skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the idea, but not everything needs to be social. I've been slowly working through certain collections of movies, and if I could add them automatically to my queue, that would be great.

I have no need to 'show off' to my friends, because my Netflix queue is highly personalized to me. But, it would certainly make it easier to feel like you had a grasp on any certain body of work (such as my current obsession: everything directed or produced by Scorsese).
I don't think of this as an attack of Postmodernism as much as analytic philosophy in general. You cannot construct a proof of a philosophical statement by referencing chunks of math and physics. Analytic philosophy is science for those who do not understand science and better left to the field of science. The real philosophy is moral and ethical philosophy, because everyone uses it to decide on every conscious prescriptive actions they undertake, yet they cannot be derived from science and are arbitrarily agreed on by societies. Pure science is purely descriptive and observational, it does not provide a proof for correct future action. Individuals often reference science as post-facto justification for their actions, for example I would reference my knowledge of natural selection as justification for pursuing a job, whereas the Nazis also used natural selection as justification for undertaking the Holocaust. Moral and ethical philosophy are the most important area of philosphy, it is a discussion that guides every action we take yet one with no completely "correct" answers.
I'm not sure if this happened for anyone else, but choosing a markup from the drop-down list did not change the link to the reference pop-up window.

edit: nice idea
“Meetings are an addictive highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.”
Why don't you just buy a Mac Pro? I know this isn't what you asked, but isn't your time worth more than the thousand bucks you're "saving"? I used to build a new PC every three or four years and I don't miss those hassles at all!
It varies a lot depending on who you ask, and most postmodernists probably don't really have a theory of truth. Some really don't believe it's a meaningful concept, or even if they do, think it's epistemologically never accessible, so not worth bothering with.

Some are open to coherence theories of truth, though, more or less that you can't decide whether something is "really" true, but you can decide if sets of beliefs are coherent with each other, within a particular culture's conception of coherence. That's actually not too different from coherence theories of truth that a lot of logicians hold, which is that "truth" is consistency relative to a formal system. Whether that turns into anything-goes seems to depend on just how arbitrary the choice of formal system is.

A different direction is Richard Rorty trying to take some branch of postmodernism and weld it with early-20th-c. American pragmatism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_and_the_Mirror_of_Na...
I run a DNA test in 2005. I'm chilean and have british ancestors and I wanted to find out what was my origin (English, Scottish, Irish). A Carpenter 'cousin' from USA told me about DNA for Genealogy and bought me a DNA kit from Family Tree DNA http://www.familytreedna.com

I didn't match any Carpenter from USA but a lot of people from UK and USA. Genealogy is a fascinating hobby.
Check out http://markdownr.com/.

It does live previews for Markdown, Textile, RDoc, and Wikitext. Code is on GitHub.
I'm not too familiar with CouchDB in particular or what exactly a "document" is. Let's say I have a site about books. I need to be able to look up books by author, title, isbn and users who have it in their catalogue. Is there a way in CouchDB to ensure consistency while maintaining those relationships?
What sounds more attractive to a Hacker type looking to work on a startup?

"Come be an effective software engineer in today's new start up and use .NET to change the internet!"

or

"Laid back atmosphere, free pizza, Ruby and text mate. Let's get at it."

MS is a tool set - not technology. Hackers are very opinionated and want to do things their own way. In my experience, .NET, VB, Visual Studio (all while great tools) require you to do things one way, their way. That just doesn't sit well.

Then of course there is cost, stigma, lock-in, etc. Start ups are the anti-Microsoft, using it as a platform to build their technology, from a very fundamental level, is dissonant.

It certainly is culture shock, and its not going to get any better for Microsoft in these markets. But they don't care, their business isn't designed for it. Microsoft doesn't do consumer products well. If you think about it, the only reason DOS got in front of everyone is because they were able to sell it to IBM.
(offtopic) The white drop shadow under the body text is quite annoying.
"At one point in A Thousand Plateaus, the authors say that vaginas are just penises travelling faster than the speed of light. Does anyone think this is meant to be analyzed scientifically?"

Does anyone think that's actually a coherent statement?
Understatement of the year "...though it has largely fallen out of use".
Instead of going by a checklist, try to approach it by domain: Searching; Sorting; floating point, integer computing, and bit-manipulation; numerical analysis and computation; DSP; optimization and dynamic-programming; information theoretic stuff like compression and encryption; graph theoretic algorithms; symbolic algebra; geometric and hierarchic data structures and algorithms; statistical, probabilistic and inferential algorithms; string and sequence processing along with linguistic techniques, etc.

The whole point of big encyclopedic texts like Cormen et al. is to wet your feet and give you a broad exposure to various techniques. That way you have a small idea on what you want to use next, and you know which domain to focus your research.

My one recommendation is to ditch programming languages with huge boot-times when playing with algorithms. You want something that you can interact with live and see results; in that regard, even a symbolic algebra system like Maxima would be better than C, C++ and Java. Lisp and Python would be ideal for most algorithms.
I've seen this however this doesn't take advantage of all of the work that is done by the business owner in categorizing/itemizing inside of Quickbooks for instance. This is simply scrapping your CC and Banking account information. If this could pull from the ledger do you not agree it would provide a lot more value? I already have my business accounts in Mint, not sure what inDinero is really doing to differentiate itself.
How Goldman Sachs gambled on starving the world's poor - and won.
The Royal We: Single Founder Startups
I would love to do this, however, the cost is hard to justify. Though, your post makes me think twice about it. The backup of all my "stuff" would be a welcomed safety net and maybe enough to justify the cost. Thx!
This is false because it relies on an incorrect assumption: that if you were using .NET to do web development prior to MVC, you had to use ASP.NET.

When I was writing .NET web applications, the sum total of ASP.NET integration was implementing IHttpHandler and friends - not much more than access to the request and response streams. You can build your own lightweight framework, which, being lightweight, isn't a big deal.
Can someone send me an invitation?
That does actually sound nice.

What about web access and/or being able to copy a public URL to any file like you can with dropbox?

I guess you'd have to set up your own web server with some software to do that, right?

Is it easy to use with a remote control? Browse movies and play them, etc?
Belgium, to be specific
> Everyone has to make the choice between being clever or kind.

I was baffled by this remark; since when being clever or kind are mutually exclusive options? According to the transcript he said "will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?".
Are they useful? What would happen if you just didn't go?
Characteristics of a Link
Text should NOT look like links, and links should NOT look like text.
Everyone's going to have different favorite editors; nothing wrong with that. However, the free version of Visual Studio 2010 has both the features you cited.

(and for what it's worth, I wasn't the one who downvoted your comment)
I was trained in analytic philosophy, and I'm not convinced you know what analytic philosophy is. Postmodernism isn't analytic philosophy--it's close to the exact opposite. In fact, analytic philosophy originated as a response to continental philosophy, the intellectual cesspool of Hegel and friends from which postmodernism is spawned.

Some analytic philosophers you may have heard of include: Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.E. Moore, R.M. Hare, A.J. Ayer, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Edmund Gettier, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Nick Bostrom. Many of these philosophers discussed morality and justice a great deal. Others discussed the logical underpinnings of science and mathematics--Popper in particular is highly esteemed by many scientists I've known, and Russell needs no introduction.

EDIT: There are of course many great analytic philosophers I forgot, but I found it worth editing this post to include W.V.O. Quine, in honor of whom we write programs which print their own source code.
Why Email Newsletters are so Valuable, Case study on StartupDigest
Homebrew tries to coexist with the pre-existing environment, whereas MacPorts and Fink create their own little isolated hierarchies in /opt and /sw, respectively.

Which means that if install Git, that's all I get. With Macports, I'll also be installing duplicate versions of at least curl, openssh, and rsync, as per http://help.github.com/mac-git-installation/
There was also MonoRail, an MVC framework inspired by Rails ... http://www.castleproject.org/MonoRail/
just wrote a follow up piece on HN about our personal story on why email newsletters are worth so much: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489352
here is the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489352
Visual Studio destroys [other environments] in any feature set-to-feature set comparison.

sounds an awful lot like

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame

Even for the nerdy, a long feature list is not what actually makes people want to use a tool. In the case of Emacs, it's the customizability. With Vim, it's the simplicity, speed and focus on its purpose. Other environments have their own advantages that don't fit neatly in to a feature list.
Can I have an invite? :)
This is why I hate .Net, it hides everything, changes the normal pages work. I guess it does this to make it easier for people who don't understand what is going on, but it just frustrates me. I understand the way POST and servers work, I don't feel the need to have to unlearn that and learn Microsoft twisted version of the web. And the horrible code and javascript it puts on a page is just ugly.
I'll raise you one: Russell on the 19th century forebears of postmodernism:

"Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject."
Istanbul / Turkey.
I would imagine a lot of Googlers have it written in their contract that they aren't supposed to talk about how much money they make. I know most of the companies I've worked for have at least had it in the employee handbook.

Personally, I was okay with divulging that information even when I was working for places that told me not to. I figure if a company is willing to fire or sue me over telling someone else how much they pay me, I wouldn't want to work there anyway. It seems like such a trivial bit of information.
Why Open Source Stalls Innovation and Patents Advance It
Remote access: You won't need to install your own web server. It's built into WHS (see screenshot: http://www.windows-now.com/blogs/dougknox/WindowsLiveWriter/...).

You will automatically get your desired, password-protected https://[whatever].homeserver.com, pointed to your server. (It's autoconfig too with your router). When you access that remotely, you get access to your WHS server, plus all your connected devices. (it looks something like this: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/5B259B0F-B5B...)

For public URL, you can install dropbox on the WHS box or one of the connected PCs, if you'd like.

For movie playback, that's separate from the WHS. You need to think of the WHS as the Server and the playback devices as the Client. In this way, the WHS is very extensible and your playback options are limitless. You can use windows media center on a different PC, or just use VLC or windows media player.

Effectively, WHS is a very "insanely great" home server that stores your files and serves it, allowing you to decide how you want to consume it.

For what it's worth, I use windows media center on a machine connected to the TV, and a logitech dinovo mini for remote (see: http://www.logitech.com/en-us/keyboards/keyboard/devices/384...).

Because I'm a home theater junkie, I did start a side project called http://www.intellimote.com that uses the iPad as a remote to browse and play movies.
My real world experience with this is entirely different. Most .net devs are doing what they do because they have the best job prospects in that slice of the industry, especially in light of the overall skillset for the average .net coder is 90% .net, and 10% in the other languages learnt during thier degree.

I personally enjoy working in .net; the entire development process is very smooth and intergrated.
Congratulations. As someone who does not live in the US, I have never seen these before, and I am pretty sure they are new as in the last few years.

They do sound like a solution to my problem, and I will investigate if they have them here in Australia.
Fyi, visual studio is extremly customisable. See: resharper.
I am by no means a philosopher, but I've read some Rawls and found him both clear and accessible. I wish more philosophical writing was this way!
This was a post we wrote up in follow up to this HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1488170

Gives our personal account to why email lists are so valuable and some of the metrics we collect to track this.
Here's a previous "where are you from" poll: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=527681

(not that it's a bad idea to run another one, given that it's been over a year).
It doesn't. I only added a textile reference; I will be adding a markdown one soon. Sorry about that.
Home Page Teasing
The home page should show an OVERVIEW of the VARIETY of con­tent the web site offers and TEASE users into click ing through to learn MORE.
Modernism believes in absolute truth. Postmodernism is not the nullification of all truth, but rather it's truth in context. Even in the absence of absolute metrics, it's still possible to create local meaning.
I realize that we're all programmers here, and that we live and die by unambiguous semantics. But human languages are awash in ambiguity and borderline nonsense, and the only thing holding it all together are some shared concepts and idioms. The disjoint between the clarity of science and the ambiguity of human communication is really interesting, and by that token something can be both incoherent and rich with meaning (though obviously this isn't always the case).
Some inspiration for wrttn actually came from markdownr.com. Originally I set out to build a similar layout, but I decided against it because of a space thing.
I'm sure I'll get accused of having no sense of humor, but I have to observe that from a usability standpoint, this is unhelpful. It gives me no clue as to what I've done wrong, it wastes my time, and it offers me no help in correcting my behavior. I might install this on my personal machine for fun, but as a system administrator I have no business touching this.

Responding to invalid input by actively mocking the user is about the worst decision you can make for discoverability. It's this kind of user interface thinking that can lead to a toolchain being rejected regardless of how powerful or useful the tools could be.
+1 for this. We've been working in C#/ASP.Net for 7 years now, and we always stayed as far away from ASP.Net controls and Web Forms as possible. Some things we liked such as master pages and making a class hierarchy for the pages to inherit, so we used that.

For the past two years we've been using our own light-weight MVC framework.

C# and IIS are very versatile technologies, you don't have to buy into the entire Microsoft tool chain to use it, you can use whatever parts you want.
I wonder if there is an equivalent for somebody who misspells ls -l as ls- l. That's one that nails me quite a bit, and all I can do is grumble as it takes few seconds for bash to realize that no, that's not a valid command anywhere in the system.
A lot of assertions; a lot of bullshit.
Your hate is completely misguided, the feature you are complaining about is Web Forms.

.Net is a set of class libraries and a virtual machine, your rant would carry a bit more weight if you at least got the basic terminology right.

(Although it has to be said that even Microsoft can't get it straight all the time either)
There's no "there" there...

What's funny is that is (in a way) exactly what post-modernism is talking about. There's no "there" there anywhere. "There" is a shifting frame of reference, gone before you finished contemplating it.
I haven't figured out how to send invites, but after submitting the waitlist form, Kyle sent me an invite within a reasonable amount of time. Give it a try.
eyePhone was not a problem in the episode because of context, which is missing from the clip. In the interest of keeping the internet green, let me recycle what I wrote in the reddit discussion of this:

Spoiler alert. This post mentions elements of the episode that are not in the clip, and so could be mild spoilers for those who have not seen the episode.

There's no particular reason to believe Apple had anything to do with this. I'd guess it was initiated either by Comedy Central or by the Futurama producers, for comedic reasons.

One of the themes of the episode was to parody the iPhone, using a phone called the eyePhone. If you watch the episode, you'll note they are careful to make sure than when they introduce the eyePhone, you see the word eyePhone written, so you can tell they are saying "eyePhone", not "iPhone". Then when we see how the eyePhone is used, we see why it is called the eyePhone.

Having the viewer know that it is eyePhone, and it is installed in the eye, is important. It's what makes the difference between a funny parody and a dumb heavy handed commentary.

In the original clip, note that there is no place that the word eyePhone is written, and there's nothing that indicates the phone is installed in the eye. Someone seeing that clip who has NOT seen the episode therefore might think they are saying iPhone, and think its a dumb heavy handed clumsy commentary, and be disinclined to watch the episode.

Hence, they edit the clip to take out that element. Now the clip shows the viewer only things that are understandable and funny without needing context from earlier in the episode. The clip thus has a chance of fulfilling its intended function of getting people to watch the new Futurama episodes.
That was fun to read. Afterward I looked for another commencement speech, and read Bill Gates' speech at Harvard. It's interesting to compare and contrast them.

> There were always lots of people in my dorm room late at night discussing things, because everyone knew I didn't worry about getting up in the morning.

http://humanity.org/voices/commencements/speeches/index.php?...
Im not sure I knew anybody in University who didn't study 4+ hours a night. very odd article. I routinly would wake up at 8, go to class and work, come home at 6 eat dinner, take a 1 hour nap, then a shower. Go back to the library at 8pm, study until 2am, then go home and sleep. I did that 5 days a week.
There are addons to make Visual Studio editing just like vim. Or Emacs if you prefer that.
As a rule, I choose the most charitable interpretation of anything. The most charitable interpretation of most postmodernism is that it's a joke.
Wow. Awesome ipad project.

And the remote access does look nice.

My blog post was originally about a device that just worked like I described out of the box with no other requirements.

Preferably it would be a small box like my media playing storage device that I have or like the tonidoplug, which costs $100 and is already set up.

Your WHM solution is super awesome, but it's not something I can buy from the store, plug in, maybe configure a little bit and start using. It's a project. It's something you work on to get it working the way you want it to.

What I'd like to see is somebody create a pre built solution, similar to the tonidoplug, with more media capabilities etc, video outputs etc.

If some startup or company would build that, people would buy that.

Your solution is awesome, I must go ahead and try WHS, I didn't even know that it existed.
yes me too please.
Would be nice to have more difficulty level http://elv1s.ru/i/bombada-score.png
"That, to me, is obviously rubbish and rightly attacked."

Let me get this straight -- faced with the proposition that "we have no absolute metrics to judge [our findings] by", you made up your own metric and used it to denounce the statement in question?

...Which is of course precisely what the statement is addressing. Rather than acknowledge that we're all standing in quicksand, we prefer to gather up our quicksand into a small lump, stand on it, and announce that we are on a mountain. All the mountains are quicksand, buddy.
quite a lot of structure amongst these algorithms that the list misses out:

- dynamic programming comes from solving Bellman's equation and Q-learning is an approximate means of doing dynamic programming.

- It's possible to do beam a* search, where beam search, a* search, and best-first (greedy) search are special cases.

- in the continuous domain, greedy search is essentially gradient ascent.

- you can use discrete differentiation to find the gradients for gradient ascent (actually, i would replace the first order method suggestion of this list with newton-raphson or some quasi-newton raphson method like BFGS).

- EM ties some bits together.

- if you replace the max of the viterbi algorithm with a summation, then you get the sum-product algorithm which is essential in the E step of EM. if you use viterbi instead of sum-product, you get something known as zero-temperature EM, which is an approximate form of EM

- the M step of EM is typically just gradient ascent!

- you can use max flow to do a similar thing to viterbi on certain graphs

and so on...
Uh what? Where did tax dollars get involved in this?
While Sokal is amusing, it's not the smoking gun everyone loves to dress it up us. That is, unless you're willing to concede the same thing of Physics:

"The Bogdanov Affair is an academic dispute regarding the legitimacy of a series of theoretical physics papers written by French twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanov (alternately spelt Bogdanoff). These papers were published in reputable scientific journals, and were alleged by their authors to culminate in a proposed theory for describing what occurred at the Big Bang. The controversy started in 2002 when rumors spread on Usenet newsgroups that the work was a deliberate hoax intended to target weaknesses in the peer review system employed by the physics community to select papers for publication in academic journals."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair