skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been doing that for some time. I charge extra for:

1) Signing NDAs - Projects under NDA get a premium charge of about 33%-50%

2) Releasing rights to the source code to the client - Premium of about 100% (I see this the other way around, though... If the client will let me have rights to the source I write, I give them a 50% discount)

3) Work I hate - I charge about $200/hour if someone asks me to fix their client PCs (virus, DLL hell, etc...). I hate doing this so much I don't even do it for my own computers (I just reinstall everything from scratch when Windows starts to act up). My point by charging so much is that I really, really don't want to do this crap, but I'll cry my way to the bank if a client really wants me to do this.

4) I also charge extra for doing stuff in really old languages (I started in the Clipper/dBase/QuickBASIC days). These clients just want to keep their system running and want minor changes (or database corruptions repaired). I have to keep DOS virtual machines for these people and have to keep around books for those old languages. I charge extra for these little, mostly single-digit hour jobs. The clients are happy because they keep their system running without risking the disruption of a rewrite (These are critical financial systems), and the extra income makes remembering old school tech worth it for me.
It seems that google was generous in the way a company is generous by having a policy to pay for traveling employees' hotel stays at the Ritz, and when it learns that they are paying 4x more than competitors who have employees stay at the Marriot, changes its policy by having employees stay at the Ritz but charging them to cover some of the subsidy, instead of changing their policy and paying for employees to stay at a lower priced hotel. Apologies for the looong sentence.
Celebrity Pics Now: Amanda Bynes
"Organic" is a stretchy word, but somewhere in there is the idea of sustainable farming. That is, not draining the water table, not relying on dangerous pesticides to compensate for massively monoculture fields, and not relying on expensive (energy-intensive) fertilizer to compensate for overfarming and soil erosion. If "organic" means more sustainable practices, then this price argument against it probably won't be true for long.
Hackers like to experience things directly, and improve them. Religion of the traditional sort tends to assert that there are immutable revealed truths, which cannot be experienced except by a rare few who lived millenia ago, and which it is a crime (heresy) to "hack". So traditional religion is unappealing, and a lot of them come to the conclusion that nothing in religion is true.
Finding out the results of the 1950 World Series does not require an open mind - History can answer that one.

I think we are really playing with words here. You are absolutely sure God does not exist, but I cannot make the required leap of faith that being a true atheist implies and, thus, I can only call myself agnostic. Still, I am pretty sure He (or She, or It) doesn't exist.

As you well pointed out, I am not absolutely sure of anything that cannot be proved with a sound mathematical demonstration. That's about all the faith I have.

And I place it _very_ carefully ;-)
"execute", you silly!
...at best 99% anthropomorphizing fable, and often consciously designed to enslave you.

Ironically, in the modern West the relationship between church and state has been almost entirely severed. Christianity is now mostly harmless. The truly dangerous religions are the civic/nationalistic religions. Instead of pledging to God, we pledge to the flag. Instead of wearing crosses we wear lapel pins. We even get to elect a high priest every four years ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY&feature=relat... ). And unlike Christianity, nationalism has conscription and nuclear bombs. The history of the 20th century shows that dropping the "God" label did not get rid of religion, it made religion far more insidious and dangerous.
Hosting
I realize hosting is a common topic here on HN, but has anyone out there used site5.com? Opinions, recommendations...?
Only somebody with beliefs so different from my correct beliefs would say something so stupid.
The scientific method is used to make educated guesses based on prior evidence.

Using newton's models we have figured out how (and why) planets orbit the sun, why objects fall equally quickly in a vacuum, etc. The scientific method has nothing to do with finding absolute answers. Still we're able to accomplish remarkable things simply by testing what works and what doesn't. Man on moon. Proves pretty conclusively that it's not about having ultimate answers, it's about having a model of the world that's so awesome you can stick people on a giant rocket and hurl them into space without anything going boom.

For every answer a scientist gives you you can answer a more specific question, until the scientist answers; "I don't know". Always. The ultimate answer is always "don't know". But every decade or so we have one extra answer in the chain of knowledge before we have to admit we don't know.
Color of bike-shed.
There's a definite pleasure in using old, well-designed pieces of technology that were state-of-the-art in their time and have managed to remain competitive with newer equipment. I love my record player, I still use a high-quality CRT, I ride a steel bike, and I print documents with a mid-90s HP LaserJet. Many of you would cite LISP, a 50-year old language, as a perfect example of this phenomenon.

Windows 95, however, really doesn't strike me as one of those things.
depends on the extension
I disagree. I think most atheists are, strictly speaking, agnostics (even if some may not know the term agnostic). When pressed, we'll concede that, no, we don't _really_ know whether a Creator exists. However, our doubts are so very small that, for all practical purposes, it's more convenient, and not really any less honest, to think and argue as though we were entirely sure.

Conversely, I think that intellectually honest believers have a similar but opposite belief. Although, as a nonbeliever myself, I have a hard time putting myself in their shoes, or my brain inside their skulls, so maybe I'm mistaken here.
How does quantum mechanics "blow the possibility of a god existing completely out of the water"?

This is why I believe in God: based on some unusual personal experiences that made it difficult to reject the supernatural, I came to the conclusion at one point that, in fact, consciousness is not an illusion, and that there is no such thing as randomness, and that our course along the quantum "tree" is chosen by some being for a purpose (or purposes). This doesn't mean that we live in a deterministic world, but that we live in a physical one that is constantly taking "pushes" from a spiritual beings. This seems supernatural and unlikely, but if we believe that the spirit (consciousness) is not an illusion, then we accept that a complex physical system, the brain, can be affected by a spiritual entity, human consciousness, and so it doesn't seem implausible that there are other spiritual beings among us, doing things like rigging the seemingly "random" collisions of particles so that 10^-20000 improbabilities (life) actually happen. This, coupled with the direct experience of mystics, makes it likely that there are vastly superior spiritual beings in existence, which could be construed as gods or facets of God.
Meebo’s Jen: How to Find Hard-to-Find Talent
All a priori knowledge we have discovered so far, is universal at least to the locality that we can see.
One note that I'll add: if we want to make "religion" palatable to hackers, there is a way in: reincarnation research. The reason I say this is that, as I mentioned in another post, hackers like to experience things directly, understand them at intimate levels, and improve them, which makes the immutable, transcendent, unprovable and irrefutable "truths" offered by religion unappealing.

500 years from now, we'll still have no scientific evidence either way regarding the existence of God, and there will be millions of people on each side of the debate. However, empirical reincarnation research (e.g. the work of Ian Stevenson) can be done, and early results are promising. It's not enough, at this very early stage, to "prove" that reincarnation occurs after death, but it could provide a lot of interesting insights into what we are as humans, using methodology that scientifically-minded hackers would approve.
All models are false but some models are useful. http://is.gd/MnP

Usefulness of the God model depends on the context. Therefore it does not make sense to discuss such things without a context.
after N tries, don't lock them out, use a captcha or something else. lock out policies enable anyone to launch a denial of service attack on your site for every one of your users they know email addresses for.
Cool, one of these days I will have a computer with IE :).
This is true, but would actually compel the stock/gold ratio to become more favorable to stocks (except for the fact that the stock supply is also increasing).
I was just thinking how nice it would be to see these sorts of graphs in academic papers. Most papers already have the habit of including stdev in () next to means but it would be nice to see these sorts of graphs for things like learning curves.
That's how it's commonly explained, but it's not really correct. The bitsavers.org folks have a copy of the original Lisp Machine paper:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/mit/cons/TheLispMachine_Nov74.p...

The pointer/register format was very LISP-friendly, but the actual instructions are much more conventional. The trick is that instead of having to test the tag bits with separate instructions, the "load" instruction equivalent does it in hardware.
If you're a real programmer, you're using an IBM Model M... which is a switch :)
Throughout my youth, I always considered a similar thought experiment.

Make the assumption you were some higher power with no concept of 'time' (or lived forever in our concept of time). What would you do?
Well, I believe you would get very bored quickly, and the only logical solution is to run some experiments. I would start small (lets for arguments sake say at the molecular level, but almost certainly it would be at a smaller level in our perceived world) and create every possibility. That would not take very long - so you would have to create an infinite number of expanding test areas. Each one of these you could equate to what we consider our universe. So basically you are testing every possible 'path' that could exist.

I haven't put it very well to words here due to time constraints - but basically it seems like a logical conclusion that we exist in one of these 'paths'.
Unlocking LinkedIn's hidden back door
With all due respect, did it never occur to you to get this all figured out BEFORE you had kids?
First of all - you should disregard unusual personal experiences if you don't know of any way to repeat them. I dream. I even start halucinating when I don't sleep enough. People can even dream and halucinate under fairly ordinary circumstances. Given the tendency for people to halucinate, I see no reason to seek for supernatural explanations.

"Human consciousness" doesn't need to be something metaphysical. The brain is basically a big petri dish. Chemical reactions everywhere. Our understanding of it is poor, but we're making lots of progress. We know which regions serve which purpose, and we can make people laugh or cry by sticking electrodes in somebody's head during brain surgery. We can see people enjoying music, by watching electrical activity, and we can see how brains of savants differ from ours. The more we learn, the less of a mystery the brain becomes. But we still have 95% to explain.

As you make computer programs more complex you realize that sooner or later you have to start meta-programming. Only by making a program introspect itself or the system around it can you give it additional functionality. Windows Vista is a good example - it's all about processing watching other processes work. Watching memory patterns, to improve cache efficiency. Monitoring which programs are run often. Watching which clusters on the hard drive are suspiciously unresponsive. Meta. Meta meta meta.

Windows Vista is conscious in the sense that it feels when programs are unresponsive, or when the system has trouble shutting down. And it will try to take measures to fix it. Isn't this just basic consciousness? Nothing spiritual about it. And when you can explain consciousness by just saying it's a function of complexity of a brain we have a pretty plausible answer.

Does your cell phone have consciousness? Yes, but very little. Less than an ant, probably.

How about babies? Yes, but only as much consciousness as a cat.

How about a rock? Yes, about as much consciousness as a "Hello World" program. That's simply no consciousness at all.

Consciousness doesn't need to be a binary switch. A spark that people get at some point. A "soul" doesn't explain anything.

You probably don't agree with the way I frame my answers. So what's do you think the difference is between the capacity for introspection (think about self) and consciousness?
S&P/gold reflects gold speculation, so I don't take too much out of that. S&P/oil is more disturbing, because despite the complaints about oil speculators, the fact is that the current oil run-up has a lot more to do with geology and international politics than "speculators". However, if you want to see the real, incontrovertable proof of a "silent crash", look at S&P/euro. It's ugly.

The 1980s-90s bull market was fed by a couple of factors which are not likely to repeat, and if anything, will unwind. The first is that a lot of middle-class people came into the stock market, due to online trading and the replacement of traditional pension funds with 401k plans. Until 1980, stocks were considered a rich peoples' game, too risky for the mom-n'-pop investor. In 2008, after US equities showed an abysmal performance, it's unlikely that many new investors are going to come into them as they did in the '80s.

The second factor is that there has been an expansion of large corporations into all aspects of American life, with Wal-Marts knocking out local shops and mass media gaining ownership of average Americans' minds and desires. This trend is going to reverse for two reasons. The first is that our fairly long-standing energy crisis (call it "peak oil" if you wish) is going to make a lot of corporate business models less competitive, leading to increasing localization. The second is that upper-middle-class Americans, who drive the culture and started this trend toward suburbanization and corporatization in the 1920s-50s, just don't like corporate anymore. They buy produce at farmer's markets, avoid chain restaurants, and prefer the internet over TV. These two factors are going to cause a glacial retreat of the corporate state that will continue even once the economy starts to recover.
Exactly. That's why I proposed Dawkins' model as a frame of reference. Without some common ground communication breaks down.
I wonder why he doesn't use Linux, seems he could build whatever he needs and forget the bloatware of windows. Specially with a distribution like Gentoo he could build a custom system and not have to have the technology drawbacks of Windows 95.
google should be experimenting with different kinds of education

Not quite true; Google is legally obligated to act in the best interests of its shareholders, and only that. That's true for any public company, and the board can go to jail if they aren't seen to be doing that. With great riches comes great responsibility...
"God is dead" - Friedrich Nietzsche

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead
It's a huge business opportunity.
Thanks for the comment! Maybe our marketing is off in describing our service. I'll try to describe it better and maybe that will help show where it's off.

Where our idea is different is that we're not just offering video upload or a quick how-to site, but a complete training system for a fraction of the cost of any of our competitors, and with zero technical setup. We do much more than text or video in our lesson builders, but we also combine that with lesson delivery, sales, communication and assessment tools, and various privacy levels as well (free public lessons, paid public lessons, private lessons, etc).

We don't see YouTube as a competitor, since they just provide video delivery, which isn't functional or private enough for companies to deliver their private training through.

We've taken the essence of online learning and built a simple way of achieving that all in one place. That certainly has similarities to other services like YouTube (we both allow video upload), but I wouldn't use Flickr for training either, now that they do video as well... ;)

What is new about Dojo versus our competitors is that it provides an informal learning experience specifically for companies and trainers (no grades :), and is technically and financially more affordable for anyone. The existing solutions are prohibitively expensive for most companies, and most including the open source tools are geared towards formal learning institutions as their primary focus.

After that mouthful, I guess we'll go back over our site and see if we can hone the message a bit now :)
Ssh! Do not inflame the coffee-fueled wrath of the Unitarian Jihad!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/ar...

Seriously, though... despite the fact that some UUs are indeed atheists, most of them (including many of the atheists) would disagree with this statement.
One or more founders will keep their current jobs during the summer.

Shouldn't that be winter?
Who? How? When?

You. The way you made her. The Famous 20% time?
Well, if you look on pages 13-14 of the manual you referenced, you'll find instruction codes for PCAR, PCDR, SCDR, SCDDR, NCONS, CONS, LIST (alloc), CxxxR, CxxxXR, GET, GETL, ASSQ, ASSOC, etc. Seems like Lisp primitive instructions to me.
You know, Marie Antoinette is famous for saying "then let them eat cake" when told that the poor of Paris had no bread. That wasn't her being cruel; she had been raised in such luxury that she simply couldn't comprehend that there was no food at all to be had outside of her cloistered world. The pre-IPO Googlers have all the characteristics of an aristocracy now...
That was my first thought as well: "Hasn't he ever heard of Linux?"

But then again, if he's got all the apps he needs, running as well as he needs them, and isn't bothered by being unable to run newer applications (which he pretty clearly states at the end of the essay): well, more power to him, I guess...
If Google entered the education business its shareholders would (rightly) wonder what its competitive advantage in that market would be, and whether the margins (return on capital) would be more or less than its existing businesses. Seriously, what could Google bring to the table here?
He wants to play old DOS games natively. I bought a surplus PC ($40) for just that reason as well, so I can understand.
Btw, just checking out your learnITfirst.com site from your profile, watching the free SQL Server video :)
At first, I was looking for the publishing date hoping I would find April 1st somewhere, but I guess not...
The reality version: Shoot for the moon, then about 10 meters up, you realise there's a bunch of things like a poorly designed rocket and gravity holding you down, then you fall and painfully break your tailbone.
http://www.dosbox.com
Before you start on this, what about the problem of consciousness? If the simulations can't give rise to consciousness, then I know this isn't the case.
Also well worth watching are the first 2 Dr. Mabuse films.. And Lang's Spies is pretty entertaining.
Why is daycare so expensive? Seems to me you need a room and two to three people to watch over the children. If you have 10 children in the room, and everyone costs 40000$, that would mean it costs 400000$ per year to rent a room and pay the salary for three people?

It seems child nurses earn a LOT more than the average IT person?
Not again! :)

Guess they'll be yet another definitive final completely restored digitally enhanced version.

(Not that I mind; it's perhaps my favorite film.)
Security Updates?
Aren't all Javascript programs effectively just ephemeral browser extensions?
Proving that something exists is the first step, before getting an "adequate explanation." The scientific method already proves that gravity exists. It doesn't matter if we don't have an explanation for it, but it exists. The same cannot be said for a god / gods at this stage.
FTA: "Consider the sign-up form on Yahoo. The visitors are provided only with the form which is required to set up an account. "

But the form asks for gender (are we parts of speech?), country AND postal code (can't country be derived from postal code?).

I think all that's needed to create an account is some unique means to identify the user, and some means to ensure access control. Asking for more than a name and password needs justification.
It's not that this is shockingly new, it's that it's exceptionally unoriginal.

Every 15 year old has done all these thought experiments already. Brain in vat. What happens to personalities when you clone? What happens if you copy a brain on the molecular level - do you get two different people or not? Are you the same person you were 20 years ago? Even though every cell your body has been replaced?

It's just psych 101. Not topics you can discuss over and over again.

The computer simulation model is uninteresting because you can't use the model to make predictions that can be tested. And if you can't make useful (or interesting) predictions the model stinks.
If you choose to ignore science and logic in one area of your life, that is your choice and not necessarily a bad thing. It is often necessary psychologically to hide from the truth, but it doesn't make the untrue any more true.

Some people find it impossible to accept or not accept all manner of things, but whether or not you accept or do not accept something does not change whether or not that something is true.
That's interesting. MacRumors.com is the only blog I manually visit every few days too. Almost everything else is in my RSS reader but for some reason I still visit MacRumors "by hand."
What do you guys think about Sudbury education model?
it seems insane to me to have children and then dump them all day, from a young age, with strangers

It surprises me how rarely this gets said. It seems kind of obvious to me. In Canada a few years ago one party announced billions of funding for government-run daycare centers, while the other party (who won in the end) wanted to give the money as tax credits to parents. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, but I recall quite a controversy about how the latter proposal was "anti child care".

Perhaps the discourse is this way partly because of economics. Postwar economic growth was closely linked to women entering the workforce. A mass exodus of parents back into the home could have negative macroeconomic effects (that's the perception at any rate). From a conventional point of view, the "answer" is to prevent that from happening and commercialize child care itself.
I admire and salute this guy. He's one of those that keep our whole geek society interesting. He's a bit like a writer who still uses a manual typewriter rather than a word processor. It's very charming.

(On further browsing of his site, he seems an interesting chap. These mid-late 90s style sites chock full of various types of content are far more interesting than most of the vapid personal sites nowadays that have nothing besides blog entries.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity == Atheism?
Windows 95 is so old that I'd doubt (though I might be wrong!) that its vulnerabilities are being actively exploited anymore. WinNuke ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinNuke ) was the most annoying, and in the late 90s you were guaranteed to be nuked within a few minutes of getting online without a firewall.