skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Structures with predictable behavior - eg drugs that will alleviate suffering, chips that will compute, etc. I take no position on whether it's ok to ignore philosopy, but as far as I can see they largely do. It doesn't matter to me whether logical positivism is correct - I'm saying people doing science clearly seek predictive knowledge. Models are predictive. If you still disagree, I'm not sure we can come to any agreement here.

Again, all of this is too vague to either agree with or disagree with. If you read the relevant philosophical literature, you'll find that it's very hard to say exactly what words like "predictive", "model", etc. should actually mean in this context. Do you mean that theories have to make verifiable predictions? Falsifiable predictions? What exactly do you mean by verifiability or falsifiability? Do you believe that observations can be made independently of theory? Do you agree with Quine that confirmation and refutation are holistic? To say that scientists attempt to construct predictive models is to say virtually nothing of any content. This is why it is not a good idea for scientists to parrot phrases like "verifiable", "observable", etc. without at least trying to get a grasp of some of the issues surrounding them.

>They're only "scientific" & "rational" in retrospect because you now know what is actually happening.

No, that's not true. Their theories were based on constructing hypotheses and testing them (an oversimplication of course, but basically true). That is a rational method. The fact that they didn't know exactly what atomic numbers were doesn't make it any less rational. (After all, we still don't know exactly what atoms are.)

>So if our current brain structure is an accident of evolution what makes our present moral beliefs more correct?

Their correspondence with the moral facts of the matter.

>Coincidentally the only moral facts that aren't already changing (much) are those crucial in evolution.

I don't know what this means, but I think you are confusing moral beliefs with moral facts.

>It's inconcievable to me how you can make a statement about this reality without (eventually) referring to some observation/experiment -- ie some test that argues for that outcome over other possible outcomes.

The idea that all contentful statements reduce to statements about the outcome of experiment or observation is (again) essentially the one that the logical positivsts put forward. It turned out to be wrong, for reasons which are well documented for anyone who is interested.

Personally, I don't find it inconceivable at all that it's possible to make a statement about "this" reality without referring to an observation or experiment. "It is wrong to kill people for no reason" is clearly a statement pertaining to reality which has no connection with any particular observation or experiment.
The story seems very similar in theme to this one: http://www.viruscomix.com/page473.html
GameStreamer Instantaneous Gaming
Allows gamers to play instantly and developers to distribute games on the fly.
I don't think it has to be random. I meet most potential partners through organizations. Try a organization like the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Dallas, where I'm from, has one of the oldest chapters in the nation. You could also try Startup Happy Hours and design groups like Refresh. You've got to get out and network.
I've heard both that it was due to budget cuts and I've heard that it was due to well-meaning activists who were pushing for patient's rights. Honestly I never dug into it to figure out what really happened.

Whatever happened, it's a sad state of affairs.
Yes, superuser.com.

Seriously, it just opened. Go post some Linux/UNIX themed questions!
Colt (Parallel Colt, really) is what Incanter is built upon and it already has a lot of libraries. I suppose R has more, though.

However, there is no Incanter community yet - not even a mailing list. That matters.
>it is that he denies the very ability of science to investigate certain effects, and further, he believes those effects to be important and not mere hypothetical possibilities.

I'm not a materialist but I don't deny the ability of science to investigate consciousness. I think it's an open question whether or not science will shed any light on it.

I'm not sure why you think that materialism is a necessary assumption for doing science. Science is generally supposed to start free of any huge metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality and draw its conclusions via observation and experiment. The balance of evidence might turn out to support materialism or it might not. At most, I think scientists might be entitled to assume what Russell called "neutral monism" -- the notion that there is basically only one kind of "stuff", divorced from the notion that there is anything particularly "physical" about it (whatever that means).
One of the cool things about the first web was that it was so simple that you could essentially do anything with it. It was originally meant to help people publish their research papers, and now here we are 20 years later doing all this stuff that the original authors never intended.

That's the good thing about it.

This guy's proposal is all about formalizing a bunch of things that we do on the web today. But there's no reason to assume that 20 years from now we'll be compiling lists of our friends online and authorizing random strangers to follow the 140-character random thoughts that pop into our head. Or shortening URLs or any of the thousands of other things we do online every day that the guys at CERN never expected us to do in 1990.

As such, the only thing this "new web" can possibly do is get stale. As a thought experiment, imagine we'd built it in 2004, and it was all about helping people create Blogs. Or we built it in 1999, so it could help you "optimize the internet" by installing spyware on your computer. Worse still, imagine the original creators put in a bunch of codified methodology to publish and critique research papers, thus making it better suited for the task it was originally intended. What exactly would we be doing with that extraneous functionality today?

So yeah, it's cool that we need a fresh start and all. Just make sure it's capable of expanding beyond the silly OpenID/oauth issues that bother us today.
Yehuda Katz's 5 Favorite Things About Rails 3
They associate the multiple google id's with each other, so it appears you are using the same one.
Sounds a lot like Vendor Relationship Management: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/Main_Page
From http://everything2.com/title/Costs+of+launching+to+orbit

Therefore if we can get to the point where the fuel is the only thing we need to use up, a 140 lb (70kg) person can get launched for just a few tens of thousand of dollars- hardly any more than the cost of an airflight; a little bit more than a supersonic airflight.
The residence is being accused? Residences can commit crimes/infractions?
That's kind of a bizarre way to put it. Science has very little to say about the probability of God.

Science has removed some old proofs of God - the watchmaker proof in particular, by providing alternative explanations for the existence of life. Science itself has come almost nowhere towards placing a probability on the existence of life given the universe we live in, using only known physical processes.

It's completely plausible to say that, given a modern version of evolution, and all the time and planets and matter in the universe so far, the odds of creatures at least as intelligent as humans is one in a million. Or a trillion. Who could possibly know otherwise? There are, after all, thousands of unknowns in any such calculation.

If, in a few centuries, someone did accurately calculate that the odds were one in a trillion, would you say that science gave "a vanishingly small chance of a god existing?"
I'm working on #3, but the technology for the AR part isn't quite there yet (or at least doesn't have a public API).
AFAIK, you can use the same account on all websites related to StackOverflow (ServerFault etc.). Isn't this the case with SuperUser?
Excerpt from article: Multiplications of numbers in [0,m) can almost be done in time O(log m). For the purposes of hash tables, the number m must be close to the number of different keys n. Thus—formally—hash tables often run in time O(log n).

Yes, this guy is confused about Big-O notation — nothing to see here, please move along :)
Yeah, this is just the normal flow of things- all the ra ra new economy types will die off because they were operating as charities, not businesses.
haha wow... so true
By comparing things we learn. By comparing programming languages we learn things about them, such as how easy it is to express yourself.

By doing that over time programming languages evolve. If we didn't compare programming languages you'd be programming ALGOL right now and the whole web things (much less the internet) would have never happened.
Exploding iPhones
The "Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed" section is also great. A side-effect of Amazon's recommendation engine is that it groups all the unlikely products and humorous reviews together. Here's a gem of a review on the page for the (discontinued) gallon of Tuscan Milk:

http://www.amazon.com/review/RXXPVOUH9NLL3/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt?...
I wonder why he isn't considering Octave, given that his lab already has a pile of existing Matlab code. Also, I think it's relatively easy to get Python to go faster than Matlab: http://www.scipy.org/PerformancePython so maybe that's a reasonable approach if some people are already using it but just having trouble making it go fast.
Your example, though, outright assumes the claim is false because you have different error rates for different languages.

I agree the metric is coarse, but I think it's a decent stand-in for things that matter. More lines of code tend to mean more concepts unrelated to the problem you're solving, more assumptions and a greater cognitive load. All of these introduce more opportunities for error. Consider the problem of concatenating a sequence of text, and putting commas inbetween each distinct entry. In Python:

concat = ','.join(texts)

In C++, this would be

string concat;
for (list<string>::const_iterator i = texts.begin(); i < texts.begin(); ++i) {
concat += *i;
}

There are more opportunities for me to make mistakes in the C++ code. I've introduced more concepts (using iterators to access a sequence, using iterators to access a value, building a string) which increase my cognitive load. Hence, I'm more likely to have more bugs in this code, despite solving the same problem.

I don't even want to write the C code to do this right now, because I would have to deal with the following concepts: allocating sufficient memory for the C-style strings and ensuring I'm not accidentally overflowing that memory; determining what kind of sequence texts is (native array or my own linked list?); determining how to iterate over that sequence, and how to "add" strings.
Is Mint Going After Freshbooks? Its New Features Point In That Direction.
Agreed, but not doing silly things is a pretty good start to the process of scaling.
Jeesh... is this thing on? Humor in puns people, humor in puns.

Granted I didn't realize there was also a Haskell variant of such a document. So many down votes makes a man sad... T_T
Except not a trade school. Olin is bit heavy on entrepreneurial ventures though.
"free (very important!) if we want to run a job on 100 machines (e.g. in the cloud), I believe currently you need a matlab licence for each one"
funny,... but it just snaps a single picture, and in no way monitors what is going on at street level.
Is Taleb a crank ? You know what, I don't know.

Is Sam Sethi a nut job ? Also no clue.

Is Dvorak a troll ? Again, it doesn't register, he might be.

What I do know is that "Is X a Y ?" where 'X' is the name of some guy that's in the public eye and Y some hyperbolic term (preferably derogatory) will get immediate traction.
Failvert
The Archive of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences
Hello HN, I'm the guy who wrote the LYSE site! I Hope you'll enjoy it :) At least I have fun writing and drawing for it.

I'll always be fixing mistakes and technical points that were not caught in the reviewing process, so it's much appreciated if you give me comments and criticism. Feel free to speak your mind, I collect these ideas and build on them.
The "About" page: Your Internet junk drawer?
We did start applying Steve Blank's stuff in Q4 '08 when we began to change direction to focus on college, but we applied it poorly. There are a number of reasons why, many are too long to explain here. I'll be writing up some posts on what went wrong and post them here so hopefully that will prompt further useful discussion.
Collaborative Design Isn’t the Same as Democratic Desig
With the ice-fan, the heat from the room is going into melting the ice (and, eventually, warming that water to room temperature).

The freezer, of course, works just like an AC: it moves the heat from inside the freezer to outside the freezer — i.e., to the room its sitting in (some large commercial freezers actually use outdoor parts so then can dump the heat outdoors). Assumably, during the day, the windows are open, so that heat will escape outdoors.

Random note: If you could prevent all heat transfer with the outdoors, the freezer/fan/ice cycle would actually heat the room.
Max out the I/O capacity on your existing server:

At the very least, make sure each system bus (i.e. PCIe/PCI-X for commodity x86) slot is populated with a host adapter (ideally a hardware RAID controller) which can saturate that slot.

For each host adapter, ensure that each port has enough disks behind it that, even with worst-case contention (not fully-random, unless you've somehow managed to magically induce 512-byte transfers), they can saturate the the upstream system bus, even after RAID processing is done by the adapter.

After that, upgrade to a server with more slots and repeat the saturation.

Repeat once more for the largest single server available, while starting the project to implement (perhaps write from scratch) a distributed database.

I have yet to see anyone make even a concerted effort on the first step, instead skipping to the second part of the last step, probably because that appears, at first glance, to require only a Small Matter Of Programming.
I've been to several highschool/college level competitions they generally fall into two types, writing scenario code the fastest with no concern for real-world problems, or a test in reading obfuscated code (GE/Fairfield University you're seriously incompetent in your inability to provide actual computers.). In my experience the later is worse, much worse, more-so because its frustrating as hell.
My post specifically refers to vectorization where you may use the fact that you can multiply 4 pairs of 16-bit integers in the time it takes to multiply a pair of 64-bit integers. So, you could operate four 16-bit hash tables in the time it takes to operate a 64-bit hash table.

That's all somewhat theoretical sure, but the point is to challenge your assumptions. (People do use vectorization, right now.)
I believe the inefficiency of an empty freezer/fridge actually comes from it being inefficient to cycle the compressor. The low heat capacity of air leads to the compressor cycling often.
This is dissapointing. I was really hoping for something more exciting about number of buckets vs number of elements or something like that.

In any event, he was correct when he said: "The problems that result from picking the wrong model of computation are well known and addressed by most textbooks. I have not discovered anything new." There are problems that you can "solve in polynomial time" by encoding the problem as some HUGE number (where the number of bits is exponential in the size of the problem) and doing arithmetic. This is where you really see the breakdown of the constant time arithmetic model.
If the police considered me criminal (by mistake, vindictive, whatever) enough to park the naughty van in front of my house for a little while, and then drove it off, I think I'd recover.

The van is not a permanent fixture. It's not a scarlet letter burned into your front yard. It goes away.
I know Miran from IRC, so it was a very friendly discussion.

I certainly aim to make it as good as LYAH, his online book is doing a great service to the Haskell community and I'd like Erlang to have something similar.
I'm guessing it was the $20 million.
I'll probably end up reading it. Is it referenced anywhere?
Wish I had the time to try the same task in R, NumPy/SciPy and Incanter to get a feel for the relative strengths and weaknesses of each. If anyone does have the time, and cares to write it up in a blog, I would be happy to read the results. :)
Summerhill costs 20,000 pounds a year.
> but Frank Lloyd Wright was not (he designed fallingwater in the time it took his client to travel to meet with him, after meditating ahem on it for months).

Isn't putting stuff off to the very last moment the hall mark of the true hacker ?
Good marketing idea from articulate - makes it seem like it's some startup but, in reality, it's just a way for articulate to get more people in their funnel. I like it.
Wouldn't have changed the outcome of the lawsuit if it had been on there beforehand.
There are multiple audiences:
1) peer scholars familiar in your area of research trying to determine if you really did and understood what you said you did and understood
2) someone who is not a scholar and wants to learn about your topic

Write a separate paper for #2. Use contractions and exclamation points. Present related work in a framework that tells a good story instead of that catalogs the space. Skip correctness details and drill in on implementation specifics.

Something for both audiences will just be too long and boring for either.
Words mean what they mean. You could call any interpreter a compiler if you twisted it, and you'd sort of be right, but you'd be a lot more wrong. Same in this instance. Its an interpreter! And yes, it sort of does a job close enough to compilation that you wouldn't _really_ be incorrect calling it a compiler, but its not a compiler dammit!!
That doesn't just work with debters, I've done it to electronics retailers who've jerked me around. I was told my phone had water damage when it was in fact over heating, and then they somehow managed to lose it when I asked for it to be returned. I sat in the phone store for about 3 hours watching the guy, and the store front was about 20sqft with a bench. I got a brand new replacement phone out of that one.

I've also sat on the line with my cell phone operator for near an hour because they wiped my credit early. I got a full refund and they extended my top-up time by two weeks.

People willingly stress themselves out, staying relaxed and using this to your advantage can help you anywhere.
It's one small step better than blog-jacking in that he gives proper attribution to the legal publishers of the content and doesn't pretend to have any affiliation with the author.
Ewing Theory 101: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/print?id=1193711
I admit an amount of hyperbole when I implied that you NEVER read such blogs, and of course it's good that you do!

In general I think it's fair to say that the more popular blogs and books about startups talk about successes rather than failures, so I'll defend my general point.

I did take some license in how I stated it, and thanks for pointing out that it's too harsh and that there ARE good sources of info like that.
Good God, man, have you gone looney?
You say the internet is broken because authentication is a pain?
You say there should be just one social network?
Try telling that to the people making boatloads of cash today.

The internet IS democracy.
You can't tell it what it should and shouldn't do, or how it should or shouldn't be.
It gets to decide that on its own.

The solution is kinda simple.
Don't try to control the internet.
It has never worked, and it will never work.

Instead, focus on making OpenID & OAuth easier to implement.
Most sites don't want to manage authentication & account creation.
They would love to farm it out, but right now, it requires a lot of work to do so.

Instead, take a cue from Plaxo: focus on making a better Identity & Privacy control service.
Fill it with simple APIs, and let other sites use it.
Make it come complete with lifestream feeds & webhooks.
Find a way to use Facebook mail without logging into Facebook.

>>You could have multiple profiles on multiple gateways so that you could have multiple identities if you needed them

Doesn't that defeat your entire stated purpose?
Now we're back to 2009: multiple logins on multiple sites.

>>either support the construction of this model or to force the startups you found to embrace this model

Are you TRYING to break the internet?
You can't force anything!
The internet IS evolution.
The internet IS democracy.
The internet IS freedom.
The internet IS bottom-up, not top-down.

This ain't gonna work.

Build something.
If it really is better, people will flock to it.
If not, they won't.

There is no force, only do.
An experiment is easy to run. Obtain a Kill-a-Watt or other power meter, then measure (a) how much power the freezer uses over a day w/o freezing extra ice for fan-ice cooling, repeating several times; (b) how much power the freezer uses over a day with freezing extra ice for fan-ice cooling, repeating several times; (c) how much power the fan uses blowing over the ice; (d) how much power an AC uses to keep the room comfortable, repeated several times; (e) [bonus] how much power an AC set to a higher temp. + a fan blowing on you uses to keep the room comfortable, repeated several times.

You can then compare (b)-(a)+(c) vs. (d) or (e).

Ideally, you'd do these experiments in identical conditions (temp., sunlight, wind, humidity, etc.), of course.
What the author missed: the internet is by definition a decentralized and aggressively pluralized network, whereas what he's calling for is one single centralized system with a canonical API for every single person on the network and - here's the kicker - that every single person on the network agrees to adopt.