skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it amazing that people volunteer to be lumped together with people for whom music means "songs", not composers, there is no sense of history or different classifications of music, and each new incarnation of the most widely used organizing application blithely offers fewer features.

It's not as though there's any shortage of music organizing applications, including free ones -- they just won't work in the insular Apple environment.

When I witness the sort of person who voluntarily enters Apple's pseudo-reality, I'm forced to agree with Erich Fromm that people fear freedom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Freedom
dude, how are you going to maintain that?

Depends on why it took 15 hours to figure out the problem and make it work. I would presume he (you) learned something during the process, so if it had to be repeated you wouldn't have the same false starts and understand the general solution much quicker. After that, comments should help the coder understand the details like edge cases and non-obvious decisions.

I speak from a recent similar experience where I had to build a fairly complex piece of multi-threaded image processing code on Android. Starting out there was a lot of knowledge about image processing and Android that I simply did not know. Learning and internalizing that information took a significant chunk of time reading the docs and other peoples code. Only then could I fully understand my particular problem and implement a solution.
Please describe the mechanism by which Page could get a million people into [anonymous location, don't let Target advertise either] for flu shots without disclosing anyone's name.
I'm making my way through The Process of Creating Life. It's one of only two books that I've read in recent years that I can't read too much of at once – I get three pages in and have to stop, because of how excited I am about his arguments and its implications.

I was debating, at one point, scanning its pages and making a digital copy for my friends' sakes, but the work is so tremendous that I feel bad distributing it for free. I would love to work on a digital copy of the book formatted specifically for computers – seriously, if I know if any book that I'd recommend everybody read, it's this one.
Yes, maybe. But first of all, personally I find, it is ok, to not be interested in all political questions. The chance here is to at least borden political influence, so maybe there are just some people, groups involved, why is that not ok?
At the same time I believe people will learn over time, that if they don´t take their chances, they will end up living under laws, they don´t agree with. And since the system I imagine allows constant iteration, there will be ways to change laws to the better, all the time.
why do ARM chips are more efficient?
A fairly transparent bit of rhetoric there :-)

In answer to your non-question question, yes that site exists, there are literally hundreds of them. They get a few users, then they don't get new news, they get a few 'bad' things (people get scolded for being negative, or chastised for being 'off topic' or 'social') and then no one wants to post because they can't really tell what is "acceptable" and what isn't. People stop going there. It fades into obscurity.

My suggestion is that what your looking for isn't a web site its friends. Get together once a week and hang out. You can talk about programming languages, mathematics, science and other oddities. Invite people who stick to the program, shun people who keep wanting to talk about tech products.
Record Labels go to High Court to Force More ISPs to Block Pirate Bay
Apple CEO Tim Cook moves out of Steve Jobs' shadow
Vijayanand is moderately infamous for sheepishly promoting his in50hrs event (it is a PAID event organized by him) under the guise of such shallow articles and also on twitter

(EDIT: I've been his follower for ages, he sometimes misleads people into buying tickets for the event, falsely advertising that it's going to be 'sold out' even when no one has actually signed up).
What a fantastic response! I'm so heartened to see this as the top comment. The article is completely absurd, of course, but unfortunately represents a bizarre sort of anti-intellectualism that is running rampant through academic communities which are coming closer and closer to declaring outright that philosophy as a discipline, and not just particular philosophers, is irrelevant and has been superseded by a specific form of dogmatic, reductionist science.

The breathtaking category mistake in this sentiment is not only disturbing from an abstract point of view, it is cause for deep concern for the future of human inquiry, if we continue to naively demand that all knowledge of the world be communicated in one form or another of bayesian/cartesian modeling, under a watered-down, diluted Popperian epistemological regime (exemplified in the OP's blog title, "Less Wrong".)

I have to take issue with one aspect of your response, though. I lay the blame for this trend, unsurprisingly, at the feet of Descartes himself. The article's sentiment towards Aristotle and Plato and indeed all previous philosophy is first expressed, with nearly the same dismissive arrogance (albeit couched much more subtly for political reasons) in Descartes' Discourse on Method. The Discourse is in fact a much more eloquent (naturally) and far-reaching version of the exact same argument in the OP. It is Descartes' naive dualism and reductionism, as well as his not-so-subtle dismissal of medieval and ancient philosophy, for precisely the same reasons found in this article, that laid the groundwork for the current large anti-intellectual, naively reductionistic trend.

Kudos on the Alexander citation -- I think if you dig deeply into his philosophical and metaphysical roots, you'll find a similar suspicion of naive Cartesian dualism, and a rejection of the simplistic mechanistic metaphors that animate it.

I believe it is in fact this rejection, coupled with a return to more confidence in formal realities, closer to the specific philosophical bent of works like Aristotle's Poetics, that is the basis Alexander's entire project. Note that Alexander has received more attention in many ways outside of his discipline (such as in the software community), for precisely his criticism of the radicalized Cartesian/modernist tendencies in contemporary architecture.
A lot of physics quackery comes from engineers.* Their knowledge of advance physics is generally nowhere near that of a physics PhD, but their title lends them credibility to many people.

* I have not found the reverse to be true.
Disrupt Hacker News! Come help change the way that we Hacker News Hacker News! :)

I'm not near as focused as you are, but I understand your discontent. I have two suggestions.

One, the easy thing (easy as in less work and commitment), which a few others have suggested. Help make HN better, make it what you want. It's probably already closest to what you want, among the alternatives.

Read /newest and upvote good content and good comments. I personally rarely downvote bad comments, I just avert my eyes. I do flag spam, it's like picking up litter. But downvoting is an option, and part of the deal. Just don't "be a downvoter," it will probably make you feel worse, and make reading HN like a burden. Don't carry a cross, just watch the parade. (Worst metaphor you'll read today.)

Write good comments. Respond seriously and helpfully to the occasional lame or hostile comment. Be the change you want to see, and all that.

But mainly, get good at ignoring what you don't like. There's still a lot to like.

Two ... this will take some work and time. You can do it in parallel with HN, or wherever you go from HN. Curate your own discussion group. Look around in your current social, academic and work circle, and talk to a small handful (less than five-ish, more than one), who you think might be interested in discussing what you're interested in. Establish some broad but focused discussion topics.

Set up a mechanism for you all to discuss privately. If you're all local, beer is a great mechanism. Otherwise the easiest and simplest thing would be email, and you should probably stop at that; don't focus on the tools (fun though they are, especially the beer), start discussing as quickly as possible; like, this afternoon. Really, this afternoon. If you like, one of you can maintain a forwarding address, so you don't have to each maintain lists. But you don't need that this afternoon, let that emerge naturally. I've been a member of exactly such a list for ... 15 years? Dayam.

Every once in awhile, invite a new individual in. Do it slowly and deliberately. Don't obsess or agonize over whether someone is right for the group; if you thought of them, they probably are. If they aren't, they'll stop participating. New people will change the dynamics and focus, and that's a good thing. Just do it slowly, not as a focus.

Be generous and engaging with your fellow list members. Accept heat, and let it dissipate quickly. The fewer rules you have, the less they'll be broken.

Over the years, your group might grow to five, or ten, or a hundred, it's up to you.

As you communicate with people you know personally (or online personally), there's a danger that the group might take on some social aspects. You may even become friends with some or all of them. That's a risk that you'll have to take. It's not so bad. :)
I was never one for convention :-)

Yes, much better. Working off a USB stick with persistent space, (I have the Gnome Ubuntu Remix as PC os at present) and this box has Nvidia graphics, and we have problems with the broadband. So as slow a combination as I can imagine anyone new to Ubuntu seeing.

Searches now seem to be completing before sending to Amazon, and my maths related file name terms were bringing up sensible UK relevant suggestions from Amazon, mainly textbook titles. This 'feature' has got a lot smoother since I first saw it.
Reducing the uniqueness of a browser's fingerprint seems like a more valuable privacy investment than a DNT header that may or may not be adhered to by the websites you visit. Are any of the major web browsers actively working on this?
See, professor, the Martians are intelligent after all!

Oh wait, those were human beings, and they're being treated like lab rats because they're poor and not European. Seriously does nobody else see the stark white-man's-burden arrogance in all of this?.
I think this is as close as you can get for the moment: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/
Listen on a UDP port and dump received lines of data
And the animation in their home is pretty sinister too.
That would be an interesting twist: made in U.S.A. by a Chinese company.
Maybe they'd be more open to these ideas if you didn't refer to them as "followers of scientism".
Disruption is a Culture -- It's Simply Who We Are
Ask HN: What do you hate about your office?
If you could change your office (for the better) what would you change?

Areas to think about:
- What processes currently frustrate you?
- How would you improve your desk / workspace?
- What cultural elements of your office drive you crazy?
- How could your boss better support your work?
me too. Do you reckon this is enough?
In what way? (Genuine question.)
I'd love an invite too :)

edit: thanks polyfractal!
> I'm making my way through The Process of Creating Life.

Pro tip: always provide a link when you refer to a title:

http://www.amazon.com/Process-Creating-Life-Building-Univers...

(This doesn't constitute a recommendation, indeed, this book is way too expensive for its content.)

> I was debating, at one point, scanning its pages and making a digital copy for my friends' sakes ...

Pro tip: never say this online. It's a crime, you know? Granted, this book doesn't deserve to cost US$75.00, regardless of what's between its covers. But copying it would be a crime, one receiving a lot of attention right now.
Zynga Plans to Tap Gambling Market
I am not sure if my experience is typical, but I successfully landed my internship at Shopify, which was my number one choice, by emailing the CEO directly and telling him I'd like to work there.

It's only a data point of one, but it worked well enough for me. If you can't find their email online, try firstname@company.tld.
If you're trying to produce light equivalent to what we're used to in first world countries, yes, you're right.

If you're only trying to replace kerosene lamps, you don't need much power. A tenth of a watt with an LED gives a light output comparable to a kerosene lamp. See the numbers elsewhere in the thread.
They do if you're trying to replace kerosene lamps, which is what these lights are intended to do. Do you have any specific numbers you're not happy with?
It's invite-only, but you don't need an account to read it.
This is one of the stated purposed of HN. To let YC applicants have an extended group interview.
Amazon is run by Skynet
About a decade ago I noticed this phenomena.

Worthwhile communities need to be maintained by barriers. The kind of barrier that I personally enjoy most is, "Crappy enough interface that only people who really like the content will be motivated to show up."
"Amen."
This is the first time I've heard of labels. A lot of us learned html from googling and ending up on w3schools, which is not the best reference. http://w3fools.com/ has a good list of the erroneous info.
That's interesting! My understanding of Descartes comes from the book Descartes' Bones, which frustrated me in some ways but made an argument about Descartes that I found very interesting: when Descartes wrote his Discourse on Method, he was a Christian who felt his works very strongly connected with the existing works of the Church. He was not an advocate of discarding all non-mechanistic discovery so much as he advocated reexamining what we already knew. It was philosophers who came after him who began to argue that perhaps the mechanistic model could function in its own right, without connection to any other existing school of knowledge.

I haven't read Discourse myself yet, unfortunately: it's in a long queue of works which is currently taken up by Alexander's The Nature of Order, a wonderful but long read. I was led to believe that Descartes argued his new method should be added to existing ones rather than replace them entirely – am I wrong in thinking this way?
Actually, according to the philpapers surveys most philosophers are moral realists. Of course, that means that they believe that at least some moral statements are true independent of what anyone thinks about them, not that "nature cares what our thoughts are" (whatever that means). And i think everyone would do well to explore the position seriously.
Getting Serious with JavaScript
The entire concept of the downvote is flawed and is very likely to be the absolute worst part about reddit.

In theory it may be a good idea, but in practice it's essentially a "CENSOR THIS POST" button that people use to get rid of content they don't agree with.

I've also noticed that negative points on a post completely destroys credibility despite cited evidence or a well thought out argument. I've seen identical comments on similar posts in the past where the first few voters determined the post's fate in that if the first few voters voted it down, the post would receive flames and even more downvotes, but if it was initially upvoted, more people would upvote it and it would receive well thought out replies.

Probably the most horrifying part of the downvote is that all it takes is 51% of voters to dislike your post to destroy it. For example, all it takes is 51% of viewers on the politics subreddit to turn the the /r/politics frontpage into a pseudo fox news where every single post praises democrats and slanders republicans.

It strikes me as disgusting that some people actually consider reddit to be a good place to have a controversial discussion when it's so pathetically easy to censor opinions that you don't agree with.
How to Turn Off the Lock Screen in Windows 8
he has never been particularly constructive

yeah. i mean except for the part where his actions directly lead to one of the most significant changes in technology in a generation.
I'm not sure what that means. Dogs and apes and all social creatures have an innate sense of morality. They react emotionally to transgressions and punish transgressors.

Nature has evolved that, in humans it has created certain rather strong thoughts and feelings on the subject. So in that sense nature does care.

Different systems of morality are also going to lead to very different societies of varying effectiveness. So in terms of outcomes nature cares as well.

Seems like a potentially interesting and fruitful thing to look into.
Yesterday a friend explained the physiological reasons behind 25 minute breaks: basically the muscles (including eye muscles) go into a different state of relaxed-tension and its generally not good for them to be in that state while the body is sitting-looking.

There's also the issue of the effort required to concentrate on a task, which gives diminishing returns as you extend it beyond ~25 minutes without break.

However a mental flow state (what you seem to describe) requires little to no concentration effort and so can yield great returns over the time spent. The tradeoff is that the body is in a less-than-desirable muscular situation for a prolonged time - but I'm guessing the damage there is not so significant if 8 hour flow sessions are not a daily habit.

tl;dr: the 25 minute break thing is probably a good general guide, but shouldn't stop you pulling an 8 hour session if you are absorbed and productive
Different.
Flu vaccines prevent flu. Liability insurance doesn't prevent damages.
If you use Chrome, there are extensions like this one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-disconnec...
While I agree that philosophy has the ability to ask good questions, unfortunately it does not seem to be able to answer those questions in any meaningful way. Science also has the ability to ask good questions, but it knows how to answer them in a meaningful way (at least good science does). By meaningful, I mean provably true. Philosophy is very happy to take untested opinion as true. Which is provably dangerous.

I get the sense from reading your post that you think of Philosophers as Philospher-Kings, who sit at the top of humanity and think about important things and their ideas eventually trickle down to the Plebeians at the bottom. And once everyone agrees with the Philosophers, there will no longer be a need for Philosophy. Give me Science any day.
No philosopher worth her salt would try to answer this question as formed because of the large number of buried assumptions in it that presuppose the form of the correct answer, and that answers not meeting that form are, by definition, incorrect. Your question is a sophisticated version of "have you stopped beating your wife?"
It looks like it is only companies it can track for you.
Oops, my bad: should have linked.

> (This doesn't constitute a recommendation, indeed, this book is way too expensive for its content.)

I assume you're saying that without having read it? Because it is a marvelous and astonishing work – one that manages to simultaneously work out an abstract view of order while reasoning all the way to its practical outcomes – outcomes which Alexander's demonstrated in his decades of work as an architect. There's a reason it's so long, and it's that Alexander works rigorously through all his theories and their underpinnings until he can finally come up with practical ways of using them and, in using them, proving their correctness.

> Pro tip: never say this online. It's a crime, you know? Granted, this book doesn't deserve to cost US$75.00, regardless of what's between its covers. But copying it would be a crime, one receiving a lot of attention right now.

That's actually why I'm not making a copy of it. I don't say this about many books, but this one is entirely worth the outrageousness of its price (well, almost: I ordered used copies for 25-33% off). I plan to incorporate Alexander's ideas into works of my own, even hopefully write about them so they can reach a wider audience, but I respect the work far too much to think I have a right to give it away myself.
I have been known to do that. It is great for writing an initial block of code.

It doesn't work so well 6 months later when you're editing that code.
> Definitely interesting, but legal? Not very likely...

There is nothing in the US that makes this sort of activity illegal. The exceptions would include minors, health or certain financial information. Excluding that, unless it goes against something stated in their policies it is perfectly legal in the US.
List of the products I offer
Quoting from the original "about" post:

>Invitations

>Not for exclusivity, but rather, invitations will be used as a spam-control mechanism. New users must be invited by a current member and invitations will be unlimited (unless scaling problems temporarily prevent new accounts). If spammers are invited to the site and banned, the user that invited them may also be banned, going up the chain of invitations as needed.

https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters
He didn't even use the word "I" in the announcement. It was a sentence fragment. He said "Personally providing", an neogrammatical construct whose only purpose is to downplay the subject of the sentence.
does this mean we can finally do something with those eggs, the key, and the door in the desert?
A relevant note is that MIT doesn't release class ranks or average GPAs or anything like that. Personally, I think it's good because while people might think they're below average, I'm ok with them not worrying about the particular number.
Navigating Past Innovation's Naysayers
That actually sounds kinda right. When people hear the phrase "above average" you probably interpret that to mean "noticeably better than most people" rather than "scored higher than the mean score".

It would depend on what the distribution of ability looked like, it's quite possible that over 50% of any given class have scores/ability that are grouped very closely together to make the differences in scores fairly trivial. Then you have an elite group that are effectively bunched around a significantly higher mean and also a struggling group noticeably at the bottom.
Being a few marks off a B will still make you a C student.

This was certainly my experience at college, there was the "smart group" (which I wasn't in) and then there was everyone else.

I'm sure there is a better way of describing this with statistical terminology.
Google Now is going to be integrated into Google Chrome
5 probably is just a factor of a small sample size. It's a small major.

There's also some weird things going on with 17 (political science) and I would speculate that it's due to the high rate of double majoring. AFAIK, there is only one 17 senior that isn't double majoring.
"These discoveries may be correct, and they may be true."

This is the problem with Philosophy. You can take something correct and true, and disregard it. Worse, it is disregarded in favor of what is essentially an opinion.
https://lobste.rs/s/bkeYe9/about_lobsters

https://github.com/jcs/lobsters
Really? I thought I saw one for the majors. Might be wrong.

edit: nope, you're right. I was remembering a different tech survey graphic.
http://www.ghostery.com/
Dunning and Kruger also found that people with above-average competence rate their own competence lower than it actually is.
The case for an AppleTV Transmitter
Ironic that "georgeorwell" promotes manipulating the public through secret actions instead of transparently telling people about ones doings.

Teaching Larry Page humility is less important than getting the job done. The man has more money than god and he still goes to work every day, even after issues that forced him to stop doing his public CEO work for a while. How much humility does he need?