skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, there is some hyperbole in my first sentence. I won’t stop saying “art exhibition” or “modern art”.

Yet calling something art is in my eyes only a nice shortcut, not much more. In what way is it even useful to answer the question “Is it art?” when you know so much about the object in question? In know how I feel when I look at Guernica. I can describe shapes, color and texture. I can read all about the history of the painting. Does calling it art or refusing to call it art change any of that?

This discussion reminds me of this really great text by Eliezer Yudkowsky called “How An Algorithm Feels From Inside”[1].

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/no/how_an_algorithm_feels_from_insid...
Inside iPhone OS 4.0: Multitasking vs Mac OS X, Android
...wait until someone does the hard work and sue/get licensing payoffs.

If someone else thinks it's worth doing that work, that suggests there is a payoff to implementing it. If you are in the position to implement it, you probably stand more to gain from doing so yourself than hoping somebody stumbles into it.

If you're not in the position to implement, or perhaps not on the right scale, it's in your interests to license it to somebody who does or for them to buy you out. It would be pointless to just leave it unimplemented and unlicensed.

That isn't to say patent trolling hasn't worked for some--only that it's a bug and not a feature. It has more to do with bad patent grants than a lack of incentive.

...where problems are hard, etc. But software/UI certainly isn't an area like that.

Then why do so many do it so poorly?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-M-vnmejwXo
I think the volcanic ash is going with the mostly easterly winds
Yahoo Beats Feds in E-Mail Privacy Battle
> boycotting the company completely might have been more effective

Effective at what? Making you less productive?

They don't give a shit about whatever "message" you're trying to send them. No company actually listens to the histrionics of their customers like that, least of all Apple.
Ask HN: Please review my site/app - Dokuments.com
Hi everyone-
I'd love to get your feedback and suggestions on two things:
- the marketing site (dokuments.com)
and
- the software (signup for a free 14-day trial)

Thanks in advance for your time and comments.
One day, I was playing Dragon Age. I made a City Elf character. Spoilers follow:

At one point early in the game, your soon-to-be-wife is kidnapped by the son of the lord of the town outside which the ghetto in which you live is located. He is going to rape her and several other young elven girls he has kidnapped. You break in to his castle and confront him. He offers you a ridiculous amount of money(especially to an elf to whom any money is an enormous amount due to their poverty) to just leave. A friend that was watching me play was wondering what happened if you took the money. I saved and tried it to see what would happen. I immediately felt as remorseful as if I had brutally tortured and murdered a dozen baby kittens. Even my friend was similarly horrified. I was absolutely incapable of continuing to play past the end of the conversation. The moment I was able to, I loaded the save from before the conversation and saved the young women. Even now as I type this, I feel physically nauseated just remembering it. I'm not crying(although I have before as a result of video games), but nonetheless, just a beginning of Dragon Age had more emotional effect on me than any film I have ever seen.
umm... Am I the only one that sees something wrong with this? We'll mess with your brain's ability to function and then give you some kind of test to see if indeed your brain is malfunctioning in some way. This is just retarded. I'd go as far as to say the region of the brain that the magnet is pointed at has nothing to do with morality. All they are doing is hindering the brain to do what it usually does.
Yeah, regardless of any sensible reasoning it's just funny that the country to blame for it all (sorta) still has an airport.
Apple doesn't really play partisan politics so they don't have to worry about hypocrisy. They do whatever makes the most sense to them in the context of building a good product.
France, Belgium and Netherlands (at least) have been conducting test flights during the weekend:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63G1U920100417

Finnish Air Force had some fighter jets in air on Thursday 15th, when the ash first hit Finland, and they've published some photos from inside the engines after some contact with ash:

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2010/04/16/340727/pictu...
It depends on the project...

For tech-heavy companies, obviously not. But for content plays, sometimes outsourcing makes sense.

International outsourcing can be tough, but domestic outsourcing (simply using a third-party firm) often works. My friend who started the website http://academicearth.org outsourced the entire thing with a firm out of North Dakota, and his website was named by Time magazine one of the top 50 Websites of 2009 (along with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
Won't work. You have to choose the machine's moral decision outcome before you use it, which means that you're making the decision while still "immoral" (for the lack of a better word).
All of that is likely in their academic paper, but it is behind a pay-wall: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/11/0914826107.abst...
upvoted, really good response, but calm down man, it appears you're barking.
Technology ipad/slate v multi slate
>> "Then why do so many do it so poorly?"

Because IMHO you have to have a talent/practice at it. It's trivial for anyone skilled in the art.
The question "What if there were a machine to make everyone moral?" implicitly assumed it would make people moral, whatever that is, as a premise, rather than moral according to someone's judgment. This reading may be debatable, but I think that's how he took it.
Traffic results from picking a fight with 37Signals
If you do need lambdas, Ruby does also have those. "lambda { return x + y}" does what you want it to.
Looks very clean and well designed.
Thanks. Did not pick it up in my proof - typo corrected.
Thanks. I did not put in absolute numbers because the story was live only 12 hours ago.

To give you some perspective though the top bar in the graph was around 1,600 hits :) While I was on the 'new' page (but not yet on the RSS feed) the article had around 350 hits from HN.
Yeah, these kinds of things are usually massively oversold as if we have the ability to precisely control things about the mind by poking at the brain, despite understanding the relationships pretty poorly. Usually it's more like trying to change how your web-browser operates by soldering on your motherboard: sometimes you'll get lucky and actually do something, but usually you'll either break it or cause generalized weirdness.
OK, Maybe I should have been clearer. I said "there isn't any other useful way you could do it", so let me quantify that. If the iPhone did it any other way, I don't think I'd have bought an iPhone. If any touch screen device did it any other way, I'd seriously question the makers sanity.

I didn't say there weren't other ways to control zoom on a touch screen, but IMHO all of the ideas you suggest are inferior, and less obvious - less useful.

The obvious, intuitive one, is clearly pinch to zoom.
You're obviously right about Apache (but then, why did you bring it up?).

But I disagree strongly about the "GNU/Linux" thing. Linux would have happened either way. I installed 386bsd off approximately seventeen thousand floppy disks when I was young, and I don't recall that being a GPL'd userland.
Cool that they released the photos. Any insight into what we're seeing there, and how it poses a risk?
Thanks for the suggestion. I made the suggested changes (check github for the latest) but it doesn't seem to be significantly faster than the other fragment shaders (within 0.1 FPS over a 150 second video). I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to investigate the performance/behaviour of the OpenGL pipeline on the N900.

How'd you come up with the cycle counts? I'm new to GLSL, so any documentation beyond the spec would be super useful to me.
Open Source Dynamics Engine
But the key is that the brain is impaired in very specific ways. If you asked the person to do any task that was not a moral judgement and did not use theory of mind, they would be unaffected.

This is how the brain works: manipulating certain parts (e.g. by injury or, as in this case, stimulation) of the brain impairs certain capabilities while leaving the remainder intact. If you put this in another part of the brain the person might not be able to move their right arm, or might hallucinate faces, or their personality might change. The incredible thing is how specific the changes are.
Ask HN:  What is the advantage of a formal CS degree for an entrepreneur?
I am a business guy. I have degrees in economics and finance, and I have a few years of corporate banking experience working on $1MM - $100MM deals. I have some light web development experience and started doing freelance web development for local companies as a teenager to pay my way through college. Now I want to bring the elegance of web based applications to enterprise software for the financial services industry. I have the domain experience and I am an inner geek at heart, but I lack the formal education. I have seen a lot of people on HN say that getting a formal degree in computer science is far better than teaching yourself. However, I haven't seen anyone specifically mention what exactly would be missing from a DIY curriculum. After all, many undergraduate courses from top CS schools are now online and free.

For example, say I went through all of the computer science courses on Academic Earth (http://academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science) and also used the Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/) to bone up on my math (I already have a decent background in algebra, probability, statistics, and calculus). I am also learning Python and Django and know HTML, CSS, and some Javascript. Plus there are a lot of great communities online that I could go to for help, and I would probably make a lot of great friends there too.

Other than the people I would meet and the actual degree, how much would I actually be missing out on if I went the DIY mentioned above? What, specifically, would I not be able to understand other than strictly theoretical stuff (machine learning, NLP, etc.)? Would going back for a master's degree in computer science really be worth it (perhaps the MCIT program at UPenn: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/grad/mcit/)?
JavaScript is the new BASIC.
Who needs a machine when drugs are so popular? Ritalin to make kids behave, Antidepressants to make people more lively, Amobarbital to make people honest, etc. Morals are a fickle thing and I don't see how any meaningful conclusion can be made from asking the question. "How moral is an atomic bomb?" is just as meaningless a question to ask.
I mean, I think it's a crazy mentality seeing as most of the people who think it have parents or relatives who were immigrants (and we're almost all immigrants if you go back far enough).
Are you completely against medical research? The researchers are deactivating a specific area of a person's brain (temporarily, and without surgery) to observe its effects on behavior and judgment. This research, in turn, might contribute to eventually alleviating the devastating behavioral changes some stroke victims may experience.

I don't see anything wrong with this research.
Generally one of my articles that end up at the top of HN gets about 5000 hits, most in the first 2-3 hours.

A lesser article gets, well, less hits... 1, 2, 3k, depending.

Here's a screenshot:

http://skitch.com/swombat/n9mrs/danieltenner.com-dashboard-c...

You can probably correlate those with article dates on my blog and find out how many votes translate to what level of traffic.

Edit: I wouldn't give so much weight to the HN RSS feed. Google Reader is by far the largest subscriber to my feed, and hits from there register as hits from google.com, not hits from news.ycombinator.com.

As you can easily see here: http://skitch.com/swombat/n9mfb/danieltenner.com-dashboard-c... the Google reader hits are a very small minority. Most people read HN on HN, not on the RSS feed. I guess the author uses the RSS feed and so gives it a disproportionate weight.
I should have been more specific. I'd like to change the background color of the active window to indicate which one has focus.

Your solution changes the background color for all windows.
R is not such a terrible language, though it is quirky. Unfortunately, yes, you are kind of handicapping yourself. The libraries behind R are, for statistical purposes, infinitely better than Python.
I wasn't too interested in this particular post, but the rest of the site definitely had some good reading! The little algorithm-into-Postscript-thumbnail was very attractive and it would be interesting to see some code for that.
Breaking some normal function by applying a specific set of conditions to the brain is where a large portion of our medical discoveries stem.

Even if findings from this research do not give us any new practical knowledge in everyday life, coupled with other similar, seemingly trivial findings, could facilitate major breakthroughs in the future.
You seem like you know what you're talking about so let me ask this: Can a reasonable case by made that the contracts were entered under duress and are therefore not applicable? (Sorry for my poor usage of legal terms here, I am not a lawyer.) Because a lot of people feel like they don't have an option -- it's either feed your family and accept whatever BS the company asks you to sign or remain unemployed and broke. Because if you're getting hired at a sizable company, they're not going to change their contracts just for you. You can try your luck at smaller companies but there's no guarantee.

People just shut up and sign not because they don't care about their rights, only because they feel like they have to agree to these terms to get hired on and thereby provide sustenance to their families.
Sounds like you are assuming that "moral" is an exact concept. Practically speaking, there seems to be lots of cases where opinions on what is moral differ: Abortion, porn, finance...

What would worry me with a machine that could tweak everyone to the same 'standard' moral is who gets to decide what that standard is: Having my moral controlled by the porn industry, Goldman Sachs or the religious right all seems equally bad.

I like my moral just the way it is, thank you :)
How To Submit Your Video To Multiple Video Sites
+1 app engine. It's pretty great.
Honestly, once you learn them both, it's best to use Illustrator when you need good presentation and R all other times. I can think of very little that Excel can do that can't be done faster in R and prettier with Illustrator.

So I'd condense the argument to: if you're not comfortable with R/Illustrator and don't have time to learn, use Excel.
Here: http://randomwalker.info/misc/PNAS-2010-Young-0914826107.pdf
Why not aim for a visualization of both?
Why ads stopped working
clickable link: http://founderdating.com/

I've heard mixed reviews but skewed on the more positive side, so definitely worth checking out.
I know how to install software on Mac OS. I didn't know about Sparkle. It looks nice, but doesn't provide quite what I want; apt lets me have an upgrade process that's simultaneously automatic and controllable.

I knew about the display inversion. It is most certainly not what I want.
I can see that some of the cities are popping in and out - in the top example, Highland park by the lake in the upper right, and Lasalle at the intersection of 39 and 80, but it's really hard to see them with the labels moving around. Might have been easier for him to make his point if he could add in some red circles around the affected towns.

Actual, maybe the cities are being hidden due to label placement? That is, there's not enough room to display all the cities with their labels, so rather than have them overlap, the algorithm chooses to hide the city if there's no room to place it.

I bet if you zoom in on a missing city it'll show up.
Heres hoping
"When you open your mind to the impossible, sometimes the truth is revealed"
I think we can blame the internet for that. Before, time created a huge gulf between each stylistic period as they receded into the past. It was very difficult for someone in the 70's to experience much at all of 50's culture except through the nostalgic ramblings of old folks (which idealized these times heavily).

Now the net has created for us a "long now" where cultural elements are basically assimilated and never forgotten (to emerge later as idealized nostalgia). I think its the fist little nibble of the singularity at our heels.
All of this I know and your argument is much more interesting, though I won't debate gun politics on this forum. I was just trying to point out the ridiculousness of the author's statement "No one owns guns. I have yet to fear for my life since I've gotten here."

There are parts of the US with very high gun ownership and very low rates of violent crime. Moving there someone could say "Everyone owns guns. I have yet to fear for my life" and it would be just as stupid a statement.
You know I'm getting really tired of people misrepresenting what I said by interjecting a question that had nothing to do with what I was saying. My point was the brain is more interconnected than people admit and of course if you mess with some parts of it you are going to get impaired functioning. How is this research? Take a really complicated biological system and deactivate some part and observe the cascade. I expect more from people with a Ph.D. getting millions of dollars in funding. You don't need a theory to do this kind of research. All you need are some fancy toys.
I agree but just a small correction : s/Marques/Márquez/ (pronunciation : 'markes) they are both common Spanish family names leading to a common confusion.
"Women own 40 percent of the private businesses in the United States, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research. But they create only 8 percent of the venture-backed tech start-ups, according to Astia, a nonprofit group that advises female entrepreneurs."

There's a whole host of companies which popped up in the 20th century in America that were designed to give increasingly bored[1] housewives a means of earning a supplemental income for the household--Tupperware, Avon, and the like. All these statistics about how many private businesses are owned by women are usually talking about these. The statistics about private businesses with more than one employee are not nearly as heartening.

[1] Because of labor-saving devices such as laundry machines and dishwashers being invented.
Agile 2.0: Make Love, Not Money
Almost all the work during the Unix Wars was wasted, entombed in proprietary forks. It's no coincidence that they were all quickly surpassed by the first kernel whose license makes it mostly immune to that problem. Without the GPL, Linux would have happened just as slowly as the BSDs, and getting where we are would have taken many years (decades?) longer--and what's most appalling, most users would not be allowed to understand or improve their tools.
There's a difference between climate and temperature.
I get what you're saying about specific parts acting in specific ways. Neuroscientists have been working of the modular theory of the mind for a very long time now. I'm not saying it's the wrong approach but morality is a really high level construct and to say it is localized to a very specific region just seems absurd.
The site design looks ok, but it looks a bit bland. The color palette is not too enticing.

There is too much info on the main page. I have looked at the page briefly twice (while writing this) and I still don't know what the app does. That scrolling image in the middle should tell me what it does, and not show me an abstract example of a screenshot of the app.

Upon looking at the page a third time, I see the following:
web + database apps made easy
create portable, open-source PHP/MySQL/Ajax web apps in minutes.

That doesn't sound specific enough. What problem is this solving and why should I care?

Looks like you put all of your links in the navbar in the header. Maybe you can reduce the number of links there and move some of the others either throughout the page or to the footer (e.g. the blog, contact us, etc.)

The 'free 14-day trial' button doesn't jump off of the page enough. It's your only call to action but it doesn't grab me, per se.

Other than that, congrats on actually launching.

I am not being mean, just trying to give constructive feedback.

Good luck!

[edit] All of the above was for the marketing site...not the service itself.
For a while, it had the pin for The Bronx smack dab in the middle of Brooklyn...
So, the issue is that this is significantly more expensive than getting an iPad with AT&T. Sprint charges $99 for the Overdrive 3G/4G hotspot and then $60/mo for service. While Apple charges $129 more for the 3G iPad, that's only $30 more than the Overdrive and service is only $30/mo. After one month, the AT&T service is cheaper.

And it isn't just more expensive. The battery life on these personal hot-spots isn't so great and it would mean carrying around two chargers and constantly plugging in two devices rather than one. You even get saddled with a 2-year contract and early termination fee which AT&T's month-to-month iPad service doesn't come with.

Sprint and Verizon are pushing their mobile hot-spots as a way to get iPad owners on their service, but they're requiring two-year contracts, twice the monthly fee, and the hassle of carrying around an extra device and charger. I don't think they'll get a ton of takers.
Usually I get around 3k, but one of my lasts posts was featured on lifehacker and I ended up with like 50k uniques or more. There are very cool people reading this website.
Google Search's Speed-based Ranking, Baking and Frying
I endorse the movement that ads are doing more harm than good because of their overabundance, though if users don't pay attention to seven ads that don't "emotionally engage" them, why are they going to pay attention to one ad that doesn't "emotionally engage" them?
I have a copy of the paper if anyone is interested. My email is in my profile if you want to read it.

The short story is that there's no good answer to the question of likeliness to make a moral decision based on theory of mind, because they scored the results on a 7-point scale of permissible vs. forbidden.

But, their error margins are very good. Here is an exert from the combined analysis of the two experiments: "TMS site specifically affected judgments of attempted harms: TMS to the RTPJ vs. the control site resulted in participants’ judging attempted harms as more permissible [independent samples t test based on the item analysis: t(87) = 3.6, P = 0.001]."
I'm an American. I'm applying for a permanent residence work visa in another 1st world country. My CS degree made this easy. Degrees in economics or finance would not have done so well.
(Separate comment because it's a separate point.)

The problem with articles like this is the constant tension between the idea that women are equally qualified as men and the idea that the startup culture is inherently unfriendly to feminine personalities. Example:

"Later, when Ms. Vijayashanker joined Mint, she also wanted interaction with other people, but, she said, “the guys went into their rooms and coded all day.” So she started a weekly group lunch and hired an intern so she could write programs with a partner."

I'm not saying that women are inherently more social than men, nor am I saying that a software startup inherently has to have a work environment where coworkers don't talk to each other. But this article seems to make both of those assumptions and put them together to conclude "startup work environments are unwelcoming to women" while totally ignoring the fact that the same two assumptions lead to make "women are inherently unsuitable to work in a startup".