skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
egads! thank you for linking to that article. Sure enough, it was there in ~\Library\Preferences\Macromedia\Flash Player\www.macromedia.com\bin

Also, I should add that I did not watch the inauguration online via CNN. I think it might have been installed when I was watching live coverage of the jet that landed in the Hudson River.

And I'm surprised that Time Warner, owner of CNN and provider of my cable broadband service, would allow such a thing since, ultimately, it eats away at their precious upstream bandwidth.
It's interesting to compare these figures with those found at

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html

concerning two populations of scientists in the US, one supposedly representative of all US scientists and one supposedly representative of "leading" ones.

Ignoring the (very severe) issues of sample bias here, it seems that HN contributors are intermediate in skepticism between Larson&Witham's two populations.
Perhaps it just me who's a food nerd, but from the title I thought the article would be about substituting cheap unhealthy fat, like fries, for expensive stuff such as avacados. Which, incidentally, is great way to live healthier.
My employer tends tends to upgrade to the latest stable release of PHP, so when PHP 5.3 comes up, we'll be upgrading. Since I rarely use PHP outside of work, this still will be worthwhile for me.

But, you're right. Significant changes in incremental releases like this makes it difficult for people to adopt, and I doubt that someone will bother backporting closures to a PHP 5.2.x release, like might be done in something like Python (from __future__ ... )

As for PHP 4 support, I thought that even Zend was done supporting it? Why is it still around?
I considered whether it would be inflammatory, but figured it was different than an article, where the interaction takes the form of discussion thus potentially leading to flame wars if the issue is controversial. Here, the interaction is mainly about voting, and people will feel less of a need to make their voice heard through comments.

So being curious, I decided to take the risk.

So far seems ok. If not, just flag it, and some mod will kill the thing.
There is very strong evidence that there are no (ordinary) elephants in the room

That's assuming a closed system open to inspection.

The universe is neither of those. I can say what is or isn't in the room because I have total control over and full freedom to inspect the room to the level of detail required to find elephants. Your example simply doesn't translate.

You pivot then into the "far away God is the same as missing God" argument. That's another can of worms (One which I did not go into)

What I find humorous is that every 80 years or so we see a resurgence in either atheism or deism. Each time the generation feels like it's way smarter than the one before it. Only the arguments are all the same as they were three iterations ago -- or three thousand years ago for that matter.

The existence and nature of a God, if there is one/them/it, isn't as easy as looking for elephants. But that's what makes the conversation fun -- as long as everyone acts in a civil manner.
Nu does not have Ruby-esque syntax. Nu is a full Lisp, complete with macros and first-class functions, and has Objective-C's object system under the hood. It combines those with a few tokens from Ruby, such as the use of the @ symbol, but really, it's an Objective-C/Lisp hybrid first, and anything Ruby-related second. Of the two, F-Script actually has far more in common with Ruby than does Nu, in my humble opinion.

(Just to make it clear, the above is not in any way meant to attack Nu. I have used both Nu and F-Script, and prefer Nu. I just think that saying Nu has Ruby-esque syntax would be like saying JavaScript has Scheme-esque syntax. Semantics, maybe. Syntax, no.)
They mention a company doing just that: http://www.stickK.com/

The idea of using people's innate biases to help them is compelling, I especially enjoyed that the 'anti-charities' of causes you dislike had the highest success rate.
I'm more worried about labeling something as metaphysical when epistemology leads to uncomfortable answers.
Don't you mean it has an S-expression syntax?

The article also got the syntax part wrong. The syntax of F-Script is smalltalk's not Objective-C's. Objective-C's object semantics was influenced by smalltalk, so F-Script looks and feels like smalltalk.
Watch the video and see
it feels awkward and unaligned to me... deactivated in a couple of hours as well
> My own personal interest is protein folding.

> But computationally we're stuck with exponential time.

It's not that bad and it "recently" got a lot better.

Search for "shaw protein folding neutral territory".
And I'm guessing you're single.
Have you seen thr 1-2-3 Power System yet?
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I'm sure I'm not the only one who will thank you for posting that. It makes good sense.
Thought the cockroaches are gonna win...
It is infinitely harder to find a tenable pediatric densist than it is to find someone to fix your own teeth. It's so far apart that they aren't even the same problem. And so, I suspect, childrens dental work costs quite a bit more.
It's not like we haven't done it before. We usually chat for a while, people complain, and then either it is zapped or we move on.

It's interesting to me to see how the influx of newbies will deal with the topic. It's a sociological/social networking question, which makes it interesting for hackers. Will the new group play by the older group's rules? Will the newcomers complain more about it "not being HN" than the old farts? Will the newbies pull the oldies out into discussion, or the other way around? Will folks who post regular science-vs-church articles participate here or pass?

But I can certainly agree that it can get out of control. What can I say? I like danger in small doses. This afternoon is kinda slow anyway.
Java asks to install OpenOffice too, by the way. :-)
There's some discussion in the comments, including some (little) elaboration from Eliezer, the author, in a comment at 5:27pm on 2009-02-02 and another at 12:33am the following day.
Heyzap: Online games reach the long tail
> One of the greatest tragedies of our time is happening right now in Africa, and if it was up to the Catholic church it would be a lot bigger than it is already. (HIV/AIDS spread because of a lack of / refusal to use condoms).

In all fairness, the Catholic Church does a lot for people in 3rd world countries (I live in an African country and they provide a lot of services). As an example, the school and hospital system in such poor countries as Lesotho was at a time almost 100% CC run and funded. The CC has probably the most extensive hospital system in Africa – and this provides medical service to thousands of people.

Some abstinence programs did work (for instance in Uganda which uses an ABC approach). On the flipside of the coin some programs promoting just condom use were huge failures (a good example is the “Love Life” program that was partially funded by the Bill&Melinda Gates Foundation – a lot of money went down the drain there). The best program (IMHO) is probably an ABC type program that promotes both.
iShoot: 18 hour workdays, written one-handed, 220k paid downloads
There's an angle to this that I see on the ground as a graduate student in neuroscience that I've never seen anyone talk about, including Greenspun. It's that there are way more training positions for graduate students than there are jobs waiting for them.

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations reveal the problem.

In 2001, there were 57,639 grad students in the biological sciences [1].

If they want to labs of their own, how stiff is the competition?

9100/98,700 scientists in the "Educational Services" sector are life scientists (9.2%) [2]; 46,300/98,700 scientists in this sector are in the "Colleges, universities, and professional" category (46.9%) [3]; so, 0.092 * .469 = 4.3% of 98,700 = 4258 scientists are life scientists in the "College, university, or professional" category.

Let's say that the average graduate student takes 5.5 years to graduate; that means that there are 10,480 newly minted Ph.D.s in biology each year. Let's say that the average PI has a lab over a 30 year period; that means that there are ~142 jobs a year in biology that open up for those 10,000 graduates.

This means that 1/73 of the newly minted Ph.D.s should reasonably go on to start a lab of their own. The actual number will be higher, but they will be winnowed out once they fail to get grants at some point early in their careers.

I don't know how real these numbers are, but they are in agreement with the sense of struggle I see day-to-day.

The government should fund fewer training slots at graduate schools, and more R01s (the grants that keep independent labs running), to get this ratio in better balance. Right now, it is a pyramid scheme.

It also should come as no surprise that domestic students would stay away from grad school. It's an economically irrational pursuit when other options are open. On the other hand, this is the best country in the world in which to train; students can go home and be big fish in their local ponds. For them, it is economically much more rational to spend some time here.

[1]http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf05310/pdf/tab2.pdf
[2]http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf05313/pdf/tab2.pdf
[3]http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/nsf05313/pdf/tab1.pdf
This is amazingly interesting. Thanks for sharing. I read the first few chapters, then forced myself to defer the rest until after work!
It's worth noting that functions created via create_function won't be garbage-collected, which can cause some obvious problems.

This article about partial application may also be of interest to PHP hackers with an interest in functional programming.

http://metapundit.net/sections/blog/166
I think most of them make it clear that they are 'weak atheists', who believe (as John McCarthy puts it) that the evidence on the God question is about as strong as the evidence on the Werewolf question. Strong atheists are much rarer -- I'm actually not familiar with their arguments.
But quantifiable karma and leaderboards that result from the addition of numerical values serve as incentives for users to contribute to the community.

For the site owner, 'the game' is in his/her interest because it pulls people in to participate. It gives recognition to the efforts of site users.

I'm not sure how effective 'good', 'very good' or 'poor' will perform as a substitute.
Setting up CouchDB-Lucene on OS X (Some issues..)
It's true. I'm a happy Mac user and Apple doesn't pull any of this tomfoolery here. But whenever I use a Windows machine, the Apple Software Updater wants to cram the machine with extra software.

I realize Apple isn't the only one to do so on Windows, but it's still in bad taste.
Ways in which git makes the opposite of sense to me
Auto update is horrid for disabled people and those with other usability issues. There you are happily using a product, and the next day you cannot. I'm going to be a crabby old snot and say, perhaps Google would see things differently if 99% of its employees were not so young and healthy. The trouble is, Google isn't just a whiz-bang company with whiz-bang ideas. It's almost a public utility.
I use linux-vserver on gentoo. It rocks!
You're probably an atheist without realizing it.

I've met many agnostics who weren't aware that there are different types of atheists, including many who don't know one way or another but lean toward disbelief, which is very close to agnosticism.

The typical misunderstanding of atheism from self-described agnostics is that atheists claim to be certain that there is no God. Some atheists do that, but that's not the only kind of atheism.

Another problem with agnosticism is agnostics seem to believe that one cannot assign any probability without perfect knowledge. Yet you do it every minute of every day, in ever decision you make. We live by probabilities and beliefs (and disbeliefs). I don't see why certain concepts in life should be off limits for assignment of probabilities.
The title is incorrect. The updater doesn't install all of the Google apps. It just updates Google apps you do have installed when there are new versions available.
Reverse net neutrality. Instead of the restriction coming from the ISPs it's coming from the content provider. I don't see how going back to mid 1990s style AOL ideology will ever work.

To see if your ISP is already involved in this go to http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/espn360/index and click watch now. It also has a scary message if you don't have access:

ESPN360.com is available at no charge to fans who receive their high-speed internet connection from an ESPN360.com affiliated internet service provider. ESPN360.com is also available to fans that access the internet from U.S. college campuses and U.S. military bases.

Your current computer network falls outside of these categories. Here’s how you can get access to ESPN360.com.

1. Switch to an ESPN360.com affiliated internet service provider or to contact your internet service provider and request ESPN360.com. Click here to enter your ZIP code and find out which providers in your area carry offer ESPN360.com

2. For Verizon Customers Only:
Sign-in using remote access if you already get ESPN360.com
It's not necessarily true that they'd make more money selling to more people at a lower price.

Revenue = avg selling price * #sales
Cost = avg cost * #sales
Profit = (avg selling price - avg production cost) * #sales

If they double #sales but the average price goes down by <50%, they're going to lose revenue. If they triple the number of sales, they'll reduce profit if the cost is >50% of the post-reduction sales price.

Yes, increased sales can result in reduced average production costs, through both reduced marginal costs and spreading the fixed costs across more units. (The latter can be a big deal for drugs.)

However, the actual numbers matter.

US drug companies try to do price discrimination to address these issues. However, if selling low-priced pills to Africa reduces their average selling price too much, they're not going to sell to Africa.
If It's Difficult to Pronounce, It Must Be Risky
ShoutNow: Rapid Voice Messaging (Indy Startup Weekend company)
This a little ridiculous. Anyone who's seen both a Kindle and an iPhone side by side knows they don't compare. It's pretty hard to imagine someone reading War and Peace on an iPhone, or even the Wall Street journal or something...
Thanks.

Yeah, I know registering is a pain but once you log in you'll see that the app integrates with your accounts on Flickr, Youtube and DocStoc etc. That info is never passed down to the bookmarklet and the jsonp exchange is handle securely through our server. So registering is a necessity.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into creating a version that can be installed without registration.
Good catch. Sorry, I shouldn't have used influences. Thanks for pointing it out.

Gates used the word explain. At about 12:50, he said "This chart takes four different factors and asks how much do they they explain teaching quality?"
The History of the Pinball Construction Set: Launching Millions of Creative Possibilities
Reed Hastings: Please Raise My Taxes
German Mac clone maker claims it won't face Psystar's legal troubles
I've tried Conkeror and while I like the concept and can't really find any problem with the execution I just don't get on with it very well. Being an Emacs user I feel compelled to ignore Vimperator ;)

The ' key in Firefox (search for links) is great for navigating around without the mouse. Not that I'm religious about non-mousing of course, sometimes (especially during idle web surfing) it makes sense for me.
The BBC documentary "The Century of the Self" really delves into the role that Bernays played in changing the notion of selling on the basis of utility to one of selling on the basis of emotion, e.g. from "Buy this car because it offers superior reliability" to "Buy this car because you will attract women" etc.
Fantastic point about the distinction between writing and speaking. Benjamin Franklin famously trained himself to speak in terms of "modest diffidence":

http://books.google.com/books?id=D29W3OkXFq4C&pg=PA13...
I said nothing about ads, rather that it's hard to raise money so charging is almost a must.

About ads, FriendFAQ is killing it on Facebook. Friends that run content sites say ad payouts are down, affiliate companies are killing it.
One of my family members recently had a career change. Teaching is not that bad a career choice (if you compare with what difficulty a person with a Journalism or BA(Languages) degree may find work).

Teaching has a couple of advantages:

- The entry requirements are not that high.

- The degree program is not that demanding.

- There is always employment (compare that with journalism or pharmacology in some countries).

- There is a huge shortage of teachers in 1st world countries. For immigration to some countries a teaching degree can count more than an engineering degree.

- In some countries there are fairly long (paid) holidays for teachers.

- There are a lot of half day (08h00-14h00) positions available. This is especially important for someone with children.
- There are generally a lot of bursaries available to fund study and distance study is also a good option.

- Some countries allow abridging studies: a person with another degree can work as a teacher while doing a 1 to 2 year diploma that will make them a fully qualified teacher.
You're still missing the point tome is trying to make. 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. Only through exposure, can a person form a desire and adequately articulate wanting something, as in "I want to buy Reese's."
It also works with the G1, here's the original announcement from google: http://tinyurl.com/cvlxmu
If you are a Christian, you are probably very much an atheist when it comes to other religions gods (by commandment, I believe). So, what would be the right answer?
You don't need a legal reason for EULA terms. Its your property, you're letting someone use it -- but only if they agree to your terms.
I'm no networking expert but I think NAT doesn't assign the IP addresses, DHCP does. And at least on my router, you can turn off DHCP and setup static IP addresses for your nodes instead (you can even use some static, some DHCP).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Address_Translation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhcp

edit: I don't think he was claiming that either, it's just that someone trying to learn networking basics from that article could easily get misguided.
Amazing what small teams can do. Digg has more engineers than Gmail...
IT-free fortresses for future elites
...and is it finally coming close to .00001 % of a human brain?

If someone is excited about that, what about the human brain itself? Just a simple information:

The human brain is the most complex thing in the whole universe, or: all of physical universe is less complex than a single human brain.
Google brings Shakespeare and Twain to your iPhone
As I said when someone brought this up half a year ago:

Most realists believe in only one observable universe. Solipsists just go one universe farther.

Most baseball fanatics pull for only one team. People who hate baseball just go one team farther.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=253858
you are welcome. It's like scratching my own itch :). I am migrating my code to svn server and was looking for some help and tutorials and found this web page.
I am a strong agnostic... or strongly agnostic, I don't know what's the proper grammatical form. But I DO know strong agnosticism is what sums my own thoughts on god. :-)

(I don't get why you've been downmodded to -1, I have just +1'd you)
Playing in dirt as a kid seems to help. At least it correlates well in all my anecdotes.
agreed. finally found a good aggregator that didn't seem to have the flamebait/trolling that plagues the numerous others. Really hoping that doesn't happen here as well.
Wasn't the Long Tail debunked a few months ago? (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/07/long_tail_debunked/)
People still call themselves deists? I thought the term was obsolete.

(not trying to debate, just wondering if people really use that term and I somehow haven't heard it)
Interesting excerpt:
The hoaxer, it seemed, had exploited the trickle-up nature of online information flow. The blog comments fooled the blogs, the blogs fooled the news sites, and the news sites fooled the magazines. When the Times came to Bugduv, his story was resting on a pedestal of widespread acceptance.
May I ask what is the basis of your estimate on the computational capacity of the human brain?
"You're probably an atheist without realizing it."

You know, it infuriates me when my theist mother tells my atheist self that I'm probably a theist without realizing it. I won't take any of that "If you're a X, you're probably just a Y without realizing it" nonsense.
If the ISPs become content providers, wouldn't they lose their status as common carriers. If they pay for ESPN's services wouldn't they become liable to the FCC for the content that they are paying for and possibly by extension the whole internet.

IANAL and I don't see an ISP losing its common carrier status over paying ESPN(It's too easy for them to buy the regulators.), but I can hope that something would stop this from occurring.

Not that I would advocate anything illegal, but couldn't someone set up a proxy from within an ISP that pays ESPN and open it up to those without access to ESPN.
Physical fitness tests. How fast can you run a mile? How many pushups can you do in a minute? Situps? How many pullups can you do?

Most people don't just need to "lose weight," they need to improve their overall fitness. If you're overweight, then increasing your fitness will include losing weight, but it's not everything. And the best measure of your physical fitness are simple physical exercises.
My father retired with half the salary of my entry-level software engineering job. This was after 30+ years. Go Coshocton, Ohio.
Quick Summary of this article…

Whenever a successful person recounts how they got that way take note of it. When you start something new go over the list of things you took note of and use your own judgment to decide what will and will not work for you. But don't copy anything verbatim.

There, I just saved you like 3 minutes of life. You're welcome :)
An excerpt illustrating the value of underpromise, overdeliver:

"For a store that aims to give you a bargain, it also excels at customer service. Here's something that happens often: I'll buy an item on Monday afternoon and be told to expect it to arrive Wednesday. Then, sometime Tuesday, the UPS guy rings my door—amazingly, Amazon has moved the product from its shipping center in Nevada to my apartment in San Francisco in less than a day, for no extra charge."

Imagine what the author would have written had Amazon said the package would arrive Tuesday but the packaged didn't show up until Wednesday.
Especially pointed question since the statement implies someone has crossed the chasm of the physical universe in order to measure this.

(since "all of physical universe is less complex than a single human brain" and the physical universe contains around 6.7 billion brains (that we know of))
most of his tips aren't all that useful. consider #1 "using randomness" what he's actually talking about is using constraints to your advantage. Humans often have problems getting anything done with a blank sheet, they need rules to try to get around or work with. But he doesn't mention this.