skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think intuition is the only way to proceed, actually.

-- But let me clarify! I want to directly attack those who you refer to thinking that "if you can't explain or prove something rationally then it's not of any value". I don't think anyone is a constant calculator like that. It's important to learn because we're building computers that operate that way, but it doesn't appear that strict rationality (whatever that is) is our true operating mode.

So if you want to get the gains of rationality, the best you can do is use rational structure to train and shape your intuition. If you're skilled at the math required then you can use it to empower your intuition -- but never replace it.

I say this with strong fear of thought paralysis. Those who spend too long rationalizing every thing seem likely to trap themselves in local minima, to argue endlessly over two similar choices while missing out benefit of either.

I like to think about MCMC algorithms, actually. They're guaranteed to converge to the most liable posterior beliefs, but do so by jumping randomly. Each step forward is technically blind and hopeful, but by keeping a goal in mind and learning from every jump you improve, even considering the immense ignorance that Markov methods maintain.

Intuition can do better.
i'm half way through it. it's quite interesting, but i seriously wish it were 25% as long.

i read these articles because i honestly hope to get something life changing out of them, not for the pleasure of illustrative anecdotes.

i suspect authors of such articles have a word count to meet? it's unfortunate that the economics of writing reward filling whitespace - how could we motivate writers to be as succinct as possible?
> The key point that's missing in this headline is that it attains that speed 'directly downwind'... As a mind experiment to explain why this seems impossible,

After reading TFA and watching this video[1], I think you are wrong.

[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHsXcHoJu-A
was it scott adams who said this last time - "we're one more step closer to flying nude"
" Definitely the only thing that keeps people back from sexual assault is consciously deciding not to."

That is so not true. Don't extrapolate your own pitiful lack of morality onto others. If you have to explicitly remind yourself not to rape people, it doesn't mean everyone else does too.
That's true about "Be more rational." (ie "Your idea is stupid; quit being adventurous."). That's why I hesitate to say "rational optimist," because rational as an adjective has such skeptical, pessimistic connotations. Some "skeptics" drive me nuts.
Hitting a couple of your points:
What about Generics is broken? For the extent of power they seem to intend to provide (forcing methods to only take a particular type, and providing syntactic sugar so you don't have to cast everywhere.

Tail-call optimization is just that, an optimization. A 1.6 compliant, open-source JVM could provide that. Same with the faster startup time.

As I don't generally use closures, and would replicate their abilities through interfaces and anonymous classes, I don't have a comment on them; and you'd need to expound upon "module system" for me to say anything.
It's just too easy to make a case by taking a retrospective look at the winners. I want to see a current battleground along with a prediction of which one is the toy and which one is the non-toy.

Here's an example of why it's hard: iPhone vs Android. Well, obviously the iPhone is the toy. You have to do incredibly awkward things, or pay Apple $100, to run your own code on it; you can't tether it (sometimes); you can't replace the Web browser. It's hard to script it. Want to use your favourite email client? Good luck.

But hang on. Clearly Android is the toy. You can pick up Android phones for a lot less than an iPhone. Most of these phones are nowhere near as pretty or as specced out as an iPhone -- but pick one up and you've got the complete Android experience. If you want to hack on it, go ahead. If what you're looking for isn't built in to the phone, chances are someone's written it for you. Sure, it's messy, but that's democracy.

But hold up again. Smartphones are getting cheaper, but who really needs such a powerful, battery-sucking device in their pocket? Maybe the real "toy" of this generation is yet to emerge.

In five years someone will write an article about how obvious it was that iPhones would succeed because they were the simple accessible choice, or that Android would succeed because it was democratising, or that something else entirely would succeed because the smartphone genre was a fad.

Disclaimer: I agree with the general sentiment of the article.
This story is completely mis-leading. They certainly had users before 15 days ago [1]. The product was developed in an incubator in the Winter 2009 class [2]. They have relaunched and revamped it, but to start from a clean slate and say you had zero users with no disclosure or information about your past makes this story blatantly false. It's a shame because it still would have been a good story without the reset.

[1] http://www.startupnorth.ca/2010/11/03/has-kik-finally-arrive...

[2] http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/alumni/kik-at-blackberry-devcon
How China’s Entrepreneurs Are Helping It Win
In the Unix culture the people who claim to use vi actually use vi + shell + hundreds of little software tools. If it have worked for 30 years perhaps you should give it a try.
Hm, good point.

What about general life decisions? It's hard to say if you have enough "experience" in life to have good intuition about it.
Can really see why you'd use this, except for being able to see when somebody has read your message - which personally I hate because then people will be on my back wondering why I didn't reply right away. That's a reason I wouldn't use it.

I use a multi-protocol IM client on my phone, which has a constant link in the background to my GTalk, Windows Live Messenger, AIM, Skype, etc. - That way people can IM me any time from whatever platform they're currently on, whether it be computer, phone, browser, etc. But with Kik they have to be on a phone as well? That's really a step backwards, if they're sitting at their computer, logged into 5 separate IM clients already, and then have to pick up their phone to IM me. But it has obvious solutions.
In order to determine the value of resume paper over "regular" copy paper, I will go out and buy some this week to evaluate.
We don't know. Does it?
Well, if somebody offer you a job for a pitiful wages, along with food and shelter. Without it, you will die. Would you take it? Or would you not?

Is it really being "taken advantage of"?

Moreover, if the new economy mean you can afford more stuff, are you really being taken advantage of?

I find it presumptive for me to judge a relationship between a wealthy capitalist and the employee no matter how right I might be. For whatever reason, the employee agree with the capitalist to do X work and be compensated Y stuff.

What the use of having the right to self-determination if other people decides your boss shouldn't be allow to make a voluntary contract with you.

Perhaps, "fairness" is much higher than the principle of voluntarism?
This is the kind of marketing strategy that turns me off to a service. Linked-in does it too. I get invite invitations from people that I am already linked with, but where they have another of my email addresses in their address book that is different than my Linked-in email.
From reading the article, it seems that Demand Media treats writers as a (completely replaceable) commodity.

I don't think the fact that they pay a (highly debate-ably) reasonable wage to writers, is a good reason for viewing their operation more favourably.

In my opinion, sites like this (and other crowd-sourcing sites) are effecting cultural change by exploiting the bad-times. Recession helps their models world well, because there are more skilled people around without jobs.

At the end of the day, I don't think the output that Demand Media creates makes the world a better place.
"Unions and political parties are collections of individuals who've organized for an expressly political purpose."

No, unions are bargaining groups for workers. They have as much / little right to politics as corporations. Corporations are groups of shareholders and the days of normal people not owning stock are long over. Look at the hold of certain unions in California and their pension system woes for an example of undue influence that is going to bite someone.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -- Margaret Mead

People need to be able to start revolutions without the use of arms, and for US politics that means spending money. I find the preference for parties and unions to be a poor substitute for individual rights.
The only thing is that, for me, rationalizing the intuition before I act on it can waste time and the opportunity, and kill inspiration. So I think it's important to act first sometimes (then go back and understand rationally later, as one other poster mentioned).
Like it or not, this is how the game is played. If the situation were reversed, Google's lawyers would be all over Oracle like a cheap suit. They'd be neglecting their responsibility to their shareholders if they weren't.

If you think Google is "different" from any other multinational public corporation then you've fallen hook, line and sinker for their PR.
Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Ten minutes of feeling like an idiot for not getting it, then a moment of glory when it finally became clear.

For those who still feel like idiots, here's the post on Autopia that made me a believer:

"Let me get this straight. It is common knowledge that a sailboat can tack at an angle to the wind sufficiently fast to reach a directly downwind point faster than the wind itself. Yes? And yet people actually thought that merely doing this in a straight line would be “impossible”?

Assuming the former is true and commonly accepted, all you have to do is imagine an arbitrarily small (narrow) “zig zag” tacking pattern — which is roughly the equivalent of your “cylinder earth” thought experiment. If the zig-zag is small enough to be contained with in the width of your “boat”, that’s all you need, in principle.

The rest is just engineering (and using a propeller is much better than a zig-zagging mechanical device of some kind). I had never heard of this controversy, and halfway through the article I’m thinking “this is just obvious.”"

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/08/ddwfttw/2/

Tacking within the width of the boat is the key, right? Now, think about changing the angle of the sail not by swinging it horizontally back and forth, but by TURNING THE SAIL UPSIDE DOWN. In other words, constantly spin the sail at the correct rate, and it's the same as tacking back and forth; and we already know that you can beat the wind that way.
i found out that most times my intuition is right, even when rationally thinking about something would come up with a different decision.

but i guess this strongly depends on your intuition :)
I think you might be confusing instinct with intuition.

Intuition is a means of taking in information. Psychologists call it irrational because it isn't really a decision making process.

Instinct is very rational, we just don't usually recognize it as such because it isn't concerned with verbalizing its logic. For instance, the game of basketball actually requires a lot of logic if you think about it. It's just that it requires a very fast-acting form of logic. Imagine how ridiculous it would be for a basketball player to say something like "I know I can make this goal because of Jordan's theorem". By the time they finished that thought, the other team might have already scored.
All you really need to pull it off are:

- Change scripts for every schema change, stored in source control.

- An automated build/deploy that pulls down new change scripts and executes them in order.

- (optional) a good way to generate your backend CRUD by looking at the existing database schema, or as a lesser option an ORM that does the same thing.

So your workflow is: script out your schema change, check it in, apply it to your dev environment, regenerate the CRUD from your local schema, fix any compile errors that you've introduced. (and optionally make sure all your unit tests still pass).

You'll notice that all that stuff above is just the basic workflow you should have in place anyway.
Einstein has some great quotes about intuition and creativity.

I also like "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."

His quotes are basically the proof of the pudding that rationality needs intuition, since he's thought of as one of the greatest scientific minds ever.
A Scheme interpreter, compiler, & VM written in Python
The value of the two are intricately linked but ultimately not comparable.

Is money as valuable as a marketable skill? Is getting somewhere quickly as valuable as a vehicle?

The intuition of a person who doesn't value rational thinking is going to be worthless in an empirical field. The gut feeling of someone who can't show they are right is not likely to be correct.

Intuition is just the fast-read cache of pre-computed notions. If a problem looks similar but not exactly like a dozen or so others that you have solved in the past, you take a sort of snapshot of all that past work and distill it into an intuitive grasp of the problem.

If you see a problem unlike any you have ever encountered, you are unlikely to have an intuitive idea of the solution. Sometimes people will pull past-solved problems out of their fast-read cache and apply them to unrelated problems in an irrational way; sometimes people will feel their intuition guiding them in a certain way and rationally realize they are projecting subconsciously an unrelated situation onto the problem.

So intuition is only as valuable as its rational basis. Intuition is much more efficient, much like using a rainbow table to crack a password; the table is only as effective as its precomputed hashes; it will never crack a password that hasn't been precomputed. However, compared to a traditional brute-force approach, it's orders of magnitudes more efficient. A brute-force approach however, with enough time will crack any password.
Thanks for both responses. I do like the having a couple options to offer. I appreciate the input guys
SpyPhone: See how your Apple iPhone privacy can be violated
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I want to see a current battleground along with a prediction of which one is the toy and which one is the non-toy.

I agree. I'd be happy to see an additional article which explores a bunch of current technology battles as toy vs. enterprise fights.

But, not every battle fits this analogy. I'm not sure the iPhone vs. Android battle does.
You write as if Microsoft discovered the Kinect, maybe deep inside some ancient system of caves, and now is hoarding them for their own nefarious purposes.
remote OK?
I don't think it is different. What's sleazy about printer cartridges isn't the lock-in, it's the teaser price on the printer made up for with the artificially inflated price of the cartridge.
Yea, people who insist that everything should be thought out rationally do seem pretty insane, since no one, no matter how rational, could ever be like that all the time, and it would actually limit them a lot.

It feels empowering to hear from a fellow intuition enthusiast, too! :)
If I were a movie studio, I’d make streaming a priority
I can't track down a source for this. Do you have one? It's not that far from things that Einstein said (for example, he did say that imagination is more important than knowledge), but it's different in tone. He didn't typically speak in terms of the sacred and he wasn't this kind of social critic, so it would surprise me if it were authentic.

Off topic but interesting: the wonderful definition of insanity that's always attributed to Einstein (doing the same thing over again while expecting different results) never came from Einstein at all. It has been traced to a 1983 novel by mystery writer (and one-time partner of Martina Navratilova, how's that for trivia) Rita Mae Brown.
No, I meant, Microsoft will contract to teams of outside engineers who have made this problem their life's work.
Yeah but unless Google buys Oracle or wins the Dalvik lawsuit and implements a better server side JVM than Oracle, I just don't see how it can happen. Closures work fine in Scala, BTW.
How about DTV cards, or BD+ Blu-Ray disks?
I don't want to piss anybody off but I know a lot of Android users that would be using an iPhone but they are not on AT&T.

If the iPhone was available on every carrier we would have real numbers.

Plus, we ARE comparing OSes so platform does not matter. Right now it iOS vs Droid. The fact that Apple has managed to push it on multiple devices should not count against them...just as keeping it in one carrier has hurt them.
The "Apple makes more profit" angle is nice, I guess

51% of profit share, $238 of profit per phone sold. If market share was all they cared about, they could drop the price of the iphone by $200.

http://www.asymco.com/2010/10/31/making-it-up-in-volume-how-...

edit: formatting
Taking on Google by Learning from Ants
but that's democracy.

No, a democracy is 50% + 1 votes. A market serve anybody who is willing to pay the price. See the difference?

A democracy would be that only Iphone, but not android win.

But in a market, iphone will continue to service 10% of the population that want the iphone. The rest, simply use some kind of android.
No, it wasn't a great joke, but the funniest part about it is that it came at the end of a long article that would have had Apple fan-boys so steaming mad that they would be unable to rationally respond to it. And there is nothing funnier than watching normally rational people so angry that they're irrational.

(And thus unable to rationally respond to this comment, making the whole situation worse, but even so much more funny.)
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Eh? Dell is very much not a brand like IBM or HP, they are pioneers in the field of cheap generic hardware. That's why I chose them as an example! And Red Hat is hardly an obscure OS these days either... And Oracle runs happily on Windows or many other common OSs too...
I am not sure trolls have a pulse. Perhaps you are detecting the speed with which his editor patting him on the back with all the page views?

That said, I agree with every delicious word of the article (I am rabidly anti-Apple) and enjoyed reading it and enjoyed even more the twisted outrage I imagined would be forming (foaming?) in the minds of certain people as they read it, and then I had to chuckle a bit as I now see said people freaking out and firing madly into the jungle, Predator-style. Except this type of pulse-free troll doesn't bleed and you can't kill it. And no matter how many times this is pointed out the pro and anti Apple trolls will continue and there will be no light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant commentators clash by night.
May be so , but so far no software patent lawsuits from Google. Yet.

I read somewhere that Schawrtz, the nincompoop former CEO of Sun, pitched Google lawsuit as an asset. A typical Asshat CEO meets douchebag investor love story.

May be my visceral reaction stems from the gradual acceptance of the fact that I would have to learn Haskell after all.
You don't ignore the topic when your on an earnings call unless you want some really bad articles written. You could do like he did with the flash question ("we love flash memory") or you can give them some stats. The actual quotes (not the summarized crud in the article) were about on par with what was said about Apple at the last Google event.

The big take away from the call really wasn't Android versus iPhone, it was iPhone versus Blackberry. The "aw shucks" businesses are adopting iPhone / iPad all on their own without an Apple push is a pretty big shot at RIM. Add to that the whole 7" screen thing, it really looks like Apple is thinking of RIM customers as up for grabs.

I find it funny that a column called "Android Power" isn't talking about cool Android stuff. Seems like another "I need some page views" article.
Welcome to the world of fake Twitter accounts. Wait until you see how vulgar BP was about the oil spill on @BPglobalPR!
My first usage of twitter was for sending DM's to my window air conditioner. At the time I didn't have a smart phone, so using twitter via SMS was my means of communication.

Soldered the air conditioner remote to a relay connected to the parallel port on my computer. Whenever the script pulled down new DM's from my username with special commands, it would briefly flip the relay turning the ac on or off. Also set up a scheduler to turn it on 30 minutes before i woke up.
Amazon does so much A/B testing that I've grown accustomed to it never looking the same between visits.
Ask HN: Whats your preferred CMS for non technical users?
Hi All,

I am looking at building a CMS for a very non technical audience. Rather than re-build the wheel I would like to extend an existing CMS. I have worked with WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Serendipity. However, none of them is very easy to use for the lay man.

Would it makes sense to build one from scratch or is there something out there that is super easy to use?

Thank you for your time.

Update: I have looked only at the php based CMS since I am most comfortable with php. However the language does not matter, so I am very open to Python, Ruby and others.
Palimpsest: the guide to a (mostly) paperless life
Amiga trademark for sale
Well, the powerful thing about intuition is that you actually can intuit something totally new. Of course it draws on past experiences, but it can connect past experiences and solutions in new ways, to create a brand new solution. So, I think intuition is not as simple as being a faster way of pulling out an old solution.

I, for one, often struggle to explain to others why my gut feeling is right, but it often is.
The book is worth reading, but half of it is historical data about disk drives.

Edit: I think it's a bit overrated, actually. Had it been a quarter of its size and stripped of its pretentiousness, it actually might be the classic everyone says it is. That being said, its core insight is an important and good one, so you kind of have to read it anyway.
Which programming language do you really hate?
Ask HN: What is it with Steve Jobs' turtleneck?
Right now we have yet another article[1] on the front page concerned about Steve Jobs' dress code. But honestly, what is it with his turtleneck? I never got it.

As far as I am concerned he is a pretty down to earth guy, having roots in Zen Buddhism as can be read on blogs[2] or Wikipedia[3]. Zen Buddhists are not known for showing off wealth, but for quality and mindfulness. In my opinion, he gets that part pretty well done.

On a smaller scale, I make more than the average guy, but feel no need to show it with a suit (not that I'm rich). On the contrary, I think doing so is silly. So why should Steve Jobs dress like the CEO of some bank or law firm when he's not? He's the CEO of Apple, a pragmatic company making quality products that speak for themselves. Or else, why would people buy from some bum with a turtleneck?

Please, enlighten me.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1876906
2. http://evalinux.wordpress.com/2008/01/13/the-zen-of-steve-jobs/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs