skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of commenters don't appear to have read the paper on which the article is based on - critiquing at its best. Some factoids of note:

The Bem study isn't unique, there have been 1000s of studies exploring psi that have arrived at significant results. Look up Dean Radin for starters in case you're interested.

The Bem study is unique in that it is getting published in a mainstream journal, which is unusual since the mainstream psychology community doesn't believe or like the idea of researching psi, i.e. most consider it impossible. But that mainstream attitude is just that, an attitude.

Bem is fairly unusual as most researchers that do psi-research are considered on the fringe of the community and don't get in to the mainstream journals.

Researchers that do explore psi risk their reputations and careers.

Bem started out as a skeptic when he was invited to critique another researchers psi experiments. He's a well reputed researcher who has contributed his own theories that have been a real contribution to the field of psychology(non-psi related), something few scientists achieve in their careers.

So far, 2 papers have been written in response to Bem's study, as noted by another commenter. The first uses the Bem study to argue an entirely different agenda: the need for changes in the way general studies use statistics. The core of their argument would affect hundreds of thousands of papers across the entire field of psychology (and others). How valid the authors points are in relation to the Bem study is open to debate.

In the 2nd paper by other authors, it was attempted to replicate their findings. If you read the paper, you can't even tell how closely they followed Bem's original experiment, ie. what software did they use, how did the users install it etc? (and they didn't replicate all of Bem's experiments). One big warning bell is that they used internet participants, which is a shoddy way to do a psi experiment, or most any experiment for that matter.

For those that critique the design: Bem took 9 classic psychological experiments that the field is extremely familiar with and reversed them. Designing a good psi-experiment is incredibly hard and a lot more thought and scrutiny than the average experiment. Using classic experiments makes a great deal of sense.

@araneae:
Welcome to psychology research. Almost all the experiments, findings and studies that make it into journals were paved in copious amounts of (pilot)studies and experiments that yielded no results. Such is the nature of doing research in the field of psychology. Designing a psi experiment that stands up to scrutiny requires even more work, failures etc.

The concept of backward causation has been verified in other fields, like quantum biology and from a physics point of view, it is widely accepted both by theory and empirical study. It's not that big of stretch of the imagination that the most sophisticated organ that we have encountered in the universe (our brain) might be capable of it.

Fact #389: number one reason start ups fail and random critiques are flawed: they're based on relentlessly operating on unproven, unverified assumptions.
Whoa, that is awesome.

And now I have also found the pizza section of the Serious Eats website. I am doomed to never work again.
I have been a few times, and it's a truly fascinating country. Well worth a visit / vacation.
1) Oh I was agreeing with you; probably should have prefixed that with 'I agree'.

2) I disagree with you here. How much loyalty do users have to HP, Dell, etc? Certainly some, but I feel the loyalty to Windows, OS/X, etc. exceeds that loyalty.

In terms of users wanting a certain phone, the mobile industry has changed a lot in the past 10 years -- phones are much more powerful. Users now end up investing substantial time and money into apps. Such apps lock users in; on an upgrade the user better have the damn things work out of the box.

Profits of a given device are quite different from profits of applications made for that device. Sure, there's some correlation, but how much? Case in point, the operating profit percents of Macs as a total % of computers is 35%. I'd be amazed if the operating profits of OS/X software profit as a % of total desktop software are even a third of that.
Please enlighten us. Are they on TOR hidden services? Links?

[edited to sound less snarky. genuinely curious]
Respectfully, I think this is a false choice. A rephrasing:

"Are you a developer or just like to write code? During the last few years I've been making functions. I really like writing the code and choosing good sets of functions but I don't really feel like a developer. I don't want to make the jump because I like writing code without the pressure of making those functions into an actual application."

To explain:

If you're doing side projects, you are an entrepreneur. You might not be a very good one (yet), but an entrepreneur is just someone who takes risks for an uncertain payoff. The risk in this case is your time, and the uncertainty is that a project might take off.

It is worth realising that the difference between "someone who builds things" and an entrepreneur is largely about focus. Why are you making these things? If you're building them in the hope that people will use them, then you should think about users. How might they find your thing and what would they like about it? If you're making things in the hope that they might make money, then you owe it to yourself to learn a bit about why people pay for things and keep it in mind. If you hope to work with others, then any effort you put into meeting people and figuring out if you should work with them is well spent.

I don't want to discount here the possibility that you genuinely don't want your projects to get users or make money. If you're building things just to learn and would be mortified if they got into the hands of real people, this probably doesn't apply to you, but I suspect that's not the case.

Otherwise, it's merely a question of how much are you doing to make your hope (project takes off) into a reality?

It doesn't have to be scary. Admitting that you're an entrepreneur doesn't mean you have to quit your job tomorrow. Many entrepreneurs wait before jumping ship, because they want to take a calculated risk. Nothing wrong with that. The point is that if you're starting side projects and you hope they succeed, you're doing entrepreneurial things. There's no harm in accepting that and learning how to do it better.
I'm really afraid this type of user sign up is going to begin taking a hold of new apps on mobile devices.

It's one thing for me to receive emails from friends inviting me to try a new service they're using, but it's really intrusive to receive txts from kik telling me to sign up every time someone I know installs the app.
French fries are made by expelling moisture, and are then saturated in oil at which point a crust forms on it. I don't think this warrants and experiment as the results are pretty obvious :)
OS X is Not Bullet Proof (Mac Viruses – Fiction or Fact)
So the executives sell shares of the stock after a nice jump in the market because they don't want complete exposure to the market as they did last time the (real estate) bubble burst. "A diversification" is definitely a legitimate justification of off-loading some shares.

I know people who saw their net worth fall from $150 million to $30 million when the market collapsed last time. They've made much of it back and they may not exactly be broke but all the rich people that saw their net worth disintegrate last time around are not as interested in betting their entire future on the stock market after seeing the existing vulnerabilities of the system.

I have a feeling that a lot of this money (particularly from technology execs) will end up reinvested in other areas ... including startups. Such a theory would suggest that the bubble is still only beginning.
- Emergency exit row = more leg room. Those are usually taken though.

- Isle seat if you are not interested in the view.

- Window seat if you are.

- Front of plane lets you get out faster.

- Must: ask for a baby bassinet in advance if flying with a baby.

- On really long trips don't take the seat next to the bathroom. Then again, on fully booked planes those may be the seats where you have a whole row for yourself.

In your case, as others have noted, 23 window seat looks like the winner. Weird that it's still available.
I think it's more about the marginal cost of one extra question on StackOverflow rather than the entire site. Unlike a physical good where there is an additional fixed cost of every unit the fixed cost of one more StackOverflow question or user is close to zero.
I was there for 5 months last winter. I'd like to live there. Crazy country but so nice.
Ah yes, capitalism at its best.
12A looks like the obvious choice. No seat in front of you (I had that once and it was better than flying first).
So what are they supposed to do about this? Even if you move legit security warnings out of the browser window and into the chrome, I don't think it does much to stop this sort of attack.
Well, the "asynchronous" and sent-delivered-read notifications are cool, but what I'm really excited about is this:

"Here’s where things get interesting. If it can build its community, Kik has a lot of new territory to cover if it wants to. It can layer on functionality as it sees fit. For example, it can let you take pictures, and show friends what you’re seeing. It can then let you stream the music you’re listening to, directly from your phone over your friend’s phone. The same can be done for video. And it can be done over any device. While none of this is available right now with the app, Livingston demonstrated this advanced streaming technology to me, so it’s clear he can turn it on at pretty much any time.

During the demo of all this, we sat hundreds of miles away from each other, but he was able to remotely take over the Chrome browser (with my permission, of course) on my MacBook. He then played music over it — all while remotely operating this from his phone. All I did was enter a code that he gave me so that my browser knew to pair with the phone and allow the stream. (A QR code can be used, too.)

It’s pretty cool. Basically, Kik’s technology lets you wirelessly “sling” any content on your phone to any device running on any software. This hasn’t been done before, as far as I know. Sure, AppleTV lets you stream iTunes content to the TV, but it’s a closed garden. You can’t run Apple content on other devices. Kik’s technology allows you to stream pretty much any content on any device with a browser, whether it’s a basic PC, or even a PS3, Wii or a Windows Media Center device.

It’s heady to think of the future of this application. I can scan my surroundings with the camera on my Droid, Blackberry or iPhone with merely a cellular connection, and then stream it to my friend’s phone. Or I can go to my friend’s home and stream an HD move from my phone onto his TV."

from : http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/03/kik-messenger-sees-explosi...

It's also promised on their blog: http://www.kik.com/blog/2010/11/zero-to-a-million-in-15-days...
YAY! Oracle is going to drive MySQL into the ground! Thank god.

I'm getting really tired of cleaning up relational disasters.
How to Make Digital 8-Bit Style Corners Using Only CSS
not allowing facebook to use gmail data is not the same as preventing users use their data. You can still get your gmail data and go elsewhere. All they did was restrict one company from using the API because they were using in a way that was inconsistent with Google's stated philosophy. This isn't less open it's exactly as open as it's always been for the user. The only one who has less access is Facebook.

also where do you see Google saying: "they'll find a way to get it even if it's not through being granted access by Facebook" I didn't see that anywhere.
I see that several of the commenters have run into the same problem that I did: If you use the full 1/4 cup of liquid the crust turns into soup. (It does, however, still work, which is a testimonial to how well the alcohol concept works.)

I tend to just leave out a bit of the liquid.

Although someone else in the comments suggests resting the dough for longer instead, perhaps even overnight. That might help soak up the full 1/4 cup. I tend to make this stuff in too much of a hurry, so my pie dough doesn't rest all that long.

A year or so after this recipe came out Alton Brown did his piecrust episode. I tuned in wondering (a) if the guy had done his homework; (b) if he could top the vodka thing for theatrical excitement. And Alton passed both tests by making apple pie with apple jack in the crust instead of vodka. Now that's theater.
A Couple of Steps in Writing Your Term Paper
How to write a term paper is a common question. The writing of the term paper will not be a challenging task if proper understanding is had of how to write it. Therefore, this article is dedicated to the students who find this task impossible.
If the index ticks up in next 15 minutes, show picture A. If not, B. Consistent 53% accuracy on this would make me king of the world inside of a year.
I agree with everything here. Another rephrasing could have been: "Are you a founder or non-founder?" It depends on the original context of OP's question.
If not pressing libel charges makes you suspicious, doesn't not pressing sexual assault charges make you suspicious too?

Somewhat, but the contexts are a bit different. Victims of sexual assault often decline to press charges because testifying about assaults can be traumatic (and even more so being cross-examined). Many simply want to hide and pretend that nothing ever happened.

In contrast, people who are wrongfully accused of crimes tend to shout their innocence from the rooftops.
Interesting. I wasn't familiar with transpersonal psychology before, but the wikipedia article on the topic specifically cautions against conflating parapsychology with transpersonal psychology. Consequently, I don't think that what I've said could reasonably be interpreted as an attack on people who you say are reputable, like Stan Grof.

Transpersonal psychology sounds harmless: a soft science that makes soft claims. Unless they barge onto the scene and start claiming that spirituality has a physical basis that (only) they can perceive, I'm probably not going to have any concerns with what they do.

In contrast, parapsychology makes claims about the physical world that would have real impact if true, but in the end what they claim is never true. If they've simply been suffering from "bad luck" for the past several decades, I think that real scientists can be forgiven for having a hard time distinguishing that run of bad luck from from incompetence or fraud.

One thing is true: on HN, you and I always seem to get into very interesting discussions (from my perspective, at least). I hope that my stern words for the field of parapsychology don't cloud the fact that I wish you well.
Came here just to say that, you beat me to it. htaccess files are performance-crippling crutches for allowing config access in limited shared hosting environments. If you own the server, never use them. For performance reasons nginx doesn't even have a similar concept.

One interesting thing to note is that every Apache config file will (or should have!) some lines like this in it:

<Directory />
AllowOverride None
</Directory>

If this is not there, Apache will look for a .htaccess file in every single folder starting at '/' all the way up to your document root and on into the folder of the URL being requested e.g.

Your document root is here:
/very/long/path/to/your/webroot

You request the following URL: "/project/files/here/file.html", which servers this file:
/very/long/path/to/your/webroot/project/files/here/file.html

Without the above config settings, Apache would attempt to stat the following files each time the url "/project/files/here/file.html" is requested...

/.htaccess
/very/.htaccess
/very/long/.htaccess
/very/long/path/.htaccess
/very/long/path/to/.htaccess
/very/long/path/to/your/.htaccess
/very/long/path/to/your/webroot/.htaccess
/very/long/path/to/your/webroot/project/.htaccess
/very/long/path/to/your/webroot/project/files/.htaccess
/very/long/path/to/your/webroot/project/files/here/.htaccess

Ouch!

If you have the above mentioned config in place (it's part of most default apache configs, but I have seen mis-configured servers without it), but you allow override for your webroot, you will still have the following file stats to perform for the same URL request:

/very/long/path/to/your/webroot/.htaccess
/very/long/path/to/your/webroot/project/.htaccess
/very/long/path/to/your/webroot/project/files/.htaccess
/very/long/path/to/your/webroot/project/files/here/.htaccess

Which is still rather wasteful if not absolutely necessary. Only use .htaccess files when no other option is available.
I think you're looking at the image the wrong way round. (It's rotated in the wrong way so not really your fault.)
I can't find anything right now because it's not a very common statistic; most of the research focuses on how hard it is for people already addicted to quit. I definitely did read that stat somewhere though, although I think the exact number is somewhat controversial. If you dig around enough I'm sure you can find the research though.
Actually, if someone wouldn't commit a sexual crime, they're not going to do it drunk. Only 30% of reported rapes and sexual assaults involve alcohol use on the part of the offender. (Keep in mind that this is reported rapes and sexual assaults; sexual crimes are extremely unreported.)

The underreporting is not uniform, though. I wouldn't be surprised if intoxicated victims are less likely to report than sober victims; and the sobriety of victims and assailants is highly correlated.
Don't hold out on getting experience because you're waiting for passion. (If this is starting to sound like dating advice, my sincere apologies!)
There was a much longer article about Google Maps role in political disputes earlier this year in Washington Monthly:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.gravois....

"Google maintains thirty-two different region-specific versions of its Maps tool for different countries around the world that each abide by the respective local laws."
Although, it's an strange move on their part not to immediately release at least some of these features. I'd have thought that the initial confusion or lack of clear product differentiation would have turned users away who might not come back when Kik releases more interesting features.

What explains their virality? Maybe the S-D-R thing is good enough for an initial hook?
Ask HN: Teaser page now or wait for launch?
Background: I've been working on building my first web application for a couple months or so. One-man show. I'm also learning Ruby on Rails - at the same time. I figure it's good practice to have an actual product to work on while I'm learning the language/framework, especially because this web app is one of the driving factors behind my desire to learn how to program. On top of that, I've got some decent design chops and I've put together what I consider to be a beautiful landing page (with signup, headline, brief desc, etc) as well as a basic user interface page.

As long as school doesn't throw my schedule off, I'm shooting to have a very respectable (beta) product launched by Jan 1, 2011 with all core features. I won't release with every single feature I've ever imagined - big fan of the "release early, release often" mantra. Other features will be pumped out after release. Freemium business model.

Question: Do I release a "teaser" page right now requesting emails from potential users, or do I just wait for the initial launch? The teaser page would be designed in the likeness of the actual web app with header, info, product description, etc but would have a field requesting emails instead of a signup button (is there an actual term for this type of page?). If I do decide on a teaser page prior to launching, how early is acceptable?

I see pros and cons of both approaches, and would love to hear your thoughts on the subject.
A
B
D
D
C

assorted curses

<esc>
:q!
$ echo "alias vi=vim" >> ~/.bashrc
Sure, but are those printer cartridge businesses in potential legal trouble?
Ask HN: How have you used the social web to grow your business?
With all the talk about using social web and now that some time has passed since Facebook and Twitter hit the news for being used as tools for businesses, I was wondering if anyone any success stories and strategies to share.
Does anyone know what % the founders held at the time of the sale?

Sounds like they should have done OK, depending on what % they gave up for their $78MM VC.
A better question: Why doesn't HN automatically convert the URLs to links in the first place?
Did we need to have the link with this?
Forgive me... I don't really know either way but something feels awfully astroturfy about all this...
Making browsers squeak is a fundamental part of the SSL security model.

Invalidly signed HTTPS is only slightly more secure than HTTP. Let's look at the open WiFi scenario. If you login to ServiceX over HTTPS but ignore certificate warnings, I can just mount a man-in-the-middle attack and relay all your traffic to ServiceX. It's more involved than just sniffing your cookies, but its still quite practical.

The only place where ignoring certificates is OK is if you know that an attacker can _read_ your network, but cannot write anything to it.
now it's just a domain name that redirects to yahoo homepage
So let me get this straight... You declined the job to pursue your own projects, while concurrently thinking you were "bad at generating good startup ideas"? I might have missed something in there, because that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. You must have had some idea of what projects you wanted to pursue when you declined the job, right?
It would be interesting if they combined these types of studies with brain scans to see if there are any patterns within the human brain during positives and negatives. This would help to find if there is a neurological basis for precognition, or if it is all really just random chance.
Well I mostly declined it because of choosing college instead, but yes I did and still do have an idea of the projects to pursue.
Why would you checkout to production, rather than export?
The Story of Number 10
Opening braces on the same line means that you can always open a new line for editing with O and o in vi and it will be a valid line for placing code on.

Very handy.
http://xkcd.com/808/
I have a Symbolics XL1200 that still works (at least, it worked the last time I turned it on, which was a few years ago). I'd be happy to demo it at YC sometime.

It was a fun environment to work in. Although the hardware was very slow by modern standards, the environment was designed to maximize hacker productivity. For example, you didn't have to run a program under the debugger to debug it -- the debugger was always there. Any program that hit an error would drop you into the debugger. One keystroke would then take you to the source for the current function. You could change that function, recompile it, and restart from the point where the function was called.

The environment was completely open; there was no access control of any kind. There was also only a single address space. Did that make it crash-prone? Remarkably, no. The hardware tagging and bounds checking kept programs from stepping on objects they didn't own. Of course such a design would never survive outside of a research lab, but it made it amazingly easy to hack almost anything in the system.