skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I really appreciate your feedback. All your points are valid. The search box is disabled on the set page to keep the UI consistent but that functionality is not built yet. You again make a valid point that there isnt much content on the site. Relatively. Yes, Electronica is huge, there are literally dozens of genre. We really wanted to launch the service at a certain level before investing the time in covering different genres. It will come, eventually and hopefully you will return to the site.

Once again, this is exactly the kind of feedback I wanted and expected from the HN community.
Cheers.
Thanks for the feedback. I am really happy to hear that you are interested in those features. A lot of the things you mentioned are planned and will eventually come into play. We are young right now, but we are definitely here to grow.
Cheers.
China has tens of thousands specially trained spin doctors posting blog comments
could you post a screenshot of what you are seeing?
Going bankrupt now because the lessons of its 1759 Founder have been forgotten
how exactly did all those PHDs screw up the code to come up with that bug
Or the part where Dagney cooked and kept house for John Galt as repayment for her staying with him.
"I really loathe vagueness in science (or, for that matter, in philosophy and argumentation in general)."

Is he a computer, true or false no other answer? I think he's fooling himself, what happens if quantum computing becomes common and a result can be a 1, 0 or 'maybe'?
Yeah. The problem, which I still find sad, is that Rand's main message, above the stuff she writes about, is that you should always believe in objective reality, which means picking logic over dogma, and treating the world as a constantly-evolving thing that requires your own thought. Her followers throw out that message more often than not, and follow an incredibly dogmatic belief system that disregards logical statements for catch-phrases.
Another iPhone developer's app store experience(after 3 months)
Steven Pinker Gets to the Bottom of his own Genetic Code
The one really good camera movement I've seen in gaming is in Shadow of the Colossus, where the camera blurs when it moves too quickly. It means that suddenly there's a visual effect for switching camera angle. And for whatever reason, most shots in that game are gorgeous without the player trying.
Japan's new energy efficient bullet train achieves 350kph
That's what I was thinking when I made my "eminent domain" comment. At what point can the government legally step in and say, "in the interest of the public welfare, we're going to let this happen?"
I have a mate who's a solid pianist and guitarist, and he plays guitar hero too.

Like me, he's skeptical of academic types who try and steer every detail of the little people's lives with grand-plan political philosophies.

This Jon Elster character sounds like a tripper. In one of the quotes he uses the idea of 'marginal utility' to further an argument. The quote is taken from a book about (and by a broad proponent of) Marxism. Much of Marxism is built on the labour theory of value, which proponents of marginalism believe to be discredited by the marginal theory of value, which is tightly derived from the idea of marginal utility.

I haven't read any of Elster's work. All the same, I'm confident there's some rigorous turd-polishing going on between the pages of that volume.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Elster

Update: I may be selling him short. There seems to be a lot written by this under the topic of 'Analytical Marxism', including that "Elster and Przeworski were notable departures from the group in the early 1990s.". I've heard friends recount stories from professors about the period that say that buying into Marxism was in some circles had a similar dynamic to baptism in born-again Christian circles. In that respect I suppose that pattern of trying to bring more sense to loved themes is no better or worse than Catholicism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_Marxism I'm now miles out of my league and this will be my last edit here.
That was my take also.

Personally I could never understand why does everybody think Microsoft must become a great Internet company. I do understand that a lot of people are tired of so many years of Microsoft dominance on the desktop and are willing to look stupid predicting their collapse just because another markets opened up that MS isn't dominating in (yet). But hey, IBM is still around and doing fine.

A friendly reminder to Web 2.0 types: the only company making seriously big piles of cash, the big boys club kind, is Google. And the rest of Internet ghetto can only dream of making the kind of cash Microsoft is generating without "getting it".

And speaking of new markets...

Here's another reminder: measured in computer years, widespread Internet is very, very, very old and can hardly be called a "disruptive technology" anymore. We've all had fun throwing VC-supported sheep for free, now lets get back to work, figuring out what software users want.

That's what Apple's been doing, and perhaps this is what Microsoft has done with Windows 7. I hope so, even though I'm not their customer.
There's something already out there similar to this, at ShouldExist.org (currently down for redesign.) Might be some duplication of effort, or an opportunity to strike while the iron is hot -- depending on your point of view.
Academic Culture Wars
Germany university adds an "online flirting" class for its Masters program
I was gonna make the same comment. Since when was web 2.0 (hairs goes up on back) about 3 companies.

If you need a real example of lean companies look no further than YC companies.
The dichotomy he puts forward - algorithms (CS) vs. proofs (math) - is totally made up.
Crunchies results: Half the winners are established companies
Angry Perl Users
Sounds pretty sweet. Their quotes of Tandem Computers CEO also make you want to work for them. The reality however is that...

"As the company entered the 90's, however, sales and profits slowed, and many of these innovative programs were either curtailed or eliminated totally. By the end, Tandem was pretty much a company like any other in the computer field..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers
The 2008 Crunchies is our second annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling
startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.

They should really change their tag line
A botnet that 100% autonomously opens a bunch of honeypot email accounts, publishes them somewhere, reads every single spam message and organizes DOS-attacks on pharmacy sites that pay for spam advertising.
EC2/AWS Console Easter Egg
I was poking around in the AWS Console to find out what GUI toolkit they used when I came accross the following. This is in the source of https://console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/home

---

Der transzendentalen Ästhetik

Was sind nun Raum und Zeit? Sind es wirkliche Wesen? Sind es zwar nur Bestimmungen, oder auch Verhältnisse der Dinge, aber doch solche, welche ihnen auch an sich zukommen würden, wenn sie auch nicht angeschau würden, oder sind sie solche, die nur an der Form der Anschauung allein haften, und mithin an der subjektiven Beschaffenheit unseres Gemüts, ohne welche diese Prädikate gar keinem Dinge beigelegt werden können? Um uns hirüber zu belehren, wollen wir zuerst den Raum betrachten.

Von dem Raume

1. Der Raum ist kein empirischer Begriff, der von äßeren Erfahrungen abgezogen worden.

2. Der Raum ist eine notwendige Vorstellung a priori, die allen äßeren Anschauungen zum Grunde liegt.

3. Auf diese Notwendigkeit a priori gründet sich die apodiktische Gewßheit aller geometrischen Grundsütze, und die Möglichkeit ihrer Konstruktionen a priori.

4. Der Raum ist kein diskursiver oder, wie man sagt, allgemeiner Begriff von Verhältnissen der Dinge überhaupt sondern eine reine Anschauung.

5. Der Raum wird als eine unendliche Grüße gegeben vorgestellt.
I think this guy has mathematics totally wrong. Maths just doesn't work today the way it did in Newton's time, and even back then people weren't satisfied with Newton's proofs, but they lacked an alternative so they had to use them anyway. If the author had his way, we would have refused to accept Newtonian physics for two centuries! Could you imagine the damage that would have done?

> [A]ny realistic mathematical proof will leave out a great many steps, which are considered to be the "required background knowledge"

Computer science papers are different how? Computer science != programs!

> [T]he inference rules are not always specified accurately, or are not believable if they are. This is why you will sometimes read a mathematical proof and say "I understand the reasoning, but I just don't buy it"

I think this guy just isn't too hot at mathematics. Omitting a trivial step (or domain specific knowledge) is not a lack of rigour, but a courtesy to the reader. The details can always be filled in cleanly. If you ever see a modern mathematical proof that is accepted by all mathematicians, but you don't "buy it", then I can assure you that it's you that's at fault, not the proof.

Oh, and computer science papers never leave out trivial steps or assume domain knowledge? Not the papers I've read. Once again, CS != programming!

> This is reminiscent of Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica where hundreds of pages pass until the authors can prove that 1 + 1 = 2.

Surely Principia is a reductio ad absurdum of the argument that everyone should always spell out all the steps!
HTC S740 (Unlocked)
HTC S740 is Not only does this phone feature the slide out QWERTY keyboard of the Pro, but it adds a keypad for dialing in phone numbers directly So now there are three versions of the same model and the S740.
Distributing Rails Applications - A Tutorial
That's a good idea, and one I've actually kind of piddled around with, however, I have the nagging feeling that it isn't the costs themselves that are egregious, but the diagnosis.

Example: I take my car in for a squealing noise it makes. Obviously, I'm not going to pay $3000 for a belt replacement, but I have no assurance that the "Miscalibrated Magnetostat" isn't the correct diagnosis. I'm willing to pay $3000 for a magnetostat recalibration, and the going rate may well be $3k, but all the mechanic really does is replace a belt.

Though, saying it out loud, perhaps I should just implement some kind of rating system for mechanics as well.
because John Galt had carefully sabotaged the bridges and railroads

John Galt destroyed nothing except a room full of his own inventions. The railroads were destroyed due to the poor management of Dagny's brother (forget his name) and interference from Washington.

Also, from that link:

John Galt, outraged that anybody would even suggest that he or the company he worked for owed anything to the nation that provided his education, protected him from infectious disease outbreaks, protected him from Communist invasion, built the roads that got him to work each day, provided the police that kept him safe, and provided the court system that protected his property rights at all, sabotaged the Galt Engine, so nobody could have it.

As I recall, one of the heroic characters (Ragnar?) specifically states that these are all legitimate functions of the government and that they should be financed by taxes. In fact, one of the strikers actually worked for the government (Judge Narragansett).

It's always helpful to read a book before criticizing it.
Guitar Hero is a bad example of the argument being made here. Guitar Center attributes a recent spike in sales from games like Guitar Hero inspiring players to learn the real thing and move beyond their video game introduction to music. http://www.edge-online.com/news/activision-guitar-hero-iii-p...
There has been great success in large-scale projects in the past. It's just that back in the 1950's and earlier when they were spending vast amounts of money on single projects, people had been talking about them for over a decade.

Perhaps today we don't need 10 years to come up with a plan on how to build a network of highways, perhaps all our computers and better analytical models help greatly in predictions. However, it's hard to tell if software is giving you a good prediction until you begin getting results and I don't think many people would have felt comfortable betting on Deep Blue before it publicly won its first game of chess.
I think they just withhold paying you until your financial details are figured out.

I'm basically in the same boat as you... It's extremely frustrating to set up my financial info. I'm a coder, damnit!
I upvoted to offset your downvote.

That said, I think there's an android app I saw recently on the market that does this. I'll install it later and see how closely it compares to the features mentioned.
Not sure I understand the point about development at all. You can program apps for the iPhone using HTML/Javascript/CSS as well. In fact, when it was first announced, many people criticized Apple for not having a native SDK. People felt that it was too limiting and you couldn't really tap into the power of the phone. We've seen some great applications since the SDK has come out that shows that these folks were justified in their initial critiques.

As it is now, you can still program apps for the App Store using web technologies through the WebView object.
err why did someone downmod me for this ? - IP insurance is the standard way to protect yourself being sued in a patent lawsuit.
I think this guy just isn't too hot at mathematics. Omitting a trivial step (or domain specific knowledge) is not a lack of rigour, but a courtesy to the reader. The details can always be filled in cleanly.

A very astute comment. In principle, mathematical proofs are supposed to be every bit as completely described as computer programs, but perhaps not as explicitly expressed. Edsger Dijkstra used to refer to mathematical proofs as a model for computer programming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_derivation
with the words politically modified
Isn't this as simple as a mobile-enabled webapp? I like the idea, but how would you monetize it?
"Comments, rumours and opinions can be quickly spread between internet groups in a way that makes it hard for the government to censor.

"So instead of just trying to prevent people from having their say, the government is also attempting to change they way they think.

"To do this, they use specially trained - and ideologically sound - internet commentators.

"They have been dubbed the "50-cent party" because of how much they are reputed to be paid for each positive posting (50 Chinese cents; $0.07; £0.05)."

Even today that can be decent money in China. I think this phenomenon has been going on on Usenet since the 1990s. Certainly Usenet was a critical communication resource for students in North America in the China democracy movement that flowered in 1989.
"eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing"

I fear spending a lot of time 'mastering' something meaningless. Music, woodwork, metalwork, drawing, painting, they all sound worth spending time on.

Spending several years mastering Cisco router operating system commands, Sharepoint internals and development, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Java, Oracle, Jabber protocols, SGML/UML/YetAnotherMarkupLanguage? These don't sound fun, but they do sound like they'll take almost as much time and effort - but only because they were designed by big corporations/committees who don't care if you spend your life helping them profit until your 'skill' is suddenly worthless and non-transferrable.
I'd recommend posting this question over at stackoverflow.com, too.
Probably quite well, once you realise how "misunderstood" js is: http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html

Also, they probably use drawing on a <canvas /> element for the main UI, so it won't be limited to html/dom.
Ask HN: What Criteria Should a Young Hacker Apply to College Choice?
Every once in a while a long thread develops here on HN about how colleges choose applicants. To turn that around, how should an applicant who receives more than one offer of admission choose a college? Is list price the most important criterion? Or does prestige (however that is gauged) trump list price? If you were advising a high school student who is choosing colleges this year, what advice would you give about which college to choose?
I agree with you, but I think your parent's post still makes sense. The Pre does have a static keyboard, yes, but it also has a nice big screen where (presumably) those extra functions you mention could still be used.

But then again, that makes the phone bulkier. I'm very pleased not having a physical keyboard on my phone at all.
I wonder if it would be hard to get in our case ... like getting health ins. with a pre-existing condition
Several of the suggestions are very low-margin activities; Facebook might not be able to earn serious money from those even with improbably huge revenues. But Facebook does have a capacity to gather an astounding amount of data about each user, and it would be missing an opportunity not to find some way to monetize that. The downside risk, of course, is that if Facebook finds a way to get money from users' willingness to share personal information that they may become less willing. Online social networks appear to have huge elasticity of participation depending on how the business model and thus culture of the nework changes.
I think the closer you get to merit based accumulations of wealth the better for society. Let's suppose you could give 15 million inflation adjusted to your children, but after that it's taxed at 75%. Now clearly 4 billion to 1 billion is not going to eliminate wealth quickly, but the history of the ford family and the ford company is going to look vary different.

Now do the same thing but start that at 250k vs 15 million. Your still going to have the corporate lawyer issue but that still has a lot to do with education and a type of drive.
I'm running Win7 from MSDN here. Honestly if you're on Vista SP2 (pre-release) then there not enough difference in Win7 to waste the upgrade time. (Vista SP2 seems to be pretty stable memory wise - no more swapping/disk grinding for me).

Also note, if you have an older ATI video card you may need to boot into safe mode and remove the old drivers to make the screen readable. I had to run the 2nd half of the install blind (it really is beta).

Final note: watch your MP3's - check the release notes. Seems the install damages them.
It's much stranger seeing people change the words of a drinking song into a national anthem.
Personally I find this article stupidly hilarious.

> "Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism..."

I'm sorry, I thought it was capitalism that just fudged the butter causing this economic crisis. I mean there was the whole mortgage deal (that only happened in the largely non-socialist US) that started screwing the economy up because the US doesn't have enough legal protections in place to stop people who physically don't have the money to pay a loan to get a loan in the first place. I mean there used to be the day in the US where if you had no money you'd get a credit check and then be refused like everywhere else in the world.

The subprime mortgage fiasco caused the big swathe of mortgages defaulting. Basically this made the banks need to get their money back or face bankruptcy, then the NYSE went down the crap hole, gas went through the roof and then the mixture of shit vehicles, crappy prices, high gas price/low mileage and big debts caused chaos for the big 3 automakers in the US.

I'm sorry, but correct me if I'm wrong, but that little summarization (essentially thanks to wikipedia) never once mentioned a country other than the largely non-socialist US.

The US's major butter fudging caused all the economic problems in the more socialist countries like the UK. The funny thing is, is that if the US had nationalised health care (like the UK) they would pay approximately half what they currently do for health care and would result in them being twice as healthy. Ironically this would mean more americans would have more money to spend and would have less reasons to not spend it, which is exactly what the economy needs right now.

On the side of Ayn Rand's background, she came from soviet Russia, which completely fucked up the whole socialism thing by preventing anyone losing a job or being unemployed. They avoided buying combine harvesters for farms because it would make some people unemployed not realising that those very people would become reemployed in other jobs... like fixing the combine harvesters.

Now I have a cute little pet bunny balled up in a blanket in between my legs whom, much like me, cares little about Atlas Shrugged and any misconceived links to the current financial crisis and he only cares that the prices of his food and hay and treats have all gone up a couple of dollars thanks to the US.
Why is it that everyone bitched when the iPhone offered a Javascript widget API and now Palm is being praised for it?
Not sure why this article was published. Won't the bot net developers just update their software now?
Here's google's english translation. It's not very good, so if a native speaker could translate, that would be great.

The transcendental aesthetic

What are space and time? Are they really care? Is it only rules or conditions of things, but those which are also to be given if they are not angeschau would, or are they, those only in the form of opinion solely liable, and thus at the subjective nature of our mind, without which no such Predicates things can be settled? In order to teach us hirüber, we first consider the space.

From the rooms

1. The space is not an empirical notion of äßeren experience has been deducted.

2. The space is a necessary idea, a priori, the outlooks for all äßeren based.

3. In this need, a priori, based on the apodictic Gewßheit all geometric Grundsütze, and the possibility of their structures, a priori.

4. The space is not a discursive or, as they say, a general term of conditions of things at all but a mere opinion.

5. This room will be given an infinite greetings presented.
The dichotomy of CS vs Math is tenuous as well.
Quick note: many of you are saying that this guy is totally out of touch with how math works, and that formal derivation of proofs is just fantasy. It's true that that's an extreme view, but it is in fact one that is held by some top mathematicians, even if a small minority. There are people who have built up research programs out of trying to make it a reality. See, for instance, Doron Zeilberger, who apparently describes himself as an "ultrafinitist":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doron_Zeilberger

http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/OPINIONS.html

I'm not saying I agree with that, just that it's not lunacy. Carry on.
Don't think so.

I'm just showing you how to abuse that without doing much ;)

Seen such behavior on both local ISPs and an Information Security conference website. Its one of those things that should not be there but every now and then some webdev decides to include ;)
> Rails (0.14.3)

This tutorial is a bit dated, don't you think?