skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Quite simply, there is very, very little reason to believe in any type of "god". Sure, there's stuff we don't know. But trying to explain that away with some type of "god" thing doesn't cut it.

Quite good. We have a brain, we should analyze things and not only accept them as they are.

I find it quite baffling that anyone can believe in a god, actually. I mean, surely the logical inconsistencies in pretty much all religions must bother you?

A very good reason. The inconsistencies in religions are huge and spawn lot of doubts.
I have a macbook pro and an iPhone and neither has been great since day one. How do you explain that?
Hmm, mostly agnostic eh? Looks like a startup could shake things up here. Let's bootstrap a new religion! http://god.ly has a nice ring to it.
Well, this kind of question is usually asked when someone is trying to force me some specific moral rules or kind of behavior, based on an idea, that if I believe in God, I'm somehow obliged to accept some specific set of moral rules (not that there were just a single one) or respect authority of some church or so on. In that case, I say no, to avoid it.

Otherwise, it's just a personal feeling about an English word. Which doesn't have much meaning to me. I have some workable idea about what God should be for me, I can even believe in it, but I guess it wouldn't make any sense to you or anybody else -- and I still remain an atheist :-)
The iPad can utilize a bluetooth keyboard.
Perhaps so, but neither atheism nor agnosticism is equivalent to scientific materialism.
as far as everyday life goes, would it make a difference? Being part of the religions usually means various changes to your routines
I considered it, but then I would have to add Emacs, and then I'd have to add Lisp, and it would've just gotten messy. ;-)
First, get suicide out of your mind. The very thought is ridiculous. None of this is worth killing yourself over. Second, what expectations are you setting for yourself? If your self-vision is not meeting reality, that's a major cause of disappointment right there. Change your self-vision. Third, who said anything is "wrong" with you? People have different temperaments. Some people bond tightly with others, some do not. As long as you're not harboring sociopathic or homicidal thoughts that prevent you sticking to others, it's not much to worry about. Fourth, in regards to expectations, do you imagine what others might expect from you -- and this is the underlying reason to avoid them? Does having to see other people feel like confronting a school test, with that sinking feeling you're being put on the spot and might fail? Well, that's shyness. Medicine claims to have a pill for that, but I really don't trust mind pills (all pills have revenge effects sooner or later). Lastly, you are young. The opportunities available to you are many -- perhaps too many. Whittle down everything to what you really love and want to do. Once you've got that settled (and this won't happen in just one day, so be patient), once you know your passion, everything else falls into place on its own -- because you will naturally gravitate to people who share that and being around them won't feel like a test. One other thing. You might want to read The Outsiders by Colin Wilson. This will give you some insight into just how different people can be -- but that didn't stop any of the people in that book from gaining prominence. I hope some of this helped.
Wouldn't "unknown knowns" be things he knew, but didn't know he knew?
Design concept: luxury yacht that transforms into submarine
"Who knows? But I guess you know (or have heard) of some people who do not bother studying attending institutions that issue grades."

Some. But why cater to the minority? If the grade system wasn't working, we would see more problems in schools and universities. I also don't really know of a good alternative.
Although, an agnostic who is aware of the implications of Pascal's Wager would probably still implement those changes.
1) People had fewer distractions earlier

2) Thanks to the Flynn effect, people are growing smarter, so need less time for the same content

3) Thanks to the internet, its a lot easier and faster to learn something than it was earlier (more cliffnotes type resources)

4)People today can probably make much better assessments to what things will actually help them in their professional lives, and what things are random rites of passage i.e. hoops they have to jump through to get their degree
You should absolutely find a psychiatrist or counselor. They deal with people going through this ALL. THE. TIME.

I absolutely believe that people run to medications too quickly these days, but drugs like Adderall et al. help people like you to find focus, break self-destructive patterns, and get back to a baseline of normal.
Of course, with a convincing reason I'll believe, that's the definition of "convincing" :)

I don't think non-believers "not-believe" for a specific reason, just as believers don't believe for a specific reason.

It just seems highly unlikely that there's a "god". Just as it seems highly unlikely that there are aliens from another planet living among us, or that I can levitate by merely willing it to happen. Quite unlikely, but happy to be shown/proven wrong :)
We have very different ideas of 'adequate' then. For example, I'll take modern medicine over faith healing any day.
I personally cannot imagine a creation made by pure hazard to be this beautiful. I know that beauty is subjective. But i find that nature is so wonderfully created that -- for me -- it's hard to believe that there is no artist behind it. Like, when i see a nice piece of code, i know that there is a really good programmer behind it. :-)
I do not see Python listed here, I believe you should update your poll. :)
Agnostics are just sissy Atheists.
Not if you're an agnostic in regards to e.g. Buddhism rather than brimstone Christianity.
Where's the Cowboy Neil option?
Really comes down to a matter of definitions. For example, many would claim that atheism is simply the lack of a belief. Some would define agnosticism as the positive belief that the existence of God cannot be known. But these are just example definitions.
Hang on, so The Teapot isn't real??
Personally I think even if God exists, religious people are still wrong. They're 'sucking up to God' instead of getting on with their lives on their own terms (ie. not accepting anything for which they have no proof).

Most people value religion because of its moral lessons (see PG's essay on relgious 'package deals' - I think it was in Why Nerds Are Unpopular), and perhaps fear the 'moral vacuum' of a godless world. But personally I have no trouble deriving morality from logic/reason and empirical data, so I have no need for religion.

For the record I think most of the Ten Commandments are valuable lessons regardless of their divinity.
Pascal's Wager is ridiculous. It is rooted in a false dichotomy and attempts to salve the conscience by the acceptance of a contradiction.
Missed Taoism here... =(
What do you mean by "believe"?

Does it mean considering that an idea you hold in your mind is a valid conceptual representation of some aspect of external reality?

Or does it mean to value an idea in itself, irrespective of its relationship with any autonomous external reality?
Food for thought: what do you think would happen if Apple opened up the app store to all devices (assuming there were a way to run these apps on Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, etc). Don't you think a significant number would jump ship to other phones (e.g. ones with replaceable batteries, slide out keyboards, removable memory cards)? It would be more beneficial to the other companies than to Apple in the sense that Android users, for example, would be able to choose from the Android Marketplace and the Apple app store.
mix it up with some virtual currency and you're ready to rock the IPO
I think the split is a fairly good indication of how rational someone is. People who consider themselves atheist tend to act more rationally in the bayesian sense.

I'd like to see a split between atheists and agnostics, particularly because the numbers are so high in that category in this community. I would guess that there would be many more agnostics than atheists. I don't think that being an entrepreneur is particularly bayesianly rational :)
"UPS developed software that routes trucks such that they minimize left turns in their deliveries. By doing so, they reduced their annual fuel consumption by nearly 51,000 gallons in Washington DC alone. The reduction in fuel comes from drivers not having to sit idling at red lights waiting to make left hand turns."

I wonder if mapquest, google maps et al do that.
At least until you ran out of fuel... ;-)
You may even help to raise the quality of work of your partner from Singapore over time. I guess he's not immune to learning.
Let's assume that neither of us know if God REALLY exists...don't you think it might be safer to hedge your bet and believe in a god - for the afterlife?

What will it cost you to believe in God while you are alive? Nothing.

What will it cost you if there really is a god and you chose not to believe? Could cost you eternity. So why not believe? The upside is (in the worst case) the same as not believing, but the downside (in the worst case) could be eternal damnation.

This is ofcourse assuming that the person that does exist, believes in the right god.
Ok, we agree that there is a universe, and we find it beautiful, that's pretty easy to believe for everyone but the most depressed among us.

Why explain that beauty away by adding a god-figure in there? Isn't the universe even more beautiful and majestic without a (fairly silly) "outside creator" explanation?

Your explanation also logically doesn't make sense. You say: I can't believe there is nothing behind it. But then what is behind God? Who created him? You can believe that? It's logically inconsistent, and makes me think that perhaps you haven't thought this through very well.

There's a similar argument around consciousness. The naive interpretation of consciousness is always: "there's a little man inside my head doing the thinking", a little "me", something that represents the self. But then, who is the little man inside the head of the little man? Same flawed logic. The latest thinking/science now says that consciousness just "arises" from processes in our brain. And the "me" is mostly an illusion. Which is, funnily, quite close to the Buddhist interpretation of the self.
Simon Marlow explains how and when to tune garbage collector settings
Hmm, well. I am from the ungodly Netherlands and have been living in Florida for about 9 years now. From what I can tell, the European media sure like to paint the US as a very religious country (among other things); and certainly, many Americans feel like they are, or pretend to be. At the same time, many of those same Americans do everything their god forbids, and apparently seem to think this is perfectly OK, assuming they give it much thought at all.

I am not looking to criticize Americans here, but I think in everyday life, there isn't all that much of a difference with less religious European countries, in spite of the apparent emphasis on religion here in the US.
It is also something that is naturally outgrown, which is why I avoid suggesting pills.
I have considered addrell many many times only to hear from close friends that it will turn me into a bot. That's kept me away from it but perhaps I should reconsider...again.
bundling those together is approx equal to saying one is non-superstitious/non-makebelieve.
David Foster Wallace - In his own words - commencement speech/essay
I'll buy that. It makes sense that one who evades the facts of reality would evade questions as well.

EDIT: Rumsfeld was in denial over what it took to do the job of invading Iraq. And he never caught on. The "surge" was simply sending enough manpower to do the job. Finally.

Not to say it made any sense to invade Iraq to begin with.
Modules as Objects in Newspeak
Thanks for the explanation. It's definitely a cool hack. Looks like a fun project.
that's a precise number to bet

thanks now I'm picturing a stealthed YC startup with exactly 14 employees, and their business is making and selling light-sabres
Pastafari
ok I clicked that link. http://god.ly
Behind the Silly Bandz Craze
I wouldn't agree with this assessment. Atheism is not a knowledge claim; it's just disbelief in God. Similarly, I don't believe in intelligent life on other worlds, but that isn't a knowledge claim — there's just no good reason to believe in it.

Agnosticism, however, is a knowledge claim: It's the claim that God is is unknowable.
Hope they change this policy soon.
your question is exactly the kind of thing I was afraid a religion poll on HN would devolve into. let the endless debate & flamefest involving religion/God begin.... (runs away)
The only things I have to manually copy over to my Droid are music and video. Everything else (photos, contacts, email, docs) is just cached transparently from the cloud. This seems a lot simpler and more user-friendly to me than forcing a user to physically attach to a computer and worry about duplicates, overwrites, stale files etc. Isn't the whole idea to stop forcing users to think about files?

The only reason I have to manually copy music and video is bandwidth so it's likely that at some point in the near future those will also be handled for me.
I totally agree and I do not believe God doesn't exist explicitly; I just don't rank finding the answer as a high priority in my life right now. Having recently taken up taekwondo, I am intruiged by Buddhism, Asian religions, and other alternatives to Christianity.
I recognize the fact that the theory of the existence of a deity or deities is logically, scientifically, factually, demonstrably, historically, and obviously devoid of any creditability. So yea, nonreligious.

Allow me to plug a speech by Douglas Adams before any discussion attempts to ensure: http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/

also, 3 scientologists? gosh.
> As a developer, I just wish that I had started using linux earlier because I would have learned a lot more and it

Total agree.

After years of windows, i moved to Linux Desktop since last 2 years. How i wish, i had done that earlier.
Yeah. A thing you think you know but which isn't true would just be another type of unknown unknown.
AFAIK, Shikantaza is only done after you've had a good amount of experience with other, more structured forms of meditation, like counting breaths or following the breath. At this point, you should already have some idea of where you're going, and "just sitting" will be more than just sitting to you.
Python 3 is not backwards compatible with Python 2. The developers have always stated that Python 3 will be a 5 year project until the entire standard library is ported.
This is known as Pascal's Wager.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascals_Wager
http://wiki.python.org/moin/Python2orPython3 was created recently to answer just such a question, quite recently in fact (some people were asking similar questions and the issue of the quality of the stock answers was raised in comp.lang.python).
No, but I'd be willing to bet that a large portion of the atheists here are atheists because of such a viewpoint.
That's a false dichotomy for the vast majority of religious people. There are very few people that believe exclusively in faith healing and don't accept modern medicine.
"So why not believe?"

How is it that easy? We're not picking a team to support in the Finals series. The idea of believing in a "god" to me is as foreign as believing in a tooth fairy. When an employee of mine is openly religious, it is to me akin to him espousing a belief in something purely fantastical - tooth fairy, Santa Claus, etc. His choice and I don't deride it, but to me it is all entirely bizarre.

When I look at mysteries of our existence, of the creation of our universe, at no point does any fibre of my being whatsoever think to consider that a god-like higher power might be behind it all.

And even if you could force yourself to believe, without doubt, which god are you going to believe in to guarantee yourself some sort of 'eternity'?
I'm not sure there is a false dichotomy present there. You're either going to burn in hell or you're not. The downside of trying something to get out of that sentence is small and upside is big. It's terrible theology but it's decent logic.
I don't think there's really much of an analogy between programming languages and food.

So what's your explanation then? If functional languages are no more difficult to learn and are more powerful why are they not used? Why have Python and Ruby flourished while Lisp and ML remain academic obscurities?

I still say the burden of proof is on the FP advocates. If you want to claim that everybody is doing it wrong you should have a pretty strong case.
Well, from a purely philosophical standpoint, I tend to agree that I can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. As such, I used to describe myself as an agnostic.

However, more recently I have recognised that underneath that, deep down I just don't believe that there is a God - while simultaneously acknowledging the unprovability of this belief. So I now self-describe as atheist, and the reason why seems to be a deep-seated feeling that the theory of the existence of God just doesn't sit right. A non-God Universe is just somehow more... elegant.

It's also worth pointing out that I don't see a good practical reason to believe in a God, either. Since the God-theory makes no testable predictions, it is of little value in explaining the world around us. Explaining the past in terms of miracles perpetrated by an ineffable being gives us no guide for what to expect in the future, and is thus not worthwhile, even if it is correct.
I find that the first song doesn't play on my iPad as well, but I got it to work by going to the next song.

And agreed about its coolness.
Mac SSD performance and TRIM in OSX
Religion interests me a lot I just don't feel any need to elevate it to a super natural level. Lots of stories have moral messages but we don't worship Obi Wan as a real person who existed a long time ago in a galaxy far away do we? I guess science probably replaces the super natural element for me completely. As a non-religious person I follow most or all of the ten commandments in my everyday life. (most of us probably do) I don't do it based on the fear/promise of the super natural.
Can you at least bother to look up the definition of the key words before arguing?

Obese: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity

Overweight: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overweight
Wikipedia is down?
By that logic you'd need to believe in every single religion at once to hedge your bet, since most only promise the afterlife to adherents of their specific belief system.

That aside, how can you say it'd "cost nothing"? It would cost me my integrity.

Another debunking of this argument: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZpJ7yUPwdU
This is basically Pascal's Wager. The main criticism, I think, is that you could be "hedging your bet" on the Christian God, when the actual God could be from a different "religion". Some religions place a lot of emphasis on their god being the one and only.
A photo album site.
Wikipedia website suffers global outage
Depending on what you want to do with it, but this might be what you're looking for: http://www.mattmazur.com/2010/03/six-months-of-hackernews-fr...
He might've gotten some negative rub-off from being in the Bush administration as well--- since Bush already had a reputation by that point for "Bushisms", people were sort of in the mindset to be looking for them.
I think you mean to say "until third party libraries get migrated". The standard library is already migrated.
How to play with Google Chrome Web Apps right now
Why link to the spammy review site rather than directly?

http://weekis.com/
You should make a movie about it. You could call it "Army of Darkness".
IQ Testing 101
I've been waiting about 2 weeks I think. No clue where we're at with that.
I'd be curious to hear what you found incompatible in the two's work. Certainly not all of it matches up nicely, but a lot of it, strangely, did—or so it seemed to me!
There's nothing wrong with what he said taken on its own. But as an answer to a reporter's question, it rings of sophistry. Kind of like how Clinton gets shit for talking about the meaning of the word 'is', even though Kant also talked about that subject.
maybe it's about the defintion of high availability. If you need 99.999999% a DNS based solution will not work.

But even Google, Yahoo and others use a short TTL to switch between their datacenters… So this should be "reliable enough" for nearly everything out there.

$ dig www.yahoo.com

;; QUESTION SECTION:

;www.yahoo.com.	IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:

www.yahoo.com.	48	IN	CNAME
fp.wg1.b.yahoo.com.

fp.wg1.b.yahoo.com.	2711	IN	CNAME	eu-
fp.wa1.b.yahoo.com.

eu-fp.wa1.b.yahoo.com.	33	IN	A	87.248.122.122

also:

$ dig www.google.com

$ dig www.twitter.com

$ dig www.cnn.com
I'm missing the Chuck Norris option. To me he is still the answer to everything.
Don't waste your time linking directly to 4chan posts, especially on high traffic boards like /b/. It only keeps a certain number of threads up at one time, ones that stop being replied to will scroll off the end of the queue and be nuked.
Who created him?

I just believe he's eternal.
I agree definitions vary, and that can cause confusion. For example, people unsure of what to believe can label themselves agnostic. Some call this "fence sitting". At the same time there is what's called weak atheism and strong atheism, the latter asserting there are no gods, which of course is a stupid assertion to make in an absolute sense. So weak atheism makes the most sense as it makes no assertion; it's just the absence of belief. So a weak atheist could technically be labeled agnostic, which is how I define myself, and appears the most rational definition for having no god belief.
Is your disbelief in God solely based upon Occam's Razor? If so, could you elaborate on it a bit?
"What will it cost you to believe in God while you are alive?"

Time. Money. Freedoms.