skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Speaking factually incorrect things if you believe them to be true is honest but incorrect.

In ordinary conversation, yes, of course. But not in advertising copy. As to the latter, one cannot claim ignorance.

Try your position in a court of law after someone holds you responsible for an "innocent misstatement of fact" in advertising copy that leads to sales based on a false premise, and/or that causes injury.

Interestingly, about the difference between false statements and lying, this played a part in a scandal at West Point a few years ago, in which some students didn't realize the point you make about ordinary conversation -- lying must be intentional falsehood, with knowledge that the statement is false.

Nevertheless, someone who writes advertising copy can't claim this protection.

> Are people who write code with bugs just dirty liars ...

That's not the same at all. A programming bug isn't an intentional statement, whether true or false. A closer comparison would be someone speaking a word in a language he doesn't actually understand, and not realizing he's used the wrong word.
Microsoft makes money on the one off sale and then essentially zero from then on. Google makes zero on the sale, but then makes money from then on. Asymco has the numbers from 6 months ago:

http://www.asymco.com/2012/05/14/the-android-income-statemen...

Also note that the more recent the version of Android, the higher they monetize:

http://www.insidemobileapps.com/2012/10/24/androids-jelly-be...
Is Ignaz Semmelweis a TEDx compatible person?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

'The Semmelweis reflex or "Semmelweis effect" is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms.'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex
For a game it's even more puzzling because the odds are high this was all done in some C++ framework and barely uses Cocoa.

I know as a developer I'm not even thinking about iOS 6-only releases until the middle of next year. Which is a bitch because dealing with the iPhone 5 without autolayout is no fun at all.
This is a good statement of the problem.

I'd be quite curious to hear suggestions on the solution(s).

Direct attacks on something as huge and culturally interwoven as "religious belief" is probably ineffective and even counter-productive.

But populations do wax and wane in religious fervor, and the power of religious belief in everyday people's lives. It's unavoidably difficult to winnow out actual factors affecting that kind of thing, but there must be theories out there.
Woah. Snaggy dev here; didn't think I'd see this on HN yet. I made Snaggy myself a year ago as a side project - it was my first experience with web development. After a year of feedback, I was in the middle of giving it a big revamp, improving the UX, handling other browsers/OS better, user accounts, deletion options, etc. I was going to post it here once I had all that fixed up! But here we are.

Please give me your feedback! I had zero experience with webdev when I made this, but now I feel much more confident.
Snaggy uses S3 and Cloudfront, and deletions are permanent, if that's a concern. Also, I use the user-agent for browser detection, which I realize now is not very reliable. I need better browser/OS support and I'd like to improve the editor.
The idea is - if the reader doesn't grok direct products or cyclic groups, he's fucked anyways, so why bother ? And if he does grok them, why impose cognitive overload by spelling it all out in great detail, just use 1-character symbols and move on.

This case analysis works if you only consider people who've been sitting in on the class the whole time, but someone who appears mid-way through the semester (or analogously, starts looking at some project's code without having been involved in its development) may understand group theory and still have trouble following the lecture.

// Compute the direct product of 2 cyclic groups

I would much rather give the function a name that describes its purpose (and give a full description in a comment at the function's definition) than annotate every use of the function.
Yes, this is the normal conversational test. But in advertising copy, one can be held to account for false statements, intentional or not.

I always call advertising-copy misstatements "lies", just because the level of responsibility is higher and the copy writer has no excuse for endangering the company's future. As it happens, the courts agree.
"Most people"? That's a large assumption to make.
There's a commercial game similar to this called Flux. It's not as free-form (there are cards with rule changes pre-printed on them), but it is easier to play with a group of new users.

One of the primary results--obvious to programmers but perhaps not obvious to the general public--is how easy it is for rules to interact in unexpected ways, often producing ambiguous gameplay which may go unnoticed by players for significant lengths of time.
Awesome. We'd actually have a use in the lab for such a measurement (we see seismic traffic noise from a bridge ~200m away). We've toyed with a magnetometer a bit, but an acceleration-based measurement would be more relevant for our needs.

Did you do any documentation/know of a reference? Thanks!
Which browser are you using? It only needs an applet for browsers that can't support the clipboard api (unless it detected it wrong, which is possible).
Sac longchamp
The Platform of the Century will power cameras, credit cards, cellphones, computers, consoles, clocks

This is why I've decided to crosstrain from iOS to Android. I think Apple is going to continue to do well for many years but Android is going to be much bigger than just phones.

I expect solid Android experience to be very much in demand.
I suspect the reasoning is to prohibit first gen iPads.
> Do you fact check every single thing you say that you heard ...

You're comparing ordinary conversation with advertising copy. They aren't comparable. Advertising copy must meet a higher standard -- misrepresentations are sometimes severely punished, and such statements always hurt the company's reputation.

A different standard is at work, and it should be.
Must not have gotten the expected response.
It was my first thought as well ;) But the article doesn't do the comic strip justice.

https://lh3.ggpht.com/_zRSvuGbL2L0/TE0I0GlkcTI/AAAAAAAAAg4/k...

http://littlebobeep.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Calvinbal...
I've been interested in this idea of games with modifiable rules on and off, but something about the voting aspect doesn't appeal to me that much. Not entirely sure why. I like the self-referentiality of the rules being modifiable, but it just being a vote, "what rule change do you want?", feels unsatisfying.

I'm not sure what to replace it by, admittedly. I did one experiment where instead of saying what the rules were, your actions were taken as an example of what you thought the new rules should be: if you did something not previously legal, it was inferred to now be legal [1]. But that just led fairly quickly to chaos, unless it were carefully restricted. So maybe not the right approach either. But I still like the idea that the game-mechanics changes themselves are related to the game mechanics in a cybernetic-feedback-loop kind of way, rather than a completely "outside the system" free vote. Now as to how to implement that in a way that makes for a playable/interesting game...

[1] http://www.kmjn.org/notes/reflexive_rules.html
Each "bill" in bitcoin includes a full transaction history, which gets shared with every other bitcoin user. It's quite different knowing that a dollar bill got from A to B, vs a bitcoin which tells you exactly how it travelled from A to B.
> For a game it's even more puzzling because the odds are high this was all done in some C++ framework and barely uses Cocoa.

The iPad 1 has 256 megs of RAM. The iPad 2 has 512, The 3 & 4 a gig.

"Requires iOS 6" is the easiest way, as a dev, to get the store to enforce the requirement that your app needs more than 256 Megs to run comfortably.
1917: A Woman Who Teaches Men How to Fly
Google Desktop (while it was still alive) was also spying on users in the same manner as you described above. I am not clear why there was no uproar about that?

http://angryhacker.com/blog/archive/0001/01/01/google-and-pr...
BlogNomic is a nomic game that has been running since 2003. When someone "wins", they reset the rules and being a new "dynasty". New players are welcome, but most players have been playing for a very long time so the rules get quite tricky.

http://blognomic.com/
No. He's completely off his nut about blobs, cloud computing and a host of other topics. Very few people use a distribution that he doesn't have issues with.
Yeah, that's cool. I chuckled at your comment, and I didn't downvote (I can't. Guess I don't have enough karma). Just trying to abide by the guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).
If only I could use GChat with Outlook.com, I would switch in a heartbeat.
You can get double of anything except for guac and meat if you just ask.

Heard it from a Chipotle employee.
For comparison, the original version of Baldur's Gate required 16 MB of RAM (32 MB recommended).
Um, this is Larry Page not Ellison. Very different men in many ways.
Ha, I had phrased it "everything in moderation, including moderation"
For the sake of an argument, let's assume you are right, and the language of math sucks.

Then, we have had centuries of mathematicians inventing ever changing notations and ending up with a notation that sucks.

If so, those mathematicians must be extremely stupid. Surely persons of average intelligence must be able to come up with better notations, and find proofs for stuff that is out of reach of those morons?

I do not rule out that notation can be improved. After all, it took millennia to move from Greek and Roman arithmetic systems to Arabic notation. There is no reason to assume we have reached a global optimum. However, I also find it unlikely that mathematical notations truly are stupid.

Your argument is like someone complaining about the difficulty of discriminating between "37" and "73" because it is way easier to see the difference between 37 and 73 scratches in a piece of wood.
> I believe it depends on where he got this information. If he had heard that information from a scientist in the field ...

That's a somewhat different topic, but it's relevant. Not all scientists can be relied on to deliver accurate claims. Case in point:

http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/10/report-dut...

All Stapel's papers were published in refereed journals. It will be years, possibly decades, before Stapel's many retracted papers are no longer referenced in the scientific work of other psychologists.

My point? Advertising copy must be vetted by knowledge, not appeals to authority. It only took me 15 seconds to find a source that falsified the claim about mosquitoes, and it's not my field. It can't hurt that I knew it was false at the outset.

The problem with claims about mosquitoes and light is that there are a lot of dishonest vendors who lie about this, and a copy writer with insufficient training will almost certainly repeat the lies of others. I think that's what happened in this case.
Yeah that is surprising. I would have just assumed they offered that if you hadn't mentioned it.
Also depending on the discipline you're working in you can make very confident assumptions about what a random mathematical object is depending on which language it is typeset in. In the context of programming language type systems, for example, a Greek letter is almost always an ML style type variable (think Haskell type a -> b -> a stuff) whereas Roman type is almost always a ground object (int, bool, whatever). Vectors are boldface, groups are capitals, fields are blackboard bold, lowercase letters in a group context are almost certainly group elements... In some contexts you're actually reaching for new alphabets (e.g. the Hebrew letters that are used for infinite cardinals) to be even more distinctive.
I do think it is a bad thing. The law as written should reflect the practice of it. If smoking in public parks should not be enforced, then it should not be illegal. It shouldn't be up to whether a police officer or some prosecutor finds me agreeable enough of a citizen to give me a pass.

That's what I mean by cowardice; on the part of lawmakers who don't want exercise the courage to make the law reflect reality and instead just do whatever is politically expedient.
I believe that there's a sensitivity threshold for laser gyros at which the Man gets interested. I've been to a colloquium where the speaker noted that foreign graduate students weren't allowed to work on gyros with sensitivities greater than a specific value. They were careful not to optimize beyond that threshold (sensitivity was ancillary to their science measurement).

I've also seen a civilian science project rename themselves in order to differentiate themselves from missile guidance systems. In general though, I don't think it's much of a problem for science. The sudden classification of a promising technology is a strong signal to other states that the technology is of practical use.

In CS terms, the day that quantum computation goes dark is a day you know that RSA is over.
I see your point, but there's more numbers when it comes to companies, there's a break at 7 or 8, and another one somewhere around 20. I might have fudged the numbers a littlebit, but they're both breaking points when a company needs to change its organisational structure: Starting with a flat, informal startup, at 7 or 8 is where people may feel their voice is not informally heard at (for instance) meetings, that needs to be addressed by a (slightly) more formal type of meeting. Somewhere around 20 there's a second break which is when you need to start thinking about an extra level of management (just one at first, of course). There's probably a few more that I don't know of and I would not be at all surprised if Dunbar's number is one of them.
Kind of a quirky note, but now the creators of all of the most popular web languages (Ruby, PHP and Python) have had a stint at YC companies:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2756314

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus-lerdorf-...
So the answer to the question is that C++ is just much more performant than Go in general?
Is it curiously left-aligned for anyone else?
Where I can see analogue of http://blockchain.info/new-transactions for cash?
Byte-code for the web is coming: Pepper 24 can build PNaCl executables
I often get double meat, too, which in principle costs extra, but that information has to propagate down the line, and I'd say about 1/3 of the time it gets lost. What remains is an ethical dilemma—do I inform them that they're under-charging me and thus pay for the extra meat, or do I keep mum and get the free second serving as a bonus?

N.B. I knew about the fajitas hack—I always get vegetables in my burrito bowl.
Found out today that my employer was hit by a patent troll[1].
"We plan to vigorously defend ourselves."

This needs to be solved, quickly. I'm even scared of publishing simple Android apps for fear of becoming a target.

[1] http://news.priorsmart.com/metasearch-systems-v-travelzoo-l6...
I suppose you could just make a new rule that says rules are decided on by something other than voting.
And if someone cannot get their paper published in a system that allows such results, then what can we reasonably assume about said rejected paper?

As a metaphor, compare the earning of a Harvard degree through cheating with not even getting through the admissions process.
I'm tired of domain investors being called legitimate. It's free and open space; take what you need and leave the rest.

... You're probably the person before the hurricane who buys all the gas in the neighborhood and resells it to people for 1,000 times the price.
That about sums it up. It's made worse by professors who have been trained to teach things in an unmotivated fashion.

I had a graduate probability teacher who said (paraphrased) "one of the beautiful things about math is that you start with a definition, and you prove some very simple things with the definition... so simple that you feel you're just using circular reasoning. Then you find that your definition is equivalent to a useful property!"

Actually, what happened when the stuff was developed is that someone wanted the useful property, and managed to rationalize a definition which fit. (example: group theory was done for hundreds of years before we had a definition of group. Noether noticed that a lot of folks were writing the same sorts of things in different contexts, so she distilled it down to three axioms.)

For a really concrete example, consider ordered pairs. A person being coy about their intent would say that "we define an ordered pair (x,y) on a set S as a set of the form {{x},{x,y}}, where x and y are in S."

It's safe to say that no one thinks of an ordered pair in that fashion. The intent was to have two ordered pairs be equal if and only if each of the two coordinates are equal. You can prove this from the above definition, but it's far more helpful to tell the audience in advance that we really want a structure with this property.
While I agree, I still believe this could have been an honest mistake including trusting someone that should know the answer.
That's what the last bit of the post I linked says, actually.

ETA: Oh, wait. His older post actually explains it better: http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html

"In my opinion it is at 5 that the feeling of "team" really starts. At 5 to 8 people, you can have a meeting where everyone can speak out about what the entire group is doing, and everyone feels highly empowered. However, at 9 to 12 people this begins to break down -- not enough "attention" is given to everyone and meetings risk becoming either too noisy, too boring, too long, or some combination thereof. Although I've been unable to find the source, I've heard of some references to a study from the 1950s that says that the optimum size for a committee is 7. Likewise, it's fairly easy for us to see and agree that a dinner party starts to break down somewhere above 7 or 8 people, as do also tabletop games of both the strategic (I prefer 5) and role-playing varieties (I prefer 7). These size limits can be overcome, but require increased amounts of "grooming".

"The chasm that starts somewhere between 9 to 12 people can be especially daunting for a small business. As you grow past 12 or so employees, you must start specializing and having departments and direct reports; however, you are not quite large enough for this to be efficient, and thus much employee time that you put toward management tasks is wasted. Only as you approach and pass 25 people does having simple departments and managers begin to work again, as it starts to really make sense for department heads to spend significant time just communicating and coordinating (and as individual departments become large enough to once again allow for the dynamic exchange of ideas that had previously occurred in the original 5-9 member seed group).

"I've already noted the next chasm when you go beyond 80 people, which I think is the point that Dunbar's Number actually marks for a non-survival oriented group. Even at this lower point, the noise level created by required socialization becomes an issue, and filtering becomes essential. As you approach 150 this begins to be unmanageable. Once a company grows past 200 you are really starting to need middle-management, but often you can't afford it yet. Only when you get up past that, maybe at 350-500 people, does middle-management start really working, primarily because you've once again segmented your original departments, possibly again reducing them to Dunbar-sized groups."
Much easier than:

Command + Control + Shift + 3

and

Command + Control + Shift + 4 + Spacebar + Mouse Click

in my opinion.
I've never found Android, the OS, to be distracting. I'm a swipe and a tap away from any notification. I prefer it, no doubt because I'm used to it, but all the same. With the new lock screen widgets, I'm pretty sure it's faster/directer access than any other mobile OS.

I never really got those ads, you get what you put into your phone. I think the people that spend a bunch of time on their phone are spending the time because they're choosing to be on it. It's not like my brother stares at his iPhone all the time because he's looking for his bosses email... it's because he's texting, or playing a game or lazily streaming music via youtube, etc.
I would argue that the self-documenting code in your first example (albeit excessively verbose to suite your argument) is better than having to put a comment above every terse statement one writes?.

Programming with descriptive and meaningful variable / function names that have intrinsic meaning skips this step: 'wait, what was the cg2 again? let me waste time by looking back through the code and figuring that out again'. Particularly for others reading your code later.

But I try to fit somewhere in between the two examples you've shown, meaningful but not too long -> the benefits of longer variable / functions names diminishes when names get too long as variable names tend to blend together (see law of diminishing returns).
I'm on the other side of the fence now. Yes, it's much harder, and much more stressful, but it's on my terms.

There's a lot more to this story, but I've decided to draw this out over a couple posts.

Funny you mention being risk averse. I've talked about this with my cofounder, and we don't see doing this as being risky. We see taking jobs as being risky, because we feel like we are losing out on doing something we like more and wasting our lives.
This look interesting. I was one of the rare few who paid for hotmail premium ($20/mo it used to be) - back in the day.

For sentiment sake, (largely), I held my original email address for so long (~14 years) and I didn't want to let it go.

It's always a surprise to have people you haven't heard from in 5+ years contact you!
It's hard to understand any programming language if you haven't taken the time to learn its syntax.

Unlike teaching programming, the problem I see in teaching math is that the syntax is slipped into the lessons without making a conscious effort teaching it.
You don't. But without something like them (or microframeworks + libs) you're going to be rewriting a bunch of stuff yourself. On top of that, security sensitive parts (session management, CSRF protection) that get hand-rolled will need a significant amount of testing.

If you have the time and resources though... go for it!

Edit: But it does seem like there's already some contenders for Go's go-to framework (Like Django/Rails are for their respective language)

http://robfig.github.com/revel/

http://code.google.com/p/goweb/

https://github.com/ungerik/go-start
Common Physics Misconceptions
The HN format is only good at a few things. It can't do things like images, or adding commentary to links (I mean as part of the OP). There are other things it's not so good at, like linking to all of a user's posts and comments, showing real names of users, searching by topic, resharing to people not in the HN crowd, etc.
On my more cynical days my observed definition from context clues would be:

"A company that isn't profitable, but isn't as unhappy about it as I would be yet."

[edit: Worth clarifying that I doubt Dropbox probably ever qualified under my definition... but that's fine. Who wants to be a startup? I'd rather start a company.]
Not to be contrarian, but flux is nothing like nomic. Rules in flux don't interact in unexpected ways (there are a few variables that change, notably, draws per turn, maximum hand size, and win conditions which are generally what cards you have out in front of you in order to win) but the player has no freedom to make up new rules on her own.