skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a really bad title. Something more like "Excerpt from new book 'The Checklist Manifesto'" would have probably gotten a lot more attention.

After reading this excerpt, it's going on my library list. (I'm a big fan of checklists.)
That's not always practical if you're interacting with another service like Facebook that won't know to check.
A female fox is a "vixen" and not a "bitch".
You know, gold is "fake money" too. Money of any kind only works because everyone agrees to want it.
That's a fair question. Issues with misguided draconian measures tend to be revealed fairly quickly, but I also gradually rolled the policy out to several servers so I could make comparisons. With the AWS block in place, I'm sacrificing a lot less bandwidth to the startup crawler du jour (there appear to be a lot of Google wannabes in the AWS space) and there's a huge reduction in exploit attempts/pentesting against all services. It's true that the vast majority of blocks are for DNS requests, without which the domain can't be resolved, so post-block logging won't reveal the desired target host & service. Nonetheless, it's like I applied a pesticide and there is a noticeable reduction in pests. If the pesticide itself proves to be harmful, I'll adjust the amount/formulation or stop using it altogether.
I'd give you two upvotes if I could.
Be very careful about what you want to achieve and why. Developing a product and holding on to the business requires years of commitment and a solid cradle to cradle strategy. Help lines, refunds, quality control and government standards all come in to play. import export requirements, material quality requirements not to mention differing taxation requirements per country and state. Be clear on wanting to license the concept, sell the IP or actually make a business. Not to mention that the profit on hardware is minimal compared to content. (I worked in new business development for Philips electronics for 6.5 years)
Open Laboratory 2009 (50 best science blogging posts of the year)
Claims of Himalayan glacier meltdown based entirely on a single short phone call
I had quite some unsuccessful tries to get started with coding. This one did it for me: http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.pdf
In general, I agree with you. But you can downvote for dishonesty in a comment, and the poster is advocating dishonesty. Not the same thing, but related. I think an argument can be made that that particular comment crossed the line and can be downvoted.

For example, you said that you believe a comment can be downvoted for being rude. I agree. But advocating dishoesty, I think, is far worse than being rude.
Yes. Nobody has ever given me sufficient reason to believe otherwise.

You know a lot of men whose "ambitions and abilities" include dropping out of the workplace every few years to bear children, in what would otherwise be the prime of their professional lives?

Interesting.
No doubt the monitoring has been in place for a long time. It seems the real news is an uptick in shutting off service and requiring IDs and written promises to get service reinstated.
One difference is that gold is in limited supply, and cannot be instantly materialized by the State. Its scarcity, beauty and durability make it a natural store of value when the printing presses are running overtime.

Of course the State knows this too. In April 1933, less than one month after taking office, FDR signed an executive order confiscating all the private gold in the country. I wouldn't be surprised to see that happen again some day.
I've been reading this site all day since I found it on here. Awesome.
Vigor Quest
Why? Just because you think it's clever to imagine that the next level is also a lie? Hell, I can top that...maybe all of reality is a lie!
There's a problem he didn't mention. It's something anyone seriously using VoIP will know - you shouldn't expect it to work on a random network - ever. Nat issues, traffic shaping, firewalls, address masking which is not like natting really, sip ipv6 support - or actually the lack of. These problems will kill your "transparent voip" experience. Of course you can setup a vpn to your server - which will cost you battery life, more firewall problems, more traffic shaping problems and delays caused by another network layer. The highly enterprisy solutions will have even more problems, like MS solutions requiring a login into the company domain. Maybe Cisco has something dedicated that would actually work...

In short - I think there's a long way before we can just walk into a random WiFi range and do a transparent call handover. Or you can use it on a network which has been prepared for this - but there aren't many solutions providing live call handover :( and you need to route that call through your voip to begin with (unless your mobile provider also allows live call transfers).
So it's OK to lie

Perhaps. That's for you to decide.
"Parallels does not have updated video drivers from Apple"

Parallels doesn't run in a browser.
This was the first comment on this post, and I had to wonder if it was an intentional or unintentional example of the article's main complaint.
The Apple Time Capsule Memorial Register
This is exactly what happens when you allow one proprietary plugin to become dominant. I have no doubt that that it's not in Adobe's best financial interests to devote more resources to the OSX Flash plugin. It's a small subset of the market. Most users are just going to suffer with what they have. Adobe loses nothing by offering a subpar experience on OSX at this point. I understand it's not realistic to simply say "don't use Flash, ever" because open standards aren't entirely interchangeable with the wide range of Flash apps out there. That being said we should certainly be trying to minimize the amount of Flash used on the Internet. As an avid user of Click2Flash I find it's quite easy to avoid Flash the majority of the time.
> There are Javascript/CSS demos out there that are much more dynamic/interactive than the average Flash based ad that still use less CPU.

I don't agree with this in general, but let's say that I did: Of course native things will run faster than a sandboxed plugin. Unfortunately Flash still does WAY more than browsers do.

> In a similar vein, there are other Safari plugins out there that do much more than the average Flash based ad that use less CPU.

Oh, like what? Some specialized thing that does one thing only? Comparing other plugins to eachother won't work unless you are comparing the same code vs. each other. Actually, it would be nice to compare flash vs. silverlight in a pure performance test using "real life" situations like video and motion graphics.

> The Flash plugin uses more resources than people expect it to based on their experience with Flash in Windows, as well as their experience with other technologies on Safari/OS X. I don't think it is a collective hallucination.

So now we are back to Mac vs. Windows, and it's been covered enough in this thread that OS X is more limiting than windows when it comes to browser plugins, and it sounds to me like it's up to Apple to fix it, or for some other browser maker to come along and do it better, so we'll have to wait and see.
I remember my dad telling me about different kinds of businesses one can start. He told me about a family friend that's running a pawn shop, and is rather successful at it. I asked him why he never went into the pawn shop business. My dad told me that wasn't a business he'd be able to do by his nature.

I realized a while later that what he meant was that there's lots of ways to make money, but not all of them will sit well with you. Each industry has its cultural values and accepted norms. Everyone's different with the ethical decisions that crop up in business's edge cases. You'll want to pick one that suits your nature so you can sleep at night.

Of course, business is all one gray area. While we may all bend the rules a bit for an advantage, beware those that do it too much. What you do attracts those you run with.

I remember reading in Tao of Warren Buffet saying something to the extent of (not exact quote) "Pick those that are smart, hardworking, and ethical to work with. Especially the last one, because if that isn't there, the first two are going to kill you."
delighted to hear it! I was just projecting a possible future - if a person gets into trouble with a few empty water bottles now .. what will they do to the curriculum later...
It's also been made into a dead-tree book (from Cambridge University Press, no less), for those who like paper: http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/
If someone's interviewing for a job, there must be something they want that they aren't (currently) getting from their employer.
I personally found the submission very informative and useful. I mean, "considered harmful" sounds a little weird, but doesn't really affect the content of the submission.
I'm not aware of any such research either, yet the possibility that people which would later in life develop serious illnesses have higher chances to die as infants in harsh conditions does seem like a plausible explanation of apparent better health of the surviving population.
Would you buy Pepsi Jeans?
"Investigators had never encountered anyone like this mysterious young woman..."

Really, only because they hadn't read about the cases of classic "hackers": Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulson, ...

Fading between assumed identities is a pretty common scheme in my reading, though perhaps less common in reality.
A mineral is only in limited supply when there isn't a rush. (See: 19th century American silver rush and bimetallism). Gold isn't that scarce or that beautiful after all, it's mostly a convention.

The limited supply of gold can also be a hindrance, causing systemic deflation as an economy grows.
Everyone else is left in the email wild west, where they either have massive amounts of physical and reputational capital (Amazon et al) and get their mail accepted for free, or they're almost certainly trying to spam you (statistically speaking).

Hm. I've been involved with the mail servers of a few small businesses and I don't think it's as bad as you're implying. SPF isn't hard to set up, the RBL systems seem to work pretty well, and if you're sending from a stable IP/domain with a few years on the clock and no history of abuse, your mail will usually get through.

I view those for-pay mailing companies as being necessary only if you're sending out something a little spam-like but not spam, like opt-in mailing lists or marketing material or something that might otherwise look a lot like spam. But for regular mail I don't think it's at all necessary.
Yeah that sucks. But you have to admit their reasoning is pretty sound.

The minimum "credible" IP suitable for duty as an email server is probably a cheap VPS somewhere.
Nah. Advocating dishonesty is okay. It's a legit point of view, if you don't like it, say so. He wasn't being dishonest, after all, only advocating it.

Also, it's ironic that your comment was downvoted.
I'd do that, since I want to buy an apartment in Tokyo. But the problem is, I also believe an earthquake is coming ...
Just for reference, all I see is the standard address not found browser error page.
From the article: "The females came on heat every six months like a bitch, instead of every year like a vixen."

He understands the difference.
WebNumbr: graph any number on the web
Tips for surviving a startup interview
I have been wondering for some time why on earth the JCB has been allowing the yen to stay so high. It would seem a no-brainer to sell it down - they have all sorts of incentives. The car companies in particular must be in a state of permanent howling rage about it.

And yet they haven't done it. There must be an awfully good reason for that.
I believe the rc feature exemplified in the link is actually equivalent to that used in the this bash idiom:

$ cmp <(old) <(new)

(only the braces differ). The author of the article describes a case in which the command in question (unlike cmp) cannot read its input from a pipe such as this, namely xdvi. So for instance

$ cat file.dvi | xdvi

or

$ xdvi <(file.dvi)

would not work due to the nature of xdvi, but one could use

$ cat file.dvi | tmp xdvi

as a shorthand for

$ cat file.dvi > /tmp/blah
$ xdvi /tmp/blah
$ rm /tmp/blah

(of course using cat this way would be stupid, but suppose that the file data is going to stdout via a command such as curl, as in the article, and it becomes non-trivial).

I really like the characterization of these commands as sort of second-order and I like the 2 new ones offered here (although I try not to get too addicted to command line features that aren't going to be around when I'm hopping from server to server).
Thanks for the recommendation, I'll check them out!

edit: I see that their 14mb package has a 65 gig/month transfer limit. Teksavvy is 200 gig/month minimum, or unlimited for $10 more.
However, a browser runs in Parallels. Which should really be much more difficult, when you think about it.
The question is: Why is this happening?
It depends on how they computed average life expectancy. Due to high infant mortality, life expectancy of survivors can be in fact much higher.

"Life expectancy is heavily dependent on the criteria used to select the group. For example, in countries with high infant mortality rates, the life expectancy at birth is highly sensitive to the rate of death in the first few years of life. In these cases, another measure such as life expectancy at age 5 (e5) can be used to exclude the effects of infant mortality to provide a simple measure of overall mortality rates other than in early childhood."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy
You can buy a machine with 128GB of memory and 2 TB of disk space for under $10k at Dell. A billion rows could be an in-memory dataset now.
Ultimate Aloe Juice | IsotonicsOnline.com
One of these days, people who believe fairy tales about gold will have to wake up and smell the basic economics:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=629390
Irony: "Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as "voodoo science"." More on Pachauri here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6847227/Questions-over-busin...

Between stories like this and the release of the emails / climategate, you really have to wonder especially about the validity of some of the most alarmist claims. On one hand, I wonder how much of this is because of confirmation bias but how much is the result of outright fraud? Something else that I've been reading more about lately (because of another story here) is the reporting by Gary Taubes on 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' and I can't help but wonder about what supposed scientific consensus means and the importance of skepticism.

Obviously there's a massive body of work out there when it comes to climate science and it would be ludicrous to dismiss it all, but surely it's time to agree that we need a lot more skepticism especially when these claims are being used to advocate policies that will at least cost hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars.
I have heard this story (about personalized porn ) before reading the blog post. At the time I wondered how many people would be comfortable doing so, but in all of NY I figured it was remotely possible. Now, I realize it would be the perfect lie because it was "obvious" that he would not have any material left over, and as a rumor it could easily spread.
I can't stand WoW. I try playing for 30 minutes and just quit.
Unfortunately, I'm not. Growing up in the inner-city (Detroit), the ONLY thing we learned about our ancestors' history was slavery. No desire to thread-jack, but being influenced by such an education system does wonders for one's self-esteem (especially at such a young age)... Seems I have a research topic for the day!
This is both the coolest and dumbest thing I've seen all day.
Unrelated: Is your last name Zlob*? Because mine is, and that's weird.
/facepalm

This was my first idea that I was working on when I started reading HN about a year and change ago. Decided to drop it
http://eloquentjavascript.net/ <-- Really good
http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/ <-- Absolutely awesome
http://www.humblelittlerubybook.com/ <-- Another great starter

http://www.learnyouahaskell.com <-- Once you get the basics done
http://www.learnyousomeerlang.com <-- Another minor jump
I'll be more sympathetic to your point of view when 40% of Americans no longer believe the Earth is <= 6,000 years old and that humans were created in their present form.

Religion is voluntary stupidity, and stupidity has consequences for civilization. Dawkins understands that, having seen it firsthand.
Of Times and Marshmallows
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/10/tsa-cant-believe-macbook-... =]
People can be trustworthy in all sorts of ways. Some people will lie all the time because the truth is boring, but they will also drive 2 hours into the middle of nowhere to pick your ass up when you break down at 2 am.
I think we only see scientific consensus when experiments can't be done. You don't hear about scientific consensus in physics because people can check...
So, if a girl asks you if she looks pretty, and you think she doesn't, what do you tell her?
At my 9-5 I have to use Dreamweaver (code view) and I have no gripes about the text editing portion at all. Maybe there just aren't any IDEs for OSX I've fallen in love with yet, but they all have a sort of clunky aspect to them that can be annoying and can't be changed. Any IDEs that are like TextMate but with auto-completion? (I've done my fair share of looking in the past 3 years on osx.)
Yep, my post was not meant to slam Oracle in any way. It only meant to outline that our Oracle instance was being taxed such that the data pull could not be as aggressive as I would have liked.
Economic Calculation and the Limits of Organization
I'm not sure what you mean by "bogus question." How would you classify these: Does Asia have any native writing systems? Or Europe?
I consider them quite straight-forward.
I am well aware of the cultural make-up of Africa. In regard to your statements about ancient Egypt, isn't that up for debate. You speak with a certainty that even most Egyptologist lack.
When a girl asks you if she looks pretty (and she doesn't), do you tell the truth?

Yes. I do. There are plenty of people who probably think I'm an asshole, but I think there might be more people who trust me.

I'm not saying that I tell the truth in absolutely every situation. There are cases where I would lie immediately-- to save a family member from kidnapping, whatever-- but that's a far cry from lying being merely a weight on the scales. For me, if I'm thinking about it consciously, weighing whether I should lie, the answer is no. I'd even go so far as to call lying Bad.
There's a fair amount of rote and practice involved in becoming good at StarCraft. The "grinding" in WoW can also lead to subtle and gradual improvement at the game that makes you better at it.
True story, I think:

One of the senior engineers at a past employer once worked for a government contractor. Their product didn't work. At all. And everyone at the company new it.

However, their customers were all government agencies, and the work was classified. Which meant that none of them could tell other government agencies that the product didn't work. At all.

So they went on merrily selling the same non-working product to multiple agencies, one by one, until they ran out of agencies working on classified products that didn't already know they were full of shit. At which point I assume the company went bankrupt and the engineers took their saved-up salaries and found other jobs.
Here's an, uh, example: http://webnumbr.com/tlrobinson-hacker-news-karma

(not very interesting yet but you get the idea)
I feel that dogs are somewhat of a plighted animal in modern society. They have a strong desire to wander and be social within their neighborhood, but our living environments today are so heavily bisected along property lines and car traffic that for the most part, they are not allowed outside except in very restricted ways at specific, supervised times.

So the modern dog owner has to work extra hard to keep their instinctual needs satisfied, and most owners can't manage this. Hence, the dogs will bark, and bark, and bark, or try to escape or misbehave, because that's the next best thing they can do when they want to communicate and get attention.
Regarding 1) the interview questions and a little research/verification on the CV should be able to flush that out.
Good point. I did mention it in some other posts. We are moving to SimpleDB for greater scalability and availability.
+1. This, along questions of the validity of other forms of science and journalism--such as Errol Morris' recent work in the NYT about the trustworthiness of photojournalism--has been bouncing around in my head nonstop. How much of what we believe, and the framework of what we decide to believe, is really very fragile?
This seems extremely serious, much more than the leaked email affair. The claim in question has been very widely cited. PBS Frontline even chose this glacier story to lead off their 2 hour special on climate change:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/heat/view/1.html (see Chapter 1, 3:30-6:30. The actual claim is at 6:00 in the video)
In MMOs it's easy: go look at the psychology of rewards. Psychologists found that if you rig up an experiment where you take rats and give them a button where they get food when they press it they'll more or less do the sensible thing: when they're hungry they press it and then eat.

However, if you rig it up so that if they press it they some times do NOT get food they'll immediately press the damn button until their tiny paws fall off. (No joke.) Even though they could do the same thing (press it until they are no longer hungry), the inconsistent rewards makes them freak out. It's the same thing with MMOs--that's why MMOs have loot that you have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting: because it makes people play 24/7 until they die of exhaustion.

As for myself... i prefer to play games that aren't quite as blatantly copied from psychological experiments. Once you buy into the internal logic of the MMO you're done for until you crash and/or quit.
And look at the "correction":

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped: "If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC assessments."

In other words, we'll remove this particular Jenga block in our little tower of preconceived conclusions, but everything else is AOK. What he should be doing is ordering/performing an immediate review of the origins of all similar "evidence" in the IPCC reports, and a close examination of process to ensure this kind of balls-up can never happen again.

Honestly, the IPCC has less credibility than Wikipedia. Maybe they should just ask Wikipedia to do the research for them - at least the WP admins have shown some basic ability/willingness to do due diligence on what gets published.

And the worst thing is, we only shine the spotlight on the IPCC because climate change is a controversial subject. How many other government departments are practising this "well I read this in a magazine somewhere" style of policy-making? All of them?
Deflation isn't bad.
That problem is undecidable and bubble is not well defined[1], but you only have to look at the price of gold to see that there's evidence for a claim that gold is in a bubble.

Certainly the idea that gold is immune to inflation, overvalue or a bubble is entirely absurd and outright dangerous to the people who might fall into the trap of believing it.

[1] If someone had such an algorithm Wall Street financial firms would be making untold amounts of money off of it, most trading algorithms are just rough heuristics that happen to work, but rarely work for extensive periods of time or any specific claims.