skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For all we know, he may have given all of the same answers you did. Have you ever tried to give intelligent responses to someone who has already decided you are wrong? This is what is meant by an "emotional argument masquerading as logic". Somebody asks seemingly logical questions with the sole intent to bait and knock down the responses no matter how logical and well thought-out they are. The author of the article eventually recognized that this was just a pissing match and tried a different approach which worked better in that particular isolated case. From your "proper response" I have to believe that you would have fallen for the bait.
A disappointing article. The 'intellectual pollution' consists of exactly one supposed change in the way we raise our children: following our intuition instead of some guidebook. This change was supposedly brought about by Dr. Spock in 1946, but I think it is obvious that doesn't make any sense: how on earth does the author think people were raising their children in the past few hundred years? Based on keen pedagogical insights, gathered from books on the subject? Given illiteracy rates, lack of education, availability of books, etc., I doubt even 10% was reading about 'how to raise children'. The others raised their children as they saw fit, so there hasn't been a change at all.
the context seems pretty obvious, to let people compare the different search engines without being biased that they are using a search engine other than Google
When I started my start-up, I set it up as a c-corp. A lawyer agreed to work with us on a deferred fees basis. A friend of mine did the same thing, different lawyer.

Boot-strapping start-ups should look for this kind of opportunity. Not only do you look rosier to VCs, and avoid any need for payroll - you also get legal and tax advice early on, which is very valuable.
Ask HN:  When to release? 
I've been toiling with this question this morning and curious to hear the thoughts of HN. This isn't a purely academic exercise as I'm planning on launching a startup in the next couple months and this is an issue I have to grapple with. Rather than speaking in generalities I'll layout an example. Say you are Pandora and you are building the first music recommendation engine or you are Farecast and building the first prediction model for airline tickets. These companies spent years developing their predictive technologies and they are assuredly extremely comprehensive and robust. However, say they gave themselves a 2 month deadline and released a service which they strove to improve over time. Their service was not nearly as prescient as it could be if they took 3-4 years to develop it. Still, there was some data analysis that went into the service and Pandora and Farecast could advertise that fact on the website and indicate that the results will get better over time.

How many users would these services have lost? Some users will be dissatisfied with the services so they would lose potential customers. Also, another competitor could see that they could do better and launch their own service, diluting the market share for these comapnies. But these companies sacrificed revenue by not releasing their service until it was very strong. Also, there are other companies that took years of work and flopped miserably upon release. Farecast and Pandora faced the risk of joining that unenviable pool.

It's hard to argue that Farecast and Pandora went down the wrong path since they were super-successful startups. But if I'm not mistaken, both started in academia so they have a higher standard to live up to in terms of rigor. Most startups are under the pressure to launch something quickly. If you were running a similar company, when would you launch?
In-depth CPython crash debugging with Visual C++
While this is true to a certain extent, it only becomes true once search results are good enough to no longer be the deciding factor.

Even if cuil had a mobile version which magically doubled the screensize and gave me a magical flip out keyboard, it still would be a bad way to locate information.
Do you think you can make a living making apps?
A+, A-, B+ - everything was "explained" in "Brave New World". "I'm glad that I'm Beta..."
"It's not that parents weren't raising their children this way before. They were, but since the 40's the wealth of scientific best practices have been largely ignored thanks to Spock's influence."

I stopped reading here.

You could always tell who read Dr. Spock because they were the ones with problem children. And the laughing stock of their community.

"largely ignored" != "mainstream acceptance"
We can use our emotions as a shortcut to save on processing time. Whether or not that shortcut leads us to the correct answer is a different question. Emotions are not bad, they are just often dangerous when dealing with situations outside of our evolutionary context (groups of at most 160 hunter-gatherers, etc.).
The post begins -> "This text has circulated quite a number of times on Usenet, and so far as I know is authentic. This version (less, of course, the HTML airs and graces) was posted by one jenm289@aol.com to rec.arts.books, 13 Nov 1995 03:21:23 -0500, message-id 486v63$9an@newsbf02.news.aol.com. Jenm289 wrote: "The following was written several months ago by Noam Chomsky in a discussion about po-mo and its contribution to activism et al. The discussion took place on LBBS, Z-Magazine's Left On-Line Bulletin Board (contact sysop@lbbs.org to join)."

After reading only a few lines of this article it struck me as inconsistent in tone from other speeches and writings of Chomsky. So I would first like to get Chomsky's response on whether he authored this. Considering how many interviews and public speeches Chomsky gives, I find it hard to imagine him having the time to debate his ideas on Internet bulletin boards. Unless he was experimenting with the format back in 1995.
I have the distinct impression that familiarity with the command line and the Linux's commandline tools give me quite an edge over Windows-based developers I work with.

- Something wrong with the build? Use ant or maven from the command line, so I can be sure it isn't the IDE screwing things up. Should be possible for Windows developers, but I've never seen'em manage it.

- Need to collect some data from a log file? Grep/sed/awk are often fastest and sufficient.

- Windows desktop search nowhere nears the power of 'find'.

- Hmmm, what port is the JVM debugger listening on again? ps auxwwf | grep java. Ah yes, 9001.

I would feel extremely handicapped developing on a Windows system.
You are misusing the word "context" - http://www.answers.com/context : 1. The part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word or passage and determines its meaning. 2. The circumstances in which an event occurs; a setting.

The searches here are without context, the rating of results are without context. All we know is that on arbitrary, one-off searches, a set of people who may or may not be representative of anything clicked the button above a certain set of results for some unknown reason.
Maybe, but it was sufficient to get the developers to a conference.
"It's not that parents weren't raising their children this way before. They were, but since the 40's the wealth of scientific best practices have been largely ignored thanks to Spock's influence."

In other words, if not for Spock less people would be making these mistakes today. I don't think Spock himself was a bad guy and his advice may or may not have been sound at the time, but the problem is that this book has taken on a life of its own to the point where people today use it as a justification to avoid learning anything about being a good parent. And of course most of these people haven't even read the book, but that's a whole other thing.
I agree that the piece would be much better without the baity title and the bizarre imputation to Spock.
Why have comedy when you have postmodernist 'academia' ? So much funnier.
They're comparing search results, not search engines.

Results matter, but so do speed, usability, features, privacy, etc.
It's a disappointment!

I wanted to see my design converted into ASCII not my text...
"Oh, you wanted an argument? That's next door. This is abuse."

I have to admit the title did not promise a way to use logic to reply to emotional arguments, as most of us were apparently hoping.
If the guy was baiting, then I concur with SamAtt:

There's no way he made sheep noises at a guy who is emotional about gun control and from that changed the guy's mind.
I am always for launching as soon as your thing is operational. Real users and critics need to shape your startup and technology, and nothing can replace that.
That depends on what you're trying to build. For most startups, getting early users (not a full launch but a limited alpha/beta) is key in developing a good product.

Sure, given more time you could just keep perfecting the product to your standards, but if you don't have a good idea of EXACTLY what you're building, why not do a limited release and work with the feedback that these alpha users give you to improve your product as opposed to waiting for a really long while before you release something that you (not the market) thinks is perfect in every respect, that sounds like a really good way of failing.

Yes, you're going to lose some people who will hate the product and find it useless, maybe they're not your target market. Maybe they are, if they are, listen to the feedback that they give you and hopefully retain them. If not, well, you don't care about them anyway.

3-4 year long dev cycles are generally not a good idea, since user driven development is key in making good products.

You can do it if you're Apple and you have the in-house expertise and market research to know EXACTLY what your users want, but if you're a scrappy startup, you have nothing to lose by launching early, and often and failing fast.
You can access basic IMAP from an Exchange server. I was using thunderbird at my last job and it worked fine. Connecting to the LDAP server for the global address book took a bit to figure out. I finally got it all connected and figured out though. If your Exchange usage is more than email and shared addresses I don't know how much further you can get into it without Outlook. Not because it's impossible only because I didn't try to do it.

As far a sharepoint goes I don't have any real experience with it but it looks like you are able to use it on linux but the activex controls will not work(of course):

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263526.aspx
Ah he's an academic (per your wikipedia link).

That explains a lot. That is the land where pedigree is everything, especially so in the humanities.

No wonder the poor guy is so confused, enough time in the ivory tower and he actually started to believe the company line.

Not to bash on academia exclusively, I've seen the same thing from friends in the legal industry.

I think it applies to any industry where reputation and prestige is paramount.
1.) Go get a C# or .net book with a shiny cover
2.) Go download Visual Studio 2008 Express
3.) Get to work.
if you believe that IQ measures intelligence, you lose 80 IQ points.

Expand on that thought, please. Is your disagreement with the word "measure," with the word "intelligence," or with both?
I saw your point, I just think that given that mobile phones are now a platform instead of just a device, of course they're going to be influenced by many other devices out there.

The fact is, that the iPhone didn't "invent" all this stuff, the ideas existed out there in other platforms and across many devices (even touch surfaces and multitouch existed long before the iphone interface).

They simply took all of the ideas that were good and incorporated them into a handheld device.

Touch Screen with multitouch, demo'd at TED in feb 2006 (http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakt...)

App Store - Valve's Steam is an equivalent

Ambient Light Sensor - Blackberry's have had this feature for years.

See, all of these ideas were out there years before the first gen iPhone came out. Apple just managed to get put together a device that was completely different from what the norm was and guess what - it took off.

Of course they're going to get copied if the device is a success. I just wish they would bite the bullet and add more features rather than saving up easily added stuff for later generations of devices, just to milk it for everything it's worth and make the iphone a mobile standard rather than an option.

Essentially do what MS did to Apple with the PC, just with the mobile device and do it to the mobile companies.
I tried camino, jetpack, svg, xul and never voted for bing.

As long as MS tries to move down relevant links to competing technology their search engine is useless.
Incredibly useful. We just released a widget, and will definitely be using this to make sure its bullet-proof.
Psychologists love twin studies, but they're mostly worthless. The unstated assumption is always "A twin study holds genetics constant while randomizing the environment".

Of course the families of two identical twins are far from independent variables. They're both made of the kinds of people who would adopt a child in the same city at the same point in time. You haven't managed to separate the variables at all!
We don't have an alternate history without Spock to compare to, so I reserve the right to doubt that it would have made any difference whether Spock would have existed at all. If not this book, then they would've used other excuses. Everyone likes to do things 'their way'. Only those motivated to be good or better at something go out of their way to read, learn and change. Most people aren't motivated to be better at parenting, because they think they are already doing a good job. Isn't Johnny smiling, crawling, talking, walking, potty trained, ... when he should?
There's an SDL extension which does ASCII art graphics drivers...
That's a complete fallacy, there is such a thing as bad publicity... either that, or the whole ribbing that mega-corporation Mcdonald's took from Spurlock's "Supersize Me" was imaginary.
"Can everybody have truly been absolute frauds?"

Yes. There are many historical examples of fields which are simply complete nonsense, with some practitioners who are well-intentioned and wrong and others who are just blatant charlatans. Alchemy is one obvious example. More controversially, psychotherapy in our own era probably qualifies (http://www.amazon.com/House-Cards-Robyn-Dawes/dp/0684830914).
The direction of causation may be wrong here, because economists of education, sociologists, and other persons familiar with the data are well aware that young people from well-off families are much more likely to begin higher education and much more likely to complete it than poor young people.

Here are some links about the issue. The overall picture in the past decade has been that high-ability, low-income students are at a clear disadvantage in the college admission process compared to low-ability, high-income students. (The links below are in approximate chronological order of publication, from oldest to newest.) Is anything changing recently about this?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_27/b3840045_...

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ffp0621.pdf

http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0615S.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/carnrose.pdf

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/Education/kahlenberg-affacti...

http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/05/a-thumb-on-the-scale.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200511/financial-aid-leveragi...

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=510012

http://www.equaleducation.org/commentary.asp?opedid=1240

http://www.jkcf.org/assets/files/0000/0084/Achievement_Trap....

http://www.reason.com/news/show/123910.html

http://www.ihep.org/publications/publications-detail.cfm?id=...

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2008/11...

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hkBGMsvJKR...
I wish I knew of their existence, but nothing in my environment prepared me for being one of their students.

That's nonsense. There are fantastic universities the world over: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/hybrid.asp?typeCode=24...
Seems like I've finally found a way to Bing for "sex" in India.
The methodology for this is flawed because people will tend to search for things they have searched for before on Google and then pick Google as the best because they find that ranking more familiar.
I strongly disagree. Incidentally, while this may be new since your first message, there is disclosure on the landing page which I found quite adequate. I notice Google leads by a significant margin. Is Bing looking better than it really is? Who knows, but while I don't plan to switch away from Google, Bing is OK by me - the quality of results are pretty good and its fast. Yahoo not so much (and I got no Yahoo results to my tests at this site) but I'd given up on Yahoo search before Google came along.

You assume it's a one-off search and that the users are simply licking randomly on whatever they see that's immediately interesting. I see no justification for this assumption. Personally, I did what I did with any new search engine: perform 10 searches on topics ranging from topical to deeply obscure, and look at the first 5 results for each search to evaluate the quality of both the returned sites and the text clips for each.

If this was the subject of a paper submitted to the journal of information processing, you'd have a valid point. But as a 'what happens if...' experiment on the web, I'm just fine with it.
And your basis for asserting 'arbitrary and one-off searches' is...?
It is strange that Hacker News bans religion/politics submissions but allows IQ article submissions such as this.

IQ article submissions have the potential to be more offensive for many people than any submission on religion/politics.
Seems like I've finally found a way to Bing for "sex" in India.

Actually I found out you can bypass the filter by adding in a generic stop word at the end which the search engine should ignore anyway (I use the word "the") and it will search for whatever phrase you want just fine.

Discovered this about 8 hours ago - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645812
Common creed I've read around the startup world seems to be "release early, upgrade often", but I've always thought you must have a strong (note: strong doesn't mean many) set of features before launch.
I think you should launch as soon as your service provides enough value to someone that they should care. If no one cares, it doesn't provide enough value (for whatever reason). If people do care, then you know your on to something.

If you launch before you provide enough value, no one will care.

If you wait to launch, you are only doing yourself a disservice by delaying or prolonging the feedback cycle. You should be doing the opposite, figuring out how to make your feedback cycle as short as possible.

Worrying about competitors at this stage is dumb. You could only be so lucky as to have an idea good enough that someone would care enough to try to challenge you for it.
> Firing a gun, and learning about gun safety isn't going to change my mind that an populace armed with firearms is a solution for... anything really.

You mean aside from the scads of strong evidence such as the frequent mass shootings by terrorists in Israel until citizens were allowed to carry concealed weapons?
I contracted at Microsoft a few years ago, and even they didn't use Visual Studio, just vim and a make clone with some extra win32 support (build.exe) and sometimes windbg.

I can actually get by on a Windows box with just Emacs and Perl, though I do miss stuff like lsof.
Two questions:

1 - What language is the wave server written in? Have google mentioned this yet?

2 - If Wave is going to disrupt and displace email, how are they going to combat spam? Messages between wave servers are encrypted which is a good start, but how are they going to ensure that we don't end up where SMTP is now?
We just launched a widget too and were surprised by how hard it was to stop the cascade. This is pretty useful.
I was curious and tried browsing geeksonaplane.com, but couldn't really figure out what this is about. Does it cost money, if yes how much? Do I need to be awesome/famous/rich or can anyone join? There isn't enough information to actually join this.
Not nearly so much as cooperation in the wrong direction.
There's a site, which I found via HN, I think, that allows readers to vote on the bias of articles posted. Articles are then categorized as left, right or balanced. I'd post the link, but I can't find it anywhere.
Moreover, studies of broad heritability (a pre-Mendelian concept) merely establish a minimum influence of environment on the trait of interest. More extreme variance in environment, or more specifically directed variance in environment, could still result in greater variance in the trait.
Heh. I had exactly the same response: it didn't sound like Chomsky to me. I even commented to that effect, but then had second thoughts and deleted it. It wouldn't be unnatural to use a different voice in a casual email than in a published article. Also, some of the things in there do sound distinctively like Chomsky (e.g. the second last paragraph).

I searched around for more on Chomsky and postmodernism and came up with http://archive.zcommunications.org/chomchatarch.htm, which includes quotes from the OP. So it seems it's at least partially authentic.

As for whether he would have had time, that's easy. It's already impossible to explain how he has time to do what he does.

Edit: I also ran across a clip of Chomsky's discussion with Foucault on Dutch TV from the early 70s (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kawGakdNoT0), which was fun to take a look at. Can you imagine anything more un-TV-like? The very length of their sentences is unthinkable - I was going to say "nowadays" but I bet it was unthinkable on TV even then.
agreed, in fact i changed the title to "almost identical". Did you try a few searches, what were they like?
I tried 5 searches about subjects I knew well. Results: Google 4, Yahoo 1, Bing 0. But in every case I had to look closely at the results to decide which I preferred. None of them returned obviously bad results for any of the queries.
Because it's a obscure micro app for doing one-off comparison searches that's making the rounds on social sites.
from parent comment: Asian-Americans

from the comment to which this reply is attached: Chinese college students

I take it that both of these statements refer to an ethnic group specified as "they," that is to people who have a different ethnic identity from the person posting the statement. I too am not Chinese, but I am a speaker of the Chinese language and am married into an (ethnically) Chinese family and have lived in east Asia for six years and I think these statements are too superficial and based on insufficient acquaintance with Asian-American and Chinese people. There is plenty of pursuit of art for art's sake and desire for deep understanding of a subject among Chinese people. Perhaps this is not noticed by Westerners who have not had enough curiosity about Chinese language and culture to have had many deep encounters with the behavior of Chinese people.
This is a good example of a journalist digging into facts reporting by more lazy journalists, and is a thought process we can all apply to other stories we read online or elsewhere.
Could you not run Windows in a VM?

When I switched to OS X from a Windows workstation at my job, I used VMWare Converter to convert my workstation to a VM and it worked flawlessly.