skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're right, the problem with anecdotes is that they are told as innocent stories, but often serve a higher purpose, intentional or not. This one is no diffferent in that regard. An anecdote is usually written to convey a truth, a mindset or a "right way" to the reader. This is how religion gets many of its points across to the reader. It's also how a lot of racism works (I know this black guy/eskimo/Indian that never works, they're all like that) And the reader, unless he has an analytical mind which many don't, will perceive that truth or right to be exactly that.

No proof required.
It's also strange that Gates had to buy the tapes at all. I would have assumed that the BBC had an ongoing digitization program to make material languishing in their archives freely available, and that anyone who wanted to speed a particular video through the process could simply donate the costs plus a little extra. That would have been a lot simpler for Bill Gates than buying the rights and handling everything himself, so I guess there is no such program.

Or, on the other hand, maybe there was no practical reason for buying the rights. Maybe Bill Gates bought the rights as an IP art collector, like someone who buys a Picasso just for the pride of owning it.
I think this post deserves some explanation.

The purpose is NOT to start a political debate. If you want to debate, please do not comment.

The purpose was for all the other Americans on here to read a foreign editorial about our country which we normally could not read because it is not in English. Sometimes it is interesting to see how other people view your ideas and theories. I think it says more about the observer than the observed, but that's a topic for another day.

I posted this link a year or two ago, but I thought it deserved a redux for all the noobs. If you'd like to read translated foreign editorials, try the Watching America site http://watchingamerica.com/News/ (I have no interest in the site besides just being a fan) I usually scan it each day as part of my news/commentary read.
Yes.

Politicians have a lot of vision, but little commitment.

We would have not went to the moon in the 1960s without the cold war.
The very energetic high-energy particles are less of a problem. They tend to pass straight through and cause relatively little damage. The critical danger comes from cascades of low energy secondary particles causing much greater damage to genes.

The people pushing for more sophisticated radiation shielding than tanks of water are hoping to get funded to build that stuff. It's unnecessary.

Again, the lethality rate for Mars transit is about the same as picking up a bad smoking habit. Acceptable for early explorers and initial colonists, and actually an argument for settling Mars as soon as possible. (Many people already know these risks, and they still want to go! Once you have a native workforce living up there with a local infrastructure, the risks are minimized because the resources for shielding form radiation are also more available.)

We are not going to mars anytime soon. Even a colony on the moon is not possible right now. We would either need to send people on once only short term construction trips, or some sort of robotic construction to make a shield first. Or a biological protectant of some kind.

Again nonsense. You can build bricks and masonry arches out of local Martian materials. Ship a "vault-laying" robot up there, and you can create lots of living space quickly. Bury it in soil, and you get the physical support to pressurize those environments as well as radiation shielding.

(You can't do the same trick on the Moon, because you need lots of water to make bricks. Far less of it on the Moon, and easily extracted concentrations of it are probably only at the poles. To build weight-pressurized compressive structures on the Moon, you're going to have to make silica blocks. A lot more energy intensive and expensive, with high temperature handling of materials. Smelting aluminum? Fuggedaboudit!)

Also, the radiation question is actually an argument for Mars over the Moon. Mars has an atmosphere that reduces the radiation load of humans walking outside. In fact, this is another reason why lunar industry should be established from Mars with teleoperated robots controlled form Earth.
Let's also imagine many Alans (corporate engineers) and Charles (hackers) and from this bigger sample, measure how consistently each approach produces an acceptable outcome.

It may be that the Charles, on average, produce better solutions with less resources than the Alans, but that individually, more of the Charles projects fail catastrophically.

Now imagine how good Charles would be if he could learn to cooperate and participate in a group like Alan's.

Let's also imagine how good Alan could be if he could learn to see past the inflated corporate policies, procedures, and checklists and focus on the crux of the problem.

Both excellent, I think. But further, let's imagine an organization that arbitrates the risk of each Charles by simultaniously working many cheap, risky Charles on the same problem and managing the results with an Alan-like process.

If the Charles are software startups and the Alan-like process is "the Internet," this could work.
Because everyone here is focused on Silicon Valley, and Tesla hangs around there.
Disclaimer: I work at SEOmoz

"If there is ONE thing I wish everyone at HN understood in their bones about SEO, it is that the ROI on it is just freaking amazing."

I couldn't agree more. I am frustrated and humbled to see so many intelligent people in this community that I respect be so utterly against SEO. The worst part for me is seeing so many entrepreneurs simply disregard it as an option.

I don't care if you use SEOmoz's products or our competitors, SEO is a legitimate marketing tool and I truly believe it can help everyone here build better businesses.
Considering the biologist in this thread disagrees with you, you may want to tone down your arrogance.

Also, I do not think you could kill me with a rock, unless I were sleeping and you were dropping it from excessive height.
Hence, deletionism.
Ben Franklin as motivational speaker. Title: Industry! Frugality!
Seems true, but I think we're talkin about a different kind of depression here than mourning over someone's death.
I am. Whether its worth the money depends on whether or not you're doing a lot of SEO work now. Their tools address pain points that are specific to the industry, so if you do professional SEO work they are great, but if you're still learning I would stick with the free options.

Here's where we've gotten value out of their tools:

- Providing a quote to a new client: Before we can give a fair quote, we need to perform a quick analysis of the client's current SEO efforts (if any), their competition, and their niche. We need this process to be both quick and accurate, and the SEOmoz tools help immensely.

- Competitive analysis: A smart, defensive SEO will fill their Y!SE profile with hundreds of garbage links, creating noise that makes it harder to find paid links and free authority links. SEOmoz's Linkscape tool will do the leg work of sifting through the pile to reveal the links which are actually helping the site rank. This alone can save hours of work (plus it has an API you can use to augment your private toolset).

- Tracking progress: They've got great tools for tracking a site's position for a given keyword in SERPs over time. Simple, but essential.

The other feature we like a lot is the Q & A. Each Pro member gets to ask 3 questions a month about anything under the sun, which will be answered in a timely manner by their staff. They do a good job of triaging these requests, to the point that their CEO will handle tougher questions. Although we don't use the Q&A service frequently, its invaluable to have a source that can answer truly obscure questions a client might ask.

Bottom line: the product is well worth the money, if you need it.
"The old world hadn't run out of resources when the American Industrial Revolution hit full stride."

I don't understand what point you're trying to make. American Industrial Revolution?!?

Let us look at Europe. In the early 15th Century, while England was fighting France and Spain was fighting the Moors, the Portuguese started exploring the western coast of Africa. The goal was to seize access to commodities such as gold, silver, silk, spices, etc. Spain then started its own explorations, but while the Portuguese went east, Spain went west. Then the Dutch, the French and the English joined the party. The old continent had no resources, so yes, it was a hunt for resources that triggered the European expansion.

Of course technology is constantly changing. If space exploration becomes really cheap, then going to Mars for resources would make economic sense. However, I keep saying there are more urgent problems to be addressed. One of them is energy. If we could come up with relatively clean and safe nuclear energy, then the hunt for oil and coal would cease to make sense. The world would be a safer place.

It took the Portuguese 100 years to reap the benefits of their expansion overseas. I don't know if the U.S. can afford to wait that long to start reaping the benefits of going to Mars.
Current rumor from the British tabloids is that Justin Timberlake will do it. I am sure he can sell out at least a few dates.
I see no disagreement.

I could kill you with a coffee mug or a bic pen if you were unarmed. In the unlikely event you're unusually strong and alert I'd get my brother to help. Power in a band of humans has way more to do with how many relatives you happen to have than any silly conception of "alpha".
It seems to me that the main problem is CYA. A scientist shouldn't have to worry about maintaining their positions when trying something new or unorthodox.

It seems to mirror what hackers experience when working for large or traditionally-minded companies. The hacker wants to do things unorthodoxically (use a non-Java programming language, a non-Windows OS, a non-Oracle database, less enterprisey software, etc.), but the company resists due to the managers' concerns that approving such "risky" things could harm their employment or advancement.

In the end, both scientists and hackers have to seek alternative methods to pursue what we want. And even though that often can result in what looks like failure, both groups know that's where they trully learn new things and break new ground. And that usually means that the next time around, we're more likely to succeed in ways that advance technology and scientific knowledge.
http://www.sabnzbd.org/

As long as you have a usenet account, and a computer that can run Python, the above software will do what you want. Granted, it helps a lot more if you have a newzbin account.
Congratulations for Microsoft. They are currently in the #2 in the four step Gandhi scale:

1) they ignore you
2) they laugh at you
3) they fight you
4) you win

Let's hope they never get beyond 2.
Well, I already mentioned that you should check who the critics were. Maynard Smith, Wilson and Mayr. AFAIK, they each have more than double the cred in the field as Gould and Dawkins have -- together.

Marxist... Lewontin, Steven Rose Kamin et al can hardly be described as liberal or right wing... :-)

Can you mention three non-leftwing well known biologists in that camp? One?

The fun part about Gould is the criticism from intelligence researchers. They more or less accuse Gould of misrepresenting the contents of their field -- very similar to how Gould is described by evolutionary biologists...

Edit: I might also add that there were lots of discussion about how new "punctuated equilibrium" really where.

Edit II: First post by a user 460 days old? I am honored! :-)
They're walking down those steps, though, not up. The next step is 1, not 3.
No one is making millions selling water in a desert.
The first words on the first page are:

The Video Bay - Beta Extreme
(Don't expect anything to work at all)
Using Bazaar Like Git
A Saint, Demons and a Leap of Imagination
I signed up to preview, but I really didn't get what I was doing. I tried to add a Home list for Stuff I do at home. I tried to log the activity of mowing the lawn, but it wants a "number" for the work done. I just don't understand.

I think I really needed a little YouTube video on the homepage to show me someone actively using the system so I can have that "oh, I see" moment before signing up.

Anyway +1 for the video preview.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. American Industrial Revolution?!?
Let us look at Europe. In the early 15th Century...

Okay, I see. You're taking a shorter term view. In the 15th century, they didn't know the potential advantage of the conveniently situated coal and iron resources of North America.

"Gold, silver, silk, spices, etc," weren't strategic resources for the American Industrial Revolution, not so important if you want to understand the ultimate potential of North America as home to a future superpower.

If space exploration becomes really cheap, then going to Mars for resources would make economic sense.

Please get this already: using North American history as a model, we should figure out that going there to bring resources back is not the point. That's obviously stupid. The point is from what set of values the next superpower draws its lineage. I think human history will be far better if it's the US that gives rise to Mars civilization.

If we could come up with relatively clean and safe nuclear energy, then the hunt for oil and coal would cease to make sense. The world would be a safer place.

I agree. But there's no reason why we can't go to Mars while we are doing this.

It took the Portuguese 100 years to reap the benefits of their expansion overseas. I don't know if the U.S. can afford to wait that long to start reaping the benefits of going to Mars.

In the longer term view, it is imperative that we start as soon as we can.
Not necessarily Paul, but in any case someone who has something to say about how the industry developed and is likely to develop. The historical / economic context in which you will work.
I think he's referring to the Robinson-Patman Act - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson-Patman_Act.
Gell-Mann on Feynman (video)
Don't want to come out as a troll, but that's the random anniversary of something hardly anyone uses for anything important. Is it newsworthy?
Rather than having one specification for layer in web apps, and another for local apps (eg, iPhone or Android), there's a single layer. It's very DRY.
Maybe they have reason to be grumpy and closed-minded, such as sifting through joke edits all day.
I think this problem is specific to today's web: I don't think slashdot and yahoo (or google) had a tribe.

That is, another approach to marketing is to build something that is just really good - much better than the alternatives. But this is extraordinarily hard to do, and it's much easier if you're in early, before it's mined out.

That said, whenever it seems that a market is stable and everything that can be invented has been invented, that's the very time that is ripe for something unexpected, perhaps coming out of left-of-field (eg. a disruptive tech).
Mars is so much easier to get off of, space elevators are almost irrelevant. However, I would vote for moving a moon of Mars and using it as a counterweight.

The major downside is that the vicinity of Jupiter is as cozy as the interior of a microwave oven and sunlight is not that abundant as it is down here.

Helium 3 is probably going to be the next oil. It will be the stuff you run your military machine with. Mars is in a better position than Earth to control the resources of the gas giants, and it is in a very good position for even control of the Moon's He3. The higher population of Mars due to agriculture and vast potential living space will probably mean political domination of the Jovian moons by Mars.
I agree with everyting you wrote. And I keep thinking the U.S. should first rebuild itself before going to Mars.

It depends on what kind of time horizon we're talking here. Each shuttle launch cost over 1 billion USD. Hence, killing the shuttle program would release enormous amounts of capital to be used to "conquer" Mars. Say, 10 billion a year. That's enough money to fund the space exploration effort if the time horizon is a few decades, instead of 1 decade (as it happened in the 1960s).

Carl Sagan was against the shuttle program because he said that one can't keep going to the very same place and call it "exploration". In a way, he had a good point.

So, it perhaps would make sense for the U.S. to allow the Europeans and Russians to manage the ISS, and while the Chinese spend trillions becoming the world's super power, the U.S. could spend trillions becoming the Solar System's one and only colonizer. It would take decades for the other nations to catch up.

Last but not least, I am a bit concerned about the impact on Mars. It's a very long shot, but suppose there's life on Mars. Colonizing Mars would contaminate, if not destroy, the original habitat and prevent us from learning more about it, which would be unfortunate.
Because a lot of people clicked the up arrow.
Brian Cox, the physicist. I missed a chance to see Stephen Hawking. Out of some bigger names I saw Stallman, Mitnick and Desmond Tutu, all interesting people.
Content Providers - Embrace the Internet or die fighting it
Exactly. It's not like books went anywhere and the Kindle brought them back. Books are a lot older than discussions about multitasking.
We routinely build completely self-contained environments in which dozens of ordinary people with a few months training live and work for months at a time with very, very low casualty rates. They're called nuclear submarines.
is there any reason to use that? I mean pretty much all users would have to upgrade their browsers
"The question is not if it's valid or invalid (which is another debate) but rather is it faster or slower."

Well, the question I answered was whether it was valid. I'm not knowledgeable enough to answer the speed question.
There is an API so I believe your suggestion ought to be possible. Just to play devil's advocate though; wouldn't people overestimate Wolfram's capabilities and expect the bot to be able to answer all sorts of difficult questions that it can't grok, particularly about ongoing political/cultural events which seems to be the lifeblood of Twitter, thereby making the service look kind of lame and useless..?

I'll do whatever gets the most votes but it seems this thread was forsaken. Would have been nice to see more discussion/refinery!
What's the distinction though? Hulu was created and is owned by the content owners.

Sure the folks building Hulu may feel that way but this is a business that's still figuring out how to do this in a way that works for everyone involved and right now TV ads are the cash cow for the networks.

From Hulu's perspective really the best thing to do right now is deploy their content in the most restrictive way possible because they don't want to identify a model that works and then be in a position of having to limit functionality or access to existing users in order to make it happen. Its always better to be able to add access then to take it away.
I'd like to see a wikipedia mirror that ignored deletions.

Edit: Already exists, but seems to be missing some articles I know were deleted.

http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/
I agree somewhat. An anecdote is a tool, and has been shown to have a more powerful effect on the minds of a population than solid evidence.

However, I think that anecdotes offer much more than just a way to avoid having to prove your point. They're not merely for gaining power over weak minds. They can be useful among intelligent, analytical folks as well. They can serve as a supplement to real data. They can illustrate a point of view more accurately. They can communicate a feeling or a sentiment, and can pack more meaning and generate more tangents of discussion than dry statements of fact. A startup begins with something like an anecdote, an idea that may be crazy, but stems indirectly from a myriad of past experiences.

Our brains are not binary storage units, and therefore anecdotes and parables have historically been used to help people remember things. Similarly, you cannot bring to the table a hard set of data for every life lesson that you've learned, and therefore you have many beneficial things to teach others that you cannot directly prove. If you're a good teacher, you'll tell an anecdote to help people remember (nonfictional preferred of course).
Scientists, Anti-Scientists & Economists (video)
Interesting idea and I can think of a novel interface for this. I upvoted you, and that's where by influence will end.. for now :)
That's helpful -- a helpful explanation, I mean, as well as a potentially helpful tool. It'd be great if you could say more stuff like this on your home page. I tend not to sign up without a lot more information.
Ripple - P2P can cut banks out of the picture
I think the distinction is that Hulu has an outward appearance of a proper hacker-run site. From very early on, it had an excellent feature set and a strong feeling of quality and pride. It seems that it isn't run by dinosaurs; just owned by them.
More on Feynman Vs. Gell-Mann:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=578345
On the off chance that you are genuinely curious about the phenomenon, here is a good start:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200805/why-do...
However, if you want to learn the actual skills required to live and work on other worlds, you should focus on building missions which demonstrate and refine the skills required to live and work on other worlds.

So, as soon as possible, start on agriculture. If you're going to prioritize that, then you need to prioritize the knowledge and skills for the most productive environment. If you had to settle North America from scratch, would you first try to figure out how to farm in North Ontario? No, you'd try to figure out how to farm in places like Virginia, for the toehold, then as quickly as possible move out to the midwest, where the really big yields are possible.

Mars is probably going to be the off-Earth agricultural power, like the American midwest. The Moon, with its lack of resources, including suitable forms of sunlight, is going to be like North Ontario.

Doing so on our Moon and near-Earth asteroids (the nearest locations to support and safety) is the best way to do that and will give us the tools needed to move outwards permanently.

Near-Earth asteroids are a good rehearsal for expeditions to Mars. Any techniques useful to Mars that we might learn from the Moon, we would also learn from Near-Earth asteroid exploration. I am all for this. They will also yield information relevant to preventing asteroid collisions. I say we save the Moon for when we have a use for He3.

However, we can't even construct a reliable artificial biosphere fully enclosed here on Earth!...no one has done it yet. Ever.

I don't think you need a reliable artificial biosphere to get started. All you really need is life support for growing plants. I'm sure there's some grow houses out there in extreme northern latitudes that qualify as exactly this. If you can reduce the weight of supplies by a factor of 10 or 20, then this is enough.
and so began the death of flash
Why do you believe Blackboard and Moodle are "behind what exists on the web today"?
Agreed. I look forward to a future paper on the personality characteristics of academic psychologists, although I suspect I might have to wait a while for that one.
Yet in a blog post last week on the future of newspapers, he concludes there may be only one way to save the industry

Hint: if you have to change the law to protect an industry, the industry is a dinosaur. You are not really saving it, merely delaying the inevitable at great global expense. The proper course of action lies in that eastern technique known as letting go