skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"The first problem we run into with "is math invented or discovered?" is defining invention and discovery."

Yeah, that's one of the most interesting parts of the discussion.

"I'm also less interested in hearing people's opinions about how evolutionary pressures have affected us, ..."

I'm referring to the sciences of evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology, not evolutionary punditry. ;-)
The code is GPL'ed though. This means you can't link with your proprietary front-end code but I think RPC is ok.
You are spot on with that observation. Somebody says "religion" and everybody runs to their corners ready for an argument instead of a discussion. Same goes for "discovery", "soul", or "justice." I spent about 20 minutes retyping my comment above because of the issues around definitions.

The thing is -- everybody wants to argue what the world is based on their definitions, but nobody wants to take the time to compare notes about just what the heck the other guy is talking about.

I've been in some really good net discussions -- discussions that changed my mind about some closely held beliefs. But you first have to get beyond all the pre-defined BS and canned political arguments people learn to a place where everybody is on the same page and thinking for themselves. Otherwise it's just a waste of time: nothing happens except people posturing and talking past each other. I wouldn't want the board to devolve into that.
I don't think the problem is too much information and too much activity. The problem is too much information/activities that people don't enjoy.
Works for me. I pop by daily and can relate to the community. As it gets bigger, the community will change which will completely change the content. This is a good thing though, even if it ceases to interest me. It's still doing what it should.
I voted this up because I agree with the first paragraph, but I don't like most of the specific big questions you list here.

I can't think of any way of saying this without sounding mean, but the type of big questions you list here are the stuff of pseudo-intellectuals. These are Omni magazine big questions (if anyone here remembers that). I'd prefer Economist big questions.
My understanding is Heroku is primarily a development environment. If you want to make a full-blown gajillion-user app, you'll probably have to move it off Heroku's servers -- i.e. I don't see any way to edit DNS entries / use your own URL.

Maybe they'll allow you to update your account if you want to use them for hosting.
I agree, but I'd prefer questions like the kind that are asked at Edge.org: related to technology, physics, mathematics, biology, logic, astronomy, etc.
Karma Contribution:  (# subsequent people who vote your way)-(# of subsequent people who vote differently)
So voting in a social news site would no longer be about what you think, but rather, what you think others will think.

Such a karma contribution would encourage people not only to vote but also to be careful about how they vote.
I doubt that you can really influence the depth of a debate with any voting system. Voting is good for filtering large amounts of information. For everything else we'll have to use our brains for the time being. I agree that fear of getting downvoted is a very bad motivation in a debate. Downvotes are just unnecessary in my view. They only create bad blood and don't help to filter information. I've decided to never downvote.

But, you know, the day I really start to worry about downvotes is when the karma to $$$ conversion rates are announced ;-)
A question being permanently unanswerable or currently out of reach (or "too big") doesn't make it a poor question. I agree that academics focus on questions at the edge of reach with currently available tools, and that's fine and important from a practical standpoint. But I don't think that the validity of the question is determined by whether or not we currently have the tools to attack it. If you're interested in the important political and economic questions that face us today, that's fine, and I agree that in practice it's more immediately valuable to debate and resolve those questions. But I do think that the larger (and possibly unanswerable) questions are interesting to ponder. Maybe I picked a poor list as I wrote the original comment, but as the sibling poster said, the types of questions asked at edge.org are what I'd like to see more of.

I'm surprised that everyone is responding to my list of questions instead of the meat of the post. I just threw that list out there as an illustrative list, the real point I'm trying to make is in the body of the post. I also think that all of those questions I listed have mostly settled answers in academia that aren't popularly accepted by society. (e.g. people still cling to the idea of a "soul" separate from the information content of your brain)

EDIT: I also think that the most interesting work happens when asking questions that are at the edge of being taken seriously.
ChipWits remake by the authors of the original 1984 version
http://top200.jottit.com/
In some countries this is the result of a deliberate policy. The German and Dutch governments, perhaps from fear of elitism, try to ensure that all universities are roughly equal in quality.

http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html
Not sure how this quote disproves the previous statement (English speaking bias).
International careers with iHipo.com - have you ever heard about this startup?
How many people in the academia do not speak English?
I like Tim Ferris (saw him at SXSW) and read his book. But his book seems like a long commercial for himself and his "get rich quick" shortcuts smell very much of a fad. He may be a great promoter and his techniques may be interesting, but this diet, like the Atkins, seems incredibly short sighted and, dare I say, a bit selfish.

I like his passion and enthusiasm and positive attitude to improve his own life, but I'm not sure I'd like to live in a world full of Tim Ferris's.
"Harvard, whose endowment of $26 billion (GBP13.8 billion) exceeds total annual funding for all British universities"

that gives a powerful indication of the sheer scale of the imbalance between the resources at the disposal of UK and US education institutions.
Well, what I meant was I could be wandering the streets of Beijing and going to work would be as easy as hitting up the nearest web-bar/internet cafe. As far as I know, they don't have them nifty EVDO cards in Beijing...
Humans are born as physiological fetuses to allow further growth of the skull. There is a natural limit to how early a child can be born, and therefore a natural limit on the size of heads. Human females have adapted wide hips to account mainly for the size of the brain, but there is a practical limit to that as well. The cesarean section will perhaps allow further increase in human intelligence.

If the hip-fat theory is correct, then other bodily fats should have a similar effect. I am guessing I could find data that suggests large-assed females actually have children with lower IQs, though I doubt I could get a grant for that.
No Indian university?
I have been. When he's busy refactoring my mess, I come here.
I went to #70, Nottingham. At the time, it had a reputation for being insanely difficult to get in to study mathematics there, which is why I applied ;-)
Y Combinator in Python &#955; Shorthand
Reddit, Digg, and even Slashdot already cover all that stuff daily... why do you want another source of it?

There is no reason you can't participate in those sites alongside this one. I like having a place where I know I can find good nerdery.
I like scientific and business posts. I also like the posts where people talk about specific problems their start-ups are facing.

But I really don't want to hear discussions of politics and religion, especially when they degrade into flame wars. I think there are plenty of other places on the web that people can do that if they are interested. And trust me I have done my fair share. But I don't think Hacker News is the proper forum.
Studies like this have a simple formula:

Find a correlation.

Make up a cause.

Pretend the correlation implies that cause, when in fact they have found absolutely zero evidence whatsoever of their conclusion.

Get published.
correlation with GDP per capita, or no?
That's exactly why I like news.ycombinator, I can only hope that the community will remain focused for as long as possible (which doesn't mean it shouldn't grow, but it should stick to the hacking/ programming/startup theme so it attracts more dedicated users from these areas and doesn't deviate into a mainstream news aggregator) ... anyway, if you look for articles like those you mentioned in your comment you can always check out reddit.com or other similar sites.
Have you read their paper?
No. It requires registration and is unclear on whether I will have to pay to read it.

I have read many other papers.

Have you read it? Is the linked article misleading and it's actually good?
Here's the abstract:

Upper-body fat has negative effects and lower-body fat has positive effects on the supply of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids that are essential for neurodevelopment. Thus, waist-hip ratio (WHR), a useful proxy for the ratio of upper-body fat to lower-body fat, should predict cognitive ability in women and their offspring. Moreover, because teenage mothers and their children compete for these resources, their cognitive development should be compromised, but less so for mothers with lower WHRs. These predictions are supported by data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Controlling for other correlates of cognitive ability, women with lower WHRs and their children have significantly higher cognitive test scores, and teenage mothers with lower WHRs and their children are protected from cognitive decrements associated with teen births. These findings support the idea that WHR reflects the availability of neurodevelopmental resources and thus offer a new explanation for men's preference for low WHR.
I do not know if a yellow-page company that has existed since 1978 can be considered a startup...

Nice implementation though
I think that's why you can't delete comments or edit them after a few minutes... ;)
I haven't a clue, but I suspect a lot.
I would agree about the quality of publications and the pin heads who evaluate us simply by the number. It's really very stupid.

On the point of teaching however I am a bit more optimistic ... in Sweden at least. I am fairly impressed with most of my students. They are for the most part curious, hard working and smart. So far the elements that have tried to dumb everything down have failed. Although they do keep trying...

In the long run education is probably in trouble.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccYoVnBc_fk
Yeah I saw that. I don't think we can tell much from it. Do you think it's revealing?
Counting papers is dumbing things down -- initially for academics. This in turn may result in dumbing things down for students as mediocre academics (who would not get tenure without counting papers) may then teach at an easier level.
I like this place because it's solely good nerdery, unlike Slashdot, Digg and Reddit. I think it'd be nice to expand the scope of the nerdery though.
Or that these things are typically faddish?

"How this book solves all your problems!"
Wow... not one mention of the Indian Institutes of Technology which may just be the toughest engineering schools on the planet. Just have a look at their entrance exams...

Bias anyone?
I'm all for discussing these topics, but if you want to start a discussion you've gotta submit a thread. Find an appropriate link around which to discuss or just ask a straight up question.
Based on the fact that they were testing them in 2004[0], I suspect they do.

[0]http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/200410/13/eng20041013_1600...
Those questions belong in a late-night dorm room discussion in between bong rips, not Hacker News...
I know, I know. And the mediocre academics take mediocre graduate students and the whole thing repeats... thank god a lot of the undergraduate students are wise enough to recognize lame professors. The best students have fun making these frauds look stupid in front of the class. BTW students need to be encouraged to act in such ways.

I have been fighting my private battle to get evaluators to actually read 1-3 papers of those they evaluate. Usually if someone is working on pointless stuff, you can see it pretty clearly when you read their stuff.

Whatever the case, the simple counting technique must stop. BTW some consistent universally accepted impact factor rating might help in computer science. I don't know.
"... I think the reason is that it's a PR placement, and the Fashion section ..."

I know it's (more than likely) a product placement for this reason alone. I've noticed a nasty habit the NYT has of purposefully stuffing their non-mainstream news feeds with ads posing as news.

- First example: Google article in employment where a google employee talks about google work practices. [0]

- Second example: Article in Blog section by Brad Stone on companies blocking social software. [1]

So I'm not bothering to post news from NYT.

[0] I double checked this with the NYT by email & getting a very sheepish "YES" response. You can read the thread here ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70827 and the NYT confirmation here ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71411

[1] The author uses information which blindly copies media release information ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=77206 ) from vendor w/o critical examination ~ http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/news_and_events/index.ph...
So I class this one a sub as well.
You usually put out pretty good submissions. But I don't know why this one is significant. Care to divulge? (please)
Current-year bonuses could be paid in shares of the corporation/fund itself, and vest over the next several years, contingent on no major reversals based on the current-year strategies. That's two incentives -- core value and preserved vesting -- to seek enduring gains.

But, some of the risk-encouragement in these compensation packages is by design. By human nature, managers can be inefficiently risk-averse, compared to investor preferences (since investors have a large diverse portfolio). So some 'flimsy random gains' might be a price investors are willing to pay to help offset other loss-aversion biases of managers.
LOL! Yes it's funny to hear eniro referred to as a 'start up'
Interesting to see Peking and Tsinghua at 36 and 40, respectively.
The Erdos Number is a good attempt.
That's pretty cool. If you're looking for something else to do, try syncing up the same songs in different languages.
Cable Ruling May Provide Opportunities For Google, Startups
Thanks for the feedback I really appreciate it!
Didn't Steve Jobs do something similar?
As a big sports fan, I see where the almost exclusive role of the paper and the beat reporter is to help sell tickets. And the sports coverage helps sell newspapers. It's a symbiotic relationship,

Why should we expect any other section to be different? Indeed, where a paper only tends to cover certain sport teams, at least in other sections, the products and companies change.

If I'm a reporter and I get an interesting PR package, why shouldn't I run with it? Why is it a "nasty" habit?

Besides, a newspaper isn't a purveyor of facts or knowledge, - it's just full of "stories" that are sometimes interesting. What more could you ask from a free content provider?
High entrance requirements are only one of the factors which define a good university. I'd say that the quality of teaching and the quality of research performed are more important than the quality of incoming students.
Couple things:

1) Considering there are over 1 billion people in India, IIT decided to "filter" students AFAIK

2) Scores are calculated by averaging all other departments, in which IIT might not even have or weak.

No they're not bias. If they are, then Waterloo University should be somewhere within top 10
The IITs have a good undergraduate program, one of the best in the world. The graduate and research output of the IITs is nowhere as good. In fact , the research in particular is fairly mediocre, compared to say Stanford or MIT.
I'm interested in this as well. My oral surgeon demanded that I sign an arbitration agreement before he would see me. What would happen if I had a problem with him?

Also, should it be legal for someone to FORCE you to waive your rights before they will do business with you?
I agree that downvotes are much less useful than upvotes. That's why there are so many restrictions on them. There are no downvotes on submissions; you don't get a downarrow on comments till you get a certain karma threshold; and even then downarrows are missing in some places.
"... If I'm a reporter and I get an interesting PR package, why shouldn't I run with it? Why is it a "nasty" habit? ..."

Because the mixing of news with paid placement is not "clearly" disclosed.

So readers of such articles are not aware that "Journalists" are really being paid to place product, posing as editorial. It's not about news or stories. It's about disclosure, ethics and giving all the information, not one sides view of what they want you to hear.

It's "grubby" because the articles if clearly marked, could in all likelihood be ignored. Just like advertisements they aim to replace.

One thing I did notice was you sure do submit a lot of NYT articles ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=robg Have you noticed many subs in your submissions?
A nice feature would be a view of what stories others have upmodded.

I bet lots of people probably want to know what you would like everyone to see, which fits with the original motivation.

Generally, exposing data is good. A big chunk of hidden data on this site is modding history.
Huh? I don't see how having a lower Erdos number indicates that your work is better. The Erdos number has nothing to do with publication quality nor citations.
I cannot cite the article, because I read it a long time go, but the author made a point which immediately reflected my experiences with pure FP:

FP is all about the glue.

What I think will be interesting is using FP (or at least FP style) to glue together solutions to problem which are best expressed using non-pure methods. I think about that whenever I use Monads in Haskell, though they're still awkward.

I think FP will teach programmers the potential advantages of making things pure, perhaps even at great effort. It's not always what we're after, but when you can manage that level of simplicity, FP is exploring what kinds of payoff you can make.
IBM: The End Of Advertising As We Know It
Google Being Sued Over Database Architecture
Thanks for the shout out, pfedor. - Doug Sharp, ChipWits
Are you Left Brained or Right Brained?
I just happen to be one of the right brained people. Apparently I'm rash and religious? Go figure...
Microsoft Wants To Create The Next Flickr
It's 15 seconds because the song uses a four bar chord progression. 4 bars * 4 beats per bar = 16 beats. The song is around 64 bpm so you do the math and it comes out to 15 seconds
you know, lately I get the weird feeling that google is getting to look more evil every day.

dont actually know why...but people are starting to paint them a little less heroic-ly than they used to. Perhaps its just cause they're big.

Maybe its the same thing is m$? hmm. food for thought.
It was joke. More seriously, the Erdos number is indeed far better indicator than the number of publications.

Number of citations is not as good as it seems, because not all citations are created equal.

I believe that, if we are talking about the details here, the best system should be similar to the Page Rank. Citations from important works are more valuable. Awarded papers, like Nobel or Fields Medal, could get the highest rank.

The only problem with this system, which I see, is its mix of dynamic and static nature. The paper's rank can be dramatically changed literally overnight. On the other hand, it takes ages to get the Nobel prize. Not that good when your career depends on your rating.

However, it should be quite obvious that brilliant work is not appreciated immediately. So, very likely that the problem lies in the educational system, that requires fast and pretty objective, not necessary reliable, method of rating.

Furthermore, I don't know whether there's a correlation between educational successes, and research abilities. I bet there is no. Perhaps it does not really make any difference whether a guy got a Nobel, or two.
evolution at its best. survival of the curvy-est.
who keeps firebug on all the time?

I only use it when I'm actually coding something...
I couldn't get one when I was there in Jan...anyone else in Beijing know for sure?
the threshold is getting lower
Except that it's comparing a capital sum with an annual expenditure, which is rather misleading. A capital sum will ordinarily be around 20x as big as the annual income it generates (though no doubt Harvard gets better returns than the average nonprofit).
Yeah you're right, business is all about people and programming does require an immense amount of solitary intellectual effort. Thanks for the encouragement ("We all start out at the low end of the continuum")! I do hope to have more time someday to focus on developing my technical skills.
Interesting.. I saw it as going clockwise... which sort of throws my theory that I was more logical than "feeling"s based person... maybe I need to seek a career in philosophy than hacking... :D
yeah I dont really get it...its just a social wordpress....
I dont agree. Ads have been...ads will be.
The ranking of US universities within this list is quite different from the US News rankings. That suggests at least one of them is bogus.
This thread is a good example of why I don't usually comment on YC. People don't take the discussions seriously enough. They ask a question and don't followup. It's not worth explaining things carefully here.
A lot of my friends saw it counterclockwise. I was clockwise though...hmm.

but if you read the descriptions, it makes left-brained thinkers seem smarter =[

"that liberal media!"
heh. I was going to learn rails, but after reading a blog post somewhere, I figured why do something in rails that I can just do in PHP.
The press loves two kinds of stories: 1) underdog does cool stuff, and 2) big fat corp stumbles

Google may be ending its period of #1 stories and starting a new period of #2 stories.

At the end of the article, the writer made some kind of slur to the effect of "since they were only looking for lawyers on a contingency basis, they must have a weak case"

To me that sounded like a cheap shot, probably delivered on background over the phone from a Google source. (I have no idea the merits of the case or of this particular story)
My favorite part of living in Japan was when I wanted I could not listen to what people around me were saying. Sure, if I felt like it, I could really listen to them and understand what they were saying (as long as it wasn't too far out of my lexicon), but if I didn't want to hear it, it all just became white noise. It makes thinking a lot easier.
Ask: Best Math Courses for CS?
Having recently switched my major to CS, I've also decided this semester to minor in mathematics. I already had most of the 1000 and 2000 level courses done because of my previous major in engineering. My first upper level elective that I've chosen is Symbolic Computation; I'm also looking at taking Combinatorics next time it's offered, and I was recommended Theory of Probability. What do you thinkof these? And does the specialization / generalization ratio apply to math as well?
Old school hack: Eugene Jarvis (defender, robotron)
Yes! I like this about being in other countries too. Isn't it shocking when you arrive in an American airport after some time abroad and you can understand all the inconsequential chatter around you?

There's a similar advantage to being in a country where you can't speak the language too well. When I was a student in Italy, I didn't say unnecessary things; it was too much work.