skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not to completely throw up a smokescreen to hide the fact that I think you're better read on this debate than I am, but your challenge is pretty reminiscent of what bugs me about this debate: It's often framed as a debate between politically motivated hacks vs their more sensible, less biased opponents, when there was real scientific disagreement at stake, and a disagreement that has at least some practical political implication. Admittedly, this defense works better when talking about controversy between Gould and Dawkins (who is not at all apolitical himself) than between Gould and Wilson.

That, and I thought that the best place I could find on the internet to defend Gould would be in the middle of a thread full of amateur evolutionary psychologists making up stories about why depression came into being. :-)

re your edit II: There was some stuff about this on Pharyngula recently that put it on my mind, and plus the combination of screeching flamewar and biological debate in this makes it pretty interesting reading.
He was my childhood hero, still remains a big influence in all I do to this day. Growing up I always wanted to be a "universal genius" like Da Vinci, so I tried to pick up on science, music, art and pretty much anything I could get my hands on. I think my admiration of his abilities and the realization that he was just a man (like you or I) provided a lot of the drive and ambition I now have. This does have the unfortunate consequence of producing a 'jack of all trades, master of none' type persona, or at least it did for me.

So yes, it would have been amazing to hear him speak. =)
They could identify connections into the Tor network by analyzing handshake traffic and it seems that this may be exactly what is currently happening.
I know you're joking, but personally I'd find Timberlake doing a whole MJ set far more entertaining than the real thing.
it takes like 2 minutes to turn the computer on, and then you have to launch all the apps. I'm just used to keeping it always on, so that I can get started right away.

OS is vista, but the reboot was required by firefox, not the OS.
While I agree the bus-number is an important factor. Most products, programs, languages, platforms early on were developed by 1-3 programmers, maybe closer to one.

Also, the bus number is usually only applied to programmers whereas product managers, executives, etc all dont' have the same bus number over their head. It is almost like companies hate the fact they have a valuable technologist or programmer and try to consistently offset that.

Now of course if the single programmer is not communicating or after the project is done they play complexity games then that is different (only one person can read their code) but usually I see the 1-2 man teams obliterate the 3-7 person teams on a regular basis.

Programming is not construction, the number of programmers on a project has little to do with success ever. So the bus-number is quite silly. What about the bus-number for the CEO, or the project manager, or the one person that handles billing etc.
This is great! If it were possible to play against people I didn't know I would use it all the time. I've annoyed friends for years trying to get them to play.

I like toggable settings by the way.
Nokia N97 Theme : Camo Green
Egads. That's the most obnoxious ad-laden site I've ever seen make it to the front page of HN. I hope this isn't a trend. The obnoxiousness of the ads also makes me assume that whatever this is must be a scam.

Here's the actual ripple site:

http://ripple.sourceforge.net/
"Don't let the Internet Marketing crowd fleece you, though." -- mind explaining that? I'd love to hear more. Thanks
I hope others follow very soon.
In addition to the Ko rule, you might want to consider handling the other repeated postion situations like at:

http://www.britgo.org/rules/molasses.html

Rules vary for these, though. See:

http://www.britgo.org/rules/compare.html#rept

The British Go Association has a great site in general, with good info on computer and online Go playing resources.
THis is great to see and maybe in 3 to 5 years the video tag maybe become as popular as flash? THough every web browser will need to support it, along with ogg vorbis and other non proprietary codecs. Microsoft ... erggh!
Looks like a fun site. Anyone want to try playing me? My email is lukeb@cs.stanford.edu. I'm a 5dan (aga) but I haven't played for years.
Definitely impressive, but I think I prefer www.dragongoserver.net for the moment.
I agree and totally grok why. In an appengine chat I asked Guido directly this question when AppEngine will support Python 3 because after his PyCon speech he was really pushing it. He also stated the difficulties which I totally understand.

But I am not for dropping python older support at all. What I am hoping is there are better ways to install python side by side and within the python program itself it can select the version to use. Therefore you could have apps running 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3.1 etc.

Python version 2 only got good around 2.4 2.5 so the same might happen with Python 3 it is just the infrastructure currently in many cases forces you to choose new or old only because there is no easy version picking in many platforms.

AppEngine did recently add the ability to use_library('django','1.0') so I am hoping the same starts happening for Python versions and more people do this as times goes on.

Python is the best programming community and tools are immense (libraries) I just hope we are able to beat the legacy wave. One way is with version picking and side by side installation of different runtimes.

On the flipside there is a big opportunity to make newer frameworks that are able to run on Python 3 with support back to Python 2.6. So let's go make them.
Our brains are not binary storage units, and therefore anecdotes and parables have historically been used to help people remember things.

Yes, an anecdote is a tool. It's great for remembering things, poor for proving things. It just so happens the only conceivable purpose of the original story was proving something. Now, if he had anecdote which helped you remember, say, the standard form of the quadratic equation or something else people just needed to remember, then it would be using the tool for its proper purpose.
I can't believe this post got no comments yet.
This is a long article but one of the best write-ups of the year.
Summary follows.

The web learns. Not only by humans adding data consciously, but also by sensors. This is the hidden treasure on the mobile web. They call it the sensor revolution. Quote:
"Today’s smartphones contain microphones, cameras, motion sensors, proximity sensors, and location sensors (GPS, cell-tower triangulation, and even in some cases, a compass)"

Data is capital, and sensors are the new way of getting data. Best quote:
"Think of sensor-based applications as giving you superpowers"

There's a huge opportunity building structured data from unstructured data. Best quote:
"It’s also possible to give structure to what appears to be unstructured data by teaching an application how to recognize the connection between the two."

Another big theme is connecting real life with the searchable web. Best quote:
People talk about "the Internet of Things" assume that what will get us there is the combination of ultra-cheap RFID and IP addresses for everyday objects (…). Instead, we can make do with bar codes, tags on photos, and other "hacks" that are simply ways of brute-forcing identity out of reality.

Winning applications are designed to get better the more people use them

As a side note, I would encourage anyone here to learn R (www.r-project.org). Data analysis is flourishing in a world where new, interesting data is so easy to collect. Quote:
"Data analysis, visualization, and other techniques for seeing patterns in data are going to be an increasingly valuable skillset. Employers take notice."

Real-time is huge. We need machine learning to be applied here to make sense of streams of data.

Quote: "The Web is no longer an industry unto itself – the Web is now the world."
We need to solve real problems in the real world.

The article concludes with some examples: Government 2.0 (Obama champaign), crowdsourcing for
personalized medicine.
In every course I've ever TA-ed or even taken, a corrupted paper or code submission is considered the problem of the sender, and thus late. Last term, the penalty for one student who, I think through an honest mistake, submitted a corrupted file, was -50%.
I don’t really think this is about the Internet.

There’s a battle being fought all over the world right now over what people can and can’t freely say. European and Middle Easter companies are on the censorship side of things. In France you can get prison time for telling a friend you don’t like Muslims.

Now I don’t agree with such prejudice but should we turn the unenlightened into criminals?

That’s the issue and it goes beyond criminalization. Recently we’ve heard a lot about the blogosphere trying to force Facebook to take down holocaust denial sites. But that opens the door because the principle is "we don’t like these people so we have the right to stop them from speaking here"

But if we in the blogosphere can censor what we don’t like why can’t the Government censor what it doesn’t like?

Yes, Facebook is a private company. But it’s a private company that has chosen not to censor these groups. When the public tries to force it to do so you’re setting a precedent that those with power (in this case the public) have the right to force those under their power to censor free speech. Which again begs the question why can’t the ultimate form of power in our modern world (the Government) use that same precedent to censor those under their power (the Citizens)?

So this isn’t about the Internet as much as it’s about a decision that affects the very fabric of society itself. The internet is just part of that society.
Is there a reason I should prefer this over http://www.dragongoserver.net/ ?
I genuinely hope you are right
This article was already posted and discussed a few months ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=578345
can you include a match making service?
I doubt it works. Lots of very smart researchers are looking at the problem of decentralized trust / reputation / economics. It all works fine until people start gaming the system in groups, which is further amplified by zero-cost identity (another tricky problem by itself). The solution is generally to introduce a central authority.
Thanks for the comment. It led me to read the article.
Hey sorry for the late reply.

The built-in hash method returns Integer values which can change between versions of Ruby (1.8, 1.9, JRuby, etc...). I needed a hash value that was consistent between all of them for the same object and which also reduced the possibility of collisions.
It depends on your needs.

If you need any advanced features, or you want to play for rank, DGS is the place to be.

If, on the other hand, you want to casually play games with friends, my site is probably better suited to that. My site has (in my opinion) much nicer visuals & interface, but most importantly it is easy to play with anyone you like -- they don't need to have an account.

I am contemplating adding accounts and rankings in the future. But then I would stray into DGS territory.
It's got more problems even than these.

Bernie Madoff ran on a "network of trust" and he established a strong track-record over the years. The problem is that a monetary system requires more than even sophisticated mutual trust. It requires knowledge that the underlying processes are sound - and most people can't understand that. That's exactly why Ponzi schemes constantly reappear.
See my other comment about how I think my site relates to DGS -- I think they are complementary.

And can you give me specific reasons that you like DGS better, or is it a case of liking what you're used to?
Could you put cursor:pointer on the clickable parts of the board?
Robert Hooke.
It just so happens the only conceivable purpose of the original story was proving something.

Absolutely wrong. The purpose of the original story was to provide an illustration.

Now, if he had anecdote which helped you remember, say, the standard form of the quadratic equation...

There are ideas and lessons worth remembering that aren't mathematical facts.
Other suggestions:

- All SBA loans should come with free lifetime supplies of Provigil

- We should send our kids to Singapore to learn math and physics

- Earlier specialization
I went back and forth on this.

In the end I decided that cursor:pointer was most desirable for links, and that on the board I just wanted the standard cursor.

Let me know if you feel strongly...
Was referring to Startup School (in 2008)...

But thanks for the link to a bunch of great videos! Watching them now.

Edit: Not the best quality, but video here: http://www.justin.tv/clip/116fb17d94c
This is about the Internet because the Internet has become the only medium that hasn't been stifled. The recent protests in Iran certainly show how a technical means like twitter, leads to political results.

The point is that the technical evolution of the Internet has so-far paced the growing urge of state to impose censorship. The technical questions and political questions currently are intermingled.

Imagine the present society without the Internet - with something like Al Gore's "Information Superhighway" or France's Minitel system.
Agreed. I worked helpdesk for a few semesters in college. The first semester, I had a great time showing off, helping people format their floppies add page numbers to their term papers. The second semester, I got tired of the repitition and started to want for more challenging questions.

By the third and fourth semesters, I couldn't understand how humanity survives when everyone is so universally stupid. Nothing about the job had changed, but I began to realize that there can be no "forward progress" because a new batch of (understandably) ignorant freshmen appears every term.

I'd imagine the same jaded bitterness creeps into any situation where the senior users act as a bulwark against a constant stream of newbies. How can you prevent "Forum fatigue" from setting in?
I originally designed this site so that I could play with _my_ friends, which basically meant I wanted to challenge them via email.

As a result, the site is (currently) correspondence rather than account-based. If you want to play with strangers, Dragon Go Server is the place to be.

I am thinking about adding accounts and rankings in the future but if I do so, I want to make sure I can differentiate enough from DGS to make it interesting to people.
Singularity Summit gets a hug from me for transcribing all the (long) talks.

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/people-blog/?p=233
Of course, Google's infrastructure is great, whether MapReduce or GFS.

However, if Bing gets to a point where their search results are clearly better, then Google will be in trouble, and no amount of screaming "we have a better infrastructure!" will help. Users want the best results, and that's why Google originally won against other search engines.

I don't know if that's ever going to happen. Probably not, but I would not bet on it.
Maddof was supposed to be an investment manager. Ponzi too. Ripple is just a way of transferring IOUs. Investment and protocol design are entirely different beasts.
Inventing something is the easy part. If you don't do it, someone else will. Making it into a business is what's hard and that alone is what makes your invention special.
But Hulu Desktop is the just the same Flash bullshit, with the same ridiculously awful performance.

If you're going to go to the trouble of distributing a desktop app, why the fuck would you still accept playback 100x crappier than native implementations?
Why does every arm chair discussion of evolutionary psychology veer to social hierarchy?

Amen. What I have been trying to articulate in so many words but somehow fell short. Think that's my main gripe -- these explanations always veer into territory ripe with any number of convenient social stories.
I wonder if in this context we could extend the limitations of "free speech" to include something as abstract as "common sense"... go with me on this.

For instance, smoking tobacco in public places? Now I was under the impression that not a single shred of evidence existed to back up the premise that second hand smoke is dangerous to your health. BUT, I would concede to the arguments that favour "common sense"... of course being in a smokey bar for hours on end is going to have a similar effect to smoking. What I don't agree with, however, is a government that is willing to mandate _laws_ on the premise of "common sense".
If you don't want to breath other peoples smoke, don't associate with smokers. If porn offends you, watch something else! If you don't like what fascist say, speak louder than they do!

Haven't even read the OP yet, I just felt compelled to reply. You've hit the nail on the head.

[EDIT: read it! yep - nail, head, hit]
It's true, the audio and video lectures from The Teaching Company are consistently (95%) excellent, no matter the subject.
Thanks, I closed the original link in a couple seconds because of it.
Ya, Patrick, I don't really understand that statement. Please can you explain?

Secondly, I remember you writing previously that you got a free membership to the site? Or do you now pay for it?
I'm not familiar with specific research, but consider the following logical argument based on evolutionary theory:

Any species has some set of foods it is capable of digesting. The set of such foods is a function of the environment in which the species has evolved.

All of these specializations/tradeoffs of an organism's design (fangs, intestinal tract length, stomach composition, etc.) are a function of the species' unique evolutionary environmental history, and should be viewed as optimizations over past environmental factors.

There is also the important factor of calorie scarcity as a driver of selection -- through most of evolutionary time, simply getting enough calories was paramount for all species, including the human species. Also note that there is significantly greater selection pressure for characteristics that facilitate survival through reproductive age even at the expense of overall longevity... so being able to eat (or even craving) a food that causes disease at age 60 historically offered a benefit well through the reproductive age and thus offered a net selection advantage.

So, if one takes the list of foods a species is capable of eating and removes the notion of calorie scarcity, one can determine which foods are most optimal for vitality and longevity...

Most of the arguments for why humans should eat meat, fats, etc., are based on the implicit assumption of calorie/nutrient scarcity. Of course if you're stranded in the arctic it's a great idea to eat some seal blubber... and it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective to crave it or to enjoy the smell of cooking meat.

But when you're living in an advanced, rich society with essentially no calorie/nutrient scarcity, it becomes possible (and fun) to address the question of optimal nutrition.
Garrison Keillor On Power Ambition Glory
Seems like there needs to be a DARPA with a cancer focus, funding only high-risk, high-payoff projects with people routinely replaced on a 5-year or so basis to mitigate bureaucracy formation.
You sound like one of the anti-linking people.

Also, if writing for a wire service isn't journalism, I don't know what is. The problem with it is that you don't get a byline and you have to churn out boilerplate stories at a prodigious pace.
My suspicion is that they're not counting the ethanol in their MPGe calculation. They claim to be using E85. In other words, the fuel mixture may contain about 85% ethanol. Their MPGe calculation probably only counts the gasoline in that mixture, the 15%.
You can't multiply the numbers because you couldn't depict prime numbers. For instance, what would you point at if you wanted to represent 13?
Yup. IBM has an operating margin of 17% according to Yahoo.
Society has always been able to censor its members through culture and pressure to conform, yet this allows one freedom to diverge on say political issues or art form, although this may not be entirely true.

My point is that in the case of Facebook it is the common decency of people which have decided to protest on some action by Facebook. Although these people may have influence and may pressure the Facebook to act as they want it to, the decision still lays with facebook.

Government however has a vast machine which ensures that its laws and policies are obeyed. For this fact alone nothing can be compared with the government and everything should be done to ensure that their hand remains at the absolute minimum because some old bureaucrats do not really know how a twenty year old teenager may achieve the "good life". To the old bureaucrat it may mean marrying a woman, perhaps a white woman, or a Chinese woman. To the old bureaucrat it may mean that prodigy is a bad influence on youngsters, etcetera. In short, it is none of his business and what is his business our society has been deciding since it became a collective and it could not be simpler, if it harms anyone, or anyone's property, then sure regulate their behaviour, otherwise leave society to deal with pressuring into confirmation when it comes to such issues as common human decency to have respect and empathy for the tragedy of an entire people.
"...might be the final push viewers need to dump their TV subscriptions altogether."

I recently dumped DirecTV. I have a Mac Mini running Plex. The latter nicely integrates seamlessly with Hulu, TheDailyShow.com, TheColbertReport.com and Netflix (watch instantly), and to round out my TV watching experience I download the rest from P2P (eztv.it, currently down with "hardware problems").

I've been giving preference to Hulu, TDS and TCR over P2P so that the content providers know I'm watching. I also want Hulu to make some money on the ads, which aren't too bad.

What I don't understand: from the point of view of content providers, Hulu should be preferred, because, after all, I can't skip commercials. TiVo, my old DirecTV DVR and other means all allow me to skip commercials. They should embrace Hulu. It will save their asses.
The claims only run to a hair above a single page, though. And they don't even amount to much - as far as I can tell, they're trying to patent what amounts to a plot for a video game. And not even a particularly interesting one!
heh. I find most psychologists to be a bit too open-minded. maybe it's just me.
As trite and cliche as mentions of "alpha male" have become, there is good reason to believe that early human social structure might have involved just such a character. Namely, some of our closest relatives in the great ape family have this sort of "alpha-male-with-harem" approach.

Now, there is also good reason to believe that the evolutionary adaptation that pole-vaulted early humans ahead of the other apes was a change in their social structure. However, even if that is true, you also have to remember that humans have spent a much larger portion of their evolutionary lineage as great apes than as modern (or nearly-modern) humans. That is, even if early humans had distinct social structures from their ape cousins, we are bound to have many remnants of the ape social structure left in our genomes.

In other words, depression doesn't necessarily have to have been an adaptation of early humans, it could just as easily have been an adaptation of early primates that humans just haven't had time to get rid of yet!
Patent or lit-major dissertation? YOU DECIDE!
Because Microsoft's monopolies are hurting competition and the evolution of our practices. We certainly don't need them pushing a new search engine through MSN Messenger or Windows updates.
Teens Don’t Twitter