skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're not doing the "new journalism" any favors with the examples you're choosing to advocate with. The O'Keefe ACORN video you're talking about has been roundly criticized for editing out details that exculpate ACORN staffers. The fact that O'Keefe probably had a real story to chase down makes it worse, because his sloppy efforts --- which by his own admission mix "attack-attack-attack" political tactics with reportage --- make it impossible to talk about ACORN without talking about the credibility of the reporters.

You seem eager to talk about politics. I don't care what your politics are. I care that we're exchanging The Wall Street Journal (35+ foreign bureaus) for Twitter, TechCrunch, and the YouTube exploits of DailyKos and Malkin "diarists".
My problem with it is that tablets have not become significantly more popular since 2005, which indicates to me that she's confusing the two.
I would be shocked if it weren't, based on the sheer number of possibilities for this one year.
I would think Bonobos are first in line for 'non human personhood'
User uploads fake flag to Wikipedia, flag companies run with it.
Ask HN: Distribute visualizations of code to increase sales?
Would it make sense to distribute various visualizations of the code in commercial software to give people some impression of how much work went into it?

You could even use interactive sorts of visualizations to make it more fun for people to browse through.

Of course, you would use visualizations that don't give away any of the source.

Even if you don't think this would work long term, what about the publicity that you would get from having say the first iPhone app that does this?
The article does not support the author's 'just works' perspective. Its not much of an article at all but simply lists a few product he's tried on various platforms.

For me, I expect a certain amount of setup in any secure and fairly robust backup solution. tarsnap has very little setup for a person that loves the command line.
For my servers (linux), I use tarsnap. For my workstations (OS X) I use SuperDuper.app to image my hard drive.
"Another place the radar is invaluable? In fog. I drive over the Santa Cruz mountains every day to get home and there often is fog. One day there was a car in front of me that had no back taillights."

I bet the driver of that car was just using parking lights. I hate that! People who drive with parking lights on don't seem to realize the rear running lights are not on, parking lights are not meant to be used when driving that's what headlights are for.
Why can't cats be persons? They certainly have personalities. And they can recognise themselves in mirrors; at least, my cat reacts differently to seeing himself than he would do to another cat.

They are also a lot cuter than dolphins.
Correlation between US Dollar (UUP), gold (GLD), the s&p 500 (SPY), and the Canadian dollar (FXC).

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

The intraday correlation is beginning to break down, especially for gold (this chart may be obsolete when you click it, so click 1d)

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&...

...but for a while, you could see a minute-by-minute inverse correlation between the dollar and everything else.
We plan to have simulcast showings & meetups all over Europe. Where are you based? If you're interested in starting or finding a European-based lean startup meetup, you can check here: http://leanstartup.pbworks.com/Meetups
Do you store emails entered into your demo?
Besides radar I think there's a lot of potential for automated systems to help drivers cope with snow & ice. For example a sensor scanning the road able to warn the driver of black ice, or at least inform the driver that they may be seeing rain on their windshield but it's freezing on the ground. Maybe speed controls based on real time weather conditions. No one should be going over 40MPH on any road in the snow. How about using cars as a way to measure road safety? Monitor the road conditions and the cars traction and report this information to the DOT so a plow/sander can be dispatched to particularly bad areas.
> Why not give certain animals a similar status?

I think that we do don't we? What this appears to be raising is a new category or rights, between humans and animals. The ethical considerations for this will most likely also be new.

Yes it was a bit tongue in cheek, but I was also semi-serious. If we are to consider dolphins and great apes and such as something in that category, and provide them with an abridged set of rights (I think human infants is not a good, model, more like human children under 18), then we should also expect a certain level of lawfulness to go along with that.

How to make those laws? Should we start electing dolphins and great apes to congress? Unless we also figure out uplift (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_uplift) then probably not. But perhaps that limitation can also help guide us as to how to craft appropriate rights recognition and lawful behavior for these creatures.

I'm not against this kind of recognition per se, just that I think we have to really think carefully through it. Rights are not typically given out without some level of responsibility to go along with it.
Well, first you said companies not just manufacturing companies so I would have pointed to Wal Mart. But since you have limited the range it's more difficult because manufacturing companies are not as high profile as retailers. I will point to China as a whole as a contemporary example. Chinese companies have consistently beaten the previous generation's manufacturers by achieving lower costs.

Anyway, since you say "it is fairly established" the burden should be on you to tell me where & by who. What I know is established is that internet marketing gurus speaking to small & micro businesses recommend finding non price differentiators. This arguably makes sense for small businesses where market size is not an issue. Most large companies however, need to go after large markets & that means lower prices.

My old marketing textbooks say that there are two broad positioning strategies & corresponding pricing strategies niche(differentiated) & penetration(low cost). The larger share of the pie usually belongs to the latter with high margins often going to the former.

I would argue that low cost strategies are probably more "stable" since they do not rely on innovation & other constant miracles. Even Apple may flop two or three major products in a row & die again.
I wonder how many numbers between 0 and 9! (if any) cannot be generated by each method.
Watching TV Together in Different Time Zones
Daytime running lights are mandatory in Canada. Not sure why they aren't in the USA. If the car is out of park, the headlights turn on automatically. It solves a handful of issues like this that are potentially dangerous.
Hey, sweet. High five!

Now I'm very curious. What kind of underlying string representation does your VM have that you require your own regexp engine? Actually, more importantly, what is the VM for?
Reminders me of this time article about whales:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12whales-t.html

An elegant piece on them.
Tagging based on context, or from the image itself? Semantically, or on graphical metrics?
Right, I was speaking a bit tongue in cheek, but I think you got the gist of my point. Since we cannot communicate with these animals in such a fashion as to learn their intent beyond the most basic needs (hungry, angry, sleepy) if that, granting rights without obligations to self-service those rights seems inappropriate beyond the rights we already grant any other animal.

Granting those rights would assume that there is some type of obligant who could service those rights, and those would almost certainly be people. Thus this opens up a fascinating thought experiment of parallel non-human persons rights courts and legal systems....imagine a stuffy wood paneled court room with a couple of water tanks, where the lawyers argue their cases for clients that could not possibly participate of understand what was going on. This opens the situation up for massive exploitation by the people taking on the roles of non-human person obligants.
The problems in mark to market accounting wasn't so much in the accounting itself which generally should prove irrelevant given that the disclosure ends up being in the notes. The problem is because of regulatory accounting which requires that you need a certain threshold of regulatory capital - and the writedowns (even on bonds that companies intended to hold for their full maturity) meant that they were immediately undercapitalized or overcapitalized based on the whims of the market - an almost perfect storm at the time because these were relatively new regs.

Granted, you could make the argument that these banks should have had greater reserves, but it is also useful and relevant to note that many of these banks may not have failed if they were not forced to sell of some of these assets at their lows as a result of regulatory requirements that did not exist only a year or two earlier (I forget the date).
Mcollective: A parallel execution framework that's not a fancy SSH "for loop"
What about when dolphins violate human laws? Like breaking undersea cables or eating fish hauls still in net, or attacking a human or some other such violation?

This would seem to be most closely analogous to an international border violation.
It might make an interesting blog post, but don't expect it to have much impact on sales, unless your app audience is other coders.
Likely inspired by Knuth's Christmas Tree lecture: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=998655
Does non-human person make them better than us?
No, you are still trying to treat Dolphins as human persons.

Dolphins could not violate human law since they are not human.

International implies nations, Dolphins probably would not recognize nations.

For an encore, with a wink to Douglas Adams, they might not even recognize humans as particularly intelligent.
http://www.hybir.com

full online backup

bare metal restore

windows only for now.

Interesting performance advantages can be seen in the screen casts here:

http://www.hybir.com/Action/HybirBackupAction.html

(blatent self promotion)
Your comment suggests that you either don't believe the thesis or that you find it obvious.

In trying to change multiple things about myself and failing at most of them (say, 80%) I believe that understanding the human brain allows us to succeed where we place our mental energy.

And with that, comes success. Merely my $0.02. Take from it what you will.
Conversations being split can be a feature; I know vaguely what to assume when writing for the audience here, but not at random other sites to which my comment could be syndicated without my knowledge.

And if that other audience responds there, I may not know, and if that other audience arrives here, the quality differential you've observed may evaporate.

A tech blog did this with HN comments at one point and I registered my strong objections in that thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=639874
When people who know little about how cars work look at an engine, aren't they impressed anyway? Don't they feel like they are getting their money's worth when they see a complicated looking engine?

Currently, people look at things like graphics and sound in software. But what about also being impressed by the complexity of the implementation? You don't need to be a geek to appreciate an impressive looking software visualization -- especially an interactive and/or animated one.
> One year, Yale University economist Robert Shiller, who'd never gambled in his life, found himself at a casino there. He says that was because Wharton economist Jeremy Siegel realized that by using coupons offered to conventioneers, they could take opposing bets at the craps table with a 35 out of 36 chance of winning $12.50 each. Over two nights, Mr. Shiller netted $87.50.
I am curious about your Git usage, is there an email address you can be reached at? (your hackernews profile is empty)
Pain?

When you poke a Euglena[1] with a pin while looking at it under a microscope, its sensors detect an intrusion and immediately start flapping the flagella (the thing it uses for locomotion, analogous to a leg) to get out of the way. That's a super-simple nervous system. Many plants do this as well, using a slow production of chemicals which move branches and leaves.

As you get more advanced, going up the biological totem pole, every creature uses that exact same sensor => action mechanism. Pain is the brain's complex interpretation of the pin prick, and an animal attempting to remove itself from the source of the pain is the same as activating the flagella.

My brain has mirror neurons which make me literally feel your suffering as you experience it, which is why humans are so against "pain" and "suffering". It's also why I personally will never injure another human, or even another animal, purposefully.

Is it more "wrong" in any scientific way to injure a human instead of a dolphin or a bear or a chimp or a plant -- or even to break a window? Absolutely not. This is why science should never be used to prove or disprove human "morals" and morals should never dictate the functions of science.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euglena
I think this is good commentary for what people will believe. This suggests that entrepreneurs can make larger leaps in "logic" (although they may not be based upon reality or fact) and make a success out of it.

I'm sure there are examples of this in real life.

Microsoft anyone? (we certainly cannot deny their revenue.)
Why not? We've tried to abuse test like IQ and apply them to dolphins and apes and such. Dogs and cats also seem to have a measurable IQ and they certainly have personalities and emotions. And outside of a few notable areas, eating any of these animals is generally considered taboo.
Scientists are in a position to tell us about various traits that dolphins possess, like a sense of self.

By saying that this gives this puts them in a position to make moral judgements you are implying that these traits (basically, intelligence or some flavour of it) are the basis for granting a moral consideration. That is one giant implication to just rely on without even mentioning. That is something these scientists are not in a special position to comment on.
Internet Explorer losing users as other browsers set share records
From the image itself.

A combination between the two.

If I get it to work I'll do a write-up on it. It's not going to be an elegant solution, I can already tell you that, more of a brute force approach.
I'm not eager to talk politics, however most big news stories share that subject so it's hard not to. In fact, my original criticism of "old media" and all the bureaus and trappings that lend it legitimacy, was that it had gotten lazy and shallow. This seems to be your quarrel with "new media". I'll reiterate my original point. I don't like repoters who write factually incorrect articles that are read by millions when there are better original sources.

I would like high quality journalism be it new or old.

Nary a partisan statement to be found:)
It's a pretty good flag. I think Herefordshire should adopt it.
Agreed. I almost didn't read the piece because of the headline, but it's an interesting one and worth at least a skim to most people.
David Brin starts off one of his articles talking about this: http://www.crackaddict.com/~nalgas/David_Brin-Dogma_of_Other...
I wouldn't call that working badly - it seems to be about the only reasonable way to handle the situation. I just started working a logout at the end of the day into my schedule and never really thought about it since.

I'm curious what you would rather have it do… backup the content unencrypted, or force a logout every hour to do the backup?
I think you are going backwards & trying to find rational justification for how you feel or act already.

Why is average intelligence for the species you basic qualifier? Why not intelligence of the individual?

I think we are fundamentally speciest and there is no way around it.
Interesting iPhone Observations
> The dog analogy comes to mind: Dogs are smarter than people because they understand us but we do not understand them.

Having owned a dog, a cat and numerous small animals, I can say that I think that at times I was definitely able to have a two-way conversation with most of the higher animals, but not the lower. I think the Guinea Pig I had when I was 8 was about as low down the evolutionary scale as I could have any understanding at all (lots of squeaks meant "hungry").

My Gerbil was a black box, I fed him and cleaned his cage and he ran around for a few years, but other than that, not a lot to say. My cat and dog, on the other hand, most definitely told me when he wanted outside, or didn't like this brand of food, or needed his litter box changed, or was unhappy when we moved, was cold, needed into a room and the door was closed, was happy to see me after a long trip, etc. All it took was a little bit of observation.

Research into Apes and Dolphins seems to have revealed very similar levels of two-way interaction.

I'm not saying they were particularly interesting conversations, but there was definitely an effort to communicate something by both parties and we managed to understand each other I think a fair amount of the time.
Ask HN: How to convince my friend to study software engineering
A good friend of mine took a programming course this autumn and really liked it. He is starting university next year and is not sure if he wants to study software engineering. How would you motivate/inspire him about this profession? Any inspirational text I could point him to?
This is more about not treating dolphins as animals, not whether or not we should treat them humanely. There's a subtle but distinct difference.
I'll probably post to my blog with the statistics and comments about the reddit approach to advertising. I don't think much of the "buy a fraction of a day's traffic, but we're not going to tell you what fraction you're getting" approach, for one thing...

Experiment day is Thursday, so I'll probably have useful numbers early next week.
Based on my limited knowledge of positional number systems, I would think it's possible for any integer from 1 to some upper bound.
Well, a nice definition of rights, but also one I don’t share. In my mind rights don’t come with obligations, and I would argue that many (for example) constitutions share that definition with me. (I know the German one does. It’s less clear with the US constitution but in context I would say it does – you know, all the talk about inalienable rights and stuff.) It’s kinda pointless to argue about definitions so I’ll stop here.
whereas radar is for people who don't pay attention and should not be driving in the first place.

So, "for people", then. I'm confident that there is no driver who is fully paying attention to driving at every moment while driving.
They do a decent job at explaining ego depletion without using the term. Some discussion is here: http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/Ego_Depletion . The wikipedia article is also pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_depletion
Of course we both know that mice are in charge. :)

I think though, what this shows is that there is the potential for a very interesting and lively debate as to how far something like "non-human person" extends. If we don't hold them liable to any kind of responsibility for particular extensions of rights beyond what we'd show any other animal, then are we not just treating them like another animal -- and thus the new classification as a "non-human person" is simply superfluous?
Thanks, I'll send him an email next week (I'm doing a reddit ad experiment this week, and in the interests of science I don't want to have an unrelated spike in traffic at the same time).
To mangle Oscar Wilde, economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing. An exaggeration but not by much.
"Why should our ability to comprehend the universe be the yardstick by which we measure ourselves?"

The movie Avatar (obviously on my mind because I recently saw it) tries to bring the audience around to the opposite conclusion. The movie makes clear that the humans better comprehend the universe (star ships, ability to create bodies to control remotely, etc.) but then unequivocally roots for the aliens who demonstrate no interest at all in the scientific method.

Which I guess is a long winded way of saying, the ability to comprehend the universe is certainly not accepted as the most important yardstick of worth by all your fellow human beings.
Clever of you to use diff!

The AGPL is only an extension of the distribution constraints as far as the strings embedded in the program are covered by copyright. It can't use distribution as an enforcement boundary for the code, which never gets sent to the user.

The AGPL has everything to do with the execution of the software. That is its entire purpose! I am not allowed to run the software unless all parties providing it input can get its source, with an advertising clause. Anyone bound by the license does not have Freedom Zero.
I'd much rather trust cperciva with data, but unfortunately his system lacks some critical features for our uses.

If you haven't already done so, please send me an email listing the lacking features which you find critical. I can't guarantee that I'll add them, but it's always useful to know how many people need what features.
I fully agree. I'm looking forward to LLVM becoming fully mature; it's a great platform already, and just needs to be fleshed out with some more optimizations/analyses/etc. And with the clang front-end, we can get rid of the unmaintainable pile of crap that is GCC.
111111102 is probably the upper bound.
Welcome to Mardi Gras 2010
Math Quiz: Why do men predominate?
That's a really good read. It's interesting how in his interaction with his audience people have an enormous problem letting go of their usual frame of reference.

The Dolphin example is a great one because just like with chimps (or pigs!) there is obviously some modicum of intelligence there, it's an alien one because of the lack of shared references but it comes with all the ethical issues that the discovery of an extra-terristrial species of similar capability would have.

I'm pretty sure that there are some ethical lines that you probably shouldn't cross with any creature, intelligent or not, and we're a long way away from even establishing those boundaries (as per our imagined feelings placing ourselves in the shoes of the subject).

Dolphins are mammals, have adapted to living immersed in a 3D salt water environment, I wonder how we'd feel if they would be able to communicate and declared that henceforth ships are to pay toll or else :)

It would be a sad day for biologists and there would be a glut of Dolphin steak if our past with other species is any lesson.
his public silence is odd -- but given that the GPLv3 contains a clause explicitly granting an exemption for use with the AGPL, and the degree to which the FSF is essentially an extension of his person, he must approve in some sense.
Google's Falling Apple