skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There'd be no point to it, at least for this kind of breaking out of normal behavior. By "point", I mean the kinds of things I've done at IE events are not the kinds of things that would be enjoyable to do alone. Compare it to going to a pro football game -- it's fun! But you can't recreate that experience on your own, as touch football in your backyard isn't the same.

Of course, I'm not arguing for following the crowd blindly.
Alpharetta Child Custody
Alpharetta Child Custody
Arrogance of Socrates made a compelling case for his death
Haha, great resume...
The Pirate Party has been around in Sweden for a few years already:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party

Interestingly, in my own district of Berlin, probably the most left-leaning in Germany, they also polled at 3.4%, whereas the chancellor's party (Christian Democrats) only polled at 9%.

This isn't so much about the Pirate Bay as something that's been brewing for a while already. This was, in some senses, just a tipping point for the group as they'll now have a voice outside of Sweden.

To my mind this is similar to the ascendency of the The Greens in the 80s as they landed in their first positions of real influence. The particularly interesting thing there is that the effect of real power was an increasing pragmatism at pushing the original core agenda; I wouldn't be surprised if we see something similar evolving in the Pirate Party in the coming years.
The point is that the one day they were above yahoo is also the one day they launched, and got everyone trying it for the first time and tons of launch-day media coverage. The number could be 100% accurate, it still doesn't mean much.
Roger Federer wins french open men's final 2009
I highly doubt this will make them very much money. Given the manpower necessary to verify accounts.
Several years of lawyer work for this kind of award? It sounds too much for me. That's like 1.9 million for building a web form.
>I'm curious about the distinction between Big Brother and large-scale logging/filtering/monitoring in electronic systems without court orders by the government. Maybe I've misunderstood the term "Big Brother"?

Well, the distinction I'm making is between keeping logs/records and abusing those logs in order to infringe on other civil liberties, a la Big Brother in 1984. What was evil about Big Brother was not the monitoring/recording, but how it was used. I know some disagree with me on this, but I do think there's a distinction.
I just downloaded Zotero in response to this lawsuit. It's good stuff, very handy and minimally obtrusive, but plenty of functionality when you want it. That's the way to make software these days: minimal learning curve, and fitting into people's pre-existing habits.
I don't disagree with the class member award, but if this is the expected outcome, why go forward with the case at all unless it's just a way to fund your legal practice? That's what bothers me.
I have a feeling that the owner is trying something else out. A free email list with heavy advertising for the ebook.

If you look at the FAQ it talks about an ebook:

"1. I have been trying for days to get the training e-book but I keep getting error messages stating that the site is either unavailable or cannot be found. . How do I report such a site error? :"

http://www.parrotsecrets.com/FAQ-parrot.php
In other words, they believe in creationism just because the Bible and their church say so, but they try to make it sound scientifical for their propaganda. Science has a hard-earned cachet that comes from many years of delivering the goods, and creationists would like to co-opt that.
Given how much MS will be spending on advertising, everyone will probably know about it anyway.

An obvious thing for Google to say (if true): Google researchers have evaluated Bing results and have found them to be inferior.
Thanks for all the feedback, Dave.

I just deployed a bunch of updates that address the bugs you found -- yeah... I'll confess... they were bugs :)
Playing devil's advocate: perhaps it seems wasteful in isolation, but if it were not for running the risk of owing many times the actual damages worth of attorneys' fees, companies would be able to screw large groups of people for small sums with impunity.
OK, to be honest I've been looking for someone to actually debate this with.

First of all, "proxy for efficiency" is my own terminology and seems quite sensible to me. We talk about productivity in terms of GDP per capita. Implicit in that is the assumption that money is its own value, which it isn't - money is at best a marker of value. But we reward people with the marker, not the value.

Second, your point of money being more efficient than other goods as a unit of value doesn't go anywhere. It does not get at the point Eisenstein presents, which is that the concept of trade exists because of ownership of scarce resources. If nobody owns anything, trade is nonsense.

Third, the Eisenstein thesis doesn't mention interest. Negative interest is mentioned in the form of demurrage in one of his closing chapters, as another way to define money. But his overall thesis is non-economic: that we have set ourselves up, in a variety of ways, to battle against nature and against each other. "Separation of self" is the term he uses, along with a variety of colorful New-Agey terms. I'm focused on the economic points in part because I hold a B.A. in economics myself, and there are some solid points made about economic systems outside our mainstream viewpoint - particularly with respect to prehistoric gift economies.

Your claim that the current wave of technology - by which you presumably mean online communications - was driven by monetizing efficiencies....that one seems a bit faulty. The Internet started as a military/academic project, not as an attempt to build a consumer market. As well, most open source software isn't built with a monetization in mind, but rather is a way for others to reduce their costs. In general the market doesn't build the technology, the market commercializes the technology after it becomes self-evident. The reason we have zillions of web startups is that the web still has so many new concepts to explore that everyone can be a do-gooder and monetize at the same time. The fact that a lot of people aren't monetizing the things they do online(for example, HN being free and user-driven) is the interesting part. That's a huge reversal of so much of history.

Your statement of technology not giving power to individuals seems incredibly wrong. The Industrial Revolution was organization-driven, but our current revolution, whatever you might call it, is acting to take apart organizations. Blogs vs. newspapers. Social media vs. mass media. Central office vs. virtual office.
is there a backstory here? some context would be nice..
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=516215
A single example of twins who are similar proves nothing. I've personally met identical twins who couldn't be more unlike each other - which is no more evidence than the single case (case study, anecdote, they mean the same thing) you cite.

The author works as a professor of statistics, and his work is specifically in the field of uncovering the latent variables which underly human achievement. His arguments seem cogent and clear to me. Just because he comes to different conclusions from you does not mean he "has an axe to grind", which is a purely ad hominem accusation. Where do you think he makes a mistake?
So, uh, how do we scan our books then? I've got way too many dead trees in my house.
If you subscribe to the free emails, you'll eventually get this link:

http://www.parrotsecrets.com/Parrot/index1.php?page=training...

On that page you can buy the ebook set for $40.
Edit: It might be worthwhile visiting a post written by Tom Chance 6 days ago, http://tom.acrewoods.net/blog/2009/jun/european-parliament-e... , or visiting the The Green Party of England and Wales's extensive policies: http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/mfss/mfssec.html#EC990

* * *

The Green Party of England and Wales also support file-sharing, taken from a news item on the Green Party's own website [ref: http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/3496.html].

"The Green Party condemns these as 'draconian measures' and warns they would harm the quality of life of vulnerable people who use shared internet connections and are likely to be targeted as suspects. The party also argues that a healthy music industry, less dependent on corporate power, can continue to thrive without attacking people's rights to share content...

"Draconian measures won't stem that loss. The speed and ease of file-transfer makes it an increasingly attractive option compared to conventional shopping. It's the difference between pressing a button and going out to get the bus to the nearest music shop. If the music industry ever hopes to compete with that convenience, it needs to develop both legal and fair means of sharing files.

Record companies typically want to develop software along the lines of iTunes; a monopoly where individuals sign up and pay to legally share music. That's clearly unsatisfactory. The money collected won't find its way to musicians - the companies' typical charge against filesharing." (Tom Chance, the party's Intellectual Property Spokesperson)
Well look at the opposite side of the coin, what if Google researchers do evaluate Bing results and don't find them to be inferior. Google internal documents have been leaked before...

... I think it's better to just leave that Pandora's Box unopened and let your search results and positive image speak for itself.
Don't you mean $79?
They have an AFFILIATE program for the ebook.

http://www.parrotsecrets.com/affiliates.php

I'm pretty sure they still sell it.
Reminds me of a quote that was on the iGoogle page just a few days ago:

The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect. -- Esther Dyson

We're only just starting to find ways to connect over the internet. I suspect that there will only be more examples of things like IE as connectivity spreads.
Ordinary networking attacks could work if the system in question uses EOP (ethernet over power).
sorry, figured it was infamous by now. I think there was someone about it on the front page of HN for about a week ...
I wonder why he's trying something else out? If he's making 1000's per week, why change it up so much?
The author is using machine learning and multivariate testing as straw men.

No matter how much multivariate testing you do to optimize your "copy, size, color, font and placement of data fields; the format and text of buttons; the flow of pages", in order to get millions of users to sign up, you still have to a) Get millions of users to your web page b) At least appear to offer something they think may be valuable. Millions of people won't sign up for free TPS reports no matter how well you design your site.

What's more, if the number of "accounts" was the metric everyone used to judge companies, MySpace would be hot hot hot. Active accounts have to be considered and their definition obviously matters.

The author's last argument is the only one that I find to be strong: First spend time building a great product and then focus on optimizing things like font size using multivariate testing. When you build something people want, any traction you get is there to stay.
Or, it's an especially clever insult, since it'll only matter to those he insults.
I made this simple Perl CGI several years ago for generating ASCII art websites: http://tastytronic.net/asciiweb/

There are links on that site that direct to other sites using the same engine.
But it has $137.17 worth of bonuses included (it's a special offer for today only) so they actually pay you $57.22 to buy it!!!
Django Admin actions
Lets text here, and get points! I have a more immediate commitment, I have to modify the general wordpress theme to fit a non profits future website. Do you want to dissect wordpess online together? I'm a newbie on wordpress.
With all due respect, who cares if they've changed course?
So, why do people care so much about IQ in the first place? If it determines your success, then it doesn't matter what you do, you might as well learn what you are passionate about. If it doesn't, then you should learn what you are passionate about since that'll raise your IQ...

The real issue is that people think success is a determiner of human worth. So, if people are inherently less capable of being successful than others, they think they are inherently less of a human. The IQ debate is really a debate about what determines human worth.
Maybe next year. There's too much anger among developers about the App Store bullshit — not the store itself, but the stupid hoops Apple has made developers jump through to get listed there. (See Gruber's recent http://daringfireball.net/2009/05/diary_of_an_app_store_revi... for a taste of the development community's feelings about the App Store.)

My take: If they want to build an App Store for Mac, this year's WWDC keynote will include a quick reference to something like 'streamlining' or 'expediting' the process — just enough to let people know they're aware of the problem and have some interest in fixing it. And then if they do fix it, they can announce the Mac App Store at next year's WWDC to rousing cheers.
Yes, I generally agree that it would be theoretically possible to do a separated at birth identical twin study. In practice, the requirements are so stringent that they've never (to my knowledge) been met.

The setup you describe could indeed separate genetic/genetic+environment feedback component from the purely environmental component. Albeit with caveats:

- Identical twins given up for adoption and then separated at birth are probably not drawn at random from the population.

- You can't draw any conclusions at all about which genetic variance is causing the issue, unless you restrict the demographic cross sections. So it can't possibly give you evidence that one race has a higher average IQ, for example.

- The conclusions you draw may be much more about environmental feedback than genetics - maybe with a different environment, the differences will go away. For example, maybe you've found genes that code for susceptibility to iodine deficiency, and your society hasn't discovered iodized salt yet. In that case it's hard to say that you've determined the degree to which intelligence is "genetic" except in the most general sense.

In practice, locating identical twins separated at birth is hard. Finding a representative sample of them across demographic mix is harder. Doing it again for fraternal twins to control for womb environment makes it yet more work. I'm not sure how you control for the fact that the identical twins who are given up and then separated at birth are probably a different population from random adoptees, but I don't doubt with sufficient cleverness it could be done. The problem is that real twin studies almost always fail to control all these factors, and failing to control even one factor dooms your entire experiment.
The Pirate Party has limited information in English and I know it can be hard to understand what they really stand for. So I compiled a summery of their program. Keep in mind that this is only a summery and mostly only says what they stand for and not why they stand for it. This is also not an official document.

The Pirate Party’s cornerstones are; the right to privacy, culture must be open/free and that patents and private monopolies hurt society.

Privacy:
Secrecy of letters should apply to all forms of communication, including digital.
No data retention and no surveillance without substantial prior crime suspicion.
No anti-terrorism legislation, current legislation is sufficient. New legislation risk being used as a tool of oppression.
The individuals right to control ones own personal information must be strengthened.
Respect for human rights without exceptions.

Freedom of information:
Swedish freedom of information laws, access to government documents and communications, should be applied to the EU.
All government archives and documents should be available in open formats.
Use of open formats and open source in the public sector, including schools, should be encouraged.

Open culture:
Copyright should be reasonable, balanced and with societies best in mind.
The copyright holder’s commercial monopoly should be limited to five years.
You should have the right to remix copyrighted works, with some clearly stated exceptions.
All non-commercial distribution, consumption and remixing of copyrighted and non-copyrighted works should be legal and encouraged.
Trademarks should be kept.

Private monopolies:
The successive removal of all patents, including software and medical patents.
Patents force scientists to keep research findings secret instead of sharing them.
Competition should be based on innovation, consumer benefit, and quality.
Tom Watson's right. If the MPAA/RIAA/IFPI continue to push for bad new laws, such as the ACTA treaty or 3-strikes, they will find Pirate Parties getting significant numbers of votes across Europe. And once that happens, mainstream parties will start copying PP policies in order to woo back the voters.

In other words, the content corporations have probably lost the ability to take away our Internet from us, or impose any new restrictions on digital technology, throughout the EU. And there may be a rolling back of existing restrictions, such as the ban on circumventing DRM.
I think we're in total agreement. Libertarians share platforms with both the left and the right; we call them "left-libertarians" when they find themselves mostly voting in alignment with the left, and "right-libertarians" when they find themselves mostly voting in agreement with the right.

European libertarians, coming from the background you describe, much more often find themselves on the left than the right.
The Morality And Effectiveness Of Process Journalism
31 paragraphs detail the men who tried and died, while the last 13 paragraphs are more positive, detailing a group of men who tried and lived. I'm not clear how you feel that he is paying disproportionate attention to courageous success. That he wanted to end the article on a positive note meets my approval if not yours. Frankly, I needed a little uplift after those first 31 paragraphs.
There seems to be a "time-limited" 50% discount which is always available, so it ends up being $40.
He recounted case studies in which identical twins who had never even met each other both had the same proffession, favorite hobby and even shared odd habits

n = ?

Where are these studies published? (That is, what is the primary source for observations of the twins by researchers who met them personally?)

A lot of these gee-whiz stories, I fear, expand in the telling. What was documented as the twins were directly observed by researchers? Which twins? Where?
Ask HN: are non-compete agreements just for suckers?
I hear of a lot of people who are asked to sign non-compete agreements successfully requesting to have them taken out without too much argument. Is this a common thing? Are there that many companies out there that will put them in the contract hoping that employees won't notice?
This is correct. After the article was submitted, I went to the University of Minnesota main library (Wilson Library) and Bio-Medical Library to look up monographs on IQ and on human genetics. Adoption agencies, as one widely used genetics textbook notes, have taken care to place separated twins in matched, similar environments, so a study of identical twins reared apart still tends to understand the influence of environment on the development of most human traits.
Ask YC: Do You Use Metasearch Engines?
The blind results from Bing/Yahoo/Google left me scratching my head. The subtle differences between the results sparked my interest in metasearch engines.

Have you used any metasearch engines? What was your experience?
Still, it is good that the OP is questioning the accuracy of information previously discussed on this site.
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As long as your twins and twin-like pairs have the same demographic mix, you have an adequate sample.

Proof of this statement? There are mathematical definitions of what size of sample is "adequate" for given effect sizes. (What are the effect sizes of some of the differences in IQ we are talking about here, and how do they compare to error of estimation in the most reliable brands of IQ tests?)

It may be the case that most twin studies are performed badly.

That would definitely be an important matter to look at.
Are you an accredited/qualified investor?

I recall you have to have a fairly large non-home kitty to be able to actually invest in companies. Something like $1m in savings or > $200k/yr income. Ask your lawyer.
The IQ debate is really a debate about what determines human worth.

I think you are on to something.
Yeah. I'm close to saying no to further convertible notes.
Yes, some kinds of competition are good e.g. products competing for market share. However, even here, comparative advantage (specialising and creating a niche) seems to promote survival more reliably than competitive advantage.

The issue is over where one directs creativity. Asking "Am I the best astronaut in the world?", for example, is less fruitful than searching for the neatest way is ensure all space tools are returned to the space station.
Ugh, the post decries valid SSL certs as meaningless. Thanks for contributing to the problem.
In my experience (IANAL etc.): If you're being hired solely for your expertise &/or experience, there should not be a non-compete clause in your contract. If you are expecting to some extent to be trained in an emerging field then a non-compete clause may be justified.
Juristiction plays it's part too - I've 'agreed' to such a clause in the past knowing that it was unenforcable as restraint-of-trade under EU legislation.
It also speaks volumes when a company would rather direct resources towards litigation instead of innovation. Engineers tend to be cheaper than lawyers and legal maneuvering will only delay the demise of an inferior product temporarily.
The actual problem is not credentialism per se, but legal credentialing requirements that are pushed by the professional lobbies for the purpose of creating artificial barriers to entry.

For instance, lawyers used to be able to pass the bar and become a lawyer by simply self-studying and passing the tests. The bar associations wanted to raise the barriers to entry to the profession, so they passed laws requiring a Law school degree. Students then started taking correspondence courses. The bar associations then changed the accreditation rules to mandate a minimum amount of classroom face time. These artificial credentialing laws ended up hurting the poor. Because before a student could study with books from a library card and become a lawyer. Now he must pay a very expensive tuition bill. Also, the artificial barriers to entry drive up wages for the credentialed professions, which means everyone has to pay more for doctors, legal help, etc.

Something like 30% of all jobs in the United States now have a legal credentialing requirement. Other companies are forced to use college attendance as a proxy for IQ tests, simply because the Supreme Court made it illegal to use IQ tests in hiring.
On Trolls.
it's only used because it's a legal way to keep minorities out of the workforce.

Evidence? I've never heard anyone who does hiring say anything like that, not even in private late night conversations after many libations.
As far as I know, they're not enforceable (at least not in Canada). I would take it as a warning sign that the company has some d*ckhead lawyers running around without adult supervision.