skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everybody knows what they're getting when they buy a Macbook, but not every product is familiar as a Macbook, and not every brand is as concerned with protecting their reputation as Apple. The existence of Chinese-made Macbooks proves that the Chinese are capable of making good products, but it doesn't prove that they habitually do so. With a lot of products, you're not going to find many reviews online, and even if you do, you don't know if the product has changed since the reviewer purchased it (unlike the situation with Macbook, where we read about it on HN every time there's a refresh).

Here's an extremely long thread at a website for toolheads that attempts to address this issue by reviewing harbor freight tools (mostly cheap no-name Chinese imports), but it's a long way from solved. The sheer size of this thread gives you an idea of how many people face the dilemma of buying cheap, risky products or expensive safe products.
http://garagejournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=27192

Often, you're forced to rely on the reputation of the country of origin or the brand (and the good brands are mostly American, European or Japanese).

That said, I have bought some Chinese made no-name products that turned out to be perfectly good for a much lower price than their USA-made counterparts.
I've no idea if their service actually works but if it does, it's illegal in the EU and it would also be illegal for their clients to use such information to e-mail those visitors.

EDIT: talking about relead.com mentioned in a g+ reply.
It is not too bad IMHO if you only use a slightly different domain for the same purpose but with completely different domains, it looks odd. And there is always the problem that some mail clients use your default Gmail address to reply and not the one you actually used.
That sounds like a great reason to improve the tools.
Interesting.

I would like to see an article like this, about the economics behind Eve Online. That would be interesting.
Movies as code - Top Posts
Well, consider that the very point of philosophy is to approach a seemingly simple question or subject – say, "What should laws be like?" – and then probe deeper and deeper into that question, searching for irregularities that might reveal hidden facets to that question that we don't consider, either due to our own assumptions, social norms, or even in the way the question is phrased. That's what philosophy does really well and really rigorously – and it's why its greatest works are so notoriously frustrating; imagine 800 pages on what it means "to be" that expounds on things like "because we all die in time, time is an essential part of man's being" at extraordinary length.

Obviously, that summary I gave is an exaggerated parody – and that's the problem with judging a philosophical paper based on its abstract. "Is there a contradiction with atheists liking Bach?" is a simple question that might reveal very interesting insights at length. Remember that this isn't a magazine article, in which such a question will be insipid and asked only to provoke controversy and sales – in all likeliness, that question is asked to provoke further questions, further examination, that might lead to something truly provocative. But I can't know for sure, because I only have the abstract – and that's all this guy has either, and he knows that's all he has, which means this article is either self-promotion on the author's part, or it's proof that the author doesn't understand philosophy to a worrying extent. Probably a combination of the two.

I see a parallel between this discussion and the science vs. religion debates that frustrate reasonable people on either side. You can't enter a debate with another field by starting with the assumption that your side has all the answers, and should therefore be the absolute center of the discussion. You have to be able to acknowledge what the other side is good for, what they can do that you're incapable of, before you start to make any kind of meaningful critique. It's wrong to attack science without acknowledging what science is good at, it's wrong to attack religion without some understanding of what lies at the heart of religious practice, and it's wrong to attack philosophy for its pursuit of deep abstraction when that's precisely what makes philosophy so valuable.

Going after philosophy because it generates stupid abstracts is like going after science because it promotes nihilism: when you make that argument, you admit to knowing so little about the field you're attacking that essentially your critiques are invalid by default.
(Also, I don't think all math majors use that second style).

Indeed. I don't, and I can think of several others who don't. Then again, most of the math majors I know were/are also studying CS.
Is there a VM offering preconfigured browsers being identical for everybody? Same JavaScript settings, same (VM) screen resolution, same browser size... Make it fixed and use that VM only for browsing...

That would not prevent all types of tracking but it give people using panopticlick-like tracking techniques a few headaches...
That relead.com stuff seems pretty scary:

"Unmatched in quality and accuracy
We can track exactly WHO is visiting your website, and how valuable or interested they are in your business"

"See complete company profiles of your visitors: Company Name, Industry, Size. We'll also be adding Credit Risk soon."
Two different and separate questions people always lump together.
I would have preferred the story.
I feel like (2) isn't difficult, in absolute terms, but is simply computationally expensive. Reddit is _still_ crashing all the time. They certainly don't have the resources to throw a bunch of machine learning or algorithmic muscle into preventing downvote spam.
Really enjoyed some of that. Thanks.
A replacement LCD and digitizer for an iPhone 5 currently sells for a few hundred dollars:

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbm=shop&q=iphon...
> As a writer in the 1600s you were lucky if you got an advanced payment from a wealthy patron, otherwise your income was dictated by how many people you could get into the theatre.

Sounds like the situation with bands and touring.
could i have one? my email id is siamoreslr@gmail.com
> We have experimental psychology now.

Yes -- apparently a big improvement over philosophy, until you take a closer look:

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/11/final-repo...

A quote:

"The blame goes far beyond Diederik Stapel and the three Dutch universities where he worked as a social psychologist. In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."
Quick privacy scan of their homepage only shows scripts being launched from 6 different companies and tracking cookies from optimizely and themself. (along with google analytics).

This actually has fewer than the average for tracking cookies placed on a homepage yet they are able to uniquely identify you. Privacy isn't gone on the web, but it is getting harder by the day. Some data can be passed outside of cookies and just through loading the scripts, but in general this site seems to be much ahead of average. (~10 unique domained scripts and ~7 unique domained cookies).
This is `apt`, not a dodgy app with a checkbox. If you apt-get remove something, it's gone.
It's how philosophy began and it's how philosophy is in its purest state, which is much different from saying it's the only way for philosophy to be.

Generally, I think philosophy is like mathematics in that while its purest application is very obscure and very hard to understand without a whole lot of effort, that pure application results in practical breaththroughs on almost every level of "practical" research. I wish that pure philosophy was taught to more people, just as I wish that we taught kids more than the boring "practical" math that convinces them math sucks and patterns are boring. It's a pursuit that benefits nearly everybody who learns from it: reshapes our mind, teaches us new ways to observe the world. And if we had scientists, psychologists, programmers, and politicians learning philosophy, then there'd be less pressure on the actual philosophers to start studying something practical.

For me that's the change that should be made: not more practical philosophy, but more philosophical practice.
Oh I agree with what you say there. Especially the OpenOffice part (and I would extend to several things)

And of course, most of (domestic/'business') sales are for Windows computers.

But see how much money Intel puts on Linux. I believe there are very good reasons for that, like the server market.

AMD support for Linux is lacking.

And the problem with AMD is that it ends up driving people away from using Linux in their platform. Sure, this may mean someone buying a MB/Processor at their local computer shop, but it may also mean someone selecting a server for a company.

See how many sales have been generated by cloud computing infrastructure. See how many of these are AMD
How Larry Page came to run Google
it's spelled "perl"
Dunning-Kruger effect maybe? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

>Next to the average MIT student, I think my accomplishments are impressive.

It's a subjective question and I don't think it's unreasonable that less than 20% of students have accomplishments that are more impressive than average.
> Notably absent from this guy's syllabus is anything concerning ethics, morality, values, or right and wrong.

That's because all morality is relative, one of the few things philosophy got right. The universe is morally neutral, which means that, to the degree that we fully grasp reality, to the same degree we discover that morality is a human invention, malleable across time and place.

Not to discount notions of morality, only to say that nature doesn't care what our thoughts are on the subject.
The TOR browser bundle is probably the closest thing at the moment, but there probably aren't all that many people using it, at least compared to the Internet population at large.

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en
"Even if the logo cost $100,000 "

It's likely going to cost millions. All the letterhead. Every web site. Physical signage.

"Connecting with the brand"? You're suggesting that people weren't familiar with the "brand" before?
If you opened any scientific journal, picked only the articles that seemed the least "relevant" to the mainstream, and quoted their abstracts without delving into the interesting, by which I mean actual, parts of their research, you could probably make scientific study seem stuffy, over-intellectual, and completely unworthy of serious study.

Hell, look at the critics of scientific education who say things like "Why does my kid need to study fruit flies? What if I want my kid to study humanity instead?" You'd respond that not only does that argument miss the value of studying fruit flies, but it misses the deeper reason why we study science at all.
I totally agree. It would even be easy to find old, well-received HN submissions that have likely been forgotten and to queue them up for resubmission to your new service.
Go further with TAILs.

A virtual machine or USB boot disk that allows nothing to be written to disk, and destroys all the memory contents on shutdown. Oh, and all connections are forcefully proxied through TOR.

https://tails.boum.org/
I'd say using AdBlock and Ghostery greatly increases the chance you're uniquely identifiable, provided there is a client-side (perhaps non-Java) test to list the browser plugins you use.

At least that is the worst offender to my identity, revealing 21.29+ bits of information.
I agree completely. I've been running LMDE for a little over a year now; quite easily my favorite distro.
Wichita, Kansas should not be a surprise[1]:

"In the 20th century, aircraft pioneers such as Clyde Cessna, Walter Beech and Bill Lear began projects that would lead to Wichita's nicknaming as the Air Capital of the World. The aircraft corporations Stearman, Cessna, Mooney and Beechcraft were all founded in Wichita in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Cessna and Hawker Beechcraft remain based in Wichita today, along with Learjet and Spirit AeroSystems, and both Airbus and Boeing maintain a workforce in Wichita. The city was also at one time the headquarters of the former Derby Oil Company, which was purchased by Coastal Corporation in 1988."

Albuquerque, NM also should not be a surprise[2]:

"Albuquerque is home to the University of New Mexico (UNM), Kirtland Air Force Base, Sandia National Laboratories, Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, and Petroglyph National Monument." (emphasis mine).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wichita,_Kansas

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albuquerque,_New_Mexico
Help HN: Incomplete HTML5 Bubble game: Someone help him complete it
Exchange/MAPI on the other hand always seems to support push mail. IMAP IDLE exists but many clients do not provide support for it, for example Mail.app for iOS. And if you use Gmail on a few devices via IMAP, you easily run into the annoying 'too many simultaneous connections' issue.

(I use IMAP nevertheless since Exchange/MAPI has some annoying issues on iOS if used with Gmail and Exchange/MAP is not supported by Mail.app on OS X.)
The nVidia proprietary driver usually works ok, it's certainly not "only now"

nVidia sells for people running professional (3D) applications on Linux, and their drivers usually outperformed the competition, especially in OpenGL

ATI had a lot of problems even with Windows drivers at the beginning.

Also, see who's the vendor behind EC2 Cluster GPU: nVidia
Pleases -> Please (sorry about that)
In a New Era of Insider Trading, It’s Risk vs. Reward Squared
I know how you feel, diggan. Go to my startup's About Us section on our website (which I develop! http://cyberialabs.coldstream.ca ) and read my bio (my IRL name is Kimberly Crawley).
I have a mere CompTIA A+, but like you, I have a self-taught web development background (since 1995, age 11).
I've done some consumer tech support (Windows, x86 hardware). But it was really tough for me to get my tech support job (it was before I got my A+, even!), where we weren't paid much and treated like crap.
Now, my only real employment is in my co-founded IT security/data centre startup. We got our first client (few days ago) but our business has yet to have revenue (we're getting there pretty soon, first client).
In addition to everything else, I'm a woman. One who looks even more feminine than average. I've got to fight tooth-and-nail to be taken seriously in this "boy's club" industry.
At least my fiance and co-founder is a Computer Scientist (who, even with his amazing IT security career, including working for the military and international public transit systems, and contributing to data security laws here in Canada), finds it tough to make money these days, hence our startup.
I'd gladly take you on, especially if you have some skills outside of web development, and you can remote into our work in Toronto, Canada and South Africa.
We could pay you once we start making SOME money... I'd have to learn more about you though, honesty.
… with some issues though:

https://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

An issue not mentioned is the possibility to show selected labels only. With IMAP, only the selected labels are shown in Mail.app.

Do you know BTW if using Exchange with Mail.app on iOS resolves the problem that each Gmail messages is shown in at least two folders/under at least two labels (for example 'All Mail' and 'Sent')?
Ok. When I imagine a "trained philosopher," I see someone who has spent a lot of time on studying others ideas, proposing their own ideas and challenging/defending these ideas. Should I imagine what you imagine instead?
Simple Tracking & Metrics for Business Processes (SOA)
As an American who built several web businesses before moving to Germany 4 years ago, I now shudder at what can be legally done in the US. There is no real perspective of data privacy at all. Now, I often feel that the German (and proposed new EU) standard goes way too far. But, I'm a fan of at least something that can keep such creepy behavior away from identifying users until they identify themselves.
Android's Google Now services headed for Chrome, too
I have always wanted to play Ultima Online, since years ago.
But too bad it still has monthly fees... $10 a month might not sounds too steep, but I'm in a place I can't pay using credit card nor get dollars... and it sucks.
That's insane! You'd be better off getting a replacement iPhone from Apple at those prices. I guess Apple is being tighter with their manufacturers this time around.
> If someone wanted speed of execution, why not use Ansi C? If someone wanted object oriented programming, why not the myriad other languages?

Because they want both speed and OO programming? :)

C++ is a multi-paradigm language. It has more abstractions than C, while retaining the ability to get down to the metal when you need to. Arguably, these higher level features are desirable when working on larger code bases. C++ also has features that make it easier to write clean and correct code (such as RAII). Templates and operator overloading makes for writing expressive libraries. I remember reading and article that compared C and C++ in the context of a matrix library. The C++ code was much more concise and readable, and was easier to get right compared to C, mainly due to those two features.

Furthermore, C++ can actually be faster than C. The canonical example is the templated std::sort() vs C's quicksort(). The C++ compiler is able to inline the comparator argument to the former, whereas qsort() takes a function pointer.
So this is a great place for me to be educated: what practical applications has philosophy yielded?

Btw, I've read your comments on this thread, and it seems like you're very knowledgeable about the field of philosophy, but not particularly knowledgeable about LessWrong. I'm only slightly knowledgeable about philosophy, but I highly recommend you read more of LessWrong - it's an amazing resource of knowledge and of philosophical discussions (albeit with a more practical-minded bent most of the time). Lukeprog, the author of the above post, is a very respected member of that community as far as I know, and I honestly think you are underestimating him.
Company claims to "track exactly who is visiting your website"
Actually, it looks as if they stop short of personal identification, though they can achieve personal identification in some cases, depending on the size of the company, location of query vs location of key contacts, etc.

As I read their pitch, they identify the company a visitor to your site represents, and then they suggest the contacts at that company and give you a bunch of info about the company and the key staff.
Right – which is why philosophy is more than just "the study of nature", and why in fact it's important that philosophy continues to examine questions like "if morality is relative, then is there a practical or even a deeper argument for morality's purpose that doesn't revolve around divine judgment?"

Nothing's more frustrating than people who take a very shallow summary of a very fascinating philosophical inquiry and using it to argue that entire swathes of philosophy are irrelevant as a result. The whole "moral relativism" thing was never as cut-and-dried as most Internet Moral Relativists think it is; it's an intricate discussion that deserves prolonged consideration, not a pithy "watch me prove you wrong!" zinger in an Ayn Rand novel.
4chan's /g/ board is pretty good, but at times brutal.
Well, I would hate to be accused of handing out pats on the head.

I was compelled by padseeker's idea, and honestly my similarity to your non-techie, want-to-learn-to-build position. I just wanted to point out that want-to-learn or not, it's on you to post a project to a public forum like that.

I appreciate your comment, just another POV.
This comment is very shallow.

Here is the big picture: there were millions of customers in America prior to the great depression and the same number immediately after the onset. Aggregate demand dropped, consumers sought safety, etc. "People just need to find the right product" wouldn't have been sound advice when looking at the overall scenario.
HN is definitely not the most supportive place on the internet. I've gotten some really good feedback from people who know what they're talking about, and read some discussion which was more interesting than the linked article. But then, I've also seen some people with a lot of karma who just bicker about insignificant things. Also, the fact that the community rules and best practices are ridiculously opaque, and every new person is initially viewed with hatred/mistrust for being 'from Reddit' or 'from /.' makes the place seem a bit hostile.
Likewise, a spare invite would be appreciated. http://scr.im/amh
ActorFx, an actor framework for Windows Azure, is now open source
Windows has "snipping" tool that does that.
Been hanging out at Lobsters for a while. Any chance I could get an invite too? Thanks! :)
Your joke made me literally laugh out loud in the middle of a coffee shop. Bravo, sir.
Philosophy sounds to me a lot like art. They do it mostly for themselves. We can consume it, but it's not really useful.
Yes, but my reply was to a post which argued that morality was being given too little weight. On the contrary -- too much weight, if anything, to the degree that some misguided souls are able to picture philosophy as a secular replacement for religion.
A slice of Raspberry Pi for underprivileged youngsters
Then why is it asking for my name during registration?
Precisely How Google Killed Google Reader.
i think it's just exchange 'activesync' so it'll work on your iphone but not on your desktop mail (mac mail for me)
When it comes to individual rights (as opposed to corporate) better it goes too far, than come up short.
This really bugs me. My bank's website doesn't use them correctly!
Philosophy and I parted ways in college when it became apparent that my own opinion meant less than someone else's. I look at philosophy as it's taught now like an introductory art class, where you learn how to draw lines and circles and shade things. Once you have a certain repertoire, focussing purely on technique becomes a waste of time, sort of the antithesis of art. Modern philosophy is touching things up in photoshop and calling it art.

I wish that philosophy was more about existentialism. Exploring what all of this really means and how it fits into your life. I've already diminished my argument by focussing on one narrow segment of philosophy. Then again, if philosophy is so fragile that any talk of improving it is met with hostility, maybe it's not all it's cracked up to be. And "modern" sciences like mathematics and probability don't have much to do with philosophy in my book.
Lovely argument that I would like to second.

I think you're the first person outside of my former research group that I've seen reference the Nature of Order. That made me very happy. It's too bad the books are so expensive – they deserve to be circulated more widely: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0972652914/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...
Ah! Okay, that makes a lot more sense; I think I misinterpreted the point you were trying to make. Sorry for the mess-up.
Foxconn Plans American Expansion as Clients Seek Made in U.S.A.
I usually follow a big mix of subreddits I'm interested in.
This is one of my bookmarks: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming+python+vim+compsci+webde...
Literate Programming - another 30 years old "technology". And it's good. As you say, the problem is not the tools, but rather mentality of rediscovering the wheel at best, and staying ignorant to the history of our field at worst.