skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Einstein stated quite bluntly that he was not an atheist, specifically using the phrase "I'm not an atheist."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein%27s_religious_v...

The notion that there is nothing to debate is insulting. Proof is required, always. And everyone is bettered by an open an honest debate that patiently brings people around by convincing them with a sound argument backed by evidence. At some point it's important to recognize when an intellectual opponent is no longer worth debating, but that doesn't justify shutting down debate entirely, or of refusing to reach out and attempt to convince others who might be more open minded.

Indeed, this is quite critical, especially today. Because guess what? Atheists, and believers in, say, evolution, we are in the minority. Even in the liberal and intellectual modern western world. Far more so in the world at large. The world believes in gods, it doesn't believe in science. If you shut off that debate you aren't helping yourself or your beliefs in the slightest.
Competition to find a new chess rating system
Virtual desktops is the big one for me. I like being able to categorise my windows eg. one for programming, another for other work, another for leisure and multimedia etc etc.
The thing which communicates to governments "what the people want" is not how they pay taxes, but how they elect officials and vote on policies.

Nobody wants to pay taxes, and nobody wants social programs cut. Therein lies the problem.
You don't. His apps were developed and in the store before he was hired, Apple's policy doesn't seem to allow their own employees to develop appstore apps in their spare time, and only allows them to have stuff in the appstore (in their name) if that stuff was there before they got hired.

Which is what happened in this case.
First, we don't have it on the scale of Facebook yet.

Second, everyone knows their Twitter/FourSquare posts are going to be public. Not so with FB.

Third, Facebook is the one with the established reputation of making public by default user information that many assume to be private.

I think the point is less about telling people that you're away and more about publicly broadcasting the location of other people's private information.

I can assure you I'm not a privacy nut, but I think we all have the right to keep the latitude and longitude of our homes hidden from 500 million other people if we want.
The article would be better title "the not black city", as it goes on to use the African American population as the demographic for the cities 'whiteness'.

The article goes on to use Portland as "America's ultimate White City". However, looking at demographics, it is 78.6% white (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland,_Oregon#Demographics) compared to the average of 75.0% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...). This isn't nearly as striking as the 6.0% vs 12.8% African American demographic in the article.
Disclaimer: sorting algorithms can sound like just about anything, depending which parameters you map to which sounds.

This is just a simple example of data sonification, albeit with some nice visualisation too, and a subject matter which appeals to the computer scientists in the room.
can't wait for trying it!
Is it possible that check-ins are just a fad? Can you imagine doing check-ins for the next 10 years, or for the next 30 years?
Mobile Web vs Mobile Native: Who's winning and why?
> postscript would be an absolutely terrible choice: the barrier to entry is simply too high.

You say that like it's a bad thing.
"Are you looking to use LOLCODE in the enterprise?"

omg!
Personal Touch Yields Startup Success for Husband & Wife Team
This is a really really weird idea and I can't take it seriously at all. But, I just thought you might want to add a "Call Me Now" button so that people can test it out immediately and see what this is all about.
I think Eric was not clear in what he was saying. It is not so much that Google should tell you want to do next but that Google should predict what you are going to do next and suggest the answers before you even have to search for them.

Of course I am not Eric so take this with a few grains of salt.
My father-in-law would have supported this whole-heartedly.

He got disillusioned with math after he got tenure. So he stopped doing research. He went to the department head and said, "Since I'm not doing research, why don't you just schedule me to teach more courses?" He was turned down because the department head didn't want him to make the other professors look bad. He made the offer repeatedly until he got tired of hearing the nos.

The end result? He puttered around for 15 years after that. His classes were always well attended. Students who attended his section of the course always did better on tests. But he never again got a promotion, and he was never allowed to teach any more courses than anyone else.

I think that a system without tenure would have forced him to make choices that made him happier. A system that actually rewarded teaching would have both made him happier, and have served the students well.
For whatever it's worth, I have an anecdote regarding safety in station wagons vs. SUVs. When I was young my little sister was almost killed in a car accident because she was in the back seat of a station wagon when they were rear-ended by an SUV. SUVs don't have the same bumper level that other cars do, so instead of impacting the designed crumple zone, the SUV rolled up into the back window of the station wagon. Another foot and she would have been decapitated.

Subsequently, I've seen a couple sources which corroborate this trend -- in high speed accidents between cars and SUVs the fatality rates where higher than two cars.
No, he’s talking about data URLs. They work in everything barring IE6+7.
I think in their current form (game-ish) they are.

But attaching useful information to real life, that's not, it's just one of the sides of a future internet of things, and I believe that is where we are headed.
The Future of Compiler Optimization
To quote the thesis on probabilistic chips:

> In practice replacing digital computers with an alternative computing paradigm is a risky proposition. Alternative computing architectures, such as parallel digital computers have not tended to be commercially viable, because Moore’s Law has consistently enabled conventional von Neumann architectures to render alternatives unnecessary. Besides Moore’s Law, digital computing also benefits from mature tools and expertise for optimizing performance at all levels of the system: process technology, fundamental circuits, layout and algorithms. Many engineers are simultaneously working to improve every aspect of digital technology, while alternative technologies like analog computing do not have the same kind of industry juggernaut pushing
them forward.
Are they frills? There is no before-after comparison, of course, but the articles does say:

> It sounds far too basic, but the OhLife team says that it works: they report that 50% of users who complete their first entry have continued to add an entry at least once every other day. It probably helps that, despite the spare feature set, the site is very nice to look at. At this point OhLife isn’t doing anything to monetize, but if it can get traction then the team will consider freemium options.
SVG is supported (and hardware accelerated) in IE9.
What can I offer friends for investing instead of equity?
I've set up a company which looks like it will be receiving some angel investment in the next 3-6 months. In the meantime we need to raise a small amount of extra cash (3-5000) to push out a couple of features and keep us ticking over.

Friends and Family have offered to help out and keep asking if they can have a share in the company in exchange. I don't want to do this mainly because I know that having a number of small investors involved can put off larger investors as well as make things more complicated later on. Not to mention it's quite a lot of work just for a small investment. The alternative is obviously a loan but family/friends seem quite opposed to that as they've bad experiences and feel investing would be more fun.

So - does anyone have any ideas of how I could offer a reward system for small investments so that they feel involved and can benefit if we do well but without muddying the waters for future investors?

(To clairfy - I have no problem with giving up equity or rewarding people who have taken a risk on me - I just don't want to risk future 6-figure investment by having a whole load of small shareholders)
I don't think it needs to make a whole lot of money. How much bandwidth and disk space could an email+plain-text-storage service possibly use up? With minimal ongoing costs, they could use strange or very inefficient business models.
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I have well over 10 customers. I want to take my startup to the next level
I'd also point that this is email-based, so aren't you automatically saving a copy? You can just search on OhLife's email address to pull up everything you sent, and there are your valuable memories.

(You want them as a bunch of plain text files? Well, hopefully you are using a nice email provider who gives you POP or IMAP access, like Gmail. Download them, grep, and Bob's your uncle.)
Given that the width of the elements being sorted changes (therefore there are more/less elements in different visualisations), I'd say no.
Never write form confirmations ("Thanks for your email") in red color. Looks like a warning. If a form is processed correctly, it should be black or green.

I hope that usability of djangy service will be better. Can't wait to try it :)

Btw, isn't Heroku itself planning anything for Django?
Finally it arrived :)
I love Heroku and was looking for something similar for Django for ages now. Can't wait to give it a try!
Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups
I'd like to see the script; I take it that it's some sort of Perl thingy which goes through the Google spreadsheet API? Or does the spreadsheet have builtin scripting?
Sounds like a contestant in the AWS Startup Challenge.
Sprite and Image Optimization Framework
Don’t let jQuery’s $(document).ready() slow you down
On the other hand, you get a lot of people doing crazy amounts of work for little pay in order to get tenure. If you abolished the tenure system, there is no chance at all that the majority of current scientists would stay in the field - the freedom that comes with tenure to pursue whatever interests you is the only reason to stay and work the ridiculous hours required of post doc researchers.

It's a beautiful idea that people would work for 1/3 the market rate because the work is so interesting, but it doesn't hold water. If you work as a researcher at Google, Microsoft or IBM, do you get paid 1/3 of a senior developer position? Abolishing the tenure system would see even more of the current brain drain from academia to industry.

Changing the tenure system is feasible. What really needs to be done is to split professorship into three paths: project management and administration, technical work and teaching. A professor should pick one main area, and one minor area and stick with them. It won't happen because all the prestige is in technical work and all the power is in administration. There would be few professors choosing to teach, and few professors willing to admit that they don't do any technical work. Everyone would claim to do technical work but actually politic and scheme, and to change things you would need the enthusiastic consent of exactly the guys that play the system the best.

By the way, in the point alluded to in the article that universities pay a lot of money to professors: professorial salaries have not inflated all that much in the past 30 years. Vice principals' salaries have, consultancy services have and centralised administration has. To the best of my knowledge, the inflated money has gone to purchase huge IT systems and employ a lot more student support services and student monitoring, at least in my experience. To point a finger at professorial salaries is misleading at best.
FYI, this has been submitted before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1565257
isolation isn't about high typing speed I think as much as about high thinking speed -- shrinking the think-act-check loop, and maximizing the freshness of short term memory. and cutting out unnecessary stimulation and tangents. i think if you're stuck, yes, communicating with other folks can help get unstuck. but that can be done with IM, video chat, email, phone, screen sharing, pastebin, etc. There's advantages to live bodies in an office, definitely, but lots of disads too.
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I don't really understand why Europeans think they have harsh weather. Despite their relatively northern position, water currents and conditions actually produce a calming effect for the majority of Europe (excluding Russia and some of the westerly former soviet satellites). Recently someone asked the same question for a city in Sweden, but I noted that even Chicago has a slightly lower average winter temperature and a much higher average summer temperature. Whatever you do, don't underestimate Minnesota! (I say from experience :().

P.S. Yeah, I know you Canadians have it rough, I feel for you.
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Thanks for all the responses guys. We've decided to drop the free plan in light of the prescient advice herein.
Probabilistic processors possibly pack potent punch
Thanks for pointing those out, I hadn't thought of them and can perhaps be accused of survivorship bias. I don't know about the first two examples but isn't Linux actually better than Minix and Apache certainly better than Microsoft? In any case, this is a bit of an unfair comparison because these are examples of open source vs proprietary, not product quality primarily.

In the context of the OP's blog post, we are talking about winning in terms of building a profitable business, for which I believe building a good product and selling it is a better strategy than getting popular by giving away a crap product for free.

The gist of the matter is that you should be clear what you are selling:

* a product

* advertising space/lead generation (if you are free)

* yourself (acquisition)

I see most web startups are going for the second and third options, but it seems it is mostly out of fear and the status quo, not careful consideration of the pros and cons.
New Facebook Places Logo Is A “4.” In A Square. Yeah.
Is it just Django, or will other Python frameworks work?
> the ability to do pure-CSS buttons and icons is a win.

CSS is not designed for assembly of vector graphics, we have SVG for that. SVG is a well defined and logical format for web vector graphics. The ideal case would be Firefox and IExplorer implement embedding SVG graphics with <img> to catch up with Opera\WebKit. Also since SVG is xml based any web app could also probably implement dynamic generation and cacheing for bizarre use cases.
Thanks guys, yes, Pollenizer is one of the teams behind this.

Looking forward to the first crop coming through.
Misco: A MapReduce Framework For Mobile Systems
Does anybody know or can post any sources which show how much share J2ME have in the mobile app platform market?
Adsense is essentially free for publishers.

That's a strange way to look at it. Publishers are selling space to Google for a cut of the Adsense revenue. Google is selling contextual ads within those spaces to advertisers.

What's free in that?
loopt does that
Wasn't a big fan of this post. it would have been more interesting if he showed some examples of his three sentence replies to actual emails. 3 sentence emails sound great in theory, but really after a while if you are sending such short responses you are just an email mass producing factory.

I've been on the receiving end of some short/terse emails and I have to say that my impression is not positive. I understand people are busy, but when I read short replies to emails that don't make sense it doesn't make me feel special at all :(
The iPad, the Kindle, and the Immutable Laws of the Marketplace
By definition this is a form of political correctness. I think that there are a lot of companies run by people eho think they are tolerant but who really aren't and reject candidates for the simple crime of growing up in a differnt part of the country.

For instance, someone i know at amazon will not hire people from the south. He's a liberal and as "tolerant" as he thinks is, he thinks everyone from the south is stupid and evil, and so he won't hire them.

Personally, I would take politics into account. I had to work with some leftists who were constantly sowing dissent in the company because they thought anything having to do with profit was evil. I'd want to screen those kinds out, they led several pointless sorta revolts.
Leave Uni Smerity! Self fund and live the dream!
This is a stupid article. For one, tenure is on a huge decline among most universities (and even more so in professional schools). The most laughable thing though is believing that removing tenure will encourage teaching. What? My dad has a saying -- you're only as good as your last grant. My school charges $50k per student per academic year, a decent portion of which goes to fixed costs. You know what keeps the lights on? Not student tuition. We recently sold IP rights for Lyrica to drug companies for $700 million. We have ~8,000 students. You do the math.

I have said it before and I will say it again: major research universities are not about teaching students. Harvard isn't making the big bucks for its endowment through simple education.

Getting rid of tenure doesn't help any of that. If anything, it removes the option the tenured professors have of focusing on teaching. That said, if tenure disappears I don't really care. I would hope that it would cause universities to decide to pay people other than the tenure track professors decent wages but I really don't see any chance of that no matter what way this goes.
People who are irrational make poor employees. I wouldn't say all people with particular views are irrational, but this is one way of discovering some who are.
http://www.loopt.com/
No mention of Loopt?
> Slow down, for your own sake

I wonder why this has gotten 28 points. WHY should he slow down? I have done many many things myself and some have become very profitable.

From my experience, the fastest route to success is to do what you like. If this guy likes to start a new startup every week then he should go for it. If someone likes to do one thing for 50 years he should go for that. Neither of them would be wrong.
Interview with the CEO of Impel CRM
I disagree. Ineffective tax collection actually might be helping the greek economy. The government is so inefficient that I cannot imagine how paying more taxes would actually help in the long run. People can be more efficient and produce much more real value by spending their money.

The real big problem is the inflated public sector. This of course is a problem because is a big burden to the public finances but more importantly results in >20% of the population that is capable of working being occupied at the public sector producing minimal value for the economy overal.
It's looks like a cool service. I'm really curious to see how it does...keep us posted, have you decided how you plan to market the service? Press releases, book clubs, etc?
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How to prepare a programming job interview
> Btw, isn't Heroku itself planning anything for Django?

Has that ever been mentioned or rumored before? Is that even feasible given Heroku's technology stack?
This is why I stopped using firstname@domain and started using firstname.surname@domain. Tends to stop the dictionary attacks from working.
Celebrate Whyday
4G, looks like it's the HTC EVO(or something using the same platform).
I would say it's likely. There are all sorts (pun intended) of optimizations you can do for each algorithm, but at the textbook level, I could say they seemed typical as far as speed expectancy goes. My rough estimates for the times were (in seconds): insert: ~10, bubble: ~27, selection: ~18, merge: ~17, and gnome: ~19. I have only written inserts, bubbles, and selections; with bubble being slowest and insert being the fastest, my limited experience agrees with the video. Note: the merge algorithm appeared to have sorted a different data set.
raphael.js can take svg-style input (it's trivial to write a svg-raphael converter) and display it in all browsers incuding IE using IE's VML support. It's a hack but it's a damn nice piece of tech and allows us to move forward with SVG use.
Higher than those who try and avoid life/death situations though?
Will it work for Flask? Any plans?

http://flask.pocoo.org/
You're confusing "usernames" and "email addresses". Underscores are fine in the local part of an email address. The following are also valid:

O'Reilly@example.com

"Foo@Bar"@example.com
How seriously can you take a service if developers forgets to disable the DEBUG flag :)

http://djangy.com/admin
Kudos to the aussies for having something similar to YC. The mentorship from TWENTY (woah!) successful founders, the $25.000 (aus?) sound amazing.

What I find it really sad that even in this decade the best way for a web startup to get attention is to go to the Valley. If the web is global shouldn't the support networks be global too?

In the case of my country (Chile) it is very difficult to make your own web startup. Seed investment is centralized in a goverment organization that only cares about patents and how many millions of dollars you are going to make in the first years. Another problem with seed investment around here is that you must spend the money in very specific things like getting incorporated (which is expensive) and build a business plan $$, not getting the work done. It you aren't sure how you are going to monetize your app in a way that is going to give you massive profits, don't bother trying to get an investor (unless you have rich relatives).

Is Australia similar to my country in that innovating on the web is very difficult from a support ecosystem perspective?
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but there is no way of getting out of the eurozone, both in the "no actual procedure" and in the "no actual chance". If greece got out of the euro, it would get instant weimar-like inflation.

Moreover, the SPV and the bailout plans in the eu seem to be more like smoke and mirrors than concrete stuff (e.g. bailing out greece with money coming from portugal which is in the same position)
Since it looks like that all your apps are free, do you use iAds somewhere?
If you plan to build new paid apps, what about promoting them to your existing user base?
Because none of your business.
The critical success factor for YCombinator is, without a doubt, Paul Graham.

Do they have a Paul Graham?
Seems more sensible to me to filter mailing list mail into its own mail folder than filtering it into an rss feed. At least when it's in a mail folder you can reply to it without messing about...
must to be fixed quickly, that's a serious error.
I think Mathematica can be used to make "audiolizations" really easily. They include one of the Riemman Zeta function as a demo. It sounds really cool (sorry I can't find a link, I'll try upload it)
Would be nice if there were something like this (like Heroku) for Java. I know that there are several "cloud" solutions for Java, but I haven't found something as simple to manage/extend/deploy like Heroku so far :(.