skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's make sure I understand.

Someone says "X is bad". Your response is "bad person Y also did X".

It's unclear how that's an argument for the goodness of X.

Note that the person who said "X is bad" may have disagreed with it when Y did it. If you find X acceptable now, it's unclear why you're criticizing Y for doing it.

And, FWIW, the Iraq/Afghanistan war has been cheaper than Obama's other adventures. And, for all the pre-election talk, Obama has followed the Bush timetable/plan wrt Iraq/Afganistan.

Bush's errors do not justify or excuse Obama's actions. However, they do constrain them.

WRT govt debt/spending, it's one thing to say "I'll start a diet tomorrow" if you're 20 pounds overweight and quite another if you're 200 pounds overweight. If you honestly think that Bush put us in a hole with spending, you can't seriously argue for digging it deeper.
Did they pay for this brand placement, or is it as free as posting to ycombinator.news?
I saw an episode where Glenn was demonstrating how Bush increased spending when he was in power, and how Obama is increasing spending now. Both had promised that they wouldn't.

Sometimes he says crazy things, but he's pretty good at pointing out some serious deficiencies in government.

I've never heard him say anything even remotely racist on television. He does trash talk political figures quite heavily. He seems to be more against big government than against any minority or minorities in general. In fact, I've heard him say that the borders should be cleared up, and immigration fixed so that the government can streamline the process of letting qualified immigrants into the country.

On the other hand, he did say that he believes Obama to be a racist. Sometimes I think these people say stupid things deliberately to appeal to their target audience (a la Ann Coulter). That wouldn't be so dangerous, except that their target audience is significant in number and resonates with the most idiotic of statements.
Clash of the Titans Box Office Prediction & Budget Analysis
> Long winded bull shit (like the above) expresses contempt for one's audience.

You'd better never read David Foster Wallace, then, who basically invented Mark's style there.
thanks! For the others, it will be added on learnivore end of week or sooner.
I have no idea how this is on Hacker News, but Capgras is both fascinating and tragic. The tragedy is when a family member is alienated as a result. The patients that I have worked with who had Capgras due to dementia have sometimes had this delusion in relative isolation to other changes, whereas the patients I have seen who had it due to schizophrenia often had a variety of related and unrelated delusions.

Sadly, when it is related to dementia it usually doesn't clear. When it is related to schizophrenia, it often clears in days to weeks with medication.
What the article doesn't mention is how the errors are detected -- in a fool proof fashion and cheaply. I can think of error detection schemes that might be cheap to implement but are not foolproof. For instance for an integer multiplication the parity might be cheap to calculate (and without redoing the whole calculation.)

Thus, the error detection algorithm checks the actual parity with the "correct" parity. That of course falls down for multi bit errors.

Researching the literature a bit:

A different approach (tradeoff precision for power) in GPUs: Energy-precision tradeoffs in mobile Graphics Processing Units (http://iccd.et.tudelft.nl/2008/proceedings/060pool.pdf). Another one (probabilistic chips):
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/20246/.

Edit: Added more detail, formatting.
Closer to home though, Beck directly promotes a political party whose platform is explicitly anti-empiricist, anti-civil-liberties, pro-internet-content-restricting, etc., and does it in a vile and toxic tone which threatens reasonable political discourse.

By this logic, Apple should pull ads from any network with any political commentary. They didn't.
What Social Media Ad Types Work Best? [STATS]
The awesome thing about the LHC is that they expose loads of its operational details live on the web, so you can see what's happening right now in confusingly large amounts of detail.

"Page 1", which is the main accelerator status screen:
http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.ph...

Operational status of the experiments:
http://op-webtools.web.cern.ch/op-webtools/vistar/vistars.ph...

Cycling status screens for the CMS experiment:
http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cmscc/cmstv/cmstv.jsp?channel=4

Status for the LHCb detector:
http://frankm.web.cern.ch/frankm/test/Online/Stomp/web

You can also find loads more links at http://lhcportal.com
While I certainly am not questioning the potential uses of this, it also gives me have horrible flashbacks to the days of using MSN Messenger -- when 75%+ of my contacts felt it necessary to have to at least two smiley faces, three hearts, and a music note on either side of their actual name.
All incredibly old jokes aside, you can see the actual live webcams from the CMS experiment here:

http://cms.web.cern.ch/cms/Media/CMSeye/index.html
Many of the students and academics from the older engineering fields (e.g. mechanical, chemical) don't know of python either. When I tell them (python + numpy + scipy + matplotlib) is as potent as MatLAB for most situations, and far more flexible and generalizable later, most don't believe me. They get started faster with MatLAB, then struggle later with its constraints, and end up creating overly-specialized, one-off tools that few others can use.

Ideally, science/engineering schooling (college and up) should not allow anyone to graduate without knowledge of at least one general purpose programming language. But in the meanwhile, those who can program while working in another field - whether sociology or environmental engineering - have an enormous advantage.
The original page for this is: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html and apparently it is available for download for free: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html
Nick, one of the other guys that worked on the site, is into this industry. He does tutorials and stuff, so a lot of people follow his website and twitter account.
I believe we have come a long way from the days when the shuttle computer was cutting edge.

In fact, it's a bit of a shame we still haven't got how to make correct software, but it's no way impossible and should be getting cheaper by the day.

I think should is the important word here. It's not and we have nobody but ourselves to blame.
I think that is a better answer. Hemorrhoids are hardly a programmer specific ailment. The article applies to any individual who sits for long periods of time and has a poor diet. I'd say this applies to most people since we're mostly office workers and our diets are mostly horrible.
"Senator Conroy has conceded that greater transparency is needed in terms of how content ends up on the blacklist, but last night he again refused to make the blacklist itself public, saying it would provide people instant access to the banned material."

This was the most interesting quote in the whole article for me. There is a parallel with the taboo on swearing, it being impossible to perpetuate the taboo on swearing without breaking it.

The difference is that the taboo on swearing has always been there. People just work around it. My feeling is that this law will end up the same way - no more useful than any other irritating quirk.

I'm skeptical that it will impede political speech, or free trade or whatever in any significant way. This doesn't mean I'm in favour of the law, though - it strikes me as a complete waste of time.
John's usually pretty accurate and circumspect.

I would imagine this is real, based on what he's getting from his sources. (Which are usually good.)

The high ppi screen is an obvious next step (especially for Apple, where appearance is paramount), as is the use of their own custom hardware.
Amazon S3 has recently started to come under the block here, which is making Shanghaiist not work for me - their static CSS files are served direct from S3 buckets.
It looks fine on my Chrome/Linux but that doesn't really say much because Linux fonts are so configurable.

I'd guess anyone following the Windows school of font hinting will have problems in this brave new world of web fonts because they'll only look good if someone with the requisite skills has spent a great deal of time hinting them for the pixel sizes used.

If, like another commenter, you see non-core fonts as "thin" (or "spindly" etc.) then this is probably the cause.

On Apple machines, or the way I set up Ubuntu machines (which the default seems to get closer to as time goes by) they basically ignore that hinting information, even if present and just pretend they're printing on a high pixel density device and let anti-aliasing sort it out.
Hi! Brisbane here.
Stuff isn't particularly important to me. I like having a nice laptop (but that's mostly so I can work effectively). Probably the most important thing in this area would be experiencing new things by travelling the world (and sharing in these adventures with my fiance).
Please define "competitive".

E.g. MIT does not grade on the curve; that would be insane, instead they grade on mastery of material. I've e.g. never heard of someone sabotaging another work to improve their own grade, we're all in it together and tend to help each other out.

As for costs, about 5 minutes with Google suggests a 5x difference compared to average state school tuition costs. Based on my experience, the difference in teaching quality is a LOT more than 1.5x, but I wouldn't be able to pin it down.

I'd say the real asset is not the student body per se, but the whole community and the ingrained meritocratic attitudes. It's assumed by default that everyone at MIT is serious about what they're doing (which of course is not 100% academics, not that we've ever managed to top CalTech's Rose Bowl hack :-), and there's a tremendous amount of respect all around.

It's said that undergraduates are treated like grad students (and that includes serious cutting edge research (e.g. through UROP; in both my experiences there, the problems had not been solved, period)) and grad students like junior facility, and on up for faculity (except, I will add, everyone in the Math Department is treated like shit, but it's not entirely horrible (my first job was maintaining a computer system in that department)).

And in the end, if you're trying to get into a good grad school, which is the better foundation? If you care about how your resume impresses people and opens doors, which school would you rather have on it (note that in lower quality tech areas MIT envy doesn't make this entirely a good thing, but then again it acts as a filtering function).
What Twitter Really Is
A grand unified theory of AI
I love the variable-height desks from Biomorph, but they're rather expensive new, so I buy them used.

E.g., I've got a few of these various places:

http://biomorph.com/1-888-302-DESK/personal/overview.html

with the maple plywood material, for around $500-ish. Excellent quality, though hard to find used.
Anyone aware of what he talked about on his blog that got him in trouble with his work? (Which is what I think he's saying)
Slightly off-topic, but I can't believe that people are falling for the anti-Steve Sailer flame (peanut butter).
Resetting PHP6 (or: Unicode claims another victim)
It loads and loads and loads and I never get a response back when I submit a twitter username to be evaluated. Too much traffic now?
Playing Video Games Will Not Get You a Job But Creating One Might
Agile and lean: Better apart or better together?
It's surprisingly cheap to have a TV channel broadcast on satellite in the UK, assuming you have content to fill the time.

I always treated Fox News as comedy, to be honest. I'd like to watch it in Canada, but having to pay an extra couple of bucks to them directly is not agreeable to me (it's not a free channel on my cable package here).
I guess you'd never hire me: http://github.com/scotts/cellgen/blob/offstencil/src/xformer...
Duplicated here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1228347
Airfoil from Rogue Amoeba does that for Mac and Windows, and can play on your iPhone (or Airport Express or Apple TV), or Mac or Windows machine.
For agent-based models -- what the author seems to enjoy -- also see http://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/
I think you could argue that Beck, Hitler and Stalin are part of the same type. This is not to say he is as bad as them just that the both focused on demonizing a group of people rather than supporting his viewpoint.

based on Glenn Beck and his ludicrous statements, including calling President Obama a racist and branding progressivism a "cancer."

Note: I am not comparing them based on ideology but rather core tactics. You can agree with someone’s standpoint and find their approach unacceptable
I wonder if having a dream of positive change more likely implies wanting a laptop to a large home. Do you think your goal of changing the world is shared by your peers? Do you see things changing in that respect, a move (however slight) from materialistic goals to a make-your-mark attitude?
Ask HN: Review my proof of concept for a translation website
I'm a graduate (business) student working on my master thesis. I find it really fascinating how the web is changing so many aspects of our life.
That's why I decided to write my thesis about the economics behind this evolution, but that's not the point of this post.

As a case study for my thesis, I wrote a website (more difficult than I imagined!) that serves as a proof of concept for an idea of mine. The website's url is:

http://www.translapolis.org

It's a community website for translations and grammatical corrections, primarily intended for language students to use, but it's really open to everyone.

Now, what I need is (100+) people who take the online tour offered on the website, and who fill in the survey which is located at the end of the tour. From start to end will take about 15 minutes.

Your combined input will allow me to make an estimation of the viability of the idea and about some more general hypotheses that I make in my paper.

If you leave your email address and mention 'hackernews' at the end of the survey, then you can also win a $20 Amazon gift card.

Thank you so much!
Once upon a time a boon, today I'm unconvinced he's better than a bane.

He can't be ignored, that's for sure....

(Obligatory disclaimers: we were in roughtly the same wider social circle, both worked on the MIT/LMI Lisp Machine fork for a while, were roommates after that, and then were at daggers drawn when I went to work for Unipress Software and I became a "Software Holder" working on Gosling Emacs. I found him to be difficult but not impossible (come to think of it, we both respected each other, which I'm sure helped), but I fell out of contact with him after the '80s when I moved to the D.C. area.)
I've just started using Django testing framework to do unit tests for my app. So far it helps catch a lot of errors that would have required more tedious manual testing, which is what I did previously. It sounds like Selenium would be a good way to test the javascript aspect.
To become financially independent so I have time to change the world for the better.
Looks great to me. I don't personally have need of it, though if I found I had need to send letters in the US it would be cheaper than airmail it seems (from the UK).

If you want international trade you should probably list paper sizes in cm and as standard measures (A4?, US Letter?) and give paper weights in gsm.

Do you only handle PDF?

Are you planning on using something like TinyMCE, http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/, in your "type in your letter" box?

If you need someone in the UK then I'd be interested...
The problem with that (in C++) would be that

A a;
A* p = new A;
assert(sizeof(*p) == sizeof(a));

This wouldn't be true and cause all sorts of trouble (arrays, etc.) if a had no pointer to a vtable, but *p did. Moreover, you can take the address of a stack/member object, so how would you distinguish the two types? You'd literally need to modify the type system, and that would cause trouble with templates, etc.
At first, I asked myself "why shouldn't I just use the character map application built into every (windows) pc?", this may be organized, better, so I realized that the real question is "why is this branded as 'twitter' symbols?"
url of website: http://www.translapolis.org

direct link to the tour: http://www.translapolis.org/tour
Hi Kirsten,

Two recommendations. 1. Use https://www.dropbox.com/ to share the files. 2. Put some contact information in your profile :)

My dreams are pretty small for the time being. I want to build most, if not all, of the furniture in my new house. I want to explore the American wilderness before it ceases to exist.
Needs filters to be useful but otherwise very cool.
Great pacing and clearly communicated. Has helped me no end to get up to speed with Vim in my new job.
Short answer, no. The fundamental reason goes back to 1933/1934 when the modern rules of public offerings were enacted. To avoid investors being fleeced by unscrupulous business owners that falsely advertised the merits of their businesses, stringent rules were put in place for any offering of stock to the public. These rules continue to govern the behavior of publicly traded companies today. As a result of these regulations, stocks cannot be offered to a mass audience without those offering falling under the regulation of the SEC. Exceptions are made for small numbers (<99) of Accredited Investors ($250K annual income or > $1M liquid net worth, or something close to that), and others close to the company.
In short, a company cannot offer its stock broadly to the public without complying with the fairly onerous SEC provisions regulating public companies.
I'll pay vim many compliments, "minimal" is not one of them.
The LHC starts regular operations at 7TeV
Well I'm trying to accomplish many of this things. I live near my son and managed to stay in Sicily even if with my work it was hard. I'm finally working at Redis full time, so I'm avoiding doing things I don't care, at least in the work side. Now I live with my woman, this was very hard and took two years of sacrifices where she was in Florence. I only live three months every year near to the sea, in the rest of the year I've to live at 15 Km from the sea, at 800 meters of altitude in the vulcano Etna.

Good point about working long hours. Unfortunately currently I'm working too much, but fortunately I'm working too much spending my time in things I like a lot. I need just to adjust how many hours I work every week :)

One thing that makes me happy and I noticed that works with many people I know is to go out for the two days of the week end, without bringing with me my laptop, so that I'm sure I'll enjoy other things.

Thanks for asking, this is a good exercise to do: what makes you happy? and what you still need to accomplish in order to be happy? It's better to fix what's wrong asap as life is wonderful but not infinite :)
False logic. If Apple has determined that network neutrality is important for their business model to succeed, why should they support the political party that opposes net neutrality?
Probing Ports in Remote Security Groups in Amazon EC2
One of the main design principles behind C++ was "you don't pay for what you don't use." Hence, if you don't want to use polymorhpic member functions, then you don't pay for the overhead.
Don't like world hunger? Starve people yourself!
Don't like murder? Start killing people!
I use QUnit to test my JavaScript and whatever's on hand to test backend code (unittest in Python, Test::Unit in Ruby). I'd use Selenium for point-and-click-style testing but I haven't gotten to it.
That's pretty cool. What do you have that's automated?
Greenpeace: Cloud Contributes to Climate Change
Ask HN: Will you buy an iPad? 
Just wanted to quickly survey HN readers to find out how many of you thinks that its good time to buy iPad or one should wait. I would have bought without second thought but I already own Kindle and iPhone.

update: 1 Yes, 9 No. Thanks for the responses. I got my answer.
Thanks for the feedback. If you click on the magnifying glass in each column header you'll get a filter for that column.
This quote struck me:

I’m determined to tell my kids and grandkids amazing stories beyond my iPod and iPhone ones.

That makes me feel simultaneously small and motivated.
A/B testing experiment on a homeless
Does your website add features or solve problems?
You can disagree with him and still judge his actions as being helpful overall.

I certainly don't mind him being in my camp when it comes to software patents!
Outline is a helpful usability hint, especially for keyboard navigation.

Be wary about removing it.
That's not the point. The point is if you don't like what someone else (not something else) is doing to you, become one of them yourself.
You are correct to point out I didn't explain or qualify why I think copyright law is stupid. I wrongly assumed I was preaching to the converted. Let me waive my hands a little and try to provide a motivation without going into too much detail.

In general, copyright protections are government-granted monopolies. This creates a number of economic inefficiencies. One example is distribution - instead of money and labor being spent to distribute recorded music and movies, all of this could be done for free over the Internet.

Of course, there must be mechanisms by which people who create content get compensated for their work. Copyright rarely works well in this regard (I think you said it did it "imperfectly"). The truth is most musicians make most of their money through touring, advertising deals, etc. Therefore, they would benefit from a wider distribution of their work, which copyright law impedes. There are people working on alternative models whose work you could read if you want to look for ways around these kinds of paradoxes. The big obstacle to implementing more progressive policies are the hugely powerful private content providers, so framing the issue as YouTube's billionaire owners versus the independent artist is disingenuous.

Regardless whether you agree with what I've said above, what cannot be denied is that individuals are still able to download all the pirated content they want very easily. Therefore, copyright law's greatest flaw is that it has been demonstrated not to work. Reforming or scrapping it would allow the market to adapt and move to a more sane model, which would benefit both the consumer and the content generator rather than the content "owner" and the content distributor.
Just to add to a good list -- Al Gore on the board is catering toward liberals and not conservatives!
Is Your Software A Pain?
Web serving in ec2 - our experiences with nginx and instance sizes