skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
... because historically that's what people have chosen when they were free too. Gold has a lot of properties that make it ideal for money. Doesn't tarnish, separate parts can be rejoined, scarce, hard to get more of it etc. But any object that satisfies all those goals would suffice as money,
Sure. And there are plenty more effects you haven't even mentioned. What about the changing population ratio between people with white skin and dark skin? More dark skin means more heat absorption which means more global warming.

Of course the effect is probably 1 zillionth the size of the effect of CO2, but apparently thats irrelevant to global warming skeptics. I'll admit the effect cosmic rays on cloud formation is quite creative, but I think their are even more ridiculous and irrelevant effects out their if you were really trying.

The only honest scientific rebuttal of AGW at this stage is a model inclusive of all known effects (including CO2) that predicts current temperature patterns better than AGW models do. Positing inputs to the system without reference to magnitude and other inputs is absolutely insufficient.
Interesting. Sounds a lot like Christopher Alexeander's "Nature of Order" work. Specifically, trying to answer the question: "What makes something good?"
The American stock market isn't going to go down, it should keep going up, but it will be losing value because it is denominated in the USD and the USD is falling.
You've made the mistake of assuming that more wealth (economic growth) requires a greater quantity of money. It doesn't. Money is just the exchange mechanism. If the amount of gold in the world stays static, but we improve our economies it would just result in prices falling.

If we could not find more gold we could still have economic growth, it's just that the value of gold would rise relative to the goods it could buy. (ie prices would fall)

You can read more here: http://www.mises.org/mmmp/mmmp5.asp
What's the Future of the Music Industry?  Freakonomics gathers opinions.
For Scheme:

1. How to Design Programs [ www.htdp.org ]

(1.5) I've heard good some good things about using Concrete Abstractions or Simply Scheme before SICP...

I know Simply Scheme introduces some non-standard functions, though. I've only glanced at both, so I can't give a full recommendation yet. I just ordered them both in hard copy. These two are probably only useful if you're still new to programming and want to gain more confidence before moving on to SICP.

http://gustavus.edu/+max/concrete-abstractions-pdfs/index.ht...

2. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
[ Buy the book and check out all three sets of videos...the instructor's manual is pretty much a waste of $, though, IMHO. ]
"The only honest scientific rebuttal of AGW at this stage is a model inclusive of all known effects (including CO2) that predicts current temperature patterns better than AGW models do."

It would be sufficient rebuttal of the AGW model to simply show that temperatures don't rise as predicted. A model to predict the future stands or falls on it's ability to predict the future.

For example if I had a model of the stock market that failed to predict the market that model couldn't be be considered to be correct so long as nobody could come up with a better model. The failure of my stock market model to predict the future would be enough to show that my model didn't work.
What's the exchange rate of Acebucks to US dollars? My guess is that it's roughly the same as the one for Chuck E. Cheese currency. The economics of this sort of model (which is similar to that of "Free iPod" promotions, if I'm not mistaken) are such that the amount of work required to earn something valuable (like an iPod instead of a gumball) is too much of a hassle for most users.

Similar companies' affiliates also tend to spring all sorts of hidden conditions and charges on users, so that's something Acebucks should avoid like the plague.
Hmmmm... you can run GNU/Linux on a MacBook, no? Or is he bothered by a non-free BIOS, or some such thing?
Actually, the free iPod sites that are still operating today choose offers such that they would break even or even make a little money if every single user eventually got an iPod. Most users don't get an iPod, so they would make lots of money except massive fraud has a tendency to bankrupt these sites.
I concede that the future is the absolute measure of a prediction. But its not a very powerful tool for deciding to act or not in any situation before that future arrives.

If you had a stock market model that's based on very observable micro effects and your model predicts past stock prices well, would you use it to invest? Of course the answer very much depends on your levels of certainty, but if you don't invest now you won't make any money.
I run it on a powerbook. The only problem is there are no drivers for the nvidia video card, so no acceleration and suspend to ram doesn't work. Theres no flash support either, but I don't think that applies to Intel MacBooks.
try viewing now ...

899	vlad	5	News.YC #1 for Startup News, #3...	0	3 hours
newsbruiser:

pretty friendly install and web config

can't avoid running it as cgi, which sucks

once I decided to make my entries in restructured text (huge mistake), I can't easily change to using regular html for new ones, which is what I want. Half my entries include an apology for not being able to present some fancy escaping correctly or for screwing up my links. I just want to use xinha! This is likely the issue that will finally cause me to switch blog systems.

spam comments have corrupted stories in the past. A look at the gross NIH article file format will show you that comments-corrupting-stories would not be surprising

anti-spam comment system is too hard to get right. I'm currently on the side of "reject all good comments" and I don't know how to get to a better state

it has tags, but I can't provide an RSS feed for a single tag, which I'd really like

it's in python, which is why I chose it, but the barrier to writing patches or plugins (e.g. per-tag rss feeds, or per-article input syntaxes) is too high

each blog gets a large number of scattered data files, including some dotfiles (why?!), which can make it hard to reorganize blogs or get the perms right when you move everything to a new NFS drive

Thanks for asking!
There are certain types of apps that will probably never reside in a browser, and certainly never with AJAX. Heavy-duty stuff like Final Cut Pro and the Adobe CS springs immediately to mind. I know a lot of people use GMail as their primary mail client, but to me, it can't touch Mac Mail. From a UI perspective, freedom from the browser is the ultimate trump card.

Obviously, there are plenty of apps that make more sense to have exclusively on the web (like, say, the good old Google search engine), but there's a lot that will always belong on the desktop.

The mistake AJAX zealots make is an overly broad view of the web's value. The web is valuable as a back end. That's it. As a front end for apps, the desktop's possibilities are comparatively limitless.

If, for instance, Word featured remote access and collaboration (i.e. use the web as its back end), Google Docs would be in serious trouble. The same goes for almost every major desktop app (including OSes) whose death knell the web 2.0 crowd is so eager to ring. In the next few years, using the web simply as a back end for the desktop is going to be a huge area of innovation.
Pretty good, aside from the typically inane Bob Dylan quote at the end.
DHH's response to "7 reasons I switched back to PHP after 2 years on Rails"
Futures in Objective-C
Indecision Bingo!
The Big Rewrite - why many software rewrite projects end badly
Why editorialize the title?!
Raytracing: Theory & Implementation Part 1, Introduction
lolgeeks
I hate metrics like this.

2 of those 100k are mine and they are dead-in-the-water (I was just fiddling around with the system).

How many of those 100k have ANY activity in a given day (that isn't spam)? Don't keep track of Social Networks. Keep track of ACTIVE Social Networks-- that's the metric that matters.

I like the idea of Ning
Metaesthesia (1/3)

[This was meant as a reply to a comment about soul, but I drifted too bad to claim it's really a reply to anything.]

The word 'soul' has a lot of baggage I don't care for, but I need some word that expresses the concept of 'feeling', 'perception', 'consciousness' in me. Not my ability to perceive this or that, to feel this or that, but the quality of experiencing stuff at all. Just to get rid of some of the implications of the words above, I could call this feeling of self autoesthesia, or, for an even more pretentious neologism, metaesthesia. I'll conjure a ridiculous, but convenient, word for the act of exercising metaesthesia: metafeeling.

Note that in the paragraph above I have talked about myself rather than about humans as a species. This is for several crucial reasons. To confront the thorny one first: quite honestly, I haven't established yet that any of you guys have this.

No offense; most of you folks look convincing enough, especially when I only have myself to compare to. In any event, I have to say most of you other people are quite alright phenomenons to perceive. I hope we can still continue this discussion in civilized terms[1].

But I'm trying to be rigorous here (heh..), and for all I know, you could all be replicants, NPCs, or hallucinations. I can only metafeel my own stuff!

Another reason why I didn't speak of 'us' is, who are us? What is not us? As soon as I go happily assuming metaesthesia in other stuff, I have no good reason to limit myself to humans, animals, living beings, computational systems, complex systems, material things, or whatever else, if anything, is there.

Do my cells metafeel? Do the mitochondria within them? Do cities, societies? Does the world as a whole, does the universe as a whole have a definite consciousness that metafeels itself?

[I had to split this. Search in page for "Metaesthesia (2/3)"]
blog.pmarca.com: Ning passes 100,000 social networks
Metaesthesia (2/3)

[This follows from anoter post in this page. Search for Metaesthesia (1/3) if interested.]

In the interest of agility, I'll go one level deeper into insanity and present the rest of my drivel as an interview with myself:

How can things metafeel if they don't have nervous systems, or any mechanism for reacting to their environments?

Well, they can have very peaceful feelings. I know where you're coming from: I can relate my feelings to the flow of information through my nervous system. I can see how different conditions that alter the quality of that flow alter the quality of my feelings similarly. Extrapolating, I'd say that feeling emerges somehow from complex order.

Ha! Typical nervous system chauvinism.

(sigh) What's a neural network to do?

No, really. Why are my metafeelings bound to my physical body? If everything metafeels, why don't I metafeel everything? Why this fragmentation?

I imagine there is some I that emerges from the interactions of my body with other entities. My matter, my actions serve that consciousness too, although I am a less significant part of it. Just as most of my cells are replaced often (and thus, I presume, their tiny consciousnesses are born and die), while my perceived self stays mostly constant.

So what if half my brain was transplanted to other body?

I hope you'll go on the other half.

No, seriously: after some initial weirdness and confusion, it will be business as usual. The other body will be a different person. A very affine person, to be sure. Maybe like someone you've spent all your life with and told all your secrets to, probably someone you'll care a lot about. But I bet you can get something similar without surgery, if you were willing to go all the way to get that level of intimacy with someone. It's scary and it wouldn't be easy to know yourself well enough, nor it would be easy for the other person to understand you well enough, but I bet some approximation is possible by good old interpersonal communication means.

So what about the converse? Could it be possible to merge consciousnesses by merging nervous systems?

I bet. That would be an even more interesting experiment. For maybe different degrees of metaesthetical merging, you could link brains temporarily or permanently, and you could do it with more or less bandwidth.

[Continued in Metaesthesia (3/3), which search for.]
Nick, why the sudden interest in raytracing? Just curious...
Metaesthesia (3/3)

[This is a multi-part post. Read it before I'm killed from the site! :P Search for Metaesthesia to find the other parts.]

Bandwidth?

Yeah. If you have a connection as dense (or more) as your hemispheres have with each other, you can get some pretty strong integration, to the point the two selves dissolve into a new one. With a narrower link, like the one you have with your feet, each brain will still metafeel mostly autonomously, with a small window of empathy and ultra fast communication to the other end.

How would brains make sense of each other, if the wiring in each of us is unique?

Just as we make sense of the world in general: by rewiring until it 'works'. It would take some time until each brain makes sense of the other, and in the case of hardcore brain mergers, it would take some more time until some supra-consciousness emerges from both.

For low bandwidth-- if this technology became casual enough, conventional wirings could emerge. As we try more peer brains, our own brains pick patterns and get better at negotiating this kind of stuff. I don't rule out computer assisted training either. This would allow good old neural rigging.

In the case of high-bandwidth brain merges, would the emerging new consciousness replace both original consciousnesses?

I think it depends mainly on bandwidth. Time and plasticity of the brain also matter. If you merge brains in unborn children, I'm pretty sure they'll grow to have an unified consciousness. The older the subjects are, the longer it will take, in principle, to dissolve the old selves. But we have to assume that there is some medical way to stimulate and assist brain rewiring. It's part of the required technology, lest both brains go nuts before they can integrate.

But do you see both the original selves and the supra-self coexisting at some point?

The rewiring takes time. It doesn't just click and voila, you're merged. It's more of a cross-fade.

Do they metafeel each other?

Yes, but not necessarily in any meaningful way. Most of the time it will feel like a terrible LSD trip.

If my city metafeels, why doesn't it talk to me?

Why don't I talk to my mythocondria?

I bet you do.

That was uncalled for.

Let's continue this in private, shall we?

Sure, my email is in my profile.

[And thus, there is no Metaesthesia (4/x).]

- - -

[1] And seriously, folks, if this was all that important to you, metaesthesia.com would be taken.
One of the beauties of the raytracing algorithm is its code compactness. One of the beauties of haskell is its code compactness....
Opening Up the Patent Process
Will Life Be Worth Living In 2,000AD?
Do you think stars metafeel? The universe as a whole?
I noticed that all the transportation predictions didn't come true, but the predictions on information systems and computers can be considered to be fairly accurately predicted. However, I suppose because they left out details like how machines will talk to each other, or how mail will be transcribed, they seem to be spot on.

Notice they didn't say anything about a worldwide network of computers, nor anything about search, nanotech, human genome, cell phones, personal devices, or genetic engineering.
Certain things in this article indicate that it was not written by a serious man. The confusion between the words 'effected' and 'affected'. The reference to 'capitalists' as an identifiable class of people. The assumption that America lacks "the ability to produce products that the rest of the world wants to buy", apparently irrespective of their cost. Gratuitous references to 'obese' Americans.

I want to make two general points in response.

1.) Many things in Economics have two sides to them, and exchange rates are one such thing. Yes, a weaker dollar means those who hold dollars are, effectively, poorer. OTOH, a weaker dollar makes our exports more attractive to the rest of the world, and will redress the trade imbalance that the professional doom-and-gloomers are always on about. If you're in business, selling to the rest of the world, a weaker dollar is _good_. See, for instance, all the whining about 'artificially' low pegs for the Yuan and Yen.

2.) The _current_ (floating) exchange rates represent the aggregate wisdom of the market on the question of _future_ exchange rates. If the dollar was "obviously" going to depreciate further, it would depreciate now, as traders looked to short it. Predicting deviations from the current market rates is simple speculation. If that's your bag, knock yourself out, but don't act like the future is transcendentally obvious. That sort of talk is simple kookery.
Really? That bad? Why not? I like editorialized titles, and without the editorial DHH's post is essentially a linkjack to something fairly old.

I toned it down. Is that better?
CodeGear (Borland) releases 3rdRail - "High Power Ruby on Rails IDE"
Attainable.ws: Dictionary Domain Names Available
Wait... there are still people who do any non-trivial programming without version control?
the original post was not very pertinent anyway, as far as ruby/rails is concerned. All 7 reasons have almost nothing to do with ruby/rails:

#1 - "is there anything rails/ruby can do that php can't do? ... (thinking)... no."

#2 - our entire company's stuff was in php: don't underestimate integration

#3 - don't want what i don't need

#4 - it's small and fast

#5 - it's built to my tastes

#6 - i love sql

#7 - programming languages are like girlfriends: the new one is better because you are better
The year of the social network
Doesn't look like this article covers this, but you can anti-alias your scene using a method similar to what is covered for soft shadows. Instead of shooting rays back to a random point on a light surface though, you move the camera slightly (randomly) on the XY plane and shoot multiple rays per pixel.

Not only does this AA, but it also naturally offers depth of field blur.. The more you allow the camera to move with each ray, the more depth of field blur you get.

And then if you not only shoot rays from different camera locations, but also spread them out over time, AND you move objects in the scene, you get motion blur :). The greater the delta t you allow, the more motion blur you get.

Raytracing is really damn cool.. Too bad its still too performance intensive for real-time applications.
Can you offer defense of that position please?
10 rules of Twitter (and how I break every one)
Using Open Standards to Free the Social Graph
MIPS-X - A processor with a self-destruct function (halt and spontaneously combust)
iTunes Movie Rentals and Old Media
What is the impact of an iTunes Movie Rental service?
The brain is composed of neurons. Each neuron either fires or it doesn't, just like on or off in a computer. This is determined by chemical reactions in and outside the cell. A powerful enough computer can simulate this down to the atomic level, it's just physics. Just because the computers we build don't function the same as the brain doesn't mean that the brain isn't a computer. Some attempts at AI have taken this approach, and while they generally work, we don't yet have the processing power to scale it.

When a certain stimulus happens, the effects it has on the brain, which include thoughts, is predictable and computable by doing the physics. We just have this illusion of "free will" and making choices. Our personalities are simply the result of how our brain's wiring developed from our environmental stimuli.

This also brings to light an important topic in philosophy of science: determinism. Is the world deterministic or not? If it's not, then physics and the sciences simply don't work. If the world is deterministic, which all evidence we have says that it is, then free will cannot exist. It's just easier and more comforting for people to pretend we have free will.
I think some pretty smart people (Neoptica) are working on this problem - aided by the the general purpose programmability of the latest generation of GPUs.
Nice.... First imply that characteristic X means you are smart, and then give examples of your intelligence by showing how you possess this characteristic.
The nice thing about raytracing is that it scales so well with parallel processing. The more pipelines, the more simultaneous rays you can process at one time. Synchronization issues are minimal because essentially what you are doing is waiting for pixel data to return from all of the rays shot from the camera. Order doesnt really matter. Sounds like a perfect problem for multi-pipelined GPGPU programming.

Hadn't heard of Neoptica before, but they do look like they have some really smart people there. Raytracing itself is an old concept, but I'm sure there are creative ways to optimize and extend the concept yet to be done.

Here is some info on what Neoptica is doing. Sounds very impressive [PDF]: http://www.neoptica.com/NeopticaWhitepaper.pdf
@dfranke: Does this Aaron Swartz post answer your question? http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/smartabstractions
Remember: The fact that you CAN us a regular expression doesn't mean that you SHOULD. I'm sure this isn't the slowest possible way to detect primes, but I honestly can't think of a slower way right now. [EDIT: Ok, I can now see how to detect primes in superexponential time by simulating a Turing machine.]

In general, the more powerful a tool is, the slower it is. Good coding requires understanding how much power you need and using the right tool -- not waving a sledgehammer around because you've discovered that it can solve all of your problems.
Religion apart, only a fundamentalistic person would say that the earth is only 6,000 years old.

The problem is not earth, but animals. The real problem is that 'millions of years' period. Anybody can make up a nice theory involving 'millions of years'. But how do you prove it? You can't. That's the real question and real problem with the evolution theory. It's only a theory which nobody can prove. (But a time machine would certainly help :)
You need to be bigger!
Why not cut to the chase and define the joule as standard unit of currency.
Wow, I must be incredibly smart. I hate OOP (if you want function pointers, just use function pointers, and forget all this modern "object oriented" garbage); dislike databases (for the same reason as mentioned in the article -- they're leaky abstractions where performance is concerned); scowl every time someone mentions "web services" (tunneling RPC over HTTP? I was doing that long before "web services", REST, or SOAP existed, and it has nothing to do with the web); hate synchronous networking (for performance reasons, of course) and avoid it even in places where it would be quite adequate; rigidly stick to BSD style(9); and also (a hangup not mentioned in the article) absolutely loathe garbage collection (I'm smarter than the garbage collector).

The fact is, however, that having hangups doesn't mean that you're smarter than anyone else. Rather, it simply means that you're willing to refuse jobs which don't meet your (arbitrary) requirements. People who are smart are more able to be picky, because they have more jobs available to them; but people who are independently wealthy can turn down jobs due to personal hangups; and anyone who is employed in a field other than programming can afford to have as many programming-related hangups as they want.

If you have to support a wife and children, and programming is your only marketable talent, you're not going to have programming-related hangups for long.