skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It has nothing to do with snobbery it has to do with getting people interested. My little sister will be more likely to keep programming if she can build a website in as little time as possible.

Once she has done that she will slowly expand learning more and more. Quickbasic doesn't have that ability it doesn't have the libraries to allow an easy start.

This is beyond the fact that the language itself makes it difficult to things that are simple in other languages.
As you might guess, I think this completely misses the point.

See: http://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2006/07/science-and-...
In 2008, TWC spent roughly $1 billion on video content and only $33 million on high-speed data (30x more spent on content). So the infrastructure cost per subscriber to TWC is negligible.

Also worth noting, TWC made about $2.7 billion off cable TV subscriptions, compared to $145 million from advertising. So while its true that they do "double dip", its fair to say that monthly subscriptions are paying the content bills, not advertising.

Source: TWC's 2008 SEC filing, available here: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/TWC/629188992x0xS9501...
I called the AZ Republic newspaper to find out why there was a slightly higher charge on the Visa bill. I was told it because the Thanksgiving day paper cost more. After some fruitless discussion about how they notify readers of this extra charge, I point out that the Thanksgiving day paper was basically the usual Thursday paper but with extra advertising.

Yes, that's right, I was told; it cost more to produce, so you have to pay more.

And these business wonder why things aren't going so well.
Many of the points in the article ring true for me, but I feel compelled to offer an alternate partial explanation for some of the trends.

Family income correlates with intelligence and determination. Intelligence seems to be heritable, and determination may be; it's certainly passed along through upbringing if not genetics. Intelligence and determination also correlate well with high school performance, SAT scores and to some degree, athletics.

There may well be a conspiracy here, but I think we'd see the same trend to a lesser degree without it.
Is it me or is anyone else surprised that people use Google this way? I don't mean the content, I mean the kind of query.

I generally type specific words or phrases (often with a 'site:' prefix when I know where I'm looking). I never type full questions (i.e., sentences) into Google.

Edit: My wife reminded me that there was a New York Times article in December about how children search this way automatically: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/technology/internet/26kids...
Except for the Sim and the cat the only one on the list that is legal. Just sayin’.
Do floor tiles occur naturally?

Even if we can't intercept their communications, we should be able to see their works. The universe looks far too natural to contain much technologically advanced intelligence.
Location Does Not Matter | Force of Good: a blog by Lance Weatherby
I found this to be an excellent, and Free, introduction to microeconomics. It's quite crisp and mathy, unlike most econ texts which yak on for hours.

It would be nice to see more economics in here.
I'm not sure whether it's really made me a better programmer, but I find that doing something like taking a shower or getting something simple to eat can be a good way of getting around mental blocks that have formed when I'm working intensely on a problem.
It's generally done for compliance reasons, banks are covered by fairly strict regulations which require communication audit logs. Similarly most personal brokerage websites and gambling websites are blocked to prevent insider trading, obviously it's not going to stop someone who's determined to break the law, but banks have to be able to show they've taken reasonable measures to prevent it.
A bunch of my friends from college are doing or have done this. For pro bono stuff, I believe you just find an SAT tutoring place you'd like to help out and volunteer. It's pretty manpower and time intensive, so they're always looking for qualified people. You definitely don't have to be a teacher. I believe they ask for your own SAT scores though, and only take people that scored significantly above what would be expected from the people you're trying to tutor. My friends are mostly in the 1500+ range, and a bunch have perfect 1600s, so they're pretty hot commodities on the market.
I enjoyed reading it. Without getting too picky, the biggest thing I'd work on is making the article more cohesive. I get how superpowers and hypnosis are related, and I get how hypnosis is related to influencing people with words, but there's a lot of disconnect between A and C.

The fourth and fifth paragraphs bored me a bit, so I skipped down to the next section. I don't find the history of magic and hypnosis nearly as interesting as your experiences with it, though perhaps that's a personal preference.

I like the way you present words as tools to build or break bridges between people. That seems closest to what the piece is about.

Finally, take my words with a grain of salt. It's your writing, after all. (P.S. Stephen King's On Writing is a great source of writing advice if you're interested.)
I'm not sure of a tool to automate testing of ads. It's more of a gut feeling / experience in creating the ads than it is creating an endless number of combinations. Goal completion is influenced by both the ad and the landing page. I've had cases where the weaker ad became more successful by pointing it to a different landing page.

I'd certainly be interested in discussing further as it sounds like you have some experience in Adwords and conversion too. I develop software and am always looking to share techniques on testing and improving conversion. Feel free to email me (info is in profile).
If we as humans or post-humans figure out how to balance our need for resources (by not having to mine space) I think that could change things dramatically.

More sustainable civilization in the universe is still better than less. (cf. Bostrom's "Astronomical Waste": http://www.nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste.html)
IEEE Spectrum: 25 Microchips That Shook the World
A VPS (Slicehost anyone?) should do the same, and it's way less expensive than EC2. You just have to set up everything from a non-filtered connection (at home! ..hey, you can even build this in a home server!).

Anyway, if you can use a SOCKS proxy, it should work for almost every application supporting any kind of proxy (but not using the 443/SSL port).
Does anyone what that interview is from footnote 8?
This sounds like a good idea — not sure how to change it without botching this page, though.
CES Chief Says That Obama Administration is Stifling Innovation
Music recommendation algo in Gremlin using the live WebOfData and LinkedData
Think this is major cool. This script is operating directly onto LinkedData and giving a good explanation of modern heuristic recommender algos.
I gave a talk at Ignite Phoenix last year. It was essentially a stripped down version of a talk I gave at MountainWest RubyConf earlier.

I took my original material, intended for a 30 minute talk, and got it down to five minutes. Part of that was easy; I dropped the demos. But there was still a fair amount left over. Ruthless selection and repeated practice enabled me to convey the essential points in the alloted time.

Since then I figure that one should first prepare a terse version of a talk to figure out what can be omitted, and work backwards, making sure that anything added earns its place. Better a punchy short talk than a meandering lecture.

Conferences would do us all a favor by just insisting that all talks be no longer than 20 minutes.
Probably because they want to be around other black people.
Hey, works across cultures! The results in German are pretty much an exact mirror image. That would be cool if it weren’t so depressing.
I've ran into the general public way too much to be surprised by such queries.
The problem with saying 'there is no extraterrestrial life because we haven't observed it and it would probably be here by now' is that there is always the first wave of lifeforms who would come to the same conclusion.

True, but that a form of reasoning inevitably gives a wrong conclusion under rare circumstances is only a weak argument against it.

-Based on our experience, it takes ~4bn years for life to evolve in a planetary system.

I don't think we have a strong reason to believe that there's something special about that length of time. Not much change happened on Earth for most of that time, suggesting dependence either on stochastic evolution of a few things like photosynthesis (so 4bn probably isn't much more likely than 3bn) or on something like increasing solar output crossing a threshold (it's doubtful such a threshold would be crossed at ≥ 4bn years at every location). That aside, even a few tens of millions of years is plenty of time for life to cover a galaxy.
This sounds like it would be very useful for writing a poker bot.
First, some people just search this way on a regular basis. Strange, but I've met several who do. Bless their hearts.

Second, often for queries of this type I'd expect to find hits on advice sites, Yahoo Answers, etc, where the question is actually in the text of the page.

Also, I would have trouble boiling down most of these questions to keywords...
Seeking Web UI Design Intern YC W10 [Bay Area]
We're a YC W10 company that's seeking to add a web UI design intern to our team to help us as we refine our product in preparation for launch.

As an intern, you will have the opportunity to experience the earliest stages of starting a business and may be offered an opportunity to join us as one of our first full-time hires.

Principal responsibilities will include:

* Transforming ideas into web interface mockups
* Improving usability of existing products
* Participating in regular discussions with co-founders

Requirements include:

* Knowledge of web UI best practices
* Adobe Photoshop/Fireworks design capability

Bonus:

* XHTML & CSS
* Experience working with Ruby on Rails
* Knowledge of IE6 compatibility issues and workarounds

Preferably located in the Bay Area, but not required.

Interested? Please email resume, portfolio, and a few sentences about yourself to: stealth.posting@gmail.com

Questions? Please email: stealth.posting@gmail.com
Also from my understanding the term "droid" is trademarked and pretty aggressively protected.

(ergo even all the Motorola Droid advertising actually has disclaimers. They must have a deal with Lucas)
I think my favorite explanation of wisdom versus intelligence came when reading about how D&D players should think of it: Intelligence tells you it's raining inside. Wisdom tells you to open the umbrella.

When we get to the point that we can just download all the information we want directly into our brains, it's going to be those with wisdom that will know what to do with it.
I'd expect the distribution to have more countries with net emigrants than countries with net immigrants--people on the move will try to get into the best countries that they can get into.
The New Cavemen Lifestyle
I don't think that CS in a strict sense should go away. On the contrary, I don't think more formal methods are thought about enough. However, I do think that outside of the box thinking is important, and things that are not strictly scientific can be pursued from other perspectives, such as api design or interface design.

Offtopic: wow, this droid is hard to type on compared to my iPod touch. Sorry this response was so mangled the first few times.
Be careful what you wish for. A world without borders might sound nice in a John Lennon song, but in practice it is not.

The domino effect can happen – one state collapses and the people move to another state, which strains that state’s government and collapses that economy too.

I live in South Africa, and we basically have an open border policy (since the laws do not get implemented). There are a lot of illegal immigrants which significantly increases crime, puts strain on services and creates social problems. We have a broad unemployment rate of 40% - we can’t even provide jobs for our own people, let alone 4+ million illegal immigrants.
Most Early Admissions programs are no longer binding. Students from families earning less than 100K no longer have to pay tuition at several top schools. Every school I was accepted to pretty much offered the same financial aid, which was inline with what FAFSA said my family should contribute. I have never heard of anybody admitted to a top school having to turn it down due to finances. There is plenty of aid (grants that you don't have to repay) for anybody who is not rich.

As for SAT tutoring, well for kids applying to top schools this will probably improve your M+V less than 100 points. If it's any more than that, you probably aren't top school material.
You can get a couple more if you drop the "to":

How can I get my gf

and

How can I get my bf
Which "we" is responsible? The individual schools? Parents? Students? And can you describe how it's a problem that some schools are racially homogenous? Given the same academic standards, a school with low minority enrollment will try harder to get a minority student than a school with high minority enrollment.

So you're sort of positing this Maxwell's Demon of Segregation: even though public policy and public statements all draw minority students (of a given level of ability) into situations with fewer minorities (by, e.g., lowering admissions standards, offering them scholarships), minorities still end up segregating. Some collective "we" is responsible (presumably in a way that requires this "we" to pay a little money to somebody else's "us"). But there are many missing pieces to the puzzle.
The UK has good laws (you can get a highly skilled Visa without major problems).

Unfortunately some of the nicest countries it is difficult (e.g. Ireland).
I'm definitely on the PHP guys with this. A big criticism against PHP is that it's inconsistent in numerous ways. This bugfix is obviously part of an effort to standardize function behaviour.

Go PHP!
The general population cares about being able to do what they want to do on their machines. If there's software people really want they they aren't "allowed" to run on their machine by the gatekeepers, they will, as they have countless times in the past, vote with their wallets.
Ask HN: Should one buy the N1 ?
I admit, I have a crappy old phone (SonyErW910). Everyone seems to be running around with shiny new iPhones. But I can't figure out if the N1 is really worth it.

Has anyone used the Nexus One ? The reviews about it appear to be divided.

Or would you recommend going for Droid/iPhone ?

Thanks

*Disclaimer: This post was not A/B tested nor optimized for maximum viewing.
Ahem, Paris Hilton.
Has anyone heard if this has some proven health benefits? I wonder how much of the benefits can be attributed to a cut in processed foods and less sugar intake.

I was surprised to see Nassim Taleb show up in the article as well.
I think of the non-hardware parts of computer science as applied philosophy.

Art seems wrong to me as a descriptor because it would imply that I'm writing code for a sort of aesthetic beauty. The aesthetic beauty should be in the end result.

Which also means it probably isn't science, because really what I worry about when I'm programming is that the end result will be correct.
To some extent I am concerned about scientific process, having a program that is repeatably verifiable as doing what I expect, but in terms of actually using scientific methods to write software, I can't really say I do that very much. As with the beauty, the science is in the end result and not really the process.

Which brings me to why I think it is applied philosophy:

What am I doing when I write code? I am taking a problem and deconstructing it into different pieces, finding ways to represent the different pieces, and reasoning about how everything should interact. I think this basically holds true for functional, object oriented, and imperative programming.

I think that from this perspective, writing code is closest to some sort of philosophical inquery. You are using a computer to build abstractions, and through enough abstractions (or abstractions written by someone else, imported in libraries), you are able to create something.
The point is that the art of computing should be much more interesting than anything to do with coding style. See the link above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001

See in particular the most recent paper from NASA (November 2009):

Life on Mars: New Evidence from Martian Meteorites

"New data on Martian meteorite 84001 as well as new experimental studies show that thermal or shock
decomposition of carbonate, the leading alternative non-biologic explanation for the unusual nanophase
magnetite found in this meteorite, cannot explain the chemistry of the actual martian magnetites. This leaves the biogenic explanation as the only remaining viable hypothesis for the origin of these unique magnetites. Additional data from two other martian meteorites show a suite of biomorphs which are nearly identical between meteorites recovered from two widely different terrestrial environments (Egyptian Nile bottomlands and Antarctic ice sheets). This similarity argues against terrestrial processes as the cause of these biomorphs and supports an origin on Mars for these features."

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/403089main_7441-1.pd...
default search results from French Google I guess?
You can shut it down and start it up whenever you like. Billing is by the hour so it is perfectly possible to just have it running when you need it and have it shut down for the rest of the time.
I'm aware that it may not be legal. My argument was that it's also unenforceable.
Notice the version numbers converging to PI
If after four years in the work force, you only learned what you would have gotten from a BA program, you're probably digging ditches.
It works with anything but Google chrome.. I just learned that it doesn't support SOCKS proxy :/
The comments below the article made good points:

pretty much everyone at Palm has actually used one, not to mention the fact that lots of Palm’s engineers were copped from Apple… they most certainly know what an iPhone is.

and

I think Rubinstein is distancing himself from the iPhone given the (very real) possibility of them being sued by Apple. I would say he’s being cautious.
I don't find it depressing at all. Men want a more active / interesting sexual life with their partner. Women want more bonding with their partner / want their partner to do stuff for them. It's nothing we haven't known for many millenia.

Clearly there are a lot more into relationships but these are the most common "entry-level" problems and there's nothing wrong with that. People who have enough experience at human relationships (because they're old enough) won't use Google to solve their problems, don't you think?
You sign in to Blogger and Youtube with your Google account.

Doubleclick is a good point, though. Of course, you know if you place ads on the site (there's a "Google" in the URL) and you know if you buy the ads. So I guess consumers don't know. Would they care, if they did?
Chrome doesn't support DNS query via SOCKS5 (aka network.proxy.socks_remote_dns in firefox), but support SOCKS5

chrome.exe --proxy-server=socks5://127.0.0.1:8008

credits: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=29914
Why use WiFi? Don't AM, and TV signals have way more energy? Is WiFi really the highest energy source available to you?

Or is this just to make it buzzword compliant?

What about visible light? Even indoors, if the lights are on, there is far more energy available via visible light.

And WiFi barely even transmits if someone is not using it. Does this device have some sort of busy loop keeping the accesspoint constantly transmitting? That's really going to be great for interference won't it.
Agreed, although I'm not at all familiar with that era (not really much before the bus at the end of the 19th century, I too need to read Friedman's tome, right after I finish Human Action and 15 other good economic books :-) but I know this is very complicated.

For the Jackson bust I just cite the specie payment requirement because it was a shock to the system of a bad sort. Jackson intended to pop a bubble but I'm not sure he thought the result would be as bad or as long as it turned out to be.

The only gold "causal link" I (currently) believe in is that it is good to have during a deflation, since it's "The only liquidity that doesn't depend on anyone else's liquidity," to quote an essay in the newsletter of William Rees-Mogg and James Davidson (although it's probably not unique in having that property).
I use it too.. My "top" arsenal is composed of top, atop (for apache) and innotop.
> Also, I would have trouble boiling down most of these questions to keywords...

Right, and fair enough. But to me that's a clue to the real answer: don't ask a search engine to solve your romantic issues.
Europe tying traffic fines to income level
This is false. Whites/asians accepted by medical school have average GPAs of 3.7 (3.6 in the sciences) vs 3.4 for blacks (3.3 in the sciences). The average white/asian MCAT is about 10 (9.9 asian, 10.2 white), while the average for blacks is 8.3.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080801022539/http://www.aamc.or...
I started teaching for Kaplan back in 2000, and pretty much used that as my credential.

(I've since left Kaplan to work on Red Ivy Prep, my side project that aims to find repeatable TODOs based on learning styles. Thankfully, I have a sister getting a PhD in learning and memory research who's helping me out with the theory. I'm trying to do a free all-day drop-in workshop for students here in Boston on MLK day, but it's a lot harder without that credential anymore.)
I think a project like OpenFrameworks embody some of the thoughts in the post: http://www.openframeworks.cc/ (don't get put off by the fact that it's C++)
I think the main reason is that Linux users are most likely not willing to pay for something like that, while Mac users are used to pay for everything..
From this thought-provoking article:

"The near-total lack of useful information about teaching and learning has three main effects, all bad for students. First, it creates distortions in the higher-education market that drive up prices. Second, it gives colleges free rein to ignore their teaching obligations in favor of a mad contest for status and self-gratification. Third, it leaves colleges that serve the most disadvantaged students with the fewest resources."
My first response to this was "money grab!" (and I'm normally on the bleeding-heart-liberal side of things). But, after reading the article, I'm more in favor of it. It's reacting to the very real problem in Europe that millionaires can afford to simply ignore smaller traffic fines, and tend to drive haphazardly.
For $60/mo you can get a Sprint MiFi, and have mobile broadband access anywhere there's coverage. I know, this doesn't work for everyone, but compared to a $57/mo EC2 instance, I think it's a win in many cases.
To someone who wants to use newLISP for calculating Pi to the nth digit, it might appear "fundamentally broken." Of course I don't know why on earth you would want to do that in the first place, using a program/language specialized for such a task would be a far brighter idea, as such, the doc you refers to correctly suggests using the 'bc' program.

However, for someone who wants a Lisp for rapid web development, newLISP is a dream come true:

http://www.rundragonfly.com

As emphasized in the article: use the language that's most appropriate for the task at hand.
7250i Speaker Earpiece Ways Problem
"Everyone thinks of changing the world [his or her girlfriend or buyfriend], but no one thinks of changing himself." --Leo Tolstoy
I originally read the title as "Should someone by H1N1". Oops.
newLISP doesn't want to be compiled. It's perfect for front-end web development, say as a replacement for PHP.