skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
California has an infrastructure project that will put charging stations all over the state.

http://ecolocalizer.com/2008/11/20/electric-car-infrastructu...

As goes California, so goes the rest of the country.
Surprisingly, there's plenty of alcohol and sex there. Gambling is a separate story.
Please post your email address here, or at least put it in your profile, so people can contact you privately instead of posting their own email addresses. I'm more than qualified, my email is in my profile (just click on my name) and I might be interested in working with you on a reciprocal basis if you're willing to consider such an arrangement.

Please email me because this forum doesn't alert me via email to new posts, so I seldom visit a thread more than once. Thanks.
Isn't that saying "let them eat cake?"
Firstly, Darwin "basically" said that the best adapted organism will have most offspring, so you are setting up a straw man by suggesting he implied that competition for resources is necessarily the over-riding factor.

Secondly you say that "In reality, the organisms that are the best adapted for their niche win-- almost always because they are the best at cooperating".

Now, I'm eager to see you give decent examples. How is cooperation in any way involved in the production of poison-resistant rats, the speckled moth transitions, the evolution of the horse's hoof, the eye?

Is the first quote above REALLY suggesting that there is no competition for fit mates among mating animals? That birds won't strip a fruiting tree before their compatriots get a chance?
Nice, so I can finally justify that book I've been working on as a "startup".
Ah, so God's in the cosmic rays and the replication errors?

I'm sorry but the original poster is clearly saying that the article is attempting to be misleading, by creating a false dichotomy between natural selection and 'designed' evolution.

I see no evidence that the dichotomy is false.
Companies have and are competing with both MS and Google. If MS/G aren't competing fairly, that's why we have antitrust laws.
Quite to the contrary, after recently becoming interested in history, I have found scans of rare first edition works on Archaeology on the web that no library within 500 miles of me had.

The web cannot provide equal weight to old and new stuff alike. All media in any age will have a recency bias. The web makes it much much easier for one to access old books. The Kindle (and similar products) will make it easier (by building central repositories and making it possible to monetize the resale of very old books in one more way)
You, like the people in this study, are simply not seeing things through a religious person's eyes. Let me give you one example.

It is well within the realm of possibility that a religious person could believe the impact event that made the Dinosaurs extinct was some kind of divine intervention. If God's purpose is to create man and man could not stay alive long enough to evolve with Dinosaurs roaming around than it's not a big stretch for God to do away with the Dinosaurs.

If they believed that, and also believed humans evolved according to Darwin's theories, wouldn't that be "guidance by a higher power?"

That's just the most obvious religious argument that could be made. There are tons of others. The fact that the people doing this study didn't think far enough ahead to come up with something I thought of in the minute after reading your post proves, to me, that it's flawed.
That sounds right, I can think of some revamp/rewrite projects that felt stunted because we only really thought about the problem in terms we already created in the first iterations.

However, in practice I find that programmers don't necessarily know what the (software engineering) problem is, what feasible solutions are out there (feasible != possible), don't know what the drawbacks to their plan are, and generally feel unmotivated if they don't start banging out code relatively soon. It seems really easy for a project to stay indefinitely in the planning stages if you want to make sure it's a "perfect" solution, and it's very hard to know that a solution is "perfect" without encountering its drawbacks through experimentation, i.e. coding.
There's definitely some clever coding afoot when a pure-python library can outpace a C wrapper library.
"When you embrace Darwin, you're not embracing science, you're embracing fascism."

Bollocks. I embrace Einstein, does that make me a Jew?

You quote from "No Contest", an interesting book, but not a book about evolution. You'll also recall from that book that the author quotes Stephen Jay Gould saying that natural selection doesn't imply cooperation or competition a priori. So I think your supporting quotes don't add much to the argument.

And, so what if animals have evolved to cooperate with each other? If that's the way natural selection has taken things then so be it. Doesn't take away from natural selection as the mechanism.

So, the core of your argument is "Darwin basically said that species compete for scarce resources, and the organisms that are the best at competing win. This is entirely wrong."

Perhaps quoting Darwin is the solution: "As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form"

"Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.... I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection"

My reading of that is that Darwin is saying that individuals compete to survive and they compete with other 'organic beings' and nature in general. And specifically he is saying any variation that is profitable to the individual. Doesn't exclude cooperation with others. He says that any variation that is beneficial will make that individual survive and that it will be passed on.

I read Darwin's struggle as a metaphor. For example, if I am born with a stronger immune system than those around me I may be more likely to survive an epidemic and thus I am more successful in the 'struggle' for life. In no way did I actively compete against my fellow humans.

Similarly, if I am born with better vision than my fellow humans I may survive longer because I am a better hunter (or see the bear that wants to eat me before others do). Did I struggle against my fellow human? No.
Toyota I can see having more commercially viable PHEV models, but have you paid attention to any NA automaker's adverts recently? They haven't even noticed that they're in a burning house carrying a crate of gunpowder. I mean watch the commercial for the new Ford F-150, it has steps. Yes their selling feature right now is steps. It's mentally retarded, they completely gloss over the fact they've increased the carrying and towing capacity for the vehicle because they've got steps.

They even say something like 'with the extra capacity, you'll need those steps more than ever' and I'm just trying to think through the logic there, because whenever I've seen a truck fully loaded it's been done by a fork lift or a bobcat for when we filled the sucker full of sand... it had a purpose, I swear! And it wasn't sandcastles neither.

My point is, is that everybody is watching gas prices to see when they spike up again. The price is quite nice here in Canada, but we're all waiting for it to double and be at the same price it was last summer. What no NA automaker seems to realise is that the market has completely changed, right now almost everyone is wanting fuel efficiency because everyone's afraid they're going to be spending a fortune commuting.
Selecting the option on a survey that species "evolved over time under the guidance of a supreme being" allows ample room for believing in whatever is the current widely-held scientific opinion. This is a smear job.

They don't like religious people. We get it. They should just admit their biases and write an op-ed instead of trying to mislead people with this truly dreadful article.
I don't think he was degrading the work. The definition of "menial" is:

"of or relating to servants"

He was saying that many of the Indians there are working under conditions that can make it impossible to leave weather they would like to or not. That is not a comment on Indians in general nor on the value of digging ditches. Rather it seems to be a comment on the terrible societal problems in Dubai.
Let's examine your thesis by replacing Google with Microsoft in your third last sentence.

Microsoft was massively profitable in the 90s. Why did nobody compete with them?

Oh wait, Google did.

Why did they not get crushed like a bug?

Because they innovated.
1% of the population make things happen.
9% of the population watch what happens.
90% of the population wonders what happened.

The majority of what most people believe is wrong in one or more very significant ways. This has been the case since the first people started beliving.

About the only thing that will continue to exist in abundance is stupidity sustained by abysmal ignorance and the taking of stuff that belongs to others.
The point of speaking out should not be to stop the government from continuing it's policies, which is futile. It should instead be to educate people about the flaws in these policies so that when they do fail it will be understood that it wasn't because "they didn't do enough" but because of something more basic.

To merely give in and not continue to speak out would be to assent to their policies.

I agree that we should not look to stop him now but looking three chess moves down the road still requires playing in the present. If we stop proclaiming the truth, we won't even be able to say "I told you so" because we wouldn't have.

However, I think that individual rants will not help much for these other goals anyway. We need a stronger, rational argument for why his plans won't work, and what we can do better.

In response to socialism, Mises did not merely try and say "See, it isn't working" because that kind of response is easily defused by statements such as "it wasn't pure enough". Instead, he wrote a rational argument from first principles about why it wouldn't work. Granted, not everyone has read his book or agrees with it, but it's better than just using evidence of previous failure. It's amazing how good humans are at rationalizing away flaws in their belief systems.

We should do the same thing with the current financial crises. Make clear statements about why it happened and what the best way to fix it is, and then try and get as many people to read them as possible.

As incorrect and irrelevant as academia often is, it has an amazing effect on future beliefs. If we can get the ideas out there, I'm sure that we can make a difference. Maybe not in time to stop the current president, but possibly in time to stop the next one.
Yes, but the other way around (Oracle's implementation of SQL lines up closer to Postgres). Also, Postgres has a procedural language based off Oracle's PL/SQL language called plpgsql, so if you have experience in one, learning the other is pretty simple.
Google Plans to Convert Finnish Paper Mill into Datacenter
Unless Twitter change their rate limiting model it makes sense to be be read-only still. This allows you to tap into the 100reqs/hr Twitter allocates to users rather than using up the IP rate limiting for generic requests.
Intel to Invest $7 Billion in US Operations
Who'll make the machines that automate? If there are a million people sitting on their haunches with nothing to do, don't you think some of them will find something constructive to build and employ the rest?

The industrial revolution massively automated practically all aspects of life. I didn't see a world wide job scarcity throughout the 20th century.
Thank you very much. . .you reminded me how I used to approach this when I was younger but not on my hands and knees begging for an extra addition in my portfolio. Your tone has inspired enough confidence in my to write up a strong selling-point given Web2.0 ever extending lexicon. I should just define my rate according to the technology I use and the trends they're making into the business sector. Thank you.
I agree. A religious person could go so far as to say that God put in place the process of evolution and let things run knowing that man would end up emerging.

The problem with that argument is deciding when God intervened. Evidence appears to point to the Big Bang theory being correct and we push further and further back in time closer and closer to the Big Bang itself we leave less and less room for God's intervention.
Comet is an abomination if you think the problem is how to design a persistent stream. But the real problem is how to design a persistent stream in the browser.
The wording needs to be quite specific here. For instance, I am essentially a deist, but I choose to believe that the universe was "created," if you will, by a deity who knew exactly how the starting conditions would play out. (Yes, I'm implying that the current state of the universe can be traced back to the Big Bang deterministically; we'll assume that the Divine Architect is not troubled by little things like quantum uncertainty, even though we are.)

The point is that if you said "iron_ball, do you believe humans evolved over time under the guidance of a supreme being," I might say yes. If you then said, "iron_ball, do you believe any stage of human evolution requires supernatural intervention," I would roll my eyes, slap my forehead, slap your forehead, and leave.
OpenID actually has support for extensions that can allow you to require additional requirements of the AP (authorizing party). This means a bank could, for example, ask for multi-factor authentication from the AP.

I doubt banks will accept generic identity providers in the near future, but I can see them allowing known players in the consumer internet space to provide multi-factor identification.

At the least they could let you identify yourself with another provider and then add additional factors on their side.
YouTube - My puppy - Elrond All Mighty
MSN  Hack
Using TCP View , you can easly get IP Address of a friend. Just start conversation on MSN and TCP View will do the rest.
... Compare it to Vegas. Alcohol is banned most places in Dubai. In Vegas there aren't even open container laws, you can walk around with a cocktail. As for the sex side, how many strip clubs are around? How many escorts? You can't walk down the strip without being offered cards for call girls. In Dubai you can't even kiss in public.
Tesla Model S: First Official Teaser Photo, $350 Million DoE Loan for Production
CSI Scandinavia: Computer Dissects Cadavers With No Scalpel
And we're off to the races!

Comment threads like this are why we can't have nice things.
Are they brilliant or just lucky? And how do you tell the difference?
Fine gentlemen?
Stimulus: 7 billion for broadband, 15 billion for science research
Why call center agents get paid so much.
I guess Marshall would argue that if there were no wealth redistribution scheme, all the non-executives would simply die off, followed by all the executives who made stuff for them, until eventually only a micro-economy existed of executives making stuff for other executives.

I agree that Marshall is concentrating too much on one side of the economic equation, though. He ignores that people could form less efficient micro-economies rather than die off. He ignores that human desire is ever-changing and limitless, capable of out-stripping the most efficient production facility. And he ignores the fact that people have intrinsic value to other people apart from employment: to interact with, to command, to love. People will pay to keep other people alive and happy.
The DNA evidence for evolution is overwhelming.

But evolution doesn't explain "inner experience" and probably never will.

So the mystery will remain, and many people will attribute or define this mystery to/as God.
The .NET framework is pretty good, but Stefan has a point on the paradigm limitations of ASP.NET (bringing the VB6 programmers to the web on a MS technology).

By thinking outside the MS box, we have built a site that receives over 5 million pageviews a day... but the .NET part is limited to serving pages with low traffic and interaction, managing sessions and hits and doing some minimalistic HTML rendering. The rest are Ruby-generated HTMLs and some indexing services.
If anything you could say a mixed economy doesn't work. The problem is the state makes all sorts of problems and then they blame it on free market capitalism. The current situation is widely attributed to the federal reserve's manipulation of the currency. In a Lassez Faire economy their would be no federal reserve.
There is an old saying, those who were asleep in CS 101 are doomed to be mocked on the Internet forever :-)
From the article:

"OK, it’s just one data point. All I know is sales of FogBugz and Copilot."

"This could be a fluke; it might not reflect any reality."

I think it's very informative for them to share (relative) sales numbers like this.
Could be. Or maybe he's just telling the truth. Do you have evidence of Joel being dishonest before? His blog doesn't feel like it is, to me.
In particular, there are a limited number of geosynchronous slots

Really? That's a circle of about 43,000 km radius, so more than 170,000 km long. Even if you want certain points, it's not like it's packed over there. You can separate a satellite some km from the next and still have plenty of space for hundreds. If a satellite is at the same distance from Earth as others, they won't be moving relative to them.
Dubai has debtors' prisons! Wow.
> if you can do it over http then you really should

There seems to be some wisdom here that I am not extracting successfully. It seems HTTP "can" in most cases. But where it can, do you really want to use it? Technically you could also write a db engine that reads over HTTP, but this must be a terrible idea; what would be the argument here that counters the rule of thumb?
I don't think there is any a priori bias toward either competition or cooperation, I just think that in practice organisms that are better at cooperating tend to be more plentiful than organisms that specialize in competing. Because the trophic levels form a pyramid of sorts, competing really only makes sense as the dominant strategy in the top layer or two where usable resources really are extremely scarce. But 99% of organisms don't fall into that category.

"In no way did I actively compete against my fellow humans."

Competition just means that in order for one person to win, another person has to lose. In the case of your immune system example, I would agree that you winning doesn't cause anyone else to lose. But in Darwin's words, "As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence." This to me does imply that for one person to win, someone else has to lose, even if there isn't any direct fight. When in reality, for most organisms, there are virtually unlimited resources and the best way to survive is to help everyone else survive as well. There are times when resources are scarce and competition becomes essential, but those times are the exception, and not the rule as Darwin's quote seems to imply.
The thesis of this article is built around an anecdote and two assertions.

The anecdote is that someone inserted a "Wilhelm" into finance minister Karl Theodor Maria Nikolaus Johann Jacob Philipp Franz Joseph Sylvester Freiherr von und zu Guttenberg's name. I think K. T. M. N. J. J. "Phil" F. J. S. F. von und zu Guttenberg has a sense of humor about it by now. Similar (though less amusing) anecdotes have been breathlessly reported for years now.

The assertions: first, that the greater part of all edits made by newcomers to the site are reverted by a new breed of xenophobic editors. This is an extraordinary claim. It's easy to disprove; go pull up Special:NewPages and watch dozens of new users create superfluous new pages every hour, most of which won't get reverted.

The second assertion, that attrition is taking a toll on WP administrators, is even more laughable. Go pull up Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship. Status-obsessed WP dorks spend weeks and months doing menial work (like patrolling new pages) to build a case for adminship. If anything, WP's problem is that it has too many of them.
someone should create a "Now with Amish!" bookmarklet (like the bacon one) that adds an image of an Amish person to any webpage. :-)
Hmm, "For every dollar invested in broadband, the economy sees a ten-fold return on that investment."
God I hated those arguments so much. I especially hated being told I should be using xml "because the parser is already written" as if writing a parser was the difficult part of... well anything really ;-)