skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am afraid it may be too late. Once people get used to whining, excuse making, and mental laziness it can be nearly impossible to start acting responsibly again. See my response to Bruce Schneier's latest column http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058448 also see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1056904
The person who asks a question hoping for a lie to make her feel better will not be my girlfriend (plus, I'm lucky in this case in that I think my girlfriend is dazzling).

But the real point is, I try to avoid people for whom appearances are more important than truth.
For a falsifiable experiment, see Lindzen & Choi.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/11/spencer-on-lindzen-choi.ht...

In essence, all the input to the IPCC climate models assume a negative relationship between outgoing radiation and temperature increases, while observational data indicates that the relationship is in fact opposite. This basically the opposite of what the greenhouse effect is believed to do.
very useful, thanks
Morals that are not backed by reason are on shaky grounds.

I'd say that's exactly what the moral realm is-- the area where reason fails us. Like you, I don't see much point in arguing about non-rational propositions; it's just two people contradicting each other.

I disagree with you about "white lies," though. In the limit, sure, I'd lie to save my brother from kidnapping, or that sort of thing. But most of the time, I'd rather deal in the truth, even if it makes people a little unhappier in the short term. For example, I'd rather hear "Your startup has serious problems X, Y, and Z that you had better fix before you launch," than "Looks great. I'm sure it will be bigger than Google," if the problems are really there.
Buying good textbooks to learn from is a lot more cost effective than spending on the high-speed internet connections that is needed to download even a short video in any reasonable time. This "resource" is only useful to already have high-speed internet access.
Excellent website, I'm impressed.
I haven't done what you are talking about. I did have the domain califmichele.com at one time. I was going by "Michele in California" online at the time and my email was califmichele (@ something). I wanted the domain name "michelesworld" but it wasn't available. It was a personal site of just stuff I was interested in, with no particular focus.

Trying to tell people the domain name verbally was a huge problem. My name is spelled with one L and many people automatically spell it with two. They also tended to think I meant Kalif or Caliph rather than short-hand for California. (As an aside: This was making me increasingly concerned that the site would attract the wrong kind of attention for the wrong reasons.)

I eventually left California and broke the site up into several sites, each with a specific topic focus. When I did so, I worked hard to find natural language domains that are easily conveyed verbally without having to spell them or add verbal explanations/provisos.
I haven't looked deeply into this particular project but I agree with you: the hypergraph data model seems to add too much complexity for too little bang compared to a generic graph model. The Neo4j graph database:

http://neo4j.org

is based on generic property graphs. We sometimes get requests for hypergraph features, but we've found that the real-world problems are always solvable through a normal graph. Either way, it's very nice to see more open source graph databases out there!

-EE
http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:PQiKtMRXBJkJ:www.kobrix...
Perhaps if Turing were alive today, he would define artificial intelligence as the inability of a computer to tell whether another machine is human!
Ooh, greedy backspace exists? I did not know that. Thanks!
US lead in science shrinks
Sure, but does it matter? Being the best human chess player on the planet is still impressive, even if millions of machines can beat you. Not even only ‘still’ impressive – just as impressive as it ever was. It’s probably (theoretically) possible to build machines that are better at anything a human might attempt.
I homeschooled my two sons. Games were a part of their curriculum. I think games can be useful in that regard, but, like anything, can also be misused.
That sounds very admirable, and if there is a mass move of Haitians to Senegal, I hope it works out. I don't know much about Senegal but a quick look through the Wikipedia article on it shows that it's a progressing country, albeit with much problems to solve, it seems to be heading in the right direction.
People who work for themselves are much happier than others.
> only you are allowed to criticize your kind, any outside criticism is presumptuous and arrogant. This attitude pisses me off, since it prevents us from learning from everyone else on this rock.

Well it's generally true, one important factor is the Chinese way of thinking & culture is very different from the western. Chinese has their own definition of good and evil. It's easy to understand western beliefs, but it's damn hard to practice them.

Currently there's a trend on the Internet, that it's patriotism to damage foreign companies, no matter what kind of dirty method you use. For patriotism, any kind of line can be crossed.

Another example is Chinese people actively reject the idea of universal values no matter what content they are. I remember not long time ago a Party official speaks to media , calls 'human right' an American thing, even though it's ridiculous and laughed at after this made public, but it largely reflects part of Chinese subconscious mind. There's no extend of human rights in Chinese history & culture, or rarely advocated.

In my theory, this is a language barrier. Universal Values, human rights, democracy are all looks clumsy foreign concepts, it's not native at all, it looks like you are running a GTK app on Windows. It functions but it looks odd.

To pass these ideas and stuff to China, I think direct porting (aka, translating and interpreting) is very ineffective, it has to be rewritten from the source code level, and use native Chinese APIs :)
I hate articles like this. And he gets the Turing Test wrong.
Someone else has already mentioned the issue that handicapped people may not have the money for something that helps them. A bigger problem can be that handicapped people tend to be very resistant to change. We have a difficult enough time doing anything and change can be especially hard and dangerous for us. This is a serious obstacle to market development. If you haven't already, I suggest you give some thought to it or you may find that there isn't enough money in the world to make this fly.

Good luck.
Joel says don't rewrite, like the Netscape guys did http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Derek Sivers rewrote 90,000 lines of code in 12,000 lines... after 2 years on a failed rewrite. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58429 Maybe the lesson is that before you can renew your code, you yourself must be renewed?

Or:
You cannot solve a problem at the same level you created it.
It certainly seems like a good gesture, but I have to wonder where this land (possibly an entire region) would come from. That is, is there really that much un-owned fertile land in Senegal? Would the government buy the land from existing land-owners, and would the land-owners have a right to refuse? I have no idea how it works when a modern country decides to offer land to people (as opposed to back in the old days of the US, when you could take whatever land you wanted provided the only occupants were American Indians). I kind of wish this article would answer those questions for me.
That's pretty absurd. Senegal doesn't have that much fertile land and what it has is densely populated. Haitians on the other hand do have land. I don't see how that offer solves any problem.
New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers
JavaScript Data Visualization Libraries
Query Wolfram Alpha right from Chrome
A month of high speed internet is cheaper than a single text book in many countries. Considering there's probably 40 textbooks worth of material on this one page alone, nevermind the rest of the internet, I'd say priorities should be on providing internet access.
I am always horribly annoyed by misused apostrophes.
"It's less portable, since different editors/pagers render a hard tab as varying numbers of spaces, and most editors can have this number altered on a per-user basis too. If you use spaces instead of tabs, you're never relying on a particular editor or pager to have tab width set correctly. Even if you're prepared to configure every editor/pager/platform combination you use, aren't you going to be making life difficult for others who want to read or modify your code?"

Nearly every editor I've used allows you to adjust tab size. In my mind, that means tabs allow every user to set the width that they prefer.
the core of the dispute is not whether the glaciers are melting, but how quickly they're melting.

Most glaciers melt at the margins, seasonally. Most glaciers refreeze somewhere, seasonally. Glaciers don't form at all at sea level at the equator, and haven't for a long, long time, but that hasn't stopped glaciers from forming elsewhere. As I experience an exceptionally snowy and gelid Minnesota winter (I have lived in temperate Minnesota or Wisconsin every winter of my life but for about six when I lived in subtropical Taiwan), I'm not seeing any radical climate change here yet, and the current weather pattern could hardly be called "warm" even on the historical pattern observed in my lifetime.

Weather varies all over the world. Climate change over broad historical time and especially over deep geological time is an established fact, but also has nothing to do with human activity. It's not entirely clear that the trade-offs of anthropogenic global warming, a phenomenon I accept as a fact, are all harmful trade-offs or even mostly harmful trade-offs for the majority of the human population.
Are green auto rules based on flawed science?
And on the other hand, text streams are easy to work with, because ad-hoc tools can be written to work with them, rather than having to wrestle with strongly typed libraries and being constrained to languages compatible with the libraries that define those types. Imagine a web written using CORBA RPCs over rendering APIs, rather than HTML over HTTP.

You can argue that HTML has inherent syntax and semantics, but of course server and client can have slightly different ideas, and it all still works, mostly. The same is largely true of shell programming using pipes: different stages in the pipe expect certain formats, for regular expression or field extraction, and format pasting together, etc. The format is easy to eyeball and easy to test on the shell REPL, so in practice the problems aren't large.
Surely the whole Deep Blue thing is just a false dawn for AI. Beating a human player through brute force isn't _that_ impressive. If anything its obvious.

What would be more impressive is a capped AI that can only look so many moves ahead and uses principles (such as say Nimzovich's opinionated twaddle) to win.
I think it's a novelty, however, I would not use a domain hack for a business unless I knew I could plug the leaks in traffic. For example, del.icio.us was a domain hack but they ended up buying delicious.com.

The average Hacker News reader knows domain hacks (I think?) but their parents probably do not and will just add .com at the end.
QDB: what on God's green earth gets a fucking PL7
Fred Wilson: Texting vs Tweeting
Ask HN: What history of economics and technology book would you recommend?
Hi guys,

I have started to read about how technology impacts the economy of a society. Currently, I'm with "Science and Technology in World History", by McClellan and Dorn.

Would you recommend it? Also, what other books have you read on the topic?

Thanks a lot.
How about tracking HN stories from a custom interface. Starting with this one :)

http://webnumbr.com//points-for-hn-story-on-webnumbr
For anyone who can't read the "x-small" font in the main body, Readability is your friend (http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability)
Predicting the Golden Globe Winners with Google
We're not arguing this part right?

"As the numbers will show, Flash performs far better in Vista versus Mac OS X running on the same hardware, and it actually improved slightly with the version 10 update."

http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/10/benchmarking-fl...

(OS X + Safari + Flash 9 Plugin = CPU hog)
(OS X + Safari + Flash 10 Plugin = slightly less of a CPU hog)
(Windows + Firefox + Flash 10 Plugin = CPU friendly)

I think that part we can agree on. It's unfortunate Ars didn't report on (Windows + Safari + Flash 10) or (OS X + Firefox + Flash 10) since those would have been a nice data points. I'll also admit this article is a bit dated but the point is that here is an example where Adobe tweaked some code and claimed a 3x increase in speed. Users were complaining all that time and some people were blaming the Plugin API. A performance problem can have multiple contributors.

My point is that you would think Adobe would push on it with all of their talent since it's in their best interest to optimize. I think though, that it's only computer geeks who realize it's caused by a plugin (for whatever reason) and the general public just thinks "my computer is slow".

I still have never seen a good analysis/description of what is flawed in the Safari plugin API.

In the end, I just don't think there's enough published data to settle this.
Deep Discount on Space Shuttles
It probably depends on the age, but in primary school both boys and girls love games. Note that I'm not talking about computer games, although that could be an interesting application.

But my point was not if everyone is interested in games and game programming, but rather that you can't please everybody all the time, and game programming can be just one application, which could be enough to show students there are many applications for what they are learning. If you want to teach other applications, that's perfectly fine, as long as you reach your teaching goal.
C? Try English. It is an ill-developed style that doesn't make judicious effective use of the semicolon.
For other examples of incendiary politics, see:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28615688/
it only matters if you do both. only do one.
OT:

Do you not people see these two twin (troll?) threads posted by the same person? Within the same minute?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058196
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058195

http://i.imgur.com/m1DyR.png

Someone went out of his way to find two trivial, but hot-button issues and submitted an argument for each. It's another "experiment".
When I graduated from an ultra-liberal California university in the mid-70s, computing technology was consistently reviled as soulless, cold, and dangerous.

It is interesting to have watched this attitude transmute over the years into a belief, typified in this piece, that such technology will so revolutionize the world as to work some great deliverance in the human condition.

Back in the day, those who criticized the "Machine" would glorify the artisans and revel in the idea of human creativity in its pure form (unaided by advanced tools of any kind). The attitude was almost anti-science and was in any event highly "humanistic."

Now creativity and technology appear to be closely coupled in the eyes of young people in academic settings, to the point where information technology, at least, is seen as having almost redemptive qualities.

Not saying any of this is profound - just wondering if others have observed this changed perception as well or have thoughts on how it might have come about. Is it because technology became "personal" as opposed to "corporate"?

By the way, don't play Fritz as a chess adversary - it is like playing a demon from hell!
I have to wonder where this land (possibly an entire region) would come from

Being a cynical bastard, my guess would be Casamance. There's a separatist movement down there with close ties to Gambia, so the Senegalese government's probably trying to dilute their influence by diluting their demographics --- bringing in Francophone immigrants who are completely clueless about local society (and thus dependent on the central government at first).

Ironically this is the same strategy that Rafael Trujillo used to strengthen the Dominican Republic's border with Haiti back in his day. [1]

[1] E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_settlement_in_the_Domi...
You have mistaken the purpose of the karma system here. It's just a system to encourage civil discussion. Earning back points doesn't matter - points don't matter. Keep up what you're doing and there's a good chance you'll be banned. But you won't know it.
I actually just released http://sit4.us as a tool for coordinating your existing network of babysitters. I kind of figure that having to deal with lost traffic is like having to deal with scaling, it's a problem I wouldn't mind having because it means that people are at least trying to find my site. On the other hand, this is really just a little tool I built because I wanted to use something like it and I couldn't find any existing tools out there. If I was really banking on it becoming a business than maybe I would have covered my bases a little better with the domain name.
Once I had some (considerable, 3 months) spare time and decided to fulfill my ambition of writing a chess program. This one would be special - it would work to a strategy, rather than brute force.
3 months later, and having written it first in Java, then C++, then C, I realised that it could never compete with the brute-force millions-of-nodes-per-second crunching machines.
This actually made me become disillusioned with chess as a whole, although the emergence of Rybka has restimulated my interest somewhat.
The idea that strong chess programs mean that AI is on the march is, sorry, laughable.
>> At school, usually the vast majority of people is interested in games.

>"People" or "boys" ??

Depends on the game.

In my experience everyone likes some kind of game. It's the rare person who can't let their hair down at least every once in a while and enjoy some meaningless structured play.

Sure, your wife may not like Super Mario Brothers, but I can almost guarantee that if she took a probability and statistics class or studied combinatorics that coin flipping, dice tossing, dominoes, odds-taking and card playing were major topics of discussion and about the only examples that can be used outside of pure theory that represented a simple enough model of the topic for instructional and study purposes and had as common of a shared experience as possible.

That being said, I never played many card games growing up, and when those topics were discussed I had trouble relating and thought that like your wife it made it hard to relate to. But at least I knew what it was and what the basic concepts were.

Similarly you would be very hard pressed to find anyone younger than about 30 who couldn't relate to some kind of game.
it's back up
Ending Our Advertising Relationship With BigDeal
His videos. They were all created by one guy.
already may have been involved in past murder and torture cases.

This is the very definition of a movie plot threat: it makes for gripping drama, but is less effective and far more risky than just doing the traditional thing and saying "I'm Bank of America. What is your PIN number?" to as many people as possible. I would be astonished if "tortured for your two-factor identification" was even visible next to old stand-bys like "killed for cash/jewelry/sneakers."
MIT recently started a general AI project http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/ai-overview-1207.html
It's not just that. The REASON why tabs are so bad is because it makes very very subtle errors when they get mixed.

Additionally, tabs are 8 spaces to the python interpreter. If you're not using 8 space tab stop, you're setting up people who use your code for a world of hurt if they ever change anything in your files.
seems to me that you need to install some software to share your screen. that is much more complicated than what was showed in this screencast. since most people that need help with fixing a problem on their computer probably also would have trouble installing and using the zolved.com screen share utility this site is a vast improvement.
I guess PL7 is reserved for nuclear weapon deployment. All running on the same box from 1983, of course.
Sometimes I want to copy/paste SQL from the source code to a command-line interface like mysql or sqlplus. Tab characters are interpreted as tab keypresses, triggering auto-completion. To get around it I have to open a blank file in a text editor, paste the SQL, convert the tabs to spaces, then highlight/copy it again. It's a pain in the ass. I can't be the only one with this problem, but I never see it mentioned in tabs/spaces debates.
My take was similar. It seems to focus too much on flexibility in storage, whether objects or graph elements, to the detriment of clarity in its API.

The one bit that piqued my interest is that it claims to be a distributed database, so looking at its mechanism for such will be interesting.
A classical hypergraph can be easily drawn as a bipartite graph (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipartite_graph). HyperGraphDB goes to an extra dimension (with higher order links) and that's hard to visualise if you want to see connections b/w different abstraction levels. Otherwise, once you get past the slightly unfamiliar concepts, HyperGraphDB would make working with complicated models much simpler.
Is that wall of text really how Wikipedia administrators sort things out amongst themselves?

Did they have a competition to design the most intimidating user interface known to man? It's impenetrable.
Accusation of plagiarism in young scientist award
Me too, but I don't think it does any good to complain about it unfortunately.
The author is an international grand master, the highest title in chess.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Rogoff#Chess_career
I use `:tabstop=2` in vim, and whenever I load the java library source files, the indentation is mucked up: they mix space and tabs (`:ts=8` fixes it). I'm guessing this a common (?)

I use tabs mainly from habit, but I think it helps keep consistent indentation (it's quite easy to be off by one space). Also, with my habit of using `h` and `l` for navigation, tabs mean fewer keypresses than spaces (I should use `w` and `e` I guess)
The Pain of Fame
Hacking for Haiti
Tell HN: You have been trolled.
Not only that, but people's relationships with each other have been changed by machines.

It used to be that the FBI keeping a file open on somebody famous was considered scandal-worthy. Now FaceBook keeps much more personal information on all of us and people don't bat an eye about it. Younger people today seem to have completely abandoned the idea that they might have a private life and that privacy might have great value to themselves and others.

The noble savage and artisan view of humanity has changed into a view that we're all mostly just interchangeable nodes on the world network.

We have become the very machines that we once so hated.
What's interesting is that I never used to care how code was indented, never bothered me. However, I got a job using Python/Django, and almost all of the code in that community is in the PEP8 style (4 space indents, etc, http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/).

Now whenever I read python code that is outside of PEP8 just a little bit, it makes me cringe, but I can still read other, non python code indented almost any way. Thought that was interesting.
Ying: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058196

Yang: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1058195

They been posted right one after the other.

Someone went out of his way to find two trivial, but opposing issues and submitted an argument for each.
Data munging with SQL and R (video)