skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No amount of evidence will convince people. The vast majority are married to what they believe is their origin and trying to convince them otherwise, in my opinion, is a fool's errand. Majority of these conversations aren't based on not having enough facts, or having too many facts.

Also, you should frequent HN's IRC channel. You seem to create a lot of mostly off-topic threads that pose a single question in an attempt to create a discussion and I think your goals will be better suited to the channel.
That's an empirical question. The best book I have found on the DNA evidence for evolution written for a popular audience is Sean Carroll's The Making of the Fittest

http://books.google.com/books?id=tyRWHQAACAAJ&dq=Sean+B+...

Perhaps one could compare changes in opinion after reading Dawkins's book with changes of opinion after reading Carroll's book. On my part, I think the change of opinion from believing young-earth creationism to believing the scientific fact of biological evolution takes assistance in dealing with opinions on religion as well as opinions on science.

After edit: I should note that I'm personally acquainted with people who have gone through the change of opinion being talked about in this thread. Such a change does happen, and it's legitimate to ask how it might happen more often, as having correct beliefs about biological evolution helps people have correct beliefs about other scientific issues (for example, safety and efficacy of vaccines).
Addictive, very low barrier to entry - but where's the stickiness ? Why would i go back and more importantly what is there to make me remember my fights of which film won or lost ?
You can actually try it on the site, by the way: http://laikafont.ch/applet/test.html
We seem to have differing definitions of 'neutral'.
Knuth's paper "The concept of a meta-font" (from 1981) has a nice example in which he typesets Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd ..."), changing the parameters of his font a little with every character. It's sans-serif at one end, serif at the other. (Among other things.) Regrettably, this demonstration doesn't seem to be available online. You can find it, e.g., in Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas".
There are constructors in C++. The water is wet, how sneaky of it.

You either know the code you are working with or you don't. C++ or not.
Positive Change NY,positive change,positive  change services NY
Positive Matrix are designers and facilitators of positive change in NY. We offer a wide variety of services, so please visit our website for full details.
There's more to it than preference, fad and fashion. Tools get replaced when a better one comes along that transmits messages that exist near the same point in { Fidelity, Latency } space. Telephone calls are pretty high fidelity, zero latency (if they're answered). Snail mail is for high fidelity, high-latency messages (like phone bills). Nobody would snail-mail a lunch invitation any more - too high a latency. And so on.
Twitter is lower latency than IM; IM is lower than email. They vary in fidelity (Twitter's 120-char limit).
There remain room for a whole menagerie of tools in between, above and below. And these will be eclipsed when higher-fidelity replacements get invented.
Btw somebody explain to me why its ok to automatically switch a phone call (low-latency, high-fidelity) to voice mail (abysmal latency, half-duplex crap fidelity)? This really bugs me. I don't set up voice mail because its absolutely the wrong choice - send me an email if you can't get me on the phone, or an IM or pretty much ANYTHING but voice mail.
Writing your pom files in Groovy
I'm pretty sure the author was comparing C++ to C, not to Java, but that's kinda beside the point, because as the article says, "The real hidden cost is that now, instead of looking at one piece of source -- the function itself -- I need to look at up to four different classes. Add possible ancestors to find out if a call is virtual."

Put another way, the performance details we so often care about in projects for which we're using C++ are often non-local to the calling site. In order to know the performance characteristics of "a = foo(b, c)" I need to know a lot of things about the types of a, b, c, and foo, in addition to knowing what "foo" does inside its curly braces. In contrast, while it's hard to reason about the instructions being executed in Java in the same way we do in C or even to a large degree in C++, the types of a, b, c, and foo don't really matter, since passing in b and c is always a pass by reference or a primitive value copy, and foo is pretty much always going to be dispatched the same way (and constructors are preceded by a "new" operator at the call site, so we don't have to worry about that, either). Now, the only thing I care about is what's inside the foo method.

I am of course not disputing that you need to know the language you're using. It's just that even when you know C++, if you can't trust everyone who ever touched the code, you need to check in a bunch of different places to reason about the performance characteristics of this one piece of code.

Also, reasoning about the performance of C is all well and good right up until you realize that your compiler is better at translating C to assembler than you are and also, some jackass wrote a preprocessor macro called "foo" which does 18 different things. At some point, writing high-performance code is not about assuming you can guess what will happen but about seeing what's happening and trying to make something better happen.

Disclaimer: it's been a good 4 years or so since I worked with Java, and on top of that, I've never cared too much about Java performance, so please take this with a grain of salt.
He doesn't actually argue that the type system isn't useful. He assumes it derisively. You can take the entire review and replace Scala with C#. What does that tell you?

Scala encourages immutability. See case classes, for example. Or if ( ) ... else ... expressions. Stuff is designed to return values rather than be actions that set values. Even try ... catch ... finally blocks are expressions that return values. Being OO has nothing to do with mutability/immutability.
Objective-C Tuesdays: The for...in loop
College Tuition Cost Rising Again This Fall
Pop Quiz: Why should I clutter my brain with these little guessing games about what the compiler is doing? And why should these pop quizzes slow down my group's code reviews? There are, after all, languages out there that do not force this insanity on us.

The alternative for performance-critical applications is not Java, but C. C remains surprisingly tough competition after all these years for those rare pieces of software where programmer time is cheap compared to hardware resources. Having had non-trivial experience of both languages, reasoning about the performance of a C program is much, much easier than reasoning about non-trivial C++ programs' performance. Guesses based on local code inspection have an order of magnitude less uncertainty attached to them, which is basically what Rachel is saying here.
I'm talking with her on Skype atm, she's telling me that she hasn't starting using it yet, but that she went to a course at UCSB held by Stefan Th. Gires about R.

She is going to start using it in January when she gets some new corpus material.

She also said that they are going to use Tinn-R.
Trust on the Internet has a solution. SSL with proper CAs. Then the problem atleast shifts from Internet to real world.
Continued increases in college expense should open up opportunities for hackers to make start-ups that disrupt the higher education system. There are several HN participants building businesses in this market.

But note: "More importantly, the estimated net price -- what the average student actually pays after accounting for financial aid -- was much lower, at about $1,620 at public four-year colleges, and under $12,000 at private ones. Both figures are higher than last year but still lower than five years ago, thanks to recent increases in financial aid both from the government and from colleges themselves. The figures do not include room, board and other living expenses." As long as colleges appear to offer out-of-pocket prices that are substantial discounts from list price, many students will continue to think that they are getting good value for their money--as perhaps they are. The challenge for a hacker is to offer plainly better value for even less money.
If Paul Offit just creates vaccines and publishes factual research, then all the anger directed at him seems completely absurd. But if he or RotaTeq advocates or lobbies for mandatory vaccinations, then it is at least fair to criticize him as a moral agent.

People often throw up absurd objections to factual research because they have a moral stake in the debate but limited evidence (or knowledge, time, or interest) to engage on a utilitarian front. Unfortunately, it seems to be more politically successful to fight via convolution of facts than to engage in the moral issue directly.

The public seems to undervalue legitimate moral arguments, so competing interests instead engage in a proxy war of claims about benefits and harms.
Apple Announces Major Consumer PC Upgrades
Generally, in Clojure you'd write (do (foo) (bar)). The do form tells Clojure to evaluate its arguments in order. Some forms have an implicit do, e.g. (when x y z) is (if x (do x y)), but in general the order in which forms are evaluated depends on the form containing them.
ironically, lag was one of the reasons i ditched my iphone. bringing up the camera application would take 5 seconds to be able to take a picture, apps would take a long time to start and then end up crashing shortly after.

now i'm on an android phone (the t-mobile mytouch) and lag is there too. a phone call comes in and it's slow to respond. the web browser is painfully slow to navigate and clearly chokes on javascript-heavy sites.

i think android and webos will get better over time, but more focus needs to be put on responsiveness. even if the phones don't have all the whiz-bang capabilities, if they are quick to respond to the user, they will at least not frustrate them.
Most software is priced like a disposable commodity item on the iPhone because it is a commodity. You haven't developed your own distribution channel, and you haven't developed in any software 8 other people haven't already made, so your software is not worth much money per item. Those with difficult to reproduce software like navigation systems companies can charge $50 on the iPhone, quite successfully.

A candy bar costs $0.50 and each one has to be physically manufactured, distributed, and occupies retail space. But that's not a bad business - Mars Co is incredibly profitable. Pricing is an optimization problem, and there's no moral issue here. You are free to charge whatever you like; some prices make you more money. It sounds like World of Goo has made a good deal of money selling their software for $20, and managed to make a good deal more by offering a temporary sale (much like a department store). What's wrong with that?
Oh, and make Box's constructor explicit.
I think that's (A) a larger cultural thing, and (B) an over-generalization. Is it really that hard to see how that can all be averted? Especially if you're in a society that, like I mentioned somewhere before, takes a much more willing approach to education?
>I've never used Android, unfortunately—can't find people with the phone to irritate/mug

unalone, will you be at Startup School this Saturday? If so, you're welcome to borrow my Android Dev Phone for the day to play around with. I rotate between that phone, an iPhone, and a Nokia E75 depending on what I'm working on.

(back on topic) Considering the amount of attention that jwz gets, someone on the Android team should send him a free phone to tinker with asap.
To respond to one point: In standard SQL you usually cannot assign variables, macros, subroutines, etc. to complex or repeating parts in order to break the logic and sequence down into more manageable parts.

SQL actually has a way to break queries down, at least MS SQL does. There are views (certain kinds of views are even updatable), inline table functions (aka views with parameters) and Common Table Expressions.
There's always some risk with injecting anything into yourself (or your child). With a vaccine that risk is miniscule compared to what it prevents, but, if everyone _else_ in society takes that tiny risk, _you_ can get all the benefits without actually taking the risk yourself. So, if I give my son his a shot and he gets a little fever, or a sore arm, etc, you can skip it with your kid and send him off to school where he's assured to not get the flu/pertussis from mine. It's just downright selfish to put it on everyone else.
Man, that font had me guessing for a second there, porn files in Groovy ??
The argument boils down to the fact that C++ can express more in a single line of code than C can.

a = func(b,c);

....

Is it a function call, a member function call, or is it an anonymous constructor? Are b and c implicitly invoking copy constructors for other classes as part of type coercion? Is that a normal assignment, or an assignment operator? Is there a cast operator involved?

If it's such a complicated expression, then the equivalent C code would be correspondingly large and hard to understand, and it would be just as complicated to figure out its cost. The not-so-hidden cost of C is that even simple things end up being many, many lines of code. C++ was invented because certain kinds of C programs -- programs that were already being written in C -- were painfully verbose to express and complicated to change.

If writing your code in C would be simple and clear, then you would have to be stupid to write it as complex, obscure C++. When your C++ code gets complex and you start banging your head against a wall, imagine re-expressing it in C. If the result would be an improvement, then you screwed up. If you blame C++ for screwing up, then you're a language feature junkie. Admit it and check yourself into rehab.

That is the hidden cost. The mental model for a simple function call became incredibly large and complex, and every function call is potentially as complex. Which makes reasoning about performance a rather hard thing to do.... All that translates ultimately into either worse performance or longer development time. Neither one is something you like to hear about.

I don't know how it is a "hidden cost," because it's quite well understood that any reasonably expressive language can say more in a single line of code than C. Anyway, the size of the mental model of your program is what you should be worried about. C++ doesn't give you worse performance or longer development time. It gives you more choices for how you express your program. It means more different problems, because you can write C-style code and have C-style problems, or you can use the possibilities C++ offers and have different problems. If you already know that the choices forced on you by C are usually the right ones for your domain, then by all means apply that knowledge to how you write C++. For instance:

Worse, it makes profiling harder than necessary. All the type coercions that happen at the API level will show up as separate functions, not attributed to the callee, but the caller.

If you want them attributed to the callee, it's pretty simple. Do the coercions in the callee, just like you would have in C.
Unique ids are cheap though, and it does lead to interesting discussions:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=887466

This particular one is not very 'on topic' though.
This may not be likely, but - you don't specify a level for your printk statement. It could be your message is just not getting printed to console. Check out info for "/proc/sys/kernel/printk" as well as information about syslogd and klogd as the message may be logged to somewhere else.

I also would like to mention that in general memory barriers can be useful for working with i/o irrespective of your particular situation.
Not all markets are the same. I pirate most of my games.

they expect us to enter a store here and pay US$200 for a title. and that's for wii. PS3 are double or more then that.

wiiware? Nintendo wouldn't take my money no matter what. ...in fact, let me try today... yep. amazon still can't ship a 10gram card overseas. "Wii 2000 Points Card cannot be shipped to the selected address."

so, yeah, I pirate most games I play. And dare you to buy world of goo for 200 bucks.
"Science loses ground to pseudo-science because the latter seems to offer more comfort."

Or more likely because the U.S. government lies to its citizens about health information all the time; I'm not getting the H1N1 vaccine for the same reason I didn't sign up to go breathe the air at ground zero.
Which is why it's handy to remember that, while copyright licenses can be received as part of a contract, copyright licenses are not in themselves contracts.
Look at the new 27" iMac, that 16GB of RAM make it a very interesting machine. I do wish the price on the new MacBook would have been $799.
More explicit handling of error conditions is also good FWIW - don't see you doing it here. The kernel is not forgiving of using resources your don't have or failing to free resources acquired.
They've done some other GFDL'd books more recently. Jacob and Adrian's Django book, for example.
The new iMac looks nice, the Macbook looks like less of a wussy addition to the lineup, the Mac mini still looks like a Mac mini. What I'm excited about is that mouse. Multitouch scrolling is the feature that I love most about my Macbook Pro; I feel somewhat crippled when I don't have it on the iMacs and Mac Pros at my school. This mouse looks like what I've been waiting for from Apple. Sexier and sturdier than the Mighty Mouse, and much more in line with the rest of their technology.

EDIT: Yes! This was a launch that came with Jonathan Ive talking about things. Score one for Ive fanboys. http://www.apple.com/imac/the-new-imac/#large

EDIT EDIT: Two smaller announcements: New remote, new Time Capsule. http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/20/apple-updates-19-remote-p... and http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/20/apple-quietly-updates-air...
I see your point, but I am reminded of multiple research where if you make it an option people are less likely to follow through. (sorry too lazy to find and link source)

I think it applies here, but there was a study in which they made something default. Like by default they enrolled you into some fitness program, but you have the option of not doing it. The study found that more people actually went through with the program instead of trying to opt out. Compare to when the program was optional and people had to sign up to do the fitness program.

By stating that vaccinations are mandatory, his intentions might simply be trying to get as much people as possible to take the preventive care. Again, I am just trying to state one possible reason.

What if he was not attached to any company or any entity, but just merely a doctor who advocated the vaccination as mandatory? Would things be different?
China's long-range electric car
Ugh. Try attacking the vector math required for most games programming these days in C, using macros and magic instead of classes and templates and operator overloading. I'd rather blow my own leg off with a bit of C++ any day.
Please further explain your moral agent statement. I can see mandatory vaccines on the one hand as a moral position (you must save your kid my way) and on the other as a socially responsible position (not vaccinating your kid provides disease vectors to mine.. not all vaccines provide 100% immunity so more vaccines is better protection for all). Im interested in hearing more on both sides of this.
Also from what I know, which is not much, you should be requesting the ports via request_region. If that fails you should probably not be writing to the ports and should also mean you're sharing the port with another module.

kernel newbies is theoretically a good place to go with these kinds of questions too.
I've set up a similar voting site with moderate success (about 3.5 million page views in a bit over a year):

http://www.bestsporecreature.com/creatures

A couple of points:

- The biggest hurdle is that you need to have watched both movies to really decide between them - with a simple image voting site, the judgement can be instant. Movie buffs will likely enjoy it, more casual movie watchers like myself probably won't get far.

- related to the above: it needs to be easier/more obvious how to skip a pair.

- to really make it sticky, you should offer something to the hardcore set. In a kittenwars, that's pretty obvious - people can upload pictures of their cats, and keep coming back to see how they do. It doesn't translate very well to movies, because people don't really add "their" movies - and there's even less emotional attachment to a "pairing" of movies. It's mildly interesting, but not something you want to check obsessively throughout the day. You need a way for people to keep score and know when they're "winning".

Which movie is better IS an interesting argument - but the point is often to show off one's knowledge of movies, which this site doesn't really let you do.

How about this: when you create a fight, you can state which movie you think is better, or estimate a percentage win for each movie. Then, your "score" is how many people agree with you through the blind voting on the home page. The more matchups you add, and the closer your initial guess, the better your "score". Add a leaders list, and you're getting places now.
The problem today are the cost of the infrastructure to support CAs (this may be a minor problem) and usability (I think this is the most difficult to address). I cannot imagine many of my FB friends using PGP (or GnuPG), public and private keys.
> Being OO has nothing to do with mutability/immutability

It does if you are using OO to represent state - which most OO programmers do. For things like UI stateful code is often the simpler solution. However for large, large swaths of a program using stateful objects is a complexity bog.

The real question here is whether programmers will bring their stateful OO habits and recreate them in Scala.

When I was first learning Clojure I started by creating an object system. And then I realized I was entirely missing the point as well as going against the grain of the language- functional programming is palpable in Clojure's design.

If an object maintains state you can't generally view it as an immutable value- that's another benefit to Clojure's approach. You generally design your program around the idea value -> function -> new value (_not_ same object with a different internal state). The transparency of this is quite enlightening.

In anycase, I don't know enough about Scala to make an informed opinion, but whether Scala's decision to meet OO programming sensibilities halfway is a liability remains to be seen.
How to create good code
The reason is that this is desireable is because anyone who's willing to spread what Mark has written helps Mark. Think of it as free advertising.

This could be much, much longer. I actually spoke on a panel at my local PodCamp about all of this a few weeks ago... It's a very complicated topic. A lot of the ideas are very counter-intuitive to a lot of people.

You've read a lot about Free software, but have you read the primary source? The Free Software Definition (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) would be a good place to start, if you haven't. Does that still not make sense? If not, I could try, but this is basically what I'd tell you, without some further context.