skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The girl who conned the Ivy League...

...gained admission to three universities — including continuing-ed programs at Harvard and Columbia."

I assume by "continuing ed" they mean the Harvard Extension School and its Columbia analogue. From extension.harvard.edu:

To take courses at Harvard Extension School, you simply register.
No application is required.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good headline.
What if you just let logged-in users have the option to turn off the display of comment points?

FWIW, One method I often use to find interesting discussion here is to just go to the threads?id= page for certain people who I think make interesting comments like you, tptacek, patio11 etc..
As a current consumer of an Oracle database I can say from the purely anecdotal experience that Oracle is sufficently complicated to set up and run that I'd like to ditch it for just that reason. Our Oracle installation sucks and we are in the process of porting away from it. It's just not worth it to try to tweak it to work better.

Oracle seems to be built with just one goal. Pay the salaries of people who do nothing but consult on Oracle. We run a Production Grade Oracle instance with high quality hardware and it still won't perform as well as an equivalent mysql db does.

(This opinion is purely subjective based on personal experience and should be understood with that in mind. I'm very soured on Oracle right now :-( )
Starcraft AI Competition
None of those claims are backed up by actual evidence. I pointed directly to a graph of the CPI which explicitly shows the dollar is only inflating by a few points each year and most recently (when the largest amount of noise was coming out of people's faces about gold) the dollar was actually in a deflation period and getting more valuable.

There may be flaws with the CPI-U data, but I don't know of a better data source. Feel free to point one out.

Until you do however, the data we've explored in this thread directly contradicts all of your assertions, despite their popularity among some.
While serious, I don't think the ramifications of this are greater than the leaked emails - more on that here: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100022157/... (I suspect the words "peer review" will be treated with considerably greater skepticism in the future)

They can and will likely chalk this up to some administrative error, but the underlying contents of the leaked emails, charges of fraud of some of the most prominent authors of the IPCC reports is far more significant. More from a (formerly?) strong supporter of the IPCC reports here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/nov...
But we're not doing this a priori (unless you're some kind of cave-dwelling hermit who'se never seen another man or woman). I certainly haven't noticed any detectable difference in male/female intelligence in my own experience.
When your entire site is a technological solution, that doesn't work. It's not natural to divide conversations and rank them based on merits of "good" and "bad". This is why flat conversations don't succumb to groupthink as quickly or as badly.
I continue to jokingly suggest that people ought to buy pork belly futures if they really want to hedge against inflation.

But of course people just love to think about owning gold and that's what's really driving this madness.
But you need to plan for data growth.
With the flag button that already exists?

The instant you let somebody's comment be worth less than neutral value, you've built a mechanized system that makes people feel excluded. That means anybody who wants to can make anybody else feel alienated from this community. Not that I speak from experience.
New name for blog: Data Sorcery with Clojure
Does anyone know what the author does now, for a living, if not write code?
The disappointing state of Unicode fonts
http://pilotsfor911truth.org/amrarticle.html
436 – A Map of the Great Fear
I'm raising a high content wolf hybrid and a Shiba-ken. I can see the plight you speak of daily. However, the strange thing is that it affects my dog more than it does my wolf. During their walks, the little Shiba just wants to run wild, play with everyone, and generally explore his world. The wolf just wants to run to every shadowy corner he finds, and generally avoids people. He is happiest when back home.

A strange thing I've noticed is that, while at home, both of the animals behave as though they were the same species. Only when outdoors, do the differences become pronounced.

It's interesting having both these guys, I can easily identify which traits of the wolf have been suppressed, and which have been amplified.
From your comment:

This represents a problem: if the total amount of currency available for use in transactions does not maintain rough parity with the total amount of goods and services available to be exchanged in those transactions, then the imbalance will lead to wild price fluctuations.

I strongly recommend reading "What Has Government Done to Our Money?" by Murray N. Rothbard (http://mises.org/money.asp). It's short---easily read in one sitting. It's also lucid---easily understood in one sitting. You are clearly smart enough to get it, and you obviously care. Reserve the right to change your mind---you just might surprise yourself.
A Python-Markdown Extension for Embedding Graphviz
Can anyone explain the importance of reducing overall head movement?
Finally, Dawkins at his prime, not preaching anti-god bullshit. The man is a complete genius when it comes to explaining natural selection, yet he wastes so much of his time preaching atheism.

IMO any intelligent person should come to the logical conclusion: God cannot be proved or disproved, so stop wasting your time! It's as useless as discussing whether a glass is half-full or half-empty, it's a glass with liquid in it!

Dawkins' massive waste of time preaching atheism like it's the Papacy 2.0 is retarded. It loses him all his credibility to everyone except the atheist wackos who are holding him in infallible regard like it's the second coming of Jesus.

Dawkins is a scientist, and as such should be working to teach people to conquer ignorance. Yet he'd rather spend his time alienating the people he could be enlightening. It's, quite frankly, a pitiful waste of such genius.

Edit: I repeatedly hear Dawkins being praised as highly as Feynman, and he is far from Feynman. Feynman was a pure genius, possibly the greatest scientist to grace the earth, but he was so great because he had the ability to relate to the common person, to every person and he had the ability to explain even the most complex ideas to the simplest of people.
The limited supply of gold can also be a hindrance, causing systemic deflation as an economy grows.

Nope. The initial supply isn't what matters. With a fixed-supply currency (well-approximated by gold), the demand for money increases as an economy grows, so (for fixed supply) its price increases as well. Hence, no deflation.

Intuitively, the money supply must increase as an economy grows. Intuitively, clocks tick just as fast at sea level as they do on top of Everest. Intuition is often wrong.

Einstein can help you re-tune your clock-ticking intuition
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_time_dilation). Rothbard can help you with money (http://mises.org/money.asp).
Adobe doesn't need to care about that 6% rounding error at this point

I don't have any hard statistics but my anecdotal experience is that the developers of new, "Web 2.0" applications are more like 60% using macs, not 6%.
Bush and Clinton team up for Haiti relief effort
Trojan based click-fraud that still generates conversions
For what it's worth, when my blog recently hit both sites, the discussion was still pretty good here, and pretty terrible on Reddit.

You've done a better job holding on to original culture than most forums. Not that I'm a subject matter expert, but I made the /. -> Digg -> Reddit -> HN move like a lot of other people. I'd certainly fall under the 'happily try out changes to increase civility.'
I've heard arguments to the contrary, for example that deflation encourages people to invest their money under their mattresses. If money you hoard loses value then you feel a stronger need to invest it, which is better for the economy as a whole. Without that incentive once a person reached some level of wealth they would sit on their money instead of putting it into a nice retirement fund that puts it into the stock market.
I certainly agree about Feynman. I sometimes miss his clarity and honesty. (Among other things, I think he would have been so helpful in untangling the global warming controversy. But also explaining what evolution is and is not, to a layman.)
Why the United Nations is a useless failure
That won't help, because the people who'd be willing to turn them off probably aren't part of the problem.

Then again, maybe I'm overly troll-paranoid.
Having grown up in the UK, and having spent much time in France, and a fair amount of time elsewhere in Europe, I've certainly never seen pepsi brand jeans before.

Where I lived, Pepsi was difficult to find, and I believe the area of the UK I lived in actually had one of the youngest demographics, which is allegedly Pepsi's target audience. I've been throughout France, from Paris through to remote rural villages, and I've barely seen Pepsi there either.

It wasn't until I moved to Canada that I really saw Pepsi everywhere. Where food courts alternate between Coke and Pepsi products. In the UK, the only place I ever saw selling Pepsi products was KFC.

Supermarkets carried pepsi products, however they might only have a tenth of the stock compared to Coke and the local drink manufacturers. Quite surprisingly Irn-Bru usually had similar stocking in the 2L bottled sections. When it came down to cans and bottles, Lucozade usually had double the stock of Pepsi, and Coke obviously dominated.

Edit: In my local convenience store, I believe Pepsi actually lost out to Dandelion and Burdock.
funny, i created this exact same thing about 4 years ago. Got it all working and then lost interest before launching it.
I think it's less of a reaction to technology than it is to the post-9/11 terrorist scare.

Ever since then America's developed severe allergies to everything bombs and explosives or dangerous.

What's worse is an incompetent TSA that's trying too hard all in the wrong places. The only reason the recent terrorist attempt failed was because the guy just happened to be as incompetent as the TSA. Or maybe the plane would have landed on my house and killed me (and would have disrupted my stream of consciousness; I live in the Detroit area) and so in my universe he failed.

But to be completely fair, China's TSA seems to be just as incompetent, probably more so since they really don't have as many terrorist attacks to test their strategies. I had a really small bottle of children's Moltrin confiscated, but it got through USA TSA. I wouldn't be surprised the next time I get on a flight with two sticks to be stopped and questioned. God forbid I start a fire by rubbing the sticks and burn everyone to death while they are sleeping.
It doesn't seem like any of his proposals would have even remotely the impact of Apple's work in 1984. Actually, even compared to the concept of a touch screen phone that works as they developed in the iPhone. Maybe I'm missing a joke here, but I'd say that he's not in a place to criticize if he thinks that "object-oriented drawings" or "wiki namespaces" are going to be more useful innovations than even the tiniest detail of what Apple, or, hell, Microsoft is doing.
"That's for you to decide."

That's a given. I'm asking what you think, and if that was the point of your post.
I think the most important truth about dog evolution is that we still don't know how it happened. Dawkins only discusses one of many plausible theories that have been put forward (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_domestic_dog).

We still live in a mysterious world, with lots of unanswered questions and plenty of avenues of exploration open to anyone curious enough to pursue them!
Why post this now?
not flame bait, just an idiot. flame bait always has some adverts on it, or a some kind of link bait. this guy is just a communist/socialist non-thinking mental masturbate type.
His words, to me, sound worse than you attribute to them. IMO it sounds like "We're going to remove this, if this fuss keeps being made, and only if we really have to."

It doesn't even sound like he cares that part of his report might have been based on nothing more than thin air. It sounds like he cares more about having to do work to undo his gross incompetence.
Wow, Apple just approved Haiti GPS, just a few hours after it was submitted!
"Scientific consensus" is like a used car dealer saying "we're so trustworthy you don't even need to look under the hood!" There's a gaping hole where the engine should be, and no one wants to be asked as to why.
Last I checked, Yahoo was doing an alright job at that.
Http://www.google.com/web is highly confusing.
What is there to change my mind about?

On one side we have a certain amount of goods and services. On the other we have a certain amount of currency which we use as a stand-in. If goods and services outpace currency, you get price swings tending toward deflation. If currency outpaces goods and services, you get price swings tending toward inflation.

Gold is advocated because the supply of it is relatively stable, thus decreasing the chance of serious inflation. The problem with gold is that it creates additional vulnerability of serious deflation.

All of this is so basic that I have a hard time believing anyone could argue with it.
http://meyerweb.com/eric/comment/chech.html
There's no substitute for doing. http://getfirebug.com/ + notepad/gedit/vim + http://www.w3schools.com/ You probably have picked up the basics of web stuff by osmosis. Javascript is just as much a programming language as any other... copy some javascript into the browser and start messing around, use firebug to see what your experiment gets into different variables at various times. You can arrange your windows so you can see your editor, a tutorial and the browser all at once - fast turnaround time for testing code changes is a cornerstone of effective programming.
I think you're drawing a bright white line where there doesn't deserve to be one. White lies aren't "dishonesty"; they're essential social manners for getting along with people. Taken to the limit, in a drunken aggressive situation, white lies may save your life.

What annoys me more, though, is that you seem to be making a moral argument rather than a rational argument. Morals that are not backed by reason are on shaky grounds. And the great-grandparent was arguing by example that lying is sometimes not immoral. You can't counter that kind of argument by saying, in effect, that lying is wrong, that's that, and your argument is therefore worthless and should be downvoted.
>God cannot be proved or disproved, so stop wasting your time!

http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprova...

(tldr: skip to the last paragraph)
Rothbard isn't the end-all and be-all of monetary economists, and there is historical precedent that contractions in the money supply have caused deflation. Also, economies which have gone back on the gold standard have usually deflated as well.
I've had /23s and /22s listed as dynamic incorrectly, and anti-spam organizations wouldn't take them off even when they were either SWIPd through to my company, or were in my ASN.

Getting off the lists is an enormous pain in the ass. They make absurd demands, like changing the rDNS on every single IP in the block to contain the word static.... as though breaking rDNS is a good idea.
If they can inject code, then they can run code
google's opengl browser plugin, which works fine, speaks otherwise.

it's not an api problem. it's that adobe's software is shit.
Analysis of Aurora/Exploit-Comele
That depends whether the instability brought by poking a corrupt regime is good or bad. On the one hand the human rights campaigners could improve democracy and help bring China into the modern world, whilst on the other hand promoting the faults of their corrupt regime could easily result in anarchy and martial law if there was ever an uprising. The major problem here is that an uprising would quickly cause the cost of production to go through the roof in China, forcing virtually every industry to pull out of the country and relocate elsewhere. This major export hit to the Chinese economy could collapse their entire system, and disregarding the international effects, it could easily land China in the situation of North Korea.

Honestly, with the fact that China could so easily result in a massive North Korea, how would that help the standard of living?

China isn't a simple situation and assigning childish ethics to the country will resolve nothing. The simple allowance of unions in China could easily result in another global recession. A college strike here in Ontario is threatening the provinces recovery as it may delay the graduation of all those getting retrained due to the financial crisis. Simply imagine what happened if unionization occurred throughout China and the ramifications for the countries trade.

China is going to require baby steps to bring it into a democratic and free world, anything faster could be an international economic disaster on the scale of the great depression.
The paragraph above is not a quote of Ballmer. There is no actual context provided to say what Ballmer meant by "that," only what the reporter says Ballmer meant. Perhaps that is what the GP meant.
Neat! I have recently been needing exactly this, as I have been obsessively checking Avatar's box office totals to see if/when it will overtake Titanic:

http://webnumbr.com/avatar-box-office-total
You must have been at Super Happy Dev House too!

Lots of great lightning talks.
It must be positional; image recognition would seem a little too good to be true.

Would be delighted to be contradicted, though!
Facebook's move ain't about changes in privacy norms
When I was in school we had friggin' ROCKETS! That's right, we had an after school ROCKET club headed up by one of the science teachers. He'd show us how to build the different Estes models and then supervise us as we launched them, and in class would blow shit up and set things on fire and we all loved him for it. That was 1992. It's sad to know that such would never be tolerated today.
I added a current course and instructor from a college website; when the system didn't know about either (it knew the school), I typed in the 'verify text' captcha number and it went to a new page asking for all the info again.

The design is fine; the concept might help many students, if you can get the traffic.
With these maintenance tasks seemingly pretty well-defined in terms of movements and actions with 3D objects in a 3D space, it doesn't take much imagination to see a suitably equipped robot could be doing this kind of thing pretty soon.
Hey -- yeah, are you in the 280N tshirt floating around? I'll say hi the next time I see you!

Lightning talks were great.
It's odd to hear all this victory hooting over a single hyperbolic prediction with so many glaciers in retreat all over the world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_of_glaciers_since_1850). Ah, but I suppose every claim on the page linked above is also attributable to equally bad science, or perhaps the citations were merely planted there by members of the Shadowy Underworld Global Climate Change Cabal.
Oh man. I regret missing it :(
Anyone creative and determined enough to come up with a lie like that to get around barriers and break into a business, would have creative enough to come up with an alternate route that doesn't involve lying.
"Feynman was a pure genius, possibly the greatest scientist to grace the earth."

Feynman was certainly a pure genius, on that we agree, but saying that he was the greatest scientist is somewhat distasteful, imho. For starters, there's no metric that allows one to measure scientists. And Feynman himself thought that Gell-Mann was smarter than him.

There were various geniuses in the last 200 years. Most did not write their own biographies including lock-picking and doing physics at strip clubs, so the general public forgot about them. Truman once said that the U.S. Marine Corps' propaganda machine was second only to Stalin's. I would claim that Feynman's propaganda machine comes 3rd.

It's not that Feynman was not a genius, it's just that he was not the only one. What about Pauling, for instance? Why is that everytime I go to the Caltech bookstore I see an entire section dedicated to Feynman, a cult of personality that is almost nauseating, while there are virtually no books on Pauling, or Gell-Mann? Feynman was a pure genius not only in Physics, but also in marketing...
What is your home country?
useless data visualization, is this spam? #ITS use FLOT, it's awesome.
Yes, yes: 'On critical examination it can be disproved', so where is the critical examination there? Nowhere. This is simply someone saying, I'm anti-religion and I want my argument to be relevant, which it isn't, which is why it's on lesswrong a 'community blog' rather than somewhere legitimate or relevant.

The argument over the existence of god is simply put, pointless. Religions are irrelevant to the existence of god, they're a construct placed around an idea. You've got to disprove the idea, which places you squarely into philosophical debate, which as I already said is akin to debating whether a glass is half-full or half-empty: fucking pointless.
You make a good point. But I think most people, given the right external stimulus, will become aware of a thirst for knowledge. I think it's an open question as to whether anamnesis is real or not, and whether only people with a predisposition toward knowledge can be wakenened to it. Personally, I believe that given an appropriately interesting, tailored goad, anyone can be stimulated to wonder and curiosity, and the concomitant desire to de- and reconstruct. I think a book or an FAQ can be that goad.
1. I'm thinking CYC is an existing database that knows cups are dishes; 2. If the article points to what useful information it has learned, I didn't find it.
If he's getting into programming I'd suggest nano as your starter text based editor, moving up to vim.
in "embed code for graph": 'allowTransparnecy' should be 'allowTransparency.'
Simple [possible] solution: restrict the number of downvotes and force people to prioritize. Further, you should get future downvotes only as a function of how many downvotes you already have. If you have 0 downvotes, you don't get to do it again, ever.

In this way, downvoting stops being a privilege you get at karma X and starts being something that's not to be squandered. I believe (or maybe hope) that every person here internally wants hacker news to be a good community, and that change will make them cognizant of the fact that downvotes are for special occasions where discourse is uncivil and not for "puttin' noobs in their places"
VIM, do nothing else, master VIM, start there, and solve your frustration. discover how VIM is simply the most efficient time saving conscious enhancing arrow in your quiver. Then write poetry.
I completely agree, in fact, I think it's hard to claim something is science without falsifiable experiments. And yes, I know all about the difficulty of the demarcation of science, but this is just my gut feeling.
Argh. Well that's pretty indefensible. There must be some reason, though - you probably had the bad luck to take over a block that had previously been blacklisted.

That "static" thing is just stupid. God I wish ISPs would just standardise on putting "dyn" into the rDNS of their dynamic IPs though. That would solve so many problems.
> Religions are irrelevant to the existence of god

As the blog noted, that's certainly not what most religious people believe. You're just not in Dawkins' target audience. So if it's ok with you, i'd rather not continue derailing this thread..