skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, didn't Hawking write about cosmological versus thermodynamic versus perceptual arrows of time, in A Brief History of Time, like 20+ years ago? (Therefore I assume it was well-established even before that).

Plus, I may be missing something, but what's the difference between the self-indexical principle and the anthropic principle?
High school sex - teens and sex
high school prom sexual encounte
I understand it that self-indication is for any observer, not just us puny humans. Oh, and that might be the answer to my question too!
No, it is not. If we discover something that appears to disobey physical laws, then we clearly either don't understand the laws that it disobeys and need to re-examine their definitions, or are making a problem in observation of the phenomenon.
Translation: This is the anthropic principle applied to the direction of time.

Basically, he's saying that universes which have a definite direction of time are much more likely to be very large and long-lasting, and have many more opportunities for "observers" (like us, or our particles, depending on whether you've read http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/35391/title/Do_su... ) to exist, than those which do not have a definite, reliable direction of time.

And therefore, because we exist, we are much more likely to find ourselves in one of those kinds of universes than in one which is not so compatible with life.

This is probably not the most interesting article I've read on OvercomingBias... the others usually make more interesting arguments.
Because 5 people (at the time of this comment) got confused and thought this was Reddit.
Exagerated in terms of complexity and conspiracy, but not in terms of effects probably. Nationalist mass rage is in a way much more scary than some government action.
That's actually an cool idea. I mean, if they can really pick your preferences effectively, you don't need 'stars' anymore.
What's your favorite Overcoming Bias post?

This is mine: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/faster-than-ein.html
I read the article and was about to post the exact same thing.

I mean it sounds like one of his "weapons" as a "soldier" of this "cyberwar" went something like this...

document.body.appendChild(iframe = document.createElement("iframe"));
window.setInterval(function() { iframe.src = "http://some-georgia-website.ge/"; }, 100);
How to get Laid Online - My Guide
descriptive information on how to get laid online
I wonder if it is not also the artists "fault": they chose to be represented by the music industry. Apparently alternative channels have not yet attracted sufficient talent to create a radio service based on it.
I need to fix this up, I'll be very honest I have just copied of from a similar extension.

What parts are concerning and does anyone have any advice on getting a more approiate one?
Read the entire EULA before you install. It's pretty interesting.

"By sending BooYarr any information, material or communication (User Submissions) or posting User Submissions anywhere on the Site, You grant BooYarr a worldwide, unrestricted, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, copy, reproduce, display, perform, modify, prepare derivative works of, translate, transmit and distribute those User Submissions, and You also agree that BooYarr is free to use anyideas, concepts, know-how or techniques included in User Submissions for any purpose."
Having actual experience of Red Hat support, I stand by my assertion that if you need a RH-like system you might as well be using CentOS.
As a person that started programming on X11 in the late 80s and still uses vim daily, I can't think of a better environment than Visual Studio (possibly with the vi plugin) for programming. It is actually sad that guys like the author of this post and some hardcore Linux geeks pride themselves in the lack of good IDEs.

The two main arguments are:

1) C# needs more boilerplate class code than C++ or other languages. Wrong. It definitely needs less boilerplate code than C++ and is close to Python and Ruby.

2) C# and Visual C++ have huge class libraries, which makes it impossible to use without an IDE. I'm sorry, but I would always go for the language with the big class library, rather than the one without it. Also, C++ has fairly hefty Unix libraries, too.

I guess the real problem is sour grapes. For languages other than Microsoft's and Java (and maybe Lisp - I don't know), there aren't any good IDEs, which really understand your code, are stable and bug-free, and provide useful refactoring tools (e.g., change the name of a method and update all of its invocations). For one, the lack of a good IDE and toolchain really does reduce efficiency in large projects (although I would guess the average Rails project is not that large). It also steepens the learning curve. While learning Scala I've spent ours trying to find a mistake in a single line, which neither the IDE nor the compiler could reasonably point out, but Visual Studio would have explained right away.
I have removed that (scary paragraph) from the EULA.

I completely forgot to read over this more carefully and apologize. Laziness on my behalf.

I will be working on getting a more accurate EULA up and running asap.

Just note, I do not track search queries at all!! Its really no interest at all to me!!

I have put this extension together rather quickly, perhaps a bit to quickly!!
Eclipse >> Visual Studio (and I use VS more)
In pretty much all of North America, except for some parts of New Orleans and Florida, the cops will arrest you for doing it against a wall in the alley.

Fixed that for you.
I particularly enjoyed the fancy type in the search box. It really classes up the place.
The title was a plug for windows, the gist was to try out unix editors before you decide on one, and the common thread was this wandering around the IDE world comparing random features of various products.

As somebody who has hacked code with both notepad and batch files and various IDEs, I can say unequivocally that that most IDEs are configurable enough to win hands down.

Pick a feature, and you can either find an IDE that comes with it out of the box or easily code one up. Good IDEs are a superset of good text editors.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this didn't look like too good an article. It looked like a big morass with "Paul Graham" stuck in about half-way down, no doubt triggering the auto-feed into HN. (grin)
And a huge memory saving !
This is not relevant here. It's not funny and it's not hacker.
Windows Server has been painless for me. We use MSSQL Server which is a good database, much better than your MySQL.

We use PHP, ASP and ASP.NET in no particular order. I prefer PHP and use PHP. It works flawlessly in IIS.

Also, the subversion server is very easy to manage (tortoiseSVN to create repositories, etc).

However, for email, Linux is much better. Email hosting in Windows sucks. MS wants you to buy Exchange.

This is my experience with a dedicated Windows box. Shared hosting in a Windows machine is the world of pain other posts describe.
Ask HN: tips for starting as a freelance coder
Hi,
I am just out of college(BS) and instead of joining the regular job I am planning to start as a freelance coder.
Which is the best place to start as a freelancer and any tips for starting will be appreciated.

Thanks and regards,
Vineet
I AM THE HACKER ROBOT

I PUSH LANGUAGE WARS DOWN THEIR THROATS

I AM HERE TO PROTECT YOU FROM ENJOYABLE WASTES OF TIME
A software startup doesn't need money. Maybe a few bucks for a server.
Definitely not relevant, except maybe as an example of good writing. Not funny, but amusing. All in all I'm glad I came across it in one way or another, even if it is contributing to the fuzzying of HN's focus.

I guess I'm not very good at making sacrifices.
QuickStart, The Swiss Army Knife For Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop
We don't. I'm stating that there are many vendors who will sell high end x86 for cheaper than Sun will sell you Sparc.

Sun on Intel is just another one of those vendors.
I'm pretty sure this specific point was addressed directly in the Wikipedia article you linked earlier, under the "In science" section.

Within the confines of science, and outside the consideration of religion, philosophy, or faith, free will simply refers to the limits of determinism. i.e., is it possible to have enough information about the initial state of someone's life to perfectly predict all of their actions? At the moment, quantum mechanics says no, and so science says we have free will.

However, it's not a black-and-white, on-or-off thing either. Psychology and sociology can both make predictions about a person's life based on specifics of the person's initial state, and as genetics and biological sciences continue to touch borders with psychology, we find more and more that there are physical forces which influence the way people behave.

So, to what extent is there free will? If someone is born with the genetic traits for schizophrenia -- pre-determined by their parents, and their parents before them, and so on -- then just how much free will does that person have?

The question of determinism has nothing necessarily to do with religion.
If, in order to have an Internet radio station, you needed to negotiate with the owner of every song you wanted to play, running such a station would be prohibitively expensive.

I think this can be solved using technology and micropayments. The artists could register their songs in some sort of online database, with the price they are willing to accept. This would make a free market where the artists could decide what their songs are worth.

I don't think the artists in RIAA would be the first users of this database, but independent labels might be interested. An unknown artist could set a lower price to make their music more attractive for radio stations.
>"That makes me really sad"

Id say it makes a lot of people angry. It's also another step in making people reconsider the concept of copyright for music.

I think someone's mentioned it here in the discussion: Copyright protection is not an inalienable right (like the right to remain silent), it's an instrument designed to have some desirable result (like tax deductions). Copyright in this case is preventing innovative products & services, and very probably harmful to the art itself. 'Small' artists & genres have the most to gain from the potential of free music.
My Life as a Prolog Implementor
I don't understand this.

When a forum tries to focus on a small number of topics, people accuse it of "groupthink". When a forum doesn't try to focus on a small number of topics, people accuse it of being the next Reddit, or Digg, or whatever.

For that matter, you should know better than to throw around the "groupthink" accusation, when your own project encourages people to tune out everything that they think they don't like, until they only see things that they'll like anyway.

Let's use something a little more descriptive than "groupthink".
Ask Sama: Any advice for startups talking to big companies?
I need some bizdev advice and figured I'd go straight to the source. How should a small startup approach a big company? Is there anything you've learned in your experiences that you'd like to share?

I guess the best thing to do is starting sending emails and making phone calls, but I don't know much about bizdev. Are there things to avoid or things that we can do to maximize our chances of getting a meeting?
also, http://angryflower.com/subset.html
Biz dev is one of the areas in which you can actually find top quality people who will work for little or no salary in exchange for equity. Is that a possibility here? In my limited experience, the BD folks who will work for low/no salary in exchange for equity can do so because they've been quite successful at BD so far...

Outside of that, networking through the warm market works best but sometimes you're going to need to cold call. Walking into the company, asking the receptionist for the name of someone with a specific job title and asking if you can leave them a packet of information can work as often as 20-30% of the time. Knowing the name in advance and having a custom packet would be even better.
The best place to start as a freelancer is by working for your old company as a freelancer or for your old company's clients.
It's NOT funny. Just because it combines big words and swearing does not mean it's funny.

I just read it again, and I did not find any sentence that amused me at all. For example, this sentence:

"Because you can always claim to be a starving artist / poor student / down-on-his-luck poet / pitiful-single-mother-working-at-a-non-profit-even-though-you-have-three-kids / empowered, henna painted lesbian out to crush the patriarchal Man shtick or – and this is my favorite – because you don’t believe in the capitalist free market system and feel entitled to enter because, well, it’s your goddamn right as an American."

Let's zoom in even more:

"pitiful-single-mother-working-at-a-non-profit-even-though-you-have-three-kids"

This sentence, you would expect to be funny, right? Like you would expect some type of contrast, or something unusual. But it's not. It's just at that edge of credible where it could be true that it's not funny. It's not absurd, it's realistic. Why would I smile at that? It's like saying

"Computer guy who has a large office when everyone else is in a cubicle."

That's not funny because it could happen.

I really dislike this elitist attitude where all you have to do is write stuff with big words, and people think that it is funny.
Gay raving, clubbing, poppers and sex
Male lawyer hates work prejudice and goes raving instead
Aah, just looking at the screen shots, I thought that was the design that this "new form of search that depends on design" depended on...
You are SO wrong. The physical laws are physical laws because we observed them that way, and we defined them that way. Gravity? Time? Small c? Matter? Mass? Those are the physical laws, but they are based on our unique observation.

The truth is that we cannot know if there are things that are 'above' these laws, because we are not capable of observing outside of these laws. You are eyes are made of matter and mass, if something existed that was fundamentally different, how could you deal with it with your eyes? You can't see it or observe it.
I think UNIX users, seeing they're never going to get something as kickass as VS simply adopted an elitist approach and claim that for various reasons (language, vi, emacs) they don't even need one.
The benefits of VS are obvious:
- tabbed: (could you live without a tabbed browser?), also control+tab brings up a smart switcher
- search: suppose you have a large project and are looking for a function call, irrespective of the language. VS brings up a docked window where you can double-click to jump straight to the line (compare with eg. TextMate, where search results are displayed in a window on top, so you can't see the results)
- solution explorer: see the files and click them if you need them
- for supported languages: code refactoring such as "smart" renames
- and so on...
- important: "it just works", it's fast, stable, etc.

I've been trying to find something comparable for MacOS --- it doesn't even have to be an IDE, as in I don't want it to understand the code or compile it, just be a comparable text editor to VS. TextMate is promising, but it's not there yet, lots of little things are missing (good search, tab switcher, etc.) So for now I'm using Komodo Edit, which is pretty cool, only problem is that it's cross-platform and uses some middle API layer, so it's kind of slow (right-click a tab and wait a second for the menu to appear).
#$#%ing hell, salon? HN just continues to jump the shark. We all get exposed to salon.com's crap in digg and reddit. We don't need it here.
You obviously have a lot more data than I have. My statement wasn't broken, it's just not as complete as yours.

Virginia Beach is notorious for cops actively engaged in enforcing those ordinances, though.
Explaining REST to Damien Katz
Anyway, I guess what I’m getting at here, is that I’d like to see more books that fill out that middle ground - show me concepts, implementation and applications all at once

Okay, so let's pretend that there were two versions of the book: Standard and Professional Edition. Standard Edition ("SE") is the book in it's current form. The SE book costs $49.95 and is 1,000 pages.

The Professional Edition ("PE") book covers everything SE does as well as what you requested. It contains 2,500 pages of material... The book publisher can't print a 2,500 tech book so there are now two versions of PE: PE Vol 1 and PE Vol 2. Each costs $49.95.

So the question becomes - are you willing to pay double for having what you ask for ($49.95 for each PE Volume)? Or do you think it should just be included in the book already at no charge?

If you ask an author to write another 1,500 pages (as in our example), you should expect to pay that author a considerable sum for doing so, The problem is that the author would make 95+% of the proceeds for the book that's already in print (the SE version). He would earn the final 5% from geeks like you who bought it because it had the included middle. Yet the time to create the 5% of revenue was longer than the time to create the 95% revenue.

Capitalism.
If a user is only out to get traffic for their sites, then they will tend to submit much and comment little. However, there are bound to be other users who are sincerely contributing who just happen to prefer submitting over commenting. (Should we call them "submissives?" jk)

So there is a reason to care, but distinguishing the exploiters isn't straightforward.
It seems that all the parties involved have something to lose and nothing to gain by Pandora shutting down.

Surely it's in everyones interest to keep it going. If the royalties gained aren't as much right now does it really matter? Surely getting something is better than nothing at all.

Pandora is arguably the best known service and keeping it going might offer further opportunities for everyone in the long term.
Muffy the bush-a-holic
monogamous Muffy leaves her bisexual partner
Except that it looks heavily influenced by the INHD logo.

http://media.jackmyers.com/images/march-inhd-logo.gif

http://pressflip.com/static/pf_web_logo_front2.png
Playing devil's advocate:

"... the same effect of refusing a license, which (one could argue) would interfere with the progress of science and useful arts."

So does that mean that Google or Coca-Cola should (must?) license their algorithm/recipe for the progress of science and useful arts?
Big corporations also treat their production staff using in-house software as beta testers, even if this costs them many millions of dollars in the few days after each release. (Because hiring a test staff for less than a million would be "too expensive.")

It says a lot when a company can treat customers in the general public like in-house employees it can abuse.
Digital Designers Rediscover Their Hands
"But Johnny did it first!" is also what Amazon says about abusive patents like "One Click."
At School, Technology Starts to Turn a Corner
No, because those are not copyrights. They are trade secrets/patents, which are protected by a different set of laws.
High cost per developer? That was the mistake many of the Smalltalk companies made. Mindshare and volume will always win in the end.
This is much better than the original.

But if someone wrote it this way, without all the additional nastiness, would it have gotten so many votes? Which I suppose probably explains a lot of the nastiness. It's a way to get attention.
Isn't the basis of science built on the proposition that everything obeys a set of rules?

As such, there is no free will, there is simply responses to outside influences which are grounded on some rules.

Hence, how can he say there is no algorithm to the way that the particle responds? How can he possibly know?

Or is he conducting what could be called "pop science" you know like stuff that people are walking faster today than twenty years ago
I do not have a old company . I am a fresh graduate.
mt_srand and not so random numbers
What happened to Zimbabwe
I'm familiar with the advantages of free software. But if you refuse to use proprietary software, you are, by definition, imposing a restriction on yourself.

I'd also suggest that, when someone makes valuable business documents available to others (a fine example of 'free software'), and you decline to use them because they're in a ubiquitous proprietary format, you are maybe missing the free-software forest for the trees.
The Chestnut blight: "unrivaled in the history of human-wrought ecological disasters"
The "limit" on copyright is duration. The market owns price. You haven't answered my question.
11 Steps to Fight the "God Complex"
This is basically my thought as well. Pandora is upset because without major-label artists, most of their clientele will vanish. But that's really not our problem, is it? If WMG (or their trade reps) are a bunch of bitches, Pandora should just do business with Matador.

It feels like what Pandora really wants is for their business model to be handed to them on a platter.
Startup idea for you: A button to make websites readable
The world is full of unreadable websites: sites that have poor contrast such as dark gray text on a light gray background; sites that have tiny fonts; sites that obscure their content in a sea of advertising and widgets, sites that block their content with popup advertising...

These unreadable websites are especially painful for older people to deal with, since often their eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, and not being as tech savvy they are more easily confused by clutter and distractions. But the older demographic isn't a bad one for startups to target though, since one thing older people do have is money.

This startup idea is simple: create a bookmarklet (see, for example, http://www.google.com/bookmarks or http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html) labeled "Readable". When the user gets to an unreadable page, they click on your "Readable" button in their bookmarks toolbar, and your site renders for them a readable version of the page that they're on.

You can include a small, tasteful header at the top of the page which includes a "Nope, not good!" button which gives you immediate feedback on which pages you are messing up when you try to render them in a readable fashion.

The core algorithm could be pretty simple: scan the page for the larger blocks of natural language text and display that. You don't have to be perfect, since if you miss anything of importance on the page the user can always click the "back" button to return to the original.
Expand your horizons a little. Learn to use Vim or Emacs, then spend a year doing serious development in something like Ruby instead of C# or Java, and do it in a Unix-like user environment.

So does the author suggest anyone working with Java or C# should quit their job?

Or does working with vim also provide you with an alternate space-time continuum which allows you to "just" spend one year doing doing something else entirely without it affecting the world around you and the requirements that you have a job which needs to get done?
Funny is subjective.
Tasty Rails ETags
I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop.
If I can see your packets, I can sub in my own ARP (local) and DNS (remote) responses. In the absolute worst case, which never happens, I also see your TCP sequence numbers, and can simply inject segments directly. You have no hope of keeping me out of your connections. The "passive-only" attacker is a myth --- hackers don't use solsniff.c anymore.
Notice that the project is to make it thread safe, not to make it multithreaded.
That event was so rare that it made national news, hasn't happened since, and has never happened to a financial institution.

If your argument is that Verisign sucks, though, I won't contest it. I'm not saying the CA business model is good; I'm saying that it's silly to say you can run SSL without CAs.
British Ministry of Defense hosts grand battle of spy robots