skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Google is way more than just google-search and has been for a long, long time.

Google is mainly an intelligent services company. Their main intelligent service is search, and other services such as machine translation and intelligent prediction are also provided. [1][2]

Besides services, Google actively develops many open platforms, such as Chromium and Android. Many of their attempts to build simple applications have failed. [3]

> You can use them but of course you don't have to. Same with apple. Don't like it, don't use it.

People aren't fully aware of the fact that Apple/Microsoft exert control over their devices with operating systems such as Windows 7 and iOS. In the free software movement we are trying to get people to realize this through campaigns against these systems. [4] [5]

If you try to get everyone like me to shut up whenever whenever we criticize Apple/Microsoft then people won't be able to make educated choices.

> And other people like their macs, iphones, ipads. You think you are smarter than other people to show them what they like is wrong?

You clearly don't know me at all, so please stop personally attacking me. I certainly don't think I am "better then other people."

I want to educate people about the corrupt activities of Apple/Microsoft and develop better alternatives based upon Linux and web technologies. Google has been an essential ally in this effort.

> Apple software overall is generally considered very intuitive.

I don't know how you qualify "very intuitive", however, it is counter-intuitive to base a system on applications like iTunes rather then tasks. See away with applications by Aza Raskins and the anti-mac interface by Jakob Nielson. [6] [7]

> nor are you stuck for choices and alternatives.

You are wrong about this. There simply is not an abundance of free choices out there for people. Apple/Microsoft have totally dominated the computer industry since it started during the PC revolution nearly 25 years ago. Even now that free Linux alternatives like Ubuntu and Android have emerged, they still aren't widely available.

> You are in absolutely NO position to tell any software or hardware company how to do business as long as what they are doing is legal.

One thing our legal system still provides us with is freedom of speech. So I am still free to educate everyone about the harm that the tyrannies of Apple/Microsoft have inflicted upon the computing industry over the last ~25 years. On the other hand, apparently you think I should just buy my products and suck it up, rather then talking about this.

[1] http://translate.google.com/

[2] http://code.google.com/apis/predict/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discont...

[4] http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/iphone

[5] http://en.windows7sins.org/

[6] http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6856727143023456694

[7] http://www.useit.com/papers/anti-mac.html
I don't see the anomaly you're talking about. At any rate, it was probably just that -- an anomaly in the mapping software -- which is completely different from the government-mandated misinformation that is the subject of this story.
Concerning Many Worlds:

Firstly, [1] disagrees with you. Secondly, there is a difference between accepting MWI above other interpretations and actually believing in multiple parallel universes. A difference between accepting the physical and the metaphysical consequences. Thirdly and crucially, MWI depends on QM. Everyone acknowledges QM is probably not a definite description of the universe and non-locality, non-contextuality or another kind of modification would wreak havoc on MWI. If physicists subscribe to MWI but also acknowledge QM seems incomplete, they are being inconsistent.

Concerning determinism:

You say "it's just basic reductionism". But in fact it presupposes reductionism as a viable strategy to determine 'the truth' about determinism. It isn't [2]. Specifically, the question whether we can even determine whether our fundamental theories are deterministic is still wide open. None of the theories, from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics, is clearly deterministic and it remains a question whether it can even be determined whether they are deterministic.

Concerning morality:

No matter how well you can 'measure' my 'true' ethical views on abortion: no measurement will ever tell you what my ethical view on abortion should be. No collection of measurements will ever tell you what a governments policy on abortion should be. At most you can hope to be able to say: in this particular case we should allow it, because that will be best for everyone: the average happiness, productivity and insert-factor-of-importance will be highest if we allow it. However, that kind of judgment presupposes a certain moral system. You can never determine which factors should be important. At most you can measure which factors people rate as most important on average. But again, you presuppose a certain moral system if you choose to use that measurement to determine what to do. If you feel otherwise, there's a large philosophical nut left for you to crack.

I think you underestimate the complexity of these subjects and that your verdicts are premature.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation#Rece...

[2] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
I think he was just being off-the-cuff and flippant like a conversationalist. It wasn't some big statement. The q&a format lends itself to this style. He also said he hadn't really thought about it much.
This is a terrible idea. Users shouldn't have to guess what a blank button does.
Anyone can suggest web apps and services related to papers, finding preprints, summaries, Q&A etc etc? I 'll start with http://pubcentral.net/
The battery drain from polling the camera so often would not e worth the occasional issue.
I'm a little unclear about threads in ruby 1.9. I've been told in the past that threads in ruby were problematic. Can anyone illuminate the current state of affairs?
Maybe. While I couldn't care less if the "new tab" button has a plus on it, Google has a tough job ahead of them if they want to replace every single use of the "+" symbol. This is a branding failure. In the end, it's a pointless endeavor because they can't overload every use of the plus operator with their own trademark. I hope the endgame here isn't a slew of law suits against all kinds of sites and content that use the plus in some fashion.
The Power, or Folly, of a Product's Name
So if we have polymorphic types, and now polymorphic kinds, if we call those first- and second-order polymorphism, why can't we extend this to higher orders? For instance, third-order would be when our kinds' types are also polymorphic.
It kind of understates the issue and hides it behind multi-threading.
Xoomaworldwide
Xtreme X2O is an all-natural, organic mineral complex derived from a pristine ocean source found near the Okinawan Islands. Harvested in its natural form, we use a patented processing method to ensure the highest level of purity and safety before packaging this powerful product into individual, ready-to-use "sachets."
@Xoomawolrdwideo
Just A Few Years Before Facebook
Show HN: My solution to write Open Letters easily
1) This is one of the most beautiful things I have ever read.

2) I finally realize what has always fascinated me about him. He was ALWAYS working, with every single breath he took. He seems to have found a way of taking the hazy concept of "work" as it is commonly understood, and elevating it to a more in-focus ideal form through which to understand and shape his life.
Should I Start a Family Investment Club? | Broke Professionals
More likely they want to remove the plus symbol from all places where it doesn't refer to google+ just to strengthen their branding.
Doesn't matter who she is. That was my impression from watching her interview Mark. I really don't care if she's one of the founders of YC, or just another woman. I'm talking about that interview.
On the other hand shadow work is exactly what empowers people: 1. Automation allows to DIY tasks that previously were too expensive to acquire in the market in exchange of a bit of your time.

Quite the opposite: this is all the dull, menial stuff that distracts people from their primary tasks. These are jobs that were "supposed to" get automated out of existence and didn't. The store has not automated the bagging of your groceries. This only frees up an employee by having you do it instead.
To me, genius is the creative application of extreme knowledge. Geniuses posses a mind, like Clarke's Third Law on advanced technology, that is indistinguishable from magic.

You can't pretend that Michael Jordan is simply some preternatural freak of athletic nature. I mean, he is that, but there are others stronger, faster, smarter and with much better leadership qualities then he could ever pretend. But none could excel in such ways as he could, not even his successor, LeBron James. The way he could push himself along with his team. He elevated modern basketball to the stratosphere, and inspired countless basketball players and coaches.
I apologize, my native language is Spanish. Thanks for the pointer.
Also for non-web companies, I think it's better to be outside the valley -- it's just such an echo chamber there. We're doing a biotech startup and I think locating in Boston was the right choice.
Show HN: Send a Bitcoin gift to anyone with an email address.
11 simple ways to support the occupy movement without sleeping in a park
Nokia plans to leverage exclusive EA games to boost new WP7 handsets
Sounds like someone always wanted a big brother.
I always heard the Earth was warming because we were still coming out of the ice age from 10,000 years ago.

Seems like the relevant questions to me are how accurately are we measuring it? What kinds of problems (or benefits) will this cause? How much of this warming is caused by humans and CO2? How good are our models at predicting, really? And most importantly, can we, and at what cost, should we actually attempt to change the way things are headed?
Not submit or upvote stories which are fundamentally about politics

Hi, patio11, I'm sure I'm one of many users who appreciates your comment here. I'll definitely try, in light of your comment and other comments posted here, to broaden my definition of "politics" to exclude more submissions and more comments that I might otherwise make from HN. (I have a good group of Facebook friends of diverse political opinions who civilly and thoughtfully discuss politics with me there.) There seems to be quite a broad community sentiment, which perhaps needs more reflection in the community guidelines,

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

that political posts and commments have no place on HN.

That said, looking at the guidelines, I see on the one hand a statement

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. . . . If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

I'll interpret that statement broadly and both reduce any tendency I have to post political stories or make political comments, and also flag political stories and both downvote and then flag political comments. I'm trying to listen to community consensus here.

I see on the other hand in the guidelines the statement

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I discovered this site by following links from Paul Graham (pg)'s personal website, which links here and also hosts very interesting online essays,

http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

which are the first way I became aware of pg's career. The first pg essay I ever read was "Why Nerds are Unpopular,"

http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html

and in his later essays "What You'll Wish You'd Known"

http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

and

"Undergraduation"

http://paulgraham.com/college.html

and

"Is It Worth Being Wise?"

http://paulgraham.com/wisdom.html

among others, I noticed that pg seems to have a certain interest in education policy, which is one of my strongest reading interests. You too, patio11, tend to make comments about education policy in HN threads, and those are particularly valuable for American readers because they are informed by your time abroad. Thus I hope it will still be considered fair game here to discuss reform of education, whether in the private sector or the public sector, as long as we are honor-bound to seek facts and verifiable information about the subject of how education works and how it can be improved. I think education reform can provide start-up opportunities for hackers and is also of interest to anyone doing business in the modern world, especially anyone with a growing business who wants to hire competent workers.

What do the rest of you think about leaving scope for the possibly politics-connected subject of education reform here, as long as we take care to submit good sources, make best efforts to post thoughtful and civil comments, and don't gratuitously drag partisan politics into the discussion?
Just to clarify.

I am in currently in the US in Boston, MA.

And yes I am more interested in the advantages and start up culture of Silicon Valley and SF
This shows a good side of him, love. He put that in the products.

Great writing, his final words were striking.
If you used to turn this feature on, then this program just runs right after the accelerometer senses the changes and confirm whether to rotate the screen. if it rotate in the wrong way, it may just cost much more battery
Memolane and Patchlife - Alternatives to Facebook's new Timeline?
Show HN: my one-day project, Trnsfr
When I am trying a new whisky or brandy, I like to have a pour of something I know, so I have a reference point. I have found that time of day, outside temperature, what I am eating or have eaten, etc. really affects how much I am enjoying the drink. Of course the main point of the article is that while we think we are just using the current observation (the data), we often have strong priors that often dominate our posteriors ;)
So what kind of extreme knowledge/magic did Jobs have?

I also disagree with that law because there is always a handful of people capable of explaining an advanced technology, but no one can explain magic. For example, Siri might seem magical to end-users with no technical background but it is definitely not magical to the engineers and programmers who made it.
The other thoughts I had on this subject are a little more radical but I'll say them anyway: why not get rid of downvoting entirely? I'm a new enough user that downvoting isn't even an option for me and I can't say that I miss it.

This site is already radically different from other online communities, why not go full-bore and just make it based purely on a the-cream-rises-to-the-top model?

I would imagine the flag feature is enough to get rid of the spam or junk topics. If someone really likes a topic or wants to see it stay on the front page, they can burn up karma with upvote boosts (to a limit).

It seems the focus here is already on the community finding and upvoting topics of intellectual value and fostering stimulating discussion. Why not just bring that to a laser-like focus and drop all efforts at "punishing" or otherwise disciplining members of the community.

There's a big difference in motivation between thinking "what can I add to the discussion that will be appreciated and upvoted" versus "gee I sure hope I don't get penalized for saying this"... and that thought loop feeds back into the culture of the site. Right now I would (subjectively) say that 85-90% of the effort people put into the site is positive, while maybe 10-15% of it is negative (downvoting, indulging in a bit of flaming, etc.). If the architecture of the site was further refined to reduce channels for negative action, it would seem that positive effort component could get upped to 90-95% and make this place even more of a standout than it already is. HN could be one big proof-of-concept that a large, diverse, open community on the web can still be a highly evolved and civil community.
I have one piece of advice: Just fucking do it. Seriously. The only reason I didn't leave Boston sooner is because I'd never been to California, and I assumed the weather sucked everywhere.
There have been many times when I wanted to get something quickly from my browser to my phone. A Google Map before heading out, or an app someone messaged me to check out on Facebook.

So I built Trnsfr. It's super-simple: click the bookmarklet and it'll SMS your phone with whatever URL you're looking at.

That's it. But it's made my life a little better already. Hopefully it'll improve yours too.

What do you guys think?
There's fairly good research (though the point is debatable) that most innovation, especially the kind that significantly shakes up industries, comes from smaller companies, not from large, established firms. If that's true, then it would also be reasonable to hypothesize that if large established firms are able to buy out upstart competitors extremely early, and pull them into the fold so to speak, there will be less overall innovation.

It's pretty hard to prove these sorts of things, since it's hard to set up solid experiments with good controls in economics, but there is some interesting research around the what-drives-innovation question, and it's not an unreasonable hypothesis, at least.
These tools all work in different ways, but I would love if someone could write an app store for these (and others) to live in so we could one-click install and one-click uninstall dev tools locally. I'd definitely pay for that manager app, and it'd be way easier to give micro-donations to open source tools we use a lot.
Not a SJ fan, but man that hurts.
That's why you get the title in the Wikipedia link and search for that text. It comes back in the first hit.
i've cried reading this article. god bless sj
Wow -- that's really taking significant whitespace to a whole 'nother level. Very pretty.
"Anonymous draws its roots from an online forum dedicated to bringing sensitive government documents and other material to light."

Making Moot sound like a legitimate candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.
It's important to remember that Zuckerberg kept saying 'I don't know', because he was thinking out loud, not speaking from a script.

Zuckerberg said he would stay in Boston or move to New York, in consideration with moving to Silicon Valley, if he was starting Facebook right now, and knew what he knows already. He would start a company in a location where it was commonplace to build sustainable businesses, with employees who grow within a company. He admitted that six or seven years ago, when he didn't know anything or anyone, he could not have done Facebook without being in Silicon Valley.

My thought is that if a big consumer-facing/social tech company like Facebook was successful in Boston (now or in the future), many more companies like Zynga and other startups would be based in Boston as well. Facebook's and Google's success (and their willingness to buy startups that may or may not have a viable business at the time) causes a side effect where highly paid employees save up money and quit these and similar companies in order to create startups just a few miles away.

After all, Zuckerberg also stated he believed that the next wave of applications will have to integrate with social networks or else will die. If this is true, he must expect that a ton of startups would be started in garages and incubators all around where such social networks are based (Facebook and Twitter, which happen to be in Palo Alto and San Francisco.)

It would probably be more accurate to believe that Zuckerberg means that Silicon Valley is the best place to start a company, but he wishes it had a startup culture that he believes other cities like Boston and New York have right now (while they don't have very many giant web properties headquartered there).

He doesn't realize that a Facebook in Boston would mean that 1) investors were more likely to invest in startups than they really had been and 2) the built-to-flip companies of ex-Google and ex-Facebook employees (and those of other companies) would now be based in Boston or New York, both factors changing the startup culture of that city.
Do you realize how long the process of getting an employment based green card takes? Oddly enough, it is possibly the longest way to obtain US residency. 5-7 years from the start is probably the average, and 10+ years is not unheard of. Most of that time the application is simply sitting idle on a shelf in some government office waiting to be processed. Illegal immigrant who crosses Rio Grande at the same time as someone on H1B submits his paperwork has a decent chance of getting legalized faster (there was at least one if not two amnesties while I was waiting for my GC, and each one slows down the legal queue because understaffed USCIS offices divert resources to process "undocumented" aliens). Getting GC through marriage or some refugee program is much, much faster.

It would be nice if US voters at large were a little more aware of how immigration laws work in practice.

[EDIT] I am in no way suggesting the marriage route, just pointing out that there are many countries with enormous backlogs and for people coming from those countries converting H1B to GC for the purposes of starting a company may, unfortunately, not be a viable option.
Well, then I have some wine you might want to buy. Best wine ever. Pay no attention to the cheap-looking labels; I disguise it to keep people from stealing it. Just close your eyes and savour the experiential experience. A bargain at any price!

Oh, and you'll need to wear one of my special energy-flow-enhancing crystals around your neck. Also expensive, but surely able to increase your eventual enjoyment. And I'll enjoy the money.
The removal of the "+" is one of the most idiotic decision they could've made!
برنامج للحفاظ على عينك من ارهاق الكمبيوتر F.lux
Last I checked I get to decide my own personal beliefs. I love technology, including hardware such as televisions and tablets, and free software based upon GNU/Linux and web standards, which are both things Google actively contributes to.

I am anti-capitalist precisely because of my love of technology. I believe that we can construct a social system which vastly improves our rate of technological progress and that won't hold it back with things like the AI winter. I believe that subsequent to developing our technological productive forces, we will have a post-scarcity resource supply that makes money obsolete because our technologies will produce everything everyone needs.
Please take your troll attacks of JavaScript elsewhere.

Thank you.
OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

One can only wonder what he was referring to. Such a well written piece.
How Can You Learn To Sing - Up And Running
1.8 had green threads and when the interpreter blocked on some operations it would block all the threads.

1.9 uses native threads but it has a global interpreter lock which has known issues.

I am not sure what the improvements to locking in 1.9.3, as the changelog has quite a few commits related to that.
if you have ruby-build already installed and you pull, you need to rerun ./install.sh
A few simple tools I want edu-startups to build
Can an international student (on OPT) file for a company registration? I was on OPT, moved to H1 this month, can I also file for one?
The 2nd point you made reminds of Beethoven and how he overcame deafness to write some of his most brilliant pieces. He was incredibly passionate about his work and it was reflected in his music. It's amazing to see read this story and to realize that maybe Jobs' most important inventions, the iPhone and iPad, came at a point of extreme illness where most others would've quit. Passion drove everything he did and defined who he was.

Sidenote: I hate broccoli too.
yep, cause so long as they have to worry about an uprising of an armed populace they will at least show a little restraint.