skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can we please stop cluttering the front page with every post to the google blog? If we care what google has to say, we can subscribe to the RSS feed.
First off, what jdminhbg said.

Second:
If you show him evidence that demonstrates a flaw in the current theory of evolution, he'll happily change his mind.

Given his attitude towards those with differing opinions, I'm not sure he would even get to the point of being able to see any perceived flaw. It is this arrogance that I question in him, and yes, it does equate to worship.

If you hold your opinion so highly that it prevents you from evaluating other arguments, you have moved into the realm of religious belief. IMO, Dawkins is firmly in that realm, regardless of how he got there or whether or not I hold to the same things.

What gets me even more is the seeming willingness of his followers to excuse outlandish statements like the one in my earlier post with nary so much as a comment.

At any rate, opening up your objection with three fallacies is not likely to convince anyone of your position.

That would assume that I have a) a contrary position and b) care to change anyone's mind.
How Startups Can Defeat Bigger, Stronger and Dumber Companies
Except he does rebut Dawkin's claims. Did you not read the part about not accepting Dawkin's claim that 40% of the western world does not accept evolution and instead believing in a Young Earth Creationist model?

As per the original post, it seems to me that the demonizing of Dawkin's is largely unfounded. Even though I've never met him, from what I can tell from videos and interviews, he is a fairly meek man who just writes passionately about his position. I would hardly call his position evangelical because he is neither unwilling to change his position nor is he founding his statements upon unverifiable evidence.

Just because the man is confident, doesn't mean he's an asshole.
The "secret" that cuts to the heart of the ethical imperatives of my field (and supersedes the Hippocratic Oath) is simply, "The secret of caring for the patient is in caring for the patient".

Some need the constant reminder of oaths: those for whom money is the sine qua non for giving a damn.

Hunger for discovery, compassion, and the need to create beauty, eliminate the need for oaths.
The Physics of Startups
Kudos to this dude for providing all of the details, almost all of which are embarrassing to him. That probably wasn't easy.

He also names names on companies that "helped" him.
> Yet another smug boomer with an overinflated sense of entitlement...

...who, to be fair, made a very public "mea culpa" about his failures in personal judgment when faced with the possibility of buying a house he couldn't really afford.

I don't necessarily think this article was all that appropriate for HN, but I did think it was a compelling piece, because of the insight it offered into how even otherwise-rational people could make bad decisions about credit.
That was beautiful.

Her point about code being incrementally forgotten and IBM having "no on left who understands" was well taken. I think this is where and why open source comes into play. Most programmers understand this basic fact about code that non-programmers don't.

If IBM's air traffic control system had been open source, it likely would have never gotten to the point of obsolescence it reached.
"media companies make a huge chunk of their income from buyers who lost their original copies and are forced to buy new ones."

That's new to me - is there a reference somewhere for how big a chunk this is?
Knowledge of macroeconomics != personal spending discipline
... He's trying to sell a book which makes it quite a bit easier.
When I read #31, I started crying... weird.
It was a sincere answer.
im amused that the highscalability.com domain being linked to is not responding to my web request. timed out too many times. i'll heed ulf's comment and move on. if it's that good, i'm sure it'll come up 20 more times....
Ask HN: Rate my site - FirstDrafter community library of contract forms
Perhaps it's not a matter of giving them pools but rather giving them opportunity?
$220 a month for internet, TV, phone. Cancel that in a heartbeat.

And how stupid can his wife be if she is still buying all this stuff?

These are the people who should be foreclosed on and never get a loan again. Open that house up for someone responsible
"In that case I’d expect Twitter to argue that the feature they want to remove for engineering reasons is filtering out some of the tweets you see based on whether you are a follower of the person the message is directed to not the other way around. "

That would be easier for the twitter engineers, but thats not what 97% of twitter users want. The author doesn't acknowledge this.
Is this what they are teaching in economics? That $2777/mo can magically cover a $470,000 mortgage.

No wonder we are in this mess.

"At any other time in history, the idea of someone like me borrowing more than $400,000 would have seemed insane."

Apparently at this time in history too, we just found a way to hide it for a while.
That's it, I need to track down a Neiman Marcus Kitchen Computer (or reasonable facsimile thereof).

"...she can program it to balance the family checkbook. 84A 10,600.00 complete with two week programming course..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_316
"The accusation is unfair, however. He is certainly uncompromising, but not wilfully rude or overbearing. He is generally polite, softly spoken, and precise in his statements – often taking uncomfortably long pauses to weigh up his replies to questions. He is certainly not a ranting demagogue. On the other hand, he is a ferocious debater."

If you are going to quote, you should as well include the whole statement on the issue.
The website does have some good advice on the matter:

They’re completely fake, of course, and would be illegal to use in any situation where you actually have to show ID, but for showing fake cops when they cite fake laws? Nothing more appropriate than fake ID.

So, probably not a great idea to show it to a real cop.
My point though isn't about his confidence level, but the fact that he is being arrogantly hypocritical, suggesting his detractors base arguments on logic and evidence - of which I have no argument with - but then supporting his own stance with stuff he's clearly firing off of the top of his head.

It's the arrogance that he is above error combined with the - obvious! - error itself that makes him come off as an asshole.
His other web site he mentions here:

http://tones.wolfram.com/

is just pathetic.

I wrote a jazz improvization machine 18 years ago which played more sensible music some jazz fans even kind of liked, but it was as useless as this "new kind of" crap.

Music is an abstract language we, humans, speak to express ourselves. You can't touch hearts and souls by generating random sequences within a given scale.

I hope Alpha turns out to be more useful, but good Lord, this man's narcissism case should be included in psychology textbooks.
I'm think Profit per employee of Google and Balsamiq is the same. Interesting.
Facebook’s Revenue Per Employee Is Comparable To eBay
Exactly. $700 at J Crew when they were already up to their necks in it!? We're all suffering because of people like this. Baby boomers have screwed everything up, at last they're sharing some of the pain.
IQ scores are affected by education and training, so if the US has lower IQ than European nations (a fact I have no idea if it's true) I would suspect that's because of the differences in education (where education does not just mean school). If you want to suggest there is a big genetic difference in the two populations, I think you're going to need to cite some references there before that's credible.
I get the argument against HDMI, but to insinuate that "it's all one cable" is just marketing speak is crazy. It's a legitimate and useful feature benefit - it reduces clutter and the fewer component types there are on a device, the more ports it can support. At this point, the best differentiator of most sub $3,000 HDTVs is how many HDMI ports it has and where they're located on the device.
Is this just taking the total expenses of the company and dividing by employees?

It doesn't seem right to count server costs and bandwidth (for example) as part of how expensive employees are.
> I can't stand this nimrod.

A professor at Oxford and the man who wrote The Selfish Gene, one of the best science books EVER, is many things. Nimrod is not one of them.

> Outside of the US, there is nowhere on the planet where that belief system comes close being 40% of a population.

This is patently false. Alot of europeans think this. They think this is a uniquely American problem. I have no idea where this myth comes from, but I have my suspicions: they are a victim of poor media coverage and a sense of cultural superiority.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/4410927/...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4648598.stm

39% of people in the UK chose "creationism" or "intelligent design". One in three believe the earth is under 10,000 years old. These numbers are slightly, but not substantially, higher in the US.
> those for whom money is the sine qua non for giving a damn

You mean, almost all programmers?
That was really interesting to read and I think I agree but I'd like to offer one criticism, it was really hard on the eyes with the lack of paragraphs.
My iPhone app has mostly very positive and very negative ratings.  What to do?
See:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=312424712&mt=8&uo=6

The only comments are positive ones, so it's not clear why some people didn't like this app at all. My guess is that they didn't understand it and/or didn't find it fun. Or maybe they were expecting fancy graphics and sound.

Maybe there's a way to discourage people who are not likely to give this app a high rating from trying it at all?
Give me a break, scaling Twitter is not easy. CS principles do not magically allow you to construct an optimal solution for real world engineering problems. At Twitter's volume, the tiniest bit of extra latency in some middleware or network hardware can be the bottleneck.

It's so easy to sit here and play armchair engineer and diagnose Twitter's (mostly past, btw) problems with a nauseating mix of hubris and ignorance.
Boy Scouts Train in Post-9/11 Law Enforcement Methods
In this case, though, the ID is not falsely identifying the individual. While I suppose you might get in trouble with the cards in the article -- which falsely claim they were issued by certain organizations -- I don't think there'd be anything wrong with an official-looking "photographer" ID that does not make such claims. Whether created yourself or under the aegis of a photography club, it would have the same defusing effect on fake law enforcement.

Apparently, a variety of real, non-governmental organizations already issue such passes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_pass#News_agency_cards
linux is free dude.. and runs on commodity hardware. The installation.. is a one time process, so if you sold boxes with it already installed would not be an issue, and the controls are very intuitive. Linux mce is very comparable to boxee.. something you install to use as media center software. If they can figure out boxee, I don't think mce is that far off.
Agreed. No new information here, and zip on the architecture.
> "But with her take-home income averaging only about $2,400 a month, we didn’t make enough to cover our bills because my take-home pay was going straight to the mortgage."

What the heck are you buying if $2,400 per month can't cover your expenses after the mortgage payment is taken care of?
BTW I was the one that mentioned the "bait" to Andrew, but not to bait you but rather to have others learn from your experience. I think it's important that people building a company know about liquidation preferences going in.
Poorly Made in China: Why So Many Chinese Products are Born to be Bad
I think the author's first mistake was not in taking out the subprime loan, but in entering a marriage without some kind of mutual understanding of how to manage the household finances.

One of the first things my wife and I did, after getting married (possibly even before), was to set up a budget, including line items for how much money each of us could spend without being questioned by the other.
Well written personal account of financial trouble, but I don't think this is HN material.
This is so true - all too often the problems encountered in a project were caused because someone didn't really understand what was going on under the surface.
We should all be completely embarrassed by this. It's the most ridiculously childish thing I have ever heard and it damages the reputation of the entire BitTorrent community.

With people like this leading the community, it's fate is disaster.

I am now proud to say I have never used BitTorrent. I know it's a great protocol, but it is in fact, one of the most criminal things on the internet and behavior like this is completely disgusting and morally corrupt.
> at some point consumers must take responsibility for their choices... If you know that Sony installs a rootkit, then don't buy Sony media.

Have you ever bought or rented a DVD? If so, you have subsidized DRM, the purchase of copyright extension laws, and lawsuits against P2P users.

The burden to act ethically must rest largely on programmers precisely because users are largely unable to act collectively, while media conglomerates easily unite to protect their own interests.

The Sony Rootkit fiasco is an exception, rather than the rule. Consumers would have simply rolled over and accepted it, just like they accepted every other abuse perpetrated by copyright holders in recent history, were it not for the heroic efforts of a few activists.
Use CPALead.com and get your users to complete a survey to enter a tournament or to restore their balance. You'll earn around $1 a survey and they convert extremely well. Best way to monetize USA poker visitors.
$4,000 a month in alimony and child support.

I'm glad my wife has promised that I'll only leave this marriage feet-first.

ETA: whoops, I missed the part saying those were automatically deducted. Downmod me.
You should look up the meaning of Nimrod. There is a reason it is capitalized, and it has nothing to do with how smart you are, or your individual contributions to science. In fact, being smart is a pre-requisite.

In the survey, 51 per cent of those questioned agreed with the statement that "evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages"
A further 40 per cent disagreed, while the rest said they did not know.

Turning that into "40% of people think that the earth is 6000 years old" is called twisting your statistics.

What the surveys you link to suggest is that people can accept both evolution and the existence of a god. There is no conflict there, and that doesn't turn them into young earth creationists.

In fact, Charles Darwin himself would fall firmly into that category.
As someone not familiar with divorce laws and alimony, I was shocked to read that he has to pay $4k every month for child support. That makes a $120K salary almost a $50 - 60K salary after taking into account progressive taxation.
The interesting part of their article is a trivial rehash of this one:

http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2009/05/12/the-computers-poweri...
Most 10 Weirdest Names Ever
Wow. I live in the Midwest so housing is dirt cheap compared to other places, but half a million dollars for ANY house seems insane to me, let alone this "small" one he's talking about. I don't have any sympathy for him.

I also don't understand how he could have "near perfect" credit score when he had thousands and thousands of dollars of debt with massive interest rates.

Just goes to show that your income doesn't make a whole lot of difference if you can't control your spending. I pay all my bills and save about 10% of my income making $40k a year. And I really do have a near perfect credit score.
BitTorrent is _not_ illegal, go do your homework! The BitTorrent protocol can be used for activity that is illegal in some countries. So can more or less every other traffic protocol as well.
A year with Python
You should be sending any clothes you buy to a tailor regardless of how you buy the clothes. Further, you can't buy clothes off the rack without trying them on! Skin tones are different and you really need to try the clothes on.
I agree. I have a lot more respect for quiet agnostics like Sir David Attenborough+. To the best of his knowledge, there is no God, and if there is likely God used evolution as a tool for creation. But he never insists that everyone believe it as fact, or that anyone who doesn't believe is ignorant. He simply says what he thinks is true.

+the gentleman who narrated Earth an Blue Planet, as well as the "BBC Life" nature documentary series.
> ... with a nauseating mix of hubris and ignorance.

That, and the pointing out of quite natural questions which Twitter has failed to address in its explanation of how it is acting. I mean, once you know what you are doing, being able to satisfy people asking ignorant and hubristic questions is a pretty sweet bonus.
If you had actually read my criticism you'd see that I do get what it does. I'm not faulting the design, I like it a lot, it's just that the implementation has issues that caused me to favour other schema free backends.
For co-located servers who pays the energy bill?
I wouldn't dismiss the advantages to putting audio, video and lightweight control on one cable. It does help to reduce confusion and clutter.

My issue is that the goal of HDMI wasn't moving audio and video to one cable. The goal was to add encryption so that it becomes illegal to try to record off it. (whereas it's perfectly legal to record unencrypted analog + digital signals for personal use)

The selling point to the public is a single, pretty cable to make everyone's lives better. We won't know the trap we've fallen into until years from now when we can't even buy a display _without_ an encrypted input. To make a device display anything I need to conform to an industry group to get a key to encrypt my data.

But what if the industry group doesn't like my product and denies me a key? What if it has large 'fees' to keep out small companies? So much for a small company building the next pong, atari 2600 or apple I.

So the 'single cable' is the perfect trap. It's true that today's LCD's are measured on how many HDMI ports they have. Later in life we'll be bidding for older LCD screens and projectors with analog inputs on ebay. (hopefully an exaggeration)
The Economist had an article a while back that showed that, the "American dream" notwithstanding, social mobility in the US is lower than in most European nations.

Inequality of outcome leads to inequality of opportunity because the conditions people grow up in are conditional on the income of their parents. This is especially strong in the US due to things like minimum wage being below living wage so low-income parents work several jobs and have less time to interact with their children, school funding being based on local taxes, and colleges' need-based financial aid not keeping pace with tuition increases, to name a few effects.

So people from a low-income background have the deck stacked against them. It's not that no one can make it, but it's much more difficult. And that means that the nation as a whole is not tapping into the full talent pool. People who could have started startups are instead stuck in low-wage jobs because of their background, and that's going to have a negative effect on the economy because it's not tapping into the full potential of the workforce.
Knol is one of the reasons I don't like Google. Why would they want to compete with Wikipedia?

They, like the world, should want to help Wikipedia thrive. Wikipedia is good. The enemy of good is bad, therefore google is bad.

The logic is undeniable.
My blood pressure went way up when I found out how brutally he is being raped by the alimony system. He'd be better off in a technical field where skills matter more than reputation; he could change his identity.

Assets earned during the marriage are earned by the couple and should be equitably split, but child support should be no more than 1/2 the minimum cost of raising a child (of course, if the father's not a prick, he'll contribute much more; but the govt. should not require him to) and alimony should not exist.
It's also about bad management.

I've been through office moves as well and it's obvious that this is one of those things that can kill a project or even a while company when everybody with the best of intentions starts negotiating with everybody else over where the coffee machine goes.

And there are many other examples where if you allow open negotiations it will end in ruin. It's like management 101.
CTM has my vote.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 86 – The Countdown
"After many calls, her father reported that it took him three days to close a window and that he still didn’t know how to make an @ symbol appear on the screen."

"Ms. Bryant thought it was even more of a lost cause when her mother asked for her fax number so she could send an e-mail message and then spelled out d-o-t in an e-mail address."

We laugh at this, but easily forget, "How are they supposed to know?" If someone has trouble with technology, it probably has much less to do with their age or circumstances than with our ability to satisfy their needs.

I've often thought there are gold mines out there for those of us who can simplify while providing the same value. OP posts a great example of this.
A blogger could have his blog issue himself a press id. Nothing fake there. Hey, PG could issue us all press credentials.
Are you being serious? Do you really believe I don't understand that BitTorrent is not illegal?

It is the USE of BitTorrent that is illegal or, more precisely, the majority of users of BitTorrent are using it to commit crimes and I would argue that the elimination of BitTorrent would be a net positive to the world.
great explanation of the "quality fade" phenomenon
That was taken out of his salary before he got it, the rest was going to the mortgage.
Well, I don't know you so I can only base my assumptions on what you wrote in your comment. And what you wrote looked like a very common misconception about the technology in question. So, yes, I was being serious.
His salary covered the child support/alimony, as well as the mortgage.
The next Frankenstein - A hacker in Cuba
This blog generally publishes anecdotal stories of life in Cuba. I thought this one might be of interest here. Keep in mind that it's translated from Spanish, so it could be awkwardly worded in places.

I wonder what he would have accomplished had he been born somewhere else.
On the contrary, he has said -- in The God Delusion, in TED speeches, etc. -- that he is an agnostic. He emphasizes that he believes that there is no god, but that he cannot prove it. He calls himself a "tooth-fairy agnostic". He cannot disprove a god, but thinks that a god is just as (im)probable as the tooth fairy.

So he's not being dogmatic. But he's quite clear that religious beliefs are not susceptible to logical refutation. But this means that you must make a choice: if you are going to demand that the world follow logic, you're stuck with a disbelief in a god. Conversely, if you believe in a god, you are willing to accept non-logical propositions. This is where science and religion wind up in conflict.