skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wasn't really looking to conduct a survey, I was just hoping to get a few opinions. True, hacker news is not about religion, nor is it a good way to conduct statistically signifcant surveys, but it's still nice to hear what people think.

I could think of lots of explanations for the shortage of religious sites...and I was looking for some opinions. A few possibilities include (A) there is no shortage of sites, i'm just ignorant, or (B) there are a relatively small number of religious hackers, or (C) there isn't really a pressing 'need' that has been identified, or something I didn't think of at all.

I hope that this wasn't construed as being a judging question - I was just curious.
No, religion is much deeper.
I've been down voted, but I only say this because it's been the case in every one of the (literally) hundreds of discussions I've had on the topic.
> Are you religous?

Nope. Religion implies belief in something/somebody. I for myself don't believe in anything at all. I can only assume. And I assume that there is no any god, life has not any sense and everything in this world can be understood and scientifically proved. From this point my position is safe, because it would be incorrectly to ask me prove my assumption just because it's assumption. Religion/belief, in contrary, is not about "assumption of anything", rather it's about "assertion of anything". And if someone asserts anything, he should be ready to prove his proposition if he would be asked(and of course he
couldn't do it).

Such point of view is very much spread among technical/scientific guys. So, I don't think your hypothesis is right.
Hee hee.

Of course, to a large corporation such mosquitoes don't matter much. Most patent-troll companies can be paid to go away -- that is, in fact, their entire business model. And giant corporations get a relatively good deal in those negotiations, because they've got the money for a defense and their own giant collection of dubious patents to deploy in countersuits.

It's a cost of doing business. Microsoft has to pay their legal department anyway, because even without software patents I'm sure that the company is sued dozens of times a day.

It's true that, once in a blue moon, a software-patent holder will have a good enough case, and a stubborn enough attitude, to at least appear to seriously threaten the interests of a large company. But I think it's pretty rare. And appearances can be deceiving when parties are arguing over money -- bluff and bluster are important legal tactics.
> morality is one of the great unsolved dilemma's of our kind

With religion morality is supposed to be the norm. For Christians, Jesus feed the hungry not because it made Jesus feel good but rather to model "normal behavior". This goes on with Jesus saving the woman from stoning, the son coming back to his father and his father forgiving him (for demanding his inheritance early and blowing it on hookers), and so on.

Morality in the real world (without religion) is an excercise in making yourself feel good (and feel you are "better then others") without any self-examination.
You have to go back a really long time to find when everyone thought the earth was flat, but even though it was no longer consensus, flat earth was still a well-represented belief in the middle ages.
How confident are you that your model for this is correct? Hundreds of millions of records is a lot for one table... in some cases, it may be beneficial to partition such a table even in a normal relational database.

That being said, if this is an application with complex calculations and a very simple data structure, you should note that the biggest issue is creating indexes to find the records that must participate in a particular calculation quickly. RDBs are very good at building indexes, typically and I would personally be inclined just to use mySQL with data partitioned across multiple tables (perhaps with the same schema) backed up to S3 and with calculations run in EC2. You could also create a custom data structure for this if you are into low level pain.

What is your application?
Although... I had a very vivid dream a week ago, where I was at the "Google acquires Digg" party. I spent the whole party apologizing for stuff I've said on the web since leaving ;-)
Byte of the Apple The Real Issue About Steve's Health (cancer has not returned)
Chad Dickerson: Leaving Yahoo for Etsy
This isn't a direct response, but: cool project in your profile.
If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone
The problem is that you can't be too reliant on Reddit for programming news. What gets voted up is either REALLY BIG news like the DNS thing, or just cool tips from Joe's Blog. Not that those tips aren't cool, I just feel that a lot of more newsier things don't get voted on in Reddit.
Curiously enough, the BusinessWeek cover story on Digg almost two years ago claimed "people in the know say Digg is easily worth $200 million".

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_33/b3997001....

Has Digg's value been stagnant for 2 years? Did BW overestimate? I suspect a little of both...
Free the Phone & Venture Capital Will Follow
Agreed. With religion, as with many things, people with loud extreme opinions make for good tv, and tend to be vastly overrepresented in the media because of it.
Google to Acquire Digg
Google is in final negotiations to acquire Digg for $200 Million. Apparently, Digg will fall under the control of Google News.
4-6 caffeine shots a day, with the least one close to midnight. If I don't have any, then I am feeling blue.
Your point makes a LOT more sense now that you put it that way. Titling your post "Are you religious?" probably isn't a good way to get people's thoughts on why there is a perceived poverty of religious websites. You will notice that most of the responses on this page are about people's personal beliefs and not about their thoughts on religious websites.
Does "Leroy Jenkins" stay or go?
I never would have assumed they couldn't. By a snooping librarian, even if not by the FBI.

I don't think it's likely that a librarian would bother to look through my very boring records, but it's certainly no less likely than the prospect of an FBI agent doing so.
Facebook still gaining on MySpace
The real question is which books trigger a ping to the FBI and why are those books in your average library? Wouldn't it be clever if the FBI placed those books in libraries just to see who got them out? Now that's a conspiracy theory.
No, it makes sense. Customers cost money. If you have customers that cost more money than they generate that's bad.

It's totally conceivable to me that people uploading and watching these gaming video cost more than they brought in for Vimeo.

It's part of the web mindset that more customers == more eyeballs == better. It's not always the case, especially if you're working with limited resources.
One cup of coffee a day, average. Some days more.
Not all religious authority rests on any sort of divine command. In buddhism* , morality is based on the idea that it's immoral to do some things (primarily: kill, steal, engage in sexual misconduct, lie/slander, and consume intoxicants that cloud judgement) because they tend to increase the amount of suffering in the world.

* Which may or may not be considered a religion, depending on how you define things; it's not necessarily theistic, for example.
To be honest w/ you, I never spent more than $30 on textbooks per class (w/ a rare exception or 2), because I was always able to find really cheap version with gettextbooks.com or download and print it off for $5.
Ask HN - I'm in legal training, how can I help the startup community?
I've got one year left until I obtain a law degree, then have a good few years of training and so on. My knowledge will be mostly UK based but I'm hoping to gain more knowledge of the US side of things.

Could my knowledge and eventually experience, be of benefit to the startup community and if so, how? Maybe a blog on law issues, an ask me questions blog, accessible rates for startups, maybe something else I haven't thought of?

The only snag is anything I publish (if I'm writing a blog) comes with the disclaimer that it shouldn't be taken as legal advice, which nearly defeats the purpose. Maybe I won't be of any use at all?! Maybe anything would be too boring for anyone not interested in law?
I've been climbing for a good long time and diving for a few years. There honestly isn't much to tell, it has always felt like a terrible stretch to try to compare programming to one of my hobbies. Whenever I do it, I always ask myself, "how is this simile different from comparing programming to building a bridge?" And then I delete it all and start over.

I don't have a great dangerous idea, but to use a more folksy analogy, I want to be a Jedi that builds his own lightsabre, but not a lightsabre technician.
wait .. what is so wrong with GrandCentral ? I use that service everyday and I have been very happy with it.
But does the same person that knows that Google exists know that Digg exists?
I'd say that I am spiritual, in that I have an interest in the enrichment of the body and the mind, but I am not religious in any way, shape or form.

Infact, I am something of a militant atheist, but I am a very moral person. I would happily tolerate religions of all types, if only they would tolerate me and mine. But, as they won't.. then neither shall I.
A person's religion says a lot about their epistemology, which in turn says a lot about them. You have to pick and choose your friends somehow (this is not unnecessary meddling) and there are few more substantive ways.

I'm a non-militant atheist, so I generally don't "look down upon" religious people or feel it's my duty to convert them. But I also have a hard time really relating to anyone who is willing to base their morality or political/life decisions on such silly things as the Bible (see http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/... for explanation) or logically unsound principles with no factual evidence. Their epistemology is just too different from mine.
I'm not sure militant is the right word--seems like that would be adopting the nomenclature of the religious. I've never had an atheist knock on my door and try to convert me. I think the term militant comes out because believers sometimes find non-belief threatening in and of itself.

Most religions have, built into them, a meme for spreading (evangelizing) themselves. There is no such meme for atheism to spread itself. The idea is to put atheism on a more equal footing. Being open about atheism counters conformity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
> the number of eyeballs on Earth is limited

That's obviously not true (in the medium term), more people are being born, and more people are coming online every day.
I would be willing to bet that the average hacker is significantly less religious than the average American, if any of the terms in that sentence could be defined and then measured.
I went to Berea for my undergraduate degree.

My first two semesters I worked 10hrs/week in the pit (the basement of food services) on weekends at 6am cleaning dishes. Not that fun.

Each semester after that I would work in either multi-media production or as the only student assistant systems analyst. This meant converting cobol applications running on a Prime mini-computer to Oracle Forms.

They didn't have a computer science major at the time, so I majored in mathematics (and loved learning about proving things and that advanced mathematics != calculus). While they do have computer science now, I would highly recommend doing self learning (lisp, python, javascript, ...) and majoring in math, science or even theater!
Buddhism as most Americans understand it is more philosophy than religion for that reason.
Instead, how about: love the believer, not the belief.
I agree. Society would be much better (fairer, wealthier, more peaceful) if there was a separation of economy and state.
Perhaps it's the tone and content of your post that got you voted down.

Without even knowing what my religious faith is, in one broad, sweeping generalization, you've told me that whatever my faith is, it's logically indefensible because of evidence from the last 200 years.

Those sorts of comments are usually voted down on Hacker News.
I can fairly easily think of how you can help.

The source and veracity of my legal knowledge is nebulous and not something I'll discuss here, but, I can help with the US side of things.

With regards to that, a procedural challenge has been made by the USPTO (patent office) to software patents. Investigate, pursue, and attempt to create a test case for it, see if you can reinforce it.

Should help open source, and startups in one shot. Have fun.
The problem is that they are just now beginning to focus on their overseas presence, with translations and such, and statistically there are many more people with slower internet connections over there. It's safe to assume that anyone at a university has a broadband connection, but that is no longer who they are targeting.
Didn't read the article, but to answer the titular question, it's too out of touch. Too focused on Apple/Facebook/Google (currently in that order, though sometimes it gets shuffled) and not focused enough on what's really happening.

You'd think from reading tech media that 100% of the population owns or cares about the iPhone. The writers need to take a step back and look at the general populace, where far more people own a Blackberry and, despite loads of hype aren't even considering switching. Despite the tech media's constant insistence that it is "game changing" the cell phone industry is the same for 95% of the population and carriers as it was two years ago.

A surprisingly large % of Americans use MySpace or Facebook, but even most of them only do so casually. The average American has never heard of Twitter, and likely never will, but anyone in the tech industry is doomed to read 5 entries about it a day.

So I guess I'd like to see tech media realigned, such that the number of articles about any given company match the amount of difference they make in the real world.
What makes the situation worse is that the laptop manufactures work with Microsoft to include 'Vista only' hardware, making it difficult to get XP running on the machine - my DV6000t is a prime example.

Thank goodness that Ubuntu, SUSE and Fedora all run great (fast, cool and stable) with less configuration than XP takes to get rigged to work on here. Since I am running Ubuntu, and not running the hog that is 'Vista', I have plenty of machine "left over" to run Virtualized XP at lightning fast speeds...

Paint a turd(Vista) gold(fight back ads) all you want, you just have shiny shit at the end of the day...

On a related note: I think it would be interesting to see how many prior Windows-only users were turned to the world of Linux because of Vista being poorly released at a time when the Linux environment was moving towards its current usability and hardware support.
I don't know how many librarians you know, but the ones I know zealously guard the privacy of their patrons. They take that custodial duty extremely seriously. Librarians as a group are some of the staunchest civil rights advocates you will find anywhere.
Isn't Digg using Microsoft for their ads? I wouldn't like to be a chair in Redmond now.
That's the efficient way to browse Reddit in search of programming news.

I like to keep my options open to all of the topics. Why? Because other than most of the [PIC]s it's intellectually stimulating to sometimes take a look at the articles outside of my realm of interest.
YouTube: we're selling ads against 'less than 3%' of our videos
It's hard to tell whether it'll be useable or not. Have you applied it to your codebase?
Oh, you do have a logical defense then? Or are you just spitting into the wind and claiming that "there could be a logical defense, so we shouldn't say there isn't?
What about a means of pulling updates from the GitHub gem server over to RubyForge? Or a hook in GitHub that ties gem publishing into RubyForge? Seems there are a number of ways to solve this problem with just a little collaboration between RubyForge and GitHub, without sacrificing any of the centralization of RubyForge or the distributed coding goodness of GitHub :)
... I really don't understand why folks act that way.

They act that way because when 2 people disagree, and there is absolutely no way to determine who is right, the only way to convince the other person is to coerce them.

If I say "Santa has a blue suit", most people would say it's actually a red suit. Fine, lets go find santa and see what color his suit is, that is how you determine the truth, you go find out. But crapola, there is no santa, just fictional images of him, and if I take my 'facts' from a different fictional source than you, we will disagree forever because we are both hopeless morons.

But frankly, you don't have any reason to believe in Christianity. If believe you have talked to Jesus or an Angel, you need medical help. If you believe in these beings without having witnessed them then you are just buying into a very old rumor with no evidence whatsoever.
Well... I miss my 3278 font a lot. I can't find anything that's really close enough. I remember the numbers were slightly taller than letters.

I wonder if someone has the original pixel maps floating around.
...and great artists steal.
What is surprising to me, is how no law enforcement exists at any level for individuals who get scammed on the Net. I am talking about eBay scams, all those spam emails etc.

Yet create a company where the IRS might not get every penny due either to e-gold's actual gold appreciation or money transfers, and see how rapidly the Feds react.
Are We a Nation of Financial Illiterates?
What is mochiweb for?
That all makes sense since a PII and a Duo use the same kind of transistors. I was more curious about what the effect on power would be when memristors augment or replace transistors on a CPU.
It is well documented that the level of religious intensity is very dramatically inversely proportional to education, as well as IQ and income level.
State of the Mobile Web, June 2008
'spiritual but not religious' is the most vapid phrase ever to originate on the lips of a douchebag.
Indeed. But I do a lot of those on my phone anyway. Lot simpler than pulling out the laptop, and I like browsing on my phone more than I do on my laptop (egads).
Raytheon:  Directed energy weapons set to go
I called it militant because Dawkins has used that himself (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_dawkins_on_milita...), but it may have been a bit out of context, because he seems to use it with a bit of irony intended (about 5:30 into the video).

On the second point, I agree that atheism doesn't have the same self-spreading mechanisms, but most religious people I know don't make any effort to convert other people either. They see religion as a personal thing, are respectful of other people's religion or non-religion, and do not try to push their belief on others.
California adopts innovative solar loan law
It's true that I didn't make any effort to soften what I said.

If your understanding of the nature of things was largely formed more than 200 years ago, chances are that it's wrong.
Google Maps Offers Walking Directions
If it were to gain adoption they will find out and baninate your app. It probably will be then removed on next sync from all phones.
Awesome indeed, for 8.5K of assembly, but I prefer the Advanced Beauty stuff: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253027
Bit gold will provide a safer alternative:

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html
I'd like it if a duplicate submission could be counted as a vote.

I often submit articles that have already been submitted. There's no vote button on the "this has already been posted" page, and it's often hard to sift through the "new" page to search for the article link to vote it up.
In discussing Windows vs. Linux (a different sort of religious issue), you can call upon a series of verifiable facts to support whichever side of the argument you are on.

For instance, I could point to Linux's superior X in comparison to the X provided by Windows.

I cannot make similar arguments in defense of my Christianity however, without going through a lengthy process of communicating first with the person, determining what they consider important, reaching mutual agreement on a set of criteria by which to compare different religions (and atheism) , etc. Only then, given a hammered-out base to build on, could I then communicate clearly and succinctly why I believe "X".

Surely you can see that this would be a great amount of effort to expend in a forum, and probably would be best handled through one on one exchanges rather than allowing some random user, to whom my comments were not originally addressed, to jump in at any time.
I'm atheist.
It takes a few minutes to get used to... You still can click to open any portion in a new window so you're not relying on hovering.

I don't understand the codebase question?

Also, The UI is evolving.so please join the private beta. We really want feedback.
I am wondering, how will Google handle the fanboys. Maybe bad comments in Digg will get fanboys blog downgraded in Google search. Google is capable of doing that.
Gratuitous non sequitur.

http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/show-them-the-code
Switched to caffeine pills here.

1. Easier to keep intake from growing out of control.

2. Easier to keep caffeine levels steady since the pills take less time and effort than making more coffee and the dosage is very consistent. No unexpected crashes.

3. Teeth/mouth.
Comments like that turn this thread into sewage. Take your bigoted vitriol and leave.
Can't botnets generate a near-infinite supply of bit gold?
Okay, I misunderstood it. Yes, what you're suggesting (basically to only keep the glue for the current query and not to cache it, right?) would be a fix.

Buuuut you'd have to consider that legitimate glue usage includes A records for NS records.
This is like Arrington coming here to upvote Techcrunch. I thought you were better than this, Alaska...
In order to maintain that trend, Google has to both keep hiring and acquiring the best people and also do what it can in a non-evil way to prevent the best people from becoming serious competitors.
You really think this is the first time science has discovered something? The details may change, but the arguments stay the same.

> believing in supernatural stories born of bronze age cultures is logically indefensible

Unless of course it actually happened.....

Which you'll never believe, and I won't convince you, so why talk about it over and over?
I think they have a name for it: "race to the bottom"
A Word original? Can't have been the original original...
JotSpot got Google Joe Kraus. They're still pretty happy about that one, I think...
lesson learned: i'll try to be a bit more descriptive in future submissions.
Wait, are you saying that Hacker News is left leaning? I don't know, I think there's enough diversity of political opinion around here to prevent a broad characterization one way or the other.
Tetris written (by a female hacker) in sed