skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The government would not need to buy the land. There is a lot of land to given away. The only problem is that it will have to be about 25 minutes outside the capital (where houses cost between 160k-200k USD). I do not see them giving land anywhere within the capital, but if you are willing to make a 30-45 minute commute than you will end up with a nice piece of land, near the ocean.
I like the style and I appreciate the idea. In fact, I’ve been working on something in the same direction. So, here are a couple of things that I prefer to do differently. First, these are video lectures but without actual students present. As a result, he is essentially talking to himself. I noticed that this causes him to skip some details that students might be wondering about. I prefer to start with actual lectures and initially put them on the web as pdfs (http://users.marshall.edu/~saveliev/Teaching/Fall09/m430/upd...). Then I transcribe them to an online version (http://inperc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Introductory_algebrai...). This is the second problem I have with his approach. Video just isn’t enough. I don’t’ have to explain to you what video doesn’t have and html does: searchability, cross-linking, speed of download, the ability to read and work at your own pace, etc. Certainly, my way is much slower.
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In quite possibly my only point of agreement with Noam Chomsky, I think our discussions of AI are impoverished because they turn on a distinction of language not of fact. Machines that can "think" are AI, machines that can do impressive calculations but not "think" are just impressive calculators. This is not a statement about AI, this is a statement about the English word "think". It sheds about as much light as asking whether an aircraft carrier can swim. (I am informed that aircraft carriers do indeed swim... in Russian.)

A lot of the other "Oh, that's just a cheap trick" non-AI things are a) much more useful to humans than the sci-fi notions people think of when they think AI and b) actually exist in the status quo. For example, if I told you that there exists a program which can make evidence-based judgments of a human's character to tell you whether they are likely to be trustworthy or not in their future business dealings, you would probably say "Egads! That is clearly AI! Holy cow, that is lightyears ahead of passing the Turing Test, and we're nowhere near passing the Turing Test!"

But if I told you "The program is called a FICO score" then, pfft, that isn't AI, that's just clever math and good selection of data sources.

This is one of the reasons why academic AI is, ahem, pretty dead as a field: after you actually get something working we drum you out of the field. Telling the topic of a document by reading it and understanding what it is about? AI! Leveraging anchor text on the link graph to do the work for you? Boooooooring. Granted, billion dollar business boring but still boooooooooring.
It seems to me the fascination with this type of story (and it's not the first I've seen here) is the element of remaking ourselves. A lot of famous people got famous under a stage name: John Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison; John Mellencamp became famous as John Cougar; Julie Newmar was born Julia Chalene Newmeyer. On this site, the man behind Mixergy took the name Andrew Warner because his ethnic name was an obstacle to business success. Many people also go by "handles" on various online forums rather than their real name and plenty of people have nicknames that their close friends use for them.

I suppose one lesson to learn here is that there is a right way and a wrong way to remake yourself. And that assuming a new identity does not automatically prevent problems from following you.
...just in case Haitians wanted to move to an even poorer country. (They rank 149th and 166th, respectively.)

Also, flagged. This story itself seems to be the political equivalent of link-baiting.
I doubt it. Casamance is the most fertile part of the region, but unless Haitian are used to working the land, it will not work so well for them. There is plenty of land in Senegal. There are only 2 problems: 1) If you want to live near the beach, then you have to move 30-45 minutes outside the capital, 2) There is not much infrastructure inland to accelerate growth for a newly formed region.
This is interesting; reminds me of lisp in Haskell http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp-in-haskell.html

Is there any practical use for these kind of projects? I imagine it might make make it easier to write multithreading programs when the lisp is implemented in a purely functional language. At least Haskell seems to have decent multithreading support, I don't know about F#. Are there any other reasons other than curiosity to do this?
Take Arizona, it is not fertile, but Phoenix is one of the fastest growing city in the States. If the land is not fertile it helps in some way, because you have to find different ways to survive. Welcome innovation.
Everything here is spot on. Most branches of mathematics do not apply directly to games in the same sense that they apply to sciences, financial analysis and other real-life examples.

Games may occasionally be mentioned in passing when applicable, such as using traditional games as examples of probability or the importance of linear algebra and trigonometry in video games.

The problem is that the mathematics used in video games aren't introductory. You need to know a lot about these foundations before you can get very far. Chances are, if you are studying them at such a level, you know what role they play.
The issue is not that a few people are making innocent mistakes, it's the organizations (the UN in this case) which are entrusted to lead research into this which are doing it.

These are the same organizations who are cited as the "scientific consensus" to deflect criticism and debate.
I don't have a problem with anyone disagreeing with the statement you're disagreeing with. But I find it really troubling that the first response to it is to flag it. I have seen people on hacker news regularly discuss whether or not there is global warming, whether or not HIV causes AIDS, and whether or not men are genetically more likely to be geniuses than women, each subject which has the potential to offend any number of people. Given what hacker news is, I don't see why Israel should be such a taboo subject. I don't see why it is better to flag than to refute.
Autonomous robot 'gliders' explore oceans up to 1000m deep, weeks at a time
Origin of Mac vs PC ads?
Up until recently I think the country was politically stable. It still is in some ways. The only issue is that the population at large is not happy with the president and his son who supposedly wants a piece of every major business in the country. But overall it is rather peaceful place, and given the way Muslim (95%)and Christians respect each other, I think Israel can learn a "thing or two".
OpenBTS: Cheap, open source cellular network
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.

That's a really good observation. People who are below a certain age don't have much perspective on

a) how mundane most information in FBI files always has been,

and

b) how much more pervasively personal information about most people is now shared by computerized networks than it was shared by small town gossip.
In general I try not to use a sampling of people different from the general population, filtered through my own personal biases, to draw conclusions like this.

Further, your inability to see a detectable difference might simply be due to a lack of a margin between the two groups. Humans are great at separating groups, they are not so great at detecting small differences between groups.
How many people are interested in doing something where they must "get over" discrimination? Most women who stay in the field are ones are really excited about it, naturally very good at it or very lucky not to run into idiots early on -- usually all three. That weeds out a lot of talent and a lot of people who would be otherwise interested.
We have a Godwin here!

Does that mean we can get rid of the stupid climate change articles and talk about something we actually know about and participate in, like hacking and startups?
I don't know much about meteorology either, so most of my facts come from the media. Perhaps that's the problem. For all we know, there may have been posted lots of papers that predict this. When I see all the errors in the reporting of technology, I don't have much hope for an accurate reporting of meteorology.

For what it's worth, I do remember reading that one of the consequences of global warming is more extreme weather (both rain, wind and warmth/cold)
For most people, they come out of high school not just poor at math, they come out "Math Broken" as one of my friends puts it. The second you mention anything to do with Math, their eyes glaze over and their brain completely disengages. I think there are a lot of things that contribute to that, but generally Math is not taught in a very approachable way. The KhanAcademy is I think a very good start in solving that problem.

I came across this site through an article that was on HN sometime last year, around November or December IIRC. Since then I've watched roughly 100 videos on that site. Some of the Finance videos, Trig, and Pre-algebra as a refresher, and I'm now roughly 60 videos into the Linear Algebra videos. Even though I'm in the midst of my master's program now, I've set a goal to watch 2 video's every day as time permits.

I am so impressed with this site, and with Salman Khan. The math is very well done, but it's also very approachable. Most of the videos are roughly 10-15 minutes in length and are highly topical. That makes it easy to jump in and pick up a refresher on something you haven't seen for a while. It's also great for getting into something you haven't ever seen before. Personally I haven't ever had Linear Algebra before, and if you've looked at many of the textbooks, they are pretty dense, particularly if you are self learning. I've found this site to be a great resource in getting oriented and it has really helped me get some traction.

I have recommended this site to dozens of people, and while most of them don't share my love of mathematics, they have been able to get some traction in various problems by using this site as a supplement.

Anyway, as a daily user of the KhanAcademy, I can't say enough good things about the site. I don't think it's a stretch to say it has the potential to revolutionize how math is taught.

The one downside to the site I've noticed is the lack of problems sets. There is a tester that will walk you up through the different topics, but unlike the video's you can't just start where you feel you need to, you have to work up through the early material, and that's fairly time consuming. I have a number of other resource's I'm using for problem sets, but it would be nice to have a few problems to work through for each video.

Overall an absolutely fantastic resource.
Rating: 10/10
Even so I am not convinced it is so shocking. Take the guy who dismissed questions about the melting of the glaciers. Was he involved in actually writing the report? When was the question posed to him? Perhaps it was just some inpatient moment when he was tired of silly questions, so he dismissed whatever was thrown at him. Maybe he just decided to trust his staff, and was let down. Or whatever.

Were the glaciers the main point of the report, or just a footnote? Probably there was a lot of information in it, so the people who wrote it eventually got sloppy with fact checking.

Also, isn't science about double-checking? I would have thought that melting of glaciers would be easy to measure via satellite imagery.

Errors always happen - they should be corrected, maybe even organizations and procedures should be restructured. But it isn't shocking.

Maybe I just don't have some grand illusions about science, as others seem to (still) have. But somehow the whole thing still lurches forward, just like the big corporations that seem as if nothing should ever be possible to get done.
NYT, while you're charging for things, please let me purchase an ad-free version of your iPhone app.
Indeed. And from the other end work in neurology and applied computer science continues to push out the boundaries of things that count as mere "cheap tricks". 40 years ago, no one would have looked at the face recognition and red-eye reduction features on our $100 cameras and said it was "obvious". It looks a lot like "thinking" if you don't understand it. Likewise the operation of much of the brain is better understood than it was in the 60's, and we're less likely to ascribe magic terms like "thinking" to the brain; even things like consciousness are starting to look like a trick (albeit not a cheap one).
Total ordering of Lisp objects
Ask HN: Does Windows Mobile have a future?
I am planning to buy a smartphone which I will have to use for next 3 years. I was wondering if WinMo is a good OS of choice.

I have to open a lot of word documents and ppts and mails. What can be other alternative ?
The answer depends entirely on what kind of startup you're trying to make and who your audience is. If you want businesspeople and grandparents, having a snappy dot-com is crucial. If they're more tech-savvy, what they remember to punch into Google is a lot more important than the URL. From memory, I believe the domain for Scriptaculous is scripta.culo.us, but I would never type that into an address bar blindly.
Avoid some common pitfalls
Not a folk tale, just a visible representation of the local competitive environment. Animals in the Galapagos are generally less flighty because the entire ecosystem is not very competitive: everyone lives off the bounty of the sea. The booby birds, the iguanas, the tortoises... are not intimidated by us because there are no land or air predators to eat them -- not in their risk profiles. Like any other security measure, you optimize for the challenges you expect.

In other environments, apex predators still have a flight response because they still have predatory competition (e.g., wolves against other wolves, or other dangerous situations). The flight response increases based on individual vulnerability - e.g., a well-fed pride of lions will barely observe nearby vehicles on safari (they are some of the most self-confident animals you may encounter) but hungrier singles take more notice.
are all languages implementable in every other language?
It's not about calling the entire peer review system into question - it's about being skeptical about whether or not results can be trusted on the sole basis they've been peer reviewed - particularly in areas of scientific controversy.

From the linked article: "As Climategate has shown, [the process of peer review] became compromised – causing an instability. As seen in the leaked emails, many within the climate establishment were interrelated and working together to ensure their message of global warming wasn’t diluted. There were even desires to redefine the peer review literature to punish journals that published skeptic’s papers."

It's not just climate science (as I've been reading on nutritional science with Gary Taubes and Robert Lustig).
I really like "The Worldly Philosophers" by Robert L. Heilbroner. I don't know if it's as focused on technology as you're looking for but it does a good job of showing how economics and economic theory evolved over time and the circumstances the people driving it were in that would have helped shape their thoughts.

It has a short chapter covering the time before "modern" economics and then covers many of the major economists from Adam Smith to Joseph Schumpeter.
To be fair, this is partly because python is uniquely sensitive to whitespace issues. Other languages don't tend to care as much. C code that's mixed between 2, 4, and 8 space indentation might be untidy, but it's really not that big a deal to read it as long as the code isn't broken in other ways.
This is also why gambling is so addictive: intermittent reward.
Another solution: make down votes "cost."

If a user hits the down-vote then a comment box opens requiring a reason. I don't mind down votes, but I can't stand not knowing why. It's like a (bad) dog owner who comes home and beats the dog for pooping on the rug. Poor dog did that hours ago and thinks hes getting beat just because owner came home. No lesson learned and it fosters a poor relationship between the two and encourages "acting out."

Additionally, if "the reason" received n down-votes HN could automatically cancel the DV to the original comment.
tabs and spaces are different things to the Python interpreter. If you really want to, you can mix them in your code. But you cannot mix tabs and spaces on the same indent level.
We're just talking about default assumptions here, so I'm not sure what you're getting at. Of course my default assumptions based on my own personal experience might be wrong; that's why they're just defaults.

>Humans are great at separating groups, they are not so great at detecting small differences between groups.

Is this actually true? It seems like a bit of a sweeping statement, and I'd be surprised if you have any hard evidence to back it up. Also, the observed inequalities between men and women are currently quite large, so it seems unlikely that very small differences between men's and women's abilities could explain them.
If you use spaces instead of tabs, you're never relying on a particular editor or pager to have tab width set correctly.

Tabs aren't just used at the beginning of lines. There might be a left-aligned, multi-line comment to the right of a block of code(...)

I cannot fathom what point he thinks he's making with these. If you're using tabs in a way that depends on tab width, you're doing it wrong.

Tab indentation generally means that one tab character is one layer of indenting. That's it. It's about semantic structure, not layout.

If you want to make ASCII art, or align things like paragraph-style comments, or "indent" things that aren't part of a block of code like pieces of a lengthy conditional clause split over multiple lines, use spaces instead (and then the five people who use proportional fonts will complain that using spaces for alignment "isn't portable"). Of course, if you're using a language with an off-side rule for syntactic whitespace even a die-hard tabber ought to just use spaces.

Personally, I dislike that sort of non-semantic formatting business in source code (and I think off-side rules in syntax are a horrible idea), but that's a matter of taste. And obviously, consistency is vastly more important than the particulars of indenting style. But I get tired of people arguing against tabs on the basis of not knowing how to use them properly.

On the other hand, this unintentionally makes a different, very strong argument in favor of using spaces: people can't manage to use tabs properly, so don't let them. This is why we can't have nice things, folks!
why would you call this trolling? the submitter's history indicates he is participating here in good faith. and i think the idea of finding two articles espousing diametrically opposed ideas and submitting them both is pretty clever. further, the conversations generated seem to indicate that people here want to talk about this constructively.
team's what?
In my experience the "Best Hiring Tip" is actually: ask the person to do the thing that you are hiring them to do (or a representative exercise), and see how well they do it, or how much potential they demonstrate.
The United States is the leader in psychiatrists for scientists.
The REASON why tabs are so bad is because it makes very very subtle errors when they get mixed.

And the reason why spaces are bad is because it makes subtle errors when they get mixed in with tab-indented code. This is an argument for consistency, not for using spaces.
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That and high-speed internet may be a sunk cost anyway.
YouTube Moving to Open Formats?
I'd avoid Windows Mobile. It's stagnating and is not as beautiful as iPhone or as open, hackable and nice as Android. BlackBerry might be worth checking out too.
What’s wrong with the Linked Data world - Keyword Search
I don't describe myself as religious as that to me has connotations of order and regulation that I don't ascribe to. However, I am a man of faith (I believe we all rely on faith in some way) - I've directly experienced God and as a Christian most people would pigeon-hole me as "religious". I have not directly experienced or observed evolution. I find macroevolution to be too large a leap based on the evidence I've seen.

You describe me¹ as adopting voluntary stupidity. Could you give me some pointers as to where I'm being stupid.

---
¹ I'm assuming "religion is voluntary stupidity" to mean "all those with religious faith are choosing to be stupid".
Nope. For example, you can't parse HTML or source code with a regular expression, because of limitations on how the language itself works (it doesn't have the ability to parse nested structures).

However, in practice, most common programming languages can be used to implement other programming languages...it's just a matter of how much/little code you're going to need to write to do it. Using this article as an example, it would be much easier to implement Scheme in F# than it would be in C#, due to some features of the F# language.
Isn't the metered system as adopted by the Financial Times simple to circumvent? I simply open each article in an Incognito Window in Chrome and I can read as many articles as I want.
Exactly. As someone said the other day on HN, argue over the issues, not the details. :)
It sheds about as much light as asking whether an aircraft carrier can swim. (I am informed that aircraft carriers do indeed swim... in Russian.)

"The question of whether machines can think... is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

This is one of the reasons why academic AI is, ahem, pretty dead as a field: after you actually get something working we drum you out of the field.

Even if you're really just using techniques originally developed by AI researchers. It's kind of silly.
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Your argument changes with each comment. It's less about defending any coherent perspective about software and security, and more about prolonging a pointless argument on Hacker News. Despite opening with a tirade about not accepting the failures of commercial software, you attempt now to wrap up your argument by referring to "the code that runs my coffee machine".

I don't care about your relative inexperience in software security. I care about the disrespect to computer science; the utter certainty that your comments betray that an unsolved problem that implicates vast swaths of terrain in CS is in fact solved, and could be put into practice if only every software practitioner would behave in some unspecified and abstract way that Ricardo Banffy has determined for them.
Wow, that's some deep material. Thanks for the link, Chaos.
Wired - A Romance by Gary Wolf

Very inspiring story of the rise and fall of the coolest magazine on the planet. Worships upon the altar of the driven, scrappy, and relentless. Nothing else like it.
Reversing itself, FDA expresses concerns over health risks from BPA
I agree with everyone else that it's a fantastic resource and the material is brilliantly presented, but I don't think it will help with the "Math Broken." I'm absolutely not knocking the resource or the site, I can't say enough good things about it, but if someone is already glazed over at the very mention of math, I don't think the videos here will help.

If you think otherwise then I'd really appreciate a suggestion, as I have someone I'd like to point at it ...