skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting, related question: when is a creature self-aware enough to be held to a different standard of behaviour than, say, a dog?
When the project reaches the phase when everything is obvious, no challenges are left, but just a lot of routine work - it becomes non-interesting. I think this is normal.
Uh, sorry, I'm thinking in terms of italian definitions. Probably in other countries these are a little different.
Pure science is purely descriptive, it is not prescriptive.
People often use science as justification for prescriptive action. But prescriptive action also always requires a categorization of outcomes as [good, bad]. Good vs. bad is an aesthetic decision that is not intrinsic to pure science.
ANTHONY MORRISON
Anthony Morrison: Anthony Morrison Testimonials. Anthony Morrison Autobiography: The Hidden Millionaire. Learn The Secrets That Made Anthony Morrison A Millionaire.
I embed text on my blog every day. There’s even a special tag for it. It’s called “blockquote”.
If you've spent any amount of time at the Ars forums, you wouldn't refer to Peter as "clueless".

Committed bytes is completely the wrong metric to appeal to, since it includes pages that have been committed but have never been touched. Windows reserves space for such pages in the page file (it never overcommits), but saying that it leads to "memory pressure" is ridiculous.
We recently wrote a blog post about monitoring DJ workers with Webmin that you may find helpful: http://blog.activeinterview.com/post/2010/01/28/use-webmin-t...
I don't understand why it doesn't have a concept of a cursor? Windows Mobile phones have the concept of cursor and I can have a mouseover by holding the cursor over something whether it's with a finger or stylus, and then click by tapping either with my finger or stylus.

What's the disadvantage to having an invisible cursor so that mouseovers work? Couldn't the cursor "appear" to the system when your finger is on the screen, similar to how the cursor shows for restaurant POS terminals when your finger is on the screen and then disappears when your finger is off it. Clearly I'm missing something.
No, a large part of file caching in Vista and 7 is preemptive -- Linux doesn't do it by default (I think there's a utility called preload that does it).
Trade Shows/Expos in the US for Web Products?
Hey. I'm looking to promote my CMS http://halogy.com and my Project Management software http://projectbubble.com at a trade show/expo in the US (ideally CA?).

Can anyone make some recommendations for the best ones to go to? Cost of registration? Any tips (e.g. bring business cards and a laptop with a working version of the site... etc)?

Thanks guys.
A touchscreen is not a trackpad. Their interaction models are markedly different, though they might (superficially) appear similar.
I don't think self-aware is a good metric. I would argue the economy is self-aware. I think a better metric of how evovled or human-like something's consciousness is would be capacity for analogical reasoning.

Humans are by far the best, by the great apes and dolphins can do it too.

A biologial metric that is more accurate than brain size is cortical folding. Again humans have the most, but bottlenose dolphins actually have more than early human ancestors.
FINDING THE RIGHT COLLEGE FOR YOU
The impression I got from (briefly) reading the Adobe Labs page on slider is that it still would require all existing content to be re-written for it... which really negates the main reason for Flash on the Ipad: the dearth of existing Flash content on the web.
Hacker NEWS (?) re an article from 2006? Come on, you can do better ...
Ask HN: List of all YC startups?
Does anyone know where I might find a list of all 172 YC companies?
Because our society has not debated the consequences of cognitive enhancement, and we are worse off for it. There are moral arguments for and against enhancement, but the way it currently is prohibited, yet tolerated (nearly everyone who really wants to can game the prescription requirement), is the worst way to handle it.

So why not allow healthy people to take it? Because it distorts the competition - not who studied the most wins, but he who enhanced himself best. If you allow some enhancement, why not others forms? What about artificial limbs for athletes? Where does enhancement stop? What about everyone then feeling pressured to enhance themselves to still be able to compete, if they want to or not?
In my opinion, there are none. Paypal sucks but it's also the best. I tried switching to alternatives for a while, like Paystone, E-Gold, etc. Sales plummeted as a result, they're too confusing for customers.
Simple pager for ASP.NET MVC
The Partnerka - The secret behind Blackhat Spam SEO
If you've spent any amount of time at the Ars forums, you wouldn't refer to Peter as "clueless".

Please explain, for the (majority?) of us who don't spend time at the Ars Forums
I concur. If I were at Harvard Law School or someplace similar, where supposedly 1/3+ of a class take cognitive enhancement drugs, I'd really try to start a ruckus about it. Either expressly allow it or prohibit it effectively (require signing a form allowing the school to revoke your JD in case someone can proove you took drugs etc.; any way to increase the moral tresholds for taking them; ethics courses and honor codes obviously don't work).

Alas, ignoring the problem and thereby severly distorting the outcome of any mental competition is what's going to happen for the next decade.
Candid Search - XNXX.COM
Great great article.

As far as my memory serves my I do though think that the article is making one claim that is wrong.

It was Bach and not Mozart who was obsessed with numbers and not phi or fibonacci.

Harmony in western music is based on phi subdivisions of the octave.

Fibonacci is used in design and art quite a lot. the A paper format (A0, A1, A2, A3, A4 etc.) is based on it.

When you see a website that is "pleasing to the eye" that is often (but far from always) based on some interpretation of Fibonacci sequence.

Most probably it's the consistency in proportional difference that is pleasing and not phi in it self.

Phi and f are retrospectively pleasing because they are culturally imposed on us. If you divide an octave in ten (instead of 12) then you get a different division of the octave but it wont feel pleasing to the ear.

Just as the Arabic division of the octave is quite different and doesn't really allow for harmony.

So I think it's premature to just throw it all out and say nonsense. Neither Fiboncci nor Phi are some natural constant but they might be a cultural constant for the west.

Or as Wittgenstein said:

"The faculty of taste cannot create a new structure, it can only make adjustments to one that already exists"
It may be that this comes to pass eventually, but soon? Not a chance. The majority of kids don't even have any access to a programming course until college. The students I see in my intro courses often don't even have a very solid understanding of what a (mathematical) function is, much less have the precision-of-thought skills one needs to successfully program. It's one of the main things we have to teach in CS1. And these are the kids that actually want to learn to program.

So, not soon, no.
Dunno why you got voted down, but it's a rule here not to use them. URL-shorterners are very handy sometimes but here they are completely unnecessary, there's no 140-char limit...
Whoa, I really apologize if I came across as harsh there, I seriously didn't mean any offense, just that at 7 years old, I wouldn't have even known how to process a youtube video, or what a wireframe even was. I guess my point was that I doubt the creator of this video ever imagined that a seven year old would be watching it, so it's a bit silly to get mad about the content of it. Also, when I made the comment I had just gotten inside from having my four year old niece help me tune up my bikes...it was really more of "hey, playing with little kids is really fun and everybody should go do it", not "GRR YOU ARE T3H SUX-ZORE!".

Sorry, that came across wrong and I apologize; my bad.
Exactly. When I was reading this, the first thing that came to my mind was that my MacBook has a multi-touch trackpad. Probably the solution would be to enable a mouse pointer over flash content.
School district: Spy Webcams activated 42 times
"That’s not because of slow mobile performance, battery drain or crashes. It’s because of the hover or mouseover problem."

That is a problem with mouseover NOT with Flash.

The same thing can then be said about any website out there running on jQuery or Ruby that uses the mouse over for tooltip or menu pulldowns.

Just because the input is different does by no means suggest that flash couldn't be used.

The argument of performance is the only one I can see right now that have any merit.
Why the downvote?
Licensing my CMS commercially, without having to use a solicitor
Hey,

I've been looking at distributing my CMS by selling copies of it on the website. I have been working hard on it for two years and don't plan to just give it away for free like a lot of open source CMSs out there.

However, I want developers to have access to the code so they can make the alterations they need to make, and also submit bug reports etc.

What I don't want though is for them to change the code a bit and then re-release it as free, or even sell their own version of it.

I've looked at GPL but there are issues when selling software under GPL. The closest license that I have found is the ExpressionEngine license, but then to get something like that I'd have to pay a solicitor a lot of money to draft me a license and I just cannot afford it.

The CMS is Halogy - http://halogy.com and is at the moment hosted. I get emails almost daily asking when its going to be released or sold, and I can't really answer the question until I have the right license for it.

What I do know though is that I want to release a free copy for Non-Commercial use, a 'Freelance version' for about $99 and a commercial version with lots of modules for about $199. I would also like to sell modules separately in a shop.

Please advise.

Thanks guys.
This also works well on pub trivia machines.
I personally think that there are plenty of people, and organizations, that are doing less than nothing by sabotaging the work of others. Nathan Myhrvold's latest venture qualifies, as do many game playing executives killing internal innovation that threatens their area.
Crunchbase seems like a good start, but I'm not sure how up-to-date the list is
http://www.crunchbase.com/company/y-combinator
For the point about government, see Wikileaks and Twitter/Youtube following the Iran election.
My thoughts exactly :)
I'd say the status quo is bad but not the worst. It would be better if cognitive-enhancing drugs were available for anyone who wanted them. It would be worse if using drugs for cognitive enhancement was illegal.

I don't think the sports analogy maps. Sports are artificial competitions and usually zero-sum. Commerce is cooperative. Intelligent individuals often benefit the less lucky. They invent new technologies that end up helping everyone.

If you allow some enhancement, why not others forms?

My sentiments exactly.

What about artificial limbs for athletes?

I guess that would be the Paralympics, but I don't have a problem with it. Cyborg kickboxing sounds more interesting than any modern day event.

Where does enhancement stop?

Hmm... matrioshka brains I guess. Although I'm willing to compromise and limit people to Jupiter brains.

What about everyone then feeling pressured to enhance themselves to still be able to compete, if they want to or not?

The same can be said for getting a college degree or some other kind of certification. Yes, people feel bad when they have low status, but the benefits of enhancement technologies outweigh the costs. I'd rather live in a world where Einsteins were 1 in 10. That world would have a better chance of solving humanity's problems.
Yes, computers are more widespread these days, but I don't see the amount of kids being interested in programming change anytime soon. When I was a kid in the 80s, not everyone in my class or school had access to a computer, but some did. Of those, not everyone cared to learn how to program, only a few did.

Today, everyone has access to computers, and the programming tools are better and more varied, but I still think that most kids actually thinks it's boring as hell to learn how to program, there's still only a small amount of people who have a passion for it, and the focus and aptitude needed to become good at it.
It strikes me as arrogant to dismiss a system as 'not valid' that has apparently worked pretty well for literally billions of people for thousands of years.
One or two commentators on Reddit suggested that regular exercise and a healthy diet could work as well. Can anyone confirm or refute this?
Little by little more information trickles out about this case, I think it is far more serious than it looks on the outside right now.

Given the fact that there apparently was surveillance of students without proper cause it immediately becomes a legitimate question how far reaching that surveilance was.

You have to do a lot of 'watching' in order to catch someone doing something that looks suspicious in the first place (no matter they got it wrong), and then to go public with the fact that (1) you've been doing this and (b) you underestimate the ability of the world to extrapolate to whatever else you might have been up to is pretty dumb.

Then there is the question of any screen captures / voice recordings, listening in on employees without cautioning them is already a punishable offense, listening in on minors in a structural way and looking at them without going through the proper authorities is a completely different kettle of fish.

And if hardcopies or files were passed around with screenshots and / or recordings those responsible will end up in jail for a long long time, in that case you could argue that this was actually a child porn ring that got their raw materials by subverting the PCs of children in their care.

More links today on this case (which I've been following pretty closely, given my interests in anything that has to do with webcams):

http://education.zdnet.com/?p=3655

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/84877027.html

One immediate question that needs answering is if this laptop was not reported stolen and that supposedly is the condition to be met before activating this system then what was the reason this student was under surveillance in the privacy of his own bedroom.

It's a typical case of 'who watches the watchers', if there are no real safeguards on enabling this feature then you can almost be sure that it will be hacked. And depending on the security of the implementation it is very possible that there are ways to enable the feature completely bypassing the schools' central safeguards (assuming those are in place).

I'm hoping for some hacker student on that school to dive in and document what exactly is going on on those computers, for instance, why there is no visible indicator that the camera is active.
I don't think it takes a lot of confirmation to believe that regular exercise and a healthy diet will have a tremendous impact on everything you do.

But, if you need a bit... it works for me. When I am hiking or skiing 3-4 times a week, I get a lot more done.
This is a good move just because there is so much confusion caused by Gears existing. People seem to be going out of their way to misunderstand that Gears is implementing bleeding edge HTML5 features in a way that can be added to other browsers.

The only browser that needs such a plugin is IE, and Chrome frame now fills that same gap.
I wrote off the article, rather than the author. If I indeed read more of the author, perhaps my opinion would be updated, but the article on its own doesn't add much weight of authority. The trouble with Task Manager is that it doesn't have sufficient per-process memory data to be useful. Process Explorer is better, because you can view Working Set (Private|Shareable|Shared) and Private Bytes. I'd view both private working set and private bytes as the most important metrics for a Windows app, but depending on the circumstances (such as how likely multiple instances are) other things may be considered.

Committed Bytes would be a measure of potential maximum physical memory usage if every process were touching every page that it had available to it. Yes, no process ever does that, but statistically there will be an average fraction of that memory which is touched, so it can be interpreted as a proxy for physical memory pressure. A poor one though, as different processes have different patterns.

As to the Ars forums, with a brief perusal it seems similar to the programming Reddit - i.e. a lot of opinionated and frequently misinformed noise, interleaved with a small amount of signal. It looks like a time sink, to be frank.

But to give Peter his due, I registered with the forums and scanned through his past posts (DrPizza), and I can't find much that I disagree with; I particularly agree with him on the consolification of PC games, and the lack of MW2's appeal to a mature gamer, etc.
Hm. paypal randomly invalidates payments, but as far as I can tell, if I don't get the money, the person sending the money gets it. Hm.
Because the job of a medical doctor is to treat people who are ill. Unless you have enough money to hire a personal assistant for biophysical issues.
Yep, that is already quite interesting. He doesn't say how this compares to the situation on windows (and linux). Nevertheless - this is already far more substantial.
I use a black background with a very carefully placed light grey diagonal line that corresponds to the lower left-hand corner of my second monitor, which is to the right of my primary monitor.

I use this line to align the bottom-left corners of cascading windows on the secondary monitor. In this way, the corners of the windows themselves form a kind of "spatial taskbar" that lets me switch between console windows, email, documentation, browser, etc. - all usually stuff that's auxilliary to the action on the main screen.

Here's a diagrammatic description:

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_2GNT8vlZj48/Svme4EwbLWI/AAAAAAAAAI...

Here's a description of how I did it - and how awkward it is to do in Windows 7, for good measure:

http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-win...
The person who started the thread said the following in response to a question similar to yours:

I agree that regular exercise, a healthy diet, proper sleep, and a good schedule is a great solution most of the time.
This was discussed a few months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=958899
"If you're really using your computer, your desktop should almost never be visible"

This is even more true if you use a tiling window manager like xmonad, dwm, or awesome.
It's just quite annoying that the Brazilian banks are not in the IBAN system, and only some banks work internationally at all. There are a lot of regional banks you can't even use to pay in another region of the country...
How to build a web service in 8 hours
Because the bible says that you cannot take anything that alters your behavior or your body, something like that, and that has been inherited through centuries even if it's not cited as the main reason, but it is the source of the war on drugs.

Millennia old beliefs are the source of many current traditions held by society (specially drugs and sex related). I would love for someone to prove me wrong or at least state otherwise.
I am surprised by the amount of redditors that know all pros and cons of those drugs. The first time I even heard about it was when my sister started using ritalin. It helped her becoming a medium performer in school instead of beeing on the low end and also increased her social abilities.

What do you think is the percentage of academics using cognitive enhancers or similar stuff?
This is something that pisses me off about Ruby -- it has four goddamn callable types [Methods, Procs, Blocks, Lambdas] that all turn into one another at different points, but you still can't pass around non-anonymous callables directly!

I really love how Python's approach is structured: Methods are just Functions accessed as properties of an instance Object. Lambda expressions just return a normal Function. Functions are just Objects with a __call__ method, metacircularly. It's turtles all the way down!

In Python I implement __call__ methods in Classes and add instance properties as metadata on function objects all the time. In Ruby it seems like I always have to wrap a callable in another callable to be able to pass it around without accidentally calling it -- goddamn no-paren calling! At least lisps have quote operators to solve this problem transparently.

Ruby's block syntax is rather nice, it just solves a completely different problem: you don't actually use it to make functions to pass around as objects -- you're really using it to make control structures directly.
UK: The National Archives releases UFO files from the UK government (1994-2000)
While the video makes the wireframing process look like a lot of fun, the resulting UI just looks rather crammed and confusing to me.

I'm wondering whether this is a side effect of the tool in the sense that it's easy, fun and rewarding to add more elements (think FarmVille).
But gaming is a much lesser experience with a trackpad then it is with mouse and keyboard; my Bloonz scores with and without a mouse prove it. Also, this doesn't get around the many games that require a keyboard.
A lot (most? all?) of these drugs are habit forming and have serious side effects.
Mixergy is now a paid subscription service for interviews older than a week
Avoid suffering.

If it can suffer, do not kill it.
Thanks for the suggestion and the blog post. I'll look into whether adding Webmin to the server makes sense. ("Every additional moving part is a future source of failure." -- popular maxim locally.)
Communicating Science in a Post-Newspaper Era (audio & transcript)
If the demand for programmers keeps growing, no one needs to starve.

For most of its life, computer adoption has been growing exponentially - each time they got cheaper, more businesses could afford them. This meant a constantly growing demand for programmers, and therefore higher wages. Eventually, every business that wants a computer will have one, and then demand will stabilize to grow at the rate of population growth - bye-bye supernormal profits for programmers. I saw a fascinating presentation that claimed that this happened at around the year 2000.

Of course, now computer adoption is greater than 1 per capita, with it being common to have at least two of a desktop, a laptop, an iPhone and a gaming console - and greater demand for software. Also, some consolidation of software would have seemed likely (and that happened within the categories of e.g. word-processors and OSes) - yet, the number of categories themselves seems to have grown, with a webapp for every occasion, and even add-ons to websites like facebook etc.

So maybe the exponential growth in demand will continue.

I like to think that software embodies knowledge, and like knowledge, is therefore be limitless - it's just that that hasn't been the driver of industry so far
Making an RPG in Clojure
My first reaction was well, that sucks. I was wrong.

I think this is an excellent business model for Mixergy. As a fan of Mixergy, I am happy that I have a weeks time to listen to the interviews before they go behind the subscription wall. Andrew, keep up the good work.