skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understood you to say that parts in the brain communicate by something other than physical means. Is that where I went wrong?

If some of the communications are not by physical means, how does the "not physical means" communication work?

If all of the communications are by physical means, how does the brain have "infinite" interconnect? Am I wrong in believing that one can't have infinite connectivity with physical means?
I see what you mean, but I don't think I agree. For one, direct action seems to often be the best way to at least get started the sort of revolution that would have to occur to get this change made. (I'd argue that the only reason that the majority of people who believe in grades do is that they haven't taken much time to think about them.)

In addition, this isn't a case of, say, someone believing that people would be better off if they were occasionally hit with water balloons and thus deciding to throw them at random passerbys. (Whether that person would be justified in pelting everyone is subject to debate.) Instead, this is a case which only effects the people who chose to become his students. And how is he hurting them?

He isn't hurting their future prospects of getting a job (though I guess that maybe you could argue that he is diminishing his school's reputation or something like that). He isn't hurting their ability to learn--I think he's right that not using grades helps students learn better, and either way we generally give teachers the right to choose how to teach their students, since they're usually the most qualified to make that decision. The only possible way that he's hurting anyone is if later on one of his students get hired when they shouldn't have (or visa-versa), and arguably that decision isn't on him; if he's truly wrong about grades, then the rest of the students' grades should reflect that.

(Perhaps you could say that if some of the students wanted a grade, they should be given one, but I feel like he would be willing to give them feedback/change their grades if they asked him.)
Hopefully about as ridiculous as "Birds sang that day my friends."
That DDJ article is eye-opening in its use of memoization.
What you are referring to is global-to-local compilation:

Biologically-inspired Self-Assembly of 2D Shapes, Using Global-to-local Compilation, A. Kondacs, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2003
The presentation isn't as long as the slide count makes it out to be; each transition (such as adding a bullet point to a list) gets its own slide. So even though it's 127 pages, you can read through it in 10 minutes.

The meat of it doesn't start until slide 35. Everything before that is motivation for the project, which is improving the library and syntax of OCaml.

Did anyone else find the proposed syntax Python-y? I actually think that's a good thing, as it's expressive. But even the name ("Batteries Included") makes me think of Python, as Guido famously considers Python a language with the batteries included.

(Disclaimer: I'm making my way through the OCaml tutorial (http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org/), so I don't even qualify as a OCaml newbie since I've never written a line of OCaml code. But I will seriously consider it for my next systems programming project, since it seems to occupy the intersection of functional, expressive and low-overhead.)
Why does this worry you so?
I broke up the points here:

On Direct Action: Action can mean a lot of things. Maybe...MAYBE if he’d worked for years to abolish the grading system and gone out and debated proponents of the system and still failed...then maybe his actions might be justified. But he hasn’t done that.

People who act unilaterally aren’t trying to start debate they’re afraid of it.

On hurting the Students: The question was never "is he diminishing the prospects of his students" it’s "is he diminishing the prospects of other students." His students are getting A+ grades so it’s unlikely they’ll be hurt? But what about the person from another university who is trying to get a job where grades matter? What if that person got a B at their university and is competing against one of this professor’s students who got an unjustified A+?

Systems exist to create a scale by which people judge. Even if that scale is as flawed as you contend it’s the scale that exists and he doesn’t have the right to tip it based solely on his own arrogance.
Arresting him for entering the university area?
In Sweden the police would have refused to do that.
So a muslim, atheist, and former christian preacher turned atheist walk into a debate hall...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oocFLfoT0Q4
It's a good analogy, especially since the guy is talking to animals in the zoo, instead of out in the wild interviewing the real survivalists. People who ask everyone for answers rarely want to leave the comfort of their safety net to go out and find them.
That's great to hear. Freedom of speech has always been under attack around the edges where unpopular speech is being considered, so it is good to see a victory come down from the supreme court. Neil Gaiman wrote an excellent article on this subject ( http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-... ) last december. In it, he mentions some of the issues still facing other countries, most notably the UK. Hopefully they will come around as well.
The first part was great. A great opening. The second part was so bad I couldn't continue.

What a shame.
Bill Gates' Q&A with Chris Anderson: Video unveiled
Think of code executing say 30 stack frames in, generating an exception not caught until all the way up to 5 frames in (a very common situation). That exception cuts a swath through 25 functions, leaving stale variables and dangling pointers.
Also, only looking at patients older than 50 means they're presumably overrecording the effect on things like heart surgery and underrecording it on things like emergency treatment of work accidents. Still an interesting study.
That isn't my experience at all. I've found no correlation at all.
If you were to ask me free-form about my religious views, the answer you would get would be very dependent on how you asked the question.

If you asked me, "Do you think a god exists?", I would say "no", and you would call me an atheist. If you asked, "Do you think a god could exist?", I would say, "yes", and you would call me an agnostic.

On the other hand, if you asked me "What term most closely describes your views?", I would say "secular humanist" and emphasize the humanist part. Ultimately, the question of the existence or non-existence of a god doesn't enter my life very often and that's the way I like it.

(As an aside, the term for the beliefs you describe is pantheist)
It depends on where you live but verbal contracts are enforceable but very hard to enforce. Having done some business deals that were with honest guys that went south after differing opinions ruined the company I can attest to the fact that you need a contract. Get the contract reviewed by a lawyer. I know that lawyers are costly but look at it this way if you were buying a used car you would do some due diligence and take it to an independent mechanic to review and make sure that you were not getting a lemon.

The way I look at contracts now is you and the company are being held to certain standards. The company promises that they will pay you x shares or x dollars and you promise that you will work for the company for a certain number of years to be fully vested.
There's a fantastic (physical) product design blog at http://www.thedieline.com/ that I often use as inspiration, especially since many of the product ranges use a palette of 3-7 colors.
Aviary releases Raven, The First Vector Graphics Editor For The Web
Andrew Napolitano: Executive Salary Caps are Unconstitutional
Raven's been out for a while - this isn't a new release, it's just been in limited beta. It's a neat tool, though.
Shrug - not sure what the author is trying to say. Seems to be a whole bunch of random quotes to justify the position he's taken.
Just remember the only human as we know them in the story is the Confessor.

A central point of the series is to discuss the validity of imposing one's moral standards on others that share little or no background with you.
Just remember the only human as we know them in the story is the Confessor.

A central point of the series is to discuss the validity of imposing one's moral standards on others with little or no shared background.
The Difference Between Good and Great
How We Kill Geniuses
There are a number of people who have worked to abolish grades over the years, so I don't think your direct action point makes much sense. Additionally, this seems like the sort of issue that, simply due to inertia, won't be changed without some sort of revolution.

Again, I'd argue that he's not diminishing the prospects of other students (assuming most other graders grade "normally"), simply because other grades will balance them out. One A+ isn't going to make or break an interview. Besides, this sort of thing happens constantly anyways, simply due to the fact that different graders grade differently.

I think your last point comes down to a moral value judgment. You say that he doesn't have the right to try to fix the system on his own; I'd say that he has not only the right but the responsibility. I think this especially makes sense when you consider that, if grading is as flawed as I say it is, using grades to judge is discrimination (and I mean it in the pejorative sense).

Think of it like racism. If there really is an intelligence gap between different races, and you are supposed to label peoples' races so that employers could judge them, then my moral intuition would line up with yours; it would be wrong for you to label everyone as white (or whatever the best race was supposed to be) just because you believed that race was a good indicator of intelligence.

But if race isn't an accurate indicator of intelligence, but people were using it as a measurement of intelligence anyways, then my moral intuition says that you would have a responsibility to do everything you could to fight against racism, which could include labeling everyone as white.

Actually, it seems a rather sticky point.
The smaller the granularity the more likely it is you'd need some sweeping change at the top of the chain -- at the CC providers, banks, processors. Most services charge you for every authorization request you initiate, let alone successful or failed transactions, so you'd have to be charging a very high rate for your service to be authing a card once a minute.
Didn't they mention Chase?
I thought that this was the norm too (that you have to hold off on any kind of agreement for compensation before the company has funding) but it's actually not the case at all. I just signed something with two friends last week for a side project that might take off and we put in clauses for how many shares of stock we'd get, depending on two conditions: 1) that we get at least a million in funding, and 2) that we each put in a certain amount of hours within the next two months.

Although it's still an experiment in progress, I think it covers several bases well: we get a shot clock on the amount of work we all have to put in and by when, and as long as we do that, we'll all get varying pieces of a pie that doesn't even exist yet. Self-reinforcing.
"Switching ISPs" is too difficult. ESPN should also offer paid subscriptions, which would enable video regardless of your ISP.
on hndir.com, i basically got my inspiration from the textmate editor theme "Blackboard." many of them can be found here: http://wiki.macromates.com/Themes/UserSubmittedThemes

i guess after a while, you like black as a background so much that it creeps into your projects ("black's da new white, yall!").

our next project, which we should have ready in march, is also themed the same way. dark background, neon'ish colors. i need to get over it. there was a phase i went through where everything was white and blue. i honestly have no idea where i get these fetishes (fetishii?).

but yeah, great artists steal. anarchy has no rules, so declare a form of government and go ballistic ("maybe wrong in YOUR country, but in mine, which i happen to login via root, it's perfectly acceptable.")
$ date -d @1234567890 # to convert from epoch seconds
Zemanta For Webmail
I'm a sucker for any kind of "behind the scenes" articles on other people's work and especially a progression of wireframes into final designs. Having said that, the screenshots is pretty much all there is in the post, there isn't any explanation about each step or design decisions or why each screen iteration evolved the way it did. Presenting them flatly like that w/o context is like clicking through the wayback machine.

37signals often posts great blog posts with critiques of their own work or process, here's a recent example:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1525-writing-decisions-he...
The sim is good as far as getting your app going but if you do anything out side of a basic app, anything graphic or animation intensive. You have to use the device. The sim uses the same processor that it is run on which is way more powerful than an iPhone.
Surveillance and collection of personal data are "pervasive" in British society.
"We can presume that the senior executives of the banks that have received TARP funds who are paid more than $500,000 annually are worth at least that much to their employers. Otherwise the employers would be violating their fiduciary duties to their shareholders by paying those salaries."

We certainly can't presume that. These executives are their own employers, sit on each other's boards and grant themselves billions of dollars in cash and stock. That's part of the problem.
RAII is pretty old isn't it? What changed in 2005?
Not at all - it just depends on how good a designer you are and/or comfortable with html/css.
For me, the money wouldn't do it. I need competition. It actually works and I was winning until yesterday. http://zealog.com/zealogs/the-smaller-losers
Facebook Opens Status API, Say Goodbye to Twitter
Talk about superstition.
People who live off the beaten path love Amazon, and especially Amazon Prime. The big box retailers are still good for everyday stuff, but you really appreciate the convenience, price and selection Amazon offers when you have severely limited retail options.
Shucks, I had pretty much exactly the same idea a year or two ago, but it stalled when I couldn't find anyone to pay me to develop it.

May I ask for details about the platform/architecture?

Also, the usage caps seem low to me, across the board. If I ran a site that I expect to get major mobile traffic, it might make me nervous to see that the top tier is only 10k hits/day (even if in reality I'd never come close to that)
Nick O'Neill has bid Twitter farewell at least once a month for the past two years. First when Facebook let you change status via phone. Then when Twitter and Facebook integrated via apps. Now it's because of an API. Twitter hasn't disappeared yet.
I'm not suggesting he work himself into a foaming-at-the-mouth sort of rage, but there's an unsettling disconnect between the subject matter -- the plight of generations of students caught in bad public schools -- and his emotional tone. Personally, I value sincere communication and feel a little anxious when someone is forcing me to read between the lines. There is a place for justified anger in communication, as long as it remains civil.

As for the practical consequences, if there is a congruency between the words and how they are expressed (body language, tone, etc.), the message tends to land a little heavier.
> Seems to be a whole bunch of random quotes to justify the position he's taken.

Much like the average college essay or, dare I say it, mass media story.
I'm prompted to log in???
It's not even close. Shaw's work is good, but we are still not close to folding proteins from a linear sequence. The physics is just not there
I do think that really understanding molecular machinery (known proteins and their dynamic interactions in atomistic glory) and true molecular recognition problems are what we should be doing.

That said, we need better physics to represent these interactions. The fields been relatively static when it comes to forcefields that really work.
What exactly the hell is a "quantum equation"?
Everyone here on HN is genius, so even if a few get knocked off there are plenty to step up and replace them.
Community-powered gem compatibility for ruby 1.9
I'll take two 16 ounce Mystical Fairy Juices and a two cookies, please.
He has also been an outspoken critic of “Israeli military aggression” and is not shy about expressing those views with students.

I am certainly seeing a pattern here, first victims of the aggression are critical, world doesn't listen to them. Then neighboring countries are afraid and criticize Israel for being an aggressor. Then slowly decades pass by, smart people of other developed-countries start criticizing them for human-rights violation and then slowly most people will listen to the smart people of their own country and change their mind about Israel. So according to me, it is just a matter of time before everyone is critical of Israel (you can't fool all the people all the time).
No one is rushing out to register gibberish domains. If anyone wants too they have plenty of other opportunities to do so. Nearly all domains still available are not intrinsically valuable - they generate close to zero type-in traffic for squatters to live off.
Why do you keep the good domains private? I bet the affiliate commissions from showing off these domains would be much higher than the revenue from membership fees.
If they don't like the caps, then don't take the bailout money.
We've been through this before! I'll just quote myself from a month ago:

Facebook: full-fledged social network. Twitter: simple, quick-posting environment.

There IS a big difference between these two sites, Facebook won't kill twitter, we can all go to sleep calmly now :)

Edit: just for reference, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=418151
Yes, it's clear that this project was inspired by Python. In the presentation's language comparison, Python is the overall winner. If they can combine the best aspects of Python with C-like performance, more power to them.
You are not the only one. There are a few companies with very similar services, like MoFuse. Is there anything your company offers that can differentiate you from them? If not you might have a hard time gaining traction against VC funded players with a big head start.
Just because X has Y's functionality now doesn't imply that X will overtake/kill/get people to say goodbye to Y
I usually pick a theme I want my site to have, like "education", then do a Google image search for the term to see how others have represented it with color. After getting a basic idea of what color I like I hand it off to the designer with very general suggestions. I have learned this is one area I am better off delegating to someone more talented.
Hey guys, I know I've said it before but honestly I think this has a serious chance of removing Twitter. I'll put my money where my mouth is ... I'm working on programming another version of Twitter using just the Facebook API ... we'll see if it makes sense :)
At the business I work at, we have been thriving as well. We're not anywhere near as big as Amazon, infact we only have 5 employees (and one part time accountant)

Yet, we've had our 3 best months in a row since November, and February is shaping up to be pretty good

We sell outdoor and indoor recreation items, so no one needs them, but everything is below retail. We also sell through about 5 different channels (Our websites, Our small retail store, Pennysaver, Kijiji, eBay..)

We also make sure to ship everything same-day, answer every customer email within 12 hours, and run a super tight ship when it comes to inventory counts so we're not in a big mess.

Of course, I'm sure there is many guys like us but I thought it'd be ok to share some good news from a small retail business :)
I'm definitely catching a lot of flack for the spurn comment, and justifiably so considering this window into your work day. I would say that the essay in general was an attempt at levity, as I hoped smart-alecky comments like "birds sang", "voices of children", "Christopher Hitchens", etc... would convey. Although a word like spurn may imply the opposite, having enjoyed your essays, interviews (when I can find them), and especially Arc itself, I am the last person in that world that would tell you how you go about your creative process.
Because there are some awesome indie bookstores (If anyone is on Long Island or NYC area, check out Book Revue in Huntington) that are, unfortunately, going out of business.

Barnes & Noble or Borders are hardly the only physical dead tree bookstores out there.
Now, is there a proxy service yet that let's you post your Twitter updates to Facebook and vice versa?
Why must hackers be so literal with everything? Just talking about inspiration as coming from an external entity doesn't imply superstition, it doesn't mean somebody has strong faith-based beliefs about the exact nature of spirits and little green people.

If you're willing to loosen your grip on the necessity for all ideas to be fact-based, and let some of the fuzzy in, the idea of a muse can serve as a useful perspective on the creative process. It's a hell of lot more useful than sticking electrodes on people and trying to quantify creativity with statistical analysis.

Even hackers have muses.
Can we bring some fresh blood into HPC?
A Mac running Leopard Server. If you want to keep it legit, at least.
Moral of the story: beg borrow and steal to get to the top of search results, if that traffic is valuable to you.
You can't run osx in a vm without hacking it. aka: osx86.
Discrete mathematics ;)
No, that is manufacturing. New technologies are developed by engineers. But then, there is manufacturing engineering, so you may be correct for a subset of "engineering".
I generally pick a main color i want to use and pick colors that are on either side of it in the color wheel (Also that are similar in brightness and so on) if I don't want a monochromatic site.

Or if I'm at a loss, i have this widget: http://www.colorschemer.com/galleria_info.php
MoFuse is an RSS feed converter. Mobify.Me supports proper URLs, search, forms, sessions, interaction - mobile is a lot more than RSS. There is a big gap in that niche, though RSS converters are definitely very common.
One of the professors during my degree used a different method. It was difficult to fail his subjects; he could not fail a student because of a poor showing in a three-hour test. But to get an A, you had to show him that you knew exactly what you were talking (writing) about.
Yes, unquestionably.
http://heartattackproof.com and the videos by Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn (Google his name for videos) should be enough to motivate people to change how they eat. It's a fact that heart disease is found in 12 year olds, and some authorities estimate that this will be the first generation where the parents will outlive their kids. Dr. Esselstyn, Dr. John McDougall, Dr. Dean Ornish, and their colleagues have shown how a low-fat plant based diet can prevent and even reverse heart disease. Note that this is FAR different than the low-fat diets used in many of the studies the media has reported on. 30% of calories from fat is not enough. 10% is where these programs aim.

The good news is that the foods are actually very delicious. One just needs to be open enough to investigate what is actually allowed and not be biased by a "vegan" misconception. There are many unhealthy vegetarian and vegan diets. The diets recommended by the above doctors are a healthy plant-based diet, as opposed to many of the junk food veggie diets.