skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Despite the criticisms, the outcomes have been amazing. People are living longer and healthier lives than they did 20 years ago. Is Adams also forgoing vaccinations?

My impression is (but someone with actual knowledge please contribute here) that modern medicine and science have achieved what no other institutions or ideas in human history have achieved, significantly extending human life and curing diseases that cursed humanity since the dawn of time. It is a miracle, and it continues -- life expectancy continues to improve and more diseases are coming under control of prevented (except measles, of course).

Scott Adams' cartoons are insightful; he does not seem to apply the same depth of thought to his writing. This piece is poorly thought through. "Science" has told him nothing, unless he reads the research himself. News about science, and the public's poor grasp of uncertainty, risk, and the significance of scientific research (i.e., is this one study? settled science? etc.) are what generate confusion.
The irony is that the Pi comes from someone who has exactly that kind of childhood hacking background who wants to replicate it for everyone else. It's the opposite of a "prison of no understanding". Holding out for free-to-RTL hardware is allowing the best to be the enemy of the good.
I'm actually glad it took this long.

If it didn't it would probably be like all these other new languages which only attempt to improve upon the art of programming in one or two aspects.

Another good thing about it taking so long is that it took a few tries before anyone figured out a decent way to implement Perl6. If everybody had just settled for the first halfway decent implementation, we would have been bridled with a language that was half as good as it could be. And the worst thing about that is that there would be people relying on the features the way they were implemented then, making it far harder to break backwards compatibility and get here in as little time as it has so far taken. ( There is still at least one big breakage that will come before Perl6 is officially released )

That's ignoring a few stumbling blocks like illness and some mismatch between the goals of Parrot and Rakudo. Without which it could have been done possibly 5 years sooner.
That will be a sad day. Internet technology still has a lot of room to improve before the government steps in and kills all market forces that encourage those improvements.

If you don't like your current service levels now, just wait until the government gets involved.
And how, exactly, will a child be faced with debugging NT internals while making a game in Scratch?

The educators that want to foster an interest in computing will do so in a way that's least burdensome to a child's limited attention span and desire for instant gratification. Those that want to foster an interest in writing software simply won't put Windows on the thing unless they're teaching it.
I unfortunately had to downvote your comment because this is not the conversation about DRM, Google Services, etc. I'm as passionate as anyone about fighting the walled gardens out there. But it's not germane to the current thread.
No, no. Just thought it was a good opportunity to explain.
Agree with all of you, was just trying to gauge the difference.

The government regulates the utilities pretty tight, but there is also little to no room for competition in those spaces anymore either. Which is one thing that's improving service in Google Fiber markets.
Yes, we changed the title from "Facebook can terminate your use of React if you infringe on their patents" for (I hope) obvious reasons.
IANAL, but this seems to imply that, if you use React, Facebook (and affiliates) can infringe on any of your patents with impunity -- you can't even verbally accuse them of infringement.

The same applies to Facebook's other open source projects (e.g. immutable-js), so one must also avoid any libraries that depend on those projects (even if it's a dependency of a dependency of a...)

This seems to conflict with the spirit of OSS, since the grant doesn't apply to modified versions of React (i.e., trying to fork React could result in a lawsuit). Again, IANAL, so I might be misreading this.
Taking a step back.

The rate at which science has moved forward ever since there has been science has increased far, far more than the average human life span.

Say, a few hundred years ago, it took science an average of X years to move forward enough to know that it was wrong about something. X was on the order of many human lifetimes.

Today, science is moving so much more quickly. It 'finds out' it's wrong, over and over again, about a given topic, during a human's life span.

Add to that the increased number of humans who are science literate.

Add to that the total amount of 'bandwidth' between 'science' and people.

Here is yet another area where technology has left biologies ability to cope in the dust.

In this case, there are some possible solutions, mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Understanding what science actually means has never been more important.

Here are my basic assumptions. Everything I believe is going to be proven wrong, multiple times, over the course of the next decades. All we can do is go forward, making sure what we do base our decisions on, every day, is the on our best and most honest efforts, for this moment in time.

Note, I don't really think everything I believe will be proven wrong, in all likelihood. It's just a starting point.

I understand my comments are skipping over a whole lot of important, relevant and fundamentally broken things, many of which can and need to be fixed.
Very good point about mercury. What are people supposed to think? "Mercury is so bad I'm barely allowed to purchase or handle it, but then I'm supposed to then inject it into my baby?"

Yes there's a lot of nuance here, and a lot of cost/benefit analysis around the risk of a tiny amount of mercury (in excretable compound form) vs. the risk of nasty diseases. But it becomes harder to communicate that nuance and be believed when you've just been telling people to eat margarine (artery plaque) for 50 years.
Java. Python. Golang. Lua.
The problem here is not with science itself, but the expectation of what science is, and what it tells us, and how. People are not educated on science, period.

The popular perception is that science tells us facts about the world. This is false.

What science is, at its core, is a complete and utter acceptance of an extremely high level of doubt and uncertainty. It is living with the unknown, and working with it anyway to try to get closer to the truth.

Framed this way, science always "changing its mind" about what's right should be revered and celebrated by everyone in the world! We're looking at the advancement of civilization with our own two eyes! Not always grand and not always perfect, but that's how science works, in its own extremely productive way.

But we don't teach this. We do not teach, deeply, this version of science. No people except a chosen few will reach this level of understanding. The 99% of society which are not scientists will look at it as untrustworthy, because it always looks like it's wrong, all the time.

That is what needs to be changed. Not science itself, not what we recommend based on science—which is just the best thing that we know at the time—but the public perception of science itself. Science education must be deep, ingrained, and profound; not simply functional.

It would solve a great many problems of society if the average person were able to look at a situation with a respect for both what we know and what we do not, and understand the procedure for moving closer to truth, and respect it. It is unlikely to ever happen, but that is the systemic problem, and that is where we should direct our attention.
There was a decent article (I think it was on HN) a while ago that argued against this type of generic error message. The basic idea is that you can very easily discover whether the email is valid or not by attempting to create an account with that email (in most cases). It's trivially easy to either verify that the email you are trying to use is valid, or even build a database of valid email addresses to crack by attempting to create accounts. So why bother with generic error messages at all. It is not really buying you anything on the security end and it seems like it is sacrificing some usability.
Interesting. I appreciate your candidness!
That's what I'm worried about, you see all the news stories of the current ISPs magically improving once Google Fiber moves in.

Any 'utility' by government terms is highly regulated and has no market competition. Hell, they have to ask a judge before they can increase rates or change anything. Ha.
Please read this: http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability...

Ethylmercury and methylmercury are not the same thing.
It's worth noting that these "unelected bureaucrats" are nominated by a President for limited terms and confirmed by the Senate, and that all powers they have are bestowed upon them by Congress and can be revoked, and that their regulations have to fit within restrictions that are defined and may be revised by Congress.

It's certainly not pretty, but it's not unaccountable, and it seems to be moving things in the generally correct direction. We can hope, anyway.
Nope, but it would be braindead for google to then just index however many bytes it has received up to that point as if it were the full document.
And why does it always come back to Americans, specifically?

It doesn't; the others just don't get read so much because they're not written in English :)
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You still almost certainly need to implement a backup system. It is rarely a good idea to force a new user to enter his facebook/google/ms credentials to use your service. Even if 99% of your potential userbase has such credentials they may not want to connect them to your service.

That's even before getting into the question about whether or not such systems make it more likely that users will fall to phishing attacks by conditioning them to enter their credentials somewhere other than the website where they were issued that they went to directly.
> not more than 2 identical characters in a row (e.g., 111 not allowed)

Why? If my password is id8FK38f@&&#d is it inherently less secure if 111 appears in the middle of it somewhere?
As in, better be damn happy with the speed you have now because you ain't going to get faster anytime soon. Well unless your lucky and someone politically connected on your street.

Going back to the days before cable, when high speed was whatever the regulated its a utility phone company decided I was allowed to have

There is no free lunch and regulation will just mean normalization at best, to the lowest allowed numbers. People below the allowed numbers will eventually be put on a schedule where their area will be upgraded, after meetings and such mostly all not public. You might get lucky and see movement in five years.

Where they really need to be acting is mobile data. This is where the real thievery is going on.

I am all for having no fast or slow lanes, but if regulation comes out dictating speeds you can guarantee the lowest allowed levels will be met with gusto
Graph Theory and Lost Economic Development: Argentina in the 90s
How does it exclude assertions made when you're defending yourself against Facebook? I don't see it.
The scientific consensus was worse than "fat is bad for you", it was saturated fat is bad, so switch from butter to trans fat loaded margarine. It lead to things like McDonalds using hydrogenated vegetable oil instead of saturated fat laden beef tallow in their fryers. The scientific consensus was specifically wrong on the types of fat that were bad.
Persistent Mapped Buffers, Benchmark Results
Landscape Field Service Management Solution
Explain how the two ideas aren't related.
For me, science is synonymous with "predictability". By studying systems, you can create models and theories that allow you to create a prediction about the future which can then be verified. The key to science is the verification step (which is why supernatural concepts are not science; they've never been confirmed or denied).

Based upon my definition, you may be wondering about something like the theory of evolution, since evolution concerns the past (and progresses too slowly to observe in the present). But the science in that field is still a future prediction -- the nature of the prediction is that it just so happens to be about the past. In other words, as new evidence emerges that explains what happened in the past, we can compare this evidence to our prediction for what kind of evidence we would find.

So, if science is prediction, then good science is "better" prediction. Then what's the best science? Physics. Physics can make theoretical predictions that match reality up to twelve decimal places. That's insane. The next best science is chemistry, followed by biology, followed by nutrition and health (as the article discusses), followed by psychology.

Does this mean that psychologists are not as intelligent as physicists? No, it just means understanding quantum mechanics is far easier than understanding how people work -- a view which I would hazard to guess most physicists would confirm. Despite the fact that QM requires advanced math that few can understand, the totality of information necessary to make predictions at a subatomic level is very small in comparison to the amount of information necessary to model a human (biologically or mentally). A few postulates, a few mathematical definitions, some numerical methods, and BOOM -- twelve decimal places of accuracy for the gyromagnetic ratio of an isolated electron. One textbook would be completely sufficient to describe this prediction and the math behind it (although it may be kind of hard to read). On the other hand, there's no way a highly predictive model of a human could fit in one book.

Unlike the elegant laws of physics, a human body is the result of millions of years of all kinds of adaptive chaos and evolution. There's no pretty equation that describes it.

My point with all this is that the public hears "science" and they lump all science together. Instead, they should be educated on which fields of science are the most predictive, and which are still in major development. In this sense, they would have a better idea of what to trust when making decisions for themselves.
Three BBC journalists questioned for using drone in Davos no-fly zone
I'd like to point out the infectious nature of determination. This gets back to motivation vs discipline discussion on HN lately.

It seems like human nature, when you see someone leaning in so vigorously, to either join their cause or do something to help them personally. The manager's wife cooked James meals, the banker was giving him rides, and now as nwilkens points out, someone's crowd funding a car for him. Think how the guys at that plant feel working alongside someone like that.

For those keeping score with discipline and motivation, here's another tool for that toolbox.
The issue most here are not mentioning is the sad state of affairs of much of the US public infrastructure. I wonder how old the pipes running to your house are and how long ago they should have been upgraded? This is also a possibility if internet becomes a utility.
Do you sponsor visa? I live in Bangladesh.
Also, as pointed out in previous discussions of this clause, this is significantly more restrictive than the Apache license.

This would make me quite hesitant about using React for any project of significant size (especially for a large enterprise). I saw a post earlier about Netflix using React -- I wonder if they know about this.
My brother rode a bike from Warren to Madison Heights for work for almost a year. I think it was about 8 miles each way. He at least got in good shape doing it.
Right, so like you said they have a reasonable cut-off for this one most likely ultra-rare situation. It's not going to be perfect but it doesn't have to be, in order to be useful.
I understand that these things are written as defensively as possible, but could someone explain how likely this is to actually be used? It seems like something that's intended to protect FB, but I can't imagine a situation in which they would actually use it.

Perhaps someone with more legal experience could point out the precedent?
The FCC doesn't regulate power and water, what they're talking about is making to Telco regulation - AKA Title II. The same regulation that left the telephone system unchanged for near 50 years, and made it near-legal to get the cell system off the ground until dramatic changes were made.

I'm very torn on this - I want net neutrality, but I have zero faith in the ability of a bunch of unelected bureaucrats to write 10,000 pages of regulations that will make things better.
How does this work for foreign shareholders?
There's an easy way to measure entropy non-heuristically: see how well the password compresses. Then, to measure whether a new password is a variation of an old one, you just compress their concatenation and see if you get less entropy than expected.
My philosophy is this: Correlational nutritional studies should be trusted because they are the only and therefore best source of verifiable information on maintaining healthiness. They are, however, very noisy and each study in isolation should therefore influence my choices very little. Meta-analyses should be given more weight because they tend to smooth the noisiness.

Scott Adams bemoans the fact that the wildly varying conclusions of diet science cause people's pattern recognition to conclude that this is not trustworthy information.

However, the problem is not pattern recognition. The problem is the weight that people give to signals. When each signal is given a weight of 1 or 0, the pattern recognition will never converge on the underlying trend. The media and the public must understand that some studies should be given more weight than others.

Thus, scientists have a duty to communicate which studies should be most influential. They CANT trust the media to this.
Right, and perhaps one of the biggest things to understand is that, while thermodynamics does apply to human exercise and consumption and is really easy to understand and reason about, the conclusions you get from that tend to be overly simplistic. The problem is a fallacy along the lines of "all humans are perfectly uniform, rational decision-makers." Instead different foods release different chemicals in your brain over different timelines, causing your cravings for food to be different.

Just to take the simplest case, there is something like a 20 minute delay between food hitting your stomach and any sort of satiety signal hitting your brain. So if you have an abundance of easy-to-eat food, then you may end up consuming more calories than someone who doesn't. (You could call this the "second bowl of cereal effect": when you've eaten a bowl of cereal and still feel hungry afterwards, it's because you ate too fast because you didn't want the cereal to get soggy.) Easy weight loss plan: cook your own meals, tasting along the way; by the time you're sitting down with the food you won't be quite so hungry.

And none of that picture has to do with calorie-counting. Calorie-counting is important if you can stick to it, but most people keeping informal calorie-counts will be victim to their cravings, and those cravings are dictated by parameters of the food other than the food's caloric content.
We did in December. This is still a work in progress. Thanks, I've updated my comment.
As a libertarian who knows tech, I'm on the government's side here, although I'm grimacing while I'm supporting them. It's simply the lesser of two evils.

One thing to help clarify the debate if you're talking to somebody who opposes this move: do not confuse the issue of how the government should be treating utilities in general with whether or not the internet is a utility. We can have a grand old time debating the overreach of a regulatory statist society, but that has got jack squat to do with the issue at hand. Is the internet more like electricity, where you pay so much for a bucketful, and then you can do whatever you want with it? Or is it more like Star Wars, where George Lucas and Disney can charge us 17 times at 17 different rates for different versions of what is essentially the same thing? These are two different discussions to be had; do not let folks conflate them into one.
I realize HN is full of idealistic kids who never lived through the government taking control of something to "improve" it, so your down votes are forgiven.
Seems awfully low. They pulled you from BitPay four months ago, and now you're without a job and given one month's severance.

Not to mention you were effectively let go with the CEO, but not told. That sounds like a claim for constructive dismissal right there.
Publicising warez of a cracking tool will bring him problems?
I'm surprised at how reliable utilities are in America. I was in a low income neighborhood in San Antonio during university, and had maybe 2 blackouts in 3 years.
But the cost of the GPS system does not increase with the number of users and it has to be deployed anyway for military reasons. There's no point in charging users.
I think Science to non-scientists becomes a matter of Religion, and for us who actually do it, it becomes a matter of Philosophy/Spirituality - if you forgive the medieval imagery of that sentence.
The mental exercise is definitely good. If you only knew one language knowing another will probably increase your knowledge of your native one as well.

I'm not saying it's a must but it can come handy and be a healthy exercise.
This doesn't touch on commercial authentication managers and how horribly they can be implemented. There's no authorization cheat sheet either.

They also make assumptions like "When multi-factor is implemented and active, account lockout may no longer be necessary." Sure, until someone finds a simple hole in one of the factors and the rest become trivially brute-forced, sniffed, phished, etc. The chain is only as strong as the weakest link.
The other complexity rules rule that out, though.

If I have a password 10 characters long with at least one uppercase, one lowercase, 1 digit, and 1 special character then having one of those repeated won't make it any less secure. Rigidly enforcing that rule doesn't make sense, it's saying that "R%Vg9~\LL" is less secure than "R%Vg9~\".
If you read his latest book, he describes what I think is a very healthy view of science and the notion of expertise in general. For certain classes of problems, an expert will offer the right solution 98% of the time. But for edge cases it's more like 50%.

I think there is a lot of conflicting science about nutrition (exacerbated by advertising), and people assume it falls in the 98% certain category when oftentimes it falls in the 50% category.
> "I say, if this man can get here, walking all those miles through snow and rain, well I'll tell you, I have people in Pontiac 10 minutes away and they say they can't get here — bull!"

I say someone with that attitude should help this guy get a car. Good grief.

Is this guy respectable and noble, or an excuse for demanding more from his fellow workers? As in "look how determined your coworker is, you should all be doing more".
I see a problem too when these sort of articles are a little too abstract/simple. I think the solution here is ground articles like this on, you know, real startups that have succeeded on focusing. In that respect there are few sites that try to address this issue.

I think what articles like this me is that the author/company has 'figured it out' through their own experiences and are so excited to share that joy in some way.
> and at least one uppercase, one lower, one digit, and one special character

Not to nitpick, but they wanted at least 3 of those 4. Is that possible with a regular expression or are we now into the custom validator territory?