skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to come out and say that I consider most of those "X results in Y grams of CO2 emissions" posts/calculations/activities to be utter bullshit and a complete waste of time.

These calculations are necessarily based on very hand-waving maths. They try to focus on only one specific facet of what is absolutely and completely a systems problem. The only level at which it makes sense to talk about emissions is on a large scale like a country or even the whole world. Otherwise, you risk turning the "effort" into one of externalising carbon costs to other people's counters.

But, that's too complicated, so people will go and calculate the emissions produced in the fabrication of a cheeseburger, as if that was a useful thing to know. And then they'll write countless blog posts about it.

I submit to you that there is absolutely no value whatsoever in that calculation, or in the result of it.

Even if the calculation could be relied on, what does it mean? Is there any actionable element to this calculation? Should we do something about it? Should we care?

Counting the grams in a cheeseburger, or in a Google search, is a gimmick used to get people excited about CO2 for no particularly good reason, and with no specific result in mind. It achieves nothing other than to waste our time and provide yet another vague, shapeless concept with which people with an agenda can manipulate others into doing whatever they want.
I think this is a fantastic idea, but the filter could stand to benefit from better requirements. For example number of direct messages sent to the user (since people don't DM spam bots very often), number of @replies sent to the user.

It could stand to happen that a lot of users who use sites like Brightkite or other sites where they broadcast what they're listening to or where they're at could get caught u p in your spam/bot filter simply for making heavier use of such sites.

I'd revisit your filter to look at how the user interacts with other users, versus just monitoring posting behavior.
Why don't we standardize this? Make a goog the base unit. We could measure newspapers in kilogoogs. (The Enquirer is 0.867 kilogoogs.) A cheeseburger would be 15 kilogoogs.

In other words, this stuff is nonsense, only good for amusement.
The author is mistaken, disease is bing with the fourth tone. I'm sure MS meant bing with first tone :)
I honestly feel like the cool thing to do these days is hate. I mean everyone is hating on something, Dave Winer is hating on twitter(even though he uses it all day every day), Om is hating on wave, just seems like everyone is hating on something.

I do understand that google is a huge company and definitely has some financial end game associated with wave, but I don't mind that. What we need is more companies innovating, regardless of whether they are failures yet or not.

I think its irresponsible and ignorant to call a company arrogant because they are not worrying about making money(at least initially). Only thing that is evidenced by this article is that the author doesn't understand google or its motivations.
A lot of people don't realize that Chinese is dependent upon the intonation of the word spoken for meaning. Standard Mandarin has four separate tones. When it comes to bing, the fourth tone can mean aliment or disease, but the others mean several vastly different concepts or ideas.
I'm pretty certain that the author was making the subtle suggestion that Gödel would delight in concocting questions that would confound Wolframs' Alpha.

Fans of Stanislaw Lem might look at it this way...

Gödel : Wolfram Alpha :: Klapaucius : Trurl's Electronic Bard

("Have it compose a poem about a haircut. But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter S!")
not really. there's a lot of chinese characters pronounced "bing", especially since the tone is unspecified. look at e.g. http://zhongwen.com/s/v19.htm -- the first three rows are all "bing" characters.
"Humility and all of that are wonderful social skills, but they are by no means a prerequisite for being a paradigm-changing person or leaving great innovations to society."

Social skills are paramount for all but solitary achievements. And great innovations are rarely paradigm-changing innovations.

An interesting contrast is Steve Jobs. Jobs is legendarily arrogant. But I would be surprised to see an outright self-protestation of his brilliance or greatness. Of Apple and Apple products, yes, but not Jobs praising Jobs. Instead, his great skill is flattering, motivating and persuading others. I do not think you can dispute that this has led to much paradigm-changing innovation.

Perhaps the problem is not that Wolfram is arrogant, but that he is so clumsily and self-apparently so. Wolfram has accomplished much, but it is possible he could achieve much more with a modicum of social skills.
Does that statistic take into account all the greenhouse gasses the cows emit through flatulence? If not, the number might be a little higher...
I wonder if that little accent-like looking thing on the ì indicates the right tone?
17th century Damascus sabres contained carbon nanotubes
Trouble is, he thinks the videos are conclusive evidence. I can provide links if anyone's interested (youtube only, no desire to promote these sites)

How do you demonstrate to someone that what they are watching is not proof when they don't understand what you're talking about? Example - someone takes a 'fuel cell', plugs in into mains power and exclaims how great it is because it's producing bubbles. Apparently this is a working example and therefore conclusive proof. He just does not comprehend when I say that it demonstrates nothing. Arghhh :/

This raises another question then - how can seemingly intelligent people fall for such bad science. Why don't people understand the basics of chemistry? Why on earth can someone who has completed a university level education be so lacking in the fundamentals of chemistry?
couldn't it be mistaken for the negative meaning?
It also means pancake and cold, make of that what you will

edit: post dictionary lookup, 冰 (bing) is cold as in ice cold or ice itself.

there are a lot of other meanings too: military, merge, third, bright - all depend on intonation of bing
Well the demo video is up now and I believe MS's Bing is pale, very pale in comparison.
If I had a hand that steady I would be a brain surgeon...

Better:

If I had a hand that steady I would still be a brain surgeon...
Those aren't adjectives.
In fact it does. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Mandarin#Tones
The problem I think is that DMs are not public information... You can only know yours, not from the others.
Hm... cold is not really positive, pancake neutral?
The technology already exists in the form of the OLPC screen, which, I can assure you, is quite beautiful and amazingly high-resolution with the backlight off. It's not the same as Kindle's eInk, just an LCD with amazingly low dot pitch and an anisotropic color filter which only works in transmissive mode (backlight on).

That kind of thing in consumer-level devices will lead to cheap, very high-res, nearly page-quality devices you can fit in a pocket.
There is always shortcovers as well. They will probably add support for this.
The idea is that by having rods of certain dimensions, and by pulsing the current at exactly the right frequency, it is possible to break the bonds using less energy that normally required.
> "What you should explain is why this techie isn't going to be the one sitting around doing all the work while you tell him what to do."

Building a startup isn't only about coding... you need to create the brand and make the target public aware of your product (marketing). Thus, connections helps and the will to execute the idea is essential. Most business people that comes up to me with a new venture talks like this, I see nothing wrong there. You also need to do all the paperwork to make your startup legal, etc. For all I know, you guys seem pretty serious about your project and that's a good thing :)

> "In other words, you really need to sell yourselves as people who can make something happen. Do you have a track record?"

Yes, it would be interesting to know why the startup is different that the rest so we know it's not one of those bad startups that goes nowhere. You don't need lots of details, just a simple explanation about the vision & scope of your project and why we shouldn't use the online travel sites that already exist on the internet. What is different about your project and what is the competition? (no competition is not an answer! ;)
I don't think Songsmith isn't a particularly bad name for the product. Unlike Bing, it sums up the program pretty well.
So this ì is Pinyin diacritic?

Too bad that the accents are used in different ways in the different diacritics, it seems.
see http://www.octoshape.com - CNN used it to stream the Obama inauguration.
I cannot upmod this enough. This man is an idol of mine and a huge source of pride for every Serbian geek out there.
cold, diseased pancake?
If it's Microsoft, is there any question which tone to pick? They are, after all, the masters of infection through embrace and extend. (Which could also describe the strategy of the newly hatched Alien movie nymphs.)
I'm not sure where you got the idea that Opera is a dying browser. They have a significant market share in the mobile market. As Wikipedia says (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_browser):

Approximately 40 million mobile phones have shipped with Opera pre-installed. Opera is the only commercial web browser available for the Nintendo DS and Wii gaming systems.
I don't think this name will troublesome at all in Mandarin-speaking countries. Bing also refers to bread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bing_(Chinese_flatbread) or pastry http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Jian-Bing-Chinese-Crepes/Detail... or ice http://taiwandays.blogspot.com/2007/07/bing-ice.html. Bing means a bunch of things depending upon tone of voice. Bing(sickness) isn't an immediately obvious translation.
I should elaborate :)

There is afaik no service, that offers a nice and easy payment integration for small e-commerce websites. Of course you can get all the heavyweight stuff with merchant accounts and so on. But if you're a small garage-shop which wants to accept credit card payments, there is no alternative to paypal (at least in germany).

I think there's no need to mention here how much the payment process of paypal sucks anyways, as it has been discussed here already extensively.

Within my own little company, I've estimated that we loose about 30% of our customers in the last phase of checking out, where people are on behalf of paypals website. As far as i've seen, amazon does a much better job here.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but i think you dont even have to open an account with pasword and stuff to checkout using ur credit card?
Making contact / A kid from Harlem reaches toward extraterrestrials
Thanks. I wish there was copy and paste already on the iPhone.
Have you visited the museum?

While I was writing the book I made a conscious decision to downplay Edison and highlight Tesla to try to rectify the situation a bit.

True geeks know that Tesla was the man.
Statments, that's in no way easer to parse than that some code on a single line. (Assuming you have collar coding for the ()'s in your IDE.)

c = 9 * ((d > 7)?e:f);
x = ( a = 7 * (b = 14)) + c;

IMO is not that bad, it's the mixing of all the assignments and the conditional that makes it hard to parse, and

c = 9 * ((d > 7)?e:f);
x = c + (a = 7 * (b = 14));

is fairly readable even if some of the ()'s are not needed.

PS: ;'s I thought it was clear that the ;'s denoted lines not the whitespace which is meaningless.
Apple vs. Microsoft - A Website Usability Study
Maybe overconfidence gives you a slightly higher likelihood of success. But I couldn't live with myself acting like that, and I wouldn't want the success that would come with it. I will settle for perhaps a slightly lower chance of success, but I'll feel better about it knowing I am being myself and treating others well.
Bing is going to spread like an epidemic :-)
Still not as bad as Chevy Nova. They should have called Vista Nova... now that would have filed neatly in the truth in advertising section.

Kind of the same thing. People worried that "Nova" would sound like 'no va' in spanish, which meant "no go". In reality they are pronounced differently and it was no big deal.
Palm Pre impersonates an iPod to trick iTunes to sync
Prism: I Like It, What Do You Think?
Are you referring to Tzong Yo Bing (sp?) which mean onion oil pancake. One of my favorites, we often make these with the left over jaotze dough.

The tones have always been hard for me, my favorite is the words for buy and sell. Same word different tones. I wouldn't do well as a stock trader in China :)
It can also mean "ice" therefore it means "cool". As long as it is a good product and give people what they want. Making fun at the name is really childish.
Huh? Do you have a link to that?
Sorry, should have put the date in. The reason I posted it was because I thought people would find it interesting in the light of the recent Perl success stories published here.
The Reg has always had it in for Wikipedia. I'm not entirely sure why, but it might have begun as a backlash against the hype surrounding Wikipedia, and over time it became the norm.
Singing sensation Susan Boyle 'considered quitting show'
You made some very good points. But we also take into consideration the number of followers, so if sites like slashdot or Brightkite broadcast their info and have lots of followers, the spam count will go down too.

Lots of variables in there and I plan to improve even more.
If you comment on a product or website that is "hot" at that time, the authors may be overwhelmed by the feedback they get and keeping the servers stable at the same time.
Happened to me once with goosh.org, I got approx. 500 emails in a few days after the launch. I tried to answer them all anyway.
But I think big corporations that have the money and manpower should answer every single email (yes google I'm looking at you!)
I am embarrassed to say that I haven't yet. I've been back to Belgrade at least twice since I've emigrated to Canada, but I didn't make the time to go.

I'm planning to go back very soon, so that will be a priority.
nah, it really does :) think how much outbound data there is, it really fouls up the local part of the network.
What I learned from screwing up my first ebook launch
Yeah, you're right, and I knew that too. Heh. Thanks.
I totally disagree. Saying you are working on a 100 year language, ie being openly ambitiousis not the same thing as saying "I'm one of the most important scientists today. I'm really one of a kind." it seems silly to equate the two. And I don't think great scientists typically do that. They usually talk of standing on the shoulders of giants or being humble programmers.
Actually, it's because the attention of the masses is finite. Therefore, less books are published than written. And getting published depends on your academic credentials, (if you're lucky), where you went to University (like East Anglia), or people you know from University who can recommend you to their agent.
Good one.

What about a user driven blacklist?. Maybe you can collect them the way @spam (http://twitter.com/spam) does.
Upvoted as the best link here to the wide variety of Chinese morphemes that are all spelled "bing" in Hanyu pinyin.

No, the Microsoft logo for the new web service doesn't look like a standard tone mark at all.
Yeah, there is a joke in Chinese twitter sphere (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%E8%82%A1%E6%B2%9F%E6%9C%...):

谷歌有钱，百度有啊，微软有病

literally it means

Google is rich, Baidu has YouA(youa.baidu.com), Microsoft has Bing (Microsoft is sick)

It's more funny if there's domain like you.bing.com then it totally means "has disease"

Officially Bing was translated as 必应, which derives from 有求必应(when there's a request there must be anwser)

必 means 'must'
应 means 'response'

and PinYin domain for 必应 BiYing.com is registered by MSFT already

Registrant:
Domain Administrator
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond WA 98052
US
domains@microsoft.com +1.4258828080 Fax: +1.4259367329

Domain Name: biying.com

Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com

Administrative Contact:
Domain Administrator
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond WA 98052
US
domains@microsoft.com +1.4258828080 Fax: +1.4259367329
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
MSN Hostmaster
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond WA 98052
US
msnhst@microsoft.com +1.4258828080 Fax: +1.4259367329

Created on..............: 2003-09-07.
Expires on..............: 2011-09-07.
Record last updated on..: 2009-05-26.

Domain servers in listed order:

ns5.msft.net
ns1.msft.net
ns3.msft.net
ns2.msft.net
ns4.msft.net

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
MarkMonitor, the Global Leader in Enterprise Brand Protection

Domain Management
Online Trademark Protection
Online Channel Protection
AntiPhishing Solutions
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

but BiYing.cn is registered by someone else:

Domain Name: biying.cn
ROID: 20060514s10001s52568323-cn
Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Registrant Organization: 王志刚
Registrant Name: 王志刚
Administrative Email: yeetung@163.com
Sponsoring Registrar: 北京万网志成科技有限公司
Name Server:dns8.66.cn
Name Server:dns9.66.cn
Registration Date: 2006-05-14 19:56
Expiration Date: 2014-05-14 19:56
Here is the only yearly data that I could find:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

You could certainly read that to mean that Opera has doubled its market share since early 2003.

You could also read that to mean that Opera has remained at about 2% market share for six years now, during which time Firefox has been born and risen to about 40% penetration, and during the last six months of which Google's browser has been both released and passed them by a factor of 3.

So yes, Opera is not going anywhere. You can read that to mean that they're going to stick around if you'd like. You can also read that to mean that they are not now, nor have they ever been a real competitor in the Browser market.
I heard that anecdote in a linguistics class back in college. The same professor shared another:

Back when the advertising slogan for Coca-Cola was "Coke adds life," an unfortunate Chinese translation came through as "Coke brings your ancestors back from the grave". And, of course, they take their ancestors pretty seriously, adding to the hilarity.
So what? In English, a yahoo is "a brute, a crude person, often lacking in intelligence, and uninterested in culture", and a million jokes were made about the Wii on launch. I doubt it's impacted their popularity at all.
As usual, there is a lot more detail on this mathematical topic in Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli_numbers
60% for me. Sometimes I'll write a rather verbose comment before realizing that what I have to say doesn't matter, is not relevant, or is self serving; so I close the tab. I figure if it doesn't help someone, or it has already been said, I should save pg's disk space for something more valuable. :)
I don't know Wolfram, and I doubt you do, so I can assume that perhaps he is clumsily arrogant. Makes sense to me.

I'm also not a math genius, and I doubt most of the folks on HN are either. I also lack the perspective of viewing Wolfram's works from a couple of hundred years out.

Given all of that, why would I want to hold Wolfram in any more disdain than the guy at the local softball game who thinks he was the best baseball player since Hank Aaron? If anything, such people are fun to be around -- at least until you've heard all of their stories. They certainly don't deserve mockery. If you've got a problem with how somebody treats you because they are arrogant, that's one thing. But if you're just out there tearing somebody else down because they're an easy target -- they're clumsily arrogant -- get a grip and start treating total strangers better.

I thought about mentioning Jobs. Goodness knows there are a lot of technology types that think they are God's gift to mankind as well. We just don't hear about them so much.

I think it's disturbing that we are all turning into hate-mongers: we define ourselves by who we mock and hate. Wolfram is cool to hate, so let's all pile on him. Bill Gates is the epitome of evil, so let's have at him too. It goes on and on.

These are human beings, precious other people. Would you want to be treated this way in a public forum by some writer looking to score points from his social group?

It's clanning at it's worst -- made out to be light and funny. Kind of like picking on the slow kid at school. Wolfram isn't any good at self-promoting! What a self-deluded idiot. I guess that's what struck me about the article.

I don't know one way or the other, but I know I'd rather talk about Wolfram's ideas than the man himself.
Between WinAmp and iTunes, bye-bye iPod!
I own the Kindle 1 and Kindle 2. So yes, I have used e-ink devices quite a bit :)

The screen refresh on the K2 is waay, waaaaay better. Much less painful to type and use UI elements.

But I have learned not to use ref books on them not because of the slow UI/search (it's not so bad), but because I require a physical book for memory "wayfinding," to flip back and forth, to rescan, and remind myself, "hmm it was about in the last quarter of the book..." or "Where did I read about that study? I'm thinking... yellow book about yea big... aha, that one", etc. With a digital reader that always looks the same, and feels the same, you lose something.

That is where the Kindles (et al) fall down - nothing to do with the screens, just that the natural UI of books is very good for these things.
Yes. But 'should' is not 'is'.
Ok. But how about proxies?
As a Chinese, Bing.com accures to me as disease when I first saw it.

I like the recursive acronym 'Bing Is Not Google' more :-)
No, I live in California.
Yes. But they may decide to suit the individuals involved.
Just how universal is higher education in Sweden? Can all people who desire to attend the best university in Sweden enroll if they wish, or are there entrance requirements for that university?
I always liked Opera's philosophy of "do what IE does" rather than Firefox's policy of interpreting the more ambiguous parts of the standards in a way that conflicts with IE's pre-existing way of rendering. It meant that pages just plain worked first try on Opera no matter which browser you targeted initially. That definitely wins me over.

That being said, Opera is the only modern web browser that we no-longer test for on Twiddla. For a while we were putting in little Opera-specific hacks to work around its painfully slow rendering engine (which ironically is the reason it's such a pleasant browser to develop against), but eventually it became too much effort to be worth it considering the 1.35% of our traffic that it comprises.

So yeah, I'm with you in hoping it doesn't go away. Still, I'll stand by my statement that breaking the user experience to make a point would be a fatal mistake for them.
How I Won The DFJ $250K East Coast Venture Challenge
With pride, I can say that I have visited the museum myself in Belgrade. I also attended the elementary school called Nikola Tesla in the near by city called Novi Sad.
That's a good idea too. Will see how this can be integrated with them.
long story short: no. the process isn't efficient enough for water to actually successfully fuel anything.

the concept keeps getting rekindled with new breakthroughs, the latest one being the radio frequency generator that "burns" salt water. its still not efficient enough to make a car go. not yet, at least.
Why Comcast Has To Worry About Hulu, Part 2: Hulu Desktop
> They usually talk of standing on the shoulders of giants

Hah, you think Isaac Newton wasn't an egomaniac?