skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nutcase? I think its abundantly clear he was deliberately trying to cast doubt by telling lies. I'm not sure if I should be surprised as I am that the internet so readily believes such a blatant ploy. I suspect if he wasn't a geek reddit/slashdot/digg/hackernews would be unable to stop laughing at the blatant transparency of it.
Richard Branson Ticket to Space.
Wow, what an enormous rathole you have discovered.

Let me politely decline to explore this complex issue of justice, policing, and ethics -- one which probably should be decided case-by-case rather than by a one-size-fits-all rule -- and just point out that accepting patches from an apparently-insane convicted murderer is really, really bad P.R. for your open source project.
And on the other side, the serial killer friend/lover was completely unknown to the jury.
If all we're arguing about is the degree of the evidence... that's why we have juries.

The problem is that a judge must interpret a guilty verdict as an immutable fact, rather than as a decision made by emotional and fundamentally random human beings:

if conviction == guilty
decide a sentence based on the type of crime

Instead, a person's prison sentence should reflect how confident we are in the guilty verdict.
And in other news Tony Soprano today made a large contribution to the Palish for Governor campaign.
limiting prison terms to an absolute maximum of ten years...

At the risk of repeating myself: Yes, you'd be right to complain if Reiser were being sentenced to death, but he isn't. And it would be sad if Reiser spent 25 or 30 years in prison even though he was innocent... but that might not happen, because at any moment Nina could turn up, dead or alive, and exonerate him.

[EDIT: removed bogus argument I made based on misreading the original article. I promise to get more sleep before my next post. :]
Wow, that was a tremendous talk. Initially, I was expecting him to go on for an hour about his pet project and it really turned into a much larger discussion about business on the internet a la DHH's recent talk at startup school.
>accepting patches from an apparently-insane convicted murderer is really, really bad P.R. for your open source project.

Touche.
I can just imagine it:
"And Hans Reiser was heard arguing with his wife - just like he'd practiced for years on the mailing lists of open source communities where overly-violent and highly-sensitive people are known to dwell and practice verbal abuse quite often."
Would what you're describing really be much easier than a "Buy this book at Amazon" link?

There's also the issue of trust: people know Amazon. They might not be as willing to buy a book from a random website.
The issue is that many people hate ads/affiliate programs. With this method, these issues go away.

Yes trust is an issue, but most companies that need to advertise would benefit from being on a more trusted site anyway.
2nd Grade Math
What is included in 2nd grade math
My Mac Mini
The way I picked up AJAX was by looking of some of the simpler articles on the basics (don't worry about cross-browser to start with) around the web. The basic concept is quite simple and it is easy to get up-and-running if you have experience with client-side and server-side scripting.

For me, the firebug tool for firefox was indispensable as it allows you to see the requests that are being sent out and received from the server, information you have no easy way to get at without such a tool.

Once you are up and running with the basics, the magic of AJAX will no longer be so mysterious and you can move on to one of the frameworks for adding cross-browser compatibility (I like jquery personally).
my gf has aspergers and although she acts strange she wouldn't go to the lengths that hans did. which is more than a little strange especially given the circumstances.
TwitterSnooze. A script I wrote over the weekend.  Thoughts?
Oops that was poor grammar on my part. I meant the "if not" to refer to the state informing the jury.
Currently, yes. That (indirect) question is difficult for me, and the answer might change in the future as I become more experienced. (I'm only 20, so what do I know anyway?)

There are proportionally few people who are murderously inclined. It's worth risking them if it means that no innocents are convicted. Perfect murders are unlikely, and they become more unlikely as forensic technology improves. It's best for a prison sentence to be based on a proof, but if we can't be positive about a person's guilt then we should favor the possibility of innocence.
Nick Bostrom: Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.
Pretty common complaints about the actual OS for people who are used to windows. You just have to get used to the idea that windows float and that it's not really designed to have windows maximized. I was pretty used to the interface after a month or so, I started in late 2003, so Panther was out by then and Expose helped out a lot.

I have to disagree with running 2 monitors, I've done it for a couple years now and have never had any usability issues.

However, the Apple store comments are pretty much dead-on. I'd rather just order online or go to a reseller then deal with the Apple Store.
Various startups have tried various versions of this idea already. I forget their names; they all seem to have failed.
I agree with izaidi. I would rather have a link to amazon. I may value your opinion and so if you present the link to amazon as a recommendation instead of an ad, I will likely click through and check it out. But just because I'm on your site and value your opinion, doesn't mean I want you as a third party in my purchase and I already shop on amazon anyways.
Git from the bottom up
Really nice, detailed walkthrough of how git works.
People don't hate affiliate programs so much as they are weary of people trying to sell them something all the time. For this reason any sort of embedded sales link is not much different than an affiliate program.
Simple brain exercise can boost IQ
Of course, its just that inside all of us, there is a conspiracy theorist that thinks anything could be a set up ;)
Man, this thing is literally what I have been working on since last week. Now it's mentioned in NS I have to rush like there's no tomorrow.

The n-back test is basically a short term memory task. It is has been found to be a strong indicator of fluid intelligence because it is determined by attention and ability to manipulate and perform comparisons on objects stored in the STM buffer. 2-back test is fairly easy without distractions; 3-back becomes very taxing for the untrained. And it can definitely be improved.
I know for sure that I'll be championing Phil Spector to be allowed to continue evolving his Wall of Sound once he gets convicted!

>>> Would it be so horrible to give him a laptop and some internet access and let him hack?

Yes it would. The only hacking he'll be doing is with a shiv.
To be honest, my motivation for posting it here was to see how long until someone starts working on a site based on it.

I have to admit, negative 7 days is sooner than I expected :p
Why does it matter if the guy is "smart" or not? The justice system doesn't play favorites for people with high IQs - especially when they're accused of murder.
I think that finding extraterrestrial life would challenge many of the worlds popular religions. Take Christianity for example. How will Christians interpret Genesis after the discovery of life on other planets? Was Christ sent to other planets as well?
Actually I wrote my first n-back test close to two years ago, but for myself. The biggest reason why I wanted to make a web version is because of all these brain games popping up, made by people who don't know what they're talking about. This thing is for real.

I'm also working on subitization test variants, but that's much more familiar.
You just described the OpenBSD mailing lists quite accurately.
"He is an extraordinarily smart person, a valuable member of society, and could have made significant accomplishments in the next 25 years with his intelligence and experience."

I really don't like this line of argument, because it implies that if he were not an extraordinarily smart person, a valuable member of society, without significant accomplishments, then he should be convicted. If it were a homeless divorced guy living out of his minivan, should he have been convicted? How about a blue-collar landscaper? An unemployed househusband?

A society's standards of justice say far more about the society than they do about the people who go on trial before them. We have laws instead of kings because there's this wonderful innovation called "equal before the law". We owe a lot of Western civilization to that.

The part I find disturbing is that he was essentially convicted because the jury didn't like him. I know this happens all the time - this is why lawyers have you wear a suit in court, and why they agonize over whether you should testify or not, and why they coach you on what to say on the stand, and why they have closing arguments. But it's usually not quite so overt. He made an ass out of himself at his own trial - I'd like to believe that it shouldn't matter when "justice is blind", but of course it does, and that's why he's going to jail.
The jury was asked how confident they were. They had the option of returning not guilty, or even guilty of a lesser crime, such as manslaughter --- murder without intent.

You are obviously not as confident as the jury was. But you were not on the jury. The jury, given the facts of the case, appears to have been maximally confident about Reiser's culpability: they returned a verdict of premeditated malicious intentional murder, where they instead could have found that Reiser had accidentally killed Nina in the heat of a terrible argument.

At a certain point, you just have to let go of the fact that you disagree with the jury. Clearly, we cannot simply poll every person on the country as to what they thought of the case from afar.
The "friend/lover" was not a serial killer. No professional who interviewed Sturgeon believes him. If they had, he would have been called to testify. The defense had the option of calling him; they chose not to, because they did not think he would help their case.

I find it ridiculous that the DA would have chosen to pursue a case against a lonely computer programmer instead of locking up a serial killer. You have to believe something pretty incredible to argue that Sturgeon was a real factor in this case.
There's a difference between being convicted "because the jury doesn't like you" and being convicted "because you manage to do supernatural damage to your credibility on the stand".

I think that if Reiser had shut up and not testified, he'd have gotten manslaughter. It seems clear that his demeanor amped his conviction up to murder. But the jury didn't do that on a whim: Reiser managed to portrary himself as deceptive, evasive, and utterly unconcerned over the welfare of his family. That got factored in. How could it not?
I disagree with this advice in the general sense. There is a trend right now in Silicon Valley to have all manner of meetups and presentations. I've worked with tons of these guys and the majority of them are not going anywhere. You still need something worthwhile to present. A top-notch presentation about another new Ruby DSL for migrating data from MySQL to PostgreSQL is not going to help your career as much as writing Anywhere.FM in 3 months. If your work is good enough, you can always get someone better than you to do the talking. Improving your communication skills can't hurt but it isn't the single most important thing you can do.
216 tiny spherical magnets == billions of topological possibilities == one cool toy
Yes, but we tend to collaborate with members of our own species and enslave/butcher/experiment on other species. Even our relationships with dogs and other family pets can be highly unequal and sometimes downright disturbing. (Treating them as chattel, "putting them to sleep" when it's more convenient to do so.) So this counts against your position in two ways: 1) our only data point indicates that interspecies collaboration is likely to be less than cozy 2) others might observe our treatment of other species and use that to evaluate our potential for hostility.

Also, our record with regards to polluting our own environment doesn't recommend us highly as "good citizens of the galaxy." (This was brought up as a possibility in David Brin's Sundiver series.)

And this isn't even considering the vast differences in culture and even basic mental models there will likely be. It's far from a sure bet that this openness will extend to us.

Also, one can readily imagine how a "innocuous" act from the point of view of one species might be considered a greivous crime by another. (The Ender's Game books are one example.)
I think I might give this a shot. I recently posted looking for a developer to work with as a co-founder and only had one bite. I'm going down the outsourcing route with one idea right now. I'm also trying to teach myself Ruby as I type this entry. I've seen lots of complaints here from developers dealing with douchebag MBAs. I'd like to find some developers with some balls to invest their time without putting cash in their hands.
I hate that it all comes down to success equaling traffic. Isn't there more to success?
I'm going to have a bit of a laugh when Nina comes back from her vacation to Russia.
There is a well known study of Native American cultures in the Mississippi valley where we have access to skeletal remains over many hundreds of years. We can see the health of individuals decline as they made their switch to corn agriculture from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In fact, there are considerable increases in disease and a shortening of lifespan. The reason why the agricultural lifestyle won-out was because it was capable of supporting larger populations with ruling theocratic elites who could then organize manpower for military and other purposes. Hunter-gatherers, despite being healthier individually, couldn't compete.
Matt, I think you should try Ubuntu for comparison purposes.
it doesn't? The average prisoner has an IQ that is one standard deviation below the mean. People whose IQ is one or two standard deviations above the mean rarely go to prison.
> The single most important thing you must do to improve your programming career

... stop reading social news sites and start writing some (&#@!ing code?
Finding the Exact Spot of the First Internet/ARPANET Transmission [video]
I'm not sure if Marconi or Tesla could detect WiMax signals. Of course, that's only 100 years, no telling what a thousand or a million years of tech could hide in the EM spectrum.

Also, stuff like nanopond makes me want to think self replication is easier than he's making it out to be.
I thought this post was satire until about 75% of the way down..

That said, his point about installing programs is spot on for people from the Windows world. It makes sense in a UNIX-y way, but it's totally counterintuitive if you've come from Windows. I found it odd the first time, then grew to love it.
I disagree with your criterial of looking at previous qualifications of the developer but by your own criteria you should love web2py.

Yes, developing the ORM was very very easy compared to, for example, developing www.fermiqcd.net (BTW we should be friends since I see you are in data representation and me too these days mdp.cti.depaul.edu/vqcd).

I will agree with you that for some of the web2py components there is a better module out there, the point you are missing is that the web2py modules are designed to work together while the alternatives are not. You will not appreciate this until you try it. Here is an example: Pygments is a much better general purpose syntax highlighter than the web2py's one, nevertheless web2py's one can highlight web2py code, create clickable links from web2py keywords to the web2py online documentation, is faster and fits in 10k. If you need to syntax highlight Java or PHP code you can still easy_install and use Pygments. Although you can, the web2py modules are not designed to be taken out and used separately.
Someone please make Twitter Alerts, just like Google Alerts,

YOu would think that you would get Tweets about your brand via Google Alerts, but that does not seem to be the case. Searching Google yes, but they are not indexed for long. Also, with a Twitter Alert service it needs to be instantaneous!
This is sick.

How are they doing this? There's no API for Yahoo mail is there? Are they just monitoring HTTP requests (post).
Ubuntu/Debian which is more UNIX-y than MacOS in some ways has none of this. Software installation and uninstallation is a breeze.

In my 2 months of experience with the Mac, I have found that the Mac is very appealing when it's new. It's beautiful, but sometimes it feels like Steve Jobs prefers form over function a bit too much.
regardless of what studies may have said or not said,

Good one. I like that honest approach to inquiry: Fuck science.
People with high IQs can afford top-notch legal counsel.
it's not really designed to have windows maximized

I've heard this line before - people say it as if something disastrous would happen if Apple gave in and made the green '+' a maximize button... so far nothing's coming to mind.

(btw, I haven't used windows for anything other than testing IE for about 9 years, and I still hate Apple's choice regarding the 'zoom' button).
I still use Windows, but run an Ubuntu VM in it for all web development. You get the real Windows, the real Linux, everyone wins. Microsoft's investment in fonts really shows - it's my #1 reason for sticking with the OS.
Genius Bar is lame.

Never had a problem with dual monitors aside from the fact that now the adaptor isn't bundled, and the DVI cable they will try to sell you first at the Mac Store uses a pin layout that no monitor or cable sold actually uses.

The maximize button is indeed bizarre. I just maximized safari and it made the window 2/3 the size I had it and shifted it to the left hand corner of the screen. Then I "maximized" iTunes and it sent it into mini mode. Maximizing iChat seems to switch the buddy window from a skinny column to a wider, but shorter rectangle.

Not sure why installing problems is so hard, my grandma and 11 year old cousins have no problems with this. However, every die hard windows switcher can't seem to figure it out.

Fonts are a matter of taste and Windows users have none. But that's OK! MySpace is the #1 social network, NASCAR is the #1 sport in America and Bill Gates is the richest dude around. Taste doesn't really matter as much as people who have it would like to think...
Seems like a formula for (a) half-assery on the part of developers working on someone else's baby, and (b) incessant nagging from the "idea guys" who can neither communicate their feature requests nor understand their implications.

In short, a hip "seed" version of the company where Dilbert worked.
The inventor of the ideas behind SuperMemo has a fascinating site in which he explains how he uses the same principles to organize his life. http://www.supermemo.com/english/contents.htm

For instance, he states that "lifetime minimum cost of remembering a single well-formulated piece of knowledge can easily be estimated to fall into the range from 30 seconds to 5 minutes (minimum cost is the cost that is achieved using the optimally spaced repetition schedule). This estimation can be used in cost-benefit analysis in deciding which mission-critical pieces of knowledge should be subject to learning based on spaced repetition."
Sage advice from a high school friend: "If you can use Windows, you can use Linux. If you can't, get a Mac. While you won't be able to use it either, at least it'll look pretty."
Incrementalism and "The New New Thing"
That's absurd. We would notice any intelligent society, no matter how primitive.
I do use the api... the only way I can think of to not request passwords is to send emails to people reminding them to unsnooze people. The follow/unfollow commands require credentials (with good reason).
I don't think we're highly advanced, so we have 0 data points from a highly advanced species.

Collaboration leads to advancement and that trend applies to higher levels of advancement than we are at. For example, imagine there was no war. Trillions of dollars of economic activity could instead be directed toward, say, curing cancer. The more collaborative a society, the farther and faster it can advance. Learning from another species (thanks for the cool warp drive tips, Xarcon!) is a type of collaboration that offers benefits that a species doesn't get following the approach in the parent post. So, as a matter of policy, extending the openness to other species can be sound strategy.

The rest of what you're saying is not really related to my argument, which was focused solely on the "personality" of highly advanced species.
There are probably a lot more counterexamples.
6th Grade Math
What is included in 6th grade math
Ruby, Lisp, Why a Lexus is Not An Acceptable Ferrari
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking

Please refute. Good luck.

If you're basing your post on a Penn and Teller Bullshit episode, they now say they were wrong. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrub3dt7R5U
dual monitors (which, by the way, you shouldn’t even bother attempting on a Mac. My cofounder has to close the lid when he hooks his MBP up to a monitor).

Funny, my cofounder's MBP works just fine with a second monitor.

The window maximizing thing is probably my biggest single annoyance when using a Mac. I've noticed that some people hate maximizing windows, and prefer having them smaller and overlapping, I guess to be able to see the contents and make switching between them easier. I'm the opposite, I need my windows maximized - I don't ever want to deal with moving or resizing them, alt-tab or the taskbar work just fine for me. I guess Macs work great for the first group of people, but not for me.
The disastrous thing is that it would be less useful to have a maximized window be 10x the size of its contents. For example, IMO the behavior of safari on maximize is just beautiful, because it's tailored to the specific website you're viewing.

If the application is a window into your data, why make that window bigger than necessary, thus obscuring your desktop, or some other window behind it? That may not be disastrous, but I think its intent makes sense.

Without further explanation, I end up suspecting that when he writes: "it almost never does what you’d want or expect it to," the emphasis is on his expectations as a Windows user, not on what he would prefer, all things being equal.

[and for the record, I'm speaking as an Ubuntu user, who has never owned a mac]
I want to obscure my desktop, and all the other windows. Why would I want that stuff in my peripheral vision when I'm busy working?
FoundRead Moves to GigaOM
Not necessarily. People with lots of money can afford top-notch legal counsel.
> ...Bill Gates is the richest dude around...

Don't mean to nitpick, but he's currently #3, actually (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_billionaires).
Window maximising: I use some Quicksilver scripts from

http://jon.smajda.com/blog/2007/06/30/keyboard-control-for-m...

The fact that you can use keyboard shortcuts makes this even better.
i'm looking for some information here...how do you not be an "idea guy" if you have ideas? I have detailed business requirements, well thought out mockups, use cases, I listen well, "stay out of the kitchen", what else?
"Kinda neat", like, "I hope there's a Greasemonkey script to turn it off?" Or "kinda neat", like, "possibly a useful way to monitize my site and annoy my users".

Do you honestly think that anyone has ever selected some text on that site, and then randomly right clicked on it hoping that related search terms would pop up?