skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would the climate issue thing be any different even if nobody applied any Bayesian methods and only went by frequentist statistics?

It's not that this is a problem with applying Bayesianism in science, it's that our thought is Bayesian on a fundamental level. And it couldn't be otherwise, at least not for beings as intelligent as humans.
Actionscript 3 + PHP Stock Ticker
The culture in Boston is adverse to startups.
Cool! But what if I write a more complex program that I want to perform well? Is it easy to understand where the compiler will or won't do this crazy fusion thing?
Impromptu, inspiring convergence of music and programming.
I have read several commenters here on HN that have mentioned having success with mechanical turk style twitter campaigns for generating inbound traffic. I am curious how many of the successes out there have utilized this technique, or if it is just too risky (getting labeled as a spammer) if it's done distastefully.
Getting the LED out
another LED panel hack
It's Gnome, not Apple. Their success and/or continued existence is not predicated on secrecy, message control, and surprise announcements.

Besides, `task pooper' is whimsical, not offensive.
actually, i was trying to make a joke there... wasn't taking it personally at all. (srsly, i just have a terrible bedside manner).

that said, when you cast disparaging comments on the entire class of VCs not treating entrepreneurs well, it's hard not to take it a little personal (altho i've been on both sides).

when you're stereotyping, it does hit home a little harder.
Thank you, I see what you mean. The headline wraps because the font is too wide on Ubuntu (in Firefox too), hope to fix it soon.
Once I was told they were the same color it became one of those "CAN'T UNSEE" things.
you may disagree whether EB-6's are higher priority than EB-3's, but it's not an irrational perspective... giving preference to people who create jobs is a reasonable point to argue.

you're in your rights to have a different opinion, but it's not an unreasonable position to argue. you act as if that's unethical, but it's more based on job creation in the US than for VCs to get rich. (there are plenty of other ways for VCs to get rich, and this isn't some nefarious angle we're pushing )
This isn't not delegating. Not delegating would be installing yourself as a manager of an underperforming store, say.

Instead, this is an application of Genchi Genbutsu.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genchi_Genbutsu
They don't deserve a free pass on anything. They do deserve not to be bullied by businesses with massively more resources in ways that don't improve market efficiency.

I have no problem with Wal Mart killing off neighborhood True Value hardware stores; that has a demonstrable benefit (though perhaps not one I'd choose) for consumers.

I have a clear problem with a parasitic business extracting cash from a neighborhood cafe. I don't benefit from that at all; in fact, nobody does except for the parasite.
Facebook awarded a patent for the news feed.
There is no guessing. You get to answer that question for yourself based on the context of your application. Many Lisps provide as much(or as little) type checking that you might want in your application.
Yes: because they've been tested extensively for over a decade for them, especially over the attack vectors exposed on web applications.
http://www.tripadvisor.com/
http://www.dopplr.com/
http://www.zagat.com/

Still, yelp is very useful, but if you don't want to use it out of principle (for the little guys!), you can use the sites above.
It really isn't that hard to make a commerce website work with most browser. What idiot thought it was a good idea to make it harder to buy internet ads?
If Yelp is a sort of monopoly, then users' standards for its usefulness is a low bar, since they'll be comparing it to nothing rather than to a better alternative. (And before users have reason to suspect any foul play at Yelp - as they now do - it's more difficult for better alternatives to gain users' attention.)
I listened last year to a great set of lectures about the Philosophy of Science. Too much to go into here, save for the fact that, at the end of the day, it very well may end up that probabilities are all we have to go on for a wide swath of things.

I'm not yet ready to make the leap to total Bayesianism -- those priors can really bite you when you least expect it -- but there is some really good stuff here. Thanks Kaj.

Perhaps we'll see some kind of structured cross between Peirce and Bayes in the next few decades.
> In other words, Google does not believe in privacy.

That's a bit of a crazy jump there ;)

Open workspaces are extremely common and very popular for companies (at least in my experience - and I have been in quite a few offices :)). Google seems to extend it to top management too - which is unusual.

I think the theory is solid btw (in that it does work in improving the work ethic etc.)
I "file" windows I don't need onto another virtual desktop. Example: I click a PDF to download, it opens in evince, and when I decide "too long; will read later", the window gets whisked off to another desktop. (XMonad.Actions.FindEmptyWorkspace automates this operation.)

Occasionally, I notice I have a lot of occupied desktops, and then "garbage collect" the tasks.

I think this is a lot like what the article describes -- tasks for later go in a special area.
2BR (straight up, not flex) 1.5 bath. I live with one other person.
I'm trying to apply these usability lessons (based on my multiple-times-daily use of readability + instapaper) to my apps.

There's a lot to be said for clear, large, readable, high-contrast text, either where there's a big block of text, or a critical label used for skimming the layout of the page. If you want your users to be able to quickly find the element on a page that's important to them, give it a big fat text label.

I sometimes give advice to the web editor at a consumer magazine-- their body text is small, tightly spaced, and low contrast. As a result their average time-on-page and bounce rates are quite depressing. Unfortunately, as is the case in many large orgs, making the content (remember, they are in the content business) more accessible to the site's visitors is not necessarily high on the larger organization's priority list (they seem to only be interested in pageviews, thus boosting their ad inventory so they can qualify for larger ad networks).
Before we get into how to manage cost, let me start by saying that one of the most important things you can do when working with a law firm is invest in building a real relationship with your lawyer. Don’t worry about the clock, just worry about getting to a point of real trust and mutual respect. It will pay for itself 10x.

Nice piece, and the best way to get value, and to avoid abuses, is to have a strong bond of trust. After nearly three decades in the field, I can strongly affirm that it really does work that way.

Ditto for the downside as well. A sloppy approach to managing legal costs can get real expensive in a hurry. The "minimum viable" approach is one very good way to keep things in line as long as it is always coupled with a good strategic overview of what needs to get done and when (which is why to have a good working relationship who gives you that perspective).
> If you know how to write Lisp macros(i.e. experience) then they will be correct.

Is this the same argument as 'C is an insecure language only if you are a bad C programmer'?
an you imagine Apple or Microsoft calling their features "Code Name Poopy Diaper"?

Nope, but I can't imagine them writing software worth using, either. Maybe I am just unimaginative though.
Nothing they would be able to do about it particularly. A large number of people probably clicked that link. Getting warrants (or the police) to track up all of the IP's isnt going to happen :)

Also: im not sure what they could do. Certainly it breaks no laws I know of.
Reviews aren't meant to decay quickly, sure a restaurant could improve over time but many do not and creating online accounts or hiring people for fake reviews is most likely easier and cheaper.
This will "probably work" just like MMORPG's "probably don't get pirated".

But have you seen how many 3rd-party hosts there are for many MMORPGs, some built by hand to mimic the original servers? Requiring a server connection does not stop piracy, it just annoys people.
The business doesn't lose anything by not playing Yelp's game. You would still go to the cafe if it had a few bad reviews on Yelp, and so would I. (Then again, I read the content of reviews rather than the arbitrary star rating. If someone says "1 star, I ordered a salad and hated it because I hate vegetables" then I am not going to think negatively of the business that has this review attached. I am going to think, "damn people are dumb".)
I wonder how playable a spiral pyramid version of that would be; I've long thought that a long line must be a suboptimal piano layout (like a single long alphabetic row would be bad for typing).
How Many Nukes Would It Take?
Type hints are not static proofs of type-correctness, though, unless SBCL's warnings have gotten ridiculously more intelligent.
but I live in Manhattan
Tell HN: I created a ChatRoulette clone
I have created a viral facebook application that is a clone of ChatRoulette! service. Released 5 days ago, it has reached 70,000+ users. Will this look good on my resume for FLEX job app?
So you're saying we can't make any sort of general long-term predictions about the Solar System? That's the core of your argument?

Maybe we are done here.

I mean, the crux of this absurd argument is that “our long term forecasts might be updated so they are never trustworthy!” Except that nearly every field of science is this way and it hasn't stopped us from using our knowledge to make meaningful predictions and incredible technological breakthroughs.

Basically a double standard has been applied. When it comes to quantum theory or multi-body problems, our best guess is all cool. But when it comes to the weather suddenly everyone gets all philosophy-of-science and asks what we really know. The absurdity is compounded by the suggesting that climate science is basically models and “long term predictions” rather than a huge array of physical evidence showing us what is happening right now, a short-term trend leading up to it, and a long term contrast with multiple lines of evidence.
The irony is that if you pay your taxes with a credit card, you have to pay the credit card fees in addition to the balance on your taxes.
http://apps.facebook.com/chatroullete/
Some game companies have already turned off servers for their older games. It's not a question of whether this will happen but when, especially when the service is provided for free.
no passion -> no fun -> no superb code.

Many good things spreads from playing. You can do good things with N professional programmers, but they'll not think out of the box, they'll not be imaginative. You'll be good but not outstanding.

And when I talk about superb code I'm not talking about the code itself, but from the point of view of users.
Poop is shit. Most people find shit disgusting.

The English language is not short of words, so I'm sure they could have found a better name. Like, idunno, Task Wilted Lettuce, or Task Slightly Dirty Underwear, or Task Dull And Boring.
If we consider time of composition as a variable though, then the function space is even unfathomably huger.

What I mean is that even if those 3 chords have been played countless times in the past, right now may be the time to hear them again: when to play is an artistic choice as much as what to play is, because art relates not just with itself as a static object but also with the world around it.
My rules of thumb:

* Don't ask anyone to do something you're not willing to do yourself (willing doesn't mean that it's smart for you to be the one doing it)

* Don't ever delegate by abdicating responsibility

* If there isn't any follow-up, it wasn't really delegated.

* Allow properly aligned incentives to do a lot of the "delegating" for you.

[edit- formatting]
OK, and now we've hit on the main problem I've had with Common Lisp -- every library thinks it's the only library in the universe, and they don't compose well. Your comment exactly expresses the attitude of the Common Lisp community (as I see it) -- "you should write every single line of code in your app from scratch, just for you".

No thanks. The less code I have to write, the better.
my issue isn't impact on the guys that don't play, it's impact on the consumer from the guys that do. a crappy restaurant that has 5 star reviews because the bad ones were paid off hurts me financially.
you're a lawyer? anything I missed or was wrong about?
What about dropping the price of games? Perhaps if they weren't as expensive people wouldn't feel so inclined to pirate them. After all I assume that's why people pirate. No one wants to pay.

However, even if it did cost less, I guess most people would still rather try to get it for free, rather than having to pay anything at all.
I'm not saying that they need to decay quickly, just that there should be some notion of decay on reviews. Reviews from last year are not as important as those from last week, especially for a food establishment. You're right though, there does have to be protections in place against gaming too.

The problem is though, that every company will get some 1-star reviews, and there has to be some mechanism for them to get erased (eventually). This mechanism should be open, clear, and well known, not $300/month to the rating company. Otherwise, once a long-running, good company gets some critical mass of negative/crazy customers leaving 1-star reviews, they'd have to close or rename or something in order to get back that unfairly lost traffic.
It's true for the great majority of programmers I know (good and bad), but it's not true for me. I care a great deal about programming and I'm not particularly interested in making cool stuff. So there are both sorts.

I'm interested in programming as a tool to give myself a clearer mental model of language, mathematics, computation, and thought, and I'm interested in writing and reading code that I find artistically aesthetic and elegant.

(Then again, I wouldn't call myself a 'hacker'. I think 'hacker' implies a large degree of making-cool-stuffmanship.)
If you are letting random people on the Internet hurt you financially, you are doing something else wrong. Take everything you read with a grain of salt.
This really makes me sad. Webiste are moving from "click-the-monkey" ads to "camouflage" ads.

Surfing... Surfing.... Doh! (Clicked on camouflage ad).

Facebook is using this hard - it takes considerable horsepower to try to determine what's linkbait vs. what's actually going on in your social network.

I'm hoping that someone (hopefully a HN member) will come up with a "better way" and in turn make the web a better place.

// updated Dow -> Doh
Patriot Act Renewed Without Any New Civil Liberties Protections
Tor++.
It's largely been my experience. The best programmers and the best hackers I know are all more passionate about what they're DOING with code rather than the minutiae of code itself.

Which isn't to say they aren't interested in technique. After all, carpenters still like to geek out over tools once in awhile . . .
Jquery.mb.containerPlus 2.4.7 is out
The article is entitled "ScrumPad Offers Free Subscription for Bootstrapped Startups," I'm using a fairly high-res screen, and I don't see a 'free subscription for bootstrapped startups' link anywhere.

I can scroll, but I won't unless something captures my interest. A free subscription might, but not if I'm not aware of it.
Patent Stockpiling and Positioning for Patent Fights
And think, just a month or two ago a hot link on Hacker News was how Google was killing innovation & startups by buying so many.
Just give in a buy a console; that's what I did. If the developers are going to develop console-style games, there's no point in playing them on the PC. And since the PS3 hasn't been cracked, there's no ridiculous DRM.
hurt financially == going to a restaurant/store/{insert random b&m service provider here} that i shouldn't have gone to, and spend more time/money + get worse service/product out of as a result.

isn't the whole point of a review system to influence people's decisions?
Deliverables for U.S.-Russia Innovation Dialogue
The damage radius from nuclear weapons can also be greatly reduced by hills and such, so we are even better off than that.
Interesting. So, out of curiosity, are you just not particular about projects? If you had to choose between two arbitrary projects to work on, on what criteria would you base your choice?
Similarly, tabs and spaces can be used as a primitive form of binary. A simple decoder function will allow you to generate entire Javascript programs using only whitespace.

Javascript obfuscation can get really nasty. For those interested in pursuing the issue further, I recommend checking out Caffeine Monkey [1], an automated tool for analyzing and classifying Javascript. The paper [2] gives a good overview of Javascript obfuscation techniques and the implementation of the tool.

One notable thing about Caffeine Monkey is that it attempts to do behavioral analysis instead of signature-based analysis, thereby reducing the effectiveness of obfuscation.

[1] http://www.secureworks.com/research/tools/caffeinemonkey.htm...

[2] https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Feinstein_a...
I was just going to say the same thing. Disguising the ad has value in that most users of digg have no clue how digg makes money outside the overt ads. Same goes with google. I would dare say 99.99% of google users have no idea how google makes money because the text link ads look so much like regular search results
A lot of people do input validation by disallowing 'bad' characters.

The idea is to stop people buying JavaScript in comments, as that would be bad. Just strip enough characters that you can't do functions and everything will be...

...oops. Hope you remembered to filter out + and [] as well! Never mind, now all your visitors are automatically posting/up-voting spam comments or something similar. Better luck next time.
Very interesting. This is one of my favorite lunch spots; the people that actually run the restaurant are a friend of a friend, and they are super-nice. Too bad they got caught up in this.
Looks like we don't have near enough nukes... need to get building!
That's a bit disingenuous - the explosive damage is a tiny fraction of the net destruction a nuke can cause, especially if it's a windy day.
"a basic income that declines as they have more kids" ?

The people who this hurts the most are the kids themselves - the ones who aren't at fault and who, given different circumstances, are perfectly likely to make it into the "productive" class. And since the incentive is applied after the kid is born, it hasn't really helped anything.

Plus, there are already pretty strong economic disincentives for having lots of children, and it doesn't seem to be stopping anyone. People (particularly low income people) are not rational when it comes to children.
So, out of curiosity, down-voted because it wasn't funny, or because jokes aren't encouraged?
Technology Review: Making Sense of Mountains of Data
I updated my comment to answer the obvious question of what I am interested in. I program to fulfill my practical needs and for work, but I really am interested mostly in learning as I do it and in producing code that is really high-quality, beautiful code (to the degree that the problem domain, my ability, and my personal taste allows.)
It seems like the majority of posts I've read about "passion" in programming are aimed at discouraging people from becoming programmers. Or to put it another way: encourage people whose motivation for becoming programmers is mainly to get a well-paying job to pursue a different vocation.

The article might've been more interesting if the author had discussed it in terms of discipline being more important than passion.
"... Dow!"

I believe you mean "Doh!"
To completely wipe out mankind?

I guess a couple hundred would be enough to nudge a passing rock into an Earth-crossing trajectory. Better yet would be to use the fuel to power a mighty big NTR attached to a comet and use its own water as propellant. This would be a lot more discrete than a big blast, may provide for a quicker intersection and also add a nice oomph to the comet for when it hits the ground. I would also suggest hitting the Atlantic or Yellowstone as nice strategies for maximizing destruction. Hitting Europe could yield the maximum number of deaths in the first hours, but the other two may provide a larger overall devastation.

And nothing would prevent you from using more than one comet. A string of fragments, like SL9, could rain death from the sky very evenly across all inhabited places.

In the end, it all depends on how long after launch you want to wait until the last human is dead. If you require them to be all vaporized a couple minutes by the end of the afternoon, then, perhaps, we don't have enough nukes. If you are a villain with a little more patience, you could use them far more efficiently to first render useless all emergency services (EMPs or stratospheric detonations), then ruining food supplies (even small nukes could start fires) and only then using the remaining firepower to wipe out whoever is left.

It's doable. In fact, we may even be able to wipe out humanity without using any nukes. Some politicians are much, much more destructive.
In the end, you hurt yourself financially. What if there was no review system at all?
You missed one in #3.
hit a couple capitol cities and civilization as we know it is gone. thats, like, 20 nukes.
Write for Code Quarterly (Peter Seibel's new "Hackademic Journal")
Content on the site looks largely copied from other sources. I believe this is the original

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/how-i-learnt-to-s...
the former.
YC dead filter is overzealous.
There are multi-leg flights that share the same flight number. I recall of a particular AA flight that has the same flight number from JFK-ORD and subsequently from ORD-MIA (or something like that).
the ads are actually useful and relevant. they're also clearly labeled as sponsored. you're just as likely to click on them by mistake as any other ad. odds are you'd actually click on them by mistake a lot less. if you don't like the ad? vote it down/bury it. I'm actually very bullish on this model.
Ah. Thanks!
The more I think about it, you're right. We were recently explaining to one of our clients about some basic SEO topics. They did not understand that the links on the side of Google are paid links.

I wonder what the CTR is for Google Ads on typical Google search?
... then i would use other, less centralized and organized sources, as i did before yelp existed. what's your point?

i'm certainly not saying that yelp is stealing money from me, but trusted (yes, only to a certain extent) information is trusted information. if misleading, there are consequences to the consumer.
A lot of nukes going off at once would cause a bunch of dust to go up into the atmosphere and block out the sun for a long time. That would kill plants and we would all starve or get sick and die. This is at least according to the history channel.
Live Ships Map - Vessel Traffic and Positions
I don't really understand the whole "right to choice" argument. I don't really have the right to stop people from expressing themselves, but I do have a right to walk away if I don't like it.
I suppose fallout is not factored into his equation.