skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That list rather reinforces the point that it is hard to identify the difference between "weird belief," "well-supported but not widespread hypothesis," and "interesting hypothesis that is on the outs in a presently complex field".

Also that mere shades of intent can make the difference between "weird belief" and the latter two classifications. Tipler's Omega Point is an excellent example of the type. It would be an interesting exploration of anthropic influence on future cosmology, our determination to turn the future light cone into intelligent matter, in light of prevalent knowledge at the time of initial publication re: future big crunch likelihood, except for the determined shoehorning into Christian theology on the part of the author. Oh well.
<-- Maturity -- Fundamentals well designed -->
R Python Julia
They should have led with Mullis:

> Mullis also claims to have chatted with a glowing raccoon that he met at midnight while on his way to the loo then losing the ensuing six hours as a result of an alien abduction. The improvements made by Mullis allowed polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to become a central technique in biochemistry and molecular biology...

And probably dropped the anti-religion slant. There's enough weirdness in here without being a dbag.
You have a very naïve view of the world and an unrealistic conception of what open source is.
The many more generator-style iterables give it a strange dramatic tone to me. Also, the type hints syntax looks utterly un-fun.
Sounds just like Googles system to me...
Interesting stats on how SMEs perceive mobile apps
It's relevant because Marc is very influential and wields a lot of power in the tech industry. What he thinks about someone who blew the whistle on unconstitutional mass surveillance programs of epic scale is pretty important.
I disagree with the waterfall->agile thing. There are a large number of development paradigms, and back then I was mostly doing some sort of Rapid development (not sure the term was in use right then, but the concept sure was).

This may not matter to a lot of you, but computation has made a huge difference. I can run nonlinear solvers in seconds instead of hours. I have ready access to things like NumPy and SciPy to very quickly explore data in a way that used to require a supercomputer.

hardware = this is partly covered by 'computation' but the kind of work I do would have been impossible back then. We generate 10+ terabytes of data a day, and that is laughably small to some of you. some more from hardware...

bits. Anyone remember trying to fit things in 32K? You know, because integers were 16 bits long, and so were pointers. It was a major chore to just sort or otherwise manipulate data, and I made some significant wins by being clever about this sort of thing rather than just saying 'eff it, use a database' (which is what my competitors did).

5 minute compiles for rather small applications.

Sneakernet.

minimal version control. A lot of people didn't know what it was.

Off the hardware front, you mostly had the ability to understand your 'stack' (that word wasn't used that way in those days). You could more of less know the Windows API, inspect the assembly coming off of your C compiler, read the standard library, and pretty much have a picture of what is going on. These days it is much harder.

To put some of this in context. My first job, in 1988, consisted of computing cancer statistics. I'd carefully write a batch job. It'd go off to a supercomputer center. There, operators would (eventually) pull tapes off the racks and insert them into the tape reader. The job would run (eventually). The job would print to printers. A van would make runs several times during the day, delivering print outs. I'd go check the bins, eventually my print out would show up. And so on. Part of my work was converting that to the PC, but we still had to do a lot of batch runs to massage the "huge" data inputs that the PC couldn't realistically handle. By '95 the situation re data handling was better, but still quite limited both in storage and computational capacity.

These days we can trivially handle pretty big problems on a PC. And if we can't handle a problem, well, there is AWS. It is just a different world in this regard.
The hardest I have noticed is to make them understand that it is not only the time, but also the date that change.

So when discussing whole timestamp or time - everybody is somewhat aware there is going to be timezone involved.

Good luck however, if you need to ask the question: "Is the instruction date (yyyy-mm-dd) in the Counterparty (Sidney), Party (London) or System timezone (Brussels) ?"
Is Python changing the world, or Go, or Ruby, or Javascript? If you are asking about "changing the world" that's a big thing to ask for. Simply being useful doesn't make a technology world-changing. I feel very confident that Go will not change the world. People may use Go to make things that change the world, but Go won't change the world. If Python has changed the world – that is the language itself has done so, not just the people using the language – then I'd look mostly to its community, governance, and development process. For Ruby I'd look to its culture, philosophy, and discourse. Javascript actually has a technical claim to changing the world: it's created a programming platform that requires no installation of software, and has brought sandboxed development into the world in a broad and practical way. But if we look at Node.js/IO.js, a Javascript platform with similar scope to Python, then I personally see a generational reinvention: a platform that a new generation of budding developers can call their own, and make their own decisions. Asking a lot of questions that no one actively considers in these older platforms.

But there's lots of other things that can change the world besides programming languages. Are programming languages really the best place to hang your hat? Do you want to compare Python to Ruby or Node.js, or compare Python a web application or wiki or the cloud; i.e., entirely different categories?
This article is completely worthless because it is all about looking at studies about drinking coffee. If you really want to get educated about health, you need to learn the details of taking care of your entire person, how all your body parts are interdependent and affect each other, and what different habits actually do. Instead of looking at whether or not long term it lowers or raises your risk of certain problems, it would be better task these questions: What is coffee? What are the immediate affects of drinking it on different body organs and functions? What is the purpose of those organs and is that purpose disrupted? How does it affect digestion? It is well known among those that actually know stuff about health, that taking care of your digestive process and things that affect your bowel movements is where the root of most disease and healing begins. So how does coffee affect this? According to the book "Tissue Cleansing Through Bowel Management", coffee will kill the good bacteria necessary for this faster than anything else. If that is true, it makes a strong case toward coffee being bad for you. Of course not all coffee is created equal. Some coffee is naturally less acidic than others. A lot of coffee is polluted with high levels of heavy metals. But if coffee is generally bad for digestion, and digestion is one of the main keys to healthy living, why do so many studies show long term benefits from drinking it? Here is where I don't like studies for this kind of thing. Most people come nowhere near living in harmony with what is now known about healthy living, myself included. So these studies are mostly about the affects of coffee on people who otherwise do not live a healthy lifestyle. Also, who funded, setup, monitored, and published the results? Who gamed the system by deciding who be included in the study and what type of coffee they would use? Who was paid off to change the numbers? There is no way to know. And yes, I drink coffee, at least for now. But I am on a constant journey of always improving my health in some way. Some day, I may stop drinking coffee altogether.
> in all seriousness i would leverage the shit out of that advantage. if I could raise a large A round simply by having sex with a few people, you're Goddammit right I would.

You're thinking as a man living in a patriarchy. In this world a man sleeping with some women to get ahead is more likely to draw admiration than denigration. A woman doing the same thing is likely to be shunned and slut-shamed. She doesn't even need to have a conflict of interest. See also #GamerGate.
Our pragmatism is one of the biggest factors that draws me to Python as a dev.

I agree about our significant use outside of web dev -- even though I know a lot of it is "out there", I had a hard time gathering it with many major orgs not being on CrunchBase, AngelList, or StackShare, (and some with a footprint that doesn't represent their true size on GitHub). If there's a source for this data out there, I'd love to find it.
I also have the same feeling. Python is very mathematics-friendly compared to other imperative languages and is used a lot more than other mainstream languages for mathematics related projects. On Github, there is a lot of good quality machine learning and statistics projects built with Python.
I'm not sure; I think I learned it from Charlie Brown's 'Cyclopedia when I was six. Wherever it was, it was about snails rather than ants; I remember that.
> willing to wait for 10 minutes

Wtf? This kind of programmed helplessness deserves some studying too. I generally wait ~60 seconds or one light cycle, after which I ignore the broken light and proceed on my own. Traffic lights are there to mediate between people, not exert iron-clad control over them.
Given the parent engaged in nothing but good old USA! USA! USA! chest thumping, the response seems fitting.

Both are out of place on HN, /r/worldnews is over there ->
Speeding up your ZF2 application
Backup your smartphone pictures for 20 years or more – ideas
Btw, it's "hear hear", as in "hear him out, everyone!"

I'll crawl back into my hole now. :)
I do CS (software mainly) graduating next year And I only know a couple of these .. Should I be worried ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_and_recapture
Love the idea of "place" versus "not place". We should really be optimizing for "place" everywhere, not just SF, and street-narrowing is a good place to begin. That, to me, is the main point of this, not "increasing housing supply" or anything like that. It's increasing place supply.
You just did an excellent job of not answering the literally one question I asked you. Could you do that, please?
IP Tricks
Any updates on the windows installer.?
We believe in a government of the hackers, for the hackers and by the hackers
I'm confused. Are you promoting the web app behind this list, or the contents of the list itself?
This has been largely solved with virtualenvs where those collisions happen on the system level, but I concede it's harder when the mutually incompatible requirements are in the same project.
I think I'll do that next.
I'm not sure how appropriate this discussion is for Hacker News, but I find it rather insulting that religion is listed as a 'weird' belief here (and repeatedly). A huge majority of the world has some kind of religion [1], which would suggest (to me) that there's something pervasive about religion in our humanity. (Although I'll be the first to admit that I am not a religious scholar.) Does the author have something against Judeo-Christianity that makes it especially weird, and fitting with the context of the rest of the list?

[1]: http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscap...
DIY realtime temperature sensor
I think there is a certain kind of sloppiness in Python culture that holds it back.

For instance, the split between Python 2 and Python 3 has kept from me getting more into Python because I have to choose one or the other in terms of which libraries I want to be compatible with (and the libraries are a big reason I'd want to to use Python.)

If you look at Java or PHP or .NET there is a lot of concern about keeping compatibility between versions, but going from 2 to 3 they changed a lot of APIs that they didn't have to.

The most disturbing thing is that I have been shouted down for years on places like proggit for bringing this issue up but it is only in the last year that I have seen it talked about by pythonistas, and that's a general problem I see with Python, that it ducks the hard questions which Java, in particular, faces before anyone else. (i.e. having a memory model for threads which is mature)

On one hand, the GIL means that Python is not scalable in terms of threads. Today 4 core machines are mainstream, even for phones, and with a language that supports scalable threads, you can get a 4x speedup easily for many real apps.

The other option is go to the Node route, which is balls-to-the-walls async operations in a single process, but (i) the async people also have had a culture of "kicking the can down the road", (ii) it is hard to get programmers who are used to sync APIs to switch to async (this is one reason why the "Modern" interface in Win 8 was DOA... Microsoft was pushing people to use Javascript because rewriting Win32 apps to be async defeats the purpose of using Win32 which is being able to use all the old stuff and not learning anything new.)
I try not to be pedantic, but I was really confused for a minute- I believe you mean "rappel".

(Or if you want to sound fancy, "abseil")
> Do you have any examples of the standard library using panics to signal handle-able errors

Are those 79 handle-able errors, or are they programming mistakes?
Help My Clojure Exception Has an Empty Stacktrace
I remember that doubts were raised about some of the studies, but not that it was definitively debunked. Do you have a reference by any chance? I'm not doubting you and realize that I can Google, but if you have a good paper I'll start there.
Because then they wouldn't benefit from the crapware they installed, so they need to disincent you.

Not running crapware is theft, just like not watching commercials is theft. The only way they can afford to sell you a PC at those prices is by subsidizing their profit with crapware income. /s

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/676651/posts
Python is changing the world more than ever before, by becoming the new default.

I know undergrad CS students, masters CS students, non-CS professionals well into their career, and non-CS hobbyists. And they are all writing Python. Five years ago when I was doing my undergrad, that would have been Java, or C++.

It's not exactly an exciting change from a HackerNews viewpoint, but it's pretty amazing for programming as a whole. The people I know are so much more excited to be learning. There is frustration, but much less than when I knew people learning on C++. Obviously that's still a fantastic language, but I'm happy Python is the new default.
This a million times. Tanks are ceremonial items at this point, at least against a sophisticated NATO-like enemy. This is just a propagandist display, something Russians are prone to do. Russia doesn't even have the autonomy to properly invade a non-military power like Ukraine without the West stepping in, thus all the "that's not really us" shenanigans. I'm not sure what enemy they plan to use this stuff on as anyone within their limited military range can trivially get Western ATGM's or already has them.

The reality is that long-range power projection, automation/comm/logistics, long range targeting, advanced arms, drones/UAVs/unmanned, air superiority, quick carrier group deployments, etc decide modern war outcomes. Russia struggles with this level of sophistication, hell, they are trying to get the French to build carriers for them and are woefully behind in several critical key measures. Pretending its still WWII and bulking up in armor, especially ones without counters to modern ATGM's, makes as much sense as building another Maginot line. Russian reactive armor leaves a lot to be desired. ATGM tech usually outstrips armor tech quickly and NATO's current offerings are pretty impressive. Not to mention the cost of reactive armor raises the cost, per tank, anywhere between 300-500k, which makes it economically infeasible to retro-arm older tanks frequently.

Russia's tank force is mostly a 1970s relic, the T-72. Constant retrofitting is still lipstick on a pig and to NATO forces. Older DU based munitions like the M829A3's and others punch through these things with ease. Fifth generation M829E4's take out the best Russian armor today. A $10,000 NATO round punches through $500,000 tank armor. Tank armor is a fool's errand at best, as munitions catch up too fast and armor development takes too long/tank lifespan is too long/tank retrofitting is too expensive. The Russians know this, but lack the sophistication to modernize in other ways, so they double-down on tanks, which will probably have a long service life on the usual parade route, but not be effective in combat. Especially now that Putin has rebranded himself anti-NATO, anti-West, anti-Democracy, pro-Autocracy, pro-Annexation, pro-Assad, pro-Jong-Un, etc. He's not partnering up with NATO for some peace mission, he's pointing his guns at them and compared to NATO he's at a massive disadvantage militarily with these tanks, which just become very expensive coffins for Russian tank crews.
New U.K. Government Focuses on Startups and Spooks
Maybe it can, but in this case it seems to buy pretty minimal cooperation and a whole lot of backstabbing.
Ask HN: Why do tech companies and VCs not take part in the boycott of Israel?
Why do tech companies and VCs not take part in the BDS campaign against Israel?

More and more universities and companies in North America and Europe take part in this campaign.

More about the BDS movement:

http://www.bdsmovement.net/
The article convinced me that talking about databases as CP or AP is not very useful.

The article did not convince me that CAP-centered thinking is itself harmful or counterproductive. It's true that C-Consistency and A-Availability are relatively blunt definitions in a landscape of diverse and subtle possible semantics. But their usefulness is that they represent our intuitive notions of what a database should do.

If it were possible and had good performance, every single database system would provide C, A, and P, because it would make distributed databases much easier to reason about and program against. Intuitively, it really seems like a database ought to read the data that was most recently written. And it sure would be nice if a distributed database could somehow magically remain available and consistent even in the presence of a partition.

C, A, and P are useful because they are a yardstick against which we can measure a distributed database's actual capabilities against what a distributed database could do in an ideal world. The real world will fall short of that, and the CAP theorem gives a vocabulary for which part(s) of the ideal world real databases cannot satisfy.

For example, even in this article CAP terminology is used to describe interesting edge cases in ZooKeeper which, despite having generally strong consistency guarantees, does not always guarantee full capital-C Consistency.
Kudos! Simple and to the point.
What you really need to know the dirty little secrets of the various implementations of the stacks and the short cuts (or blatant ignoring of standards).

My Boss at BT could do this from a x.400 packet trace and point to the offending dword and say that is XXX's POS stack.

There is also the story of a guy (at BT Labs) who took the CCIE and only scored 98% he then wrote a personal letter to John Chambers explaining why he was right and Cisco was not.

...

Turns out he was one of the 3 inventors of Ethernet
If the author doesn't agree with those beliefs, it doesn't necessarily make them weird. I didn't like his pretentious tone. Such kind of tone is what's weird.
R is an awful language with great libraries.

My main beef about R (and similar tools) is that I summarize my data I get from Hadoop and find it is still too big for R to handle and I then have to summarize it some more.
I agree it wasn't a perfect fit - I'm not fluent enough in debate terminology to know, maybe this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy
Because generally the birds don't really need saving from wind turbines.

Numbers from an unverified source:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science...
(other sites seems to agree on the cats vs turbine numbers)

Alternatively, from a source you might expect to be very biased in favour of birds:
http://www.rspb.org.uk/forprofessionals/policy/windfarms/
I thought the same thing. I'm not religious but I wouldn't call this "weird".

"Georges Lemaître proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. He was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest."
No. If you can't figure them out from reading the relevant RFCs, then maybe (reading specs is a vital skill), but this is absolutely not stuff that's worth memorizing (at least for most CS jobs).
I expect I'll be educated in the replies...

I like going to art museums but .... sometimes I wonder if the museums that display old-ish art are outdated in concept. People spend more money on art today than ever in history. They spend it on art in movies, art in TV, art in games, art in comics. They are exposed to tons of art in ads, in packaging, in magazines, on some? websites.

Compare that to when most? old museums were made. Back when TV and movies didn't exist. When people didn't buy magazine or have internet. etc. In that context the only place for them to see a large amount of art was the museum. Now though most people are exposed to more art in a day than people 150 years ago were exposed in a lifetime. (Yes I made up that stat)

So, on the one hand I know that seeing a painting or sculpture in person is very different than seeing a photo of it. On the other hand I actually can see photos of pretty much every famous painting ever just by googling it. What I'd much rather see at a museum is stuff I can't see at home.

Stuff like this

http://www.team-lab.net/en

or this

https://www.google.co.jp/search?q=yayoi+kusama+dots+obssions...

Of course maybe that's just a personal preference. I probably went to just under one art museum a week last year mostly displaying old art and while a few pieces were truly special up close most I felt like the photo was enough. It might even be more enough in the new future with VR. So ... give me an experience I can't get at home.
Stopped reading after the first three were all calling belief in God "weird", as if it was something bad.
Thanks for your insight. I have some questions for your, if you don't mind.

What walls and why did you switch? Did you find the shift in syntax and mindset difficult? Have you used rpy2?

There definitely seems to be more innovation in R world, but blaze, numba and bokeh have no R equal.
For containers, security is problem #1
I am so tired of this response.

Claiming that I don't personally feel the need for a fully enclosed, solid steel cubicle to get changed in doesn't mean I'm happy to get naked in public. I feel that whilst the changing cubicle you find at a public swimming pool wouldn't prevent a determined actor from invading your privacy it provides adequate privacy for me.

Yes, servers at Google can read my email - I'm willing to accept the risk of a Googler committing a fireable offence and going through my emails.
I think it's just confirmation that we can't know everything and there is always room to learn more.
The OP is "implying" that based on who funded the research, this may be truthful. So while the claim was not made outright, it was insinuated.
Upvoted since reinstalling is a valuable skill to learn and cultivate.
Arduboy card sized gaming
Arduino compatible fully functional Gameboy clone on kickstarter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/903888394/arduboy-card-sized-gaming
On MVPs, Gluing Things Together, and $270 Flights to South Africa