skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To reason that there is no god is not based on factual observation. To reason that there is a god is not based on factual observation.

I don't need to pigeon-holing anyone anywhere the nuances I highlighted are based on the real world definitions not ones I invented. The only conjecture that I added was my personal view that lumping agnostics (by definition) in with atheist is to deny an agnostic a more robust view on things, something that neither the religious nor atheist tend to appreciate.

--please have at least few facts you can back up

That's all I was talking about was true facts, it funny how emotions cripple people logically and blind them from the true quest for knowledge.
Probably, but let's all just keep pretending it isn't for a while longer.
instapaper is one of the few web apps that's changed my internet behavior in a big, pleasantly unexpected way.
in fairness, "void" strikes me as a type while "nil" strikes me as a representation. When I see "nil" in a language I expect it to have all the hideous C-like baggage of applying to any type and being a valid value for any variable. With "void," I would stop and read the documentation to see how it works.

If void behaves like nil in other languages, that's bad. But if it behaves like None in Haskell, that's good.
Interesting then that I can't find the release anywhere.
Nothing special, but I'm interested about geek ideas :)
I'm all for short-but-informative books* , but twenty pages is a booklet. It would be a good size for a chapter in a book on web tools or particularly good Ruby libraries, though.

* Such as seemingly everything Brian Kernighan has co-written.
You don't need to prove intent to send someone to jail. For some types of crimes intent changes the punishment but that's about it.
I thought lawyers faced fairly serious penalties for knowingly pursuing obviously meritless cases.
> Productive depression is a dignified depression¸ where the person realizes that the object of the angst is a little elusive

I think their theory is that this state (realizing what is the object and why it is elusive) is the healthy outcome of a depression, and it can either happen naturally or with the help of therapy. Using their metaphor, what you call "unproductive depression" is like a person hallucinating or dying with a 40º+ fever.
When we had that 3-4 quake outside Chicago earlier this month, my wife was convinced a tree had fallen against the house or something. USGS Shakemap had no data yet.

On a hunch I searched twitter and saw over 200 "OMG WHAT WAS THAT?" messages. Confirmed the quake before anything else.
Central banks and fiat currencies are the problem, what we need are asset backed currencies -- ones where politicians cannot inflate at will.
Loopt patenting location sharing
Tools to desing logo online for free
Funny, this is showing up right beside the "asteroids worth 20 Trillion" post (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1154812). Sounds like the US just needs to get 1-2 asteroids!
Achievement Porn
My limited understanding is that national debt is not supposed to be paid off, actually attempting to do that is often a catastrophic move. If the interest is paid year to year, exponential growth of the economy takes care of things eventually. WW2 debt for example would be peanuts in today's money, so it's not really important if it was actually paid off or not.
How long exponential growth is sustainable, and how is this whole system different from a martingale gambling strategy is another question.
That's precisely what makes free/open source software so interesting. You can compete, of course, but you also are free to build upon the work of others, to borrow ideas and code and then run in a different direction and see how far you can get.

I miss the hardware diversity of the 80's, but there are exciting times for software folks.
How can I contribute? There's a section under the Models for Sequel, but it is blank. I've done plenty of work with Sequel and Sinatra and I'm sure I could fill in the blanks.
Nukes are much cheaper.
I don't even know why this site is promoted here? HN, this is how you lose your readers.

You see, the truth is that the U.S. government now owes more dollars than actually exist. If the U.S. government went out today and took every single penny from every single American bank, business and taxpayer, they still would not be able to pay off the national debt. And if they did that, obviously American society would stop functioning because nobody would have any money to buy or sell anything.

The last sentence makes me laugh and stopped me from reading any further. The only thing thats obvious here is that the author hasn't any clue about economics.

It's not good to have debt above 100% of GDP, sure. It means that working that debt off takes more than 100% of GDP. So it takes more time or/and more effort to get rid of it.

That article is bs. The purpose of this article should be clear by looking at the pages it links to: Emergency Food, Home Security, Alternative 'more secure' investments... come on HN! #2 on the front page? really???
It's MASS is 860 billion tons and 700 billion tons respectively, its weight is 0 tons and 0 tons respectively other wise they would have sunk. They're NEUTRALLY BUOYANT. With no ocean currents and no winds I could move them around with a pocket fan.

All the question here is whether you can anchor the icebergs against the forces applied by ocean currents and the wind. The fact that these icebergs weigh nothing due to their buoyancy is the problem here, no one would have given a shit if they sank.
Except the WW2 debt was paid in 1945 dollars which are worth a hell of a lot more than 2010 dollars. If you imagine the loans as being in gold (and this might be a bad example because I don't know how gold has inflated) then they still have to return that amount of gold.
I've tried both, I seem to like OmniGraffle better, perhaps mostly due to the huge number of templates on graffletopia.
I keep saying, only half-jokingly, Twitter is turning us into nodes of a global collective mind.

When she said that she became aware of the quake, I questioned what did she mean with "she".
It's a wonderful idea.

If the MIT folks decided, today, to build a Lisp Machine, what would it look like? What would future LMI and Symbolics turn into? How would that affect the way we work?

And, while I am at it, what would a Debian GNU/Plan9 or a Ubuntu Plan9 look like?

Would it be more successful if it looked more like a traditional Unix desktop and exposed its sophisticated internals only to the power-user?
A way to make a digital thesis
When talking about the modern form of essay writing the most uncommon form is writing a digital thesis. A digital thesis is a form of thesis that is digitalized and made available on the internet for ready reference and reading.
Well written, but still stupid. I'd like to see less of this kind of stuff on HN.

Choice extracts:

Anthony Burgess’s nightmare vision of an elite using high culture as a “punitive slap on the chops” for low youth has come true.

The weaponization of classical music speaks volumes about the British elite’s authoritarianism and cultural backwardness.

Britain might not make steel anymore, or cars, or pop music worth listening to, but, boy, are we world-beaters when it comes to tyranny.
From an outside observer, Britain seems pretty clearly to be creeping toward an authoritarian state. Why is there no pushback to things like ASBOs being used to criminalize everything and omnipresent CCTV cameras?

EDIT: Not that this topic in particular is anywhere near the most serious example.
I bet the report will say "it was hacked after a large number of people visited it, coming from a site called 'Hacker News'".
In-Stream Marketing is an endorsement not an interuption
Indeed, miles is just a nice name for reward points, but you're not quite on target with the calculations. In American Airline's AAdvantage program, you earn miles per dollar spent (for example, CitiBank's AAdvantage card earns 1 mile per dollar spent[1]). However, it takes a static number of points depending on your departure and arrival locations[2].

On top of the $1 = 1 mile business, for whatever reason, lots of airlines hand out frequent flyer miles like candy. American Airlines used to give you 1,000 miles ($500 worth, as you get double points with AA services) just for booking a vacation through their service... the pudding is another example of this. There's lots of potential for bonus miles, basically.

So, depending on how you want to look at it, doing this without rewards, he earned $1,250,000 worth of miles for around $3750. With rewards, it could be anything, but surely he paid the minimum amount.

[1]: http://www.citicards.com/cards/wv/faq2.do?screenID=801&s...
[2]: http://www.aa.com/pubcontent/en_US/disclaimers/free-ticket-a...
I wonder whether the headteacher who invented this got the idea from "A Clockwork Orange". He must have seen it before.
I'd blame vitamin D deficiency for the bulk of depression cases in the modern world. Indoors culture, heavy clothing, an aversion to organ meats - which the biology tells us are the most nutrient-rich parts. It adds up to a massive nutrition gap, one only slightly offset by the tiny amounts added to dairy.
aren't there many private businesses that couldn't make a profit without laws supporting them?

In a sense, no, by definition.
Real threat in virtual battleground: hackers
I am disturbed by the creepy similarities to "A Clockwork Orange" (which the article refers to, as well).

The concluding paragraph is plain scary. I hope UK's situation is not entire like that.
the interesting bit is they are using code from webkit. I wonder if mozilla could also integrate google's Irregexp regular expression engine, which appears to be scarily fast in some probably irrelevant tests :)
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=reg...
The Law of Medium Numbers
The site is a thin veneer over an attempt to use people's panic to get them to buy:

gold coins: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/gold-coins
silver coins: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/silver-coins
emergency food: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/emergency-food
water filters: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/water-filters
alternative energy 'sources': http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/alternative-energy
home 'security': http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/home-security
personal 'security': http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/personal-security

and truely wtf...

macbooks: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/macbooks
and
netbooks: http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/netbooks
For some reason I enjoy using Sinatra more than Rails, I think it is simpler and more 'Ruby-ish'. Also it works well on the free and scaleable Google App Engine: http://goo.gl/6eW4.
Cybersecurity bill to give president new emergency powers
I don't tend to notice the CCTV cameras all that much. In my view the privacy violation they pose is relatively minor, considering that anything you do in public is, by definition, not private.
Most of the CCTV cameras are privately owned by businesses, shops and the like. They're not all joined up. If the police want to see what has been on them, they need to go in and ask with a warrant.

On the other hand, councils etc have been shown to be abusing the permissions in RIPA to snoop on relatively minor offences so some concern is justified.
In 1945, 1 troy ounce of gold was worth something in the vicinity of 35 USD.. As of today it's over 1100 USD, and going up really fast. It would have been unfortunate to have it paid back in gold.

http://www.nma.org/pdf/gold/his_gold_prices.pdf

Also some figures for what was mentioned in the article:
http://mises.org/markets.asp (the last set of diagrams show the national debt figures over 60 years, useful to get an idea)
Part of it is probably that there is no protected constitution in the UK - there is no distinct set of laws set up as "the constitution", and therefore there aren't any laws which see special protection from changes. Moreover, privacy in general is a relatively new idea, and the lack of political upheaval over the centuries means there haven't been any major events to cause a general overhaul where such privacy laws might have been created.

Part of it is probably that the scaremongering from mid-market and tabloid print media, as well as the ruling party actually works, and people have been led to believe that the authoritarian measures are for their benefit. There seem to be fairly widespread xenophobic attitudes, and a fear of the "out of control" youth.

The education that kids receive at school seems to be pretty poor [1], which gives people little historical and political perspective and therefore no strong feelings towards personal freedom.

The plurality election system of the House of Commons also causes a relatively weak opposition. I haven't been following UK politics recently, but as far as I know, the second most powerful party, the Conservatives, don't oppose the authoritarian measures, anyway.

[1] I studied at a UK university - the average standard of education among my fellow students seemed far lower than what I received in Austria
Since the debt is in dollars and not in gold, this does not matter. I never heared that national debt would be updated to reflect inflation. And I don't think WW2 debt was ever paid in any dollars. It's interest was paid in 1945 dollars, then in 1946 dollars, etc.

What you say about inflation matters only if debt is in a different currency, which was Argentina's case, but not the US.
Certainly the conclusion is open to debate. The facts however are that the Federal Reserve is owned, not by the "people" of the USA but by some number of presumably unknown owners.

The other fact is that unlike other money systems, the USA does use a system where every Federal Reserve Note created has debt attached to it - that is why the word "note" is on the front of it - a note is a promise to pay, not the payment itself.

Under the Constitution, only gold and silver stamped into a standardized form, is "money". That is why the FRN is declared by the government to be "legal tender" - only force, enforces its continued acceptance by people inside the US.
Wish I could downvote main page submissions. This is tripe totally unworthy of this site.
Given India's comfort level with gold dealing, I wonder if this means that an alternate payment system such as goldmoney.com will be able to get a lot of traction.

You have to think that some other online payment company would be planning to buy ads online and run a billboard campaign in some of the larger cities in an attempt to gain share.
The difference to other countries is that you don't need permission to set up a camera overlooking land not owned by you, which is what has caused this massive proliferation. Whether the cameras are privately or publicly owned is irrelevant - the executive can gain access to the recordings fairly easily.
Keep in mind it's an unusually clean 50Mt device.

Who needs a 100Mt device anyway?
It is unfortunate that he uses the Alaska purchase as the benchmark for shrewd public investment as there is some thought that maybe it wasn't, see: http://bit.ly/d3WsHn
The purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, ridiculed in 1867 as “Seward’s Folly,” is now viewed as a shrewd business deal. A purely financial analysis of the transaction, however, shows that the price was greater than the net present value of cash flow from Alaska to the federal government from 1867 to 2007.
Pathfinders: Lost at Sea Game Download Free
I don't agree with the author on one point, not all achievement in a game are "fake". Well, that actually depends on your perception of the definition of what is fake. In my opinion, if you actually solve a problem, a puzzle or a quiz in a game that amounts up to a "real" achievement.
Unless detention is to be reclassified as weaponizing time, agreed, this is pretty stupid. It does look like a fine way of giving children who might otherwise be indifferent to it a lifelong disgust for classical music.
Orwell was British; prophets and home towns, etc. :-)

But seriously, crime/terror are getting easier with better technology. Some solutions are needed. Also, soon cameras with logging will be trivially cheap, so video logging your life ought to become common.

Let us be grateful that the British research this type of society and risk a 1984 scenario. We can then copy what works.
USS Nebraska Submarine Embark November 2008
I half-joke about it as well. It's a little scary, little exciting that something like this is even possible now.
Technological Progress Happens via Simulated Annealing
Slides from a visit to Ohio Class Nuclear Trident USS Nebraska submarine. Go to slide 22 for interesting pictures
The Corvair was actually a pretty good car by the time it got into production, and there remain the buffs who are loyal to it.

As for the Prius, Airbus killed a number of test pilots getting fly-by-wire right; I'm not entirely surprised that Toyota experiences difficulties with drive-by-wire.
Incorrect; for computer misuse laws you have to prove intent - it's the most important part of it.

It's the reason most hackers or online criminals are convicted of other crimes.

(I work in this area and have studied the US laws quite recently).

EDIT: perhaps "show intent" is a better way of putting it.
Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning
non-mobile version: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61Q0S920100227
The Etymology of Nerd and Geek ... and a Little Love
A personal take on the etymology of the words nerd and geek.
If this is interesting to folks, I highly recommend "Mining the Sky": http://www.amazon.com/Mining-Sky-Untold-Asteroids-Planets/dp....
Because the general public loves it.
this is a wonderful article. anytime there is some sort of measure of achievement you have to be careful that it isn't easier to bend the measure than to actually achieve. the comparison to school is great and can be seen in even sharper relief in Japan and Korea's "Cram Schools" the existence of which is predicated on hacking the school system.
It doesn't matter where he got the idea. Ideas aren't protected unless they're patented. If it's not patented, or if it's not even patentable, then it's fair game.
Why is the government always in the corporation's back pocket? The democrats are firmly in control, with a president who has shown a huge favor for unionized labor.
I'm a student who loves programming and food.

I think I'll come.
Get the latest and free tools for making logo
Seismon: chilean coast.
The Atlas V rocket exceeds the speed of sound
What exactly are the 'creepy similarities' beyond the authors' tenuous grasp on reality? Is anyone at all being "forced to take drugs that induce nausea and to watch graphically violent movies for two weeks, while simultaneously listening to Beethoven"?
I got a 360 recently to play an arcade scrolling shooter port. Microsoft requires game publishers to have a certain minimum number of those popup achievements in the game before they approve it for production. Cynically, the publisher (a medium-sized Japanese company) created achievements for it like "Cleared level 1" "Shot an enemy" "Cleared level 2" "Died" "Defeated a boss" "Touched a power-up" "Score was a multiple of 200" "Watched the credits" stuff like that. There are also achievements for picking certain items in the options menus, not touching the controller for a certain amount of time during gameplay, starting the game (yeah, just starting the game), scrolling the selection cursor off the screen, etc. Awesome.
This will only cause me to loiter even more - free music!
I'm curious about when you would use a Ruby port of Readability.
Please explain what you mean by "real achievement". At a minimum, I would think that it must include making people's lives better, directly or indirectly. By that metric, solving a puzzle - e.g. sudoko - is fake, as the puzzle could be solved much more efficiently e.g. by a computer program, and the human effort put into solving it could be much more productive - and "real" - elsewhere.
> First of all, you have modified the function that I posted (you changed the type declaration from a list to an array).

How would I demonstrate SBCL's ability to detect type errors except by making a type error? Your example showed nothing; 'type' could be a null-op for all it does.

And checks about primitive types are all well and good, but how far does it go? Not being much of a lisper, it's hard for me to give whole classes of example where SBCL's warnings are non-existent, incorrect, or buried under a flurry of others. If I declare a custom CLOS object with multiple fields/methods/whatever and call a field/method which doesn't exist, is SBCL still smart enough to warn me? I dunno.
Brent Simmons On switching away from Core Data
Mel the programmer was a real person
This is one of those examples of why I love the Ruby community so much, it's almost hard to find a Ruby book/tutorial/blog post that hasn't been written with such love and care. It makes me feel all fuzzy inside, try to find a similar source for spring mvc :(
I don't have a TV to attach a console to, and I really couldn't be bothered with having to manage with multiple physical tokens for each game - I don't pirate, but I do use nodvd cracks and the like. And the games I enjoy, primarily first person shooters, work best with keyboard and mouse.
Just like momma said, the web is like a box of chocolates...
That's why I literally love capitalism.

The market does not give a heck about your little silly titles. You might be a God of the Universe, but if you cannot bring a profit, you're out.
Agreed. You have to be careful to remove bias.

For example, if I set up a scientific study that compares the intelligence of vegetarians to meat-eaters I may find vegetarians scoring higher on intelligence than meat-eaters but that wouldn't necessarily prove the points that I speculated about above.

That's because meat is subsidized, so people in poverty would have a harder time being vegetarian, and I would think that poverty is correlated with education level which would be correlated with intelligence. (See http://www.pcrm.org/magazine/gm07autumn/health_pork.html)
What a terrific offer. :3

i'm several thousand miles away tho :(
Damn this thing and it's ability to only upvote once!
The first paragraph says it all: worldwide to Scoble means US, UK, Canada, France and Israel. What does Scoble know about how hard it is to start up in Hungary or Russia or ...? Nothing.
Britain has a serious problem with its youth, more than any developed country in the world, including gun crime america. In america the rough spots are confined to certain sections of town. In other european countries youth are generally well behaved. In the uk though, many youth are just simply out of control, I wish there were a lot more cameras (and people looking at them). Droves of the middle class are simply choosing to leave the uk and settle in france,australia,spain,canada because of this.
That's a good question. Does building muscle mass by lifting weights count as a real achievment? Being fit makes that person's life better (and possibly others, since wellness travels along social networks). Repeated problem solving is cognitive exercise, so perhaps it can also be "real". The trick would be to be honest about the benefits of said exercise. Imagine someone who only worked their biceps, but deluded themselves into thinking their achievement were greater.
An attorney can incorporate and keep your identity secret. As long as the corportion isn't public disclosure requirements are trivial. The problem is with respect to banking business; banks will insist on knowing who the real customer is. It is almost impossible to conduct banking business though third parties.
What kinds of other crimes do they use to convict people?
Can Entrepreneurs be Made?