skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's a data point for you - I changed my mind because of evolution.
Here we're not really interested in smart people - many smart people believe in God. We're interested in the subset of smart people with a special kind of honesty, the kind great scientists almost always have, and great philosophers often do. The 'smart people' you claim changed their minds because of fashion aren't the ones we're really interested in talking about.

Also, I like to distinguish between deliberate atheists (like myself) and people who are atheists by default. Some people are apathetic about philosophical questions and will say they don't believe in God simply because they weren't brought up with any religion.
Great, will definitely check it out. Agreed on the narrative. You always need a good story to tell, and I feel like traditional press/readers need a different story than the web crowd. I guess thats obvious since our target users probably haven't heard of Digg or NetVibes or any of these popular web 2.0 service.
This whole 'nerd' vs 'jock' meme seems to be a fairly typical situation of 'invest' vs 'consume'. A young kid has no other assets apart of time. You can spend you time being popular NOW, at the expense of studies and other form of self-enrichment. Sports (with their short fitness time-span) are not really an investment, unless you are a really talented athlete.

So, by investing your time wisely as a kid you have a good chance of reaping monetary rewards later -- in term of a good job or even your own business.

An additional bonus for geeks comes in a form of above average growth rate for knowledge industry. We are living through a kind of 'industrial revolution' that is changing the shape of traditional industries. The rate of return that an internet software business can deliver is unmatched. And it can only be run by a geek, somebody who has spent countless hours bending his mind around recursion rather than flexing his muscles in front of girls.

And of course, "the girls will come chasing", after you reap economic rent from your investment.
What, exactly, do you think I'm trying to argue? To me the question is exactly whether having a concept of infinity has metaphysical significance. I think no good answer is humanly possible. Your definition is just as tautological as anything offered in the positive. That's exactly the problem.
To precis: Vista has failed. A second try will be wheeled out soon (end of 2009), and expect something decent (hypervisor?, but no one at MS will talk) in 2012 or so.

By this time, the resources behind GNU/Linux, including OEMs, should have driven Linux to a much higher percentage of lower end equipment where MS cannot compete, and much as MS did to IBM, this wedge will slowly work upwards.
"Often someone will hand you a book or paper and exclaim that you should read it because it's (a) the most brilliant thing ever written and/or (b) precisely applicable to your own research . Usually when you actually read it, you will find it not particularly brilliant and only vaguely applicable. This can be perplexing. ``Is there something wrong with me? Am I missing something?'' The truth, most often, is that reading the book or paper in question has, more or less by chance, made your friend think something useful about your research topic by catalyzing a line of thought that was already forming in their head."
Forget Silicon: How to Be Steel Valley
That's the problem, it's hard to tell what you're saying.
Is an eclipse described in the Odyssey?
XMPPHP - PHP Jabber library
I'm hesitant to ask this question because I think many of you will probably jump down my throat, but I will anyway.

Are any of you actually Black American? By which I mean a son or daughter of American Slavery.

I only ask because I would like to hear from one of them, about being a nerd in the black community. The reason I ask is because I've seen in Newark and LA for example, where even black athletes are only worried about getting home after school. I talked to a football standout from Newark and his exact words were,"I'm not tryin' to meet new faces at school, if I want women, that's what church is for." What I mean is, when I talk to these kids you get the sense that, between the police, the teachers, and the gang members, high school for them is a dangerous place. Many of them have expressed little interest in popularity, or looking down on others, indeed, they express little interest in even knowing others. It is dangerous to them. They SEEM to be just trying to get through the day without crossing the wrong person. Or as the young man I talked to would say, "Ain't no kids in a ghetto high school."

This contrasts sharply with things I've read in the national press and in reports like this about being 'cool', and looking down on the smart kids.

-- EDITED OUT A PART PEOPLE MAY FIND OFFENSIVE --

I'd imagine the average nerdy guy from the black underclass is far more concerned with mistaken identity on his way home, than he is with being accosted because he is smart.

But again, I'd like to know if I'm way off here.
And watching TV should not be anyone's pleasure or hobby..
Randal Schwartz: The Year of Smalltalk (Video + Slides)
We’re Engaged (And how Facebook’s News Feed is Strangely Relevant)
I have noticed the same phenomenon in the black and hispanic community as wumi. I think PG's explanation is still valid though. Kids choose popularity over intelligence because becoming successful by being smart seems to be more difficult than becoming successful by being popular. There have not been many visible examples of blacks and hispanics who became successful by being smart so when a child has to choose between intelligence and popularity they are more likely to choose popularity.

I'm going to hypothesize that there is a correlation between unpopularity of nerds and the probability of success through intelligence. The less likely it is that people will become successful by being smart the more likely people will try to be successful by being popular. In the competition to become popular the first ones to lose are the ones who don't care about being popular: nerds.

There are a lot more examples of smart and successful blacks and hispanics now than there were a generation ago. I bet that black nerds will become more popular soon. Of course, they'll still be unpopular because they're nerds.
"Infinity is that which can be put in one-to-one correspondence with a subset of itself."

If you're saying that infinity is not directly realizable in what we perceive, then I agree. But this has little to do with how it's defined (or even its metaphysical significance); positive and negative definitions are for all intents and purposes equivalent.
The problem is demonstrated by the video in the article. Maths? Here, try some Long Division. You could get yourself a maths degree without even touching long division, but it's the example they use to get people to do maths??
I have a question that is along the same lines, if we have a project that we want to open source and basically make money on service contracts what is the best open source license to go with?
I hope no taxpayer dollars were used to fund this research.
On the topic of hosting, has anyone been able to get into [Codebase](http://codebasehq.com/) beta? It looks very cool on the surface but I couldn't find any hosted projects to play around with. I submitted our info a while back, heard nothing so far.
First and second are similar yes, however Google is not just a search engine. They have a dedicated base of Gmail users, they have a great advertising service. They have youtube (although are thinking it less and less likely to turn a profit). It would be a huge blow yes if Microsoft somehow overcame Google in search functionality, however it would not be the end of Google.
>I don't see him as ambitious as these young generations that want to get rich quick.

He worked at transmeta for crissakes.
Well, I'm a full-time researcher (cs phd student) and I find it sexy. I'm not even rare, I feel the same spirit amongst most of my peers. It is certainly labor intensive and tedious, this does not mean that the work is trivial. In the context of this particular conversation, of all the problems that are being solved between startups and academia I hardly think that someone could label academic research trivial. If someone chooses to work on lame problems, thats mostly their fault, but there are plenty of interesting/difficult problems to be solved.
Edit: Now made.
Indeed. In fact, thanks to this I have discovered that what I was taught as "long division" is not what other people (or, at least, Wikipedia and those in this video) were taught. The method I use still works though, but appears to be more of a dead reckoning system and heavier on the mental arithmetic.
The Transient Life of Software
i think humans are experts in spotting "the to stupid to mate with".
if you are clever enough chances are the average person will think you are odd enough to be labelled stupid.
"Wumi, color does not have much to do with popularity."

I think it does.

In many high schools in America, social groups tend to follow racial lines, though by no means absolutely. If you're a white or Asian nerd, there are plenty of other similar nerds for you to associate with. However, if you're a black or Hispanic nerd, there aren't so many.

For me, this never ended up being a problem because all of the nerds shared almost every class, so we ended up being a pretty tight group on our own. For a black nerd who wasn't as nerdy as I am, things were probably more difficult. He wouldn't be in all of the same classes, so he wouldn't grow as close to the nerds, but he'd still be relatively isolated from the "normal" black people.

It seems that blacks and Hispanics have a larger social disincentive for being a nerd than other groups, though that is probably on the lower end of factors that contribute to underrepresentation in the nerd population.
Don't use Flash because it doesn't allow SE... oh. Well, don't use Flash because Flash is "teh sucks"?

Brilliant post by a man who's only creative graphic is some stars and stripes with an Uncle Sam hat.

FAIL.
Then I've failed... :)

Seriously, I'm not trying to proselytize nor argue. I just find atheism to be an untenable position. It's an attempt to say something while really saying nothing. Problem is, I know the same can be said of theism. But I think the latter is that much more compelling because it starts and ends with one question - "God" - that we can pose to ourselves. Where the answer leads is up to us to decide.
I always thought there was something just a little bit Dr. Seuss about the giant Danali with built in tvs and cup warmers and seat-heaters....

Like those giant contraptions the Whos are pictured riding around on.

I'd never drive one, and they do scare me when right next to me in my Corolla but I'm gonna miss that 5'2" woman climbing down outta that thing in the parking lot of the Wal-Mart lookin' like Cindy-Lou-Who.
I took a class recently on the sociology of education. We focused heavily on Ogbu -- he has done outstanding work that is worth a look from any layman.
she's kinda spicy
Trac is great, and I've used it a number of times, but if you are rolling your own platform then Redmine (www.redmine.org/) is worth considering as it is much nicer and easier to get started with.
"Kids choose popularity over intelligence because becoming successful by being smart seems to be more difficult than becoming successful by being popular. "

I quite agree. More generally, it's about increasing one's social ranking in relation to others. And culture (not limited to ethnic) plays a huge part in that.

Someone posted earlier that a kid would be popular if he were simply better than others at something. But this disregards culture, not just black, either. (I noticed the same thing in the schools I went to - British and all white).

For instance, certain strands of hip-hop seem to laud brash and expensive jewelery. If a kid grows up with this influence, he will internalise this and laud anyone he sees who exhibits similar property. He would not think to do the same with anyone who announces he has read a certain book because he has not grown up to laud this achievement, because of his exposure to this micro-culture.

Excellent article by the way!
For what it's worth, I am from Pittsburgh and intend on starting a startup in the Burgh. I have a lot of pride in the Pittsburgh region and consider it a goal of mine to help do a my small part to re-energize the city.
It's even simpler than that -- don't let unauthenticated users break things! Google is not stealing someone's password to get to your site, they are just clicking links. If that can break things, you need to fix your application!

(BTW, GET requests can have side effects in practice; a GET updates the logfile, potentially filling your disk, for every request.)
Agnostic theism? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnostic_theist)

(The question was "best summarized by", so I assume the idea is to check only one, even though this spans two of the choices.)
I think Westernunion.com is a prime example of this. Unreadable captchas, password character requirements(some caps, certain length, etc). To top it off, they hide the login page about 3 pages deep.

1) Go to homepage, select your country. (Really, is this necessary today? Do IP detection, set a returning cookie, SOMETHING.)
2) Now the Sign In link is available in the toolbar. Click.
3) Try desperately to remember the password they made you create and to read the frakking captcha.
4) Send money or pay bill, while taking a nice fat one in the toukus when you see the exorbitant money transfer fees.

Dear Paypal, please get into physical stores across the U.S. to put Western Union the HELL OUT OF BUSINESS.
AlphaLabs seems to be offering six-month tourist visas to foreigners. The foreigners happen to be startups, but they do get a house to live in and a little walking-around money.

If they find further rounds of funding in Pittsburgh, there might be a danger of them overstaying. But when it comes to companies that have already demonstrated that they're pretty eager to move where the opportunity is, I wouldn't worry about it.
Great find!

In general, we don't hide secrets in Flash because it's easy to decompile. We already knew that.

To help real developers understand why this is a problem for Flash developers: Imagine the problems you'd have if Google suddenly started to combined your Google Code Search results with your content search results.
I only read the title of this submission.

But if your on HackerNews this should already be pretty obvious.
Oh my god, no lie, I just overheard almost exactly this conversation at my local Starbucks.

"I don't know if God is testing me or something, but none of the smart nice guys I meet are even willing to hear the word of our Lord."
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The immigration talked about is only tangentially international immigration. It is more about people who already have the right to work in the US immigrating to Pittsburgh. The other immigration problem is more of a national one and has been the subject of much longer and better articles and posts.

I don't think AlphaLab is offering six-month tourist visas. Doing something like AlphaLab or YC on a tourist visa is likely to be illegal, and I think they would fund a company with people who are abroad only if the circumstances are right. It is still up to the USCIS to grant the visas, anyways.
I don't think that is worth the effort. Unless there is a really good reason to require a username, just use their email address to identify them.
The thing is - one of the biggest factors in making the decision is the child! And you cannot know what the child is like, until it is there, and even then it takes a while to get to know it. Children are unique, and very different, one from another. What will be best for one will not be for another.
Awesome. Drop me a line if I can help in any way or just to be in touch.
That was my thought as well for the last application I built, but no one is going to care to find their data by url. Just use a random key to form the url: okay.com/lekaro.
I too am also amazed at how often Facebook is used to convey this sort of information. I guess changing a status is easier than describing the event to multiple people, particularly if it's a crappy change...
Many startups have spent millions on such advertising without much success. If you pay for it, it is expensive and often poor ROI.

Instead, I'd try to get organic mentions/articles based on the USPs of your offering or some quirky/funny story the press love to write about. Learn from the early days of milliondollarhomepage (http://milliondollarhomepage.com/blog-archive.php), weebly, and other successful startups/ventures that grew mainly due to organic media exposure.
This is particularly true. Conformism is particularly strong in the black community. In college I had two good black friends. Both who grew up middle class and smart Both who were ostracized for having white friends. One liked heavy metal, computers and video games. One I roomed with for a year and he was harassed about it. We would receive threatening anonymous phone calls at all hours. If I answered, they would hang up. Eventually the campus police were able to trace the calls and we found out that it involved several people.
Viacom's Statement on YouTube User Data Controversy
Send Your Name to the Moon
I assumed the 'Steve Urkel' post was making the point that a black nerd could be very well loved, and moderated it up based on that.
I think white society views black people are more masculine and physical, asian people as less so.

You might not like that, but that doesn't affect whether it's true or not.

The result is that black people are expected to excel at the physical. When they don't (instead favoring the intellectual) they're viewed as not making use of this gift.
Also see RZA/Wu Tang Clan, Pharrell Williams/N.E.R.D. It certainly seems like some aspects of nerddom/geekiness are perfectly acceptable: video games, kung fu, sci-fi, etc. Of course, you have to be cool already for geeky things to be acceptable.
I was surprised by how many Pittsburgh hackers were at YAPC::NA this year. The PPW (Pittsburgh Perl Workshop) made a pretty impressive showing with lots of T-shirts around and people talking about it quite a bit, and Pittsburgh.pm won the bidding to be the location of YAPC 2009. The city was completely off the map for me until I realized how many hackers are working there. I'm looking forward to visiting next year for YAPC, anyway. I dunno that I'd want to start a company there, but maybe it's an ideal escape from the high cost of living here in the valley. But the same could be said of Austin, and I'm not wishing I'd stayed in Austin to build my business.
Architecture You Always Wondered About: Lessons Learned at Qcon
At dinner, we were discussing European countries that we might consider moving to. My friend mentioned that Switzerland is one of the hardest countries to get a work permit and later residency (ten years uninterrupted). I immediately started to wonder if the Switzerland IT job surplus is due to their pretty restrictive immigration policies, to say nothing of the notorious cleanliness standards (that you must adhere to when selling your home)
Well, Pittsburgh has CMU which is arguably one of the best computer science schools. It follows that there are going to be hackers around.

Also, the original YAPC was at CMU, that's why it's being brought back for the 10th anniversary.
100% agreed about the format. We really should have retreated to our own blogs a long time ago :)

I suspect that no deep satisfaction will really be had here. But it's been enjoyable and entertaining, that's for sure.

language allows us to describe and converse to some degree about this while having a common understanding.

That's a neat thing about language and the power of the human brain, for sure. We can probe into the unknown to make stories, and then reason about the world in which those stories would be true, and then test to see whether or not we live in that world or not. Sometimes, it takes quite a long time to figure out if there would be any differences to be tested.

But "truth" is an emotionally laden term both sides use. How about "it just works"?

And so instrumentalism enters the discussion... We ARE getting into deep waters here!

And with your question of how to find morality, ie, "it's not all supposed to be taken literally" I have no idea what you are talking about.

I was referring to your comment about the conquest of universal concepts of morality and faith over political, tribal, and primitive power systems -- the species learning what part of God-belief is critical to its survival and what is not. I don't consider morality a "part of God-belief", but apparently you don't either, so I seem to have misunderstood where you were going with that. My bad.

I simply stated that a God-belief may be as genetically useful as rationalism.

What if God-belief was an emergent property resulting from other beneficial traits, but not itself beneficial at all?

For example, our mucous membranes, social customs, and fondness for living indoors are all---themselves---very beneficial traits. However, together, they make us very susceptible to the common cold, which is definitely not beneficial to us at all.

Likewise, our agent-fixation, our creativity, and our way of passing wisdom on to our children are all beneficial behaviors, but together, they open the door for bugs to creep into the system. Science is our unit-test framework :)

Love Buddhism, from what I know about it. Wonderful ideas in there. Wish I knew more.

Nothing stopping you :)

The science of spirituality is a very interesting subject, which has sadly been stymied in the west by the success of Yahweh. For centuries, to avoid being persecuted, scientists have had to avoid any subjects that might impede upon religion's "magisterium". If the two do not overlap, it is only because religion has been so aggressive and successful in defending its turf.
I believe it's the Micro Optical SV-6. Although the company site seems to be something else. I believe they are now in the business of making those HUDs for ipods (ala MyVu).
we call it 30 dime wine for $2.99 in the midwest.
SarkasmShirt - Shirts Not Only For Geeks
I would think that cause there is no need to be religious. I mean what's the point of believing in something which no one knows whether existed or not while life goes on as usual. I mean computers work for both who believe in something and who don't.
Mostly, poor ROI is due to bad targeting. Advertising on NBC and advertising in "Mississippi Dog Breaders" journal are worlds apart.
Yeah, hopefully those were used to fund research on weapons! </sarcasm>
I just read the Founders at Work chapter on Max Levchin. He described PayPal as a security company that does financial services. That they assess the risk of each transaction and sometimes they decide to do the transaction even if it is risky. Western Union is in the instant cash transfer business - once I send you money via Western Union, I can't get it back. Since the buyer has little opportunity to get their money back once it is transferred via Western Union, PayPal is much more attractive because it offers purchase protection for buyers and more confident buyers (for sellers). PayPal is not going to be going into Western Union's turf.
God is a particularly bad word for that term.

Not only is my life 100% godless, I try to be free of superstition of all kinds. (No Santa, no tooth fairy, no magic dreams, no esp, no ghosts, etc.)

Superstition, in my opinion, is mental clutter that obscures spirituality.
See Twitter's SQL.