skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's definitely partly true. You can't argue that market capitalism doesn't move some resources to useful and productive things.

Maybe you are right and this is just a horrible inefficiency that will be corrected as soon as we figure out how to make ad optimization and ultra addictive time wasting games more efficiently.

It doesn't seem likely to me at all though, the only arguments I've seen for it are just ideological commitments to our current economic/political system.

The statement that modern global captialism is the best system for productive human endevour we have come up with and the statement that modern global capitalism and the systems it will spawn are enough to continue the upward trajectory of civilization are not the same thing.

> If they had a net loss from advertising they simply wouldn't do it.

I have little faith in the non-scientific philosophies that this kind of statement is based on given modern neuroscience and human irrationality. There are too many counter examples. We are not self interested rational actors, it's way more complicated than that.
Interesting idea, I haven't used the service yet, but my reservations about using the service would the 'lazy period' where I let go and indulge myself. Lets say I wanna reduce my time on HN, I spend disproportionate time here on weekends, but wanna control my time here on weekdays. Hope Beeminder takes that into account.

Also, Its new year's time. Try and capitalize on new year resolutions.
Rings a bell, http://www.bounceapp.com/
For what it's worth, thanks for that detailed article. I've just used Coffeescript for a large-ish WebGL project and had no idea of that behaviour. I got freaked out when I got to the bottom of that first fragment and saw log vs log.

I'm going to keep using Coffeescript, I love it. Maybe this kind of scoping isn't the best decision for modularity and teamwork, but on reflection at least the rules are simple and consistent enough for a single programmer to keep in mind.
On the other hand, they just signed a contract providing Microsoft licenses to all the students, which is unfortunate. Earlier they did the same with Adobe. This is their solution to lowering costs--lets provide Microsoft and Adobe products to everybody! I, naturally, disapprove, but that has never mattered...
Detection at a distance is not that easy. The primitive analog radio signals we used until about 1995 are easy to recognize, because they are so simple. The digital, encoded, encrypted signals we use today are much more difficult to distinguish from naturally occurring signals. They tend to be more efficient and to vanish into noise much more quickly. So in our case, the time window during which we were visible in space was about 25 to 30 years. We only recently became capable of detecting the light of entire planets, what makes us think we can detect their radio signals?

Regarding the more general problem: what about economics? Even if it is technologically viable for us to go into space, it is remarkably expensive. We couldn't sustain a Moon program, for all its scientific interest. So we need a pretty big return on investment to do further space exploration.

To me, there are really only two options:

1) Speed of light can't be broken, and colonization only happens by losing any practical contact with your descendants (a ping time of 1s is bad enough, think about 100 years). This reduces its economic appeal to practically zero. No return on investment at all. Not even intellectual satisfaction: you will not even know in your lifetime if your expedition was a success. So why bother?

2) Faster-than-light travel is possible, and relativity tells us it's basically equivalent to time travel. Now, just try to imagine how well our own economy would survive the availability of time travel... This is one thing that Star Trek or Star Wars or Galactica never get right, it's a problem they never consider because it's too hard to think about it. If you can jump or warp or whatever, then to the best of our knowledge, you can travel back and forth in time. How does a civilization survive this? I have no idea. A good example of singularity.

One final thought: the Fermi paradox always start with the premise that we don't see aliens. But most serious work on UFOs claims that a fraction of UFOs can't be explained away. In short, some UFOs appear to be artificial, to exhibit intelligent behavior, and to show technological capabilities well beyond our own. I'm quite surprised to write this comment at a point where there are 86 comments, and I'm the first one writing UFO. Taboo?
A lot of excellent points, and I don't think "digital conferences" are the only places women are harassed in this nature. But for all the good points I found myself wondering what she was really struggling with at some times. Part of her piece came off as a rant about how she felt jilted that she didn't "stack up" to other ladies.
Funny you should say that--finance is probably the field that uses the most Haskell :)
This article is not about the fermi paradox, it is just a soap box to warn against the misapplication of technology.

But back to the subject, I'm not sure if we are even smart enough to recognize any intelligence that does not resemble our own.

So far our solution to the fermi paradox may be summarized as:
"We must stick them with quills! It's the only way!!"
Sadly I don't see this scenario changing any time soon, the reason being that so far, for these guys, the rewards are much greater than the risk.

The rewards would be (male) peer approval and easy relief during presentations, whereas right now there seems to be little risk of either law suit or peer reprehension.

So, since these guys don't really think of women as people, they don't see any harm done.

It's actually a horrible picture of just how much non-empathic an adult can be and still function well in our culture.

The fastest way to revert this is to get many male tech guys to acknowledge the problem enough to publicly reprehend them. That way the rewards are thinned for the sexist presenter. He may carry on to be a jerk, but won't gain as much from being a public jerk.
On User Retention as a Service - Response to Paul Stamatiou's post
Googlers?

Edit: maybe that? http://code.google.com/p/radishdisplay/
They're not migrating the other apps. From the FAQ [1] - Q: Is Microsoft Office being replaced by Google Docs? A: No, Microsoft Office will continue to be a desktop standard at the University. ...

Nice Freudian slip, btw.

[1] https://kb.berkeley.edu/jivekb/entry.jspa?externalID=2980...
Throughout history men have exceeded in making all those roles second class by painting them as duties or burdens that are naturalized to women.
A response to Paul Stamatiou post: "Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service" http://paulstamatiou.com/startup-user-retention-lifecycle-em...
For one, as I mentioned elsewhere, they have a site-wide license for actual Microsoft Office products (unfortunately). Here they were probably primarily looking to replace Calmail which is not brilliant.
Consider your analogy stolen for future use!

They're all down there thinking "why aren't there any alien bacteria sending us some chemical messages already? It's clearly the best way to communicate"
It's really unfortunate that they insist on using Microsoft office. Happily the rational departments--the ones I usually deal with :)--don't expect office docs, but I wouldn't put it past my future literature (or whatever) professors to expect them. And that would suck.
MySpecialNow - a place to buy or sell my special, now
Looking for something special? Get it here now! MySpecialNow bridges real consumers to real Australian businesses. So buy your special here or post your special to sell.
Well, looking at my friends here in Taiwan, empirically I can say that they read books in Chinese much faster than I do it in English (which is not my native language, but been using it as primary language for more than 8 years now).

One important thing can affect this, though, that many texts can become much more simple (ie. shorter) when translated to Chinese, since that language doesn't have many of the complicated (but also very expressive) grammatical structures of other languages.
> How else should I communicate that?

Who says you should?
Sounds like a job for mechanical turk.
Microsoft Bringing HTML5 and JavaScript to Office 15
Or they go so advanced they were able to intercept and snuff out all that alien porn before it got to us.

Maybe even an intergalactic SOPA is in place!
Put more simply, either we're A) doomed, B) boring!, or C) in the Matrix.

Merry Christmas.
Do you really have to depend on your carrier ? Most of the phones are available in the open market, with a higher price tag.
The Shroud of Turin Wasn't Faked, Italian Experts Say
I have some hope that the maker/3d printer/home fabrication sector could combine the profitable small startup business that we all seem to love with some progress that will actually provide substantial benefit to humanity.

I think we need a lot more time to figure out how to organize and motivate and fund large projects as well as evolve culturally before any interesting large scale space exploration will be done. SpaceX type experiments might be the first step, even if it's just a data point about what doesn't work.
Since the aliens are only brought in for comedic effect, yes, I find it a plausible article about the effects of entertainment on progress.
Comparing iphone 4 to Galaxy S is like comparing apples and oranges. Care to compare your iphone to Galaxy S2 ?
I'm a bit torn by this particular post. On the one hand, I think there's enough evidence of sexism and racism in the technology sector to treat it curiously -- as in, it's worth examining further and figuring out if there's an actual problem (I think there is, but that's just opinion) and where that problem is and how it can be addressed. I'm also interested in why so many self-described "hackers" seem so quick to dismiss it, especially since if they share any one trait, it should be curiosity.

So if this were a post about how they couldn't make a business deal or get funding or were at a disadvantage because they had a woman on their team, it would be as compelling to me as some of the other stuff I've read recently.

But: it's primarily about jackasses with no social skills, and there are tons of those in technology circles. People who interact with electronics more than other people are more likely to have all the social graces of a meadow muffin, and I don't think that's a solvable problem in society this year or next.

It sucks that she had to deal with those people. It sucks that they focused on her gender or attractiveness and said stupid things instead of having a conversation about one of her interests. Still, this is mostly a case of nerds behaving badly more than anything else.

I'm also pretty lukewarm on her feelings about “the sexiest women in social media”. Taken seriously, she's right on all her points. Taken in good humor, I find it about as offensive as sexy firemen calendars (i.e., not at all offensive, just all in good fun).
IPhone 4S
iPhone 4S
Updated Our digicam group has used some expert time with the iPhone 4S so have a look at out our indepth results of the snapper.
Software architect mistakes
The Perfect Server - CentOS 6.1 x86_64 With Apache2 [ISPConfig 3]
They already sell that data to credit agencies who use it to produce more accurate credit scores (and get the answers to those questions they are not legally allowed to ask).
Wall board | 3d board
Wall board - Buy 3D Wall Panels today - High quality 3D boards are artistic, durable and environmentally friendly product. Buy 3D boards and take your interior design to a new level.
I don't use dropbox for sharing at all, and suspect I am not alone. Generally use Google docs fir that. Dropbox just for replication to my devices.
12 volt air compressor, air compressor Australia
Air Compressor Sale at Bitoo - Buy 12 volt, portable air compressor and heavy duty air compressor at best price. Check professional models for suitable to your needs and order today.
Founding Father
I would have remembered when the message to tag the location of my photos came up.
Huh? Everyone? I expect it to be 'hellp' because I am thinking it works similar to Ruby's 'hello'.succ
Humans do not always self-correct. Ever heard of Easter Island?
Organic life can be detected in the emission spectrum of even the most distant objects, without establishing any contact. In fact we can theoretically detect life at very early stages. But we haven't detected anything yet, which makes the Fermi paradox even more valid (and chilling).
Only if you're uploading data to it just once per frame. And you're not doing stereo.
Again. These are classes for _beginners_. I'm not suggesting that you should never learn these things. They should also learn functional programming, estimating how algorithms perform, concurrent programming, binary trees, and a few hundred other things.
But Programming is not something you master overnight.

You need to understand that 2+2=4 before you can understand that 2+i^2=1.
Yes, learning some programming to be an iOS developer isn't enough, but that doesn't mean that guys like k-mcgrady can't learn on their own. Keep it up, man!

I know a programmer that knows so much of language and compiler theory he is always a source of knowledge and inspiration to me. He has a university degree in... accounting.
> At the minute most employers won't even consider someone without a degree

This is actually a good thing, it's and excellent flag of someone you wouldn't want to work for! I don't have a degree in anything - I dropped out of an engineering degree in the second year and joined the marines :-). I taught myself to program and I now work in a small team in a hedge fund. In my opinion experience trumps education anywhere that's worth working - if they won't even consider someone without a degree run the other way!
Questions you have to answer correctly to get funding for your startup
I know Jane well IRL and count her as a friend.

My company also runs digital conferences and she's frequently spoken at our events - and I'm very thankful it wasn't one of ours where the sleazeball stuff happened.

From a purely pragmatic perspective (i.e. what, as organisers, can we do about sleazeballs) I'm fascinated by two aspects of my own personality:

- on the one hand, I skew towards believing that individuals are entirely responsible for their own actions. If someone's a sleazeball at one of our events, that's entirely his fault (I would obviously react badly if I witnessed it or knew it was happening in real time)

- on the other hand, I'm into game theory and behavioural economics and I wonder how we can structure things so that we reduce the occurrence of this kind of thing. I'd love to hear ideas for tactical things conference organisers can do to filter and constrain ridiculous behaviour...
"Voice cues for the unfortunate souls that gave us 1-star reviews."
We don't need to find a particular grain of sand, we just need to find a grain of sand that's a particular shape or color. How rare such grains are is the big question. Everything we know tells us that they should be everywhere, but they aren't.

We can see for 93^h^h47 billion light years in all directions. That's a pretty big ball-o-space. Plenty to observe.

And if we find ETI, even at distances that preclude ever interacting with them, it will still be the most amazing thing to ever happen in all of human history.
Here's the whole text, as an app developer I definitely can relate:

About .01% of users got stuck on the first screen where it says Enter Your Name. They apparently got stuck and not understand that you were supposed to Enter Your Name. We have now added voice cues to help out these unfortunate souls that gave us 1-star reviews.
I'm kind of peeved at how (in talking about how the human economy has become so focused on entertainment as opposed to "real" economic activity) the author cites "IBM, Canon, Hewlett-Packard, Matsushita, Samsung, Micron Technology, Intel, Hitachi, Toshiba and Fujitsu" as companies that are pushing out "fake", "virtual" goods that do not contribute to human material success, and then lists Victoria's Secret as a company that makes "real things". (Victoria's Secret being, by the way a prime example of a company that bases its success on manipulating evolved behavioral mechanisms. I don't think this is wrong in the way the author does, but this does betray a certain internal inconsistency.)

The antipathy to computing is incomprehensible - I would say that the ability to have fast and high-bandwidth communications, computerized organization (calendaring, e-mail storage, etc.) and the like is more likely to contribute to human growth to the stars than (in the author's example) zippers.
I think they will as well. India will shortly have to address this seriously and probably will.

That covers the types of pollution and over-consumption that are a visible and immediate threat, like dumping toxic waste in rivers and highly toxic air pollution.

There has been no serious willingness to address the issues of the increase in per-captia consumption of finite resources.

I was really taking issue with the statement that humans will be the first species that does not reproduce and consume as much as it possibly can before partial or complete extinction. That somehow humans will naturally reign in their natural impulses before it becomes too dangerous. That statement is based on zero evidence. We think we are the exception, humans are good at that, individually and collectively. Here's hoping.
Just talk to each other.
IAAL, and I deal with this stuff all day every day. The language you quote above is a very standard mutual confidentiality provision.

You left out the definition of "Confidential Information", but I'll bet you it's along the lines of "stuff one party gives to another that by its nature and under the circumstances would reasonably be considered to be confidential in nature".

Also, unlimited liability doesn't mean an automatic jackpot for the side whose secrets were leaked. It just means that the contract doesn't impose a ceiling on how much can theoretically be recovered in a worst-case scenario.

So, what's this really all about? Theoretically speaking, the fairest contract in the universe would not include any limits on liability at all. In other words, each party would and should be fully responsible for all of the harm that it causes.

However...by convention, it's very common for Party A to shift at least some of the risk of its screw-ups onto Party B. (If I had a dime for every sales person who told me "mistakes happen", I'd have thousands of dimes.)

One popular way to shift risk is to say "I'll be responsible for harm that I cause you, but only up to $X MM".

Another popular way to shift risk is to say "I'll be responsible for harm that I cause you, but only to the extent that I was the direct, proximate cause of it". (This rather vague standard gives the lawyers plenty to fight about in court.)

Anyway, imagine you gave me an important secret on a piece of paper to hold in safe keeping for you, and you asked me not to share it with anyone. Now, imagine that I lose the paper, and someone finds it, and your secret gets out.

What are your damages in that case? Well, we know you lost a piece of paper, so it's easy to measure your "direct" loss. Will you be happy if I just give you the price of a loose sheet of paper? No! You've just been dragged through the mud because I leaked your humiliating secret to the world. You're going to want compensation for losses that can't be so directly connected to my screw-up. You're going to want to hold me accountable for harm to your reputation, lost opportunities, etc. Maybe the secret on your piece of paper was the key to your company's whole competitive advantage! Now you're going to want to hold me responsible for ruining your entire business...just because I lost a piece of paper.

But you know what? You're not wrong. It's important to make both parties liable for losses that are both directly and indirectly caused by a breach of confidentiality, because the losses associated with leaked secrets can be quite severe indeed.

* The usual disclaimers apply. IAAL, but I'm not your lawyer. Don't treat this verbose, but fatally incomplete, post on HN as legal advice. ;)
When there are few suppliers, depressed demand makes it easy for oligopolists to behave like monopolists.

Should they cancel the deal? Certainly their shareholders wouldn't like them to do it out of the kindness of their hearts. I do think that competition watchdogs should be looking at HD mfers very closely now.
The observations we are making are millions of years old - what if in 100k years those same analysis we do now suddenly show life.

We are not just looking at the wrong places, we are looking at the wrong times.
Regularly scheduled hard disk maintenance for your XP users
Weltschmerz comes close.
The common complaints are record syntax, String/Text / ByteString/Char/Word8, the functor/applicative/monad (should be a hierarchy and there's duplicated functions:

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/n7x5t/on_the_applic...

lack of stacktraces (loch ca't be used with 6.12 on), cabal on mac, profiling vs. inlining, GHCi's limitations and slowness, and how do you know which packages on hackage to use?

A lot of these are being worked on:

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/k4lc4/yesod_the_lim...

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/mm68o/ghc_74_branch...
Ohh using a screenshot as a reference point. Nice. I like the idea of using screenshots as a test assertion.
I think not having booth babes and strippers would be a great start. It would sure cut down on the males of our species being subconsciously primed for sexual thoughts.
The reasoning basically seems to be "if you misuse this feature (i.e. have top-level symbols), you'll get bugs (like the OP discovered), therefore don't misuse this feature (i.e. keep your top scopes clean), and therefore you won't get bugs, and therefore it's not a problem with CoffeeScript".

It shouldn't take a lot of thought to see why this is a somewhat user-hostile, passive-aggressive approach for a language. If something is ill-advised, the language should actively steer you away from it, not dissuade you with subtle bugs a few thousand lines of code down the road.

I think this scheme would be more workable if sigils or similar conventions of some kind were mandatory for top-level symbols. Then it would be much harder to accidentally wander into this problem. The language he seems to be drawing inspiration from, Ruby, does do this.
This is my biggest problem with CoffeeScript. And the author stubbornly refuses to fix it. Apparently it's some sort of Ruby religion.
Sure. I am just frustrated with Talk/Docs. Talk, a bare minimum IM client. Docs, are we in 1999?
FedEx Response to Customer Video
When a copyright holder blocks a website from receiving revenue, that will often result in the website being taken down for business reasons (i.e. it will be down for the whole world, not just Americans. Does your site accept Paypal? Earn money from Google ads? Earn money from Amazon affiliate links? Not any more if Universal Music decides to put you out of business).

Note that the website does not need to be infringing any of the copyright holder's copyrights for this to happen: there is no right to due process.
This is one of those things where personal actions do mean something. Avoid booths with half naked girls at conferences. It will only take one conference with an empty booth for that company not to use this kind of attraction again. Makes sure that people around you know that this is not OK, they will think twice before acting as assholes, even if it is for the sake of peer pressure and not out of respect for women.

Thanks Jane for writing this up. Important.
What if we are not just observing the wrong places but the wrong time.

Our observations are millions of years old.
I doubt the naming is coincidental, cucumbers and zucchinis are both gourds.
Java Considered Harmful