skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This kind of article is mildly intellectually stimulating, but doesn't provide any new information about anything, and is only likely to spark debate of a truly inane variety: talking at one another between people who have no intention of listening to the others' point of view.

Speaking of interesting material that doesn't belong here, can we please just stop posting wikipedia links? If I want to read random historical trivia I can go there myself.
No. Christianity is worthwhile because the Sistine Chapel is pretty. Whether or not the Christian god exists is undecidable and ultimately a McGuffin.

I grew up with a literalist/fundamentalist version of Christianity, and when I discovered the atheistic/materialistic/scientific worldview it came as a shock - I implanted on it immediately, the world made much more sense almost overnight and I lost all interest in anything remotely spiritual. Later on I discovered the rest of religion, and the intellectual shock was similar, but not much else changed. I still find the purely materialistic worldview perfectly satisfactory and I fully expect that it will continue to conquer everything in its path, up to and beyond the mind-body problem, but until then, and maybe even after then, I have no problem characterizing my lack of personal commitment to faith, God, or the spiritual as purely aesthetic. I can appreciate, to some extent, why other people prefer to believe it, and I can appreciate, to some extent, why many people on each side either can't or won't believe that sensible people could hold such obviously stupid and wrong beliefs. Every time I start to think that the religious have a monopoly on lack of curiosity, some atheist pops up and makes a spectacle of their own righteous single-mindedness. I prefer to cultivate a certain amount of genuine curiosity about, and appreciation for, the aesthetic preferences of the other 80% of the human race.
I remember reading about a required minimum salary for officers, so...

Where are the tax accountants?
But really just to put the word 'turbo' on your machine, to make it seem faster.

I had what, 3-5 PCs with that switch on there, and never once used that feature.
Overly broad and probably ineffective. Although I can't imagine a time when this would be harmful any effective click would prove annoying.
MS are not the ones who f*ed up the economy or failed to provide the oversight.
There may be people who wear T-Shirt Hell shirts because they think they're funny instead of because they want to offend people and get a reaction, but that's not germane to the question of whether anonymity is one of the essential elements of trolling. It isn't.
Social and economic impacts of severe space weather
The Do's and Don't of Entrepreneurship
A clarification: H.264 videos on YouTube don't use FLV containers. Flash 9 and up supports H.264 in MP4 containers natively. The iPhone app simply streams these directly.
None of this would be needed if Apple did the right thing and added a garbage collector.

In the mean time, thanks for the links.
Time Lapse: Painting a Jumbo Jet in 3 Minutes
Adobe AIR for Linux Delivers (if You Can Get it Installed)
I too grew tired of debates over religion years ago. But this article actually substantially altered my way of thinking about religion. That hasn't happened to me in a very long time, so I thought it was worth posting. Your mileage may vary though.
CMS is definitely an NP-hard kind of problem... no matter how many features a CMS has, end users will always find something lacking...

One of the other issues I have found with CMS is that the software does not evolve as fast as the business requirements... so good luck!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot-Hawley_Tariff_Act

Every politician in every country right now is trying to raise barriers, buy at home first, preserve jobs for Americans/Canadians/Chinese/... . It's even more the wrong thing to do now than it was in 1930, because trade is so much more than it was in 1930, and should be resisted over and over and over again.
I looked at the static pictures in the presentation PDF. Now, I've looked at the videos though. Great stuff.
When a product is covered by more than one patent, the patent-holders end up in a tragedy of the commons problem. The commons is the person with the product. He has money he can pay. Each patent holder has a veto over the product and wants to extract as much as they can. One hold-out can ruin it for everyone and every single stake holder often ends up worse off as a result.
Why are you pushing files with rsync with a working copy? That is what "export" is for. There is no special security in the .svn folder, because you are not supposed to publish it to the website.
I'd love to read some commentary by someone who's really intimately familiar with the iPhone and its internal workings about the rationale for not having a garbage collector. I've seen Apple refer to performance, but.. how big an effect is it, really? If anyone here wants to have a shot at explaining it, go ahead! :)
Ask YC: What is a good book about the JVM?
I'm looking to learn some bottom-up Java - any suggestions?
I just saw Man on Wire, it's a must-watch.
I love Pirates of Silicon Valley. Second/third/fourthing.
Wrong, wrong, and wronger.

"When Dawkins and other proselytizing atheists point out the errors, inconsistencies, and crudities of the Bible, they hope to be the doughty Daniels of their own True Faith. But by showing that there is a great deal of myth in scripture, all they are doing is to fault the people of two or three millennia ago for not being aware of current scientific theory and for using the means available to them to describe natural phenomena. "

No, they're faulting modern religious people for basing their social morals and political choices on something written by the people of two or three millenia ago who weren't aware of current scientific theory. Truly most Christians don't believe the world is flat and rests on four pillars, but a large percentage do believe, for instance, that homosexuality is a sin because of stories from the same book. It's not so much that they don't believe the Bible is literal that irks atheists, it's that they don't believe that the parts that are clearly fiction discredit the parts that are murky. It's as if they're saying "well, this math book routinely says things like 2+2=6 and 5*3=87, and I know that's incorrect, but I'm going to trust the chapter on differential equations."

"The theory of evolution, to cite one example, does not per se disturb any Christian who is not a literalist."

In that case, 51% of American Christians are literalists, since that's the percentage who believe in intelligent design.

"What disturbs him is the neo-Epicureanism that frequently accompanies it (and for which there is no more empirical basis than there is for the idea of intelligent design)."

Clearly this fellow is not a biologist, or someone who even reads the science section on Google News. Evolution occurs daily, and we can and do watch it. Wild animals that humans hunt are rapidly growing smaller. Bacteria are becoming antibiotic resistant. Genes for lactose tolerance becoming pervasive in humans.
Great. Those wanting to break the law simply need to break their phone's speaker while the rest of us have to live with annoying phones that beep uncontrollably when we want to take pictures.
+1 for Cube. Cube 2: Hypercube and Cube Zero, not so much.
Though Steve Jobs thought Noah Wyle was so good that he invited him to trick the audience at one of his keynotes.
To be perfectly honest I'm not sure if its an rsync or a checkout. I'm not the sys admin or the person who set up the process. But doing an export makes sense, that was something I was thinking about after I discovered this. Thanks for the confirmation.

Regardless, this problem exists and it exists on some extremely large websites.
> Oh, and cowboy bebop

I think Ein, yes the dog, is my all time favorite character in any series/movie ever.
I was thinking more of that scene, where his line before that one was "Are you, Alice, menstruating right now?" It's clear he's more interest in her than the study. Again, it makes for a funny movie, but it's also making fun of scientists.
I agree 100%, but there is disruption though. In the future, thing trend can be broken.

I'm a big advocate for robots, as you know. But in a span of 10 years they might advance enough to eliminate, say, 50% of the jobs out there. Think about what would happen if you no longer need 90% of factory workers, drivers, cleaning staff, etc...

That's why we should really start to stress the value of retraining for new industries. People should expect to learn new things quickly.
It won't go anywhere, don't worry too much.
A friend of mine frequents Taco Loco over in Somerville. I've never been, but he seems to always be talking about how good the food is there.
Well, it's lowered the tax rate. Social conservatives have had their way with us though. They're one Republican president away from repealing Roe.
The (quasi-?) official specs, "The Java Virtual Machine Specification" and "The Java Language Specification" are about as bottom-up, comprehensive, and dry/matter-of-fact as possible.

Online:

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jvms/

http://java.sun.com/docs/books/jls/
Edit: I used "anti environmentalism" because while I don't think they hate the environment rather they see little value in protecting it. There could be some pro environmental movement (R)'s out there but I have never heard of any of them. The 1930's US dust bowl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl) is really the first case where we noticed a problem and attempted to reverse the effects of changes to our environment by planting trees. You could also look at the creation of the national park system as part of the same movement.

Note: This rest of this is a long rant but I am not going to delete it.

OK, they all all corrupt bastards. Both the stimulus bill and the bailout package are supported by both sides. They like to talk shit, but watch who votes for it. Anyway, it's not a long term issue so moving on:

http://www.wallstats.com/deathandtaxes/

The federal government has a 400 billion dollar budget deficit. Now let's forget about the huge unfunded liabilities from the Iraq war, the stimulus package etc but just look at that number. We spent ~800 billion on national defense. Inflation is one thing but "President Clinton's FY 1998 budget requests $250.7 billion in budget authority and $247.5 billion in outlays for the Department of Defense (DoD)." Granted the we are fighting 2 wars for some reason. Now, if we cut defense spending by 1/2 we would have zero budget deficit. No single Republican bill in the last 20 years would reduce the size of the federal government by that much hell all of them put together is smaller than that single change.

When the Republicans wanted to improve the national heath care system with their prescription drug plan they prevented the agency from using it's size to reduce drug prices. This is standard practice for all inshurance companies but for some reason they felt it was unimportant.

Obama's plan is require private heath care companies to cover people with prior medical issues. Regulation with Zero cost to the government which actually fixes a major problem. The other issue is letting inshurance companies drop people who become expensive to treat. You might take issue with this, but having inshurance that becomes unfordable when you develop a problem sounds like not having any inshurance at all. That's like your car inshurance saying we will pay for 5% of the damage but we decided to drop your coverage in the middle of the accident because it would have looked like you where going to cost us money.

When Oil was over 100$ a barrel GB kept increasing the size of the national reserve even when it was running out of capacity. Rather than using it as a strategic asset and bursting the Oil bubble sooner he decided to increase the problem by reducing the worlds oil supply costing us money and gaining an asset that's drooped to 1/3 of it's original value.

PS: The federal budget is also this out of whack while they have reduced funding for state programs. Yea, let's talk about states rights but at the same time let's cut the purse strings.
I've used Drupal for a few projects as well as having written more than a few CMS solutions from scratch in PHP and Rails.

I share your dislike for Drupal, but I wouldn't go so far as to say it's unimpressive. My gut instinct is that Drupal is about as good a hybrid framework/CMS as you can get. That's not to say other approaches might not hit your or my sweet spots better, but fundamentally I think it's operating at the wrong level of abstraction.

The problem is to give you anything that works out of the box a CMS has to make a ton of assumptions. Drupal goes to great lengths to make everything configurable and hookable. It's hard to come up with a use-case that can't be coded using Drupal hooks. The problem is you face the crushing weight of a system designed to meet the needs of any and all potential websites. Even though deep knowledge of the system allows you to do amazing things with very few lines of code, the system itself is a straitjacket where the cost of seemingly trivial customizations can be crippling. If you find yourself with a scalability problem that can't be solved with naive caching you may well be totally fucked.

Contrast to web frameworks like Rails. The goal here is to give you a set of raw tools to make it easier to handle the trivial yet repetitive tasks that come up over and over again in web development. Unused features in Rails don't introduce cognitive load on the developer. If you've spent any time writing CGI scripts before then you can see the reason for almost every feature and design decision.

It's possible to build a career on top of Drupal. Becoming expert in it will allow you to "solve" a wider range of client problems faster than any other CMS or Framework. The problem is that you have to embrace compromise at all levels. You will never create an amazing design in Drupal. You will never create a successful startup in Drupal. You will never write a lean and scalable site in Drupal. If you are willing to compromise you will find a huge swath of potential clients who think $1000 is a lot to pay for an e-commerce site or want a do-it-yourself solution with a little hand-holding.
Ok - So - What's the alternative?

There are some inventions that take vast amounts of investment, yet are easy to copy.
Mechanical or not, this is a very untidy way of implementing a "fast lexical scanner". Even the Duff's device looks cleaner and more elegant in comparison. And it's not like there is a shortage of other implementation options that are as fast.
Well, its only got 128MB ram and flash storage...so there is no virtual memory I suspect. I'm sure the OS takes a big chunk of memory, with the possibility of background tasks eating up more. With a garbage collected system, I'm sure you'd routinely see performance hits when the garbage collector runs as it frantically tries to free storage with low and fragmented memory conditions. Not to mention the extra battery drain to constantly scan the freeable pointers. This is an embedded device with big limitations...you need to be more mindful of resources.
I think the thread, where a bunch of designers all argue for approaches to a garage-door opener better than a single button, actually refutes the post.

Compared to all the ideas for multiple buttons, buttons with LEDs, rocker buttons you have to hold down, etc. -- the classic single button shines. Tiny, simple to build, and 999 times out of 1000, all you have to do is push it when the door isn't already in the state you want.

Who cares if you need to click a few times while paying attention to door state on those very, very rare occasions when you need a half-opened door, or mid-operation reverse, etc.?

Chalk the blog post and thread up to "Designers Overthinking Things".
My two cents - that name is fantastic. Has PR appeal all over it. This sounds like a brilliant strategy, good luck.
Mozilla has already committed to native Theora/Vorbis support in Firefox 3.1, and WikiMedia (who will administer the grant) is already committed to using Theora and Vorbis for Wikipedia.
Register now for RailsConf (warning: it's very expensive)
No, you don't. I have a C Corp and and no FTEs - just contractors - including myself. We're incorporated in California. I set up the company with legal counsel, at considerable (though thankfully deferred :)) expense. Both my lawyer and banker agree I don't have to have any employees.

I don't know about paying dividends - doesn't capital gains get taxed quite heavily? I think the normal route is to pay everyone as a contractor and let them sort out their own taxes.

You'll just need to send 1099s to all your contractors - and if you use special electronic payments through a bank like Wells Fargo, that'll take a lot of hassle out of it all.
I ran for public office last November. Very little in this article appears to be useful, except as "one reporters rant" - i.e. take it with a pinch of salt. With one exception, every newspaper interview I had was conducted via email.

One of the books available at my public library, which I felt was helpful is this one:
http://www.amazon.com/Make-Most-Every-Media-Appearance/dp/00...

If that book isn't available, get any book you can from the library and/or local bookstore on media appearances. The skill you use when interviewing for a job isn't that different from being interviewed by a journalist.

One of the essential points is that you have a few (hopefully compelling) set of "talking points." The ranter called it "stick religiously to some pre-cooked three point memo and ignore all other questions". Sticking to them "religiously" is wrong, but having 3 (and three is an extremely powerful storytelling number) points is important. The key is to not sound like a drone reading a powerpointless slide.

As for the "off the record" remark... nothing is off the record. Ever. You might say it is, but it will get printed anyway if the editor wants it in.
any sufficiently brilliant idea is indistinguishable from drivel?

After reading the article, I'm thinking I have that backwards.
Hang on you're writing a Scheme that compiles down to PHP?
I guess this is what happened to reddit.
How do horses walk? Many experts don't know, study says
As per the guidelines, you shouldn't make them. If you think the article is that bad, flag it. I did.
Dylan removes the parenthesis, but it doesn't go as far as using whitespace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_programming_language
>> Then maybe I'm misunderstanding the point of your reply.

I was pointing out that your examples don't make sense, as it's trivial to
translate the Haskell code into another general purpose language (such as
Scheme, C, Perl, Fortran, etc), while impossible to translate into an eager (strictly evaluated) language (such as...?).

Additionally, the reason monads are cumbersome in other languages has
nothing to do with eager/lazy evaluation, or conditional computation, and
everything to do with the fact that monads exist in Haskell to solve it's
sequencing problem (arising from the fact that it's a declarative language).
Imperative languages have no problem with sequencing, and therefore have no
need for monads.
Larry and Sergey: The Playboy Interview
I normally keep my religious views to myself as they seem to conflict with the majority of people here (and Reddit, for that matter), but...

In that case, 51% of American Christians are literalists, since that's the percentage who believe in intelligent design.

The two groups (evolution vs. intelligent design) are not mutually exclusive. I fully believe in the big bang and the process of evolution, but why couldn't a higher power have a hand in that? Call it 'divine evolution'.
The recursive idea is an old one. If it worked we'd have had some sort of assembly-based nanotechnology decades ago. The problem is that the nature of matter and mechanics changes as you get small; the world as we know it ceases to be, and you enter a world where what we macroscopic folk call a "chemical reaction" becomes a "physical force", where friction is a much larger concern, and where this strange new van der Waals force makes everything strangely alternative sticky and slippery in strange and bold new ways.

Unfortunately, we need to build an entirely new engineering discipline for the small. Which is underway, but takes some time.
Clearly this fellow is not a biologist, or someone who even reads the science section on Google News

The author attacks neo-epicureanism not evolution. The author believes in evolution.

In that case, 51% of American Christians are literalists, since that's the percentage who believe in intelligent design.

Well yes, but that's not an indictment of Christianity per se. Most people who believe in "science" have very superstitious views of science. Most of the "studies show ..." features on the five o'clock news are really cargo cult science. If we judged the value of science by what the average person believes, we would toss the whole field out.

Also, while I do not agree with the Christian teachings about homosexuality, in general, I think relying on accumulated wisdom for morality is a much better strategy than throwing the whole book out and rewriting morality from scratch. A lot of the social science fads of the 20th century, from Freudism to equality-of-results-feminism are far more crackpot than the moral teachings of the Gospels.
NSZombieEnabled +1
Is Java to Blame for Sun Layoffs?
Maybe not so much hacker, but let me suggest Slacker.
Payroll doesn't have to be complicated - through our bank (Bank of America) we have an automated payroll system that handles everything, including all the tax forms and it is free (since we meet some threshold of employees w/ direct deposit at BofA).
In the informal algorithm description, it says "Create Children from the best programs by mating and mutating them". By mating, do you mean actually taking two (or more) "programs" and merging the contents? I looked over the code, but I don't know enough clojure to find any part that looked like it merged two programs.

Incidentally, now I want to learn clojure :).
Incidentally, I wouldn't suggest a frontal attack on any established company. The method should always be to take over some territory they're overlooking (ideally because they're in denial about it), and then expand from there.
You're thinking of the pass-through tax situation for S-Corps; people play games with dividends vs. salary to hide their money from FICA taxes. If you're a 1040 contractor, you're paying FICA anyways.
Yes. Not so much particular qualities of Java, but that for several critical years in the 90s they focused on Java as if it was going to save them (to the point of changing their stock symbol) and ignored glaring fundamental flaws in their business model.
I won't address the rest of your post, but you're misreading his quote about neo-Epicurianism. He's not arguing that there's no empirical basis for evolution, but rather that there's no empirical basis for the _ethical_ component, neo-Epicurianism, which he sees as often being held by modern atheist believers in evolution.
...tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.
Accurately depicting the walking stance of quadrupeds has been a problem for humankind for as long as there has been visual art. A great examination of this issue by a paleobiologist who is also an accomplished artist can be found in The Nature of Paleolithic Art,

http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Paleolithic-Art-Dale-Guthrie/dp...

which was the most interesting book I read in 2008.
Browser Detection without Javascript
Technological development has always accelerated. So far it hasn't caused dramatic social disruptions. Maybe now happens to be the exact moment that it will. But by default you have to assume your fears are the usual temporal chauvinism.
Gattaca is currently free on Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/46029/gattaca