skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nicely said.

For me, there are two caveats to this: 1) the mere possibility that a discipline of science might be wrong does not mean it is wrong, and unfortunately the possibility of wrongness is often used as an argument where it shouldn't be; 2) the various sciences tend to be wrong in a very specific way, and for some reason this often gets ignored in discussions like this.

The last time I can think of the popularly-accepted science of a discipline being "wrong" in exactly the opposite way from what later came to be accepted as "right" was the gradual shift from a terra-centric view of astronomy to a relativistic one. It turned out that not only was the Earth not the center of the universe, but the universe doesn't even have a center.

Since then, science -- and mathematics -- have been wrong in the sense that they are continually being revised, not reversed. Relativity represents a revision of Newton's laws, not a reversal, etc.

I think that there is less and less -- though not non-zero -- opportunity for any discipline of science to discover that its foundations are completely incorrect.
I built a social networking site by myself with real time chat, messaging, photo sharing, music sharing, users can post wall messages, display their public timeline tweets, create friends list. I think the reason it didn't take off is the lack of money in advertisement. I tried Google adwords but the most I spent is 50 bucks and kind of short of it. The site is http://www.jamafriend.com
Hey mate, I'm a final semester student doing CompSci at Monash. The melbourne startup scene is awesome! Definitely a lot of experienced and inspirational figures who're willing to give back to community. Would be awesome to catch up in person sometime.
$1400/day for applying power to a LED. Well done.
women, fire, and dangerous things.

I didn't say that women are fiery and dangerous, but that association will be made in most people's brains simply by virtue of me colocating them.

The original commenter was talking about specific scientists then talked about injecting politics in an ambiguous way. This will lead to a similar effect. Most people will take it to mean that he is talking specifically about these scientists. That's why I asked him to clarify. Was he specifically talking about them, and only them?
I know all that. I was bitching about how it seems like every layer of the software cake on Linux likes to design its own virtual file system.
Using R with Oracle
There's no problem with asking the user about this; the point is not to do when the app is going into background.

If you're concerned that most of your users won't want this, then turn it off by default and have an option to turn it on.

The model to follow here is the iTunes Remote app. It allows you to remain connected in the background, but you have to activate it from settings, where there's a little explanation of the trade-off.

Doing it the way this app does is plain nasty.
I can neither confirm or deny that you are a bigot, I'm just surprised that the FOI request forms have a box for religion. Can you send along your dataset?
this is a cool search. no clutter. easy to find things.
Get my "C" rating in Foil at a USFA-sanctioned fencing tournament.
Visual Search for Ebay, Amazon, BestBuy, etc...
Why is that a problem? Isn't the perception of a micropayment, such that it's an insignificant trifle? Why does the particular size of a trifle matter to the giver?

Also, why is a month's delay universally bad? I can see that it would be bad to some people, but there are certainly a lot of other content-creators for whom this wouldn't be a significant problem at all. Actually, I would think that a month's delay would tend to encourage content with at least some staying power.
I can't see the sense in it.
It's analogous to a situation where a newspaper's only paying customers would be other newspapers.
The content creators send each other money and the only net beneficiaries are Flattr and the vast mass of interenet users who continue to view for free
OkCupid is great because the women are super easy.
But I'm not sure those are the ones you want to marry. However, I guess given the marriage choice between frigid and easy I would pick easy. Just be sure to get tested, and maybe don't ask about things you don't really want to know.
You said that the CRU folks withheld data in reaction to activists.

No, I did not say that. I should have known better than to participate on this thread - I'm going to stop now. I really don't enjoy being called a bigot.

[Edit: You edited your comment after I replied - my original quoting is correct. Ok, I'm really stopping now].
Dude, Are you doing a Ph.D or MS ?
I am looking to apply to a PhD for coming Fall. Can't afford a unfunded MS.
I'm preparing to start the application process to the United States Air Force Officer Training School to be commissioned as a 17D - Cyber Operations officer.

Roadblocks are the back log to even talk to a recruiter, and the extremely long and thorough application process. Someone help!
Intriguing. I hadn't thought of this take on filesystems before.

I'm a big fan of text-based config files but am stuck on a Windows machine at work. I wonder, would it be possible to map the registry to a virtual filesystem I could access from Explorer?
I'm thinking the best application would be maritime surveillance. It takes a long time to get to the loiter zone, but once it's there it can circle indefinitely (I'm assuming it can be made unmanned). If you're ~1000 miles from the nearest airbase that's probably a lot cheaper than swapping planes out every N hours, and the $0.5 million cost is virtually nothing on a military budget.

I can't think of any good civilian uses, though.
Well, the same could be said about node.js and libev, to be honest.
I want to start my own private equity firm, and then my own Fortune 500 company.

Sky's the limit, right?
One of the many reasons to prefer PowerShell over CMD: http://powershell.com/cs/blogs/ebook/archive/2009/03/30/chap...
For event-based frameworks, if I'm generally in the market for reliable concurrency, Erlang would probably be a prime candidate, too.
Possibly. And possibly not. As others have pointed out, some of those 8,810 may be demo units in retail stores, units given to employees, and other freebies. Also, it may be that 503 was the number of units sold when the decision was taken to kill Kin. Who knows how many were sold since that moment?

The number of units sold may be higher or lower. It's all guesswork at this point.
Max Levchin said on Nerd TV that tackling fraud cost Paypal $100,000,000.
> Most scientists claim way more than can be supported by their evidence...

Ironically, you've made a claim here which is unsupported by any evidence at all. ;-)

Seriously though, the thing about this is that research and experimental scientists are working in environments that you and I know very little about. Their claims are an extension of their experience in that environment; they spend a great deal of time for example designing experiments or attempting to reconcile large volumes of data, and when they've spent months -- or, more likely, years -- doing that, they might publish a paper.

Then the public occasionally gets ahold of this brief summary of the scientist's work over that period, and they object that the claims are specious or sparse or incomplete.

This is not to say that a scientist's claims should be trusted just because they're a scientist, but rather that the only acceptable challenge to a shortcoming in a scientific presentation is ... more science, not argument or conjecture.

To put it another way: it is extremely unlikely that a layman will find a consequential error in a peer-reviewed scientific paper published in a reasonable journal, especially without any domain knowledge in that particular field.
Qualcomm’s New Vision-based Augmented Reality Platform Will Knock Your Block Off
Yes, in an adversarial system like the US legal system that would be farcical. However, this was not conducted in a US court room and there are are other systems such as an inquisitional style that more apt at determining truths than establishing blame.
I think it’s acceptable as-is, but I can’t help but notice that Ixquick (https://ixquick.com/) very directly markets what differentiates itself from other search engines (re: privacy).

Summary sentence wouldn’t be bad, a la Google’s homepage.
Supreme Court: You Can Spy on Employees if…
At SxSW this year, there was a session on "Banking 2.0", and they (Mint, LendingClub, etc.) all agreed that their philosophy is to treat banks as dumb institutions - mainly to avoid regulatory pit-falls, etc.

WePay is following the same path, however the risk management side isn't seeing much startup activity at all. This means consumers win in experience, but systemic risk is largely the same.
Vinyl Sticker is a Better Choice For Marketing
There are many tools that can be used for marketing. They can help in many ways. They have various uses.
"Landmark also requests that in the future you do not ship, deploy or post any portions or versions of this code in its current state or in any modified state."

Here, the lawyer is demanding that he not discuss the method whose "publicness" is the public good supposedly given in exchange for the patent.
Ask HN: Need advice on growing my 2 month startup
Hello friends,

I've always received good feedback from this board, so I'd like to ask for your help! My partner and I are a couple months full time into our startup, Howl.com. Its a social bookmarking/linkblogging service. Growth has been slow and steady, we have a few hundred users.

We've made some improvements to increase retention a bit, such as adding "reputation score" (basically game mechanics), a leaderboard, email notifications for comments/reblogs/subscriptions, and lots of little things.

However, we aren't getting much exposure to new people. I don't think our idea is "novel" enough to get blogger attention. We think moving into more of a game type of site may help with that. But otherwise, we need to increase traffic and signups, but its hard to do on zero budget.

Particularly hard is getting some sort of viral loop going on. Right now, we prompt them to share their new page with friends immediately after signup. We also allow them to cross post to facebook/twitter whenever they post on our service, linking back to our site. I'm not sure this is enough. Where else could we become more viral and get people to show off their accounts?

Getting fresh exposure to new source is difficult. Occasionally we get a nice blog post, which is really helpful for driving signups. I'd like to get more blog coverage, but again, I don't think we're buzzworthy enough yet to get attention. Should we implement more game-like features in order to differentiate, as well as make ourselves more attention worthy for bloggers?

Thanks a ton for your help, any tips/advice/comments are appreciated!
It's missing the big "Why?" question. I can definitely see why a company like Google would try to create a new systems language, but Mozilla? Its code is already a convoluted mess of old-fashioned C++ code plus even more convoluted XML (last time I looked), rewriting that would be a ginormous project.

So is it more "from some people affiliated with Mozilla" or are they trying to write some new low-level stuff (servers, OS, JavaScript interpreters?)
Facebook Acquires Social Travel Recommendation Site Nextstop
Loreo 3D Lens-In-A-Cap turns your SLR into Stereoscopic 3D Machine
Blizzard shortcuts the greater Internet fuckwad theory
DefaultBill
Cloudonomics: High Availability should be a part of your cloud computing ROI
You might find the blog post linked below encouraging. It was written by a professor at UIUC.

http://3dpancakes.typepad.com/ernie/2005/03/re_phd_with_low....

My advice is think about what you really want to do, and why you want to do it. If you want to do good research then it makes sense to apply to highly ranked PhD programs because they will give you a support system to help you learn. If you just want to own a PhD from a specific school, then it will be harder to get in, harder to finish, and less meaningful when you're done.

My advice for your specific goal is to somehow get involved with a professor's research. Preferably someone who will be recognized by admission committees. Their letter will help a lot. This might involve getting an MS at the highest-ranked school you can get admitted to. Sadly, those programs are not usually funded (as opposed to American PhD programs).
It's the latter. Some mozilla people in their spare time. Now is a labs project.
There is nothing like professional instruction. On my first run I overheated my breaks and flew across the chicane. Second run, with professional instructor, was chasing down cars with +150 hp. This was at the annual Shelby bash in Vegas - cost of entry is a Shelby, so pretty high. A few weeks ago I spent a Saturday with a Porsche-owning friend at a PCA autocross day. So much fun. These are people who own Porsches because they are genuinely great race cars. The fastest car was a beat-up-but-loved 914. Plenty of people had 924's and 944's. As has been said here, $1500 will get you a fun track car, and if its a Porsche you have access to a solid community of racers who are more than happy to instruct: in fact newbies have to have instructors.
From personal experience, let's just say dating an Indian girl as a white man is non-trivial. (Assuming Indian means from-India, not just Indian descent.)
NIH scientists find antibodies that block most HIV
It's not a solution for micropayments, in the vein that Radiohead's pay-what-you-want model isn't a solution for the music industry selling CDs.

But for casual content creators, the ability to buy a beer for a particularly well-written article or comic, this is excellent. It's a middle ground between ads and micropayments--better than ads, because you know people are rewarding you directly for enjoying your content, and you're not forcing advertising on them.

Plus, I think it can be argued that the better your output--the more it's linked to--the more you'll get paid. At least that much is predictable.
Clickable: http://www.howl.com

Examples of real users and how they use it:

http://www.howl.com/EduNut

http://www.howl.com/phil-schaillee
Not straight programming, more about software engineering

The Mythical Man Month
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month
I know of a few professional console games that where successfully debugged by embedded telnet servers: it is incredibly useful to be able to cd and ls around in your scene graph. I believe the ones I saw implemented their own shells and toolset, but I bet you could get pretty clever with debug builds that expose a decent set of unix tools across a remote shell.
If denying something could make it untrue just think of the possiblities.

Poverty poof gone. Hunger poof gone and so on...

Reality gets in the way, of course, just as it does with GW.
Palestinians, Israelis Come Together Through Entrepreneurship
Wow, this sounds over-engineered.
Ask HN: How long does it take Apple to pay you after you sell apps?
I googled for a pretty long while, couldn't find it, thought I would ask here. Thanks!
No controversy: http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/sep2007/sb20070...
Predicting Apple future products
Who Are We Plowing For Today?
I did, but I don't think my edit changes the content of my post.
Economic Analysis Explains 1945-2010 Economic Growth and Decline Fueled By Debt
My iTunes Account Was Hacked for $375 - By My Own Kids
Not knowing the exact amounts involved isn't a bug -- it's a feature. One major credible theory as to why previous micropayments systems failed is that even thinking about amounts added too much friction. A little like converting a previous voluntary activity to a paid activity, assigning any exact value to it causes a different decisionmaking-scheme to be applied -- which can then kill conversion.

Who cares if every Flattr-click is valued differently, as long as overall, the right people are net-payers, the right people are net-receivers, and the magnitudes generally reward quality? While some activities (banking) require precise accounting, many other socially-valuable activities benefit most from loose accounting.

This criticism ultimately fails because the author himself concludes:

Will I put a Flattr icon on the site? Probably. There's no good reason not to.

Indeed!
A damn good time.

That's what I thought when I saw that. Maybe I'm not "most people."
Amateurs. I'm one of 8. My parents never had a chance.
But the law was not intended to work that way. This is why bilski has gone so far. They were trying to do exactly what you describe and they probably won't get the patent in the end. The supreme court will probably find some way to not revolutionize patents by making the decision so specific that only this case will be affected.
What I would like to know is how many of those balloons can pop before the whole "solution" stops being highly available for that cloudwalker ;-P
It didn't work on 9.04, which I guess is good.
I don't see women in programming jobs as a fad, I just don't see them. I've worked at dozens of companies in over the last 15 years and I've worked with exactly 4 women... none in the last 2 years. I don't know why that is.
YouTube Leanback offers effortless viewing
Actually now thinking about it, hopefully if they are not storing IP(or cookie etc)at any point of time, even temporarily, two searches will not show relationship with each other.

But I can imagine the benefits of keeping track of all searches done by one user. It can definitely be used to improve the search engine itself.
The reason we started in stealth mode was to hope to launch at TechCrunch50. It has since been cancelled and it's pseudo replacement, The Launch Conference, is not slated until 2011 so it's a no-go.

Since we already said "We're in stealth" it then became weird to say "Here's what we're doing" without actually launching at the same time. However, we have dropped enough hints that most people following totally get it.

Someone has actually already copied our idea (doing the same thing, with a similar name, exact same pre-launch strategy, etc) I'm 100% sure it's a copy because too many elements are EXACTLY the same and I know for sure the person was following the blog and twitter well before starting his own. In that respect, being MORE in stealth would have actually helped ward off copy-cats like that until we were ready to launch.
The Enterprise version requires clients to have Admin privileges. Trying to work around that cost me weekend where I actually had to sleep at the office.

Fun times...
It seems to be a lot more focused on publishing than on reading. Maybe the main howl.com page could list the most popular links or something else that the casual reader would be interested in.

The jump from non-participant to publisher seems too big. I went to the site. Poked around and just walked away. Instead if there was a way to turn from non-participant to consumer, and then to publisher/producer, that would make it easier to get engaged.

So, make browsing easier.

If you consider sites like HN, or Reddit, Twitter, they make it easy to just consume for a while without contributing.

Another question: Do you have an account on howl? What's the URL for your link-blogging page?

Another feature to enable browsing: a way to search for people. So suppose I visit the site. I want to see if people are publishing links related to Python or astronomy, if there was a way to search for these keywords and find the link publisher that would lead to more people staying.
Drag tabs to get a side-by-side view in Chrome
Nano-particles make water cooling better
But battery technology is improving and that should be easy to prove: these weren't lead-acid batteries after all.
Because the vast majority of people will not be accepting donations because they aren't content creators. If a content creator puts $10 in per month, he could quickly get much more back if a hundred non-content creators each give $1.
Let Us Remind Your Boss About System Administrator Appreciation Day
Errors in science are well known and are part of the process, I didn't think I needed to provide evidence of that. Unfortunately science that deals with complex systems is much more difficult than those that don't. For instance, just look at nutrition research, look at the history of the food pyramid and you see poorly understood science having a substantial impact on those who are not experts because the nutrition experts were scientists, and physics works well so nutrition must also be well understood.

I just want people to bend over backwards to tell me the ways in which they might be wrong, this is useful because it helps you understand the limits of understanding and can allow people to make informed decisions.
I read a bit of the history of PayPal. It seems like they spent an enormous amount of time dealing with fraud and security issues.
in practice is that the consensus is very frequently wrong

I'd make that statement even stronger: the consensus is almost certainly wrong. The variables are just in what manner it's wrong, and to what degree.

It's not all a revolutionary shift to a Copernican cosmos. Most things we know pretty well today, but ought to fully expect to have tweaked tomorrow. The cliche example is of Newtonian dynamics being improved by Einstein, which is still being refined through quantum mechanics, etc.
I didn't know about this and after sharing with some others who didn't know I thought I would pass it along to HN. This is a great way to read a story on HN and view the comments at the same time. You can click and drag a link to the other window to open it.
Comment by Jeff Enderwick, on page:
"8810 is just a different flavor of zero."
Eh, not really. Imagine that there are four buttons on the iPad instead of just one. They're each at the midpoint of the bezel on each size. Depending on your rotation, the bottom one acts as home, and the left and right act as buttons that act on what you're looking at. (not sure about the top one :))
How To Hack Orkut ??
> what if you dont have a linux machine ready to go?

Ubuntu or Knoppix LiveCDs didn't work for you?
You certainly don't make each processor or core a dimension if that is what you are suggesting.

The small is type systemic. Machine proofs show that you have written your typable logic correctly.

This is still not at the level of concurrency or machine assistance to which I am referring.

You are getting closer with dataflow programming languages. Pipeline and compute farm visualization, spatial/resource quota policies and control, and process calculi equivalences proven across visual/spatial refactorings is what is needed.

Of course you can do all of this with a linear byte array. Of course you can get more dimensions with names and references.

Unfortunately, these methods are very specific and very technical and, despite their accuracy, are relatively devoid of meaning at-a-glance. In the future, a domain expert will work with a programmer to build an application which the domain expert will then operate and monitor. This is not possible without heavy use of graphical interfaces and visual representations. This is not possible without an advanced type system and an easily constructible syntax for DSLs and DSL graphical front-ends.

Perhaps you wouldn't classify this as a "visual programming language" as most of the programming itself is not done via virtual objects and connections. However, visual system tools will become increasingly important as programming moves from implementation to specification and control.