skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
IMO philosophers get into trouble because they want to nail down what is "real" or "true". They try to work by pure logic, but alway get tied up by the limitations of spoken or written language. "Infinite" for example is a logically imprecise term; there are different flavors of mathematical infinity.

Perhaps a more valid way to phrase the same sentiment would be to say that science, because of its assumptions and methodologies, can only address phenomena that are spatial, temporal, and causal. There might be real things that have none of those attributes; science and philosophers would have difficulty studying them, but that difficulty does not rule out the possibility of their existence.

edit: spoken or written
This. A bed should serve for only two purposes; sleeping and we all know the other.

Watching TV, laptops, reading, etc... do not train your brain that the bed is for sleeping. Now I lay in bed for a nap and I will typically zonk out in a couple of minutes.
If you eat the steak you have to pay. Even "complete and functional product" is unlikely wording as very open to interpretation. Quite likely the contract is vague, people often do not lock these things down well at the start.
Sorry, forget link: https://github.com/gnewton/chidley
If Half of All Species Go Extinct, Will One of Them Be Us?
Poor New Zealand!
I'm pretty glad that's over with. Authorship was a pain in the ass
1) Change your landing page. It makes it seem like your app is an alternative to just texting "thank you" to someone. A visitor is going to think, "Why not just text them? What's the benefit of doing it on an app that my friend is not using yet?"

And, on that note, I'd be interested to know how this is actually better than just texting the person (or tagging them in a grateful Facebook or Twitter post).

2) I knew a startup that spent 3 years working on an app that allowed you to publicly "thank" a service professional (waiter, hairdresser, etc.) That service professional would build up a profile of "thanks" and get a resume out of it.

That startup failed because no one wants to say thanks in an app. People aren't looking for new apps[1], so you'd better address a huge pain point in their lives if you want them to download anything.

3) Decide what you want to get out of this project (hopefully not an income). Set yourself a hard deadline. If you're not hitting your target, move on to something else. That was advice given to me by a 500 Startups investor, and though it was painful to hear at the time, it was incredibly helpful and important. Decide what failure means and, if you do fail, accept it and forgive yourself. You certainly wouldn't be alone.

[1] http://qz.com/253618/most-smartphone-users-download-zero-app...
To be fair, this only kills one of the multiverse hypotheses. I'm reading Brian Greene's "The Hidden Reality" right now, and he describes about 8 independent (or semi-independent) multiverse hypotheses. From what I understand (and I'm no physicist), this just provides evidence against the anthropic principle, and the multiverse associated with that line of thinking...
Honestly I feel like this is an even bigger problem in the natural sciences. In my experience journals want strong and interesting positive results. They rarely want negative results unless it is debunking a previous result that seemed interesting and positive. I have worked on projects before, that while interesting and on a solid theoretical base as far as approximations go, were ultimately incorrect for what ever reason. I should be able to publish and report on this so no one else wastes their time on it or can find a glaring flaw in it and build upon it. While the initial idea may be a good one the implementation of that idea is not always a good one. It can be useful to other scientists to know these things.
There's a very subtle undertone of negativity in this article about physics. Before I get into, William Bardeen is not in the same league as 'Surfer Dude and his E8 Theory of Everything' which throws basic facts about representation theory out the window, coming up with 'todalay boogus' arguments which amazes auntie, mommie and magazine editors but a real physicist would instantly dismiss.

Bardeen is the real deal. His papers are very interesting and feel a bit like reading Sidney Coleman's papers. If you're interested...

http://arxiv.org/find/hep-th/1/au:+Bardeen_W/0/1/0/all/0/1

Is nature scale invariant? So far the answer is absolutely NO but I strongly advise to wait and see. There are many topics that point to some breakdown in scale or reorganizing what we think of space and distance (dualities in string theory, conformal field theory).

OK, now the important thing I want everyone here to realize. You are living through a GOLDEN AGE of physics. You wouldn't think that based on what all the popular magazines tell you. Here's why...

1. Higgs particle - discovered!

2. Inflation - discovered! Denying this one is like denying the Big Bang itself. The evidence is overwhelming and in fact I would list this as the single greatest scientific discovery of all time. The concurrent discovery of gravity waves, quantum gravity and a real life example of a Hawking process only sweetens the deal.

3. Supersymmetry has basically already been discovered IMHO. They aren't announcing anything at CERN and won't until they have so many sigmas under their belt but trust me, it's coming and truth be told, it isn't really so surprising. SUSY physics has always been rock solid from the beginning. The situation is very similar to that before offical Higgs announcement and before someone went knocking on Andre Linde's front door. Many were extremely confident in the Higgs particle a least a year before the official announcement. The BICEP 2 results were even more glaringly apparent than the Higgs results. Many people were walking around the Earth with 'secret knowledge' that inflation theory was correct even 2 to 3 years before the official announcement.

So you are living through EXTREMELY interesting times but you wouldn't know it with all the big science bashing being thrown around.
If I play solitaire on my phone, when tired, it does the trick. I find it's way better than other things, like watching TV or reading random websites or books.
Well both sides have asked, bizarrely.
This looks pretty similar to the native driver, and not as easy to use as mongoose. How would you compare this to the other node-mongo options out there?
Naive question (I know nothing about this stuff):

If mathematical logic is a property of our universe, then aren't we again entering the realm of circular logic? i.e: "Given the logical frameworks that are correct in our universe, our universe is very likely."

Unless math is something that somehow exists independently of our physical universe... but then "where" does it come from?
Err, that is complete nonsense. If there is a reasonable case to be made then people should consider it.
Unless the person naming names is wrong and you end up with a witch hunt.
Agreed on trains. Train data hasn't been good historically so we only recently have the ability to improve this. Internal debate, but not sure we agree on more frequent options like tubes and buses. We're experimenting with real-time ETA, but its pretty whack, things could jump around, which may be ok for nerds but not normal people. Stay tuned, we're not in any way finished. This is what we work on.

(Founder of Citymapper)
They have to keep the conversation lighthearted, or else there's a chance we might actually talk about all the real problems with taking a scientistic view of the world. That is, the crackpots are way less threatening than someone with real critiques.
This suggests to me that there might be a follow-on problem with fabricated results.

Given the "publish or perish" thing in academia, and devaluation of negative results, it seems there's a strong incentive to obtain positive results. And this is likely to increase the incidence of researchers being pressured into tweaking data to obtain affirmative results.
There's really not that much to understand, and the details aren't that important unless you're living them.

The question boils down to this: are we one of an infinite number of universes that popped into existence that just happened to have the right variables to be stable and result in life? (The anthropic principle, a statistical conclusion, and a philosophical mind-bender...)

Or are we in a single universe whose properties are mathematically aligned in such a way as to be very unlikely to result from chance, even if repeated an infinite number of times? The details of this are interesting, but extremely numerous and complex: basically, Physicists are trying everything.

The latter does not require the hand-wavey wishy-washy existence of an infinite number of non-observable extremely large things, and therefore garners more enthusiasm.

However, if observations conclude that the parameters of our universe are in fact paradoxically perfect, then the idea that we're an evolved observer of one chance universe out of many holds water.

Hence the intense research on how this whole universe thing works. Fun.
That's seriously messed up. There are tons of adblockers on the Play Store, why has Disconnect Mobile been singled out?

BTW, I'm currently using Freedome which from what I understand is very similar to Disconnect Mobile
Really the only thing that was keeping it alive in my opinion was the nostalgia factor. Makes much more sense to make everyone use Skype, I don't think they even had cross platform chat which probably could have helped ease the transition.
DeadDuck: Google ship is Dead
Really dislike software with configuration baked into the code, every key binding and experiment requires recompilation which prevents managing it sanely through a package manager.

I get the appeal of "minimal" in this case, but it just doesn't work for me.
Related: https://twitter.com/trevorpaglen/status/504713665908850689
>> curly braces

and "wokkas"

I mean, how many XML interpreters do we really need? At least for Java, it seems like there are too many "Enterprise!!!" libraries that seem to exist to extend the lameness of the language by requiring you to write a DSL in XML.

I suppose for C there really are a lot of low level libraries that actually do things, though, such as read/write sound and graphics files, or implement useful abstract data types. Things that might seem "built in" in a 21st century language/environment, but not in C or Pascal.
How  APIs Will Increase Your Revenue
Does each cable actually lie at the sea bed? What if the route comes across a really deep part of the ocean?
Because developing for the alternatives (Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch) don't allow people to make a living.
Caveat here is that you're duplicating data in a multi-master scenario. If you have a single write master and multiple read-only instances then consistency is easy to maintain (and suffering when you write from a distance) - obviously you're giving up strict read consistency, but that's enormously easier to model and understand.

edit: I guess this is written from a very web-tech point of view, where the assumption is often made that reads will dominate writes. Obviously that's not always the case, and the tradeoffs get a lot more complicated!
Same here. It's been a pretty good heuristic for bullshit detection so far, to be honest.

http://i.imgur.com/H7BkObO.png
I've always wanted to try out jQuery alternatives but don't really have the opportunity at work.

What does MooTools do better than jQuery? Or is it purely a smaller binary size?
I recommend 'A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable' by John Steele Gordon. [1]

From description,

"But in 1866, the Old and New Worlds were united by the successful laying of a cable across the Atlantic. John Steele Gordon's book chronicles this extraordinary achievement -- the brainchild of American businessman Cyrus Field and one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century. An epic struggle, it required a decade of effort, numerous failed attempts, millions of dollars in capital, a near disaster at sea, the overcoming of seemingly insurmountable technological problems, and uncommon physical, financial, and intellectual courage."

[1] http://amzn.com/0060524464
This is kind of a default approach for minimal WMs (probably inspired by DWM).
Yep, definitely the sort of thing that belongs in a dotfile.
> I think you're going to have a hard time here trying to convince a developer community that a "refund" is something a client is entitled to in a work for hire situation.

Not true at all. I'm a freelance developer that would be ashamed of handing over poor quality code and I believe that if there are developers out there who do little in ensuring that their clients receive the best quality software that they're capable of producing and fixing bugs in products given to clients then they don't have the right to demand to be paid.

That being said, if the problems were due to miscommunication about requirements & scope and finding problems with the software as an excuse to demand a refund, then that's an entirely different issue.
Nice list, bookmarked!I am going through the SHARK paper and would say that its definately worth a read.
5 Places Where You Can Open a Bitcoin Wallet
CakePHP has a few features for use on the client-side.
Are bar value labels supported?
What could this possibly have to do with anything?

Maybe do a little research about the project first...you come off as pretty ignorant with a statement like that.
Especially given the first one laid in 1850 failed within hours http://atlantic-cable.com/stamps/Cableships/indexstc.htm
Thats kinda how it is.
Chrome 38 Beta: New primitives for the next-generation web
Ask HN: Why do companies not provide good feedback for rejected candidates?
I am curious it is a policy or is it too time consuming ?
> If it's for "programming", then you have to pay, no matter what program you receive.

Even that would vary considerably depending on the exact contract terms – most of the pure-hourly contracts I've seen had some thought towards standards & quality, client acceptance, etc. Lawyers make a ton of money arguing over the finer points of contracts and given that both parties involved are discussing this in public I'd question whether they had a good lawyer writing the contract given that they appear not to have one now.
Why the heck is "allegedly" in scare quotes? "Allegedly" is exactly the proper word to use. There were allegations made. We don't know what happened.

Also, this drama playing out in public is a very bad idea for all parties involved.

EDIT Title no longer has "allegedly" in scare quotes.
They prescribe modafinil for sleep apnea? I have apnea and I'm curious because I've never heard this. I've heard it is used for narcolepsy.
The quality of a library isn't just performance or usability. You also have to consider if other people working on your code base will be able to figure it out and use it.

Even if jQuery is worse than MooTools in almost every way (performance, usefulness, size, etc.) it has a HUGE advantage in that any web developer has used it before, so there's a minimal learning curve when someone new has to start working on your code base.

Furthermore, since jQuery uses sensible practices in terms of API stability and plugins, you can expect performance and coverage to only improve.

Edit: I realize this could have been read as "MooTools is better" but I actually prefer jQuery from every angle. If you're doing something too complicated for jQuery, you need a full-fledged framework, not MooTools.
One deep end to jump in to philosophy here is the concept of http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience
>I'm sorry but I fail to see what this post is for. You made a post complaining about someone else's post (of which should not have been made in the first place) trying too win over people of whom have no opinion on the matter?

weeeeell, if he's the founder, he does have a right to defend his companies reputation (that said, i don't agree with the way he's handled it).
> "...the framework was not utilized correctly which resulted in the numerous bugs and browser incompatibility issues."

CakePHP is a server-side framework. Browser incompatibility is not going to be an issue of CakePHP. Either you are too inexperienced to know this or you are making a lame excuse.

I can see where this would go wrong if the developer made a complete rookie mistake and screwing up input on forms, methods, requests, etc. But these are the reasons for choosing and using a framework, anyone using a framework should know this. These types of problems are abstracted and there is not a need to reinvent the wheel. This does not add up with your story.

I am calling BS. I think you stiffed the developer and you trying to save face. You guys were apparently not involved with the development processes of the project, you could have had the developer resolve the problems and thus would not have had a complaint.

In the end, this is basic business, you agreed to pay the developer for their time. You allowed the developer to complete the project apparently without question, pay up and move on.
Chrome Extension makes Google say Mother's Day is today
Many of the technology buzzwords are actually business buzzwords, not programming buzzwords. For instance, PaaS and SaaS are business models, not anything technical. Cloud and Digital Rights Management are marketing terms.
The most valuable real estate a Realtor can own – a look at Dizzle
Why not? Server-side rendering of views?
Softcover: Frictionless self-publishing
> how to actually write data to the disk efficiently on any operating system

Discussion between Postgres & Linux devs: http://lwn.net/Articles/590214/ & https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7521008
I don't like monster but rockstar zero carb or sugar free does it for me. Also anything sugar free with erythritol as a sweetener is gross to me. It tastes way sweeter than sugar.

I wish I could acquire a taste for coffee because it seems like the healthiest way to get caffeine, but if I have to load it with sugar and cream it defeats the point.
Why Apple's September event may be its most significant in years
Garage Door Monitor Using OData and Electric Imp
Google SVP Ramaswamy to Inaugurate Brown CS’s IT Leaders Lecture Series
I'd have no objection to how he chose to transmit the audio. But in the article he mentions that he transcodes them to MP3 in order to save space.
The ANU Quantum Random Numbers Server:

http://150.203.48.55/index.php
When I became interested in modern physics theories of both quantum and universe level, I found the following book [0] by Max Tegmark to have very good explanations regarding origin and nature of the universe, quantum mechanics, and just interesting stories / facts from the life of physicists.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Our-Mathematical-Universe-Ultimate-Rea...
Galileo satellites experience orbital injection anomaly on Soyuz launch
How to Use Amazon SQS from Sinatra / Ruby
Note to everyone: This is why you shouldn't accept PayPal.

The only people PayPal benefits is consumers and scammers.
Hard to imagine NSA intercepts most of that.
Wonderful list! The C-Store papers are particularly fine reading.

For people who looked at this wanting to get going with using database systems (as opposed to creating them), I'd recommend:

Learning SQL by Alan Beaulieu
SQL Performance Explained by Markus Winand
SQL Cookbook by Anthony Molinaro

The three of these will take you up to a pretty useful level of SQL knowledge/understanding. The first two are fairly easy reading to boot.
Libotr: the code review
Sure, a lot of philosophers are so audacious, but not all. See, for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-realism
Disputes like this at the very least becomes very costly for both parties, notwithstanding the fact the damage each one may inflict in just trying to get the upper hand over the other.

Considering that you've brokered into an agreement before, haven't you explored the possibility of just resolving this amicably, with both parties finding a common ground to ensure a win-win situation for both.

Going through the lawyers and courts should be the last resort. I know to some degree this advice (which you could take with a grain of salt) may not hold some ground with the others. But just the same, you've worked together before and there should be no reason for you not to be able to settle things properly.
Does anyone know of a map where I can select two locations and find the shortest path (via submarine cable, obviously) between them?

By the way, this is a nice one. Happy to see that I can scroll indefinitely in one direction.
Consider it for what benefit to pigeon.ly? True there is altruistic value to the HN community, but from a business perspective his OP is likely to cause damage to his brand.
Neither. They are looking for the best candidate.

It's not their job to provide detailed feedback to 100+ lesser candidates.

If you want feedback, it's best to apply through a recruiter. Then you can ask the recruiter why you were not selected.
Normally I'd agree with you but it sounds like this work-for-hire arrangement wasn't based on an hourly wage but rather payments for deliverables. If the software was as bad as described, no deliverables were met and the developer isn't owed a payment. Note that this assumes the contract specifies the specifications for what was deemed acceptable work.
The `?share=1` parameter seems to let you view without hassling you to log in.

http://www.quora.com/What-startup-investors-have-really-bad-...
Or why you should get your money out of there as quickly as humanly possible. I never leave more than ~25 bucks on there.
Hello jcrotor. I think that a Meteor app could easily handle hundreds of simultaneous connections on a very small server.

Meteor is for writing highly interactive/reactive applications and I don't know if it is even meant for massive scaling.

There is a sweet spot for Meteor for apps that will not have millions of users.
> I can see where this would go wrong if the developer made a complete rookie mistake and screwing up input on forms, methods, requests, etc. But these are the reasons for choosing and using a framework ...

I think you just pointed what the problem might've actually been: Not using the framework to prevent browser incompatibility. The OP didn't say that CakePHP was the cause of the problem.
Why Amazon’s Newly-Bought Twitch Has Value
But they did have a protocol supported by many clients. This is very difficult/impossible with Skype. Though at least it works on the desktop, unlike whatsapp, the most idiotically crippled IM client of all time.
Really?

http://amzn.com/006097771X
You ask a developer to do work for you, they do the requested work, and you pay them. If you don't like the work, you end the relationship. But you still have to pay them for their time.

This is not a given, and it's why we have contracts. I've certainly never worked one that was refundable, but you never know.
In the past I've definitely written PHP that worked in one browser but not another. I don't know why this is the hardest part of the story to believe.
Thanks for the information. I put October 7 on my calendar as a reminder.