skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well let me try and convince you anyway that optimism is the rational view in this case.

I'd also take issue with the idea of the middle class being allied to the poor. Doesn't seem to work that way in the U.S., at least.

You're actually just wrong here; liberalism is inherently an ally with the poor; and you will find more liberals in the middle class than any other alignment.

Beyond that, the reason I am optimistic is because I perceive a clear trend between sharing of information and 'fairness'. In virtually all cases of inequality, a small percentage of people control, have power over, or exploit a majority of people. The only reason they are able to maintain their regime is that when isolated instances of rebellion start to quell, they are quickly extinguished through force or other manipulation.

Historically, it's organization of these exploited-majorities, including efficient means of internal communication which has led to successful revolutions; and without the internal communication they are bound to remain fragmented, and thus easily extinguished.

The internet has completely changed the game in that regard; the total ramifications have not been seen yet; as the first people to mass adopt the internet were middle class and upwards and used it for what those people do with all their lives, entertainment and work.

However, that's not what poor people do. Not having ever been poorer than an avg broke 20-something; I can't speak directly; but at least in South America I know there is intense power struggles happening between the rich and the poor.

The rich can 'stay on top' the poor due to their power-advantage. They have control of the social structure, and beyond that just generally have capital, more freedom and ability to move and communicate, etc.

However, as the information age progresses, more and more things that used to require capital, or large amounts capital can now be infinitely distributed for free (or nearly free) as software; thus raising the power of the poor.

As the power of the poor, or the lowest classes of society raises, they will be more and more successful.

Beyond that, having an attitude of brotherly love and compassion for all humans is the best 'meta-game' strategy. That is, if life is a game and being altruistic or selfish is a strategy, altruism is going to win in the long run. Players tend to trend toward successful strategies as a game gets played more and more (and results of others success get more and more eyeballs), and thus I have to assume that overtime altruism will become more and more common as a life-strat.
Billboard Complies Social 50, Music Artists With Maximum Social Influence
That's great information and you are right. Secure disposal of drives by the vendor is of course also extremely important.

For those deleting virtual drives in the cloud securely the points made in the post might seem obvious but I believe most users in the cloud don't undertake such measures. That's why the encryption option is another way to go and implicit so much more likely to be taken up by cloud users.

Customer side encryption is great and of course usually means access is restricted to the customer, the issue is server restarts, crashes etc. which require manual intervention to get the file system or data directories back up and running again. In a dynamic cloud environment this can be particularly cumbersome.

Best wishes,

Patrick
Budget-Cutting Colleges Bid Some Languages Adieu
Perhaps the opportunity for hackers here is providing language instruction at less expense than college major programs.
There are two categories mentioned. Josh Groban and Mozart are based on some level of "skill" where Strongest Man and Tour de france have a physiological or genetic component. That may or may not be present within singing. As mentioned in my other response, deliberate practice and coaching are what seem to determine skill level. Also discussed in talent is overrated is the notion that deliberate practice seems to have a lifetime cumulative effect. So you probably can't catch up with a Groban or Tiger Woods simply because they have such a large cumulative head start in their fields.

Genetic potential is something else entirely. It's hard to say how much of being a strong man or winning the tour de france is genetic, but likely the effect of genetics is less than we typically think. As an example in the book mentioned, they discuss the change in mile times since the four minute barrier was broken. The amount of people who can run a four minute mile now cannot be due to evolutionary changes in that brief period but is much more likely to be caused by improvements in teaching and training methods.

Anyway again, I highly recommend "Talent is Overrated" by Geoff Colvin. These issues are covered in depth.
USB also provides enough power to light a bright LED. There was no power on a printer port, though people would steal power by setting a lot of pins high and hoping for the best.

I think I'd just spend the $2.40 and use an AT90USB82 instead. It has USB built in so you don't have to wrestle with software USB. I've done software USB on an Atmel and getting 98% of the way there is easy, but I never really trusted the end result.

On the down side, it doesn't come in a DIP package, but you could use any little breakout carrier card to get to the pins. On the plus side you'd have a couple dozen pins to play with.
I think an important aspect of this discussion is what your goal is. If you're measuring success by results achieved then some amount of talent is necessary though not sufficient. If you're measuring success by happiness then talent seems less important. If you enjoy spending time at something that you are terrible at and can sustain yourself, more power to you.
That's a possibility, the concern is the performance implications, particularly latency involved in operating such a system which needs to interrogate every data access. The question is whether such a system would have more of a performance hit than simply encrypting (with the added advantages that has anyway).

Best wishes,

Patrick
An easter egg, it seems.
I could try my entire life and I will never be able to sing like Josh Groban

Have you tried the experiment? The really striking thing about K. Anders Ericsson's research

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html

(which is the research underlying many articles and blog posts on this subject) is that Ericsson found results that no other researcher predicted before trying the experiments. In one case, Ericsson developed a training program for undergraduates to increase their "digit span" from the typical seven digits to more than 100 digits. That's a striking result, because "digit span" used to be regarded as a reliable proxy for IQ. (There are still IQ tests that have a digit span item as part of the item content.) Scientists who obtain surprising, replicated results show that sometimes our intuition about how the world works needs correction from factual observations.
"`Lorem ipsum dolor' is the first part of a nonsense paragraph sometimes used to demonstrate a font. It has been well established that if you write anything as a sample, people will spend more time reading the copy than looking at the font. The ``gibberish'' below is sufficiently like ordinary text to demonstrate a font but doesn't distract the reader. Hopefully. " - just in case someone is wondering.

source: http://nwalsh.com/comp.fonts/FAQ/cf_36.htm
HN content hasn't been purely news in my experience, there is a lot of interesting content that is submitted that isn't new, nor does it fit it in the "news" category. Many well thought, well written essays end up on the front page and recieve many upvotes, even if they were written years ago.
I'm of the opinion that most workplaces do not provide adequate opportunities to become an expert in anything beyond the very narrow niche job you're paid to do. Often it's knowledge of of their business domain that trumps programming skills. A few are lucky to have research jobs that allow for spreading your wings, but you're typically already an expert in something before you can land a job like that.

I'm also a corporate drone right now, and my experience is that most of my "corporate programmer" peers check their programming skills at the door when they go home. Adequacy and personal development mean nothing to them so long as they remain gainfully employed. These men and women also tend to be the most boring people to converse with, not because they lack passion for programming, but because they have no apparent passions at all. Any personal improvements are due to system constraints that force them to learn something new to prevent failing a task. The few who strive to improve on their own, learn another language besides Java, have side projects or businesses, or run a blog or whatever...they're the ones who also do interesting non-programming stuff. I attribute it to having a personal drive or being a self-motivated person or having some mental itch that needs scratching. Something that just prevents a person from being happy by just sitting around watching TV.
Script to help manage (merge, share) hosts changes
This is correct from what I'm seeing. We know about some issues with the Apache configuration that seem to be delaying the JavaScript downloads, but otherwise we actually have spent a fair bit of time optimizing things.

To clarify, I really appreciate everyone's feedback here, I just don't think it's a page problem, I think it's a DNS or server configuration problem.
I think as history progresses, the world becomes a more richly complex place; and more opportunities are made available to its inhabitants as a result.

I don't think that people are less worthy, or less 'good', than they were in the past. I do think that our attention has to fight more distractions than ever before.

Maybe it's not surprising that we sometimes lose track of what's truly important.
Yes, but HN is implemented for news and doesn't handle submissions of long term interest properly.

Moreover, the name "Hacker News" encourages mostly news submissions.
Nope,

The controllers on both ends expect a fairly complex protocol (one which you have virtually zero control over - in software).

Some hubs will allow you to selectively turn power on their ports (most just say they do). You can in theory stick leds there.
Would you say being 6.9 feet tall is a talent for a basketball player?
As citizen428 pointed out, anyone can be right at some point in time (as unlikely as it may be in Che's case). Even a broken watch will tell you the time accurately twice a day.
Mozart had a father who was a well practiced musician himself, and Mozart's father was an innovator in music education. Wolfgang Amadeus got an early start in studying music, and his dad was also relentless in promoting his career. A lot of people who may have had more "innate" talent didn't grow up with those environmental advantages.
New WWF file format will help save trees
What the Kinect sensor actually does
wow.. so many people stepping up to help this couple out. it's really almost tear-worthy for me to read.

best of luck to you and your wife! it seems like HN's got you covered
I'm guessing "good" is relative for many people, but one measure might be the ability for just one person's job (typically a father's) to be able to sustain the family. Many of the people of that person's generation grew up to be two-income families just to keep a similar standard-of-living as their parents, because jobs paid less relative to cost-of-living and offered fewer benefits.
I don't understand why you think this.

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i-SzzhUtws&feature=fvw
Ask HN: what's on your Christmas list?
Season's greetings,

I'm stumped when friends and family ask if I have a wish-list for presents. I don't know about others, but I'm hard to buy for (mp3s and ebooks have killed the traditional, non sock, options), vouchers are the safe bet, but leave the giver feeling like they're handing over a small amount of cash with no personal meaning.

So, what do you all do, and what are the HN equivalent of Buzz Lightyear dolls of 2010?
> World peace is a pretty unrealistic goal at this point

Aren't all the worthy ones? We can try or we can give up our ideals and be happy within our homes, with our gadgets and cable channels, driving our cars, going to our restaurants, pretty much doing whatever the world tells us will make us happy.

Would this alone make you happy?
More information:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzY4SGgEB7g

http://wwf.panda.org/?197485/New-WWF-file-format-will-help-s...
Let Amazon know we're boycotting them because of Wikileaks
Don't bother reading. The conclusion is that they don't know.
I think you're missing the point here. The goal is not to create a mainstream replacement for DNS. Its to create an "alternative" naming system.

> I want free beer.

A p2p naming system would use free software and shared computing resources. There are numerous examples of both (GNU and BOINC/Gnutella/Bittorrent respectively.) So striving for a free naming system is not the same as striving for free beer.

> Peer-to-peer networks are easy to overthrow completely even with a relatively small number of malicious nodes.

Not if your p2p model uses a web of trust model like PGP. This is what the proposed model uses.

I don't agree with the proposed model, for what its worth. I think they should be looking at leveraging the work done on semantic free referencing at MIT, instead of the existing name to IP model.

(http://nms.csail.mit.edu/projects/sfr/)
USB is a complex protocol, encoded using just two wires (the other two are power - +5V and GND). There are no pins you can steer high or low.

See http://www.beyondlogic.org/usbnutshell/usb1.shtml for more info.
I don't the think this article is 100% incorrect. Here's why: the author of the article is, in actuality, talentless. He has no talent. That part is true. He even states that the people impressed with his computer skills are those without any skills themselves. They were simply impressed by the 'magic' he was able to do with something they didn't understand. He's correct in understanding this his feeble skills are no indicative of any real talent. He is average in every sense of the word. He got that right.
Largely agree with you here. But I actually think the most important talent is being good at practicing. This ties in a bit with self-analyzing and self-correcting, but also the ability to put yourself through crushing amounts of practice over and over.

The pinnacle of human performance is formed by the intersection of those naturally talented, those who are passionate, and those who have the talent for practicing.

I put talent for practicing separate from passionate just really based on that lovely coach's slogan 'practice makes nothing, perfect practices makes perfect'.
Okay. So what are you going to do about it?
This was discussed (and killed) yesterday http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1969371
Captain Crunch needs your help
No actually I read that his so called "compositions" at that age were heavily guided by his father and were merely modified improvisation of Bach/other pieces he was taught. The Mozart we know didn't emerge till a later age.

By the way, I don't mind being wrong. So, let's figure out the truth and I'll email you, okay?
I agree. If you don't believe there is such a thing as talent, it means you never met anyone really talented.
You make a good point but I have a few qualms. I agree that there exist a lot of passionate guitarists who play poorly. Speaking as a guitarist, guitar is an extremely difficult instrument to learn to play and master. The amount of time involved in learning to play guitar and play it well is huge. I argue that passionate but untalented people only exist because they are partway through the learning process or because of a loose definition of passion.
That's what social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us) are for. When I make the choice to come to a news site I'd rather see news, or at least current discussion relating to a "classic" link. If I instead see a bunch of old links without any active discussion attached, I'm quickly going to find another place to get my news.
You're free to boycott Amazon if you wish, but I think your expectations of Amazon are ridiculously high if you expect them to martyr their business prospects to make a political stand. What were they threatened with? More sales taxes? IRS audits?

Yes, Amazon's response to this was really weak and cowardly, but let's not lose sight of who is the real villain in this case — Joe Lieberman and whatever other elements of the government are complicit in trying to shut down free speech.

I'd rather boycott Washington D.C. than Amazon.
Need help publishing a OSS HackerNews app for Windows Phone 7
I have created a open source WP7 app for browsing HN easier and i need help publishing it to the WP7 Marketplace (can't do it myself because i'm from Romania and can't create a developer account).
So if you have a WP7 account and want to help please reply.
When I first started studying graduate math, professors would write how my usage of i as bizarre since I would use it for my index in sums.

sqrt(-1) = 1,2,3,... ????? WTF
Here's a description of how MS Word and MS Excel were actually used to create 4,600 parameterized web pages, complete with samples of the Excel and Word documents used:

http://www.horniman.info/DOCUMNTS/HOWTO.HTM

Scroll down to section 6, "Webpages" for explanation of this topic.

The generated website is also live online at

http://www.horniman.info/

so the generated HTML can be easily inspected.
FCI recently performed an empirical comparison of shaking vs. stirring:

Shaking completely chills, dilutes and aerates a drink in around 15 seconds, after which the drink stops changing radically and reaches relative equilibrium. Shaking is basically insensitive to bartender-induced variables. …bartender skill is very important in a stirred cocktail. Because stirring doesn’t reach equilibrium, stirred drinks are warmer and less diluted than shaken cocktails. Stirred drinks, unlike shaken ones, are not aerated. Stirring does not alter the texture of a drink—it merely chills and dilutes. A properly diluted cocktail stored at -5 degrees Celsius in a freezer is indistinguishable from a properly stirred one. http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/09/02/cocktail-science-in-...
Really? Downvotes for that? That's actually what it says!
This is nice. Let's spread the word.
That would only make the use of TL;DR more appropriate.

Blog posts are rarely targeted at an individual, and those that are are often written in a confrontational or sarcastic tone.
"but I think your expectations of Amazon are ridiculously high if you expect them to martyr their business prospects to make a political stand."

Whether it's true that to continue hosting Wikileaks would amount to martyrdom may depend on how widespread the support for Wikileaks is. This success or failure of this pledge campaign will give some indication of that.

In any case, there's no question that pols are to blame. But for better or worse, I hold Amazon to a higher standard than I do politicians.
Where did you read this? Musicology journal? Popular biography? Oprah Magazine? In academic musicology unsubstantiated theories and hearsay are unfortunately the rule and not the exception, but in general it should be considered bad practice to so plainly contradict conventional wisdom without giving a convincing reason to do so.
I'm trying to convince my girlfriend to purchase http://ardrone.parrot.com/parrot-ar-drone/usa/ for me
Bugatti Veyron
It's getting cnverted too, but noy until we can port the API that allows global keyboard shprtcut helpers.
Preview of Facebook's New Look
My layman's conclusion of HIPAA and cloud hosting was that the language of the law was vague and technologically out of date, and that depending on how you interpreted its requirements you'd be either OK or OMGWTF noncompliant.

It's too bad because the medical space is in dire need of innovation and there's a lot of money to be made.
Ask HN: Shoud I stay or should I go?
I'm working for an Internet start-up who promised land and titles when I initially joined.

Almost a year later, although I have taken the company from strength to strength, when it came to promotions, those with the right surname have seen rapid progression - even though their technical ability is hopeless to say the least!

There is still no sight of the venture capital money which they promised would come over three months ago.

I now have an opportunity to move to a profitable company closer to home - although it is a step backward in my career as I will go back to being a senior developer as opposed to the lead developer which I am now.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks
The "just because they are public does not make them unclassified" argument is definitely a new one to me.
I must admit, while I thought it a pity that Amazon took that step, I think their strong point is selling books and stuff, not politics. I can understand why hosting Wikileaks might have seemed too risky.
Baaaa, why choose?
As far as I know the $20K figure is 4-5x high what it should be.

Does anybody with a lot of experience with Visas have a better price quote?
What variable did mathematicians use for summation before physicists started using group theory to describe symmetries in systems of differential equations? Isn't that a fairly recent development?

My search for an old paper with a bloody summation symbol found nothing. I did, however, find this OT gem about Newton, written in 1848:

From the thick darkness of the middle ages man's struggling spirit emerged as in new birth; breaking out of the iron control of that period; growing strong and confident in the tug and din of succeeding conflict and revolution it bounded forwards and upwards with resistless vigour to the investigation of physical and moral truth; ascending height after height; sweeping afar over the earth, penetrating afar up into the heavens; increasing in endeavour, enlarging in endowment; every where boldly, earnestly out stretching, till, in the Author of the Principia, one arose, who, grasping the master key of the universe and treading its celestial paths, opened up to the human intellect the stupendous realities of the material world, and in the unrolling of its harmonies, gave to the human heart a new song to the goodness, wisdom, and majesty of the all creating, all sustaining, all perfect God.
Why wouldn't the old links have an active discussion? Perhaps not as active as the news, but still active.
Absolutely. Perhaps I'll do a more elaborate comparison between a few other languages just to see.
That's a fair point-- and exactly what I'm talking about.

This idea that it's a waste of time to write or read anything nice about someone else is a cancer on our community.
No; height is a physical attribute.

When a group of physical and psychological attributes or characteristics, combine to achieve favourable performance in a specific activity - talent can be a result.

EDIT: although passion (or interest) is key too.