skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think one of the most important purposes of morality is to keep people smart and interesting. I grew up in a pretty sheltered Christian environment, and the difference between how I thought and they way the jaded teenagers at public school thought was very distinct. The behaviors that are traditionally considered sinful end up making the sinner a boring and small minded person in the long run. This is essentially because sin destroys a person's imagination.

The object of sin is usually a very strong, visceral pleasure, and if there is anything that can control the focus of a person's mind it is strong, visceral pleasure. And, when I am thinking about pleasure, I'm not really thinking about anything. It is just a feeling, and feelings don't have any kind of logical content that can lead my mind to other thoughts. Finally, engaging in visceral pleasure makes everything else seem boring by comparison, while also requiring a greater amount of the pleasure's source to get a thrill. The combined result is me having a one track mind, constantly thinking about nothing.
Essays must use generalizations. There are always exceptions to any possible example. However, you are probably reinforcing many, many other deep-seated cultural norms that were not used as examples. Some that may even drop out of favour in the future.
Stolen MacBook Owner Logs On, Takes a Photo, Busts Thieves
thoughts of desperate cows clambering to avoid the stun bolt

I'm certainly not saying that this never happens (How would I know? And from what I hear you don't want to give the meatpacking industry too much slack; they cut every corner they can. Read Fast Food Nation...) but Temple Grandin claims to have built an entire career out of making sure that this sort of thing doesn't happen. She says that panicking the cows is more than just cruel: It lowers the quality of the meat and it threatens to slow your slaughterhouse to a halt.

I read a book by Grandin, and she's an unusual writer; perhaps because she's autistic, she's almost supernaturally incapable of mincing words. I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable reading her work to a kid. :)

Incidentally, as a non-vegetarian married to a vegetarian, I understand your point of view perfectly...
I think most of these "lies" are to avoid things that strongly attract our minds but do not cause them to produce. The things we encourage don't attract our minds immediately, but after time they do, and they cause our minds to be productive.
Five Google Android apps we love
While slightly different, this creates the same exact problem as goto statements.

Reading/writing code should be linear.

Introducing goto statements allows you to "jump around" inside your code--which is bad form and confusing.
This new resistance to higher system requirements is interesting in the context of ESR's "World Domination 201" (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-dom...),
which looked at the 16-bit and 32-bit transitions and predicted that the 64-bit transition would shake up the computer industry again, in 2008. In theory, the middle of the bell curve of computer users would be buying 64-bit systems with 4+ GB of RAM this year, and if Windows cracked under this requirement, Linux or Apple would have a chance to break into the mainstream.

But we're halfway through the year, and 4GB of RAM still doesn't seem to be the median for new computers. Is it because we're finally satisfied with what a desktop computer does? Are smaller, lighter laptops changing the market? Or are retailers and hardware manufacturers deliberately hitting the brakes, having watched Vista go sailing off a cliff ahead of them?
Unicode support would be great.

Is this planned for PHP6 or just being discussed?
It is indeed true that there is no basketball star who is an extremely successful musician. However these pursuits are very different than being an entrepreneur. If you're 100% focused on software engineering and 0% focused on the other things needed to be successful in the software business, you are a software engineer, not an entrepreneur.
Is this the same article that you mentioned almost a year ago? I read it expecting more of an evolutionary psychology approach to the teenage sex issue.

I've read a good bit of literature about religion and its roots in EP, and why it's such a good meme. The "payload" is part of the spread mechanism.
IBM is a sleeper company, which is what microsoft is becoming, which is where the majority of the wealth in this nation is at. I have read the old articles from the 80's and 90's that said that Microsoft would supplant IBM. It is now 2008, and Microsoft generates about US$12B a quarter where IBM is doing right around US$24B a quarter. In other words we are still waiting. IBM made a decision to GIVE microsoft a market. The decision was all the more easy as Mrs. Gates, mom to Bill, was EDIT:(a high level executive at IBM) - on the same boards as the CEO and other board members of IBM - at the time.

My point in all this is that companies, the large ones, the ones that write the US$250M per annum IT checks, buy what IBM tells them to buy. IBM told them to buy Microsoft for a while, because writing that software themselves was a pain. Now IBM will look around for a cloud vendor to be their go to guy for cloud deployments. It is too early to say what this relationship will look like, but it is a certainty that whoever gets the IBM guys out pushing them, will be the enterprise monopoly in the future.

This is a SLIGHT oversimplification of the enterprise purchasing process for large organizations, but it gets at the fundamentals. And in any case, the negation is likely and sufficient to cause GOOG and MSFT trouble. That is, if IBM says NOT to buy Google or Microsoft cloud services, then they are non starters.

If you want to bet on a company that will ride the next enterprise upgrade wave, put your money on IBM. This is the only constant in the global enterprise IT market.

It is way to difficult to figure out whether Google can come up with a product that any large enterprise would want to use. That is, can they really innovate? I think open minded analysts agree that the jury is still out on that one. Equally vexing is the question of whether Microsoft can get their heads out of their butts long enough to create a product that conforms to the next computing paradigm? The only certainty is that whatever happens IBM will be supporting it, and THAT is where the money is. All US$100B a year worth!

And that is only likely to grow!
That too seems to be mere speculation with no evidence or even sound reasoning supporting it. Nobody has yet presented a compelling picture of how search will stop MS from selling copies of Windows. It's no more accurate to say Google could compete in the OS space than it is to say MS could in search.

And don't even get me started on Office.
All I have at work is a parrot. And the parrot is now cackling with laughter.
"Microsoft begins work on the user interface last"

This is part of the problem that Microsoft is having. I'm pretty sure that interface decisions and design aren't the last thing to be done at Apple.
If Microsoft made cars...

1. For no reason whatsoever your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road you would have to buy a new car.

...
http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=689
Advanced Codemunging: How SICP, Emacs, and Lisp Change Your Day Job Performance
I think you're right about that. I've made a few defensive comments in anticipation of and in reaction to antagonism. It's pretty weak of me to be defensive and reactionary in that way. I didn't intend it to insult or dismiss others' viewpoints, yet it did. Thanks for that comment.
Microsoft emails Blender
You must be using one of those new-fangled translations.

Tell me, how many Gospels do you have? if there's more than one, we have a problem.

;p
Narcissism of small code differences
Read Paul Fussell's Wartime. Or Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed - At Peleliu and Okinawa. Then you'll know why I'm happy to study war from my armchair, despite the fact that I'll never really know what combat is like.

It's also good to not know what it feels like to be high on heroin or hooked on nicotine.
Why we need proof - not anecdotes
I think the reasoning is pretty sound.

Microsoft know that in the long term the role of the operating system might dwindle since a lot of the stuff people do is moving onto the web. Salesforce, zoho and google apps are examples of this. This is extremely threatening to them since their main competitive adantage lies in their desktop dominance. So they obviously want to dominate whatever they think might be the next big thing, and one of these happens to be search. And the 500 pound gorilla in that market happens to be Google. And the fact that Google is also trying their hand at an online suite that might replace offfice one day makes them an even bigger threat.

Note that I'm not saying that the desktop is obsolete, or that the one that controls search controls the world. I'm merely saying that Microsoft is looking at current trends which point towards a lot of data and functionality moving to the web, and are hedging their bets accordingly. As they should.
Exactly. The key is what pg hinted at, that parent's like their kids to be cute and innocent, which is usually self-serving if we are completely honest about it.

However, pg seems to assert that the alternative is being jaded and cynical, which does not fit with the children I know who have, for example, witnessed death up close and personal.
The discussion at LWN is also pretty insightful and explains how this happened.

http://lwn.net/Articles/281901/

I think the mantra "don't fix bugs that you don't understand" by Ben Laurie (as linked by randombit, thx) is a really important message to take away from this debacle.
Carl Icahn may go after Yahoo
I agree that belief by itself does not deserve respect, and I upvoted you since your sentence addresses a common defense and should be highlighted.

But, no one has beliefs independent from any kind of cause or reason. So, just because someone says you should respect what they think because they believe it does not mean you should reject their belief due to bad justification.
duthel's comment is not spam.
Google's search business might be bigger than Windows, but let's not forget that the way we access the internet could change as well.
A new protocol for accessing/finding information (no webservers anymore) could put google out of business and they would have to start at 0 as others would also.
Is this intentional? "the anaesthesia was too too much for it"
That was a great article.

It also touched on a commonly-told lie which pg's essay didn't mention: Eternal true love and monogamy in marriage.
Doing Physics with Quaternions
I wonder if a Reddit-style upvote/downvote system might be a better voting system for Yelp. You are forced to choose whether you are recommending a place or not. No wishy-washy in-between score like 3 is available.
Thanks for taking that in the way I intended. I think it is understandable. A "discussion" on the net can feel like a hundred people quickly walking by and taking a quick potshot rather than a genuine exchange of opinions.
If you consider that valuable knowledge, then I agree with you there. There may be some merit to writing (and understanding) a minimal bootloader that enables A20, switches to protected mode, and loads a kernel from a floppy disc. Just getting that far will teach you quite a bit about writing and debugging low-level assembly code. However, if you go this route then, as you say, you should definitely consider it throwaway code.

But, I don't think that knowledge is important. You'll gain much of the same knowledge from implementing virtual memory and multitasking. Besides, the bootloading process is highly architecture-specific. Switch to an ARM or PPC chip, and it's a completely different process.
The Magic SysRq Key For Linux (like Ctrl-Alt-Del for windows, but better)
okay, the main point in what you are saying is true.

if a company is working in a market that is reaching maturity or decline, it should look for a new market where it can invest its effort

but the trick is simple, MS have certain competencies (skills) the new market must be a market where its competencies would be relevant ... the even trickier part is, the relevence must not be so obvious, the product can be completly different, but the needed skills could be same

for example, Dell is good at complex assemblies, so maybe dell, can start assembling cars, instead of PCs, because a car can be customized in ways comparable to a PC

of course this is just an example, but you get the idea
> 7) if an area is just less densely settled does that make it just as unappealing as suburbia in your view?

If you'd seen Paul's west coast home, you'd know the answer to that :-)
22.6 MB of .Net redistributables will make anyone cry.
He was obviously just listening to his taped version and writing down whatever he said almost verbatim. He's obviously very busy, so copying it all down was fine. You just have to read it like he's presenting it. It wasn't that long. And its all talk style, so it keeps changing direction and therefore doesn't get boring.
People with money can already opt out of ads. Tivo is the quintessential example of this. Even before Tivo, pay-per-view was popular amongst those who had money.
heritable does not imply genetic! it could just as well be due to parenting. (i realize it's a twin study, just replying to the title)

and genetic does not imply the relevant genes being inherited have anything to do with executive function. they could just as well be for, say, the right appearance to cause parents to think they are smart and thus help them become smart.
If we think we lie too much to our children - what about the politicians in power that lie to us every day, and call it FREEDOM?
This is only marginally useful. It is not, for example, an effective way to maintain a login session, which will obviously break down on opening another window, or browser restarts, etc. Plus the fact that any website could then steal any user session.

Since this is by far the most useful reason to have session cookies (there are other valid uses, but plenty more abuses), this seems mostly like just a clever hack to me.
An open-source 3D Scanner
Why do you insist on misunderstanding me? I am talking about solving a PROBLEM, and not creating an algorithm. Let's say you were the google guys at the start of their career. The problem they intended to solve involved getting the best result for search. This is a problem that requires 95% of your time spent at a PC. You are no enterpreneur if before you solve that problem, you are going out trying to mingle in startup school or so.

Contrast that with the Amazon guy trying to solve the problem of how to retail books successfully online. This problem cannot be solved by sitting at a computer - one needs to talk to the logistics industry, publishers and so on.

Focusing on the problem will lead to different social behaviour for both teams.

If a person focuses on the problem and solves the problem, the difficulty in selling the solution becomes trivial. If a fellow creates a digg clone, he has not solved any problem. If a fellow creates a tool to monitor the health of students in boarding schools, he has solved a problem, and will have no difficulty in selling, because boarding schools know they need what he is offering, but never had it before.

It's common sense, but people still don't seem to get it: Focusing on the problem is the only way of solving it.
Oh noes, genes might control our behaviour. Why is this issue always so sensitive?

Here's one interesting study that suggests genes to a large extent determine happiness: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080304103308.ht...
Omnisio Syncs Slides with Video Presentations
Mary Maxwell Gates was never an IBM employee. She was on United Way's executive committee at the same time as then IBM CEO John Akers. Their casual conversation led to IBM's introduction to Microsoft.

IBM never meant to give anything to anyone. They were as ruthless then as Microsoft is now. IBM, along with most of the rest of the enterprise world, never imagined the microcomputer as anything but a toy. They didn't even enter the market until 6 years after Apple.

In 1980, IBM was a hardware company. Today they are a service company. The makeovers in between were not painless and were not by choice. Just for not taking the PC seriously.

In 1980, you were as likely to find a job in a Fortune 500 company as anywhere else. Not anymore. New jobs are being created at a much faster rate by smaller, more nimble companies. After all, economies of scale don't mean as much in service economies. These smaller companies don't have the same decision making matrix as the enterprises and will use SaaS. Look at Salesforce.com.
Most modern English speakers seem to use way, way fewer semicolons than they should; I'm not sure whether to blame this on education or if it's just the bar for publishing being lowered; nevertheless, the vast majority of people I've talked to don't know to use semicolons with coordinating adverbs (or whatever they're called) such as "however" and "nevertheless;" oftentimes they also don't know that comma-splices are bad; as an amateur Grammar-nazi, this general practice really irks me.
Isn't this rather off-topic for HN? It's a well-written interesting essay, as always from Paul Graham, but is it at the top of the list for any reason other than it is written by Paul?
Vista reflects the time: all surface, no content improvement. We get the flashy interface, but no new filesystem etc.

ReactOS might replace Windows in the future.
Never been linked to anywhere but the index: http://paulgraham.com/scient.html
3G iPhone with GPS, Video Conferencing, TV?
In the notes, he mentions concern for how the readers 100 years from now will view his essays.
I can think of another reason for lying to kids: because everybody else does, and if your kid doesn't play along there are consequences. I am reminded of Roman Polanski, who was Jewish but was raised Catholic at an early age to protect him from the Nazis. He ended up becoming an actual Catholic, because you can't tell a four year old that he's really a Jew, but has to pretend to be a Catholic, because they're incapable of being that deceptive. I can't remember why he finally left the Church in his teens, but it was for something like a conflict with a priest, the kind of thing that lots of gentiles have the Church over.

If your kid curses, talks about how there are no worthy black scientists, tells other kid about how the penis squirts semen into the vagina and that's where babies come from, and denies the existence of God (I live in a red state, this one may not be a big deal where some of you live, but in some places this will still mark you as a pariah), then there are certain consequences, especially if the child does it in front of adults, because other parents aren't like that. Nothing as severe as a trip to Auschwitz, but I at least want my kid to understand tribal taboos before breaking them.
I teach my child not to swear because OTHER adults think there's something wrong with it. I truly don't give a fuck, but I don't want my son to be banned from his best friend's house because his mom heard him say "fuck."
Well, I'm certainly interested in spreading it, I just don't have any great ideas for how to do so. At one point I had it so you could email the links off the site to other people, but it wasn't used much so I dropped it in favor of dropping clutter.
i have trouble seeing how these comments apply to the content of the post - parenting influences are largely controlled (as you seem to indicate) and I don't see how these heritability estimates could reflect something unrelated to executive function. that's the whole point, they clearly have something to do with executive function. one would assume that something like appearance would show large unshared environment since kids dress differently, etc/
a claim of 99% is too high for me to resist posting the following URL:

"Why Most Published Research Findings are False":
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/09...

and

"Most scientific papers are probably wrong":
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7915
for one simple example, it could be facial appearance. say that all parents in our culture react in different ways to different facial appearances. then the gene that is causing heritable executive function could actually be for the face that causes best parenting treatment.

any causations of this type (gene causes something detectable by parent, and parental reaction causes improved executive function) is consistent with the study/data.
NASA Opens Arms to Private Space Industry
I suspect Toshiba will solve that problem by not allowing you to program the SPEs at all. :-)
Enabling 3D microelectronics platforms: MCMs
On a winding mountain road six miles from the nearest cross street.
Because it's thought provoking and well written?
Science or Philosophy?: Jon Elster and John Searle (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
I honestly thought this would be about how every time someone anywhere posts a code snippit online 10 people attack how it is written suggesting differing opinions(3 of which won't work at all, 2 will be in a different language, and 2 will solve completely different problems).

I see it everywhere I look and I'm really getting sick about it. How about the rest of you?
I prefer "Working at love" to "Falling in love" - it addresses both of those "lies"
Gadget geek's guide to spending stimulus check
"Guide to NumPy" Sales Model: Sell book for limited time (or total price), then it's free
> I honestly thought this would be about how every time someone anywhere posts a code snippit online 10 people attack how it is written suggesting differing opinions(3 of which won't work at all, 2 will be in a different language, and 2 will solve completely different problems).

Does Freud's "Narcissism of Small Differences" help explain why this happens?
I'm surprised Enkin (http://www.enkin.net/) isn't on the list.
From the website:

To publish with Trelgol, authors must set at least one of the following:

1. a total price (P),
2. a total time (T) (maximum 14 years).

When an author-determined combination of these requirements (P and T, P or T, P only, T only) is reached, Trelgol will release the creative content either to the public domain or under at worst an "attribution only"-style license such as the one offered by the Creative Commons. In other words, the content is set free (in all senses of the word) as soon as the author receives compensation (or sufficient time has passed).

This sounds like an interesting sales model. I wonder if it will work.
That's an outrageous opinion, frankly.

Do you blame the people of Burma too for not "recognizing the signs" of the impending catastrophe? The rape victim for wearing a dress that's too tight?

Blame should be placed always with the actor. There may be extenuating circumstances for the people involved, but one should never allow those to dissolve and/or lesson the blame in the action.
I've used this site and I like it.
Letter to a Young Procrastinator: Some last-minute advice from a veteran slacker
Yeah, fair enough. The definition of what should be on or off topic is always a complex one. And I did enjoy reading it.
A working solution is here:

http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/res/show.html?what=barcode

http://people.inf.ethz.ch/adelmanr/batoo/
PG may not have kids, but I do. His observations of parenting are true nonetheless.
i see - so you're talking about gene x environment interactions. it's true this isn't accounted for in the analysis.

but i find it hard to believe that environmental effects of any sort could explain 99% of the variance that we see here, and I don't know how even a whole genome analysis could rule out GxE interactions. how exactly is that done?
I'm sure it's intentional. Pinker's written many excellent books for laypeople which are full of great, fun examples. And the books themselves are great. He has a knack for explaining new, interesting ideas in an engaging way.