skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I disagree with the logical premise of this article, at least for our specific case (social networking app sending notifications about activity). We most certainly don't want replies. The sender of the emails is not us, our company, but the application itself. When a calendar app on your smartphone reminds you of a meeting, there's no "Reply" button because having one simply doesn't make sense.

The fact that email is a system where it's implied that anything is replyable is unfortunate. Email is currently the best option for sending out notifications on the Internet, since most people don't know about feeds or how to use them. If there were a better, equally established technology for one-way notifications, we would use it. (We use SMS messaging, too, but only when it makes sense, since it's pretty invasive.)

Anyway, we did try to kill the no-reply behaviour at one point. Sounded good on paper, but it was impossible to execute in practice. Some issues, off the top of my head:

* We got a ton of vacation autoresponses, in all sorts of languages and all sorts of phrasings. It would be too time-consuming to set up rules to deal with all of the variations.

* We got an onslaught of replies accusing us of spamming them. These were users of our site, remember; a lot of sign up to an app and then promptly forget that they were now members. They never read the actual email, which has a very visible footer explaining how to disable notifications.

* A lot of confused users replied to the emails, either to thank us for the notification (not useful), or intended as a reply to a specific user, such as in the case of "new comment" notifications.

Sure, in some cases (like comment follow-ups) we could automatically process the rely. However, I'm really skeptical about our ability to handle email formatting well, though. Things like quoting, HTML, "On June 12th, John Doe wrote:" headers (which often are not in English) and signatures must be stripped, and I could not find an existing library that would do this reliably.

Maybe if you are Facebook or Google you can spend the necessary manpower to deal with the technical challenges, but we can't; our company is small enough that we can't even afford the resources necessary to screen replies manually.
Addendum – Came back at the end of the day to add this clarification:

Nothing in Sam's comments about this lead me to believe he's a bad guy, just that he's missing something about this particular scenario. On the contrary, spotting rules begging for breaking is a very helpful trait for an entrepreneur – as most here know, the YC questionnaire asks for examples of "hacking the system for your own gain". (Though the PG "no jerks" rule[1] implies hacking that's not at someone else's expense.)

”There's always one“ who's constantly challenging conventions, and when that one zeros in on the line between audacious and antisocial, 20 years later he often winds up running things.

For more human background, this Washington Business Journal profiles the Odio brothers.[2]

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1632477

2. http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/stories/2010/10/11/foc...
Ah but doing better at business is only important if you care more about creating new things than gating paid a lot. If, on the other hand, you are in it for power and money, being better at "playing the game" is where money and power will come from faster and easier.
It looks good. Have you tested it with SVG? I've been using https://github.com/hrj/box2d-js
Hunches are/used to be a big part of police work. When you just know they're guilty, you're not going to let them get away with it if there's anything you can do.
start chrome with --ignore-gpu-blacklist WARNING: could crash your machine ;p
It works in Safari as well. You have to enable webgl in the developer menu first though
This reminds me of a prevalent attitude I encountered in college where it was assumed that disciplines required more intelligence as they got more abstract. It's a persistent and seductive intuition that this is the case, but as Asimov points out it is only a matter of convention. Some geniuses can be very bad at dealing with mathematical abstractions and very good at performing in a specialized domain. Gifted athletes come to mind.

Wittgenstein puts it this way:

I can play with the chessmen according to certain rules. But I can also invent a game in which I play with the rules themselves. The pieces in my game are now the rules of chess, and the rules of the game are, say, the laws of logic. In that case I have yet another game and not a metagame.
Four types of human capital
حجز موعد في الاحوال
Great point, I didn't realize it but you're right: like a carrier, iTunes is infrastructure.
Same here, although I don't use a password manager, I generate them based on a fixed seed and the website's domain, using a simple algorithm. One less backup to depend on ;)
> I am sick and tired of "anarchists" subjugating every legitimate cause under the sun so they can have an excuse to deface and destroy. Not only is what they do juvenile and unproductive, but their presence taints what are otherwise very legitimate and important grievances and seriously compromises public opinion and support of these causes.

If they're actually anarchists---as in those who despise governance in any form--its absolutely appropriate that they attack all the arms of the government, even the innocuous ones that do nothing but bring joy and happiness into the lives of people.
They could easily have been intimidated by the prospect that they would be wrongfully accused and went to his office under the implied premise of amnesty. The game as visible to the student is something like an extra essay assignment weighed against possibly having to fight expulsion.

I suspect that there are similar factors involved in other false confessions. It's an asymmetric knowledge game. The only winning move for the person being questioned is not to play, but they may not be aware of that - and worse, they may trust the other player. With further intimidation, privation, and humiliation, it's not hard to imagine why people could break down.
To compare: There are lots of useful bacteria in your guts, and when you take antibiotics most of them die. But most people survive that, and you can help re-populate your guts with the right mix of microbes.
It's a nice story. I agree with his point about testing. But it seems to me he's just apologizing for his intelligence and education. I'd bet Dr. Asimov would make one hell of a auto repair mechanic if he dedicated his life to it. I'd let him work on my cars!
Given the length of time it takes to put up new towers, it is probably that the money they spent is finally showing some results. In ND they are in the middle of a transition from a local carrier they bought to themselves. It did not go smooth (total loss of network for a period and double billing customers), but the coverage is now getting better.
If a virus has infected a cell, the cell is usually beyond hope.
Hackers Strike Hong Kong Stock Exchange Twice in a Row
I would ask Mr. Asimov: Do you think that, given a reasonable amount of training, your "intelligence" could be applied toward automobile repair? Or do you truly believe that your mechanic friend had a different sort of "intelligence" that made him better at car repair, while your brand of "intelligence" lent itself toward academia?
I'm not so convinced... I went to my Apple store to buy an MBP, 17", 8GB, SSD.

Nope. "We only stock the HDD models in store here." Not "we're out of stock".

Hmm, okay... well maybe I could just buy an SSD from NewEgg, and sell the HDD...

"What about with 8GB... I only see 4GB prices out here."
"Yeah, we don't stock 8GB models. We can install 8GB and give you the 2 x 2GB chips."

Yeah, not so much.
With antibiotics the super-bugs are usually only really good at evading our medicine, not as good as infecting a healthy human as the traditional microbes.

Thus they are mostly a concern for already weakened persons.
An example does not prove the point but Click and Clack of "Car Talk" both graduated from MIT.

Their 1999 Commencement address to the graduates of MIT:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/clickclackspeech.html
Carteiras SecureMyID  e Acessórios - Os Estilos Verifique Empresa
Experience in market and a totally different type of phone are reasons. I am pretty sure some features required carrier support (i.e. Visual Voicemail). The initial data plans were also a bit different than a traditional offering. The iPhone was not a sure bet even with the backing of a carrier.
A friend of mine used to be a welder. I always found his political views simplistic to say the least. He couldn't control his liqueur and one day he felt down from high up and his arm got trashed.

I always thought that he was going to end up as a looser, although I love him as a good friend.

Years went by and he never really got anywhere, of course supporting my theory and increasing my concern.

Then a friend suggested (for whatever reason I don't know) that he should take up system administration. So he took a couple of courses and lo and behold got an apprentice position at Maersk.

He blazed through the various Sisco certifications without any issues as such exceeding what was normally considered possible. Basically flooring those who hired him and our common developer friends.

I was puzzled and asked him how he was able to advance so fast and he basically said to me.

"You know it's not really that different from installing and welding pipes. I see things needing to be connected and I connect them"

The moral of the story.

Sometimes things that seem very complex and require a tech centric mindset is really very simple. The welder, electrician and the plumber also deals with complex systems, they just have different names for them.

My friend is still the simple minded person that I know (and love) but he sure know how to lay pipes.
You sir, are rich.
Right. So pedantry wins. The point is that there is some number of pennies after which the demand is elastic notwithstanding the original poster's indifference to a one cent price increase now.
To me, the reason to do this has nothing to do with the business of actually running the carrier. The reason to do this would be to put pressure on the other carriers by providing data plans with reasonable pricing and terms. The terms of service for every wireless data plan out there today are completely ridiculous and terrible, and since wireless is an oligopoly there's no way that's going to change until a tech company that actually understands the internet buys a wireless carrier and makes them change.
I totally agree, so far as merit is concerned, but the value society places on intelligence is entirely economic (at least at the moment). And academic intelligence has great economic value because it scales: it's abstract, so can be applied broadly; and is information, so can be replicated and transmitted widely.

Asimov's books, textbooks and articles need be written once, but have been replicated many times. Likewise his insights and perspectives (including this article). And the nature of insight and knowledge is there's no danger of mining them out, because you can always make finer distinctions - so there's room for arbitrarily many suppliers, each in a minuscule specialization.
Something I've never understood from one example from that talk: If it's your word in court vs. the police officer's regarding an unrecorded conversation, how exactly does not talking help you? In the example (linked below), the police officer lied in court, saying that the defendant admitted to placing a hand on the plaintiff when the officer first approached the defendant. How does being silent help you in that example? The officer could still lie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik&feature=playe...
The risk to the apple brand/reputation is too great.

Not to mention the antitrust issues.
The class for which there is only a marginal benefit to sending it in hardcopy vs. email. Or the class of items whose delivery could be delayed long enough to combine it with another item.
Also, police have power. Power has a profound impact on most people, and generally not a good one.
Bringing solar light bulbs to the world
Show HN: Crash into Python
I was able to have the dots come on and off while I focused on the center. Turning them on and off at will when i wanted them to. What shocked me is that you can make the yellow dots 5 times there size, and they will still disappear.

I think this shows there are multiple modes of human vision. During the first few hundred milliseconds we are in "situation assessment mode" where we see the outer dots perfectly, during "focus on something" mode, the dots go away. This provides insight into the exact algorithm our visual cortex uses to parse whatever data streams come from the eyes. Amazing!
Linux 3.1-rc2 released
I've started working on these slides for a set of tutorials I plan to give at $work. As I went on I thought they might be valuable to others, so I added an index page and posted them up. I'd truly appreciate any feedback the HN community could provide me with.
This is a fantastic article. I'm sad it didn't get any traction here. Maybe resubmit it with a better title?
Yeah, but everyone's ears are different. You'd have to characterize ear variations that are relevant to earbud sound and put people in different buckets to get consistent results, and then to interpret the results for a specific person you'd have to find out which bucket they're in.
C++0x Is Unanimously Approved
I think he was going for Gaia Hypothesis.

Simply put: what if the entire ecology of the planet is part of an integrated system that has an intelligence of its own, motives of its own, and merely operates at an epic time scale.

Just as the bacteria in our stomachs don't know they're contributing to our well being, so also may we not know that we're contributing to the well being of Gaia.

The issue I have with that is that it seems unproveable, and therefore its truth or falsity has no impact on our daily lives.
Then only use the ones that do guarantee this. You can also make use of C libraries, but still have access to some nice C++ features for your code.

Since C++ lets you omit language features until you basically have plain C, you get to choose what level of support you can live with.
...and another starts to use it
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=13077
Technology offers 50 ways to leave your lawyer
Sadly it was more of a monologue vs a discussion
T-Mobile is a third rate carrier as it is. They can barely compete with AT&T Verizon at this point. The only reason wireless carriers buy each other is for infrastructure and customers to boost its bottom line. Apple has neither. To buy a wireless carrier would be suicide for Apple.
It has to be multiplied by less than two - if it's multiplied by two or more, putting money into the pot is always worthwhile (or at least break-even), no matter how much the other player puts in.
I used Scrivener to write my 2010 Nanowrimo entry. It's a great piece of software, and I can't recommend it enough.
Try type this into your location bar in Chrome:

about:gpu

.. it might be a GPU that isn't supported?
That is true but Apple does seem to have a higher adoption rate with their physical products. iOS 4 killed support for the original iPhone and now iOS 5 is killing support for the iPhone 3G.

When the iPhone 5 comes out this fall I think by June of next year there will be enough penetration of iOS 5 that some apps will be able to put that requirement on it.

Heck if we're lucky iOS 6 will finally kill support for non-Retina displays.
The only similarity I see is black keys on a silver chassis; the shape of the chassis itself looks nothing like a macbook.
How does assigning greater importance to learning lead to mixing up identities?

There doesn't seem to be a link to the actual paper (if there is one yet) - the DISCERN link is to a 1998 paper. The idea of a "story parser" is interesting...
Git Annex
I don't think much can help you if you are dealing with an officer who is willing to lie and falsify evidence in order to convict you. But the key detail is that its much more likely that an officer (or any person) will misremember something you said or take it out of context if you actually said anything at all.

By not talking you prevent this problem entirely because no one will accidentally forget or take out of context that fact that you never said anything at all.
Pakistan shares with China samples of US stealth helicopter downd in Abbottabad
Not every instance of "I dunno" is equal in impact or insight to Gödel's theorems. In fact, almost none of them are. This is because the interesting part of Gödel's work was not the "dunno" aspect, but the positive knowledge of what is and is not possible in mathematics.

The halting problem, likewise, exposes exposes a fundamental limitation in computing. It is not simply "I dunno," but "This cannot be known."

If the article proved the origin of viruses to be unknowable, that would be quite interesting and surprising. But asking a difficult question and then answering it with "I dunno" is a much simpler and less interesting accomplishment. I could do this with any number of things.
Repressing the Internet, Western-Style
After being called out twice, at this point I would have thought you would given up. Stop skimming and start reading if you are going to comment on articles.
Schumpeter: American idiocracy
South Indian Actress
Can the middle class be saved?
IMO, the absence of real exceptions (deferred et al. are not enough) and generics makes Go unsuitable for large scale projects
As Mobile Networks Speed Up, Data Gets Capped
"Lie" in the eye of the beholder.

To the cop, stating that you touched someone means that you've opened the door -- it's a thread connecting your story to the plaintiff's. Since you are probably not routinely interrogated, your body language may reinforce that thought process as well.
Before you can make something meaningful, you must immerse yourself in problems, either yours or someone else's. You need to learn what the ailments are, then find a cure. It's easy to see when someone is simply targeting a market they think is ripe for exploiting, and are not really immersed in solving problems.
> I guess I knew it was possible, but was never convinced of it by any concrete code. The standard library, for example, is horrifyingly bad.

Between your comment about Android and this one, it looks like your problem is much more with the Java API's than Java itself.

Besides, I disagree: the Java collections are fairly solid with the right mix of abstraction and efficiency. Compare with those of Scala, for example, which require a lot more work before they become decent.
I don't think motion is required. I remember staring at a patterned ceiling in 8th grade algebra class - if I focused on one point long enough, the further out patterns "disappeared."
> Go keeps all the old errors everybody should know are errors (nullable pointers, shared mutable state, raw types, ...) and then proceeds to add new ones,

And because of the absence of exceptions, Go forces you to deal with errors at the call site (see the number of times you see "ok, err = Foo(); if (err)..." which is not scalable to large scale software.
The author really sets his screen to yellow text on a black background? Makes my eyes tired just thinking about it. Anywayz... on a Mac you can flip the colors of your monitor by holding down ctrl-option-command and pressing 8, if you like that sort of thing.
If that's the case, then the first words out of your mouth if you are ever interrogated are "I would like to exercise my right to remain silent." If you say that, then the police are legally required to stop the interrogation then and there. (Ironically, simply remaining silent is not sufficient: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berghuis_v._Thompkins)
The Confessions on Frontline is one of most interesting reports from that show that I've seen, it's related to four men who confessed to a crime they didn't commit. Highly recommended.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/the-confessions/
I do everything besides screenplays in plain text. Compatibility wins here. Between Google Docs, Word 2010, Word for Mac, Pages and Open Office, it seems even basic documents get mangled. RTF is only reasonably better.
I am with you. I don't see how you could call it a dumb phone at that point.

It is still a foolish idea. To keep costs down, you would probably use the same chip as your other iPhone / iPod Touch or the previous generation chip. You might have less flash, but the commodity chips have increased in size. The biggest cost savings would be to use the original iPhone LCD resolution. No significant cost savings for Apple comes from just having a browser phone. Plus, it would annoy app developers, increase support costs, and cost Apple their 30% cut. I see it as a no go.
Those are not 'lies of' business schools. Those are false beliefs about business schools, which is different.
not all problems have obvious solutions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
$102,300 - $153,400 seems like a rather small salary for a CTO. Especially one who would have to put up with working for a dysfunctional, highly political bureaucracy like the MTA. In NYC, you'd probably have to pay that much to hire a senior software developer.
re: "Many people agree that revision 5.1a, specifically, was the best version of Word that Microsoft has ever shipped."

Fortunately, my Ancient Powerbook still runs version 5.1. Eminently usable, and far less annoying than the Office 2008 version. Among other travesties, the current version will often refuse to select a single word, obstinately selecting another word, next to the word you want to select (and delete) and thus deprecating one's deletion experience to repeated tapping of the Delete key.

As a side benefit, the Powerbook won't load almost all web sites, thus removing one obvious procrastination temptation.
I don't doubt you've been thinking about this idea for years, and have told this story to many people. It was abundantly clear from the post that from your subjective point of view, you regard this technique as having prime importance; there's no need to reiterate.

All this being said, my remarks stand. Your post reads like an uninterrupted barrage of self-praise. This idea is neither new, nor thought-provoking, and is justified entirely by your own assertion that you're a Really Effective Guy.

Your solipsism continues, with you convinced that a wonderful exploration of your big idea was just around the corner until that Onan guy came and fucked it all up, with his awful, mysteriously-at-the-top-of-the-discussion-for-some-reason, posting. Your major anecdote in support of this comes from a situation where you were the boss and the evidence of how well it went is entirely from you. Aside from us all trotting out our own tales of how wonderfully we too resolved various situations in similar and equally subjective fashion and praising you for your insight, I'm not quite sure what you're looking for here.
http://nn.cs.utexas.edu/?grasemann:cogsci11

I believe this is the paper, from the abstract it seems like hyperlearning is related to greater consolidation of memory, which might imply creation of connections between things that are not really connected
Why U.S. Broadband is So Slow
I honestly doubt that would make things any better. The carriers are terrified of becoming dumb pipes between you and your content. Apple's latest strategy is to wedge itself in the middle as a distributor (iTunes, iBooks).

Considering Apple's control obsession, a telecom buyout is more likely to make things even worse. Wireless spectrum is a public good, what we need is a company that has zero interest vested in the bits going down the pipe.
I write all my code with a black background and green text (well except for syntax that's highlighted). Much better than staring at the sun(white screen) for hours ;p