skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use .NET and VB.NET. I am not ashamed. :) Oh, and ColdFusion too. I'm proud to be a language agnostic developer. Immune from hype, smoke and mirrors. Hehe. Okay, maybe not as immune as I think.
I know. Did anyone see the r^2 for the correlation?
He is in the newspaper business, its in his best interest to kill the ad supported model
At first I thought the same thing, but this guy is in the UK where the debate has moved on from 'whether global warming is real' to 'what to do about it'. He says:

"However much we agree on the fundamentals of the physics of climate change, there are huge ethical, political and ideological differences that remain about what climate change signifies for society"

So this is a different debate than what we have in the US, where we watch Fox News, deny global warming, and believe in creationism.

His point is that yes, global warming is here, but we must choose how to handle it, what the trade offs are, what the priorities are, what to give up, and so on. These are political and ideological decisions which the science cannot make.
My belief (I call it a belief, because I haven't done rigorous research to confirm it; it is based on what I learned during studying physics) is that all early, 'basic', mathematics was invented (or discovered, I don't want to get into that) to describe nature.

Initially, the natural numbers were nothing but a convention to describe and differentiate between sets of multiple objects that were to be considered equal for the purposes of discussion. IV apples vs. V apples. II rocks vs. VII garments (of course, the Romans didn't invent this, but I find it a distraction to use 'our' Arabic numerals).

Another example: Newton invented differential calculus specifically to describe nature. Shortly after that field was invented, mathematics in it would be done for it's own sake, but that doesn't detract from the fact that originally it was meant to describe nature.

More recently, mathematics has been invented before it was shown to be applicable to physics. What I earlier meant is that this may be a result of the origins of mathematics and doesn't prove what it seems to imply.
Collins' point appears to be that we have no way of distinguishing between a situation of purely random chance and a situation where God loaded the dice of the Universe, so to speak. I agree, but this is not so much an "argument for God" as a way of making an apparently-mechanical universe consistent with theism.

And "there is nothing new under the sun"; this kind of argument precedes the discovery of quantum physics. Rabbi Israel Salanter (1810-1833) said that a pious Jew is allowed to buy one lottery ticket, because that way if God wants to make you rich but doesn't want to do so with an overt miracle, He can just arrange for you to win the lottery. But if you buy another lottery ticket, that's gambling, which is forbidden.
Stairbot
the plan you are referring to is not 'cloud' but dedicated virutal. (mt)'s cloud is only $20 per month.
Interesting article...

HN: if you could completely rebuild business plan competitions, what would they look like? Would it still even have a business plan involved?
Lamport clocks is one topic that stood out most prominently in everything I took away from my excellent distributed systems class. I have no idea why, but the second I heard "Lamport clock," it got etched into my brain forever.
Sean Gourley examines the Mathematics of War
But he did say 'a few hours'. That sounds about right to me.
The Hat Puzzle (logic problem with unexpected connections to coding theory)
Unless they blatantly scraped the information from somewhere, this is indeed the best splog I've seen, actually interesting enough to read.
N97 is Available for Pre-Ordering
Yes. http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/config/cron.html
The Zappos way of managing
While the exact way it could happen is unclear (and whether or not it is at all possible is subject of debate) it would be analog to the way Special Relativity violates Newton's mechanics: it covers special cases that demanded new models that explain them.

SR is not a law (as Newton's laws are not "laws" in the strict sense) but a model we use to explain certain phenomena.
what would you expect? they're just trying to ride the star trek PR wave to generate new traffic. might pull in new interest for space.
Why are scientists satisfied with studying existing artifacts rather than creating their own?
Scientists are some of the smartest and most ambitious people around.

And yet many are satisfied with studying and explaining existing phenomena rather than inventing new things.

For example, why is it rewarding to study the messy artifacts of evolution? Isn't it more rewarding to use evolution for your own purposes to create an artificial intelligence for example?

Even computer science is like that. Many computer scientists devote their time to studying other people's inventions (e.g., social networking, blogging, tagging, etc.). Why is that rewarding?
Ok, but he's talking about it in the context of attempting to write provably correct programs.
Ask HN: Do you do your own PPC marketing?
If you don't do your own PPC Marketing which company do you use? If you do your own PPC what tools do you use?
Advanced Regular Expressions
So, it would violate SR under certain conditions (just as SR/QM violate newtonian mechanics under certain conditions?).

Boy, we really need a unified field theory to work out the kinks in physics ... I guess this could be a chance for String theory to provide a falsifiable prediction that differs from relativity and quantum physics.
Upcoming Nokia E52 Mobile Phone Brings 8 Hours of Talk
Nokia today announced a new Eseries mobile phone, the Nokia E52 mobile with full QWERTY keyboard and a 3.2 megapixel camera. This new Eseries Nokia E52 mobile addition boasts eight-hour talk time and an ultra-thin body.
Looking back, I think I struggled with Pylons' lack of convention (or perhaps flexibility) more than anything else. There seemed to be a lack of consensus (or as I saw it, no established "best" solution) for handling common middleware tasks such as user authentication. It seemed like I was spending more time on application architecture than fleshing out a working system.

This was over a year ago, and I'm sure some things have improved, but looking back into that Pylons Cookbook still gives me the willies.
I think you're mixing up several issues here.

First, nothing is truly black or white. Scientists are humans, and humans are political and involved in things outside their own field. This humanity, however, poses a conflict of interest from the mechanisms of how science operates: observe, hypothesize, test, reproduce. In other areas where human nature play a conflicting role with job goals, such as the therapist-patient relationship, doctor-patient relationship, or lawyer-client relationship, strict guidelines have been established to ensure that the human part of doing the job doesn't interfere with the job itself. Where's the line? That's outside my pay grade. When scientists start viewing themselves as activists first, scientists second, however, we've crossed it. Science is concerned with both normal science and paradigm-changing work. Whatever else you may be doing could be important, critical, wonderful, whatever -- but it ain't science.

Your second concept is statism. I'd take that up with the other commenter who mentioned the statist issues.

I think your observation that politics and science have always mixed it up is a great one. However, I think it actually proves my point instead of yours. During the time that these people lived, like Galileo, the word "science" could mean many different things. Indeed, science of the day was the church. And the church had a heavy hand in what was "allowed" to be discussed and what had "scientific consensus". It's only in looking back that we're able to say, gee, of course Galileo was the _real_ scientist here. At the time, common opinion was against him.

The A-bomb guys, as far as I know, did not publicly advocate some sort of scientific consensus in atomic policies. The old Soviets, however, had Lysenkoism -- another example of "science" being co-opted by the state and used to shut down discourse. (In many places even today, you'll end up in the insane asylum if you have the wrong political opinions). The Nazis were famous social darwinists. The list goes on. In each case, science and politics got mixed up to the point where politicians were using science as a foil to advance their ends and scientists were in politics to advance their own ends. You're absolutely right. This isn't anything new. We've seen where this ends up. Science ends up like the old church: with dogmas, consensus, political funding, ostracism, etc.

Let's not go there.
The hype may turn into a backlash if a few embarrassingly wrong answers get well known.
Security researchers have released VBootkit 2.0 code
Yah. Good point. But if I remember correctly, Bill Bryson's argument was that it TOOK 7 extinction periods for life to evolve to what it is today.

So if we're talking about more intelligent life forms than our own, then perhaps that probability is still small.

Who knows though.
Also, somewhat related and interesting:
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2008/11/13/onlineAdvertisin...
As someone who was raised christian I still don't understand this. Why knowingly and purposefully believe in something that you do not hope to rationalize. (OTOH, I'm always glad to see religious people who actually and clearly follow their beliefs.)

edit: removed edit
Show / Ask HN: Hacker News Linx
A couple days ago, Fred Wilson asked for an application that aggregates the links of the people he follows (http://twitter.com/fredwilson/status/1694722348). I told myself, "Hey, I could probably hack that together," and so I did:

http://tweetlinx.com

I feel like there's potential here, but I'm not quite sure what it is. I just realized I could build a nice RSS feed for HN by following the HN twitterbot. Anyone have any more ideas?
Yeah, I gave up quickly once I saw what they were doing. Anyone want to take the time and post a simple list here and what the general methodology was?</lazy>
"If there is a God who created the natural laws of the universe, surely he is also capable of suspending the rules when he finds it worthwhile to do so?"

Why do you suppose this? Perhaps it trapped itself in.
A couple days ago, Fred Wilson asked for an application that aggregates the links of the people he follows (http://twitter.com/fredwilson/status/1694722348). I told myself, "Hey, I could probably hack that together," and so I did:

http://tweetlinx.com

I feel like there's potential here, but I'm not quite sure what it is. I just realized I could build a nice RSS feed for HN by following the HN twitterbot. Anyone have any more ideas?
Because some incredibly intelligent people have spent their lives working out the implications of belief in God. Had, say, Pascal decided to write about the Flying Spaghetti Monster instead of God, perhaps we'd be having a different discussion right now.
Ask YC: Review My Website - XLHit: Translated Real-Time Search
Please visit: http://www.xlhit.com

XLHit automatically translates your Twitter or FriendFeed searches (English, for example) into another language (say Spanish), and translates the results into your language.

What do you think? What's missing? What could be improved?

I also wonder how best to promote XLHit, any thoughts on PR vs directly contacting journalists, to adding viral features would be great!

Thanks!
Proving the existence of God is as simple as looking around you (nature, sun, water etc)

My favourite proof is as follows:
- A group of atheists approached to meet with the ruler of the land and asked him to bring forth his best scholar to debate with them on the existence of god.

- The ruler summoned the scholar to meet at location x on date y @ time z.
- On that date and time everyone showed up except the scholar. He was late. Very late.
- The atheists were now belitting the scholars great status (he didnt' even show up!)
- The scholar showed up and the ruler immediately questioned his absence.
- He explained that on his way to this meeting he had to cross a river where there is usually a boat. The boat was not there. So he had to wait and wait and wait. Eventually he noticed branches falling from a nearby tree. The branches kept falling and fashioned themselves into a boat and the boat came over to him. So he used to to cross the river.
- At this point everyone was quite amused espeically the atheists who replied "you expect us to believe this??"
- The scholar replied, "If you can't believe a boat made itself, then how can you believe this world made itself"
A clickable link: http://www.xlhit.com
Yes. Apples also can be compared to oranges by several different criteria.
"The Ruby on Rails (RoR) open source framework is about to get more modular and faster -- thanks to some benefits of its recent merger with Ruby rival Merb. "

"Ruby rival Merb" -- what a shame, I've started to avoid the mainstream online media and paid authors in favor of simple bloggers
But this is one of the necessary differences between science and politics. Politics requires making decisions, and acting on them, based on imperfect information. There's nothing wrong with saying "I know we don't have 100% certainty on this issue, but even at a level of only 80% certainty, the expected cost of doing nothing is so great, compared to the cost of taking action, that we're better off taking action."
Steve overlooks an important part of the competition - the opportunity to win non-dilutive financing in a time where fundraising is hard.
They did start over, at least twice. I think the first implementation was with the Quake 2 engine, but once it became obvious that was too dated, they moved to a version of the Unreal engine.
Reverse-Engineering DOS 1.0 - Part 1: The Boot Sector
Instead of a lite version, why not make your iphone app free every other week?
Even if people notice the pattern, who would bother waiting for it to become free if it only costs $0.99?
Don't worry. We will find ways to violate any unified theory we can come up with ;-)

We have to agree experiments that could falsify String Theory are long overdue. If ST physicists can't come up with something, people will start calling it "String Hypothesis".
mos def. this was fascinating. made me question what i see in 3d printers when more public hackershops and forges could enabled so much!
This may have something to do with it. Did you manually subtract votes from all newly created accounts or just Linode's?

http://is.gd/xuVf
http://is.gd/xuUZ
http://is.gd/xuVE
I'm all for private action, but you cannot take the government out of this issue. After all, whether to build the third runway in Heathrow is not a private decision. Likewise, it's hard for private parties to deal with externalities.
The site is funded by the Templeton Foundation, which seeks to find common ground between science and religion.

You're ruining both.
First: The report uses metro area as unit.

Below is the simple list from high to low:

Atlanta, Phoenix, Riverside, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Washington DC

Here is the summary without going through 11 pages.

Definition of the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity : "the percent of individuals (ages twenty to sixty-four) who do not own a business in the first survey month that start a business in the following month with fifteen or more hours worked per week."

The 10 metro area by Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity from high to low.

Atlanta, Georgia: Population: 5,376,285 2008 Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity: .74%

Phoenix, Arizona Population: 4,281,899. 2008 Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity: .55%

Riverside, California Population: 4,115,871. 2008 Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity: .52%

Los Angeles, California Population: 12,872,808. 2008 Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity: .51%

Miami, Florida Population: 5,414,772. 2008 Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity: .50%

New York, New York Population: 19,006,798. 2008 Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity: .45%

San Francisco, California Population: 4,274,531. 2008 Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity: .42%

Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas Population: 6,300,006. 2008 Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity: .42%

Houston, Texas Population: 5,728,143. 2008 Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity: .34%

Washington, D.C. Population: 5,358,130.2008 Kauffman Foundation Index of Entrepreneurial Activity: .30%
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies
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Mozilla and Opera Complain About Windows 7
To tell the truth, its too much freedom for the big brother to allow it.
How the heck does "who he is" have to do _anything_ with the scientific evidence and argument he presented? This is worthless "cargo-cult" science and it's exactly what should be avoided in the scientific community. The article does it too...

Laudable aim or not, the argument seems an odd one for Collins to make, given that he's such a renowned scientist and led such a pioneering project, one grounded so deeply in the principles of scientific enquiry and discipline.

And thus begins the effects of "cargo cult science" which Feynman once talked about. Collins will be slowly removed from further scientific inquiry for disagreeing with his peers, his reputation will be debased, and he will be ostracized from the scientific community. All because (gasp!), the man may have a religious bent!

Yet another example:

It disappoints me that such a gifted scientist could make this argument.

Two character attacks in less than 1000 words that have nothing to do with the science presented. How dare Collins question the status quo? How dare he try to demonstrate scientific integrity by showing any and all sides of the matter? Either you're for us or you're against us, that's how the cult of science works these days. Especially if you're religious, then clearly you're in another cult and you need to leave the science cult now.

As Feynman once said, science should "...give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another."

Regardless of whether Collins is right or not, I hope that everyone can see how this pitiful system of cult "science" that we have functions to eliminate anyone who disagrees with the worldview provided by scientific naturalism. The scary thing is that it has been like this for many years. Scientists are so used to being logically "right" within the empirical domain that they quickly forget their worldview holds no more water than religion does in the realm of explaining the unempirical.
New Inks Cut Costs of Office Color Printing
It seems like GAE is usable for displaying content and building a web interface, but any significant processing has to happen elsewhere. This is due to the limitations on a single request (I just read about the cron functionality, but it appears that the same restrictions are in place for cron jobs). Note that, even in the tutorial, the non trivial part (accepting text messages) is handled by an external service, and the app just stores and displays the data.

So, an architecture that leverages the strengths of GAE might push the processing intensive parts onto servers outside of GAE, interfaced through a services API (most likely something "RESTful"). GAE would then handle the data storage, templating, and UI logic. Note that these web services might already exist, and GAE is a good candidate for building an interface on top of them (this is the case with the text message service in the tutorial).

Does that make sense?
I would say no, it's all about gametheory. I wrote about it here: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2009/03/online-news-and-prisoner...
Go Atlanta! heh
thanks
On the Fence? Major in CS
Brighter Planet Launching App for Treehuggers
Can I just say: I LOVE posterous. Excellent startup, YC!
I guess I should be more explicit that the God I had in mind is the Christian God, in the sense that creation and creator are distinct. It is true that there are other conceptions of God as integrated into the creation in some form or another.
Well, that seems a pretty poor proof. Or rather it's not a proof of anything at all, it's just a silly story.
I'm sorry, I didn't understand what you are saying.

Are you saying that the problem I gave was computationally hard? I only want the algorithm, regardless of how computationally hard it is.
Didn't I just see something a month or so ago about how scientists now think Alcubierre drive IS impossible...

Ahh yes: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23292/
The methodology was business started per 100,000 people. They range from about 300 to 700.
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Ask HN: What language was Scribd built in?
Was Scribd built in straight PHP, Django, Rails or something else?
Teach entreneurship in Ghana
Designer Studio Store | Lacoste Women Shoes | Uggs Classic Cardy | Ed Hardy
The last interactive cli app I wrote was on a calculator, but I might have to make one for site maintenance tasks now, just for the hell of it. I've been writing Python since 2007 and I swear I still discover a new standard library almost every day.
The reason for this is that most people (pretty much regardless of profession) are biologically incapable of creativity.

Neither intelligence nor ambition can substitute for it. You either have it, or you don't - and if you don't, you can't even conceive of what creativity is. You will see all sorts of not-even-wrong essays explaining creativity, written by people who have none, and don't believe that they are missing anything.
I wasn't sure if it's inappropriate to post a job listing on here, but it sounds like a good opportunity for someone who is looking for something a bit different from the usual startup/desk job.
StrokeText.js
Gmail, yea... I dont see how iPhoto is expected to know about gmail. How about, if it's your wife and she doesn't like exporting photos, just setup Mail to use her gmail account.

For file sharing... yea, windows file sharing really sucks. Not sure what to say about that. Half the time I can't get my windows machines to see my other windows machines, heh.

Finder needs (and has been getting) some work. Still, I don't get your complaint. There's a bar right at the top that shows the current directory, click it and you get a breadcrumb trail all the way down to the root, and a list of recent/common places! Also, column view is where it's at, and it helps bring things fewer clicks away.

The last one, well, it's hardly a complaint and more a lack of understanding on her part. Just tell her in simple terms what's happening. Applications are not windows, an application can have multiple (or 0) windows while it's running. If she can't grasp it, disable the dock and replace it with an app launcher maybe?

Feel free to go on.

Cheers!