skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Appeal to authority would be something like, "North Korea wasn't behind the attack because Schneier says so." To avoid an appeal to authority, you cite Schneier but make use of his arguments. "According to Schneier, North Korea wasn't behind the attack because if North Korea was behind the attack a different locale would have been used."

The fallacy still applies when the authority gives an opinion on some topic they are knowledgeable about; the fallacy isn't about the relevance of the authority so much as the use of the appeal.
Tracking the Santa trackers: Google versus Microsoft and Norad– which is better?
Reminds me of Opa[1], which I heard about when it first came out and I recall telling a much more experienced developer friend about how I (in my inexperienced naivety) thought this was the way of the future and he brushed it off and with something like "wait and see if it's still around in a few years."

Well it appears it's still around but it obviously didn't usher in a new era of web development like I thought it did.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opa_(programming_language)
> nothing ever leaves your local computer. There is no server component in IRHydra.

Wow, cool!
Diabetes Patients Are Hacking Their Way Toward a Bionic Pancreas
How about we start with yours.
I think they are doing this because they are otherwise having many issues with distribution - e.g iTunes Store. But definitely nice to see a step in what I think is the right direction.
http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1pwwr0/system76_is_sc...

When I last checked the reviews of the system76 laptops, there were more problems than the T420. The Zareason systems have those awful keyboards from the looks of it, and even the "UltraLap" looks bulky. And it includes a terrible resolution screen. (Why is anything shipping with 1366x768 anymore?)

They either aren't thinking of programmers, or they don't have the money to compete.

I'm considering the XPS 13, but the screen is too small. I want a thin 14 or 15 inch laptop. (The T420 doesn't quite make it in that regard, but it's old technology at this point.) And, of course, the XPS 15 doesn't have a ubuntu edition.

I'm willing to make a sacrifice for weight if the keyboard and monitor are top notch (like the T420) but nobody is taking keyboards seriously anymore. And as far as I can tell, the best keyboard and screen today is Apple.

I've spent the last 3 years with my personal laptop running Linux. I'll probably stick with this until I can't anymore. But I'm not willing to sacrifice my productivity "to make a point."
Proof Theory Foundations
Unfortunately, the author tweaks facts and statistics to make his claims more believable than they are.

For example, the author claims that Germany lost its chance to conquer Europe and the U.S. This is very misleading, and here's why.

Even though Germany rose to the Europe's most industrial and populous nation state following the unification of 1871, its production capacity was incomparable to that of the combined outputs of its western rivals. That is why Otto von Bismarck wanted the newly established Empire to stay out of any conflicts (and this is why he got fired by the more aggressive Wilhelm II).

The U.S. at that time was nobody. It was still undergoing the post-Civil War recovery and the Industrial Revolution JUST arrived on the continent. No European nation was interested in conquering the largely agrarian society.

Germany didn't miss a chance. It had neither the capacity nor the will to conquer the U.S.
The Nightscout Project
if you have any questions or comments about the code or algorithm, my email address can be found on my company website
I'm going to stop arguing with you because it seems you're either trolling or being intentionally ignorant. A couple of simple Google/Google Scholar searches would show you that I'm right and it is you who may have read something online and extrapolated from it, rather than studied this subject seriously.

Of course I'm an ideologue pushing an agenda! (Who isn't?) I think it's our moral obligation to push this agenda. But in order to actually make society better rather than just talk about it, research is crucial, and thankfully a lot of research into this has been done over the past three or four decades, and we now know a lot more about how sexism works. What some people are doing though is using the real fact that there are biological behavioral differences between the sexes to hide the equally true fact that cultural effects have been shown to dwarf them by orders of magnitude.

It has also been shown that humans -- like many other animals -- have instincts driving them to subjugate others. Still, we've abolished slavery to alleviate the painful conscience of hyperliberal babies, and I think society is better for it. Some (most famously Freud in the very unscientific but thoughtful and fascinating Civilization and its Discontents) believe that all of civilization is one big mechanism for exerting control over our instincts, a mechanism that's even been internalized by us (see Norbert Elias for a demonstration on the power of this internalization). Most recently, this view has been modified (mostly by conjectures made by evolutionary psychologists) to say that civilization is some instincts overruling others (many instincts clash with one another: our desire for sex sometimes overpowers our fear of strangers and is sometimes overpowered by it).

Power and influence in society is objective reality. That women possess less of it is as objective as the Sun fusing hydrogen into helium. Perhaps you think that's fair. The fact that men have more power does not imply that every man has more power than every woman.

Of course, if we're to be totally honest, we must admit that both research into biological differences between the sexes as well as cultural researches is not up to the highest theoretical standards in experiment design and statistical rigor, so whatever it is we know (i.e. that both are real, but the cultural difference is a lot more prominent) is suspect. But hey, this is HN and geeking out is the name of the game.

Anyway, it's been fun arguing over this. If you want to learn more about the subject, I suggest you look up Susan Fiske. Yes, she's a hyperliberal baby crying for her quotas, but a good researcher nonetheless.
Another option: refuse to stay at Marriott-owned hotels. There are lots of other awesome hotels out there, and a lot are cheaper and/or nicer than Marriott brands.

Related: http://fortune.com/2014/09/16/marriott-tips-worker-wages/

They're not exactly the best company out there to be supporting.
Sure, if you can render at so 120 hz, or more and composite the 4 frames together into your single frame you will get a single improved frame. but even at 4 renders a frame you'll still get artifacts, I imagine you'd need at least double to make it worthwhile, But even that only gives you ~8ms to time step and render the entire scene. Minus composting and any other full-frame post effects. And hitting the ~16ms required for a 60fps is already pretty difficult.

Now, in video games we do have methods to help simulate inter-frame motionblur. The most commonly used is to build a buffer of inter-frame motion vectors, this is often generated with game state, but can also be re derived by analysis of current and previous frames to some affect. Then you do a per-pixel blur based on the direction and magnitude of the motion vectors. Which often works to good effect.
I'm pretty sure that 24 FPS footage with a 1/24 second shutter speed would be completely unusable except as an extreme blur effect.
We can generalize the crypto version to:

"If your product isn't used by terrorists and drug dealers then it's not much of a success."
Not really.

Just thinking about general use personal computers (not remote boxes, servers, etc.), the only thing I feel like Linux adds to the OS X experience is tiling window managers.

But I only care about them on my giant 4K screen at home, where I only /need/ to use OS X for certain non-linux apps and where similar functionality comes from 3rd party apps. On my laptop(s), I tend to full-screen basically everything anyway, which works about the same on every system.

So, desktop PCs....no. You can build something better than any company can offer for similar or less money and with the compromises you want instead of the ones someone else decided on.

And for laptops, no. I find that I can get what I want from products that are already on the market. I /would/ pay for an Apple Laptop with a 12" 16:10 very high resolution screen and a trackpoint without thinking, though.
Publishing deals often revolve around exclusive options. Also, publishers often wants to bring in a third person as an editor, market a book or a film at a particular time during the annual release cycle and so on - often for entirely legitimate reasons. It's not that publishers are inherently morally worse tha autheros, just that their interests aren't perfectly aligned, and short copyright terms shift the incentives strongly in favor of the publishers because they have more economic resources than the typical author and can better afford to play a waiting game.
It wasn't even all that much earlier that European countries were selling off their American land holdings, to Americans mostly to finance their various national monetary needs.
Absolutely. However isn't it strange how rarely you see such a polished Windows application? I'm a Mac user so maybe I'm missing a lot of gems in the Microsoft world, but apart from Metro Apps, which brought pretty defaults, there seems to be a lack of apps with similarly thoughtful design.
I don't know that we disagree, depending on how you're using "but minimal". My recollection is that in the case of Mincome specifically, you did see a reduction of hours worked amongst working mothers, and I expect this would generalize to "people with better things to do" - which is not a bad thing.

"if you don't aggressively the poor for their poverty"

I think you left out a word. Am I right in assuming "punish"?
Drunk HN: Why is entertainment ranked higher then news?
Disclosure: I'm drunk

Is anyone else ticked off entertainment is ranked higher than science?
Subjectivity is not the same thing as placebo. There has to be a perceptible difference to have a real preference.
The trouble I have with everyone's evaluation of The Hobbit's HFR footage is that I am apparently the only one in the world that think it looks absolutely phenomenal. I think it's a positively game changing technology, and I hope this is just a short transitional generation of nay-sayers. The fact that I can watch a camera pan in a theater that doesn't look completely terrible and strobing is eye-opening.
Free as in Freedom Podcast: 0x52: Legal Issues from a Radical Community Angle
So, does this mean that everyone's personal phone will now be inundated with SMS messages from work at all hours? Will all of their internal extensions now have an SMS endpoint to receive text messages?

I know so many people that will only text and not hold an actual voice conversation. It's really irritating to say the least. In general if it's a short "I'm running late, eta 20 min" or "heading to the store, let me know if you need anything" I'll text (the store list is even better that way, it's written down... But anything more than that and a one-two minute conversation is better.

I've been a rabbid google voice (formerly grand central) user for several years now.. I love the voicemail transcription. The only annoyance is I have to "press 1" to answer, and that's harder to do while driving... no idea why it isn't "press one, or say 'answer' to answer". Just the same, getting rid of it altogether is ridiculous. Having GV-like integration with their desktop and phone platforms would have been a better move all around.

My two issues come down to.. A) Keeping work time and personal time separated.. and B) From the outside how are you supposed to reach anyone?
Assange is an arsehole who's only interest is in publishing documents to damage short-term political interest without interest for morality, the safety of other human beings and the disregard for all things right.
That can't explain Andrew Johnson's opposition to Sherman's land reform initiatives though. That was quashed by Northern industrialists.
You are actually speaking of the same thing, "high-speed film" similar to a "high-speed lens" doesn't actually affect the framerate, yet rather how fast it can produce an image from a certain light-source. It's simply more sensitive.

Now, you're correct that the actual effect is done by changing the shutter speed. but the loss of light is often compensated for by using a faster film, since using a larger aperture has more significant effect on the scene in the form of DOF.
Drunk HN: Why is entertainment ranked higher than news?
To add on to this: In South Korean newspapers you'll often find Hanja (the original Chinese characters) on news sites or in the paper or even on the news. It may be simply to clarify a phrase, or for when someone has passed away, there's a character for that. So South Koreans may not know a lot of Chinese characters, but they know the basics and they are quite aware where many words come from-- In North Korea to emphasize their Korean-ness they have little to none of these Hanja anywhere, they don't learn it in school like a South Korean child would, either.

On top of this, you'll find that those English loanwords are almost nonexistant in North Korea. Where South Koreans will simply say "Ice cream", North Korea has the word "얼음보숭이" which literally translates to "ice fluffly thing".

There's also differences in the speech styles (a very complicated and extensive topic in itself) and verb endings. NK prefers some styles where SK prefers others-- But like it was said farther up, the difference really comes down to something like US/British English, obviously different but still very mutually intelligible.
Yes, it is a casual introduction and not a rigorous scientific survey. But, the people behind the video are real scientists with real and interesting data to back them up. The UC Berkeley team behind it have been doing research in this field for years, and there are links to relevant websites with their research on the same page as the video. I hoped it would spawn a conversation, but that's not really what happened. A few people dismissed it, and a few found it interesting, but nobody said, "Here's an article or piece of research which seems to conflict with these results or presents new ideas on why they got these results".

I think it's interesting that you haven't raised any objections to the science...only that the video is not a peer-reviewed scientific article, even though the peer-reviewed science does exist, and is easily found on the websites linked in the information on the video (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~keltner/publications.htm).

The use of the term "natural philosophy" implies you don't believe the research discussed in the video is reproducible or predictive, and is instead merely the musings of pre-scientific thinkers, which is dismissive. Yet, you haven't addressed the science itself, only their methods (seemingly without digging a bit to see that they are, in fact, doing real science).

So, I understand your desire to see real science instead of bogus science masquerading as the real thing. I'm as suspicious as you of most videos I see that claim to understand something really complex (like human behavior). But, if I see that the people making the claims have linked to copious and good research on the subject, I'm happy to watch a layman's introduction to the subject so I can get a bird's eye view, without having to have a deep understanding of the subject matter.

If you have reason to believe there's something wrong with their science, that would also be great to talk about. I'm genuinely not trying to convince anybody of anything, I'm trying to learn and I found this video really interesting and informative about things I don't have a good grasp of.
It is solved for some specific platforms, GNOME for example:

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2014-Nov...

The average user doesn't use GNOME or Linux though :(
Ask HN: Desktop applications
I've been mostly doing web development during the past 5-6 years and want to get back into the Desktop application development (C#, VB .net) Do you guys have any ideas for small projects i can work on that may help your day to day tasks with a desktop app?

thanks
>> Germany didn't miss a chance. It had neither the capacity nor the will to conquer the U.S.

I doesn't seem the author is saying that Germany wanted to conquer the US. Germany wanted to create the equivalent of a US on continental Europe by annexing large landed regions and populations to get parity with the US on natural resources and population.
I've been using Google Voice (formerly Grand Central) for my primary contact number for years. The integration with hangouts is mostly complete now, and not a bad way to interact.

I can check my voicemail via my computer or an app on my phone. They also transcribe the voicemails, as well as offering blackout times, and buckets for different calling numbers. If it's from a cell phone, I can directly reply via text.

During the day, at work, I pretty much ignore my phone, and send all calls to voicemail... being able to quickly see and reply is useful (though sometimes the transcriptions are particularly bad).

There are/were other similar services to this out there, not sure what's available in the UK, but you may want to look into it.
That's awkward. Marriott had to settle with the FCC, and as part of that settlement can't jam peoples WLAN, but suddenly theres a decision to be made, petitions considered and Google and Microsoft have to beg for the law to be applied?

How did that happen, exactly?
> It is this piece of evidence—freely available to anyone with an enquiring mind and a modicum of cyber security experience—which I believe that the FBI is so cryptically referring to when they talk about “additional evidence” they can’t reveal without compromising “national security”.

The evidence mentioned here are the addresses of the Command and Control servers. But the author does not give any reason for why he or she thinks this is the thing the FBI is being cryptic about?

First of all, there might be several things to be cryptic about. Second, the article gives nothing that I can see to connect that bit of information to being something that FBI would hold back on. Third, the author just revealed it, so if it were what the FBI was keeping secret, that seems silly.

Did I miss something?
800 self-made billionaires
> Appeal to authority (as a fallacy) refers to advancing the opinion of a prominent figure for something on which they themselves are not an authority.

This is incorrect. An appeal to authority is when an argument is claimed to be true because someone of authority has stated it. It is a fallacy when the authority of the person has nothing to do with whether the argument is true or not. For example, if a maths authority makes a maths claim, that doesn't mean their claim is true since their authority in maths doesn't determine the validity of their claim. The truth of their claim is determined by looking at the maths itself.

> Citing Schneier on computer security is not an appeal to authority.

It could be, if you're arguing that it's true because Schneier said it. Obviously something relating to computer security isn't true because Schneier says so.

That said, appeals to authority are somewhat necessary in discourse, since we don't have the time to explore all arguments on their own merits. I believe that claims that Schneier has made in the past are truthful, and therefore conclude that I can place some trust in other claims he makes without fully exploring them, but that trust may be misplaced.
Sony should have just released the interview outside the US to avoid this
People need to take a step back and remember that film is art, it's not always meant to be the best possible depiction of reality.

48 fps can be better, but 24 fps can too, it's another tool for a director to use.

The issue is when people start trying to proscribe 48 fps, or 24 fps, as inherently superior, it's all situational.
The video has links to the research groups who made the video; both links have lists of peer-reviewed publications related to this topic (and others), many of which are downloadable.

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~keltner/publications.htm

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/resources/studies
In San Francisco, Rideshare Drivers Are Safer Than Taxi Drivers, Zendrive Says
If he attempts to leave his domicile, won't he immediately be arrested? That is the impression I was under.

It's the same scenario as someone under house arrest. When you're under house arrest, typically there is not an armed guard preventing you from leaving (although this is sometimes required by a court). Rather, you have the ability to leave your house, but if you do, then you will be arrested. I can see why he would consider the situation equivalent to house arrest.

[Edit: moving my other comments about the Assange case to a separate reply]
Write an essay about it. You seem to understand it well enough to explain, and care enough to keep explaining in spite of how exhausting it is. You practically wrote half of the essay with that comment alone.

Sort out all arguments against BI to focus the discussion and you could be onto something.
> He chooses not to as he is a coward

It's pretty clear that the UK would arrest him the second he walked out the door and promptly turn him over to the US. The US has made it quite clear, vis-a-vis Manning, Drake, Binning, etc, that he would have a very bad time ahead of him, and possibly see everything he has attempted to accomplish shuttered and turned against him. In any case, his signal would surely be reduced to zero.

Snowden likewise chose asylum. Are they both cowards?

Perhaps an alternative narrative is that these new political asylum seekrs are both using their asylum as so many asylum seekers have: as a chance to amplify their signal.
I'm not surprised by average viewers being taken aback by HFR. What surprises me is how many ostensibly serious film critics are flat out rejecting it. I just can't believe that's anything less than clearly being on the wrong side of history, like people who probably complained about audio in films, color films, or CGI.
This article contains so many elements of a Borges story that by the second paragraph I assumed I was reading a work of fiction. Upon further reflection, it seems plain that, while every word of it is without doubt true, the story is a hoax.
Ask HN: Tips for moving to SF without an offer
I'm currently employed as a backend Scala dev in Boston, but I've wanted to move to San Francisco since my first visit. It's a beautiful city, the people are warm and welcoming, and of course it's the place to be for tech. I plan on moving sometime in the next year. (Concretely, I've promised myself that this is my last winter in the Northeast)

I don't expect to have a job offer from a company in SF before I move. I'm going to keep looking into companies in the area that match my skill set with the aim of having coffee dates set up before I move, but I don't want to wait for the perfect offer with relocation before I move.

What can I do in the next few months to make this transition easier? For those who have made this move yourself, do you have any advice to offer, or blog posts about your experience?
So, if I'm calling you while driving, you would rather I have to pull off to the side of the road, or risk and accident to leave you a message?

Your dislike of voicemail makes no sense... Are you saying you want to get rid of phones altogether? Because that's what it sounds like.. voicemail is a fallback from a phone call.
Facebook Challenges YouTube Channels with New Features for Pages
Solution: Release the archives as a torrent (of sorts) and compensate people for hosting the files in exchange for credits usable toward rental or purchase of new movies.
Uber slapped with suit by Philadelphia taxi companies