skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sorry, fell into a little philosophical opaqueness there. Platonist is meant to refer to the ancient philosopher Plato. What he may be most famous for is his theory of Forms. The idea is that there are two worlds: the material world which we can perceive directly and another realm that is "intelligible" but not directly perceivable. We can refer to these as the sensible and supersensible realms. The supersensible realm is accessible through thought and abstraction: it is a world of perfection. It is this realm where perfect circles and shapes and ideas lie. In the Republic, he uses the allegory of the cave to describe the relationship between the supersensible realm and the sensible realm. In a sense, the sensible realm can be imagined as the shadows of figures on a cave wall, where we are unable to turn around and see the figures themselves and only to perceive their projections into the sensible realm. The most modern reinterpretation of Plato's philosophy is present in Judeochristian philosophy. Many would go so far as to say that Christianity is simply a dressed-up reinterpretation of Platonism.

My second section was meant to deal with a proof of God's existence known as the "Ontological Argument." I'm going to reproduce it hear and quote liberally from Wikipeda (I'm kind of lazy):

1. If I am thinking of the Greatest Being Thinkable, then I can think of no being greater
1a. If it is false that I can think of no being greater, it is false I am thinking of the Greatest Being Thinkable
2. Being is greater than not being
3. If the being I am thinking of does not exist, then it is false that I can think of no being greater.
4. If the being I am thinking of does not exist, then it is false that I am thinking of the Greatest Being Thinkable
Conclusion: If I am thinking of the Greatest Being Thinkable, then I am thinking of a being that exists

I know that you are not attempting to prove the existence of God, but the argument bares some similarity, simply replace "Greatest Being" with "Perfect Circle." If there is no circle more perfect then, by the same argument, such a circle must exist. The trouble is this argument is deceptively simple. Bertrand Russell notably said, "The argument does not, to a modern mind, seem very convincing, but it is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies."

Perhaps my favorite refutation comes from David Hume:

[T]here is an evident absurdity in pretending to demonstrate a matter of fact, or to prove it by any arguments a priori. Nothing is demonstrable, unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing, that is distinctly conceivable, implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being, whose existence is demonstrable.

In this way we can see that conception (of a form or of God or of a mathematical concept) does not lead directly to any statements of existence or non-existence: they simply "are."
Totally correct! Had been meaning to change it, then crashed out. Woke up to shock that someone reads my blog. Then changed it. By the way...now accepting applications for a copywriter. I am very very bad at headlines. :(
It's gossip. TMZ for the tech crowd.
The deal with bcrypt is that you can increase the number of work units, so that bcrypt gets slower and slower as you like. That defeats the ability to very quickly iterate over a dictionary, because it simply takes too long to do effectively.

(Please correct any of this if I'm wrong. IANACryptographer.)
He and Zed got into a pretty heated discussion in this thread and a few others:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1570694
I agree on the no substance part....and I wrote it. Was very shocked that this post got any traction and now I'm curious about it from a sociology / marketing point of view.
That's fine, of course, but then it's not open source until you release the source. I agree with the OP that it's misleading if labeled otherwise.
No one said anything about causation. Reexamine the sentence, adjusted to the passive voice:

As you can see, the general pattern is that better pictures are taken by more complex cameras.

This does not conflict with your hypothesis.
Try Kensai.
Ask HN:  How would you introduce a 14 year old to programming?
When I was in about 8th grade I downloaded a copy of Visual Basic 3, which was my first introduction to a higher-level language. Before that, I had played around with basic on one of those toy computers. How would you introduce a child in middle school to programming? Does anyone know of any studies done?
WordPress - in my experience - is easier to deal with, while Drupal is a more complete solution, but with a steeper learning curve.

If I were you, I'd go with WordPress.
Actually, I did spend a year (and parts of 2 summers) in Austin. I used to go for late night walks near my apartment, which was just off 183, well north, in strip-mall land.

If you walk slowly enough, you won't sweat. Or maybe that's just Austin.
Bah, Falls Church isn't a suburb anymore; anything inside the beltway is basically just more of DC.
People always complaining... Too cold in winter, too hot in summer... Too inflexible framework, too much choose in framework... Too boring gf, too hot gf (attracting too much males =))... Too high taxes, too low quality of life... I can continue =)

Just shut up and learn/do stuff. Learn/do the way you like it. This is how everything evolve!
I actually applied for one job labelled "product manager rockstar" when I first saw the term. But that was mostly because I had been playing music onstage for ten years and I thought it would be funny to put that in my resume and send it in.
The site is intended to go along with the activities that happen here. I was planning to name it HNSeeder. Alot of developers have the problem of finding an audience for their product, and I'm not just talking seeding from HN alone, I'm thinking about different demographics and location. So, it's more of a complementary not a competition. Since, I haven't gotten any feedback from it, I will probably build it and put it on github for anyone who wants a chance to run it.
Short version (you almost got around to it, but didn't explicitly state it :)) -- Don't use straight hash functions because they are made to be fast. Even if you salt/nonce them, you can generate private rainbow tables quickly.

Use a password hiding method that's slow to compute (slow being "this operation isn't implemented in hardware or optimized assembly") which is what bcrypt or scrypt provides.

Differences in speed/effort are mentioned at http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html -- scrypt enc is approximately 100 billion times more than the cost of cracking the same password on a file encrypted by openssl enc
Or bad math. The guy confuses mean & median in the article.
i think the deal is that it wasn't like this for ruby before.(and it still really isn't, but rails has grown exponentially)
Paper is cheap today, but becomes a more expensive choice.

You have to figure in the implied costs of transporting, storing, archiving, searching, referencing, etc.

That's why, much as legitimate uses of paper have persisted, they have done so only within areas of local creation: paper tickers don't leave the air traffic bullpen, annotated papers don't leave the desks of their authors, post-it notes rarely leave the desk, etc.

In short: software is failing creators, and that's where paper persists. After the process of creation --during recording, transportation, storage, reference, indexing, etc-- paper is already dead.
> It forces people to be more aggressive with their investments if they want to maintain wealth. If your making 15% ROI each year 2% inflation is nothing, if you make 2.5% ROI each year inflation is going to crush you. Now which one of those people has demonstrated a better utilization of capital?

Please be careful to talk make clear whether you are talking about nominal ROI or inflation-adjusted (i.e. real) ROI.

If you have a tame investement with x% real ROI, you will get approximately x%+inflation nominal ROI.

So your argument needs patching up.

It is true, that inflation deters one from just holding onto cash.
Is charging monthly for a license that you download a common practice? Obviously, a recurring pricing structure would be my preference if that's realistic. My initial idea was a yearly license.

On the Analytics API front, I have plans to use the API for a SaaS model later on, but right now I wanted to give developers a tool for running flexible but simple server side tests.
You'd be surprised at how many people who own iphones own one outside of their means. There are tons of people working two jobs or never eating out just to pay their cell phone bill.
I had the same problem as the author (SD cards in an Acer Aspire One). It took me about twenty minutes to mind the fix on the web and apply it to get both card readers working. I'm not sure why it would have taken him the whole day and only get one working.

I've also had lots of weird hardware configuration things with Windows, especially when upgrading from one major release of Windows to another, so I'm not sure that you can say it's a Linux thing.
Whitman's biggest goof could be Jobs's next coup
So in theory you can sync to as many iPads as you want? Didn't know that.
Shouldn't the conclusion here be "make friends with people that own Panasonic m4/3rds or nice dSLRs"? None of their example photos look like self portraits.
Maybe it's that the job market in computers especially is so much more dynamic with better opportunity for advancement, so it attracts a greater share of the best and the brightest.

It might also be accessibility. Anyone can play with a computer. A jet engine, not so much.
Yes, Yes, yes. I have implemented two small websites on GAE. It's fabulous. It has some scaling issues, but it scales up high enough for proof of concepts and minimum viable products. It is cheap, and easy to use. No futzing around with a server, ever. No DB installation or maintenance issues. Just write and run.
"AAPL could swallow Skype whole without even pulling out the Amex Black card." - I definitely thought that was funny.
If Myrhvold wanted to give the book away for free, he'd have put it on the web. Maybe he still will! The rest of this comment is just rationalizing. Going to the library to read the book is inconvenient (no library is going to let you check this book out; most libraries won't even have it for a couple years). The convenience you want costs $500. But you don't want to pay $500 for convenience, so you take it instead.

Don't kid yourself; you're not torrenting books to get access to the knowledge inside of them. You're torrenting them because you don't want to pay the convenience fee the publisher and author decided to charge.

Don't expect universal sympathy for this endeavor on a site dedicated to people who earn their living creating and selling intellectual property. I'm actually surprised people here are as supportive of piracy as they are.
Gambling on grades
I don't have direct experience, but I can share some of my favorite links on the subject.

This is my ultimate favorite:

http://teachingkids.railsbridge.org/2009/08/15/teaching-ruby...

I also like this guy's blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alfredth/
IPhone to Droid-X: Lots to Like
c'mon. if you want child to learn computers - install *nix and ask them to work in it.

but, ahh.. these government budgets - that they HAVE to spend..
Its Official: We are Burnt Out - Productivity Drops
Where Founders Come From
So many people wonder how they can make money online. This is a good technique to know to make it easier.
Are you referring to this bit?

"Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York University and one of the co-authors of the paper, said he drafted the introduction and conclusions of the paper, based on data that Hauser collected and analyzed."

As far as I can tell from just this article, raw data is available (he supplied it to a skeptic for a disputed study in the '90s), it just wasn't shared with the co-author for no doubt division of labor reasons.

It should also be noted that raw data is generally quite messy in format (lab notebooks, recorder paper strips and the output of other machines, in this case a set of videos, etc.). Releasing a copy, especially in a form that will make sense to others (e.g. adding annotations or explaining your labeling system) will take time and money you'd rather spend on doing more science, so you only do it when necessary.

Climategate certainly told us that the sharing of raw data with peer reviewers or skeptics is anything but routine or normal (they weren't called on the carpet for merely refusing to do that); you might recall that one of the things that cased it all to fall apart was when a member of clique published a paper in a journal they didn't realize had a "supply your raw data" requirement....

Raw data can most certainly be tampered with, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thereza_Imanishi-Kari, a case I know an awful lot about due to overlapping social circles plus incidental contact with NIH's "fraud busters" in the mid-90s. Here the Secret Service "inks and paper" types were called in and found that some raw lab notebook level type data was falsified after the fact, or at least this was reported in Science in quite a bit of detail.

The important real test is reproducibility. That's why there can be a lot of fraudulent science without it hurting the general scientific endeavor: if it's unimportant, no one will depend on it and it gets the "publish or perish" job done. If it's important, people will try to build upon it, that won't work (that's where Imanishi-Kari lost), they'll try to reproduce your work to see how they're screwing up, and the fraud/mistake/whatever will get caught.

I am a bit surprised at how terrifically opaque Harvard's handling of this is. As the journal editor said:

"[...] he had not been told what specific errors had been made in the paper, which is unusual. “Generally when a manuscript is withdrawn, in my experience at any rate, we know a little more background than is actually published in the retraction,’’ he said. “The data not supporting the findings is ambiguous.’’"

No kidding. This is not a satisfactory state of affairs, as is pointed out elsewhere.
How Can I Make My Dog Food Taste Better?
I'm a freelance developer. I'm always looking for other talented developers and designers, like the ones that read HN, to help on my projects. But I have a lot of trouble finding them. Job boards and resume search sites are too expensive. elance and other sites like it are full of outsourcing companies and are rigidly structured for quote/bid projects.

What I need is a site that's free to search and has quality developers and designers posting their resumes, work samples, etc. I think there needs to be some sort of community validation of the users so they are validated as well.

So I started building a site to serve as an open directory of talent.

At the moment anyone can sign up and post their resume.

What should I do to attract/foster talented designers and developers to the site? Should I make sign up by invitation only? Should the site be limited to only IT professionals? Should I allow users to post code and graphic snippets as sample work? Should all users need to get x number of recommendations before they appear in search results?
There was an article recently posted on HN about how your type of business plays into the logistics of hiring called "Is Your Startup A Cash or Equity Business?" with some good discussion.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1589808

Concerning whether you should hire or contract, that depends on the kind of startup you have and what stage it's in. Being a contract developer among other things, I am naturally biased toward that route if it makes sense at akk for the project. But in my experience it doesn't make sense for most of the startups I've come across.

If you are pre-revenue and not funded, then contracting makes no sense. If you are pre-revenue and funded, it makes a little sense, but not as much as bringing on a dev as a cofounder for equity (not just because you can better afford it, but because you need it and it helps to validate your concept to find someone willing to come aboard).

So, when does contracting make sense? Typically if you have decent revenue and one of the following also applies:

a) you need to prove an initial add-on concept for your business
(e.g. a new feature or complementary software service/product)

b) you are unsure of your future development needs beyond your immediate need.

c) you are unsure of future revenues and/or company stability,
in which case you need to stay as agile as possible.

d) you need something to be developed and completed NOW.

Of course, this criteria is not exhaustive or absolute, just some anecdotal guidelines.
The number of hops still isn't related to net neutrality any more so than buying servers in a particular country can reduce the number of hops to a given ISP.
Major (unfixable) flaw found in P!=NP paper.
Probably my favorite quote on this subject is from Dan Wineman at Rogue Amoeba: "You say 'looks like somebody has too much time on their hands' but all I hear is 'I'm sad because I don't know what creativity feels like.'"
I've cut back on RSS dramatically
?

Every payment is a transfer from one person to another. If you spend $10 on, say, golden rocks (gold), it doesn't get eaten and wiped from existence by the God of Golden Rocks, but rather goes into the pocket of the gold miners and owners of the gold mining capital. It doesn't make a difference that gold is a commodity, not a service.

Net product is equal to income. You learn this in Macroeconomics 101. Example financial statement: http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTa...
I got into it through HTML and javascript. This was in the Geocities and Tripod days. Websites were really the only application that I could create something cool easily.

I also played about with VB and Pascal, but stopped because it took too long to create anything usable. Although HTML and JS are not terrible complicated, it allows for simple development and it is very usable later in life. You could get them into server side scripting too.

Also, check out the Torque game engine. It is pretty easy to create a video game with no programming at all. When you want to get more advanced you can do some Lua scripting. When you want to get really advanced you can work on the C++ that the engine is built on. Torque is pretty well supported and you can even port the games to XBox.
I noted that :
- With a great idea but bad execution, someone else will probably do it better.
if there is any conclusion to be made, it's that low-carb diets may have some positive benefit on cholesterol and triglyceride levels, but don't seem to have any net benefit when it comes to weight control.

This observation is hugely important because one of the biggest myths about low-carb diets is that eating all that fat will be bad for your heart when in reality study after study shows that such diets outperform low-fat calorie-resricted diets on the most important lipid indicators - HDL, VLDL, and triglycerides.

The scare-tactic logic runs something along the lines of "Sure, you might lose weight but think about what you'll be doing to your heart."

When hard numbers show that eating unrestricted amounts of fat and protein lead to similar weight loss as a low-fat, calorie-restricted diet, the lipid results are swept under the rug.

This matches my personal experience. I had similar weight loss result on both types of diets, but my blood panels were dramatically better on a low-carb diet. I'd also add that I never felt hungry on a low-carb diet, while I was constantly hungry on the low-fat, calorie-restricted diet.

I find the main difficulty with low-carb diets is that they are boring. Our society does not cater to them. Ordering at restaurants and eating lunch with your workgroup when meals are brought in ase challenging. There's also a lot of social pressure around dessert (parties) and alcohol.

Unfortunately - at least for me - cheating on a low-carb diet is a major setback because it can set up a cycle of hunger that take at least a few days to get out of. Low-fat diets aren't the same, mostly because you are often convincing yourself to be hungry all the time anyway.
BTW, the author has removed any mention of a proof for P!=NP from his home page:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/
Follow-up video: Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling
This looks slightly contrived. Can you provide an example more likely to crop up in typical usage?
Why Andrew Orlowski is wrong about net neutrality
Shallow compliments do irritate me. It's not that I'm offended it's just that I don't know how to respond. There's nothing polite that wouldn't be equally shallow. A genuine and deliberate person is rare but valuable.
Perhaps you could charge a one-time fee for the download, and then charge an additional recurring rate for the convenience of using the online interface when you develop that in the future.
First SMS trojan for Android detected
Check out some of the 0.25mm and 0.18mm (!) pens available from Japan. Really, really fine-lined pens are something of a fetish there. jetpens.com sells a bunch of Japan-only imported pens and other writing tools.
As a former neuroscience student, it's strange and frustrating to see how old fashioned ideas can persist so long in academia. The idea that the brain operates as a connected network is so such an intuitive one it seems almost an after thought to question why we should study it as such (even if it turns out to be dead wrong).

And yet for the last 8 years or so, every year, I've read about "new" and "groundbreaking" research like this, and it never seems to get any traction.

Since I'm no longer in academia I don't know why this is, but I'm guessing its a widespread phenomenon and I wish it was discussed more openly than it is.
A side note: While Gold is chemically fairly stable, money can be created and destroyed.
I love Rails, and this is still the best summary of the current situation I've seen.

I just spent way too much time getting passenger and rvm and rails 2 and 3 to (all) play nice together in a deployment environment, though, so I'm biased.
And indeed, economically it makes much more sense to have that salary go to somebody who needs it, say somebody from India, than to somebody who has better options.
I saw that too but didn't find it awkward. It was pretty clear to me they meant their organization is distributed like 37Signals or the SO guys. Reading the job post confirms that.
I am in similar position but doing a depressing job ( for major portion of the day) takes a physiological toll on you .
Everything ( lemonade ) looks uninteresting .
Using the API, you could now build a decent CRM that integrates directly with your contacts, no? Or perhaps just sync existing data.
I'd like to see a new feature on Hacker News that attaches a [citation needed] to all economic posts. We are actually getting more income from foreign countries than they are getting from us: http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTa... .
Putting them in the position of thinking they have to offer you "stay money" without first having the decency to just sit down and have an honest talk with them is a slap in the face.

As I said, you don't demand "stay money" from your boss first thing. You just tell him you feel you deserve $X and have the exact honest conversation you describe. That's step 2) of my plan.

You only mention competitive offers to your boss after he tries to lowball you. Without hitting the market, you'll never know if your boss is lowballing you and you'll also have no leverage for negotiation. That's step 3, if your boss didn't give you a satisfactory package.
They place upper and lower bounds on the type member.