skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think scientist are so much hurt as lost: when you have years of evidence pointing in one direction, and someone replies with a completely unscientific argument (take a lot of pseudo-science for example) what is he supposed to do?

Science has its own epistemological methods. You don't prove something beyond a level of reasonable doubt because that's a) vague, b) really difficult (rarely science proves anything), c) the scientist never claims that his theory cannot be improved, i.e. it's perfect/finished.

On the other hand scientific agreement comes when a theory explains current data and can predict many new situations, and these were tested not just by the author but also by other people in other places with other apparatus. Every article is also checked for the assumptions and methodology that are stated in each paper. The scientific method cannot prove anything but has its own ways of knowing things...

... which is why it is so hard to give a scientific answer against some wacko unscientific theory.

The fact that the person doesn't see experiments or peer reviews is no excuse: that is the way science proceed, and it's open to anyone to scrutinise. You seem to suggest that scientist shouldn't just scrutinise each other's work but also answer any complain/criticism from someone who has no clue about the field. But you know, there's a reason the scientist spent 4 years of Uni and maybe more later: how can society know "beyond a level of reasonable doubt" what the scientist have agreed upon if they don't have the tools to understand it?
There is a still popular perception that Macs are for frivolous hippies and PCs is what real people use to do real work.

I'd tend to disagree. That might have been the attitude a decade ago, but today I think it goes more like "Sure, Macs are nice, but I can't afford one". At least that's what I hear most frequently from people I know.
That's true he doesn't say they weren't successes explicitly. He does say that it took 10 years to make you look like a succes in the last paragraph which I understood as the other sites not being successes to him.
Was anyone else scared that the link was to goatse?
Though blogger was a big hit he wasn't the founder/co-founder of it. Evan Williams was credited with 100% success of blogger. I am not sure about his association with xanga though. But with Twitter he gets an equal footing. That's what I think he is referring to in this article.
Why Does Google Think Social Media is so Important?
1. I think that it would be more interesting instead of just testing if a applicant can do a specific task, let them try and fix it if they failed. After all, it isn't such a problem in real life if someone doesn't get something right.

2. What about having them refactor some messy code?

3. Exercises where they write tests for untested code.
while I can't say I personally admire twitter as a business, I have some serious respect for his message: 10 years of hard work make an overnight success.
> the christener of cool when it comes to indie music

Off-topic: the idea that indie music needs a professional gatekeeper seems ... contrary.
It's called luck
well, with all due respect, you're not king of the world if you're the founder or co-founder of Xanga :)
It's true that there's a certain amount of fuzziness, but also there's a gradient of trust between 100% and zero. Predictions that consistently come true start to dwarf alternative explanations after a while. Darwin said that the great apes are our closest living relatives, and 150 years later research finds the genetic code similarities in the 90+% range. That's pretty strong.

On the other hand, it is indeed possible that the field of study is a chaotic system, and accurate predictions impossible. But then I will argue that's not a branch of natural science, but rather of history. A good historian can tell you in small details the reasons why Lincoln got elected in 1860, but is as clueless as the next guy as to the next presidential election. Would you trust him if he said Republicans are always best?

Similarly, there's a lot of great work done in historical climatology, with pollen analysis, ice cores etc. and we can find out a great many things about the past. Computer models can be built to fit this history perfectly (as I'm sure that even I can code some curve that spits out the order of Democrat and Republican presidents, or even last year's Dow Jones). But unless we see these models also making verifiable and accurate predictions (without 50% margins of error! what if chimp genome turned out to be 49% identical to ours?), it might well be that the system is inherently chaotic and muddy. Then it might simply not lend itself to scientific analysis, at least not with our present methods.
Thanks for the suggestions. I will check out the book, and the method you suggest seems very fair enough. Appreciate it very much.
I don't think this is the method SSL uses, because what you're describing is just a variant of symmetric-key encryption. I think SSL uses asymmetric-key encryption. The better metaphor for that is a lock that anyone can lock, but only one person can unlock.
Career Element Job Fairs in September and October
(SF, NY, Seattle, Berkeley, Santa Clara):

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Also, we are launching on September 30th at our Santa Clara job fair! And, we are looking for more talented software engineers! We are an angel funded startup with a bunch of talented engineers from Stanford, MIT, Google, Yahoo, Oracle, and more!
As a further friendly jab to atheists in present company, I've always found cosmological discussions funny. Here they are, willing to believe in an infinity of infinities of parallel universes, with varying physical laws and constants. They cannot detect them, they cannot describe them, they cannot say anything about them other than that there must exist enough of them for the probabilities to work out. Bazillions upon bazillions of totally barren invisible universes, just so this one can have stars.

Meanwhile, I believe in a God who has intervened in history in a recoded and well attested way, who leaves behind lots of witnesses to his activities in the present and the past, whose prophecies come true and whose wisdom on human nature closely matches fact. He claims to have created the universe and I believe him.

And the atheists think I'm the one who believes in things without evidence.
good luck to you then with having as much luck, if all you think it takes is luck...
London-based agency We Make Websites are looking for Drupal freelancers based anywhere, more detail: http://www.drupal.org.uk/wanted/we-make-websites-are-searchi...
Rails Developers - San Francisco

Blurb!

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We've just been named #47 on this years Inc 500 list of fastest growing companies. We have a great group of folks - talk to us!

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http://www.bafflebot.com - clickable

beta code: baffleboy
I didn't know physics problems are assumed to be idealized... When you build a bridge for example, will the physics try to be simplified to the max? (Honest question here).

Velocity would matter -- it seems to me -- if there is friction and probably a few other factors included like elasticity. No?

Personally, I always considered physicists to be applied mathematicians (not the other way around although I've seen physics problems thrown in university level math classes). That's why I put that there, so assuming a high level of math skills, you'd probably change your way of thinking quite a bit.
I'm at G5 Search Marketing in Bend, Oregon and we're hiring for a bunch of positions: http://www.g5searchmarketing.com/jobs/

We just closed a $15 Million Investment from Volition Capital and really need to staff up our engineering department. We're a rails shop so the usual skills in Ruby, MySQL, nginx, agile, etc. are what we're looking for. These positions are onsite, but Bend Oregon is a fantastic place to live.

A key hire we're especially looking for is a VP of Engineering.
"Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success."

Love this.
Arguably, it already has: http://wiki.github.com/bjpop/berp/
Interesting. So that's why "there are other, less picturesque examples that improve more."

Out of curiosity, does the GHC GC take advantage of the property that most data is immutable? Is it mutable from the perspective of the GC? I could easily see GHC playing with that constraint internally. Pure curiosity is at play here: I've never heard of a garbage collection scheme that takes advantage of immutability, but logically it seems like it should be possible.
There is an element of being at the right place with the right idea when people are ready to embrace it. But certainly there would be plenty of startups where the stars aligned for them in terms of this and they never managed to make it big.
"Overnight success takes a long time."
Paul Buchheit

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2009/01/overnight-success-t...
Maybe I had a uniquely-bad experience, but I heard basically nothing after submitting my YCommonApp nearly a month ago.
Apparently. I think its Australian for kerfuffle.
I consider HN to be a very informative forum hence posted it here :)
My goal is not to beat the markets, at the same time not to leave the money in Savings account which does not get any significant interest either. Volatility is a concern, hence I had stayed away from stocks till now. One other suggestion was to track some specific companies for a period, and invest based on the results. Investing in index funds seems like a good choice, and will explore that :)
HOW TO: Track Hurricane Earl Online
Thanks for the feedback. Expanding international is definitely in the road map. There are a few companies outside the US that are posted, but unfortunately the location search wont find them.
True. The airplane problem had several things that were ambiguous; this problem only has things that are unspecified.
Javascript/CSS/HTML5 Senior front-end engineer - Secaucus, NJ, USA (NYC area)

http://www.prg.com (PRG) is the world’s leading supplier of entertainment and event technology, including state-of-the-art audio, video, lighting, rigging, scenery and automation solutions.

We are looking for a front-end lead with strong mobile uix experience to join our team developing our product that we hope will change the way large conferences are planned, managed, and run. if you're interested send me an e-mail at ismith _ @ _ prg dot com
Nope, you just take as much as you want/need. We dont put restrictions, but expect our team to be respectful and not abuse. As long as you work hard, you can play hard. The type of people we hire understand that and we have never had a problem in the past 2+ years.
> Being an entrepreneur and failing

Well, it's the business that failed, not the entrepreneur. There are always lessons that you take away from the experience - something that people who didn't try will ever have.

This knowledge is both rare and valuable. It can be shared with others, or it can be used to generate wealth in the future. I'd suggest you make en inventory of items that you learned from the experience. It could be something tactical (e.g., "learned how to run a proper AdWords campaign; learned how to build a professional website") or more strategic. In either case, you're going to be better at starting up the next time around.
For the tl;dr-impaired:

"Einstein, like many inventors and discovers, spent many years stubbornly pursuing his great discoveries — about seven years for special relativity and the other discoveries published in 1905 and seven years for General Relativity. His accomplishments did not come easily or quickly or without error."

Well, at least when he was finished, he didn't have to code it up in LaTeX and run a bunch of experiments using code written at 2AM after the lab sysadmin disabled his login for downloading too much data. Instead he went for walks.
I'd be interested to see this research. It's obviously no surprise that drinking would be associated with lower levels of inflammation, considering how much physcial/emotional discomfort alcohol causes to people prone to inflammation. I just have a really hard time believing there could be causation without seeing the research.
San Francisco, Austin, Boston, Baltimore, USA

Zynga is definitely hiring in a lot of different roles. We're looking for great Product people and engineers in all the different studios.

http://jobvite.com/m?3yUDXfwM

My email is in my contact info if you are looking for more information.
Given CNN's new behavior of reporting news as defined by their viewers on Twitter, this is not too surprising.

It would be nice if news organizations went back to being cost centers separated from the organization's entertainment center.
Well, that's only the localized version of that argument.

The better argument is concerned with the capacity for the universe itself to hold any life whatsoever. The relationship between the fundamental forces (strong, weak, gravity, etc.) and certain other constants in physics that, were they slightly different, would rending the whole of existence something entirely different.

This leads to one of three conclusions. 1) It's a staggering coincidence that the one universe is such that it supports such nuance as life and consciousness. 2) The universe is cyclic and that this iteration happened to be the one where that occurred. 3) There are many universes.

The problem with 2 is that it seems that our universe is not going to contract. So you'd have to fold in the likelihood that of the infinite cycles needed to get to this arrangement, this one that works for life and intelligence also happens to be the last one.

As for 3, it solves many of the problems, but it's no more empirical than 1. It's favored in philosophical circles because it is naturalistic, but when dealing with questions like this, the idea of a prime mover isn't obviously any less natural than the idea of infinitely many bubble universes.

The compelling argument against #1 has always been, "Well, making a god or God the first mover does nothing but shift the question to 'Who made God?'" The response to that it is only our universe in particular that is subject to the evidence that there was a beginning and will be an end state. We know matter is not infinite. We know it had a start, a finish, and we know pretty well that the universe is going to wind down at some point to a static end. This means that it had a definite beginning (or that we happen to be in the final cycle of infinite cycles which is a strange, maybe intractable metaphysical problem in and of itself).

Anyway, a first-mover outside of our universe doesn't have any of these pressures on it.

I assume that Hawking's work here (I'm not a physicist in the slightest) will seek to establish that there is a gravitational background to existence that is independent of our universe. In short, he's made gravity the first-mover. He's made gravity into god, an eternal entity that is unchanging and requires neither beginning nor end based on our understanding of it.

I know that's a huge block of text, but this is an old, old idea. Hawking is hardly the first person to explore this territory, and he's almost certainly not the smartest, whatever that means. It's primarily a metaphysics problem, not a physics problem, but if one could discover in physics something that is independent of our universe, that would have major bearing on the metaphysical problem.

TL;DR The anthropic argument is much more interesting when applied to the universe as a whole than to us or our planet in particular. It's an open problem in metaphysics. Hawking may shed more light on it through physics, but this isn't just a case of terribly ignorant people vs. civilized educated people. It's a real question.

(Edited because I wrote "week force" which, while I could try to play it off as a novel way to refer to time, was clearly a stupid mistake.)
G5 owner, here. Is Gitmac UB or Intel only?

And yes, I should have replied to the OP.
I was checking out a few of your "baffles" and ran into a bug. After clicking refresh a few times I got stuck on a puzzle piece; the caption and description said to refresh it, but it just returned to the "please refresh".

I've repeated this 3x now; it appears to occur after the first reload.

(In Safari 5.0.1)
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The answer probably was just "car".
Like “API” Is “Storage Tier” Redefining itself?
the idea of "click here to see what you could get into right nowish" is immensely appealing to me. if it could go out and aggregate all the event thingies out there and show me whats geographically and temporally close, that would get regular use from me. throw in scrapers for local venue websites and it gets awesome.

i dont kmow about posting up my current status. i dont see myself ever doing that, so naturally, i presume no one else would (and i could obviously be wrong there). but im telling you, if you could make the kayak.com of finding out whats up in your hood, you would have a hit. maybe start it off localized to one major city like dc or bmore and take it from there?

hell if you dont do that i just might! "whatsupbmore.com" <- id buy that for a dollar.

not to yank your idea in a different direction, this is just what popped into my head, apply salt, etc.
Unfortunately for Apple they'll have to deal with this more and more as they grow beyond simply being a premium niche provider to mainstream. It's easy to keep a walled-garden clean and orderly but once you grow beyond that and need to connect people's outside "messy" lives with your product, it gets much tougher (see Microsoft)
Reading... thanks.
Apple is like graphic artists back in the early days of the web. Only experienced in the controlled print environment, the web pages they designed was just images on static pages, but not web.
ZeroMQ: Modern & Fast Networking Stack
Chill out. There is nothing in my comment to imply that there is anything wrong with title, or authority, or pink ponies. The author of the proceeding comment wrote "Trusting scientists because they use controlled experiment, peer review and other similar tools is quite a different thing than trusting them based on authority." The purpose of my comment is to say that the words attributed to Singh indicate trust based on authority indicated by title, membership, etc.
Asia Just Does Not Get PCI
Factual is hiring in West Los Angeles, though I think we could make things work with someone in the SF bay area if the fit is great.

Our goal is to be the place where people meet to share, improve, and mash-up data. We have an awesome team, and an incredible CEO (he was the co-founder of Applied Semantics, which was sold to Google and became AdSense)

We're looking for awesome Java generalists. Bonus points for MapReduce, NoSQL or machine learning expertise.

http://www.factual.com/jobs

You can also email me personally at leo -at- factual.com
When a weight is at rest, the tension in the rope must be less then or equal to half the weight. The problem asks which weight will be first to not be at rest. The answer should now be obvious.
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Interestingly:
RT @ev: @biz also, don't forget LUCK
I didn't write it but I thought it was interesting. Also, people read most of the article in the 500ms it took to submit? I don't think so.
First look: Taking HDR photos with Apple's iOS 4.1
And nobody likes more than three genres of music.

oooookay. (there are 9 on that list I listen to weekly)
Okay. You should have said something like

“film is dead for ‘serious’ uses where serious is defined as ‘a client paying by the hour’”

then, instead. But generally clients paying by the hour care about “bang for the buck” and “timely” and “good enough” more than they care about absolute quality, so that’s sort of a different use case than fine art photography.

I really don’t see why there should be any problem with a writer or guitarist using whatever equipment they want. The product is what matters here, not the tools. Basically, your definition makes journalists serious but novelists not, and orchestra members serious, but rock band members not. Eh.
Calling it a phone is fine. I don't see why the word can't evolve. These sort of things happen organically.

However, I liked his observation about the recipient of every phone call being a "victim."
Ask HN: is algorithmic or HF trading something I could do on my own?
Assuming I had the necessary skills (and I do, in math and programming, but not finance or trading at the moment), could I do algorithmic or high-frequency trading on my own, or is it (participation in the market, low-latency information, etc.) priced too high for an individual?
until consumer heads-up displays crop up and the devices spend most of their time in pockets.
Actually, this is my site (tweetage wasteland) and I've heard from a couple folks that anytime they try to link to one of my posts, the link disappears. Historically, my posts have gotten some decent traffic and/or responses from this site. Love to get to the bottom of this and get my site off any blacklist. It's just a blog, no weirdness.
How to pour the perfect cup of coffee
Side note:

> "When my so-called phone rings, my first reaction is "Shit. What's wrong now?" ..."

This is so true. Partly because we've trained our contacts this way. I only ring people when it's 'important' (read: shit+fan) and tend to expect the same in return.

It's odd since a 30 second phone call can usually replace 10 minutes of back and forth over email (albeit without the paper-trail).
I really like Stormpulse, but this is a problematic post. The title is editorialized, focusing on a layout feature (Stormpulse gets its own subheading, whereas other sites are clustered by similarity). A layout artifact on mashable.com doesn't mean that Stormpulse is truly considered to be in a category of its own; in fact, I think it easily fits in with the Google Maps mashups, but I don't really care either way.

Tl;dr: I think this title makes sense for an internal company email, but not HN. The article linked, however, is useful, so I'm not flagging this.
Hey Nicolo, change your about page please, if you really want this to succeed:

"Nic is the CEO and business guy at Taskforce."
"Alex is a serial entrepreneur and developer."

Alex left.

Now what? Your first line of introduction makes you (a) CEO and (b) business guy. Hmm... your whole R&D and tech department just left.
Barclays Capital IBD. Esoteric ABS. Need to be highly intelligent, technical, quantitative, passionate and passionate about something worth while.
Are you colocated at the NYSE?
Provocative Language and the HTML5 Working Group
Explained here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659814
Wow, so people are getting upset that content is causing a greater emotional response, with a direct influence on the graphic's creator? To me that seems as if the designers and marketers are doing their job properly.
True. But skill also. Luck let's you roll a 6 if you need one. Skill makes sure you get to the roll the die 10 times.
Uh, guess I'll be delaying my BD player purchase for a while.