skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Unless we're hacking gods, or the Large Hadron Collider poked one in the eye and there's a scientific study detailing the result, why in the hell is this even posted on HN. This place is turning into Digg before my eyes.
Constraints can also encourage creativity, because people have something to push against. Larry Niven (science fiction writer) claims that constraints make a story (although he arguably writes puzzle fiction; and puzzles are defined by constraints).

I've seen a similar idea in niche marketing, where you specialize on a segment instead of spreading yourself thin to please everyone. Does this promotes creativity, or does it just focus it? I think the focus makes it engage with reality more, and that this does promote creativity.

This is really how content constraints affect content (not how
medium constraints affect content.

Typewritten essays were very constrained in their presentation (especially in the form of the manuscript that the author worked with), including academic papers, such as Einsteins.

PS: maybe I misunderstand, and by "content" you mean the presentation that people create, not the text.
What's stopping Hastings from paying more now, without any change in the law?

I suspect that he could even make "pay more" a condition of employment at NetFlix.

I'll bet good money that Hastings is arranging things so a huge fraction of the money he makes goes to entities that won't pay a dime in taxes when he dies, that he's going to exempt himself from the estate tax.
I wonder if this could set up a new model for the Internet, one that would in some ways mirror cable TV. Most sites would still allow any ISP access since they don't have enough demand to have any bartering leverage with the ISPs (and even some that do like Amazon are interested in having as wide a base as possible). Sites like the NY Times, however, might be able to negotiate with the ISPs to license their content. This essentially gives them to ability to negotiate site membership at a much larger scale (and hopefully at a reduced per person rate). On the surface I agree that this does seem bad for consumer choice; however, if it meant the difference between having an NY Times and not having one, it could perhaps be argued otherwise. Of course, this model depends upon consumers having a choice of ISP in the first place.
El Humidor: The Ins and Outs of clj-record Validations
Amazon to offer Kindle e-books on cell phones
It's fun... but it's also a good way to avoid someone having you by the balls if they're the only ones who can run the systems, and there's a problem at 3AM.
I believe that God exists, I however also believe that his existence cannot be proven empirically, what category does that put me in?
Niether. I chose not to participate in any activities religion, therefore I am not an Atheist, Deist, or Theist. Religion is secondary to my being alive, and if I chose not to participate, I also shouldn't have to put up with people attempting to label me according to something that has nothing to do with reality at all.
Let me explicitly repeat your statement:

You say that the human brain would (in theory) be able to create something more intelligent than itself?

(Are you aware of the irony?)
> The human brain is quite "infinitely" interconnected, and this is something which not only would be really, really hard to solve with a physical machine: it's simply impossible.

Hmm. How does this "infinitely interconnected" thing work if not by physical means? (In physical, I include electromagnetic waves without a dedicated conductor, not just "wires".)
> "As for PHP 4 support, I thought that even Zend was done supporting it? Why is it still around?"

Because there are still some applications and frameworks that do not support PHP4, either because no-one is working on them, or because certain incompatibilities between 4 and 5 would cause too much of the codebase to need to be rewritten. Sad but true.
> "though map, and filter aren't 'Pythonic' anymore"

How come? I must have missed the memo...
Watched until 1:40. That chart could be taught in school as "how to lie with data": reduction from 20 to 10 made to look more dramatic by changing the scale.
Agnostic theism
I'm also 37, and I haven't encountered ageism (yet). I might be lucky, however - I get most of my gigs through a tight network of acquaintances, and so I rarely have to interview. My experience is that so many places are so desperate for truly good help (where "good" also means you're capable of communicating well with other human beings), that age matters much less than it might otherwise.
Professor makes his mark, but it costs him his job
i can imagine the epic levels of hand-wringing that will occur when we are capable of terraforming.
Reed writes:

The reality is that the boards of public companies hate
overpaying for anything, including executives. But
picking the wrong chief executive is an enormous
disaster, so boards are willing to pay an arm and a leg
for already proven talent

So if it currently takes $2 mill / year in an executive's pocket to get him on board, and that means $3 mill / year pretax (because, as Reed points out, the current tax is roughly 33%), then why, with a higher tax rate, is it going to take any less to get the same executive on board?

The only different between a 33% marginal tax rate and a 50% marginal tax rate, of course, is that now the board have the pay the same executive $4 million pretax to get the same after tax dollars in his pocket ... and the bitching and moaning about high executive salaries will ramp up in proportion.

Reed is a pretty smart guy, but this is a pretty stupid editorial.
<i>Your example simply doesn't translate</i>: I wasn't saying "God is just like an elephant", I was saying "Your alleged point of logic, claiming that one cannot have evidence that something doesn't exist, is incorrect". The elephant is a counterexample to it.

For what it's worth, though, I think the argument does translate -- for some but not all notions of God. Specifically, as I said before, if you adopt a notion of God that involves not-impossibly-vague claims about how he interacts with the world we can observe, and if those claims are something other than "he basically doesn't", then it is possible for there to be evidence for or against the existence of such a God.

This is true even without "total control over and full freedom to inspect" the universe. (Just as the claim "Some star within 100 light years of us went supernova between 100 and 200 years ago" is one we can have evidence for or against even without total control of and full freedom to inspect everything within 100 light years of us.)

<i>You pivot then ...</i>: What I'm saying is not "far away God is the same as missing God" but "professedly inactive, or indiscernibly active, god is hard to distinguish from no god". It seems to me that there is a difference.

<i>What I find humorous is ...</i>: You're welcome to find humour wherever you please, but for what it's worth I don't think I'm way smarter than people in the generation before mine, and I don't think skeptics generally think they are. (I expect skeptics generally think they're smarter than average people in the previous generation, but no more than they think they're smarter than average people in the present generation. Whether they are is a separate debate.)
Google Makes 1.5 Million Books Available For iPhone, Android Phones
It seems like what the PHP team really needs to do is drop backwards compatibility with PHP4+ (on the road map for 6 maybe?), clean up the OO implementation, and then implement closures and anonymous functions.

What they need to NOT do is ridiculous things like this http://news.php.net/php.internals/41374.
I have a (simple) question to all atheists:

If you didn't create yourself (and you didn't, otherwise you would know/remember/etc.), and (consequently) some other one did, how do you call it?
> Unless there is an innate need for a particular thing, often on the basis of utility as it relates to survival or reproduction, a person cannot want what he is ignorant of.

That fails wrt "good food". There is no innate need for any specific food. Yet, there is a generic expressed need.

Heck - it even fails wrt clothing and warm. There are many ways to be warm. (When my cat gets cold, she doesn't put on pants.)

> You're still missing the point tome is trying to make.

I'm pointing out that the interesting version is wrong and the correct version is uninteresting.

Yes, one can't want a specific solution of which one is unaware, but that's not a very interesting result. One can easily want a solution to a generic problem ("cold", "food") and thus value information wrt specific solutions ("little black dress", "Reese's").
The link is: http://books.google.com/m
the soft sciences need to get over empiricism. You can not have empirical proof of anything in situations where a control is impossible. social/economic theories are either deductive or abductive, neither of which is falsifiable.
I guess the question was mostly theoretical -- then again, it's only theoretical for another month or so.

To answer your questions:

* Ruby on Rails, Apache with Phusion Passenger for deployment. We've been using SQLite for development, but probably MySQL for deployment, and are not picky on the flavor of Linux, but like Debian.

* Tough to predict at this point. The software is fairly niche, but it's a large niche (freelance graphic and web designers).

* The plan right now is to start with one server (likely at Linode) and use S3 for file storage (perhaps also backing up to Mosso). But this is something we'd definitely be open to changing based on the recommendation of an expert.

* We're bootstrapping the app and have the biggest chunk of money set aside for legal fees (incorporation and making sure our TOS passes muster). In my head I was hoping this wouldn't cost more than $1000 as a one-off job, but, this is definitely not a place I want to be cheap. I'd rather spend more now than wake up one morning to a disaster because I tried to cut costs at the get go.

* We don't think it should be too heavy.

Planning to run a small closed beta in the next couple of weeks to get a better idea of things like that, though.
Agnostics are shy atheists.

If the answer is either yes or no, and you say "maybe", you say "no", substantially.

Why? Because every "no" is simply a refuted "yes" (philosophically speaking).
Ubuntu comes with 5.2, so I'm assuming it'll adopt 5.3 rather quickly.
why, with a higher tax rate, is it going to take any less to get the same executive on board?

The difference is that with a pay cap, no matter where an executive works, he gets paid the same. He has no incentive to compete against his peers. Within a high tax-bracket (with no pay cap), instead, executives have incentive to compete, because their salaries are able to differ from one-another.
If someone is going to work for you for years then it's still silly to hire based on knowledge of a particular programming language. In your example I would focus my recruiting efforts on more fundamental skills and experience such as accounting, maintenance, troubleshooting, configuration management, and OO analysis. If I found a candidate with those abilities but no Java experience I would be happy to train her on Java (or whatever).
list comprehensions take care of them. Guido wanted to remove them from Python 3.

map = lambda f, a: [f(x) for x in a]
filter = lambda f, a: [x for x in a if f(x)]
I don't see redundancy as much of a problem for a couple reasons:

#1 If you teach yourself to scan text well, your brain becomes very good at parsing the data that is new. I can get the gist of a one-page article in 10-15 seconds if it contains only a few paragraphs of truly "New" information.

#2 Redundancy cements important knowledge in your mind. I am willing to bet that if you examined any 'designed' course of study such as you would find in college, you will see a great deal of redundancy. Studies have shown that spaced repetition and review can greatly impact how well you retain a certain body of knowledge. If you are reading articles on the same subject in an attempt to learn a body of knowledge there would be some benefit to the overlap, especially considering that any new nuggets of info would be learned in context and cemented in place next to already known facts.
New York Times editor: "Serious discussion" about charging for online news
What is that intended to mean?

Do you mean:

$var = $tom ? $tom : 'ed';

If so, you can also do:

$var = $tom or $var = 'ed';

If you don't want to calculate $tom twice.
Definitely good advice. Having the skills to be able to fix problems when shit goes awry (or at least enough so that things aren't exploding until someone who really knows what they're doing can fix them right) would be a good thing, for sure.
Take what I say with a grain of salt as fitness is different for everybody.

I've gone through several cycles where I have gained and then lost weight. Right now I am in another weight-loss cycle as a result of a overly sedentary lifestyle; this is the hardest "comeback" that I have ever staged.

When People ask me what my goals are I always tell them that I want to loose 30lbs. I don't elaborate any further unless they show a real interest in what I'm doing.

In all actuality, my real goal is to loose an "aparent 30lbs." Essentially, when I have reached my initial fitness goals I want to physically appear as if I were 30lbs lighter. Since my regimen is a combination of diet, aerobic exercise, and weight training the actual metrics at the end of my goal will most likely result in me having lost some weight, but also having gained some weight as muscle mass; this is, in my opinion the healthiest way to approach weight loss.

Having said that, normal metrics such as BMI, and weight are not good indicators of improvement. Its actually better, at least for me, to use much simpler criteria. In my case I look at easily measurable things: Am I getting stronger? Is my cardiovascular training getting longer and/or harder? Am I sleeping better at night? How are my sustained energy levels throughout the day? Am I staying fully hydrated? Am I handling stress better? Is my overall attitude positive? And finally, do I see visual improvement by taking a self-photo every 2 weeks?

Really I only check things like weight and body fat % at the end of a particular fitness goal and even then I don't give it much credence.
How do you deal with impatience?
This is one of the problems I want to deal with but I cannot find any advice. I'm restless, I have trouble spending more than half an hour reading a book or concentrating on a given activity. I also find it very hard to concentrate while waiting for something to happen. Is thare anyone who managed to deal with impatience? How?
WorldPay do this.
If I remember correctly, I think it only offers to install(with default behavior being no openoffice install).

I think it's a fair enough practice; you are installing java which is free, and nothing wrong if they try to promote some stuff as long as they don't trick/force you.
I have found it is really beneficial to copy somebody else, but ONLY if you take the extra step of completely deconstructing the solution to understand exactly what makes it work. Once you've identified the inner workings of it you have gained the ability to change it to fit your needs and take it far beyond the original design. In short, learn the principles behind the design and you can apply it anywhere.
What if the business is not setup in US? Do you need a bank account in US if you want a merchant account?
Ask HN: How do you find a colorscheme for your project?
Assuming that you do webdesign yourself, at least initially, how do you go about finding a good colorscheme?

Do you "borrow" from a site you like, get help from design-savvy friends, use online color tools, or do you just have great design sense and come up with breathtaking colorshcemes at the drop of a hat?

If there are any good online resources for this please share them :-)

Thanks!
I am curious as to why this comment is garnering so many upvotes.

Let me be clear; I do not think those traits are net positives overall. The fact that when we are young we are a bit too willing to defer to authority is an artefact of buggy monkeyware. Any Manager/CTO who hires youngsters because they are easy to browbeat and relatively cheap is on crack; it feels real good at first, but it destroys you sooner rather than later.

Most teams benefit from a diversity in age as well as in outlook. You need people who are experienced enough to be able to see through the bullshit, but you also need people who will stay up late hacking on a skunk works project because they are excited about the work.
The ubiquitous 3AM phone call.
In the article they talk about how they initially wanted to charge a per-year fee but eventually had to charge a per-month fee, but anyway the better granularity was better for everyone in the end.

Now I'm thinking, what would it take to reduce the payment granularity to 2 weeks? 1 week? 1 day? 1 hour? 1 minute?

I mean, we already have compound interest, which calculates interest continuously and precisely over time (I think). Why couldn't we have the same for payments?

Now I know that "micro-payments" aren't a new idea and it must be a really tough challenge but if someone has some knowledge of the different difficulties I'd love to see them spelled out.
The important sentence in that story is Prof. Rancourt's suspension is the most serious step in a long series of grievances and conflicts with the university dating back to 2005.

Still, even if one-third of his colleagues have complained about him, I doubt they'll be willing to set the precedent of tenured profs being fired, they'll strike for him if the union requires it.
This is a great 37s post, less about how a tiger manages to stalk its prey and more about how a multicellular animal manages to drive its Krebs cycle.

Note that a really important code issue is buried in the comments here, with DHH following up to clarify: you have to decide whether you want to store credit cards, or enroll them with your payment processor gateway.

I have an opinion here, as one of the people the payment industry sends out to punch unwitting developers in the kidneys: don't store credit card numbers.

It's not just that you have to follow "PCI guidance" (which changes at an average rate of once every 18 months). It's that you become liable for PCI auditing at some unknowable point in the future. PCI audits are not one of our industry's great technical success stories; imagine an IRS audit where the auditor had an upsell interest in making you fail, and you're getting close to the mark.
Yes, you are always free to misunderstand.

The interesting thing is: some do, some do not.

(We have physics, chemistry, and others, exactly to distinguish different levels...)
Paying by the month gives you extreme flexibility. You can always lower the price in the future, although raising it is a bit harder.

One thing to do would be to compare what your app does with the one that costs 300/month, and what yours does compared to the one that costs 14/month. Where does your app fit in?

How much are you looking to make? How much are your costs per customer and costs per month? The basic way to price is to add up your fixed costs (rent, hosting, marketing, etc) and the cost per month for providing the software, and then add in a healthy profit margin. That's how much you should charge.

There are a lot of other pricing mechanisms, including how much money your software will save the customer, how much value they perceive it to have, etc. You could always start high and just keep lowering the price until you reach the ratio of customers to price that you want.
Aren't they getting that from Authorize.net?
I love the animation.
Glad you are ok, if you are still laid up in bed, check out itunes U for some lectures on something interesting an give your eyes/body a rest.
Abject thievery.

As I waste-time on the internet (err, do market research) I bookmark attractive sites. My only scruple is that I try to pick a site that is totally off-topic in a completely different industry. One of my projects recently "was inspired by" http://heroku.com/. I hope they take that as a compliment.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my little netbook. But to me that’s the worst solution for someone on bed rest. The problem is you run into something that requires the full computer (usually due to screen size like a video tutorial that’s too tall to watch on the Eee PC). So now you’re supposed to stay in bed but your computer's just 4 ft away and you really want to watch this video (or whatever).

Maybe others here just have more self control but for me having the netbook is just a recipe for disaster.
I found these by by asking Google:

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

http://www.colourlovers.com/palettes/top

but found them pretty wanting..
how much you get paid is a function of the value society puts on your skills divided by how common your skills are

This is a statement of fact, not opinion of what ought to be. Part of what Gates (and others) are saying, I think, is that to have a better functioning society, we need to increase the value society puts on teaching.

If we provide the educational opportunity that Bill Gates, John Resig, or Larry Page got to every child in America, we will all be a lot better off.
They're ok, but I'm thinking something just focused on weight loss. More specific is better. I think our company would also be the "referee" to give the service more legitimacy.
probably because of those fixed processing fees that you get charged...plus you'd have the stuff show up more than once on the credit card statement
Learning to live in the moment might help. That means living in your body.

You may want to add meditation or yoga to your life and move away from some of the electronic gizmos. I think they really have a lot of us overstimulated.
The main difficulties are the high per-transaction fees and the reasonably large percentage revenue cuts all of the concerned parties take from you. The more you charge, the larger the percent of your revenue you keep.
Don't cargo cult code or business plans. But if someone can solve your O(n) problem in O(log n), do try to understand and adopt their solution.
The logo is a real game of life, and if you download Golly, it comes with a bunch of patterns you can try, including the scrolling "golly" text.
Ask HN: Hacker News Thread Dynamics
Have you ever noticed an interesting quality of HN. Once a topic gets a lot of posts, the first post on the page determines the discussion: the replies to this posts go before even the second highest rated post and any comment on the raw body goes far, far to the bottom. Is this good? Is this the intended effect?

I don't know any easy solution but I think its something to keep in mind.
Authorize.net, basically just an API front for the real money handling, is only available through 3rd-party resellers. My best guess is that 37s's bank is one of those and is also providing the merchant account.

I know that you can just grab a merchant account and then find a reseller for Authorize separately, but it just seems easier to take the package deal from someone, and banks are safer than some random Authorize reseller on the web, IMO.
Seems like culture-jamming. I bet we are going to see a lot more of this as time goes by. Blogs are here to stay, and mainstream press can't put the-internet-as-a-source genie back in the bottle.