skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Obligatory TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...

Countries with low organ donation rates are simply countries where the box isn't checked by default, and in countries with high organ donation rates the box IS checked by default. Basically the decision of whether or not to donate your organs is such a complex decision that the majority of people do not waste the mental resources on it and just go with or justify the default choice.

edit: if anyone is interested in cognitive biases and heuristics, wiki Daniel Kahneman. Only psychologist to win a Nobel Prize (was for Economics). Also heuristic mentioned in the original link is an example of Anchoring & Adjustment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring_and_adjustment
If you get the chance, would you mind adding info about the issue you are having to this Google form? https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dF9URVpxVEZ...

We are doing our best to document all of these and get fixes out as soon as possible.
Grooves are very bad. But they don't reduce friction. It's happened to me, they make the most horrible grinding noise, but they stop the car quite well. Too well.
ISPs sound ready to sue over FCC's "third way"
Have you tried AppBrain? I like being able to do the shopping on a larger screen and also manage lists of recommendations and future possibilities.
The Jews never worshipped multiple gods, but there is evidence that at one point, they believed other gods existed (but they did not worship them, they only worshipped the god of the Hebrews, now known as G-d).

There's also virtually no evidence that Jewish monotheism was influenced by Atenism, the Egyptian monotheism founded by Akhenaten. It's a fun theory but not one that most scholars give credence to.
Nice points, though we disagree. Ironically, I was an atheist for 20 years of my adult life before I went in the other direction (I don't think I became irrational in the process, but that is where we disagree).
Google increases font size on search page
Apple developing Flash alternative named Gianduia
Rabbis aren't a caste, they're just a profession.

There is a priestly caste, the kohanim. The kohanim have various obligations and duties, most of which are moot in the modern world, and one of which involves the hand gesture made famous by Leonard Nimoy.

There is another caste, the Levites, but they have no remaining duties.
Leading causes of death by age group, United States [chart]
Create Your Own WordPress Theme from an HTML Template
In this tutorial, Matthew shows you how to take an existing HTML/CSS template and begin converting it into a functional WordPress theme.
Agreed - for us.

But this was printed in a national Sunday paper here in the uk. Which I think is great - my dad was talking about it for ages.

EDIT: huh? my point being that the audience in question, for the most part, have little active interest in physics - thus this was a great way to expose people to some new ideas :)
In quantum foam, miniscule tunnels between distinct times appear. Is it possible to put something in such a tunnel, and push to widen it? What forces would be exerted to counter that? Or do these "tunnels" obey totally foreign laws of physical interaction?
You may also like... http://futureoftheinternet.org/ (hit the Download link for a free copy)
7 Weeks Until the Twitter OAuthoclypse
Twitter is switching off basic authentication in their API in favor of OAuth. Developers have just 7 weeks remaining to change their applications.
I think I can sum it up by saying facebook has become a big, dumb company. It's a little early to call it, but it's looking more and more like the next excite/yahoo. Trying to be too smart by a half.
How is this news?
$(this).css("opacity", 0);

[Admittedly, this is helpful if yr trying to style w/o JS, but it's not exactly a new technique -- as evidenced by the publish date.]
Weblog uses bright purple text for unvisited links... Why?
How do you Choose the Right Logo for your Start-up?
> It beg's the question "Why do I reject those other 529 gods?" Generally there is no good answer for this other than being indoctrinated at a young age.

But that does not explain people who switch religions later in life.

For myself, I decided that I could not be atheist after encountering spirits. My encounters with spirits disproved atheism for me, instead I am currently a Christian because that is the only religion that is able to accurately describe my spiritual encounters. Atheism as a worldview denies that spirits exist, therefore in my mind it can not possibly be accurate.
I wanted to write up a blog post on how to manage your privacy settings, but I couldn't figure out myself how to do it and that was what pushed me to finally deactivate the account.
Affluent black Africans (Nigerians and a Kenyan) and the daughter of white South Africans are actually why I say "black" instead of "African American" these days, as both groups objected to the term.

The underrepresented groups are correctly, American born descendants of former slaves who are identifiable as black, and Hispanics of darker skin tone. But man, is that a mouthful to say.

"a lot of the top schools try to up their racial stats by admitting upper-class Caribbean and African black students"

I don't think it's a conspiracy as you're putting it. I think they just happen to come out better qualified for various reasons ($$ helps a lot), and happen to have the correct skin tone to take advantage of any remaining quota or aid social programs designed for the American born descendants of former slaves.
Yeah, you can run an authorization transaction which only checks for sufficient funds. It's what happens in a restaurant when you pay with a credit card, get a receipt to sign, but can then add a tip to the total: a pre-auth is done on the card when you give it to them initially, for the amount of the bill plus some standard percentage, and the charge is actually run once they have your signature and know the amount of the tip.
I fully expect wall posts to start opening up significantly this year. That is where most of the 'real time' information is and given their need to imitate twitter, it would not surprise me in the least if we start seeing less privacy here.
Traveling backwards in time is functionally equivalent to exceeding the speed of light; in fact, an object is traveling faster than the speed of light in one inertial frame of reference if and only if there is a second inertial frame of reference, with relative velocity to the first less than the speed of light, in which it is traveling backwards in time.

Technical matters of relativity aside, consider that you can't actually change how fast you move through time. You can't make time move faster or slower, at least within your own frame of reference. Time doesn't just move in a fixed direction, it moves at a fixed rate. Note that this is pretty close to how special relativity actually works, modulo semantics of "rate" when dealing with time.

There are also thermodynamic considerations. One direction of time does seem to be privileged in terms of entropy. This doesn't necessarily mean that time travel is impossible, as far as I'm aware, but it does mean that "forward" in time isn't completely arbitrary, and reversing that may be thermodynamically unfavored.
It would be a nice accessibility feature to make it scale a bit better for browser zoom functions.
Have you guys done my 3+ year old request of making a cool URL scheme for encoding documents?

http://microsoft.com.scribd.com/some/path/to/a/document.pdf

I'd attend your party if I could. Sounds cool. Good luck.
Climate Change and the Integrity of Science
That looks a bit shaky to me. Confusing to users, impersonation, etc

http://scribd.com/microsoft.com/path/to/document.pdf would have less issues.
Facebook could do anywhere between $1.1 to $2 billion in revenues this year. Zynga is doing at most $600 million.
If you look at the top contributors in the stats area (http://www.wolfire.com/humble#statistics), there's a guy that contributed $FF under the name 'unsigned char'. Brilliant.
Pascal's wager only makes some semblance of sense when you consider one possible god with a simple "damned if you don't" heuristic. Throw in all the possible gods that have come before and after (Ra, Zeus, Freyja, Odin, The Moonies) and the wager starts to look pretty bad when you have to pick the "right one."
I am unfamiliar with the memory patterns in the application, but: 600x improvement in performance does not have to come from increase in processing power.

If the algorithms have a lot of data reuse in their matrix computations, I can see achieving 600x improvement when compared to a hardware cache based architecture. If the CPU implementation doesn't do tiling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loop_tiling) effectively (or it can't) then it's going to shuttle a lot of data back and forth from cache to RAM.

The accepted term for this effect is super-linear speedup.
What documents should I bring?
You make some very cogent points and make them well. But there are alternative ways of looking at it.

- It beg's the question "Why do I reject those other 529 gods?"
I reject the others specficially because I accept Christianity. I can neither prove my religion nor disprove (most) of the others, yet by accepting mine I must reject all others. I acknowledge I do this as a leap of faith, but that is different from being indoctrinated at a young age. I will agree with your over all point that most people just believe whatever they are told at a young age, but the more thoughtful people of any religion will often be able to bring forth real arguments for it. This of course is not proof, and many of these arguments involve sometimes personal experiences, but that is still very different from no good answer other than indoctrination.

Most of those gods have likely been created before your god had even first been mentioned.

Many religions will disagree with this. Literalists amoungst Christians and Jews, for instance, will beleive that God was known about since Adam with an unbroken chain of believers. The reasonable literalists will agree that God was first written about late in history, but that is different.

To those people, society did not move past older deities so much as some branched off to false religions and then some of those false religions faded away.

(I am not a literalist, but it is an alternate explanation)

If you follow the trend of gods, you realize that humanity has been generally moving away from polytheism towards monotheism.

True as a general rule, but first note that some polytheistic religions are still around, even in relatively highly educated populaces. Second, note that an alternate explanation is that God is trying to subtly guide humanity to the truth and moving to monotheism is man's response to this guidance. I am again not saying I personally believe this, but that is provides a different explanation.

You make excellent arguments which I respect, but there are other explanations for everything you bring up and I do not think they would provide much weight to someone who already believed one way or another.

[edit: fixed an omitted "not"]
Thanks. I cop to having a certain glee when the opportunity for that arises. :)
All good points.
That's great. Let's hope they find the original version of the The Magnificent Ambersons next.
I was meaning maybe as in it's their rights to license it anyway they please and retain full rights to their data. For instance, if they wanted to, they could upload an album of pictures as Creative Commons, or if they wanted retain full copyright.

My point is, it's your data, you can do whatsoever you wish with it, including delete it all.
SoulPancake / SP Content / Like You Didn't Know
All of them. :)
As to code licensing, that will most likely be GPL or MIT, if I actually get that far.
After taking money from the Russians, Facebook all the sudden operate like a Mafia.
I read into it mainly that one reason some developers are complaining about Apple's actions is that they don't get the idea of working on different platforms, etc., but have an "I do Flash and doing Flash is my right!" sort of view. Which seems right to me, even though there are clearly other reasons to dislike Apple's actions as well (like the antitrust concerns, and reduction in language experimentation).
Many (most?) new consumer drives have support for ERC (the standard term for what WD calls "TLER"), which is part of the ATA-8 standard. See here for the spec (ERC is described in section 8.3.4):

http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2007/D169...

Until recently, you often needed a vendor-supplied MS-DOS executable to enable or modify ERC features on consumer drives, but smartmontools supports it as of v5.40, thanks to this guy:

http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~greg/projects/erc/

I just bought a 1.5TB Samsung HD154UI for $99 that supports ERC. There are reports that P-model variants of the WD 15EADS don't support TLER anymore, but I have several S- and R-model variants of that drive that do, including one that was manufactured in March; so it's still possible to get WD consumer drives that support TLER/ERC, you just have to be picky about the variant.
I for one welcome our new scientific overlords
Absolutely.

I like your picture of the common interactions, it really boils it down to a kernel of core functions.
Hydrophobia Not intended to see life on Xbox Live Arcade
Was it for failing to upsell or was it simply because the manager was a jerk who wanted to feel important in front of his friend.
If wall posts are forced open despite my current 'friends only' setting, I'm gone. It's the only thing I am still comfortable doing there. Might as well twitter otherwise, no ads there yet.
FYI anyone who follows that URL will be logged in as you.
Nowmov (YC W10): Sit Back, Relax, And Watch An Endless Stream of Videos
wish I was in SF ;/
Pro tip: some settings reset to defaults when reactivating, so double check. A while back I found all of my notification settings reset to "email on everything" upon reactivating, and I think some privacy settings were different too.
Here are the slides from all of the presentations as well.

http://www.scribd.com/web2expo
Facebook Location Coming In A Few Weeks. But Is It Foursquare Or Twitter?
Why can't Zynga use their games as a means to move its users outside of the FB wall and into a Zynga-only platform? It seems that many of Zynga's users would do almost anything for some free game credits.
they should pimp it out to match.com :]
...and then they evolved... ;-)
So apple bought sproutCore right? How is this different? or is it a next step from sproutCore?
Earthquake for Windows desktop security software
I also found the leading causes of nonfatal injury hospital visits interesting: http://www.cdc.gov/injury/Images/LC-Charts/10lc%20-%20Nonfat...
The assets archive is 1.3 gb and it uncompresses to almost 11 gb of data.
Would you tell Facebook where you are right now?
I'd never pay a $50 premium for Linux support, but wouldn't mind a $5-$10 premium if it means I don't have to reboot every time I want to play.

Assuming a game is written using portable technologies (OpenGL, GLSL, cg, OpenAL, SDL), I doubt that porting it would be difficult. Obviously, a game which uses Direct3D, MFC, embeds IE, etc, will be a different matter.
Like it, nicely done.
Refusal to split checks irks me every time. So what if they pay a fee per transaction?

If I go grocery shopping with my friend, the cashier at Wal-Mart doesn't see that we came together and force us to combine our orders.

Why are restaurants the only business that gets away with this?

Transaction costs are built into the prices on the menus. Restaurants essentially refuse to give you the convenience that you paid for.
"Hyperbrain" sounds like some woefully inadequate (despite the name) 8-bit computer from the late seventies.
I use hyde, its pretty nice(unlike my blog).
It gave me 4 spanish language videos in a row, despite thumbs-downing them.
I wouldn't count too much on hackable, though you might look up what's going on at http://openinkpot.org . Those things are usually ARM Linux, I believe.

Just the reading material over at http://www.feedbooks.com/books/recent has tidied me up nicely - worth the price of the reader ;-). Check also over at http://www.mobileread.com/ , they also have opinions and their own books.

(I used to go to Borders when they first expanded in the US - nice stores.)
Ask HN: Has anybody here ever participated in 'snapnames' as a buyer or seller ?
I'm thinking of auctioning off some of my domains, there isn't enough time in a life to implement all the stuff that I've registered domains for over the years, and I've been looking for a way to do that.

snapnames seems to fit the bill (I've looked at 'flippa' too but they have a lot of weird conditions), has anybody here used snapnames as a buyer or a seller? If so what is your verdict?
Apple has a few frameworks floating around, internally and out. See http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/286536824/apples-myriad-java...
This does answer the issues I raise. Why the question?
Photos were introduced in 2005. I was on Facebook in Sept. '04, and there were absolutely privacy controls at that point. You could find people in your network through search, but you couldn't see anything other than their name and class year (even profile pictures were opt-in restricted). It's possible that at the very very beginning there were no privacy controls, but my school was whitelisted-in very early (if I recall correctly, we were the third or fourth after Harvard).
I don't mean to be too discouraging, but I really don't understand the point of this as a business. It seems like something that anybody could code in about five minutes, and YouTube itself has started to add playlist functionality.
Who uses the Google home page anymore?
I find that example rather discouraging. Generating a list of prime numbers is an interesting toy problem because it comes with certain expections. The trial divisors are 2,3,5,7,9,... that is two and then odd numbers. One is supposed to stop early, when one reaches the square root of p, and one is supposed to detect this efficiently by looking at the quotinent and spotting that it is less than the trial divisor.

This makes for messy code in any language. Which is very much the point. Will the language help you with the messiness of real applications? If the example ducks the challenge, that is a strike against the language.
Quality over Quantity: How We Built iTeleport into a Profitable Business
preaching is one of my character flaws :-)
"When deciding which direction to take with a start-up we do hours and hours of customer interviews, site visits, market research, brainstorming, reading, and even self-reflection. The same, and more, should be done for religion."

How, exactly? The former involves actual data points and hard evidence by which you can understand what is probabilistically true. In talking to a religious figure, you're just getting someone's opinion on what he believes. That method of 'research' cannot possibly help someone understand what is true in reality.
without the ability to like or dislike a video and to personalize the stream, this is essentially useless for most people.

Pandora for video, but without personalized settings.
Recommendations is an 11-figure business. Seriously. This is a pretty reasonable angle of approach, so I can understand that part.

What I have trouble with is what chaosmachine points out: the recommendations are not that good. At least from a cold start.

How does this have 18 votes in 16 minutes? At a time when the site is pretty quiet? That is very suspicious.
I also can't figure out why in the world would anybody use this - neither me, nor anybody I know, regardless of age/sex/other characteristics.

But then again, I said the same thing about Twitter when it came out and I was wrong.
"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."

The same can be said for unicorns and garden gnomes. Except that an overwhelming majority of people consider it a Fact that those creatures don't exist.
> Comparing the belief in Christ with the belief in Zeus ... for a Christian it may actually be insulting?

Why? Why the double standards? We both find belief in Zeus ridiculous. What's fundamentally different about the Christian God in 2000 AD and the Greek God in 0AD? What statement can you make that is valid for the Christian God but is plainly ridiculous when you replace the word "God" with the word "Zeus"?
Sir Ken Robinson: A New View of Human Capacity
You are right. Also computer power tends to increase pretty fast and get cheaper all the time. Also the software at this stage is likely not optimised for encoding speed. Also, that software was likely to have a lot of debugging flags, etc.
Facebook considers your current IP address to be "public information" as well
Nope; Skynet had intelligence.
From other YCers one would guess ? - maybe someone did a shout out at the scribd party or something to get upvotes.
I just lost another 15 minutes of my life to NowMov. So addicting.
I get that recommendations are a big deal. But YouTube itself already DOES have recommendations, on the home page if you're logged in!

If a service like this catches on, YouTube could replace it overnight, especially as they have data on what you (and the people you correspond with, via Google) enjoy watching.

The Pandora analogy has been thrown around a fair deal, and it is flawed. Pandora does not play and recommend content that is owned and managed by exactly one company.
YouTube could also easily replicate this idea and probably do much better recommendations since they have more resources, more data on the users and videos and more people that are experts in ranking algorithms.

Their business model might be being bought by Google :)
What business model?
The data this company will be able to collect at scale could be valuable in and of itself.
Whoa. That's .... not good. What OS? And you're viewing the http://www.scribd.com/html5 document?
Me too. A filter based on language selection would be nice.
Why windows user might be paying less:
1. They have loads of choices for cheap games compared to the other platforms and hence are used to paying less for most games but big titles (Oblivion, street fighter)
2. They have gotten ripped off often with people promising the best software/game in the world and ended up buying a dud.

Interesting thoughts:
1. Age distributions: My guess would be that a linux demographic would have a much different age distribution than the windows user. If a 10yo is trying to dl the package he might be susceptible to paying less.
2. Gender distribution
etc.
How easy is it to return most software once you've used it? All retail shrinkwrap software, console or not, tends to be no returns once you actually open/use it. Typically the only ones that allow you to return software are indies with %110 guarantees and such not as marketing tools.
In greek it is rather similar:

* Monday -> Δευτέρα ("second")
* Tuesday -> Τρίτη("third")
* Wednesday -> Τετάρτη ("fourth")
* Thursday -> Πέμπτη ("fifth")
* Friday -> Παρασκευή ("preperation")
* Saturday -> Σάββατο ("sabbath")
* Sunday -> Κυριακή ("of the lord)

That version is being used since the time of the Roman Empire, before that, Greeks used the babylonian model that named days after planets -which in turn had been named after gods.

The english names are of germanic/norse descent, again mostly names of gods.
Value Propositions: An Encyclopedia of Paywalls & an exploration of value online