skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If you forget your fear of "soul" and other terms not ratified by science journals, you'll find out there are plenty of theories in metaphysics and spirituality on what it means to be and what awareness is. It requires you to at the very least read those philosophical/theological concepts instead of dismissing it as "woo".

I've read them. They are, from a scientific point-of-view, all woo. Almost by definition. They necessarily appeal -- if they can be epistemologically justified at all -- to a non-utilitarian epistemology. Science is based on a radically utilitarian epistemology: claims are justified to the extent that they are demonstrably useful in explaining and predicting observed phenomena. Theories -- in the non-scientific sense, obviously -- that involve entities that produce results in the physical universe but which are not governed by physical law or controlled by physical events as they are conjectured to be outside of the physical universe -- are non-utilitarian. They are irrelevant to any predictive model of observed behavior, and it is impossible to distinguish by observation between the existence of such non-physical, uncaused causes and processes that are purely physical. Either (a) there exists an adequate scientific model of the process, in which case the model being an accurate model of an underlying physical process is indistinguishable from the uncaused cause merely mimicking the behavior of the model at the times it has been observed, or (b) there exists no adequate scientific model, in which case the physical process not yet being discovered is indistinguishable from a non-physical cause.

That's not to say that such conjectures cannot be true, just that they can never be validated or distinguished from either known or unknown physical processes.

Say we create a machine that behaves like a human to all outward measures. There is no way to distinguish between:

(1) Human and machine alike being purely physical,

(2) Humans having metaphysical features like a "soul" and internal awareness and machine simply mimicking behavior,

(3) Humans and machines alike having metaphysical features like a "soul" (perhaps because God chose to reward human ingenuity by creating a "soul" for the machine.)
I am not sure what is actually the worst thing we learned here, that this many people were hacked or this percentage is/was employed by the US government
[PDF]Origin & History of Bioinformatics - arXiv
arxiv.org/pdf/0911.4230
by SM Thampi - ‎2009

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0911/0911.4230.pdf

"The gathering, archival, dissemination, modeling, and analysis of biological data falls within a relatively young field of scientific inquiry, currently known as ‘bioinformatics’, ‘Bioinformatics was spurred by wide accessibility of computers with increased compute power and by the advent of genomics. Genomics made it possible to acquire nucleic acid sequence and structural information from a wide range of genomes at an unprecedented pace and made this information accessible to further analysis and experimentation. For example, sequences were matched to those coding for globular proteins of known structure (defined by crystallography) and were used in high-throughput combinatorial approaches (such as DNA microarrays) to study patterns of gene expression. Inferences from equences and biochemical data were used to construct metabolic networks. These activities have generated terabytes of data that are now being analyzed with computer, statistical, and machine learning techniques. The sheer number of sequences and information derived from these endeavors has given the false impression that imagination and hypothesis do not play a role in acquisition of iological knowledge. However, bioinformatics becomes only a science when fueled by hypothesis-driven research and within the context of the complex and everchanging living world. "
Ask HN: What problems are you working on for the buy-side/hedge fund industry?
What problem are you/startup working on and in what domain? What problems are in demand and worth doing? How did you pitch and land your first paying customers?
"2. Is true. You need your own people on salary to program for your needs."

I think what he was saying is "do it all yourself", the opposite of you interpreted it, it seems. But maybe I got it wrong.
I do not undertsand this. We recently had to change our announcement to upstream ISPs from/23 to /22 and our ISPs verified with ARIN that the entire /22 belonged to us, before changing their filters. Also, there's RADb database.
I wish alternative strategies like "stop having the government collect and store information" would be considered in these situation.
Reasoning on Web Data: Algorithms and Performance [pdf]
An old team at Reddit
Wait, what about "scrypt"? Maybe the only acceptable advice changed in the last hour? :-)
Anti-Patterns every Product Team should avoid
Come on, man. 5 year old data? 20-30% of top websites are currently using Google's CDN, so it seems like you're wrong about the picture not having improved significantly. You really think people don't have DNS for ajax.googleapis.com already? And HTTPS is available (and default), so you really think somebody is gonna hack Google to serve you bad JS? You also conveniently ignore the benefits of domain sharding and the fact that the CDN will serve the files faster and with lower latency than almost any setup. And that HTTP/2 mitigates the cost of not concatenating your scripts.
But it has everything to do with the security of your information.
I found the submitted paper on the home page of one of its authors,
Ioana Manolescu. [1] According to her page, the paper is designed to be
more of a tutorial. Having a rough understanding of the Resource
Description Framework (RDF) [2], RDF Schema (RDFS) [3], and RDF Query
Language (RDFQL) [4] certainly helps, but is not required. If you think
about the paper in terms of how a major search engine like Google works,
and you remember the occasional "index updates" they used to do a few
times a year, you'll see the "saturation" or "closure" approach
mentioned in the paper. i.e.

> "compile the knowledge into data, as follows. Infer all
possible facts derived from the base data and by the semantic
constraints prior to querying the database; add these facts to
the database; then, process queries on the (enriched) database
ignoring the constraints which have lead to it."

Since Google no longer does occasional "index updates" and now updates
continuously, it seems they may have moved to something similar to the
alternate "reformulation" approach mentioned in the paper:

> "The alternative technique is called reformulation. Here,
the database is left unchanged, while queries are modified
(reformulated) to take into account all the known semantic
constraints."

[1] http://pages.saclay.inria.fr/ioana.manolescu/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Description_Framework

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFS

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDF_query_language
Reddit Co-Founder Steve Huffman in for Reddit CEO Job, Pao Out
I enable JS for sites I feel are valueable for me. The first impression is always without JS. If navigation-buttons dont work without JS - I just leave.
i tried using the prebuilt ami. However after installing and configuring tunnelblick on my mac, when i connect to the vpn, i get: "This computer's apparent public IP address was not different after connecting to <<hostname>>'. now steam cannot detect the windows server. what am i doing wrong?
I'm not sure if it was edited, but reference to China has now gone.
Is it sad that because I have worked on government systems in the past that this does not surprise me at all?

It makes me mad, but it is not at all surprising. The negligence on government software is crazy. That is on top of the regulations that basically don't allow developers to use new/open source technology.

While new technologies wouldn't have prevented this by themselves, they might have made it easier to encrypt data so the devs would have said, "oh yeah we can do that". Or they might have had defaults that prevent simple things like cross site scripting.
Wimbledon's super grass: the turf of champions
For web applications, you're definitely going to get better performance with OpenResty. However, Node has one advantage: you can write any sort of socket server with it. With nginx/OpenResty, you're stuck with HTTP(S) servers.

The creator of OpenResty has expressed interest in eventually extending it to work for non-HTTP usecases though.
The post was modified	in the meantime.
Well that didn't take long. It's amazing how powerful a self organizing community of users can be.
Wish her the best of luck where ever she ends up, so long as its not here....
Show HN: A short story character turned into a Twitter bot
The income of people has diverted more and more in the last decades.

It is a fact, that countries really flourished (USA, Germany, other countries) with a bigger part of the society in the middle class and having a better living and education, when those countries managed to bring better income also to working-class people.

Today's wealth in the US is for a big part because of the flourishing middle-class of the country shortly after the 2nd World-war. The same holds for Germany and other countries.

Today, all over the world, the income diverts and education already is going down for normal people in many countries. Middle classes are melting away.

Wealth of a society is not only to be measured by the wealthiest people in the society, but by the wealth of the middle class (and worker) people.

Today, we waste the wealth created after the war and give it away to the <1% of people.

Everybody should see this film: Inequality for All [1] that shows, the connections, that many are just ignoring today.

To my opinion, to help poor people, raise wages of workers in all the world (thus making an end with a Globalization that just helps the rich).

By raising the wages, you will not have people that just live on welfare, but that can be proud again for their work they do.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2215151/
Pandas Categoricals
Great to see Steve back in the fold
It's remarkable how fast and how organized they were.
That was quick but the corporate agenda being pushed flew in the face of the Reddit community. Power to the people!
F1000Research – Open and Transparent Peer Review in Science
Huh. That's good, I guess? Not sure it matters at this point, I moved over to voat.co and found it smaller, lots smaller, but surprisingly pleasant.

Reddit has become pretty untrustworthy, at least to me. Way too much censorship, way too much focus on monetizing. It's their company, they can do what they want, but the trust is gone.

If the voat guys make it sort of a lifestyle company, enough ad revenue to pay for the servers/bandwidth/small staff and don't go the IPO route voat will replace reddit for me at least.
I think most people just let out a sigh of relief.
In part, I agree with the author's skepticism that psychopathy is purely a mental disorder. I've known people who would easily be classified as psychopaths but they clearly knew what they were doing was wrong, hurtful, and downright evil (these people oddly happened to be bullies that fixated on me through most of my childhood too).

Sometimes people are just evil and trying to sugar coat the notion that someone can be evil doesn't make it easier to cope with it. All it does is delude people into thinking we should have respect or love for someone when they do wrong by us and betray our trust. I think it's better to treat a so-called psychopath as an adult (if they are one) rather than as some broken down piece of machinery. At least then, you won't find yourself with your guard down and your judgement clouded by false sympathies.
I think this was the right thing to do from a PR perspective. Having Steve back as the new CEO will definitely be good for the community.

I also applaud Reddit's announcement for calling the community out on their childish BS:

> As a closing note, it was sickening to see some of the things redditors wrote about Ellen. [1] The reduction in compassion that happens when we’re all behind computer screens is not good for the world. People are still people even if there is Internet between you. If the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community. Steve’s great challenge as CEO [2] will be continuing the work Ellen started to drive this forward.

All in all, a good day I think.
So can someone summarize the ordeal?
... Because the government is keeping everyone insecure so they can hack other nations and themselves?
I was thinking the opposite. Feels like it took forever to extricate her.
rough year for her
I think that's why the statement was "be careful with" rather than "don't"
What ever happened to "do no harm"?
OpenResty is considerably faster than Node in the JSON serialization, single query, and plaintext benchmarks. It is slower than Node in the multiple queries benchmark, and missing from the other benchmarks.

So, it's a bit more inconclusive than you describe. I'd expect OpenResty to be much faster than Node for a lot of common web interactions. Node has better support for interacting with external services asynchronously, though.
Announcement on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...
*Communities
I don't, but the NYTimes says this:

> Every person given a government background check for the last 15 years was probably affected, the Office of Personnel Management

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/us/office-of-personnel-man...

Not sure if Global Entry / NEXUS is considered a background check, since they are certainly less intensive than the one done for a security clearance, but it doesn't sound good.
Should probably change the link to Recode, which appears to have been first on the story and to which the OP links to and quotes from: http://recode.net/2015/07/10/pao-out-as-reddit-ceo-co-founde...
if they were really in the know would they be writing ars?
The author of the post isn't variable.
I'm in. Email in profile.
Wow, I applaud this development!

Now, if Victoria is coming back too - that's would be 200% right move for reddit!
Retardly funny video of Singapore Soldiers
You might find http://realearth.ssec.wisc.edu/ useful. Just be sure to click on either the "Presets" or "All" tabs within the "Layers" section.

Oh, and if you decide to use the animation feature just try to be patient with the way it loads in the individual times--once you've pulled down everything the animation should look a good bit nicer.
Yes, it was silently edited, which is not a particularly classy move.

I think this whole "foreign contractors" angle is sourced to a single anonymous ex-contractor speaking to Ars. Even if true, I don't think there's any evidence it has anything to do with this hack.
7% of American't were not "just hacked"[1]. Perhaps the HN title should be changed to avoid misleading users herein.

The title is very much click bait.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28computer_security%29
So... who is replacing Steve at Hipmunk?
Yup, she did awesome Sam. Especially recently. (Makes me wonder how bad one of these people would have to screw up in order NOT to get the happy handwave as they're booted.)

I didn't even know who she was until "the last few months." Which have been a parade of increasingly-negative press and idiotic behavior. And that's from reading Reuters and the NY Times -- I don't even use Reddit.

---

Sam Altman, a member of Reddit’s board... “Ellen has done a phenomenal job, especially in the last few months,” he said.
Pretty much had to happen. To say that the Victoria situation was mishandled is a severe understatement. I wonder what will happen with communities like FPH and others (that have since moved to Voat). Will reddit lessen their censorship efforts?

Time will tell. IMO, the problem at hand is that reddit is still trying to make advertisers their bread and butter. And advertisers will never be overly attracted to censorship-free spaces.

Even though I may not agree with her aggressively politically-correct agenda (nor does most of reddit), I think it may have been a smart move from a business dev. perspective.
nvprof is still a command line profiler, and has even more features.
previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9866755
Conservatives, progressives, and libertarians call it different things. Basic income, negative tax rate, social safety net, etc. Milton Friedman advocated for a negative effective tax rate for low income folks. Rand Paul recommended not taxing (Federally) folks who make less than $50k USD.

We also need to consider micro and macro-economics. Folks with less money have a high marginal propensity to consume or likelihood of spending most or all of the extra funds they receive. Also, consumer spending is a factor of economic output or GDP. Increasing consumer spending increases economic output. Q.E.D. Give people with no money enough money to not fall through the cracks.
> I wish alternative strategies like "stop having the government collect and store information" would be considered in these situation.

I don't think nixing collection for background checks is viable, though limiting the scope (EDIT: both of data collected and the scope of applications for which government background checks are mandated) might be.

Similarly, limiting both the scope of data retained and the duration for which it is retained from such checks after the decision they support is made might be viable, though there are costs (among other things, to the accountability of government decision makers) as well as benefits to that.
It's been about a week... that's faster than South Carolina and its flag.
Patent troll lawsuits head toward all-time high
To add some context, F1000Research is one of the few (only?) journals which operates a post-publication, fully open peer review process; articles are published immediately at the point of submission (after a light editorial check for issues such as missing data sources), and are then subjected to invited, open peer review, where the reviews are published alongside the article.

They've just had a major upgrade and now accept slides and posters as well as articles. Details on the upgrade here: http://blog.f1000research.com/2015/07/09/the-new-f1000resear...
People usually use OpenID for that bit and OAuth for the authorisation to use the third party APIs as the customer. There's nothing horribly wrong with third-party signin if it suits you and for smaller projects however it does limit your relationship with customers and tie you in to third party services which might be charged for or shut down at any time, so it's not ideal for many websites. It depends on your requirements.
Sure, since the outright protest, but the community has been against her since the start.
She thought she could enforce her agenda onto an online community and it would all go well. Results as expected by anyone who has ever been part or observed an online community.
Reddit would do well to hire someone with experience in the association management field. Those folks specialize in managing fractious communities such that the volunteers not only stick around, they're happy to pay for the privilege.
99% were hacked the last decade, along with most of the rest of the world, by an US government agency. If people didn't care about that, why you expect sympathy for this one?
I will be interested to see if anything changes regarding the management of Reddit or at least the communities opinion of it. I wonder if the community will chalk this up as a win and suddenly forget all of the reasons they have been complaining which really have nothing to do with Pao in the first place.
> Will reddit lessen their censorship efforts?

I doubt it. Garbage like FPH should have been dealt with much sooner. The reason there was a backlash about that at all, imo, is because they let it drag out too long. Reddit was the friend-parent for so long that when it finally came time to enforce some discipline, it came as a shock and felt like a betrayal.
This article seems naive, at best.

Time after time, when I've helped family members with cash, it winds up getting wasted horribly and helping them less than it hurt me to give it to them. When I help them with what they need, their situation improves.

And logically, if the poor as a group were good with money, they wouldn't be poor.

Yet the article asks me to abandon reason and experience because there's some "a growing body of evidence" somewhere out there which are not provided by the article.
Psychologists are not psychiatrists, so they are not really part of the medical world. And, anyway, we already gave up this principle when we started doing live donor transplants.
Hack me twice, can't get hacked again, right?
I don't see Law on the list but anecdotally, I feel it would be up there
Not from the editors, from the commenters. The IPv6 coverage on Ars has been pretty decent.
It is possible to save a life for $3,340 by donating to the Against Malaria Foundation [1].

Helping desperately poor people is a surely virtuous thing to do and helping them efficiently by giving them money via GiveDirectly, as suggested in this article and the linked 2003 NYT article, is all the better.

But, right now there are worse things to be than desperately poor: like being a kid in Africa who dies of malaria for want of a malaria net.

Given the poor state of medicine and public health in places where people are dying for want of a few thousand dollars, optimizing poverty relief programs seems premature.

And for what it's worth the people you'll save are also desperately poor.

[1] http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/AMF#Cost...
Yeah, that too. Not having to hunt around for a browser tab is really nice.
I downvoted you because you need to support your claim. 21 million Americans had their personal information compromised. That's 7% of the ~300M population. Summarizing that state of affairs as "7% of Americans were hacked" seems reasonable to me.
This entire debacle and the 'communities' (the small vocal part that acted horribly) response pretty much hammered the last nail into the coffin for me when it comes to reddit.

With the exception of a few niche subreddits and the (few) incredibly moderated major subreddit's the whole place has become a negative pit with horses beaten so badly to death Findus put them in their lasagna.

Twitter often feels the same way as well (I'm pretty much at the unfollow as soon as someone acts like an idiot stage now).

Ironically the only social network I don't hate is Facebook and that's because I have about 20 people I consider true friends on there, all signal no noise.
I certainly can't speak for Buffer, but most companies use bonuses to account for this (for salaried employees). Having a tiered salary structure lets both the company and the employee plan for a base salary from year to year and provides opportunities to "move people up" as the progress through a career. Beware what you ask for: if you produce less value for the company in a given pay period, they should be able to pay you less!

I think tying a base salary to performance creates a really unstable financial situation for the company and the employee.
Negative income tax is certainly a very interesting idea, but it is virtually unheard of as a position in any mainstream U.S. political compass.

It's generally considered that you either want to expand the current, highly convoluted system, or that you loathe welfare entirely as a matter of principle.
True, although it's important to note that there are still many communities that are much worse than FPH on reddit.
Link to full statement:

https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cucye/an_ol...

It is a good read.
It's one thing to rationalize "live donor transplants", quite another to make excuses for torture.
I am opening a bottle of champagne and at the same time answer my own question: it took 3 weeks for the community to get rid off a tyrant. Well done Reddit!

Friendly reminder that if you are using downvotes for disagreement than you are doing it wrong.