skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
From the article, referring to recidivism rates in sex crimes: "But among the strongest predictors of recidivism are prior sexual offenses and sexual interest in children. When you compare the predictive power of the actuarial approach with that of the parole boards and psychiatrists, there is no contest: numbers beat intuition."

One of the best changes in the administration of criminal justice in the United States during my lifetime has been use of standardized sentencing guidelines, pioneered in the state of Minnesota,

http://www.msgc.state.mn.us/msgc5/guidelines.htm

to reduce the variance among different judges in how convicted criminals are sentenced. By taking into account the severity of the most recent offense for which a defendant is convicted, along with the defendant's history of previous convictions, Minnesota can imprison many fewer criminals than most states--diverting less dangerous criminals to community-based rehabilitation programs--and actually spend more per prisoner (for more humane imprisonment) while spending less per taxpayer on its prison system than most other states. The most dangerous criminals are kept away from potential victims, so that my neighborhood and most neighborhoods in Minnesota are perfectly safe for children to go out in alone. Youthful offenders who make one minor mistake are set straight and continue to be productive members of society. By contrast, the "three strikes and you're out" rule of California, promoted as a make-work program by the prison guard trade union, needlessly imprisons tens of thousands of California convicts in degrading conditions that result in more recidivism when convicts are eventually released, and endangers the solvency of the whole state government.
Given the quotes used in the article such as "catastrophic loss of cooling","Level 4 emergency" and the ever mysterious "events" seem cherry picked to portray impending doom, it perhaps comes as no surprise that a verifiable source is neither referenced nor can be found.

Other articles referring to this 'cover-up' which do have references, refer to articles saying that there is no emergency at the plant.

Soon the baseless articles will just start referencing one and other and because mainstream news hasn't reported on the baseless allegation it proves to conspiracy nutjobs that the article is correct because there is a media news blackout.
My thesis is not that people reject OpenID for that reason, it's that OpenID exists as an ethereal add-on to other services. That is to say: it does not exist in and of itself. Facebook Connect is an extension of my Facebook identity. Twitter Connect is an extension of my Twitter identity. OpenID is NOT simply an extension of the listed providers in the same manner.

I'll illustrate the point as such: My username is Sayter. 1) Go find my Facebook. 2) Then go find my Twitter. 3) Now go find my OpenID. You immediately know where to go for the first two, and in fact can type in the url's for my Facebook and Twitter accounts directly. But how about my OpenID? Is it my Gmail? Yahoo account? Windows Live account? All of the above? Whichever I use the most? Or is it the OpenID that I have on one my domains? My identity for OpenID is fragmented (I'm not even sure how many I have, honestly) and does not exist in a single space, while Facebook and Twitter do exist in single spaces (assuming I only have one Facebook/Twitter of course, but that possibility was simplified for the sake of argument).

That is a non-trivial problem that Facebook and Twitter have (mostly) solved, while OpenID is still struggling with it.
Because it's only legal to posses small quantities for personal use (about 10 days). Possession of bigger quantities has remained prohibited by Portuguese law, and criminal penalties are still applied to drug growers, dealers and traffickers. You cannot go into a coffeeshop and buy some weed as you do in netherlands so it doesn't make much sense to go there as a "drug" tourist.
John Hansen’s FirePow System – The Complete Evaluation « Cheap Web Hosting List
I've only ever had one account. But just today I saw a friend suggestion to friend an account, which I could recognize for what it was by being able to read Chinese, for the pet dog of my niece in Taiwan. I've seen more than a few other accounts that at the very least don't use the actual real-world name of the account holder. Many married women with children who have been online since the 1990s take great care not to use their real names, or at least their real photographs, online.
Odd. I read the checklist, and it's not at all what I would have expected (or recommended), which is:

1) Have your lawyer read the contract, carefully
2) Listen to what he says

I don't know about you, but I sure as hell want to do more than spot-check for "contract provisions that could cause real problems for your business."
"If you're not careful, you might have your private information stolen online. You may even lose money to an identity thief!"

"Google is a large technology company which runs the world's most popular search engine."

These are NOT good stories for HN, because the people here /know this already/. There is nothing wrong with introductory stories as such. In the case of bitcoin, there is also a suspicion of an ulterior motive in promoting bitcoin stories.

As for "don't read it" -- forums are damaged when the noise (and spam) level is high. I can express my opinion by commenting, unless a moderator tells me not to.
Really? I was under the impression that most Django apps spend the majority of their time waiting on database queries.
Rails and Django are two web frameworks standing at the same place greeting people coming from opposite directions. They are vaguely familiar with what each other are doing, but for the most part are just trying to do what's best for their own users. They have way more in common than they have differences and I think each community could benefit from learning the other's workflow.

I think Rails is slightly more beginner friendly because of the conventions and magic but that becomes frustrating for more advanced developers. Rails is working on making themselves more customizable and Django is working on codifying standards. I'm pretty sure it's a meet-in-the-middle kind of thing.
Unfortunately, this article sounds very much like he was just introduced to Django. Great write-up overall, but it felt like lip service to Django with the real meat of the article is the RoR stuff.
I think they mean in the context of your search. This is what has annoyed me most about the "filter bubble" idea. If google doesn't return _relevant_ results, you'll go somewhere else. If I search for a steak restaurant and get results for KFC because, hey, Chicken deserves a chance, that result isn't relevant. If google shows different results for the _same_ query, but both are just a relevant to the searcher, than google is doing its job.
It's not a big surprise that you were able to find one economist from 1935 who disagreed. It would have been more surprising if you hadn't been able to. In any event, this is not a situation where a contemporary analysis necessarily has a closer view of the situation; far from it, as someone in 1935 didn't see what the next 75 years brought.

So: I didn't downvote, but I remain unimpressed with George Robinson's contemporary analysis, as it consists simply of two unsupported assertions.
HN is the target of opportunity by a distributed pump and dump scam. They are attempting saturation coverage to increase the value of their bitcoin holdings. It is exactly equivalent to why a company incorporated to sell pool cleaners would pivot to biotech and then get touted on Yahoo Stocks as beng in late stage trials for a pill that would cure 30 pct of cancers.
I watched 10 of them from 2011 and this is my favorite:
Online Filter bubbles. How people are becoming increasingly segregated, intellectually from the whole content of the web:

http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...

edit, and:
http://www.ted.com/talks/angela_belcher_using_nature_to_grow...
I'm not the GP, but I'd be equally annoyed if people were continually posting stories about Google or Rails or security problems that added nothing new to the conversation.

At this point, the Bitcoin story has been pretty well picked over, and I'm not convinced there's anything new to say.

And, the fact that the stories continue to get upvotes is precisely what is troubling.
Headline fail. If they're going to introduce an article with the words "What about economists?" they should maybe quote at least one (rather than make a vague hand wave to "critics say")
Do you find Facebook applications have enough value to warrant this? I just don't use them. But maybe I'm missing out.
I guess the issue is why do people attend start-up weekends? Is it to network for professional reasons? To actually begin working with a team that may produce a marketable product? Or is it for the fun of going flat out on an interesting idea? It's probably a combination of these things, but if the first or second reason applies most strongly, then it's not surprising that the attendees chose to join other teams. More because of age than anything else.

Don't get me wrong, I think that there are certainly serious barriers within the start-up world for women and minorities. I'm not sure this is an example of that bias playing out, though.
One of Kurzweil's important points is that humans consistently underestimate the speed of exponential growth. We have a natural bias to assume rates of growth are constant. But with exponential growth, the rate of growth is exponential, and the rate of growth of the rate of growth is exponential, etc. So although it seems like his predictions are pretty wild, they are merely based on extrapolating out the present exponential curves to the future. Keep in mind your own bias about this when criticising his conclusions. To refute him, you'd need to argue that the exponential growth was going to stop, or that his calculations about the rate of growth are wrong.
Absolutely. It's ok if you're installing Django to run some 3rd party software but if you're actually building something you need to support it's important to have more control over your environment/libraries than the system-level package manager provides. The author gets it right on the Ruby side but their lack of experience on the python side here is showing. Pip and virtualenv are definitely the way to go today. For tomorrow you should keep your eye on the packaging PEP and the Hitchhiker's guide to packaging:

http://guide.python-distribute.org/introduction.html#current...

http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/2010/02/10/pep-345-and-386-a...

It's confusing but improving quickly. I know it took me quite a while to figure out what the right way to do things in python was.

This is also where rails' conventions help. As good as people say the documentation for Django is, many searches pull up blog posts from 2006 which were right for their time but now are simply outdated. That being said, I think there has been a tremendous boost in Django activity in the past year or so. I feel like they are getting in front of the curve again.
Sweden, France, Croatia
UTorrent / BitTorrent Sued For Patent Infringement
Ask HN: what is your experience with Python/django and Google App Engine?
I'm thinking of using Python/Django on Google App Engine and would like the hive mind's feedback. How is the app engine platfrom? Any problems? What about relying on Google's platform? Does App Engine offer any special support for Django? Thanks.
There are two ways ahead here I think, but first we have to admit filters are everywhere. When googling something, I'm happy that Google filters out link farms and other content-free websites. When choosing to follow some people on Twitter, I filter out all other people I could follow. The other assumption is that automatic filtering is sometime successful and anyway increasingly necessary. Last assumption is that everyone needs both familiarity and a pinch of unfamiliar.

One way ahead is the way fashion works: present always the same thing and make believe that it is new. It requires a good amount of brainwashing, but it works very well. I hate it. This would enclose each part of the web in a set of provinces and people will eat information from their provinces only, with, sometime, a sticker "exotic" or "unseen" added, but it will be like Chinese food in the West: cheap Western dishes with a foreign name.

The other way is to have informal communities doing the filtering, like on HN. There must be a common denominator, but it can and should be traversal. I mean, here, I see posts about physics, drugs, laws, internet. The common denominator is something related to geekiness, but it is ok. It is still a place where I can discover things about the world.

That why I fight (and get downvotes) against some provincialisms I find on HN, like when someone unknowingly writes something that do not apply to non-Americans or non-Western people, or non-English natives.
The Comprehensive Terminal Guide
In 1935, a lot of very intelligent people thought that the Soviet model was the answer (I don't mean George Robinson in particular). It turned out that those people lacked some information and perspective, and were probably guilty of wishful thinking. So why should the 1935 date of this book impress us, in itself?

P.S. The story of Westerners who relocated to the Soviet Union in the 1930s is fascinating. And very sad, for the most part. There were tens of thousands of such people. I am sure Google will find references.
Want to fly without crash,just try Airplane Simulator Games
Flying With out Crashing ? Attempt Airplane Simulator Games At the moment has been a dream for nearly every young kid and even adults. Nevertheless, it is not a feat which you could easily understand, since people can’t fly after all. The closest that you are able to do to fly is thru airplanes, though just riding one doesn’t really give you the feeling of taking flight.
I very much agree. Blog platforms are being used for things that are not blog-ish. But the problem is not overuse of blogs; the problem is a lack of appropriate, high-quality platforms for non-time-dependent info.

There are the various flavors of wiki, obviously. Using Wikipedia as an example is not the best choice, since such software is available.

I'm thinking about something like PG's essay page. With that as a starting point, what could one do? What kinds of features would be interesting to add? We want it to be usable by non-techies; what kind of interface/functionality does this suggest? Could/should it be integrated with a blog platform (or with a wiki, or with something else)? And if so, how?

There's a startup opportunity here, obviously. Probably several.
I believe (though I obviously can't know) the reason you are getting down votes is that you are making an explicit appeal to authority ("An economist from 1935 disagrees") against another appeal to authority (the "Many economists" from the article). But the thing is, "many economists", who have the added benefit of decades worth of observations and accumulated knowledge in the field of economics are almost certainly _much_ better authorities than someone from the 1930's.

Which doesn't prove any points, because appeals to authority never really do. But if you open your argument with an appeal to a weak authority, the rest of your argument will look weak as well. I imagine you wouldn't have been down voted if you had just left out the bits about George Robinson and let the arguments stand on their own.
"People (even scientists) tend to overestimate the "deepness" of technological advancement and underestimate the "wideness"."

Very interesting thought, that our predictions have a bias toward "vertical" advancement -- vast improvements in areas addressed by tech that we already have -- rather than the "horizontal" creation and filling of new niches in demand.
WordPress change admin area “pagination” posts per page
The LD50 (lethal dose for 50% of the population) for psilocybin cubensis being consumed by a 150lbs person is 3015g (over 6 lbs!). A "high" dose is anything over an eighth of an ounce (~3.5 grams). That's quite a large difference between drug and poision!

Link: http://www.erowid.org/plants/mushrooms/mushrooms_chemistry.s...
I do this too. Also, the comments don't have ads and the page loads much faster.

I think it'd be a great idea to mine the meaning of stories from the article. It might be similar to what Yelp does with their reviews and summaries of what's good about a restaurant.
A few suggestions if you really want to support other formats:

+ Pandoc[1] - a Haskell program/library to translate markups from one format to another (supports LaTeX, which I think you're using).

+ Leanpub[2] - a service that lets you write a book as Markdown or HTML and then easily publish and sell it in multiple formats (PDF, EPUB, Mobi). They do all the conversion for the output formats for you. I don't think they currently support LaTeX, but I have a recollection that they're working on it.

Having said that, it's not necessarily your job to provide us all the formats we might want. (Though going with Leanpub may provide you with a simple way to make a little money for your troubles.)

[1] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

[2] http://leanpub.com/
Rails's community advantage over Django looks like something that is not likely to go away in any foreseeable future. Although Sinatra is getting popular, Pythonistas are split between Django (or the AppEngine variant), (Jinja), Tornado, Flask, Jekyll, Pylons, and so on.

With Ruby, Rails oftentimes seems like the obvious framework, whereas the same can't be said for Python and Django.

Getting into Django has been a bit of a pain in the ass for me - at least for being unable to work on it organically with some fellow students or co-workers - but is there any reason to believe that getting a big Python framework community similar to Rails's is a plausible prospect?
I believe that there is a large difference between the magnitude of error in my natural bias for estimating exponential rates of growth and the naive application of a mathematical model to the fields of biotechnology and cognitive science by someone untrained in either.

Computing hardware and software may be developing rapidly due to the commercial sector, but my guess is that the developments in academia (algorithms, etc.) are hardly exponential. What about the fields where happenstance discoveries drive improvement?

Innovation occurs readily in fields that have money--mobile computing is huge right now, isn't it? The question is whether this distribution of reward correlates with the reverse salients of technological advancement.

In my original post I offered several predictions for the growth of biotechnology. I think I'm placing important and valid markers to be able to identify the trend. When I see them happen I'll be happy to conclude that we're on the path to exponential growth in our field. (Note: I follow this area well enough to see where the reverse salients lie and what discoveries may inform us to better techniques.)

I'm tired of the Kurzweil meme because I feel that it gives people a comfort that we'll reach some kind of Utopia without much effort. It's wrong, and quite frankly damaging. If the people who believe in him so strongly really want to see his vision happen, perhaps they would lend their hands in developing automation tools for us biologists.
We do not live in a post-racial society. It would be nice if that were true. Here are some other things that "hold black culture back."

Subprime mortgage rates are nearly double for black and hispanic households: http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snap...

Black males are 10 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug offences than whites: http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us0309web_1.p...

Black sounding names are less likely to get a callback, despite identical resumes: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/09/29/national/main57568...

This is not an issue that is solved by a single election, or by making it sound like a "moral" failure on the part of blacks or whites. It is complex, systemic, and we all have our internal biases that are difficult to recognize, let alone root out.
Why would this change anything?

Most people using Bittorrent are already violating copyright law. Why should they care about patent law?
To be fair, they probably pay another firm that actually owns the ad space and which throws all the ads up. Google likely isn't directly deciding to market Chrome like that.

I'm not sure if the one-space-full-of-ads is a strategy, or just laziness by the space owner. I've only seen it once for a local news station on the L in Chicago, and it seemed weird since no other car even mentioned the news agency. Made me think communication was warped somewhere along the line.
David McCullough on the "history gap"
I'm not sure if PZ Meyers is a reliable source to cite when he is regarded a "confrontationalist" and has been proven wrong on many of his criticisms against Kurzweil. There are always going to be examples of heavy critics, and Kurzweil has openly responded to many of these, including PZ Meyers himself in this link:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-ray-kurzw...

Another critic response here:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/01/ray-kurzweil-responds-to-is...
Wow. That means that FB doesn't have 600 million users but 20-30% less.
It always bothered me that they pretend that every account equals a unique user.
Good IPO luck.
> It is true that a lot of DnB and Jungle was awful and repetitive, but that's the case in most electronic genres.

Most genres, period, in fact.
My opinion is base on the following benchmarks : http://attractivechaos.github.com/plb/. This is obviously not a typical web application, but it gives a good hint on the performance issue.

Those interested in a C++ web app framework might consider wt (webtoolkit). It has a built in http/https web server and is thus plug&play for average applications. It is worth a look at.
The media doesn't have such a pro-corporate message in the UK. The Economist, widely considered a conservative paper, is wholly in support of government-run socialized health care. The BBC is also a great source of news that's not as tainted as most US agencies by corporate sponsorship dollars.

We have NPR, but they can't really espouse liberal views, because the Republicans are always at their throats for grant money (I think most elected Democrats are corporate whores too - they're just more subtle about it). Other than that, there's probably a dozen decent newspapers in America, all of which are slowly dying, and as such can't afford to upset their advertisers.

Financial newspapers are an exception to this, but you'll never see the Financial Times or the Wall Street Journal suggesting that people like Lloyd Bankfein or Joe Cassano should tighten their belt buckles. In the US, the hand that feeds the media is biting everybody, but the media is afraid to bite back.
I feel that if IE wasn't so terrible it would still occupy the top spot. All other things being equal, IE is still distributed as the default browser to more systems than any other browser. The issue is that users have many reasons to switch. If Microsoft can rebuild IE's reputation and make it into an honestly good browser, it will keep the top spot.

It's only because Microsoft got lazy with IE that it has fallen so far, and the power of integration with the rest of the Microsoft suite is demonstrated by the share it still has.
Top Free Samsung Apps for Wave S8500
I wonder if he actually got version 1.3!
He's not harsh on either, but I found it strange that having a pluggable admin is ok for Rails, but pluggable migrations like South was a big gripe.
I believe you should use the http link to lessen the strain on the server.