skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Take heart entrepreneurs, John Calvin had this idea almost 500 years ago when he introduced Calvinism.

There are no new ideas, just new implementations.
Free will is a little like Hume's idea of miracles. Which is more likely: that physical entities created from (roughly) deterministic processes would develop free will, or that it would be a valuable evolutionary adaptation for them to think they had free will, and to narrate their lives as if they did?
You've probably evolved to produce offensive body odors and to fear social interactions with your own species. You probably have no choice but to trick yourself into thinking you are good at trivial reading comprehension.
Here's a mirror (don't know how well it will hold up):
http://hildr.luminance.org/ibb/
On DIRFAs
There are a lot of good tools for game creation on the iPhone (Unity, for example) that just don't exist for Android yet. They are coming, (JMonkeyEngine is coming out with one sometime soon I hear). Also the audience is bigger, though Android is catching up. All that being said, it is probably easier to make a name for yourself in Android game development...basically it is a tossup. Go with the language you are more effective in, and if you get some cash coming in from that, port it over to the other platform.
"I wondered if it was ethnical - since I haven’t seen it on any restaurant menu yet."
The dining industry is not ready yet for such a culinary perversion...
And yes, the OP could have posted something else instead of this :)
Free will doesn't really matter. Only an illusion of free will matters. You give me an illusion of free will, I'm fine with that. But if you take away any perception I have that I'm making choices, I won't like it.
Microsoft Tag Android App
The assumption that cheap, standardized software is either cheap or standardized is a false one. Take the content-management space. For a complex site serving millions of viewers with 100k+ pages, off-the-shelf solutions can be quite expensive (when you account for the initial investment, the time-to-learn, the internal development work required to implement customizations) and often you need to customize the solution.

In the end, you end up with a custom solution layered on top of a specific implementation (so, no standardization even if you started from the vanilla off-the-shelf). Implementing a tool that's specific to the needs of the company can turn out to be a reasonable decision.
So why do you think Apple use WiFi positioning on the iPhone?

GPS can take minutes (or never come back with a location if you are inside) and tower triangulation has never lived up to the accuracy claims that they made.
Heisenberg uncertainty principle prevents perfectly accurate measure of "physical state".

So, two brains as physically identical as possible will probably have (slightly) different outputs.

But those differences would have nothing to do with human will. They would be random, or, more precisely, non-deterministic (per definition, as you can't measure them). So, having a non-deterministic free will is like having no free will at all.

Conclusion: We have no free will nor fate ;)
> The Old Microsoft way was to threaten to cut off vendors just for competing, not for giving a competitor an advantage.

What specific incident(s) are you referring to? The closest thing I can think of is threatening to witholding volume discounts based on vendor behavior. As I understand it this practice is only illegal because the dominant market position of Windows and Office makes MS (retroactively) a monopoly. If a small startup did the same thing that would be fine both legally and (IMO) morally. I don't know of any cases where a vendor was threatened with not being able to sell Windows or Office (i.e., "cut off"), however.
Ask HN: Conversion rates for free trials for Freemium
Would love to hear from the community about their conversion rates and any tips with regards to free trials.

In my view, there are generally to types of free trials: with and without asking for a credit card upfront. Has anyone done any comparisons re: conversion rates?

Also, if anyone has any rates or stats to share regarding Paypal vs roll-your-own, would be interested in that too. Basically, all metrics welcome!

Finally, if you dont ask for CC info upfront, how much chasing do you have to do to get them to provide that info at the end of the free month? There's probably a dev effort to build the emails, reminders, warnings and eventual expiry right?
Your argument is still circular. What do you think proof and disproof mean in this context? Why don't you think that materialism suffers from the same flaws?

This is why scientists make bad philosophers. They do not acknowledge the boundaries of their philosophy.
Has anyone used their API? I signed up a long time ago but never got a response. Their sample code seems to make it very simple to integrate into .Net apps.
Losing Weight - Ideas For the Working Mommy
Announcing the NYC Startup Job Fair
I have a screenshot with one that reached 139%.
I love how 'conscious thought' goes into a little circle like it's a solved problem. Same with 'unconscious thought'.
> Rules? In a knife fight? No rules.
I love this kind of comments... it's like UK and France were talking about Germany before WW2 :))
False,

Safari comes pre-installed on macs.

Firefox comes pre-installed on linux and was the first open source browser and was adopted by many for this.

Chrome is advertised all over Googles network of sites telling non tech people that they will see youtube and other sites better with chome.

Opera is just there and sadly forgotten.
I'm not exactly sure how relevant this is the the free will conversation, but it's related and something I think about on a regular basis.

When I see a person who grew up in a wonderful environment with presumably good genetics, judge and condemn someone who did not, I wonder how they justify their superiority. It's as if they believe that, if they were that person, they would make better choices and do better things with their life. My question is, if you were that person, with exactly the same genetics and environment, then wouldn't you, by definition, BE that person and live your life in exactly the same way?

I suspect their answer would eventually come down to something about a "soul" which, even if it exists, would still be something that you were born with and thus completely out of your control. So, again, I would ask how they deserve their superiority, especially if they don't go for the soul argument.

I can then imagine some of them going for the "I deserve it because I was so awesome in my past-life.", which also doesn't hold up because it's a circular argument. So, again, how can they justify their superiority?

I'd say it's just luck, but I can see some people using that as an excuse to never do the right thing. "I was born this way so that's how I'm going to be." I could probably argue with myself for hours about this kind of stuff.
"Free will" is a philosophical issue, not a biological one. It's somewhat comical that a neurobiologist thinks he has something relevant to say on the subject.

Would anyone take seriously an article like "Phagocytosis is a myth, philosopher says"?
Why Joel Spolsky Should Not Quit Blogging
Adenyo secures US$26.9 million in financing | Embargo Zone
And yet the nerve impulses which caused the muscles in your arm to contract left your brain about 500ms before you became aware of deciding to raise your arm. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6640273) Additionally, the mechanisms which sent that nerve impulse were spinning up for up to 10s before that (http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v11/n5/abs/nn.2112.html).

The you that lifts your arm and the you which feels like it decided to lift your arm are on different schedules.
Borderless Networks in Action Video: How the network can make our lives easier
pretty much what i was thinking. the position that flash is unviable on a mobile device is just untenable. sure not all web-flash applications will work without tweaking simply because the usage cases are different, but that does not invalidate the platform in the slightest
Conclusion: We have no free will nor fate ;)

The alternative interpretation is that all particles in the universe have free will. ;)
I'm not aware of any commercial solutions but a tool you might find useful is Hive: http://hadoop.apache.org/hive/

These videos are a great introduction:
http://www.cloudera.com/videos/introduction_to_hive
http://www.cloudera.com/videos/hive_tutorial
http://izismile.com/img/img3/20100304/daily_picdump_357_127....
Some distributions of 'cp' have it built in: https://bugs.launchpad.net/fedora/+source/coreutils/+bug/640...
> Why not let the market decide?

Apple never lets the market decide. It hasn't since Steve Jobs came back from NeXT. "The market" is incredibly bad at spurring the kind of innovation Apple wants on its own. Because "the market" is largely composed of people who have no fucking clue what they actually want from technology. They couldn't tell you what they really want unless you trained them. Even then, they might not be able to.

"The market deciding" is what we've had pre-iPhone with the incredibly conservative and stunted market behind smartphones. Everyone—and I mean everyone in the mobile space—had the technology to create the iPhone. No one did. Why? Because the HTC Crapfest and the Blackberry Eyebleacher sold plenty well. Because instead of taking bold risks and trying for real innovation, companies like Palm and RIM crawled forward with a constant eye towards this quarter's revenue. It's a malaise that has infected so much of the world's business.

Apple's approach is frustrating and inconsistent, which is repugnant to the News.Y crowd (myself included). But it's allowed them to continue to shape the AppStore into something they want and something that moves product. It's the foundation for future products as well. So don't ask, "Why not let the market decide," because we all already know the answer. What Apple is doing may be a slipperly slope, it may be doomed to fail long–term and it may be infuriating and alienating to its developer base. But undeniably it's a business strategy that is at the heart of the ascendancy of their products onto a worldwide market.
Well free apps are never going to make any money. That’s obvious, right? You wouldn’t think so with some people.

Wrong! Free apps can definitely make money-- just not through software sales. Free apps need to be monetized some other way, and in many cases, this is a much smarter way to go.
It's a nice backup and is very useful in the iPod Touch.
Somehow this seems to be an idea that comes up from time to time, I wonder if anyone has pulled off a successful service based on this yet. Just a few months ago I was talking to someone entering a business plan contest with this very idea.
How about jQuery-style “property methods” for C#?
88 Ways to Make The Naughty List
I always thought that "it doesn't exist" means "we have a test which would prove that it does exist, and it has failed that test." If "it doesn't exist" means "I can't prove it either way and I don't think it matters," what category is left for phlogiston?
Shipping is awesome, and if you don't ship you've got nothing.

But to think your first product/site/whatever is going to give you creative freedom...I think that's selection bias. I've shipped a lot of mini-sites (mostly for my own amusement) and the traffic is very low and has not brought me any sort of fame.

Sure, maybe I'm doing it wrong, but I would say 9 out of 10 projects you create are not going to become popular or get you renowned.

That doesn't make it not worth doing. I've learned something new from every new project I've built and every person I've worked with. But it also hasn't benefited me financially.
I think a better definition would be "the thing that makes people responsible for their choices." The really hard problem of free will is explaining how on earth people could be responsible for their actions if these actions aren't freely chosen. (Or of explaining what it means for something to be freely chosen if they are indeed freely chosen.) The issue of determinism vs. non-determinism is a complete red herring, IMHO. A belief in free will is not just a belief in non-determinism, or a rejection of physicalism.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/r0/thou_art_physics/
Good article about large builds. I know of at least one outfit with a large legacy C++ code spend the effort to move to C#, in no small part due to unmanageable build times. This would be under the "constant reduce" leg of this journey, but with C# you cut your file count in half all other things being equal.

A minor nit: most other builds should be O(WhateverChanged) -- consider a C++ header file used by 10 c++ files. Those 10 would need to be recompiled. The agony there is that you wish for some less-than-full-file dependency analysis so that only the files that use that constant you just changed need to recompile.

On the whole a good start to those massive builds you have.
I've been reading your posts on this thread with fascination. Where exactly were you trained, if I might ask? The streets of Compton? No offense intended, it's just that "heavily injured by a baseball bat during training" doesn't sound like national military to me...
Swimming Upstream: 'Salmon,' Google's Open Source Social Web Aggregator
Yeah, it's not like philosophy should update itself based on science, pfft!
Why would I be trolling? Sure, it's an unpopular opinion, but I'm expressing it sincerely. The idea that you should continually build on the work of others is insane--do you build buildings like that? Constantly tacking on parts as they're needed, never re-analyzing the foundations? Of course not. Why, then, should the same work for software or science? All that results in is an excess of information; I'm suggesting that it's better to trim that excess by constantly rebuilding and refining the basics, rather than building monstrosities upon monstrosities.
So, higher quality ads should stand out, right?

I've been toying with the idea of running a PPC campaign on Facebook, to compare the ROI to Adwords.

Any advice on how to avoid the pitfall of "low quality ads" that you find to be endemic?
Why would that feel like free will? Wouldn't it just feel like using adaptive heuristic problem solving to explore an imperfectly mapped problem/solution space while attempting to maximize value fulfillment payoff?

It's of course logically possible that doing that could make someone feel like they had free will, but it seems a rather odd idea.
Super bad to read thanks to letter-spacing: -1px;

Oh why...
Tower triangulation is really just not very precise (at the moment). If I'm in an area with no wi-fi networks and attempt to get my position without GPS, then I'm given a pretty huge range of coordinates I can be in (at least a square mile). If I give it enough time, AGPS can kick in and get me closer, but if I am in range of a couple of wi-fi networks, I'm usually within 50-100 feet or so in a couple of seconds. The majority of APs seem to be in Skyhook nowadays. I understand why Skyhook can't be used for e911 — APs can move, or the information can be inaccurate from the start. So, in that respect, AGPS is more accurate, but not as precise. In my daily usage, precision is more important to me.
What an incredibly horrible interface that is. Here's something which is readable: http://esd.mit.edu/Faculty_Pages/moses/Macsyma.pdf
Mark Twain said, "You need two things to survive in this world: Ignorance and Confidence."

Jim Cramer has a lot of both.
blah..

The only reason the iPhone does not support flash is so that the app store can sell more games. If the iPhone supported flash people would make flash game sites for the phone and apple would lose money in sales from its app store. It would also not be able to control these games and that would make steve sad.
See also this story of a biologist thinking that even fruit flies have free will: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN1532077920070516
For a bit of historical trivia, July 26, 2007 was when debt markets began panicking, causing the meltdown of Bear Stearns hedge funds, thus leading to the collapse of Bear and Lehman, thus bringing on the crash of 2008.

So this is like saying "So what if an Archduke gets shot?" in early June, 1914.
You can stop thinking in terms of "responsibility" and start thinking in terms of "incentives." i.e. you can still send a criminal to jail even though they didn't decide to be a criminal, if jail time is more likely to discourage other criminals.

If you don't have free will, you still respond to stimuli. So instead of punishing someone for willful action, you subject them to stimuli.
It is a very cool idea. But I'm so tired of downloading jquery a hundred times per page. I'm also frustrated that jquery is so difficult to pull apart into a minimal set of components.

If there is one thing jQuery could eagerly copy from Mootools, it should be that ability to decompose the library into a minimal set. Then using it wouldn't be a problem.
I agree with most of this article, down to the part about having a public 18-36 month plan. To me it sounds too obligatory. Now you are on the hook to deliver things that may change over the course of time. I know Earlyvangelists are supposed to understand the vision is "subject to change", but it's much easier to assume they are okay with it in theory. I find them much less forgiving in practice.

We've never announced a feature unless we know the day it will deploy. That way we meet or exceed customer expectations 100% of the time. Sure, we might have an idea of where the app is headed in three years, but we don't share it with customers because it will change.

When we say we're going to do something and change our mind later I think it makes the company look bad, even if it's the right decision.

We're at a point where my company is trying to get out of client work 100%. To me, selling features of a product to a company and telling them I will deliver in 18-36 months puts me right back in the client business. No thanks.
At a bigger scale, they seem to act randomly, though.

But maybe if we could follow one particle in its everyday life, we see how it exercises its free will?
But I don't want to stop thinking in terms of responsibility.

I just can't view other people as black boxes who "respond to stimuli", because that's incompatible with any kind of moral or human outlook on the world. After all, I don't think of myself as a black box who responds to stimuli. And how can I be a truly moral person if I think others are fundamentally different from me?
True story: I major decision early in my life by flipping a coin.

Now whether or not I was programmed by the universe to make that decision that way or not, from the outside there is no way a universal observer could determine what eventual choice I would make. It easily passes the duck test as being free will.
Because the choice resulting from problem solving is adaptive and heuristic, I can't run it advance of the evidential state I'm in when I choose. I can't know the evidential state in advance, because the problem/solution space is imperfectly mapped. So it feels like my choices are not determined in advance. (However they're entirely determined at the instant I make them.)
Does something have to be physical to be real? It seems like no to me. What is a "movie" but pixels on a screen flashing in a certain order, or a song but a series of sounds. But these patterns, or forms have predictable effects on the material world--the sound of a fire alarm will change the position of people around it. If these patterns exist apart from the physical world--their implementations in some sense, then why does free will need a physical basis? Couldn't it be a property that exceeds the sum of parts?
The sad part was that WiFiFoFum was a great app to diagnose problems with my work network. I really hope this one gets resolved somehow.
Open source reaches hardware products
Duh... headline should replace hackers with crackers.

On first sight I really thought that it was about regular Google employees who developed something new during their blessed self-time.
"I sorta find it amusing that McAfee released a PDF of the white paper, considering that Abode’s PDF Reader is also a popular attack vector. It’s like railing again IE6 being insecure, but using it to post the message that IE6 is insecure."

-From the comments in the original article.

I found the above interesting because it suggests to me one of the fundamental principles of security: we must necessarily try to improve our security from inside of systems which are already insecure.

We could say that no one should ever use an IE with a zero-day vulnerability. And that no one should use pdf because it can be an attack vector. Or view jpegs because there have been embedded executable code vulnerabilities. Or run executable code because sometimes it is malicious.

Security is always a matter of trade-offs. One can never build a house which cannot be broken into but one can build a house that is not worth breaking into.

Sounds like there were a number of vulnerabilities here. It also sounds like improving default settings is one of the best solutions here. But it's clearly not a justification for no longer using SCM, or pdf. Perhaps for old IE.
Some initial training in the uk with the military. A little in Brazil (that was more for fun) and a week in India. The last was where I got brained with the bat. My fault. It was the last day and I tripped while practicing defence.

I refresh every couple of months.
Self Esteem, Self Destruction
A friend of mine released an Android app for free on the Android Market (we're in Canada), and he has made virtually nothing on advertising.

The model available to him was limited to clicks and not impressions, so while he has had tens of thousands of impressions and a decently large number of active users, he receives a very tiny number of clicks and therefore makes a profit that is less than negligible.

One of the apps I released on the other hand (on another store), has cost a variety of prices between 1.99 and 2.99, and I've made a few hundred dollars in sales.

Think about it this way: he makes around $5 CDN a week in advertising for his free application which took him weeks to develop, whereas my app nets me around $1.90 USD per sale and it took me about one full day's work.

I've kind of rambled on at this point, but basically what I'm saying is this: I need to sell less than three copies a week to top his profit, and I'm running on a store that has significantly less traffic than the Android Market and selling my app, not giving it away.
Skyhook is no-way exclusive on the iPhone. You can use it in your Android or WinMobile app, I think it's included in the Droid, and it's in other Wifi products.
--Its nice to think that people factor benevolent principles into situations like this. However, when people fight back under high stress situations like a robbery, it is probable that the moment is not about defending society; its about survival.

To some it is, to some it is not. I personally have been in a similar situation (assailant had a gun). As well, I have trained since a young age in defensive combat. I can honestly say that when that moment was upon me, the rage that ran through my mind was not for saving myself but the idea that a little old lady had most likely stood in my same position and that the people around me are being victimized. I think most that do decide to stand, stand for a sense of honor that is beyond them or their personal well being, because even to them, logically the money is not worth it, it is the principal of the matter. Given the original post's description of the gentleman as an individual who dislikes violence he sounds to me like he is a man that does not compromise his principles even if it costs him his life, which it looks like it eventually did. Being a man of principals in not unintelligent and that was the summation of my previous post.