skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not necessarily. I've seen some of the decisions and they don't really make sense. One of the decisions was to 'protect' the children because it was possible for someone to hack their computer, steal the images, and then distribute them -- even though no such distribution had taken place, and the only reason that images came to light is because one of their cellphones was confiscated for an unrelated reason at school. The child was 'protected' against having these images distributed by being convicted of a sex crime and having to register as a sex offender... Sometimes the lack of logic makes you want to rip your hair out. The judge with the dissenting opinion said everything that I wanted to say to the majority judges. I almost want to find him and take him out for a few beers just for performing his job reasonably.

I see this as most judges using this as a way to 'make an example' of these children so that others will think twice before engaging in such action. I also believe that they are purposefully misinterpreting the laws to do so. Or maybe they just don't want to be painted politically as not 'caring about the children' or some such nonesense that other politicians/media would paint them in such a light.
They should add a black beast to the game (if there isn't one already). It would be a nice touch.
It is one thing to say facebook's current advertising isn't working.

It is another to use that fact to reach a conclusion like "It's the great lie of the internet."

I use facebook. And clock over 10 hours a day with a fb window open. According to the OP, I've bought into some type of a lie. I'm wondering what that is.

Re: revenue...give them time. I think they'll figure out. It usually takes web companies with explosive growth some time to pin down their source of $.

And offering myspace's poor management as evidence of why facebook is bad makes zero sense.

I think facebook's paypal-killer will be its source of revenue in future.
Don't try to paint everyone with such a broad brush. I posit that in America too many people are apathetic of the legal system so only the hardcore wackos get any sort of political support on social issues such as this.

But things like 'save the children' seem to me to be a modern day form of McCarthyism. If I don't support stripping sexuality from children, then I must be a pedophile and just looking to make it legal for me to have sex with children. Or else I "just don't understand" because I'm not a parent myself and all of my views are therefore discounted as if I am not really a part of the same society or even a human being at all.
Reading it depressed me because he was having such a good time.

The film (and moreso, the book) Wonderboys I think depicts young academia brilliantly, much better than Catcher. It has the crazy mentor (which I also had) which Catcher lacks.
you might also want to try qrimp.com don't need a lot of database experience and it's easy to build it then tear it down, then rebuild it until you get it right and since you don't have to write a lot of code, you don't lose all the time recoding stuff to match your data model.
If I am a modern human moving to africa, would I start eating monkeys?

Why not? What's to say they weren't already?

Why modern humans moving to europe ate neanderthals? Why not cro-magnons, australopithecus, aztecs, mayans, vikings?

- Cro-magnons are modern humans, AFAIK

- Australopithecus existed long before modern humans (millions of years), and not concurrently

- Aztecs, Mayans, and Vikings: by this point in human history social mores against cannibalism had already developed. Most European exploration was funded by theocracies.

This isn't my field, so please correct me if I'm wrong.

Did europeans eat american aborigins when they conquered america?

No, they just killed them.

Again, this is confusing an anthropologist's "modern humans" (30k years old) with a more common definition of modern humans (last 2k years). Social mores had already developed.

Just because you saw a jawbone with some marks it doesn't mean one million neanderthals had that fate.

I agree, but I didn't see that claim in the article.
Chi-square goodness-of-fit, Benford’s law, and the Iranian election
> The question was: What is the chance of being able to find exactly 2 tests

Sure thing. That's:

(30 choose 2) * (.95^28) * (.05^2)

= 0.258636738

I thought you meant "at least two tests", for obvious reasons. (If 4 tests showed vote rigging, the researchers would still report vote rigging...)

> (and does that mean less than or equal to 5%?)

Yes.
If you happen to be into finance you can check out http://www.newmogul.com/

It's based on the same code as HN and run by nickb (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb)
Yeah, so thats a good niche for it.
At the institute where I work, we're sequencing H1N1 isolates from (IIRC) fifty UK patients. There are also emergency plans to start sequencing flu samples on a massive scale if it turns into a major epidemic. I would be astonished if large sequencing centres in other countries were not doing similar things.

In other words: yes you're right, and it's already being done.
Not sure i understand your question correctly. For our case, i just started it with a long-time friend of mine. I did talk some part of it in our blog. Maybe you can find it relevant in addressing your question. http://blog.blindoptimists.com/2009/01/23/hello-world/
Joe (Joe's Own Editor) which IMO has better on screen help than pico/nano.

Although if the app is well designed, a GUI editor should be entirely keyboard controlled as well. Hit alt-f(ile) or alt-e(dit) in whatever text editor came with the install. If that works, find out how to disable the button bar to free up that screen real estate.
Firefox changed the way people perceive browsers. I don't know how much I trust the recorded sampling.
Adaptive sampling and timed adversaries
Having read Catcher in the Rye later in life (in my 20s rather than as a teenager) and rather enjoying it, I find this interesting.

I do think the millennials are more integrated into society than the Gen Xers or earlier Gen Ys who were more interested in rebelling. It will be interesting to see how this plays out as the millennials come of age.
I can see a Ubuntu Scientology Edition coming.

Albeit a Windows version would be far more appropriate.
The Road less Traded
> A worrying argument: what happens when her images make their way onto the CP networks and some crazy person decides he is madly in love and tracks her down (yes, this does happen).

She doesn't need nude pictures on a 'child porn network' for something like that to happen. Plain-clothes pictures of herself on a Facebook/MySpace page the is public could be enough. So I hardly see how this makes it an offense worth destroying the rest of someone's life over.
I really like Nuclear Phynance:

http://www.nuclearphynance.com

A lot of high-caliber people in there.
Past Discussions (search for more):

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=576677

- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199103

Suggestions:

- http://similicio.us/search.php?url=news.ycombinator.com&...

- I was also going to suggest stackoverflow.com, but you got that down

- http://episteme.arstechnica.com/

Usual hacker suggestions (not necessarily communities):

- http://research.google.com/video.html (Google Talks)

- http://www.ted.com/

- http://lwn.net/ (Linux Weekly News)

- etc.
The kids who show up in this article are framed to sound callow and shallow. I'm suspicious. I want to hear more from them directly.

What does it say about the author of this piece, and her generation, that she seems to think teens (and the rest of us) should want to be miserable? Hell, I can't prove that we shouldn't, but that's no reason to assume it.
It's depressing to see Catcher In The Rye continually misinterpreted. Salinger's fault for being so obscure, perhaps, but I blame English teachers for not explaining the book well.

The "Catcher In The Rye" is a snippet Holden Caulfield mishears from a poem about two children growing up and having sex. He thinks it's about catching children who are falling out of the field, protecting people from growing up, when in fact it's the opposite. His sister points this out to him when he takes her from their home.

The point of Catcher is that Holden is wrong. He thinks he's being bold and brave and telling the truth and rebelling, when in fact he's too young to know anything. The moral is supposed to be that we all make mistakes and think we're the heroes, but that eventually we all grow up.

But that's not taught anymore, so instead we have a bunch of whiny kids idolizing that book and a bunch of people who ought to appreciate it all thinking it's whiny. Salinger's better than he's given credit for. Again I blame schools.
Cro mangnons are an example of early modern humans, though may or may not be members of H. sapiens sapiens.

Reading the article, it sounds like Dr. Rozzi had an answer in search of a question.
Maybe some anachronisms slipped, let me try to explain my thoughts again:

Gorillas don't eat monkeys and monkeys don't eat chimpanzees.

Lions don't eat tigers, tigers don't eat leopards.

Maybe it is written in all species DNA not to eat themselves or their close relatives.

(Yes, they can kill each other, mating, male supremacy, territories, etc, but not "eat" each other)

Just a thought.
I'd be worried if Harry Potter was replacing Holden, but the two can stand proudly side-by-side. The alienation in Harry Potter may not be as overwhelming as it is in Catcher, but it's probably even more pervasive in how it illustrates the world as a relatively amoral place where few people care about others for the sake of caring. The Goblet of Fire marked a moment when a whole generation of kids suddenly got a lot older.
Even BEFORE you turn 18. There are cases of <18 yo kids being tried as adults for 'possessing', 'producing' or 'distributing' child pornography. Even the girl who takes the pictures of herself is not safe from this sort of legal system madness.
I'm pretty sure they sell "e-mail typewriters" for this - a typewriter that you hook up to an e-mail account, and you can see emails come in on it and you can type them back out - and that's it.

If not, it can't be hard to customize a linux distribution to do that.

EDIT: Or get a typewriter & a fax machine with your fax2email number on speed-dial.
It wasn't a Bible quotation. It was pretty specific and relevant to his time period. I'll try to find it but I haven't had success yet; apologies.
I just read this book for the first time, in my American Literature class, and as my fellow peers read it, I heard them remark that Holden was "annoying and whiny."

Personally, having looked up a lot of the symbolism in the novel on my own, I truly enjoy <em>Catcher</em> and all the life lessons it teaches. I, at times, related to Holden, even through all his inconsistencies and flaws. It's an excellent book and I hope teachers understand how to teach it better at their "work"shops.
Could be, although I and many others have difficulty telling apart Satanists-in-jest vs. Satanists-in-earnest; so the need for scare quotes in the original is debatable.
Objectivism is terrific in a few ways. I still reread The Fountainhead once or twice a year. But the more you learn of it the shallower it becomes. The Fountainhead works because it's an incredibly contained world; Roark is essentially a loner. But Rand makes that out to be some ideal in and of itself. In truth, lots of brilliant people are radically social, and have had convoluted lives entirely unlike the straight path Roark takes. If you ignore that, and ignore the biological imperatives that explain it, then you're creating a fantastic type of human that doesn't really exist, and in some ways you belittle the people that Rand drew inspiration from to create Roark.
I'm just wondering, if I ate a Chimpanzee would it be considered cannibalism? I'm not sure H. Sapiens sapiens eating H. Neanderthalensis is much different from H. Sapiens sapiens eating Pan troglodytes.

Also, I'm not clear on whether the stigma against cannibalism is mainly based on social pressure or stems from our biological programming.
Oh thanks! I suck for missing that...

Code for above:

d <- read.csv(file='~/stuff/earlh/Iran_2009.csv', header=T, sep=',')

lastDigit <- function(v){
v - 10*floor(v/10)
}

digits <- lastDigit( c(d$Ahmadinejad, d$Karroubi, d$Mousavi, d$Rezaee))
hist(digits, breaks=10)

#chi2 gof
tab <- table(digits)
n <- length(digits)

model <- chisq.test(x=tab, p=rep(0.1, 10))
model

# hand generated -- check our work above
ts <- 0
for(i in 1:length(tab)){
ts <- ts + ( tab[[i]] - 0.1*n)^2 / (0.1*n)
}
qchisq(p=1-0.076, df=9)
i like the logical separation of the page using light colors. I think, although you may be tempted to add more rows to the "top tutors", it looks good as is at the moment - may be couple of rows more. The pound sign beside the top-tutors is very 'diggy'. may be small image size? may be you should think those rows in terms of reddit-like than digg.

..and could you share your web-framework/db/architecture details?
I'm very hesitant to support any attempt of government to regulate the content of the internet. I think, on the whole, that the internet is best served as a sort of information anarchy. It's really the ultimate example of truly free speech (even when it's illegal).

Of course, people will always be lied to, misled, and outright deceived. But, let people build their own defenses against that. On the whole, I think it's better to keep government as far away from the internet as possible.
You're not allowed to love free source and also love incredibly beautiful closed-source devices?

I didn't know GNU was an us-or-them system; sounds a bit closed-minded to me.
No. I didn't say anything about the quality of USENET, old or new, in my post.
Every single time this is posted I read it and it is still as good as I remember. Thank you for reposting this, volodia.
Wow -- incanter looks terrible. All that code to run a chi2 test and a plot?
The BBC is the Uk equivalent of NRk and I really wish that the scales would fall from their eyes and they'd get on with this kind of stuff. They currently do a little bit of this, and have the online iPlayer, but it's a pretty closed DRM'd platform.
I would seem to be inevitable for publicly funded broadcasters to go this way with their own content - after all, their citizens have already payed for it, so they should have the right's to it; it's just a matter of time.
I find that it helps if you distance yourself from your account somewhat. When I posted under an account related to my name and my activities, I felt pressured to think and act a certain way and I monitored my karma a bit closely. Using a blank-name account stopped me from worrying so much.
Well, the one thing that motivates me to come back to entrepreneurship despite some past failures is simply the fact that,

There is a future in working for yourself. If your plan succeeds, you own your destiny and with it comes financial independence.

What is really the future for an employee? If the business goes south, you are laid off. If you work really hard you get promoted and make a little more. Hardly a recipe for financial independence.

Of course that's oversimplification, but the payoff in entrepreneurship is highly gratifying and motivating.
Stick to sites that use flat displays rather than threads. Threading almost always leads to crap. Flat displays have disadvantages but the linearity of the conversation leads to there being some focus in the community.

Metafilter and SomethingAwful are my two drugs of choice. I'd argue that SA's community is better than this one overall, though it's not as focused. It's also good for promotion: A company I did some work for used SA to launch their product and got a few thousand sign-ups, though they had a damned good piece of software to launch with. Metafilter's got ups and downs, but its community is terrific.
You should probably do it in US dollars rather than British sterling.

Firstly because more people know dollars, but also because it's a higher number, which I'd think would attract more answers; £10 vs $16…only to Britons would they seem the same amount.
I want to know about friends I may have missed.

Specifically: Friends of mine's friends who are following me and I'm not following them back. (Defining "friend" as a reciprocal follow relationship)
If you have no db experience, it seems likely that actually your idea does not require that complicated of a database. Why don't you post more specifics and HNers can see if there's an easy solution.
Iran's Web Spying Aided By Western Technology
>I have a business idea, which will require a non-trivial database.

Non-trivial. So that's almost certainly not a relation db. Probably something really scalable like Tokyo Cabinet or Berkeley DB.
The plots and chi-square tests are a single function each, it's the data preparation that takes up so much space. Alas, most statistical analyses involve a lot of preparatory steps, which are rarely shown in the final write-up.
Bloggers getting paid is a big problem, but journalists married to the folks they're covering is no big deal.
Checklist For Frankfort Storage
There are many public self storage facilities in Frankfort, so you really do not need to hurry your packing even if there is a steady rise in the number of people using storage spaces.
Since I recently did something similar in R:

d <- read.csv(file='~/stuff/earlh/Iran_2009.csv', header=T, sep=',')

lastDigit <- function(v){
v - 10*floor(v/10)
}

digits <- lastDigit( c(d$Ahmadinejad, d$Karroubi, d$Mousavi, d$Rezaee))
hist(digits, breaks=10)

#chi2 gof
tab <- table(digits)
n <- length(digits)

model <- chisq.test(x=tab, p=rep(0.1, 10))
model

# hand generated -- check our work above
ts <- 0
for(i in 1:length(tab)){
ts <- ts + ( tab[[i]] - 0.1*n)^2 / (0.1*n)
}
qchisq(p=1-0.076, df=9)

and to be more specific:

(def regions (sel votes :cols "Region"))
(def ahmadinejad-votes (sel votes :cols "Ahmadinejad"))
(def mousavi-votes (sel votes :cols "Mousavi"))
(def rezai-votes (sel votes :cols "Rezai"))
(def karrubi-votes (sel votes :cols "Karrubi"))
# -or-
attach(d)

(def ahmadinejad (map first-digit ahmadinejad-votes))
(def mousavi (map first-digit mousavi-votes))
(def rezai (map first-digit rezai-votes))
(def karrubi (map first-digit karrubi-votes))
# -or-
digits <- lastDigit( c(d$Ahmadinejad, d$Karroubi, d$Mousavi, d$Rezaee)) # not even attached -- could drop d$

etc. While it's obviously a matter of taste, it looks horridly verbose.
Why use this when I can type my question into Google and get ranked answers from answers.com?

But I do like the design and interface, a lot.
Read the article and I just have to say - oh, wow, religiously branded Operating Systems.

Am I the only one here who thinks this is taking stupid to a completely new level?
If they are really satanists, they aren't talking it seriously.
Fort Worth Lawyer
David E. Cook Attorney at Law is an experienced criminal defense lawyer specializing in DWI’s in the Fort Worth, Texas area.
So, those of us with the mutation that causes lungs to ignore the H5 port would have a better chance of surviving an Avian flu infection, whereas as those of us that open port H5 on the lungs have no chance to survive make your time / all your base pairs are belong to H5N1.
> I have a business idea, which will require a non-trivial database.

Non-trivial in what sense?

If it's non-trivial in size and you're worried about scaling, just build the simplest thing that will provide the desired functionality and start shipping.

Why? Because you'll have money to solve scaling problems before the db stops working because it has gotten too big.

Customers and money are the solution to most problems.
This just isn't true. Not only is cannibalism somewhat common amongst the animal kingdom, there's nothing to support the idea that animals don't eat species that are similar. Lions, tigers, and chimpanzees all eat other members of their own species on occasion.

However, cannibalism, and to a lesser extent eating similar species, does present problems beyond simply depleting the gene pool. For instance, the chance of contracting a disease from your meal is much higher if its a similar animal (likely to be susceptible to the same pathogens).

I think the point Dr. Rozzi is making is that although we like to think humans are deviant from other species in this way, there is evidence to the contrary.

(BTW, lions don't eat tigers because tigers are 2x as large, and they don't coexist outside zoos. I get your point, but couldn't resist :-)
Postal Microscopical Society
Worse, the lorem ipsum isn't aligned with the rest of the elements on the page. ;) It isn't even doing its job!

Also: your teachers have areas of "expetise". Normally I strive not to flame people's spelling, but when you're building a site to sell expertise to people...
I'm not going to defend Naggum's online style, but for God's sake, the man just died and he probably isn't even in the ground yet. There was plenty of time for a meta-debate regarding netiquette while he was active on Usenet, and there will be plenty of time for retrospectives on the subject in the future. This week, though--if not for Naggum's own sake, then for the sake of his grieving friends and relatives--can we just take a break from the subject?
Same with the "News" page.
Heh. Because the answers that come back from answers.com won't be the answers to your specific homework problems. ;)

Or has Google gotten that good, while I wasn't looking?

[attempts to cut and paste equation from a question into Google to see what comes back]

Um, is there a reason why I can't select the text of a question on this site we're reviewing? Is this a bug, or is it some sort of "feature" that just happens to drive me right up the wall?

Anyway, the answer is: there really are a hell of a lot of pre-solved equations out there in the Google database. So maybe you're right. But I suspect that, even if the answer is out there in Google, there's still value in the service of locating that answer and presenting it to the questioner on a doily.
> Gorillas don't eat monkeys and monkeys don't eat chimpanzees.

Maybe so, but people eat all of the above. The relevant term is "bushmeat".
The last time this type of thing came up (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=606801) I decided to use it to help me learn some shell scripting:

join <(twidge lsfollowing | sort) <(twidge lsfollowers | sort) -v 1

I tried using diff and reducing the sorts but couldn't make it clean. I am a beginner. Any suggestions?
So, this really gives new meaning to "Heroin Chic."
Something can be arbitrary and still worthwhile.
As a millennial (born 1988) I enjoyed the book but I was unhappy that we couldn't finish the book in class for some reason (time constraints?). I want to rebel against some of my parents values but I am primarily more concerned about getting a college degree and integrating into society.
Right, that's why I said digits. The law pretty much says "uniform" for the last digits, like this article.
Your right, my teacher didn't tell us this interpretation in my school. The book makes more sense now.
Richard Dawkins has a quote along the lines of, "Why do we have to look at a beautiful planet and demand a reason behind its being here? Can't we appreciate it for what it is?"

So it is with life. Perhaps in the long run we'll all be dead and the universe will cave in, but in the meantime the things we do and say matter, and there is beauty in the world to appreciate. So I went to the boardwalk with my father and brother and we all had a terrific time, and having a good time was reason in itself to do it.

Once you give up the religious/gamers' view that everything you do has a score, you can appreciate things for what they are rather than for any ultimate result.
It's still faster for me to follow @duckduckgo, DM, and then unfollow.
Remind HN: Meaningless sniping may be useful on other sites, but here we all try and contribute to the discussion.