skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
...parents that say to a successful child, "Wow, you're so smart" undermine that child's ability to muscle through tougher challenges later on in life.

This bears repeating. This kind of thinking (the "self-esteem movement") was extremely popular in school systems in the late 80s and much of the 90s, when someone born in 1982[1] would have been in school. This kind of "I'm not living up to my abilities" panic is common as a result. It conditioned smart kids into thinking they succeeded because they had a special power, so when that power fails to deliver the results they desire, many have problems.[2]

I say "they", but I myself spent some of my early 20s thinking I had somehow damaged my brain at some point, and did a lot of fretting about how I needed to find out the "trick" to getting back to the level of success I felt a person of my talents was capable of. And I know I'm not the only one here.

The truth is there is no trick. You just do stuff. You get more of it done if you actually care[3] and if it's stuff worth doing, but beyond that it's just tactics and micro-optimizations. You learn what works for you, and more importantly what doesn't, but it always comes back to actually cranking whatever widget needs cranking. Only then do you get to exercise your talent and intelligence.

[1]: I assume the date in "kksm19820117" is a birthdate.
[2]: These days they call that power "Adderall", but that's another story.
[3]: We all have projects that we start because we think we should care, but that don't get done because we don't actually care. Drop them when you spot them. There's no shame in that. You'll free up your attention for the stuff you do care about.
An Important Choice to Make: Your Browser
I think you could make the same argument for lots of things computers do. Could Grand Theft Auto 4, including the character AI and per-pixel 3D rendering, be implemented by people following instructions on cards? Yes, because Turing machines yadda yadda. But it's inconceivable to non-programmers. The Chinese room argument is convincing for the same reason: doing something AI-like requires billions of steps and non-programmers can't imagine building up something that complex from primitive operations.
Has anyone used 4store? They claim amazing query speeds.
This article should be down voted. it says that people should take a lot of coffee, it's insane.
In their words:
"Want a drug that could lower your risk of diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and colon cancer? That could lift your mood and treat headaches? That could lower your risk of cavities?
If it sounds too good to be true, think again.
Coffee, the much maligned but undoubtedly beloved beverage, just made headlines for possibly cutting the risk of the latest disease epidemic, type 2 diabetes. And the real news seems to be that the more you drink, the better."

Now, consider the risks of taking too much coffee (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine):

Main symptoms of caffeine intoxication.
An acute overdose of caffeine, usually in excess of about 300 milligrams, dependent on body weight and level of caffeine tolerance, can result in a state of central nervous system over-stimulation called caffeine intoxication (DSM-IV 305.90), or colloquially the "caffeine jitters". The symptoms of caffeine intoxication are not unlike overdoses of other stimulants. It may include restlessness, nervousness, excitement, insomnia, flushing of the face, increased urination, gastrointestinal disturbance, muscle twitching, a rambling flow of thought and speech, irritability, irregular or rapid heart beat, and psychomotor agitation.[89] In cases of much larger overdoses, mania, depression, lapses in judgment, disorientation, disinhibition, delusions, hallucinations, and psychosis may occur, and rhabdomyolysis (breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue) can be provoked.
In cases of extreme overdose, death can result. The median lethal dose (LD50) given orally, is 192 milligrams per kilogram in rats.[2] The LD50 of caffeine in humans is dependent on weight and individual sensitivity and estimated to be about 150 to 200 milligrams per kilogram of body mass, roughly 80 to 100 cups of coffee for an average adult taken within a limited time frame that is dependent on half-life. Though achieving lethal dose with caffeine would be exceptionally difficult with regular coffee, there have been reported deaths from overdosing on caffeine pills, with serious symptoms of overdose requiring hospitalization occurring from as little as 2 grams of caffeine. Death typically occurs due to ventricular fibrillation brought about by effects of caffeine on the cardiovascular system.
Treatment of severe caffeine intoxication is generally supportive, providing treatment of the immediate symptoms, but if the patient has very high serum levels of caffeine then peritoneal dialysis, hemodialysis, or hemofiltration may be required.

It is insane to write and publish articles like that, without warning people about the risks of caffeine general high usage, and overdose.
I don't understand why people are willing to even accept the premise. The system as described (a book of instructions for manipulating Chinese symbols) can't usefully answer the question "what time is it?"; why should I believe it could carry on a lucid-but-very-slow conversation in Chinese?

Imagine that also in the room is a triangle with four sides. Now the Chinese Room Argument disproves AI and geometry! What subject do you want to demolish next?
I doubt In-N-Out focus-tests, as they never really change anything, but there are a number of other parallels to Apple. They have a near-religious focus on the customer experience, to the point where they pass up significant growth opportunities (like franchising) rather than put that experience at risk. Not to mention that the frenzy around the opening of a new In-N-Out makes an Apple Store opening look positively sleepy.
Almost seems like can you can fund anything web-related and call yourself a Google competitor nowadays
In 1998, there wasn't really the concept of a blog or a blogger. My point is that mass-consumption journalism is falling short of the ethics that it is supposedly built on, but the explicit bias and naked greed of mass-production journalism actually balances out to something more usable, if you're information literate. No one has to pretend to be impartial anymore. But they can and do argue with each other, allowing the audience to watch and make their own judgments.

If you're not information literate, maybe you need a perfectly impartial press with no conflicts of interest. Tough shit--human nature rarely allows us such a luxury. The history of news has more Hearsts, Pulitzers, Murdochs, Drudges, Huffingtons, and Arringtons than any kind of ideal journalists.
Ask HN: What are all the good launch platforms for an Internet startup ?
It should be global, themed around internet and competitive like Techcrunch 50. Absolutely no charging money from participants. An award is a plus.
Sadly, I know only Techcrunch 50.
I'll round it up for Thomas:
- it's likely that the earth has seen temperatures as high or higher as recently as 1000 years ago, with no human input. The level of warming is not precendented in recent (geological) history
- the rate of warming from 1979-2005 matches other rates of warming in the instrumental record, so the rate of warming is not unprecedented.
-there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995
-the production of co2 and associated increase in the atmosphere has followed previous trends and predictions
- sea ice loss and glacier loss may or may not be related to the warming temperature, in many cases it is not clearly known (ie Himalayas) and requires more study. In other cases it may be microclimate changes causing snow loss (Kiliminjaro, deforestation)
- there is no statistically significant increase in extreme weather events measured over the 20th century. While there was an increase in insurance losses, this is due to more people and property living in high risk areas.
- the early IPCC and other predictions made in the late '80s and early '90s have failed to predict the global average temperature
- the underpinning of the AGW theory is that the earth has warmed since the mid 20th century, and scientists haven't been able to find any other reason, so the assumption is that it is greenhouse gases causing this, given they have gone from ~ 0.000035% to .000038% of the atmosphere

Don't believe me though : these are the facts as I have read and understand them, everyone reads and believes different things. Also see Richard Lindzens' recent post to the Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/letters/...) for his views on this type of editorial - he sums this up in a much better way than I could.

Finally, the 'in the pay of big oil and coal' is a tired meme and shows political advocacy rather than a true discussion of the issues. Most of the genuine research sceptics are self funded or in tenured university posts. Yes, there are oil-funded research groups, but these do not provide the bulk of sceptical views. The oil, gas and coal industries have donated millions to climate science research, and AGW research has received billions from governments. Like there is no shadowy conspiracy of climate scientists to instate a communist world government, there is no shadowy network of big oil funding for sceptics.
Ask HN: Would you pay for a 1Password-like service for email?
Given the privacy concerns around Buzz and Facebook's purchase of Ocatazen, it is more than likely that you can be tracked across different social networks if you use the same email address.

Would people be willing to pay for a service that does for email what !Password does for passwords? That is you provide a different email per site but it funnels all back to a specific email of your choosing.

Of course, this is not a Tor like service but at a minimum creepy services such as Intelius and Pipl would have a harder time of mapping out your activities in an aggregate manner.
In at least one pretty important sense, Thomas Kuhn isn't "out there" any more. He's been dead since 1996.
I am not a lawyer, or an accountant, or anything like that.
My understanding is that for federal Canadian corporations a certain percentage (I think 25%) must be Canadian residents.Before doing anything like registering a company in another country it would be advisable to consult an accountant.
> The purpose of philosophy is to protect us from bad philosophy.

Nicely put. I like Wittgenstein's way of putting it as well, "What is your aim in philosophy?--To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." (Philosophical Investigations 309)
I wish our founding fathers had inserted a sunset clause into the constitution that would require each new congress to read every previously passed bill and re-vote on them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_clause
I don't feel at all that my iPhone treats me "like a dumbass". I could not have less desire to change the way I unlock my phone: by about the third time I did it, it was completely natural... so much so that I just had to think for a second to remember whether I have to slide to unlock each time (and I do so probably 100 times in an average day). It just "happens".

In cases where the designers can make a choice for me that's the "right" one, I'd much prefer them to just do that and remove any cognitive burden from me: I don't WANT more things to make a choice about in my life, it's complicated enough as is.

I certainly understand that other people feel differently, and I'm happy that they enjoy their Android phones. But I think our industry has labored for far too long under the assumption that everybody wants to tinker. The fact is, most people actively don't want to tinker; tinkerers are just vastly overrepresented in the group that designs these devices.
Small problem
A friend of mine once told me that a person who explains himself well will never be wrong.

I have an idea. I think it's good. In fact, I think it's absolutely amazing! And everyone i've brought on board believes this as well.

Now here's my problem. What if I just explain the project well? How do I know if i'm really on to something great or if i'm just explaining my way towards absolute disaster and disappointment?
Their focus on the customer experience may actually be religious. They discreetly print bible verses on food wrappers and cups. Maybe they couldn't trust normal people to uphold their Christian affiliation.
At least with android you still have the option to use different contact systems, dialers, calendars, and browsers if you choose to. Android, unlike iphone, is perfectly happy allowing to replace core functionality just about everywhere on the phone.
Actually, I believe the author is a gal : Tara Hunt
Why a day for a shopping mall and a month for the internet? Also, why just one nearby mall? Why not the entire internet vs. all shopping malls for an equal amount of time?

Of course, we'd have to ignore the business the shopping malls do over the internet. So maybe all in person transactions at all shopping malls vs. all consumer purchases over the web, for an equal period.
I don't disagree with the premise. But the phase-out of Gears is because it wasn't a revenue stream, but rather a means of enabling new scenarios on the web that weren't otherwise possible. Its standardization is a win for everyone, including Google.
The creepy thing about In-N-Out is that nearly every In-N-out store is exactly the same. Overall I've been in probably 20-30 that all use the same layout with very small differences (placement of the ketchup station, sometimes fake plants in dividers and a couple variations of placement of a few seats). As well as a few kitchen variations but I haven't noticed those anymore.
I had seen this before too but I liked watching it again.
Avoid This Startup Mistake: Losing Customer Focus
From my reading over the last few months, I think the unanswered question of subjective experience/qualia comes down to the Born Probabilities. http://lesswrong.com/lw/py/the_born_probabilities/
The essential ingredient to Apple isn't the consistent, stylized aesthetic, or the expense, or any of that. The essential ingredient is a charismatic dictator who says "this is what we're doing" and makes the company focus on it. It's usually a very bad business model, because dictatorship almost never works, but it does depend on the dictator.

And there's also no good way of choosing a dictator--someone with Jobs' force of will either makes himself the dictator, or you have to use some sort of collaborative process. No one at Apple sat down and said "let's put Steve in charge again", Steve heard that they were shopping for an operating system, called them up, and spent the next year or two taking over the company.

And if someone makes himself your dictator, he's not always very good at it. Jobs himself almost ran two companies into the ground before his business sense was properly calibrated. You don't just have to have a dictator, you have to have a dictator who knows what to do.
The 9400 is still active when the 9600 is; you can use both at the same with with OpenCL for instance.

And I'd imagine that there's only one video decode ASIC between the two of them, no need to uselessly duplicate hardware.
Ask HN: What are the best ad services for low traffic sites?
I'd like to know some of the options for ad services -- specifically, those that provide ads so I can generate a little revenue from a Website (preferably at least enough to pay for the hosting). I'm looking for things in the same vein as Google AdSense. What are the options? What do the hackers who frequent Hacker News use?

Note that:

1. Services that don't work until some advertiser specifically picks out a given site don't work so well for fairly low-traffic sites, because nobody will ever want to spend money to advertise there.

2. I'm not interested in the kinds of ad services that essentially require me to either write ad copy as site content or to post ad copy written by someone else on the site and pass it off as my own words.
The problems are not, as argued by the blog post on zacker.org, poor adoption. Rather, there are more fundamental problems with formal representations of semantics.

Once you start to sit down and try and encode all knowledge in a formal manner, one begins running into Godelian imcompleteness. Tugging on the string and trying to resolve inconsistencies leads to more special cases and more descriptions, which in turn lead to more special cases and more descriptions, and so on.
In "Ambient Findability", a book on the future of information finding, author Peter Morville calls Knowledge Representation the "quagmire" of good old-fashioned AI.

There is a certain benefit to the formal representations used by the semantic web. Namely, that communication between different systems is enabled by communicating using discrete tokens. The discreteness of these tokens make the choice of token unambiguous, but does not mean that it is a perfect map of meaning. This is similar to language, which is an incomplete and imperfect representation of what is nebuluous and informal in the brain. For example, if I use the word "healthy", you can be pretty confident that I used this particular word (assuming you heard me okay), but you are not necessarily confident that you know precisely what that actually means. We communicate with distinct tokens as our language not because it is a perfect map of meaning, but because its better than using continuous linguistic representations. Imagine if you weren't even sure what word I used at any given point in time, because words are fluidly flowed into each other. So even though knowledge is better modeled probabilistically and continuously, it might be difficult to communicate with a language whose representations was explicitly probabilistic and continuous.

The semantic web shouldn't be viewed as a be-all end-all perfect encoding of knowledge. Rather, it should be viewed as a language for machines to communicate, in an imperfect way, but better than having no language at all.
If that company enforced their monopoly through force then I would agree with you.
Google Officially Deadpools Gears For Safari.
And once again the overriding impression I get is that "bipartisanship" means the other guys should do what I want and not make such a big fuss. A pox on both your houses.
I can't shake the feeling that these are just talking points. He certainly sounds nice, but ultimately his proposals come down to new restrictions on free speech regarding campaign finance (any 'reform' short of a constitutional amendment would most probably be useless anyway, as there are always ways around, as witnessed before) and why is it filibusters are only impeding progress when your own party is in power?

Edit: Just back in Nov 09, he was still in favor of the filibuster. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/11/evan_bay...
The problem with Congress is not that they don't do enough. It's that they try to do too much.
This from the blog they wrote:

As a business, we did need to bring in revenues to cover our costs and development and to accomplish this we created a tiered pricing plan for certain types of uses. Although this was financially successful for us, the side effect of this was that our tools and their features (in their full capacity), were not truly accessible to everyone.

We have long felt that to better serve our core mission our complete feature set needed to be in the hands of everyone - not just those who could afford it. Fortunately, our recent round of funding (by Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions & others) enables us to finally achieve this goal as we shift revenues opportunities to other exciting areas that don't limit individuals in any way. We are excited at the opportunity to stay true to our mission. Not many companies are so fortunate.
Probably because of the sort of stuff found here

http://daringfireballwithcomments.net/
I would say Chipotle is a fair equivalent. Still fast food but a more refined aesthetic inside, hipster music, more expensive food, though quite tasty for fast food, and only a few options on what you can order.

Edit: They also have a "green" angle that they are selling.
I think it was sarcasm...

A sense of which, unfortunately, is in very, very low supply around here.
I think this is the only real objection to Searle.

People get handwavey in these thought experiments, that we can just assume that such a system can be built. Well, no, we can't, not even in theory. It's trivial to show that a Chinese Room that could converse for more than 15 minutes would have to contain more elementary particles than the entire planet.

There is an analogy here with Chomsky's linguistics. You can disagree with the specifics of his theory, but he did show that there was no way that people were learning sentences like parrots and repeating them. There had to be some computational / grammatical process.

Anybody can imagine mechanical alternatives for doing any information processing. To an extent, that drives the whole of the programming industry. The whole question of intelligence is that we can do it with a few pounds of biological material. Anything that doesn't address this is missing the point.
Bill Gates is going to Antarctica - will send notes from there
Why do you need a "platform" to launch on? It really won't have any effect on whether or not your startup is successful.
Wind Power Not On Track For 20% by 2030?
Goddamnit, why do people keep taking Adobe's statements at face value -- shipping versions of Flash on Windows aren't hardware accelerated either!

The Windows Flash 10.1 plugin has been in public beta for less than 6 months, and only accelerates video decoding on minority hardware. A few percent of their install base has it, tops. Flash on Windows has decoded H.264 video at unaccelerated libavcodec speeds just fine without it going back to Flash 9 in 2007, and H.263 going back to Flash 6 in 2002. Neither of those codecs works nearly as well on OS X or Linux.

They're pushing this angle because it makes them out to be the heroes -- see the passive-aggressive spiel you get when you visit the Flash page on an iPhone -- they'd love to frame everything as "if only Apple would let us". Unfortunately it's not true in the slightest.
There are definite UX "costs" to following a Youtube link rather than watching an embedded video: it breaks the reading flow, it distances you from the context that the embedding site often provides, it opens a separate tab or window that you'll need to manage, you need to wait for the Youtube page to load, etc. These might seem like minor things but watching videos is often an impulse act, so any operational or psychological obstacle to the user acting on that impulse makes it less likely that they'll follow through. And the opposite is true too; an embedded video is more visually interesting (think of the still frame) than a generic link, making it more likely that you'll bother to actually watch the video.

There's also a cost to the embedding site -- embedded videos keep the viewer's attention local, whereas linked videos send them offsite, possibly never to return. Many sites will just pick something different to embed rather than risk losing the viewer to the endless morass of distracting content on Youtube.
> This argument is ridiculous. Flash is native code and does not run in a sandbox. It already interacts with graphics hardware through numerous other APIs and has the ability to kill your system in innumerable other ways.

Actually, in Safari 4 (Intel, 64bit) each plugin runs in its own process, and it _is_ effectively sandboxed. If Flash crashes, it no longer takes down the browser, or even the tab a la Chrome; you just get a hole in the page.
>Govt workers typically have great authority to impose things on other people. For example, school officials can suspend students.

Government workers generally don't exercise their own authority in these respects they apply the local rules and laws. I don't know how USA school boards run so I can't say for sure this is true in the school situation however.