skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What a great article. I have so many random comments.

> If you have a few million dollars, you can even set up your own parody of the scientific process: your own phony experts, in their own phony think tanks, with their own phony publications, giving each other legitimacy by citing each other. (Of course, all this is a problem for many fields, not just climate change. Climate is special only because there, the future of life on earth might literally hinge on our ability to get epistemology right.)

And yet, the author presumably believes that only (or mostly) the climate change deniers do this? How can an unbiased but completely uneducated (regarding climate science) possibly know?

> Now, would those with axes to grind try to subvert such a system the instant it went online? Certainly. For example, I assume that millions of people would rate Conservapedia as a more trustworthy source than Wikipedia—and would rate other people who had done so as, themselves, trustworthy sources, while rating as untrustworthy anyone who called Conservapedia untrustworthy.

In what sense is that "subverting," unless you're assuming that one source is "truly" more trustworthy than the other?

> But here’s the thing: anyone would be able to see, with the click of a mouse, the extent to which this parallel world had diverged from the real one. They’d see that there was a huge, central connected component in the trust graph—including almost all of the Nobel laureates, physicists from the US nuclear weapons labs, military planners, actuaries, other hardheaded people—who all accepted the reality of humans warming the planet, and only tiny, isolated tendrils of trust reaching from that component into the component of Rush Limbaugh and James Inhofe.

How does that help? If there's a "truly true Truth" out there, why should an unbiased uneducated person trust the broad connected graph over the smaller isolated one as the source of that Truth?

> As long as I’m fantasizing, the point would be that, once people’s individual decisions did give rise to a giant connected trust component, the recommendations of that component could acquire the force of law.

Oh. Crap. That's terrifying.

> In other words, Google takes a link structure that already exists, independently of its ranking algorithm, and that (as the economists would put it) encodes people’s “revealed preferences,” and exploits that structure for its own purposes.

If you like the idea of revealed preferences (I do), let's try a polycentric legal system where organizations offer services like law enforcement and dispute resolution and people can choose to pay for those services from whichever provider they like best. This largely solves the biggest problem of democracy, which is that a good legal services in a democracy are public goods and are thus likely to be underproduced. Good legal services in a polycentric legal system are not public goods, which is a good thing. Of course, it has its own problems, like what about really poor and really rich people.
Does $100M/year in revenue and $-25M/year in profits really make a company worth $1B these days?
This is why academia sucks so badly: they think because some features were released in some projects that "there is nothing new under the sun." Bull! There is still a lot to be explored and none of those projects you listed contain much of the live programming story at all (Chris Hancock at MIT did flogo II, which is more relevant than the Lisp and smalltalk projects).

To make any progress at all, we just need to stop listening to those who are living in the glory of a past that wasn't so great anyways.
>Just because someone hasn't done it before doesn't mean someone won't in the future.

It isn't random chance that no one has developed nuclear weapons using nuclear waste from a commercial reactor. It is because it would be far more expensive, a far bigger engineering challenge and far more difficult to hide than any of the other ways to create a nuclear bomb.

>You're also ignoring the larger threat to that plutonium; the issue that someone may not want to separate the contaminants. If they're making a dirty bomb, they don't care if it has contaminants or not.

I didn't talk about dirty bomb because the original statement I was replying too was saying that reprocessing akes plutonium easy to separate out and was a nuclear proliferation risk. It is impolite to criticize me for not bringing up a different issue. In the case of a dirty bomb, it would be many times less dangerous than a nuclear weapon would be and there are many, many potential sources of material for a dirty bomb that would be much easier to obtain and work with than the waste from a commercial nuclear reactor.

As I said before, a very good approach to deal with nuclear waste would be recycle it.
One interesting aspect of basic income is that it would create a large number of people who are now free to become politically active. People can sit in the streets with no end in sight en masse. Sounds like a revolution in the making.
Making Python 3 more attractive
I take the point, but one thing we've learned in trying to have a sizeable online forum where the values are 'civil and substantive' is how destructive the little jabs can be. If we're to have the intelligent discussion you speak of, we all need to edit our jabs. It takes discipline, and there's a cost (a certain blandness), but it's necessary. I've had to learn this the hard way, and am far from the only one.

I've often wondered why jabs, swipes and sarcasm are so corrosive on HN when anyone who knows about the history of discourse knows what a lively role they have played. Literary wit, especially, is frequently scathing—both an art and a sport. Not having an answer to that is why it took me so long to learn not to engage that way on HN.

But I think I know the answer now. It's because this community is many orders of magnitude larger than those were, and so the lowest common denominator is both much nearer and much suckier. Keeping that at bay is HN's major task, and the main purpose of the site guidelines. It makes the discourse a little more bland, but the alternative is not lively exchanges of high wit, it's YouTube comments.
And then some.

I can't immediately find the survey that struck me, but here's a Quora answer [1] that cites O'Reilley selling twice as many Vim books than Emacs, the Debian PopCon results [2] that are rather striking (but Debian PopCon has quite the preselection bias, and the data may not cover all sub-packages properly), and Ubuntu's results [3] are a bit harder to parse but also striking, with vim-common at 2714181 / 25488 installs / "votes" (regular uses), vs emacsen-common (the highest-placed "emacs" package) at 330647 / 1669.

[1] http://www.quora.com/Are-there-more-Emacs-or-Vim-users
[2] https://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=vim%2C+emacs...
[3] http://popcon.ubuntu.com/by_inst
The FDA Would Love It If Kind Bars Could Stop Pretending They're Healthy
"If you gathered some of the world’s best designers and gave them significant organizational support and all the resources they need, is an app which at best matches the functionality of bundled OS features from a few years ago what you’d expect?"

If I read an article by a professional writer, I expect sentences I can parse.
(RE)INTRODUCING ESPEAK.JS
@kefs: I can't agree more. Here is it with Skype chats- https://defuse.ca/microsoft-reads-your-skype-messages.htm
Is it used to derive separate HMAC and AES keys or is the same key used in both contexts?
Les jeux pour enfants abondent sur l’application Badabim
Did your game theory teacher have any ideas for a type of government or society that could be expected to do a better job with climate change? Climate change seems like the final boss of the public good problem, and I can't think of any society likely to do a very good job with it (without some sci-fi paradigm shift).

Functioning democracy, by which I mean a government whose policies closely match the desires of its population with each individual weighted equally, should be expected to do a bad job, because each individual accurately estimates that he or she is better off voting to not solve climate change.

Dictatorships or non-functioning democracies, by which I mean governments whose policies are determined by a small group of people, should be expected to do a bad job, for the usual and obvious reasons.
I used to entirely use hand-written recursive-descent parsers, until I discovered packrat style parsers. They are crazy fast and so easy to write. Also, the parser generator I use (esrap) lets you fall-back on recursive decent for parsing rules.
Python 3 adoption
I don't think design is losing its seat at the table: most new apps are nothing but design. But it would be nice if pretentiousness lost its seat at the table.
Are they asking thought provoking questions or contributing new information or insights, or is it a me-too comment? The latter does not really contribute to the conversation.
How to Speed Up Wifi Cracking Process Using Pyrit
In the 2000-2001 time frame a lot of us watched in amazement? disgust? at certain dot-com valuations, and Rotary Rocket starved due to lack of funds. It makes one wonder about how capital is allocated. People made conscious decisions to invest in a sock puppet versus a technology that gets humans into space.
Can Canada Teach the Rest of Us to Be Nicer?
Autocad 2014 Crack Plus Product Keys Incl Full Version
Maybe that was a misconception. I can't assess how seriously the party concentrates on those silly blood issues. Anyway, FPÖ's support is not as high now as it was in 1990s.

However, hook-nosed banker Jew cartoons are also spread by the left, even that is no exclusive to the far right.

Regarding old-school antisemites, it is notable that in France, daughter Le Pen is kicking her father out precisely for that.
The more advanced (Stanford Energy Symposium) research that I've seen suggests that there is only one possible power source that we can look to long term to meet the energy needs of the world, and that is Solar Energy. Nuclear Energy just won't be possible to build out quickly enough, inexpensively enough - even if we could do it safely.

In particular, check out Nate Lewis's Solar Energy 101 (https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodca...) - In the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) where he makes a strong case that the only choice is Solar - not because it's a good one, but because there is nothing else out there that can meet our needs (And he spends a bit of time talking about Nuclear Energy, and why it comes up short).
By "an event source [...] that streams the RethinkDB changes feed", the parent is implying a separate web service layer that consumes data from RethinkDB and sends it out to clients. RethinkDB is not meant for direct access by clients. More about RethinkDB access here: http://rethinkdb.com/docs/security/ (TL;DR: plaintext shared key or ssh tunnel)
I think what parent comment is referring to the process patched or process that depends on the patched process.
On 32-bit x86, you could use segment registers to get bounds checking with overhead only at setup and not at use, effectively making bounds checks free in hot loops (http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-05/BH_US_05-Chi...). I believe that SpiderMonkey uses this trick. Doesn't work on x86-64 though.
Run their code via unit tests. We've assumed if you've written a unit test for a function, the state will be taken care of.
Ding ding.

There's really only 4 possibilities, and they're all significant.

1) PD is responsible, and intentionally infecting defense attorneys with malware. Major obstruction of justice.

2) PD is responsible, and has been hacked. At a minimum, all their computer evidence is tainted; who knows if someone has been using their access for ill as well. Access to police DBs is useful for all sorts of nefarious purposes.

3) Defense attorney has faked the whole thing. Noteworthy in its own right; defense attorneys are pretty used to losing as a matter of necessity so for one to go on some kind of intentional crusade against the local PD, especially in such a public and falsifiable way... No judge will sign off on criminal sanctions here without a thorough investigation, so this is extremely unlikely barring a psychotic break (which does happen now again, it's a high-stress job).

4) Defense attorney has been hacked. Who hacked him? Have any of his clients been affected? Is someone, perhaps a technically sophisticated someone, targeting defense attorneys?
It would seem you're right. I can't find a way to confirm what Guest OS version I'm on (WA-GUEST-OS-*) but running Get-AzureOSVersion has newer versions than what's shown on the site and checking installed updates on the server shows that this has been patched. That is exactly what I wanted to see, thanks!
App Store review process is hurting users, but not allowed to talk about it
Sweden in 2014 produced about 64 TWh (42%) from large hydro and 62 TWh (41%) from nuclear. The rest came from wind 12 TWh (7.9%) and from other 13 TWh (8.5%)! other being mostly biofuel and waste.

The interesting thing here is probably the change over time. In 2005 the distribution was 72 TWh (hydro), 70 TWh (nuclear), 0.9 TWh (wind), 12 TWh (other). With wind growing by 13x and the others staying relatively static, and energy use going down slightly. [1] There is quite a lot of variance per year, as the winter weather changes energy consumption quite significantly.

Electricity export has gone from about zero (2005-2007) to 15 TWh (2012-2014).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Sweden
Do you have any particular recommendations for new(ish) consumer routers?
https://www.redhat.com seems to work
Thank you, that was a gem. "But that's the assumption being made whenever anyone argues in favor of a law by referring to the righteous aspirations underlying it, without contemplating whether the process initiated by the text of the law could lead to results that are at odds with those aspirations."

Good intentions, sometimes quite counter-productive end results.
A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development
You might be interested in something I've been working on - hyphaelia[0]. Users publish both respect and trust ratings for other users, and just respect ratings for content. This allows me to calculate individualized rankings of content for any user, given their direct trustees or alternatively, other specified entry-points into the network.

[0] https://github.com/kurotetsuka/hyphaelia
Panini is just Italian for sandwiches. Panino being the singular. You can put what you want on them but popular things here would be one of prosciutto, speck, salami, cheeses like mozzarella or (locally) Asiago, and maybe tomatoes.
I just found out about this today, very unfair ,
Does anyone know what the pre IPO price per share was offered at?
Please email me at oneeasyride@aol.com
Original Associated Press Report of Lincoln's Assassination
First of all, "bandwagon fallacy" doesn't make sense here. If I said, "English as it's commonly used is correct because everyone tells me it is," you could say that I'm jumping on a bandwagon.

What I'm saying is that "English as it's commonly used is correct because that's what defines the language itself." Language is, by its definition, a function of bandwagoning.

Second, you're utterly wrong about there being hard and fast rules to language. It's important that you look this up, or you'll go through more of your life being upset about something trivial and subjective.

If you do a little googling, I'm sure you'll see that there is no central authority to define the rules of language. In fact, for any language, there are many competing standards.

The "rules" you seem to be referring to (which I'm not limiting to grammar, but also including pronunciation, syntax, etc.) are prescriptive. Someone codified them at some point, and they were adopted by a general population.

But there are also descriptive rules for language, which refer to how people actually speak and write. These are often incorporated into newly-published or newly-revised sets of prescriptive rules. Descriptive rules may also change due to prescriptions, as is the case of avoiding ending a sentence in a preposition.

So both prescriptive rules and descriptive rules are valid, and there's no single source of "truth" for any of them. Here are some examples of things that many people (you included?) probably think are forbidden in English but are actually fine:

- Ending sentences with prepositions[1][2][3]

- Splitting infinitives[4]

- Using "whose" to refer to inanimate objects[5]

1. http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2011/11/grammar-myths-pre...

2. http://www.grammarly.com/blog/2014/youve-been-lied-to-heres-...

3. http://grammar.about.com/od/grammarfaq/f/terminalpreposition...

4. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_infinitive: "As the split infinitive became more common in the 19th century, some grammatical authorities sought to introduce a prescriptive rule against it. The construction is still the subject of disagreement among English speakers as to whether it is grammatically correct or good style: "No other grammatical issue has so divided English speakers since the split infinitive was declared to be a solecism in the 19c [19th century]: raise the subject of English usage in any conversation today and it is sure to be mentioned. However, most modern English usage guides have dropped the objection to the split infinitive."

5. http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/23541/can-whose-r...
Why I Regretted Hiring the “Perfect” Employee
Ground speed doesn't seem like a feature to me - after all, the ideal is an unblinking 'eye in the sky' that provides high-resolution video for large regions a la ARGUS. A stationary observer seems like it would provide more valuable information than an orbiting one.

With orbiting satellites, most of the time the birds are over the ocean and empty stretches of land that most people don't care about. You're wasting most of your bandwidth and storage on places that someone might be interested in one day...

Don't get me wrong, the work you're doing is very cool, and global data sets are really fun! Unfortunately, I've found that the 'value density' of these global data sets isn't great.
They say it closed to us on the 13th , which is very unfair to most of us who found out today
Why can't it just be a feed-in tariff? And if the consumer can consume using the network they can produce, in the other direction. The cable runs both ways, no?
Docker Raises $95M
I consider myself an emacs user but if you counted invocations I probably invoke vi significantly more frequently than emacs (I'm not going to wait for emacs to start to edit some little thing in /etc).

There are people who can program very productively in vi (I'm not one of them), so they can use vi for long and short tasks. I can program very productively in emacs but I don't consider it the right tool for quick one-off edits of something. Also vi comes with pretty much every UNIX-like base system I know of, while emacs is often off in a port system somewhere.
good to know. I'm going to give it a try. Thank for this module.
Sounds sort of like something I've been working on - Hyphaelia[0]. Users publish both respect and trust ratings for other users, and just respect ratings for content. This allows me to calculate individualized rankings of content for any user, given their direct trustees or alternatively, other specified entry-points into the network.

Anyways, pretty interesting - I'll be sure to hit up the author once i'm done, to see what he thinks.

[0] https://github.com/kurotetsuka/hyphaelia
Also happy to help here (S12). seth at amicushq
Another way to think of it is this : there's no orange flair so far, because the pressers haven't let it get below 21. Getting orange is dependent on what the collective does, a robot isn't going to help you beat that, only let you be there when it finally goes down without having to neglect your life in the meantime.
Well, I'm an emacs guy, and I've bought a vi book (O'Reilley's in fact) and not an emacs book, because I needed a book to figure out how to use vi and I didn't with emacs. Just throwing that out there.
wow, I would like to know how fast it can be? Since video transcoding is very expensive job, is it ok to use in production?
http://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/1986/AAAI86-044.pdf

Apparently cooking with AI has some successes in its history.
Let me take this opportunity to recommend the best PuzzleScript game: Heroes of Sokoban.

http://www.puzzlescript.net/play.html?p=6860122

(Full disclosure: made by a friend of mine.)
Ah, this is similar to what Gilad Bracha is doing in his live programming work for NewSpeak.
Where I live, in Sweden, you can. I purchased shares in a wind power coop. It feeds me all the electricity I need wherever I live in the country, at cost of production. And with interest rates at effective zero here the investment is significantly better than having the money in the bank.
Boolean parameters to API functions considered harmful (2011)
The Wolves of Vuln Street – System Dynamics Model of the 0day Market
hello,

Because video encoding is very expensive job, so the idea is to split things into small chunk and encode chunks instead of video file itself.

I can see we can archive smooth streaming and seeking went well in our production (with caching enabled).

It would be great if people can give it a try :).

Thanks!
To me it is all about a sane starting point. With Sublime I could jump in and start writing code in a beautiful and immediately helpful environment, even though I had never programmed before. As I got better at programming I wanted more advanced features and most of them I found in the included batteries, and a few I got from plugins (although all the good plugins I want seem to have died).

With VIM or Emacs I have no idea where to start, except for maybe a few weeks in the terminal and manual before I can even start to code. Then it is still an open question about what it will scale to. I am not sure I want my environment to look like [this].(http://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/files/2013/06/vim3-1024x74...)

With Spyder, RStudio and Octave GUI I can start programming right away, I can see the benefit of the IDE right away, the only problem is I have 3 different text editors with their own short cuts and features.
How many times had you tried to pitch before that day? My guess is less than 50 times. It takes several dozen practice runs before, really, the ideas gel in your mind, the questions people ask are all predictable, the confusion points are already planned for and navigated around. This is just an example of how everyone feels when they've done 'the pitch' an order of magnitude too few times.

I think it's also worth pointing out, listen to just the very next person who comes up to speak. PG hands a big gift-wrapped present to the speaker, "with that in mind, please, tell me precisely what you do" and look what the entrepreneur does... launches into a thing about something Bill Gates said, and you can see PG just going right back into that pain zone.

So I think it's a terribly common problem, and really, it's something that pretty much everyone works through manually just by getting out and giving the pitch over, and over, to different people, gauging their reactions, their body language, their questions, and just adapting, refining, sharpening that pitch to the point where it really crystallizes exactly the best way to communicate how what you're doing really makes a difference.
The best journalism of the year so far