skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
<<In the USA it is culturally and socially acceptable to be "religious.">>

Ah, yes. In some European countries, this is much less the case. I noticed that in the US it's perfectly normal for the president (or other public figures) to say that they have been praying, for example. In the Netherlands, if the prime minister said that nowadays, people would look at him like he's pretty weird, or at least old-fashioned. =) (Even if that prime minister belongs to the "christian democrat" party.)

(It wasn't always like that, by the way; only a few decades ago religion played a much more important role in politics, with separate political parties for every major christian denomination.)
Pretty sure it'll be a "Yes".

A quick note, you find it easy to believe that the universe can just "be" when everything you have ever seen has had a creator. (Whether you believe in science or God, it does, the creator just differs.)

Both have an equally frustrating leap of faith, you either have to believe in God, or that something can come out of nothing.
Faith healing was just an example. You can substitute pretty much any "because God said so" explanation.

I think the reason that the world makes sense for most people is because they have their adequacy levels set too high - they're too used to 'hand wavy' explanations and not having to actually think through things for themselves.
Faster/lighter how, exactly?

Faster in the simplest sense: sudo port install x takes longer to finish than brew install x. Lighter in just as straightforward a sense: same installations, less space used (fewer dependencies I suppose).

The "it's Ruby" argument was entirely personal. I like to hack and help, if I can. Here I can.

Rudix provides binaries, but fewer packages.

The funny thing is that not that long ago, I was as skeptical as anyone. I installed Homebrew only recently when I updated two machines to Snow Leopard - mostly to prove to myself it wasn't just inertia and stubborn keeping me with MacPorts. I stayed with it because it works so well.

I didn't update my post in reply to you. I often write a quick reply and then do a bunch of expanding edits. Bad habit- sorry. I haven't tried MacPorts in a few months. Maybe it's much faster. I got very, very tired of editing the Python portfile to remove the TK dependency that dragged in an entire xorg system. But I think that deep is now optional. Again, I don't have a religious attitude towards Homebrew. I tried it, and I'm very happy with it for now.
I can personally attest to the exact opposite. Aderall literally turned my life around. That doesn't mean that it will do the same for you of course. Just remember that everyone's different and that what works for you may not work for your friends.
Email More Popular than Facebook for Finding Deals
A friend of mine lend me is iPod Touch. To get it working with Wifi or connect it to iTunes running on windows is a very painful process.

I didn't had these problems (No need using the iTunes in the first place)with the G1, Motorola Droid, even my old N95.

So what is so great?
If you truly are interested in being proven wrong or at least have your beliefs tried, there are plenty of books out there on non-religious people becoming religious.
Wrong website :-)
Beautiful Minds
I can't find the dupe. Care to provide the link?
yes, but a dedicated server can be a rather high upfront cost. As with anything else, it completely depends on what your trying to accomplish. In my opinion its a bit of a non-discussion.
How did that article manage to shift from a report of outage to an editorial on why Wikipedia is bad for college research?
Much, much beer.
Algorithms for Extracting Timeliness Graphs [pdf]
I have to respectfully disagree. I think you have your definitions mixed up.

Agnosticism is 'There may be a god, but I don't care enough to claim one way or the other', I think the 'fence sitting' argument is good.

Atheism is: 'There is no god' ie, Richard Dawkins

Atheism is a stronger claim than Agnosticism.
Replying again since you updated in response to my questions =)

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

That hasn't been my experience, but have you checked the latest release? It switched the local installation information to sqlite, which seems to make things mighty fast.

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

Because the "we won't replicate dependencies" thing won't survive another full OS X release cycle. Snow Leopard was a rushed release cycle that brought a quick refresh to the OS-supplied components, but it was a once-off and it's not going to happen again soon, especially given the focus on iOS.

3. ... 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.

That doesn't seem to match reality. Take the current case; MacPorts:

* Has been tracking Python2.7 releases since its alpha release 5 months ago.

* Has years worths of institutional knowledge regarding patching Python to actually fully function (see the portfile here: http://trac.macports.org/browser/trunk/dports/lang/python27/...).

* Provides ports for python 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and 3.1 (all of which are not always backwards compatible)

Homebrew is tracking only Python2.6, didn't have any Python2.7 submissions until yesterday, and hasn't integrated the change into mainline.

When they -do- integrate the change into mainline, everybody is going to have to deal with the headaches that invariably occur across minor releases of Python[1], rather than tracking the multiple versions they require, because homebrew has a naively simple and ultimately flawed policy of "only one version".

Most of the complexity in MacPorts and Fink is a direct result of understanding the complexity of the problem space over a decade. Homebrew will become just as complex as time reveals the necessity of many of these compromises.

[1] As an example, http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/query?status=closed&group=...
Actually, it's literally impossible to know something that isn't true. Plato defined knowledge as "true justified belief", which is an imperfect definition but good enough for our purposes.
At risk of a further beatdown:

Certainly not my intention to pretend special knowledge here, and I don't mean to be argumentative. Specifically I was thinking a long-short mutual fund like HSGFX might work as a hedge for a small investor in a situation such as now, where there's the possibility of futher downside risk (in the spirit of using the right tool for the right purpose). Now I could be completely wrong, and please correct me or suggest alternatives if I am.

I guess what concerns me about answering the OP's question with "buy index funds" is that it's only part of the equation, and it seems too many people just buy the index and never think about it again (the buy-and-hold scenario).

As someone with experience, what would you recommend the OP (or any index investor) do to help preserve capital?
I think the author's insinuation that this is an attempt not to "let a good crisis go to waste" drained a lot of the credibility from the article.

It's clear that Obama is a huge proponent of offshore drilling and that he won't do anything to jeopardize it.

It's odd how a conservative essay tries to paint Obama as someone who would stop all drilling when it's so far from the truth.

I think that ending all offshore drilling should certainly be under serious consideration after a disaster of this magnitude... there is no economic justification at present for risking the environmental damage.
ahhh, k.

so if that's the case, here's what I should do. i'll begin preparing a series of questions to post to HN in the coming weeks, to keep in the same spirit. Rough list to start with:

1. where do babies come from?

2. what is PageRank?

3. what sorts of languages can you write iPhone apps in such that they are allowed in the Apple store?

4. why might I want to write an app in C versus in BASIC?

i'll add more as the whim comes to me. ;)
This is my own experience. Every user have different needs and preference.

My previous phone was Dopod with Windows Mobile 5 since 2005 (very long time huh). And during my first month using iPhone 3GS, I've been struggling using it (and iTunes). There are times when I want to use back my old phone.
He intended it as an insult; the English, in his mind, were too concerned with the practical matters of life and not at all with grand visions and ambitions.

This is also the man who said "You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I have no time for such nonsense."
i think a lot of very lucrative successes are not in consumer-facing applications. i suggest reading Super Crunchers if you're looking for some very lucrative successes:

http://www.randomhouse.com/bantamdell/supercrunchers/
Why is it that whenever I hear Brazilians speak, I think they are speaking Russian?
Short answer: it's not you; it's Apple, mostly. There is nothing for OSX as good as the APT tools. Apple provides a good selection of nix tools, but it cripples some, rarely updates them and has zero investment in a larger tool-set for dealing with them.

All the community solutions are imperfect. What MacPort "sees" is what's in /opt/local with its tools. I'll bet the binary you got installed ImageMagick into /usr/local. (That's pretty common.) Welcome to *nix package management, sadly.
The "where'd it come from" clause can terminate successfully at the genesis of time proper, to define a time prior to time is to posit a time where there was still time, ergo...

"Big guy in the sky was hanging around in void and created it all" posits nothing about the nature of time, and in fact infers that time is eternal and has always been, as big guy in the sky is eternal and has always been, that's why it's not logically inconsistent to point out that the god hypothesis simply raises more questions whilst taking a competing theory to the genesis of time proper does not fail in the same way.
Because marco specifically stated in his article that Apple products are great from day one.
Can we have an "It's complicated" option?
And why is the entire second page quotes from Twitter about it, and the link to the "latest discussions about the outage" a Twitter search for "wikipedia"?
The perils of only having one datacenter :(
Someone is channeling their inner-John Gruber, apparently.

The original iPhone had a mediocre display, a forgettable design, zero apps (and, contrary to the revisionism that is now the rage, had zero plans on every having apps at inception. Apple and AT&T saw apps as a unnecessary risk, and web apps were the only solution), a terrible back-facing camera (and no front facing camera, which in those early days was considered an egregious oversight), and it was strangely 2G in a world that had already moved to 3G.

It succeeded because it was Apple. To say that it was "Great since day one" should embarrass the speaker, and if Nokia, or Motorola, or anyone else released that phone it would have been panned.

The latest iPhone needs to be cocooned inside a case lest you shatter the good-looking-but-bad-engineering glass back or touch the untouchable antenna. Great since day one?

It has a video chat application that inexplicably only works between iPhone 4 users on WiFi, which to most other companies wouldn't even classify as "beta". Great since day one?

It has a notification system that is horribly crippled by the most generous evaluation. Great since day one?

The iPhone is a gorgeous, gorgeous phone. It is the new trendsetter. It is not without many flaws however, though it sits in that remarkable favored area where flaws are glossed over. Indeed, it's telling that Apple's flaws only become obvious to the faithful once the replacement is available. Suddenly, you'll note, every Apple-head is talking about how the iPhone 3GS is dated, feels plasticy and cheap, etc (Hey, I was saying that since it came out, but of course as the deliverance from Apple it was impossible that could be true, until the next deliverance).

These sorts of cult-religious screeds are an embarrassment to technology.

I mentioned Gruber earlier because this Marco guy is stealing his schtick.
Smart People Use Firefox, Even Smarter People Use Chrome
I've heard more than a few Indians speak in an accent that very close to Scottish.

Caribbean English accents also remind me of Scottish.

I wonder if there were certain areas of the British Empire that had disproportionate Scottish influence.
It'd also cost you a lot of Sunday mornings, at least if you did it properly.
If Agnosticism and Atheism (and nonreligious) were different options I would have a problem choosing which one to vote (and I think many other people here too). There is a lot of overlap among these options, and the definitions vary.

There is more than one definition of Atheism (some classify them in weak and strong atheism, but even these two classes aren't enough for some), and there are different "levels" of Agnosticism depending on your country or culture. Some of these differences are because of communication issues. For example, there is controversy if "lack of belief" and "disbelief" are synonymous (compare with "not liking" and "disliking"). When books on such topics are translated to other languages, such nuances may get lost.
I prefer to live life with the cup half full, if you remove the "doubt" in your mind, there is a peaceful underlying unity that can be sensed. Doesn't benefit anyone to make it more complex than that.
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Hi,
I don't really understand your lack of self discipline. I am going to probably go off on some incredibly poorly written tangent here, but please work through it; friend :)

The lack of focus and discipline is something i totally understand, and I think that it might be a product of your your readings if you have in fact worked through say the Kiyosaki books or equivalent. You had a taste of the high from doing your startup, you hopefully learned a whole hell of a lot and you really like that idea(that life) and that's fine. Maybe you were sold on the ideologies they sell, and that's great, they can be achieved, I promise. Maybe it isn't working out for you right now, but you are merely 23. I am 29 now, everything(literally) in my life has changed since I was 23. Education, housing, girls, friends, employment etc.

I think it boils down to a few things really, your entire ambiguity toward life is something i somewhat understand but something you should really address. I think you need to find something to work toward, be it a new start-up or anything. Just because you "failed" once it doesn't mean you'll fail again. Remember that :)

I think you need to simply pick something and get it done, something you can totally get behind.

Maybe you are avoiding something you need to do that you aren't doing? That has been my case in the past.

Also don't go through with suicide. I went through it with my dad a few years ago(he succeeded, after a botched attempt a month earlier).... It isn't something I would wish on my worst enemy's family...

I hope you take care and heed the other advice here, I just felt compelled to weigh in and seeing this phone number from another user here makes me feel a little better about writing here on hacker news.
Apathetist is a better description. An agnostic says he doesn't know the answer; I'm saying the question is meaningless.
Definitely find a therapist if you have suicidal thoughts, but also consider spending some of your time with those less fortunate than yourself. This can add a lot of perspective. For example, John Vonier founded La'Arche http://www.larche.org/home.en-gb.1.0.index.htm , a set of homes where individuals with and without mental disabilities live together, and he firmly believes that the non-disabled benefit at least as much and probably more than the disabled from the relationship.
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I don't know why this was modded down--it's a valid solution in the finest tradition of the Gordian Knot: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot
This is actually a faith claim In and of itself. Your basically saying you don't believe there is a God who desires (or worse, requires) anything from you. Otherwise it would be in your best interest to care. You're completely entitled to your own beliefs, but passing it off as a position of "non-belief" is illogical. It's the same paradox as "there is no truth" being a truth claim. You sound like a person of great dedication to your belief, despite (and actually because of) your statements to the contrary.
most of what they have most students "study" is academic trivia that (1) won't be retained for very long after exams are done anyway, and (2) doesn't have use after leaving college. Note I said 'most' and 'most'. The tech fields tend to have more stickability and usefulness in what is taught (though it's not perfect either). Most of the "studying" in college, from what I remember, was about doing short-term memorization cramming in the days or weeks, and very often just the night before or hours before a test of some kind.

Memorize, regurgitate/apply, purge and move on.
I was reading some item (on HN probably) about how they have a big one in Tampa, Florida, a small one in Amsterdam and are planning on building another big one in Virginia.

That said, the article mentioned a time when a failure in Amsterdam lead to a failure to fall over to Florida which took out the whole service for a good while.
No. It can't.

Where'd time come from?
Welcome to what passes for the mainstream media here in New Zealand.
What is the reason for making me build it instead of doing soemthing like apt-get on ubuntu?

Originally, because around '00 Apple asked some Debian people if they minded if Apple used dpkg, and GPL non-withstanding, Debian said (paraphrasing): No, you evil capitalist pigs.

Or at least that's how I remember it being related to me at the time when it was explained why, in the interest of open-source peace and PR, we couldn't using dpkg =)

But now, realistically? Because nobody invests the time in doing it. MacPorts can actually spit out dpkgs, rpms, and apt-get and yum repositories, but nobody has brought the rest of the glue together to actually build and distribute binaries using it.
If I wanted to, I could probably learn more in a month or so of home schooling using the Internet that what I could in an entire semester at a traditional college. Roughly speaking, YMMV, etc. Could pick my own hours, topics, pace, no need to cram for tests, no worry about grades, spend a ton less money, etc.
When in doubt, pad the article with meaningless fluff?
And the smartest people refuse to click on linkbait headlines.

There is nothing in that "article" but unsubstantiated claims. No data, no results, nothing.
Find the answers to (a) here.

http://factcheck.org/2010/06/oil-spill-foreign-help-and-the-...

I'd appreciate it if you could substantiate your allegations in (c) with a reference. Thanks.
Difficult to say much from a forum post... errors in self perception are probably a large part of the problem. I don't think you have a motivation problem. You seem to start lots of things. I have a motivation problem. I haven't started anything (let alone an actual 'startup') in a very long time.

One thing that strikes me is how long you last with what ever endeavour you undertake... 1 - 2 weeks is very short, especially for a relationship. I don't think that is enough time to genuinely lose interest. I take this to mean that either you didn't really want to do the thing in the first place or are afraid of something.

I don't think medicalising the issue is a good first option, as other people have said. You describe some depressive-like features such as hopelessness, loss of enjoyment, social withdrawal, weird dazes... but once you label this as a disease, it becomes very difficult to deal with it in other than a medical fashion. Having said that, if you are reading about suicide, I would get professional help.

I don't have any particular advice. It may be that entrepeneurial pursuits (which are open ended, with ill defined goals and little feedback) are not the right thing for you at this stage of life. I would also suggest you try something which places no pressure on you, and isn't encompassed by the failure cycle you describe. An example would be some sort of volunteer work, or a (team) sport/hobby. (A startup doesn't count as volunteer work.)
Hey, the three people who voted Shinto - care to share what your practice is like? I was always interested to have a chat with someone who practices modern Shinto...
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Here's a question I hope someone else can answer. I get the whole idea of the underdog seeing a niche and taking it over.

What I don't understand is the progression from 2 kids, a bike and $100 into a 50 billion dollar multinational corporation.

How does that work?

Thank you in advance.
I've always found it unfortunate how many people joke about this quote while at the same time praising folks such as Nassim Taleb. I think it's fair to say that a Black Swan is analogous to an unknown unknown.
I'm no fan of Rumsfeld, but the idea itself seems valid to me.
The Ben Franklin Project: Journal Register Company switches to open source tools
The worst thing was when I moved from the US to Canada one year, and from Canada to the US the next. Both years I had to file tax returns in both countries, and various amounts had to be prorated based on the number of days of the year that I was a Canadian resident. And my Canadian wages had to be converted to USD based on the exchange rates from each day I received a paycheck....

And yeah, none of my US banks or credit card companies could handle my Canadian address on their web sites.
Quite so.I made my statement more to dissuade the notion that Tornado was in any way a magic concurrency machine, that, ultimately, careful programming is still required.
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Not solely, but mainly. The following is by no means a iron-clad tight argument, but here goes.

When the concept of God is invoked, it is usually not precisely defined. In various interpretations, it is a life force permeating the universe itself, or a being that is benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient, or a being that has a "personal guiding light" relationship to every individual human, or a force that was "the prime mover" that setup the conditions of the universe just right, wound up the spring and then let it go, and has never interfered since, or rarely.

So, we postulate the existence of an ill-defined 'thing' or 'being' that has multiple unrelated purposes: to establish an explanation to questions about physical reality which are unexplained by current scientific knowledge; to establish a moral society; to establish a system of personal ethics for an individual human; to establish a sense of security and purpose in an evil and impersonal universe. Mind you, in the most common statement, all of these postulates are untestable in principle, under the guise of "well, if it was testable, it wouldn't be faith, would it?"

So, Occam's razor, in its Wikipedia form, is that an explanation with the fewest new assumptions is usually the correct one. An explanation that requires assuming an entity with multiple qualities, where each one of those qualities is untestable in principle, fails with aplomb.
I live in Tampa. We are the Lightning Capitol of North America {insert Wikipedia link here}. Right now is the rainy season here, and generous amounts of lightning. It's basically the monsoon season. So the power sucks here, and even if you have excellent generators, as Home Shopping Network does, the network connectivity is still bound by local limitations. Tampa is a terrible place to put a data center.