skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My goal was simply to relay some of the facts that came out of sitting through a round of court proceedings. One of the main things being that a lot of what was put in the complaint seemed to be just plain wrong. That being said my intent was not to defend the industry or the business model. I got out of recruiting early in my career because I couldn't tolerate all the shady practices and lack of ethics in that industry. I simply ask that everyone give them the courtesy of due process and not condemn the hardworking employees of Hashrocket for something they had nothing to do with. We are a separate company in a totally different industry. We are self sufficient financially and have been for some time now. We have always and will continue to pursue the highest level craftsmanship in our development and complete transparency in working with our clients.
Why DRM hurts eBook sales: A piracy analysis
WebGL's greatest challenge as a gaming platform
Quite simply, there is very, very little reason to believe in any type of "god". Sure, there's stuff we don't know. But trying to explain that away with some type of "god" thing doesn't cut it.

I find it quite baffling that anyone can believe in a god, actually. I mean, surely the logical inconsistencies in pretty much all religions must bother you? And moving away from organized religion, why would you believe in a "god"?
That's beyond the scope of my question — my concern is solely resolvers extending TTLs.
You can also use ports. I assume it will have a 2.7 port shortly, if it doesn't already.
Most people mistake "Brabantian" with "Flemish" Flemish is spoken in East and West Flanders and sounds very much like Hollands, which is the dutch dialect spoken in the west of The Netherlands. This is not strange as it were Flanders monks that started to cultivate the peat bogs in the west of the Netherlands round 850 - 900 AD. In most other parts of dutch speaking Belgium they speak Brabantian or Limburgish (cross between Brabantian and Lower Saxon) which has a soft G and a lot of it is hard to understand for people of western Netherlands, but not hard for the people living in Dutch Brabant or Limburg, likewise the north eastern provinces in The Netherlands they speak "Nieder Saksisch" (Lower Saxon) which is closer to German than to Dutch. Like Belgium The Netherlands is situated exactly on the border of of 2 main language areas that is Lower Frankish and Lower Saxon. We have many crossing dialects between those 2 language groups and many people cannot understand each other when speaking in their native dialect, that is why the standardization of languages is so strong here. I live in Amsterdam and can understand Flemish without any trouble but when listening to somebody talking in dialect from Antwerpen where they have Brabants dialects it sound like they speak Russian or Chinese, no kidding.

Hollands and Flemish come from Middle Dutch which is exactly the same Language Group as Middle English.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_english
True - except for the % that are heading to grad school to do physics studying is irrelevent.

The purpose of a college degree is to reduce the number of job applicants HR depts have to deal with.

Since everybody now gets A for every class recruiters now look for extra-activities. So studing to understand the causes of WWI in more detail is less use to you, and the recruiter, than you also being in the junior entrepreneurs club.
In-Q-Tel: a new partnership between the CIA and the private sector (2007)
Ask HN: Why are there 2 Pythons?  (2.7 & 3.1.2)
Looks to me like both are stable? Which one should you use for new projects?
ps: at some point this discussion will mention the difference between Europeans and US Americans :) The importance of "god" in US culture is quite astounding, really.
Paganism
I personally find existing religions I have looked at (mostly Christian religions) insatisfactory and haven't found the need to dig too deeply into what else is out there. I am fine with not knowing why certain things are the way they are without replacing it with faith.

As I find with many atheists, I believe there may be some higher power, but it does not affect my daily life (outside of the way in which religious beliefs have become societal norms or vice versa).
We just started using Raven: http://raventools.com/

Still on the free trial, but I plan to stick with it.
Enlighten me, what's the the British accent popular in movies like Football Factory, Human Traffic etc. which I find cool; while every Brit I've met in my life had this 'royal' accent I personally don't find understandable (sorry, no offence)? Actors of international-targetted movies use some other accent for a certain effect?

Also, once I've met a guy AFAIR south London or sth, he spoke that his wife told me even most of Brits don't get him (it was an accent, not just that he was mumbling).
Q: Could I follow up, Mr. Secretary, on what you just said, please? In regard to Iraq weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction? Because there are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.

Rumsfeld: Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

And so people who have the omniscience that they can say with high certainty that something has not happened or is not being tried, have capabilities that are -- what was the word you used, Pam, earlier?

Q: Free associate? (laughs)

Rumsfeld: Yeah. They can -- (chuckles) -- they can do things I can't do. (laughter)

Q: Excuse me. But is this an unknown unknown?

Rumsfeld: I'm not --

Q: Because you said several unknowns, and I'm just wondering if this is an unknown unknown.

Rumsfeld: I'm not going to say which it is.

Q: Mr. Secretary, if you believe something --

Rumsfeld: Right here. Right here. Right here.

Q: Mr. Secretary, point of clarification --

Rumsfeld: No, this is a promise.

Q: -- I think under Wright's rules, that a point of clarification -- (laughter)
I am saying there is no productive value in them going relative to their financial burden. For the many who go for free/cheap thanks to state subsidy, that's great. But then we shouldn't worry that students aren't studying, since college doesn't really DO anything in regards to future productivity and the like.

Also, a lot of the "soft" factors people romanticize about college (spawning appreciation for the arts or some niche intellectual pursuit, civic/social development) have occurred for thousands of years by people just growing up.
There is no reason to believe in a god, and no evidence to support it. I'd like to know why people do believe in a god, as not believing in one is fairly easy.

So, a question to your question, is there a good reason you believe in it (assuming you do)?

Edit: petervandijck said it better above me.
How the EPA is hindering cleanup in the Gulf
A Minimalist Weekly Planning Tool
Apatheist
Occam's razor.
The blog is horrifying, frankly. I can't understand that layout no matter how hard I try. Where are the actual articles?

Also, it's trying to tell me that it's Monday already. Maybe where YOU are...
I don't believe in God because I've never heard a good reason to believe in God. I find it odd that you presume a need for a good reason to not believe in something. If I did need such reasons, I'd need a good reason to not believe in invisible pink unicorns, teapots in orbit around Saturn, and many other things. (Apologies if I've misinterpreted you.)
Perhaps a longer blog post needs to be dedicated to this, but I feel like much of the debate between iOS and Android focuses on the "fundamental differences" between Apple's particular approach (or call it philosophy) to mobile computing, and Google's. This might be a bit controversial, but I find it NOT an open and shut case that an "open, customizable" platform is an advantage.

Throughout history we've been struggling with the Google/iOS problem, but the debate took on different forms: totalitarian versus democratic government, planned economy versus "free" economy, big government versus small government. The question is: should certain kinds of decisions affecting a state be centralized or dispersed? In theory, dispersed power (among citizens, or users) should win the day, IF NOT for inevitable market inefficiencies (information asymmetries, NOISE, emotional human irrationality) and malicious private agents who prey on the uninformed. There is an argument to be made that computing platforms fall under this debate. I would argue that Google's open platform also makes it vulnerable to far too many exploits: viruses, buggy, crashing, battery-draining software, and adware that might indiscriminately display pornography. All for certain powers of customizability that I (and many others) find trivial. Like choosing system fonts and having video wallpaper.

If everybody in the world had the means to discriminate between spam software and non, then I would think that a system under which anybody could post software targeting any part of the system would be an excellent thing. But they can't. WE, as hackers can. Maybe. But for a majority of the people, they must enter into a "social contract" with a curator wherein decisions of quality and security are made for them in exchange for a price premium equal to or less than the value of time saved in "not worrying" about malicious code. Beautifully, this space is evolving to a cycle of two year hardware refreshes (less than that for hardcore users), and these serve as market voting mechanisms for the job or efficacy of the curator (in this case, Apple and Google).

In the United States (which some would argue is the apotheosis of enlightenment thinking of the government problem) we have deferred legislative power to a body that we pay to do the thinking for us. We cycle through this body periodically democratically (as we can in mobile). We certainly don't have time to ponder over the minutiae of certain articles of legislation. In the same way, I would argue, I don't have time to discriminate between one piece of software for compatibility, reliability, security and quality, and another making nearly identical claims to functionality. Maybe you do, and that's why you choose Android. Meanwhile, I'll trade certain features for peace of mind.
but I personally find existing religions I have looked at (mostly Christian religions) insatisfactory and haven't found the need to dig too deeply into what else is out there.

You should take into account that those religions appeared hundred, yet thousands of year before you. They are custom made for the population of that time and they should have basic ideas that their brains can understand. So those religions may not meet your expectation. But, this in itself, is not a reason to say "God doesn't exist". You should dig somewhere else.

As I find with many atheists, I believe there may be some higher power

Scientifically speaking, there are not sort of "higher power".
Much for the same reason that I don't believe Gollum (Lord of the Rings) or Harry Potter exist. For the same reason that I don't believe that there is a Giant Invisible Teapot in outer space (Russell's teapot).

Just so you know, it wasn't always this way. I used to believe in Allah (as a Muslim).
Who knows? But I guess you know (or have heard) of some people who do not bother studying attending institutions that issue grades.

(I do not want to claim that grades cause non-studying. Just that even with grades non-studying does occur--thus invalidating the grandfather-comment's argument.)
I wouldn't recommend overwriting OSX's Python. You can install yourself from source into /usr/local, but a package manager like MacPorts or Homebrew helps a lot. It's a little more work up front - to install the package manager - but it pays itself back over time. Homebrew has 2.6.5 in its main branch, and 2.7 in a fork. See the notes here:

http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula/...

I've tried Fink, MacPorts, Rudix and Homebrew. Homebrew isn't perfect, but it's damn good.
Where's the vim option?
Statements about the nature of reality arrived at through a mystical methodology conflict with scientific materialism even if no god is involved.
If you're going with a DSL anyway, making that language happen to look like a strictly-defined subset of HTML doesn't necessarily reduce its security (plus it allows for a WYSIWYG editor option). But too often what happens next on the back end is an attempt to "sanitize" that input in place and output whatever's left, rather than to fully parse it. That just leads to an arms race between sanitizers and XSS exploiters.

Instead, parse the HTML just as you'd have to with BBCode or Markdown. Store it in an internal representation that's only capable of the minimum needed formatting features. (There's no actual HTML left at this stage. It's equivalent to any other DSL.) Then render HTML out of that parse tree, so that every bit of user input is HTML entity-encoded, and everything else (tags and attributes) comes from constants in the program.

This can be even more secure than regexp-based DSL translators that build up a result from input in multiple passes, since they tend to lack such a well-defined separation between input text and output HTML.
If you're doing something completely new that will never interact with older code bases, Python 3 seems like the best choice. This is where the language is ultimately going.

However, if you have to integrate with almost anything in 2.x land, such as 3rd party libraries, you may have no choice but to keep using 2.x for awhile. As usual, even from this older version, there are ways to voluntarily import future capabilities so that your code is as 3.x-like as possible.
Whenever I (atheist) meet religious people and start nerd raging, I remind myself of the following:

The world makes equally amounts of sense for a religious person as it does to an atheist.

It's easy to dismiss religion when you're an atheist, because science makes so much sense that it is a perfectly adequate explanation of the world around us (in the sense that it acknowledges that proving things are difficult). But for a religious person, religion makes just as much sense and adequately explains the world around them.

I think the two should be viewed as poles that have nothing in common and are complete opposites. And both should acknowledge that either may or may not be correct.
Good answer. It means that you are ready to believe if there are a really convincing reason; which is what I'm looking for.

But my question was mainly to check if you are not believing for a specific reason. A simple reason is "If God exist, why doesn't him make his existence CLEAR, without ambiguity by some kind of magical power or miracle."
I wouldn't rule out something medically not quite optimal with your brain and you may want to talk to a professional about some medication to help bring things in to a balance (you didn't mention that you'd done that yet or not).

Medical aspects aside, it sounds like you've not been able to find a niche yet. I'm not trying to trivialize this, but you obviously do have some passion (as others note) but you can't channel it in to something productive for very long. It also sounds like you're trying to do this all on your own.

There are people who remain stuck in one routine for years or decades. You have the ability - probably a compulsion - to get in to new situations routinely. Believe it or not, this would be seen as an asset in many organizations. A 'presales engineer' position (if you're technical) might be a great position to get in to, as you're constantly getting in to new situations and people, most of whom you won't need to deal with a few weeks or months after the sale is made.

Without sounding trite, suicide isn't the answer. You've likely got quite a lot to offer. You're on HN after all ;) I hate to just say 'go get counseling and medication' - I think there's probably other things you can do outside of that, or in addition to that course.

I realize I don't know you much, except for what you've posted here, but I really don't think things are as hopeless for you as they may feel right now. I don't think I've had things as bad as you're describing, but I am known for an extreme inability to focus/concentrate on anything for very long. I don't tout it, but have worked on coping strategies over the years. Eventually I found a book by Barbra Sher (http://www.barbarasher.com) - well, she's got a few. Wishcraft might be a decent one to start with. It's free, and while a bit airy fairy at times, might help you to see things in a different light. I was first turned on to Sher when I was reading up on the problem of TMI (Too Many Interests).

http://knacks.esmartdesign.com/#The_Too_Many_Aptitude_Proble... was the first article I'd found, which seemed to describe me to a T. I've since self-diagnosed myself with that 'condition' and went looking for info which would help me learn more about that. There's no 'magic bullet cure', but that bit of self-knowledge has helped me avoid situations which I knew would make me miserable, and have slowly forged a better, more fulfilling life (though even now, I keep changing my goal posts).

The biggest thing I learned from that little journey is that there's nothing 'wrong' (in an absolute sense) with that condition - it's just different.

If you'd care to discuss any of this further, please ping me at any time at mgkimsal@gmail.com or 919-827-4724.
I think I'm willing to entertain the idea of God on a philosophical level, but not on a practical day to day life level.
From someone raised in the Christian church:

I was taught from a very young age certain things about God and man: that God was all-knowing and all-powerful; that God was the creator of everything; that man was irrevocably prone to sin and therefore needed a savior; that God chose certain people to save; that heaven was the ultimate destination for those who were saved; etc...

As I grew older, I began to realize that other people had substantially different beliefs from the ones with which I had been inculcated. This was a realization only because I had been intentionally isolated from people who thought differently from my parents and educators. I noticed that what these different belief systems had in common was their moral program. All Abrahamic religions, and many others, prescribe how people ought to behave. But this moral program is not much different from common sense under conditions of abundance. The ways in which they differ are more interesting and are mostly tuned to ensure their adherents perpetuate the system.

So, with this in hand, it became readily apparent that the bulk of organized religion was a historical artifact from the time when peoples of old were figuring out how to treat one another (back at the emergence of what we term "civilization"). It is possible (and in my opinion, now necessary) to separate moral education from religious indoctrination since, ironically, much of the unrest in civilization is now caused by the differences in religious prescription rather than differences in morality.

Either that, or religious thought reeks of delusion and lacks any evidence whatsoever for what it claims. Seriously, I don't know any religious person who can demonstrate any reason for their belief other than indoctrination. Prove me wrong.
After getting a 9 to 5 doing web development I rarely program in my free time. I usually open vim, write a few lines, lose interest and start browsing the internet or hanging out with friends. :/
'll' is not equivalent to 'y' in standard Spanish, although the confusion exists in some zones (not in Asturias, from where Villa is) and it's a decent approximation for a non-native speaker.

As opposed to nearby romances, Spanish never distinguished between 'b' and 'v'. This is probably a Basque influence. There was a Roman pun[1] on these lines that said "beati Hispani quibus vivere bibere est" (blessed are the Spaniards, for whom to live [vivere] is to drink [bibere]).

By the way, this joke was played on Aquitanians, who occupied land mostly outside of the peninsula (nowadays southwest of France). This links with other thread on the historical fluidity of the concept of 'Hispania.'

Whoever differentiates between b and v speaking Spanish nowadays is either:

- a native Catalan speaker,

- trying to appear more upper-class through imitation of the French, a fashion that started in the Illustration times, or

- a descendant of one of the above.

[1] http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=997178
It seems disingenuous to mix Agnosicism with Atheism. Both are utterly different - one makes a knowledge claim (atheism) while the other is in a position of neutrality or indifference (agnosticism)
Asimov was a great popularizer of ideas that most people never come face-to-face with in a lifetime. And though some criticize his style, I always find it to be servicable and effective; he stays out of the way of his story.

On a side note: if you enjoy galactic timespanning of this sort, Alastair Reynold's "inhibitors" (a "race" of machines forming the backdrop of most/many of his novels) makes for some fascinating reading from a working astrophysicist. I found myself impatiently reading through the story, trying to get to the next bit of exposition where the Inhibitors are discussed. I wish he'd done even more of this. Ah well.
If you traveled back 2000 years with a helecoptor, or modern weapons, or a bulldozer - you'd be a higher power.
Is Paganism a religion, or a large collection of (now defunct and poorly-understood) religions?

What are the ontological claims of paganism? Precisely which supernatural beings does paganism assert the existence of?
For the same reason that theists only believe in their concept of god, all the other options failed to convince them for whatever reason. We just have a higher standard of evidence, and nothing in the entire pantheon of theistic mythology has managed to sway us. Frankly this is less a reflection of the diamond sharp analytical abilities of the atheistic and more a reflection of the woefully inadequate nature of the theistic epistemology.

That said, what I'd like to know is why other people actually believe this? If you were to find your holy text in a cereal box and read it in totality now, would you truly think it a divinely inspired text? Or is it simply an ancient perspective hangover that has not diverted enough attention to it's structure to warrant a full critical analysis?

I expected even more of a skew toward atheism than I saw here, actually.
I think you're mistaken about how science actually works - the evidence that you gather is what matters, rather than who you are. Perhaps you should be addressing that, rather than engaging in petty ad-hominem attacks.
Maybe you're being too hard on yourself? Most people don't have the productive energy in the first place that leads to start-ups or side-projects or even perhaps new friendships. In fact the moments in my life where I feel really inspired and enthusiastic about something (usually leading to greatly increased productivity) are few and far between. Sure I'd like to have more of them, but I don't think I could ever make that the norm. Sounds like for you, those moments are frequent enough you believe they could be sustained indefinitely...

Otherwise I don't have much advice except do well for yourself and never be ashamed of it.