skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently watched an episode of house (medical TV show) in which house used the (probably) well known mirror box method to relieve pain in the phantom limb of an amputee.
That just reinforces the possibility that pain may be more of a psychosomatic symptom than we think.

This is from Wikipedia article for phantom limb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb

"One particularly novel treatment for phantom limb pain is the mirror box developed by Vilayanur Ramachandran and colleagues (Ramachandran, Rogers-Ramachandran & Cobb 1995). Through the use of artificial visual feedback it becomes possible for the patient to "move" the phantom limb, and to unclench it from potentially painful positions. Repeated training in some subjects has led to long-term improvement, and in one exceptional case, even to the complete elimination of the phantom limb between the hand and the shoulder (so that the phantom hand was dangling from the shoulder)."
All most all religions are based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-fulfilling_prophecy
MapReduce Online aka Hadoop Online Prototype
I suggest to you that the joke also works if you strongly disagree with the equivalence between success and money. It probably falls flat with people who are indifferent to the relationship.
I agree with the thrust of what you write. But this is wrong:

"Philosophy requires no 'givens', which is to say it is a valid field without requiring you to make any assumptions to partake in it."

In 1748, David Hume explained why this isn't right. Hume was a philosopher himself. The most important assumption that you must make in the natural sciences and in every brand of philosophy with which I'm familiar is causality. Check out http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/ for more.
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Philosophy is sometimes considered the parent of the sciences--just about every pursuit of knowledge used to be philosophy. Once they were systematized, testable, and useful enough to stand on their own, they became sciences.
A situation I've run into occasionally is that I don't do it right the first time, either I don't ask the right questions first time (something you often don't know until you've asked them) or I ask the wrong audience. I did it here on HN a few weeks ago when I asked for criticism of our glunote app (shameless plug: http://glunote.com).
I didn't do a very good job about defining what I wanted to know, so I asked again, but this time with more explanation. When someone bought up the previous post I simply admitted that I'd screwed up the first time. I really think that most people, especially in a community like HN, won't hold it against you if you admit you did something wrong and ask for help again.
That's like saying a Formula 1 team should first design a Ford Focus and then optimize it to win the world championship. It just doesn't make sense to call that process an optimization. The same is true for hi-performance/hi-volume use-cases where KV stores make sense.

Also, putting the optimization issue aside, the KV data access model is actually quite natural for web applications. This is hard to believe (seriously), and you have to see it to believe it. Note that in web apps, being able for the administrator to go in and issue complex queries/updates is much less important than for eg. a billing system. I use an RDBMS for an old billing project, and it wouldn't make sense to use a KV store, but I use a KV store for a web app I'm writing, and it turns out to be a great fit, more natural than an RDBMS.
Nothing we believe about the outside world is unassailably justified by logic alone. Even the surest statements (that the sun will come up tomorrow, for example) are based on a fallible interpretation of the evidence available at the time. That's no reason to stop making statements--it turns out a preponderance of evidence is enough, generally. It just means some of your beliefs sometimes turn out to be wrong.
>Theology, meanwhile, requires you first to assume the existence of God

That's just not true. There's plenty of theology which you can enter into without a prior assumption of the existence of god. The most obvious example would be arguments _for_ the existence of God! But in general, most of theology can be appreciated while taking God's existence as a hypothetical. E.g. you can consider whether or not the existence of evil is compatible with the presence of an omnipotent and wholly good God. (And indeed, theologians spend a lot of time considering arguments _against_ God's existence based on the existence of evil, and these arguments clearly cannot presuppose his existence.)

By the way, have you ever read any theology?
> will produce 160 million kWh Electricity an 180 million kWh heat - enough for 50000 families.We will see more of that...

Your units is not correct. Is that power generation of 160 million kW (i.e. 160GW). If it is kWh, what is the timeframe? (kW is the rate of electricity that is produced - i.e. 1000 (kilo) Watts. kWh is a measure of the amount of electricity - i.e. 1kW for an hour).

If it is kW then it is no doubt not correct - a large power station is 1.6GW.
the advantages of being young is being able to approach a field without having to take sides.

You must be describing your youth, not mine! My experience with youth is that it was the period of my life in which the whites were blindingly white, the blacks impossibly back, and there were no colours or shades of grey to distract us from our belief that we knew exactly what was right and what was wrong.

And thank goodness, because a belief in right and wrong can propel you to change the world while you have the energy to carry it through :-)
I suspect you knew this, but many religions suggest we actually are living on the back of a gigantic turtle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_and_tortoises_in_popula...
A good point, but while Map Reduce is not new I feel it emphasized clarity and simplicity (at least for the problem of sorting), so that is probably why it markets easier than MPI or a database. I wrote a bit on this point some time ago: http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2009/01/map-reduce-a-good-ide...
Wasn't the king usually also the richest person in the country?
Philosophy has had many accomplishments, it's where the questions first get asked. In general it's where ideas get refined and understood enough to go out and be acted upon -- before it can be science it needs to through it's philosophical stages. Heidegger, an amazing existentialist, laid out a lot of problems that AI was going to have in the 50s. http://www.amazon.com/What-Computers-Still-Cant-Artificial/d...

The study of philosophy for most undergraduates taking a few classes can be thought of as the history of human thought.
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That's like saying that the major accomplishment of religion is that it led to science.
I would say Questions are the greatest accomplishments of philosophy. There are many questions out there, the meaning of life, where we came from, what happens when we die. These are philosophical questions in origin.

Philosophy is the birth of inquiry. Science is the attempt to find the rational answer.
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Jim Jagielski on The Essences of the Apache Software Foundation
Absolutely, it's OK. 5 reasons why:

1. Many people here how may have not seen it the first time. Get their feedback, too. (This is also why I've never minded re-posts in general.)

2. Those who did see it the first time may want to see the latest version but need to be reminded. Refresh their memory. Also let them see how their input was used.

3. Feedback should not be done in a vacuum. It should be subject to review just like any other comment. I have given feedback and been asked to follow up by email. I'd rather do it here once again. Give people that chance.

4. "AskHN: Review my app" posts are not just for you, they're for everybody. Lots of others get to learn from your app and its public feedback. Don't pass up another learning opportunity for everyone.

5. If this is a repeat, include the link(s) to previous discussions. Give people the chance to see the whole picture.
Erik Hatcher on Apache Lucene and Solr Search Applications
Can we keep these types of article of HN?

Other sites (such as reddit) became pretty useless with people submitting these (and other) articles and turning the whole site into an unpleasant experience.

Why not follow the same rules that we do when at work? Don't discuss politics or religion.
Ok, before answering that question, I'd like to ask you the following question:

How much philosophy have you read?

If the answer is "none" or "very little", don't ask people here what the accomplishments of philosophy are, but go and actually _read some_ and find out for yourself.
Sure, I suppose it matters a lot on the type of Web application you're building. If you have a relatively simple domain model with very few relationships, I'm sure a KVS works pretty well. Still, for anything other than applications with simple domain models, or ones that need tremendous performance, a KVS is inappropriate outside of isolated optimization -- in practice, one runs into headaches with non-normalized data very quickly (think MBAs and their giant, messy Excel spreadsheet).
Do people still think an M3 means success? Maybe 10 years ago, but these days M3's are mostly leased cars so the sense of exclusiveness / luxury seems gone.
I hope that guy will never ever have a job again.

It takes a lot for me to develop a strong disliking for someone that I've never ever met but Darl McBride has definitely managed a permanent spot near the top of my shit list.

He's the exact opposite of a role model.
I haven't used qmail, but I use djbdns. The complete installation, possibly including a few patches, is less work than figuring out how to set up BIND's configuration. It's available in Debian from apt-get.

It's good that it's so easy to figure out how to use, because I touch it less than once a year, so I've completely forgotten about it. That's great software.
The assumption here is that asking questions divorced from scientific training is a reasonable thing to do.

What makes you think that philosophers are any better at asking questions than scientists?
>Philosophy is the birth of inquiry. Science is the attempt to find the rational answer.

I think that's a little harsh on philosophy. Scientists don't have a monopoly on rationality. There are many areas of philosophy (e.g. moral philosophy) where scientific methods are far from sufficient (though useful), but where we still benefit from clear and rational thinking.
Yeah, Zuckerberg is almost certainly rich, and not just on paper. Also, I know more than a few FB employees who sold their stock through Facebook's stock sale program and are sitting pretty.
>The assumption here is that asking questions divorced from scientific training is a reasonable thing to do.

Of course it is a reasonable thing to do, e.g. "Is there any milk left in the fridge?"

I suppose you're asking whether it's reasonable to ask "deep" questions without scientific training. I think that it is -- moral questions are an obvious example -- but in any case, bear in mind that most philosophers whose work touches on scientific issues _do_ have some scientific training.

It's really not possible to consider all this at such an abstract level. If you have something against philosophy or philosophers, you'd do well to point out some concrete examples of what you're talking about, instead of engaging in this sort of generic scientistic whining.

The biggest irony here is that your views are taken almost verbatim from a philosophical movement of the early 20th century (logical positivism). One benefit of reading some philosophy is coming to a realization of how unoriginal virtually all of your ideas are, and how much they owe to the intellectual culture you were brought up in.
Responds to user support requests and begs customers not to cancel their accounts. That's in between posting comments on blogs saying "come check out my blah blah blah"

Glamorous, huh?
Any reasons why they picked MooTools instead of JQuery? MooTools is a Prototype derivative. Prototype derivatives are huge pains, as they litter the global namespace like they own it, which makes sane mashup implementations practically impossible.

I hate Prototype and its ilks with a passion.
I don't disagree with that by much. Religious institutions in the past have preserved or advanced scientific discovery at times. The difference is that Philosophy consists of seeking the truth, institutionalized religion usually consists of defending the truth. Religions may spawn some scientific inquiry, but they have a lot of trouble letting their children go off and live their own lives, so to speak.
>He should have helped her out more.

It's possible she wanted to do it for herself without his help. FTA:

>She assembled the site entirely on her own, finding a programmer, working to develop the features and watching over the small community that made use of it.
So, what about you? Everything? or Nothing?
I much preferred the old title. Can a moderator put it back?
Too true, RegEx Buddy certainly helps me with regex's but it doesn't help me get them into any other app where I actually use regexs. To me GUIs are REPL while CLI is compile and wait. CLI is much faster(especially if you know what you are doing) at the end of the day but when I don't have a clue as to what I am doing(most of the time) large buttons that say try this and try that allow for experimentation with immediate feedback,with the caveat that it doesn't lend itself to integration.
What is scientific training? Logic & Mathematics? I was having a discussion in another thread about the demarcation of science and pseudoscience, and despite decades of trying the only definition is that works is consensus of other scientists. Most scientists believe physics is science while astrology is not.

I'd say that I don't hold philosophers or scientists or mathematicians as the ultimate questioner. I believe that they are each skilled in different areas, and are probably best at asking questions in those areas.
Your example reminds me of this guy's research on 'Change Blindness'

Check out the plane example. One part of the scene changes every time it flickers, but it takes many cycles before you finally can tell which part.

http://people.cs.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download/Airplane.m...

More Examples:

http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download/

To find out more(Google 'rensink change blindness')

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=rensink+cha...

I'm currently developing a UI system that has morphing built in. I do think it helps build more understandable designs. Sometimes you can even use transitions to subliminally teach things about your underlying information architecture.
As Justice Potter Stewart famously put it, "I know it when I see it."
Another Gmail Problem
I have a feeling that a large portion of the best programmers work in absolute obscurity.

I worked for a long time with guys that wrote embedded software. Absolutely brilliant guys that never get their due because no one knows how they were.
Sites like these are particularly nostalgic for anyone who was making Websites around 1996. I'd give almost anything (maybe I'm exaggerating) if a) I could remember my old Geocities address and b) The Wayback Machine got to it before Geocities pulled the inactivity plug.
I can't disagree more with the idea that a CEO should never get his hands dirty. That his entire job is just to dictate and coordinate other people's work. I think the CEO needs to dig in deep regularly, to show people the level of work that is expected.

It's hard to respect someone who can't (or doesn't) actually produce any work themselves.

Steve Jobs seems to be an inventor, designer, tester, AND CEO. Steve Balmer seems to be much more like the author imagines a CEO should be. I know who would choose to emulate.
The key is perceived responsiveness. If transitions appear to be slowing down actions in the GUI then they become annoying. If there's a 1:1 correlation between the transition and the action being performed then they tend to work well I think. I good example is sliding between app screens on the iphone.
"You can't be the best without being influential in the field."

I think an appropriate analogy is judging an architect on the hammers he has improved instead of the buildings he has designed.
It's ok if it has changed a lot.
Just remember everyone...

The difference between a sell-out and a not-sell-out is the presence of a buyer.

:-)
Vista was really obviously bad on release. I mean really unusably bad. It wasn't just that it was only on par with XP, it was substantially worse.

Windows 7 is quite different. It's not going to blow you away, but it works and looks a better than XP. The "bit" better puts it right about on par with OSX for various tasks -- although the GUI consistency is off because Windows as a far longer history than OSX, and can't afford to blow off bw compat (that's part of the Vista error).

There are parts that still feel like they're stuck in 1991 (especially the command line), but that's Windows for you -- and I don't expect that to change.

If anything worries me, it's MSFT itself. Their management really stinks, which makes me question how stable the internals of the system are -- are they managing the development of windows more tightly than, lets say, their mobile effort? One hopes so... but one never knows for sure.
aguing about the best programmer is a smart move when seen as an exercise to find out what it is that makes a programmer good.
Did we need the cash? No, we didn’t need the cash. We had over $6 million in the bank. But, if I’ve learned one thing about VC fund-raising it’s that not needing to raise money helps a lot.

VC is a strange beast...
That's what I was alluding to. That and the Turtles All The Way Down story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
Try GetClicky. They are pretty solid. I started using it on a site, and did not go back to GA for days at the time.
Assuming the houses are in a desirable area, it's hard to do badly over the long-term.*

*possibly very very long-term.
Google Voice messages publicly available
Let the Sun-shine in (Oracle)
How we measure cosmic distances
I have. I took a course on religion last semester. Generally, I agreed with and loved the various sociological theories—the things that tried to explain the psychological origins of religion, for instance, were fascinating. But past a certain point, I find that I lose interest. I can't entertain a debate over whether evil could exist under a good God, because I don't believe in God or in evil.
This article doesn't make much sense, to be honest...

But anyways if you ask me, entrepreneurship is about becoming successful, rather than rich, because once you are successful, the money will naturally come -- at least you'll love what you do, and not starve while doing it :)
Huh! I guess that shows me to be the philosophical amateur I am. I always assume causality without thinking about it. Whoops.
http://jqueryvsmootools.com
I've been playing with something similar for a desktop app. Not with the morphing per se, but with something quite similar.

Basically there is a sequence of related dialogs, chained by the Next button, and the content of these dialogs varies greatly from a lot to almost nothing. Using standard wizard-style fixed-size canvas lots of ugly empty space and produces visually inconsistent page-by-page layout.

What I ended up doing is using (fade out)-(resize)-(fade in) sequence for transitioning between the dialogs. The animated resize is a key as it demonstrates that two dialogs are related linearly and not hierarchically, and one replaces another and rather than poping over the old one. The fading animation is needed to prevent dialog content clipping during the resize. It takes 200 ms and simply makes the contents of the dialog disappear into the background and back.

The feedback so far was very positive. It looks nice, not in your face fancy and it is fast, so it doesn't detract attention from the primary user interaction. Some users do not even notice the transition, so it no harm done there either :-)

2c
McBride has been fired, but the company still plans on pursuing it's litigation strategy.

They're broke, and most of their current litigious efforts are about avoiding bankruptcy and contesting judgments.

This seems like a grace note to a swan dive.
He probably equates NoSQL to KV stores that has no chance of having SQL implemented, as they have no efficient range scan capabilities. It's totally feasible to have full SQL (and more) implementation on top over Hypertable.
nah. I see a ton of kids, that don't make much money, scraping enough to buy one.
But probably a Maserati Quatroporte will though.
I believe that genius is 1% intelligence and 99% obsession. Which is what Steve is.

What I'm talking about here is not about getting your hands dirty but more on the lines of not micromanaging people. It's all about delegation.

My rule of thumb is to hire people who are better than myself at what they do. I'm not against jumping in and getting my hands dirty with my guys, but I can trust them to do a good job and know they don't need me. But if they do, I'm there.
Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers
What about statements like 1*1 = 1. I can be sure about that, but unsure about something like the existence of God.
Simon Peyton-Jones - A Taste of Haskell Part I (video)
GoogleBot as QA tester
HN: Review my iPhone sales graphing app
Astronomers have announced a haul of planets found beyond our Solar System
The headline at Wired...

U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

...is better. The version here ("U.S. spies buy stake in Twitter, blog-monitoring firm") makes it sound like In-Q-Tel invested in Twitter itself.
3 days old, Mozilla has already blocked and unblocked the add-ons in question.

http://blog.mozilla.com/security/2009/10/16/net-framework-as...

http://shaver.off.net/diary/2009/10/18/update-net-framework-...
Ramachandran gave an excellent TED talk, including detailed analysis of the mirror box. http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind...
Logic came originally from philosophy. Your question's like asking why we ever bothered with the Model T when Porsche is such a better vehicle.

Modern philosophy is important because it targets common assumptions and attempts to debate and verify them. The whole point of common assumption is that if you believe something that's wrong, you don't necessarily realize it without a lot of work. Philosophy attempts to shine light in those unknown recesses.

But "accomplishments"? I'd say the biggest casual accomplishment is that it serves as a great topic of discussion for people, gets people thinking together, and as a result brings them closer together. Might as well ask what accomplishments Shakespeare gave us, or Hitchcock. Not everything can be verified with an award and a metric.
I developed this app to graph the sales of iPhone apps in my spare time using python, matplotlib and wxwidgets. It's cross platform, and runs on both Windows and OSX. So far I've only tested on Windows 7 and would appreciate help with any testing.

I believe this is the first such tool for Windows (I may be mistaken). There are a few for OSX already. Help me test it and if you find any bugs or problems, please send to maximusklein@gmail.com.

In the future I may make a pro version that people can pay for, but I first have to come up with some extra ordinary features that people would be willing to pay for, so if you have any such wishes, tell me too!
Exactly.
Any yet, people like him seem to be guaranteed to get a new overpaid job.