skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally I think it would be great if humans started treating other humans categorically in an ethical way.

That's a ways off I'm afraid though. It's important to see that these are obviously non-related issues but I don't have much hopes for our stance towards Dolphins as long as we haven't learned to do this with each other.
Does it really come as news to anyone that if Intel wants to show their CPU in best light, they'll use their own compiler?

Caveat emptor.

The bulk of the x86 world uses Microsoft C++ or GCC - end of story.
Yeah, I know, my point is that there is less footage of dolphins being killed than most people expect after hearing the description.

And yes, it's absolutely amazing that an activist film such as this worked. How often has that happened in the history of documentary filmmaking? I think it's a shoe-in for the best documentary Academy Award this year.
How well do you treat mice that have invaded your home? How about cockroaches? How do you avoid mistreating worms while doing your gardening?
By your standards plenty of disabled people would not qualify as people.
How geeks fight discrimination
The legal rights distinction, in my view, does not alter the basic point - ethics determines how are laws are shaped and, while science can furnish the data points, it goes no further to help us determine the ethical outcome.

For example, the researchers are said to argue that it is "morally unacceptable" for dolphins to be killed by accident by humans while fishing.

Of course, laws might be passed making it a misdemeanor to kill a dolphin accidentally in such a context and perhaps make the perpetrator pay a fine. Or they might make it a felony and impose jail time as well. Or they might say that mens rea or evil intent is a required element of the crime. Or any one of many other variations. Or the laws might simply state that there is no culpability if a human who is fishing happens to kill a dolphin.

The above represents a broad range of potential judgments on a legal issue that is ultimately an ethical question (what we ought to do) affected by a scientific truth (what is empirically verifiable) whose discoverers are in no better position than is any other intelligent person to opine. Scientists may opine but no special deference ought to be paid to their ethical judgments simply because they are scientists.
This headline is poor. Here's my attempt at better: "Is the Fed artificially propping up demand and prices for equities?"
I realize that this is supposed to be a joke, but there is an answer to your question and it is (of course) no.

Our law could easily deal with dolphins that enjoy human rights protection. Babies are given the full protection of human rights, yet they cannot vote, cannot drive and cannot be made responsible for any crime they may commit. Why not give certain animals a similar status?
2010 = 1+2-(3-4-5)*6*7*8-9
Well, for a few years in the early 80s they would have looked a bit more like a poor cousin of Mexico than a peer to an Ireland or Italy, and they would have been a military dictatorship, but I am sympathetic to the general point.
I pretty much in the same situation as you and have a similar background (currently studying software engineering). Actually I did quit school for one year and worked as a web developer. I liked it, good salary and all, but I chose to go back to school for a few reasons.

1) School is a great place to make connections.

2) My parents are supporting me while I'm still studying.

3) Most of all, I'm an entrepreneur and school is a great time to start a company (see 2 reasons above + http://answers.onstartups.com/questions/2059/founding-a-star...).

4) Although I also learn better on my own (didn't learn much at school), bachelor opens the door to post-graduate studies and gives some credibility when looking for VC funding.

Finally, nowadays, you can launch a startup with minimal capital investment, so don't worry about money.
I want to ask you a few questions about your suggested niche approach.

If a cook wanted to sell his videos online, what advantages would a cooking themed video selling site have that a generic video selling site not provide?

Why "target" any specific niche. The way I see it, you're selling videos in the end and you'll want to market them, but in the end any targeting is probably going to sum up to just changing the theme of the site.

That being said my main focus right now is a niche: independent films and web series. Although theoretically any video content can be sold.

As for people trying to find niche content, a themed website would certainly help, but that's assuming I'm trying to build a marketplace. And even then, categorizing videos should suffice. At this point I'm simply building the platform: the set of tools to enable people to sell, and the set of tools customized for indie films/web series. The way I see it, people who would discover the content sold on this platform will do it through traditional new web means. Word of mouth, facebook, twitter, Youtube. That's why I want to make it easy for these films to cross upload and maintain their social presence, so they can use the instantaneous communication speed of the internet to help word of mouth spread their films.

I also think focusing on any of the niches you suggested would just narrow the potential customer base (considering content producers as customers), even though it may make stuff easier to find for end users.

As for why I'm looking for a technical founder, just because someone's technical doesn't mean he/she's incapable of other things. But more importantly, having a technical founder frees me from those duties, and allows me to focus more on implementation.

Additionally I know some indie filmmakers. I've worked on an indie film as a production assistant, and I've invested in an indie film. I've also wanted to be a filmmaker since I was 10ish. I didn't simply choose something to start a business with. Creating a service for indie films/web series was the most natural course of least resistance for me.
uhhh, ok guys, i seriously don't think this is relevant to HN at all. it's not even remotely about hacking to any degree!

i don't have enough karma to kill submissions; could somebody kill this?

(i'm the author of this article, btw)
I'm sure they are getting a lot from Mazda. The Ford Fusion, for example, is basically a rebadged Mazda 6.
I agree with this. I am far more comfortable driving faster with 4 wheel drive on, so I disable it as soon as I don't need it.
Absolutely the opposite - disabled people are a perfect illustration of why humans are definitely "people". We work around our difficulties. Can't hear? Use sign language. Can't speak? Write it down.

Human minds in dolphin bodies would quickly work out similar hacks. The fact that dolphins don't is what makes it hard to qualify them as people.
I've read that in Grade 12, really opened my eyes on a ton of things.
Yes. It's fairly established that chasing down the lowest-price path usually doesn't make for a very stable business model in the manufacturing businesses.

This is even more significant when the competitive options are significantly limited (eg: processors). In larger markets (eg: automobiles) there is more room for low-cost competitors to make some money, but they are not often powerhouses of the industry.

If you have data to the contrary please post (and by data I mean more than just 1-off examples).
As usual, Scoble misses the boat by several magnitudes in his aim to over-sensationalize something he read on techmeme. I would personally put safety glass, airbags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, and crumple zones ahead of radar. Those are technologies that improve safety for everybody, whereas radar is for people who don't pay attention and should not be driving in the first place.
The ethics of mistreatment are tied to inteligence of the species, however. Stepping on an ant, or cutting down a tree is not the same as killing an animal. Who knows where the lines are, but the distinctions exist.
Dead Reckonings - Lost Art in the Mathematical Sciences
Given the other articles I've seen on hacker news I don't really see this as out of place. Granted I'm new to the site but I seen articles similar to this one posted.

Stuff posted to hacker news isn't about hacking just stuff that would be interesting to hackers.
Looking at the data, the steady decline in deaths per passageway mile suggests improving safety actually works. Now, it may be useful to make people feel less safe, but IMO most accidents are caused by people not really paying attention and automated systems which tell them something bad happens should help as long as they alert the driver that something bad almost happened.

PS: The fact you can take little damage while rear ending someone at 65MPH is not something the average person wants to test out.
Interesting article, although the submission title is awful.

The level of USG intervention in finance, industry, and possibly now the stock market is beginning to remind me of Japan Inc of the '80s. America Inc anyone?
sorry, i don't want to fan any flames here (again, i don't think this article is HN-worthy at all), but there are lots of small poor countries in southeast asia with oppressive, politically-unstable regimes around the time when lots of refugees and other people seeking political asylum were granted admission into the US back in the 1970's and 1980's
Just like with any other scarce item we'll see more and more tricks to wring the last out of what we've got.

The good news is that an IP address that is given out can be reclaimed, so it's not like oil or some other finite substance in a sense that once used it stays used for ever.

I'd expect a couple of stop-gap measures before we're finally forced to switch to something better:

- a premium on releasing your DHCP lease while you sleep

- pressure from colocation facilities to reduce the
number of IPs assigned to a single host

- consolidation of IP addresses for hosting providers
behind NAT'ing routers

- more usage of ports vs IP addresses since that
effectively allows you to extend the 32 bit field
in to a 48 bit field

- a price set on the usage of an IP

Then, only when we're really scraping the bottom we'll switch and it will cost a fortune compared to what a switch in '96 would have cost.

Typical human behaviour, we're doing it with oil I don't see why IP addresses would be any different, in fact I think we'll learn a lot about how the energy situation will develop from monitoring this closely.
Yes, but those folks will quickly jump ship to other RDBMS. I suspect most will simply go with SQLite.

I don't know of anything that embeds a relational database that has the requirements of a MySQL.
Re: P7-P9. I don't think the author is confused at all. It seems to me that those in the market for a netbook would strongly consider a tablet as an alternative (if a tablet wasn't already in their consideration).

In a year or two, I could see somebody's technology collection consisting of smartphone/laptop|desktop/netbook|tablet. I have a harder time imagining the average consumer being interested in both a netbook and a tablet.
Use of potentially harmful chemicals kept secret under law
FYI, you can mail drives to S3: http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/
> I would want evidence of bidirectional conversation before calling them "people".

There are plenty of people that are not capable of that in any way that most people would recognize.

The dog analogy comes to mind: Dogs are smarter than people because they understand us but we do not understand them.

edit:

We seem to place the onus of proving your intelligence and your ability to communicate on others before giving them the moniker 'sentient' or 'intelligent'. By laying an arbitrary ('good enough for you') marker and saying 'jump over that and I'll accept you) we judge everybody by our own norms, whereas that is not a good way to look at any of these issues at all.

A nice example from the animal kingdom would be the ant, the bee or the termite. As a single individual they're not going to pass an intelligence test by human standards any time soon. But as a collective they exhibit very complex behaviour that could possibly qualify as intelligent.

To put up a barrier for Dolphins to prove they're intelligent makes intelligence a linear affair, cross the threshold and you're 'in'.

But plenty of people exist that could not cross that same threshold, even by employing the tricks you mentioned.

For instance, there is a state of being called 'locked in'.

A person is 100% aware of their environment but also 100% paralyzed. By your standards these people would not qualify as people because they are wholly incapable of communication.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome
oh, TC did an AWESOME job covering this story. It's articles like that which remind everyone how they got so large. I just think the topic has been discussed enough, along with a ton of other blogs just chiming in for shits and giggles. Fred is far from neutral, I agree.
I'm glad I can amuse you. Another example would be the "Citizen Reporters" who documented fraud committed by ACORN by going under cover with a flip cam. The NYT did almost no substantive reporting on the matter. I'm sure you'll try to write that off by saying it is just righty propaganda, a tacky spectacle, etc.

However Al Franken won by a razor thin margin in a state with active Acorn voter registration efforts. Might they have been the difference that got him elected? Now his vote makes a massive overhaul to our health care system possible. I'm not sure if reshaping 20% of our economy is on par with "documented unconstitutional malfeasance by one of the largest, most secretive organizations in the US government", but on a day to day basis it will certainly impact more people, in more significant ways.

And yes I can see where you could stress test this argument successfully. Congrats. Take great satisfaction in citing the supremacy of of a 100+ year old medium with an established business model that has managed to keep a slight edge on a 5 year old medium that is still getting its legs.
Yes, it's cool.
Well AMD is a small fraction of the size of Apple as well. Even more, Apple's business isn't oriented towards cutting into the market share of a large competitor. And there have been significant leaks at Apple.
For what it's worth, that's the main focus of the Motorcycle Safety Foundation course. If I remember correctly, 35 mph is the speed at which is easier/faster/safer to swerve than to try to stop a two-wheeled vehicle.
"I find Intel's compiler to outperform GCC on pretty much all of the numerical work I do."

It's only a question of time. I suspect that if more companies decided to pool resources around GCC (or any other free C compiler, like pcc or clang), they will pretty much bury Intel.

Intel is a chip company. The only conceivable reason for them to want to maintain a C compiler is to make a C compiler that's better than the competition on Intel processors and that sucks as much as possible on competing architectures.

Icc is not a compiler. It's a sales tool.
Good point, but people don't even seem to be thinking enough to look for such a document. They should be intuitively aware of the risks and possibilities associated with companies holding this kind of information.

I didn't need to read Facebook's privacy agreements to know that there was no way in hell I was going to hand them my entire social graph on a platter just in exchange for a free blog and image hosting. Just the certain knowledge that law enforcement will have easy, reliable access to a list of all my friends, with contact information no less, is a total showstopper. Maybe I'm paranoid but I don't understand why more people aren't considering these things.
I took two years off after my second year. I was doing terrible in school upto that point and prayed everyday that one of my ideas will kind of mature and give me a genuine reason to leave. I got that chance and left for two years.

During the two year break, I learned a TONNE...about everything I didn't know. It was pretty humbling. But even more educational!

I returned to school last year. And it's been AWESOME. Nothing like the first two years.

Before taking time off: I signed up for random classes.

After taking time off: I nitpick each class

Before: I didn't care if a class I signed up for sucked(for any reason)

Now: I drop it the second I feel I won't enjoy the class

Before: I didn't think I could learn much in class

Now: I know areas that I outrightly suck at. Each semester I load myself with courses in one area(last semester was strategy; the semester before was marketing; this semester is going to be interpersonal communication).

Lesson: Take time off! Best case you won't need to come back. Worst case you'll come back knowing what you gotta learn.
They think the software is processor-independent but it's really Intel-biased; that's the problem.
Device Handling
$80.00 per storage device handled.

Data Loading Time
$2.49 per data-loading-hour. Partial data-loading-hours are billed as full hours.

Yes, on the order of cost-of-drive.
The problem here is that you can easily detect leaks to the press. Tainted information gets published and you know who leaked by how the leak deviates from reality.

It's less so with leaks between companies. A company that deals this way will never allow the information it gathers to show up like that. Even analysts who will examine the leaked materials will have little (not so little in the case of Intel - they have like two competitors) information about the origins of what they are looking at.
World stats (causes of death) according to WHO:

1) Coronary heart disease - 12.2%

2) Stroke and other cerebrovascular diseases - 9.7%

3) Lower respiratory infections - 7.1%

4) Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease - 5.1%

5) Diarrhoeal diseases - 3.7%

6) HIV/AIDS - 3.5%

7) Tuberculosis - 2.5%

8) Trachea, bronchus, lung cancers - 2.3%

9) Road traffic accidents - 2.2%

Although maybe it's more correct to say the leading cause of accidental death is car crashes. I guess 'preventable' is too broad a word.
There could be two classes of license, like in Japan where you can have a limited qualification to drive only automatics, or a full license including manuals too. In this case, however, the "automatic" would be the fully automated vehicle, and the "manual" would be the traditional human-controlled one.
If you like this book, consider looking at The Math Book by Cliff Pickover; it's similarly awesome and amazingly illustrated. Video review of it here: http://www.youtube.com/user/joannelovesscience#p/u/19/BDCFms...

edit: P.S., I am not associated with Cliff and am not spamming for him. :-)
youre from jersey? respect++
Those careless people do drive and radar might stop them from causing an accident that kills your friends or family one day. Radar also has a huge potential to improve the safety of pedestrians who otherwise might briefly admire the traction control system of a careless driver's car before they are crushed to death.
The recent holiday sales most likely drove phenomenal sales. More importantly is that for the developers of the games, they get very hard statistics on game sales, price points and platform.

Steam is one of the few DRM based systems that actually provides value for consumers rather than restricting.
So where's the program that generated this?
Points for the first person who can demonstrate this is possible for ever year from 1900 to 2100.
Google Chrome Overtakes Safari
Rights come with obligations; those who can't discharge those obligations get their rights taken from them. That's not a moral statement, either; that's a descriptive statement of what the current situation is. That is the way it is because it must be that way. Rights are, ultimately, the power to draw on the resources of others in the society (even "the right to free speech" is nothing more and nothing less than the right to draw on the resources of the society to defend your free speech), and for every such draw there must be a corresponding obligation or your putative "right" will draw against a non-existent account. While we like to think about the positive side of "rights", without the corresponding obligations they literally don't exist; phantoms tools that appear to exist right up to the moment when you pick one up whereupon it is revealed to be a trick of the light.

Babies are lent their basic rights against their future obligations, and the difference is made up by their parents. Babies and children are extended fewer rights because of their decreased ability to service the resulting obligations, too, so your example isn't even all that great as children's rights are necessarily quite curtailed.

Certainly our law could easily deal with obligationless-psuedorights enjoyed by animals, but our society can not deal with them having true rights. Dolphins can be extended unilateral protection, but they can't have actual rights until they can also discharge the resulting obligations.

Some would define "right" to include this sort of "unilateral protection" but I think that strips us of a valuable word, and encourages category errors as what are "unilateral protections" one minute silently get upgraded to "rights" (as I have defined them) the next. I am quite certain this is considered desirable by animal "rights" advocate, even if they are not consciously using this exact line of thought. I'm fairly confident that if you asked, animal rights activists would not care to be classified as animal-"unilateral protection" advocates.

(Moreover, giving dolphins rights would just be an open invitation to yet more corruption, in the form of "legal representatives" of the en-righted animals suing in the legal system for some recompense or other which oh-so-coincidentally will go back in the pockets of the representatives. If we're really lucky we'll set up a parallel "animal's right court" so the whole system can be set up as a rent-extraction racket. There is in fact an upper limit on how much of this sort of corruption we can tolerate as a society.)

(Applying my definition of "right" to the current discussion of a "health-care right" is an interesting exercise left to the reader. For every right, the question of "where's the corresponding obligation?" must be answered.)
Tell HN: make HN comments display on blogs via trackbacks?
Conversations on HN are so quality and yet most of the world never sees this commentary. It'd be great if HN comments could be made to appear in the comment areas of the posts themselves. And here's why:

The conversation gets bifurcated otherwise. Some post authors will recognize and manually compensate by updating the post with a link to the HN comments but that requires awareness & manual intervention of the author. Granted, it can be argued that comments are already distributed amongst silos like Friend Feed, Twitter, FB, etc. But HN comments tend to be such high quality and they're only exposed to the sliver of people that happen to come to the post via HN. Making them sync to the comments of the post itself would expose the rest of the world to the high-quality discussion occurring here.

I'm no expert on how comments work but is there a way to implement this with minimal engineering by making use of the track back feature? What are the negative implications for doing so? If it's not possible or proper use of that feature, it seems like they could integrate w/ Disqus, Intense Debate, Wordpress, Typepad and Blogger and thereby cover 90% of the comment systems out there.

At any rate, this is how I wish it worked and it seems like there might already be a convenient mechanism for doing it.

Thoughts?

sean
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