skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
can you name a single subject, where the best source of information is an old school, mass media source ( ie, a source funded mainly by in print issues, distributed to a mass audience).

Sure. Scottish politics. The best two sources of information on political life in Scotland are the country's two quality newspapers - The Scotsman and the Herald. (This isn't saying much: appropriately, they're both very, very poor shadows of their former selves). They are far and away better than the Scottish TV news, which mostly reports on their reporting or on events which are a matter of public record. Online coverage that isn't merely opinion or repurposing from the print stuff is incredibly scarce.

Without those papers -- and both are in fairly unhappy financial situations -- I'm not sure who is going to cover this stuff at all, in fact. The country already suffers from a deep deficit of investigative reporting: many of the local councils are virtual fiefdoms. And don't think it doesn't matter on a wider scale: The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and former Bank of Scotland (HBOS) both played key roles in bringing disaster down on the UK and global economies.

Since we never had a good mass media, and never will, it is more realistic to discuss how to alter the structure of government, to make it less dependent on the whims of the masses

I don't grant the premise: we may not have ever had a mass media that lived up to our ideals, but I'd say we certainly have one that attempted to: Watergate (the entrance of which is rapidly becoming the Godwining of dying-newspaper threads) is proof enough of that.

Ultimately, the role that journalism provides is accountability. It holds power to account. If you can come up with a structure of government that takes into account human nature and is one where the rulers don't need to be held to account by the governed and has a realistic implementation plan, I'll be amazed.

But I think it might be a whole lot easier to sort out how we do the accountability thing without print media. Even though I think that's going to be hard :)
Can you give an example of something you can implement with a Lisp macro, but you can't implement with Haskell?
Is the "parallelism" section theoretical, or you can get the Haskell compiler to actually generate multi-core code automatically?
It is better typography, though it's kind of obviously a iWeb template (not that there's anything wrong with that).
I've found an interesting/alternative/different way of coming up with features is to think of features to remove.

In a way, the Gmail example is an interesting illustration of this - Things that require lots of fiddly functionality in a traditional client, can be done with a handful of (more powerful) features in Gmail.

Quite often it's the features that you actively leave out that distinguish your software.
I think this guy is already considering multiple book deals and job offers:

"Ever since I graduated from the University of Southern California, I have experienced uncertainty regarding my career path. Interviewing for a position was a full-time job and I wasn't having any luck; failing 40+ interviews...

I'm Daniel Seddiqui and I'm traveling all 50 states to work 50 different careers in 50 weeks. Sound crazy? I'm on a mission to explore the diverse careers, environments, and cultures offered in America. Join me - you may find the perfect job."

http://www.livingthemap.com/Living_the_Map/This_Week/This_We...
The issue here is that typical vegetables in your average supermarket have lower nutritional value than they did a generation ago, even though almost everything else in this society is getting better. A related issue is that processed foods are essentially a combination of corn, soybeans & sugar. Bottom line: people are eating worse food, but they are choosing to do so, not being forced.

Growing your own vegetables is labor intensive. Although it can be emotionally rewarding, specialization is more rational economically. Better to just go down to the Trader Joes / Whole Foods / Local Organic Farmers Market and part with a bit of coin to pick up some of the good stuff there.
Cringely: Making 400k/yr profit on an eBook about parrots
"The owner of Parrotsecrets, for one thing, doesn’t even own a parrot."

First instinct: I call shenanigans.

Second take: remember the numbers 37signals posted on the "Getting Real" eBook?
Where is the internet when we need it?
Yeah, we've sort of done with our analytics startup mixpanel.com. We purposely don't do things Google Analytics does to make sure we create something of value and help innovate the field.
You missed my point. It was simply a narrow point that there's no "adding" to be discussing. It's here, and it's huge. Speaking as if there's nobody consuming marijuana and legalizing it is going to suddenly cause a huge burst in consumption is simply factually incorrect. It may cause an increase, but it can't cause a huge increase.

It is a dishonest tactic that is almost always used by proponents of a law, to slip in the hidden assumption that the law already works, or will simply work if added, even when flatly contradicted by the truth. Personally, I can't hardly conceive of how marijuana prohibition could be any more of a failure than it actually is.

None of the rest of what you talk about is relevant, as you simply read into my post. I'm not even claiming "it's there already so let's legalize it". I'm just saying, "it's there already and arguing implicitly as if it's not is dishonest". Arguments shouldn't be based on dishonesty.

I will, however, point out that the badness that could be added is fairly sharply bounded by the ready availability of the product today. Prostitution and human trafficking have been at least reasonably well suppressed, and re-legalizing them would have an effect. I'm not convinced there's a large number of people for whom the sole reason they are not smoking is that it is illegal. So your metaphor, as is so often the case with terrible metaphors brought out to make a dubious point in an argument, is not applicable.

(Note I didn't add mention "arms dealing". I don't think that has been "reasonably well suppressed" at all.)

You probably think you're arguing with a pothead. Actually, I pretty much agree with everything about the nature of marijuana you said. I do not smoke it myself and have every intention of telling the truth about it to my children (which is that it isn't going to kill you but it is certainly dangerous with little compensating gain). But I don't mistake my morality for good government policy. The effects of prohibition have been a net negative, and no amount of moralizing on my part (or anybody else's) about how it just shouldn't be that way can change that.
Influenced, and created by :D
(Both Twitstori, and this site made by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs.
I'm not clear on the importance of this claim, even if it were to pan out. We aren't seeing vitamin deficiencies in this country beyond those people who don't actually eat vegetables.
> Marijuana IS a mind-altering substance.

You say that like it's somehow relevant, it's not. Sugar is a mind altering substance, so what. Caffeine is a mind altering substance, so what. It's only relevant if alters your mind in dangerous ways like making you want to kill people, but it doesn't, so it's not relevant, at all.

Dose is also not relevant, if you smoke too much pot you'll fall asleep... so again not relevant. There is no danger.

Behind all of your arguments is the presumption that it being illegal is somehow a justification of it being illegal. Your position is emotional, not logical, so you're looking for arguments to support your position, there are none. People who want pot to be illegal are not basing their position on reason, but upon emotion.

> But that fact alone does not mean it's OK to go ahead and legalize everything without any bounds and reason.

See, this is where your bias is evident. The very idea that legalizing something should require any argument at all is simply wrong. That is not freedom. The question is why should it be illegal? If you can't find a logical reason to outlaw something, then it should be legal, period. So answer me that, why should it be illegal?
Thanks. I need to work on my sleep deficit.
except he wasn't the one who did it, it was his wife
Your post reminded of Gladwell's piece on "Physical Genius"

http://www.gladwell.com/1999/1999_08_02_a_genius.htm

From the article:

What sets physical geniuses apart from other people, then, is not merely being able to do something but knowing what to do--their capacity to pick up on subtle patterns that others generally miss. This is what we mean when we say that great athletes have a "feel" for the game, or that they "see" the court or the field or the ice in a special way. Wayne Gretzky, in a 1981 game against the St. Louis Blues, stood behind the St. Louis goal, laid the puck across the blade of his stick, then bounced it off the back of the goalie in front of him and into the net. Gretzky's genius at that moment lay in seeing a scoring possibility where no one had seen one before. "People talk about skating, puck-handling, and shooting," Gretzky told an interviewer some years later, "but the whole sport is angles and caroms, forgetting the straight direction the puck is going, calculating where it will be diverted, factoring in all the interruptions."
YouTube - Rap To The Future
We never know if it was actually the wife.

Might have been a marketing move on his part to do that.

Also, the domain name http://www.iwantajob.com/ is taken.
Well, the whole point of a farmer's market is to build a strong social relationship with the people who grow your food... So why not ask them while you're buying from them?
You need to be in control of your key assets.

Why is this any different than water or electricity for which most businesses are satisfied with central providers?
The article is split up into lots of pages and there doesn't seem to be a print version. These are the pages with actual content:

1) Pluto was actually detected in 1919, but no one noticed.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/13/te...

2) Pluto's orbit crosses Neptune, but they'll never collide.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/13/te...

3) Pluto is the biggest survivor of Neptune's wrath.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/13/te...

4) [our estimates of] Pluto is shrinking!
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/13/te...

5) It's not the biggest object out there in the black
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/13/te...

6) It has an atmosphere
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/13/te...

7) It's a double planet
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/13/te...

8) We have maps of its surface, even though telescopes can barely see any features.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/13/te...

9) Its pole is tilted more than Uranus's (122 vs. 98 degrees)
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/13/te...

10) It's called an ice world but it's almost 70% rock on the inside.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/03/13/te...

And because it is on topic: http://xkcd.com/473/
No, its not theoretical. However, do not assume the Haskell compiler automatically parallelises arbitrary non-parallel code. That's simply not possible to do well, and is really a dead end.

What GHC does do is semi-implicit multicore parallelism for particular subsets of the language.

The GHC runtime is a parallel runtime supporting a range of parallel abstractions from semi-implicit parallelism to explicit task parallelism, in a three level hierarchy of OS threads -> Haskell lightweight threads -> fine grained thread sparks.

The most automated mechanisms are:

* thread sparks - you hint which code to run in parallel with `par`, and the runtime uses that hint to parallelise your code, distributing it across cores.
* data parallel arrays - if your algorithm is expressible as an array program, use DPH and the array operations will be automatically parallelised (alpha!)

To more explicit paralelism with:
* threads
* transactional memory
* mvars
* message passing

An example of the semi-implicit multicore parallelism is given in the "Haskell in 5 minutes" tutorial here:

http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_in_5_steps#Write_your...
Even if these conclusions are correct, they don't mean that "Einstein was wrong".

Physical laws are approximate descriptions of reality that are based on certain explicit or implicit assumptions and any conclusions that you derive from them are valid only as long as they hold. If Einsteins assumptions are proven to be invalid in certain regimes, it does not mean that the theory of relativity is wrong, just incomplete (as we already knew it was).

For example:

Newton's laws are not wrong, they just assume that your velocity is much smaller than the speed of light. If your velocity becomes close to light, Newton's laws are no longer valid and you must use Einsteins relativity. On the other hand, Relativity assumes that Quantum effects are negligible. If your system is in the quantum regime, these assumption no longer hold and you must use different laws.
Did you look at the site? He's all over it. This was definitely not some hapless guy rescued by his wife; he just wanted the angle. There is no juice behind the "I want a job so much I made a website" story. There's lots of juice behind "my wife made a website for me". Again: he's already won --- he's on the front page of CNN.
Piracy Has Become Mainstream, Studies Show
Scoble’s New Thing: Building 43
I wouldn't be too quick to call shenanigans on this. Information marketing is a huge business.

The average joe doesn't make a lot of money because they get the "information" part but not the "marketing" part.

Look at his salesletter -- it's traditional direct marketing copy. Big on the hype, big on the "getting you emotionally" involved. That's how you convert eyeballs into sales. (Wait on the page until you get a pop-up with a discount, another big technique.)

I'm betting he has lots of affiliates helping to get eyeballs to his site, too.

I'd believe he's making every bit as much as Cringely says he does.
Video: TechCrunch Roundtable In Paris - Where Next For France 2.0?
If only it were in scribd so it could have its very own link on the front page.
When I hopped to their website and saw a little flash animation that said "Truly Unlimited Data" I couldn't help but smile. I'm hopeful for this company solely because I want a bona-fide choice in carriers that actually makes a difference. Perhaps they'll introduce competition into a market that is severely lacking it.
Obviously a positive return cannot be made from moving averages. But how do you know that the rats don't develop some sort of intuition that can make a positive return?
Is it just me, or does Linus' blog have the most vitriolic comments ever? It's like they are deliberately trying to anger him by disagreeing and arguing with whatever he says.
As the owner of a parrot and a reader of several parrot books and magazines... the advice at the top of the sample page looks completely legit.

In particular, I cringe inwardly whenever I see someone with a parrot on their shoulder.
How to kill Techcrunch
Great comment! I like your attitude and thanks for the links. BTW we have tried your suggestion (growing our own) and after several attempts we're giving up: self-grown veggies have almost the same lack of taste as the manufactured ones from a supermarket: I suspect that's because the seeds themselves have been genetically ruined. Same with farmers markets: their vegetables are not only tasteless, but they're also ugly and more expensive.

We've asked my parents in Russia to send me their seeds of tomatoes and cucumbers but they won't grow here due to climate/soil differences. So we're stuck with "plastic" ones from the store. Many 1st gen. immigrants I know, particularly from southern Europe, share my disdain for American agricultural products. Strawberries are my favorite example: they're 2-3 times bigger than normal, have different texture and are completely devoid of taste. They're basically enlarged 3D prints of strawberries made of eatable synthetic substance. And don't get me started on various deserts with "strawberry" flavors: if the periodic elements table had a smell, that would be it - a US-made strawberry milk shake.
I believe that there is value in humility as a programmer. I can't speak to hockey.

I don't view myself as a student, that leaves the door open to hubris, and hubris is the primarily failing of programmers. Accept that you are a terrible programmer and that you will fail, you will make the wrong decisions, and you will design poorly. Plan accordingly, and you'll be more successful than all the other terrible programmers.

I am a very successful programmer because I do not trust myself to write great code. I leverage the type system, the compiler, and many other points he discussed in his article. By leveraging these tools, I prevent myself from failing as often or as severely.

I have rarely seen programmers fail so profoundly as those who hold the belief that they are too smart -- too good of a programmer -- to fuck up.
I think Mike bounced the message off his wife as part of the strategy to not come off as a self-promoter (see: Twitter girl).
Clojure has great support for parallellism, and Clojure's community is very friendly. Haskell has nothing on Clojure in these specific regards.
Summary:

For at least the last 70 years, physicists haven't taken the nonlocality predicted by quantum mechanics seriously enough. Even supporters of QM considered the prediction of nonlocality a liability, and tried to dismiss it as an artifact in various ways. Since much of QM couldn't be experimentally proven at the time, there was a fear that suggesting our assumptions of strict locality of action to be false would lead everyone to dismiss QM out of hand.

So, when we were finally able to empirically prove most of QM's predictions in the 80s, no one noticed that also meant nonlocality was a fact of our world, and that we should probably take the time to square that with our assumptions of spacetime geometry handed down by SR.

It now appears that to reconcile nonlocality with the things we know about spacetime geometry, we're going to have to challenge at least one other long-held assumption. One proposal suggests that not only is space nonlocal, but so is time. Another hypothesis suggests that the state of our universe at any given time is too infinitely complex to be reduced to even an infinite set of truth propositions.
So what?

GOTO isn't evil, it just has no meaningful context without a comment or convention. All the classic 'structured programming' control structures are nothing but simple conjugations of conditional GOTOs -- what they provide is idiomatic context.
* people are eating worse food, but they are choosing to do so, not being forced. *

Really? Try finding a Coke with real sugar, and try getting a week worth of food without any corn syrup in them. My understanding is that the corn industry is basically forcing their products down our throats by lobbying the hell out of Washington.
I have friends making just as much using adwords so I would not doubt this.

On the other hand, it is not easy money as it may appear. You have to drain a lot of hours and money into testing different markets/products until you find a niche and product with a math that returns a profit. Pros of it is because it uses adwords, the business can scale in most cases.
it eats quite a lot of CPU :)
Its actually not hard to avoid corn syrup - if you cook :)
Tell pg: Someone is abusing my karma...
Hello,
someone is abusing my karma..
take a look at this: http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=thepanister

And tell me why the second comment is down-voted? It was down-voted just a minute ago.

Please tell me who down-voted that comment, because that user is abusing my karma - I don't know him of course!

EDIT: Someone just up-voted the second comment, but I am sure that you can know who have down-voted that comment few minutes ago!
Your understanding on the corn industry and subsidies is correct, but your complaint is questionable. You can avoid corn syrup by preparing your own food; when you rely on processed and pre-made food, you inherently have less control over the ingredients.

Going back to the topic, though, supermarket produce doesn't actually seem to contain any corn syrup.
The Secrets of the Talent Scouts
If I can’t use Ada, well, then Java is the next best choice, since it’s got a lot of the same built-in bug detection capabilities.

Seriously? Java has less runtime checking than Perl, and its compile-time type checking prevents only the most trivial errors. If you want to talk about bad type systems, look no further than Java. (Of course, the same could be said about C++ and C too. There is even less of a type system there.)
In the context of the article, it is pretty clear that the author isn't asking whether Einstein was wrong per-se about special relativity; he is asserting specifically that Einstein was partially mistaken in his criticism of quantum mechanics and his dismissal of nonlocality (in the EPR paper). On the flip side, he credits Einstein for seeing through the smoke-screen put up by Bohr about separating physics from our conceptions of reality, that is, breaking the link between physics and metaphysics.
Yes I did and then thought of writing a comment to see if I was right in flagging it as it was an article with slight emotions.
In support for paralleliism or a friendly community? I'd have thought it has both in truck loads.

Well tested, fast parallelism, that's stood up to 15 years of testing...
Sorry for the meta-comment, but, the text on the page is justified -- strange! I can't think of any other significant web examples where they justify?
For the non-native speakers, "software" is a mass noun, not a count noun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun).
For a non-critical website or a web service, I can see AWS taking over for some or all parts.

For something handling financial transactions, or for anything of a high value, no.

I think there are a lot of sites out there that not having to administer their own machines is worth the minor loss of control. Sure, there will always be sites that need that control, but for many web apps (etc) out there, I think AWS will be worth the tradeoffs.
This site would be a lot more profitable if he was selling romantic situation videos of him and his wife.
Sounds interesting, but I wonder about the accuracy of the article. HP has made 4U rack mount atomic time sources for years and the GPS satellites all have atomic clocks on board. The clocks that may be built with this new technique may be smaller than current ones, but the current clocks can be smaller than refrigerators.
Apple Adds Still More DRM to iPod Shuffle
I showed this article to a friend of mine who did a PhD in physics at Cambridge. Here's what he had to say:

The entanglement arguments against relativity are fairly silly. From that article, looks like Scientific American is going the way of the New Scientist. :( Absolutely no mention of Everett and his MWI (editor's note: multiple worlds interpretation) in the article I notice. Even though that's the most obviously straightforward way of keeping special relativity, locality, quantum mechanics and accounting for the Aspect experiment. Basically Bell's theorem that is supposed to prove non-locality makes a subtle assumption called "counter-factual definiteness", which implies among other things that experiments have definite outcomes. Obviously it's violated by MWI. Really it's only Bohmian mechanics that's non-local and arguably not consistent with SR. Though Bohm adherents often claim that Copenhagen must be non-local by Bell's theorem, they misunderstand the fact that the wavefunction in CI is really an epistemic device and wavefunction collapse isn't thought to be a genuine physical occurrence except by a very small minority. CI when viewed in this way doesn't satisfy counter-factual definiteness either.
I voted you up one to stop you from crying.
'Supermodel' satellite set to fly