skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't all of these points apply to discussions of, say, "energy healing"? My view of energy healing is that it's obvious bullshit. However, there are a number of very smart people who believe in energy healing, and they have studied energy healing much more extensively than I have.
A rails debugging trick you may not know
Integral House: math professor and violinist commissions architectural good thingy
Well, insofar as the doppelganger and I have sepata experiences, our personalities have already begun to diverge. Now, if the doppelganger whipped out a pair of EEG helmets and demonstrated that we could sync our experiences - eg, I take a sleeping pill and let my doppelganger go out on the town for a night, but I can easily 'catch up' the following morning - then i'd think about it.
All of this (and a great deal more) is in Buffett's biography "The Snowball", which I'm reading right now. Speaking of which, it's obviously difficult/impossible to summarize that kind of book, but I have been taking a few notes:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/34/the-snowball-warre...

Anyone else with observations is welcome to join in and/or comment about your views of the book.
Yes, I did know that the Risch algorithm existed; and I've implemented it (or at least most of it).

I wonder why it's never mentioned in high school Calculus classes.

Because there's no way in hell that you want to ever apply the Risch algorithm by hand. As the wikipedia page says, it takes more than 100 pages to describe the algorithm; even just using it to compute the integral of x + 1/x would probably take hours without a computer.
I don't see a whole lot of hype. As for the AI part, I think you're just rehashing Searle's Chinese Room argument, which has been shot down a long time ago.
Cloud computing with Linux thin clients
For embedded Linux engineers and aficionados, one exciting aspect of cloud computing is the sudden interest in thin Linux clients. Explore cloud computing from a Linux perspective and discover some of the most innovative and popular Linux-based solutions—with a particular view toward Linux thin clients and environmentally beneficial options.
I like to be able to stop "following" somebody without them being aware of it. I like following to work like RSS. Only I know who I am watching.
I was nutty enough to like Palm's Foleo the 1st time around. Still do.
This post is a negative critique of Haml which points out that it is not an improvement over HTML - it makes working with designers more cumbersome for one thing. A somewhat different viewpoint from a StackOverflow user:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/93540/your-attitude-to-ha...
on an unrelated issue, is it possible to merge the posts (and karma) of one account into another one?
If you leave any animal with minimal amount of food, they will consume it all. The difference is how close to the ground they eat. The sheep will take the stem all the way to the ground, while goats, cows, and horses will leave a little bit. This allows it to grow later.
Every time I see Alan Turing's name associated with suicide I get angry and sad. He was killed by PTSD, effectively, given by his own country in gratitude for serving it so effectively.
From GIT to Eclipse
XP to be available after Windows 7's release
Chart combining pricing with sequential and random I/O performance data: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2009/04/18/SSDVersusEnterpr...
HN: If your CEO can't use your product, your company is doomed
No exception, whatever your CEO might tell you.
Windows 7 release date leaked
Summary: solid state disks cost more per GB than spinning disks. But they make computers go faster, so you need fewer computers, so you may save overall.

In fact, it's only in very specialized situations where having faster disks means you need fewer computers.
You could define the type by the accept header, but:

1) what if there's more than one accept header? which one do you pick?

2) most frameworks are not really thinking this way at the moment, however uber-logical it might seem to the REST-ies.

I voted you back up to 0 -- I really have no idea why people would vote an honest question down.
Make sure to click on the slideshow.

More technical reading: http://www.canadianarchitect.com/issues/ISarticle.asp?id=191...

Some more pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/integralhouse/
One thing the article didn't mention is that when using ruby-debug you can drop into an irb shell from debugging. Best of both worlds.
This Week in Startups
Government Contracts
No, what we need is a cheap EEG device that exposes its raw data and comes with a basic API. A closed system will live or die on the quality of the release software. An open one will be slower to take off, but see much broader use.
I think the problem is with the varying interpretations of "rapidly"; going from little or no background to an expert in a field might be "rapidly" done in 10 years if most people take 20.

The problem (which I agree exists) arrives when people fail to realize that even extremely rapid conversion of intelligence to knowledge does not make you an expert in many fields without years of fairly dedicated study.
Is this directed at a specific company, or are you just stating this generally? Some details as to why you believe this might be nice.

Suppose I'm the CEO of a company that makes fighter jets for the military...
I might be wrong, but this probably violates the terms of service if you're serving pages to more than a few visitors.
The interview was conducted by The Next Women, which has a "focus on startups and growing businesses, led, founded or invested in by women."

http://thenextwomen.com/about/
So when will Google officially make this their social network?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
Yeah, using DropBox as a faux-CDN is a bad idea. To quote their terms:

> By placing Your Files in your public folder, you hereby grant all other Dropbox users and the public a non-exclusive, non-commercial, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use and exploit Your Files in your public folder

But having your DropBox "repository" as your web root seems pretty slick.
The Leonardo paradox
From looking at the wikipedia page, methane is converted to water and ethane with broken down ozone. Ethane is a much milder greenhouse gas. Not sure what ethane half life is. If I understand this correctly, the net result will be putting carbon and hydrogen into the atmosphere (via ethane) and taking oxygen out of the atmosphere in the form of water and maybe reducing atmospheric ozone. With a side effect of 7 years of methane.

Regardless, this is not a closed carbon loop, and it results in global warming.
If the CEO can't use the product, they need to rely on others to - 1.) Communicate accurately the state of the product (is it good, why is it bad) 2.) Also communicate effectively both down (employees) and outwardly (partners, press, customers) the product direction.
> flowing, multi-person, real-time conversations.

In other words, IRC? Every "next big thing" communication medium has been trying to replicate the IRC experience for the past 15 years.

Twitter is the closest, it even has # and @ modifiers - I mean come on, this is getting pretty ridiculous. A stand-alone twitter client that shows a message from everyone that is posting to #topic and @messages directed to you? Last time I checked, that's IRC.

Pretty soon all of us will get our childhood wish and everyone in the world will be on IRC.
I'd ask him to wait until I'm on my death bed and it's clear my death is unavoidable. Then I'd give him the thumbs up, instruct him to keep it real.
Ok, good point.

Mostly focused for the Software industry. I think it is valid for CEO of small/medium size company, or VP Eng/General Managers in big Corporation.

I think that the reason why the software industry has been so slow (or confused) is that there are too many software execs that do not understand what they are building. They are just very good a spinning good stories to their investors or managers.
IRC? The next big thing? Who would have thought :/

>> "Last time I checked, that's IRC."

The difference is, IRC can scale really well. IRC has worked out how to deal with spam, abuse, botnets, etc etc. You can have moderated, password protected channels, user levels, kicks, bans etc etc. It'd take the 'social stream' thingys a while to replicate that functionality, and the question would be 'why rebuild it?'.

FWIW, I really do believe we'll see a massive resurgence of real time chat this year and next.

It's amazing to look back at just now big it was. Even the BBC ran an IRC server and had regular chats about programs etc. Then they shut everything down and moved to moderated message boards - which suck in terms of user experience.
Since then people have had to try and emulate the experience places like twitter. which results in, again, a bad user experience.

We'll be back to live chat on the web soon enough though.
Yeah, but goats are escape artists

I raise chickens and have looked into having goats for milk (not this year: don't have the time) and fencing is a major issue. One of my neighbors has goats and they are always getting out.
But rather than focus on symbolic integration done by hand in high school, why not focus on higher level problem solving involving symbolic integration done by computer?
The future of Rails is Ruby 1.9 - real performance of 1.8, JRuby and 1.9 compared
JSON, XML performance
Dunning-Kruger has been the (ironic?) favorite fodder of holier-than-thou tech scenesters since the early days of EFNet, Slashdot, then reddit, now HN, and I'm sure it'll make repeated appearances in the next place we all migrate to after this place gets overrun by the next group of people that so inconveniently attenuate the smugness flying around in our little echo chamber of eliteness.
I think of it as the joint variable event space relative to (or normalized by) the condition variable event space. In a few words what is shown in the article diagrams.
push news:// & irc:// to the masses through jabber/json rendered in browser...
I'd have to agree. While it's not a great walkthrough style programming book, it is certainly a very useful reference.
Abstract Heresies: You knew I'd say something, Part III
BuddyPress Social Network Lunched By Automattic
Guy Steele Interviews John McCarthy at OOPSLA 2008
Sam Odio and the EFF vs. Apple Inc.
"Masterpiece" is pushing it. The section is entirely banal, with little imagination beyond plan extrusion. When you think of the possibilities of the site, the client, and the conceptual domain (math, music), it is more of a missed opportunity.
I am not a big fan of the "rely on others" argument. There is only one maestro is a orchestra. Obviously, a good maestro with bad musicians won't be heard for long.
You overlook the main difference: Alpha’s answers are structured. So, it may be possible to build something on top of it, once API is out.
If someone is using this paper to be smug about their own abilities, then they thoroughly missed the point.

If anything, this made me question what I thought I knew, and is a lesson in humility.
Our Daily Bread (and tea): Eating at a Startup
Resist your inner Dunning-Kruger! This post is helpful: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/11/all-are-unaware.html
Ask HN: Please Try Out My Reddit-Like Map
If you know a good webpage about a park, trail, or other outdoor place, please attach it to that place(s) on the map.

First, you select stuff on the map.

Last, you can add a link, Reddit-style, or write a report using our site.

I would really appreciate any feedback!

All these pages get indexed to the TrailBehind Map (http://www.trailbehind.com), and they show up in Recent Reports, (http://www.trailbehind.com/new_stuff), which sort of looks like a Digg or Reddit with a map.
Well I wanted to sensationalize it because the story has been missed here before with the given headline and it is pretty cool both as a house and because it was commissioned by someone famous for being a calculus professor. How often does that happen? Editor can change the headline as desired.

"I think it's one of the most important private houses built in North America in a long time" is the quote from the MoMA director.
1. How far does it scale, in terms of number of agents, without needing to change the way you do things?

2. Does this need to run on a LAN or is it possible to spread the agents across the Internet at multiple sites?
Agreed. If a new person starts working with me and they are not using a fixed width font, I immediately question their sanity and their skills.
What's happening with this link? It looks like it redirects to itself, preventing a single back button click to HN.
That's actually quite a nice design and looks like it would work well on the iphone as well.
And following the link trails we find:

Paul Graham (Viaweb) On raising money: “The advice I would give is to avoid it. I would say spend as little as you can because every dollar of the investors’ money you get will be taken out of your ass…”

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/03/founders_at_wor.html#ixz...

Is that "Y"?
More than that. A two orders of magnitude kick to the backside of the memory hierarchy necessarily has a ripple effect (e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=557961).

It's not only the savings in current applications - it's the new ones that are made possible, or cost-effective. Note the tail end of the piece, and comment #6 - avc.com's ears are pricked up ;-)
Air Bike Could be a Solution to Pollution
I'd say his main points boil down to poor tooling and creating a solution for a problem that doesn't really exist... except that many of us do see issues with existing templating options and Haml+Sass works really well.

I will concede that it can cause friction with designers though.
Is anyone else using Protoshare? From the brief demo I saw it looked super-awesome, but I'm sure there are some "downsides" - any comments?
Reg Braithwaite on Optimism
Integration itself is quite a bit of problem solving itself, and much more fundamentally understandable.

I'd rather students understand the fundamentals of that integration than have a computer apply an algorithm they don't understand. You can construct problems plenty complicated enough in intro calculus courses for students without resorting to functions they can't integrate with the methods they learn.
Have you used Friendfeed? It is what Twitter should be and it has the benefits of IRC with an order of magnitude more practicality.

Unfortunately I almost never use Friendfeed; all of my friends are on Facebook.
I'm guessing (as with Amazon S3) it's not possible to host a root file - hence http://dl.dropbox.com/xxxx/whatever won't work.
The idea of real time communication is similar to IRC, but remember that it's just a protocol. The big difference here is what you can do with how that data is presented to users.

There are some really neat things you can do with HTTP and a browser that IRC clients lack. The whole rendering a page with text, images, and markup together adds a lot to the experience that you just don't get with IRC. Great job friendfeed - it looks like this brings together the strengths of each.
The point isn't that we need to know who came up with what, it's that we need to know the justification for their assertion.

If it becomes common knowledge that "the Republican party lost their way after 2000", people will stop backing up the statement. As time goes on, nobody will know why "Republicans lost their way after 2000". In the future, careful historians will want to know who first made the assertion so that they can understand where this general knowledge came from.
Eh, different strokes for different folks. My only major criticism of Haml is that it makes me actively adverse to how incredibly verbose HTML is, which probably isn't a good trait for a web developer.
I don't know if they still do this but in the past dropbox did close down public transfers for people who overused or misused it (probably more a bandwidth issue such as sharing large videos).
The non-enterprise SSDs (including Intel's -M line) are now at under 40% of the price (i.e. USD 5/GB), and can probably deliver 80% of the performance for realistic workloads.

I'd also guess that by this time next year we'll be seeing the consequences (and USD 2 or 3/GB prices, if the demand doesn't drive prices up instead).
Aww, look at their datacenter, it's so cute!

Seriously, I can see why they're so cagey about when it'll go live, if they let The Internets onto six racks of machines doing un-cacheable, potentially expensive computations they'll pull a Cuil.
I have always visualized probability and conditional probabilities in terms of Venn diagrams, it is easier to understand stuff this way. I think this is _the_ best way to teach probability to a beginner. What do you think ?!
The real takeaway from this data is not just that the below average half tends to significantly overestimate its abilities (although that is supported), or that the extremely effective tend to underestimate their abilities (also supported), but that, almost completely regardless of skill, people tend to estimate their own abilities to fall within the third quartile. To me, this seems like reasonable evidence for the otherwise anecdotal fact that (at least for some fields) those who are not themselves competent at a subject are poor judges of competency at that subject, since their primary tool for making skill assessments will be to assess the confidence others have in their skills.
IBM In Social Networks — My DeveloperWorks
mibbit's been experimenting a lot in this area directly. You should check it out.
And blogging is basically just a .plan file...
While that sounds perfectly reasonable to me, I wonder if it's that enforceable? That sounds like the public domain to me. Can a company declare "by doing X on our system, you hereby release your IP into the public domain?"
Not that I want to defend journalists but I can see why they thought this was of special interest.

If I give you you a .wav of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, I am gifting you something meaningful - an experience, a feeling of awe, or relaxation or whatever your reaction to listening it will be. I consider that to be of value. If someone asks you "And what did she give you for your birthday" you can say "Stabat Mater! The Kirkby/Bowman recording!" and nobody would ask "Was that a CD or on iTunes"? They would understand both the nature and the intent of the gift. It's yours the same way the CD was yours - you have the ability to listen to it whenever you want at no cost to you. Therefore you, the recipient, continue to derive value.

I think the reason the journalist is boggling with the otter thing, is that it appears to be of no value to them, and doubts that it is of any value to the donor either (unlike Aunt Edna's horrid sweater, which while it may not be of any value to Cousin Johnny, it is at least of value to her, and she thinks, albeit mistakenly, that it might be of value to him, and also has a material cost).

So I think they are surprised that someone can pay real money to transact something that has no intrinsic value nor any usage value to either the gifter or the recipient. Which does put it in a different category than digital music.
This is a very well done presentation - I am genuinely impressed. We could use more of these types of explanations. The more people who understand, the more help we have.
cool, thanks for the quick reply. i was also gonna ask whether parts of your thesis were available online in the forms of research papers or PDF dissertation, but i guess i can read the free On Lisp PDF.
agreed, oftentimes hacking on a problem for a long time enables you to discover another more interesting (or practical) problem whose need wouldn't have arisen if you weren't working on your original problem in the first place.
Heh, d'oh. Fixed; thanks.
I don't understand the criticism that it's for people who don't understand HTML. How could you even use it if you didn't know HTML?
Why Startups Should Never Outsource Public Relations
My point is that the bastards hooked me on Family Guy on demand and then they cut me off, and I'm jonesing. :)
Nope, I'm hooked. I need to see them all. I thought I could, until I watched the 5th episode to discover... there are no more.

Now my life is crap. Make sense?
I like redmine.
I wasn't very impressed it looked like a postmodern house with a concert hall added in. Was expecting much more from the title and came out disappointed.
Maybe Twitter should be social from the start?
The green color hurts my eyes !!
The difference between IRC and everything else is the organization of it all.

It's hard to track and organize real-time conversations.. they start off in one place and end up in another. And then even if that's fine, it's impossible to then categorize the results in any meaningful way that makes it easy for others not a part of the original discussion to go back and view the details of the (large) conversation.

The nature of emails and other "turn-based communication systems" makes people tend to make each individual "element" of the thread a standalone entity. A single has way better odds of making sense on its own than a single IRC message...
Yes, that's a much closer comparison, and I may very well have gone with an Apple in such a case (but since I very rarely use a laptop, I didn't want to spend more than about $1250, I guess it would have been a less capable machine). I do keep laptops for a long time, though, so I can amortize it across about 3 years.

I started out shopping for the Studio 15, but when the price for the Latitude was only a couple hundred more, and the Mini 9 was available for $50 in a bundle with the Latitude, I splurged a bit.

Interesting that Dell is so focused on the US market.
buy? others...check out keepass
Thats how it should be. I was a medical exception, though. I crushed two vertebrae, and so the muscle is pulled over them at a weird angle. They cramp is I sit/stand without moving too long. The instructor didn't want to hear that, because I told him the fracture had healed. Said it was my body's way of 'letting out the suffering' basically. Which was nothing other than stupid, because actually it was my body telling me, "Hey stupid, your muscles have been cramping for 20 minutes. How can you possibly stand the pain?"

Everyone should have to sit, and everyone will hurt when they don't move, but if your back muscles don't freaking work, you should be able to sit against the wall. Which they did let me, eventually.
They're very different forms of communication, suited to different uses. It's like telephone vs letter. Each has its place.
The amino acid sequence of Swine Flu Hemagglutinin as ambient music
I think generally those responses on HN are directed more at the sensationalist reporting by those journalists/bloggers who have even less expertise in the subject matter than your average Science/Engineering degree holder. This is completely justified when the article under discussion draws conclusions, citing a peer-reviewed, published scientific paper, that are simply not supported by the authors of the paper.

Obviously there are examples in the other direction as well, but I dont see it as a common problem on HN.

Also its worth noting, that the more difficult it is to grasp the subject matter of a paper, the less likely it is that peer reviewers are actually reviewing it any better than a common reader. Evidenced by the multitude of papers in the recent past that have been discredited as academically dishonest to fraud, and the hilarious meta-studies slipping computer generated gibberish through journal review processes.
thanks, but I'm very happy with 1Password so far