skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The G+ names policy doesn't say "name on your birth certificate". It says "the name you commonly go by in real life", see: http://www.google.com/support/+/bin/answer.py?answer=1228271

Even if Skud does go by that name in daily life, I don't see how it comes as any surprise that he is suspended pending review for that name. He even says it himself:

> I knew I was at risk of my account (under the name of “Skud .”) being suspended
what is the claim here? that some great leaders were addicts, so addiction is a trait of a great leader? please. it is interesting to note that some can simultaneously battle substance addiction and lead productive lives, but nothing in this article even remotely resembles proof of causation.

that said, i can believe that the greatest thinkers and inventors in human history are those that were completely obsessed (addicted?) with what they were doing. people can become addicted to pursuing their vision, and in this sense the article has some merit. not well communicated however.
This just needs to be a free text, multi line field.

I tried that for a project, using the Google geocode API. Worked OK, though not flawless.

Users entered their address into a textarea. This got passed off to Google, and the app then looked at Google's response. In case of ambiguity the user would be prompted to clarify the address and try again.

The intent was to reduce crap in the application database, but at the same time we had to allow users to override whatever Google thought and provide a literal address.
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Guess it depends on your definition of 'friend' then, because by my standards, that would have been '4 friends' and not '50 friends'. '50 acquaintances' now, that I'd agree with.

That isn't to say this isn't a valuable tactic. Making 4 good friends is nothing to scoff at.
Ask HN: Are there any iOS/Android apps that work with game consoles?
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show me a neurological study comparing passion/obsession with substance addiction!
I found it via GitHub's "Explore" section which is also a gem.
People knock Webvan around but the founder (Mick Mountz), 10 years after that debacle, founded http://www.kivasystems.com/ where instead of conveyor belts (Webvan) they use robots for managing a warehouse. Seriously cool robotics. Check out the videos on their site.

Kiva Systems has gone from strength to strength and is now used by Zappos, Wallgreens and others (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva_Systems)
Yes, that's essentially what WebObjects was. However, WebObjects today is a mess, and it's written in Java.

Also, we have a ton of conventions today, with regards to MVC development, REST APIs, etc. that we did not have in '95. Which means that therefore WebObjects is not suited to modern web development.

The only company still using WebObjects in production today is Apple.
True story: traffic cop pulls me over, turns out im doing something wrong and he could have me towed. cop asks to search my car for drugs and weapons. "Do I have the right to refuse this search?" Cop responds that I do, but heavily implies that he will have me towed if I refuse. I consented, he found no drugs or guns, I was allowed to drive away.
I completely agree. First started thinking this way after listening to Feynman talk about his discovery of how people think very differently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj4y0EUlU-Y#t=146s

He does a great job of communicating this, despite our interpretive differences. (Though perhaps it's just very well spoken for my interpretation and just the opposite for someone else out there.)
"During March 2010, I sent messages to around 400 people."

If I had to spend that much time writing messages, I'd rather just volunteer my time at a non-profit, join a club, or attend some sort of meetup.com meetup to get to know people in my neighbourhood and/or within my city.
I'm late to this party. I hit Publish on my Noah Kagan post, headed off for some vacation, and came back to a week of getting product out the door. By the time I realized how much interest the piece had stirred up, I was thoroughly behind the curve. I didn't want to jump in till I'd had a chance to go through the whole thread, which I finally got to do yesterday.

Don't worry; I'm not going to try to dredge this one up with responses to a lot of different comments, just one, I think.

For anyone who might still have an ounce of interest, I did try to respond to some of the comments and questions that were, more or less, directed to me, over on my blog[0].

All I can say, from this my first real encounter with Hacker News, is, "Wow. This is a remarkable place. Such passion and energy, so much erudition, and so many flames."

ag

0: http://sherprog.com/2011/07/24/kudos-regrets-apologies-lesso...
Interestingly, I've found these percentages seem to hold true in a variety of other social situations as well. Online dating, for instance - I find I get responses to about 30% of initial messages, but 2/3 of those are just being polite and never strike up a conversation, so I end up with RL dates with about 10% of initial prospects. Haven't met one yet that I felt a real connection to, but I've only been on 8 dates so far, so 1% would imply I've got a few to go.

Or college. I figure I knew (had some interaction with, could name & recognize by sight) perhaps 300 people at my college. Maybe 30 of them I'd call "friends" - I could sit down with them at the dining hall without feeling awkward and chit-chat about classes or hobbies or interests or society and politics. Only about 2 or 3 of them did I really feel close enough to to stay in touch with them after college, once our common interests had ended.
Probably because a function of intelligence is to get to the root of things fairly quickly so intelligent students invariably come around to: "what about knowledge itself?" "what about thinking?" etc. They are a bit more meta. Problem is if you ever go down that route you find its hard tI distinguish meta from bullshit because its so abstracted from reality where you can verify things by trying them out or observing. Maybe they attend philosophy for help with this and later when they grow up realize that actually, no, they really attended because it was a good place to just shoot the shit. And what a lot of fun it was.
Street View is just face detection (ie figure out where the faces are), and that technology has been around for years (it's even in bundled with the open source OpenCV library). This company does face recognition, which is the identification of individual people based on an image -- it's a very complicated problem.
What roots are you referring to? As pointed out by another in this article's discussion, Zynga has a well documented history of not caring about original production but rather looking around for successfull social games, copying them and throwing way more marketing dollars and gamification techniques at them so as to make the original irrelevant.
(Un)fortunately, depending on how you look at it, "everything is an object" is left out in PHP. I personally agree with having some non-object values (use one of the Spl* classes if you want something like that).
Naturally, I didn't read enough and then commented something that makes little sense in context. Thanks mbreese!
Holy moly! What a turnaround. You're welcome :)
The difference in discussion quality is this:

With identity, because users can form a social hierarchy and praise or shame each other, they live in a box that others have defined them to be in. You may be in a pleasant box, but you are not seeing "the truth." Everyone manipulates their image and how they present themselves to others. This is fine within small groups as it can make the group more stable. However, it does not work at scale; this is the subject of Assange's theory of "conspiracy as governance." Blow the whistle on the conspiracy and you will be a threat, and shut down by any means necessary...

Without identity, you have to constantly prove your worth. What Anon tells you is incoherent, and usually overly emotional, but also usually honest...trolling aside... And in this way, truth can gradually be exposed.

Since Anon's breakthrough into "the real world," governments face a situation where the global strong-identity hierarchy is being disrupted. They can no longer spin a manipulated version of facts to the public and expect it to last for very long.

We need some of both. Strong identity within small groups; weak identity when dealing with society at large.
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I found the article weird in that respect. None of these laws seem particularly odious -- the ones that seem unjust could have been avoided by prosecuters using their discretion.

Also, I'm amused by an article about injustices in the criminal system where everyone pictured is a well-off white man.
emacs is one of those things I really would like to use, but never actually manage to bring myself to switch.
Right. And how would they do that?

It sounds like you're advocating slipping your children some drug without their knowledge, in order to prevent them from doing cocaine.

Protip: My mom slipped me anti-depressants while telling me they were "vitamins". When I found out, I never trusted her again. Ever. I felt violated. Do this at your own risk.

Protip #2: If they want to do cocaine, you're not going to be able to stop them. I don't know the answer, but slipping your kids some anti-drug drug probably isn't it.
I believe those are the roots he's referring to.
This got me thinking. One thing which applies in the real world but not online is PROXIMITY.

Most of the time when you live with someone, work with someone, or just spend a lot of time around someone, you are MUCH more likely to become friends that you otherwise would.

I have not found this to be true online. Just because you spend a lot of time in a particular forum doesnt mean you are more likely to develop friendships with those people- only the people who match your viewpoints etc.

Then again I wouldnt say Ive ever formed anything coming close to a "close friendship" with anyone I solely interact with online, so I'd be curious to know what others think about this.
I googled for C hash libraries, and came across one of those 'shootout' blog posts where they compare memory size and cpu usage, and klib looked to be a winner. Plus it's only one or two header files to make it work. Documentation was poor, so i contributed some. So i'm happy with my choice.
Yes, the macro-oriented stuff is a headache, but the raw speed it gives you is worth it. And don't think you're years away from C! I work in C# and javascript mainly (and recently, obj-c) so, for me, this is as much a learning exercise as anything.
Well judging by governments getting involved around the world I would say there has been sufficient questioning of the handling of privacy.

I think a lot of people where really hoping (myself included) that Google+ was going to give us the tool we wanted for social communication. But tis just another Facebook, with all the privacy concerns, and restrictions of freedom included. Everything that makes Facebook 'evil' is now part of Google.

Oddly enough a lot of musician and writer friends use pseudonyms, myself included ... or even plain nick names for that matter.

Facebook doesn't seem to ban those people as long as they have 'real activity'. So I could argue that Google is in fact on a worse 'evil' footing than Facebook right now.

After I read through the Google "what is Google+ really for" powerpoint I closed my account. It became obvious to me it was a lock-in attempt, and then went as far as saying the main 'target' of Google+ was Microsoft and Apple (because desktop apps where seeing a resurgence eroding Google business ambitious).

In my personal opinion Google+ is a very sinister piece of work which should be avoided at all costs. Because I know exactly how I would abuse it, and it appears already that Google is thinking along similar lines to me.
i don't see how having a real name is interesting to google. a handle is a much better unique identifier, which is what you actually want when you are attempting to collect data from a bunch of sources. i could tell google that my name is james smith, and they'd be happy but it would be absolutely useless (and false). i could tell google that my name is notatoad, and that would probably be enough to aggregate all the information there is about me online.
That's one way of looking at it, and certainly the scientific community would like to think so -- as if Kant and James did a bit of theoretical work that the scientists fleshed out in practice.

But this is really quite naive, and when you look at the particulars, really one discipline has very little to do with the other. James certainly did lay the foundation for modern psychology, but to the extent that he did he was acting as a scientist, not a philosopher, and very little of James' actual philosophy survives self-consciously in the discipline today. How many psychologists do you know claim that the epistemological bedrock of their practice is rooted in a Jamesean (or Dewey-ian) pragmatism? How many psychological curriculums require a study of James' theory of belief? How much practical application do Kant's categories have in modern psychology, and if they did, would they hold up under serious philosophical scrutiny? The answers to these questions are: few if any, not many/none, not much, and no.
Google's whole goal for G+ is that it's supposed to be modeled after how life really works – circles, hangouts, etc. The picture sharing is not how things go down in the real world. When your aunt has goofy pictures of you at family gatherings, chances are she's showed them to a handful of other individuals without your consent. The pictures are hers and she shares them with her circles, regardless of who's present in those photos. The way Google is handling this seems to go against the ethos of G+.
This man is a master of irony.

He's discussing the nature of philosophy which is itself philosophical in nature; therefore, he's using philosophy to argue against the usefulness of philosophy.

This begs the question: Is he therefore advocating we shoot him? This would be one of the most clever ways to commit suicide. His gravestone would have to read "Trollololol".

On a more serious note (so you don't down vote me. Gosh.), it's already been said but philosophy's value lies in the framework for understanding Truth. With the exception of Absolutists and Subjectivists (and there aren't many that extreme) everyone is searching for something better and philosophy teaches people how to reason and what questions are relevant and will further the understanding of an issue of -everyone- involved in the argument. Socrates managed to get himself killed for asking questions which says something about their value.

Philosophy grants people the ability to understand, well, everything.
Again we seem to be at cross purposes. One type of equality might be described thusly:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights"

The other like this:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (and women!) are absolutely inseparably as good as each other at sports, that they are endowed by their Creator with a complete knowledge of the rules of basketball"

The latter would be an absurd thing to say, but would be easy to judge empirically. The former is a statement of a certain set of values - widely held, I'd hope, but nevertheless impossible to justify experimentally, beyond the fact that (again, I'd hope) most people have experienced in their lifetimes that it's nice when we all get along with one another.

Either way, they use the concept of 'equality' quite differently. I felt Dove actually captured this very succinctly, which is why I'm surprised it's been misconstrued twice now.
According to Skud (who was also suspended) you have to do this before you get suspended — now she "can’t use Google Takeout to export [her] profile and stream": http://infotrope.net/2011/07/22/ive-been-suspended-from-goog...
> 2. It is known that Philosophy majors have higher IQs and SAT/ACT scores than students in any other specialty.

Source? I'm pretty biased so I mostly came here to ask "what about physicists?" but I'm also pretty curious about these relations in general.

Anyway, this might be relevant:

> Philosophers are the smartest humanists, physicists the smartest scientists, economists the smartest social scientists.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/verbal-vs-mat...
Finding the right non-profit, club or meetup then takes the role of the first level of filtering.

When you join an organization based around something, you can be pretty sure that most of its members will share at least that common interest with you. But how do you find the organization in the first place?

If you're anything like me, you probably end up trying out a bunch of potential hobbies before you find one you stick with. When I was in grade school, I tried gymnastics, figure skating, soccer, basketball, violin, clarinet, viola, guitar, math team, Magic: the Gathering, Starcraft, a brief flirtation with policy debate, and probably several hobbies I can't remember now. The only ones I really stuck with and made friends through were violin, guitar, and M:tG. When I was in college, I tried orchestra, the Arts theme house, Taiko, whitewater kayaking, bridge, sailing, theater, improv comedy, Woodsy club, etc. The ones I stuck with were orchestra and sailing.

It's easier to do it this way if you're afraid of rejection, because you're rejecting an activity instead of rejecting (or being rejected by) a person. But it's no less time-consuming. You have to reject fewer entities, but it takes you longer to decide that you don't actually want to pursue that line, so it ends up being pretty much a wash.
Show HN: Networking rooms 4 podcasts, webinars & other virtual events. Feedback?
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Sorry, submitted the link incorrectly yesterday. Hopefully this will generate some feedback! Thanks in advance!
True story: I was driving home after a long day out with friends (hiking with some, dinner with another). Started feeling very sleepy, pulled off the freeway to take a nap. Woke with a flashlight in my face and highway patrol knocking on my window.

Exited the car, locking it. Identified myself and presented ID. Refused consent to search the vehicle: "I don't consent to any search". Officer implied strongly that he could get a warrant (it's around midnight). "You do what you've got to do, I don't consent to a search".

Got breathalyzed (I could have refused this but that would have required a trip for a blood draw), which was clean (hadn't consumed any alcohol for hours). Eventually allowed to go on my way.

Later realized I had a couple of prescription painkiller pills given by a friend (for severe pain I was experiencing at the time) which probably wouldn't have been a good thing to turn up in a search. The This American Life drug court segment relates a story that could have been very similar to mine.

You have rights. But only if you assert them.
Extending this to the album level makes some sense because presumably everything in an album is related to a particular event (so that person who was tagged would have been there for all of that).

I have many albums broken out by date. The fact that you were playing basketball with me at 10am doesn't mean you were at my sister's house that evening.

Google is making social take a lot more energy than I care to give it. Circles seemed OK. But now having to break up my albums and tagging into visibility units is absurd. It's easier to just quit.

G+ is making me really appreciate Facebook -- which I NEVER thought I'd say.
It's completely and utterly irrelevant that it's you. I took the picture, it's MY picture. I have thousands of physical pictures captured on 35mm film. I have names and dates written on them, should I have to give a copy of all of those pictures to the people that are in them simply because I put their name on the back? Should I have to give them a copy because I wrote their URL on the back? The additional meta data of the link to your profile is not ANY greater than a simple label so long as that picture is private.
This attitude towards philosophy -- 'quietly ignore' -- has been the status quo in basically every discipline since the turn of the twentieth century. It certainly isn't unique to neuroscience.
Probably not that many. I don't use facebook in large part due to their "everything is public" attitude so it doesn't surprise me. Google+ started off with the circles model and a control whom who share with model so this does surprise me.
IV is just a technology scum-bag. There's nothing more to it. No, Mr. Myhrvold, ideas have no inherent value. An idea needs execution for it to produce any value. If everyone starts coming up with ideas and nobody executes them, what will be the fucking point. We would have thought of everything and would have done nothing because it's cheaper/easier to come up with ideas than to actually make an effort to turn them into reality.

I hate patent trolls so bad. It's a pity things have come to this.
David,

I appreciate your defense of your friend Noah; you have some insights no one else brought to this forum.

But I do think you have one thing backwards. I certainly wasn’t out of my element at MicroConf; Noah may have been. This wasn’t a YCombinator dinner or a Business of Software conference -- not I think his slides would have been appropriate at either of those but I do believe Noah would fit in at those VC-funding-focused venues better than I would. This was MicroConf 2011, a conference for small, bootstrapped startups.

Bootstrapping a startup is something I’ve done and succeeded at in the past. And VC-funding, with a run at an IPO, is something I’ve lived through and don’t expect to try again. However, I did both as a co-founder, not solo, and did it a number of years ago, when the software industry was very a different place. So as I ramp up my new venture, I’m doing a lot of things to educate myself. One of these was attending MicroConf where I found a conference put on by people like me for people like me.

Not “like me” as in gender, “like me” as in what matters when you are starting a business on your own dime and looking for tips on how to make a go of it. Most of us have day jobs or on-going consulting companies and are trying to create product companies on the side. Ages ranged considerably but I’d guess many of the attendees had a lot more business experience than Noah’s normal audience. I now know he puts a lot of energy into helping very young entrepreneurs and college-dorm-room startups. Good for him but that wasn’t who he was talking to at MicroConf.

Other presenters paid attention to the audience and what we were looking for; I'm told one second-day presenter even went back to his room and revised his presentation after he heard the questions that were asked the first day. IMO, a 'brilliant marketer' should always be paying attention both to his target audience and to his effect on them; it sure didn't seem as if, that day, Noah was doing either.

As for the 'small but influential line' -- I write software for nurses, truck drivers, first responders, county extension agents, and the like. People I respect enormously but for whom the industry represented by HN is pretty incomprehensible. That line is for them, not the folks here on HN.
I've heard that internally, they call this practice "fast-following". I guess they had to invent some double-speak so the game devs didn't feel so bad in meetings!

They actively look for small games that are just starting to become successful, since those are easier to displace in the market.
The closest you can come to a write once, run on all platforms is possibly Unity. They all have different development platforms, you can't just create a game and hope that it will run on all platforms.