skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m completely convinced that the tablet is real. But I
am almost just as convinced that it is not ready to be
announced. Patience on this one.

I'm hoping he's wrong at least on this count.
This seems far better attributed to the drive of certain ethnic groups to sustain upward mobility in a stratified society, than to any disregard intrinsic qualities of craft.
Interesting point.

I would be interested in any links you might have...

I wonder about this question now and then in the context of the thought experiment "describe a capitalist utopia". In my musings, such a utopia might eliminate the distinction between work and play, and possibly even between learning and play. If such a scenario came to exist, doing what one was told would surely be the lowest form of existence and would be viewed as outright subjugation.

Or would it -- maybe many people enjoy structure and thrive when being told what to do. In reading about Myers Briggs it seems that the "guardian" personality type enjoys structure and respects authority. Doesn't it follow that if one respects authority he will do what he is told by said authority? Guardians are over 10% of the population... Are these (often high functioning) people actually the victims of the cognitive damage you describe?

I know this comment is a bit out there :)
Look, I dislike the DMCA as much as anyone, but I don't really think that a party founded on piracy is really a great thing to happen to European politics. At least, not in the respect you imply (that we're going to tell those recording industry fat cats they're not the boss of us!).

If they can push honest and realistic discussion of the issues, however, that could have a lot of impact. We all like to laugh at the publishing industry (music, then movies, now newspapers) for being unable to keep up with the times, but just as the web has introduced post-scarity to publishing, so will nanotech destroy the goods industry, robotics destroy the services industry, and, eventually, AI destroy info work. My hope is that we can learn from what is happening now (and try to understand the success of e.g. Trent Reznor, and determine whether his model would work if not for its novelty), and be better prepared for the future. But no one is talking about it...ideally, the Pirate Party will change that, rather than just explain to old dudes why torrent indexing isn't illegal.
Hashing Molecules
I think Apple will be looking to diversify the iPhone line which will probably include a cheap iPhone 3G, iPhone 3G Video as the mid-range option, and perhaps this 3GS is the higher end model -- OLED screen, slightly wider, higher specs and background apps along with a premium physical design that sets it apart from the other two iPhone models. It wouldn't surprise me to see support for LTE included as AT&T (and others) will be deploying service heavily in the next 2 years (typical life span of an iPhone?)

For Snow Leopard I agree that Apple will probably offer it at a highly reduced price compared to 10.4 or 10.5. There will probably be at least a few surprises we haven't seen yet but nothing that is going to justify a $100+ price for most people. The worst thing that could happen for Apple is for 10.4 & 10.5 to continue lingering around XP style if users don't quickly adopt 10.6. Between lax copy protection and a low price tag Apple could easily move 70-80% of their Intel users to 10.6 within a year. There have been rumors Windows 7 upgrade pricing is going to be quite cheap so Apple has to at least match that price. (both 7 & 10.6 are basically maintenance releases and probably have the same approximate value to consumers)

I don't expect any other big surprises. Apple wants the new iPhone to be the #1 story coming out of WWDC.
which do you choose?

http://blindsearch.fejus.com/?q=sex+tape
Why? This is certainly consistent with the exponents of Creationism and/or "creation science" that I've met, seen and heard of...
Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=605207

This is the printer friendly version of the same article.
There's currently a big case going on in the UK over this sort of thing. I urge you most strongly to find a sign the petition supporting Simon against medical treatment unsupported by science.

http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/3...

http://www.google.com/search?q=simon+singh+libel

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=33457048634

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/jun/04/simon-singh-li...

http://derrenbrownart.com/blog/?p=2486
I'd recommend talking with all YC rejects and picking some and investing $15K. You could spend another $10K on lawyers and then set up VC meetings. It would be risky but that's why you want to invest in startups, right?
One not so novel idea would be to buy up shares of Facebook from employees.

Chances are Facebook will have a nice exit in the next 5-10 years.
I find this surprising not because of cultural norms, but because of the much higher price of gas and taxes on cars in Europe.
Cross referenced to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=646328
Cross referenced to http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645728
Since you know many well known processor architects, why don't you try to invest in the area you already know(hardware)?

Startups are not all about WEB.
No. Do you think math is different at Yale or something?
Here's how I prepare for a launch:

1) log on to server
2) svn up
3) go to apache directory
4) bin/restart
In my personal tests the results are almost identical but the order of results may vary by a few spots. The most relevant searches are appearing in the first page so the order isn't all that important IMO. If anything this proves to me that accuracy is no longer the big deciding factor in search for most people. It's all about the platform -- mail, IM, maps, blogs, photos, etc. This explains why Google has stayed strong since they've made the biggest investment in a complete, cohesive, platform.
The "advantage" of delaying an assignment of valuation exists only for the founders. The only reason investors sometimes prefer a convertible is because it's simpler and therefore lighter on the legal fees. Otherwise it's insanely bad (if uncapped).
Search itself is simply too hard to judge. Since many of the results in the top 10 (at least in my test searches) were the same but perhaps jumbled a bit, I personally think it doesn't matter that much.

Day to day I use search for two things: very general information and looking up code errors. Code error searches will pull up the same mailing lists and forums no matter which search engine you use, and a general information search will either pull up an official website or a Wikipedia page on any search engine. 9 times out of 10 that's sufficient.

There's no superficial reason to why I use Google over Bing or Yahoo!, just simply that I've always used it and I'm always satisfied with it. Yes, I also like its interface the most and non-search related Google applications are generally amazing, but I wouldn't be any less productive if suddenly I switched to Bing for all my search.

(Although I might simply just be biased towards Google... they did just give me a free phone!)

I think the 40/30/30 results that are currently posted on there show that. For the most part it's relatively even, and honestly Google is probably winning just because some die hards are bent on making sure their favorite wins.
Indeed. 25 people who'll give you a page of detailed feedback once a week could save you months of frustration and wrong turns. If your site depends on a networking effect of some kind, you might be able to recruit Alpha testers who'll agree to roleplay all being interested in the same topic.
People who criticize Postmodernism, either don't understand it or do and is afraid of it.
I think it depends a lot on what your service is. I'm working on a startup for hikers (trailbehind.com) and we were live from day one. But most of our traffic comes from searches, and we've gotten more and more traffic from searches as we've gotten better and more popular. We've also had some hard core outdoors fans find us and send us great suggestions and even data. But if we were a service like Pandora, that model wouldn't have worked, since people would have had to remember to come back after a bad experience.
noob question: what's a "condo"?
That is an excellent ad hominem attack on the source.

You are incorrect, it is capped at a 2% increase per year and of course is reassessed at 1% of the total property value when the property changes hands.

Of course proposition 13 lowers the income from property taxes for the state, that is the point of it. Do you think the state deserves more than a 579% increase in revenue from property taxes since 1980? No other tax has increased as much.

The truth is the California government doesn't know how to spend within its means. Why do you believe we would be in better shape without prop 13? I'm sure we would have simply increased spending and leveraged out the state more. With the devaluation of homes it would have just hit us harder, representing a larger percentage of our income.

It is easy to claim California would have more revenue without prop 13. That is a prima facie argument. What you need to do is prove that taxpayers should have paid more, that California is responsible enough to have handled the money, and that the burden should be borne disproportionately by property owners more than it already is.
I've been feeling the exact same way lately ...

The designers behind this:
http://thingsthatarebrown.com/

I've also been going back to these guys a lot lately:
http://metalabdesign.com/
(Some of their work has been on HN lately)
This is probably the fifth "Why didn't I think of that?" thing I've seen on HN today. Really cool stuff... bookmarking it in case I need it one day.
I'd bet against a "lite" iPhone for now, since Apple is still locked into AT&T for another year. If they wanted to release a new "iPhone Mini", it would make sense to do so when (or if) they open up to other carriers, to make a play at the bigger market share.
From http://www.waveprotocol.org/draft-protocol-spec it's clear that Wave is 100% based on XMPP, which means contact authentication prior to communication takes place, hence there's no room for spam in Wave/XMPP (at least in esteblished meaning of 'spam').
European Greens Want to Legalize File-Sharing
Whatever they have they have unfortunately let their feeling run away with them.

Postmodernism is a critique frame of references and can't by definition be nonsense since they don't claim anything positive about the world.
OK, so. Disclaimer first: I am a professional programmer and not a professional philosopher. However, I have a degree in philosophy, albeit one from a program which was heavily analytic (and thus removed from/disdainful of much of what passes for postmodern philosophy).

That said...

My biggest problem with postmodernism is simply that there seems to be no "there" there. Of course, postmodernists would likely argue that that's the point, but it's terribly hard to talk about something so nebulously defined.

But the result of decades of postmodernist (and deconstructionist, and poststructuralist, since they're all interrelated) thought, to me, has ultimately been nothing but a game. One plays the game by choosing some particular thing (the "text", which of course is not required to actually consist of text) and:

1. Denying any and all conscious intentions the author/designer/creator may have had.

2. Reading into it any and all assumptions/positions/prejudices which happen to be fashionable to assign to one's target, by liberally playing with language or context.

This is problematic to me because it has no justifiable basis -- it's just as ad-hoc and just as unsound as a Freudian constantly asserting this or that unobservable, untestable subconscious motivation. Of course, within postmodern thought this is considered valid because postmodern thought admits the existence of nothing but present subjectivity.

And the worst part is that the largest visible result has been nothing more than the fulfillment by postmodernists of what Foucault had described in his work: an entrenched power which can bring itself to bear against dissidents and which structures all discourse to its own advantage through things like its use of language.

Meanwhile, what you consider to be "cool ideas" are not necessarily new, and not necessarily foreign to people here. Take, for example, "the map is not the territory": this is not a particularly new insight, and it would be a poor programmer indeed who confused, in the style of Magritte's famous warning, an instance of a Pipe class in a program with an actual pipe.
Others had shown were it shines as well; there was Nitro, IOWA, a few other apps that were solid examples of Ruby qua Ruby at the same time as (or prior to) Rails.

Why do some people/code get attention and accolades, while others, equally deserving, do not? Timing? Personality? Bluster?
Hello - I'd be interested in chatting with you. I'm very interested in systems stuff (programming languages, multicore, etc.), and I also have a startup which might want to take some angel investment soon. lincoln@newsbrane.com is my email.
At which point you're down to n of 1-2 per group, because separated-at-birth twin studies commonly contain no more then 30-40 pairs of twins, and your study is fatally flawed.

I'm not saying twin studies couldn't be done well, I'm saying in practice most real twin studies are not large enough or well designed enough to actually control for those outcomes. There just aren't enough identical twins separated at birth to allow it to be done well.

(That's not to mention further issues like womb environment, which further muddy the issue and are very important)

Here's a summary of what's wrong with twin studies in general:
http://drbeetle.homestead.com/twins.html
exaxtly!
Short for "condominium"

Think of it as an apartment that you own outright ... and have a joint ownership of the common areas
SSD and relational databases - update joined views?
The case could have addressed some interesting questions, such as the degree to which duplicating functionality falls under the definition of reverse engineering, and whether a file-format translator is a derivative work, as well as whether it's legally permissible to prohibit either of these.

Have these questions not been addressed before in court?
Military Intelligence Used to Shut Down French BitTorrent Site
Just got back from the election party in Stockholm. One seat in the EU parliament is just what (pp) needs for the Riksdagen election 2010. Most likely, there are differences hidden under the purple surface of the party that will show now. The maturity process is started.

Will be interesting to see if this spawns copycats throughout Europe. At the very least the established parties should take notice. Infopolitics is here to stay.
You're missing the point. Saying something is "heritable" is essentially meaningless. It tells you how that trait would change in the group measured in response to evolutionary selective pressure, and that's it. It doesn't tell you whether the trait is genetic, it doesn't tell you whether the trait is important, and it doesn't tell you whether the trait even exists in a meaningful way.

You can measure quite decent heritability from entirely random traits:

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/523.html
"The Pirate Party and friends are, in many ways, the new face of the libertarian left in Europe."

I'm curious: What distinguishes "libertarian left" from plain old libertarian?
VAServ 'hacked' - all web sites and hosted VMs down
Ask HN: Hack through Power source
I guess this is a pretty high level electronics question. Is it possible to hack a computer through the power source?
Ask HN: do entrepreneurs serve as pawns for economic development?
My thesis is that entrepreneurs serve as pawns for economic development.

This might sound a bit far-fetched, so please allow me to explain in the following lines. As a prelude, I claim that:

1) most societies need entrepreneurs to innovate, to grow, and to prosper. When the state is the sole agent of business innovation, mediocrity and inefficiency tend to reign supreme.

2) wherever there are business opportunities, there is competition. Thus, statistically speaking, entrepreneurs are destined to fail.

The point I am trying to make is that societies need entrepreneurs to advance economically, even though most will fail. Hence, my claim that entrepreneurs serve as pawns (or canon fodder, if you prefer) for economic development. A happier metaphor would be to say that entrepreneurs are the shock troops of capitalism (as Schumpeter put it).

For centuries, emperors and warlords recruited their soldiers with promises of land and loot. Are entrepreneurs today's useful idiots to be sacrificed for the advancement of the economy? The promise is no longer land nor loot, but a successful IPO, early retirement, etc.

I know this might sound extreme. What do you guys think about it?
Way to often people confuse what would be nice to have with what is possible to have.

Postmodernism unfortunately must often take the heat from those people.

Postmodernism is an observation is a critique of the absolute frames of references. It's not an atempt to claim how the world is but rather a tool to hack reality.

In that sense no people on HN should be against postmodernism but rather understand it instead of just showing their ignorance.
>> Anybody who criticizes <<idea>> is either stupid or afraid.

Even if it is true, do you really think that's a good argument?

Why don't you point out how this article shows Chomsky to be stupid or afraid.
The Swedish Pirate Party has a horrible name. Because its political platform is all about preserving the right to personal integrity — not piracy.

Certainly, they also believe that copyright and patent law needs to fundamentally change.

And certainly, preserving the right to privacy on the internet — to the same standard that it is guaranteed through other means of communications — would make it pretty much impossible to shut down piracy. But that's a side-effect, not the expressed goal of the party.

I'm Swedish myself, I've studied their platform closely, and I voted for them. Not because I want free stuff — but because I feel that the EU parliament needs more people in it who are viciously opposed to the idea of destroying our basic civil liberties.

Many other candidates from other parties are sympathetic to this (as opposed to their respective party platforms). But — only a vote for the Pirate Party would shake the "old parties" up sufficiently in order to make personal integrity the party platform. And I think we're going to see exactly that kind of progression in Sweden across party lines.
I've just started working on a web application similar to dailyburn.com, but with a different market emphasis. For $10,000 dollars or so I could build it, launch it this Fall, and maintain it for several years. I have several solid ideas for making money with this.

Sadly, I don't live in a civilized place like Silicon Valley. I'm out here in the sticks of Helena, Montana.

But anyway, let me know if you want to talk about it...

gaustin@gmail.com
have you seen the rest of the results? PP have done well - one cant help feeling on the back of TPB publicity. But the rest of the left parties have suffered heavy losses.

We're looking at a strong conservative EU parliament as far as I can tell. I fear the PP will have little impact (I confess I am not a huge fan but they do stand for some issues I believe strongly in).
And with the advent of the internet, that has become so much easier. We can find whatever niche we want and create our own echo chamber.

Before the internet, newspapers had to operate somewhat similarly to how our political parties operated. You had to offer enough to all people in your area that you'd be financially sustainable. Jonathan Sarna (a professor at Brandeis) has talked about this as to why US politics doesn't have the fringes that Europe does. Because American politicians are elected locally (for the most part), it becomes suicidal to be fringe. Sure, maybe 10% of the country agrees with you, but never 50% in any given area - no matter how liberal or conservative. By contrast European countries generally give a party representation in proportion to their take at the polls - even if they don't win a single district.

The internet is like that European system. There might not be enough in one area to support niches, but there are across a larger population.

And, to be honest, I find this a little troubling. On the positive side, there are more beliefs able to be published and heard. But really, what seems to happen is that the beliefs aren't heard wider - just more often by a sub group. And there are such things as wrong beliefs. Things that are scientifically inaccurate or something we might deem terrible for society (for example, I fell very comfortable saying that Nazism is a wrong belief). Before such echo chambers, there were at least buffers where one would have to hear wider (one could criticize, mainstream) views and wouldn't have people backing up their view constantly (or at least not exclusively).

It's quite the double-edged sword. I can understand why people like reading HuffPo or Fox News, but it can be somewhat dangerous. There's a great sorting trend happening in America where we surround ourselves with those who think only like us. Lack of contact with people who think differently both makes us demonize them (even if it's only to the "how could they think that" extent) and makes us very vulnerable. The second part needs some explanation. This makes us vulnerable in the same way that genetic engineering (or lack of bio diversity) would. Are we so arrogant (on all sides) to think that we have the answer (to life, the universe, and everything) that it wouldn't be good to hedge our bets?

I'm not saying that it's terrible or anything, just that one has to be careful about only thinking one way. If we aren't careful, we'll become people analogous to hammers and miss the solutions that aren't nails.
I'm not sure that I have any better suggestions, although the title of that original post was definitely clearer. It's too bad I didn't see that one.
Me too but Gruber has a really good track record on his predictions.
Focus, mainly. Libertarians have long been aligned with the right in America because they have emphasized the economic parts of their platform, at the expense of the social ones.
I don't seem to recall the end to the intifada. :P

Arming everyone doesn't solve problems. It just guarantees someone is going to die. You can say "better them than me", but again, that's not a solution.

Carrying a gun may make you feel safer, but that's all it does. Some people tried to make the claim that the Virginia Tech massacre could have been avoided if students were armed on campus. Except that the shooter, who clearly did not value his own survival, caught everyone off guard.

Unless you are always armed, and always vigilant someone is going to get the drop on you. Fire arms are not going to make you safer. There are always random acts of violence.

Also, don't forget that the "good guys" with guns aren't infallible. They accidentally shoot bystanders or even other good guys by accident too (see the NY plainclothes policeman who was killed last week).
Yeah - I'm from Europe and used to multiparty government. Yet every small party I've seen, that actually targeted young people and specifically issues that people <30 care about, never gets to be popular. And they certainly don't get 2 seats in EU.

I was just wondering why it happened in Sweden of all countries... was The Pirate Bay court case really the trigger, or is it connected to how Swedish people act, or was it something else?
There's a recent WSJ article on the topic that's worth a read:

"Serving in Europe's Parliament Is A Cushy Job, but What's the Point? ... Pay, Perks Are Good, Powers Not So Much; Struggling to Get Voters Interested"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124390393595074827.html