Why on earth would i want NSA and other spygates to watch me 24x7 with 4 cameras (even in night!) #CrazyStuffs!
They also have an overlay for Google maps:

http://www.lightningmaps.org/realtime
$649 for a phone with a smaller, lower-resolution screen, an nonstandard fork of Android 4.2, and a fancy sensor gimmick. Definitely not.
You completely missed what I said. Your original wording was that science couldn't exclude god. Science excludes god by its very nature; the basis of science is the assumption that god is not responsible for anything at all. It makes no more sense to talk about science disproving god than to talk about geometry disproving the postulate of Euclid that states "all right angles are congruent to each other". If you allow for the possibility of a god, you're not doing science.
Lack of UX & no ACID compliance so I wouldn't use it for anything in production.
It is targeted at (potential) Amazon Prime customers. Of which I am not one.
You're welcome, and congrats on winning a trophy - that's pretty cool! Thanks for your comment!
> 1 - Traffic is too fast - The basic speed limit unless posted otherwise, in the city of Chicago is 30mph. this speed limit is nearly NEVER enforced by police (Hello free revenue stream?)

Interestingly some cities and towns in England are having trouble because they are being accused of over-enforcing parking regulations in order to get income.

The amount of income they get is a reasonable amount but trivial in terms of the total budget. And people breaking parking rules are usually pretty clearly breaking an obvious rule.

But it cause great offence and distress and councils need to spend time and money explaining what they're doing and why; and also on the appeals process.

The use of roaming CCTV vehicles which travel to parking blackspots is being investigated at the moment, and might be regulated out.

I agree with the rest of your post! Offering better bike parking and some changing facilities would be helpful.

Another idea, that would not work in US cities, is to remove all road and pavement marking. There's just a broad road with no kerbs (but pavements are marked with slightly differen paving) or lines and everyone, pedestrians cyclists and vehicles just use it. Vehicles entering this area suddenly slow down and look out for people.
To go a little off-topic, the jab at Outbox was horribly undeserved.

> “This company sends out humans in Priuses three days a week,” one fortysomething programmer groused to me last year.

This was a soft landing for their customers after the USPS shut down their original system of having customers have their mail forwarded. Their long-term goals were 2-fold:

1) Allow customers to easily unsubscribe from unwanted mailings (incidentally, this is why USPS wanted them shut down - junk mail constitutes most of their revenue).

2) Fix USPS - they intended to get their automatic scanning technology into USPS itself, thus saving them delivery costs on mail for anyone who signed up to receive it digitally. This could potentially save them enormous amounts of money.

They originally wanted to do this with USPS, but quickly realized that they had much better chances if they started as a private company.

Great article on Outbox: http://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-off...
Have they recently moved to a different pricing model? The homepage says free, but the pricing page states $35 - $100/month.

I would guess they mean self-host is free, and the prices refers to hosted / managed instances. In which case, they should make this point much clearer.
> Is it not the case that Norway and dark places have a far higher suicide rate?

I don't know. Probably more occurrences of SAD. But then, it might be that only certain people are affected by it.

I've grown up in Norway and yes, it isn't very fun for me to wake up at 0700 in the winter, pitch black outside, and then go to school. My area also got a lot of overcast and rain in the winter which, though UV radiation might have come through the clouds, it only compounded the gloomy weather. I wonder if I'm actually more bothered by the chilly, rainy weather rather than the darkness. If there was more snow, it would be a bit lighter.

In return, you get more sun in the summer.

I lived in Spain for 5 months. I wasn't particularly happy during that time, though there were other factors impacting that. More sun and less rain was certainly nice.
I've been doing this for a while and, while it infuriates some people, I've found it to be very freeing. Mailbox is a great way of dealing with email, and Do Not Disturb lets me allow certain important calls through if I need to. I enjoy the feeling of being in control of my phone, rather than at its mercy!
5 Reasons you never finish your projects
I would not call it *tocracy but business model. Company can pay under-market salary, if it inflates ego of its employees and make them feel special. It already works in science, fashion, medicine...
Wikipedia article on sound ranging provides a nice 2d picture and example on how this works (in the context of detecting enemy artillery using an array of microphones).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_ranging
Swapping replaced the traditional prank call
A lot of the answers that people are giving have been described in one of the best books on running a service industry business. "The Pumpkin Plan". Give it a read. But be warned, there's tough decisions to be made. Dropping rotten clients, firing people who will suddenly become obsolete with the lack of work for them. You will need to be ready to make those calls.

Good luck!
Is everything alright on hacker news?
Dear hacker news community. Is everything alright?

For the last couple of days I have seen no posts titled :

`I built x in x lines of code`

I am a little worried that maybe the hacker news community could be seen as in decline due the reduced number of this kind of post.

Thanks,

Concerned community member.
We're probably the last population targeted by this phone. It probably targets seniors or heavy prime users.
You have to pay for a Mac to use Swift and nobody complained.
Of course, that's cool point!
Ubuntu Server Quick Dashboard
This phone is not actually made by the NSA, it's made by Amazon. The NSA doesn't make consumer facing hardware. If you are worried about Amazon being legally obligated to hand over your private information from your phone you would have that same worry with any other private smartphone vendor.

I have never heard of smartphone cameras being used to spy on people 24/7 either.
I think the question is whether they are able to position themselves in a way that people can recognize a real additional value. "For normal smart phone stuff I would use my Android phone. But I really also want to do X and that is something only Amazon does well." I don't think they can provide a real USP that can't be copied by the Android and Apple guys fast, though.
Including the large screen and short battery life?
> If you allow for the possibility of a god, you're not doing science.

No, that's nonsense. It is perfectly possible to do rigorous science but to believe in a God. There is nothing in science that rules out a god.

Sadly the vocal majority of people who believe in a god also believe weird stupid obviously wrong things about science. I'm not talking about those people.
No. I'm not trading the Apple ecosystem for a mere "device". Regardless if it has any slight technical advantages.
I am also concerned by the lack of `I built [existing program] x in javascript` posts. Where should I go now to get my client-side fix?
I'd add that having the whole company use a single language to describe build and tests is a trivial but crucial thing.
It allows automatically building and testing everything affected by your change, even if you never heard about those dependencies.

Oh, and "fully specifying inputs" includes the involved compilers, and even the build tool itself! You can reproduce old builds using the same tools that were used then. Upgrading any tools triggers appropriate recompilations.
> Without a natural feedback loop, interviewing mostly runs on myth and survivor bias.

It is a law of human nature that a chaotic environment breeds magical thinking and ingroup allegiance, and there are few business environments more chaotic than Silicon Valley, where startups succeed or fail seemingly at random. The noise calls for reason, and because there are no true known causes for success our mind demands some explanation. How many times have we read the line -- often written by some very smart people -- "correlation isn't causation, but we've found a strong correlation between....". What follows the but in that sentence is what is known as superstition. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but no buts follow. Actually, correlation plus confirmation bias equals magical thinking, and "data driven" correlation (with no confirmation bias) equals bigotry. Failing to realize that correlation without causation provides us with exactly zero predictive abilities (it might be "predictive" on unknown present data, but not on future data) is the root of a lot of evil. In fact, "data driven" correlation -- because it disguises itself as knowledge -- creates (or, usually, reinforces) a reverse causation.

> Whatever else one can say about the Mirrortocracy, it has the virtue of actually working, in the sense that the lucky few who break in have a decent rate of success.

This is the worst of all fallacies belying the "SV logic". Even supposing it were true, a large-number statistical observation says little or nothing about the behavior of a single random variable, or a single startup in this instance. Yes, the startup system "works" (for whom is another question) on the whole, but the vast majority of individual startups still fail. Learning back from correlative observations on the large system and implying the so called lessons to an individual company has little grounds in any rigorous reasoning.

> You can protest your logic and impartiality all day long, but the only honest statement is that we're all biased.

Understanding this is one of the keys to progress. How many times have we seen posts discussing sexism in tech deemed "controversial" here on HN? But the truth is that the chance a member of a society imbued with biases for millennia is not sexist (or otherwise biased) is extremely slim. The only way to fight this bias is to seek it out and see it (because it's there).
This is true, but there are a couple of easy workarounds for it: Cython and scipy.weave

http://wiki.scipy.org/PerformancePython
I guess there is something to this, as right now all EHR information ends up processed by human beings in the end (?) so there is no need for an overly complicated "type system". Still, a schema for prescription drugs would bring automated interactions detection, for instance.