skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Emotions are not tools of cognition. What you feel
tells you nothing about the facts.

We now know that this is not necessarily the case. There are specific mechanisms we have evolved for evaluating the health and fitness of individuals that predate written language. Many of us have an intuitive feel for when someone is lying, and there are many other examples. You can even assign the strength of such feelings to a number, and put that data into a Bayesian belief network and crank out a calculation. (Not that I recommend this particular method, just showing that there is a mathematical basis for integrating feelings with rationality.)

My sister lived out a rational fiction that she wanted to be a pediatrician for almost a decade. It just made so much sense -- there are so any doctors in our family, and working with kids, I think, was sufficiently "female" for her. She always hated my calling bullshit on her.

Today, she works as a consultant to make money so she can choreograph.

You can be informed both by intuition and rationality. Ignoring your feelings is like being a mechanical or electrical engineer who ignores his sense of smell.

Ayn Rand also ignores subconscious cognition. I've had the solutions to many problems I worked on the previous night pop into my head over breakfast. How do we know that "feelings" aren't the result of subconscious processing? I strongly suspect that many of them do. I think you can wisely use such data, so long as you use rational means to corroborate it.

EDIT: Ayn Rand also holds something like this position, which she mentions in this interview, but her estimation of the relative importance of rationality vs. intuition needs some tuning.

Again showing her outdated knowledge of biology:

PLAYBOY: You attack the idea that sex is "impervious to
reason." But isn't sex a nonrational biological instinct?
RAND: No. To begin with, man does not possess any
instincts.

We now know that man possesses instincts. Has someone updated Objectivism with the new intellectual furnishings of evolutionary biology and recent neuroscience? If no one has, then this doesn't speak well of Objectivism intellectually.

EDIT: My objection specifically, no one can be perfectly rational, any more than someone can ride a bicycle and never fall. No one commands all of the relevant facts. Rationality is a powerful tool, unmatched in its potential for bringing us to understanding of the world. However, it has some serious failure modes. Where are the elbow pads and helmet?
Well if there was a bittorrent for food, that would be great for you.
Secret Memoir Offers Look Inside China’s Political Elite on Eve of Tiananmen
White House Drug Czar Calls for End to 'War on Drugs'
Everyone ridicule's IE and yes, there are valid arguments against it, but one could also argue that it is because Microsoft shipped IE with Windows that the Internet was able to grow like it did.

Before IE, users of the internet had to use things like FTP or sneakernet or their geek friends to go find them a browser so they could get on the web.

But, then came IE standard in the OS and all the customer had to do is double click an icon. This was quite a bit easier as you may be able to imagine than the alternative methods to install netscape, ncsa mosiac, etc.

Before IE, the internet was largely the realm of technical literates. IE made it accessible to a much larger audience.
Yep. The boss at the end is really hard. :)

I worked through the videos plus the book. The videos are essential, IMO. The Berkeley lectures were not as inspiring as the original MIT '86 ones.
Tell HN: Hacker News is almost reddit
Dear readers who are deluding yourselves into believing Hacker News is the last bastion of social news hope,

It is not. HN has become another cesspool of useless ego-boosting linkbait.

As evidence, here are 4 headlines currently on the front page that literally make me STUPIDER:

Vitamins Found to Curb Exercise Benefits

College grad: ‘I wish I’d gone to prison instead’

Steve Jobs allowed to tear down his home

TECH CRUNCH TECH CRUNCH STUPID ARRINGTON BS*

*This last example not an actual headline, but instead an educated guess.

SERIOUSLY? How does any of this "gratify one's intellectual curiosity"? (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

It does not.

Hacker News failed. Does anybody have a better hangout spot?
oldddddddd
You missed the point. It wasn't that Ubuntu isn't localized, it was to attempt to demonstrate the massive frustration users encounter when they don't know how to do anything.

I have a Ubuntu netbook, and I'll agree Linux has come a long way, but when I click on the friendly "you have updates" button and then break my wireless, forcing me to track down drivers/packages I don't hold much hope for the common people as it were. It was frustrating to me!

The language of typical Linux users is very much different than the language of typical PC users I'd say. The ways we would describe a task are much different and the things you learn on one platform often don't help you on the other. A massive problem too is the fact there's essentially no configuration management among Linux distros, making support a nightmare. What's the GUI going to look like? What's the package manager going to be? Etc, etc.

I actually lied. The netbook used to have Ubuntu, now it has OS X. It's easier, even considering the hack to get it on there. Last time I owned a mac was system 7, so it's not like there isn't a learning curve there. It's just that they give a damn about the user experience, and as a general rule will not release unless they know the experience will be good.
I'd use Google Apps more if they were actually Google App Engine applications which I could choose to run locally, on Google's server or on a third-party's system.
I think the annual rate is a better way to convince people to pay. I really don't need another monthly bill to deal with, yet I barely think about forking over for my annual dns and web hosting bills.

I guess it depends on the service provided, but I'd definitely not pay $5/month for Facebook, but I might consider paying $25/year.
I've read them all, very interesting indeed. Andrew Moore makes data mining fun sans all math.
GMail has sucked for me in this and other ways too for months now, but right now everything seems fine (all Google services).

Perhaps, I was a little late to the party.
Double spacing in HTML doesn't sound a whole lot easier either. You'd either have to write something that changes one of the spaces to &nbsp; or do it by hand...
It's funny I needed to get directions, and I'm just realizing now that I can use Yahoo maps (an hour later).

Update:
Nevermind, Yahoo maps just erases the addresses I entered when I press "go". I guess I'm stuck waiting for google maps to come back. I refuse to revert to mapquest.
It's not just about consumers, it's about programmers and their incentives as well. Torvalds' famous tit-for-tat doesn't work with SaaS - they get all the "tit" and keep "tat" to themselves.
At the time that I took 6.001 (the MIT version of the SICP course), PLT Scheme lacked several libraries that the book requires. Since so many students wanted to use PLT, the staff put together the extra modules for us, but I'm not sure if PLT is now "SICP-compliant" or not. Check with someone who works on PLT (they're very nice) to find out.

For what it's worth, I really enjoyed SICP, though I still can't say that I understand every line in it.
Personal site (URL flux) Feedback appreciated
what would you prefer?
depends on what kind of bussiness you're running though...

If it has anything to do with "exclusivity" or "privilege" or "be the first to do blah", you must charge. You can give "special" customers a free or heavily discounted pass, but you must make it seem like it's only them getting something exclusive for an exclusive price. Think country club or night club style business.
Obviously, I have no idea how the service was built and it's most likely much more complicated than what it looks like but I, too, was surprised to read that it was a scaling issue. I'd be curious to know why an @reply makes it different from a regular status update.

Also, (even though I don't really care that much honestly) as a new user, I would say that seeing everything was a way to discover other people and to potentially be discovered as well. I feel like it's important to discover people as the very beginning so that you get hooked on Twitter.

If anyone can think of an explanation on the scaling issue, I'd be happy to read it.
Twitter tag in action: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23googlefail
That site seems to waste an awful lot of screen space.
I agree in theory, but in reality it would probably be divisive and not worth it. I think it's better just to accept having a lower place on the leader board than you would have otherwise.

(And also, users who self-submit their own blog posts do deserve the karma.)
So the secret is to be a country full of dour, responsible people who discover fabulously valuable natural resources, and can thus afford to subsidize even the most degenerate kinds of behavior?
It's the only thing that could possibly undivide humanity.
Another proof that Google is steadily becoming the SPOF of the web...
We haev free Wifi in our cafe bar, so do the other 3 cafe bars on our street. All four use Ch. 11! I told our techs but they can't work out how to change it sigh.
Especially if your application is business related.

Just having a paid version might help convince customers that you're a reliable company.
The tubes have a kink.
Hardly a news worthy item, but it always saddens me when I hear of an old historic home being demo'd. So much history and lost craftsmanship, gone at the hands of a wrecking ball.
Funny thing... I just realized that without Google I am kind of cut off from the world: no e-mail, no jabber... I do have some backup accounts, but the people with whom I'd like to communicate don't... Or at least I don't know their secondary addresses. It's scary. Well, at least I have HN to cheer me up :-)
but norway is debt-free (accourding tfa)

i'm not sure about uae, especially dubai
Isn't this the cost per song played? If you have 1000 listeners the cost per user per song is 0.007c.

But if you go and try the "request" approach, then you have 1000 users requesting god knows how many songs. The trick is to manage to pay about as much as before (0.007c), but let each user choose what to listen instead of broadcasting the same song. Problem is, if two users want the same song, but 10 seconds one after the other, will you pay 7 cents or 14?
I am not sure why anyone thinks this is important. You can't turn karma points into investments in your start-up - it's just stuff.
Actually, this reminds me that the time seems ripe for the next big steps in browser-based E-mail, the next product that can take GMail's features like lots of storage and mostly search as a starting point. My conjecture is that lots of people are tired of GMail sucking and would give other web clients a shot. And it might take a while before good service returns to GMail (if ever) given the rumors about the hairy state of the code base.

Anyone know of anything that I should take a look at?
s/is fighting dirty/has become sentient
It started yesterday for me, not today. Probably about 2:30 pacific time. I noticed some rather intense latency on loading gmail.
You've only made 3 submissions yourself. HN isn't a service being provided to you, whereby you sit and expect it to present you with interesting stories.
Yes, but wheras Dubai employs slave labor to build ecological atrocities, Norway is investing the money in the future of its people. It is also quite interesting that dealing with middle-eastern immigrants is a controversial issue in Norway (especially because they largely refuse to assimilate.)
Oh, this isn't about my place on the leader board. Admittedly, most of my points have come from submissions, so I'd have a pretty low spot on the list.
Anyone remember that article about how (some ridiculously small amount of time) affected google and made them lose money?
The fact that this relates to Jobs is irrelevant.

The interesting part is local municipalities attempting to dictate what people can do with their property. IME, these behaviors often coincide with their decisions around things related to technology, and usually in a non-preferred way.
Make Your Web Analytics Actionable in 5 DIY Steps
Definitely. I already pay to watch netflix over my xbox 360, and I think people would be very open to this if they could ditch cable...I think that's the problem.
I haven't seen the house, but from TFA it sounded like the home wasn't really all that "historic", aside from the fact that it's old. The two are not necessarily synonymous.
Take a look at the agplv3. Its to fight exactly what you are saying. It 'closes' the hole in the cloud.
Does something like Twitter really warrant this sort of response? I mean, if my power goes out, or my internet, or anything like that, I'd be reasonably upset with the utility company, but this is a free service. I don't use Twitter so I'm a poor judge of its value.
in China, slow. First I thought it may be the great firewall. But it seems far more worse than that..
India’s top 20 Web 2.0 sites
The study is harder than that. You have to take a sampling of those accepted to college and force a percentage of them to skip out.

The "educated people make more money, therefore get an education" arguments annoy me. There's rarely a mention that causation is presumed.
It seems like everything's back to normal now.
Self-assembly now easier to control
The business is a job search website. Although the discussion certainly doesn't need to be limited/oriented towards that niche.
It seems to me that if each of these services was peer-to-peer they can sustain their free nature. They are nice to have rather than essential, and everyone participating sharing the load fits perfectly with the "community" ideals.

These services seem unsustainable from a monetisation, cost and environmental perspective.
Whenever I think HN is becoming too reddit-like, I go spend some time on reddit. I always feel better after.
"If you have the budget, then submit to Looksmart and Yahoo."
"Submit the root to: Google, Fast, Altavista, WiseNut, (write Teoma), DirectHit, and Hotbot."

This article is more than a little past its prime.
And yet if the article were not about Jobs I feel there would be a bigger reaction here of "Not Hacker News"
Widespread Google packet loss observed today
To the extent that karma is an incentive at all, I'd rather have it encourage more high-quality submissions than more high-quality comments. (I'm reasonably happy with the level of discussion in the comments, but there aren't as many interesting submissions as I want.)
Yeah, a couple things:

- Your site is too wide. On my 15" powerbook, with safari 4 maximized, there's still horizontal scroll.

- Speaking of scroll, the individual scroll bars for each column seem to run over some of the text.

- The text is a bit hard to read, and everything looks a bit cluttered. I can't browse the headlines in comfort.

- I'm not quite sure how your stories are ranked or organized. Right now, it just looks like a random assortment of stories scattered all over the screen. There's no metric for me to rate the stories, not even a continuous time line.

Clean design overall. Nice job.

EDIT: Ah, I had to scroll down to find that the different columns were from different sources. I'd suggest moving the source names up to the top.
That's a really nice, clean design, and it's original, too! I like it a lot. If the headings were just a little bit bolder, it might be easier to read - but the fonts you chose really make the page look "clean".

The columns were a little confusing - I wasn't sure what the different ones were for, and the scroll bars overlapped the text very slightly (I'm using Firefox).

Overall, really nice design!
UPDATE @ 12:10--

AWS (which also seemed to be affected) up to normal speed. Youtube and Gmail slow but usable. Google seems to be a normal speed.
IF DRM worked, it could be used in the other direction, and your private information could be distributed in the form of software agents. Big if here, granted. However, I suspect that something like Vernor Vinge's "Trusted Computing Environment" will eventually exist. It's too useful not to.

I agree that it's a big 'if', because I don't think that DRM will actually ever work reasonably well, and I don't think usefulness is a huge boost -- there are too many confounding factors, even if the encryption itself isn't cracked.

I'm not sure what to quote of the middle of your post. :) First off, "legal" is pretty fluid; I can find a jurisdiction that allows me to do whatever I want with personal information. Second, once someone has a copy of personal information in an unencrypted format, the source becomes very difficult to identify (unless everyone gets a customized copy, as you point out for email; I used a scheme like this to track who was selling my email to spammers from 1998 for a few years, but it didn't do me any good to find out, and it was a bit of trouble to keep up with).

But essentially, privacy and copyright are the same fight, and if you can come up with an effective enforcement tool for either one, the other one is solved as well.

Somehow, the situation shifted the other direction in this case.

I'm not suggesting that there's any social inevitability, here, except as a result of a technological one.
google is up and running..
Federal Authority Over the Internet? The Cybersecurity Act of 2009
The "Jak and Daxter" postmortem lists Naughty Dog's use of Lisp as the number five thing under "what went right" and the number one thing under "what went wrong"... (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2985/postmortem_naught...)

The rewrite wasn't a clear loss -- especially if, as the postmortem suggests, there was exactly one person who was capable of modifying the old codebase. (Likely this is the same person being quoted in Bill Clementson's article, which suggests some amount of ownership bias. Come to think of it, the same could be said of the ViaWeb case...)
an objective reality exists independent of any perceiver or of the perceiver's emotions, feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

Couldn't agree more.

man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose,

Couldn't disagree more.

And I in no way think that A implies B in this case.
That's actually not true, but I'd have to do some digging to find the article that examines this across a broad spectrum of services.

Paying monthly for a product/service tends to make that product or service used more, because people feel the need to justify seeing that item on their bill.

This is why, for instance, so many gyms moved away from 'buy a year' plans. People would sign up in Jan / Feb / March, go a few times, and never go again. When it came time to 're-up', they wouldn't because 'we never go to the gym'. However, when people were billed monthly, the would go maybe even only once or twice a month, but it kept them using the service and the 'hurdle' for payment each time is much lower.

Lest you think it only apply to gyms, the study also looked at cell usage when the only thing billed per month was overages, and you paid the full contract up front. They saw a similar type of usage, where even with something as common as a cell, the annual cost was higher and the average monthly use was lower.

Bill monthly (or even 'micro' -- 'on use') and you make more money overall.
I was having problems with AWS (very slow; too slow for development). I don't know if it was just Google.
No problem for me any time this morning (United States Central Time Zone).
Not here (Going out through AT&T).
Uff... It is getting back to normal. We are all saved! ;-)
Right now, it's even hard to get a pizza delivery job.

An acquaintance of mine has been searching for an engineering (not programming) job for months out of college and was excited to get a paper boy job. (He's okay financially due to an understanding fiance, but worried that he will never end up in the field.)
I wrote a moderately useful lifestream hack a year or so back, just checked on it and it's slightly broken, but usable;

http://dsingleton.co.uk/code/lifestream/dsingleton.co.uk

The beautiful thing is that it's entire generated from a single URL. This requires the site to have implemented the microformat rel="me" link as it uses the SocialGraph API to scrape connected URLs. All matched pages are checked for a rel="feed" style link, those are all scraped and merged together to form the timeline.

Programatic is nice, but also a huge mess. I never got around to grouping/bubbling interesting content, and it unfortunately seems that my SG data is a bit corrupt, my URL has been linked to various things that aren't me.

edit note: I only resurrected this the other day, the code is awful garbage, but it is due a refactor and release soon if someone else wants to hack on it.
Pressure them to support OpenMicroBlogging..
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=18064
Yes, but my point was that it is not actually so hard to find out how to do stuff on Linux. If you can read the language, you can find the "system settings" menu - much easier than reading japanese.

"Normal" stuff that is - obviously if you have to fall back on the average Linux tutorial, download drivers and so on, it is bad. But this shouldn't happen usually. What did you do with the wireless drivers? I would have thought that if a netbook comes with Ubuntu, the proper drivers would be installed.
This begs the question... why aren't you charging a monthly fee? Too much money sloshing around in your bank account?
Wolfram Alpha: Facts at Your Fingertips
Everything You Wanted to Do With Office... But Didn't Know How
Broadcast licensing music (at the broad level that you need for a radio station) is a non-intuitive thing, and hasn't really adapted to the modern broadcast model. If you purchase a "radio" license you can play anything, but only if you follow certain conditions - like making it difficult to make perfect copies, allowing minimal amounts of fast-forwarding, and not explicitly allowing the listener to pick songs (that's why Pandora does/did all that - not just for kicks).

If you want a license that allows user choice - as in allowing you to specify which song you want to hear and then have it stream directly - it costs a hell of a lot more in licensing. Having said that, this calculation is applicable for ASCAP licensing; if you were willing to get access to less (for example, only from a specific label), you could probably get a slightly better deal.
There's a book called "Simply Scheme" that is meant to serve as an introduction to SICP. So, you could "prep" yourself for your pursuits if you first go through this book.
Good Luck,
Shubham Harnal.
[…] when Google compared search results pages with 10, 20, and 30 results per page, Mayer said the company found that putting 30 results on a page led to one-fifth fewer searches. Analyzing the data, she said that latency -- the subsecond delay caused by serving more results -- drove the decline.

"Users really care about speed," Mayer said. "They really respond to speed."

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/google/showArti...
Please do not make this a personal attack on me, one member of the community.

I argue that submitting nothing is better than submitting garbage links. Additionally, I am not bringing the site down by voting up egregious headlines.
The download url to try the software on your own server: http://code.google.com/p/sweetcron/downloads/list
Kerlikowske Says Analogy Is Counterproductive

So much for that. Maybe the title should be "Calls for end to 'War' on Drugs" as a way to emphasize that he's talking about spin, not substance.
Hey let's do some campaign to promote yours, if it's really good.