skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It would be the single biggest discovery in the history of science."

Yeah, it'd be pretty huge, but it wouldn't "overturn" anything. All the science we've done to date remains quite valid.

Our current theories all state that momentum is conserved. That's because all our current experimental data shows that momentum is conserved.

Now let's say we had a new experiment that showed what appeared to be a violation of conservation of momentum?

This would mean we'd need a new theory explaining how this experiment worked. But this new theory would also have to explain all our previous experimental results -- in precisely the same way that Einsteinian mechanics encompasses, explains, and agrees with all of Newton's results. In other words you'd have to answer the question of "if momentum isn't always conserved, why does it almost always look like it's conserved?"

There's another possibility too. What if this thing works and momentum is still being conserved? What if it's pushing against something, such as some kind of dark matter field, WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), neutrinos, virtual particles, ...??? I'd start by asking questions like that before I'd toss conservation of momentum. Even the hardest vacuum is full of particles ejected from stars and other things flying all over the place and even "popping into and out of existence" (in quotes because that's only an analogy) as shown by things like the Casimir effect. What if it's a "WIMP thruster" or something weird like that? An interesting experiment would be to send one flying on a one way trip to nowhere out of the solar system and see if it works as well in interstellar space as near the sun. The sun's throwing out a lot of particles, could it be pushing against those? Has he ever tried running it at night (far side of Earth) vs. during the day (sunward side of Earth)?

Of course it'd still be really useful as a space drive if it could be scaled up, regardless of the mechanism.
I have a 1.5 year old and you gave me some hope. Thanks.

Out of curiosity, are you describing NJ and Rutgers? One of my close friends talks about computers auctions at the NJ state school with great fanfare when I met him in college and alas after his HS experiences in the early 2000s with his professor dad he discovered they had stopped.
I love it, it is so retro and simple! I hope they will deliver an app for Windows phone as well! I just wonder how they can align the display on the device (if you have some less famous android phone) and how they can detect how much light exposes the film!
Even just knowing the basic operations is a great starting point. One cool thing I've been doing recently is using the python interface to script it for those times when I'm trying to find something particularly hard to repro that involves a lot of searching. Surprisingly easy to work with.
So transpilation to legacy languages is now the only option?
History of MOS 6502 [video]
It's possible that it's not the actual coding experience that matters, but the implicit message of "it's okay for you to do this."

I'm male, 33, and I do systems software research and development. My family did not get a computer until I was a sophomore in high school. In high school, I played with technology (some webpages, lots of internet time), but I did not understand it. My senior year, I did some very basic programming in a course. But I did not start really programming until college, in a computer science curriculum. I was impressed how much more some students knew than me. But by the junior year, I don't think that edge made a difference.

So it's tempting to say that I am an example of the kind of person you and some others on the thread are talking about. But I don't think we can discount the "okayness" effect. While I did not start really programming until college, I liked technology before that, and that was not seen as unusual by anyone.

It's possible, then, that encouraging young girls to program early may help resolve the gender gap, but not because they then become young adult women who already know how to be good programmers by the time they arrive on college campuses. Rather, it could be a cultural ripple-effect where if enough young girls program, more people see it as gender-neutral, and when a young adult woman with no prior programming experience wants to take up computer science in college, no one says, "Really?"
Threes?
I had a similar thought. This hypothesis could also be applied to red light cameras.
It's an incredibly slow wire protocol if there's any latency involved. Copying a large file from Bell Labs' servers to my California-based system via 9P took an order of magnitude longer than using HTTP between the same systems. Unfortunately that's kind of baked into the design of 9P.
What do you mean by - religion is well tested?
i consider this much more complicated than the couple hundred lines of code that it would take to simply send the image electronically, eliminating the need for cropping, straightening denoising and a whole lot of other corrections you need to do when scanning. it would not be as universal and you couldnt do it with older flip phones, but then again you cannot lay a flip phone face down, flat onto a scanning surface.
Balanced Payments HipChat Notifications
The security state of KVM
Show HN: Java Beyond the Classroom
Want to point out that this was Wharton a long time ago way before the Internet (we had the arpanet) and way before entrepreneurship became fashionable as it is today. I will further clarify what I said as well because it really relates to the entrepreneurship program "back then" as opposed to Wharton or even entrepreneurship at Wharton now. My point being that anyone who went for that type of business training in that time period was really into business at least that was my experience at the time at that school.
>Even quantum computers are far off factoring the RSA numbers because of the practicalities of the real world. The current world record Shor's algorithm computation is finding that 15 = 3 x 5.

I happen to have read the Wikipedia page on Shor's algorithm not an hour ago, and apparently they factored 143 without Shor two years ago. We're not quite there just yet, but 143 is getting a bit less laughable than 3x5.
In that case, it makes more sense to publish each submodule as an individual NPM module.
If I wanted to take that sample and actually run it inside a VM, what would I need to do? It looks like I need to know the file extension of each file and then rename the files?
Are you sure this isn't a subset of the problem of "3D graphics on Linux?"

I assume you've verified against other 3D apps on those machines that the graphics stack itself is standards-compliant.
Based on the title of the article, I expected it to describe very general principles for writing debuggers, but it seems very specific to gdb. Are things similar in, say, Python or Java?
Sony Comes to a Screeching Halt Targeted by Massive Ransomware Hack
> This vulnerability easily had a value of millions to Google...

Did it? Any competent computer programmer or competent mathematician with a passing knowledge of crypto would understand how weak that 512 bit static key was. This was clearly an oversight, rather than a subtle bug.
Look at the makefile, it just has a command line program for each basic operation.
United States V. One Book Called Ulysses
https://archive.today/kHgH4
I would assume it will go the way of other situations I've seen where embedded software depends on a specific version of a browser: the enterprise in question will lock the acceptable in-house browser version until such time as risk / cost of lack of security support outweighs risk / cost of changing their add-on solution.
> This document tells an important lie: it says (e.g., at the top of page 8) that every rank-2 tensor is an outer product of two vectors.

Then again, that whole section is in the context of material stresses and permeability, which are described as symmetrical tensors, for which the claim is true.
Maybe if we pretend sexism doesn't exist it will go away?

We disadvantage women (and gender and racial minorities) without intending to and without being aware of it. When we just say "let's treat people equally and all will be solved" we ignore the fact that we don't know HOW to treat people equally. We have countless ingrained assumptions about men v. women that cause unconscious changes in how we treat them from birth.

"Let's just stop intentionally being sexist/racist/homophobic and everything will be hunky-dory" flies right in the face of all the science out there on human behavior, on every level, neurology up to sociology.
This is a pretty sensational piece, but there's fundamental truth in that what-a-proof-is is based on an individual's ability to understand it. This is just how all ideas work.

In the end, you can then take a proof and make it empirical easily, and this (while not being anything like a proof) can be more convincing, because it's not tested by your understanding, but rather by your ability to observe... this also is fundamental to proof-by-contradiction, which convinces you simply by showing an example of a situation that doesn't work (and those disproves the assumption).

I think there's a lot of criticism floating around here, but there's something fundamentally right about a proof being about communication. The truth the proof reveals is pretty much objective though.
It's really too bad that compatibility isn't cool anymore.
To be honest the idea of having a police department / legal force on campus is crazy, but I understand why it is happening.

Just wondering though you do sign an agreement with the campus that they are allowed to, right?
Gates Foundation to require immediate free access for journal articles
Meh, from those quotes it's 100% clear that the article presents a picture that is diametrically opposed to the picture that you said it paints. If it were painting a picture of good science where such an extraordinary claim would be approached with great skepticism, then it wouldn't contain phrases such as she's 99% certain, claims that it's peer reviewed when it's really not, and implications that the space industry should invest in it.
Exactly.

The ideal future isn't one where only advanced users have access to NPAPI; it's one where the browser doesn't support NPAPI at all, and (among other things) Chrome no longer has to have a big pile of special support to launch NPAPIs in their own separate process and transparently pipe all the important bits to and from the browser's process.
It doesn't seem so bad to me as long as it's disclosed and not done repeatedly. However, many users appear to disagree.
I've been using the code review portions recently. The pre-commit workflow doesn't work too well with git, since the review happens before you upload the code. So everyone needs a local php program to both upload code diffs, and download the code diffs (to support multiple VCS systems). And once it's approved, you need to merge and push it locally (there is a command in the program to do this in one step).

Writing unit tests also requires making (a small) php program to call out to them. And from what I've seen, it only supports them locally, and not through another system. There is a post-commit review system, but it has less features, and is based only on commits.

But after looking around, there really wasn't much else that fulfilled the project-management aspects as well as code-review.
Phabricator rocks, primarily as a code review tool – we've been using it at Khan Academy since 2012. It's sad how much better it is than GitHub PRs, especially for a large team. I'm looking forward to watching it continue to grow. :)
ROOT does this with its own preprocessor and custom comment decorators. like:

class mydata
{

/* simple type */
int n;

/* the following array is of length n */
double * v; //[n]

/* don't serialize the following */
int reference_count; //!

ClassDef(mydata,1) ; // this macro does some magic, 1 is the version number etc.
};
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not Eureka! (I found it!) but rather, 'hmm... that's funny...'"

http://www.wisdomquotes.com/quote/isaac-asimov-7.html
And to be truthful, we don't even Want to treat people equally. There's the biological part of it in there, like it or not. We're bred for the last million years with distinct behaviors toward one another that can't be trained out or argued away.
Well then, I guess we should ban box cutters and hand-held GPS devices too.
Hey joshstrange,
You can't print over bluetooth--this connectivity is for control of the printer's scanning mechanism. It also allows reprogramming or custom exposures. SnapJet uses an analog method of obtaining the image because it simplifies the device electronics and mechanics. This translates to ease of use and yields good picture quality. It also tackles compatibility issues. Compare its function to the impossible instant lab--this is a similar device that uses a larger lens system instead. SnapJet isn't meant to function exactly like a traditional printer, but instead as an extension for your smartphone to recreate the fun of Polaroid photography. We're also stressing the open source aspect. It's a fun gadget that works in a simple way so people can hack and improve upon it.
To understand this phrase, think of grades 1-12.

"Did this person graduate from high school, or did they take the first grade twelve times?"

Both students have 12 years' classroom experience, but one knows more than the other.
Teaching Civility: Two Daring Assignments
First Links in the Markov Chain (2013)
Intro video for TileCase – our idea, looking for partners
I think we have pretty good test-coverage, even if all the tests are still failing instead of ever passing once.
That would be much better
I don't think you're quite getting it. This is an analogue printer, there is no scanner, light from the display of the phone is used to expose photo sensitive paper.
But the cardinality of the set of all points in a 9-dimensional space is not larger than the cardinality of the set of points in a 6-dimensional space, or even between 0 and 1 in the 1-dimensional real line.

And the set theoretic cardinality is the normal way to define what "more" means, or to compare sets of an infinite amount of objects.

How would you define "more", to get e.g. R² have "more" points than R?
I was attempting to reference that quote! But I couldn't find it (because I thought it was from Einstein) so I didn't say so explicitly.
The disagreement about universal iconography in that episode is great. I think Carl Sagan's idea was immediately shot down.
For older kids that find Robot Turtles too simple you could try Robot Rally. You can really tell the difference when you're playing with a mix of programmers and non-programmers.
Hacker News
of course!
FreeBSD 64-bit ARM architecture project update
Trouble is, sometimes coincidences occur. Humans are born to fasten onto faulty cause-and-effect relationships; its what kept us from being eaten by tigers a million years ago - "Og saw a stripey cat; today we found him dead. Stripey cats are bad news". And today its responsible for witchcraft, voodoo, the lottery, you name it.
Could you elaborate on its benefits vs. GitHub? Having used Phabricator in production for over a year and a half, I have been consistently disappointed by its horrendous user experience, lack of integrations, and overall difficulty of use.

Compared to GitHub, it has really been night and day.
The UCPD are technically State Police and are definitely real cops that can arrest and/or shoot you.
Emacs restclient-mode
Maybe, but that's not a huge difference, because when working in a language that has monads in it, then one has to get monads (in the same sense that one has to understand iterators in other languages). There's no way around it - thankfully it isn't that complicated, too bad all of these articles flying around make it seem so.

The one humongous difference is that Haskell is non-strict and this changes everything.
Since Chrome is just a repackaged Chromium, you can copy all the libraries from the Chrome download. Including both flash and libpdf.
The idea that having variables which can take on an
infinite range of real-valued values fascinates some
people. But you can't, not really.

Well that would mean it has an infinite amount of bits in memory, right? Because to set one variable to exactly pi would mean you set it to something that usually would need an infinite amount of bits.
Thanks.

> Studies have shown that, as a man, I'm less likely to be interrupted in meetings, more likely to have my opinion listened to, will likely have a higher salary, ...

Yeah, I guess the fact that I very clearly stopped after school didn't sink in with a few people.

This is of course correct and I welcome research into this and other specific pain points. As others have pointed out it means we miss out on talented people and it means good female enginners never gets the job they could have excelled at.

> If you want to argue that women have the advantage, you're going to need to provide some good evidence. Extraordinary claims, y'know?

Fine : ) I grew up in one of the Nordic countries and many of my early teachers would, very clearly, push girls first, make fun of boys, tell us how boys always woild get this or that wrong. Maybe what I expirienced was unusual but my understanding is it was quite common in those times and those places. Later in school girls would get extra points when they applied to university.

And maybe it is right, but it sure is discrimination, - the only question is whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.

(And, while my original post didn't include it it happens after you leave school as well. Around here after you get listed on the stock exchange you need to include 40 % women on the board. Which might be fine, then at least some people in the board will be chosen because of their skills and not because they are members of the big boys club. Also last year we had our first case where a man sued the military for sexism after he lost a job which he was clearly more qualified for because they wanted a woman instead.)

> White male Christians think they're the most oppressed group. Studies typically find otherwise, though.

Hehe, if any of us think that let them watch the news. A whole lot of the black and Asian Christians are having difficult times though.
I don't think anyone discredits qualitative data. All of PG's essays, the rest of the startup club's stuff about 'starting a great company', and all business books are qualitative data. HN/we eat that up.

Also, your wording might be a little alienating. Female founders aren't a rare, 'phenomena' like proton decay or black holes, they're people too. Also, saying Jessica is the Jane Goodall of startups implies female founders are monkeys. They're not a different species either.
Some quotes from the end of the article:

As time progressed and the experimental apparatus more refined, the “effect” seemed to get smaller, and that’s a REAL bad sign. It was already well below what the theory predicted. That sets off alarm bells. After all this time, if something isn’t in hand to float around a table top, its should still at least be producing unequivocal results.

I am aware of only one positive replication attempt, and even that experimenter (Paul March) had concerns over its validity. All other replication attempts have either been negative or ambiguous. My own experiments were ambiguous.

It seems to make the effect happen, a lot of parameters for the test devices, some not clearly understood, need to be “just so”. The question remains, are the devices being dialed in to create a real effect, or do things need to be just so to cause merely a false positive?
> Programming languages are for communicating with computers.

Machine code of the lowest level that exist for a particular machine is for communicating with computers. All programming languages at higher levels than that exist to improve communication with humans (many of them of other purposes as well, but all of them, relative to machine code, include communicating with humans as one of their motivating purposes for existing.)

> For example, this week I've been hanging out on a couple of open-source project IRC channels. People aren't talking to each other in Python or Java on those channels.

That may be the case for those channels, but there's lots of places -- even outside of the programs designed to executed, where the source code is definitely used for communicating with humans, particularly future developers on the same code base -- where programming languages are used for human communication. I mean, that's the whole reason that HN has a code context in comments.
Resources for Improving Company Culture
As I point out elsewhere in the thread, I did not really start programming until college. Freshmen year, there were a lot of kids in my program with prior programming experience. By senior year, I could not see any correlation with those who had experience before college, and those who were good programmers and CS students (two separate things).
> LaMattina counters that pricing should be based not on R&D costs but on the value a drug delivers to patients.

I love this line. We should do it for oxygen. Your bill is pretty high because oxygen delivers a lot of value.

Pricing should be based on cost of provision. Because if it is higher in a market economy someone else can enter the market and provide at a lower cost.
Are there not issues with all of the, ahem, crap we eat? Apex predators accumulate high concentrations of pollutants (Silent Spring and all), and I imagine that closing the loop by using human poo to fertilize crops for human consumption would only worsen this issue.
There's no clear instructions on how to use it so most people are confused.

There should be a getting started that makes clear that the framework works by adding classes on html tags and that's about it.
Could you explain what you mean by this? I'd say using monads is way more "in-your-face" in OCaml since you have to explicitly say which monad you're using (via opening a module or what have you) and there's no do-notation.

Perhaps you mean that one doesn't need monads as much in OCaml since it's impure and so they aren't required to manage state?
Illuminating the Darkness of Healthcare Costs
This is really good news for the Phacility folks... for sure. Nice work folks.
Is academic publishing “just a button”?
I disagree.

I am glad I took some spare time to learn RoR coming from a .NET background. I had no problems to solve in RoR that I couldn't solve in .NET.

I just explored it and learned about different ways of doing things. I am sure it has made my .NET programming better too.

Also learning some RoR has got me also using Linux and Git. I learned a bit about Nginx etc. I went to some interesting RoR meetups. I gained a lot from it.

So I encourage programmers to learn other languages and techniques, for the sake of it!

--

10. Learn another programming language / framework tool

20. Have fun with it

30. Realize you can now solve problems you previously
couldn't

40. Profit
Phabricator is a legend within Facebook. For an example of some truly funny marketing copy, check out its homepage:
http://phabricator.org/
Obviously he is growing trees in all the compost he is creating.
Update: I wound up building a sample project in both this weekend. For what I was trying to build (a robust, scalable API) loopback was much better. I wasn't as interested in generating server side rendered pages, although you can do it in loopback since its just built on express. Loopback seemed much better for making a serious project with monitoring, devops, debugging, deployments and less 'magic'. Sails definitely wasnt bad; it is more popular and its docs were a little better, but ultimately I had to dive into the code in both frameworks, and loopback's codebase was easier to understand. If you're developing primarily an API in node.js I would definitely recommend it.
Linear Regression vs. Logistic Regression vs. Poisson Regression (Infographic)