skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agnostic and atheist beliefs are likely more concentrated in the hacker world because this is a world of science and mathematics - worlds that have not traditionally reconciled well with the world of religion (no flaming please, historical observation - Copernicus: "The Earth is not the center of the Universe" Church: "Condemn the heretic!"). You need not search far to find examples of this (aside from the previous example) as most popular scientific periodicals and journals frequently discuss the lack of religious faith in the scientific community - Scientific American, Nature and Science all regularly discuss this very topic (very frequently in Scientific American).

On the flip, there are many hackers who are religious. Despite popular consensus, hackers are people and some 80%+ of the world population claims one religion or another. It only serves to reason that some of this 80%+ of the worlds population would call a scientific discipline, such as programming, their trade of choice.

Although a generalization for sure, there is likely a grain of truth and logic to the posed argument - specifically, fewer hackers are religious than is the case with other disciplines (such as, say, insurance agent).

I know a great number of hackers who claim to be "religious", though philosophical discussions often show them to hold concepts more akin to agnosticism. My (unscientific) theory for this phenomenon is the "fire insurance" argument - i.e. If a particular religious system is correct, denouncing the legitimacy of said religion will ensure them a place in hell. If the individual does not formally denounce said religion (despite the religion not necessarily syncing with their true beliefs), they can still claim a place in heaven as a 'believer'. The "if there is a God, I am good, if there is not, what did it hurt to pray?" defense.

To each their own I say. If it works for you to believe, then by all means, believe. Concerning science and religion, evidence suggests if there is a God, he like to play dice - something that many notorious religious scientist were uncomfortable with. Myself, I find comfort in the randomness.
You think you are an exception, and this is a unique time in history, but it's not, give it another 200 years and you'll be wrong too.

Science has a pattern it goes like this: you discover something and you find out more and you understand it fully. (Religions get bashed here.) Every single time that happens you find out a little more and you realize how much you don't actually know. (No more bashing.)

If you think you know everything about a topic then you actually don't. You don't really understand something until you know what you don't know about it.
Yes it's definitely left-leaning. Did you see the poll about who you'll vote for? Obama won by a landslide.

YC's a bit right-leaning on economic issues, but left-leaning overall.
Oops, I'm totally embarrassed.
Apple hints at something new
When I was in school, we'd always order from Amazon.co.uk because European countries apparently subsidize textbooks, and so we could get them for about 1/3 of the U.S. price. Unfortunately the falling USD has kinda nixed that practice, and I think Amazon may've started adding shipping surcharges for ordering from Amazon.co.uk and shipping to the U.S.
"Be civil."
Most people would call me religious. I'm a practicing Mormon. I pray and believe that God answers my prayers. However, I hesitated to answer your original question because the label "religious" is mildly distasteful. It seems more external than internal, more political than spiritual.

As a practicer of my faith, I get plenty of chances to interact with people of my religion. So I don't feel much of a need for a 'religious' forum.

On the other hand, I do hunger for forums and other forms of social media where the standards that I hold are widely shared. I tried Reddit. It was great to have news and education combined. But in the end it wasn't worth wading through so many headlines, articles, and comments that were (to me) degrading in one way or another.

I love it here. I wouldn't call it at all religious. But the dialog is respectful and the people are interesting. I could use more places like this.
That's true. I bet YC is much more atheist than the general population. But I know a religious YC poster who's hesitant to express that kind of idea here; I also bet YC is a bit more religious than it appears.
Help me Hack?
Trying to play a file that is resident in iTunes and has the "fairplay" DRM through a local AIR (Flash) Client. Ideas?
This is great. I wonder if it's possible to measure the tiredness level with a simple test? That way I would know when to stop coding ang go have some social contact instead.

But then I would also know when to get back to coding!
Or Monarchy vs. The Reign of Terror!

Anyway, I neglected to add my regrets that you are leaving blogging. I hope you'll change your mind as you figure out the next big subversive thing and at least clue us all in. Best of luck!
The problem with picking just one asset with which to back your currency is that you have two options:

a) pick something your country is a net producer of, knowing that producers will create more than the industrial demand to accommodate savings (this is the case with gold).

b) pick something you're a net consumer of, so saving more money hurts consumption (if some people are right and oil is being used as a proxy currency to hedge against the dollar, this is happening now).

I don't know what the solution is -- I see nothing wrong with highly liquid index funds, against which someone can write checks denominated in whatever unit they choose. But a deregulated market would probably out-innovate me pretty fast.
Verdi Spoiler Alert

In Verdi's Simon Boccanegra at Covent Garden this past spring, Fiesco says "Simone, I morti ti salutano!" -- "Simon, the [previously-thought] dead salute you!".

To the classically minded, it's a riff on the gladitorial salute to the Roman emperor "Nos te morituri te salutant" -- we who are about to die salute you.

Takeaway lesson: only date people who laugh as much at Latin jokes as you do.
The bigger problem is that everyone has a incentive to run their computers day and night cranking out solutions, which burns up lots of natural resources and processor time for a zero-sum result.
No, the bits are solutions to hard computational puzzles, and they are securely timestamped and published, so that you always know exactly what the money supply is. More on the markets and economics of bit gold here:

http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.ht...
Who is Monetizing the Free iPhone Apps? Google, AdMob, Developers - But Not Apple
I submit that there can't be a logical defense. This is not because of a weakness in religion but rather because of a weakness in logic. To get to the point where logic becomes relevant you have to build up a set of shared assumptions. The beliefs from which you argue are formed from a set of experiences. Unless you have something of a common experience it is difficult to share a set of beliefs from which to argue. The process of joining a religion is not a logical one. It is a spiritual one and is based in experience.

How, then, do we argue about experience? Either we discuss things and times and places that neither of us have witnessed, or we discuss and evaluate each others experiences. Perhaps we are fortunate and both accept a common ground distilled from some set of experiences. Maybe we are both physicists. But no such set of shared experiences seems to be broad enough to properly answer questions of religion.

If you truly want to begin to discuss intelligently then you have to seek a shared set of religious experiences. But that might be dangerous. Change can happen at that point.
But religion as a real, testable phenomenon doesn't get more valid as one model of the physical world is discarded for a more accurate one. The Four Humors don't make a comeback when we develop an understanding of antibiotics that renders previous assumptions false.

You're treating religion as the natural fallback hypothesis, which should make it fairly easy to convince yourself that you're right.
Anyone get this message when trying to access Facebook?
Redirect Loop

Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.

The browser has stopped trying to retrieve the requested item. The site is redirecting the request in a way that will never complete.

* Have you disabled or blocked cookies required by this site?
* NOTE: If accepting the site's cookies does not resolve the problem, it is likely a server configuration issue and not your computer.
I don't think the current election is a good barometer for ideology. War is a big deal to some people, and they'll vote for the person who is likely to cause the least amount of death regardless of ideology. Then there's the whole intolerance thing, which maps poorly to ideologies, but strongly to political platforms.
The economics in this regard are the same as for gold. With gold only the most efficient gold mines can make a profit, so only those profitable operate -- nobody tries to mine all the gold in the world. With bit gold, only those with the most efficient processors and most spare time will be able to make a profit, so again there will just be a handful of a few powerful computers, or many small computers but just using the spare CPU cycles (like SETI@home), solving the mathematical puzzles to generate the bit gold.
I think it's also interesting that, up until the past century or so, many well-educated people were also openly religious. To wit, holding religious beliefs does not prevent one from doing excellent academic work... religion does not go hand-in-hand with stupidity or ineptitude.
Are there other -ists who seriously believe in the existence of other universes, and disbelieve in this one? Your analogy is only consistent if: there is a single religion in which nearly everyone believes; or there is a multitude of universes in which large groups (none a majority of the population) believe, to the exclusion of all other universes.
I don't have high hopes about the possibility of perfectly bug-free software. To be bug-free from an end-user's standpoint, it seems like such a thing would need to be completely free of errors at every level, from specification (understanding precisely what the program is supposed to do, whether in terms of problem domain or customers' requests) to implementation (the bug-free program itself) to the supporting system and hardware (an otherwise perfect program could still fail due to a bug in a floating point processor, for example). Each layer presents its own problems, many of which are far from trivial.

Perhaps a more useful way to frame the question is to ask what approaches could better rule out different kinds of bugs. For example, the strong type system in ML languages (e.g. OCaml) is great for preventing bugs with extensive compile-time analysis (in part due to being derived from a theorem prover), but there is certainly room for improvement. Likewise, well-designed garbage collectors can rule out many kinds of memory leaks.
didn't mean to downvote - fatfingering on my new iPod touch.

I'm Mormon too, glad to know I'm not the only one. Email me.
I think you'd have to say "did not" rather than "does not."

200 years ago many well-educated people owned slaves. That doesn't allow us to conclude much about whether slave ownership and intelligence/education are intrinsically compatible.
In a sense, it would be very logically unsound to base faith in God on just a book, even if it is "The Book".

Isn't it because faith transcends logic and reason? This is my understanding of the word "faith", any way.
"I just bought a new laptop with Vista on it. The poor puppy was spending about 10 minutes to boot up and cool down..."

Vista makes a bad first impression. It gets faster the more you use it, rather than being fastest out-of-the-box.

This may sound crazy, but here's what I did last time I set up a Vista box. I booted, logged in, then walked away and let the thing sit idle overnight.

All the scheduled disk cleanup, disk defragmentation, spyware scanning, indexing, etc., ran overnight and the machine was quite a bit snappier the next day.

I then proceeded to reduce the frequency of some of those tasks and turn others off completely. You don't have to mess around with services for most of those things, though, because they have real GUIs.

In the end, I was able to get pretty usable performance on the PC, which at the start had appeared to be unusably slow.

"After that it could barely breathe on its own 1GB of RAM, without any applications running ... The damn thing needs 1GB of RAM only to stay barely alive on its own."

With respect, what makes you believe this? The figure in Task Manager? I know just enough about Windows' memory management to understand what a weak grasp I have on the meaning of the figures in Task Manager. Certainly the figures shown don't change much when I open up a bunch of apps.
Funny, I just posted about that to my blog (www.returncontrol.com). In short, the theory that I posted there is this: People who opted in to preview the new facebook profile used to be redirected to new.facebook.com, but that domain is now redirected back to www.facebook.com, which is trying to send you back to new.facebook.com.... You get the picture.
While You Were Mowing Your Lawn, We Created an Internet Startup
I think you'd have to say "does not" rather than "did not."

Don Knuth is Lutheran, and has done some of the most excellent academic work of anyone alive today. Guy Steele holds Christian beliefs of some sort, and his work has been extremely influential in the programming world. Just two examples off the top of my head, but I think enough to keep the verb in the present tense.

We would be remiss to claim that religious beliefs imply academic stupidity. We would also be remiss to claim that lack of religious beliefs imply academic stupidity.
> "Microsoft acquiring digg on the other hand? That would be a death notice to digg's userbase."

I don't think the average user would care/notice who owns Digg, and even if they did, they probably wouldn't change their choice of social news site based on some M&A transaction.
7 great cars you wish you owned
Y Combinator Challenge #2 - Simplified Browsing
Neat. (Although, trying to read the code makes my head hurt.)

Hey, is Julia a girl, or would it be better to refer to her as a "female hacker"? Not trying to be a troll, just thinking we should be careful about using "girl" to refer to women, if that's the case.
I'm interested in knowing those sources to which you refer and also interested in what constitutes "well-represented". The largest and best representation of generally accepted cosmology of the middle ages, Dante's Comedy, _requires_ the earth be round (an 'echo' of the heavenly spheres). And he's basically synthesizing all available knowledge (theological, philosophical, political, and scientific) in his text, so where the text is silent to a conflict (that is, where it's making an _assumption_ as opposed to an _argument_), it ought be trusted as generally accepted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_mythology has more on the myth.

And assuming the truth of the citation in the wiki article, having Gould say, "all major medieval scholars accepted the earth’s roundness as an established fact of cosmology" is, I think, fairly damaging to your position. When one of the biggest critics of religious interactions with science says 'hey, they got it right here', they probably got it right.
I do not believe in leprechauns. In fact, I actually do believe that there is NOT a leprechaun dancing around my feet at this very moment.

Note this is different from having "no belief." I also feel this way about God, because intelligence, which is a kind of organized complexity, does not just spring into existence without some stage of organization such as evolution, at least as far as we know. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but it would take more than empty assertions to do so.

So that makes me an atheist. Of course, someone claiming "no belief in God" is also an atheist, but one of a different flavor. (You know, strong versus weak atheism).

To agnostics, I have only one question: If you are agnostic about God, are you also agnostic about the invisible leprechauns dancing around your feet?
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# sed -e sedtris.sed
sed: -e expression #1, char 11: unterminated `s' command
this is basically utilitarianism. i.e. this action will benefit me, but will create a disproportionate amount of suffering for others, thus increasing net suffering.
It's not meaningful to generalize about all religion based on the church in medieval Europe. The potential behavior of a powerful theocracy, yes, but not religion in general.

Incidentally, your "fire insurance" argument is generally referred to as "Pascal's Wager" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager), in case you (or another reader) is interested in reading further along those lines.
"Crossing the Chasm" Geoffrey Moore
"Entrepreneurship and Innovation" Peter Drucker
"Cities and the Wealth of Nations" Jane Jacobs

Also, check out "The Programmer's Stone" blog for great ideas on software team building and management.
What am I supposed to be seeing?
I think that morality in the real world is a set of behaviors that made it easier for our ancestors to get along with the group, thus increasing their mating pool and offspring survival rates. Dunbar's number explains why it is so easy for us to espouse ideals like thou shalt not kill within the group and then justify the killing of other groups to take their resources and women. Intuitive morality is a function of what was most effective in a tribal environment.
And if you want to make it actually playable:

while (sleep .5); do xvkbd -text "\r" 2>/dev/null; done & sed -nf sedtris.sed; pkill sleep

(Note: I tried just using echo with a pipe but couldn't get it to work. That would naturally be a better solution. If you can get that working, let me know.)
Not to discredit her, but think the title is best left gender neutral.
You need sed -nf.
Good point. She's a hacker who just happens to be female. ;)
Too bad you can't chain commands like: "wwaaz<return>" but it's very impressive indeed. Looking though all that sed code can give you a headache.
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In general, lefties think Obama's less militaristic policy will save lives (because diplomacy will work).

And righties think McCain's more militaristic policy will save lives (because the question is when not if to fight).
Number of visits/hour to news.YC is probably a good proxy...

On that note, I should go to bed.
Depends on the field. To my knowledge, no religious beliefs conflict with any work being done in computer science. (Maybe some AI or something.)

On the other hand, certain very commonly held beliefs would totally hinder work in biology or possibly physics.
Where is this "one of it's biggest user bases" thing coming from? Vimeo has been just doing fine for the last 4 years without a bunch of video game videos.
I think there should be more women hackers celebrated for doing something cool. We are in a domain that's heavily dominated by males so when a woman does something this cool, I think she might inspire other girls to do the same. Some girl hackers today are more famous for their looks than for their skills. Julia, the author of this, is clearly very talented.
Right. It's essentially believing in something because you want to, rather than because evidence or logic points to it. Faith doesn't transcend reason, it is its opposite.
I agree, but that is not surprising to me. I suspect that Knuth and the others would be able to fully follow an argument against holding the beliefs they do, but that they would short-circuit it by 'answering' any such argument with the idea that religion is somehow a special topic not subject to rational inquiry, or that religion is based on 'faith' or something. To me these arguments are silly and obvious rationalizations, but some people cannot bring themselves to honestly evaluate religion using the same vigor they bring to other fields.
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Most Y-Combinator folk are in the USA, as such, breaking the protections on this would violate the DMCA.

IANAL, just saying.
Perl on App Engine?
Ahh, you have totally destroyed your own argument.

If to argue using logic depends on building shared assumptions, the basis of all religion is to accept an entire laundry list of assumptions without questioning them. There is no reason to suspect that a soul or spirit exists, therefore what you mean by 'a spiritual' process is unclear.

There are no 'religious experiences' that you can demonstrate to exist. At best, you can show me a group of people claiming to have a 'religious experience'. Can you define even a single way a 'religious experience' is different from any other emotional group experience?

Please don't patronize me with your nonsense. You are hiding behind nice sounding phrases like 'religious experience' and 'weakness in logic', but these are merely rhetorical flourishes, there is no meaning to them. They are effective only because they are often repeated in discourse. You might as well tell me that I need to open my soul to the forces of goodness.
Aims (1) and (2) are correct. If there are more 'exotics' to go around and they become more easily accessbile (i.e. low transaction fees), wouldn't there be more competition on the currency market? Online retailers could quote prices in the currency of their choice and you'd get an instant quote in the currency of your choice out of that. As for the non-guaranteed quotes and the latency, I'm not sure whether someone has seriously tried to get their head wrapped around that, so there's room for innovative routing mechanisms. As for me it'd be fine to just do this as a thought experiment and then apply the results to poor man's P2P networks which are more accessible in the first place and see what comes out of that.
I have all kinds of ideas for you. Why not drop me a line at pelle at the name of my blog which you can find in my profile.
I was in a similar situation and I can totally relate to Vimeo's decision. Gamer population has two funny properties that can drive any service provider nuts:

(a) Gamers don't have money
(b) Gamers stress *the hell* out of the service once it becomes popular with them

There are certainly adult gamers, but your average gamer is a teen with no money of his own and who is also very accustomed to a freeloading. This means that it's virtually impossible to convert gamers to paying customers. Nor does their existence in a user base add much to the company valuation, because of a non-existent cross-sale potential. Nor do their ad clicks have much value.

For all practical intents and purposes, the gaming crowd is interesting almost exclusively to the gaming-related companies. If you are not in that segment, the chances are that your service would fare better without gamers.
Digg: The Hyman Roth of M&A Deals