skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) In this universe, it appear that there is a property -- lets call it mass -- that determines how things pull towards each other. But our universe is just a sample of size 1; so that might be confirmation bias or suppressed evidence.

In order to learn more about related phenomena, one needs multiple data points with varying initial conditions. In order to understand more details about a specific case, no further data points are needed or desirable. Graham's essay is about his interaction with, and opinions about philosophy; he doesn't need any other data points in order to tell you his opinion, nor do you need any other data points to talk about history.

2) Actually, one would nominally point to the start of both fields in Thales, who was seen by Aristotle to be the progenitor of Greek philosophy, and supposedly was the first person to note that the angle inscribed in a semicircle is always right. Note that, even before that, there definitely existed at least non-trivial arithmetical problems (such as finding the volumes of various solids), that were known literally a millennium prior (to learn more, consider the wiki pages for Thales, the history of mathematics, and Egyptian mathematics).

Of course, this is brushing under the carpet the fact that in Ancient Greece, the distinction between a "philosopher", a "mathematician", and a "scientist" did not yet exist (exception: physician was an independent job title); the Greeks could not have seen themselves as anything less than all three. Graham's claims have much more to do with the fact that philosophy, as an independent field, continued to exist long after this distinction became clear.

3) Your claim here is not entirely clear. Are you really trying to validate the failed methods of philosophy by saying that it's important that we try them now so that we don't make the mistake of trying them later?

4) Three of your examples date from 1750 to 1850, and are examples of how enlightenment thinking bridged the gap from philosophy into what could actually begin to be called science--these people were called philosophers because there was no other word yet extant to describe what they did, but we now recognize their results as belonging to other fields. The fact that they called themselves philosophers is irrelevant; their results did not in any way require the existence of the rest of the field of philosophy.

The important contributions of Russel and Whitehead to mathematics might have been inspired by their personal philosophies, but having such a philosophy does not require the existence, import, or study of the many misshapen works of the field.

Finally, Popper is an example of exactly what philosophy can do to actually be useful--answer a question about how to approach the gathering and use of knowledge.

In summary, what he wants philosophy to do is indeed science...so why are there still philosophers doing anything else?
Be careful with "smart frame". There are 9 active trademarks with those words, several of which pertain to picture frames.

We've recently learned a lesson about trademarks here. Even simply using the words to in your product description (and not necessarily a product name or slogan) will run you afoul of trademark holders. Also, trademark attorneys will often fish for billable hours with overzealous trademark enforcement.

I don't know how far you've looked into it so far. The product is awesome. Make sure you've got your bases covered, there's going to be some jealousy.
Quotation dictionaries turn up several versions of a quotation along the lines of "It's amazing what people will do to avoid the hard work of thinking." Most mental reverie is nothing like the "deliberate practice" K. Anders Ericsson researches and writes about.

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.ht...

Another quotation that I've tried to dig up and verify, but have never been able to find a primary source for, is "Because thinking is the easiest of all things to do, it is the hardest thing to do well." Great thought. I would be very much in the debt of any reader who can help me attribute it to its original author.

As for the danger of misplacing the decade of deliberate practice on the wrong discipline, I advise my children to get to know a lot of different adults, the better to choose a passion to pursue that they really like well enough to devote practice to and become good at. And I think if people learn to truly reach an expert level in something, they can find personal satisfaction and reasonable income doing it. There are a lot of journeymen, but few genuine experts.
Steve Jobs Sets His Priorities Right
The same reason why I don't believe Facebook will ever reach real profitability - their primary audience is a bunch of poor, broke college students, not to mention ones who are generally anti-corporate.
I enjoy MythBusters, but this video impressed me more than anything I've seen from them on that show. I know it'd probably be too much for most audiences, but I'm more interested in how they build most of the stuff they use than what they do with it.
I'd like to embed them in my walls and use them as control points for my x10 home automation system (already controlled by linux pc and web browser), to view the video feeds off my security cameras, and to control the entertainment systems.

Count me in for 5 or so of the next run!
I count 23 in a PEG language without repetition. Here's an expanded version of your fragment that runs successfully:

# from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=404609
bar = 3
bat = 4
baz = 5
puts(("foo #{bar} %s %s" % [bat, baz]) * 2.+(0b0010))

And here's a grammar for the subset of Ruby it uses:

this <- 'A parsing expression grammar for a tiny subset of Ruby.'.
copyright <- 'Written by Kragen Javier Sitaker 2008; in the public domain.'.

program <- _ expr program / .
noninfix <- inparens / call / constant / quasiquoted / list / name.
expr <- infix / noninfix.
inparens <- '('_ expr ')'_.

call <- name '('_ commalist ')'_ / constant '.'_ methodname '('_ commalist ')'_.

constant <- '0b' bits / digits.
bits <- bit bits / bit _.
bit <- '0' / '1'.
digits <- digit digits / digit _.
digit <- bit / '2' / '3' / '4' / '5' / '6' / '7' / '8' / '9'.

quasiquoted <- '"' qqcontents '"'_.
qqcontents <- !'#{' !'"' char qqcontents / interpolation qqcontents / .
interpolation <- '#{' expr '}'.

list <- '['_ commalist ']'_.
commalist <- expr ','_ commalist / expr / .

infix <- noninfix '%'_ expr / noninfix '*'_ expr / noninfix '='_ expr.

_ <- sp _ / .
sp <- ' ' / '\n' / comment.

comment <- '#' commentchars '\n'.
commentchars <- !'\n' char commentchars / .

namechar <- 'b' / 'a' / 'r' / 't' / 'z' / 'p' / 'u' / 's'.
name <- namechar name / namechar _.

methodname <- '+'_ / name.

I have tested it (in http://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/tree/master/peg.md) and it seems to work for that fragment, although I haven't examined the parse tree to see if it's right. (Obviously the definition of namechar is wrong, and there's no $end token separating statements, and you can't call methods on things that aren't constants or self, etc.)
Sounds like a good idea. But it doesn't work if they have css turned off.
I'm planning on starting a "chain" of either charter or cost-free/cost-very-little schools. These schools would be high schools, but they'd be for geeks/nerds/people who actually want to learn.

Needless to say, I'm still in the very early stages of this idea.

About your textbook, what branch would you _like_ to write about?
I studied philosophy on the side of my computer science degree, and I have to say it's been immensely useful.

Before studying philosophy I was a green idealist, but after studying philosophy I centered on a pragmatic philosophy.

Also it enhanced my ability to argue immensely. If I have an argument with someone I can easily detect logical flaws and shady arguments in general.

Also I like to think my study of multi-modal logic systems has enhanced my ability to suggest alternatives and question assumptions (where reasonable).

In short, a philosophy degree might not be all that useful full time, but to compliment something more practical, like CS, I've found it to be valuable.
My interest has just been piqued.

I'd love to hear more about your projects.
me too ;) its unblocked now but the last two days, NYT was blocked.
hey, I think the Shanghai HN readers should get together for a beer sometime, get in touch!!!
Really? Seriously, what permanent damage can twitter link monster do when they steal your twitter account and start posting PR0n ad links to it. You'll get your twitter account back, and then just delete those posts. And twitter monster will have made about $1.30 in affiliate fees, and be out of business. And you'd have some great material for 6-7 blog posts about how you'll never give out your twitter account information again.

Sorry, your paranoia just doesn't add up. Now, in some cases it does. If someone stole my gmail account, they'd be able to use google payments to buy whatever they hell they want. But twitter? Give me a break.
exactly. China's "firewall" has become amazingly sophisticated. It can now block just pages of sites instead of whole sites. Also, there is the unsophisticated part, wherein, it does not behave the same everywhere.

Some of this seems intentional and controlled differences based on location (In a western hotel in Shanghai vs. at my house in a middle class neighborhood). Other differences in location seem arbitrary. Her mystery is beautiful ;)
we will never know ;). It can have been an automated firewall response to some keyword on a comment page. It could have been a person behind the great firewall that made the call. But hey, two days later, its not blocked again, so there you go ;).
Yep, I think that you guys may have just created a great hackable device when you thought all you had was a digital picture frame.

Let hacker's thrive. Give them a great, juicy section of your website. If nothing else, put up a wiki stat, so folks can start talking!
I think that this is one of those areas that would be greatly improved by starting students with assembly. It's fairly easy to grasp what each statement does in a small instruction set like MIPS since there aren't these sorts of preconceived ideas. Then once students have learned assembly, teachers can explain statements such as "X=X+1" unambiguously with the assembly instructions the students are familiar with.
Technical specs -- please!!!
I'm not a student, but I do have most of a week off and I'll be working on a way to help diabetics better manage their disease (my wife is Type I and I'm pre-pre-Type II).
Which is why you fund an HSA alongside your high-deductable plan.
thanks, but Hulu says "not available in your country" :(

oddly enough, the colbert report's own site is happy to share it worldwide:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/21198...

It's a similar idea, but the charm of it really coming from the speaker (as in a ventriloquist's dummy) is missing.
No, I understand the issues, especially for normal users. Normal users have a 1-password-fits-all scheme, which is a really bad idea. Then getting your Twitter account stolen is megabad.
Even so though, there's twitpay, which lets you make payments via Twitter (I think it's setup so that it would only be any money that you have in your twitpay account that someone could steal, not money in paypal/credit card.) Still, if someone leaves a few hundred in their twitpay account that's sizable.
Plus there's also a bug someone found so that once someone is logged in as you, they can just not close the window and keep tweeting as you forever. But that's still just tweeting.
But really, the only people that really need to be wary of giving out their twitter password are people who use that username and pass for other things and people who have larges sums of money in their Twitpay account.
I'm not stealing your passwords anyway though :-)
I want to hear the emergency room story. I heard one of the founders ended up in ER during the building process.

Story time!
That sounds awesome - me too.
Plenty of manufacturing firms will work with startups. They just have a strict "show me the money" policy.

Once your hardware design is worked out[1], you can order a production run[2] of a few hundred units a month[3].

[1] They will be glad to help you design your product too. The last quote I got for an "idea to device" service was $500k and six months from zero-to-production quality.

[2] As long as most of your components are tape and reel.

[3] Some firms have complete facilities in the US and China. Low volume orders can be done in the US while everything else is sent to China.
http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/22/news/companies/mufg_morgan_s...
I have always been fascinated by the application of both ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations. The mathematical ideas behind the methods involved in reaching solutions are some of the most beautiful ideas in mathematics. I also find the mathematics of game theory and finance quite beautiful. Any one of these topics are more than enough to fill several textbooks.
My partner and I are going to remake http://jobzor.com. We were originally looking to make a job board and internship recruiter as a Facebook App, but it's just not our thing and there is enough competition in the market already for that.

Instead, since we both rely heavily on freelance work, we're positioning it as a directory of approved designer (with specific specialties), copywriter, and developer freelancers so clients looking for work or partners can find them easily.

Given my focus on delivering great designs within my focus-time of 24 hours, this should be a good help in finding clients, as well as any revenue we scrape together through the site if we choose to monetize it.

Any HN members interested in being listed?
I know I'm on the outside with this, but I don't even think I'd want to program without an IDE anymore. Not only do they save time, but I find they also save MISTAKES which one of the most valuable things out there. For example, how many times have you had that one variable or reserved word misspelled by one character and it took you how long to find it?
The study of mathematics is both more useful, and carries most of the same benefits (although it typically lacks the forced experience with communicative writing).
1. This is an excellent point you make. There is, a priori, very little reason (as far as I know) to assume that an alternative universe would have the same physical properties as ours. If there is evidence in that direction I doubt it's merely "because our universe has this property."

But I agree with you in principle that this is a weak point. The essay's point was to respond to pg's attacks. jsomers never assumed that pg's single paper had somehow thrown philosophy into chaos and shambles.

2.I agree with you here that there is little distinction between these fields in Greece. But that's an interesting fact isn't it--it's essentially conceding that at least initially philosophy played an important role in the development of math and science (one certainly can't assume that the development of philosophy and math were going in two different tracts in the same man's head).

3.He's not saying that philosophy failed. He's arguing that pg is finding fault ex post facto. It's easy to fault Kant after you've read a response but perhaps without Kant the response (and the progress that supposedly came with it) never would have occurred.

For an analogous situation--Galois developed his theory which allowed for a proof that no polynomial of order 5 or greater was guaranteed a solution by radicals. Does this mean that Ruffini was a putz because he could only do most of the proof for order 5 polynomials? After all--he was clearly taking the wrong approach.

Or, do we think Pascal is an idiot because Newton developed the calculus that solved the problems he could not? No.

The point is that everything builds on everything. I think somers' Kant tree is a great example of this.

4. This is backwards. The point is that philosophical reasoning often led to the creation of entirely new fields of thought. Economics, politics, law and linguistics are great examples of this.

Would we have modern legal thought without the works of philosophers like Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Hobbes?

Would we have modern economics without the work of Smith, Pareto and Mill?

Would we have modern sociology without Marx and Gramsci?

That they called themselves "philosophers" is not irrelevant whatsoever. It demonstrates that philosophy often lays the groundwork for entirely new fields.

It's strange you say that their results did not require the existence of the rest of the field of philosophy. I suspect they would disagree as they seemed to rely on other philosophers in their own work.

5. What is your metric for "useful"?
In the next few days I'll also be releasing my personal project, http://epictee.com to connect great t-shirt companies with the media they deserve. I helped co-found http://anticlothes.com and while I was there, a major problem was getting coverage for the brand and for the owner.

I've noticed this is common for most tee labels, especially as they start out (no coincidence), and rather than be a salesman trying to move shirts, I'll be a salesman moving brand equity, which I'm much more comfortable with.
Ask HN: Why do the stories on HN right now suck?
Just curious
note about your site: turn off JS and it has your logo and your footer, nothing else.
Google dominates ad server market, study shows
Actually I think a bigger thing was exceptionally low living standards compared to the US which meant cheap labor...
:) cool I understand what you're saying.
its the weekend, not many companies release news worth talking about on Saturday night
Definitely, we'll use our blog for just that. There are a lot of experiences that we've already had that we can write about, and there are lots of experiences that I'm sure we'll have in the future. We'll write about them as much as we can.
Totally. I'd love to see the technical specs of the device. Screen size and resolution, CPU, RAM, storage, networking capabilities, ports, etc.
Ah, that will be for another blog post. For now, all I'll say is that it involved a hand drill, with a (very hot) metal drill bit, and ended with a few stitches and a recommendation from the doctor not do hardware anymore =)
Def. We'd like to have something that looks a lot slicker in the future.
http://www.google.com/search?q=thinking+hardest yields the following attributed to Henry Ford:

"Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it."

It's reminiscent of your quote, though probably not close enough.

As an aside, I'm skeptical that Henry Ford actually said this.
anyone use http://sproutit.com/ ?
Because you want them to.
This advice will be well noted. Thanks.
Why did you make a sock puppet account to complain about the stories on HN? Why not just read the FAQ?
The Da Vinci Code (haha remember when that was huge)
Boxee would really be a cool app for it. Also, we thought about a TV-guide application on the frame as well, so it could be a companion to your TV.
Your post had no content. [...] I would genuinely like it if you posted some actual content, and I hoped to indirectly encourage you

Heh. Something about this comment seemed very familiar to me, and after a while I figured out what it was: the distinctive sound of xlnt aka curi. Yay web history!

While I have an enduring if inexplicable affection for you, and get that you weren't being sarcastic, the last thing I want to do is have an argument about Wittgenstein together :)
Noted. A quick search seems to reveal there isn't a google analytics API. Anyone know if there are APIs for any other major analytics suite?
"My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright."

I think that's kinda the whole point of the Tractatus: much of philosophy (metaphysics and ethics, particularly) has no sense. Strictly speaking, they mean nothing.

Wittgenstein's early work inspired the development of modern analytic philosophy both in its use of formal methods and its claim that much of what was then considered philosophy was meaningless. The decades immediately following Wittgenstein were concerned with linguistic analysis (what the authors of these papers take fault with), while more contemporary philosophy has conceded to a kind of naturalism, appealing to the sciences.

If you place any value on modern analytic philosopher (even as a Popperian), you have to at least give Wittgenstein some historical credit even if the philosophical travesties of the logical positivists can be attributed to misinterpretations of the Tractatus.

With regards to decent philosophers with direct influence from Wittgenstein, what's your take on Kripke and Anscombe?
Well, it is running on Linux, so you could pretty much do whatever you want with it. But, we officially only allow running of flash programs that are built using our (loose) framework, so that it integrates nicely with our operating environment.

We did a limited production run, but are currently not producing them anymore so that we can concentrate on software development more.
Why not submit some interesting stories/links instead of complaining about how much the current ones suck?
Even just having a photo frame that also displays tomorrow's weather and an NTP-synced clock is a great but simple step forward for photo frames
HelpSpot is exactly what you're after - http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/

We've been using it for about 3 years and love it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Contributions_to_l...
Is there a way to browse previous high scoring stories? I tried submitting two only to find they were done months ago.
I kind of expect loading times on stuff, especially a video, but I don't want to sit through 5 seconds of it when watching a demo. It's boring. People won't hold Picwing to the same standards as Apple.
It never ceases to amaze me that there are articles on the Chinese firewall. The list of permitted and denied sites changes pretty much daily (and even seemingly depending on where in any given city or province you are), and anybody who really wants to get to somewhere on the Internet has a good number of options to get to them with minimal hassle.
http://news.ycombinator.com/best has the top for recent (past two weeks?) stories.

http://top.searchyc.com/ has the top {stories, comments, a few other interesting things} of all time. As well as a way to search stories/comments (as the domain name says).
Part of the unsophisticated part includes China Unicom and China Telecom not being able to maintain nationwide networks. I've had difficulty loading content hosted in Beijing from a browser on a different network elsewhere in Beijing.

Historically, locations that have been given unfettered Internet access have purchased it from the telecoms at higher prices. There is no selective Internet filtering based on location of end users on the same network... yet.
Ask HN: Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing?
Has anyone used affiliate programs for marketing?