skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Without lists of those on the other side, its relevance is limited.

Insert, oh, the former "consensus" against heliocentrism. Relevant in a period calling for capital trials against "deniers" and HN commentators calling for their criminal prosecution (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283240).
I am also American. Americans spend more than 50% of their taxes on the military, and I pay taxes here.

I am not trivializing the danger of nuclear war or authoritarian states. My point is to clarify that humor does not imply triviality, in my case on this subject it implies anger.
Don't be silly. This is not about scientific skepticism anymore.

But, in truth, Lindzen and the WSJ are not skeptics, they're deniers. Skeptic is someone not convinced that something is true. Denier is someone that believes that something is false. Lindzen (and the WSJ) are deniers.
The "Celebrity" Effect of Networks
> Well for one thing Lindzen has no testable theory, no data, and no papers explaining the current temperature trend. Despite this he still manages to get his opinions published...

No, but in order to be a scientist, you have to do... science, not opinion.
how long before facebook buys Microsoft?
Maybe it is just me, but everyone with whom I want to collaborate on a document is not my facebook friend and most probably never will be.
You're far better off just using HTML5 WebGL. The reason is that the video card manufacturers like Nvidia are already supporting 3d through their graphics hardware. It makes no sense to try to support every possible hardware combination. From a hardware point of view, it's very easy to transform 3d rendered objects into stereoscopic images rather than displaying them on a 2d surface.

This is why manufacturers like Nvidia can already support many games in full 3d right out of the box. Just use WebGL and your app will support native 3d as soon as the drivers improve to support it, provided your audience has the appropriate 3d hardware.
Turning on your Reality Distortion Field
Arizona Immigration Bill will allow arrests without warrant
"Is your average citizen just dying to be worried over the next catastrophe and willing to throw money at whomever can scare them the most?"

You can page back through the last umpteen national election results if you doubt this is true.
Tom Wujec: Build a tower, build a team
Good grief. $41,000 for a full set of CALs to run SharePoint. Does anyone know if that's per server or for a given site?

I understand Microsoft's motivation in trying to sell this but it's hard to fathom the reasoning of anyone who would buy it.
Yeah, I especially like the bit where they "prove" he "might" have lied to congress by posting a youtube video of a completely unrelated group "lying" to congress.
Ah, that's true, if extend can see protected members. I didn't realize that was the case.

EDIT: I'm not sure if it is the case or not; I can't find definitive documentation and I don't have a REPL available. Anyone know for sure?
All science is bought by special interests to a certain extent. Frankly, I think the connections to the oil industry, et al., are not as important as the veracity (or lack thereof) of his claims.
I have to agree that this does seem rather Libertarian and/or political if not simply misguided.
What makes you think they mean it pejoratively? There are sites describing strong AI skeptics, paranormal activity skeptics, quantum computing skeptics, extra-terrestrial life skeptics. It's the reasons for their skepticism that matters.
Stack Overflow Style Notifications - Jquery Tutorial
There's a running joke among my friends that I "can't hold down a job" more than a year or two, and for completely different reasons than most. Reading this post makes me wonder if that's why. I like changing things for the better. Not necessarily because something is new, but more for the customers and employees. Where I am now I can't do that, except in the smallest increments. I feel like I have the potential to do so much, but the red tape and flexibility just isn't helping.
I was going to say the same thing, and say that 1997 was the last time I saw anything using VRML, and that it was, indeed, way too early for "3D HTML" back then. No idea now that everyone has hopped on the 3D Movies/TV bandwagon in full force. Personally, I think it'd be difficult to make a plausible UI case for 3D, but that's me.
Yep, canvas will end up having a 3d context.
Joining a Startup Out of College is Hard (A Solution)
Some hardware might be failing. Have you taken the time to look into the error codes it gives you?

I would also guess that it is trying to use a power saving feature which may not be supported by your computer, as another commenter pointed out.
WPRI Announces the Launch of “Tweet Wisconsin”
You can and many do "do science" without offering alternatives, all you have to do is to point out how those you are criticizing are wrong, e.g. in interpretations of data, use of statistics, etc.

Are those Canadian statisticians not doing science when they point out that you can use Mann's methods to get a hockey stick out of random noise?
They don't all support VRML because after a brief fad around '95-'97 or thereabout, VRML died a quick death when people got bored of it and realized they had no actual need for it.

The popularity of VRML coincided with a VR fad in general though, so perhaps it'd stand a chance again today with the resurgence of 3D movies etc., but I think WebGL is more likely to be successful in that respect.
I was recently at a baseball game and realized that I really wanted to hear the stats that the announcers usually have when listening to a baseball game on radio. Wish I had a iPod Nano.
> We don't see Swedes and Finns leaving their countries over taxes.

The Swedes and Finns still in Sweden and Finland are descended from folks who didn't move to the US because they were unhappy about something.

Americans, for the most part, descended from folks who left somewhere because they were unhappy about something.

Which reminds me, as Mankiw showed, the per-capita tax burden in dollars in the US is fairly close to that of European countries. However, it's a smaller fraction of GDP because the US per-capita GDP is higher. In other words, Americans pay about the same and have more.

It's unclear why changing to pay the same and have less is a good thing.

And, since we're already paying the same and getting less, the whole "but look at what they get for their taxes" argument fails.

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2010/03/taxes-per-person.html

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=4626
Well at least we've established that it's not an appeal to authority.

Of course if it was, then this is a fairly convincing set of authorities, being the National Academy of Science in the US and their equivalents in the 12 largest countries in the world.

Who's missing that could even theoretically be on the other side? South Korea, Mexico, Spain? I have no idea who would rank up there with them but if I had to bet I'd say their national bodies representing science are going to be on the same side of the debate as those listed.

Again, this is someone who denies there is a consensus. That's relatively easy to fact check. It would be like knowing whether the church was for or against the Sun orbiting the Earth. It's an entirely seperate question from whether that position is factually correct. And, if you can't get that right why trust you on anything more complex?
No, I think the issue was never about preventing people from accessing adult content on their Apple phones/devices. The issue is about Apple not wanting to sell certain adult content on their store front.
Yahoo reports positive Q1 earnings as advertising sales plummet
I agree that shutting down licensing would be bad. What I don't understand is why someone would pay billions for a company only to shut off its revenue stream. That's a pretty bizarre scenario.
?
The Web Apps hosted on Microsoft's servers are free (or rather ad-supported). If you want to host them on your own servers, you need to buy various things. I thought Google Docs was the same way?
Had to zoom my CSSEdit icon to see the "ie sucks" for myself. Smug and awesome!
Since reading this blog post from Intridea, I've received multiple targeted ads for Intridea on other sites. I find targeted ads creepy.
I really hope WinMo 7 doesn't go very far. The touchscreen-enabled web has been significantly better since all they've really had to target is Webkit and Opera. MS is going to have to allow at least one third-party browser, or get IE9 ported to ARM, fully standard compliant very quickly. Otherwise all the iPhone/Android targeting sites aren't going to work so well on Windows.
It wasn't exactly a technical field. It's amazing how many fields outside of development are very nearly impossible to test in a meaningful way. For example, hiring a sales vp, if done at the same level of problem solving as most tech interviews I've seen, would have to result in a 30% sales increase for the company. You basically have to just see what they say, if they sound like they can tie their own shoes, don't suffer from short term memory loss and have a pulse you usually give them a try and just fire them if they don't work out.

That's why there are so many hangups during the interview process that have nothing to do with a person's actual skill in a given area..like font choice on a resume, or little tips like how to sit in a chair or whatever. Those are all little tells that people look for in an interview, but candidates also know this, so they try to game the system by appearing confident, showing up precisely 15 minutes early with a binder full of extra copies of their resume, just the right amount of hair gel, etc. Because by and large, in fields outside of technical ones, that's how you get a job.

> So, was this guy vetted like this on technical merits, or did he just talk impressively to non-technical people? I'm curious to know how he slipped through.

But yeah, this is actually how he kept slipping through. His interviewers were hiring him for expertise in his field that they themselves did not have. Pretty much it was bureaucrats and administrators hiring somebody for a particular skill requirement. They simply didn't know how to dig more than a level or two deep. In the same way that a person can game the hiring system like I mentioned above, he could do the same for his field. Somebody who was actually in the field would have to spend a little time to figure out that he didn't know the equivalent that computers need electricity to operate. But he could talk for hours about how for example, a browser operates with DNS servers to resolve IP addresses -- and do it with authority (again, as a very rough equivalent).

You could even ask him to produce a plan of action for the next six months and he could produce a pretty good outline, good enough for an interview, but ask him to fill in the details and he couldn't.
Virtually no untrained ear can hear the difference. It's perfectly normal. Now, if you really have no clue, I can give you a mathematical intuition, so your brain understand what your ear can't hear.

(1) Axiom: We hear at a logarithmic scale. What we perceive to be a difference (or interval) between 2 notes is actually a ratio of frequencies. (I think biology may explain this axiom.)

(2) Axiom: Say you hear 2 notes, of frequencies f1 and f2 respectively. When the f1/f2 ratio is a simple rational number (like 2) or (3/2), it sounds good. When the ratio is more complicated (like 19/17), it sounds worse. (Physics can explain that axiom.)

(3) Definition: when the f1/f2 ratio is 2, we call that an octave. The 3/2 ratio is a fifth. The 4/3 ratio is a fourth. As a side note these ratio were basically the only ones that were used. They didn't really used thirds or sixths, probably because of their more complicated ratios, which may have sounded bad to their ears. [1]

(4) Theorem: There is no way in hell you can make an octave out of fifths (they won't perfectly tune together). Informal proof: this is because you can't find any (i,n) ∈ ℤ², such that (3/2)ⁱ = 2ⁿ. As a side note, you can come relatively close: (3/2)¹² = 129,75 which is close to 2⁷.

So, a mathematical impossibility prevents you to perfectly tune the two most basic intervals ever. Ouch. We have to compromise, then. We can sacrifice a few chords (which if played will cause severe ear damage); or cheating a little bit on every ratio, so no chord sounds outright wrong, nor exactly right; or we can try to find a middle ground between these two extremes.

The "sacrifice" strategies was originally favoured. They sounded better, but restrained what you could play. Now, we favour the "cheating a little" strategy (also called "equal temperament"). They give you more liberty, but sounds rather dull on old music meant to be played with an old fashioned tuning (to trained ears, at least :-).

Hope this helped.

[1]: http://pipolitics.com/video-streaming/kaamelott-saison-2-epi... is an excellent joke on the topic. (This is a flash video in French, unfortunately. I hope you understand it, or can find a friend who does).
I don't know, but this specific phenomena goes back to 200 AD (sic), and then you can go back to, oh, the Book of Revelations and so on. There seems to be a strong drive in at least some people towards this sort of thing.

Politicians gain power by not "letting a serious crisis go to waste" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yeA_kHHLow); how real a crisis is irrelevant. Funding naturally follows for those talking up the crisis.
Just the iFrame.
I was curious how to achieve their notifications without any server side scripting. Let me know what you think.
Car-sharing - monetizing an under-utilized asset
I don't recall a time when Linux overtook Windows for desktop OS market share.
Related:

Just yesterday I noticed that OReilly recently published Building Web Reputation Systems (Randy Farmer, Bryce Glass)

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596159801

http://buildingreputation.com/

Randy was consulting with a company I was at a couple of years ago and while the two of us certainly didn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, it encouraged a lot of thought and debate.

I'll be ordering the book today.
Two things:

1. He noted that this wasn't in an engineering field (which I would presume to include programming :) ).

2. A technical interview is hardly a panacea against bad hiring decisions. It's just the least crappy way to hire people that anyone's found (that I know of).
The interesting thing for me here was the assertion that mitochondrial DNA was inaccurate for deducing evolutionary timescales. This has important bearings for our current understanding of human evolution which as I understand it is based heavily on mitochondrial data.
This can be a beast, but Porter's work on 5 forces is really illuminating. If you do the hard work, you'll have a really good understanding of where your business fits in the larger context.
Except you are now running Android instead of iPhone OS. You could just as well jailbreak the iPhone and use any of the multitude of open app stores for that.
BTW, if you really want declarative 3D, VRML has been replaced with X3D: http://www.web3d.org/x3d/
I'm not asking you to pay their tax bills. I'm asking you not to leave the younger generation in the lurch. All over the world the baby boomers are stumbling into retirement.
In a lot of countries this poses a serious problem as this:

* represents a significant voting block

* makes large demands on healthcare

* makes large demands on pensions

And this is on top of the huge deficits that most western countries currently have.

I envisage the new generation having to pay for a lot of the costs of the baby boomers while also representing a smaller voting block.
This is made even worse in countries with less land (Japan and most of Western Europe) as this generation is already struggling to get onto the property ladder.
These being the people that don't have enough money to afford an "investment advisor".

What makes this state of affairs even worse is that the older generation who did well are starting to move abroad thereby denying the country of their tax. Of those that remain a significant proportion are anti-immigration.

This leads me wonder how the pyramid schemes that are pensions and healthcare are actually going to be affordable when the pyramid becomes inverted and the voting block are anti-immigration.
Nobody in their right mind, huh? Guess I'm crazy, because I prefer using Android over the iPhone (my iPhone is sitting sans-simcard on my desk right now).

Not only does the notification bar kick iPhone OS' notification scheme, and despite the low app volume on the market (I don't have /that/ many apps - and I didn't on the iPhone, either), I'm still lovin' my Android. It may just be the honeymoon period, though. (Got a SNES emulator running the other day - great for the commute. Disclaimer: I only have ROMs of carts that I have packed away in my closet)
Ask HN: Who has summer internships?
The summer is coming up quickly so this is a good chance for students to find something cool to do. Anyone who has internships or any other summer-only job opening should post.

When posting, please make sure to mention your location, skill you're looking for, and whether there is a chance of remoting. Also, when posting locations, please use the full name of your city, no just "NYC" or "SF".
Please watch this inspiring video on youtube:
Did You Know 3.0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8

1:10 : The US Department of Labor estimates that today's learner will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38

1:16 : 1 in 4 workers has been with their current employer for less than a year. 1 in 2 has been there less than five years
(1) Create low-cost Italian tourism agency
(2) Get pill approved in Italy while U.S. bureaucrats fight over who has jurisdiction to approve
(3) Profit!
If there were a way to make "3D websites" such that they were more attractive/functional/etc than 2D ones, don't you think some sci-fi/heavily CGed movie would have already attempted to demonstrate it as part of its MovieOS?
Why? You can specialize in one thing and still be critical.

Gruber is clearly a fan of Apple (and other companies), but it's not as if he doesn't criticize them when he feels it is appropriate, e.g. he has been very critical of the App Store policies. Just because he doesn't criticize them when you feel it's appropriate doesn't reduce him to being a cheerleader.
Contextual Slideout Tips With jQuery & CSS3
are you saying that being a certified ferrari mechanic doesn't make you successful? And if you're really good at it you'd probably get paid well. I dont think it's an either/or situation. If you're good at what you do and you love what you do, isn't that successful?
An appeal to a "consensus" is by definition an appeal to authority.

It has nothing to do with theory or data, it's not science, it's science policy.

As Jerry Pournelle said, "Science policy is to science as birdshot is to birds."
I have to admit, I do not spend much time on Gaelic (Scottish or Irish) sites.

I've noticed that it's support for East Asian languages is also pretty bad. But Romance languages, German and Arabic are pretty amazing.
Though I'm not ready to call facebook a fad, or undercut it's significance, I will go out on a limb here and say the way the website works was pretty novel for a while, but it's lacking in innovation.

The ability to check your friends status? Ok, pretty cool. Connect with old HS and college friends? Ok, that's sort of cool too. But more and more I find myself withdrawing from actually participating in the micro of the site, and using it more as a macro tool for my own identity. I don't have a facebook now because I actually use it, or gain much from it, rather I simply have it because, well, everyone else does. And it comes up on Google when people search my name.

In other words it's a part of my general online identity, along with my personal website, twitter, posterous, etc. I'm not saying I use these tools like a lot of others might, but I'm also trying to drive home the point that it's just another of many identity tools that I have at my disposal.

Now I'm not sure about Facebook taking over my complete identity, as in being my de facto online presence, because I have huge issues with the way facebook is going about retaining its control over the data generated from their users.

I think if facebook wants to stay relevant they'll have to keep entering new domains on the web, and certainly they have plans for location-based services, and other stuff down the road.

For the time being now though, the entertainment of watching status updates on my phone, or browsing peoples wall streams just doesn't seem economic to me in terms of building something people would use on the order of a Google search engine. Sure some people may be spending a lot of time on there, but to me it looks more like an illusory fixation with comparing oneself to others than something that I can get real use out of.

(With my Mac I run a business and organize my entire personal and professional life, with Google all of the worlds information is literally at my finger tips, with Facebook I just found out that Stacey's new dog took a leak on the carpet and that Steve thinks avatar was a great movie; there's a big difference there.)
If you're after Brand Value, Security and Compensation, joining a startup is probably a mistake.

You're working at a company no one knows, with minimal money in bank, and compensated primarily in equity.

Basically you'll either join/start a startup, or always find an excuse not to.
"It's not having what you want
It's wanting what you've got" -- S. Crow
Google Docs vs MS Docs. Wondering why Google Docs still sucks?
Ah, exchange personal information with somebody in immediate proximity to you...oh, but through a central server. Wait, what?!

I'm sure the central server is and always will be benevolent and benign regarding the knowledge it gains about its users, their associates, and the information they convey.
It's just the luck of the draw. I've had multiple HDD failures in the past 10 years on non-apple hardware, owning roughly 5-10 HDDs at any given time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebryo
As you just said. It's subjective. What doesn't look impressive for you, may look impressive for others.
I can see the VR fad returning thanks to the 20-year nostalgia cycle!

More seriously, I do think the standard arguments against 3D UI will carry less force in the not too distant future (i.e. over the next 10 to 15 years), because of new(ish) I/O capabilities which will allow people to make more use of real-world spatial abilities to interact with computers (e.g. motion/vision control), and allow more ways to use computers to manipulate the physical world (robotics, 3D printing, ...)
Arduino Cheat Sheet