skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dawkins seems to be a good example of the Peter principle at work in a large social movement. Clearly he's a smart guy and at some point in his career he did have interesting and original insights to share with the rest of us.

But it seems like the new atheists [1] have elevated (promoted) him into near demigod status and he's now being socially pressured into producing new and original insight on a regular basis. Unfortunately for him, he doesn't have an infinite well of wisdom and insight and so he ends up producing drivel of this sort.

[1] I am a new atheist and some of blame for what has happened here probably falls at my feet as well.
I don't use these services much, so I might be confused, but wasn't Uber initially a limousine/black car type service with professional (insured, taxed, maybe trained) drivers, and only later expanded into "ride sharing" with UberX, while Lyft has always been doing ride sharing?

Personally I prefer the old Uber over the "ride sharing" Uber and I don't really understand why they have diluted their brand to the point where some people don't even realize that Uber drivers are not necessarily random people driving their family car, but may be professional drivers.
> Late compared to what?

I have developed a sort of notion about the inevitability of invention which I believe can be generalized to the discovery of other concepts or the development of abstract ideas.

It works basically like this: Nearly all inventions require prerequisite inventions. For example, the ipod required transistors and batteries (among many other things) to exist before it could be invented.

Looking back at history, we can compile lists of technologies that would have been prerequisites for other technologies. We can determine when these prerequisites were met, and then compare that date to the date of invention. Is there a small gap between the two, or a large one?

Many inventions have very small gaps between their genesis and the fulfillment of their prerequisites. Powered heavier-than-air aircraft are a good example; they were created within years of the creation of a suitably light and powerful internal combustion engine.

Some inventions have very large gaps between their genesis and the fulfillment of their technical prerequisites. If you were a "Connecticut Yankee" in King Arthur's Court, these are the inventions you would [re]invent. Things like the phonograph. Basic clockwork, wax, needles, and parchment are all that you need to create a rudimentary phonograph that works well enough to prove the concept (to show how simple it is: if you've got a shitty vinyl record laying around, you can play it back with a paper cup with a needle stuck through the bottom).

Inventions that came long after their strict prerequisites can be considered "late". They weren't waiting for technology or better materials, only waiting for somebody to have the idea. The vast majority of inventions were not particularly late.
Might as well treat them as that, then. I envision an app called RideMETA that orders you a cab from each and cancels on whichever doesn't arrive first.

It's all about the customer and raw, capitalist competition as they keep telling us.
They are long, but not uncivilized. That's the point - HN goes to significant effort to avoid long threads, and in my view a lot of our best information is contained in long threads.

If lack of civility is what we want to avoid, maybe we should target that directly.
Quantum Cascade Laser Tests Blood Sugar
All answer:

http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-...
If it is so safe and reliable, why isn't used more for normal projects?
Interesting how the example image for a bad UI shows the good UI using "Metric" vs "English" buttons.

In the England and the rest of the UK we use "Metric" vs "Imperial".

And we use a half metric system; metres and miles, litres and pints.

I notice in the USA the system is a different half metric system. Americans are much more likely to use ounces instead of litres. I also heard they sometimes use "kilopounds" and other such weirdness.

Anyway, this example image is one big fail to me.
How, and by what tools, do we recognise an improvement then?
“I’ve noticed lots of Lyft drivers dropping the signature pink mustache from their cars. Many also don’t bother with the fist-bump introduction, another Lyft convention.”

This is very noticeable now. Lyft used to stand for a different customer experience to Uber, but now it's effectively the same. It's sad (although probably inevitable) that their growth has lead to such a dilution of their brand.
This is absolutely true and often shocks applicants that I meet in alumni interviews (although some know it well). Most of the Ivy League offers a full ride (as an official policy) for students who come from families with <$100k/year in income. This is not merit-based, it's need-based. It's a nasty misconception of "anti-elitists" that the Ivy League is only for the rich (although as others have pointed out there are certainly legacy biases and donation biases that get some in + a need to have a certain percentage of paying students).
The man who grew eyes
NotepadConf: the textiest conference you'll attend
because choosing a language for a commercial project is rarely about safety or effectiveness - it's about language popularity, availability of libraries, and replaceability of the programmers.
Everyone Talks about Xamarin, Here's an Introduction
Is anyone using this, despite the license?

I have seen this here on HN and elsewhere. The only reason I avoid is the weird not-so-FOSS license and key-to-the-chest mentality.

I would love to hear semi-detailed experiences using it. And are there any more open alternatives built on CL? I am very interested in this idea.
It's a terrible problem. Maciej Ceglowski is doing his own study on link rot: https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/08/researching_link_rot/ He says my numbers match his own so far, about 5% per year. So I'd guess ~2200 bookmarks are dead, and maybe you could get ~1000 of them back from the Wayback Machine.

I have 28MB of personal bookmark files I'll be post-processing, as well as ~47,000 links from a shared, private bookmarking service dating from 2005 through 2011. I'm not looking forward to it.
But does a gradient really provide a clear picture if ~90% of your data points stick to one side or the other? To me this seems to be just as clumsy as a gay straight/gay/bi classification system. Either way risks warping your thinking as described in the article.
> Such a strange requirement.

Surely they need to be able to see the ads in the app to make sure they comply with the various guidelines Apple has. Otherwise all they could do is 'take your word for it', and there have been plenty of apps in the store that provide how trustworthy that is.
Ha good point :) I don't think it's a joke, I think he is falling into the same fallacy himself. To be fair, the article acknowledges it's a difficult trap: "We seem ill-equipped to deal mentally with a continuous spectrum of intermediates. We are still infected with the plague of Plato’s essentialism." He would probably agree, if someone pointed it out to him, that his phrasing here was an example of exactly what he's talking about. I think it is just a fault of phrasing though; it doesn't really undermine the sentiment of the article. It almost vindicates it!
> I envision an app called RideMETA that orders you a cab from each

Such app has been built, promoted, denied access and subsequently shut down
http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/02/corral-lyft/
I'm actually kind of being a dick when I answer "human". In theory, the data is used to answer questions about "how racist/inequitable is America these days", and given some of the uglier bits of our history, this is an important question to answer.

I just wish we did not have to ask it.
A good thread about programming languages in avionics.

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Which-is-Major-Programming-l...

Having had a lot of my undergrad CS classes in Ada (in Toulouse France, the home of Airbus) I get nostalgic every time I see a post mentioning Ada on HN.
A much simpler counterexample would be hybridization creating a new species, such as the new mexico whiptail.

Nature has exceptions in store for most of its rules.
What is the use case of being portable to other languages ? I can vaguely surmise that being portable to other language might provide more traction for using Shen in existing project.
It is possible to switch the switches on the Kinesis to Cherry MX blues, but it is a lot of work:

http://t.co/OyjGCdwvGN

That said, it is awesome (and loud).
Have you looked over the other responses to the same question? Were any of them what you were looking for?

http://edge.org/responses/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-...
We are talking about people. So I think this kind of research and distinction makes for a powerful reminder of why tolerance for diversity is so important. Were those young people who do not happen to fit so nicely into these categories encouraged to be themselves rather than conform with 90% of the other data points, maybe they could live happier, stress free lives.
Do you have ECC memory on that host? That corruption is not normal and suggests a problem likely with your hardware.

Do you have snapshots? Can you read that file in a snapshot?
Out of Many, One: The Science of Composite Photography
Perhaps he could answer the question, what is the most recently retired scientific idea? I imagine it's likely most readers are unaware that that idea (whatever it is) has been retired.
From what I understand, this methodology increases code duplication, which leads to higher risks of bugs later on.

I'm trying to understand whether this is truly the case, or if I'm missing something.
A proposal substantially similar to the Hyperloop was proposed in the early 1970s, the principle difference being that the right-of-way was to be buried underground (greatly increasing construction costs over Musk's estimate). It was the Vactrain, by Robert M. Salter of RAND.

http://www.infowars.com/l-a-to-n-y-in-half-an-hour-10000-plu...

http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html

http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html

The proposal failed largely for other reasons shared with the Hyperloop, however.
I really appreciate your honesty and the knowledge you shared here, but I fear your rationalizations about why what you did is not unethical are just that - rationalizations. It's wrong to do others work for them and let them represent it as their own, no matter how mundane the subject matter. It lets them receive qualifications that they didn't earn and others who want those qualifications in competition with them, do not receive them. It might just be a mundane 10 hour essay, but that person may not have had the time management skills, writing skills, or will to do it and therefore should not have received the marks that he did. On the other hand, if you didn't do it, somebody else would - but again that's a rationalization!
You cannot criticize economics without at least some understanding of it. The only point that was coherent enough for me to reply to was:

>What exactly is rational about a system which centuries of history have proven is unable to function without a predictable cycle of manic-depressive booms, recessions/depressions, and anti-democratic bailouts?

Economists claim individuals are rational, not that the whole system is "rational". Rational individuals interacting could result in a really shitty result, which is bascically what macroeconomics is about.

Depressions suck, that is why macro-economists try to smooth out the business cycle. The fact the we needed the latest bailout is a sign they haven't solved this problem yet. But I don't have a better solution.
For that matter, the app could just record every time it "sees" an object and when you mark it lost, it tells you where it was the last time (GPS coordinates and all) it "saw" it.
Or your sociologist professor is wrong, and the majority of the human population only orients to one sexual attraction or the other in binary, which makes a lot more sense from an evolutionary point of view.
Does the language support concurrency primitives as part of the core?
> With the boom of the "college consultants" industry, professionals are essentially "forging" entire high school careers on behalf of their clients - telling them what classes to take, which clubs to join, where and how many hours they should volunteer, etc.

I don't really get this perspective. If colleges are going to base admissions on amorphous things like what clubs someone joined, or what organizations they volunteered for, why shouldn't a student hire a consultant to navigate those waters? Is the student who hires a consultant to tell them what classes to take, or what clubs to join, or what organizations to volunteer for, and then follows through with those, less deserving of a spot than someone that happens to randomly fall upon the right combination of activities? Or, more to the point, has an uncle who went to an Ivy-league school that can give them the same advice?

If anything, admissions consultants level the playing field. Who else is going to tell a bright midwestern student that Ivy-league schools don't respect locally popular clubs like Future Farmers of America? Who else is going to tell a bright lower-income student that they should spend their summers "volunteering" in Africa instead of working all summer to make some spending money? The families with Ivy-league alums already know what boxes to check.
Kick Russia Out of SWIFT, UK Demands
>>> The big question then is how do they make out in real life afterwards

As they move up in life, they will move up in consultants, so long as they have access to the wealth necessary to pay for it.
Google Cache Link:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Aarchi...
I use both of these services extensively, but have only used Uber (the limousine service), a half dozen times or so.

UberX is at least a 20x, if not 30-40x larger business than Uber proper, which is why they transitioned away from simple black limousine service. A trip to San Francisco by Taxi from Redwood City is about $105. Via Uber it is about $150 (presuming no Surge Pricing) - Lyft/UberX charge me about $40-$55 (depending on wait time). And, unlike a Taxi, I get almost immediate service, by a courteous and professional driver eager for good feedback. As a 15 year+ user of taxis on the peninsula, and having taken Lyft/UberX around 100 times so far - I get a much more enjoyable experience in Lyft/UberX than I ever did in a taxi, some of who did know the area, but many of them just confused new-arrivals to the Bay area in dangerous vehicle that had me fearing for my life.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't develop for walled gardens if the cost-benefit works out for them personally.

I just wish they'd stop whining about the cost though.
I'm working on an article with the data that we have (conversion rates, impact of permissions asked, etc.). Will publish :)
Lived in the USA all my life and I have never even heard of "kilopounds"
I like how he used TinyScheme. s7 is also fun for hacking around with a small footprint scheme interpreter.
From the article physicians averaged $50,000/year in 2010 dollars back in the 30s or 40s. $50,000/year in 2010 was lower middle class. It's enough to live on, but certainly not enough to be comfortable, especially with a family, not is it enough to save much.
I was paid $50/hour for quite some time to do "marketing consulting" for a company started by a douchebag studying at Harvard. It was vaguely interesting work, and I over delivered on every expectation, but grew tired of his increasingly demanding explanations (pages long at times) of why I did what I did and who the market was. Those two questions were asked of me obsessively.

Eventually, after I told him I was sick of doing write ups that were completely unnecessary, he admitted he was taking a marketing class at Harvard. I was unknowingly doing all of his exercises, and he would turn my write ups in to the Professor. Apparently he got an A.
kilopounds feels like a weird bastard but I think it makes sense. The actual values of the metric system are just as arbitrary as US Custom/Imperial (a particular mass, 1/10,000,000 part of the quarter of a meridian, such and such hyperfine transitions in a arbitrary atom, &.) The value of the metric system is decimalization -- the centi-, kilo-, mega- prefixes. Really, if americans ditched miles and tonnes and stuck to kilofeet and megapounds the systems would not be meaningfully different.

On the other hand, having your prime factors be 2 and 3 rather than 2 and 5 are nice when you divid things into quarters and thirds regularly (inches).
At a great risk of going back into the lands of negative rep, let me a) warmly welcome you here, and b) admit that I was, indeed, joking and quite sympathetic to the poster above me; cheers from Soviet Russia ;)
It could also just, you know, only order one ride based on the app with the closest available driver.
This reminds me of what PG writes in a start up idea essay.

"Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless."

So a decent heuristic to see if something is able to be gamified is to look for potential hidden black markets to see if it possible, then you see see how to invest your time. In this case it seems like it would be the best choice to hire someone on an opportunity cost basis.
Can give you some example topics for the essays? Not having visited college in the US, I find it hard to imagine what these assignments look like.

Here, you are usually expected to write a paper based on multiple recent papers on a current topic.
This image comes up pretty commonly on r/badphilosphy when something he says (or drama surrounding something he says) is discussed: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpXAZGuCMAA21xA.jpg

I wouldn't go quite so far as to absolve him for his opinions due to social pressure, but there is truth in what you say.
If the services are pretty much equivalent, and the only thing left to compete on is price and/or some vague elements like experience, isn't this basically a textbook case of commodity?
Argh. Blogs/access/code

I blame swipe typing.
It could be that the code is indeed more safe and reliable, but also quite a bit more expensive to write and maintain.
Programming interviewing process can be hacked, and a quick Amazon search uncovers a bunch of titles doing just that.

I can tell you what the bias might be - people with other backgrounds might treat software engineering and programming as equals, and thus have very vague idea of things like system reliability, scalability, failover tactics, deployments, etc., jumping at the quickest dirtiest obvious solution. Steer the conversation in a way where people become cognizant of your knowledge of application architecture and system-level design.
i'm guessing these shuttles got routine maintenance (your car probably did too.. ) but also heavy inspections before and after every trip. We can make things last, it just takes a lot of effort and/or generally a lot of money..
The sociologist professor was discussing research. Though she agrees with the idea, it wasn't a claim made by her, it was a discussion.
More from reason than from any experience in biology: I don't think macromutation has any statistical chance of being a significant factor in branching of species. The chance of a 'macromutation' both occurring and being successful enough to not only let the spawn survive but even let it thrive as a branched species is vanishingly slim.

Perhaps complex characteristics might evolve as functions with simple gene input, like perhaps the shape of an organ or the structure/color of a fur or even the size of a mammal all expressed by a few genes. This would allow that the species as a whole could adapt quicker to environmental changes. Then the gene mutation would be 'micro' but the resulting change could be 'macro'. Perhaps paedomorphism is like that?
The pricing depends on Surge and Wait times and is pretty volatile - both of them are experimenting. I see a 10-15% shift in the Bay Area - with the win going to one of Lyft or Uber randomly. I agree with Farhad - I use the two services indiscriminately. As far as "Better Experience" - Many drivers in the Bay area work for both services, and some previously worked for Lyft and Moved to Uber, and Vice Versa.

Long term - it really depends on how committed each service is to responding to User Feedback, and managing the drivers with consistently low scores out of their system.
موقع التسجيل فى برنامج التدريب العسكري المهني 1435 jtp.tvtc.gov.sa
Weren't you tempted to inform the professor?
And this is the problem with any sort of app review - you never can know. Even code audits where skilled people manually inspect code sometimes misses things.

It's just yet another cat and mouse game.
So because the checks aren't perfect, they should abandon them?

Clearly you can change the ads being served after it is reviewed, but all they can do is check the ads during the review process.

One of the things they also check for is that the ads aren't too obtrusive.
I have kids. This translates into lots of home video.

I am also ripping all my DVDs onto my home server. That chews through a bit of storage, but it's also a lot more convenient (and, with kids, less likely to end in tears of sctrached or bejammed DVDs). BluRays will be next.

It's easy to use a vast amount of storage.
Well, part of the whole commodities thing is that the ones being turned into commodities don't want to be.

But in true capitalist fashion, Travis would be proud, we of course can't allow them.
> really horrible, angry, violent, and generally racist
people

Bigoted commenter is really a bigot.

Thanks, you saved me from reading your post. If you had something worth saying, you blew your chance by starting out insulting me.
Actually, I don't think that is the same. Wheres the negative feedback for the services that failed?
I tend to align with what Alon Levy called "technicals" in my criticism of CA HSR[0]. I think Fallows comes across as uninformed as to the details of railroading and public transit in CA, and Dan Richards is a rather one sided mouthpiece. The biggest challenges to HSR that I see are:

1. Pacheco vs Altamont. Altamont is faster, involves less travel through the Santa Clara County suburbs, is faster to Sacramento, and gives us a second bay rail crossing.

2. Tejon Pass vs the detour to Palmdale. Yep, HSR is going to make a big detour out to Palmdale to help build up exurban sprawl. Never mind that its more properly a Metrolink concern, the state is subsidizing sprawl.

Finally, this whopper from the article:
"Uh, I helped build that project [JF note: Dan Richard was on the BART board from 1992 to 2004] and it is a smashing success. The ridership projections proved inaccurate in its first few years only because of the effects on air travel of Sept 11th and the ensuing economic downturn. Within five years, the project was quite robust and today is operating at 105% of its costs from downtown SF to the airport, extraordinary for an urban mass transit system. "

Jesus, what a joke. BART to Millbrae ruined SamTrans financially, and has been underwhelming performance wise. Does anyone think the current system works well? What should've happened is that the people mover at SFO should've been extended to Millbrae or San Bruno. The Millbrae BART station is nothing more than a massive gift to contractors (my god, how much concrete was used?), and is horrible to actually get around in. Oh, BTW there are three BART tracks in Millbrae, and one is never used.

I remember hearing plans of building an HSR tunnel under Millbrae BART (in a world where money grows on trees) rather than having BART give up a track or two.

[0]http://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/polit...