skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Machine Learning with Orange
The Orange open source toolkit combines machine learning with pre-packaged algorithms and Python "hackability"
A virtual counter-revolution
The odd decouple
Sasol, the world's largest coal-to-liquids (CTL) and gas-to-liquids (GTL) producer, has stated that GTL becomes financially viable at $10-$20 a barrel while CTL reaches the same level at $50-$60 a barrel. So with the current price of oil at over $70, it's reasonable to assume that CTL, supplemented by GTL, could maintain prices at close to current levels.
None of this addresses the OP's point. You stated your opinion that deity was formed to fill in the gaps in our knowledge (the popular "God of the Gaps" theory), your opinion that one who professes belief in a deity harbors the burden of proof (assuming that that person is trying to prove something to you...), and your opinion that number lines exist (?).

These are all valid opinions if you want to hold them, but they don't address the OP's point. This article is entitled "Why God Did Not Create the Universe". So, how does the idea that there are reliable laws that govern the operation of our universe show why "God did not create the universe"? What about the idea that an astonishing number of randomly lucky and successful permutations occurred in the correct succession out of an infinite number of wrong potential permutations, how does that demonstrate the article's title?

Evolution is the same way; it's all well and good, but none of it explains _why_ species change, just _how_. Learning how species change is all well and good too, but it is not useful in the debate over the existence of god(s). I wish the creationist v. evolutionist group would just accept that already.

I think it all depends on the perspective you take. A religious person would read this article and spend it marveling at how anyone can believe that God does not exist, even when presented with evidence of all the effort and precision necessary to form a world like ours from an infinite expanse of random blackness, where the potential that things would randomly occur so correctly as to create intelligent humans and a hospitable environment for them is essentially as close to nil as possible.
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My bad. I was a bit sleepy when I submitted the link. And, I hadn't seen the prior link.
Agree. The Star Wars sequence where Luke and Obi-Wan plays the "you're my only hope"-message from Princess Leia would look so much less cool if they were forced to wear 3D goggles. Now where's the holograms?
Ask HN: How to handwrite faster? To get into Stanford.
With my school exams coming up, and no computer tests available, I have recently realized how important it is to be able to write faster (and readably).

Would it be worth adjusting my style of holding the pen to the recommended method?

Also, I was thinking of using WorkRave (workrave.org) breaks as a means of setting times for me to practice writing on lined paper, has any research been done on the best methods of practicing, in general - ie should I do 1 minute of writing every 10 minutes, 30 seconds every 5 minutes, 2 minutes every 20, etc? (looking at ratios, rather than absolute time, which will expand to fill my available time)

Any other general tips or similar experiences you have had? Would you be interested in improving your handwriting speed as well?
So what is software craftsmanship?
In all this talk I think you guys might be missing the most remarkable thing of all.

There was a horse in the Apple store.
I think it works better on the cinema.

The cinema is and should be kind of an alternative reality. You enter this large, dark room and from now on you're in an artificial fantasy. Wearing goggles almost adds to the experience.

Your living room is something different.
Read the quotes from the union rep in that article. You tell me.

Priority one will be keeping it legal. Any bad press is aid to folks like me. There won't be any bad press, because there are no sex slaves in our industry, just like there are no incompetent teachers at public schools.

Casinos are billion+ dollar investments where regulation helps the client and being able to legitimately raise huge sums of capital lets you crush the mob. After decriminalization you can play in a seedy backroom with an unknown rake or you can have a business conference on the corporate nickle in a five star hotel where the rake is established as a matter of law. Customer preference wins.

Regulation in prostitution tells client that they can't do what they are willing to pay to do, and it is not capitally intensive and does not reward megascale. After decriminalization you can have the sex that they allow you to have or the sex that you want to have. Customer preference wins.
David McCandless: The beauty of data visualization (video)
A Quick Marketing Idea
Well, consider all of the potential places the Moon could have ended up; space is big. And then consider that not only the placement of the moon was necessary, but also the unique physical composition of the Earth and its atmosphere, the Earth's distance from the Sun and other celestial bodies, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc., and all of the potential states that could have been selected but were not hospitable to life, and you will see why some people find it so unlikely that there was no organizing force in the creation of our world.
I don't get it. I have an insane amount of respect for anyone who manages to get a game of any quality out the door (it's stressful, tedious, repetitive (testing, at least), ...), so I really hope this isn't taken as a slight against the developer(s) -- it's not intended in that way in the least. I think the reviewer is doing a huge disservice to the developer with this review, however pure his intentions may be. He's showing screenshots with insanely low-poly objects, two-color, repetitive textures, and clunky terrain, while raving about the graphical quality. Instead of that, focus on the gameplay, story, anything -- something that indie devs can actually compete on, because graphical quality certainly isn't it.
I'm looking forward to a world not running on oil.

Finally, for the first time, there's global pressure to develop alternatives. The result of this can already be seen in hybrid cars and cheaper solar power.

Getting rid of oil is a Good Thing for so many reasons. We should salute it, not fear it.
Well, most cyclists (except for track sprinters) aim to be as light as possible.

Thus, at the elite level, one expects superior performance from smaller athletes in aerobic events where power requirements are approximately proportional to body mass--such as distance running and uphill cycling. (Technically, the power requirement scales more closely to mass, i.e. M0.76-M0.79 than does the power supply, M0.67; Swain, 1994). It is not surprising that the pre-eminent climber of the 1990s, Marco Pantani, is one of the smallest men in the peloton at only 55 kg. Anything that can be done to reduce the weight of a cyclist and bicycle, without compromising the cyclist's aerobic power, will improve hill-climbing performance.

http://www.sportsci.org/jour/9804/dps.html
> send one hundred or more paid lobbyists to DC.

With what money? Not only does Craigslist not really have any profitable business interests to protect, but they don't have the money to do that even if they wanted to.
This is exactly the kind of program I was looking for a few months ago when I first started doing all of my development on my Mac.

Looking forward to testing this out. Any idea of when you will be ready to release the beta?
All the article says is this; If I went into a casino picked a number on a roulette wheel and won straight away, you would be amazed. If I then did it a second & third time in succession, you would be incredulous. You might wonder if I was cheating the system or had some strange or divine powers.

However, if you then found out I had been going into a different casino only betting 3 times and walking away every hour of my life you would understand that it was just by chance that you happened to be there on the day that I won three times in a row. There is nothing to explain - no divine powers.

This is what Hawkings is arguing for the multiverse. Because there are many possible universes, the fact that ours has all the right qualities to sustain life is an inevitability. It's inevitable that one would be created and because we exist, we must inhabit one.
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Your last paragraph nails it. God is an alias and hence doesn't need proving or disproving. There is this huge closet containing the questions we do not have answers for. Some people name this closet God; scientists call it "TODO". You can call it whatever you like, as long as:

1. You accept that questions can be removed from and (more frequently) new questions can be added to the closet.

2. You do not add a question we already have an answer for into the closet.

3. You do not remove a question from the closet unless you have an answer.
PS I am a Marathon runner and I'd take the muscle... And have you seen the quads on a serious cyclist?

Quads, yes, but have you seen the rest of the body?

WRT runnimg, generally speaking (elite) marathon runners have much higher ratios of slow-twitch muscle than average. That means they will have lean bodies, without the peak strength or muscle mass of a fast-twitch heavy athlete like a sprinter.

Take a look at http://www.letsrun.com/2010/heightweight0504.php. The entire running world was shocked when Solinsky broke 27 minutes (for a 10 km). He's 6'1", and 160lbs - obviously still what most people would consider skinny, but way, way heavy compared to most distance runners.

(You might have good reasons to want more muscle - I'm just pointing out that it's unusual for a distance athlete)
Ask HN: Who's looking for a co-founder? 
I've noticed that many of you are looking for a technical/business co-founder. Give a description of what you are looking for in a co-founder and for what.
However "cell" refers to a portion of the infrastructure running the cellular network, so that's not a good option.
Why do you lump prostitution with sex trafficking? Why do we have to make both legal? Just make sex with two consenting adults legal...and use all those cops who are stuck busting hookers...investigating complaints about sex traffickers.
I read the article but didn't find compelling arguments to say that better oversight and regulation wouldn't reduce criminality. The question of whether widespread legal prostitution is good for a society is different to the matter of making it crime and exploitation-free. I don't have an answer to that ethical question so I wouldn't want to end up arguing that particular angle with you. It's just that the claim that it is inherently impossible to regulate effectively is quite a major one and perhaps people haven't tried hard enough, perhaps as a result of prejudices many of us share.
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Are you writing for other people, or taking notes? [edit: I fail at English comprehension, sorry. Post preserved for posterity to laugh at.] Writing for other people is largely an artistic pursuit these days, outside of class at any rate. Writing for yourself, you will destroy any achievable longhand speed by learning to outline effectively.

Among other pursuits, I have been a professional interpreter. The best exercise for note taking (aside from college debate, where they teach it) is watching the news in your native language. Write down key points only, develop personal symbolic vocabulary to quickly capture important concepts, practice practice practice.

Where is my notebook? Here we go:

w/ ^ glob 来 challop. Succ 社 現 stup roi.

Apologies for the Japanese, I swap when it saves time. The full sentences the speaker said were:

With increasing globalization come challenges and opportunities. Successful companies will realize stupendous return on investment.

I am rate limited by speaker speed for anyone slower than the micro machine man, which is an occupational requirement when you have to be translating at the same time.
Yeah, but this problem already exists on WordPress comments for example. People are free to add whatever link they want with their comments. I don't think a Glen Beck link is spam, (though I do personally think he's a gimmick).
I must admit I don't understand what this means? So Sasol could provide a replacement for oil that only costs 10-20$ per barrel? Why isn't everybody using their stuff now, instead of the 70$ "real" oil?

Also, in my mind "peak oil" was actually just "peak fossile fuels" - how much more coal and gas is there than oil?
The task at hand and libraries available also affects how "hard"/"easy" a language can seem. There are many tasks where higher level languages have more facilities available to help you. Building a web app will be easier in Python than C, for example. On the flip side, good luck writing a device driver in Ruby.

On top of the task-driven reasons, I think the other big reason people find languages easier/harder than others is really a sort of emotional connection. The number of Ruby docs that use the word "joy" or something close speaks to this. Similarly, the people who have emotional responses both for and against Python's syntax and white space might speak to it.
Evolution is not required for Homo sapiens to exist.

The above statement does not in any way infer that evolution did not result in humans. Subtle but important.
Experienced developer in Stockholm looking for a short term gig around September/October.

JavaScript, Python, Django, Perl, HTML, CSS with a focus on real-time web applications.

Latest launched project was an online auction server for renowned Swedish auction house Bukowskis (http://www.bukowskis.com/), built with Tornado and a client written with jQuery, using regular long-polling.

We also have a few Node-experiments under our belt.
I'm looking for an EventMachine and/or Cassandra (with Ruby) expert.

2-hour phone conversation to help us get up to speed with the technologies and to double check our assumptions and architecture.
The only suggestions I have are:

1) Get a good ergonomic pen that works for you. This can help.

2) If you write small, legibility may be helped by getting a fine point pen rather than a standard medium point. This was a trick my ex-husband used.

Good luck with this.
Craigslist makes over $100 million a year. And they have just 60 or so employees. And I bet they have dirt cheap fixed costs. The website hasn't fucking changed in a decade, and it's more popular than ever! They're probably the Internet company with the highest profit margins! Craiglist is the fucking showcase example of Metcalfe's law.

But like bank robbers who foolishly think they wouldn't get caught on the 10th robbery, or a gambler playing martingale double or nothing all night, they fucked up. Craig should have pried open his fat ass wallet and toss millions of pocket change towards lobbying, branding, PR and advertising many, many years ago. Instead, they let their enemies, the media itself, define their brand and PR, and they lost control of the message, the agenda and the way they are presented to the mass public.

But Craig is apparently too hung up on his neo-hippy ideals of keeping Craigslist anti-corporate to realize that if he doesn't sink to the same dirty corporate warfare as the enemy, then they'll stab him in the back eventually. All they need is one good shot, and it's just a matter of time. I don't really get how a privately held $100 million/yr corporation is "anti-corporate." At that point it's just folly and self-delusion, he should have seen this storm cloud brewing miles away and years ago, and prepared for it to hit. Such as when Ebay tried to steal the company years ago. Too late now—say buh-bye to that $36 million a year in revenues from adult ads! Ouch!

I'm an unabashed Craiglist hater simply because he completely fucked up and missed the boat and failed us developers by not transforming the most popular and best single Internet site of high signal/noise anonymous contact into the best open mashup API of real-time, localized, semantic data. And this souped up mashup data API didn't have to be all corporatified either—Craig could have kept it hippy! Like Twitter! CL would only need to lift their pinky finger to instantly defeat the hundreds of millions invested in data mashup startups, Google, FB, AT&T, Ebay, etc who are trying to pin the market which CL dominates. Again, I see the opportunity cost—by CL not chasing change, we the users of the Internet have now lost more than we've gained from the potential of CL as force for good, community and the overall power of the Internet. I suppose my idealism is even purer than Craig's. :)
At the very least, CL can stop sending C&D orders and DMCA takedowns to small websites scraping their data.

I believe a data API like this would have caused Craigslist to become even bigger and more unstoppable. Craig, Jim and whoever pulls the the strings are lazy, unimaginative fucktards who deserve to be dethroned so we, the Internet, can have a new winner in the next round of King-of-the-Hill: Winner Takes All Internet Edition. :)
I was thinking about similarity of Lisp and Forth in that programmer can very easily create DSLs.
Google Music, the itune killer?
To be fair, you would have to compare to what happens if it were not legalized under similar conditions in the case of Japan, but I agree with you that the cases where prostitution is legal does not pave well for extending it in general if you care at all about the prostitutes condition (the same is also true for drugs, where many liberalization have totally failed).

I think the Japan situation is a bit particular, though - the Japanese society seems rather tolerant on extreme commercialization of sex in a way that is difficult to comprehend (and I am far from eeither puritan or American).
Forward Internet group, London, UK (www.forward.co.uk)

We work on a number of exciting internet brands: Omio.com, GetInvisibleHand.com, uSwitch.co.uk, JustCages.co.uk, Gloport.com and our digital agency Forward3d.co.uk.

We're a fantastic company to work for: nice people, good salaries and the perks like taking the entire company to Disneyland, Las Vegas etc on regular basis. We grew from a 1 man band 6 years ago into a 130-strong, profitable company today with no investment and we're still growing.

We're looking for very smart, entrepreneurial people who take initiative, embrace risks and deliver good results. Most of the brands we're working on were born inside the company.

It's really a great place to be, so if this (http://www.forward.co.uk/careers) sounds good to you, let me know: evgeny.shadchnev@forward.co.uk
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3D TV could work if producers showed restraint and only used it to add depth behind the frame, instead of throwing stuff at the audience for effect. Clipping of objects thrown towards you really kills the experience for me.

I think it will work for sports and nature shows. In the same way BBC's Planet Earth is great in HD I think some future production of the same kind will work great in 3D. Let's face it, that is basically what Avatar is – a gorgeous nature show set on an alien planet. At least that was the best part of it for me.
Even 1080p isn't really working yet. All systems I've seen out of high-end post production gear (yes, that includes broadcasting gear) have visual timing problems. Maybe I'm biased because I've worked in professional video and TV for too long, but I'm tired of seeing gradually worse quality becoming the norm (compression artifacts, poor color, bad timing, poor sound sync are more and more common) because apparently quantity trumps quality.

So what's the last trend in "quantity trumps quality"? Adding a 3d dimension of course! I've looked at some 3D streams during the World Cup, just to check, on my 2D set. How does this work? Simple, halved horizontal resolution. Oh, BTW it's 720p, so that means actual resolution is 640x720. 5% more pixels than good ol' PAL, that's basically a step back to low def. Hu.

Did I mentioned that the first time the industry tried to impose 3D on an unwilling public was in 1958, with Hitchcock's "Dial M for Murder"? Wow, now that's a new technology!
They can demand all they want. They just can't get it from CL now.
Huh? I am using Ping without any problems from the Netherlands, with a Dutch iTunes account.
That is correct. He also doesn't prove his point at all. Subtle but important.
A whole thread about a mini horse and not one mention of Rob & Big? I miss Big Black.
Robert Sawyer wrote a great book on this subject, Calculating God. He has a way of writing about science and philosophy that's incredibly engaging and accessible because it's in the form of fiction. It's one of the few scifi books I can recommend to people who normally don't like scifi (Ender's Game is another).

I don't want to give any spoilers but it takes up the various issues raised by the Hawking article and in this discussion.
Exactly :). One nice Slashdot comment:

"That's gonna be awesome for internet help-desk workers. How about creating a Flickr clone and calling it ifconfig?" (Steauengeglase)
Apart from reference questions (like dictionary meanings, map look up, programming syntax, wikipedia), we are an awfully long way from this.

I'm not clear what you mean, but it seems to me that we're pretty close to the point where most things that have an actual answer can be found by typing a question and clicking a button (using a search engine, with fall back to asking a question in a relevant forum)

If you are talking about more philosophical questions, then perhaps - but I think you can gain just as much enlightenment from the click of a button as you used to be able to from months of philosophy classes.
Similiar stuff and one of my favorites for killing time http://bomomo.com
I'd accept, and expect to double my chances of winning the prize by doing so (from 20% to 40%).
See it's weird but that stuff has never worried me, from a rational perspective anyway.

It's all about knowledge voids and what we use to fill it (pretty much as you say in the last paragraph). But I've always been amused to see Atheists getting all het up about the non-existence of God (it's the main reason I don't identify as one). It is as if disproof is fundamental to their understanding of the universe.

My take is pretty simple; I have absolutely no idea of any of the big answers (and even some of the little ones) but I'm pretty excited to see the progress being made and, maybe, I might get some more awesome answers in my life time.

Beyond that, what does it matter :) The perspective is that we are a tiny dot on a tiny dot on a pinhead in the centre of an ocean. No matter what you believe about the origins and future of the universe our time here is barely a flicker - it doesn't seem worth worrying about not having the answers, instead lets go grab all we can before it's over :)
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Mmmm.. ec2 instance running X+Xpra+FreeNX Server, then NX on the client and you have your desktop anywhere.

(X on EC2: http://blog.decaresystems.ie/index.php/2007/05/23/amazon-web...)

(FreeNX: http://freenx.berlios.de/)
Ask HN: Any decent html tutorials?
Hopefully, this won't take more than 45 seconds of your time :)

Just wondering firstly whether to start out with html4 or html5. This is for a first programming language (if you could even call it that).

Regarding tutorials, any suggestions? Just looking for the guide that can start someone off with a knowledgebase, and google/irc/cheatsheets/etc will be used from there.

html4. www.htmldog.com, w3schools, or http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/html-css-beginners-guide

html5: W3Schools or www.diveintohtml5.org

What have your experiences been with learning html or using any of these tutorials/resources?