skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. Religion is a bit like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation, it's "rationalisations" to explain phenomenons we weren't equipped to understand in the past. Religion is a relic of an era where we just didn't know any better. In the absence of the needed body of knowledge we invented models (ex: God) of how it supposedly works and then proceeded to believe them.
Keep in mind that "car" and "cdr" were opcodes stolen from processors that existed way before lisp machine :)
anyone who can understand probability in a half-decent manner wouldn't believe in god.
I love how you worked WTC, supposedly a victim of religion, into your story :-)
I work at Google and this article has a few statements that make it clear the author's sources aren't credible (At least on this issue).

I wouldn't take this too seriously and I'm surprised that the Times:

1. Thought Google's daycare policy was worthy of the front page

2. Couldn't find a credible source who actual understands how and why the decision was made.
This is just wrong philosophy masquerading as science or skepticism. The question of lightning finally got solved by science and there're always things which are beyond the explanation of current science and technology. That doesn't mean that we'll not be able to explain it in the future.

Your belief in a "Personal god" is only equivalent to others believing in a gift of virgins and flying spaghetti monsters. - my opinion of course.
Would you agree it is a tragedy when a newborn enters daycare? Infants crave attention and they loathe situations when their basic needs go unmet. Can an overworked daycare temp better ensure your baby's interests than you? I am assuming we're not having kids unless we can financially plan for a nimble future.
He only had success with one item that he was selling to, or using for, his existing clientele, and developed the rest of the products, and started his blog, and persona, to capitalize on that.

So the real question isn't what's the best idea out there right now, or if ideas are worth anything until they're made, but what simple thing can you make that will give you some traction right now... All his other products and blog posts are just a distraction from the real, key birth of his original product, and why it succeeded (he had a clientele, and made the product to track them), and it is THOSE things that should be noticed and looked at, NOT what the person does after they've already become famous, popular, and rich. Well you probably might want to copy those things since that maintains popularity and stirs up debate, but as far as doing your own startup, that's what you want to think about... how do you get that initial customer base... even if the idea isn't something big... and what did the person do in the initial 3mo, 6mo, 1 year. Better yet, not what he did but why. But definitely not what they suggest doing 6 years later when the landscape has changed.

David is an expert at what he did 3-5 years ago, with what the landscape was back then. That is a long time ago. Since then, 37Signals has been a media company, which ANYBODY can play once they're successful, pointing at themselves being successful as the reason others should listen to them... even though they're out of the loop now (I am America, and so can you!). It's the same thing as a 100 year old company stating they are successful and therefore you should take their advice and work for them, though everything has been almost on autopilot compared to the uncertainty of the first year.
Indeed; I'm familiar with this. If you believe in the Christian God, it's possible to rationally assert that no test can prove Him, but that after death everyone will know that He exists.

The simulation argument, linked to recently here, I believe, has much the same features without the religious baggage: there is no experiment you can do which will provide direct evidence that you are, or are not, in a simulation. In the extreme case, the simulators could just stop the sim, back up, and change the outcome of the experiment (or just your perception of the outcome), and continue on.

However, it might still be important to your future survival whether you act as though you are or are not in one, in either case.
Maybe we should make a list of "common knowledge" (topics that have been discussed to death and for which there seems to be a pretty strong consensus) and then refrain from posting/upmodding articles about those subjects if they don't bring something truly new to the table...

Here's a start of the list:
Ideas don't matter, execution does.
Stop thinking about doing and just start doing.
Release early, release often.
We might live in a computer simulation.
Unit-tests let you make change to the codebase while remaining reasonably confident you didn't break anything.
It's very hard to start a startup if you still have a regular job so consider quitting.
No. Extensions go with you wherever you visit. Javascript programs only exist on one page.

Would you consider a formula in a spreadsheet an "extension" of the spreadsheet application, or just an embedded script?
I think this may be the simplest explanation for why geeks often have any particular quality, this one included:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=204240
For me it's because I understand the argument against the existence of God.

Specifically, a God, meaning some kind of conscious all-knowing, all-powerful entity that exists somehow "beyond" time, would have to be a thing of organized complexity.

And organized complexity does not just "exist beyond time."

Somehow, this kind of organized complexity has to come in to being. No, it does not "just exist."

We do know one process for bringing organized complexity into being, and that is evolution.

So far, it's the only process we know about for creating organized complexity on the scale required for consciousness and intelligence.

We don't know of any other processes that can do this.

That doesn't prove that there aren't other ways. But.

You tell me. If God knows everything, where did he/it get that knowledge?

If God "just exists", explain: how is that possible?

Your non-explanation, to me, proves nothing.

Rather than saying "I can't prove leprechauns exist, so therefore you must accept that they might exist" I am very content to say "I do not believe that leprechauns exist." Period. End of story.

Same with God. No reason to believe. Even Pascal's wager is flawed, because you lose so much by living your life according to faith, that it is not worth it, especially considering how unlikely it is that a complete perfect all-knowing all-powerful intelligence would just spring into being beyond time.
The article also fails to point out that one of the reasons non-organic farming is cheaper is because it externalizes costs with pollution, land degradation, etc. You'd think that The Economist, of all magazines, would understand external costs.
Do you know the whole story? PDF has not been created by users, but by a company.

Only now we have seen it changing into an ISO standard.

(Originally, Adobe only wanted to see it universally used to sell their PDF writers: please read for free, and please please pay for writing it.
Only that it didn't happen this way.)
half the people on tumblr seem to be designers... just keep browsing random tumblrs until you find a design or artist that you like and then contact them.
As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll
The central problem with modern agriculture is hinted at by the Economist's reference to "food prices". The commoditisation of most food staples has meant that most people consider a banana to be a banana, a carrot to be a carrot, and so on, without any understanding of how the item was grown and treated, and as a result, what it actually contains. So one banana should cost the same as the rest of them, and there should be a central "banana price" which we can all fret over, and measures of "banana yield" as well. This is different to how we think of most products, including some foods (e.g. wine, and increasingly coffee and chocolate).

The fact is that the food we see is just a package for what we actually need (or desire) - tiny invisible nutrients, many of which we are yet to identify. One banana can be markedly different from another on many dimensions, but until recently we have only optimised for one dimension: price.

I highly recommend Michael Pollan's books, particularly the first third of The Omnivore's Dilemma, where he describes this process with respect to corn.
And it's great that you can know by what amount under what conditions for everyone.
For those who modded the post down, that's fine.

However, please provide a reply with what you disagree about. I'm very curious to know. Thanks!
If you put off having kids until things are 'perfect', you may never have any. Even then, something might go wrong - say a serious, chronic illness, a company tanks at the wrong moment, or any number of other completely unforeseeable events. We've thought long and hard about any number of things, but there are simply too many variables. And I think it's extremely presumptuous and unfriendly to go casting aspersions about someone you don't know on a site like this that aims to have a strong, friendly community.

Hopefully he just dashed off a quick response without really thinking about it.
That's an extremely scary statistic. 60% an enthusiastic "no"?
> I believe the first years of a child are most magical for the parents to watch...and those moments will not return: if your wife will miss them by being in the workplace, they just will be missed forever. So take care and enjoy being with your kid as often as you can afford!

Austria, where we are now, is similar, and we've both taken several months "off" (or as much 'off' as I can force myself to do:-) to spend time getting used to the new situation, and enjoying her. It's difficult to say that it should be entirely the woman's responsibility though, especially as my wife is also quite talented in her field, and taking something like three years off might put her permanently behind the curve.

Without a doubt, though, we both firmly believe in spending as much time as possible with her!
What argument would have been made 100 years ago? Are we living in a steam engine?
I have to agree with you. I believe that guy can be even more productive with very lightweight distros like Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux.

Yes, with today's hardwares, Win 95 is fast in performance. But I believe Puppy Linux (just 88 MB) in my USB drive performs a lot better than Win 95.
Whoa... that was a long post. I don't think he meant to insult you with his jab at young people at the end. I think he just wanted some clever retort to end his article with. Sometimes people write things they don't mean because the statement sounds too good to not write down. (In this case, though, I think he should have just killed that last sentence. It didn't make sense to me, and it apparently made you made enough to write a small book about it :)
Upvoted more for the site then for the article. Loved the climate change issue I found in the archives.
Troll-bait. Digg does not represent geeks at large, and we have no idea if the poll was spammed or not.

Second, there are many geeks (like one client I have who is finishing up his studies at Cambridge this year) who are of one faith or another.

The guy who wrote the first silicon compiler (lets you lay out chip designs without having to do it manually) - fundamentalist Christian. Many Apple geeks - Buddhist. etc.
andrew turnbull is completely right. i used windows 95 too, as long as possible (2006).

windows 95 has many good things that the modern version of windows have lost or never had:

- lightweight (Doesnt even use memory <128 MB)

- very fast

- total cost of ownership = 0

- functional (office, opera, etc: everything works somehow)

- easily replaceable (ebay)

- robust (works even with damaged hardware - somehow)

- security (through obscurity)

- i have an idea how it works (in modern version of windows i have somehow lost the overview)

- no need to update (just accept how the system is)

- free of distractions (no widgets, sidebars, audoupdates)

:)
True, but you can't get to "no patents" via "more patents".
If Google are genuinely against software patents, they should not participate, and fight them by other means, including entering "patent disarmament" agreements with other large companies.

Organisations change, and the Google of tomorrow will probably be riddled with machiavellians and sociopaths, who consider the growing arsenal of software patents quite useful.
> Unfortunately, this industry isn't very scaleable

Clearly, you haven't seen my latest web-app...
"It's not that I believe in no gods, it's just that I don't believe in gods."

It seems this person is agnostic rather than an atheist. As I put previously, an atheist believes "the God question" (that cannot be answered at all) actually has an answer and the answer is "no". An agnostic acknowledges we cannot answer the God question. As for the werewolf question, it is easier to create testable hypothesis that could and most probably would be proven false.

And, of course, even if you can prove false every "evidence" every religion says it provides, that would not answer the God question. It would only prove religions didn't get it right.

The God question cannot be answered with science and, so, it cannot be really answered. We are not discussing science here. We are discussing semantics.

BTW, I would be quite astonished if God did, indeed, exist. And somewhat happy. It's pretty dry here in no-faith-land.
Seemed like a no-brainer to me, but I recall quite a controversy about how the latter proposal was "anti child care".

The controversy was that the latter proposal was anti public child care. The rival proposals were pushing in different directions the economics of the decision of staying home with children vs. working and putting them in daycare.
PHP has a lot of functions that actually take away lots of pain, but you have to know they're there. If only this fellow had found implode(), he wouldn't have needed to write enumerate().

I was a PHP hater for years, but I find that for certain types of problems, it really is the right solution.

[Edit, later: and you can (and should) paper over some of his other complaints. PHP isn't a great language qua language, but it has such great penetration that it almost doesn't matter.]
Because I don’t want to be hooked into the (proprietary) Google stack (Python, Django, BigTable, GoogleOS) just yet, I prefer using Amazon’s Web Services a.k.a. AWS (EC2, S3, SQS, SimpleDB, etc).

I don't understand this statement given that 2/4 of the things he mentions in the Google stack are open source whereas none of the AWS ones are.
The Simulation Argument is not that we are living in a computer simulation. It is that you must reject at least one of the 3 propositions:

(1) we are not living in a computer simulation

(2) the human species will give rise to descendants that have the power to run lots of simulations

(3) at least a few of them will run ancestor simulations.

Which of these three do you think is untrue? Alternatively you could reject the Simulation Argument that says the three propositions are mutually incompatible - but if so, how?
oops: hackernews somehow didnt like the layout of my last comment and made one big sentence out of it.

just use your imagination to see some paragraphs in my last message. :)
actually you could just have one link that says something like login / register
it seems insane to me to have children and then dump them all day, from a young age, with strangers

I agree with you when it is an entire family of mother/father, grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc. raising children. But I can see how a mother (or father) alone at home all day with children may not be able to provide the same environment as a day care with several adults and many other children.
Except that they didn't even quite get that right. The article seems to contrast git and hg's versioning schemes, when in reality they're both hashes of the content (the non-unique hg version numbers referred to are merely local aliases).
That he thinks the argument is sound but does not agree with "(3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation" means Bostrom believes either:

(1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; or

(2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof).
I've been thinking about doing something similar. If you'd like to brainstorm on how to make it work let me know.

I think it's possible. Firstly you need to tell people it is different. Secondly drop the email, have the form redirect to their profile. I think you should add a radio button or something that provides the options login/create/lost password. have login be the default.

then show it to someone for usability testing. If it doesn't work make 2 separate forms.
Being someone who probably overthinks some things in my life, I tend to equate "not thinking about" with "not placing much importance on something". However, being something of a complex system, between family, work, society, and other factors, it's just impossible to calculate, even though we have clear, if rough ideas about what we'd like, and how we think things ought to be.
I highly doubt that's what he's saying...
The attributes of werewolves are substantially different than the ones ascribed to the Jewish-Muslim-Christian God. Werewolves are believed (by some people, sure) to exist within our time-space continuum, to respect the same laws of physics we do and to pretty much be more or less a very strong mammal that is sensitive to the calendar as well as to moonlight. Those believers have created testable hypothesis that were proven wrong many times. I say the werewolf question is quite settled.

The JMC God exists outside our space-time continuum, since before the Universe and is said to have caused its formation and to interact with it in some way or the other, sometimes violating causality. Good luck trying to shape that into a testable hypothesis ;-) I won't bother with it until someone cooks up a decent one.

So, as only a true agnostic can say, I don't care if God exists or not. It's not a question I can answer.
sounds like a good job for robot nannys
Good analysis, to which I would add: peak debt. There is only so much debt a person can take on, and for now at least, that amount has been exceeded.

Much of the financial innovation of the last few decades has been about pricing risk so efficiently that larger and larger amounts of leverage can be employed without the borrower going under. This was the ultimate driver for higher asset prices (in particular homes), which in turn via mortgage equity withdrawal and other means have funded a lot of the second houses, extra cars, big screen televisions, and other luxuries we see around us today.

The credit crunch will soon extend to credit cards and auto loans, and we'll see disposable income fall further. Share prices will fall as earnings disappoint and most investors, seeing no dividends and unlikely capital gains through the recessionary period, will abandon ship.

I don't think this is all priced in yet.
I'm not saying that they reject the possibility that they might be wrong; they couldn't do that any more than they could reject the possibility that they're wrong about anything immeasurable (to themselves).

The very definition of Athiesm is to deny the existence of a god or a higher power.

As soon as you admit there is a real possibility that there may be a god or a higher power; bam, you're an agnostic.

Which is the crux of my point - the definition of Atheist is often misused, as in this article. There are far more Agnostics than Atheists, it's just that Atheism gets used more frequently.

This page discussing the differences far more eloquently than I ever could:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/intro.html
I wrote a script a while back to scrape people's public profiles based on Google searches like this. Two things I would add to the article:

1) You get a lot of false positives, even with very well constructed Google queries. Especially, for some reason, international users.

2) You don't actually get the person's phone number this way so you'll have to call the company's main number to reach them. This may be a problem if they don't pick up their office phone a lot -- and few people do.
That we are living in a book. Note that the popular plot device of being trapped in one (or more) books survived intact as being trapped in the TV and being trapped in a virtual reality game.

If you watch kid's cartoon series, you know that this plot device is as inevitable as the Freaky Friday contrivance.
Should we make a wiki or something?
Of course, to even read this page requires you to log in to Facebook. Classic.
Keep in mind that certainty is just a model constructed by our mind based on a limited sampling frame, so we can make practical decisions in a timely manner. Thus "absolutely sure", "leap of faith", or "atheism" are just practical labels for dealing with events of high probability in a nondeterministic universe. These are just limitations of our languages.
Just wait until you discover that they won't hire you because you spelled it 37Signals (as opposed to 37signals).

They definitely hold the opinion that their fecal matter doesn't emit odors over there.
xlnt isn't a troll. He just operates within a zone of disembodied rationality so robotic as to make Spock look like Oprah.

Can I have my DH rating now? :)
What psych 101 class did you take?
> Caterers: preparing food for ten children isn't a big job, all they need is sandwiches and drink boxes which can be prepared in advance and taken out of the fridge.

You would horrify many parents in Italy with that statement:-) Truth be told, I don't think I can blame them, even if they do get a bit fixated at times. Their kids are healthier and don't have obesity problems because they start off eating right.
and so the logic follows, then, that all smart people who have tried to understand the 'visions of the infinite' are atheists?
Read the article - Google's daycare has fancy organic food.
It's no worse than religion, and more likely to be true, from my perspective.

I have trouble understanding how the meaning of our existence or lack thereof is banal.
Heh. Someone else told me today that I use "a lot of very emotive language" like a "preacher".
Can I be a private beta tester?
Tape, LP, CD, DVD
If you don't have a family to support, my advice is to ignore the above advice.
Sucks to be Alma Whitten right now. Hope all her stock's already vested...
Philosophy. Not psychology. My bad.
I would say by and large "geeks" subscribe to Occam's Razor, meaning the simplest self-consistent explanatory theory for a given explendum tends to be correct. If the explendum, is, for example, the Universe, then Occam's Razor would point to a well-defined, self-consistent theory of quantum gravity (as yet not entirely done), then positing say, the flying spaghetti monster. If "God" is defined as some sort of disembodied "macro-intelligence" then said notion becomes a casulty of Occam's Razor. If however, "God" is co-terminous with Nature, or the Universe, or the "creativity" of nature as some would have it, which I would take to mean emergent forms or fluctuations spontaneously arising from a system in thermal equlibrium in the macro-scale, then one can carry on using the word "God", without running into Occam's Razor. Personally I prefer the word "pantheist" to "atheist", meaning the former term is "glass half full" whereas the latter term is "glass half empty".
PHP's equivalent of lambda is great for a nice laugh, though:

http://us2.php.net/create_function