skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't know if it's that simple. Ford didn't ask for the bailout after all, probably because they realized how much leverage it would give the government over their operations. You know how startup founders are wary about giving VC's too much control over their business? I'd imagine automakers (especially Ford, which is still largely a family business) are just as wary about giving the government too much control over their business. And, unlike GM and Chrysler, Ford has the good fortune to be a good ways away from bankruptcy (though from a business standpoint, bankruptcy would still be better than nationalization).
Are UCLA, Boston College and University of Minnesota top law schools?

Because I have family and friends who went to those schools and they made $120K starting salaries. I also have a cousin who went to probably the worst law school in the country and she made 80K straight out of school.
1.) I think it's both. People have sex with folks of the same attractiveness, but they don't ignore intelligence. Could you imagine an MIT grad student having sex with a trailer-trash bimbo of slightly-below-average attractiveness? (Yeah, that's a bad mental picture.)

3.) They've had less time to be surrounded by people of similar intelligence and interests. The virgin rate among MIT grad students is roughly the same as the virgin rate among average high schoolers. That's consistent with the hypothesis that MIT-caliber grad students can't find anyone until they get to MIT, and then they follow the normal rules of chance & dating & random hookups that most people do in high school.
maybe what's needed is a digg-style site that tracks headlines & the body of a news article, and rates the truth of said articles according to what the users vote.
Have you ever been forced to program in PHP?
It reminded me of a conversation I had a few months ago:

Buddy: I did bungee jumping last summer, did you know?

Me: "umm... all right?"

...

uncomfortable silence

Faking enthusiasm is something I find very difficult to do, but I guess I should at least start trying.

Also, how to stop assuming that other people are not sincere when they show interest to me?
I don't think Hitchens handles the topic well, at least not as you present it.

In the first comparison we compare two groups, we find both with the ability to do moral acts. Next we compare the two groups again, but this time we are surprised when we find both groups are capable of non-moral acts. Also, we jump from a simple comparison of believers and non-believers to the use of god's name.

The point just doesn't say much more than, "people are capable of good and evil". A religious person would only become troubled that evil people are misappropriating their belief system to back their evil acts. i.e. Hitchens point will not faze a religious person.

A better response would be to show in the positive that a similar morality to Christianity can be built from a few well reasoned assumptions. This would address the GP's wish to show that morality is not dependent on a religious system. It is important to remember, from a religious persons perspective morality is defined by God. Responding with annoyance gets one nothing and shows that a person may be vulnerable to the same shortsightedness.
Clearly the Mr. Mullaly is a 9th degree Mason and had advance notice that the economy was being taken into recession by the Pentaverate.

EDIT: So humor isn't a valuable contribution to the discussion? Now I'm sad. :(
Put postings on hacker news saying that the online media is full if it? What you did here is probably the best.
social news sites are notorious for being crowd opinionated
If you figure out the answer to this, politicians, PR people, and journalists will be knocking down your door. Once misinformation is publicized, it is very hard to correct. This can only be assuaged by making the public, through education or experience, less naïve and more likely to seek out the truth.
Especially because the "upgrade" asks nicely. So instead of silently getting IE8, you get asked "Do you want IE8".
> This does not seem to be true outside of academia

It is just like that IMHE.

> mediocre or uninterested programmers need to move into management before this

There are only so many spots for managers and there's already a buch of people competing for those. It's not a solution for most people.
The company I work for uses IE 7 standards for rendering within our application. A lot of things would break if the people using our software upgraded to IE 8.

Our HTML markup is so ugly :(
The 2000-year old language?

A Victorian Arc!
That's quite probable. Honestly, I can't understand why purists tend to dislike PDEs. I mean... Terry Tao does PDEs and he's a Fields medalist! Is it because PDEs are usually associated with Physics, and hence, are not "pure enough"?
Ask HN: What do you use when searching for houses or apartments online?
Craigslist? Any other popular ones if you're looking for cheap housing online?
which means undersupply, exactly my point
It limits unqualified supply, I'm not against that. The bar doesn't set a hard limit on number of new lawyers per year AFAIK.
Did that strip mall happen to be in Canton, Ohio?

I was there too!!
Interesting notes. The way he's doing procedural mesh generation + procedural texturing/skinning/animation is very similar to ZBrush's ZSpheres. I used to work at Pixologic on ZBrush and those types of surface subdivisions concepts and algorithms (Organic modeling, Catmull-Clark, Conway polyhedrons) are definitely a non-trivial field of CS engineering. Nice work to bring this technology into a game!
Perhaps, but that is a decision that has to be made with foresight, because even though it may be hard to find a developer in X language, its probably a lot more work (and cost) to migrate an established product from one language to another.
Anyone (and there are many) who says that we're definitely screwed shouldn't be listened to, and those who say we'll definitely be fine are the same. No one knows. One thing he hasn't factored in is that technology is on that same sort of curve and is working in our favor.

Buckminster Fuller: "We are blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We have the wherewithal, the know-it-all, to feed everybody, clothe everybody, and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never have known before-that we now have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. Whether it is to be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment."
I used to feel exactly the same way. But think about this: you talk to your mom differently than you talk to a potential employer in an interview, right? Does that mean you're not being yourself? Of course not. You're just behaving appropriately in different situations. What I realized is that socializing isn't about being totally unconstrained and unfiltered - there are constraints/guidelines for social behavior, just like for interview behavior.
It's still incredible that you controlled those massive machines. I would love to hear more about that.
Have you tried developing one? ;)

In my experience, unusual game mechanics breed terrible edge cases. It's difficult to handle these gracefully and consistently. I'm developing a new Flash game called Toaster Bro:
http://blog.zacharcher.com/2009/03/20/toaster-bro-alpha-10-d...

The basic concept is simple: you have a magic wire. You plug outlets together to produce various effects. Hopefully it's not evident to the casual user, but this has been extremely difficult to smooth out. There are many types of outlets (not just electricity); wires can stretch between rooms (but only the player's room receives tick events, so the toaster rooms trap you inside, preventing you from remotely plugging in the toaster); there's a full scripting engine but you still have to handle all the state changes, ...

To keep this game simple, I made an early compromise: only one disconnected wire is allowed at any time. If you start drawing another wire, the original vanishes. Otherwise it becomes a topological nightmare, as users want to connect the loose ends of 2 wires, it's just very confusing to play, or understand what's happening.

A friend asked me if I could put logic gates in the game. This is probably superfluous (couldn't you just run electricity to the final destination?) but this could be used to break the system, because you can plug electricity into the logic gate's output. What now, bitches?! So you need even more rules, then.

Also I think basic "warfare" games are easier to contemplate, because we're all familiar with throwing pellets at our grade school friends, and whatnot. Most of us didn't grow up warping the fabric of time and space, so it's hard to think in that context ;)
The best way to learn about India is to visit us some time. Not through books and/or random comments.
Are you by any chance referring to Universomo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universomo)? One of their architects gave us a lecture on my university's course on software architecture and said that they can deliver games on over 6000 platforms.

If anyone is interested on their approach, lecture slides are available at http://www.cs.tut.fi/kurssit/OHJ-3200/luennot/luennot2008/Oh...
There's also Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed 2 teaser that just came out:
http://assassinscreed.us.ubi.com/assassins-creed-2/teaser/
It contains gameplay elements in the form of a flash 3D augmented reality teaser. Pretty neat to promote a game.. and reusing 3D/textures assets from the game for online advertising.

Here's a video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhvZJ-nVRNA&feature=relat...
Many Worlds quantum theory seems to be a correct interpretation of our universe. How do you know you aren't living in one of the improbable universes where Christianity is literally or partially true?
Does anyone have any tips for remembering peoples' names? I hate the fact that it takes me forever to learn names. As soon as the conversation moves beyond, "hi I'm ____" I forget. It kills me inside.
The YC interview is so quick you are going to be out of there before you realize it has started. In other words, be on top of your game. Anticipate questions, especially the ones that you don't want to answer about the weakness of your product (they will come up). Don't be defensive. Have a demo ready to go when you walk in the room which gives a quick and good first impression. It's not going to be a lot of idle chit-chat, they are going to dive right in.
Compared to my cosy abode with a Linux/Windows laptop, I'd have to say writing Java on a Sun workstation at University in 2003...
You can't. I have the same problem ("being Mr Logic"), and my girlfriend points that out to me a lot. Each time she does, it feels like she's accusing me of actively trying to be that way -- of being broken. She's not, of course. That's just how it feels to Mr Logic.

And maybe people like us are broken, in a sense. It feels like I'm missing something everyone else around me seems to have: an ability to immediately understand the reason why people phrase things the way they do.

The person you're referring to probably knows he has the problem and has forgotten about it. If you want to point it out to him, pretend like you're pointing out an embarrasing bad habit, like picking his nose. So you probably want to tell him in private, etc. Also he'll probably deny having the problem. Let him deny it. Just tell him specific examples of what you've noticed. The more specific, the better. A video would be ideal. (Not that I think you'll get one; I'm just trying to convey that telling him specific examples is very important, because otherwise he won't be able to make the mental leap "I have a problem" => "Here's how I fix it".)
How to do better in loud, crazy group conversations
I saw an article on being likable made the front page recently.

I'd be interested to see what Hacker News thinks of this site. It's the best one I know about the general topic of socializing.
I saw an article about being likable is on the front page.

I'd be interested in seeing what Hacker News thinks of this site. It's the best one I know about the general topic of socializing.

No hard feelings if this is deemed off-topic, I never would have even submitted this without the other article appearing.
"Computational Photography": On the Lookout, With a Digital Security Camera
Having my server in California crash while I was in Siem Reap Cambodia, and the only way I could get to work was turn off the AC in my room to get a better signal coming from the WiFi at fancy-hotel next door and opening the window.

It was 3AM and I had sweat dripping down my palms and wrists that I had to lay toilet paper over the keyboard and mosquitoes buzzed at my ear and neck nonstop. I had to fight with an aggressive postfix filter that kept sending mail to a lisp process and did no error checking to see if Lisp ran and processed the mail. I had to remove the filter, and manually rebuild stuff later after I had the system running around 12PM the next day.

It was one day in hell, taught me that the unix errno and process exit status can be a fucked thing to debug if you're forking multiple process from a script.

[Edit: right now I'm coding sitting on the toilet seat, with my pants on, because I'm a moody SOB and like to move around the house as the day passes :-]
That is smart. Seems like a logical progression for any video game who already have assets, animations, etc. ready to roll.
I call the mindset of my peer group the "Disney culture". It is characterized by magical thinking, such as "if you follow your heart, everything will turn out for the best!"

To some extent, this is valuable. It encourages people to take risks and be creative. The wonderful explosion of technology and prosperity in the 1990s was an expression of magical thinking.

But I think we place too little value on financial stability, independence, and other more boring traditional values. This could be because we've never really had to face hard times until now. I wonder if we will pick up these traits during the recession.
That attitude makes me uneasy. Atheists are tempted to dismiss religion and sit back, confident in our superior rationality. But what we should do is try to learn even more from theist errors. The errors are not just limited to the obvious (to us) errors like faith in the supernatural. There's also obedience to authority. The Milgram Experiments show that plenty of good people will do evil in certain circumstances.
I am not convinced that Facebook needed all the money that they've spent to reach this level.

What do they need money for?
Why tax the merely well-off as if they were wealthy?
Committing code changes to a production trading system while passing a kidney stone.

I had been out for a week waiting for the stone to pass, I hadn't slept more than 15 minutes in a row in more than a week -- and those 15 mins were from sheer exhaustion and vicodin. I was hallucinating continuously and vigorously. Hadn't been eating either.

Good times.
I guess the real questions is are SSDs good enough to replace data that now sits in RAM? For example, Google keeps their entire search index in RAM. Would they be better off keeping it in SSDs?
I don't think it's happened yet. Between the application form and a 10 minute conversation, we can usually tell roughly how smart people are. And being super smart is not that critical anyway. Determination is more important.

The real problem is when a team turns out not to have enough determination to see a startup through. Startups are hard; most people wouldn't be determined enough.

When a group we've funded seems demoralized, we try to encourage them. It takes a few iterations to tell whether a group is just suffering from a temporary setback, or whether they intrinsically lack energy. If by Demo Day they've gotten nowhere, we start to think it may be the latter. But we're naturally optimistic. Usually groups give up before we give up on them.
On the other hand, I have a hard time thinking of a better grad degree than a CS master's program. Your job prospects are better than an MBA's or a JD's, you will spend a lot less time in school than an MD, and you will have a much broader employment market than your friends in other engineering and science disciplines.

I was quite impressed by the number of firms at UCSD's job fair interested in recruiting CS students.
I use PadMapper.

http://www.padmapper.com
I slowed when I got to Guy Kawasaki (interested in startups but with no direct experience, contrary to popular belief) and cringed when I saw Scobleizer (same story as Guy), and stopped flat when I got to Seth Godin. Seth's got interesting things to say on occasion, but to real startup work, he's all but useless.

And then -- ValleyWag? Seriously?
The problem is that your friend will eventually ask the same question to an honest person, or otherwise discover that $25-30 is really the widespread going rate for the coat. And then feel even worse (especially if she actually overpaid for the coat and lost the chance to return it within 30 days). By making yourself likable, you're potentially reducing the long-term happiness of the friend. Of course this example is about a frivolous thing, but what if the original question was "what do you think of my startup idea"?

There are some cases where being brutally honest has no long-term benefit so you might as well white lie, but it takes too much mental overhead to figure that out at every such stage in every conversation. I hate it when people default to always white lying.

I default to being honest, to the extent that I respond truthfully to the dreaded "does this make me look fat" question. I hope we can still be friends.
video/image hosting is not the point, it's community that counts here: youtube is just a vehicle to deliver your video to more eyeballs, because poking around youtube is easier for the joe user, rather than poking around the 'net. also, as others have pointed out, bandwidth is cheaper for google rather than for the private VPS that hosts your site.
Ask HN: Feedback for new virtual worlds tech web magazine
We are just about to launch a new web magazine "Max Ping", focusing on open source virtual world technologies. Small glitches and typos, we will fix those before launch, Would like to get your comments on it if you see any major problems - or if it looks good. http://www.maxping.org/
I underwent surgical procedure and removed a pilonidal cyst located at my lower back. Because of the surgery I was under heavy dose of pain killers, and could not sit, stand or lie on my back.

So I had to implement a "will take only 15 minutes but is extremely important" feature, lying on my stomach with laptop on the floor, with my head dizzy because of the pain killers and a bloody butt.
Viruses of the Mind - Richard Dawkins on Religion
Is high IQ as much a burden as a blessing?
>"Startups often make money primarily by reducing costs, and cost reduction nearly always means job reduction."

This is an old, old, old mistake people make when talking economics. "The Luddite Fallacy" - to be exact.

Yes, technology that reduces costs and automates production means the loss of jobs. However, it also increases the total production of society, which increases demand for other jobs.

We used to be a nation of 90% farmers. Now about 2% of workers are involved in agriculture. What happened to the other 88%? They aren't unemployed. Rather, they are employed in other jobs that never would have been created if those agricultural jobs were not destroyed by technology.
I can tell you how to do it. I don't think it's that complex an answer. But first you have to understand the one caveat which is this: most people don’t want to hear the truth.

The current "Twitter Worm" story is a perfect example. The worm really doesn’t cause any damage. It doesn’t hurt anything. But you have all these terrifying claims coming out of the tech media.

Why?

Because people like a crisis. It gets their heart pumping a little faster and they vicariously make themselves a part of it by following the coverage. That’s why news agencies devote every moment they can during things like hurricanes. Because they know people will watch.

This exists in pretty much all things. Truth is complex and by its nature contains both sides of the story. While most people want to react to things as Good or Bad, Dangerous or Safe, and so on.

That said, promoting the truth to those who want to hear it is pretty simple. Just put up a web site, publish only when you know you’re being accurate, and wait. You’ll probably have to wait years for people to stumble upon your site but if you dedicate yourself to telling the truth and then do it consistently for a period of time you’ll eventually amass an audience.
Early on they needed money, and a lot of it, for servers. They were highly cashflow negative and realistically only VC or outright acquisition could have paid for it.

A case could certainly be made that they took too much money, and I would agree with that, but they did need money from somewhere.
You're right that the first sentence is more informative. Among its other problems, it's too informative. It's like saying that pi is 3.27394 rather than 3.14.

Judgement call. "Too" informative? Perhaps for people who prefer brief sentences. For god's sake, stay the hell away from Faulkner.
"You're not living up to your potential" is a Red Queen's game that having a high IQ doesn't help.
Well, that's not exactly what I meant.

What I mean is a site that ONLY cares about the truth of a linked news item, and has options that warn ppl of what the OP was talking about, eg. "This article is one-sided, see comments"
It's not a judgement call whether pi is closer to 3.27394 or 3.14. It's almost as certain Pullum didn't mean to exclude undergrads from his statement.
This doesn't solve everything, as many commenters have already pointed out. There are going to be legacy app-holdouts. There are going to be upgrade skeptics who stay with "what works". There are going to be lazy people, dumb people, and all manner of launch bugs which scare people off.

So let's say that's 50%--A HUGE PERCENTAGE--of IE6+IE7 users. That means 50% less IE6 and IE7. Like we just said: FIFTY PERCENT IS HUGE.

I'm more than happy to lump IE8 in with the Gecko and KHTML browsers as being "good enough" from a developer's perspective. This nudges the web in the right direction, and the specter of NO auto-update was the big pisser on this parade.

I think this is a giant step in the right direction. Let's imagine that IE8 keeps on the good path, with more updates rolled out in the next year. Maybe it pulls close to parity in standards sometime. Auto-update makes all this meaningful.

I'm thrilled. The world's not gonna be perfect overnight. At least now we have a reason to hope it'll get close someday.
Making a PBX 'botnet' out of Skype or Google Voice?
The idea that the split infinitive is bad comes from a fixation in the 18th century that Latin (long dead even at that time) was a somehow superior language. You can't split infinitives in Latin (or most of its descendents). "To sleep" in Latin is dormire. That includes the concept of "to", so there's no way to say "to soundly sleep". You'd have to put it as "to sleep soundly," and so automatically, that's the "correct" form in English, too. English is an inferior language to Latin, right?

Same story with ending a sentence with a preposition, dangling participles, and other taboos: there may be nothing fundamentally wrong with it, but you couldn't or didn't do it in Latin. Ergo, it's bad.

The real fault is the attempt to make functional language into hard science. It's not. Language was not invented by god. It's a human construct, and using it is nearly an art.

Good advice? Useful. Sure, don't over-explain. But don't bother getting into an argument with someone about whether a word in a sentence was truly necessary. People who do those kind of things have lost perspective.
Hadn't seen that before. Nice find.