skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What about cases where prestigious scientific institutions have deeply held and advanced utterly wrong ideas for decades?

Nutritional science is particularly bad in this regard. The recommendations that were advanced from (roughly) the 70s through the 90s lead to obesity and heart disease.

One thing in particular comes to mind: margarine.

I understand the nature of scientific theory, and that scientific theory is not dogma or absolute revealed truth, but does the public? And was that ever communicated? Vastly and systematically exaggerating your knowledge and certainty of something in order to present a "unified message to the public" is dangerously close to just lying.

I also think science is much more vulnerable to corruption by moneyed interests than many people will admit. Research payola is very real.

While I'm personally pretty convinced the CO2 problem is real, I do not blame people from being skeptical when government-backed science and jet setting rich do-gooders tell them they must accept higher energy costs and possibly a reduced standard of living in order to combat a threat they cannot directly perceive. It's particularly easy to understand in cases like China and India where fossil fuel energy is lifting billions out of abject poverty. I could afford to pay 3-4X for energy. A Chinese peasant or an American member of the working poor can barely afford to pay 1.01X for energy.
Take a look at a movie from the 1990s, where a character pulls up say a news article on the internet. Just text and some pictures. So usable! The web peaked in 1998, when everything was plain HTML but you could Google-search it, and everything since then has been the moral progeny of the <blink> tag. So when a perfectly usable site like C2 embraces the bankruptcy of the Web 2.0 era, I think people are justified in expressing their frustration.
Do any of your links have anything to do with science, or just libertarian marketing? (Lie to people, take their money, and retire.)
The major problem is the influence of big corporations in funding studies and promoting certain points of view for their own benefit. This is a huge problem in the food industry and also the drugs and medicine business.

If you look at the history of the popularity of vitamins, orange juice, the promotion of carbohydrates and sugars over fats and proteins etc.

Not a problem with Science per se.
Still, I don't think Richard Hamming was arguing for removing doors altogether. If we are going to take his metaphor literally, then I say do it with moderation. Sometimes it's nice to have your door open for part of the day, but to close it when you really need to focus.

The problem is that in an open floor plan, a lot of people are stripped of the power to moderate themselves. This only benefits the person who would have never closed their door, not the person who decided they would keep it open for a while.
>>The general scientific consensus may have been that most Americans are consuming fat in general, and certain varieties of fat in particular, at levels which are unhealthy, and therefore that most Americans would be better off reducing fat intake in general, and certain common varieties of fat intake in particular.

Unfortunately, Ancel Keys etc were recommending vegetable based fats over animal ones, and ironically it's the animal based fats that tend to be healthier. They were also recommending that a lot of the fat in the diet be replaced by carbohydrate sources, which caused its own issues.
But you've given away Scott's point. We've been listening to how bad saturated fat is for my entire lifetime pounded into the public with the maximum volume science has available to it at the highest governmental and science authority levels, and now, oops, mea culpa, it's more complicated than we thought, and right now it's not exactly out of the question that "saturated fat" will be entirely removed from the "bad thing" or even "consumed too much by Americans" column in another 10 to 20 years.

No matter how upset you get about people being a bit glib about what the consensus said (and frankly I'm not sure I couldn't establish "science said saturated fat is bad, full stop" with just a bit more effort than I'm willing to put in right now), you can't get out of the fact that the pounding was apparently unjustified, and there's a nontrivial chance it was flat-out wrong. Science and scientists shouldn't expect to escape from those decades of being wrong at maximum volume and the corresponding vicious evils inflicted on the world (because after all the US consensus has been exported all over the world), and it would be utterly and completely irrational for me not to update my beliefs based on this evidence.
Not in the form of a webapp. It would have been a browser extension and/or mobile.
to avoid an attack where a user submits an absurdly long passphrase to the auth system, that it crashes?
I'm not sure what specifically you could be referring to. In fact, for vegans it can be easier to sometimes take supplements that have iron and vitamin C in one package, rather than carefully preparing a meal so that you're eating both plant-derived iron and vitamin C at roughly the same time.
But the military did nothing beyond procuring scopes for M2s, effectively keeping the powerful .50BMG out of snipers' hands as the M2 was a heavy crew-seved weapon (vehicle or tripod mounted), unsuitable for a lone sniper to haul for miles. Sure, Hathcock et al could make amazing shots with it, but only from where it could be little farther than driven into position. It took the civilian market to translate it to the true sniper's rifle prevalent today.
Exactly. Science isn't broken, but it seems that way because the incentives that drive it are wrong. Especially with medical science.
Huh? I routinely read people here writing that HN has the highest quality discussions of any active online fora. I happen to agree.

Also, HN has dramatically increased in quality over the past 6-10 months. It's been very noticeable for someone who's been here for 4 years.

Can HN be an echo chamber? Yes, at times. But much less than other online fora that I've participated in (most Reddits are 1000x worse, for example)

Does the site design itself leave a bit to be desired? Maybe, but I've grown quite fond of it.

And what exactly "empty promises" are you talking about?
Transcript of the workshop:

http://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_even...

Commissioner Wright's dissent:

http://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements/...
Does pure scientific discovery count, given that it can be used for evil?
I think no, but on the other hand the internet that I'm typing this on was partially created with defense industry funds....
Dictionary attacks work very well on passwords like this.
I've had a registered account here for just shy of 7 years now, and you're not giving the current moderation team nearly enough credit. dang and company have resolved a lot of long-standing user complaints, they are proactive on policing the site, and they are generally exceedingly fair and even-handed.

dang specifically has the patience of a saint.
I don't get it ... But hey, it took about six month for me to figure out how to write asynchronous JavaScript ... The key is to not use anonymous functions, it will flatten out the "Christmas tree" of callbacks. And it makes it possible to read what the code does, or at least what the programmer wants the code to do. It's much better then "then", then what, but, then, why complicate things when it's actually possible to be verbose.
cat registrationError.php

<?php echo "we don't want your kind here. go away." ?>
You're right I did switch the wording there, but in my view it was only to clarify. I didn't consider the fact that you would see a difference in meaning between the two phrasings.

I literally see no difference (beyond the latter being slightly clearer) between "I can't see why X happens" and "I don't understand the valid reason why X happens" (where X in this case is "people being interested in pro sports"). As such, I didn't consider switching it out to change the meaning at all beyond slightly clarifying.

The connotations you refer to are also ones that I don't think the original phrase is laden with. I really don't see how "I don't see why X" connotes a lack of attempt to do so, any more than "I don't understand why X" does.

I'm aware that now we're getting into differences in connotations where there really are "no right answers" (unlike the denotation, we can't just look up a single source of truth). Apparently we've just been exposed to rather different vernacular, at least with respect to these couple of phrases. I guess that makes us "both right", with respect to the "languages" that we each speak.
> It's a hundred times better to have a difficult password on a post-it on a monitor than it is to have an easily guessable password. Who do you suspect is going to hack you?

It depends on the threats you face. Generally, most attacks are from insiders.
You seem to be saying that page load is not deterministic but that is not true. A special version of a browser can easily keep track of http requests and other async operations and consider the page to be complete when async ops = 0 and the last paint is complete. The only hard part I can think of is a page that is recursively calling setTimeout endlessly, but even that can be coded around.
also the facebook mission - "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected". Is that enough?
Yes, that is the primary concern. "We" in the bitcoin community haven't yet figured out how to write 100% correct alternative implementations of bitcoin. We will have to figure out how to do that first before I would ever recommend anybody actually run an alternative implementation as a full node and rely on it for seeing the blockchain.
Makes you wonder what a ternary - based, memsistor built functionally programmed CPU with 243 cores and roughly 4G of on board RAM would be like.
Biking in the snow / slush (especially on public streets since Detroit doesn't have the money to clear sidewalks) is an extremely precarious proposition.
Personally I think medical science and the health care industry are so broken that they should just be rebooted from scratch.
How to Build Features Your Users Actually Want
I'm glad they killed this project. I can't see how integrating a crypto-payment system into reddit would have worked out into anything other than a disaster.

First of all, if it became commonplace that reddit accounts might contain some sum of crypto-money, the bustling onslaught of salivating hackers would become so tremendous that the site would likely be crippled under the weight of user grievances and brute-force traffic. I'm sure mandatory MFA would be put in place to increase security, but it wouldn't change the fact that reddit would become a major target for hackers, and many people would lose their money, despite MFA.

Next, I think the incentives for shit and spam posts would rocket off the chart as scammers, beggars and cam-models would likely flood the site with crap so that they can extract tips from anyone willing to toss penny shavings in their direction. Karma is already a sufficient reward mechanism, adding money into the fray is totally unnecessary and would almost certainly lower the quality of discussion.

Finally, this may be a stretch, but I fear that integrating crypto-money into the site would open the door for pay-to-subscribe/pay-to-view/pay-to-comment/pay-to-vote subreddit mechanisms. I understand that reddit is a business, but I think that this would be objectively bad, and even worse if subreddit mods were able to get a cut of it.

In the end, I don't think reddit needs crypto, it doesn't make the site better in any conceivable way.
Show HN: Database Labs Production Mode – Postgres DBaaS with 24/7 Support
Free Mobile Design Course
The promotion of carbohydrates over fat by Ancel Keys wasn't due to promotion by business interests. It was more due to him taking some partial evidence and making more of it than was warranted for personal aggrandisment.
I mostly agree, but "use somebody else's" doesn't really help if you're writing a crypto library in the first place.
To be fair, the micro-optimizations are nice, and being able to just throw a switch and turn them on is nice. Of course you're right that a compiler is "never" (boy, prove me wrong, then shut up and take my money!) going to convert Array-of-Structs to Struct-of-Arrays code, for example.
I think the idea of autoconf is great (test for features, not for versions). The implementation in m4 is sadness.

It's possible to do autoconf-style checks in other build systems, but not as easily. I don't know why most build systems seem to ignore the wisdom of autoconf.
He probably has secure locking facilities at both ends: he lives in a house, and is good friends with the factory owner at work.
Save time learning Linux command arguments
This is actual fairly common nowadays. And rightfully so, if you sue us for patent infringement....no you can not use our OPEN SOURCE stuff anymore. Seems pretty fair to me.
> And yet the needle moves forward, slowly.

This is the expected input; candidate scientists are told to only expect to move their field forward by a tiny amount.

The expected output, however, is off the charts. Every time I see one of those "Here's what NASA has contributed to the consumer lifestyle" news pieces, I cringe. There is way too much unhealthy pressure on scientists to say, "well, look what we did!"

The general path of science is much more like a progressive series of "hmmm. HMMM!"s than these astounding chains of discrete discoveries that people are being conditioned to expect. But I guess when money has to pay for science, and tax money to boot, a certain type of person needs the dog and pony show. Bah.
I have a parent who was a dietician. I can tell you that for at least 35 years the scientific consensus has been that some fats are good for you. Every time a new fad diet rolled through the news headlines I would get a lecture about how stupid the new fad was and how to properly eat a healthy diet.

If you believe the headlines, however, you'd never know that the science hasn't changed.
You don't have to figure out which argument belongs to which function.

The syntax is "The first expression is a function, all following expressions are arguments to that function". Fullstop.

It would be unfair of me to say "C has confusing and ambiguous calling conventions, the compiler complains if I write A(B(C(D))) as A(B,C,D)"

Because you would respond "Well of course, that's just the calling conventions of the language!"

To which I say "Exactly"
To my (lay!) knowledge, no. The primary legislation indicates that to be in violation of that section the court has to believe you did have a way, when you were given an order under RIPA, to make the content they're seeking readable, and you haven't done so. If you do not possess a means to make it readable at that point because you routinely use ephemeral keys - as most people do now (specific example: ECDHE TLS ciphersuites) - you wouldn't be in violation of RIPA in that case, I believe.

Also, keys which are only used for signing are specifically exempted from disclosure in the primary legislation - so don't hand over private TLS signing keys (if, and only if, you always use ephemeral keys, not static RSA) or any GnuPG/PGP signing keys (encryption subkeys on the other hand? However, GnuPG has a way to output the symmetric keys for individual messages, allowing you to limit the damage)!

Of course, if ever presented with any such order, you absolutely need very good legal advice rather than taking it from a lay random on Hacker News. I would definitely encourage you to fight, if you can.
Ehhh....that's "installer downloading and executing", which is a far cry from "package management". Notably, it doesn't provide dependency resolution (which is 90% of a package manager's job, IMO), and Windows' software packaging conventions don't really work well for an apt-like system, since they are intended to be mostly self-contained outside of shared frameworks.

I use chocolatey, but it's not anywhere near the level of apt-get. That's more Windows and Windows developers' fault than chocolatey's though. They've done a great job given what they have to work with.
You fell victim to the confusion in the original post and this thread between what the original poster describes as popping, and what they were apparently actually doing (which involved taking the length, which is O(N) for the reasons explained here and in the documentation).

erlang's queue's pop ("out") is amortized O(1), worst case O(N) just like every other immutable double headed queue. Here's the source code:

https://github.com/erlang/otp/blob/172e812c491680fbb175f56f7...
>And embrace, extend, extinguish makes no sense in a community-driven ecosystem. MS knows that

So assuming EEE would "make sense in community-driven ecosystem" they still would do that. Wouldn't they ?

I'm ok with Windows on Rasp2 - Linux needs competition.
For what it's worth, I (the acuser) am super familiar with JavaScript, I just thought you were making a web app. Sorry to cause confusion.
Absolutely, if you port it! ;) https://github.com/sandstorm-io/sandstorm/wiki/Porting-Guide

Or nominate it to our app committee, who votes on apps to port: https://sandstorm.io/vote

(The app committee is 32 people who purchased seats during our Indiegogo campaign.)
Thanks for the tip. I have three resolvers on my LAN, but two of them require the FQDN for reverse lookups. I'll make sure to add "search localdomain" to /etc/resolv.conf next time.
Well I'm not really sure, because it felt extremely turbulent while I was there for my brief 4 month tenue. I think the culture will change. I think the culture was a little more loose, autonomous, and with little management before. I think it will be more hierarchical and managed moving forward. However, please realize that I have extremely limited experience at reddit and may simply be wrong about that.
Looks like he may end up with a pretty nice ride!
http://www.gofundme.com/l7girc
Uber City – Portsmouth, NH Influencing NYC?
Mashable - Full Time, New York City (Remote available)

Mashable is looking to hire developers/devops candidates to work on our Velocity platform - effectively a web crawler that feeds our data science and NLP engines. Key areas of expertise would include JRuby, Java, Python, message brokers (RMQ in our case), Postgres/Mongo (tokumx)/Elasticsearch, Puppet, and AWS. We deploy on RHEL and CentOS.

If you're a Ruby developer who isn't just a Rails developer and can deal with data that doesn't fit into RAM, then we'd like to talk to you.

Email resumes or further questions to cheald@mashable.com, or you can submit your resume directly at http://mashable.theresumator.com/apply/Te5NYa/Product-Senior...
How about multi value return from functions.

```
x = foo();
oh = x[0];
no = x[1];
```

vs

```
[oh, yeah] = foo()
```
rebooting/starting Linux on a VPS takes much more time on Azure for me?
This is the case I use AWS instead of Azure for my VMs.
I don't disagree, and I'll add that the Raspberry Pi is still encumbered by a binary blob that is required to boot, no matter the actual OS that is loaded after. I for one would absolutely love to see a 100% fully documented, Free and Open Source development board, from the board layout, to the CPU/GPU design, the boot code, and all kernel and userland software.

Unfortunately there is no real market interest for such a device, so I'll take what I can get.
In 1990-1991, in my first job, I insisted on using gcc on SunOS primarily because I wanted to use ANSI C89 features (primarily function prototypes). These were already available on the other two platforms we were targeting (the Microsoft C compiler, and Apple Macintosh Programmers Workbench), and the standard SunOS PCC-based compiler didn't support any of the new Standard C features.
Peter Jackson is exactly that kind of directors. And he is consistent in that. Even before LoR/Hobbit, check out King Kong made by him. It's like watching Serious Sam, never-ending battle with CGI monsters, boring and pointless (as part of the movie, playing SS games is fun of course).
Unfortunately even the simple HTML 5 image ads (rendered using canvas) can have malicious scripts in them. The only way to stop the bad ads would be to only use text ads from Google which would likely lead to unsustainable revenue loss.
He addresses this though, with the "no true C programmer would have written this code" argument. Was it a bad idea for OpenSSL to use a custom allocator. Yeah. Did they do it anyway? Yeah. Would it be a bad idea to write a custom allocator in Rust? Yeah. Could you do it anyway? Yup.
It's been a little while (obviously) but, if memory serves, all you had to do on Windows 98 was click "Cancel" at the logon screen.
It's not just corporations. Science funding, generally, is far too tied to producing results that fit with the preconceptions of the group with the money. Combined with peer review being a frighteningly effective mechanism for enforcing the status quo, and it's unsurprising that once an idea is entrenched moving away becomes nearly impossible.

The underlying problem is an insufficient diversity in sources of funding for science. Scientists are people, and most just want as safe a career as science allows, which isn't very safe at all. Rocking the boat is, for them, a bad idea.
The 7 mile leg close to the job is in Rochester Hills. Who knows what the road conditions are there, but Detroit's budget woes aren't a factor (It's even a different county).

So apparently half of the problem is that Oakland county doesn't have as much public transit as Wayne county.
I know right, at least make your repo private ;-)

(I was more surprised that this source dump doesn't seem to line up with the "Windows 2000" source leak that can be found if you look hard enough. Very peculiar.)
For sure! I'm a strong believer in transparency. Trying my best to be open and honest.
There's one place where an open-plan office makes sense: a trading floor. This applies even to many species of algorithmic trading. That's because you have cases where a message (such as "our quotefeed is giving us stale data") needs to get out quickly.

The trading day is also, I'll note, only 6.5 hours long. And people who don't get 25% raises (or more) per year leave. It's a stressful job and unless you're making $750k+ after 6-8 years in, it's not worth it to deal with the negatives of being on a trading floor.

Open-plan began to go into vogue as a backdoor mechanism for age discrimination, due to studies showing that older people were quick to associate them (and visibility from behind) with low status and therefore leave. Two decades later, I doubt the intention behind tech companies using these plans (and almost all do) is so negative as that. I don't think there's any negative intent anymore; it's just something that's done because (a) it's cheaper, (b) it's more tolerant of rapid growth, and (c) it's how things have "always" been done.

As long as people can step away without stigma or punishment, I don't think that open-plan offices are inherently evil. The problem is that few offices have enough quiet space to allow for that.

As for "the extrovert ideal", I don't know what to do about that. It seems to be human nature. People with families, non-drinkers, introverts, women except through the immense effort needed to be socially available but not seen as available in other ways... are never going to be "the cool kids". What I've learned, though, is that while "cool kids" get a quick start, they don't hold it and "cool" doesn't last. It's not useful to envy them because, while they may appear to be moving fast at one time, the 5-year picture is not especially desirable.
Sun did the same thing on Solaris (charging extra for the compiler).