skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
But what exactly is the definition of an "intellectual"? It's certainly not a synonym for "scientist". The best definition I've encountered is that an intellectual tries to find solutions to the world's problems through cogitation alone, without reference to experiment or other experience. (Think, say, Karl Marx.) In other words, an Aristotelian. But certainly not a scientist. (Of course, some people working today as "scientists" are not very scientific, but that's not exactly the same problem.)

A characteristic and illustrative Aristotlean idea is the teaching that heavy objects fall faster than light ones. People for many centuries believed Aristotle about this, probably because it seemed sensible. But "sensible" just means according to the evidence provided to us by our senses. It also, in this case, means "wrong". Many people have "sensible" ideas about modern policy issues, such as the way that taxes generate revenue, or the efficacy of gun control laws. Most of these ideas, "sensible" or not, are also wrong, some demonstrably so, others a bit more subtly. But evidence is not terribly important to an Aristotelean, or to an intellectual.
You will be missed. You were an integral part of my hn experience and I will miss your ability to supply relevant links and commentary to the topic being discussed.
Review my Startup DomainMatcher.net 
Hey guys. I'm trying to evaluate whether domain sellers or investors would be interested in working with an intermediary that facilitates alternative payment options, like offering a buyer lease-to-buy terms on a domain they can't afford to buy outright. We've already got a lot of interest from the buyer side, particularly from founders and advertisers, and are curious to know if sellers can be persuaded to come on board. If you know any domainers or domainer mailing lists, feel free to forward this link.
Some interesting dialog here.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS:
Students I think could benefit from this greatly. Vast networks of students. Youth must be provided with the means to grasp this opportunity.

RONALD REAGAN:
Sounds a bit out of control to me.
Is this the evaporative cooling effect[1] in action?

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665
The continuing saga of the gene patenting case
It's been a LONG time since I've used VMS, but I'm pretty sure that the file versions were just complete copies of the prior version of the file, not deltas as any modern VC system would keep, and there was a limit (perhaps configurable) e.g. you'd have up to the last 10 versions of your file, but not the entire history since creation.
Regarding 1), why do you believe it is easier to change the behavior of drug dealers than drug users? Drug addicts may not change behavior, but casual users behavior should be easier to change than someone who's livelihood depends on drugs.

Regarding 2), why do you believe prostitutes are more messed up than their clients? While prostitutes at the lower end tend to have sordid histories and drug habits, their clients tend to be socially isolated men desperate for human contact.

To get an idea of how messed up the clients of prostitutes are, it's estimated that 40% or so of men who pay for a prostitute don't sleep with her (they just talk and maybe kiss).

http://www.slate.com/id/2186491/
To be fair, we have been program-and-file centric for since the arrival of the Mac (Lisa was less like that, with the stationery thing, Star even more and Smalltalk 80 didn't look like this at all) and a new metaphor could be useful.
Actually, I'd like to get you started because I think this is important. I just spent some time on the phone with a technologist who was considering leaving his full-time job to join Dreamit Ventures (Parse.ly's original incubator which just moved from Philly to NYC). The #1 reason he couldn't bring himself to do it so far: the enormous healthcare cost he would have to pay. I couldn't really argue with him. I was paying $1000/mo. in healthcare for the last 12 months (paying for 2 people, me and my girlfriend). That plus the rent for my small 1BR in NYC basically ate 90% of my earnings in my first 4-5 months. If healthcare were free or subsidized, the story would have been very different. I wonder how many potential entrepreneurs decide not to leave their full-time job due to the healthcare reason.
You get a pretty skewed version of the facts when you talk about income tax shares. Payroll taxes hurt quite a bit at lower income levels.
Does this mean we don't get to see results of your proposed saved stories experiment?

Anyway you're one of the names that have stuck out in my time here so far. Maybe the site will change for the better then you can come back.
Lurk more.
I agree. As sad as it is to see ROG go, I find it even sadder that so many people upvoted krambs' comment. It's not about the point he tried to make -- not everyone has been on HN long enough to recognize some of the key contributors -- but the way he tried to make it.
makes me glad I'm in the tech field. Most of my non-CS friends were amazed that my summer internships paid as much as they were going to make after they graduated.
You won't find anybody who dislikes Microsoft any more than I do. I completely uprooted my career about ten years ago, to move myself out of their ecosystem. But I don't read this as a joke at their expense. More like: Perhaps there is a final configuration that all successful companies reach, and Microsoft was in this one instance a pioneer, and got there first.

Besides, even if it is a joke at Microsoft's expense, why would it be okay to say in a blog post, but not in a comic?
For all of you folks who say that confirmation emails are a bad idea, let's talk about a service in which the user can download large files once they are "confirmed". I'm thinking of a site like http://www.shutterstock.com/. They offer two free downloads per week and those files can be up to 30MB each.

Let's say that Shutterstock wanted to expand - they want to allow new users to download ANY two images they wanted for free.

Would you advise them to go with a confirmation-less email routine? If so, how do you prevent bots from creating bogus signups and then (a) stealing your images at will, (b) so that they can resell/rehost them in Russia/China and make money/compete with you, and (c) clogging up all of your bandwidth?

For example, the bot signs up with 00001@gmail.com then downloads 60MB files while another bot uses 0002@gmail.com then downloading 60MB in files, etc.

And please - no solutions that require manual intervention or cannot scale.
They don't have to tell him. He is watching his customers disappear and business is hurting. He is spending all this time trying to figure out a solution. He did come around to the realization that for money, they will probably fix his problem that they created in the first place.
> As the site has become popular so the population of exceptional individuals has become diluted.

As someone who has made the journey from slashdot to reddit to hacker news starting from 90s, I have strong believe that right now, somewhere, a new community site for programmers is rising. I only need to find it.
First jacquesm leaves, now RiderOfGiraffes... that's a loss of two very active contributors in a relatively short period. Hopefully none of the other great contributors to HN have any similar thoughts about leaving.
Anyway, I think that we may soon have to see some new names on HN that can provide such good articles and thoughtful comments.
I think Ronald Reagan basically defines himself as a communist here. He says communism is "the suppression of liberty in the name of a common good." But shortly before that, he suggests he is against Jane Fonda's "liberty" in the name of the "liberty of millions of Americans" (the common good).

MARCEL BROODTHAERS:
But I imagine you might not always appreciate her [Jane Fonda's] views Mr Reagan.

RONALD REAGAN:
No I dont care much for Communist sympathizers to be frank.

MARCEL BROODTHAERS:
But surely she is liberated in her freedom to do so.

RONALD REAGAN:
If ones liberty threatens to undermine the liberty of millions of Americans then I must disagree Marcel.

<SNIP>

MARCEL BROODTHAERS:
Thats a good point Edward. Can you even tell us what communism is Mr Reagan.

RONALD REAGAN:
Its the suppression of liberty in the name of a common good.
the simple idea that anything from the BBC could be "down" and not operating is, quite plainly, freaking scary.
From what i've heard, carrier grade nat is stupidly expensive and rather hard to scale nicely at reasonable speeds.

It would be fairly easy to implement say ipv6 in china, as it would be a closed system with everybody getting new gear and everybody in the same "we have no ips" boat.

To be honest, as the internet ecosystem in places such as china is mostly closed, I'd be surprised if they didn't go ipv6 only internally well before the rest of the world switches (what's the point in having a v4 address if everything you care about is on native v6 and you have a 64 gateway for everything that isn't).

Going to be interesting to see.
Yep, and RiderOfGiraffes is not the first to go :(

After nickb, mattmaroon, jacquesm, and many other "greats" that you'll find in the searchyc.com logs left, I always questioned why I stick around here anymore. Certainly not to see junk linkbait posted all the time.
Could someone elaborate why one would use pcc over the also liberally licensed clang/LLVM, except for ancient architectures on which LLVM doesn't run or is too slow?
> whatever happened to winfs?

WinFS was marketing through vaporware. MS were scared of ZFS making into OSX and had to show something to say "look, we aren't so much behind the others" so less people would be tempted to migrate. They do it all the time. Last thing I perceived as being that was the ARM support for Win8. I would be very surprised if it materializes as a product, but they just had to say "look, we are not chained to x86".

Longhorn being all managed code (Java envy?), WinFS (every-other-modern-filesystem-envy?)... The list goes all the way back to Windows for Pen Computing (GEOS-envy?). They make outrageous claims and launch so-so stopgap products so that corporations have an excuse not to move away from Windows.
Using /dev/urandom as a password source is fine. It's a CSPRNG. It theoretically degrades if you exhaust entropy, but there's no current attack I know of based on that property. Also, RNG attacks are usually "online", meaning an attacker gets to continually interact with the RNG. This is a one-off offline use. In this scenario, you could probably survive with rand().
"On HN I see them mostly coming along when the view of the other is not accepted."

No shit?

"The radiation levels and the finding of Pu in the ground, leaking out radioactive water and the like have already been reported to death."

None of which lead to "20 (presumably square) km" being rendered anything remotely resembling uninhabited. I still haven't heard anything that would even permanently condemn the land the reactor is on. The mere presence of plutonium in the water isn't that interesting.

It may help for context to realize that my house is a RADIOACTIVE DEATHTRAP. I have RADIOACTIVE GASSES seeping into my basement that were ABOVE THE LEGAL LIMIT. No, I am not kidding. I have a radon remediation system running all the time. See that bright red blotch in southern Michigan in [1]? That's where I live and have lived all my life. If we freaked out in linear proportion to people who are freaking out about the stuff happening in Japan, we wouldn't be talking about how Detroit is depopulating due to the bad economy, we'd be talking about how Detroit is a radioactive uninhabitable wasteland.

Except it isn't.

In fact, I bought this house knowing it was a RADIOACTIVE DEATHTRAP. It didn't significantly reduce the value, even, I didn't even get a deal. The radon remediation system has a big radioactivity symbol on it, so I seriously live in a house with a for-serious radioactivity symbol in it. I find myself wondering how many people flipping out do too.

I suppose arguably I can't really afford to just flip out and call it the holy and proper response or I'd have to, I don't know, burn my house down or something.

"By contrasting "overzealous safety organizations" with "sensible risk based analysis" you put excatly no argument forward but already indicate what you would do with any such source."

Bullshit. Flat out bullshit. I will happily accept analysis that shows that some exposure would trip the rather conservative limits of, say, the US OSHA or EPA. What I have seen is that it remains orders of magnitude below those limits for almost everybody who isn't right on top of the plant, like, on the property. It sounds like you're the one trying to hide irrational beliefs from the light of sanity, not me.

[1]: http://www.epa.gov/radon/pdfs/zonemapcolor.pdf
It seems old, but I still can't stand it:) and that's why I switch those controls back to the right side on every new machine that I use/install (via gconf-editor).
I change the font size in my browser all the time. A smaller font usually makes the organization of the text more apparent and requires less scrolling, especially if you need to refer to different sections of the document at the same time, while a larger font can be read more passively and from a greater distance.

Neither default is suitable for all situations, there's no right answer.
I get the same feeling as you. I only recently discovered HN and at first I was put off by the large amount of noise. After sticking with it for a while, I now get a better feeling for what's worth reading and what doesn't deserve a second glance. Like you say though, I'm sure somewhere, well guarded from the unwashed masses, there's an utopian community of smart people having smart conversation, much like how RoG describes the early HN to have been.
I find it easier to locate things in a well-organized system of menus than I do on the "Ribbon" where everything is just sort of in your face. Countless times I've stared at the ribbon for minutes trying to find what I want to do, only to suddenly spot it and realize it was right in front of me all along, but because it's so busy nothing stands out.

My number one peeve with MS is the Ribbon and if that becomes global in Windows 8 I'm finished with the platform.
The Asymmetrical Online War
"The problem isn't that everything you know and love about GNOME is suddenly gone, and Ubuntu 11.04 is, for all intents and purposes a completely different experience than everything that came before it."

Am I to assume, then, that it follows that because I haven't used Gnome since 1998, the article's claim that this is the "worst Ubuntu beta ever" is absolutely inapplicable to me?

I suppose that since it says "with Unity" in the title as well, I'm expected to forgive its overall link bait nature?
Favorite News Presentation Style?
Hello,

I am interested in your favorite way to digest news. I have identified six different visualization styles, this list might not be exhaustive so if you know another way to visualize news feel free to add it. Personally, I like the Grid View (with images) best as it gives me a quick broad overview when I don't have much time to read long lists of headlines. Which view do you prefer and why?

1. The Classic Front Page:

* http://www.nytimes.com/

* http://www.latimes.com/

2. The Custom Widget View:

* http://www.bbc.co.uk/

* (http://www.google.com/ig)

3. The Grid View:

* http://www.newsgriddy.com/

* http://www.newser.com/

* http://newsmap.jp/

* http://tenbyten.org/10x10.html

* http://www.veryquiet.com/news.php?category=world_news&format=compact_small&language=en&target=new

4. The List View:

* http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn

* http://www.reddit.com/

5. The Map View:

* http://newsworldmap.com/

6. The 3D Cloud View:

* http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/components/spectra/spectra.html

Votes (update as you post)

1. 0

2. 0

3. 1

4. 0

5. 0

6. 0
Email Marketing Best Practices: Reward Users for Engagement (from Redbox)
If you read carefully, the scenario appears to be "Pay university based on number of credit hours applied to degree" + "Get credit hours for internship". The student is not paying the company.

My alma mater put a similar rule in place regarding study abroad: credits transferring from study abroad programs would be charged at the university's standard rates regardless of the cost of the underlying program. (This was effectively a wash for me, since Japan was a high-cost option, but it was highly detrimental to folks who would e.g. use a year in Israel or any of a few African destinations at $5k to get a year of credit which normally cost about $40k.)

(There is another scenario, in which students -- well, rich parents -- pay brokers to arrange internships for e.g. DC governmental institutions. Someone I know works at one such broker, where commercially reasonable best efforts to find a placement cost about $10k. She's deeply conflicted about their business model and is quitting soon largely because of it.)
As the FAQ says, this is a common noob delusion. But I'm not a noob either, and I've noticed reddit-ification too--mainly in the comments. Pun/joke threads at the top, rather than insightful comments, snark, etc. Looking at the articles submitted, (with the exception of the cartoon "the end of evolution") the articles still look solid to me. The comments have always been the best part of HN though.

If the acculturated core of users are overwhelmed by an influx that is larger in number than the core, it seems to me that is when a culture shift happens. I think the first thing many noobs (myself included at one time) think when they see HN is "oh, reddit for tech stuff and startups!" so I think that is where the revolution is taking us.
To be fair, I'm an HN user who has been here 594 days and have never heard of you, and am sort of confused why largely anonymous users of a site like HN feel the need to post their own dramatic farewell posts. If you aren't feeling appreciated or something lately call up a real-life friend.
What's the point of taking arbitrary cutoffs like 1%, 20%, whatever%? Just show us the overall plot/curve.
3d CSS transforms are hardware accelerated on iOS, so they perform significantly better than 2d ones.
In an iPhone hole? Keep digging
The article definitely said Dream Careers was selling internships to students.
Can you show that the rate of fatality for uranium mining is more then 13630 times the rate of fatality of coal mining per kilogram (or cubic meter)? (Including secondary effects of both)

At the end of the day, that specifically is what we are trying to find out.
This was an exceedingly gracious and thoughtful post. Thank you, Colin (and please do make that "occasional contribution" from time to time - it will always be appreciated).
Check your webpage load time with Loads.in
Look a bit more into the different alternative nuclear designs. We have enough stored 'waste' to use it as fuel for a long time, not requiring much if any mining. Nuclear weapons can not be produced from these reactors. They use the material so storage is not an issue. They can use passive cooling which does not depend on computers that could be infected.
Similarly if you look underground you will find a mantle hot with radioactivity.
No one is forcing you. A lot of people just think refrigeration is awfully nice to have.
It would have been cool to see successful hispanics too. They are really under represented too.

When I consider all the odds stacked against women, not to talk of those from a minority, I give Rashmi, CEO of Slideshare a lot of kudos!
Sorry to see you go. I'll miss your valuable insights, tireless cross referencing work and your occasional maths tutoring threads.
It still has the same problem that you can't "turn them up" to cope with higher demand over longish periods, which makes dealing with them tricky. They are a good step though.
Funny you say that - in the seven+ years I worked there I heard (serious, not ironic) versions of this phrasing _many_ times from various senior managers and execs, especially as related to IBM's consulting business.
"Human resources" is the answer. Any decent H.R. manager knows that diversity in the workplace is absolutely essential. Asking about race or age is illegal on job applications. Therefore, companies should always request job applicants complete an anonymous feedback form separate from any employment application to know who's applying for the jobs, the company's selection rate of applicants, and to comply with any potential legal issues involving the Equal Employment Opportunity Comission.
If you aren't feeling appreciated or something lately call up a real-life friend.

That's exactly the kind of snide comment that's making HN a less pleasant place and pushing good contributors away.
Perhaps this might help stir your understanding of who the major contributors to HN, as decided by its membership, are:

http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
A Developer's Worst Nightmare (The TinyGrab Story)
Ask HN: is this ethical?
A program director of a funding agency joins a start-up formed to commercialize the research he has funded until very recently.

I am certain this is unethical. The real questions is, how common is this?
Why is it taking 17 seconds to load, if the page you are serving them merely contains links?
I'm a little bit surprised you've never heard of ROG, he has been an active contributor to HN both with articles and with comments. Anyway, take a look at the leader board, he's there. Number 13.
http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Non-techie Guide to setting up Django, Apache, MySQL on Amazon EC2
They'd have a negative association with it, since the site didn't give them what they wanted. You don't want to start your first impression with a negative.
I tried not to be that guy and already gave some alternatives for regression.

“Polynomial regression” implies to me that the basis functions are polynomials. I‘ll assume you meant “good basis for a simple fit, maybe by least squares”. More local functions like “radial basis functions” can work well. Or use splines or sigmoidal functions, which saturate to a flat line or linear trend. In some applications Fourier or wavelet bases might be appropriate.

Gaussian process regression is a Bayesian treatment of some basis function models, potentially with an infinite number of basis functions. Artificial neural nets usually use local or sigmoidal basis functions, potentially in a more complicated way.
How's solar and wind power contributing to global warming?
Even new, very expensive coal plants are not contributing to global warming :)
See: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Schwarze_Pump...

Thorium sounds great, can you tell me how many of the current power plants the new ones planed in the US. will use Thorium? Could not find this information. Is there some plan for proper reprocessing?

I can just talk for Germany, as I'm unfamiliar with the situation in the US or elsewhere. In G. nuclear power plants are not insured, because no insurance company takes the risk. Pesticide plants however are insured and have to pay a lot for their potential risk. So in G. the nuclear power industry gets the profits whereas the risks are shouldered by the citizens (and their ancestors).
I admit I fell for that one for a few seconds. I think Techcrunch went overboard in the # of fake articles... There was a bubble in april fools stories...
There is a lot of empirical evidence supporting the fact that the rich "own" government, or, more precisely, that politicians vote in ways that are more correlated with beliefs of high income voters than other voters, and that politicians are responsive to contributions. See, for example, the references herein:

http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/6348

Stiglitz is a serious economist and a Nobel laureate, there is data behind what he says, but bear in mind that he's writing this for Vanity Fair and not the American Economic Review.
Why would it be negative? Personally, I'd just think "oh there's a site with a similar name", and move on. I wouldn't fault the site for that.
Sorry, could you provide a little bit more detail?
Works well on my iPad, too. It even supports a "back swipe" gesture.