skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I suggest reading R. A. Lyttleton on the nature of knowledge:

http://amasci.com/freenrg/bead.txt

The scientific attitude to adopt in regard to any hypothesis in my view
(and we are talking of subjective things,) can be represented schemat-
ically by means of a simple model of a bead that can be moved on a short length of horizontal wire (see diagram on next page). Suppose the left-hand end denoted by 0 (zero) and the right-hand end by 1 (unity), and let 0 correspond to complete disbelief unqualified, and the right-hand end 1 to absolute certain belief in the hypothesis. Now the principle of practice that I would urge on all intending scientists in regard to any and every hypothesis is: never let your bead quite reach the position 0 or 1

Once you're freed of the need to be absolutely certain of whether something is right or wrong, you can, in a more relaxed way, think about what the most sensible level of skepticism for any controversial issue about the way the world really is. Frinstance I'd say that the chance of creationism being right is something on the order of 10^-8. The chance of vaccinations being dangerous is maybe 10^-2, and the chances of them being more dangerous than the alternative maybe 10^-3. Peak oil? I dunno, 20%, depending what you mean by "peak oil". Holocaust denial comes in many forms from the lunatic to the nitpicky, each one needs its own level of skepticism. The "global warming" issue has quite unlikely positions on both sides with more plausible ones in the middle. And so on.
BBC Horizon: How to make better decisions
True, and quite well phrased.

Still, there are ways of dealing with slippery slopes. Knowing that something is a slippery slope means "approach with caution" not "stop".
Appeals Court Overturns 2007 Unix Copyright Decision
Human Brain Processing Speed clocked at less than 60 bits/s using Hicks Law
Sail to Sunny Valley
Tilting patent suits towards the defendant and against patent trolls is highly advantageous for the market and consumers. Plenty of evidence that patents actually suppress technical advances in the field of the patent.
Yeah. Conceptually, you can think of the difference as whether or not there can be two copies of something. There can only be one copy of a Symbol, Fixnum, true, false, and nil. This means that true == true, and true.dup #=> error.
Agreed - I took a tour of DIC and it was exactly what you mentioned; basically sales offices for corporate IT firms. It was glitzy not techie.
> I know it's popular around here to dislike OOP, but this guy's main objection is to mutable state. Analogous situations can occur in an imperative paradigm without objects.

To be fair, the guy's one reference to imperative programming made it sound worse than OOP.
Scrum Friendly Features in FogBugz 7
I rather thought that the court set aside a summary judgement - saying there was sufficient grounds to require a trial of the facts.

No decision as to copyright ownership was made.
Seconded. The income I put in will compare ridiculously low to US wages, even if it's quite respectable around here (Chile)
http://catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/unix-nature.html
Controversial MMO developer Evony sends in lawyers to attack blogger
> So, to the extent that I can become a conduit for other programmers to have that same epiphany [that "you are your own worst enemy" and "everything [you] write sucks."] in their own programming careers, that means it's working.

There are a couple of problems with this.

First, it's possible to aspire to a higher level of quality than that. You don't get there without lots of self-criticism, but you can get there. Wietse Venema, Dan Bernstein, Edsger Dijkstra, Alan Kay. It isn't always practical, but it is definitely possible.

Second, Jeff is so cartoonishly idiotic that it's hard to identify with him. Brian Gianforcaro is some kind of Zen Master of humility. If he wants to show people that they should criticize themselves, I think writing total bullshit the way you do is the wrong way to do it. Instead, people congratulate themselves on their intelligence: "I thought I wasn't very smart, but compared to this guy, I'm a genius!"
If you criticize on the pulpit, you apologize on the pulpit.
Flagged for drama. GTFO, this isn't the Ruby community ;)
I think the problem the author has (but fails to articulate well) is that the variance in consequences of doing things in different orders is not explicit. In short, it's like you are never allowed to know what the balance of your account is until you overdraw it.

Of course, I'm not sure whether that's a valid complaint either, since one can always define accessor/getter methods (e.g., "get_balance" for the checking account), but there are those who would argue that accessor methods violate the data protection principle of object oriented programming.
What an excellent presentation. Benevolence not because it is good but because it works.
I don't know about you but my visual systems are processing at a greater bandwidth than that. Plus I am pretty sure that my hearing system is coping well with the simultaneous audio output of an MP3 track. Plus I am supposedly doing some work - I think that 60 bits/sec is rather under estimating the total.
They've also sent in a legal complaint to The Guardian over their article from earlier this year (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/gamesblog/2009/jul/15/g...).
The bright side of sitting in traffic: Crowdsourcing road congestion data
Seconding 'academia' as a non-government item. Non-profit private academic institutions don't deserve the 'Corporation' classification either.
Thanks! We used Twilio for the telephony piece. They have excellent docs with everything you need to get going. Check 'em out.
There are cases where asking for money would actually make the site deliver more value to everyone - personal ads, for example.
The Face of Bad Credit: gauging creditworthiness from the face
Anyone else see this click-through warning?

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Well, that's one possible solution down. Maybe there are some others?

CL seems to feel that doing anything at all to fight the asshats just results in giving the asshats more toys to play with... and for the obvious solutions, that's true. What they need are some non-obvious solutions - which might require them to spend a little more money than they're making today.
Message To Apple Fanboys And Girls From Jason Calacanis
You have been misinformed.

http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/camps/aktion.reinhard/belzec/A...

http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/orgs/german/einsatzgruppen/ftp...

(there is of course more evidence available for those who seek it, but I just want to establish that the number of mass graves is greater than zero)
Yeah, but this way he gets 40+ points of HN karma...
Inside Smith & Tinker's $29 Million Plan to Merge Online/Offline Gaming
Eric Giler demos wireless electricity (video)
So no life after death would mean low ROI.
If your paycheck comes from a government organization, then you work for the government.
If you were a software engineer for the government would you complain that you can't state that you work for a business?
dasil003, I'd say that the headline was correct, but overbroad. There are lots trends in types of startups out there -- but few big picture lessons that can be gleaned from the success/failure of a small subset.
I think that's the point -- encapsulation is achievable in many non-OO ways, and encapsulation is basically just a subset of namespace management. In other words, encapsulation itself isn't necessarily bad, so griping about encapsulation doesn't seem like a very productive way to "prove" that OOP is "bad".
Shameless self promotion ... my (part time) startup http://yoolki.com
The US government failed to keep instructions for building Atomic bombs from Russia. After realizing that failure they then designed and built the far more powerful Hydrogen bomb, which was quickly copped by the Russians. This information has then leaked around the world. You can trace every atomic bomb program in the world back to information gathered from the US.

PS: Governments have discovered the best way to keep secrets is to tell as few people as possible. There are not 10,000 people who know how to create the best radar absorbing paint used by the Air force. So, even as we are constantly compromised each leak is limited to what that person or computer system knows.
My question: why do the pharms think this is bad news for them?

The placebo effect requires belief that the placebo is fixing the problem.
Studies are double-blind so that the patient does have that belief. Without the expectation of being cured, there is no improvement.

For the placebo effect to be a significant influence in general health, the public needs to be convinced that it is receiving a legitimate fix. The best way to show people it's a real cure? Give them a real cure, and tell them all about how it works. The need for chemical compounds that change some aspect of body chemistry will not decrease because of the placebo effect; instead, these compounds become the placebo. It's another, more effective layer of manipulation.

But despite my wording, I see no problem with it. It might technically be a giant fraud, if the power of healing lies with the buyer all along. But if it happened in finance, who would complain? "Company convinces clients they have more money; buying power mysteriously increases" doesn't sound all that fraudulent to me.

Essentially, it's business as usual for pharms. Develop compounds that may or may not work, tell everyone they work, sell them, produce actual results. What's all the fuss about?
Show of hands. Who is using Scrum at their startups?
Not if that type of compensation is irrelevant to what you're testing. That would be like having a control group which wasn't fed.
(Edited)

To me the Holocaust is even more certain than evolution because I grew up with the stories of it from my grandparents. But if you don't have those stories in your family, you can also look at books, museums, photographs, eyewitness accounts. The sources for facts are endless.

Being concerned about revisionism, I would have thought the OP is worried about losing such facts, but then this thread turned into an outlet for your unwillingness to accept the holocaust.

If you weren't German, I'd simply call you an asshole, but one can imagine it being hard to believe that peers of your grandparents were responsible for killing millions of people for no reason other than race. Although coming from Germany, you should be much better informed than the average holocaust denier, from say, Iran.

Half of my grandmother's family was machine-gunned into a pit outside of Kiev called Babiy Yar with about 30 thousand other Jews by German SS during the first weeks of German occupation. The bodies, bullets, and cartridges are all still there. The executions at Babiy Yar went on for months until no more Jews could be found in the region, at which point the site was used to execute gypsies, prisoners, etc. These events were witnessed by thousands of residents of Kiev during the occupation by German forces, and you can read one such account in the book called Babiy Yar by Anatoliy Kuznecov.

Google image results:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=babi+yar&sou...

When you look at hundreds of individual mass execution events like this one, you get a more complete picture of the Holocaust.
Ask HN: Review my webapp (LeadNuke.com)
This is a webapp developed internally for my startup. A few colleagues saw me using it on occasion and asked me if I could break it out into its own service so that they could use it at their companies. So, here it is. I'll let the site do the actual explaining. If enough people start using it and request more features, I could certainly build it out, but for now, this is built based on our own needs :-)

http://www.leadnuke.com
No doubt that Hitler wanted to kill them, true.
Yahoo Tries To Make Email More Social
This is pretty cool - as good as an example of the power of massive parallelism as I've ever seen, anyway.
user:	edw519
created:	916 days ago
karma:	21943

I don't think he's hurting for karma... 40 is a drop in the bucket.
Interesting piece. I am inclined to ask, should we have a core curriculum?

This is anecodotal only, but when I was an undergrad I felt like many of the classes I took where of no benefit, but they were required. Now that I am working on my masters degree, I am tightly focused on my field (and a tiny handful of electives in one other very tightly connected field) and every class is relevant.

There may be a value in maintaining a broad based core curriculum, but then it seems there is also value in a tighter focus and it may at least in some cases make sense to permit students to narrow in on that tigther focus earlier.

Of course, that tight focus should never be too confining. I changed majors twice before finding one I was happy with, and even while working on my masters the idea of switching has come up.
MMORPG Marketing LOLcat sez: "Marketin ur game. ur doin it rong."
You know the answer to this question. Wow- it is so impressive that you run two businesses in two industries. You're my hero.
Once again, the projected date is the timing for a TOP in the market, not a LOW. The bubble has been pricked but, as in very slow motion, it still looks like a bubble for a long time before breaking down.

The chart in the original article (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/files/31560/Shang...) clearly depicts (forecasts) topping action in late July. Plus, the chart labels indicate a "100% range" of 10-Jul thru 10-Aug which actually works out well given the current 4-Aug top.

I don't think we've seen any "crash" yet. We've seen big moves down but The Shanghai Composite Index is characteristically volatile. Usually, to the extent such a term has any meaning here, it's a 55-day trip from market top to crash low. The heavy action happens near the low which works out to ( ... counts on fingers ... ) 9/28/2009.

It's OK to ridicule voodoo forecasting. But common courtesy demands you to first understand what is being said, before you declare it BS. (The people at TR share some blame; they could have stated things more clearly.)
The Appendix: Useful and in Fact Promising
Why sad? That's more opportunity for those of us who do take notice.
As a techie and journalist, I'm all for more open government and the movement to put more government data online. But at the same time I find some of these sites, particularly from this list Data Masher, somewhat disturbing.

For those unfamiliar with it, Data Masher allows you to combine two data sources with simple operators (+,-, etc.) and create maps and tables with the results. But how informative is this, really? Does dividing"Violent Crime rate per 100k pop" with the "percent of households with firearms" result in any sort of useful statistic?

No, since violent crimes covers a broad swath of criminal activity, including rape and aggrevated assault, which may or may not involve a gun.

I would argue presenting this manner of dis-information as having any kind of factual validity is just irresponsible.

It also seriously irks me that most, if not all, of the data provided lacks any kind of study details, even basics such as margin of error or sample size. Unless I'm seriously missing something, there is no way to measure the accuracy or validity of these statistics other than to say "Oh, well that data's from the CDC so it must be accurate." After all, the government IS always right.

Not good enough.
I think the 60 bits/sec figure is more analogous to encoding an mp3 than listening to one. Making distinct choices like you're probably doing with your work is the sort of processing that the article was referring to, not the "parsing" done by reading or listening to an mp3.
http://stackoverflow.com and http://serverfault.com/ have good shell scripting discussions
> The government isn't causing the situation

As said previously, the government at BEST is not causing the problem, but certainly it isn`t helping and most certainly it is making it worse. By prohibiting something that creates income, the formation of a black market (in this case mostly violent) is almost inevitable. Also, needless to say, drug prohibition has been largely ineffective as a mean to reduce drug use. Other negative aspect is the superpopulation in prisons. Most people, acording to research, are imprisioned for drug-related crimes.

So, if something that costs absurd amounts of money is ineffective and has disastrous social consequences, why keep it? Well, this could be probably for a number of practical reasons:

1. Society doesn't care, at large.
2. Society has the illusion of a safer environment because of drug prohibition, when what happens in fact is the opposite
3. Illegal drug market is responsible for a lot of money flow, and i SUSPECT people in charge of drug enforcement make money from it.
4. It's a good excuse to raise taxes
5. It's a good excuse to control the population, saying it is for their own good.
6. Marijuana is the most used illegal drug in the world, and it is a plant, meaning that it cannot be patented and controlled, and a lot of people can grow it easily. Marijuana being illegal would make a lot more of money to politicians and criminals than it would make if it were legal

On philosophical grounds, I still believe that if you want to fuck up yourself in meth, it is YOUR problem (after all, it's YOUR body.)

You (we) have to understand that almost every single society that grew on this planet used drugs somehow -- The prohibitionist approach to stop (some) drug use would look childish and hilarious - if it were not disastrous.
To be fair, any inconvenience caused is outweighed by the significant increase in chance of death or injury by flying so much.. ;P
So Counter Intelligence was weak in that case. It's an anecdote, and there are plenty of anecdotes about well kept secrets throughout history.
Translating software with Pootle
Hazard Insurance, Inc
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FTA: "Martin uses his method to determine how much information the brain can process during lexical decision tasks. The answer? No more than about 60 bits per second." So, it's not 60 bits/sec of information processing, but 60 yes/no decisions per second. That's pretty fast.
You should have included country as a field since income varies a lot between countries.
This is a really neat idea, and it sounds like they tried to cover many conceivable privacy concerns from the get-go...

But given the fact that you have to enable this (by running Google Maps) each time you start a car trip, it makes me wonder how much useful data it will actually collect.

Also what if you leave Maps open on your phone while you walk around the city? I would imagine that would skew the data as well.
Sony Reader Daily Edition With 3G Connectivity Unveiled
Not quite. We all have to study constantly. The question is how to balance work and study.
I agree with the general conclusion (as I understand it) that mutable objects aren't a good way of modeling state, but the case has been made much more strongly and more clearly elsewhere, such as here:

http://clojure.blip.tv/file/812787/

You can do state and concurrency correctly in an OO language with locks, but it isn't practical. It gets exponentially more difficult as a project grows, and realistically any human being is going to end up with something that only almost always works correctly, with the occasional failures that are left over almost impossible to find.
Searching for 'holocaust mass graves' turns up several results on the front page just of fairly recent discoveries, with locations etc. that you could try to verify. If archives are not open to the public then perhaps you should press for them to be put online for the sake of historical interest, or get in touch with a historian who could help to make this case.

It sounds like you're sincere and just trying to find high quality of evidence, but statements to the effect that 'there are no mass graves' seem to contradict established fact.
That's just picking one type of process running on what seems to be a massively parallel machine and saying that's the rate of the processor.
thisweknow.org is fairly cool
As for the numbers, the criticisms I have heard are that there are no ways to validate them.

There are demographic statistics on the number of Jews in Europe before and after World War II. These numbers have a margin of error, but if three million Jews had escaped from Eastern Europe to the USSR instead of being killed, it's hard to imagine how this fact could be covered up.
And as each decision requires multiple inputs that would again rubbish the headline figure - total nonsense.
Imperative and object-oriented are on different axes. OO is an organizational paradigm, while imperative is an algorithmic paradigm. It's not hard to conceive of a more declarative object system.
Just for the sake of curiosity: do you believe the Roman Empire existed?
My take on this is:

1. The OO model of C++ and Java (the languages the author has experience with) is not the only model of OO around.

2. State has to be maintained somewhere in the program. While functional languages encourage minimizing state, nothing prevents the programmer from doing the same in an OO language.

3. Modeling is hard, regardless of the PL.
Sounds like he wants "Entity Systems" (as defined by how game developers use the term).

http://cowboyprogramming.com/2007/01/05/evolve-your-heirachy...

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=4...

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=4...

http://didntread.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/building-a-stackle...
I've interviewed with Google, Apple, and Microsoft. It always strikes me that the questions they ask you during interviews are not at all representative of what you need to be able to do on the job. That's why these course materials are incredibly valuable.

You have a better shot at these types of interviews coming straight out of college than you do after X years of job experience. The interviewing mindset is very different from the working mindset. If you want to do well, you should study these PDFs for a few weeks (repetition is the mother of learning) before your interviews. I did exactly that before my last round of interviews, and it made a huge difference.

I didn't post them on HN because, honestly, I don't want them to be too publicized. These are the exact questions that you will be asked at these types of interviews. It's borderline cheating.
"outlet for your unwillingness to accept the holocaust."

I do accept the holocaust, it is merely another big issue that displays the revisionism phenomenon. I wish I hadn't mentioned it, though.

Please be careful before labeling people holocaust revisionists. At least in Germany it is not a harmless thing to accuse somebody of.

Edit: I have also seen a lot of pictures like that. In Germany we have school trips to concentration camps. I don't doubt the cruelty of the nazi time.
The naming of a group as "peak-oil advocates" immediately flags this article in my mind as some form of propaganda. No one is "for" peak oil being reached.

His attempt at argumentation about the amount of oil that's available is far beyond my ability to discredit and as a result, I'm completely agnostic on the issue. But I know to ignore any conclusion presented by this author when he applies such obvious slander and misrepresentation of his opponents. An obvious straw-man argument.