skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The polyglots I know all agree with a moderate form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that the language(s) you use affect what and how you think. In fact, when I say that some linguists find it controversial they look at me as if I'm demented. They just take it for granted that it's true.

BTW, this is often confused/conflated with "linguistic relativity"[0] and I'm not going to get into where one ends and the other starts. More, it seems that the effects are different for coordinate multilinguals versus compound multilinguals.[+]

Pinker says in "The Language Instinct"[1] that careful experiments show that it's nonsense. On the other hand, more recent work suggests that the effect is real, and that speaking a different language can result in measurable differences in your modes of thought, perception of time, and even your personality.[2][3][4][5][6][7]

So I was curious, but I didn't have time to learn an entire new language. But then I heard of LogLan, and subsequently Lojban, which was originally designed specifically for the purpose of testing this idea. The reasoning goes like this:

* Design a language that has something specific that is not present in any known "natural" language.

* Learn to speak it, and preferably raise some children with it as (one of) their cradle language(s)

* Measure their thinking and see if there are differences

* Use that to design a careful experiment to test the hypothesised effects.

So I learned (some) lojban in the hope that I would see some changes in my thinking. And I did. Specifically, after the weekend I spent learning the tense (spatial and temporal) system I found myself using tenses that I don't believe I'd ever used before. Someone asked if I'd enjoyed a party, and I started my reply with:

"I would have had been having a good time,
except that ..."

So I strongly believe that studying another language affects how you perceive things, and how you think about things.

[+] It is suggested that coordinate multilinguals[8] do not experience the same effects as compound multilinguals[8], even if they are equally fluent. A friend of mine, now sadly deceased, never completed his PhD, but his work showed an extremely clear split between coordinate and compound bilinguals (English/German) wherein the compound bilinguals showed a clear change of personality as they shifted language, but the coordinate bilinguals showed no measurable change. He never published, I only have a copy of his thesis without the data, and I promised I would never release it.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_Instinct

[2] http://www.communicaid.com/business-language-courses/blog/bi...

[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/uc/2014/06/c...

[4] http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/language-time.pdf

[5] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3004943/Being...

[6] http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/11/multilingual...

[7] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117485/multilinguals-have...

[8] http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?id=g9780631...

Edit: Note to self - extract this as a blog post.
I did London -> Geneva eurostar over xmas hols. The change in Lille is shit. Broke my ankle rushing to the next train with all the luggage.
Apple could supply the user with a "fed key" and MITM, when user asks for their friend's key.

This is the "public key distribution problem". It's ultimately a social problem (how do I identify that string of bits B corresponds with person P?) and can't be solved entirely in software. Some solutions:

1) Certificate authorities
2) Web of trust
3) Key transparency
4) Gossiping
5) Eschew automation, OOB manual verify

There more, but ultimately all of them are ultimately trading off:

a) Centralised versus decentralised trust
b) Convenience versus security
c) Opacity versus transparency

And in particular, whether users need to understand what public keys are, and how to verify them.
Regarding your comment on energy - I hadn't thought about that but the worst of the fossil fuel subsidies has to be turning large portions of the corn crop into ethanol then ruining the performance (and sometimes internal parts) of our internal combustion engines. It's truly the worst of both worlds!
There's problems with top-down incentives, if they aren't well thought-out - http://highered.blogspot.hk/2009/01/well-intentioned-commiss...

Optimisation can be a literal genie, even when it's humans doing the optimising.
It's absolutely insipid to think that plants are akin to animals in any way. Plants are insentient and void of central nervous systems, lungs, hearts, kidneys, intestines, blood, ears, and anuses.
> we're talking about right or wrong here

And you're treating "right" and "wrong" as absolutes, with no in between, which is exactly what Asimov was saying you shouldn't do.

You could apply the same logic you're using for plate tectonics to the shape of the Earth, which is Asimov's main example. If the Earth is a sphere, then it's not flat. If it's an oblate spheroid, then it's not a sphere. If it's slightly pear-shaped, then it isn't an oblate spheroid. So every previous scientific theory about the Earth's shape was just wrong.

The problem with this, as Asimov points out, is that just putting theories into the buckets "right" or "wrong" doesn't tell you how far off they are, predictively, which is what's important. The Earth is not flat--but it's almost flat. It curves about 8 inches per mile; 8 inches per mile is not zero, but it might be indistinguishable from zero if you don't have very good measuring instruments. (And similarly for the increasingly more accurate measurements that have given us more precise knowledge of the exact irregular shape of the Earth.) So treating the Earth is flat is wrong, but it's not very far wrong. It is, however, more wrong than treating the Earth as a sphere, since the error involved is smaller in the latter case.

Similarly, the continents are not motionless, but they're almost motionless. So treating them as motionless is wrong, but it's not very far wrong. You have to have accurate measurements to distinguish the actual motion of the continents from no motion at all. And you have to have even more accurate measurements and more comprehensive data to know that the cause of the motion is that the continents are sitting on plates that are floating in magma.

> the scientists who denied it well into the 20th century were just flat our wrong.

They were wrong, but they were still a lot less wrong than, for example, the Flat Earth Society. Which is Asimov's point.
"PDF" is a valid application-agnostic printer target on the Debian box I am using.
Yay. Though, fwiw, I am a primarily mobile developer :)

I just removed Firebase from my two personal projects and replaced them with a local storage library so I could keep developing them on the go :)
You probably don't need iframes for external content
what are the current http/2 server options?
> right and wrong do not exist

I think you're going to have a very tough time defending this claim. You might have better luck, though, with a claim that ends up doing much the same work for the subject under discussion: right and wrong do exist, and every theory we humans have come up with so far is wrong by that purist standard. But some human theories are less wrong than others, and it's the "degree of wrongness" that matters, practically speaking.
There is also a matter of finance. When that money is given and with what strings attached. But even if you are right, if the competition is taxed more than you it brings into question how competitive you actually are.
Does it bother anyone else that he doesn't seem to be using gnome even when they talk about him using it?
I have to confess that I did pause what I was watching and start googling what `astu` was, glad to see I'm not alone in that.
Yes, I attended an experimental classico.
I've been using and promoting a similar process (including side-by-side, blind comparison) since 2010 on ars.io

As an ATS it removes photos and names, just shows candidates side-by-side allowing managers and team members to quickly rank-sort the applicants without gender or nationality bias.

Combine that with our "gig-to-hire" process and the result is lower time to find higher quality candidates.

I wish I was better at press.
When you send a message to somebody, you need their public key. With iMessage, you're relying on Apple giving you the public key of the real recipient and not a public key belonging to themselves so they can decrypt, view it, encrypt with the recipients real public key and then forward on the message.

Imagine if you were using PGP and every time you wanted to send an encrypted email to somebody you asked me for their public key and trusted whatever I gave you.
What's unintentional here? This looks like exactly what we want to achieve.
I'd guess that this is a reference to either

1) you have to do it one by one (or in very small batches), because the zip export is broken

2) you get a different view via Google Drive

(I don't use those service, cannot even begin to imagine why one would upload pictures to Google or use Google Drive, but - that's my take away from the article and my own interpretation)
What exactly is being proposed here? Would every app statically link against some version of UIKit or the Android Java libs? How would the app run on different versions of the OS? How do you maintain forward compatibility?

It's mystifying that the debate here centers around performance or RAM usage. The benefit of dynamic linking is architectural: it enables different components to evolve independently.

I understand Plan 9 has an unusual approach, where things that are traditionally library calls (getMousePosition) are instead filesystem operations (read /dev/mouse). But this seems terribly rigid to me: we've just replaced structs with a static byte stream format. How do you evolve this?
I’m not actually assuming that ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ are absolutes. I’m just pointing out that some widely accepted scientific theories have turned out to be very clearly at the ‘wrong’ end of the spectrum. If you don’t like the particular example of plate tectonics then just take one of the other examples that I mentioned. E.g., our conception of the structure of matter has undergone several radical changes in the course of scientific history. These changes were fairly conservative in empirical terms, but in terms of the various conceptions of matter that they put forward, they are in some cases radically different. Another example would be the question of whether the universe has a beginning in time. There really isn't any middle ground there. If it did, then the people who said that didn't were wrong, and if it didn't, then the people who said that it did were wrong.

Of course you can always find a germ of truth in a theory if you try hard enough, just as you can find a germ of truth in the book of Genesis if you're determined to defend it. I don't see the point, though. Why bother constructing a false Whig history of scientific progress when the real history is impressive enough?
Don't forget the prison labor too.

http://thefederalist.com/2015/03/04/not-content-with-enormou...
Not saying your skepticism isn't valid, there's always value in a contrary opinion, but let's be clear, the research points to discrimination being a measurable effect. Studies on this topic support an opinion that descrimination is likely.

Eg. Moss-Racusin et al (2012) which found that female students applying for jobs were seen as less competent than male students with identical application materials.

Eg. Heilman et al (2004), which found that women who succeed in male-dominated fields are percieved as not likeable.
It's only one train a day, so it doesn't need to fulfil that much of a market (i.e. it's enough to cover just the people who are in central London and able to get there by 7.00). Also, it stops at Lyons and Avignon on the way, Marseille is an addition to the service, not the main purpose:

> In fact, a few days ago, getting the train to the UK, only a few passengers boarded at Marseille. But the Eurostar filled up nicely at Avignon and Lyon where it stops as it heads north.

Good point about the change, though. That really renders the headline untrue. It's not a direct service.
Blind auditions made a huge impact in increasing gender diversity in professional orchestras:

“In the 1970s and 1980s, orchestras began using blind auditions. Candidates are situated on a stage behind a screen to play for a jury that cannot see them. In some orchestras, blind auditions are used just for the preliminary selection while others use it all the way to the end, until a hiring decision is made.

“Even when the screen is only used for the preliminary round, it has a powerful impact; researchers have determined that this step alone makes it 50% more likely that a woman will advance to the finals. And the screen has also been demonstrated to be the source of a surge in the number of women being offered positions.”

http://www.theguardian.com/women-in-leadership/2013/oct/14/b...
I think an emacs vs. vim convo between them would've been more believable.
I've never had to turn to Octave because I've always had an employer or University sponsored access to MATLAB, but I'm incredibly grateful this project exists. There is a ton of permissively licensed code written targeting MATLAB that is released for scientific and engineering purposes that would be DOA for many people without this project.

The origins of Octave are pretty amazing. Created essentially to support a single textbook and class in Chemical Engineering at UT Austin/UW Madison it is now nearly code compatible with a major commercial product and has been under continuous development for over 20 years.

Kudos to the developers/maintainers.
The Windows binaries are partially due to commercial sponsorship.

What does that mean? Commercial companies paid to have the installers built for their use and are sharing, or you bundle adware in with the installers and call it sponsorship?
I think D has shown that you can get a nice web stack in a compiled systems programming language:

http://vibed.org/

Lots of packages for it on code.dlang.org as well.
The semantics of the SQL you wrote depends on the transaction isolation level and flavour of transaction implementation. Read committed vs repeatable read (common terms for specific semantics) makes a difference as to what selects can see with respect to concurrent transactions. The way the SQL is written can also affect how reads and writes interleave.

Repeatable read isn't super-expensive in modern databases with MVCC support - these should prevent the situation in the article if the SQL is as simple as you write.

There's a strong hint that it isn't, though; there appears to be a two-phase state machine involved, with two requests. No sane developer will write a transaction that starts in one request and commits in another.
it's simply unethical to be cruel and violent to animals

That's an assertion of your personal view, and not at all objective.

Meat and dairy is filled with junk

The US has a problem with food quality – this issue is orthogonal to the health benefits of various foods. You are always free to eat organic.

Animal protein contributes to the acceleration of osteoporosis

That's a controversial conclusion at best, and it's supported by a paper backed by a vegan lobbying organisation – not a problem in itself, but sufficient to require skepticism.

Cutting it out will lower your chance of disease

That statement is not supported by the research you supplied.

Humans are herbivores

We'll set aside the obvious problems with linking to PETA as reference. The description of humans as 'herbivores' is objectively untrue, given that at least 95% of humans worldwide are omnivorous.

Modern industrial animal agriculture is a major cause of global warming [6]. Cattle consume 16 times more grain than they produce as meat [7]. The U.S. could feed 800 million people with grain that livestock eat [9].

No argument there. Eating meat is pretty clearly bad for the environment. That's arguably a separate issue.

You're not really succeeded in supplying much in the way of convincing arguments, and you've managed to be rude in the process.
Elixir and the Internet of Things (2014) [video]
What if we turned this around?

"It's absolutely insipid to think that plants are different to animals in any way. Plants are alive, and contain cells and circulatory systems. They grow, consume food, respire and reproduce."

It's obvious from the above that selecting a set of characteristics and asserting that they render a comparison 'insipid' doesn't really supply any information or make a coherent point.
That solution is more elegant, but it requires more political finesse. Measuring the external costs raises many difficult questions. What to do with that money raises many more (hopefully not as difficult) questions. It is also a more general solution, which naturally threats more interests. All this makes it take longer to implement and makes a lot more people interested in prolonging it even further. Which raises costs and drives the best talent away, and makes it more likely the project gets killed.
Throwing some pocket change to a few talented individuals and hope for the best is nasty hack, but sadly we lack skilled and properly motivated politicians to do much better.
Soviet Union. The country which basically invented and implemented state-owned free healthcare on a very large scale (the USSR population was on par with the USA population).

And, frankly, I believe USSR succeeded in this implementation. I mean you can't make it substantially better than it was (taking technology advancements into account). It was great at preventing epidemic outbreaks, vaccinations, general population health, etc.

My sister picked up typhosus in a very remote part of the country, disease not known to primary care physicians for decades (well, they study it in medical schools but just like a historical artifact). But the system worked perfectly, she was diagnosed, sent to a special facility, got necessary treatment (and became a subject of research with daily visits of medical students from all across the city) and got out perfectly well (besides losing all her hair, but that part recovered quickly).

It's just everything has its pros and cons. And when you preach socialized state-owned healthcare, don't think you'll always be at the 'pros' side. Some people end up at the 'cons'. I'm not saying that my mother fell victim to this system, she fell victim to the idiocy. But the system made her suffer beyond what is acceptable in the civilized world.
What exactly do you think culture is? Hiring for company culture could be as simple as having a no asshole rule or preferring people that can capably balance their home-work life rather than 10x until they burn out in a year and a half and quit.
The US environment overall is doing extraordinarily well in fact. And it's not cheap, the EPA is one of the toughest environmental regulators, which has helped lead to a dramatic improvement in US environmental quality in the last 40 years.

What's having a functioning economy worth? Are we going to pretend that we could have had a US economy, with ~50% of global manufacturing in 1965, running on solar and wind?

No? Then it's obviously understood that the renewable shift inherently requires vast, prior energy systems. What was battery technology like in 1965 or 1985? Let's say we had deployed an all-nuclear infrastructure (built courtesy of what? fossil fuels of course). What would that have done for electric cars? Nothing, we haven't had the ability to build practical electric cars until the last decade, due to huge improvements in batteries.

We still have horrible batteries for the home. Even Tesla's Powerwall does not (yet) work as a practical battery for the home, according to their own statements on the matter.

The US could have done a lot better. There's just no sense in pretending that you get from there to here, without a massive fossil fuel industry.
Did you look at the map in the article? China is overextending far beyond what any of the other countries are attempting. In some places there almost isn't any water left between the boundary of China's claim and the shores of the other country!
It means someone hired one of the developers in order to make the Windows binaries. He ended up forking MXE in order to accomplish this:

http://hg.octave.org/mxe-octave/file/default

There is no crapware anywhere. This is all GPL'ed, all GNU, all good for you. Commercial sponsorship does not mean we're out to screw you over. Quite the contrary, we're seeking commercial sponsorship in accordance with free software principles and to make Octave better for everyone.
Any mixed economy is riddled with subsidies. Together with taxation, it skews incentives from whatever they were without, and redistributes resources in a way the market would not. (Whether you think that's a good thing is political.)

- How many people would be getting degrees without government grants of some sort?

- Tax relief on debt is huge for corporations.

- Tax relief on mortgages is huge for individuals in many countries.

- Government itself has to spend money in one place and not another.

Of course there is the question of whether he gets more benefit that your average Joe from the largesse of the government. To that I'd say he does, but the benefits to everyone else of what he's up to are wide ranging but thinly spread.
Ask HN: Which Laptop models would you recommend for a developer using Linux?
Don't forget:

#agriculture
Monsonto
PG has said that his inspiration for the design of HN was top, the Unix utility.

I'm glad to hear something nice about the performance of the site. That is my bugbear. One day I shall wrestle it to the mat.
It turns out that when the government draws a bunch of taxes and then spends it, markets get distorted. Then the government takes credit for anything good that the markets do with the money, and opportunity cost is ignored because it's incalculable.
Polygraphs? They know full well polygraphs are not "lie detectors". And a lot of the general population knows that too. They're still useful when recruiting candidates. Obviously their results are not admissible in criminal cases.
Breaking Out of Scientific Magic Systems in RPGs
Just because you can't think of a particular word at a given moment, do not assume that you are thereby not thinking in the language. Experiments show that it is far, far more subtle than you might imagine, and that your language affects how you think in ways you might not expect.

I've participated in experiments[0] that clearly showed that my perceptions of what was happening in my head with regards language were simply not true. Introspection is extremely subjective, and very poor at getting at reality.

[0] Participation required an NDA, so I can't tell you more.
Really interesting, thanks for sharing
> It was clear when I travelled back from Marseille that many passengers hadn't realised they would be required to leave the train at the northern city of Lille for passport checks.

When I travelled to/from Romania by train two years ago, border control officers got on the stop before the border, walked through the train to check passports and got off at the next stop, probably taking the next train back. This happened both going into Romania and going back into Hungary.

So, the UK probably wouldn't even have to join Schengen to make this a less painful process.
That's how OpenCog is designed to work, isn't it? Boot up primitive intelligences that learn over time by themselves.
Per the guidelines:

|Resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.