skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
..never said i'm in favour of ‘trying to pick winners and losers' nor do i think the current approach to alternative energy (essentially doing just that) is the right way to go by any means.

rather, i'd like to a concerted effort by the government to find a solution itself (i.e. let’s get a man on the moon in ten years ... let’s have all new vehicles running on a clean and sustainable fuel source within the next 20 years). that type of approach is fundamentally different than let’s invest in this particular company’s particular solution or let’s give a loan to these guys.. it’s more analogous to the projects you described in which the government funded research/planning, developed particular approaches, and then contracted-out the development of potential solutions/implementations, and where it all fit together towards achieving a tangible goal. that’s very different than what’s going on today.

and i'd say ‘alternative energy’ is a poster-child for a project in which the cost of development and commercialization is fairly significant, but the economic and societal benefit of an adequate solution being realized far outweighs it; to me, that makes for an ideal case (and one of few) where increased government involvement can play a good role. especially so, given the government has already distorted the market by subsidizing ‘traditional energy’ sources for so long.

as to what happens tomorrow, i doubt we’ll find-out how it impact this issue in any meaningful way. as i see it, it’s a choice between continuing to pick winners and losers or just giving up entirely; neither is ideal as far as i'm concerned..
It really put me off. It's not about making it machine-readable, it's about making it human readable for the sizeable number of people who are visually impaired, prefer or need to read in large print, are on high DPI devices, or even copy/paste.

It's a massive, huge step backwards. I can't even search the page. I wanted to try and read all of it, but I gave up. I understand that it's quick and dirty, but I don't really think you should throw something out for comment when you can't even copy/paste from the source.
i agree, it totally was my failure to comprehend database architecture to a point where I was able to keep it running reliably.

but as said in other comments, i'm not sure twitter is happy with someone duplicating their entire user database over time.
Any better reading to suggest ?
If anyone is interested in seeing a city design by a single visionary that does work, I highly recommend checking out Yerevan Armenia - a project headed by Alexander Tamanyan 85 years ago - that is in parts still being implemented.
Of course, Google purchased Android in 2005; the Open Handset Alliance is 5 years old, not Android.

http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-08-16/google-buys-a...

For a more complete history, there is an article from 2008 that goes back to how it all began, only this time starting from 2003, quoting Andy Rubin in an interview with Business Week before founding Android Inc. that October.

http://www.techradar.com/us/news/phone-and-communications/mo...
Welcome to Star Scholar U: Prof as Online College
Economists with a popular blog now started their own online university (Marginal Revolution U). So did a popular author about online communities (Rheingold U). In an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U's.
Yes thats the way to create great new products. Make it easy for non-techies to get them up and running and make sure they run on shared hosting and are created in a language that beginners use to learn about programming.
Don't most countries have fishing quotas within territorial waters as well? Not sure dolphins and whales will be happy with this.
I'd say that rights don't come with obligations inherently. I believe a month-old baby has a right to live, and all it ever does is poop and cry.
You might want to reconsider the viability of your idea if it can be stolen out right without your domain knowledge and connections and still be successful.

As a technical cofounder, this would be a major red flag for me if you were so secretive while building a relationship. It doesn't sound like you actually bring anything to the table. You should have connections, skills, and domain knowledge which would make it extremely difficult for someone to compete. If you don't have that, why would I want to work with you?
> It is based on years of research that has shown dolphins and whales have large, complex brains and a human-like level of self-awareness

How did they conclude dolphins and whales are self-aware comparatively to humans? That seems like quite a large claim to make and the argument significantly hinges on this.

I wasn't aware of any scientific method to prove self awareness.
Is it safe to say that without a vastly improved mobile experience WordPress is in serious trouble?

As a huge fan of the WordPress community and what the software and platform has empowered, I'm seeing a decreasing amount of interest in blogging as my social network turns toward meme-sharing and 140-character quips simply because they're much more conducive to consumption and sharing on mobile.

It's so bad that there are startups trying to fix this like Blogstand (http://blogstand.co - our project). We know that others are attempting the same (and they should be!)
Rolling your own takes all of two seconds to copy the truecrypt executable to your dropbox.
Edit: working now

Re: "My average day is spent behind a laptop reading Hacker News, Lifehacker, The Next Web, Smashing Magazine and whatever I happen to discover online."

how about you stop doing that for a while and crank your own side project. then you'll have smth to show, learn new stuff and connect with people.

desperation will probably not land you a job, but creating opportunities for yourself and showing how you can be useful to others may.

Good luck!
Proportional representation might work until we have a runoff system of some kind. So for example at the state level, if 40% vote liberal, 40% vote conservative, 10% vote green and 10% vote libertarian, then that percentage from each party would go into office.

So out of 100 representatives, 10 of them would be green and 10 would be libertarian, instead of the 0 (or maybe 1 if we're lucky) that we end up with now. They use this system all over in Europe and even though they have their own unique set of problems, they're able to stay on top of issues that the US seems perpetually unable to grasp.
johnonolan I agree with the sentiment that got you there, but not with where you went. Because if you're just going to fork WordPress anyway, all you really need to do is replace the wp-admin theme.

Yeah, I said wp-admin theme. It's not generally considered a theme but that's what it is: the core-provided view of everything you can touch when you're an admin. Try thinking of the back end the same way you think of a front-end theme.

Unfortunately WordPress has not yet devoted a development cycle to making the entire admin area easily pluggable. Any seasoned WordPress developer could hack together a plugin that hijacks wp-admin URLs and displays its own interface. Several have. Wouldn't that satisfy your requirements?

Of course none of that addresses the issues around efficiency and performance. My hope is that WordPress will finally undergo a deep refactoring to remove its worst practices even if it means forcing updates to popular plugins and themes. There is no longer a reason to fear mass defection from the community for pulling that trigger. After the initial shock the changes would be embraced and everyone would enjoy better performance.
No they don't. Obviously not. Human rights are inalienable (though sometimes rights clash and then you need a mechanism to decide which one wins).
Yes, you should be able to star/tag a history item, and clip highlights from the page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrasymachus

This has been hashed out before. Doesn't go well for "rights" in the sense you mean.
They don't need to know you replicate! ;)

By the way, which fields (nickname, avatar, follower count, following count…?) are you storing for follower representation?
Twitter API: Y U No respond fast & why
Possible Reasons on why the Twitter API times out, and what Twitter can do to make it better.
Because it's easy to develop for, can scale to be one of the top ten sites on the internet, and your users won't need training to use it.

Now I'll be the first to tell people there are certain things that you should build from scratch, but the examples of what people build with WordPress can be pretty breathtaking even to me:

http://wordpress.org/showcase/
I meant being able to drop the application files to almost any web server (including cheap hosting providers) and just have it run
Every slider implementation I've seen on the web has been inspired by sliders in iOS, where they provide a bigger touch target. iOS sliders also give considerable information about their current state: the word "OFF" is in grey text on white, and "ON" is in white text on a vivid blue background.

I agree that they're not really appropriate on desktop browsers, and I haven't really seen an implementation of them that impresses me or gets it completely "right."
I think I'm okay with it, but it is a slippery slope. It reminds me of the abortion wars. People want to find a hard line for "when life starts" in a continuum. There's no such thing. I think the same thing could be said of all of the qualities that lead to our notion of personhood.
(Actually we just need to wait for the next reset, an a direct hit from asteroid. :) )

The problem isn't the president, the problem is that people are greedy and non-rational.
Noiiz uses pitchroll - One sentence pitch generator.
Why Krugman and Stiglitz Are Wrong About Government Spending
I don't know what this person's motives are, but these stunts have provoked thought and discussion about what's happening to us all and where this "surveillance society" is headed.

Actually seeing the individual filming us can be frightening. It makes us want to know who is filming us and why. It arouses suspicion and concern.

The unobtrusive cameras are not just to catch the bad guys, but to allow us to move around our lives without being startled by the fact that someone somewhere is watching us.
Focusing on 1): if "most popular follower" means "follower with the most followers", you could try one of three strategies.

First, just check which of the the top 100 (1000) most-followed users follow the celebrity - this will likely eliminate the heaviest hitters immediately.

For accounts with normal amount of followers, do as you already do.

For the in-betweeners,

Pick your celebrity.
For a random 1% (.1%) of his/her followers:
Retrieve list of people followed by this follower
For each user followed by a follower of the celebrity:
Increase number of people following this user by 1
For each user in the top 1% (10%, .1%) of the above table of users:
Retrieve number of followers
Report user with highest number of followers from the above

This is, of course, based on the idea that often-followed users who follow a celebrity will also have many followers among the followers of the celebrity. Results will become more accurate as you poll more followers, of course.

(I don't use Twitter or their API, and the above may be completely wrong.)
Yep, slavery exists to this day in many parts of Africa and India. That should be our first concern.
Thanks for that input ... I was actually looking for something on those lines, appreciate your comment greatly.
Your opinion is correct but don't drag Christianity here. Christianity did enough violence on the name of non-violent Jesus. Better you talk of universal human values.
> Is it safe to say that without a vastly improved mobile experience WordPress is in serious trouble?

I would 100% agree with that.
Show HN: Darth Vader VS Disney pwning Vader OR Meh.
I'm very comfortable with this in the general case; I feel guilty eating bacon because pigs seem pretty smart. Still, rights always come paired up with responsibilities. Do we then try dolphins for rape or murder?

Rather than saying certain categories of animals should have the same rights as humans, maybe we'd be better off saying certain categories of animals deserve a higher level of ethical and legal consideration.
I don't know about you, but I rarely look at the labels on a light switch. When I find light switches that go side-to-side, I usually have to rely on my knowledge of the current state of the light rather than the position of the switch. Either way, you have to agree that the confusion the article speaks of is a reasonable one, and making interfaces that are resilient to be confusing is the job of the UI designer.
> Admit it - The iPhone 5 IS a disappointment

Why would I admit it? It is better than iPhone4s in every sense. And where I am Google powered maps app never had transit data (and I have no need for it) so getting turn-by-turn navigation was a big plus without any loses.
iPhone 4S was announced a day before Jobs' death. Which do you think is more plausible: that they only started working on iPhone 5 on October 6, 2012; or what they had all the basics of iPhone 5 already in place?
Jobs probably gave his blessings to iPhone 6 before passing away.
Understandably the urban planners did not anticipate that technology would make us less dependent on cars instead of more. I assume linear regression is what contemporary planners use as well. I wonder what are the main concerns taken into account when planning for rapidly growin urban cities in Asia for example, and how they will turn out to be in 50 years
And all that training and calibration requires highly-specialised workers to be able to help you. So it's more than just the cost of the device itself. Even if you could mass-produce them, I imagine they'd still need a lot of tailoring to the individual.

I actually saw someone using a motorised prosthesis for the first time recently, and it was very impressive to watch. I'm optimistic for the future, I just hope everyone who needs such technology can get access to it.
I think there's a false logic present in arguing that "lots of people use it, so it's ok even if it's shit." Apply this same argument to one of several poorly coded plugins that have introduced basic security vulnerabilities and had widespread adoption. I think this is even worse when there's no commitment to improving it.

I find it curious we don't necessarily aspire to quality; and I think we should. I'm not happy just FUCKING SHIPPING IT.
Very Interesting Black Box Analysis on why the Twitter API is slow and what Twitter can do to make it faster.
I think the point with intelligence is to show that dolphins, the species, are closer to humans, than (say) worms.
Sorry for going off-topic, but this background is really distracting.
In more extreme cases where emotional identification breaks down, I think it is clear that the lack of brain functioning is identified with a loss of humanity, even if other bodily facilities are still more or less operational.

Now, are dolphins at the same level as vegetable humans? Clearly not. Is the bar to which we hold them higher than that, since we lack the same emotional connections? I suspect, in reality, yes.
Finally a FB Business Model That is Profitable?
Its not always possible to know which kind of question you're answering. What is the odd one in this set? Is that a math question, or language? How far along you are in the test can change the desired outcome; I'm certain the strategy being tested switches mode as the test advances to cover more capable subjects.

Short answer: you have to be familiar with the culture of testing to do well. Anecdote: I got 95+ on the GRE entering graduate school; I took advanced subject tests in subjects I had never studied. All it took was a knowledge of how the test worked.
Ok I was half joking on that part. Presumably they will use some sort of genetically engineered organisms that are programmed to die after the terraformation.
It looks really nice and I'd look into it if it existed, but it doesn't. Is there some sort of trend rising in putting mockups of vapourware?

I really like the split screen and markdown support. That would definitely get my interest. But please, ship 0.1 and let us know, don't tease us with vapourware.
And this is only the wifi models of the iPad mini - the 4G ones are coming in a few weeks. Impressive.
That's not how things work. Some people never pay taxes, but have rights.
If one of your requests for followers fails at 100, does it fail for a different user as well? Instead of backing down on a user you could try delaying it for a time period and switch to another user.

also keeping track of when the failures occur is important, and potentially valuable information.
What does it mean to be literate in the Age of Google?
True. Perhaps a Wordpress varient would allow for per-post CSS files.

I haven't touched WP in a few years; does it have the equivalent of the Rails Asset Pipeline yet?
I agree that both of the statements you gave are not productive. "Interstellar travel isn't possible" rejects all theories past and future without considering their individual merits, which is awfully arrogant. "We have enough problems down here on Earth" is short-sighted, in terms of a geological timescale. In a billion years, our most pressing problem on Earth will be that the expanding Sun will kill all terrestrial life. Hopefully some forward-thinking individuals will have worked out space travel by then.

I only read the abstract, but I don't think the article is nearly as prohibitive as your statements. It says that diverting the radioactive hydrogen is a "daunting problem" i.e. hard but not impossible. Even if Near-C space travel _is_ invariably fatal, that's not so broad as "interstellar travel isn't possible". There's still wormholes and hyperspace and whatever exotic ideas we might come up with in the future.
Wow. Never knew about ImageAlpha. Thanks for the link.
It probably won't be long until we say the same thing about some "strong AI" robots.
Show HN: I built a web based game construction kit
The Christian worldview holds that human life has value intrinsically because God values it.

Protecting helpless/non-contributing life was happening long before Christianity.

Protecting helpless/non-contributing life is seen in almost all vertebrate+ life forms and seems to be a requirement for species advancement. The alligator mother allows its spawn to swim in and out of its mouth for protection, it doesn't eat them even though it could.

For instance, could a person with Down's Syndrome be denied protection from murder?

As thinking, social beings, we've extended the umbrella of protecting life to members of our species that are functionally disabled, even to the point where they can't take care of themselves.

It would be a significantly slippery slope hole in our Social Contract if we started trying to define who can and can't be murdered based upon genetic mutations.
just wanted to say thanks real quick for all this help. i've received over 30 e-mails already from random people helping me out with advice. i know it's often looked down upon in comments sections to thank the community since it provides no value, but i don't give a shit right now, i just need to say thanks, so much everyone :)
"Especially considering how slippery the definition of 'intelligence' is."

I think 'intelligence' represents how slippery all concepts are. Think about the definition of intelligence. According to the most common scientific definition, it's basically the ability to see patterns. The funny thing about that is that the ability to see patterns is basically what makes someone a good scientist, so scientists have defined 'intelligence' to mean having the potential to be good at science. Similarly, if you look at the CIA, intelligence means having information about enemy countries, because that's what makes a good CIA officer. If you were to ask a painter about the definition of intelligence, they'd probably tell you that it has something to do with being good at painting.

All words are defined by the types of people who are most likely to spend time thinking about the definition of that word, which means that essentially every concept in the every language is fundamentally biased by the worldview of the sort of person who would spend time thinking about that concept. And since science, logic, and knowledge are fundamentally based on these concepts in terms of looking for what to talk about and measure, I think this may be a serious epistemological problem that leaves humans capped at a certain level in terms of what we can know.

This is also why I'm generally skeptical of sites like Less Wrong, as I think the real limits of rationality and human knowledge have almost nothing to do with the 'official' list of logical fallacies that these sites tend to focus on.
Also, you're kind of at the advertiser's mercy on how reliable they are about reporting conversions, right? I can't see how the ad network could audit conversions with certainty, unless they were also processing the payments.

I would be very interested in hearing how it's done if I'm wrong, though.

I suppose it's kind of the same with an affiliate program, but on an ad network with thousands of participants, it seems much more uncertain.
Wow! Where does all these customers come from? It seems a lot of consumers buy these products just because they have to have latest Apple gadgets.
...they didn't write the article.
This also reminded me of the "Archangel" class ships described in Endymion by Dan Simmons. FTL travel on these ships instantly kills all passengers but then conveniently resurrects them once they reach the destination.
Microsoft Clippy's Stanford Connection: Nass, Reeves, & Fogg's CASA Research
I applaud this. It's time we stop drawing the line of where rights begin and end at the species barrier and start taking a characteristics based approach. What are the characteristics of a human that lead us to say one should have rights? If other species share those characteristics, they too should be granted those rights.
My main concern with having a programmer in office is that technicians don't always have a deep understanding of concepts like civics, or psychology, or the contexts that groups use to arrive at the opinions that they have.

An effective public servant is just that: someone who is able to save and spend political capital in a way that best serves his or her constituency (the people) instead of choosing merely the most technical sound or inexpensive solution to a problem.

So in that respect, usually more socially minded people like teachers and nurses make good politicians. They understand that the electorate is more capable than it realizes and can rise above problems that on paper appear to be too complex or expensive to solve (for example by spending its way out of a depression instead of choosing austerity which shrinks an economy).
i run up to 16 crawlers at the same time. twitter limits (in terms of rate limits) me only for each user and the calls i issue through that user's credentials. so i can go parallel easy. not much of a bottleneck on my side.
agree, you can also clearly see this in how platforms like tumblr have "evolved" to be peoples place to share short attention-span stuff. Blogging is becoming more of a mixture of FB feeds/twitter for most people.
[video] HealthConnect Panel Event #HCTO
you could easily apply sharding to that DB table and then scale horizontally as much as you like (just think big enough, so that you don't have to re-shard too soon..)
He has the right to talk about whatever he likes. This is an open discussion.
Another 3 Toyota Prius Hybrid cars caught fire in New Jersey Cars Specifications
Screen-scraping with Javascript and the CSS Object Model
A 10 month old has no responsibilities. Certainly, though, she has rights.
Congrats on launching this. You've picked quite a battle and quite a market to get into but hope it all goes well.
The importance of selling your vision.
so long and thanks for all the fish..?

aquatic jerks?