skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm confused by the "because" in the first sentence and the "so" in the penultimate. I see no reason why the one thing should cause the other. As I say, it's logically possibly that there could be such a causal relation, but in general there's no reason to think that doing X should feel like doing Y -- you'd expect it to feel like doing X! If I don't know what my choice will be, I'd expect that to feel like not knowing what my choice will be. Which is a distinct state from feeling that I have freedom of choice.

In fact if you use your imagination, you can come up with scenarios in which you don't know what your future choice will be, but it clearly doesn't feel like a free choice. E.g. if you say "I will choose to get a coffee if I roll the die and the number is 3 or above, or a tea otherwise."
Determinism = age-old philosophical stance. Nothing new here.
Well Android isn't going to reject a Microsoft app and it makes business sense to back the underdog and hit at Apple's monopoly.
How does Jim Cramer still have any scrap of credibility?
First Look: How Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad
Seriously? Why? Why do you care about your points on here?

It's cool that you built this. Kudos for figuring out the code part.

Negative kudos for having a purpose that won't lead to building a kick-ass company or technology.

I know I'm probably going to loose karma due to this comment. I really don't care about karma. Karma should be the side-effect of your activity/comments here, not the driver of your activities/comments.

I'd recommend spending time more wisely.
The Little Car That Couldn't
Supply and Demand has to meet up especially in the early days. You'd also have to focus on a specific geography. Girls are going to be harder to attract to. I think it would be a useful service. Possibly tie it to events (like AirBnB did for the inauguration). My honest thought? Start it out as an email list like HARO. Emails queries of those looking for rides to people everyday.
Apparently, neither does his hosting provider...
This is the difference between science and scientism.

Science is an extremely powerful and well-proven set of tools for learning about the natural world. Scientism is a crock of baloney.
You can justify [almost] any decision in hindsight.
I wonder what the insurance implications of this would be... I'm pretty sure my auto insurance policy forbids me from using my car for business purposes, and this sounds uncomfortably close to that.

On the other hand, I know that there's nothing wrong (insurance-wise) with accepting gas money from a friend... and, to push it further, if a friend of a friend needed a lift somewhere that I was already going, my insurance would probably be fine with that, and I'd definitely accept gas money in that situation...
The next Secure Hash Algorithm had better be a good one
Gandi.net's tenth anniversary
Valve Teases Upcoming Mac Announcement, Not So Subtly
> Water pollution is defined as a change in the chemical, physical and biological health of a waterway due to human activity.

True, but that doesn't make your claim about the Great Lakes true.

> The Silicon valley reference was to highlight the huge environmental impact of the high tech industry.

Silicon Valley isn't the high tech industry. It is a specific place in California.

As I suggested you're arguing "the truth of my claims doesn't matter because I mean well." That's both wrong and counter-productive for both your credibility and your cause.

> That may be in North America, or India.

In other words, you have no idea if it actually happened.

And you don't care.
Cool, thanks for the tip. I might make it!
Radically improving sales with 3 characters and a misspelling
The point of karma is to ensure quality in your contribution to the community. For me, figuring out which things I say and submit people find value in has been a very interesting exercise.
A repost but Daniel Eran Dilger of RoughlyDrafted has a very cogent perspective on most things Apple.

"Were Flash Lite to gain momentum, it might make Adobe the Microsoft of mobiles, and Flash Lite the new Windows. That also makes it obvious why Apple wants to choke Flash to death before it falls into position as the new lowest common denominator in proprietary platforms on a new crop of mobile devices...

And you thought the iPhone was just Apple's way of muscling into the mobile business! No, it’s really a proactive battle against a wide swatch of proprietary platforms promising to plague a new wave of mobile devices."

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-559...
Did you misread? That "because" is an internal connective inside the first sentence only. (I'd rephrase, but I'm not sure what would be clearer.)

The part explaining the causal relationship is the penultimate sentence, "it feels like my choices are not determined in advance".

"If I don't know what my choice will be, I'd expect that to feel like not knowing what my choice will be."

You expect to know what your choice will be only when you choose it. That equals the feeling of "freedom of choice".
How do Republicans? Or corporations? Or the concept of private health insurance?

Too Big to Fail-- not just for firms, but for people and ideas as well.
FAA suspends controller, supervisor after boy directs flights from JFK tower
With svn, a clever attacker can make changes to past commits in the repository, so you will not see new commits to review, your own copy of the code will not contain the changes, but when a fresh copy is checked out by eg, a build server for deployment, it will get the modified code.

Git mostly prevents that; while sha1 can be attacked, a new, visible commit would have to be made containing the sha1 preimage.
Private Company Valuations: HubSpot, Inc.
Patents are an incentive to invent something new, with the knowledge that you alone will be able to profit from that thing for some period of time.

The idea is that this incentive will benefit society with these inventions more than it will cost society in reduced competition.

Looking at the software market today, I think it's pretty clear that the incentive that patents create for software innovations is not needed and that the cost that they create greatly outweighs the benefits. I can not think of any software innovations that would not have been made without the incentive of monopoly protection.
I had exactly the same feeling reading this. The only thing I'd add is that this is exactly the sort of clumsy FUD that the Chinese government might throw out there to cover their tracks, especially given what a diplomatic cluster-you-know-what this has become for them.
Books in the Age of the iPad
> There are some interesting optimization methods that probably wouldn't have been made public if it weren't for patents.

The one that I was thinking of was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karmarkars_algorithm .

> If you invent an algorithm that is genuinely novel and you get a competitive advantage from it, patenting it is the last thing you want to do. Keep it a trade secret.

You're assuming that the competitive advantage from using the algorithm exceeds the value that one can get from licensing. That's not necessarily true.

> Because as a legitimate company you can't enforce the patent. If you try, you'll just be counter-sued for infringing someone else's patents.

That's not necessarily or always true. Take drugs - the majors don't clone one another - they honor each other's patents.
Local Online SEM Agencies Still Battling Massive Churn Rates
For how flippant it appears, I think this is very close to the truth. People have so much mentally and emotionally invested in a particular idea/messiah/institution, that the cost of changing or rejecting that idea is basically admitting that the past several decades were lived in mistake, and changing those ideas would require a drastic self-evaluation. It's like vendor lock-in for ideas.
I remember the surprise that I experienced when Opera suddenly appeared on my Macbook. I had no idea how it happened, until I did some research and discovered that it gets installed with the Adobe CS.
Somebody needs to figure this problem out with an interesting solution and go fuck shit up. Lots of money to be had here.
There are social problems here. It's awkward sitting next to a stranger for any amount of time. Even if the stranger has headphones on and is tuned out. It might just not be worth the 20 bucks in gas compared with the awkwardness.
That's where you bust out the Firebug and fix bad design decisions on-the-fly.
My mistake regarding because. Yes, I was talking about the causal relationship in the penultimate sentence only.

>The part explaining the causal relationship is the penultimate sentence

It doesn't explain it, it just asserts it. There is no reason why a lack of foreknowledge about your future decisions should make you feel as if you have free choice. It could just as well make you feel like you're bobbing around at random in the causal flux.
Well, the Izzard / iPad connection is weak, illogical, and confusing. Avoid non sequitur connections, unless going for humor (and then beware that it's hard to do with small space).

Insulting / offensive is bad too. I've found a number like that.
Brigandry is brigandry. Whatever the scale, it is driven by the same lusts and impulses, and responds the same to rewards and punishments.
Can Honda Bring Corporate-Style Jet Travel to the Masses?
Your comment is trollish. Who are you to judge how the poster wants to spend his time? How do you know the code he wrote for this didn't teach him something that will some day lead to him building a kick-ass company or technology? That might not be his goal. Even if it was, everyone needs some time to unwind. Some people happen to do that by writing code.
Is this what you are looking for? http://goloco.org/
I'm not familiar with development for the iPhone, but the whole public /private API is interesting. Back when Microsoft was getting investigated by the antitrust depth some put forward the argument that MS had internal docs and secret APIs which were not public, and this was considered anticompetitive.
Seems like a good problem for a more software oriented learning approach.

I remember daydreaming in class wishing I could just go through the book myself and be finished with a grade in a few weeks. I did get this experience in math for a while when I was living in Texas. You didn't have to take any topic upon which you could pass a pretest, and then you got to take a test on a topic as soon as you were ready for it. I was able to zip through multiple grades until I reached some material where I needed instruction. Of course, once I moved up to the next school, I was back in the standard classes, daydreaming.
The headline is using a definition of "hacker" that has been common for 30 years now. This kind of linguistic purity argument is silly, and ultimately futile. Languages change. We need to learn to speak the language as it exists, not what we think it "should" be.

At least sites like this one preserve the original meaning of the term. That's the best we can hope for.
You should definitely tell your friend to do this idea -- I know I needed the service this weekend and there have been multiple times this would have helped!
As a developer I either want complete and utter domination by one browser (so I only have to test on that one) or lots of browsers with reasonable market share (making standards compliance crucial).

The current situation is almost the worst imaginable. I have to develop for the (mostly) standard compliant browsers like IE8/Firefox/Chrome and then tweak for IE6 and IE7.

I believe this is good news because it's insurance against another IE6 coming along.
This is the one thing I miss from working with Java in Eclipse. There, you're always in a built state so every time you save the file you're working on, you instantly get all the compiler errors if any. There's also a large amount of errors the editor can detect without invoking the compiler, and you get constant feedback about those as well.

My current main environment is Visual Studio for C#, and there you get a lot of errors detected while editing, but not all of them, so you have to continually press the rebuild button, and the time of that rebuild just keeps growing...

Then again, I recently bought a SSD, that helps a bit with build times. :-)
Oh, that's a great point about the insurance implications. There are also coordination issues, if you read the first comment on the blog post...

And what if the person you're riding with is too chatty and you just wanted to nap the whole ride? :)
There are definitely some issues. But maybe you could specify your preference for a quiet vs. chatty person.

Also, I'm anticipating this could help for people in a pinch as well. I know I would have put up with just about anything to get a non-bus ride up to Boston!
The primary problem with your argument is that (hypothetically) there were not shaved ice scoops (double the size) similar to the ice cream scoop you own previous to the invention you cite.

Inversely, there were inventions (Microsoft Surface, Jeff Han's touchscreen) previous to iPhone that had multi-touch capability and exploited much of the same ideas. They just weren't phones. The obviousness is that creating a smaller form factor and putting some phone capabilities in it were no-brainers for this tech _eventually_ since the technology did exist.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_tou...
My version control and build systems scale better than your blog.
Global warming? Check for yourself
Nice try hacker news password harvester!
Byrneseyeview is presenting an overly simplistic view. It's true that we do respond to stimuli, but fortunately we don't respond only to stimuli but also to our internal states (thoughts, feelings, memories, and even moral judgments). As a result, I don't think that physicalism is incompatible with morality (even if it is incompatible with free will) because you can still interpret someone's actions in the context of their mental state--just like the legal system currently does.
Thanks, Peter. I'm the reporter who worked on the piece and I wanted to let you know that we run this exact type of feature (same format) in every issue. We call it How I Did It. (If you're interested, you can read more of them here: www.inc.com/hidi.)

-Jason
I understood it the way clusterfu_k wrote it.
Of course I do. That's one problem package management solves. You (software piblisher) don't update libraries you don't own - just your application. Shared functionality, like how to read PNG images is managed by the system. This also forces library makers not to break interfaces, solving the other problem you mentioned. If you need a specific version of a given shared component, you state that dependency in your package and, if possible, the proper library gets installed with your package.

Added disk usage was never the issue. Consistency of behaviour is. With shared components you know your machine will decode PNGs in exactly the same way across all the applications installed.
If only there were some sort of tool you could use which would automatically detect which dependencies have changed and compile only those files...

I swear, I read "press the rebuild button" and wanted to cry.

Edit: the sarcasm-free version of the above amounts to this: there was a time when the idea of "writing software to help you write software" was a standard notion, something that everyone did. It seems like the modern world is training a generation of programmers who don't understand this, and who see the "end result" software as the only software worth writing. The idea of tool creation and integration is alien to them. That's what the IDE buttons are for.
Isn't that the same link as the original?
I agree with this a lot. Math and statistics are just as valuable to individuals for the style of thinking and discipline, as they are for any particular result. Just like the scientific method useful in any discipline making decisions based on evidence, even if you never need to drudge up those chemistry or physics equations.

My degree is in mathematics. I'm an analyst so I work with numbers a lot, but I use nearly none of my "math background" in my line of work. I don't deal with limits or topologies or rings or primality or anything. Nonetheless, I still feel that my math background helps me a lot. Any time you're in the real world you have to work with intuition and experience and make a boatload of assumptions, and that's a perfectly reasonable way to make decisions if you're good at it. Math's precise, rigorous reasoning helps you challenge the soundness of your assumptions and your intuition, which is invaluable.
Splitting the phrase/concept "free choice" into "free" and "choice", I have been mostly talking about the "free", because it describes the feeling that a choice "might be anything and I won't know until I've made it". Above, you are more concerned with whether it's a "choice" (versus "bobbing around at random") - but you know implicitly the mechanism is adaptive and heuristic and that it attempts to maximize value fulfillment payoff. So it will make a "choice" (defined in this context as a purposeful decision). Therefore, free choice.
"For the 12-week course, workbooks & other printables, teleconfs and support, you'll pay only $500."

I don't know whether the specific course she is selling is any good or not, but I'm fascinated by the possibility that little courses like this could eventually be the future of higher education.

I'm taking the Dave Ramsey financial course right now, and the experience compares favorably to university style instruction. People local to you congregate in one place each week to watch a video of Dave presenting a topic, break into groups after words to discuss the topic of the video, and then there's homework to do before the next class meets, along with a book and other materials, and more content on his web site. All for about a hundred bucks.

When I see people from the class outside the classroom, suddenly it's easy to talk about money, something that would otherwise be socially inappropriate.

Anyhow, is picking and choosing from courses like this a viable way to educate yourself? Are there subjects for which it wouldn't work? What does a university really add over these kinds of courses?
yet.
On our site, we have only free accounts and are working on producing paid accounts. Signing up for an account requires no information aside from email and password, plus name for displaying onsite.

Right now our conversion rate is hovering around 6%, with obvious shortcomings that we are working on ironing out. I believe hitting 10% is practical with some serious tweaking and a/b testing, and that is my current goal.

I don't have any actual experience with asking for a credit card upfront, however I have a serious personal revulsion to handing my card to a company without them earning my trust. If I can't see their offering with a free trial, I will not hand them my card. Many people I have talked to have the same revulsion, unless the product comes with strong recommendations from friends or other family. I think the problemis getting your product to enough people to generate those strong recommendations needed to tip wary people over the edge.

Personally, I feel that in an internet world where it can extremely difficult to gain traction, throwing up another barrier is a bad idea. However, I am interested in the numbers as well, because I could be completely off base with this opinion!
I volunteer myself as such a machine, though I won't say I can perfectly predict the actions of another human and many others are better than I am. Nevertheless I find I can make pretty good estimates from time to time depending on information.

I'm curious about your "I like to believe" stance. Are you saying you'll ignore any evidence for any theory if you don't think the theory benefits you more than another theory, even if your theory has been shown to be wrong?
Hats off to Amy Hoy for getting me to read a sales
letter from top to bottom and enjoying it. Year of hustle indeed.
Bring Back the Robber Barons
Byrneseyeview is presenting an overly simplistic view. It is true that we respond to stimuli, but fortunately we don't respond only to stimuli but also to our internal states (thoughts, feelings, memories, and yes even moral judgments). As a result, I don't think that physicalism is incompatible with morality (even if it is incompatible with traditional concepts of free will) because you can still interpret someone's actions in the context of their mental state--just like the legal system currently does.
Saying Goodbye: New Exit Strategies for Today's Venture Capitalists
This greatly disturbs me but I find myself wondering why. I drink cow's milk so why should this be any different?

I must ponder this.
All About Colored Diamonds
> Statistics say if you cooperate, you're less likely to be harmed. If you decide to push a physical confrontation, then you're more likely to be harmed.

Ah yes, "might as well lie back and enjoy it".

Actually, the statistics, at least in the US, don't show that cooperation leads to less harm. US statistics show the resistance is associated with somewhat less harm. And, those statistics ignore the "want to take you somewhere else" situation. Cooperating in that circumstance is pretty much a death sentence because those attackers are trying to take you somewhere else to kill you. (No - that's not a common scenario, but it's an especially deadly one.)

There's also a "recovery" benefit to resistance - the victim feels better afterwards.

I'm not saying that resistance is always the best option. I'm saying that it can be a better option than compliance. Circumstances matter.

Remember, a robber is telling you that the unknown contents of your wallet are worth more to him than your life. That tells you how little he values your life.
This is a project management problem, not a problem with too smart developers.

The problematic activities described here, overgeneralization and solving imaginary problems (aka Coding for A Rainy Day), are simply typical newbie mistakes.

Otherwise highly competent developers almost always fall into this trap early in their careers, so the important thing is to have someone experienced in charge of the project who can veto their weirder ideas until they mature.

I think every software company should hand out a copy of "The Pragmatic Programmer" to all new hires. It gives much good advice on how to not overcomplicate things.
Yes. And you can unify quick-select and tree-sort (i.e. quicksort, but not in-place) in a lazy language easily in the same algorithm.
Goldman Sachs Eyes Custom Servers With Batteries
> It used to be really easy to junk a Debian system by installing random apps to try them

Oh.. The 90's...

Seriously: I moved to Debian-based distros in 2002 and never experienced anything like what you describe. And mind you I ran testing with packages from sid directly for a couple years.
And of course Kramer followed up nuggets of wisdom like this with "Bear Sterns is fine!" just 5 days before they were sold for $2 a share:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUkbdjetlY8

I really thought his Daily Show appearance would be the beginning of the end for him, but obviously I overestimated the long-term memory of the average CNBC viewer.
A work of creative fiction can also be innovative, but does this mean that books should be patentable? Whilst it may benefit large companies who can afford to spend money on lawyers, patenting software is as foolish and harmful to the industry as patenting books. One thing's for sure and that's that software patents do not benefit startups or independent software contractors.

Reducing the length of applicability of software patents does not reduce their harm. Seven years in a fast moving business like software may as well be eternity.
Was it a public school? That sounds awesome.