skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those Alcor members who do donate to charity, good on them! Charities could always use more money, however - pledging $10/month to water aid is a great start but pledging $100,000 or more from a life insurance payout would make a massive difference.

Your second argument doesn't make sense - if no one individual could make a difference then by summation, no difference could be made by any number of individuals. You can't seriously argue that a donation of e.g. $100,000 to a life-saving charity makes no difference to anyone.

Thirdly, let me clarify that I never claimed cryonics is bad, and I do not hold that opinion. I would encourage research into cryonics in the same way that I would encourage research into cancer drugs or AIDS mitigation. However, I contend that under my personal ethical position, it would be more ethical to save many young lives than to invest in a small probability of saving one old life. Abstracting away from the specific case of cryonics, I suppose I would generally state that I believe (at this early state in life extension research) that death of/at old age is inevitable. By accepting this, instead of trying to deny it using technology that is incredibly immature and does not yet have any proof of effectiveness, one frees up one's financial resources to take care of family and friends, and if one is a wealthy individual, to attempt to save the lives of others.
Plus let's not forget that Chrome for a long time used Webkit, meaning the browser core was there from the start already.
Is 7.5 the standard workday in Finland or are you talking only about your case? If it's typical, it's very encouraging to read about it and it explains a lot about why it's mostly Scandinavian places that are willing to experiment with 6 hours also.
Patients can be transferred between dewars if necessary. They are also very well designed, of a sturdy steel construction specifically built to last. they are regularly topped up with liquid nitrogen weekly, but can 3 months if not topped up[1].

You don't have to move to the US, there are organisations around the world who will perform the perfusion and handle shipping in an insulated box of dry ice to Alcor, but you should definitely budget extra. Many also rely on their members to help each other out a bit; you don't need medical training but might be trained by them and help in other ways with other patients; they also often offer a higher priced membership without this provision.

An example: http://www.cryonics-uk.com/

As for the cost of the preservation itself, the vast majority of people pay via life insurance rather than directly.

[1]http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/faq02.html#bigfoot
Ditching Linux for Windows? The truth isn't that simple, says Munich
It took about eight months to get those bugs fixed. That's not the best thing. Other than that, I am still using it as main editor.
Because there really aren't any companies hundreds to 1500 years old, right?

Oh, wait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
An airfoil describes the stall characteristics of the wing.

Camber, chord, edges, angle of attack .. these are all described by the airfoil and are key to flight control, including stall handling. How an airfoil gets itself out of the stall state is of great interest to designers.

Airfoils which utilize the Magnus effect (as in this case) do have different stall characteristics. Its not incorrect to refer to the airfoil in that context.. a bit like calling a soccer ball not just a sphere but also a wing, too, which in fact it is to most airfoil designers .. ;)
Actually the 'continent' (I assume you mean Europe - if not, sorry then I am wrong) without subsidies where people pay full price for phones is a bit of an urban myth. At least for the time.
In fact in at least the larger countries (Germany, UK, France) people very much had to rely on anywhere between 12-24 months contracts to get subsidized phones. Remember, even (the higher end Nokia or Ericsson) feature phones cost several hundred dollars then.
I remember having paid 200 DM for my Ericsson T28 way back in the day which would have cost 3x as much if I didn't get it with a contract.
F5 load balancers still use Tcl, albeit a modified and optimised version.

If anyone is reading this article and thinking "Gee, I wish I could get a job writing Tcl", hit me up.
> Can you admit you were wrong yet?

I never made the claim you're objecting to. The modulo operator minimizes the bias, it doesn't eliminate it. And it's the most efficient way to solve the problem.

My suggestion is that you stop thinking like a lawyer and start thinking like a scientist.
Enforcement of Fundamental Labor Rights [pdf]
It's a nice list but I have the feeling you can read each of these articles and still not be able do write a halfway decent database because there's nothing on how to actually write data to the disk efficiently on any operating system.

I for one would be very interested in that, although perhaps the deprecation of spinning disks has reduced the complexity of the issue.
> It's the same with a human's memory/personality. Just bits in a brain.

We barely know how memory works. It is fantastically simplistic to suggest that personality is "just bits in a brain".
Raghuram Rajan (Chairman, RBI, India) spoke about this and more recently in a very interesting speech - http://www.rbi.org.in/scripts/BS_SpeechesView.aspx?Id=908&_g... (Check the section, "Money liberates and Empowers" if not the whole article.)
But half of the internet was saying that it is dead. I was using ST2 till a month back, switched and I liked it immediately. They're already working on roadmap for 4, hopefully this will reach stable soon.
Movies Synchronize the Brains of an Audience
Is ecology explaining less and less?
The Republic of Venice developed that idea to a system of great complexity for electing the Doge, that included copious injections of randomness. There is an interesting analysis of this protocol in a paper by HP laboratories, available here (pdf): http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf
>Just after his legal death was declared Thursday at 9 a.m., Finney’s body was flown to a facility of the cryonics firm known as the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Sounds like a fairly standard preservation; definitely not days in between. As it is, even if a field perfusion is not performed, cardiopulmonary support plus gradual cooling still massively reduce any chance of brain damage.

A standby is when they wait at your deathbed with a doctor, then get to work as soon as you are pronounced dead, including using a machine to perform cardiopulmonary support to circulate oxygen to the brain while cooling. They then start perfusion (replacement of blood with cryoprotectant), normally in the field.

Cryonics as assisted suicide would be preferable as an option, but a standby is significantly better than nothing. As it is, several US states have legalised assisted suicide, so it could potentially become an option in those states, but I guess nobody wants the mess of the legal battle to set a precedent. If there was a Swiss cryonics company, it would probably be available as assisted suicide today.

See also my other comment on assisted suicide: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8241828
Fair enough, I'm sorry I had the wrong view. But you said you are a PhD student now...in what kind of department? CS? PhDs are very rare in design.
How to Write Integration Tests with AngularJS Properly
You should first worry about how we get out of this planet before the Sun turns into a red giant and swallows the Earth after 5–6 billion years from now.
"Me, I tolerate writes that take a bit longer to keep things simple :)"

It's not just to keep things simple, it's to keep things consistent :-) Some NoSQL systems (e.g., MongoDB) introduced a new P in the equation (Performance) and used this to justify a lot of questionable decisions that affected consistency (and durability!). They have come a long way since these early decisions though.

If a system considers moderate latency as a partition, it would need to perform partition recovery on every write. That's why I'm not sure considering latency as partition is in line with the CAP theorem.

Maybe it is more related to availability though (not sure).
>I'll admit most physicists I've met are suspicious of wild-eyed theory.

...

>So I think the return to a fundamental assessment of phenomena is pretty natural thing. Calling out assumptions like scale.

i see big difference between "Calling out assumptions like scale" as a "return to a fundamental assessment of phenomena" and "Calling out assumptions like scale" in order to fit it into a wild-eyed theory like superstrings (basically to salvage the theory).
This is rather more interesting from a machine learning point of view than philosophy. For instance, it seems a blind person does know about space from touch, but cannot innately identify space from visual information. What can we infer about the way our brains process sensory information from this fact?
>You can't seriously argue that a donation of e.g. $100,000 to a life-saving charity makes no difference to anyone.

It also doesn't make such a massive, terrible, catastrophic difference if it isn't made as money is fungible.

I'm not actually sure on any particular foibles of life insurance payments to charity, but if it was easy/doable, it seems like something that many more altruistic people would do.
Is anyone else seeing a strange issue on Linux where the sidebar doesn't toggle open/close folders correctly?

The folder icon toggles between open and closed, however the files inside are not displayed. I can still open files via the command palatte, but I'd like to be able to browse via the sidebar too...

Update: My desktop environment is xubuntu 14.04.
UK Students: Win Tickets to the First Ever TechCrunch Disrupt Hack in London
> Is anyone else seeing a strange issue on Linux where the sidebar doesn't toggle open/close folders correctly?

Linux doesn't have sidebars, desktop environments do. Which desktop environment are you describing?
back from larakaaaaaaaaaan?
Really? Almost everyone I know checks a journey planner app just before setting off. Most of us have a choice of station or stop to set off from, and that's when you need the app most. Also your default search is set to "leaving now".

The thing that's so infuriating is that Tube Deluxe gets this perfectly correct. So I need to keep two apps.
Good point, I'm using xubuntu 14.04.
The Pressure to Create the Perfect Controller
Apple's Steve Wozniak: wearables are just a way to show off
In some of the products there's not need to worry as there's not competence. Well, it's basically search the service it doesn't really matter what they do.
Can we stop the stupid cane toad meme. The scientists at the item told the cane farmers not to bring in the cane toads and they ignored the scientists and brought them in anyway.
I hope advertisers don't discover this fact!
Could people stop spamming Sublime Text beta releases every few hours? Previous submissions:

- 3 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8241434

- 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227111

- 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8226102

- 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8226133
I feel like you're being that guy. Forgive me if I come across the same way.

Why link me to the Wikipedia article or insinuate I'm pulling this out of--to put it more politely--ex culo? Given my use of notation, one might assume I am at least a little familiar with how the thermodynamic entropy functions are mathematically derived.

To be pedantic for a bit, Entropy is an abstract mathematical state function useful for the prediction of thermodynamic systems. Much like the Gibbs and Helmholtz terms, entropy has no direct qualitative basis; there are many open-ended interpretations seeking to justify what it means, which is not unlike looking for God or faeries or what have you.

Mathematically speaking, I think you got your equality / definition wrong. Which energy function do you refer to? If you are still convinced about an error on my part, you can demonstrate in classical thermodynamics that,

S = "the inverse of available energy to do anything"

Or stats thermo, if that's how you roll. (Mine isn't that great anymore, sadly.)
my company proxy doesn't allow me to see the page, maybe they use the same regex as HN :-/
Yeah, I am hoping that an alternative will take ST crown. It really does not have the level of support it deserves.
Lime looks like a good contender http://limetext.org/
Italian Scientist Says G-Spot Doesn't Exist
Please explain why it would be unethical to do that with someone who agrees to it for a payment of 10 Mio. USD and with the option to leave at any time with only partial payment. And while you are at it, please also explain why testing of new drugs with unknown effects on human subjects is not unethical (or is it according to your opinion?).
And the classic remedy for eliminating bias is to redraw/reshuffle if the number is outside of the desired range. Note, this completely eliminates all bias. The negative aspect is that in this case, random number generation can take arbitrarily long (with rapidly diminishing probabilities); to make it more efficient, you could first use a modulo operation, but only using a base that divides the original range (e.g. for 7 kids and 60 seconds, do 60 mod 10, then redraw if the result is 7, 8 or 9).

You've failed to acknowledge the trade-offs of using your solution versus the OP's solution (or the solution above), and you're calling people who are trying to point out the trade-off "morons", that's why you're getting downvoted.
Actually I don't think the sidebar/file manager in question is provided by the desktop environment, it is rendered by Sublime Text itself.
Irrelevance: The favicon for hackcampus.io look remarkably similar to that of hike.io. Are circles the new squares?
I'd say this is a biased view. In German speaking countries, social sciences rather suffers from theory flim-flam. Maybe in the US, you didn't have your Luhmann-moment yet.
Ask HN: Has anyone actually used Parse.com to build anything more than an MVP?
There was a good amount of publicity when it launched, all of my developer buddies said "cool, definitely worth a try, next time I need to hack together an MVP".

Since, it's been bought by Facebook and all of my friends have forgotten about it (much like hoodie, meteor and few others I can't even recall tbh).

Even now, I'm working on a project we started a few weeks ago and parse seems almost perfect, but still, we went with a weird hybrid/multi server postgres/node/php solution instead, without even seriously considering it.

So what has your experience been?
It's a joint degree between my alma mater (Comm. & Arts) and a Arts & Humanities department from another university (focused on the information sciences and journalism).

Think "social science approaches to technologically mediated phenomena".
Haha, wow! Apparently they are...
Charting the Rise of Twitch
I find the mocking/stubbing in Go awkward. You have to implement all mocked methods, and if you want to record certain calls, you have a lot more code to write.

Let's translate the example to Java:

public interface Job {
int getPriority();
void doWork(); // do is a reserved word
}

Then, to mock it with JMockit:

new Expectations() {{
job.getPriority(); result = 1;
job.doWork(); times = 1;
}};

These 4 lines replace all this Go code:

var Done bool

type DummyJob struct {
}

func (j DummyJob) Priority() int {
return 1
}

func (j DummyJob) Do() error {
Done = true
return nil
}

If you imagine some larger interface, it would be a lot of code in Go. Mocking in Go isn't fun.
See also: Traffic Waves (1998, William Beaty, http://amasci.com/amateur/traffic/traffic1.html).
Cross building NetBSD on Linux
I agree. More details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity-addition_formula

If you add two velocities that are less than c, you can never get c, you always get something smaller.

0.8c + 0.3 c ~= 0.887 c (It's smaller than c)

At low speeds the effect still exists, but it's negligible. There is an important difference between "it doesn't exist" and "it's so small that if we forget it we will be fine".

It's so small that you must use floating point numbers with too many digits to calculate it. It's more useful to calculate the difference between the "relativistic" sum and the "classical" sum. Another way is to aproximate the formula with a Taylor expansion

dif = (X+Y) / (1+(X * Y/c^2)) - (X+Y) ~= - (X + Y) (X * Y/c^2)

0.8mph + 0.3 mph = 11mph - 5.9 * 10^-39 mph

The correction is veeeeery small.
A SECOND hacker group has been exposed to have ties with the Syrian government
See No Evil: Kickstarter’s humblest gaming story
Well, people get excited after some months of stalled development.
Nice animation effects on the buttons (material design).

It's not immediatly obvious, but the requirements to use this projects are: Node, Ruby, Gulp, and the Sass gem and it's creator is Google :)
Ask HN: Why can't programmers get along with business type people?
FWIW - India has one of the best money transfer infrastructures [IMPS/NEFT/RTGS]. IMPS is my favourite - it taps into the ATM machine backbone and enables 24x7 instant payments at almost zero cost [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immediate_Payment_Service ]. The problem is more than the lack of infrastructure - Most folks are a bit apprehensive about using Cards or Online banking capabilities for fear of theft.
Iceland eruption near volcano triggers red alert
OK, "Critical views of science in the news" is probably a useful avenue of "hard looking" and quality control for science. But I think it behooves us to be a little more critical in our choice of critics.

This struck me when the author, in his introduction, mentioned a previous Q&A with telepathy proponent Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake only gets a brief mention in this piece as a critic of science, and I hasten to add that I don't have any beef with the article from that point on.

For anyone who doesn't know, Sheldrake has for years been trying to convince people that telepathy is real. To this end, he's done a series of experiments which had the kind of inconclusive results you'd expect, yet in spite of a dearth of convincing, published results, in spite of a global failure to replicate his results, he keeps badgering science to take him seriously. Having been met with apathy and mild derision, he now blames science on his failure to be taken seriously.

So yes, Sheldrake is a "science critic." So are many of the purveyors of homeopathy, of miracle cancer cures, of coffee enemas, of dowsing and of Intelligent Design. Science is empirical, and people without evidence like to call this a shortcoming of science.

So my question is: how much debunking, how much finger pointing and pantsless emperors is required before we can in good conscience exclude certain groups of people from discussions about the philosophy of science? Those discussions are important, no doubt - and this is why I think we should be wary of allowing them to be bogged down by the contributions of frauds and crackpots.
Of course there are centuries old companies out there - but they didn't have the technical burden of storing along conserved bodies in a near perfect condition with them... Apple, meet Orange.
Maybe because business people request "non-sense" stuff, by non-sense I actually mean, non-logical, not fitting the system.
So? and your point is? The inhouse system was modified and worked fine it was the brand new brought in system that failed.
Many of the papers linked are case studies based on production systems. Do they count as research, too?
Even worse, it has a Boris Johnson icon in it.
See my reply to sibling comment.
> I feel like you're being that guy.

What's my incentive to continue a discussion with someone who has abandoned the topic? In a closed system, the amount of exploitable energy, and the quantity called entropy, move in opposite directions.

> ... or insinuate I'm pulling this out of--to put it more politely--ex culo?

Point to where I said this. If you can't, then you have abandoned the topic.

> Much like the Gibbs and Helmholtz terms, entropy has no direct qualitative basis; there are many open-ended interpretations seeking to justify what it means, which is not unlike looking for God or faeries or what have you.

Nonsense. Entropy is clearly understood, it's not a philosophical puzzle as you suggest. It's easily quantifiable. It's science, not philosophy.

> Given my use of notation, one might assume I am at least a little familiar with how the thermodynamic entropy functions are mathematically derived.

Anyone can adopt the notations used in science. This doesn't tell me anything about their knowledge of the topics under discussion. You simultaneously apply standard terminology, but you go on to say that explaining entropy is "not unlike looking for God or faeries or what have you", which means you don't understand the significance of the symbols you used.

Entropy = k log(n)

k = Boltzmann's constant.
n = number of states the system can be in.

How difficult is that?

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/thermo/temper2.ht...

Quote: "Temperature is expressed as the inverse of the rate of change of entropy with internal energy, with volume V and number of particles N held constant. This is certainly not as intuitive as molecular kinetic energy, but in thermodynamic applications it is more reliable and more general."
If we're going to have to play musical editors every year or so, it sure would be nice if they supported a common internal API or something. I'm sure I'm asking more than I'll get, here.

I haven't wanted to use an IDE since the 1990s but I really like the thicket of customized tools I end up with, from combining editor plugins with build scripts. It SUCKS to lose that integration by switching editors.
Because peoples understanding changes, but you know that. What doesn't change are the laws of the material world. But one must understand the imperfections of inductive knowledge to understand that.
urban renewal does sound great until you realize the only people who suffer are those who are already suffering. So you have depressed prices which means large swaths of property can be bought out on the cheap. Then those areas get developed and local property values increase. However, instead of buying out the dieing islands of poor they are driven out either through increased taxes, zoning, or imminent domain seizures, which turn the property over to the very same people who would not buy it when they know government will take it for them
Somewhere a Keurig engineer has gone 'shit'. As far as I know the law for Europe, you're not allowed to use another companies logo form on a commercial product without prior agreement, which is why clothing houses like to heavily brand their items as they can't prevent a competitor from stealing the cut of the item but they can prevent them from using a logo.
Great choice of background video.
I expect vandals would have no interest in books as a whole. They wouldn't be vandals otherwise: there is something about the fragility and meaningfulness of books that makes one shudder at the thought of making physical violence to objects.
I didn't downvote, but if you ask me I'd say others did it mainly because grandparent brought philosophy into scientific discussion. (And with reasoning or phrasing issues at that: “we can't do something even if we can”, for example, contradicts itself.)
Please have some perspective. Human beings have existed in roughly our present form for 200,000 years. In another 200,000 years, chances are we won't recognize ourselves. And in 5 billion years, which is 25,000 times farther into the future, there will be nothing remotely resembling human beings. We won't be a distant memory, we won't be a memory at all.