skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not all religious systems are based on faith. It seems to me that the faith aspect of some religions is a side effect of the fact that religion is motivated by a desire to explain and/or celebrate human purpose. To logically argue that (human) purpose is fundamental is a difficult thing to do, and as a result many religions are illogical and are based on faith. But there are many varieties of religion that don't rest on miracles. For example mysticism is a religion that is not based on dogma, but is a purely biological religion, in which understanding of purpose is derived from first-hand phenomenological experience (as most people who have taken LSD or reached some level of expertise in meditation can attest to). Sure, some mystics make stupid dogmatic statements and unfalsifiable claims related to these experiences, but that's just guilt by association. The Singularity could be another example of a religion, in this case a religion in which purpose is derived from a sense of the inevitable progress to a valorized endpoint (the "Point Omega" is what Teilhard de Chardin, the Catholic mystic and biologist termed it, and some Singularity-ists have adopted his terminology). It is not based on faith but on reasoned logic (which very well could be wrong), but the very zeal and the way in which human purpose is derived from it are enough reason to call it a religion.

One problem with this type of discussion is that religion is sometimes subject to the same kind of moving target definition that AI is subject to. If a philosophical system that was considered religious becomes viable/practical, it is defined out of being a religion? I myself look forward to the day when all religions are based on ideas that work, rather than belief in miracles.
I mean that any firm worried about you competing like that should aim to retain you as best as they can, and providing stock options is a conventional route in doing so. It also dissuades you from competing during and after employment, and to stay 'on-side.'

I was in a similar position to you but did not ultimately take the job. In my case, I already had a similar site going to the potential employer so could actually compete without too much effort. The employer was prepared to give equity only after 6 months work.
Your conception of failure might not be too far removed from the average person's idea of success.

She hit that nail on the head. And it goes not just for the Harvard graduates in the audience; a lot of people at Hacker News could 'settle' for a life most people would envy. It's nice to be reminded of that from time to time.
I just got an epiphany after PG mentioned the merchant class in China. Big advancement such as gun powder, movable types was invented in Song Dynasty. Song Dynasty was in fact one rare period in China that had a pretty vibrant merchant class. But after Ming Dynasty, most Chinese historians judged Song Dynasty as a pretty lame era. ("smaller territory, continuous conflicts with northern enemies and finally lost to Mongol) But from economics history aspect, Song dynasty was a pretty well developed period.

-- Edit --

Wikipedia has a pretty good summary of Song Dynasty. And one reason for the economic development in Song was the government loosed regulations on market economy... Does this sound familiar to anyone?
Thank you. I didn't know what I was supposed to search for. Now, I know. Thank you for your advice.
For whatever reasons, the "cover the whole page with a translucent image" thing is dog slow on my copy of Firefox. Most lightbox effects tend to be annoying for me, and possibly for others.

Unless there is an actual need, aside from "Boy, this will look slick", consider other options. Or at least do some user testing to ensure that users respond well.
My favorite part was at the end:

"Remember, it's FREE to join and there is NEVER any obligation to buy anything in order to earn. Just refer other free members and MAKE MONEY! WOW!

Click below to fill out the SHORT registration form!

[JOIN NOW button]

Completely Global | Safe | Friendly | Reliable | Fun | Lucrative"
I'd have to agree with you. I have a few years of Perl experience and started a bit of PHP to help a buddy out and learn. Writing something that is trivial in Perl gets quite complex in PHP. It's definitely doable, just not as nice as I'd want it to be.
Here's a 40-minute radio discussion about this question:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_2006...

[it's In Our Time, hence contains a decent amount of content]
Speaking of Javascript, Elance.com is a great example of how not to use Ajax.
In a world of controversy, fake and staged photos can be helpful.
Nathan Myhrvold: A life of fascinations (video)
It is not the problem for smartness. But a system that encourages innovators receive potential huge payoffs. As long as the system is out there, then just like old chinese saying "With money, you can hire ghosts to push mill wheel"

Of course there will be wealth inequality in such a system. So it is up to people to choose "everyone lives better but allow some huge wealthy guys" or "let every one poorer but more equal". As long as the existing wealth creators understand if they intervene the system in order to keep their power to control, then the payoff for new innovators disappears immediately and the system is screwed.So they will come to understand instead of abusing their power, they should just help fostering new innovators and keep the system working.
Was anyone else disturbed by the phrase "nutritional science"?

Also, an uninteresting story. Maybe if pg was mentioned having breakfast...
oldie but a goldie. obligatory non-scribd link (http://bulk.fefe.de/scalable-networking.pdf). if you are in this business get 'network algorithmics'. read it, be one with it ! it is sicp of networking.
$1 Bus with WiFi, Beats $4 Gas
World's isolated tribes face contact, extinction
I stopped arguing for this stuff in online forums because it's not the most effective way to communicate it to a lot of people. Instead I'm working on writing up stuff that can be useful to a wider audience (instead of the few dozen people who would read this comment.) I'll submit it here when I eventually finish writing it up.

Secondly, there's a lot of fractured mutually incompatible thought that goes under the banner of "Singularity". There's a lot of people who do think it has to do with some sort of intersecting exponential curves (this is the Kurzweil school of thought).

See this link for an overview of the three mutually exclusive camps, as told by Eliezer Yudkowsky: http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/09/30/three-major-singular...

"One wonders how the misunderstanding got so common if that's not what the advocates said!"

There is no "the advocates", because "Singularitarianism" isn't a single movement. The fact that it's fractured only indicates that there's three (or more) different camps -- these are different people saying different things, not the same people acting as a 'moving target'. I don't see how that makes it a religion. And you're right that there's a decent chunk of people who are dreaming of utopia and bliss and do take a Sci-Fi sort of attitude toward it -- but there are good scientific reasons to work on these issues, and good reasons to be worried about the implications.

For what it's worth, my claim basically comes down to two things: 1) AI is feasible. 2) There will be profound changes when AI appears on the scene. And we need to worry about the big issues relating to this.

I hate the term 'singularity'. It's too associated with Kurzweil's take on things, and it evokes connotations of a 'hard takeoff'. I prefer to just talk about AI's importance, feasibility, implications, and dangers.
Code to do the cloning detection: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2008/02/tonight-im-going-to-write-my...
In regards to the proposed question..Dilemma is whether to leave them to fate or push for assimilation.

I feel it is more honorable to leave them to fate to self evolve as a new world infringes upon them. What about you?
>1. Decisions in universities should be made by professors, not by government officials.

I think this is seriously a bad idea. In principle, government officials should make decisions that better the country. In principle, professors will teach as well as they can, and do research on whatever they find interesting. That's a good thing, but it needs to be constrained a bit, and professors will not be the ones to constrain it.

Read the following article, which illustrates why profs should not be running universities:

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/11/ferrall
because using any library is always going to be less optimal than a custom solution

I strongly disagree. The library authors, and fellow users, have discovered and worked-around browser and Javascript gotchas and performance bottlenecks that it could take you years of custom work to independently discover.
Are you sure Galileo had a mathematical understanding of the world? Galileo did not use any maths in his writing in dialogue.
Most of Google products were written in C++ or Java.

GMail - Not Python

AdSense - Not Python

GMaps - Not Python

Search - Not Python
Hans Reiser Offers To Lead Cops to Nina's Body
Most often heard explanation is that China had too much cheap labour to be interested in developing labour saving technologies. Fine crafts for the ruling class were quite innovative, but everything else could be done cheaper by employing people.

There is a good comment that summarizes this point on http://www.economist.com/members/persona.cfm?econUId=2970938
(economist.com does not allow linking to individual comments).
Not really true. And you can always look at the source of libraries if there do happen to be some gotchas or bottlenecks (I think the number of these is really overstated).

The issue is, they make general libraries that cover hundreds of use cases. Because they cover that many, they are very general, and useful to lots of people, but they are non-optimal. They have extra things you won't need. They have extra arguments to functions you don't need. Bloat.
Bloom: Be the Urban Johnny Appleseed, a hypothetical bicycle attachment to seed plants in cities
Ask PG: Your new book on Startups?
Your bio (http://www.paulgraham.com/bio.html) mentions that you are working on a new book on startups. Can you share some more info?
I second that. I think the best/easiest way to learn CSS is just to have a project that needs to be accomplished and get started. You'll be really slow, but you'll learn what you need as you go.
Some theories I've heard suggest that certain Islamic rules of finance or inheritance made economic activities that helped the West a lot more difficult. Specifically, there are prohibitions on earning interest, and traditional inheritance laws made joint-stock corporations that could survive the death of owners hard to do. (Is this accurate? Does this persist today? I don't know.)
Blocking chemical lets cells feast on harmful brain plaques
That's not true though... jQuery, without any plugins, supports basic animation out-of-the-box (enough for the applications that I have been writing lately). Prototype requires scriptaculous on top of that if you want to write effects, which at a minimum is an additional 40kb for the effects module.

I know that prototype and scriptaculous provide more functionality, but my point is that jQuery is providing enough of what I need from both libraries while still being smaller.

Seriously though - I've written both and I'd find it hard to go wrong with either. jQuery is more the way I've been leaning of late, but were it to suddenly disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow I'd be fine with Prototype/Scriptaculous. To each, his own. :-)
Haven't touched COBOL for decades but it's hard to believe that anyone is even hiring COBOL programmers these days nevermind the stated average salary of $70k.
This sort of supports my idea that everything good about America stems from capitalism, and everything bad about America, also stems from capitalism.
Yes, by best I meant "Most Ridiculous". I thought it was hysterical, and took nothing from the site whatsoever except for a laugh. Jokes!
Yep, lots of variations on lightboxes. I remember Wufoo had a post with pretty good library for doing it, but can't seem to find it now.

Overall though, it's easy enough to roll your own without being constrained to use it in a particular way by a 3rd party library.
Should be a mandatory read for anyone who wants to talk about "scaling". There's lot of armchair discussion of this topic from people who have never looked at UNIX networking from a below-the-surface level (or don't even know about select(), epoll and the various UNIX IPC mechanisms).
Querying Google/a search engine through my webapp?
Googling "query searchengine" and the like doesnt give a good answer so i try here.

Searchengines generally do a good job of sorting out relevant data/links but they rarely ever take you all the way to the goal.

So I have some different webapps I'm working on and I would like to query Google or some other searchengine for a subject and then go through those links and present the relevant information.

I could obv write something to do this, but is it allowed?
Or I have to pay for this service at Google?
If so, is there some automated way to do this?
ISPs confirm '2012: The Year The Internet Ends'
I live in Calgary, Alberta. For a long, long, long time there has been a company doing the exact same thing between Calgary and Edmonton (a 3 hour drive). I love it- in fact, I take it instead of a plane: its more comfortable, and when you factor in baggage/security, only takes about 20 minutes extra (not to mention it saves the organisation I work for a couple hundred).
You can always start an Ask PG thread about what he had for breakfast :-P Better yet, a poll asking us to guess what he had!
Why, I do believe I've spotted the logo on that bus somewhere else before: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Bri...
I've felt that way many times. I use CSS but I don't like it. Tables are quick and dirty and sometimes quick and dirty is all that matters. Would you rather have this guy working on his website all day or making an NES emulator?

I believe the fellow that made this site (news.y) had something to say about CSS and Tables and which one wins in the RAD department.
Interesting read, but I didn't see the case that you just don't use processes or threads covered. Did I miss it?
Number of neurons doesn't explain superiority of the human brain
This should be geographically equalized, but I can see there are still going to be outliers. Erlang, Ruby, Perl and Python are more desired in Silicon Valley than in Mid-West (and yes, this is a pure speculation on my behalf) while C and C++ are in demand everywhere. Java is highly demanded in the financial industry (just talk to somebody working for a bank).

Still that leaves some powerful observations (with C++ drawing a much higher salary than C and Erlang drawing a very high salary). Interesting.
Wow, that sure was content-free.
I notice a couple of internal inconsistencies... Objective-C 30k more than Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows 30k off from Win32. And it compares incomparable averages. This thing is totally GIGO.
:-)

However, if they've put this sort of crap into their employment agreement, I will bet dollars to donuts that they also have very onerous IP ownership clauses as well. I.e., be careful that they will probably claim to own everything that you do whether it's directly for work or not.
Its £1.34 a litre where I am (more or less $10 a gallon) yet public transport usage has more or less remained the same, people have instead opted to just travel less.
The Crusades and Islam. It wasn't so much the effect of attacks themselves as the fact that they lead to a rapid backlash against the sciences and secular pursuits. It was believed that no gains made by Allah could be lost and when the Holy Land was lost to the Europeans, it was seen as a result of secular science and law which was considered corrupt by the Islamic leaders.

Thought to fair, It is actually a myth that Islamic empires where as advanced as they are sometimes represented. Most of the scholars that you read about in school were actively persecuted in their day and with the fall of Jerusalem, the Islamacists had the excuse they needed to end their activities for good.
Excellent discussion by some obviously very experienced and intelligent people. I haven't used Perl too much, I'm much more experienced in Python and PHP, but I think all are capable languages.

I think the most important things to consider are things that you can't really relate effectively to a forum discussion like this and that is what your real skill levels at each of these languages is and the availability of skill in your area and network of friends.

I would lean more to those factors for making the final decision because it makes no matter that python might have wome extremely elegant and powerful syntax or library for coding a specific functionality if nobody working on the project is familiar enough with the language know the syntax or the library.

The primary investment in any new app like this is "developer time". Managing that resource requires the juggling of many more factors than the capabilities of any given language.
And one more modern crime - Iraq War
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/international/europe/29cas...

And do not forget about Hiroshima...

p.s. world isn't black and white.
Minor shift in Wind Direction shuts down wind farm. No PC intervention possible.
Yes it is. There was actually a scandal recently in Arab nations where special loans designed to skirt the interest issue and appeal to Muslims were demonstrated to not be what they claimed.
There's plausible elements of religion being an element in #8

The Soviet regime also did have a great amount of Nationalism built into it as well. The people who are also in the "religion kills" camp will also argue (and not without good arguments) that you could call communism a religion.

And of course for every single one of these genocides religion, class warfare and nationalism played a role (targetting of ethnic minorities under Pol Pot, state Shinto in Japan, Socialist and volk-Religion elements in Nazism, "communism as religion" so on).

(Overall I'll tend to fall within the "nationalism kills more" camp.)
Humm "Hackers at work" (co-written with JL)?... just kidding.
Heroku Down - Internal server error - Up again
It's a great idea to let people develop Rails apps in the cloud, but Heroku is down at the moment and I can't access my code.

Please let us know when you are back up and running.

UPDATE: It's back up and running.
Once upon a time there was a Google API to do that, but its not available anymore. And im pretty sure scraping their result pages is against the TOS and will get you banned pretty fast.
Yahoo! have a great search API: http://developer.yahoo.com/search/

Google quietly re-introduced their search API a few months ago under the guise of the "Ajax Search API that doesn't require JavaScript" - it requires you to provide a referrer which is a bit weird, but it should work OK: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/#fonje
Some Consulting Wisdom I Picked Up
Galileo's math was purely Euclidean. We own more to Bacon and Descartes for our modern mathematics and scientific viewpoints.
CSS is simple, until it's not.

Then it's like clawing your eyes out with a rusty spork. Underwater. With your hands tied behind your back.

It's best learned when you have a goal in mind, as tutorials are too idealized; you're not going to learn all that much by reading yet another "holy grail layout" article, you're going to learn by getting your hands bloody and finding out how stuff really works in the browser.

My advice? Have a layout in mind; for a challenge, try and replicate something you have a mockup of in Photoshop. Take a copy of Firefox. Install Firebug. Inspect elements at other websites that have done what you're trying to do: keep in mind how the <div>s are nested and laid out, and what CSS styles are applied to those <divs>. Read lots of alistapart.com and quirksmode.org, and Google as much as you can. Try and replicate styles yourself, ideally with an editor that's going to show you your CSS changes live as-you-go (ideally by-the-character) so you can experiment and iterate rapidly. Check your stuff in IE6 to discover exactly how many man-hours have collectively been wasted coding around MS's shit. And let me reiterate: Don't be afraid to Google for answers to problems, and to learn from how other pages have solved your problems.

Oh, and one book you absolutely must read: Dan Cederholm's Bulletproof Web Design. You may or may not need to design your pages that way, but it will expand your mind as to how you can get things done.
"Who knows, maybe it's not that far off?"

I have a more-or-less open mind, but I can see significant problems. I mean, how many times have we been told that some big new thing is just "five years away" and yet it never arrives? I suspect a rapture-like singularity is not going to happen, but augmentation (which to some extent is already happening) will accelerate in a very interesting way.

Anyway, it certainly highlights the ethical side of software engineering, as you point out.
Jane Goodall: What separates us from the apes? [video]
I agree with you entirely :)

I actually find both to be a bit heavy. I don't necessarily want animations out of the box, so that makes jQuery a bit more bloated to me.

I also don't necessarily want all that Prototype offers for all of my projects.
Thanks, Dani!
Map was quadratic before?! It seems like it would take deliberate effort to make it anything other than linear.
Last we checked, PHP is a framework.
Don't get me wrong. I love PHP, but this guy has some interesting views ;)
The discussion of epoll/select does talk about the event-driven scenario and there's the discussion of simplest web browser (one procession for all connections).

Memcached is one example of a purely event driven application. Another example (also by Brad Fitzpatrick) is perlbal (written in Perl and using epoll).
Good article. I for one will not be sobbing for MS.

MS lost it's technical leadership decades ago. Time for it to, like IBM, go the way of the dinosaurs and make room for more agile and useful business models and business managers.
Perhaps not, but the absence of falsifiable claims means that this case isn't scientific.
Except that China the Chinese economy is growing at a far greater clip than the US. Perhaps top students going into industry is the reason the Chinese economy is doing so well. Remember, the during the strongest period of growth and technological advancement in the US ( 1870 to 1930 ) the research university was practically non-existent.
Something about Credit Card Validations.....
There is a perl module that you can use to search Google: http://search.cpan.org/~bstilwell/Net-Google-1.0.1/lib/Net/G...

I'd imagine other languages have similar libraries.
I only listed the top 10. Iraq and Hiroshima (FYI: Tokyo and Dresden are better examples) just don't compare in scale to the Congo, the Nazi's or even Rwanda.

Also, the study your article describes (and it's followup) is seriously flawed.
I'm not sure how seriously to take this, yes its pretty scary but can't help thinking:

* Wouldn't this fall foul of anti-cartel laws, could all the ISPs get together and decide to limit what they sell without the government objecting?

* What's to stop someone starting their own ISP and not restricting access, could the network providers refuse to sell bandwidth to them?

* They're limiting supply to something artificially in order to boost the price. Unless I'm mistaken and it somehow costs less to only serve Facebook and MSN, there's big incentive for one of the ISPs to break ranks and offer unlimited access without it costing extra.

* What about mash-ups? My Google desktop wouldn't work if all the other sites that serve content to it were blocked. How would they explain that to their customers?

What do others think? Is this realistic threat?