skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Just thought I had to defend my comments as something more than simply a "ohhh, terrorist'll get ya" pokey stick.

Ha, I think we're broadly in agreemant but I'm tending toward pessimism, the above is a reference to Alex Jones which I guess helps qualify that!! Was just alluding to the fact I wasn't trying to doomsay and polarise the argument but articulate a genuine concern that there exists far to much potential in a free (a.i.s) drugs trade for corruption and misuse of power. It is not a trade I would like to see legal for fear of a smarmy spin covered consumerism. I manage nicely as it is, but decriminalisation I think is a far better option than legalisation. Speaking conservatively and pessimistically.
You know what Wikipedia needs? Game mechanics. Give every registered user x number of commits/edits/reversions. Jack up x based on participation and commits/edits/reversions that "stick". This way, new people can still add stuff (because editors can't infinitely revert) but can't just make a bunch of spam accounts to flood the site.

Obviously, you still do the IP address/superuser stuff as additional checks, but this increases the penalty for adding useless stuff or deleting useful stuff just because you didn't do it.
What exactly do you mean, and how does it make "using floating point arithmetic with insufficient precision" a viable explanation for this, given that none of the usual floating-point formats behave in this way?
> You're basing the "majority of parks" on some small observations about cali?

Not at all. I just thought that the Silicon Valley counter-examples were interesting. Most people don't know how common trailer parks are.

> Have you ever driven through georgia, alabama, ohio, north/south carolina, florida, etc?

I haven't driven through the carolinas or georgia, but the rest, yes. I've lived in the midwest, was born in the "mid central", and have driven through all that plus most of the west and part of the northeast.

I do apologize for not having a current count on the number of my relatives who currently live in "manufactured housing", but feel free to assume what ever you'd like from the fact that the number in the past is >0.

I'm still waiting for any support for the assertion that ugly houses are harmful to survival.
It's totally fun--we love it. Everyone has a role that they own and we trust each other to execute. Stay tuned--this is just a small slice of what's coming...

Jason (@FlightCaster)
I didn't say or imply humans were rational about money, I was pointing out a case where one was being irrational, and noting that the scenario they brought up didn't actually map to the issue at hand anyways.

And the reason it didn't map? Because it tried to introduce an external motivator to coerce hackers to engage in a particular activity that they weren't otherwise intrinsically motivated to perform.

And when did we start giving social "scientists" the final say on these things? Setting up contrived scenarios with children and college students hardly strikes me as definitive. Real scenarios where people are given free reign to do just as they like for pay or meaningful reward are few and far between. "Getting paid to do what you love" usually isn't - it's much more commonly getting paid to do something that requires the same skillset as the thing you love, and it's obvious why that would kill motivation.
> "You can use it under any license you want" -- only if you acquire full copyright for every single contribution.

This is easy to do. You are the end-point for accepting contributions. All you have to do is require assignment of rights to you in order to accept patches. This is obviously more difficult if you didn't do this to begin with and now have to track down all the past contributors, though.

> "You can sell services!" -- end users don't buy "services" for consumer software.

Depends on what you mean by 'end user.' If the end users for my piece of software are law firms, then yes, they would purchase support contract/other services. Not every piece of software out there is developed for home desktop users.

> "Non-GPL software is immoral" -- guess who buys the "services" that cover your development costs? Companies that ... sell proprietary software.

So the only entities that would purchase support contracts (or custom modifications) for software are proprietary software development houses?
It's how you apply your high IQ that determines whether it's a curse or a blessing. For me it has been a blessing.

I've always wanted to be an engineer, and that's the career I've chosen and am still working in. Along the way, I learnt five foreign languages, studied psychology, philosophy, sociology, political science. Acquired the equivalent of an MBA with better than professional knowledge of accounting, marketing and sales. Read about 30-40 books on history, architecture, geography, geology, astronomy, etc per year.

AND ... from all of this I've learned to listen actively when in conversation with others and ask leading, insightful questions based upon my broad knowledge and listen more. I've learnt more from such conversations than from all the courses and reading.

A high IQ is like a high performance computer, you can use it to play some computer game or decode DNA, synthesise treatments for diseases, explore the mysteries of quantum physics and lots more. You have been given the power, now choose wisely...
I think it's interesting. Not so much the ultimate question of whether they can find him, but rather the things we learn along the way about exactly how much a reader base with no special (e.g., law enforcement) privileges can dig up about someone they've never met. Not just general character facts about him (he's left handed), but also time- and date-stamped activities (he took a picture of his cat at this time and this place).

It would be a lot more interesting if each bullet point of information came with a link to a 'trail' describing how that factoid was uncovered. (For example, I'd be particularly interested in learning how we know about his ATM activity. Assuming no one got a court order, how we anyone get access to that info?)
I didn't know that, but that's exactly the reason that I pointed in the direction of SQLite. I knew it was 'in the public domain', and that their 'full license' would probably have some sort of solution to issues like this.

Obviously this issue is complex enough that they have a page devoted to it.
This is sometimes easier said than done.

We have a system that is made up of about 30-40 tables of associated data. The software itself allows many levels of reporting on the data, and we take nightly snapshot backups of the data for restores. So, the customer need not worry about the integrity of their data or getting it back out in a meaningful manner.

However, developing a system of export would not only be extremely expensive, but would be done so to allow our customers to leave.

We are working on an API that would allow some interaction with the data, and I suppose someone could write a form of export tool from the API if they choose, but I don't think we are going to do this.

I can see how important it might be to have export tools for a contact manager, or other small, single-use apps, but it's just not realistic, nor does it make good business sense when you have massive data sets and invest greatly into support and data backups/management.
Maybe you don't need a job, perhaps you need to work on your passion. Find your passion and in so doing find someone else who shares the same passion. If they are prepared to provide the structure that you require, then you could accomplish great things. Good Luck.
As with any privilege, with high IQ comes high responsibility. Leading a purposeful life is quite a challenge for regular people with all the noise in the world; even more so for a high IQ individual. I see many people running away from this responsibility by taking less than what they are capable of.

To feel that you are improving, you must continuously challenge yourself and decide to take the helm of your life. A high IQ gives you more opportunities, and thus a bigger challenge of creating the feeling that you are succeeding.

* labeling your expectations "unrealistic" may be a sign of fear of failure. Stretch yourself ever further.

* it's difficult for average people to deal with intelligent people too. Put some effort into your side of the situation.

* there's more to everything than meets the eye or any logical analysis. If you think questioning something could annoy someone, analyze instead why is that so and formulate a different question.

* it's hard enough to communicate simple ideas clearly among a large group. Traditions are a simple and effective way of keeping social cohesiveness, and realize this is important. Realize too that most progress comes from single, highly motivated individuals and not from "traditional" people. Live your social life, and life your intellectual life; don't mix when inappropriate.

* enjoying the simple pleasures of life takes understanding the value in simple things. Higher IQ gives the capability of seeing this value in the most surprising ways. Again, a high IQ individual is not easily satisfied. Put some effort in seeking pleasurable, deep ideas.

* nobody finds a job as an employee rewarding.
There are 3500 calories in a pound. Each can of soda has 170 calories. Switching to diet soda makes a difference. Even if you have only one can of soda a day (it's usually more), you'll lose 1.45 pounds a month. Now, if you all of a sudden substitute those 170 calories with some other junk, you just ruined it all. Eliminate the stupid calories and be smart. It's a science. It works. I lost 35 pounds in 60 days doing this. Other than that, this article is completely silly and complicates what is otherwise a simple formula. Reduce calories, increase exercise,and stay dedicated. Anything else is a distraction.
that's a great suggestion, I just re-styled the blog and will add that right away - thank!

-danielle at Twilio
The fact that it's common doesn't make it less stupid.

It's not actually a zero-sum game, that's just something you pulled out of your ass.

Quoting social scientists as if they were bearers of truth doesn't really seem like a winning strategy.

Most people who try to do what they love for pay don't really; they end up doing something that requires the same skillset as what they love, and of course they end up miserable as a result.
I feel like Wikipedia's latest move is just a bandage solution to a more fundamental problem. A bandage that causes Wikipedia to be even less inclusionist. (See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=761589 for some discussion on deletionist and inclusionist).

I believe Jimmy Wales has indicated that he would like to just stop editing of Wikipedia at some point and save that as version 1.0 and any later edits are a 2.0. This is just a less extreme version of that.

Edit: I also wanted to add that it seems like Wikipedia and Wales is intent on changing. As the saying goes, "where there is change, there is opportunity." I believe this now is when the seeds of the company to overtake Wikipedia are sowed.
This is easy to do.

Did you ever try contributing to MySQL? Chances are very good your patch languished for years.

As a contributor, it's a bum deal. I don't like giving away the rights to my work just to support their business model or moral imperative.

Depends on what you mean by 'end user.' If the end users for my piece of software are law firms, then yes, they would purchase support contract/other services.

I literally mean "end user". The consumer who would like a piece of software to solve a particular problem on their desktop. Someone a little like me, who uses the software I'd like to write.

Of course, I don't actually want to provide services -- I want to write software.

So the only entities that would purchase support contracts (or custom modifications) for software are proprietary software development houses?

No, they'll just make up a large portion of your sales (from experience) if you're selling technically-oriented services.
That's my biggest problem, I don't have any particular passion. I NEED an external source of focus; when I'm not working I read and study more or less at random when something catches my attention. I have tried all sorts of things to try to maintain a single focus, but so far nothing has worked at all. And I need income even more, I'm already in debt, I just have to take whatever I can get for work.
I'm surprised this has never been mentioned. web.py is my first choice for small ad-hoc websites these days over PHP - the Python standard lib is a huge plus and I've noticed that Python scales better than PHP on a small VPS.

The foundation of web.py itself is pretty solid, so even after you replace the ORM with SQLAlchemy, and Templetor with Mako, you have a nimble, functional framework. I wish they figured out what to do with the globals though, that make scripts feel messy.
Really understanding stuff is not enough: a higher IQ individual may be bored by the explanation and misunderstand it due to lack of attention while a lower IQ individual may have trouble understanding, require a shallower explanation and more time.
Tweaking that second number, I find that when the difference is 2 or less we get 0, but otherwise we get the right answer. More evidence that it's not simply a FP imprecision problem. Further, if I approximately halve them both (just change the initial 9 to a 4) then a difference of 1 or less produces 0 and other results are correct.

I think what's going on is more likely this: whoever implemented this wanted to avoid giving nonzero answers to calculations whose correct answer is zero, and therefore put in some sort of deliberate truncation somewhere. (It's not clear to me exactly what -- maybe every addition or subtraction that produces an answer much much smaller than its inputs gets clamped to 0, or something.)

I don't think the truncation is happening purely at the output stage: if I as it to do the original calculation and multiply the result by 100, e.g., I still get 0. (I had to write it like that because otherwise HN's asterisks-mean-italics hack scrambles it. Even though the supposedly matching asterisk is in a different paragraph. PG, if you're reading this, I'd love it if you were to change that behaviour.)

In other words, I think we're seeing an unfortunate effect of the same feature that makes it say that cos(2*atan(1)) is 0 rather than reporting it as about 6.123 x 10^-17 (the actual result in IEEE doubles).
on the other hand, you have a lot more hit and miss with the small to medium business market, they're more likely to not pay at all or simply drop an entire project on a whim without having to have a reason that they can peddle to the committee in charge of the project, at the same time they're only a step removed from the general public attitude of "My cousin could make it for 800$, what can you add to the equation?" and tend to be far more budget sensitive than their larger counterparts.

That said, the article does make some good points.
OPML Browser for WordPress gets a new parser
A year ago? I'm sure it was created by a product design student at the Royal College of Art a few months ago.

The site dates it as 20 April 2009.
It's been mentioned a bunch of times, it just falls out of the dupe filter after some amount of time.

http://searchyc.com/web.py

Web.py's author (aaronsw) posts here occasionally.
That's true, you can't discount for that but true understanding is a prerequisite.

Look at Dawkins, Feynman and other great teachers, they can take the most complicated material and make it accessible to just about everybody (in the case of Dawkins even really young children, have a look at the Christmas lectures for and example of that).
unless you're doing realtime graphics
Another difference: the original version doesn't take multiple arguments, but the new one does.
> The person commented that disturbed characters "seem to infest every area of life" even including "the ranks of doctors, therapists and public officials."

The person says that like the idea that "disturbed characters" infest politics is a new thing.
That's not an option. Now, switching to black coffee, that's an idea.
230V -6% +10%, which is just a fancy standards hack to make all of EU technically 230 without having to change voltage from 240
What about the misses you get when working with Fortune 500 companies? Those misses can really hurt a company.
I find it ironic that some of the groups he's criticizing have advertisements showing up in the Google text ads on his post.
Of course some euro plugs have what I'd call a "sneaky" earth, that isn't a pin but simply a contact on the other two parts of the socket and plug.

See the two pictures in this (quickly googled) discussion, for a clear illustration - http://forum.expatica.com/print.html&client=printer&...
This one's pretty old, but it is one of my favorites...
It has been mentioned a few times - the creator (aaronsw) is a YC alum and occasionally stops by this forum.

It's fine for small ad-hoc websites, but it tends to run out of gas with larger, more complicated sites. The globals are a big issue, and you frequently end up writing wrappers around base web.py classes to fill in missing functionality. Might as well just start with Django and get the missing functionality to begin with.
In the early 90's the Pentium floating point error could fit your criteria:

http://www.cs.niu.edu/other/pentium.html

I remember taking the chip into Digital at the time. They replaced it for me.
haha. good point.

i didn't even bother looking--immediately opened a new tab and google for twilio's homepage.

(btw - i love contests. they're so much fun!!!)
> Did you ever try contributing to MySQL? Chances are very good your patch languished for years.

That has nothing to do with the ease that the software owner can create a system to not have to 'track down all contributors' when making a licensing change decision. Your original post implies that this is a barrier to entry.

> I literally mean "end user". The consumer who would like a piece of software to solve a particular problem on their desktop. Someone a little like me, who uses the software I'd like to write.

So you're suggesting that I can't sell support/services for my 'law firm software' because the paralegal/lawyers that are actually using it on their company desktops will not be paying out of pocket for services? Huh?

> Of course, I don't actually want to provide services -- I want to write software.

No one is forcing you to. I'm not being 'Pro-GPL' here I'm just poking holes in your argument.

> No, they'll just make up a large portion of your sales (from experience) if you're selling technically-oriented services.

(emphasis mine) In your original post you seem to be applying that to all software that someone might choose to make GPL.
I would rather have never been to /b/ and not have that ability and miss out on all the counterculture, because that ability is also a curse.
Actually, the entire point of the article is that you _won't_ eliminate the stupid calories by drinking Diet-beverages, but instead will consume more of them _because_ you are drinking Diet-Beverage. They have some data to back it up:

"We found that reducing the correlation between sweet taste and the caloric content of foods using artificial sweeteners in rats resulted in increased caloric intake, increased body weight, and increased adiposity"

I find their thesis entirely believable, and it would be a fairly easy thing to do a controlled study on.

Why people believe that they can somehow control what they eat through "willpower" or "dedication" is something I continue to find interesting - doesn't this type of control come from the brain? This article shows that with an fMRI, your brain will actually be able to determine caloric intake of an artificially sweetened beverage - the implication being that you will then be directed to increase your caloric intake, and, as a result of consuming artificially sweetened beverages, you will consume _more_ calories than you would have if you hadn't consumed that artificially sweetened beverage.

Presumably for each persons metabolism their is something that tricks the brain into believing _more_ calories have been consumed, and causes you to consume fewer calories as a result.

I think the foundation of diets like Atkins/Zone, is that by consuming high(er) Fat/Protein diets, you are hacking your brain into thinking it has eaten more than if you hadn't eaten those foods.
I've been busy learning django/python for a few weeks now and I'm reading pretty much all day. Someone on a forum somewhere mentioned this as a solution for some of the frustration a couple of people felt while working with django.

My own personal list of bad stuff to date (about django, not web.py):

There is a lot of 'magic' going on, in other words there are lots of things that have to be done 'just so' or it will not work and you'll get a totally meaningless error message (in fact the error messages are some of the worst I've ever seen).

Simple things (like extending the user model) are done pretty kludgy and not standardized as part of the framework, which I really think they should be. It would be easy enough to 'augment' the user table in a documented manner for instance.

Pretty much all of the documentation seems to teach you how to set up your applications in a non-portable way, in other words the application has to live in the named directory that it was conceived in.

I'm definitely going to play around with webpy under wsgi as soon as I have a little bit of time.
he gave his editor access to his bank accounts before he left, and the editor has been posting data dumps regularly to the wired site.
I believe your criticism is equivalent to the old "macs only have one mouse button" argument. Sure, false==0 and "false"==0 both evaluate to true, but is that really a bad thing? It is well known and well documented behavior. I would even argue that this is an important feature of PHP. And if you want strict comparison, there's still the === operator, just like in JavaScript.
A quick search didn't find anyone else suggesting this, so:

I'd like a link on the page for a particular discussion thread that takes me immediately to the top of the entire discussion (the initial submission, in other words). That way, I don't have to click "parent" twelve times to get there.
I tried using web.py on multiple occasions and found that it never quite fit the bill. I'd love a framework that is in between this and django, but I'm afraid that django is just probably the way to go regardless... There's too many benefits of the (almost) reusable apps, and of course the admin for quick data prototyping, and sometimes production admin console.
What about limit as x goes to infinity of x - (x - 1)? We do the algebra first, right? Now, that's a special case of y - (x - 1) where y = x, so can we get a different residue by going about the limit in two dimensions?
I've observed exceptions, but this certainly seems to be the rule I've seen, too.
You are missing the other side of the argument. How ubiquitous/easy to setup/find cheap hosting for is lisp? Not very. That is why people still use php even when they "know better" - I feel those same people can leverage these new capabilities to write even cleaner code whilst living with the compromise. That is not a "blind spot" or out right denial it's pragmatism at it's finest.
(smiling in agreement)
Quietly Complaining
Ask HN: How do I find out whether something was submitted?
I'd like to be able to find out whether a specific Webpage was already submitted without having to submit it myself in the process. Is there some mechanism for doing that here?
The Functions of the Foreign Exchange Market
Have you seen bubble meshing? It handles non-manifold geometry.
fair enough. my information is not up to date, and if you have money in and have more recent experience, i'm sure you're more right than i am.
Open Yahoo and Government
Django unfortunately forces you into a restrictive architecture.