skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article is wrong.

The author is conflating two philosophical schools of thought, Rationalism and Empiricism, with two other concepts (with a complex relationship), reason and science.

Point 1: The author is defining reason incorrectly. He states that reason is "internally generated," that it starts with "your internal sense for what is right and pure." The correct definition (taken from a dictionary) is: the mental powers concerned with forming conclusions, judgments, or inferences. The difference is that the author claims that reason is basically internal/introspection, whereas in actuallity, reasoning requires both internal mental processes (such as recalling concepts you've formed previously) and extrospection (observing the world around you, learning from it, etc.). The Rationalist school of philosophical thinkers (e.g. Descartes) argued that that extrospection is fundamentally flawed or not trustworthy, so the definition the author uses is actually, basically, the rationalists' position. (Later philosophers like Kant picked up with this and ran with it, claiming that since reason is faulty, you must resort to faith. Indeed, the rationalists were typically highly religious, although basically everyone was at that time.) I, personally, disagree very strongly with that position, and I suspect that many HN readers also disagree with it. So be careful not to accidentally "accept" this position as a valid definition.

Point 2: Empiricism is a philosophical school that was formed in reaction to the Rationalists. Empiricist philosophers pointed out that the Rationalists were incapable of achieving true knowledge about the world by rejecting perception, and insisted that we just go by experimentation. However, they accepted some of the Rationalist viewpoints about the way reason works, and thus were very skeptical of reasoning, prefering "hard data" and the like to explain things. (This is ironic because validating a philosophical claim would require reason, so you can't use philosophy to reject reason without contradicting yourself, but I digress.)

Point 3: The actual relationship between science and reason is not "science vs. reason" or "science OR reason", as the author states. It's "you need to use reason to do science." Science is a kind of technical study of the way the world works that uses certain techniques; that's all science means. There's things you can do using reason that aren't technical enough to be called science (like paying your taxes or thinking about philosophy). But there's no science you can do without using reason.

Conclusion: The claim that reason and reality are fundamentally divided is the root premise of the author's blog post. This was Kant's position. Kant's main goal was to state that reason isn't really useful, so we all have to go on faith; he was trying to uphold "God, faith, and immortality" (to cite his most famous quotation). That gives me the creeps. I strongly disagree with Kant.
Evil way: sell links that you add to the widget to advertisers.

Hard way: upsell "enterprise" versions of the widget to just a few (very expensive) customers.

Good luck!
This case seems to be about whether Google can insist that devices carrying the Google trademark actually include particular Google programs. Specifically, can Google require Motorola to ship Google Maps as a condition of Motorola's use of "with Google(TM)" branding?

Maybe it's like Bob's Booze complaining that Bacardi has pressured Thirsty Time Beverage Co. to use Bacardi rum in the "Thirsty Thursday Party Punch with Bacardi(TM)" drink. Bob wants to make a deal with Thirsty to use his company's rum as a key ingredient in the punch. Suppose Thirsty Time always uses Bacardi's filtered water as an ingredient; can Bacardi insist that Thirsty Time also ship its famous rum as a condition for TT's use of the Bacardi brand name?
> give 100s of thousands of people jobs

Would have jobs with or without Gates

> make PCs affordable for small businesses and common people

Like I said before, Jobs and Wozniak did that, Jack Tramiel did that (even better than J&W).

> then went on to give away enough to charity to become the greatest philanthropist in history

He is the richest man in history.

> the people who vilify him worship Steve Jobs

False dichotomy alert! Not the case here. Jobs is flawed too.

> done most of the things that have inspired such loathing when Microsoft did them

Until now Apple is not guilty of monopoly abuse. Nothing even close to what Comes vs. Microsoft shows.

> how evil Microsoft is on your Macbook Pro

I use a Dell running Linux. At home I use an Acer. Running Linux too.
The Secret to Effective Teaching
Rather, you're using problem solving tricks in real life. If anything, programming often gives a good vocabulary for problem solving* , especially if you're not a mathematician, but it's not exactly the same. Programming works similar mental muscles, but can also encumber problems with meaningless details.

(Also, be wary of "be strict in what you send but forgiving in what you receive", it gets you web "standards". :) )

* No small thing, see e.g. Iverson's "Notation as a tool of thought". Having a good vocabulary for a problem is a great aid to brainstorming. The most recent wave of people discovering this have been buzzing about "DSLs". Before that, "little languages". Before that, I don't know.
$5000 ... you could make some decent money at just a $1 cpm. talk to some ad networks or just sell directly. what kind of sites generate the most pageviews? holy shit, 5 million is a lot of page views. i guess widgets are a great distribution model.

or you could just sell it to websites looking to SEO ^_^ reminds me of the dating site or whatever that had those surveys that people embedded everywhere, that's how they got to #2 or something for "free online dating"
I'm not ;) It seems that many wealthy people are, though.

The point is, the whole "big, inefficient government" argument, IMHO, is more often used in place of simply "I want to keep more of my wealth", and while a valid argument in theory, in practice its confused usage has caused it to lose credibility.

The fact that so many people are unwilling to just come out and say "I want to keep my wealth", and instead try to divert the debate to some other tenuously-related argument shows that they themselves believe that wanting to keep your wealth is wrong.

Personally, I've yet to make my mind up in this regard. I would like to keep my wealth, but the myriad of things that tax money supports I find necessary. Personally I see nothing wrong with wanting to keep more of your wealth, but the fact that many rich people feel such guilt about it, and society's perception of it, seems to imply that we've already made a judgment, collectively, about this issue.
Are You an Alcoholic Yet?  Dealing With Stresses of Founding a Company
Plagiarism and essay mills
Ahh... I was ignorant; I assumed the pigment provided only color. Thanks.
To add to the idea of enterprise, perhaps you could offer some paid moderation service.
The secret of Groupon’s success is … good writing & Email?
Only in America.

Nevada's listings are gone, too. Amsterdam still has the listings, though. Didn't check any other European cities, though.
Here's how I'd do it... I'd massage this a bit with some closed alpha testing, etc... but this is the gist:

Sell ads and kickback a percentage to the siteowners while working in charity donations to remind folks that you're not evil.

Create a script to categorize your install base. Eg: Gadgets, Tech, Food, Personal, etc. In version 2, plan to categorize in real-time contextually. A good ad network partnership (see below) will help you with this technology.

Change your TOS. Send an e-mail to everyone asking them to verify that your script categorized them properly, to check out the new TOS and the new ad feature. Clearly and honestly tell them why you're making this change - the project will die if you don't.

Test some "run of network" ads. Input a few different variations, measure clicks (volume and geo are important).

After a couple of weeks, approach a few different ad networks at the same time. An Adtech conference is coming up in NY in November... use their exhibitor list as a hit list.

Negotiate with the ad networks. Depending on the demographics and CTR's, I bet with a 5m install base, you'll have some good offers. Reliability is key here - ad networks start and stop all of the time. In contrast, remember that big networks come with more constraints.

Here's the part that's going to keep this from being evil: Allow your siteowners to sign up and insert their own affiliate / user codes. Give them a percentage of the ads. If someone does not sign up, give that same portion to a charity such as Kiva.

As an alternative to selling ads - start looking to sell the whole thing. There are a few funded startups I can think of that would keep your beer fridge full for a couple of years in exchange for what you have built.

As a final (tacked on edit) idea: Survey your siteowners. With such a large install base, if you ask what advanced features people would like, you may be able to get some people to upgrade to a paid subscription model. You might be able to use this in conjunction with the adrev model above. In your survey, don't give the siteowners any ideas - you don't want to sway them.
I am already doing that :)
I know Profounder is in very early stage, but where is the interface for investors? It's important to see how investors will interact with the site.
@robfitz built a really cool startup tool kit: http://thestartuptoolkit.com/

I'm pretty sure that if you can complete most of these boxes you'll have found a startup.
Galileo disproved the Aristotelian idea that heavy objects fall faster with a thought experiment, not through physical experiments and data collection.

He used deductive rather than inductive reasoning. That's why it was a proof.
Time to split test the call to action on the widget to see how you can improve the CTR? :)
Legality depends on your location.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Nevada

Here is some moral ambiguity...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_surrogate
This sounds like a good fit to me. I'd watch the complexity, though, and see what you can get done with the simplest thing that could possibly work, then build up, always with the end-goal in mind.
For anyone interested in learning tons more on the topic of consumer behavior, here's a nice outline of the book "Predictably Rational" containing key points:

http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/Predictably-Irrational

Plugging that into moreofit.com gives you an endless list of interesting consumer behavior articles:

http://www.moreofit.com/search/?q=http://bookoutlines.pbwork...
Make friends, post partner wanted ads, etc.

Thing is, in the bay area, the less connected you are, the harder.

An Internet startup can be run from anywhere, so anywhere you find engineers works, and i bet you'll find more outside the bay area. I'd try Mexico city, for instance. Or even los Angeles would be better.

There's a program the chilean government is doing thatbwill give $40,000 in seed money to startups locate there, you could find another founder or two in mexico and relocate to chile and get the cheleans to be your angels!
David Ogilvy's book, Confessions of an Ad Man; makes this point even more clearly: Good copy can lead to successful businesses.
My old Nokia 5110 also never dropped a call. The focus these days seems to be on superfluous features, as cell phones have become more elaborate over the years, the raison d'être has been forgotten and the ability to do fundamental things such as make a telephone call has regressed completely.
How are they profiting? Don't they host those ads for free?

Also, newspapers were hosting identical ads 10 years ago, and were charging for it. Isn't that worse?

Edit:
After checking, they did charge for adult ads, after pressure. But my 2nd point still stands, how is it different from newspapers?
One of the coolest R visualizers I've seen is specifically for ggplot2. Created by a PhD student at UCLA

http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~jeroen/ggplot2.html
wearing my investigators hat

The question that I can't see a satisfactory answer to is "why?". With Techcrunch onboard the Crunchpad might have worked out, it probably would have made money even if it was not a long term success. They sacrificed a highly vocal technology blog with a generally loyal following and lots of PR goodwill for, well, not a lot as far as I can see.

Working through the evidence now and nothing in there really springs out as explaining it.

EDIT: ok, it appears that they honestly thought the product was strong enough on it's own to survive a divorce from Techcrunch. Still not clear why he wanted the split though...

On a related note the email to the girlfriend from a FG employee is troubling discovery/disclosure; such material is often covered under privacy laws, despite the fact that he was using a company account. I'm surprised to see "personal" correspondence accepted to civil court and, particularly, allowed to be published.
How are you dealing with the potential of spammers? Watching and will worry about it when it happens? Or something else?

Got an idea in a similar space but been wondering how I could effectively deal with bots, etc. I have a variety of techniques on forums/comment sites dealing with spam but none are perfect and some still gets through (usually manual operators rather than bots).
No doubt!

Though I disagree that it would work for tech companies, since that encompasses such a broad range of companies.

A tech company that serves mostly enterprises may employ far fewer, yet more highly paid employees for customer service, yet a tech company that sells directly to consumers (especially if it's sales that requires a large customer service department) may employ many, lower paid employees.

The other problem I have with all of this is "why revenues"? I mean, that's a valuable thing to know, but without margin or profit, it's an easy figure to game. Ask kozmo.com or MCI|WorldCom or any of the "Generate lots of revenue then IPO" companies of the late 90's early 00's. Investors lost their minds and forgot that if you sell a loaf of bread for US$1.00 and you pay $1.50 for it, you've lost $0.50. You'd be better off not buying the loaf of bread (or, perhaps, getting out of the bread loaf selling business). It tells you nothing you can really trust.

(Edit: to fix basic math error)
Above is a worthy question and one decent answer to it. I don't think Conway is disinforming here, but he probably is indeed giving names of more well-known companies and keeping some newer names closer to his chest.

I'd say Conway is also behind the HN curve because of what he does. An angel usually comes into the picture months or years after the team has formed and a few ideas have been hatched, iterated, and pivoted upon. So my answer to the question is, probably YC and its clones, and a few companies like Google who work very hard at fostering innovation - the common thread being a focus on picking good people.
That's an excellent metaphor!

My other favorite programming metaphor is about skiplists: they're like a set of subway lines, with some extra express lines that skip a random (and increasing, for each level) number of stops.
Colloquially, it's any new business. Average folks will think of a new retail storefront, or new one-man consulting business, as a 'startup' -- and there's no need to disabuse them of that usage, it's reasonable in that context.

In technology circles, it especially connotes a business with extra reward and risk, trying something novel.

In the customer-development/lean-startup formalization of positive startup patterns, Steve Blank defines 'startup' as "an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model". See:

http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-princ...

Are you searching for a repeatable and scalable business model? If so, you're a startup! If you form a partnership or corporation to search with more collaborators, then that formation, too, would be a startup.
Does the book confirm that the way to learn about physics is to study Star Trek's warp drive, transporter, subspace communications, telepathy, food replicator, telekinesis, parallel universes, force fields, gravity generator, dylithium crystals, time travel, vulcan death grip, etc., all based on no known scientific principles?
> Saying that one "wouldn't be happy" implies that an emotional decision is being made rather than a rational decision.

What's wrong with that?
Isn't the "passion" people always talk about an emotional thing?
Thanks for the advice. It is my hope that I can keep the custom code to a bare minimum. There may already be a node based dns server out there, found a couple references, and am hoping the web platform is very minimal, letting me extend it later without changing the appliance itself.

As i dig into it more, I may have some contributions to CouchApp to make, but may just end up making the node part of it a separate open source project. Not sure if ill need to hack couchapp or not.

Edit: reread your comment. Will start just with couch, then add couch apps, then add simple node server front end, look at node based frameworks, then add executing js in node from the couch, then redis for caching, then add the load balancing, logging and see what features I need for apps.
Trying to be vague-ish, but its a customizable widget that displays tweets on a webpage based upon settings the site owner can set in javascript.
Some companies (I do believe GE is one of them) make it a policy to pursue legal claims / counter-claims to the fullest in an effort to discourage future actions.
Day 3: Nominee Kagan won’t criticize Roberts court (AP)
They may want people to but it is happening very slowly. One big problem is that XP has all the features most users need and a big price tag on windows 7 doesn't help. Every windows before XP ended up having large game breaking issues which meant the customer base would switch quiet fast to the new one when it came out. Sure windows 7 is a nice addition on top of XP but in terms of day to day usage most people would easily be able to get by on XP.
First beta release for Drupal-native mailinglist module
Realizing that this post might just cause another flame out about unit testing, test-driven development (TDD) and policy-driven development I wanted to post what I think is a useful link about a platform that can assist you to "maintain" the human commitment to TDD:

http://www.parasoft.com/jsp/products/article.jsp?articleId=3...

Hope this helps.
Also check out Concrete5 ( http://concrete5.org ), which is an open source CMS you install on your own server -- has in-place editing with drag and drop (and tons of other user-friendly features as well, like bulk file uploading, configurable forms, videos, maps, search, etc). And if you're a developer it's WAY more straightforward to extend than most PHP CMS's.
The result of this is a 64-bit double (there are no other numeric data types in JS and this is the data type regardless of the underlying CPU architecture). That has just under 16 digits of precision so the above code will not lose much by multiplying by 10^16 and rounding.

Why would you think this this calculation would get clamped to the range of a signed 32-bit integer?
Most of those hundreds of thousands of songs have no rhythm notation to parse.
Scientists Unlock Cocoa Genome, Release to Public Domain
Just to clarify, there will be no free trial version once the beta is over. The licenses are single seat dev licenses for the time being.

It is an intriguing idea to maintain the discount level for early bird customers on down the line. Thanks for the input.
I'm four of the 8! Of course, though, I think he's wrong. For instance, wanting to get rich quick is not necessarily a detriment, as it depends on your definitions or both rich and quick!
In my experience a volume can only be attached to /dev/sd[b-p], so it's a 15TB limit per instance. If what you say is true, that would be great news. I'm testing it right now.

Also, in response to your question: I can confirm that EC2 complains if you try going above sdp, or anywhere else.
Yes, I do. For example, I use all the tips mentioned on this page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1695794
Thanks for the answer. Makes sense -- especially the domain stuff, hadn't thought of that one.
I don't see how it's "zealously anti-capitalist" to suggest that people with advantages should use them in a way that enlarges the pie, rather than primarily working to redirect part of it to oneself. The theory behind free market capitalism is that the best way to enlarge your portion of the pie tends to align with the best way to enlarge the whole pie, so it's actually a pro-capitalist suggestion.

Whether or not Bill Gates did this is another question entirely.
This is the sort of discussions I love best on HN:

I read a thoughtful comment and have no choice but upvote it because it's very thought provoking and I'm nodding all the way through it. Then I read the opponent's comment ... and feel the same way!
Since the author uses Kant as an example, the rationalist/empiricist distinction doesn't really apply.

Synthetic a priori knowledge of mathematics and geometry is the starting point for Kant's reconciliation of the two schools carried out in Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant did not advocate taking anything on faith in the sense you are using the term.

What Kant did was point out that all empirical knowledge is mediated by the conditions of human experience (i.e. space and time), and that we should not confuse empirical facts with the ding an sich (thing in itself).

Kant's most famous quote is along the lines of "So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world."

It usually leads to people justifying situational ethics by mentioning Nazis.
Craigslist donated all the revenue from erotic services to charity and used the fees for adult services to pay for lawyers to screen each and every posting. It was on NPR in the bay area shortly before the adult services section was shut down.

Craigslist has said it had donated all revenues from its "erotic services" listings to charity. When it switched to its "adult services" listings last year it said it would make no commitment to how those revenues would be used.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6831MB20100904
More info about the survey here: http://norvig.com/oreskes.html
The fact that you replied to me here on HN says a lot. I wish you good luck.
Serious Question: Why does prostitution need to be illegal?

In the U.S. it is *legal* to:
Have random, unprotected sex with anyone you want
Have sex with someone only if they take you out to dinner or give you a nice gift, as long as it's not a direct cash payment
Pay someone to have sex as long as its videotaped and records are kept (pornography)
Etc.

But it is illegal for one consenting adult to pay another consenting adult directly for sex?

Why is this illegal? Especially since as the "services" get more expensive there is less and less actual sex happening. Multiple studies have shown that prostitution is less about the sex than about the john paying to have a responsibility and stress free relationship.

I may be missing something and be completely wrong but thats my $.02.
Apple Continued To Lose U.S. Marketshare Despite Spike From iPhone 4 Sales
I haven't seen this ted talk yet but keep in mind that perceived sleep benefit is mostly subjective, so if a person feels like crap if he has no sleep, no amount of evidence to the contrary really matters.
Ha, good visualization. I find much of what I read here to be like that. Especially when people or corporations (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook) are called evil. At that point it always feels like we've left the realm of enlightened conversation. There's never a recognized gray area. It saddens me and makes me giggle whenever I see the community patting itself on the back for the quality of its discussion.
I think I broke it. All I get is a spinning wheel now, searching for "Fleming, Ian," one of my test searches.