skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "I was under the impression that Judiasm was originally multiple gods."

There's only speculation, nothing really concrete (at least not that I've ever found.)

Judaism does directly reference several Egyptian concepts. Both Genesis 1 and the plagues in Exodus draw heavily on the Egyptian pantheon (in a negative way -- explicitly rejecting Egyptian gods, calling them weak or stating that they are mere created objects.) But I don't know of anything that links Jewish monotheism to Egyptian monotheism.
Browser Back/Forward buttons do nothing, scrollwheel does nothing, no overview/clickable index of links, annoying to scan...powerpoint is the future of webdev?
Science isn't separate from religious practice, but rather it's one of our contemporary religions. Only instead of the ten commandments, you start with the unprovable beliefs that there is nothing supernatural, the universe can be explained entirely through natural laws, we can learn about these natural laws through observation and measurement, the world exists as we see it and is not an illusion, etc. So in regards to the academic studies on the efficacy of prayer, I would consider these studies to be part of modern religious belief rather than separate from it.
Jqery.mb.mediaEmbedder 1.0 is out
Everybody has an "open" something or other these days. The term has been rendered meaningless.
Zynga makes some 1M a day, Facebook some 2M/day. Obviously Facebook is not so happy about someone making half what they make within their own platform.
Thank you for that extremely well-written post. You have saved me the trouble of trying to say essentially the same thing (and I'm not so sure I would have been as successful as you have here).

Good show!
You could have asked the same question about prerecorded video several years ago, and come to the same conclusions. You had professionally produced and edited shows, and you had home movies; there wasn't much in between.

There are definitely amateur/semi-pro live video producers that are producing content that people want to watch. There are several of our broadcasters that regularly have 150+ viewers; I assume that they're doing something that people actually like.
Interestingly, "Sunday" in Japanese is expressed with the kanji for "sun" and the kanji for "day". It's obviously pronounced differently, but the literal meaning is the same as the English phonetics.
Ask HN: Open Social Network -- is now the time?
Perchance a group decided to launch a fully open -- per EFF standards, etc. -- social network. That was fully transparent and the data is yours. Maybe Creative Commons licensed?

Would you and could you see a market for it? Or is the sheer size of Facebook/Twitter too much?

FWIW, I am mulling the idea.
I personally find this article misleading (ignoring the fact that it is criticizing a 9-month old change).

"No way to reconfigure this change."

Having the ability to change such a trivial setting would be terribly annoying. This type of "add a setting for that" thinking is probably what led to Facebook's privacy preferences.

"Top 10 mistakes in web design"

This article is quoted to support the reconfiguration point, but in fact the "mistake" that is mentioned is to disable the zoom-in and zoom-out of a browser (which DOES in fact work on Google's page) and not some sort of font-size preference.

"Violating Design Convention"
"Inconsistent Marketing Message"
"Branding Mistakes"

The only argument offered for these points is that the author simply does not like the new look, and that "people are now criticizing the design"
2nd the 'tradition' theory. I regularly eat at a restaurant that caters to students (who will almost always split checks) and they always offer to split the check for you. I've never seen this anywhere else.
Heh, these guys could probably get a grant from the same folks funding the EATR [1] research. Sounds like a great combination to me.

1: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-10287597-71.html
Linux users contribute twice as much as Windows users
Hyperbrain Owner's Manual - 1. the big picture
> "It works well against Christians"

No it doesn't.

It amazes me how often I hear Christians say "this argument works well against atheists" and then make an utterly stupid argument that none of the atheists I know would take seriously. This strikes me as much the same -- it's an argument that atheists think should work well against Christians, but that most Christians will think is stupid and misses the point.
" In that case, the person who believes in the true deity can consistently say that he as a theist believes in the true one while rejecting all the false ones while the person who denies all of them includes in that denial the one true deity and hence is an atheist."

This looks to be a matter of definition of "atheist". (Or "theist", for that matter.)

Is an atheist one who does not believe the claims of the existence of deities? Or one who does not believe in the existence of what is in fact a deity?

"But this logic falls apart if one assumes there is one true deity ..." Isn't this just begging the question? By the same reasoning, if we posit that there are no deities, then no atheist is an atheist because they are not, in fact, disbelieving regarding any actual deities.

"In other words, from the theistic perspective, the question is whether there is indeed a true deity of whatever type. If so, that is pretty important. If not, then obviously it is not."

Well, that's the whole matter right there; it's pretty important whether you are a theist or an atheist, because that's part of what's under question. (More broadly, the question is whether there are any deities; there being but one is sort of a variation on that.)
> if you weren't born upper-class, upper-middle is as high as you can go (your children and grandchildren have a shot, though)

Therefore one can be born upper-class to upper-middle parents? Otherwise that doesn't make sense.
HORRIFYING NEW STARTUP OF THE DAY: DirtyPhoneBook.com
He mentions the importance of the post-live experience, as well as, of course, the actual live broadcast, but he fails to mention whatsoever the importance of the pre-live experience. The build-up, the marketing, the getting-the-message-out that a live show or event will be happening.

It's silly to think one can just flip on their camera and expect users to suddenly start appearing. It would be plain common sense to let people know beforehand that your show or event will be happening. Duh?

One other thing that makes a live cast successful is a regularly broadcast format such as Mixergy, where users know when to expect the next live broadcast, whether it is daily, weekly, or monthly, or where one can check a schedule of upcoming events and add it to their calendar.
I'm sure there are 100 other gaming start-ups salivating at the opportunity to take Zynga's place as a tightly integrated gaming platform at Facebook. Not that I think this would be bad for Facebook -- I blocked all of Zynga's apps a long time ago -- but much like Apple, Facebook is pushing hard to build the best monetization strategy it can, and right now, Facebook has the ear of the masses. It has to leverage that every which way from Sunday in order to turn a profit.
What does this mean for their copy protection? How can they prevent people from downloading/printing works now?
+1 for proper use of 'begging the question' :)
Actually credit card purchases are usually batched and sent out at the end of the day, so they could edit the charge to the customer without incurring any additional charges to their own merchant account.
I think their leadership have become arrogant from their success and are somewhat naive. I understand trying to make more money and build the company but you are supposed to do this in a way that feels beneficial to your users.

Their current behavior is very poor strategy, even from someone as powerful as Facebook.
'swombat' (Daniel Tenner) linked this in a discussion a while ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1314793

I finally got around to reading it, and it is well worth being turned in to a book or so.

If you haven't read it (and the follow up postings) please do.

Thanks Daniel!

part 2: http://inter-sections.net/2008/09/01/hyperbrain-owners-manua...

part 3: http://inter-sections.net/2008/09/05/hyperbrain-owners-manua...

part 4: http://inter-sections.net/2008/09/11/hyperbrain-owners-manua...

part 5: http://inter-sections.net/2009/02/23/hyperbrain-owners-manua...
That's my problem with this - why would i pay $40 for something that is available at $0.01.

Yes i might believe it is worth $40 but when i am getting something for much cheaper than that surely i would just buy and wait for it to go up, in which case the price rise should also be in stages, which it is not.
That depends entirely on who you are, and I'd say your view is a bit prejudiced.

I'm from one of the most atheist countries in the world, and to tell you the truth I don't think I've ever had a serious conversation with friends or family discussing whether God (or a god) exists. To us it would be like having a serious discussion about whether or not the tooth fairy existed. We just don't really care, and think the whole discussion would be kind of silly if it wasn't for all the wars fought in the name of various religions.
It was found a few years back. Now a completed restoration (minus some frames and small segments too damaged to restore to what was considered to be an adequate state) is premiering in various venues.

There was also a 9mm print that was recently found. I haven't heard whether anything useful has been gained from it.
Me too since I'm one of them (and my company now 12 of them) but FWIW, none of us ever forgot that Facebook is not the web, and that it has a profit-motivated owner. We've all expected this coming, and any who didn't deserve what they get for being naive.

I'm writing a blog post on my thoughts about it, story at 11.
Saying something is "individual" is healthy only to the point that it does not stop you from actually researching it

That's the point I am disagreeing with though.

The problem with God is that there is no way we can consider it as a Fact or Non-Fact. There is currently no objective reality of God's existence - so there is no element of fact or non-fact in it (interesting side note: if we all unequivocally believe in God how would that affect things - philosophical question for those so inclined :)).

An individuals opinion of God is really Faith or Non-Faith (do you believe it may be a provable Fact or may not be a proveable Fact); and that is what I feel is the personal choice - even if someone just shrugs shoulders and says "yeh, there must be a god" we have to respect that. Period.

(another side point: my problem with religion is, simply, that it tries to influence that decision, making it out to be the most important decision of your life...)
conkeror.
Hope someone in the game industry sees this and realises that linux gamers are a viable demographic. Not many companies apart from id have released AAA linux titles offlate. Initial efforts to create linux gaming companies (like Loki games) shut down and I am afraid the wrong lessons were learned - that linux gamers wont pay for games. Hope this post changes some of that, at least for indie developers.
http://joshua.schachter.org/2009/12/blogging-tools.html
There are two questions this brings up to me, in relation to your points.

1) At one point are people willing to give up on Facebook w/o an alternative in enough numbers to seriously hurt the site.

2) How big is the time window that FB has to fix the problems before a competitor automatically could become a serious threat simply because of how fed up people are?
Another thing is that scrolling is kinda sluggish in Chrome on my 2007 Mac Mini. Google docs PDF reader seems to scroll much more smoothly. It's still a big improvement over the flash version.
Personally, I'd don't see why this is an inappropriate forum, as long as the comments are intellectual in nature.

To address your point, I agree with your general claim that there's no logical inconsistency in a monotheistic view by itself. Suffice to say that the matter has been discussed so much that if there was a conclusive 'proof' against it, we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.

However, the argument against theism presented here is pretty effective against a standard, simplistic argument of religion which is basically 'how can something believed by so many people possibly be wrong' (which is how I interpret 'How can you not believe in God'). Holding up the multitude of religions, past and present, is a pretty good rebuttal.

Not an inconsistency, but a good argument.
Some good examples there, but in all it's rather brief. Surely there's more to jQuery 1.4?

I'm getting quite weary of hearing that this or that is HTML5, and then you view it and there's really nothing in particular that you couldn't do with HTML 4.1. Is there something special and brand new about showing a set of slides with Javascript with a poor interface? With all of this hype and mislabeling, average semi-technical people are becoming confused from here to Zaire about HTML5. The comments on say, TechCrunch prove this thoroughly every time the topic is mentioned.
Google Changes Font Size Unilaterally... Why?
Don't forget FB also has way higher expenses maintaining all of the servers and the larger staff, so their income may be higher but their profits are likely significantly lower.
Definitely agreed, that's one reason the jquery website wins. I don't want to dig through your documentation to get through to something tangible. Sometimes it's in "tutorials" sometimes it's in docs, sometimes it's plain not there or you need to download the whole package to get to samples. Shameful.
An atheist can be either one who does not believe the claims of the existence of deities (if no such deity exists) or one who does not believe in what is in fact a true deity (if the deity does exist). I will grant that, if the atheistic view is correct that there is no true deity, then it is the believer who suffers from reality distortion. That, of course, is the nature of that debate. But I don't think the point I am making here assumes that one or the other is correct. I'm simply trying to address the logic of the original piece that no one can meaningfully use the word atheist because that person in turn will deny the existence of other deities.
The Japanese seem to agree; sun, moon, fire, water, wood, gold, earth. Well, the beginning is similar, anyway...
From the point of view of an atheist, there is very little to even think about. That's the problem, really. In matters of faith, faith (by its very nature) requires very little thought. You can search for 'evidence' of the existence of God, but there is none to consider really.

That's why you end up with great scientific minds being reduced to things like Pascals Gambit. While Pascal did enter into an interesting piece of game theory, the substance requires very little thought (if your not going to believe in god, you better be right sort of thing).
I think your logic depends on your definition of atheist. Taking the word apart it simply means without a theology. Substituting in the definition of theology we get "without a particular system or school of religious beliefs and teachings." Under that definition it makes sense to say even someone with a monotheistic belief system is "without a particular system or school of religious beliefs and teachings" of other gods. Meaning, they don't have system of religious beliefs for other Gods besides their own.
"It doesn't work against deists since their 'god' is sufficiently poorly-defined to be more plausible than Thor."

Contemporary thinkers might argue that god is well-defined, but ineffable.
Good point, Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" is really a good reference about our "entertaining society" and especially his concept "Information-Action" ratio. As our society is evolving into fast/ephemeral information and often really distanced from our reality. The effect of this irrelevant information which is limiting our real actions.

Another good reading on this topic is the work of Guy Debord especially "The Society of the Spectacle" where is explaining the degradation of social life due to the spectacular media.
See Eliezer Yudkowsky's The Fallacy of Gray, HN discussion and essay: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1147767
Ten Commandments of Software Engineering
Thank you Hacker News - You are all invited to Scribd's party tonight in SF
Yesterday we posted on Hacker News asking for your feedback, and wow, did you guys come through! We are very so grateful for all the great constructive feedback we received. We hope that going forward we can continue to use Hacker News as a sounding board to help make our product better.

To say thank you, we'd like to invite all users of Hacker News to the Scribd 3 Year Anniversary Party tonight in SF. We honestly didn't plan to do this originally, but we were so overwhelmed by the response that it felt like the right thing to do. Here is the invitation:

http://anyvite.com/events/home/dq4gjpnquo/w7ji380d8kmwpc/lhckmc261rk4agq2gz7v

To get in, just bring your Hacker News user name and the password is "font". Hope to see you guys tonight!

Thanks,
The Scribd Team
I don’t remember anymore whether Dawkins also argued with past beliefs but I do know that he often emphasizes the geographical distribution of religions, not so much the history of religions. You can view a example here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYigmGyN2RQ

I do think it is quite baffling how you can be consciously aware of all the myriad of religions in the world and still not be a atheist. They can’t all be right and there exists no method of picking the right one except trusting you own feelings. I mean, Christians baptize their babies, Jews circumcise their sons – those religions seemingly don’t even want you to consciously decide to join them. It’s just assumed that you will if your parents have that religion.
I wouldn't want the things I upload to a social network to be creative commons licensed; I'd want all of the rights to remain in my possession. If an open social network is to be made, I don't think it should be the Wikipedia model where you relinquish rights to everything you do on the site.

(If you were referring to licensing the actual code as Creative Commons, don't. Creative Commons recommends GNU GPL: http://creativecommons.org/software)
I believe there is a per transaction fee element to what Visa/MasterCard/ American Express charge. So its in their financial interest to split the bill into as few transactions as possible. (source: http://www.businessknowhow.com/money/creditcardprocessing.ht... )
"Spam is a free rider: it offloads most of its cost onto its audience" makes no sense as you acknowledge by agreeing with the (presumably downvoted, now deleted) parent in your next sentence "'The market' might favor that".

If people didn't make money spamming then they would not spam. People buy spam, therefore people "sell" spam.
I've never had anyone decline to split a check. Most of the larger lunch restaurants around here usually compute the check independently and will combine it or split it easily. (Dallas, TX)
An introduction to Cascalog (slides)
Wonderful visualization.

Also worrying. With each new iteration, I try to go over my settings and make sure my profile remains as private as it was in '05, but there so many fucking changes and settings, I might just quit one of these days.
A music forum I'm on did a complete re-scoring of the original film. Here's my favorite 3 minutes from the project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGw6PncahcM
Sounds like exploiting humans' tendency to disproportionately take into account sunk costs.
There's even more underrepresentation of African-Americans, which doesn't seem to be counted--- a lot of the top schools try to up their racial stats by admitting upper-class Caribbean and African black students. There might be some benefit to it, but it seems that the goal of affirmative action (remedy U.S. racial inequality) is probably not greatly served by increasing opportunities for people who are black, but are also sons of Nigerian cabinet ministers and millionaires.
I agree that it is irritating, but it is their site, it's not like they need to ask for permission.
Glaxo suspends resveratrol clinical trial
Ouch, this is very disappointing. O3D was technologically better approach than WebGL.

JavaScript is a perfect scripting/glue language, but unfortunately it still sucks at numerical computations.

Yes, even with all the massive progress that happened recently with V8/TraceMonkey/Carakan. Try working with large arrays and you will weep.

Well, good news is at least this will force JS engine developers to improve this so far neglected aspect.
Raise a seed round now  Raise a series A in 12 months
Great rebuttal.

> But this logic falls apart if one assumes there is one true deity

I'd argue that is where the problem lies. Because currently and as far as I am aware the Atheist viewpoint and the Theist viewpoint is equally legitimate and, at some specific point, not empirically provable either way. i.e. the existence of God is purely a belief/non-belief thing (I touched on this in another comment).

From a logical/rational viewpoint the Atheist and the Theist hold disparaging views regarding the Theists god (existence/non-existence). However, they hold essentially the same view r.e. other gods. Because the Theists God cannot be empirically proven the Atheist/Theist view is equally valid - they are equal.

In a case where God is either empirically proven to exist or not exist you are right; the argument breaks down. To my knowledge this situation does not currently exist.

Short version: your argument works perfectly. But if God empirically doesn't exist then the logic is flawed in the same way. From the unproven ground the logic is sound.
Interestingly it does use "section" and "header" elements, which are basically invisible to users but are also among the few "HTML5" features that actually fit the name.
Infrastructure to support Digg's more aggressive media and business initiatives.

Digg also has to run its own administration infrastructure while Reedit gets the benefit of being a subsidiary of Conde Nast.

Plus, of course, Digg got more funding and you have to do something with all that money :)
Well, let's be fair: The guy is making a literary-critical statement which is being quoted out of context in a non-native language. We have little idea of what he's really trying to say.

For example, even native speakers of English use the phrase "science fiction" in different ways, to mean different things. Just ask anyone who has read a protracted argument about the difference between SF, science fiction, and sci-fi, or the difference between hard SF, space opera, and B-movie sci-fi.

One of many possible charitable interpretations: Back when Metropolis had been cut into ribbons, the plot was hard to follow, half the characters were missing, and the allusions to various genres were hard to grasp, so we just watched the movie because it had an atmospheric future city and an awesome shiny fembot. Now we not only get the scenery and the robot, but also some idea of why the filmmakers put them there, and apparently it's not just "because eye candy sells tickets".
That's true, but I don't think their goal was to weed out crappy apps. I think what they really wanted was to keep the platform exclusively their control, to remove the possibility of a 3rd-party SDK getting popular, lagging behind Apple's SDK and slowing down or interfering with the platform's progress.

The 3.3.1 change will keep lazy developers from making crappy Flash ports, but it won't automatically make lazy developers care about quality.

Apple is in a tough spot here, they get complaints about app quality and complaints about rejecting apps, they alienate people no matter what they do. I hope they find a way to regulate quality better without pissing off many more people, but that might not even be possible.
from foo import bar