skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"God is the only objective force in the universe" <- yet its mere existence still has to be proven

"Take homosexuality for example... as recent as a few decades back, it was an abhorrent crime, hated by society, hated by government." <- and in ancient greece it was normal and accepted

"Take dress code as another item" <- Fashion in dressing has changed over the course of the centuries

"The harmful nature of swine has been studied and documented to the nth degree. The bacteria it contains, and the susceptibility of the meat to transmit viruses is well known within certain research communities" <- The same could be said of other animals such as bovine and birds.

"On the contrary. Human beings have killed people." <- But in the name of religion! And not only in the name of the 3 major monotheistic religions, but the monothoeistic religions happen to be less tolerant with other's beliefs. There are many examples, the crusades, inquisition, witch hunts...

"The death toll in Iraq has gone off the scale. The death toll in Afghanistan has reached into it's hundreds of thousands. These are Atheist wars!" <- Doesn't ex-president Bush Jr told the world that the bad ones where islamic fanatic terrorists? He even wanted to call the war "Divine Justice" or something alike.

"Religion has brought, not only moral truth" <- again, that is very debatable. Religion claims it has The Truth, yet every religion claims the same, and their truths are different from each other.

"In modern history, Atheism has killed more people than centuries of religiously motivated killings." <- That is absolutely demagogic. Atheism hasn't killed anyone. People kills people, and in modern wars is it is always for economic reasons.

"The Islamic Golden Age has contributed an invaluable amount to almost every aspect of our existence today" <- That is exactly correct. And during the Islamic Golden Age, muslims where not as fanatical as they are nowadays. On the contrary, on that age, christians were as fanaticals as muslims ara nowadays.

"What has atheist brought really?" <- Freethinking, a neutral vision of nature and the universe, curiosity and the ability to ask questions and look for answers beyond "it is god's <change your deity name here> will". If it were for religion, we will still think that earth is plain.

"than just ignorant and prejudice ideas?" <- That is exactly what I would say that religion has given to humanity.
This is exactly the sort of story I hope HN can avoid as it grows in popularity; silly, overblown, and worst of all technically uninteresting. Let your local TV evening news cover this stuff; keep it off HN.
nuclear power could deliver far more energy per year than is used yearly now for thousands of years. Innovation makes energy more useful. When the potential for growth these two cause is exhausted there's scifi stuff; solar power from satellites around the sun; fusion; etc.
> Just 50x more traffic.

50x traffic is too obvious to ban :)
Don't forget that spammers exploit botnets with tens of thousands zombie computers each one with unique IP. 2.8% from 10000 zombies = 280 first try successful breaches.
That's why they use botnets for this. Each attempt will be from a fresh ip.
Well, that depends very much on your level. If you are completely new to Spanish (like I was), you'll need to bootstrap the learning process with something really basic.

I started using an audio course from Pimsleur, teaching me to say "Where is the hotel?" etc.

After that, I still needed material of the simpler kind suitable for foreigners. There are a bunch of such podcasts, for example:

http://www.notesinspanish.com (very beginner-friendly, some parts in English)

http://teresasanchez.biz/podcast/ (slightly more advanced, all in Spanish)

http://www.spanishpodcast.org/ (also a bit more advanced)

When you're getting bored with the stuff for foreigners, you'll find a wealth of "normal" podcasts in Spanish. Don't worry if you don't understand every word, as long as you get the basic gist.

When I started I very much enjoyed a podcast on astronomy, at http://universo.iaa.es/

Spain's national radio, RNE, has pretty much all of their programming available as podcasts, at http://rtve.es

The BBC has a rather good daily news podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/mh/

After a while you'll be ready for something more difficult, for example:

Etcetera podcast is two guys in Buenos Aires philosophizing in a rather entertaining way, at http://etceterapodcast.com/

Pretty much the same, but with three guys in Spain and more swear words, is Kafelog, at http://www.kafelog.com/
I think it's higher than that. I think we can atleast use some kinda of processing to detect where the circle/square/retangles are. So, it is more like 1/9. So in 6 tries there is a 50% chance of success.
And then you fall into the same problem with a race between captcha/clickcha programmers (who MUST maintain ease for human-use) and spam programmers (who can click randomly and still sometimes succeed, so they only seek to boost their chances).

I'll give them two guesses who will win most of the time.
Right, but it's still finite to some degree, and selling people on growth which we cannot guarantee is possible is just plain irresponsible IMO.
> how many permutations of different questions are there?

Infinite! Just this of the possibilities with that kind of system. You could keep adding different questions (just minor variations) and it won't be difficult to keep ahead of spammers. Plus there is always a trade off between security and ease of use. I think the ease of use with clickcha is well worth the slight loss of security.
The feature I would really like to see added at Posterous is the ability to opt out of having affiliate links added to my posts.

I was looking through the user preferences yesterday to see if they had added this option but couldn't see anything. I was on the verge of moving my blogs to Posterous when the affiliate link thing came to light. I can't see myself going back to the service until I can opt out of that.
Not just "kind of". They had a bunch of Sun Rays at my University, and this worked great. Just pull out your card, and plug it in somewhere else, and it'd be like your session had just gone on screensaver.

Of course, obvious flaw in the model: If you need mobility, you have a laptop. If you don't, well, the feature isn't really that useful. Also, the Solaris 9 user experience leaves something to be desired, but that's not the Sun Rays fault. (I compiled almost everything from source in my homedir.)

Really cool thing: It is (was?) possible to configure a multi-monitor setup with several Rays, purely over the network.
Is it possible to jump over the flag pole in Super Mario Bros? Yes
Upvoted by accident :(

"In a normal market, one should be able to reasonable purchase a home based on local wages."

Says who? You're not even making the point of the actual existence of a bubble believable, and my cursory search shows that most people don't agree with your claims. And that's not even mentioning that there is no reason ever that it "should be easy". You can borrow at a fixed rate for 5% FFS! In the 80's people paid 10-15 % ! Was it so much better back then?
I couldn't agree with you more, it's been hyped to irritating levels. The most obvious response is: "No, he didn't." If I cut open my leg and put an infected laptop hard drive inside it, that equally does not make me infected.

It should be noted that this story comes from Reading University, home of Kevin Warwick, whose real talents seem to be less with cybernetics and more with PR. Searching The Register gives a decent breakdown of his stunts over the years:

http://search.theregister.co.uk/?q=kevin+warwick
Don't give up though, you are on to something. If you can make the permutation higher then yea you can definitely make it big.
Religion's also /caused/ all of the polar opposites you list - peace, life, healing, acceptance, tolerance, openness, women's rights, and advancements of the sciences,

Could you please elaborate on how did religion cause peace... LIFE????? er... HEALING???? acceptance, tolerance and opennes, women's rights and advancements of the sciences??

Ok I agree there is a lot of religious art, but that was possible because Catholic Church was (and is) veeeeeeeeeery wealthy. That doesn't mean that art wouldn't have advanced if religion did not exist at all.

"But all achievements - and all tragedies - were made by human hands." I completely agree with you on that. There are good things and there are bad things made by people, and there would be good things and bad things as well if there were not religion at all. There's a famous sentence "There's good people doing good things and bad people doing bad things, but it takes religion for good people doing bad things".
Interviewing programmers: coding test results.
I admit I play a game of Tetris every now and then.
I'd pay to see that.

(Seriously; VS2010. If you assume it's about new-developer mindshare then at the moment Android has one huge advantage - you don't need to buy a Mac.)
I didn't catch the other question types, and the page isn't loading for me any more so I can't fiddle with it further.

I can see where that'd help (significantly), but I don't see how a captcha-reader can't also parse the key words, and interpret the image appropriately. "size-est" and "shape" / "color" is easy to rip out, and a basic OCR to detect shapes and sizes and a number is pretty basic.

And remember that the site lists Captchas as being OCR-able, and that the question sentence must be readable - quickly - by humans, so it can only be weakly obfuscated, unlike some of the shorter Captchas. That weakens an already-claimed-as-weak system, so it's easy to assume the instructions can be read. Detecting a couple key words via a smallish dictionary seems simple at worst.

A few mistakes can be ignored, because the server must allow a few - people will make them too. After all of the above, what's the success rate on a dumb interpreter? Say, one that can't understand order of words, merely their existence.

I'm not seeking to totally shoot this down - I think it's an interesting idea, and with a large number of objects and some visual obfuscation could possibly supersede Captcha. But it's achieved by adding logical complexity; to retain ease of use, visual complexity / some other form has to be sacrificed, which makes it easier to read by machines. Or, potentially, making the image quite a bit bigger, so the images / objects used can be made significantly more complex ("click the dog" when given several images).
Why not compare it to Redis instead? They are both in-memory snapshotting stores, sure Redis does less but it is still a closer solution. But, Redis would probably be faster.
Video Gamers Can Control Dreams, Study Suggests
I think he is onto something, and just needs to think it through. I think creativity should be encouraged.
At a guess you're from S. Germany right? Ich habe gesessen oder Ich bin gesessen?

I would be very, very grateful if you could email me (barry.p.cotter@gmail.com). I just moved to Germany and want to find out about doing vaguely computery or programming Praktika or news.yc equivalents in German.
Does this guy not know that Visual Studio 2010 has already been released?
Thanks for this write-up RiderOfGiraffes.

I'm one of the HNers that sent in code for the test. The feedback provided by RiderOfGiraffes was useful and the follow up questions were food for thought.

At the time I'd just failed a coding test for a systems programmer role and felt pretty low, which is why I decided to take this on.

In the interview I failed, I fared well in most of the questions, apart from one set involving heavy binary maths — I pretty much forgot basic binary computation from when I did my undergrad course. Following this, it prompted me to buy "Hacker's Delight" by Henry S. Warren. It's a great read if you're into high-performance algorithms http://amzn.com/0201914654

I can't wait to read the next part!
It sounds like an ambitious idea, but Mozilla has had their "Firefox Sync" product (née Weave) available as a developer release for some time now:

https://mozillalabs.com/sync/

Basically, it synchronises your saved passwords, browsing history, and open tabs between different machines with Sync installed. If you use Firefox Mobile (née Fennec), you can open a tab from your desktop machine on your mobile device, and vice-versa. Mozilla have even announced an iPhone client that (presumably) launches Safari instead of Firefox, but still gives you access to your open tabs and history:

http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/05/26/firefox-home-coming-...
Having to manually add questions means that practically speaking the number of possible questions <<<<<<<< infiti. As soon as you add another question, the spammers will simply add it to their portfolio of question types. There is no way "you can keep ahead of the spammers" with this.
It seems entirely plausible to me. Much like iPod/iTunes support for Windows in the past. It's inevitable. Apple's world does not revolve exclusively around the Mac. Even if 50% of mobile developers used a Mac, which is certainly an overstatement, that's too many Windows developers to ignore. Apple is already giving away XCode so no conflict of interest there. I'm not sure what Microsoft's motivation would be except trying to lure some potential Android developers to the iPhone in the short term because they envision WM7 and Android competing directly with each other.
The disconnect between the world we are living in and the streets is huge. That's why I hesitate to pass judgment on other people - I don't know how they have been shaped by their society, and perhaps if I went through the same process they went through, I would also have their viewpoints.

It's like people who listen to rap passing judgment on country music or vice versa. These represent different lifestyles and approaches to life. None is wrong - brought up in one circumstance, you would sing the one and in another the other.
A Good Company
huh. I thought it was just me, that I was a bit bizarre being able to control my dreams - I've talked about this with lots of friends and family, and no-one else seemed to be able to do it. But no, they even have a term for it, 'lucid dreams'. Who'd a thunk it?

I don't know about the whole 'go hyper aggressive' thing though - I generally just do something like make the bad guy break his leg when he is chasing me...
{Related} I wonder how search engines are using the 'nofollow' tag these days.

I know it's supposed to mean that PR does not accrue to the destination but they would have to be mad to ignore such a huge source of data.
I don't see much demand for launchers that large. While the LEO payload capacity of a shuttle is large, comparable to, say, a Delta IV Heavy or the largest (not yet flown, AFAIK) Angara, the total vehicle weight is much larger. A shuttle launch is equivalent of hauling 100 tons to LEO (30 of payload and 70 of shuttle).

That's some serious fireworks.
Why would I pick a pixel at random when I could pick a black pixel and have better than 10% chance of getting it right regardless of the question with less than 10 lines of code?
I think payload integration with the Deltas is done with the vehicle standing in launch position.

But my knowledge on this matters is, too, very much reliant on what Google can find me.

That's one career switch I would consider seriously.
Judging by his t-shirt, DARE is apparently now informing kids as young as 10 that there exists a wide variety of chemicals to get fucked up on.
For a one-man shop, I'd just skip the title entirely. The only downside is potentially someone seeing just the card wouldn't know if you have the authority to do deals, but I really doubt that would be an issue with a consulting shop.
What a great thing to do, RoG, really, that's a very useful thing.

Maybe a bit less trivial challenge next time ?

(though I can see how in an interview setting this would be all you might be able to do).
More insightful analysis: http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2010/wilton/comments.html

Someone must be playing joke on human brain ;-)
Does anyone know the status of DSP/GPU acceleration on OS X? What's the minimum specs to support it (if it's supported at all)?
I'm not so sure about that. All you need is a bit of buffer overrun, reflection, or poor escaping mechanisms - and none of those are exactly rare.

Here's a 2006 article on RFID+buffer overflow tat wikipedia pointed me at: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2006/03/6386.ars
Why IT Needs to Take Control of Public Cloud Computing
It's not trivial till you've done it.

If it really is trivial then it shouldn't take you long.

If it isn't trivial then you'll learn something.

Care to try it before I publish Part II ??

<grin>
The writer is not stating that there is no God. He is stating that the premise that we need God to have morality is false. Human society intrinsically has to be moral in order to function. It is the model that best works, and when there is an exception, say a psychopath killing women, society will punish that person (whether you believe it is the hand of God or not). The idea that an atheist, or secular, society would irrevocably slide into amoral behaviour is simply illogical.
Less trivial? It wasn't that difficult, although I wasn't able to complete it in 2 minutes like the colleagues of RiderOfGiraffes did!
You could make it much harder for bots by asking the user to click on two numbers (e.g. highest and lowest). I don't think that would be too much extra work for the user as most of the effort is in scanning through all of the numbers.
Is English your first language?

Because if not you'll have a hard time understanding what I'm saying. (And if it is you have no excuse for the bad grammar.)

Basically you come across as (you sound like) a "cheerleader". You want him to hire you, so you are praising his software. But your praise is false, and doesn't add anything to the discussion.

Telling the whole world you want to do a ruby on rails port doesn't add anything to the discussion either.
We reported it, but we followed up with a counterpoint: http://news.techworld.com/security/3224836/human-computer-vi...
Microsoft are really strong in office software and in developer tools. Those are businesses which are actually reasonably weakly coupled to the OS business and barely coupled at all to their devices business units.

I'm suspicious of the idea that any company of Microsoft's size and maturity has a coherent strategic direction. Apple's an exception, but it's not a business: it's a totalitarian command economy with shareholders.
> However I see no reason why energy availability can't keep growing for many many centuries to come. We aren't tapping the full potential of nuclear fission, to say nothing about fusion.

Nuclear fission is currently on decline. We aren't even building enough power plants to maintain its output, nor are we likely to do so in the next 20 to 30 years. Industrial nuclear fusion is decades away, probably a century.

From the 18th century onwards, we went from tapping ever better energy sources (denser, lighter): animal power, coal, oil. There aren't any better energy source than oil available now, or in the foreseeable future. At some point, we'll have to do with /less/.
+1. Is there a way for us to userscript / greasemonkey this in in the meantime?
Wasn't the big discussion all about how easy the task was, and how unable were the perfect-CV people to complete it?
How would the ATM know that you don't prefer French (if you're Canadian) or Spanish (if you're from the USA)? (Can the ATM even deduce which country you're from?)

Is there a standardised space on the magnetic stripe to store your language preference? Or in the network protocol?
> To me, this explains how primarily capitalist countries tend toward stability

Except that doubling GDP, resource consumption, etc every 20 years hardly can be called "stability".
Your Alternate Resume
screen -R
In RoG's write-up he explains that this is a task candidates would have to pass to gain an interview.
Glaxo offers free access to potential malaria cures
Literary unsavviness aside, this is definitely the future of computing, maybe not in 2 years but not far after... All that's needed is good execution.
these are pretty sub-par questions that were probably written by a marketing person: "But completely opting out of the platform won’t allow you to play any games and other third party features on the site?"

and this is one of the first times that i have ever seen 0 comments on a NYT post, especially on a topic this controversial. am i just missing something? where are all the comments? (when i tried to post mine, i got a message that all comments are pre-moderated.)

compare this article to the last Q and A with Eliot Schrage:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/facebook-executive-...

EDIT:
there are also no comments on this NYT facebook article that came out the same day: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/technology/27facebook.html.... it looks like facebook is pulling strings to quash dissent.
This is reminiscent of this judeo-christian hate for flesh... That and the fact that our machines and programs certainly aren't our children in any meaningful way.

Overall, I'm finding these singularity fantasies philosophically entertaining, but I'll keep saying that's sick, or disgusting.
I bet he was until he got diagnosed though, and if he had never been diagnosed and died from old age like 1/2 of smokers do, he'd have been happy.

My point is that when I'm told eating red meat daily will increase my risk of colon cancer by 300%, it really doesn't give me great concern when it's really raising my risk of developing the disease from 1 in 10,000 to about 1 in 3,333. Considering the mortality rates, it's still sitting at a 1 in 10,000 chance that I'll die from colon/rectal cancer from a large consumption of red meat. So really, is it worth my concern whatsoever or is the stress of eternal vigilance in my daily diets going to kill me much sooner?
Sure, will mail you.
Assuming it's using the same API that Adobe use (which I believe is true. Actually looks like they plan this for VLC 1.2, not this release):

The new video acceleration API is only available in Mac OS X 10.6.3 or later and is limited to GPUs models such as NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M. For more details you can look at Apple’s technote. Here is a list of the Mac models currently supported:

* MacBooks shipped after January 21st, 2009
* Mac Minis shipped after March 3rd, 2009
* MacBook Pros shipped after October 14th, 2008
* iMacs which shipped after the first quarter of 2009

(Mac Pros are not supported as of today)

from http://blog.kaourantin.net/?p=89
> On a more serious note, I really don't see why everyone is getting so excited about their devices becoming dumb terminals and giving away their power to corporations that own the cloud.

Because it is enormously more efficient from a societal point of view.

The important thing is to have choice, many providers, many platforms, and prevent lock-in.

> Furthermore, they are competing unfairly: they use their ads profits to dump products on the market at very low prices or for free, killing the (possible) competition. For now this has been good for the consumer, with two observations: you're not getting something for free, you're paying with your privacy; once google gets big enough it may get to be the only player in some markets and that always ends badly.

Rather than resist the coming of the cloud, instead support competitors to adsense/words. I can't be the only one who thinks that a free OS, free Docs, free [insert here] in return for letting Google know what kind of products I like is not just a good trade, for a fabulously excellent one.

I only worry that if Google might stop innovating if they get too big, which is why it's essential that Bing is around, and Yahoo, and DDG, and so on, and competitors like iAds that can make a dent in their ad business.
According to the changelog, the GPU accelleration only comprises H.264 decoding on Vista/7 and Linux.
http://www.videolan.org/developers/vlc-branch/NEWS

So... no OS X speedups yet.