skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, I think if we can keep "bad" people inside prisons, then surely we can keep "bad" people outside a solid concrete block with no windows and nothing inside that is really useful outside.

We don't worry about people stealing a chunk of sidewalk for example. They do steal signs and road equipment and reprogram emergency signs, etc.

But if we look around the world, the benevolence that arises from innovative products is almost always greater than the destruction it causes. Nuclear War vs. Nuclear Energy for example.

This would be a project as owned and loved by the people as Hoover Dam or the Interstate System or Golden Gate Bridge. A wireless cloud built by the people, for the people, has the potential to make our lives better, collectively, than any of those indivdual projects. In comparison, those projects benefitted relatively few in the big scheme of things, but a public cloud would benefit all and we would make sure it would by providing access for all.

I think at this point, our ability to provide the technology services is increasing faster than producers' ability to fill it up. There is enough content already to entertain most of us for many, many lifetimes. We could record every second of our life on two video cameras every second we are alive and still have plenty of space left over...
Ask HN: Review our app, Lizzer
http://lizzer.com

Just pushed the beta of our blogging tool. Lizzer is a bookmarklet app that helps users insert content into most web-based blogs or email clients. You can demo the functionality on the home page.
> On the other hand, no one has a need for a MegaBananaChoco bar in particular. If you never tell anyone about the bar, they're not going to suffer from not having it.

You're cheating. While it's fair to say that no one has a "need" for a specific bit of sugary goodness, it's not fair to say that no one needs better food and won't suffer from not having it.

Yes, the "need" for better food may be expressed, but that's rather uninteresting without a mechanism for determining how to satisfy that need. The "eat Reese's pieces" ad is actionable. "Eat good food" is both useless and uneconomic in that there's no point in someone paying to say it.
While(stdin)
continue hacking...?
Inside the ingenious hoax that fooled the British sports press
From the article:

Again, Gartner was saying the technology would take away $3.5 billion from the airline industry - this year. And that's just airline tickets. The total figure of corporate savings would also include room, board and other travel-related expenses.

All of this adds up to a persuasive return on investment (ROI). "Most telepresence systems pay for themselves within a year," said Erika Schroeder, senior marketing manager of Cisco TelePresence.
I wonder how many atheists are actually agnostics (depend on your definitions, naturally). No one can (yet?) prove the existence or non-existence of a god, and although there are some who claim that they can show that a god isn't necessary for all of this reality stuff to have come about (read: Dawkins), I am less convinced of that -- we (via science) don't know enough to make that argument. Yet.

Are you sure there is no god at all, or do you just doubt?

Myself, I suspect the universe itself is "god", so to speak. We are a way for the universe to know itself.
We don't have to go back to my younger self: I constantly have to advise YC startups about this.

What I tell them is short enough to put here. The only effective protection is secrecy. But you never want to seem overtly secretive. So the optimal policy is to seem to be explaining everything about what you're doing, but to omit the important but non-obvious details that you get right but someone trying to reproduce your project would initially get wrong. By definition, no one who's not an expert will notice when such details are omitted.

Part 2: Err on the side of openness. Your valuable secrets are not as valuable as you think, and the danger of telling people stuff is not as great as you think.
Get a "bed" computer and play world of warcraft.
umm, i don't see anything on your homepage except a link to digitalscientists...
I'm always puzzled by this argument. The Catholic Church doesn't teach that it is wrong to for unmarried people to use a condom while having sex, it teaches that t is wrong for unmarried people to have sex. The condom rule only applies to married people, there is no rule as to whether people who are already disregarding its teachings should be allowed to use condoms.
$ date +%s
That both oversimplifies his points and bypasses the interesting thought process behind them. It also cuts out the 10 tips at the bottom, a few of which are really useful insights or reminders, depending on your previous reading on this subject.
How Amazon.com is thriving in a horrendous retail climate
I hope they didn't just do the simple BMI calculation...that is really inaccurate.

It's not hard to lose weight if you are just trying to lose pounds: you just stop eating as much and don't do any weight training. Your body will burn away your lean muscle mass and you'll lose water weight depending on how you cut. The thing is though that without the muscle your metabolism goes down and you just gain it back...
hmm, DNS might still be switching over. I can see it here. Sorry, might have jumped the gun posting before it had time to propagate.
In my experience, it's amazingly reliable. As long as you're not working with a single advertiser, or small number. This is one of the reasons adsense is so successful - you're beholden to 'the market' rather than a single advertiser.

I think it'd be a really bad idea to discount it as a possible business model.
What's with the "trinity" poll? No other options?: atheist; yogi; inquisitivist... I guess it's a gentle way to troll along the edge's of Pandora.
6 days ago I commented in your post revealing DomainPigeon.

I predict that it won't work because domain squatters will simply scrape and register all of the semi-decent domain names.

Are there any means in place to prevent this from happening?
logic alert. It just doesn't make sense to me, given all evidence is so clearly, hugely against it.

You can't have evidence against something that does not exist. That's like saying all the evidence is against there being a real-live cartoon Donald Duck. What we can say is that there is a lack of evidence for something. We can further say that unless there is evidence for something we don't see any point in believing in it. But you can't disprove a negative. There is no evidence against God. We simply have no scientific way to talk about God existing. There is a lack of proof. Different animal.
"Don't be (visibly) evil."
I'd like to suggest adding a "None of the above" for those folks who refuse to be stuck into theological boxes
I have a strong bias toward whatever decision is made by someone who has significant skin in the game.

The people with skin in the game are using telepresence, instead of flying.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=470063

High-definition (HD)-based video meeting services will replace 2.1 million airline seats annually over the next three years [...] Gartner was saying the technology would take away $3.5 billion from the airline industry - this year. And that's just airline tickets. The total figure of corporate savings would also include room, board and other travel-related expenses.
Rtm's going to attend the next YC dinner using a QA

http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/429862...

which actually bear more than a passing resemblance to him...
Do you have a cite for that? I couldn't find anything reliable clarifying the issue.
As the popular quote goes, Atheist and Theist are so alike.. only difference is the Atheist believes in one less god.
The real problem here is that the chances of PHP 5.3 being used in production anytime soon are rather slim. "Stable" distros, like Debian, Red Hat and CentOS, are still using PHP 5.1, which has long since been found to have issues that have been fixed and improved in PHP 5.2. Some hosts are still not even up to that level...

For open-source projects like what I'm working on, our need to support a wide variety of hosting environments means that we took flack even just dropping compatibility for PHP 4 and 5.0.

I would love to be able to start using some of the newer/better features arriving in 5.3, but sadly, PHP 6.1 will likely be out before I can ever start using those features in public projects... :(
Browsers: More important than ever. Also more boring.
There's been a bit of a reaction against the constant anti-religious bashing on Reddit lately and I don't think that it's any less secular than it used to be. I think people just eventually get tired of hearing the same arguments repeated over-and-over against, with less intelligence and less wit each time. I think that people here realize the problems that a religious debate can lead to, and so avoid them.
SAP: HP Consultants Know What They're Doing, IBM And Accenture Don't
What's a better measure you can do on your own?
Lots and lots of domains
Uh, I'm a "hacker", which is why I read this site. The rest doesn't matter.
I never have and never plan on watching sports on espn's web site. I am going to be very disappointed when my bill goes up because of this.
22. I once ran into New Kids On the Block's Joey McIntyre in the lobby of an off-Broadway show. I told him he was the first boy I ever loved. He laughed and kind of smiled. This was the most gratifying moment of my life.

JOEY WAS MY FAVORITE, TOO!

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/2/6
The first impression of the service and the site in general is good.

But I'm not really happy with the registration. Why do I need to sign up? Didn't I just use the service on the website? I don't want to customize it, just give me the bookmarklet with some default services.

Anyway, I signed up 10 minutes ago and am still waiting for the e-mail with the activation link.
It's interesting to think about the possible uses for a machine like that.

My own personal interest is protein folding.

Proteins are folding right now, as you read this, in every cell of your body, and they're doing it in linear time.

But computationally we're stuck with exponential time.

The day we find an algorithm for linear time protein folding, is the day the world changes at least as much as when penicillin was discovered.
The 2k attacker machines --> 750k DNS server ratio is scary. There's a configuration to makes this possiblity go away... it's just not set by anyone apparently.

(see https://www.dns-oarc.net/oarc/articles/upward-referrals-cons... )
Eye-tracking studies: more than meets the eye
SAMSUNG T329 STRIPE (T-MOBILE)
Samsung T329 has a whole slew of features that are designed to keep the user going without bogging them down. Bluetooth is a great way to converse hands-free and with the ability to concentrate at the task at hand.
If your hosting bill is small relative to your income/savings, the financial incentive may not be as strong a motivator as you think.

I noticed the article cited cases where the people worked together or had some other social contact.

I wonder if the real motivator is not so much money as peer pressure or "social proof" (as Robert B. Cialdini might say).
"Sometimes what you make will be just fine if it’s released after three months - but add another six months (or longer) and it turns into a jumbled, complex mess."

Suddenly I'm reminded of the Peter Principle: people rise to their level of incompetence. A similar software principle would be: developers develop till they reach a complexity level their are incompetent to manage. That would explain a lot.
I'm sorry I have to disagree with the fundamental assumption of your argument.

Polls like this one attract new people and change the community.

Any one article will not profoundly change HN, but a steady stream will over time do just that.

And then HN will not be interesting any more.
Do you think people will continue paying money for webapps during a recession?

I think the evidence from the dotcom bust was that online advertising continued to grow.
Born believers: How your brain creates God
We're getting a bit knit-picky, but yes, you can get a callback directly--which is in fact what we're doing.

Vista and later (which includes Windows 2k8 Server) actually introduces a proper WSAPoll function, so you don't need to use the godawful select() anymore unless being masochistic really is just your thing.
That's interesting news. I had been wondering, myself, about the possibility of virtual YC-dinner attendance.
Religion has been part of society since the days of pre-human hominids. It does not exist solely because of belief. I am willing to bet that few Greeks literally believed that a god carried the sun across the sky in a chariot. Rather, religion fulfills many cultural and social functions that our increasingly secular world has not yet found good substitutes for.

I went to church on Christmas to hear some carols, and I was struck by the fact that I was actually surrounded by people from different age groups and with different life experience from myself. The younger folk helped out the old when they got sick, and the older folk helped the people with little children when they needed a sitter. This kind of social cohesion doesn't exist in secular society, where I spend 99% of my time surrounded by people within a five-year age interval. If you want to explain the frequency of religious belief, you would be wise to look more towards the social functions that it fulfills, and less at its intellectual arguments.

There was an interesting post on here the other day, which was dead-ed, about this very topic. See here:

http://commentlog.org/bid/4527/Myth-and-Cult-How-atheists-mi...
Count me as an agnostic theist. I believe that there has to be something or someone responsible for our existence, and this entity is therefore at least minimally interested in the progress of our population, and that we simply lack the ability to fully comprehend how the universe works within the confines of our existence. Whether this relates directly to the Christian God that I was raised to believe in is not within my power to understand.

I find it far simpler that some entity has created our existence as it is, rather than our existence merely having spawned from a nothingness for no reason and by no creator.

I also know that this also pulls in the argument of "if our universe was created by an entity, then who or what created that entity?" To that I simply say point to my initial belief that there is likely a proper explanation for both the entity and our existence, but that it is beyond our capability to comprehend or reason about it.
Conflating epistemology and metaphysics is never a good idea.
If you're interested in F-Script, Nu ( http://programming.nu/ ) is also something worth looking into. Its got a Ruby-esque syntax and written in Objective C. Fun language to mess around with.
You're telling me that past performance influences future performance of teachers? Like, causes it?

I think you must mean predicts. I hope Gates didn't say influences.
Dependency Management: The Irony of Make
How do you process credit cards?
12 Freaky Fetish Museums
Watch a live video, share your PC with CNN
Biomimicry Breakthrough: Butterfly Wings Could Lead to Better Solar Panels
So because one cannot disprove X, then "the whole universe is X"?
I have implemented such an algorithm in the past. The problem is that it actually makes things even more redundant since it gives you stuff you have already read and liked. The results returned are usually articles on the exact same topic from a different source.
If I cared, I'd be on the atheism subreddit right now. But I don't, and that's why I'm here, learning about tech. I hesitate to say this, but let's stay on topic. The atheism subreddit can be so vitriolic and it would be a shame to foster that here, not that this poll in and of itself does that.
While that's novel, I predict it will be a bit of a letdown for him personally. A robot with a video screen of your face and relatively-limited field of view is going to make for very poor interaction on both sides.

Until/unless that technology gets a lot better, I suspect it will be like the "cell phone lag", only 100x worse.
Maybe I should have said that it doesn't really mean anything. Your weight is affected by more than just fat. If you happen to be pretty muscular your BMI will be higher (and thus more closer to obesity on the BMI scale), despite having more of the "good stuff"

There are some home scales that do electrical impedance testing but they are inaccurate too.

I think that the BMI calculation that is done at home is bad for people trying to get in shape. They worry too much about the BMI and not about the important stuff such as building muscle which will help you keep the fat off in the long run.
Just my old 'Sunday school' classes.

It's just generally not debated for same reason we don't debate whether Hitler should have killed the Jews 'humanely.'
Jerks.....That explains why it kept phoning home.
I used to work on Google Translator, and the GMail team was very close in proximity to us. It's more than 10 engineers but probably less than 30... can't give you an actual count. But I do remember a whole bunch of them crazies running around trying to get us to be in their videos that they record (I'm not sure how many they've released, but I'm sure you've seen the one with the traveling envelope).
A Space for BackType [POETIC]
They can say they had a cool date on Valentine's day.
The Google Updater was causing problems for me on Mac OS X (it would continuously fail to update), so I removed it. For anyone else also using Mac OS X and wanting to remove the updater, you can read how here:

http://blog.raamdev.com/2008/12/19/howto-remove-google-softw...
Thanks for the tip.

Does anyone have good designs that stray from the general HN look?
Why you shouldn't copy us or anyone else
The guidelines of hacker news say that any topic that piques one's intellectual curiosity is allowable. In that light, I am disappointed that the moderators have decided to mark dead anything that has to do with religion, since Hacker News is one of the few sites where the populace has the intellectual maturity to handle the topic. For example, there was a recent high-quality comment thread on a religious topic that got my synapses firing (you might need show dead on to see it):

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=469620

Now the article was admittedly of low quality compared to the discussion, so maybe that is why it was dead-ed. Then again, maybe pg just fears that allowing religious topics will eventually erode the overall quality of Hacker News. Dead-ing topics is certainly his prerogative. However, I would prefer that he make such policies explicit.

As something that is part of the life of most people on earth, it seems to me that we ought to try to understand religion if we also want to understand our customers, bosses, relatives, and leaders. It seems to me that an intelligent study of religion should be undertaken by any intellectually curious human.
I heard a great quote the other day, "Everyone is an atheist. Who believes in the Egyptian sun god Ra, or the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl? Or any of the other innumerable forgotten gods?"
This is the stupidest thing you've ever posted and you should be ashamed of yourself. There are plenty of other sites where you can wallow in junior-high level discussion and polls about off topic subjects. These types of posts encourage stupid people to comment, contain no useful or interesting information, and bring out the worst in smart people.

The religion and "meta" discussions of late have polluted the /newcomments link to the point where it is almost useless. The lame thing is that even if the post is marked dead, you still get the inane discussion from the bozos who don't know or don't care that the original post is dead.

My suggestions for technical improvements are removing comments on dead posts from newcomments and raising the karma for posting topics about religion to 10000+.
Review: Amazon Web Services Management Console Beta
Compression, Encryption, Deduplication, and Replication: Strange Bedfellows
You certainly can have evidence against something that doesn't exist. There is very strong evidence that there are no (ordinary) elephants in the room I'm in right now, for instance: elephants are large and easy to see, and the fact that I see none when I look around is evidence for their absence. Direct evidence that there are no invisible miniature elephantoids made from weakly-interacting Dark Matter in the room, of course, is harder to come by.

Similarly: If someone believes in a god who regularly answers prayers, works miracles, etc., then a shortage of miracles and surprisingly answered prayers is evidence against the existence of that person's god. If someone else believes in a god whose primary objective is to avoid notice, it's hard to see how anything could be evidence for or against its existence. (And, by the same token, it's hard to see why anyone would care much whether it exists or not. A god whose existence we can't get evidence about is ipso facto one that makes little difference to how the world is.)

... Except that it's pretty plausible that some sort of formalized Ockham's Razor works, where your initial evaluation of how likely something is looks more or less like 2^-(length of shortest complete description). In that case, a universe with a maximally-self-hiding god is much less likely than a universe without one.

Anyway, most theists believe in gods that are (perhaps intermittently) active in the world: answering prayer, healing sick people, raising people from the dead, etc. There's no reason why there shouldn't be evidence for or against the existence of such a god. (I think the evidence is heavily against; others disagree.)
Stiglitz: Depression in Davos
It makes a difference though. If people interpret all condom use as being a sin, then there is a chance they will not use them in non-marital sex, so the policy (or possibly just the lack of clarity in the policy) may still lead to increased HIV infections.
David,

Thanks again for the detailed counterpoint. I'll reiterate that I'm a big fan.

My only objection is the upfront payment by entrepreneurs. How do you reconcile this with advice found on thefunded and other places, that tells entrepreneurs to never pay to pitch?

If you charged $1,000 on contingency, or a percentage of funds raised, then I'd be your best supporter.

Maybe I'm showing my bias, since I believe in helping entrepreneurs get started with no upfront cash. You probably think that anything contingent may be hard to enforce. That's certainly true. But think of it this way: if my startup has an agreement with AngelSoft that says I owe you something, when big VCs come in for due diligence, they'll flag the issue and force me to resolve it. So you have some protection!

If you don't like contingent payment because you are worried that the sucess rate is too low, then you have a major problem. You'd better be selling a service that works. By accepting contingencies, you signal to me, the entrepreneur, that you believe in the quality of your product. I'll have no problem paying fees way higher than $250.

There is a minor issue of filtering the quality of the deal flow, but $250 is probably not the right filter.

- Alain, CEO, FairSoftware.net :-)
seriously.. what happened to that google?
I don't know how much we have learned. I will bet that many scripts and database tables are expecting a timestamp to be a fixed size
Because they properly account for non-wage compensation?

To begin, multiply teacher salaries by (12 months/year)/(9 months worked). Throw in the value of 3 consecutive months of vacation, great health plan, defined-benefit pensions (the pension plans that will soon bankrupt most states), and "can't get fired" job security. You'll find that teachers are paid quite nicely.