skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That's a bit of a stretch,

I know there is a lot of criticism. And you should never believe any media agency outright. But generally the BBC are pretty good. A lot better than Fox / Sky etc :P

They do a lot of good special interest programming like Horizon which plays at difficult questions/subjects really well.

> Secondly, this is EXACTLY the process by which a little bit of government interference can sometimes completely distort a market.

The BBC is NOT a government body. It IS state funded, yes, but it is a separate entity with a board a charter and lots of non-governmental oversight.

> Yeah, speaking of that: "BBC blocks open source video players"

True, a bit of a hiccup there. I cant believe their timing on such a fuck up too :( really screwed my argument

> We have the FCC; how is that different?

It's very different. Ofcomm is actually heavily consumer oriented and they seem to find a good balance between restricting content and being sensible. Certainly they are very unlike the FCC in my (reasonably limited) experience.

> Firstly, CSI is an American franchise. Advertisements over here are likely making up the difference for those smaller commercial breaks over there.

Im not sure it is. Channel 5 will pay a fixed rate to show the CSI franchise over here. They can make that money back in whatever way they want/need. Also I dont think it equates like that (I have no figures but I watched a documentary on CSI a few months ago that said most of the franchise's revenue comes from overseas licencing).

> But you can't say one way or the other what kind of television you might have if the BBC didn't exist, because it's been with you since 1932.

Perhaps true. But the BBC is reasonably unique. And in my opinion (and it really is my opinion, but I know others share it) we have the best TV programing in the world. A mix of all things

> There are solutions to our many television problems, and all of them involve LESS government, NOT more.

As I mentioned - there is a difference between tax funded and government owned. Italy has govt. owned TV (also their PM owns a shed load of the network) and I would never recommend anything like that!

But tax funded is pretty good because it's answerable to us, the viewers. Which is nice.

> that could otherwise be utilized by broadcasters who are actually accountable to their viewers (and their viewers' wallets)?

I guess ultimately it's not clear outside the UK what the BBC actually is. Hopefully I've explained it better. I think the BBC is MUCH more accountable to us viewers than pretty much any other network I've seen.

(Also we get major sports and other stuff on the free channels (olympics, world cup etc.) which I think is a huge bonus. For me it's worth it just for that :))
Last week's Tosh.0 is what led me to that description. Just, ewwwwww.
You're applying your own regional knowledge of English to someone else's. I'm English and I've worked as a writer and I've done copy-editing, and that 'but' has every right to be there, even if it hurts the flow of the sentence. For anyone growing up in an English speaking country we all know that a pause readily means 'but', especially if it was a longer pause.

As it's a translation of something he said, the issue here is the integrity of the translator not of the man himself. A good translator would have dropped the but, because he likely never used it when he spoke in Korean.

I've spent a lot of time in France, and even though I'm nowhere near fluent I still manage to speak the slang. By spending time in the country and amongst the people I learnt all the social norms for speaking that I never learnt in a high school class. There's a vast difference in usage between Bonsoir and Bonne nuit, the latter is literally used exclusively in the meaning "goodnight, I won't see you again today". Similarly I've seen many a confused tourist when they were greeted with Salut "bye" as a greeting.

Again from several vacations in Spain and the Spanish islands, I rarely ever heard Gracias "Thank you", they all use Graci "thanks", again despite everything I was taught of Spanish it wasn't right to how people actually speak.

There's a big difference between being fluent in a language, and being fluent in a dialect. Dialects typically teach us how to use English improperly, mainly because 90% of our interactions are informal. However almost every English speaking person would remove their dialect in the instance if they were brought in front of a world leader. I know for people receiving Knighthoods from the queen they have to instruct people on how to pronounce "ma'am" (pronounced mam) as they try to pronounce it 'properly' and in doing so pronounce it wrong, which apparently bugs the Queen herself as she's been noted for correcting people on it too.
Interesting side note: while one is in the military, you get damn near first-class health care for you and your family. In this way, at least the most socialistic organization in America is its military.

(I'm a U.S. military brat, and took healthcare for granted until I went to University and was no longer covered. Now I'm Canadian and while I don't take healthcare for granted, I'm so glad I don't have to scramble for it the way that too many in the U.S. do.)
Insurance companies may be expensive, but at least you have some choice when it comes to picking a provider;
we would have even more choice if the government would allow competition.

When the government takes over you effectively have no choice and in the case of health care they decide who lives and who dies.

FYI:
If your a staunch republican for government health care(i know not likely); one day a democrat will be deciding your fate.
If your a staunch democrat for government health care; one day a republican will be deciding your fate.

As expensive as today's health care is, I'd rather decide my own fate by having more choice of insurance providers.

Oh and for anyone out there who thinks, "but the government works for the people."
If your a democrat "how were the bush years for ya"
If your a republican "how's the obama administration working out so far"

Less government is all I'm saying. :)
Animal Experimentation and Simulation
No, it's a real Ethernet cable. It's just a cheap one, and may not be Cat-5. (I have some "Cat-3" cables that can only do 100BaseT. Microsoft thoughtfully included one with my XBox, presumably because a real Cat-5 cable wouldn't benefit the XBox in any way, and would cost like 3 cents more.)
I don't recall Kevin blogging about startups. It was a movie. Honestly, this title seems a little over the top.

As for the advice... It's good but there is a world of difference between testing something you've built and asking people if they'd want something you haven't built. In "The Innovator's Dilemma," the case of excavators is used as a case study.

If you had asked construction managers whether they wanted hydraulic excavators instead of cable excavators, they would have laughed you out of the industry. The hydraulic excavators of the day were flakey and much smaller than the cable excavators. Nobody who was using excavators would want one.

The point was that hydraulic excavators ended up creating entirely new markets. Likewise, my own personal example is the GUI. I remember when this was just a research fancy at Xerox. I used a Xerox Star at Humber College in Toronto. Great stuff, but priced in the stratosphere.

If you'd asked anyone whether they needed a mouse and bitmapped screen to replace their CP/M word processor, you would have been laughed out onto the sidewalk.

Yet look at what we have today. Some things should be shown, and even then you might have to keep plugging until a light goes on and some entirely new market (like desktop publishing) springs up to use your innovation.
For those of you that don't have Ubuntu natively installed on your computer (such as myself) there is a great answer to this problem: VirtualBox http://www.virtualbox.org/ . I installed it recently on my XP laptop, and now enjoy Ubuntu in what seems to be native speed. In fact, my dev environment of slime/emacs sbcl is runing radically faster than lispworks slime/emacs in xp. I have a dual screen setup, so I have Ubuntu in full screen mode (you can switch out with ctrl f) in one monitor, and xp in the other. Life is good.
I would suggest, if you are not very experienced in it, unix (things like shell scripting, awk, etc).
As Jonathan has pointed out, the article has lots of inaccuracies, but it also has a very good explanation of the NoSQL Faustian pact: "Cassandra doesn't do joins... doesn't guarantee referential integrity, where the user knows the data being used reflects the latest updates... can't process transactions, with a guarantee that the transaction will either be completed or discarded, the way relational systems do" because it focuses on "more immediate goals than the pristine data handling rules of relational systems."

As the expression goes: at the poker table, if you don't know who the sucker is, it's you. Guess who's responsible for those fuddy-duddy, old-fashioned things like querying your data, or making sure that you've written data, or that your database isn't corrupted... it's you.

If you're Twitter, and you're fail-whaling every day, then maybe the work required to make this trade-off work makes sense. But I can't help but feel there's got to be a better way.
Let me know if I help you with editing.

(And thanks for the compliment. Means the world coming from you.)
Mushroom Life
I assume he's laughing at the "despite its quality" part. And I'd probably agree; while the user experience in Linux has improved dramatically, Windows's user experience is still generally better, at least in terms of "hours of use before the user feels the urge to do something that can only be accomplished with a command prompt".

Food for thought: As Apple is keen to point out, virtualization should minimize the influence of network effects on your choice of primary operating system. And yet Windows is still going strong... Is it purely a matter of price or user education?
Web Inspector Vs. Firebug
Not only that, but most employers offer supplementary insurance of one form or another to provide for the things not covered by public insurance. Because they don't have to worry about most of the Big Things (except dental and usually optometric), it's far easier and cheaper for them to offer some of the smaller things (massage, orthotics, etc.).
a Vanity test would be better than my speculation though :)
celeb name + "sh*t" => HN homepage
Most people think their health insurance is great (or at least did until recently) because they've never needed it for anything large. If you're not terribly informed or introspective, and the cost to you of something is hidden (employer pays) and you got $7,500 from your insurance company the one time in 15 years you had a significant medical cost, you're going to think of it as a "benefit".

This is similar to the political syndrome where people think their representatives are great; it's all those other slimy bastards who are the problem. Thus, incumbents have a huge advantage and bad politicians rarely get fired.
How to Buy a New Car - Ignite Seattle 2007
Meet the Googlers Running AOL
Are you serious? He's role-playing the sales-pitch you would give if your positioning was 'most expensive'. It's supposed to be FUD - it's an illustrative pretend marketing campaign!
Lacking "emotional maturity" doesn't necessitate simplistic. Would you mind expounding upon what other factors there are?
I tend to up-vote any ponies capable of pantomime.
I always find it funny when people who write link bait titles can't seem to find the guts to spell out their curse words.
True, but this is only as useful as the ability of the audience to follow one's argument. As we can see from politics, emotion frequently trumps reason. Logic aspires to arrive at the truth; rhetoric aims to win the argument, with or without the facts on its side.
When did wall street journal get a pay wall?
Ehn, it's a cartoon, but it's not a caricature - we're not talking a beet-red, freaky-looking sports mascot, after all.

I'm not sure it's really any worse than using a tribe's name for a project like Apache or Cherokee in the first place.
Agreed. Your customers may not know what they want, but the feature comparison chart doesn't solve that for them. Having your new product be a huge feature superset of all of your competitors doesn't get you anything. It may give your product all of those features, but it will probably give your product all those weaknesses too plus an extra complexity that most customers won't want.
Nice game.

Do you know about http:///www.flashgamelicense.com/ ? If not it's a place where you put flash games to auction and the big portals pay to get their branding put into your game before it's distributed.
You mean the precision/recall evaluation process or specific tweaks within solr itself to achieve it? The former is like you, through test cases, though I have real data streaming in all the time. The latter is incremental, but includes multiple fields and boost functions, as well as query and result manipulation.
SiliconANGLE — Blog — Windows Phone 7 Series Won't Work on Existing Devices?
State Of The Internet: A Barrage Of Data
Slicehost now has 32-bit images
In the 80's, Grandma didn't have a computer in her basement. Still, you make very good points.
Mine too.

And when combined with a thinly veiled insult, gives the wonderful "back-handed compliment"

"He's not as unintelligent as he looks"
"She's not the liar she might have been given her poor upbringing"
Nice product. Started with Lesson 1. Thanks
Twitter Rolling Out New Web Site To Kill TweetDeck And Other Third-Party Clients
I use MPoD quite frequently. It's a pretty decent iphone MPD client.. I use it as a remote while at home and for streaming while i'm elsewhere.
I was definitely talking about an interactive prototype of the actual design, not wireframes.

It's the step I usually consider when passing on the design to the development department. Sometimes there's much more needed to explain than what a static mockup or interactive wireframe can.
Wouldn't some commentary or analogy on Waterworld be more apropos?
I believe what greenblue meant by "almost everything he mentions" was better health, longer life and better looks, and possibly the bit about mental benefits.

And at least in terms of longevity, cognitive benefits, lowering risks for lifestyle diseases and , stress relief, cardio has a mountain of positive research backing it. For looks, it depends on what you're after. Not many male models are hulking gym rats, though.
Things I’m surprised we don’t have yet
The war situation has developed not necessarily to MySQL's advantage.
I tend to agree. The fact that your IQ metric can be swayed by lack of sleep, bad experience in the day of test, etc. make it an inaccurate way to measure intelligence precisely.
I won't defend Cassandra's design choices here, but I will say that the relational model is only about joins and normal forms. The other things you mention happen to be built into all modern relational databases but are orthogonal concepts.

A distributed hash table can be built with transactions, isolation, and so forth. Such a system would offer a different set of trade-offs that might satisfy a different set of users.
Danny Kahneman Talks Memory at TED
Wow, I may just do that. Thank you!
Would it not be more correct to say they are paying the publisher to tell us about this?
He didn't actually cut the cable.

It would be like placing a fake sales call from your friend, then "ruining" it. Nothing was ruined - it was a joke.

Your victim may or may not find it funny though.
Consumers of computers in the mid-80s didn't consist of nearly the range and variety of consumers as it does now. The people who had computers in the 80s were computer geeks and engineers.

What we have accomplished in the last 20 years is the mainstream acceptance of computers. We have managed to get users familiar enough with them that they are comfortable doing things.

My grandparents no longer feel that they have to call me when they go to the store and buy a computer. They can get their email working without having to call me. They can upload their pictures and edit the documents without many issues.

Yes, there are still files and folders--but honestly: what is wrong with that? It fits how most people think. I can't name a single person I know who has a problem understanding the concept of folders and files on their computer. People don't -need- their desktop machines to do much more than they did in the 80s. And what people actually do has been streamlined and made easier. (And one could argue significant progress has been made, for example: entire airplanes are designed on computer before ever being built now. That was impossible in the 80s.)

The other stuff such as suffixes, drive letters, etc: I agree.
Thanks, I didn't know about that.

Actually, I didn't really know it was in California either. I googled that "PT" thing in the title, that's how I made my estimate.
It's worth checking out .... you make good games (played hats the other week at reddit too) and if the big portals like them they'll pay thousands, and in some cases for some lucky guys 5 digit amounts, just to have their branding in your game. It's also a great community for testing, getting feedback and improving your games and how you make them.
First of all, I think that people with high IQs tend to have a stronger tendency toward mental illnesses and related patterns such as rumination, hypersensitivity to rejection, and low self-confidence. I think many of the underperformers have what might be considered subclinical mental illness (but is more accurately described as the normal exaggerated sensitivity of creative people and adolescents).

So, they're more "fragile" off the bat, and this is probably neurological in basis. We can provide more support as a society, but there are obvious limits regarding what can be done here.

Second, society is generally bad at recognizing talent and connecting it with the resources that could be used to actualize it. Those resources tend to go to people-pleasers and horse-traders rather than to those who can make the most use of them (who are almost always viewed with suspicion). This is true as much in academia as anywhere else.

Combine the general stupidity of society and the hypersensitivity of the sharpest intellects, and you have a lot of very smart people who get discouraged and bitter, then lose all desire to play.
Ask HN: Generic Software License Agreement
I am looking for a template of a Generic License Agreement for desktop software. Any ideas where I can find something like that?
What do you have on your Kindle that tells you how much money you made?
I wonder what percentage of queries is 42?
Is there any evidence to verify the claims in that article aside from his IQ? This is all very suspicious looking, and I couldn't find anything about the timing of the Phd he got or that he worked for NASA.
about...fracking...time
I also haven't read the book, but I have looked at the prologue which Carroll's put online at http://preposterousuniverse.com/eternitytohere/prologue.html; it's encouraging that he says

"Many dramatic-sounding statements are contained herein, but I’m going to be as careful as possible to distinguish between three different types: (1) remarkable features of modern physics that sound astonishing, but are nevertheless universally accepted as true; (2) sweeping claims that are not necessarily accepted by many working physicists, but they should be, as there is no question they are correct; and (3) speculative ideas beyond the comfort zone of contemporary scientific state of the art. We certainly won’t shy away from speculation, but it will always be clearly labeled. When all is said and done, you’ll be equipped to judge for yourself which parts of the story make sense."

(Of course, inevitably some people will misjudge for themselves, but that's a danger even for rigorous and un-popular science books.)

The table of contents at http://preposterousuniverse.com/eternitytohere/contents.html suggests that only ~ 1/4 of the book is dealing with "unproven theories"; again, I haven't read the book so I can't be sure.
Ask HN: Should you register .net and .org as well as .com?
I'm registering a domain name for a friend's business. All versions of the domain are available, .com, .net, .org ..etc.

Should you order them all or just .com ? Does it really matter?
> 24. MBAs are conditioned to use their brains in much the same way as sex workers are conditioned to use their genitals. Nice work if you can get it.

Can someone explain that to me? I have no idea what Hugh is trying to say there.
I couldn't put my finger on why exactly I liked Firebug better than Web Inspector, but this article sums it up. It is all the little things that make Firebug more usable.
Like others, I think it's sad that both of these people are not contributing more and I find their trajectories to be a waste. Maybe that's my jealousy speaking. But I know if I was suddenly gifted with the ease of learning and grasping of concepts both of them have, I'd do a lot with that.
The game is fun, but I can't get over <Up> not being jump. Any reason you used <x> instead?
we have created a 64-bit Slice and kernel with a 32-bit userland

Does this mean memory consumption will be similar to that of 64-bit images, since the kernels are the same?

It seems the same amount of memory on Slicehost slices doesn't go quite as far as that on 32-bit VPSes.
Any person with an IQ of 120 can learn and reproduce Euclid's proof of the infinitude of primes, especially because most educated people have familiarity with the most elementary number theory concepts (divisibility, primality).

Less than 1/10,000 of people with IQ > 120 could have come up with it at that time, keeping in mind that the only language one had to express numbers was geometry-- no algebra or number theory existed as we think of them today. Of course, whether this rare ingenuity shows up on an IQ test is an open question.

The same holds for something like Godel's theorem. I'm starting to understand it-- he's encoding a Lisp in number theory-- but there's no way I could have come up with it in 1931.
Developing scalable PHP aplications using MongoDB
I don't think I've ever seen a Mongo tutorial focused on PHP. Here's one!
We thought the controls would be familiar to those that played cave story, and also if we used UP to jump, how would you aim up?
I completely agree with this. As the article mentions with shoestring resources it's helpful to make "bang for the buck" choices. For any given successful product, there will be a few things that really resonate with or significantly help the user. The trick is figuring out what these things are. If you hit upon a truly valuable function, chances are your user base will grow even if there is not much else other than that available. A great example of this is Google. When Google was just starting out there were many popular search engines, and the biggest, Yahoo, had tons of money, resources, and content/features available from their homepage. By contrast, Google had a simple search box on their page - but the results returned were clearly superior. The rest, of course, is history. Sure Google now has email, docs, apps, calendar, social services, etc. but they didn't start out that way, and didn't need to. I believe the best strategy is to try and figure out what will really benefit users, not the nice to haves, but what really benefits them, and focus on building that to the best of your ability. Don't sacrifice quality. How you solve the problem should be as top notch as you can make it, but solve the problem and that's it; don't get distracted. Then test it out and see where you stand.