skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Might more offers have been made if the Jones act didn't exist?

From the linked article: "In reality, the Jones Act has yet to be an issue in the response efforts. The Deepwater Horizon response team reported in a June 15 press release that there are 15 foreign flagged ships currently participating in the oil spill cleanup. None of them needed a waiver because the Jones Act does not apply. The Jones Act is a trade and commerce law that was enacted in 1920 as part of a larger Marine Merchant Act. It requires all trade delivered between U.S. ports to be carried in U.S. flagged vessels constructed in the United States and owned by American citizens. The law states its purpose is to develop a merchant marine for national defense and commerce."

and

"To date, 25 countries and four international organizations have offered support in the form of skimming vessels, containment and fire boom, technical assistance and response solutions, among others."
http://docs.python.org/release/3.0.1/whatsnew/3.0.html this is down. It was linked in the above article.

Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dqDQ-qw...
Nothing for us Deists, I guess. :)
> "those intelligent and driven enough to devote their life to producing original research."

you've heard of engineers, doctors and lawyers, right? lots of folks go to college to, in part, prepare to work in those fields. they may never do "original research" but can be quite intelligent and driven. I'm going to make a guess that you might be grad student or are otherwise on the academic/professor career path, if you said something like that. Because there are a lot of people who don't go down that path and actually have a uncomplimentary view of it, pretty much the inverse of what you said. i won't repeat the stereotypes here but they exist.
According to this, it looks like all the db servers are in the Tampa datacenter, with Amsterdam (and formerly Seoul) just having miscellaneous utility servers, backups, and a bunch of Squid proxies: http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_roles

Looks like way too few servers in the Amsterdam cluster to fail over to anyway, even if they were set up for it: the Tampa datacenter has over 400 servers, versus Amsterdam's 44.
Clinton was under oath giving testimony for a deposition live on CNN, and the talking head who came on at the end gave him a complete pass. The attorney asking the questions didn't press him very hard either.

Back in the day there was a big difference between a press conference and a deposition.

EDIT: Actually I should have used the term "stand-up" (I believe that is the correct technical term). As I recall it was a full body shot of a CNN reporter on the courthouse steps (or outside somewhere) with the instant analysis.
The design for the change dispenser is predicated on the same design principle as the soda dispenser: maximize the storage for items to be dispensed and utilize gravity to do the dispensing. If you move the slot up, you either change the dispensing mechanism or you reduce the quantity stored.
I'm a deist because I find several of the philosophical arguments for God's existence compelling. Specifically I think the arguments from fine-tuning and the intelligibility of the universe are strongly in favor of God's existence. The Leibnizian and Kalam cosmological arguments are moderately in favor, and the arguments from morality, desire, and religious experience are weakly in its favor. Between those seven arguments, I'm about 80 - 90% sure some sort of God exists.

Of course, there are plenty of reasonable people who don't find them compelling. There's a lot of room for individual judgment in this area, and the subject is so incredibly complex that I don't find it surprising that thoughtful people come to completely different conclusions.
Oh, add that iOS 4 cribs Android multitasking almost directly.

And when it borrows from Android's notification system, replacing the terrible system it has now (they're already hiring in this space), at release people like Gruber and Marco will say "See, this is what makes Apple great: It's great since day one!"

When you can look at the world like that, defining "day one" to be when the product is no longer second-rate, it's easy to say that.

Android is "great since day one", so long as you ignore everything prior to 2.2.
Check http://hnhackers.com/

I've found a great programmer there.
Define the concept of "from" without time?

By what method did the color blue arrive at it's current physical location in space, also, what does it taste like?

I realise the above sounds cryptic but I'm just trying to give examples of how concepts are intrinsic to their own space to a certain degree, time as a spatial dimension of the universe terminates by definition at the genesis of the universe, so what came "before" has no more meaning than the taste of the color blue.
agreed. for a lot of folks I believe it's used as a filter. and yes, a very expensive and time-consuming one. kinda sad actually. college is not without substantive merit to the student, beyond the filter effect, so it's not all superficial however.
Reviews: Christian Louboutin Maggie 140 pumps white
I think the assumption is that you are considering believing in a Christian God and on those terms the wager is valid. As far as I know other religions offer little promises in terms of what happens if you stick with it.

I think category A would be believing in Jesus and category B would be not believing in Jesus whatever that means to you.
When I was a high school student, a friend found a brute force attack that worked on the machine in our campus (ie. kicking it right below where the coins go).

I can say he reached a similar result.
I think that was augustl's point. Most atheist understand just as little about science as most religious people understand about God.

And is there any difference really between a "because God said so" explanation and a "because the Doctor said so" explanation? To follow either, you must rely on faith in the goodness and wisdom of the instruction given as you don't fully understand the reasoning behind it. To the religious and science-skeptic alike, the explanations used by the other camp sounds "hand wavy".

But Truth is Truth and both religion and science, if practiced well, will guide the earnest seeker along.
That's interesting. I can't tell if you're joking or not (I'm pretty sure the ability to loop is a requirement for Turing-completeness).

Do you mean like Lisp which favors recursive function (or lambda calculus which uses the Y-combinator :)?
Actually, if you went one step beyond and asked for opinions or non-obvious answers to any of those, I'd consider that perfectly suitable for the site.

For example

2. is there an open source implementation of PageRank?

3. any tips on how to fake handwritten Objective C so Apple will accept my app?

4. I wrote my app in BASIC instead of Objective C and Steve Jobs said it was okay
Atheism and agnosticism are orthogonal:

1. If you believe in a god but don't claim to have knowledge, you are a theist agnostic. (This is not that silly. Many people believe things they do not claim to know. For instance, you can believe that P != NP while acknowledging the question as unproven and unknown.)

2. If you don't believe in a god but don't claim to have knowledge, you are an atheist agnostic.

3. If you claim to know, not just believe, that a god exists, you're a theist (but not an agnostic).

4. If you claim to know there are no gods, you're an atheist (but not an agnostic).
Grouping atheists with agnostics is as catch-all as 'Christianity'. I was educated Anglican and to me it's as vastly different from Catholicism as you can tell, my youth minister was actually a methodist and the assistant was baptist. My shop teacher was actually a Quaker, who actively disbelieved in the hierarchical structure of church, who was the person who probably put me on a path to agnosticism.

My agnosticism is of the - God's existence cannot be proven or disproven (at least in my lifetime, or potentially within the human races existence as homo sapiens) so it's illogical to take the side of religion or anti-religion. The logical conclusion (to me) is that it is an unknowable variable, concerning myself with it is a wasted effort.

Besides Greek Mythology has all the cool stories, Heracles slaying Hyrdas and freeing Prometheus. If religion can't entertain me in the slightest then it truly holds no value to me.
Funny, I was literally trying to use it for college research when it went out -- had to resort to text-only google cache.
Great, now we finally have long awaited ordered dictionary in 2.x branch as well :)
Are Standards Organizations Relevant?
sure thing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482486
I think it's there for historical reasons, because Jimmy Wales used to live there, so his company was there, and now it's a significant project to move everything.
--The book talks about the 18th -20th century versions of all the problems we face now--currency devaluation, fiat currencies, and excessive borrowing. While the book talks broadly about the last 800 years of "folly", most of the data is the last few hundred years or so simply because records were not as developed.

--It's really more of a statistical assay than it is a history book. There are several parts where they actually take a look at the history of the various defaults like a historian would and in my opinion these are the most valuable parts. By understanding the players and their motivations at a given point and time, you can apply the past to current events and somehow get a weighting of various probably outcomes for the current crisis. Instead, the book seems to focus on table after table and some of the data by its nature is going to be incomplete or incongruent.

--Just to add on to the point above-- while the genesis of every economic crisis is often novel, they usually end with the same kind of behaviors of fear and hording. Understanding how that unfolds in each crisis and how policy makers might prevent that behavior would be valuable to study. The most important parts of economics is "behavioral " economics. Understanding the wild spirits is half the battle.

---There is a lot of noise around these days about economists trying to be physicists with large econometric models trying to predict exactly what the economy is going to do. I remember my first stint as a government trade economist as we tried to use very complex models from the University of Maryland to predict the impact of trade agreements. I always thought this was all nonsense as human behavior is the ultimate driver and it's more akin to modeling the weather than how fast a bullet is going.

--While I love tables too, there were not a lot of good conclusions from the data. I wanted more hard and fast rules about when a crisis reaches a tipping point. In the end, despite mountains of data I don't feel like I was materially better armed to understand how a crisis will unfold after reading the book.
I'm confused - why all the downvotes? My initial comment above is currently below the "Why isn't there a Cowboy Neal option?"

It's not a false dichotomy at all, as far as I can see. If you take religion at face value, then of course modern medicine shouldn't work and faith healing should - one of these is going against the will of God after all. It's an adequate explanation most of the time... until you have to cure a disease.
Thank you. This is the wonderful thing about opensource - you can fix it if its broken - its the price you pay for getting it for nothing.
Many schools of buddhism revere different buddhas as gods, believe reincarnation, a buddhist hell, etc. All too familiar.

All religions have something useful to be gleaned, as do nearly all books, even if the useful content of that book amounts to a single sentence.
It's worth observing that the surge was part of Condoleezza Rice's "clear, hold build" strategy. Rumsfeld was fired and she was brought in to implement it.

I think that should help put Rumsfeld and criticism of him in a little bit of context. Yes, he was a Bush administration official heavily involved in the Iraq war and got a lot of criticism from that. But he was in rare company by being someone who was fired in disgrace from the Bush administration as things came apart under his watch. The only other guy I can think of offhand who is in that group is Micheal Brown.
FlightCaster (http://flightcaster.com/)
To elaborate a little, would you say it's "meaningless" to you personally, or in general? Just curious.
I'm not so sure that "any open source project would be very receptive." The ethos of design is very different from that of open-source development and they are, perhaps, incompatible.

There's the example about putting every option in there as a user preference instead of making a decision or alienating a vocal user or developer. This even came up in the iPhone 4 reception UI "bar height" discussion: someone said to just make it a preference, and someone immediately said that's not the Apple way, which is true, but it's really not the way you design well in general.

For a designer to contribute to an open source project, there would have to be developers committed to implementing the work, to work on "polish" and "froofy things" instead of "real features" and other "important things." That's a hard nut to swallow, and what volunteer project owner will ask all their volunteer contributors to, please, stop working on your pet projects within this codebase and let's actually cut features and work on UI and usability and design?

Drupal is a great example. Acquia and/or the Drupal Association hired professional designers to redesign drupal.org two years ago but no-one in the community was interested in implementing the theme to completion or doing the work necessary to roll it out to the live sites. It might get done later this year, finally, as they've decided to actually hire people to do the work.

Drupal 7 is another example. Designers hired, but no takers on the complete implementation. Only portions of it made into Drupal 7.

I've personally dealt with this twice, trying to contribute new logos to open-source projects. One was using a trademarked character as their mascot (IP infringement), and they spent a couple of years discussing it before deciding to not do anything about it at all. The other spent only a year discussing it before it was decided upon, against the very vocal protests of a major contributor.

I would wager that as most of the developers of any given open source project are not representative of its end-users, the developers wouldn't even be involved in the design process in the first place. You can't design by committee, only take into account the needs of the stakeholders, and if you don't actually use the software, you might not be at that table. The designer would, essentially, only be generating work for them.

That said, I'm sure most junior designers would love to have "real clients" to work with, to get that vital experience, I'm just not sure many open source projects would actually be able to field them.
The US has a large number of distinct accents. I'm originally from Georgia (Atlanta, not Tbilisi) and there are at least 5-6 accents in that state alone. I'm willing to bet a trained specialist could narrow down someone's origin pretty closely. The idea of a "southern" accent is very, very broad.

The thing with US accents is that we're a very mobile country. People move around and lose much of their accent. I lost a lot of my own living in Atlanta, which is over half non-Georgian, and then a lot more living in California the last decade or so. It's there, but only in traces. A lot of Americans are the same...
Interesting that at the moment "Nonreligious/Atheist/Agnostic/etc" has more votes than all the others combined.
There's a definition to atheism I've read once that I think it's the best way to define what atheism means to me: An atheist doesn't believe in god the same way he doesn't believe in santa claus, or werewolves. It's not that he can positively proof god does not exist, only that there's no reason, given current evidences, to believe.
My rule of thumb as to when to use Python 3: once django is ported.
I was minding my own business when I started hearing from God.

What is that like?
Are you a perfectionist? Do you want to accomplish so many things your mind reels with the possibilities, but can't figure out which ones are worth the all out effort it takes for success?

Did you always think, "I've got some great things ahead of me", and now you ARE grown up and this IS the future and you're worried about what you have to show for it?

Maybe you want to have great friendships and do great things and all these seem to require so much energy and attention and so many steps to not mess up. If that's the case, I'd say try dialing back, focus on enjoying the journey and less on the result, because really there is no guarantee that the results will be awesome.

You say people respect you for many things but that you have a "terrible" problem with discipline and focus, something I suspect most everyone has. Maybe you're just giving yourself too much pressure and need to take it easy for a few months? Since you're still in school, have a chat with a psychological counselor on campus. To me it sounds like you might be temporarily stressed out or burned out from the efforts of your previous startup.

Peace.
For the "because the Doctor said so" version, you can at least ask for an explanation. If you ask, there'll be a number of papers and/or scientific studies behind the decision and the doctor will be able to tell you their reasoning, which is normally straightforward ie. we can treat it like this, which gives you an x% chance of recovery, or like that which is x+y%
Designing for Emotion
Dear commenter: Wikipedia down? No, that's not just like Google going down.
It's well worth doing. Putting a datacenter in Tampa is like putting a lighter factory in the middle of the fireworks district.
Not necessarily--rational Bayesians are more often atheists, but lots of atheists are completely irrational people who have been raised with atheist beliefs by secular liberal society, just like lots of religious people are completely irrational people who have been raised by religious society. (There are also a small number of highly rational people who have, in my opinion, a very small, God-shaped blind spot in their thinking.)
Google App Engine SDK uses Python 2.5, I had 2.6 installed and had to revert. 3 drops some features, adds some others. You can import 3.x features in 2.x from __future__, see: http://docs.python.org/library/__future__.html

One of the less useful features dropped is 'somestring'.encode('rot13') :P
You sound like me a few years ago. I since found out I have ADD.

You might have it too. You might want to get checked.
Emacsian. I don't believe in God, so atheist is technically correct, but probably misleading.
Taoist (in the classical sense) so I voted Atheist
I'm not familiar with HSGFX specifically. I've just compared them in Google Finance. If you put your money into HSGFX in the beginning of 2003, you would have been at +7% today; the SPY (benchmark) would be at +18% today. Depending on where you put your start date, you would sometimes be better off in HSGFX and sometimes better off in SPY. I see no indication from this past performance that there is any reason to believe it is any better than the SPY benchmark.

I was replying to "active managed mutual fund is better than index", which statistically speaking is WRONG approximately 5 times more often than it is right.

"Buy index fund" is (statstically) the right answer to "which stocks should I buy" which was more or less the original question.

> As someone with experience, what would you recommend the OP (or any index investor) do to help preserve capital?

Stay away from the stock market until 2013 at least, possibly later. The stock market has completely decoupled from fundamentals and performance. Last year's rally had no fundamental support whatsoever.

The things that are likely to preserve capital are gold, and some government bonds. My personal strategy is to diversify on currencies (counting gold as a currency here), using strictly CDs and government bonds. I'm trying to make sure I have RETURN OF CAPITAL, rather than maximize RETURN ON CAPITAL at the moment. Some governments _will_ default on some of their obligations in the next 5 years. Many banks, bond and debt issuers will too.

The stock market at the moment is, as far as the non-professional is concerned, an HFT casino. Stay away, unless you like gambling. Investment is a foreign concept to this stock market.

If you want to learn more about the market, read Denninger ("the market ticker"), ZeroHedge and Michael Shedlock ("global economic analysis"). Only listen to CNBC, CNN, Jim Cramer and friends if you plan on losing money.
Does this mean Kevin Costner didn't actually have a ridiculous accent in Robin Hood?
Please help me with my site.....
Hello everyone, I had this social networking site for a year already. I built this site by myself during my days off and I learned a lot from it. Now does anybody got an idea how can I earn something from the site since right now all I got is my Adsense earnings and can't even cover my operational expenses. Does anybody got an idea how to tweak it a little bit to earn? Or is this just a waste of time? The site is www.jamafriend.com
Fighting With Teenagers: A Copyright Story
Wow, that Too Many Aptitudes thing is spot on for me. I've been struggling with that exact problem, every other month I'm a hacker, a fiction writer, a philosopher, a graphics designer, a jeweler, a social worker, a fashion designer, etc, etc. My latest effort has been just to accept that my interests will rotate and rather than abandon old projects, just come back to them when I get interested in them again, and hopefully eventually I will complete something...
Hi
hi HN,i hav completed B.E(computer science).i want to become hacker...i hav good hold on programming...can u please tell me...wat should i do first....how much time will it take to become a hacker.......?
Mine, too. It's called secular humanism.
might be time to reread Timeless Physics http://lesswrong.com/lw/qp/timeless_physics/
Note: the effects may or may not be worse, however in the inter-rim present (say the next 40 years) our teaching staff would have no way to understand how the system is being gamed. You'd be changing the sport without changing the referee, an umpire can't referee a football game.

Changing from grades and teachers who've learnt graded systems and inherently learnt the systems pitfalls is a much better compromise than changing the system to no grades with teachers who've learnt graded systems and inherently have no knowledge on the pitfalls of an ungraded system.

We could overall decrease the ability to game the system, however we wouldn't be able to adapt our teachers as fast as we could change the system. Our students would be as knowledgeable of the system as our teachers, which is like turning our entire system of educators into fresh-faced Teacher's School graduates. It would quite possibly be the death of education for the next decade.
I agree with everything up to the last statement after the ellipsis.

There is economic justification for risking environmental damage. More offshore drilling = cheaper oil; More offshore drilling = more jobs (to name a couple).

I don't think this is a simple issue. The debate is a valid one.

Nuclear energy is dangerous but we do it anyway and similarly, it's not like all of a sudden deep water oil rigs are going to start failing left and right; statistically that is highly improbable.
That sounds vaguely like ignosticism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism
My preferred counterargument to this (Pascal's Wager) is that assuming there is a god, professing to believe in him just to avoid eternal damnation is more likely to damn you than being honest. Does believing for the sake of belief count as belief? (see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavkas_toxin_puzzle) which feels related)

And there is the problem of 'multitude of religions' which other people (and you) have mentioned.