skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't care who said it (My apologies, I'm always a bit critical of throwing in famous names in a discussion, the arguments should count for themselves.). Internal considerations is really all there is.

If you'd take the extreme ego central perspective, you get the double moral: "I can do anything I want, you may only do things that are beneficial to me."
Obviously this doesn't work in society, and even for the strongest individual this becomes: "You should do things that do not hurt me, and I will do everything so as to not make you hurt me."

This may be further fine-tuned in a closely knit society:"If society benefits, I benefit, therefor everybody should do what benefits society".

Basically collective morality comes forth from selfish morality. And when it does not, it is 'naturally selected', e.g. as the French royalty which was beheaded by the plebs or more commonly, the governmental policing of individuals.

I wouldn't say there is any inherent good or bad in acting on strength/confidence or fear/envy. And ethics that arise from those feelings are also neither good nor bad. Some rules are more capable of continuing than others.

e.g. The 'serial-killer'-morale has less chance than the 'pacifist'-morale. This makes pacifism 'better', but not something inherently 'good'.
"if you must have sports, that's where UMich shines."

If you must have sports, you are 10 minutes from the professional sports teams, too.
>> He's not anti-Semitic; he's Jewish...

The history of Jewish anti-semitism goes back at least to Josephus, who sold out his fellow jews to the Romans. Karl Marx, whose early writings were filled with anti-semitic hate. Etc. Etc. (I should add, BTW, that I'm not Jewish, just a friend of Israel who's never been there.)

>> ...and is critical of some of Israel's policies.

Well, that would certainly explain his hanging out with the mass murderers of Hezbollah and fronting books on Holocaust denial.

>> The New York Times Book Review said he is "arguably the most important intellectual alive."

Ah, well, that clinches it.
Board gaming in general strikes me as a good tool for education. It usually requires quick thinking, basic arithmetic, strategy, negotiation. In my experiences fondness for gaming also correlates well with mathematical ability.
There is even a making of on vimeo
http://vimeo.com/4295148
Making commercials for the web
There's no reason we can't support non-US users. :)
It works with both types of meters.
> the Googler embarks on a full-scale jihad against the very concept of taste

I say: this is all based on prejudice, not on knowledge, and the author should have refrained from posting such a bullish article.

Compare this diatribe to Linus Torvalds which often uses taste as judgement for code quality. It seems like some designers have a very narrow definition of 'taste' which only includes their own subject, and not a real understanding of art in multiple field.
Go to a community college for two years to finish all the bullshit required courses (050 or 100 level) and transfer them to either one for your major. Save money and you'll appreciate the intensive courses for two years knowing you won't be so poor when you graduate.
Ask HN: CSS framework that works with mobile phone browsers too?
I was looking at a few of my sites from my mobile phone browser, and wasn't particularly pleased with the fixed-width layout that blueprint.css gives you.

Any ideas about frameworks or other aids to make the mobile experience reasonably nice?
I agree with many of your points (uncool, sloganeering). But I find it interesting that you are saying the original idea is not worthy of consideration ('irrelevant') because you think it MIGHT be incorrect ('to the best of my knowledge'). There are actually a lot of contradictory reports on this but that isn't the point. To me it shows the disadvantages facing unpopular views when even you would so reflexively dismiss and vote this down.
Part of the division into departments is a good thing because it reflects a separation of concerns. A philosophical question (what is our ethical duty as human beings, which methods of argument and reasoning provide valid conclusions under which sets of assumptions, what conceptions of free will are compatible with metaphysical determinism) can't be meaningfully answered from a scientific or artistic approach though scientists and artists are both capable of philosophy to some extent, and in fact it would be good to see academics publishing across related fields more often. I could easily imagine epistemologists, philosophers of science, and scientists productively publishing together in methodology-of-science journals and attending methodology conferences.

Furthermore, departments allow for a deliberate separation of fundamentally incompatible approaches. Some people who take up the dubious academic pursuit of seeing everything from the perspective of feminism or race go to the Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies departments, and the rest of us are often better off without them. If we tried to close or ban the Women's Studies or Ethnic Studies department, people would be taking that crap back into other fields, so as a political compromise we have those departments as a containment field (though I am speaking too harshly, there are certainly benefits for the academics in those fields as well).
I've got trouble with the notion of singularity : why is it supposed to be an event that happens suddenly instead of gradually ?
>> I don't care who said it (My apologies, I'm always a bit critical of throwing in famous names in a discussion, the arguments should count for themselves.). Internal considerations is really all there is.

Agreed. I'm not citing authority, I'm giving credit where credit is due.

>> I wouldn't say there is any inherent good or bad in acting on strength/confidence or fear/envy. And ethics that arise from those feelings are also neither good nor bad.

Well, if we're going to hash out the basis of morality we're going to need a few more pixels. I'm not sure I agree with Nietzsche on this. I am certain that when people are scared, resentful, or envious, they can do a lot of damage. I'm also certain, based on 53 years of living, that people who are happy and confident tend to spread a lot more joy around than those who are resentful. Misery not only loves company, it creates and reinforces norms that spread misery.

>> Basically collective morality comes forth from selfish morality.

I'm not sure where you mean by this, but it's worth knowing that Hilter's National Socialist German Worker's Party stamped the slogan "The collective good over the individual good" on their coins. Want people to obey you, work for you, and die for you? Establish a morality that doing what you want instead of what the nation's leaders want (who naturally claim to represent the collective good) is bad. Or as our current Vice-President says, "unpatriotic".
I don't know if singularity is ever going to occur, but it's definitely not going to happen that soon. Our computer technology -- AI in particular -- is currently at the goldfish level.
Kurzweil suggested in the "Singularity is Near" that the believed speed limit imposed by the speed of light would be a barrier limiting the available resources to those in the solar system. Thus, limiting the exponential growth of technology and leading to the flattening of the growth curve suggested in your article. He also, gave a date of mid next century when this would occur.
Two techniques for massively faster JavaScript
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Hypergraphia at T+1h?
Also it is quite an inconveniently long word. If you strongly agree you are a 'singularitarian' which is a bit of a tongue twister.
> -7: geas. Word not in dictionary.

:(
The World's Most Influential Person Is...
EU health chief: Don't travel to Mexico or U.S.
I used to be quite addictive to a similar Flash game, called "Text Express": http://fr.games.yahoo.com/d/ztextexp.html.

Sorry, it's only available in French, but maybe it could inspire you.

The translated rules are:

* constitute as much words as possible using the letters displayed at the bottom of the screen

* constituing new words, you make your train go forward. Try to reach the train station as soon as possible!

* A level is over when the two trains reach the train station. If the other train reach the station before yours, game over (there is another train which advances regularly, forcing you to play fast)

Anyway, this kind of games seems to be quite popular. For example, in my experience, it is the only computer game than my parents & sister play.
Yes, the article seems kind of incoherent. samlittlewood's comment above was a better read.
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I'm seeing a lot of contradictory indications in the news. 'China bans pork from US/Mexico', reports that 'properly cooked' pork is fine.

You would think the original mutation could easily have happened in circumstances that are different from the current means of transmission.

Either way it is a pretty safe bet the original pig wasn't being kept as a pet or for milk or eggs.
This course website from the University of Maryland has a very good introduction to C.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall2005/cmsc212/

It starts off with the fundamentals then gets into some more advanced principles. In particular, check out the "Jan Plane's Lecture Outlines" link.
AnyEvent = "grand unified event API for Perl"

I got this from Squatting Framework creator who also recommends Coro+AnyEvent over POE (http://groups.google.co.uk/group/squatting-framework/browse_...)

* http://search.cpan.org/dist/AnyEvent/
Rational ignorance may still be the best option. (From a game theoretic individualistic point of view, of course.)
In the early '90s there was a trend to something called "ego-less programming". The idea was to leave your ego at the door when coding, and definitely when doing a code review, thereby removing personality - and personality insult or injury - from questions of code quality. As a then-techie who'd attended a review or two, this struck me as a very good idea.

What you describe as "identity" may be better described as "ego". For most of us, the ego so dominates that the two are indistinguishable: Ego is who we are, ego promotes and defends our identity.

Now, without going all new age on you, think of a moment when your ego has been totallly in control (any episode of rage, be it road or code, is likely a good choice). Now think of how, on your better days, you don't consider that person to be you. Of course it wasn't, it was your ego taking control.

Keeping your identity small is one approach, but perhaps a more fulfilling one is to manage your ego. Recognize it as but one of your tools for personal expression and defense and bring it out only when necessary.

Many of us "identify" with a great many things and this makes life rich. Keeping your identity small may be impoverishing.

Consider discussions on religion or politics you've had with people who seem particularly wise or calm. They are probably among the best and most insightful discussions you've had. And I will bet that the wise person has strongly held beliefs, beliefs that are strongly part of their identity. But they manage their ego: They can consider all sides, and even update their position, because they have separated ego - and externally manifested phenomenom - from identity, an internal state.

(I experienced the ego-less programming trend at Bell-Northern Research, aka BNR, then the research arm of Northern Telecom, now Nortel. I don't know whether it was BNR-specific, Telecom-generic or industry wide. Interestingly, only techies and techie management really seemed to get it. Folks in soft disciplines thought having ego bound with code was necessary to take pride in one's work.)
Compare the Apple I to today's PCs. Compare dialup to mainframes to scaling out thousands of severs automatically in the cloud.

These aren't linear changes. If we're at goldfish level today, and we were at bacterium level yesterday, tomorrow could be a monkey, and the next day more intelligence than the whole human race combined.

I'm not saying it's going to happen, just that you can apply linear growth analysis to areas growing exponentially.
If it actually caught on, surely it would be shortened to "singy" (sin-gee).
Opensource spaced repetition system (SRS)
I suspect that the Singularity will be like a speciation event, a recession, or the bottoming of the markets. We won't be able to say exactly when and where it happened until after the fact.

Instead of trying to predict exactly when, the smart money will execute a strategy that doesn't depend on the exact time, like Dollar Cost Averaging into the current depressed markets.

I'm not sure what that means for the Singularity.
> [...] that today beats most commercial offerings in its field

Are your customers telling you that, or is this just something you believe? Do you have customers?
And this reputation (or the signal) can sometimes be converted into money. Open-source portfolios help in getting a job, I am told.
Isn't this victim of precision hack? http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/15/inside-the-precision-ha...
Jakob Nielsen: World's Best Headlines: BBC News
I haven't read the article, but regarding your comment you are treating the departments as if they are completely isolated. I do psychology and it contains many sub-fields such as political psychology, social psychology, biological psychology which basically can be considered as inter-disciplinary fields, bringing these departments together.

I am sure many other subjects have such inter-disciplinary field, sure maths may not go with psychology (although psychologists do need to do statistics) but it goes quite well with physics, chemistry with biology etc. so these departments are not islands on their own isolated from the other fields, each field has much to contribute to other fields.
I rather believe in cybernetic immortality (http://pcp.vub.ac.be/CYBIMM.html), Vinge's singularity is too vague, some kind of pop science.

In every metasystem transformation (such as singularity would like to be) a new form of control arises over the existing reigning control mechanism.

To put in our terms, the next metasystem transformation will be the control of the culture (humans are culture beings).

And usually this is not about some higher intelligence as Vinge states, it is about the apparition of new senses which opens a totally new universe / dimension.
> The bigger issue with veganism (and to a lesser extent vegetarianism) is that it requires cleverness to avoid malnutrition.

On balance I think it takes less cleverness to be a healthy vegetarian than it does than a healthy meat eater. I'm not a vegan so I can't comment in detail but if the misconceptions about vegetarianism are anything to go by I'd say the difficulties are pretty much all BS. And of course if society was vegan it would be trivial to find all the foods you needed regularly cause they'd be everywhere.

> Like it or not, the human colon is too short for a generic vegan diet; we evolved to eat meat.

The opposite argument actually works better. Could humans live on a 'generic' carnivore diet? It is just as easy to argue that we evolved to eat plants.

But if course that isn't how evolution works. We didn't 'evolve' to do anything but to further our genes. We didn't evolve to drive cars or use computers but here we are. Maybe we evolved to die early so there would be more food for our grandchildren. Evolution can be a rough guide but now we have science which favours a plant diet.

> There are people who already have issues getting enough iron and protein. This problem would only be exacerbated by a pure vegetarian diet.

People who are on the edge of starvation will benefit from any extra source of calories or nutrition. In the long term though the most efficient way to provide this would be via plants or perhaps even artificial means in some cases.

> Furthermore, we do not have an issue producing food for people.

Fair point. However the cheaper it is to produce food the more likely it will find it's way to the poorest of people.
Our rate of development is limited by how quickly we can make good decisions.

Any decision support or "cognitive outsourcing" that is invasive will have to go through the usual approval processes before becoming widespread. It may eventually transform those same processes, but that will lag far behind the initial adoption.

I can have a super-mondo-uber tool, but I still need to know what to build. If I need more than one person for my project, then I also need to be able to scale high-bandwidth human to human collaboration.

None of these things seem impossible, it's just that closing the circle and applying these tools to ourselves slows things down tremendously.
the answer is on www.theyrule.net
You miss the point exactly. Solving the water problem is not just an engineering issue, but a geo-political issue as well.
Ads have been "not saying much about the product" for awhile. Advertisers have known that ads work best on the emotional level since the early 20th century.

See: The Century of the Self

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3LSyck0YTE

To me, there is a clear parallel between this ad and Hacker News itself!
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The knowledge is not for free. But you cannot buy it with money, as the university model is stating, but with time, the learning time.

Anyway time is money
For sake of argument: How often is the syntax the primary problem in learning a new language?

The examples that come to mind are Forth and APL/K/J (all of which I've only dabbled in), but the reason they have such unconventional syntaxes is because they're conceptually very different.
Part of the problem is an obsession with diplomas and enforced curricula. Jobs will not hire unless you have the necessary diplomas - until that changes, forced, regimented, rote and curriculum-based learning is the only real option on a massive scale.
Consider the alternative: employers become agnostic about your educational background (or even totally blind to it) and instead test each applicant on the relevant skillset for the position - a society that only tests on entry, not on exit. If singular test panels aren't good enough, bring back apprenticeships, internships, etc.

As IT progresses arguments bringing up signal to noise ratios and using school leaver's certificates, a-level grades and university diplomas as first-pass filters become less relevant.

It's win-win for everyone except those who were provided with a prestigious education through the funds and connections of their parents. Employers are exposed to a maximally broad base of candidates - who may have followed an educational path that's totally unique and has made them much better suited to the job than one that distracted, bored, diffused and brainwashed them; candidates get in on merit not so much on the paid-for (private) resources made available to them (though your dad's library or mum's financial freedom to stay at home and teach you will always be one source of inequality).
Is that not sort of cheating though? I mean sure you would be providing a service, i.e blocking all ads on the internet, but sure you are earning on the back of the people who are producing quality content and thanks to you they now make much less from it, which in turn would reduce the quality content and your profit and the producers profit.

Maybe each site could charge people what they earn from advertising in a manner of subscription, but why shut down knowledge when the profits remain the same? I mean are people still really so bothered by advertising on websites which have taken care not to make their adverts intrusive? I just read an article on new york times and am sure they have ads there, but I didn't notice them, they didn't bother me, but I hate reading stuff on the economist, that site is over saturated with ads.
I love HAML most of the time but my major beef with it is that it won't allow midline Ruby injection like ERB. This gets really lame, for instance if you have a <p> and you want to use multiple link_to()s inside it.

SASS + Compass, on the other hand, has been a boon to my productivity.
The problem with the IPv6 migration isn't technical, but social. IPv4 was the version of the protocol that was active when the Internet "went pop", and as such, many people (especially those who actually pay for the technology, rather than actually use it directly) think it is good enough. It doesn't help matters that workarounds and kludges like NAT are regarded nowadays as features instead of flaws.
Fortunately, though, there are a lot of people making decisions about what to do. :)
I think you are thinking of hard take off vs soft take off.

Come back and ask me in 25 years and I will tell you which happened. :)
No, like I said we haven't formed a business around the product yet. At this stage we're considering just selling the product as-is, if at all possible.

The product is light-years ahead of most competitors based on the feedback we've had from (reasonably objective) peers and our own knowledge of the industry.
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I wish more people were discussing, no matter their political affiliation, this largest swindle in human history.

Amazing how many are cheering them on (perhaps in the hopes that one day they can loot as well?).
game: 225

The last 27 letters disappeared one after the other, very quickly. Then, the "game over" dialog came up each time I clicked it away. (I found I could escape with ^w immediately after dismissing the dialog).

Firefox 2.0.0.7 (yep, 2 not 3).

Cool game, looks like it's for crossword/scrabble experts. A strategy guide/hints for the basics of crossword/scrabble thinking might be useful (if such a thing exists) to broaden the base - though I think you'll have more than enough users as it is. :-)
OK, so you guys stared at this thing for years, you're sick of it, I understand. Still, since so much effort (presumably) went into it, don't let it go that cheaply. It seems like most of the time, companies buy an installed customer base and/or the team that built it rather than "just" a raw piece of tech. Not saying it's impossible, but if you want to maximize your rewards for your work, take a week or a month off (the project at least) -- you might just want to put up that barely-acceptable micro site with a PayPal button and a negligable AdWords budget just to see where it could be going.

For selling the software business-to-be, you might need to find a local angel who you can get excited about getting this into someone's door.

Or you could submit your stuff to "Red Gate Software's Million Dollar Challenge" and hear their offer: http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2009/04/the-red-gate-mill...
More facts, less handwaving:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/juan_enriquez_shares_mind...
Wow, if that's so, congrats. Just start pitching it to them, then and select the highest bidder.
> made to understand

That's the problem, right there.
Secret History of Silicon Valley Part VI: Every World War II Movie was Wrong
I wonder how they'll treat the race to ring-in, which in the human game begins just after Trebek finishes reading the question. (Apparently there's an in-studio light indicating to contestants when ringing-in is possible.)

The program might want to make its ring-in decision based on a snap decision of whether the question is likely to be amenable to its analysis, even if the exact answer isn't yet know -- human contestants do this, and then take a second or two to cogitate before giving their actual answer.