skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Choosing Microscopes -or- Stereo Microscope?
what you want to do with that image will determine what kind of microscope you need. Microscopes typically come in two types: compound or stereo microscope.
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The Villages Chiropractic. Etheredge Chiropractors of The Villages Florida offers safe, effective chiropractic treatments and uses state-of-the-art technology.
"The bottom-line is that the more "democratic" a forum/board/discussion media gets, the more clueless it becomes."

The voice in the back of my head reading that is shouting" but what about the "Wisdom of Crowds"? I think the problem we are seeing here though is that we are starting with a very "smart crowd" and only adding people with less knowledge of the subject.
Thematic vs Thesis Driven Investing
I've been using NHibernate + Castle ActiveRecord for a few small/medium projects over the past year, and I find that it significantly speeds up my development process. My object model may be "contaminated" now, but if I'm getting my work done that much faster (plus the added benefit of database vendor independence), I don't really see the downside. Perhaps if you have a really complex database model, that's one thing...but in most cases, it's not.

Would people do things differently if there were an adhered-to SQL standard? Probably not, since using an ORM still saves you development time since you don't need to write a bunch of fairly routine code.

A better solution might be to have a code-generation tool that writes the code by hand but doesn't ruin your business object model.
All examples in the article had self selected crowds that later got diluted. It is the common problem, not only HN.
I don't think "decriminalize" really means what the article is trying to suggest it means. It can still be a misdemeanor.
Feynman was not a philosopher (which proves my point). Popper is indeed an exception.
Perhaps I should have avoided this side remark, since I didn't have the bandwidth to justify it.
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You are right about Popper (other commentators mention him too), but he's the exception
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this is really interesting. this is taking advantage of a loophole in the fact that animals evolve for this sort of "limit your losses through limited engagements" mindset. it doesn't apply if you can re-up your forces from the defeated. only works with humans because with animals you can't simply assimilate newly defeated tribes to fight for you.

Do you have any sources that would be worth looking into that expand on your line of reasoning?
Isn't that the point he was trying to make? Most philosophers want to be read over and over. Wittgenstein was less concerned with his legacy of writings (only the Tractatus was published during his lifetime, and that was little more than his journal) and more concerned with solving problems.
Displaying mathematics on the web
There's not much content in the blog entry itself, but its purpose was to begin a discussion about how things could be better, and that discussion is well underway in the comments. I know many HNers are interested in this, so you might want to contribute...
Weird Computers
Do you remember that one time when Microsoft tried to add "smart tags", keyword-based links that showed up as squiggly lines? Do you remember the uproar, even though there was a simple op-out mechanism, and how quickly they dropped the whole idea? That would be nothing compared with a bundled ad blocker.
You're a human. Everything you do is idiosyncratic.
Machine learning as a service, very interesting. I found a similar site some months ago. I looked over my bookmarks but I could not find it. The idea was similar, you upload a data-set and they execute different learning algorithms over it. I do not recall if you also provide an evaluation or they automatically split the given data-set.
[cue rambling]

So you want to see what interesting people do. How do you do that? You go to the places interesting people go to and stand around them, looking over their shoulders to see what they're up to. All is nice and well, except others are also interested in what the interesting people do, so more and more people are starting to look over their shoulders, and the place gets too crowded. Now the interesting people tire of all the people staring at them all the time, so they find a new place to hang out - who wants to be where everyone else is, after all?

They find a nice little place where they're just about alone, but soon a few of their hangarounds start finding their way to the new place, and it all repeats.

After a few rounds of this, the interesting people start going to private clubs with strict guest list policies, and the problem of hangarounds disappears. Now they can be interesting without distractions, but nobody will actually know any of the interesting stuff they're doing, since it's all in private, and they cease to be interesting.

So... What what I trying to say? I guess it's a variation of the curse of being a public person: people take interest in what you're doing and want to interact with you, but they do it all the time and not just when it suits you. In the end you either go Britney Spears or you go Howard Hughes.
Not sure why you were downvoted so much - fiscal darwinism is exactly what it is. We appear to have poorly calibrated selection pressures in these industries: bad regulation and stupid users. Therefore "fitness" in such an area involves fraud, vast numbers of young / unsuspecting users, and opaque advertising/pricing.
Good to see Muphry's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphrys_law) is still in full effect.
> but at least they get the feedback of a bounced email.

First, that depends. They may hit an existing domain with a catch-all mailbox configured, or they may hit a legitimate mailbox at your provider, where the receiver may or may not think to reply that they got the wrong address.

Second, what percentage of users (especially in the segment that might misspell their own email address) will know what to do with a bounce mail?
Google sued for patent infringement re Chrome Courgette compression algorithm
Play TurboSpirit XT game online for free - racing games
See also http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/10/31/google-sued-for-patent-...
An exercise ball is a good idea but I would not count on using one as a permanent replacement. My ideal situation would be an alternation between an office chair, like an aeron, and a stable, four-legged cushioned chair (the kind that is usually on the other side of the desk in an office).

At home, I switch between an office chair and a piano bench. You don't need a backless chair to sit upright and not slouch. However, an unstable surface (like a chair with rollers, or an exercise ball) can be distracting and requires more energy to maintain an upright posture.

So: a bench or a stable chair for posture, and an aeron or similar when your back gets tired. An exercise ball to mix it up would be cool too.
Is there a generally accepted "LOON" tag?, Mr Sheppard gives us:

> What I have termed the "Dynamical Laws":

> 1. The only power that females have is given to them by males;

> 2. The only thing which females do with that power is use it against males.

Complete with graphic of some Third-Eye-Vagina-Dentata.
Brand new account complains about the direction of hacker news? Not news.
fun fact about the challenger disaster. letting it launch at all was clearly an infovis fail, as tufte explains:

http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html

(i guess a lot went wrong)
Is video that important? I hate it when the only way I can understand what a product does is by spending 2 minutes to watch a video. Has anyone does tests to see how much video improves conversions?
I'm of the opinion that the LHC will make a great mess of physics. I saw a show on Discovery where most of the physicists at CERN feel there's a 9/10 chance they'll find the Higgs. Just a hunch, but I don't think they'll find it. I think they'll find something that forces them to rethink all of sub-atomic physics, which would be way cooler.

Also, is anyone else tired of every LHC article talking about Earth getting sucked into a black hole? Ludicrous, I tell you...
I'm sure Scoble is a nice enough guy and all, although I've never found a reason to read him.

After this one article, I still haven't found a reason to read him.

Dude. Dude. We've been talking about this topic over here on HN for at least 2 or 3 years. Welcome to the party. Wish you had brought some new concepts with you.

Worst yet, the wrong conclusions seem to have been drawn. It's not just "people that teach" it's "things I will enjoy experiencing" because nobody is in learning mode all of the time.
All the guff about having legit medical purposes makes it safe for legalisation :) (how many other drugs are used for medical purposes that are not legal generally; pain medication for example)

And the other thing about it being less harmful than alcohol (which is more of a case for banning alcohol really ;)).

Round and round we go :)

It's important to remember that by that Alcohol and Tobacco is NOT at all safe - it causes society and individuals no end of problems. Do we want to add another drug to that mess :P

It's important to consider everything in perspective rather than just go with either the govt. line or the supposed experts line (for example we have one here in the UK on record saying ecstasy is no more dangerous than horse riding - which might be statistically true but, as most here will appreciate, is just sensationalism that ignores the obvious problems :D)

EDIT: I should point out I am biased; one of my friends was killed after smoking marijuana and driving and another friend is now a dribbling wreck after 10 years regular smoking (one of the smartest people I know now has the intelligence of a 15 year old). I dont see how these problems wont be multiplied :)
You don't go to jail for breaking the speed limit. And breaking the speed limit has quite a bit more potential of actually hurting other people.
For information about the Courgette algorithm, see http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software...
Ask HN: Starting up in India, suggestions for a hub?
Bangalore/Pune/..?? - which one is better? Why?
Could be brilliant satire. Well, I doubt it :)
Lojban: "spelling is phonetic and unambiguous"

They clearly ignored that rule for the name of the language =)

On a more serious note, this is rather exciting. It would make a very good candidate for a universal language. A great deal of time and effort went into making this language. Hopefully this isn't the last time I hear of Lojban.
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Collaborative Generation of Software Developers
Facebook spam king to pay $711M to Zuck et al according to CA court ruling
Add another drug? Millions of people already smoke pot in America today, and legalising it will only make it safer.

EDIT: Also, I feel sorry about your friends, but it is my view that this is not what happens with the majority of the users, and the laws should adapt to that reality.
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I support legalization of pot in the U.S., but I don't think it's going to happen like the article's title predicts.

What will happen, and the article alludes to it, is a mish-mash of conflicting state and local laws that legalize or decriminalize pot to various degrees. The federal government will continue to be a wild card. Wholesale legalization is not in the cards.

That's because the way pot was made illegal was illegal to begin with. When alcohol was made illegal, it took a constitutional amendment. Ever wonder why? After all, they tried making alcohol illegal other ways and the courts threw it out. The government got tired of all that constitutional stuff and decided that in the future substances would be regulated by administrative fiat. The DEA maintains a list which it adds and subtracts items whenever it feels like it. No president is going to completely pull something like pot from the list -- too much political hassle what with getting into why the list exists in the first place. Instead pot will be ignored to some degree, leaving the same big constitutional problem we had to start with to fester for decades.

So the real news is that the people are tired of pot criminal laws, state and local governments are responding to them, and the federal government, having taken on itself to tell people what they can ingest or not, is stuck with a big bag of laws that don't meet the people's needs any more. That could take 50 years or more to work out (if ever).
It's used in bits of kernel programming - often because there is no other way to do the task.
I understand your point, although I would say that the speed limit is rather more directly related to harm to others.

My view is that young people will refuse to be lectured on the dangers of drugs by politicians who themselves enjoyed drugs during their youth. Unless that politician's got some kind of personal horror story, such as "heroin killed my entire family", then their opinion will not carry much weight. Kids look at them, see a bunch of basically privileged people that had a wild time and enjoyed all sorts of illegal drugs at college, and then packed it all in when they finally got a good job. This is not a great platform to preach from. Young people ask, "if they can do it, why can't I?"
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Unfortunately no it wont. The 2 places it has been tried the experiment failed reasonably badly (portugal and amsterdam). There certainly wasnt an outbreak of drug deaths - but the situation didnt improve as much as people tend to claim.

(sorry this is no place to have the discussion :) Ill shaddup)

EDIT: thanks for the condolences. Unfortunately I disgree; through them I explored (but never joined thankfully) the drugs sub culture in Leeds (UK). If that is in anyway representative, and I see no reason to suspect otherwise, this is the norm.

I also have a friend in his 40's who grows his own drugs and is fairly well adjusted (if a little air headed and often stoned). From my experience, though, he is the exception not the rule.
See also discussion at:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=912295
This is my startup - TechCrunch took the UK pop-culture spin on the article, but I was very pleased for the coverage!

Our product is quite niche and B2B, though very much has a technology and internet focus. Ask away with any questions.
Feynman has a philosophy book (_The Meaning of It All_) which is excellent. He discussed philosophy of science frequently in his books and lectures, and sometimes other types of philosophy, e.g. educational philosophy.

Feynman is not noted as a philosopher, which perhaps proves the point that people are looking for the wrong thing in a philosopher.
If the only way I can get at product information is a video, I leave. It's that simple
You are expecting me to cite the lack of something? How?
>> Nobody will follow a spammer.

I'm pretty sure people do, they get tricked all the time into following spam accounts. It's pretty common.
Thanks! Especially for the numbers. I had not even heard of RTL simulation before. Wow, extremely cool.
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Tata Motors may let assemblers brand Nano
How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King)
Testify!

15 years ago, I did Intel-style assembly--and loved it even with all its clumsiness. But I just dove into ARM a few weeks ago, and am loving it even more. Such sweet pleasure to code so close to such a beautiful and simple machine!
Whether "reasoning about the problems of philosophy" is interesting depends on what you think they are, and whether you manage to come up with any useful answers.

What sort of stronger point do you want? I have an explanation of what Wittgenstein was (a person without philosophical problems) which accounts for all evidence of Wittgenstein known to me. I think it can account for everything you know about Wittgenstein too, if you think about it.

Did you want me to pick several examples -- which you can then accuse of being cherry picked -- and show how it fits? And I should do this in addition to offering my general explanation, even though you've offered neither an explanation of Witt nor brought up any examples for or against mine?
When I saw this book mentioned in From Dawn to Decadence in the context of the 19th century increase in mechanization and loss of free time it struck a cord. I've noticed my own free time activities become increasingly harried as I strive to make my leisure time as "productive" as my work time. One solution I've found is to deliberately spend more time doing traditional time-consuming activities such as reading, cooking, making cheese, physical activity, etc.
I avoid == with floating/fixed points like the plague. If I can do a > or a < with a couple of and statements I'll do it. Too many times I've been burned by that damn epsilon. If only we had 8 digits per hand, base 2 would have been trivial to handle.
I have wondered for a while what the world would be like if JavaScript were to be replaced with Lua in the browser.
You are entitled to your opinion, Ryan, of course, and I thank you for sharing it. However, if you don't see how someone making a public stand against a company with questionable business practices might do anything, such as possibly motive that company to improve it's practices, then, unfortunately, I can't help you. Also, the MasterCard dispute resolution and chargeback process is a last resort. You are not allowed to dispute a charge without first trying to resole the matter with the vendor.
Zainng CHEATS for Opera Mini and Phone browsers.
> any node in the whole system could take the write

No, it says "a single node," not "any node." The distinction is important: I'm saying the former means "a single [real destination] node."

> If W writes have to happen on the first N nodes in the preference list, then I wouldn't need sloppy quorums at all.

Hinted handoff is there to make "eventually" happen faster for clients who _don't_ specify R + W > N. Not to magically make W not matter for clients who do, because clearly that doesn't work. (And if the authors didn't understand that, why bother discussing W at all? it doesn't make sense.)
1. Submit new stories. Considering your account isn't more than a day old I would start here.

2. Go here: http://news.ycombinator.com/newest and upvote things you like.

3. Comment on stories you like.

Doing these three things are much more effective than meta-complaining.
Emotional Complexities of Human mind [A story]
How did it fail, exactly? According to Wikipedia, drug use in the Netherlands is lower than America's in every possible category. The number of drug-related deaths in the Netherlands is lower than the EU average. The Dutch Government is able to help 90% of the drug users that seek help. Sorry, can't see that as 'failure'.

Legalization makes marijuana (and other drugs) safer for a lot of reasons:

1. You could buy pot from government-controlled places, where quality of the drug is guaranteed (no fillers!).

2. Users whom drug intake become problematic can legitimately seek help, which is more unlikely if your drug of choice is illegal and stigmatized in your society.

3. You don't have to get into illegal, dangerous drug trade in order to get your drug of choice. You can buy pot in the nearest coffee shop, safely (for example).

That surely happened in the Netherlands. I fail to see it as failure. What I see as failure is the growth of a culture that condemns drug use, as if it is something absurd and immoral, when in fact it _isn't_. People has been smoking pot world-wide, for thousands of years, without causing harm to others.

I could go on and on about the immorality and degenerating effects on society caused by the _drug war_, which is much more damaging than drug use itself, but I think I'll stop here.

EDIT: I'd like to make clear that, although a pot smoker myself, I don't think using drugs is inherently good or bad. In fact, in most cases, it can be (very) bad. But the fact is that people do drugs and will always do drugs, most without major bad consequences for themselves and others. Drug use is a fact in most societies (if not all), and that being so, it would be better that we manage it the best way we can. Criminalizing it certainly is not the best way (probably the worse).
10 Essential Social Media Blogs You Should Definitely Bookmark
* When they said, "What's the worst that could happen to IBM?" No one would have been taken seriously if they said, "A tiny little computer that sits on your desk."*

What if they had said: "A change in the market that they fail to adequately forsee and plan for"? That's what will kill Google too.
Semantic Overflow
The issue discussed in the article is not being democratic or not, but let me choose who I want to pay attention to. If you visit a blog you know who is talking, and the same is true for twitter.
Joshua Block, Chief Java Architect at Google, says in Coders at Work:

"But for the absolute core of the system—the inner loops of the index servers, for instance—very small gains in performance are worth an awful lot. When you have that many machines running the same piece of code, if you can make it even a few percent faster, then you’ve done something that has real benefits, financially and environmentally. So there is some code that you want to write in assembly language."
Sorry for being a nay-sayer here, but I'm failing to see the value in this service. I've been doing machine learning for about a year and in every case my algorithms had to have been uniquely tied to my data. The performance of various algorithms is tied to the dataset which is reflected in the code through (sometimes many) parameters. It's a symbiotic relationship. So I'm not sure how you can offer disparate services, unless you expect the client to upload both the dataset and the code, and then offer a flexible compute structure akin to EC2. I'd be careful though, because judging the performance of algorithms on datasets not fitting the model can be a little disingenuous.
Getting the telecomm companies out of the banking (money transfer) business would be a good idea. Receiving a share of the scammers' profits is bound to distort their notion of what is proper.

Otherwise we'll need guardians with big sticks (racketeering charges, punitive damages, etc.) to protect the most vulnerable from predatory scammers. Which then leads to other problems, such as the sticks being used for other purposes ...
What they don't tell you is that Lojban is so complicated no one can speak it. Go to the forums and pick almost any thread that contains Lojban, and you'll find debating about the language. If the supporters can't even speak it right, what hope if there for those who just want to communicate?
Ask HN: Want to start an HN Folding@Home team?
> No, it says "a single node," not "any node." The distinction is important: I'm saying the former means "a single [real destination] node."

But the paper explicitly says: "Applications that need the highest level of availability can set W to 1, which ensures that a write is accepted as long as a
single node in the system has durably written the key it to its local store. Thus, the write request is only rejected if all nodes in the system are unavailable.". The last sentence makes clear that they mean any single node in the whole system.

Additionally the paper states: "all read and write operations are performed on the first N healthy nodes from the preference list, which may not always be the first N nodes encountered while walking the consistent hashing ring.". There is no mention that at least W of the first N nodes have to accept a write.
Hey what do you use to do the A/B testing? Curious.

Thanks!