skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well there is evidence but it's not evidence that you're presently accepting. The Bible is a sort of evidence and people's testimony is as well.

For my part I believe in God because he speaks to me regularly and I'm the last person you'd expect that to happen to. I was minding my own business when I started hearing from God. Everyone I knew at the time was totally shocked and it took me over two years to accept what God was telling me (i.e. that the Bible is for real and I would do well to listen to what he's saying through it to me). I read Nietzsche and Russell in college and enjoyed them. I didn't really like Christianity as a religion much but I was nice to Christians I met and didn't really argue with them much. I didn't believe in anything but was respectful to everyone in other words.

My life now is defined by me trying to connect with God and make the most of my time here. I'm not trying to earn anything but I'm working because my God works all the time on my behalf. If God is my father then doing what he does is only the right thing to do if I'm actually his son. I split my time between serving adults (pastoring type stuff), children (Sunday school stuff), and the poor (I run a temporary food pantry). I also run a business to support my family, help my community, and build wealth. I keep busy and wouldn't change anything.

For me not believing in God is pretty hard even though I've seen some pretty bad things happen to people in my community that we prayed to turn around for over two years in one case. The only thing to do in the face of massive disappointment is to continue on. I've seen amazing responses to prayer and some big unanswered prayers too. Jesus prayer before he was arrested was unanswered as well. I take some comfort in that.

Life is pretty complicated and there are no easy answers especially when it comes to God and a life of faith. For me the stakes of life were raised considerably when I started following Jesus. It's not easy but it's not me to figure it all out either. The only faith I argue for is a living faith with a deep connection to a living God. I'd encourage to learn about that faith--not the faith that people say is found in books. No one in the Bible lived that way why should you or anyone else?
Hah, I never thought of Pascal's wager in terms of contestability before.
I'm not sure what makes Homebrew better than MacPorts. Most of their self-declared advantages -- the largest one being that they don't replicate OS-provided software -- are going to fall over as soon as the software included with Snow Leopard starts getting a bit stale.

Case in point, Snow Leopard ships with Python 2.6, and now people are going to want 2.7.

[Edit]

I think it's also enlightening to look at this breakdown of the advertised homebrew features circa last year:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=872072
why can't you look in the obvious places to answer such a question without asking that on HN? (hint: Python.org and Google)

(no ill will, but an honest counter-question)
One ASN is not enough. Think of the "routing mistakes" caused by censorshop etc. Or if your IGP routing blows up….

So if you really need to archive 99.999999% you'll have to invest A LOT of money, time, people.
Which is why it's no surprise that the Mexican family is also overweight.

But actually look at the photos of the American and Italian families. The Italians have almost half the food the Germans have, a small fraction of sugar drinks, and very little dairy. They also have one more child in the family. Which is why they look fit.
Given the poll results, it seems like you're preaching to the choir ;)
I think it's a false dichotomy because there is more than two possible outcomes. At one end you have 'there is no god' in which case it doesn't matter, fine, but then at the other end there's more than just 'worship God' - there's also 'worship multiple Gods', or 'worship the devil', or endless other possibilities of worship, with no strong reason to pick any one of them.

Unless I have misunderstood the Wager.
Might not be the best idea to comment on your personal feelings regarding an employee's religious affiliation. It'd suck to have a HN post submitted as evidence in a discrimination lawsuit.

Edit: Why the down-vote? The parent has his company and website in his info. No idea what it's like in AUS, but in the states, if someone was fired and there was any ambiguity regarding the reason, this comment could be be admissible in court to demonstrate a prior discriminatory attitude toward people based on their religion.
Well, that's just like... your opinion, man.
karma?
Thanks for the TMA link. Hadn't heard of that trait before in that language.

Have you heard of the Kolbe spectrum/ test?

It helped me evaluate my strengths/weakness a lot. It's unfortunately not free, which I think prevents it from attaining the credibility it deserves.

I really like the way it thinks: http://www.kolbe.com/ (No affiliation.)

It has a TMA-esque category It really helped me self-diagnose... and diagnose others, heh heh.

Basically it got me off of binary skill judgement of both myself and others. (Less "that person is awesome!" or "that person sucks!" and more about how job design is usually the issue, rather than people.)
Sorry but the comment thread started with: "The hatred of linux on the desktop is terribly cliche..." has nothing to do with the actual content in question. Warning for all the HN Noobs. Comments beware!
Meditation misunderstandings?
There have been a number of posts lately about meditation. I'm no expert on the subject, but it sounds to me like people have become upset over the topic and supposed benefits. From my understanding of meditation, it seems like there is a fundamental misunderstanding.

My understanding is that the main purpose is to gain awareness. Awareness of everything going on inside you - thoughts, emotions, physical feelings within your body - in addition to awareness of all your surroundings. "Just sitting" will bring you some place, and I'm sure there are benefits there, but my understanding is that it's much more effective if it isn't as passive as that. Personally I haven't gotten far from "just sitting". Focus on awareness, awareness, awareness. You may need to focus on breath, movements, sounds, thoughts, and emotions to realize your state of awareness and to maintain it, and that's OK I think. At first it's necessary I would think. From practicing this once in a while I've gained a lot in the past few months - clarity of thought, better focus, more self-control, better mood...
Probably not. UPS trips involve a lot of points the truck has to pass, so they do a lot of turning. Most trips I've planned with Google Maps and friends seem to be "get onto the freeway, go near your destination, get off the freeway".
In the USA it is culturally and socially acceptable to be "religious." Many individuals take up a religion for acceptance one way or the other, without harking to the power of it. So basically, they slap a name on themselves, and go to church off/on.

You cannot tell religion till it is unpopular, and oftentimes till it is persecuted.
Ask HN: machine learning success stories?
There seems to be a bit of a buzz around machine learning these days. The combination of cheap compute clusters and lots of easy available, potentially mineable data from social networking, e-commerce etc seems to present some juicy new opportunities for these techniques.

So, are there some good examples of successes with this kind of approach lately or is this the overpromise and underdeliver of AI all over again?
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Same. An option always overlooked in these polls; apparently most people are more concerned about what's "true" than what's important.
So you find it hard to believe that nature/the universe can just "be", there has to be an entity that created it, but you find it easy to believe that God can just "be", correct?
I don't think it's perfect, but I can tell you why I have come to prefer Homebrew:

1. It's far faster. Installations and all operations take less time.

2. It's far lighter. Sure disk space is cheap, but why waste if I can avoid it?

3. It's written in a language I know well enough to contribute. (Ruby as opposed to Tcl.) And Github is Homebrew's secret weapon here. There are literally hundreds of us with forks, providing constant updates. Packages are updated far faster than Fink or MacPorts. Momentum counts.

4. They maintain a branch dedicated to providing duplicates, where people really want them. I install Vim in just this way, and they in fact provide multiple versions of Python.

That said, it's not for everyone. I didn't object to MacPorts. The only option I really think is bad is overwriting the system's Python, as I said.
As a coder and a marketer, I would disagree. You can get by with sloppy code and even some bugs, but messing up an ad campaign could have drastic financial consequences.

No disrespect, but I think the nuances/details of marketing successfully are far more difficult to master than learning a programming language. Not to mention that there's a lot more competent programmers than competent marketers.
Another sucker on the Apple teet
So what about us? Who created us? Our parents. Them? Their parents. But wait -- eventually, even with evolution, something had to create the first molecule. Right?

Everybody has to have a starting point from which they have no clue how it got there.

One side has decided that it had to be God. The other? The Big Bang? (Where'd it come from?)
lesson: start a biz now. then 60 years later retire very old and rich! success! i'm only half-kidding.
And Euler (e^pi+1=0 discovered when he was 43). And Hilbert (published the axioms of geometry when he was 37 and formulated the Hilbert Problems) And Newton (34 when published Principia). Grigori Perelman (40). Andrew Wiles (41 when proving fermat's last theorem). Michael Garey was in his 30's and Richard Karp was in his 40's when they published their papers on NP Completeness. Paul Erdős published continuosly throught his life (died at 86). Emmy Noether developed Noether's theorem when she was about thirty, and developed Ideal Theory when she was in her 40's.

Hardy's statement was not researched, or scientific. It'd be interesting to actually take papers, take the age of the authors, weight by citation rate, and give a better number of when mathematicians 'peak'.
I served this one up on a platter for someone to take but I think lkozma's reasoning is more plausible. I don't think ErrantX's comment was based in ethnocentrism. It's just a way of describing a non-regional accent in the US and apparently the UK.
Find a therapist. This is the kind of thing they are expert at a fixing. Don't jump straight to drugs, just find out why you do what you do. There is probably a good reason for it all. You just need a little help sorting it all out.
I can agree that Apple does great things from Day One like the Macintosh and the iPhone. But Apple also has a tendency to be complacent and allow the competition to catch up. That's what's going to happen with the iPhone and Android, like it did with the Macintosh and Windows.

Great at Day One or not, the customer will eventually select freedom of choice and this is where Apple will lose.
falls under paganism with emacs.
Not only does it have little value in explaining the world around us but it encourages people just to accept the world around them as is and not attempt to understand it better.
less cynically ... perhaps the poster wanted the personal opinions of HN hackers, many of whom probably have first-hand experience with Python and might be able to give more personalized answers than what's on FAQ pages
I think that if I were all-powerful and all-knowing I could have done a much better job with it.
heck I route my vehicle like that when i drive. i wrote a small program in 'spatio-geo-English" and it runs on a squishy grey organic microcontroller in my skull
Canada too! Their English speakers sound subtly more British than American.

The New World-Old World divergence also applies to French speakers in Quebec. If you take their perfect French from Montreal to Paris, to the Parisians much of it sounds like an antiquated form of French. I suppose it's equivalent to the way King James or Shakespearean English sounds antiquated to us now.
Unitarian Universalist
I am an edge case
There might be some option in the future for corporate members, something like access for a team, or renting out a separate room, that would cost more than $200. We are planning around the figure $200 for individual monthly membership costs, but I, personally, hope to get enough deals on equipment and real estate to keep the cost at $150. Or below. If possible...
Had not heard of Kolbe, and yeah, if it's not free, it might not get as wide acclaim. (just noticed it was featured on Oprah - I guess they don't need any more acclaim!). That said, the TMA stuff is not a clinical diagnostic tool, just some guy's writings. That said, they are quite accurate in how they reflect much of my own thinking and mind.

It's taken me a long time to stop being as judgmental about people as I've been in the past, and to start recognizing and appreciating the particular skills and qualities others have. It's not easy to recognize in others when you measure everyone (and yourself) against perfection.

I'm not sure many of the psychological tests out there are free, and likely having one 'officially' administered wouldn't be free anyway. I had my IQ tested as an adult a couple years ago by a friend's wife who needed to run these tests as part of her phd work. Apparently it's quite easy to find kids to test, but few adults were willing to put themselves through it. I hadn't realized the 'instruments' cost so much money, but there's a big industry in psychologically measuring and evaluating people. It shouldn't have been a surprise, but it was.
I've never fully understood. While the full context makes it clear that it's a bit of an evasive Humprey Appleby non-answer to the question, I doubt many people have ever heard the full context, and in any case evading questions asked by journalists is more or less a universal trait among politicians and political appointees.

The best explanation I can come up with was that at that particular point in history there was a large ready-made audience who wanted something to make fun of Donald Rumsfeld about, and when that unusual quote came along they started repeating it among themselves until they managed to convince themselves that it was hilarious and that it totally confirmed all the bad things they already believed about Rumsfeld. Like a cat with a caption or a Russian guy singing "trololololo", it's not especially funny on its own, but if everybody around you thinks it's hilarious you can pretty much convince yourself of its value.

A more contemporary example would be Sarah Palin's (entirely true, and somewhat relevant to the question being asked) claim that you can see Russia from Alaska. Many people seem to think this is hilarious and proof that Sarah Palin is an idiot, without really knowing why. (Don't get me started on the large number of people who apparently think she claimed to be able to see Russia from her house...)

edit: In the interests of balance, I'll also mention that Al Gore's supposed claim to have "invented" the internet makes more sense in context, and even Bill Clinton's musings on the meaning of the word "is" is (or rather was) a perfectly reasonable attempt to split a semantic hair.
Looks like 2.7rc2 is in the repository. If you don't want to wait for the maintainer, you can:

sudo port edit python27

This will use your $EDITOR (mine is vi, yours might be textmate). Change the version from 2.7rc2 to 2.7:

version 2.7

and set the checksum value to:

sha1 6bbcd1ab16d07765a7a405671e1e43a2e74b8e6a

Then simply:

sudo port install python27

Boom. You can make it the default 'python' (if /opt/local/bin comes first in your path) via:

sudo port install python_select
sudo python_select python27
python --version
Python 2.7

The next 'port sync' will override your local portfile changes. If you want to keep them, you can also copy the port somewhere else, or even set up your own local tree of port files. ('port dir python27' to get the path to the port for copying).

Also, if you fail to update the checksum, port(1) will tell you what it should be (which is how I got the line to use above).
Actually this is an age old logical fallacy called Pascal's Wager. Because it is just as likely for there to be a anti-Pascalian god as there is to be a pascal friendly god, then belief in god is a zero sum game from the point of view of all things being equal hypothetical logic.
this is a dupe, please kill it. big comment thread on same exact article within the last few days.
A vessel able to collect 500,000 barrels per day? There's no way the government should block this (albeit foreign) ship.

"The combination of these two regulations is delaying and may even prevent the world's largest skimmer, the Taiwanese owned "A Whale," from deploying. This 10-story high ship can remove almost as much oil in a day as has been removed in total—roughly 500,000 barrels of oily water per day. The tanker is steaming towards the Gulf, hoping it will receive Coast Guard and EPA approval before it arrives."
Designing a Product That Actually Gets Used
ah, the SF master at work. one of my top favorite authors of all time. such a cleak thinker and writer, and teller of so many big powerful stories
It's fairly common for people to respond to this sort of question by saying something along the lines of "I disapprove of organized religion, but have spiritual faith."

My own view is exactly the opposite. I see the value in the ritual, community, and psychological "anchor" that organized religion can provide. But spiritual faith seems absurd; why mix your emotional security and your sense of identity up with a bunch of conceptual abstractions, or delude yourself into thinking that the subjective and particular is really objective and universal?

I respect religion, per se, and hold no grudge against religions that use theology and mythology as part of their symbolic repertoire. So when I say "I do not believe in God", I'm not so much rejecting God as rejecting belief.

Whether or not God exists objectively isn't really something I think about or care about answering.
It's false in the sense that it only provides two options and seems to indicate those are the only two options. Believe in the Christian God or don't. It doesn't take in to account Jupiter or Zeus or any other potential deities in determining the 'logic' of choosing to believe or not.
WRT the Jones Act: http://www.factcheck.org/2010/06/oil-spill-foreign-help-and-...

"Q: Did Obama turn down foreign offers of assistance in cleaning up the Gulf oil spill? Did he refuse to waive Jones Act restrictions on foreign-flag vessels?

A: No to both questions. So far, offers from six foreign countries or entities have been accepted and only one offer has been rejected. Fifteen foreign-flag vessels are working on the cleanup, and none required a waiver."

WRT to the EPA being slow to waive regulations or allow state and local initiatives, they're doing their job to make sure the cure isn't worse than the disease. The sand berm idea for example has been panned by a lot of experts. I also have a friend at the EPS region 1 office who works in water quality and they are very skeptical that the berm idea will work but they're under political pressure to allow it. Ideas should be implemented because they're good ideas, not because under-educated politicians think it will make them look good.
I can see it, but my friends outside the US apparently can't. Anyone got a foreign-accessible version?
Calm down everybody! Teapot is real and it resides in Utah, not in space.
for those who've never read Asimov, this story is not really his best. his most famous and beefy works are the Foundation series and the Robots series, and highly recommended. They influenced many many things that came after, both in science and in science fiction. you can't call yourself a true SF fan unless you've read at least his main works.

for example: when I read HHGG for the first time, and the parts about the Deep Thought computer, I assumed it was inspired by and/or a humourous tribute/riff on Asimov, because there were so many strong similarities in structure and narrative techniques.
How can you claim to create the worlds best devices, yet cannot pull off copy/paste. Its not exactly the traveling salesman problem...
i am a new mac user (and new to *nix in general). i was trying to get mapnik with postgres working on my mac yesterday and it took me 5 hours to get macports / mapnik setup, and after most of my day was done it turns out that ImageMagick via macports and snow leopard don't mix. (Finally I tried downloading the binary for ImageMagick but then macports doesn't recognize it..) Very frustrating. Is there really nothing better, or am i just too much of a noob? What is the reason for making me build it instead of doing soemthing like apt-get on ubuntu?
Be careful of what friends tell you about medication or counseling. I've seen someone not get the operation or the right medication for alzheimer because someone said it weakened inhibitions. I've seen people stop taking his medication for psychiatric problems because friend told them they would be better to work it out by themselves, in one case with the result of the person having to remain in hospital for what may be the rest of his life.

Again, ou need a professional to know if it appropriate or not. Everyone fights with their attention spans, changing interests, lazy days and so many flaws we have. The question is really to know if there is a problem or if you just need to learn to know yourself a bit more.

In all cases, suicide has permanent implications to get out of a temporary condition. Even if it looks so bad, stick around, it will get better, or you'll learn how to cope with it better.
On the other hand, in Galicia it's independentist people who most often refer to Castillian as "Spanish", implying that Galicia/Basque Country/Catalonia not being Spain, and Asturian-Leonese and Aragonese being mostly extinct, the only language left in "Spain" is pretty much Castillian.
This is simply not true (at least for people who need adderall).
(a) Why was the one offer rejected?

(b) Might more offers have been made if the Jones act didn't exist?

(c) Isn't it true that the fifteen foreign-flagged vessels working have nonetheless had to have their experienced foreign crews replaced with Americans due to the demands of the Jones Act? Also, don't they have to stay at least three miles offshore at all times?
I am an atheistic Jew. A Jew can be defined as a member of the religion or as a member of the ethnic group; this often causes confusion.
I'm not interested in this question per se, however I am interested in vending machine design. It is only recently that some vending machines are able to take my money AND dispense my purchase (soda pop) fairly near waist level (3-4ft from the ground). However, the change dispenser of this machine is still less that 12" from the ground meaning serious bending over or kneeling to obtain the change. Why cannot change be dispensed at the same height as money in and product out - especially if there is a separate dispenser for it?
How is it different from "agnostic"?
It's interesting how South Asian English uses many British words as well (such as "dustbin" instead of the American "trashcan"). I was young enough to relearn the American words when I moved to the US. However, it's still the British words that I use when English occasionally pops up in my native language.
> Whether or not God exists objectively isn't really something I think about or care about answering.

I think that you could fairly be described as an agnostic, then.