skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a good page, but one thing it doesn't touch on (presumably because of the intended audience) is the fact that an understanding of genetics is necessary but insufficient to explain speciation, variation in heritable traits, much of modern biology. Epigenetics is tremendously important, and a reductivist use of genetics via metaphor is what gets people talking about a "gene for X". It ends up, IMO, causing more harm than good.
It's more subtle than that. For example, if walking enabled you to gather more food, then anything that helps you walk better confers an advantage. If food was in trees, walking would be useless.

The best hypothesis for what triggered this change was a shift in climate where trees became less productive and thinned out more, meaning you often had to move quickly from one tree to another on the ground. Anything that enabled you to hustle faster like that gave you a big advantage.

With natural selection you do not have any choices. You survive or you die.
Other than a few synthetic languages, that true of every other language, so I don't understand why you are singling out English.

Well, I guess there are a few language academies which try to define a language, but those are post hoc. If you accept that, then I can declare myself the explicit definer of English language, no?

I can say that the past tense of "to God" is "to Gods", but English has a general rule that the "d"/"ed" form usually forms the past, while "s" is used for third person singular present tense. (There are exceptions, of course.)

I could say that in Swedish "att Gud" is conjugated in the present as "att Gudo", but Swedish has a pretty strong rule that present tense verbs ends with an -r. The exception being the modals and archaic forms like "äro" in the song "Vi äro, musikanter".

Tossing the 'explicitly defined grammar' aside, which is the realm of the prescriptivists, we're still left with the meaning of rule used by the descriptivists. What are those rules? In terms you use, what are the rules which describe what "other people will naturally agree with."

In case you couldn't tell, I'm a descriptivist, in the Language-Log-fanboi sort of way. Quoting from http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3985 :

> Bloom finishes with some more invective against "these do-as-you-please linguists" who pretend that "utopia is at hand, that everyone is a revolutionary, that linguistic anarchy will set you free." I would love to meet one of these anarcho-linguists, since they sound like a lot of fun, but I'm afraid that they only live in the imagination of folks like Bloom and Acocella, following the path of their distinguished forebear in descriptivist strawmanism, David Foster Wallace.

> Actual linguists and lexicographers who answer to the "descriptivist" label tend to be quite concerned with precisely those matters Bloom claims that they neglect. Is a particular linguistic form considered to be erroneous? If so, what motivates the ascription of error? Would the person who produced the form in question recognize it as an error and chalk it up to a slip of the tongue or pen? Or is a linguistic variant disparaged because it is associated with a stigmatized dialect, and if so, how does the relationship between the "standard" and "non-standard" forms reflect broader social dynamics over time? And finally, which registers of a language are appropriate for which social situations, and how do speakers and writers navigate changes of register in their daily lives?

See also http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001843.h... .
AMAs of Hackers
the logo is a combination of webkit's and node's.
Many linux distros do this too... e.g. debian based systems default to bash or zsh for interactive shells, and use dash for /bin/sh (aka scripting).
They're still part of C++14. You have to wait for C++1z (or use a compiler switch).
Another anecdote on the power of community college:

Back in 2009 I enrolled at Community College of San Francisco. I was 19 and had no idea what I wanted to do career wise, so I took broad and rigorous curriculum focused on transferring to UC-Berkeley.

The 2 years I spent there were some of the best of my life. I was frequently pushed and challenged by excellent professors who had true passion for their subjects (a few even had Ph.D.s). I grew a passion for learning Spanish (a subject that I had found painful in high school) among many others and got involved with several extracurricular groups. By my second year I was an elected student government senator and president of the business club. I was amazed by all the school had to offer hungry students and I took advantage of every opportunity. Not to mention I met some of my closet friends in life geeking out in study groups.

When it came time to apply to 4 year universities (fall and spring of my second and final year) I decided to apply to Stanford in addition to my originally intended UC-Berkeley. Just a few months later I was shocked to accept Stanford’s offer of transfer admission to complete my undergraduate degree. Going to a place like Stanford would have been unthinkable for me just a few years earlier in high school, back then I had pretty average grades (around a 3.4) and mediocre test scores. Community college let me re-invent myself as a student and start with a completely fresh slate.

When I got into Stanford I eventually started to focus in on a major and skill-set, taking a ton of CS classes in the process. While I hadn’t studied CS in community college (although I think they do offer it), I strongly feel the high level of general curriculum I took prepared me to major in nearly anything I would have liked at Stanford. I now work as a full-time software engineer, something I had no knowledge of whatsoever when I first started community college.

No doubt my admission to Stanford is an outlier for community college students (only a tiny percentage are admitted), however a ton of very intelligent and eager students transfer to 4 year universities every year, including several of my close friends. They have now entered the workforce and are highly contributing members to society and the tax-base.

I could go on forever about the benefits of community college (and in some ways how certain things were better than at a place like Stanford), however the short of it is that indeed, I also owe it all to community college, too.
I recall that being a plot point in Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. It sounded plausible enough that it didn't break my willing suspension of disbelief, but I never gave it much thought after I finished reading the book. I'm thinking now I should revisit the topic and try to evaluate how bad the emissions of my own equipment is, and what I can/should do about it, if anything. For example, should this affect my rotation policy for encryption keys?
My trust in actually using this even for personal reasons would go 100x had you have written tests
If food really is something important for the country, would it not make more sense for the country to prioritize and fund it as opposed to leaving it to the whims of whomever feels like funding it that day?

Most of the benefit of food is private: when I eat, I am no longer hungry. That means I take care of my food myself.

Most of the benefit to education is, as well, private. If I become a lawyer, I capture most of the benefit.

It's when the benefit cannot be internalized that you need government involved. A public good is one that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. National defense and most environmental causes are examples there. Education is a private good, since it is both trivially excludable as well as (if you listen to any NEA paper about student-teacher ratios) rather rivalrous.
No, I know, but I think I'd be much happier using something like slack.

I can always then connect it to Salesforce and any other third party systems via Zapier.
Some propose using the word theorem to differentiate between these two meanings.
I don't think he does the music for most of his games, though.
> KDB+ .. looks to have its own language to query it

And that's a good thing.

You can use sql to query it if you want by starting the query with "s)" in the console, or simply by using the ODBC/JDBC drivers.

But KDB+ embraces order in a way that SQL does not, which means that if you limit yourself to SQL then you miss out on a lot power that KDB gives you.

For example, say you want to select a list of (date,teacher) records ordered by date, and out of these pick out the records in which the teacher is not the same as in the previous date.

In kdb+, it's "select from (select from records by date) where differ teacher" (or just "&~=':teacher[<date]" if you use K notation). What's the SQL equivalent?
This is something that we legally armed US citizens train in, along of course with our police: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tueller_Drill

For others reading this, there are a lot of good videos on the net showing examples of it.
If we just buy everything that is cheaper than the Iraq war, we will very soon be bankrupt.
Did we read the same article?

The neurosurgeon discovered that the tumor was starting to entangle her optic nerves, and told her that if she had waited six months, she would have had severe, and possibly permanent, degradation of her sight.

Because I'd really like to think you're being this insensitive out of ignorance, rather than malice.
Haha, except mine is Rama like the spaceship :)
You're not going quite far enough -

Medical Practitioners and Medical Institutions should be required by law to document outcomes, provide information about disputed outcomes, and update the information on a periodic basis.

And tampering with the information should carry heavy punishment, including jail time for the practitioner and officers of the institution.

Actions like the recent cover-ups in the VA hospitals about wait times leading to deaths should be nearly impossible to hide from the public eye.
Yes, I completely agree. It's not like I'd take action on my doubts. I'm sorry if my original comment sounded critical---that wasn't my point. But it is crude, isn't it? I believe even doctors concede that these estimates are not very accurate (especially when taken mid/late in the pregnancy), and it is sort of alarming to watch a nurse snap lines across the skull cross-section freehand and use those.

I find that in general with medicine my intuition battles against what my intellect knows must be the case. It's not like anything in the body is far away. Cancer isn't even very small. Isn't it weird that it's so hard to treat? Obviously it must be, but it feels like it should be easy. The patient is a foot away. We are inscrutably powerless.

When every day you command computers and they obey, when you can summon distant people and their image appears before you, when you can instantly consult more lore than in the greatest library, when you see people casually toting radiant tablets of spellbinding powers, progress in medicine feels so slow, so analog---so carnal. I know it's wrong, and we live in a world of medical miracles, with vaccines and antibiotics and DNA and everything else, but sometimes I can't help but feel that nothing has happened since Galen. It's not an argument, it's a feeling, but one with pathos that I'm sure many share.
I like KR, but I wish I knew the true story from the Digg days til now. He needs to write an autobiography or something. I feel like there's a lot of subtext that I'm missing. We get to see the news of him joining Google, going part time, leaving but still "an advisor". These are all what the public sees. But what's the real story? I know there must be more to it.
I highly recommend Richard Dawkins' 1991 Royal Institution Christmas lectures. Dawkins is also an evolutionary biologist.

http://www.richannel.org/christmas-lectures/1991/richard-daw...
It seems like a neat idea, but I would have three big concerns (personally.)

1. If the modules are expensive or not interesting enough, the swappable parts becomes a problem, not a feature. If I just buy the modules I want and never change them, then why do I want interchangeable modules? This means I _have_ to want a phone that does weird things. (And if enough people want weird-thing-having phones, they become standard features, and then swappable modules looks bad again.)

2. I want the simplest phone that does everything I want. Not the most complex phone that does everything everybody else wants. Where does this phone fit?

3. Version issues. If this thing breaks backward compatibility or needs an updated core component, you might be buying a whole new phone anyway. In which case, the gimmick doesn't add value, it adds cost. The phone has to feel like an upgrade, not something that will hold you back because the module vendors can't upgrade at reasonable cost.
Judge not concerned that a 68 year old woman was raided because of her open wifi
And when you can't afford the insurance for the fire department? How are these people taken care of by such a system? I'm sure we all know people who've hit very hard times at some point in their life through no fault of their own. As much as I like the idea of Libertarianism it can't see how these people would make it through those times.
Brilliant. Seems to be a simple but effective time saver.

He's got more information here: http://www.idatatruck.co.uk/
It would probably be abused all the time and the claims would be for larger amounts than the difference between two similar plane tickets. There would be people claiming they had to buy a car for $2,000 more just because they missed some kind of window where the price was cheaper (even though that doesn't make sense). I don't think any bank would open themselves up to that kind of liability. Even if they would, I think they'd cap it to a low amount that was close to the cost of eating chargebacks.
That sounds awful. I would not be able to sustain that for very long without becoming exhausted and depressed. 30 minutes is about as long a commute as I can stand.
I just wanted an underground home, and to have the tunnels renovated to be usable. Several miles of tunnel would make great hiking trail and all that. Would probably have just put up a barrier at the silos and set up lights so you could look down into them... too difficult and expensive to turn them into anything.
This looks great, and really lightweight. No support for PHP/MySQL log that I can see, but it's a good start
It still feels strange to me. Makes him sound like some kind of exception, genius of his age or whatever - even if it's not intentional.

Maybe that's just me considering it perfectly natural, given that just a few years ago at age 17 I've been already working on large portion of GNU/Linux distro for Openmoko phones and I knew a lot of people at the same age doing lots of other cool and meaningful stuff. I haven't really noticed that "cultural narrative" you're talking about.

If it was 7 or 10, I'd be impressed. At 17, most of people are already capable enough to both learn how to write browser extensions and to care about politics, so he could be 27 or 37 and it wouldn't make a big difference to me :P
What I like about this article is that it seems very unbiased. Most articles highlight a lot of key features from (GNU/)Linux or FreeBSD, depending on whom they're written by. This reads like a basic overview of how the systems came to be and why they work the way they work.
Can you hot-swap the battery? (e.g. when you have another, perhaps smaller battery in the phone)
Are the component connection points water-resistant?
Irrespective of the contemporary answers to those questions, I believe this undoubtedly is the future of computing, not just the future of smartphones.
Many times the silos get flooded. The equipment is pulled out when they are abandoned leaving a lot of half broken stuff (eg: they don't care about stairs but might care about the thing holding them up).

I know of one that was used as a cave diving environment, but seems really dangerous to me.
For online transactions, least in my business, it's not the banks that eat the fraud charges it's the business. If someone uses your card to purchases services, and then later there is a charge back due to you reporting fraud, my business would lose the money that was paid from the card and would be fined $25 dollars. So for example say someone signed up for a VoIP service, made a bunch of calls through that service that were charged. You later check your credit card, see some fraudulent charges and then do a charge back. Well the bank/credit card company gets the money from the VoIP service and fines them.
One Focus
First thing I did was search this article for "gene expression." Had nothing.

I think it is safe to say that this article is behind our current understanding about "evolution" and is in fact spreading some new myths as a direct result.

In the last five or so years it has become more and more clear, that while a mother cannot alter her unborn child's DNA, the mother's environment can cause different gene's within the child's DNA to be activated or deactivated.

So our traditional understanding about "random mutations" and "survival of the fittest" being the primary means by which organisms change or evolve looks to be a gross oversimplification. Since discovering gene expression, the environment may very well shape how the offspring's DNA is used.

There are tens of studies on this, but the vast majority since 2010 (so literally last five years). But the results they're providing give us an entire new avenue to look down and the impact on our understanding of evolution likely needs to shift as a result.

Keep in mind nobody is suggesting people (or animals) have direct control over gene expression, in fact our understanding of how it works is still undeveloped.

This paper covers the topic briefly [PDF]: "Evolution of Gene Expression" http://www.umich.edu/~pwlab/Wittkopp%20et%20al%20reprints/Pr...
> The problem of iron deficiency can be solved with iron cooking pots, or pieces of iron not shaped by fish.

can be is a whole different thing from is being. Or, to use the old, tired cliche, "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink"

There are several steps to solving iron deficiency. Yes, an iron cooking pot or a plain iron pellet solves one of those steps. But the human step is every bit as important.

It's clearly not just a matter of aesthetics either - it's "a piece of iron shaped like a local river fish believed to be lucky". Sure, saying "they're dumb and should just learn to use a round pellet" makes sense from our educated western perspective. But that's completely ignorant of their deeply-ingrained cultural attitudes. When you're in a society that believes a certain kind of fish to be lucky, you can't just say "use science, idiot" and expect them to actually do what you say. As a more extreme example, remember that in Liberia, armed men broke into an Ebola clinic to free patients [0]. In cases like these, the human side of the problem is far more important than the scientific side.

[0] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/report-armed-men-attack-liberia-...
Maybe they are thinking of the bottom 10% of their class, and then imagining more students like that in the classroom.

We're talking about expanded community college for the marginal student: that is, the student who just barely cannot get into community college today but could with a little more help.
I've seen a couple of examples of this throughout the U.S., but on a much smaller scale. I'd always wanted to do something like this as a kid, but never really got the chance to. Whatever the case, it's pretty cool that it's caught on worldwide.

I personally think this sort of park is a good thing. Making the real world fun? I'm all for that. I'd imagine it's also a good way to encourage children to figure out what they'd really want to be when they grow up by letting them explore what those jobs are like.
No, you're right.

From the article:

>While Kickstarter helped popularize crowdfunding in the areas of creative projects, music and film, GoFundMe’s personal fundraising platform is focused on enabling people to raise money for personal causes and life events
There is a similar article in the Orion Magazine:

https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-gospel-of-consumption/

that goes a little more in depth into the history of the 40 hour work week.
Business-focused, ad-free version of FB launches today in closed beta
President Obama Gets It: Net Neutrality Begins at Home
Thanks. Is there a resource or a book on amazon that focuses on the testability of inter-species evolution ? I've been a bit frustrated by this as most people just allude to the fact that it took thousands or millions of years so hard to test it - but we should extra-polate some observed lab principles at a much tinier and then scale the intuition by a billion times to get inter species evolution.

Specifically are there any:

1. Simulations (i.e. code up the actors in the system and let it proceed it a accelerated time scale similar to what we do for space simulations for heavenly bodies)

2. Emulations (not computational but demonstrating using a real life model of some kind)

3. Lab demonstrations of this happening

4. Reproductions of the whole set of mechanisms that allow a species to evolve into something new that we would classify as a different species

that clearly show the evolution principles in effect for a reasonably complex inter-species case.

I have been frustrated from Richard Dawkins's accounts too. I once read his essay on how the eye might have evolved. His accounts tend to be so speculative and full of "should"s and "must"s, its very off putting.

Edit: This book in fact is the best writing on evolution of eyes: http://www.amazon.com/Evolutions-Witness-How-Eyes-Evolved/dp...

But it completely skips the actual mechanism or testability of anything it says. So basically doesn't address the how at all. A resource that actually addresses the HOW and not just conjecture on the WHAT would be really cool.
If you do any kind of programming or system administration, you need DTrace (or some lame Linux equivalent). It really pains me to see that people reject it because it's "too advanced" for them, or such nonsense. Dynamic tracing is the one technique that will enrich your life as an IT professional more than absolutely anything else ever did.

And DTrace in particular is really, really easy to use (the Linux alternatives, not so much).
Can't imagine why it would be a bad thing, although I don't know the , I don't see anything negative in the blog entry.
I feel as if even a three day weekend would make me feel so much less stifled by work.

I love my job. I love what I do. And yet the grind of going day after day, five days a week, every week except for maybe three or four times a year when I take vacation (and I try to take more than I'm allotted believe me...). It's just stifling. It's tiring. It makes me not want to get up for work in the morning. But after a three day weekend and with only four days to work in the week, I always feel better.

If it doesn't happen at my work here I'll figure a way to make it work somewhere else I hope. But it's not an option for most people, and maybe it should be.
Linux has sysctl as well, and other parameters can be set by writing to the right files in /sys. For example, the maximum c-state can be set by writing to /sys/module/processor/parameters/max_cstate (if you have support enabled in the kernel).
>Are there any studies that show [immigration] would help growth?

Immigration increases wages for domestic workers in the long-run[1-3].

"None of these studies is decisive, but taken together they suggest that immigration, in the long run, has had only a small negative effect on the pay of America's least skilled and even that is arguable. If Congress wants to reduce wage inequality, building border walls is a bad way of going about it." http://www.economist.com/node/6771382 and here http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/immigrat....

[1] http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497
[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w14188
[3] http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/what_immigration_means
Zappos: Either the future of management or a social experiment gone awry