skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not convinced of this "truth". Do-calculus might help AI in its current state, but really they may just be making up for fundamental flaws in their neural simulations.

I normally hate to hear people say no one knows how certain things work but in this instance it seems apt. No one has created a self autonomous consciousness yet and so no one really knows exactly what goes into it.

I guess there's also a difference in advancing the study of robots and advancing the study of artificial intelligence.
Is it that the article was written in HuffPo, therefore it's wrong?

No, but that there are very few opportunities best exploited by writing about them on Huffpo.

Or is it that anyone who writes an article on gender imbalance must not really believe in it, because otherwise they'd be exploiting the problem, instead of wasting their time writing?

Closer. In a free market, any legitimate complaint can be restated as a business plan. "This doesn't work as well as it should" = "I could do it better." "This is overpriced" = "I could dominate the market by selling it for less." "Women are underpaid" = "I could hire qualified women for less than you'd have to pay men."
I'm about a year away from my Ph.D., and I disagree. A Ph.D. is a merit badge for doing research. Most of what I have learned is from doing my research, with guidance from more experienced people. But there is no substitute for doing the work.
Here's the score:

1. Mind-blowing
2. Seems like too much work in 3D
3. This is total bullshit, the induction argument is completely bogus, and what you said doesn't provide any new information to them.
4. Trivial
5. It's just Diffie-Hellman, so you've probably already seen it in some crypto textbook. Pretty cool if you haven't seen it before.
6. How exactly tennis works again?
7. Trivial

So one really good one, five not so good ones, and one completely wrong.
But there are lots of interesting questions to ask about his work, and it doesn't make someone an "elitist", or a bad person to ask them.

It didn't say anything to the contrary. Note the phrases "of his harshest critics" and "many of them." He claimed that many of his harshest critics were elitists - that does not mean he thought anyone who criticized his ideas was elitist. I would suggest that he believed his harshest critics to be those presenting no reasonable basis (from his POV, at least) for their claims.
That doesn't mean much. My program requires a minimum of 90 credits, and 30 of those must be research/dissertation credits. You can't tell by looking at the requirements on a form what the expectations are from the professors in that department for what's a passable dissertation.
Firefox itself is OK for me, but firebug and flash have made firefox unusable in the last 6 months. At least on linux. It seems to need a lot of memory on windows, though.
Web sites are not the same as browsers.
Holy hell, ANNOYING auto-playing interstitial FMV advertisement.

I don't think I'm ever visiting an inc.com link again.
I call BS on Problem 1: it's bait and switch!

The answer to the puzzle #1 is simply totally incorrect: how long the permutations are has nothing to do with whether your name is in any of the boxes in the permutation that the prisoners start with your name.

EDIT:
After thinking about, and trying a few small {try 4 boxes) examples, I'm not so sure [i.e. I guess I blew it].
More food leads to better health (up to a limit), leading to lower mortality and increased wealth, which means fewer children born. Note that the countries with the most ready access to food have the lowest local population growth.

Couple this with improving sexual education (as tends to occur in wealthier countries) and you end up with population growth going through the floor, not up.
2009 Royal Society Prize for Science Books
Full shortlist:

* The Age of Wonder: How the romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of Science by Richard Holmes (Harper Press)
* What the Nose Knows: The science of scent in everyday life by Avery Gilbert (Crown Publishers)
* Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (Harper Perennial)
* Decoding the Heavens: Solving the mystery of the world's first computer by Jo Marchant (William Heinemann)
* The drunkard's walk: How randomness rules our lives by Leonard Mlodinow (Penguin)
* Your Inner Fish: The amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor by Neil Shubin (Penguin)
Lively Kernel - an IDE and execution environment on a web page.
Sorry if this is an old submission, but I hadn't seen it before. It is quite a step towards what I hope what the web will become - a programmable mashable environment.
662,258 SMS Messages from Your iPhone 3GS ? | My Philly Network
On open systems (as in system theory)
Almost the same here, I always found it difficult to do what I wanted with these frameworks. I ended writing my own custom javascript graphing code.

I realized it is not that hard to do, you can get nice graphs out quickly without too much code. I also found teh resulting code to be simpler than the one from libraries. I suspect that a lot of the complexity comes from making things generic, or maybe (in some cases) the authors being unfamiliar with javascript?
Any tool suggestions for the job of minifying and deployment?
+ /* Parse base-64 output produced only by tar test versions
+ 1.13.6 (1999-08-11) through 1.13.11 (1999-08-23).
+ Support for this will be withdrawn in future releases. */

Paul Eggert. Diff to list.c. GNU tar. line 611. 1999 September 22. Retrieved 2009 September 21, from http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/commit/?id=e4e62484...

How serendipitous it is that after recalling this curious comment in GNU tar, re-retrieving it for my own personal notes, tracking down the diff, and scrutinizing the dates rather than glossing over them reveals that this was added one decade ago. So I thought I'd share.

Bugger. This was my first post to HN, and I just took a look at the approach to comments (which doesn't appear on the submission page...), and it appears this is "shallowly interesting".
WebKit Page Cache II - The unload Event
Marc Andreesen has testified that he really does this: from http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid.html (the link is to Marc's old blog, which now appears to be inaccessible):

"Let's start with a bang: don't keep a schedule.

"He's crazy, you say!

"I'm totally serious. If you pull it off -- and in many structured jobs, you simply can't -- this simple tip alone can make a huge difference in productivity.

"By not keeping a schedule, I mean: refuse to commit to meetings, appointments, or activities at any set time in any future day.

"As a result, you can always work on whatever is most important or most interesting, at any time.

"Want to spend all day writing a research report? Do it!

"Want to spend all day coding? Do it!

"Want to spend all day at the cafe down the street reading a book on personal productivity? Do it!

"When someone emails or calls to say, "Let's meet on Tuesday at 3", the appropriate response is: "I'm not keeping a schedule for 2007, so I can't commit to that, but give me a call on Tuesday at 2:45 and if I'm available, I'll meet with you."

"Or, if it's important, say, "You know what, let's meet right now."

"Clearly this only works if you can get away with it. If you have a structured job, a structured job environment, or you're a CEO, it will be hard to pull off.

"But if you can do it, it's really liberating, and will lead to far higher productivity than almost any other tactic you can try."
The Smart List: Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World
"preventing Comcast from throttling the bandwidth on Youtube because they'd rather you buy the cable package."

YouTube isn't a TV replacement, Hulu is. I've read that in the future Hulu might go to a model requiring you to have a cable subscription to have access to Hulu. The logic was that cable providers pay large fees to carry various channels and those fees was what was financing productions of tv. Content owns don't want to jeopardize those fees.
Gregg Easterbrook: Embrace Human Cloning
Whoops! My bad.
Nevertheless a more proportionate ratio would be expected. For a simple comparison, my masters degree has 80 credits, 40 of them are in the dissertation.
I've done a half-switch, but completely agree with stonemetal. I have both a Mac and Windows that I use for development. OSX is pretty. I'm running Windows7 on my other machine.

stonemental's 'halfling' comment is dead on, and I find it the strangest thing about macs.

Also, what I wasn't prepared for was the need to learn so many keyboard shortcuts. No button to go right to your desktop, there's a keyboard shortcut for that (but who knows what it is). Not 'rename' in the dropdown menu, but there's a short cut for that (I don't know what it is).
It seems like the things like this that I use all the time and are basic on a PC are obscured on a mac.
i just had a look (thanks for the link). i downloaded some code--good stuff, no doubt better with the full explanations.

for various reasons i'm not buying the book. i do strongly recommend reading resig's blog posts. some excellent gems there. i've incorporated some great util functions from these posts, for example.

nothing is as good as working with coders who are better than you, tho ;-)
For the record, Google also distributes its own version of Linux to customers, whereas Amazon and Facebook do not. It'd still be nice to see them contribute, of course.

As for Yahoo, it runs on FreeBSD, actually. They provide hosting to the FreeBSD project, though I don't know if they write any code.
WPF (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundation) is supposed to help solve a lot of these issues in desktop apps. I am developing a desktop application with it and so far the results have been positive. Here is an indepth article about supposed the resolution independence of WPF: http://www.wpflearningexperience.com/?p=41
Gzip?
Easy there. It was an obituary. What argument is there supposed to be here exactly?
> The answer to the puzzle #1 is simply totally incorrect: how long the permutations are has nothing to do with whether your name is in any of the boxes in the permutation that the prisoners start with your name.

The answer is correct. Your name has to be in the cycle started with your box, this follows from the fact that permutations are bijections. It is impossible to have something like:

0->1->2->1

(Because then 1 would be in two boxes at once, which is impossible.)
how do you generate content for jvm and clr?
I'd love an explicit ban on pop-sci health articles in the guidelines. Most of them are pure upvote-garbage. They can make HN look like a tabloid.
I don't understand what you're trying to establish with these quotes. I agree with them all, but I don't have the slightest idea what "aha! see?" point you're trying to establish.

Please, please, just explain what statement of mine you're cleverly refuting here.
Checkout Better World Books http://www.betterworldbooks.com . Cheap worldwide shipping. Another option is to buy second hand.
As long as they utilize the inherent synergies to be found in surfing the cloud.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/
Dropbox "single" founder application: http://files.getdropbox.com/u/2/app.html

(Sorry, I just noticed you asked for video. There's a screencast, but that was before 1 min videos were introduced.)
>one in several million smart, highly educated

Then she qualifies for EB-1 or 2 permanent residence.
In the case of a person clicking the check box when uploading, that person is responsible. Scribd most certainly stores their IP address, which can be traced back to identify the infringer.

In the case of "auto-importing" feature, things are much less clear. In that case, I can see your point.
Apple sends iPhones into 'Coma Mode'
That book is outstanding. Crockford's JSLint validator is also superb. Highly recommended for any script of more than a few lines in length.
Always use "var" to define a variable, unless you know exactly what you are doing. e.g.:

var foo = 'bar';

When you don't use "var" the Javascript interpreter breaks out of the current scope and continues to do so all the way until it hits the final global scope (generally the window object in browsers). If it does not find the variable, it then defines it. If it does find it, it will trample the found variable with the new value. For example:

var foo = 'bar';

function baz() {
foo = 'baz';
}

baz();

// now foo == 'baz';
console.log(foo);
>>'baz'

Google "Javascript var keyword" for more info.

EDIT: I'll add that this functionality, which is part of a general language feature known as a "closure", is incredibly powerful when used successfully, but that's out of the scope of my comment.
Can anyone elaborate on when one giant JS file (benefit here is of course reducing HTTP requests) becomes too large? Right now I am splitting up JS files in a fairly simple manner: a single site-wide file with common methods and utilities, and then a handful of smaller files for various aspects of the site. I think that they are each small enough to all be combined into one single one... but when is that single file too large?
Here's the support forum thread about the issue:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2151766...

Better skip this firmware update.
Before I read it, I thought this would be an interesting idea, along with NYC Entrepreneur Week (http://nyew.org) - except that this is 8 startups that already have enough exposure (given that they got into these seed programs) presenting to ... er, I have no idea who? Looks like you need an invite to get in, so I'm assuming it is only open to VCs (which would explain why it's called Demo Day).

What would really rock (and I feel like NYC has very few of these entrepreneur friendly events - other than the tech meetup and the web2newyork meetup) is something like the NYTM showcase that was done at Internet Week, which allowed every willing company to put up a booth to interact with everyone at the event, with the funds coming from sponsorships. Except that these companies should be allowed to present for a 10 minutes each.

When are we going to have exciting things like that happen in New York? :-)
Peer Review: No Improvement With Practice
I agree. In the past year I've probably seen 20 different articles about sleep. In equal amounts they espouse the philosophies that we don't know why we sleep, sleep is for safety from animals, and that sleep is for the consolidation of memories. I would like to see more articles about how to hack sleep -- we hackers have notoriously irregular sleep cycles :).
I am reminded of set theory, or perhaps rather, the history of set theory. Creating "a" set theory is easy. Working through all the implications and trying to create a robust set theory took a lot of time, and involved a few unexpected complications. 'Course it all looks simple now from our 21st century perspective, but it didn't happen overnight.

I suspect the theory of causality will be the same way; yeah, a quick approximation that works most of the time is readily available (almost enough information in that post for a mathematically-inclined person to work it out, after all), but working through all the nuances will probably take us somewhere unexpected. For example: What will it mean when someone proves there is no one theory of causality, like there is no one set theory? (Obviously, I don't know this will happen, but from a strictly mathematical point of view it sure wouldn't surprise me much; for a similar example, see Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. (If you (in general, not dfranke specifically) are not math savvy, still, Google it; it's not that hard to follow. Wikipedia's a bit heavy on the math, there are less formal introductions around.)) A branch of math to keep an eye on, I think.
here is the bullshit feature Penn and Teller did on him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cR2-3Y56U
Myths of Reinforcement Learning (Satinder Baveja)
> two uncorrelated variables can't both have a correlation coefficient of .8.

Can you prove this? I think that the greatest possible correlation is sqrt(1/2) (around .7), but I have no idea how to prove it.

(Formally, the conjecture is as follows: if X,Y, and Z are random variables, and k is a real constant, with:

corr(X,Y) = 0
corr(X,Z) > k
corr(Y,Z) > k

then k < sqrt(1/2).

It is indeed possible for corr(X,Z)=corr(Y,Z)=sqrt(1/2), here's an example. With sample space {a,b,c,d}, let X,Y, and Z be:

a b c d
X: 1, 0, 0, -1
Y: 0, 1, -1, 0
Z: 1, 1, -1, -1

But I ran a program looking for cases with k > .7 and couldn't find anything.)
My stipend is only $17000. That's up from when I started four years ago at $13500. That covers rent and food, but obviously not books. Of course, Baltimore is far cheaper than New York, but it's still possible to live on.
Censoring the Internet is not technically possible, so I am not too worried.

China tried, but it didn't do a very good job. Do you really think the FCC will do better if it decides it wants to?
Apparently it does nothing to your freedom unless Apple makes a bunch of sinister changes in the future.

But in a worst case scenario where everything in the bundle is considered holy, removal of the certificate from a signed app is prevented and the integrity of the code signature is checked on launch, the answer is yes. We’re still far from this point in any of these three dimensions (in order: opt-in, not that I can see, nope), so there’s no immediate danger.
Great, but first, I believe that Rwandans should be coaxed into fewer children per family (my mom is from Rwanda, so I know my fair share about this). There's just not a large enough surplus of wealth to really sustain this. There are people who live in houses smaller than your bathroom (6ft. x 6ft. x 6ft.), with 1 mother and 2 toddlers. That's not ok. Sure, it'd be great if Kigali would have broadband, but the government should take care of its people, then its computers.

Although, I do agree with it being called the fastest recovering country in Africa. But then, maybe I'm just biased ;)
I think I must be missing something here. Don't people set their screens to higher resolutions because they want to see more stuff on their screen.

I always assume that people set their resolutions such that they can read normal-sized (12-14pt) text. If that's too small for their eyes, they would have set their screens to a lower resolution. As someone who likes to see a lot at once, this would probably irritate me.
Check out the NY Tech Meetup - you can to present in front of a crowd of 400 tech enthusiasts; VCs, press and alike are in the crowd. Some even have received funding, as well some fairly big sites launched there (Delicious, Muxtape, Hype Machine & some others).
That's because if they charge you the extra dollar they get to count you as a customer to the advertisers.
AT&T could allow you to use any unlocked GSM phone on their network but just not advertise it so that virtually no one takes advantage of it.

Untrue. Nobody takes advantage of it because it costs $100/year extra. (You pay the $200 subsidy on your "free phone" every 2 years as part of your monthly bill. If you bring your own phone, you pay for that "free phone" anyway.)

Since most people don't like throwing away $200, most people use a subsidized phone.
Zen-Coding - Set of plugins for HTML and CSS hi-speed coding
Firefox takes ...

...

...

... a very long time to start up. :(
Contact Lens with embedded 1 pixel display
I saw a link to one before, but I can't seem to find it now. I'm interested to know what about the video is important.
JSMin is also good.
Most of the time never. Additional files means additional connection overhead. Browsers typically won't open more than 2 simultaneous connections to the same host, so too many assets can quickly lead to noticeable delays.

The one exception I can think of is if you have a lot of JS code, but some of it needs to load faster. In that case you may want to split the code into several files based on load priority. If you go that route you may want to also use multiple asset subdomains or ideally a CDN to minimize latency.
I tend to create a page controller js file that my html file loads. I do not embed any JavaScript in the page rather, I grab any dom elements that I need via JavaScript so that way there is a clean separation between code and HTML. I tend to prefer Dojo as far as frameworks, so i will use dojo.byId or dijit.byId to grab references to my nodes in my page init function.

I intentionally make my controller file procedural and then I have a custom life-cycle event controller that fires off events for page init, reload, load data, page unload, etc.. so my developers can just fill in the blanks. Any data access is done by calling methods on a service facade which again is purposefully procedural. The service facade then calls any server side services we need (we don't do form posts any more, JSON is far more robust for submitting data). Finally, we use Dijit for any of our widget and any of our model / utility / OO needs.

I know it's no purely JavaScript best practices, and it is more related to project file layout and architecture, but I find it gives me the best architecture for my team size (100+). It helps me on-board people quickly and graduate their skill set while maintaining clean code and allowing advanced features.

I can start a junior on pure html layout, then we can train them to do controller modification, then to work on service facades and then when they have a good foundation in prototype base OO we can graduate them into building reusable widgets and subsystems for the controller and service facade developers. It works well and allows developers to work proficiently at their skill set without mucking up the whole system.

As well the service facades make it easy to contract out entire web projects while my internal team builds server side services to support the effort. This allows us to expand our work force, to a larger pool, without having to vet new developers to deep into business rules to get them up and running.
Diseases. Catastrophes.
Default shortcut to go to the desktop is F11. Default shortcut to rename a currently selected file is Enter.

These keys are unusual if you're already coming from another OS but I've found them to be quite comforting after you get past the initial learning curve. But that's the point, there is a curve to everything.

I don't think it really matters what OS you use as much as the fact that you constantly try to get more adept at using it (w/ the underlying assumption that the limit is not infinite yet unattainable.. but that's another story ^_^).
Empiricism, Economics and Mystery
I had my phone lock up today frozen on the shutdown screen and it stayed that way for twenty minutes or so. If you hold down the hold button and main button for awhile, it will eventually hard reset.
Also, "scope" means inside a function, and not inside a control block (e.g. for loops).

I would estimate global variables will cause at least 50% of the headaches an intermediate JavaScript developer experiences. It's particularly bad when you're dealing with rows of data, for example.

Get in the habit of declaring every variable in the top line of the function concerned before you use it. If you haven't already mastered closures, this will make things a lot easier for you.
Another thing eBay could have done differently in buying Skype
As much as I agree with you, that's highly subjective - that mysterious draw to Macs. There's also a silent, mutual bond between Mac users as well that is also a draw - the idea you're in an exclusive club. But those aren't really reasons to switch from one OS to Macs.
Your Twitter Account Is Useless Without These
Twitter these days is growing by the masses. More and more people are using Twitter for staying in touch with friends and using it as a means of staying in touch with potential customers. However which way you use Twitter it is useless without these.