skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You can't legislate morals into existence

Oh, but you can and it has been done. The repeal of DOMA was the first time the US Supreme Court has actually addressed this issue and said that laws cannot be based solely on morality. However, as long as you have morality + something else, you can have laws that would criminalize prostitution. I am mostly with you on this issue, but the details of all of this are much more complex than "let's just make it all legal".
I'm with everyone else, how can you possibly know this? I'm not saying it won't take off, but you never know how useful something will be until it's done.
thanks. couldn't find the actual tweets, but i guess they're buried way deep in somebody's timeline.
> Now imagine if there was a "charitable" catering group that accepted donations from large corporations and used it to provide free catering near corporate events. Should they be allowed non-profit status?

Are the open to the general public? Are homeless people not turned away at the door? If yes, then yes, they should be allowed non-profit status.
Show HN: The charging cable Apple should have made
There's a product hunt thread here too: http://www.producthunt.com/l/170fd13548
All Six SpaceX-launched Orbcomm Satellites Healthy in Orbit
There are different types of interferometry and different "waves" of interferometry development.

The first wave started around the mid 19th century and saw the advent of lots of new instrumentation that revolutionized science. Speed of light measurements. The Michelson-Morley interferometry test which laid the foundation for Relativity. Later FT-IR instrumentation. Fabry-Perot imaging. Etc.

The second(?) wave happened in the late 20th/early 21st century and surrounded visible light imaging, synthetic aperture interferometric telescope systems. Most major large telescope installations built since the 1990s have incorporated interferometric plans into them. The Keck 1 & 2 telescopes, for example, and the Very Large Telescope array. Both were built with the idea that interferometry systems would enable observations with "virtual" telescopes having diameters on the order of 100m. However, that hasn't worked out to be nearly as useful nor as practical as was imagined. The Keck Interferometer has been mothballed due to lack of interest/funding and the VLTI has been rarely used and has struggled to remain relevant. In fact, it's been found that large telescopes aren't particularly advantageous for interferometric unit telescopes.

Add to that the saga of space based interferometeric observatories, which have so far come to naught. There was the long-planned, long-revised space interferometry mission which was finally cancelled some years back. Then there were several varieties of telescopic interferometer arrays or formation flying fleets tasked mostly with detecting and observing distant planets (such as NASA's "terrestrial planet finder" concept and ESA's "Darwin" concept along similar lines). The idea of those was to use interferometry to both create very high resolution imaging and also to deeply "null" the starlight of parent stars. Over the last decade or two the limitations and difficulties of interferometry have become more apparent and the competitive advantage of alternate methods (such as large ground based telescopes using ordinary coronographs coupled with adaptive optics and space-based telescopes using coronographs) has more or less erased the promised future of interferometric telescope arrays as a new major class of instrumentation that would open up huge new realms of observation.
> Fuck no, programming in not math. I learned that the hard way, when I tried to take college level calculus as a refresher, after years of neglecting my basic algebra, and assumed that my interim programming experience would be sufficient to tide me over.

Calculus is a discipline that many think is not very applicable to the art and practice of programming itself.

"Programming is math" does not mean to imply "programming is any and all kinds of math".
Asking to learn. I travel often all over India and most parts of Africa. I have consistently received cell phone signals in 90% of the places. Local sim cards are easily available and the prices are ~20cents per message. In this context, I wonder the need of such a device. In fact having yet another device to charge is a bigger concern. I can see situations where this is helpful, but I think it is in the minority.
7 Times Militaries have shot down Civilian Planes
You've thrown me for a loop here. I thought your complaint was that the game glorified oppression of the Indians, slavery, etc, and that we should all feel guilty for enjoying it. Instead, you seem to be saying that the game omits slavery, and that we should all feel guilty for playing a game that doesn't glorify it.

Look: We did not enslave anyone. Slavery is not among the things that we celebrate about the colonization of the new world. We celebrate the brave explorers who sailed off into the unknown, and the Pilgrims who left the safety of home to build a "city on a hill". We celebrate the poor and outcast who took the risk of building their own businesses and farms so they could pass on a better life to their posterity. We celebrate colonists who found out how to govern themselves as equals, and ultimately charted their own courses as free men. This is what the game was about.

Slave-based agriculture existed at that time, and it spread to the Americas, but it was not the "big idea" of colonization, it was not invented in that era and it was not characteristic of it. It's just a fact of human nature: in every time, in every place, there have always been Democrats.
Link without the annoying Quora-login pop-over: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-profound-life-lesson...
> Edit: Perhaps a good rule of thumb to distinguish between programming and engineering is this: are you productively working full-time and producing more than 20-50 lines of high-level language code per day? If yes, you are programming. If no, you are engineering.

I like this. As a web developer I am often expected to write closer to an order of magnitude more lines per day than that. But maybe our high level languages aren't high level enough and I'm mostly writing bloat.
The L-R confusion with asian languages' speakers is very strange to me btw.

For example, English has t and th and f, most other languages don't have th and some don't even have f.
However it's very rare to see non-native English speakers to swap or merge those sounds. Virtually unseen in writing.

Asian languages' speakers do swap r and l and vice versa in writing too.
As someone who worked in a flyover state for 5 years and then moved to SF (then NY)... YES! The comment about the 20% discretionary income and resulting impact is also true.
Rising Conservatism in SV
It also includes far more writing and communication than it does mathematics, and yet we don't tend to talk about it as a part of Liberal Arts (or specifically Philosophy) much at all.

I feel like the biases come from the origin of programming. But to suggest that it is somehow exclusively mathematics because of its origin is puzzling. It is quite clearly mostly words, many of which are arranged into sentences based upon a strict grammar.

It's also odd in that the reason the original article was written was to suggest that it wasn't an insurmountable field, and that many more people could probably learn it if they were not intimated. It's odd that the response seems to be "FEEL INTIMIDATED MORTAL!". I feel like we're seeing gatekeepers feeling threatened rather than a particularly logical argument.
Does Tokutek intend to patent this consensus algorithm? If there's any possibility at all - I'm asking because of your track record - we're legally better off not reading about it at all, which is sad.
If I had it to do over again:

Start and run a business. The two biggest points: (1) In something stable that will last for your whole career. (2) With a geographical barrier to entry so that you are not in competition with people more than, say, 100 miles away.

A third point can help: Have the business need 'professional certification'.

Examples: Dentistry. Podiatry. Dermatology. Electrical engineering consultancy.

Other examples: Electrician. General contracting. Big truck, little truck in, say, plumbing supplies, electricians supplies.

For more: Have the wife and kids help in the business. Pass the business down to the kids.
I don't think this is limited to programming. I've noticed that most engineers forget their college math and engineering theory within a few years of graduating. Many are adamant that math isn't necessary for an engineering career, and many have heard this message from older engineers.

Maybe there's a similar divide, where some engineering activities use more math & theory than others. In moments of cynicism or frustration, I label the two groups "engineers" and "designers," and complain to colleagues that a remarkable amount of design work is done by trial and error.

Is it the right way or the wrong way? I don't know. I'm biased by my preference and enjoyment of math & theory, and I volunteer for tasks that use those skills.
Ha! I do dream about code when I sleep.
The thing I miss most is the Maybe monad. In idiomatic Haskell, Maybe serves roughly the purpose that null serves in Java -- a value may or may not be present. You don't need monads to query a Maybe value -- it works roughly like a Java Optional -- but working within the Maybe monad allows you to write a series of operations as though the Maybe value always has an accessible value and know that the whole series will short-circuit to a Nothing value if a Nothing is ever examined.
> Although in fact the decline of the value of the dollar is relatively predictable because of the Federal Reserve's policy goal of keeping inflation relatively low and the law of large numbers as applied to the generation of the real rate of inflation.

That's a crucial point. If the Fed didn't pledge to keep inflation under control, the dollar wouldn't be such a great store of value or medium of exchange. It's the stability promised by central banks that allow you to "predict the value of a dollar" in the immediate future.
One of Ousterhout's examples of this principle is something that comes up frequently on HN:

"Before I came back to academia a couple of years ago I was out doing startups. What I noticed is that when people hire they are almost always hire based on experience. They're looking for somebody's resume trying to find the person who has already done the job they want them to do three times over. That's basically hiring based on Y-intercept.

Personally I don't think that's a very good way to hire. The people who are doing the same thing over and over again often get burnt out and typically the reason they're doing the same thing over and over again is they've maxed out. They can't do anything more than that. And, in fact, typically what happens when you level off is you level off slightly above your level of competence. So in fact you're not actually doing the current job all that well.

So what I would always hire on is based on aptitude, not on experience. You know, is this person ready to do the job? They may never have done it before and have no experience in this area, but are they a smart person who can figure things out? Are they a quick learner? And I've found that's a much better way to get really effective people."
> That is why functional languages are so good. They are very close to mathematics

Wouldn't it be better to say that functional languages are close to our commonly used mathematical languages? The abstract underpinnings of mathematics are not expressible naturally. We've had to invent languages to be able to communicate the ideas.

And that is pretty much what this debate boils down to: Are the languages that allows you to express abstract ideas (programming languages in this case) math or language?
While setting IFS=$"\t\n" may make problems less likely when strings contain spaces, it's still not correct. File names (and other strings) can contain tabs and newlines, too. That's relatively rarer, but the quoting approach always works.
Yo To Invest
Just because something is theoretically open to the public, doesn't mean it's accessible or useful to the public. If the catering event is setup outside Google HQ or even in a public park in a rich or rural area it's not like a bunch of homeless people are going to show up.

The same is true for many OSS products. Yes, anyone from the public with an internet connection has access to the software. But what's the point if the software is only really applicable to certain commercial interests?
And that's the problem.

To get 10m accuracy at the equator, you'd need to get much greater than 10m accuracy at the poles.

You're effectively wasting information.

The surface area of the Earth is 5.10x10^8 km^2. In an ideal world, you could uniquely represent every 10m*10m area of the Earth - there are 5.1x10^12 such areas. log2(5.1x10^12) is about 42.2.

So you're wasting about 1.8 bits of information (~4%). Not too bad, now that I calculate it out.
Just pre-ordered.. It's awesome looking
Will a Medium post suffice?

https://medium.com/p/c7ea9cef0b01

The part where I offered on my own to write it is 100% true, by the way. They wouldn't even suggest what to say, and they put it up with virtually no edits. Which is amazing, since it could probably use a few.
"For example, while I go to Product Hunt almost every day, I get a lot of utility from the Yo account PRODUCTHUNTED, which push notifies me whenever there’s a product that gets over 100 upvotes. When I get that notification, I know to make sure to check out what product everyone’s getting so excited about."

Huh? That's what Twitter does and it includes a short summary so I know if I want to go to their site.
Streaming logs into Amazon Kinesis
> That is pretty content-light for HN.

Indeed. It was briefly let out of jail because of a mistake I made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8055336.

It's reassuring to see people complaining about stuff that the software normally penalizes. A natural experiment!
Oslo was not that different. I was told at my company to take July off as little business would be done so there was no point being in the office.

I found that a little disappointing as I would typically travel abroad or holidays and would much prefer to leave mid winter for a month and have a break from the darkness.

I'm now back in my home country Australia but not sure it was the right move. Weather is much better for lifestyle but life seems more complicated and to have more pressure/stress. In Norway you knew the government would look after you and while I've never used that support, nor expect to it was nice knowing it was there.
Write-good: naive linter for English prose
While this is a serious issue and everyone will have their varying opinions on it...

I really want Seth MacFarlane to make an episode of Family Guy based on this (The show is based in Rhode Island).
In scenario 1, both person A and B receive payment from C.
Coding as a practice, I love. It's a continuous process of learning while trying to solve problems.

But work is work. It can be a job. However, as a career, it's easier to move from one job/environment to another.
Fastpass: A Centralized “Zero-Queue” Datacenter Network
Any time I see something that is both interesting and obscure, like an article or a podcast, I have a tendency to packrat it. I have a USB RAID drive full of that stuff. It's a habit I've had for a while and it comes from exactly what you say: the Internet has a short memory.
> Mathematics in the broadest sense is nothing but logic applied to axioms.

mmmm. Lots of people would disagree with this :-)

> Until computers came along, math was entirely a theoretical pursuit

Not at all; mathematics always had applications. Not all mathematics, but it's certainly not that case that math was "all theory" and without serious application before computing.

> because for the first time we can take a mathematical idea from inside our heads and express it in a physical computer which executes it according to the logic we've defined.

We've had calculation assistants in various forms for centuries. Also, ballistics and construction based on mathematics are more-or-less "taking a mathematical idea and expressing it in the physical world".
Once we have androids for this task I wonder what will happen to the sex industry. What are the moral implications of buying a female android companion in the 2045 edition of Amazon.com
See also this recent post, which talks about something similar:

"A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8055868
Many dialects of English (in both UK and USA) merge these sounds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting
Seems similar to Naymit: http://www.naymit.com/
It seems it may be a risk, but we are nowhere near building it.
Empathic A/B Testing | Big Data, Little Devices
Nest’s Smart Home Plan Is A Hot Mesh
Clearly, Twitter is too complicated.
Half of what I read as a kid came from the library (and by "the library" I mean any one of at least 7 systems) and went back a week later. Half the remainder came from thrift stores and was left back in there in boxes when we moved. How common is it to have a personal physical copy of all your childhood possessions? What's the demographic variation?
I notice few commenters have brought up the obvious deflationary pressure being brought to bear against authors and publishers here. The same thing has occurred in music and film.

In the future is art and literature going to once again be the exclusive province of either those who have taken a implicit vow of poverty or the independently wealthy? Are we seeing the end of the era when a person could actively earn a living doing these things?
Interface Web School: Responsive Web Design Workshop withMatt Steele, 7/21 5p
Want to learn how to create sites that will display well on any device? Mobile Applications Architect Matt Steele, is leading a 4 evening workshop in Omaha, NE on Responsive Web Design at Interface starting Monday, 7/21. There are a few spots left. Sign up: https://interfaceschool.com/course/responsive-web-design/
Please, Dropbox go bankrupt so our favorite benevolent dictator for life can go work at a cooler place :)
So, question: How do you authenticate the person you are trying to message with, i.e. How do I know that I'm sending the message I want to send to (the real) Jason Greengrocer not the FBI pretending to be Jason?
Anyone have any theories on how this could have evolved? I have to wonder what sorts of minuscule electric currents they're feasting on down their underground.
Too late to edit my own post but mturmon is correct, my guess about the number of digits was incorrect. Even with a uniform distribution, it still takes 8.44 digits in base 32 and 7.04 digits in base 64, not counting checksum:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=log+base+32+of+%28%285...

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=log+base+64+of+%28%285...
I tried reading this, and I found that I wasn't a fan for two very specific reasons: First, Harry is imbued with a level of knowledge you'd be hard pressed to find at the world's top universities, and that always takes me out of a story. Its not his intelligence that bothers me, but the fact that he's a veritable walking scientific encyclopedia. Secondly, by adding rationality to Harry, the author also seems to have added a healthy dose of irrational fears. There's a moment that is the polar opposite of the original stories where harry decides that "voldemort" is a terrifying name and should be replaced with with "He-who-must-not-be-named". Which is silly and a clear misunderstanding of what drives harry potter and a clear misunderstanding of what "rationality" means.
Well, "computer" originally referred to a person performing the task of computation. In that sense, "Until computers came along, math was entirely a theoretical pursuit" may be accurate - it is hard to make math practical without computing anything. It's certainly not the case that it was purely theoretical until we had mechanical or electronic computers.
About encrypting SNI
I could be mistaken, but I'm actually asking for what these bacteria (e.g., Geobacter) use as a carbon source - that is, where do they get the raw materials to build proteins and DNA? Options are that they reduce CO2 (which could be super cool but surprising for something that lives underground; plants do this in photosynthesis) or that they get their carbon from the environment.

It looks like Geobacter can at least use exogenous acetate[1] but it's not clear what was provided to the lab-grown bacteria described in the article.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1392927/

EDIT:

The comment that was deleted copied the text from the beginning of the Wikipedia page on Geobacter; I'm pasting it below:

Geobacter... [is capable of oxidizing]... iron, radioactive metals and
petroleum compounds into environmentally benign
carbon dioxide while using iron oxide or other available
metals as electron acceptor.
Battleship Rangefinders and Geometry
I have not been to Africa or India, but considering that it's easy to find areas of North America without cell phone coverage I find it very difficult to believe your assertion about 90% coverage. Even in cities, it seems from the comments here that there is some appeal to communicating "off the grid" as it were.
This is total crap. You can't possibly say that women are forced in prostitution. For some it's a choice between making $x or making $100x, that's not enslaving, but just a personal choice by the woman.

"as prostitution exists we'll never have a free society." The whole idea of a free society is total bullshit anyway. While I totally agree with you that human trafficking is despicable, it doesn't change the equation, if the end product is legally sold (or rented by the hour more accurately) or illegally doesn't change the demand or the supply.

We will never have a free society because it's an impossibility, humans are not evolved enough, nor are we devoid of vices like greed. A free society of automatons maybe, but not humans.

And as for your comment about farming, that's also wrong. Farming is a relatively recent profession, no older than 10k years. You think women didn't exchange protein for sex before that? If you do then you're dead wrong.
Why do Quora articles continue to make the front page when we can't read them? I'm greeted with http://i.imgur.com/WTeSt8s.png No, I won't sign in with Google, nor Facebook.

How do the people upvoting this read the article? Do they sign in? What possible benefit is there to signing in? They're basically holding content hostage.

When I defended Scribd, people came out in droves to point out how wrong it was to hold unique content hostage. I'll admit, it made me rethink my position. But it's strange to see that Quora doesn't get the same stick.

EDIT: If the HN homepage had a popup saying "Login with Google or Facebook to read all of HN," would you tolerate it?
http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/sayings.php
>>In a society in which a hefty part of the male population thinks that buying a woman drinks or even dinner entitles them to have a happy ending, this statement is very cynical.

There's a significant difference between buying someone dinner and expecting sex, and paying them money for sex. The former is a favor that is done as a form of signaling and courtship. The latter is a monetary transaction that formalizes the objectification of one party.
Hmm. Does this mean that the cost of storing new data over time will grow, to support the larger and larger amount of existing data that needs to be stored?