skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is either so brilliant that I can't follow it, or the product of paranoid-schizophrenia of the TimeCube type (along with numerous other famous internet kooks) cloaked in more intelligence than I'm used to seeing.

I don't usually have so much trouble deciding. There's a bit more coherence than I'm seeing from such things. On the other hand, it does show a lot of one of the hallmarks of such writing, which is referring to various non-standard premises like the "Mind Equals Reality principle" that I can find no explanation for on the net beyond what is seen in that writing, and tends to cloak an idea that can only be sort of expressed in fuzzy words in vaguely mathematical garb that really only exists in the author's head. (Google for "Mentifex" for a much clearer example, and don't miss the FAQ at http://www.nothingisreal.com/mentifex_faq.html . The theory, such as it is, is cloaked in scientific jargon, but has no correspondence with the real world.)

Hard to tell. It would depend on whether the ideas actually have a backing that one could get at in conversation, or whether this is it. When pressed for details, the difference is the paranoid-schizophrenic ideation is endlessly recursive (talk to the timecube guy as much as you like, but you'll never get anywhere; back him into a logical corner and he simply starts insulting you), whereas real ideas can actually be shown to be grounded in something else real.
A restaurant who takes reservations is entering into an agreement: you promise that you will eat a meal there at a certain time, and they promise that they will have a table ready for you at that time.

If the restaurant is all booked up, they turn people away. If some of those reservations are held by scalpers, and the scalpers don't find a buyer, the table will be empty when it may have been used if not for the actions of the scalpers.

What the students did was to break this unenforceable contract, and convert an agreement to make a transaction at some point in the future into a pure option on their part. That's stealing value.

If the restaurants want to do this, that's one thing. If the restaurant attempts to cultivate an image of being the hip spot to be seen, then it's in their interest to seat anyone dressed nice, or has money to throw around, or whatever, preferentially. But I would expect that they take this factor into account when setting the wages of the maitre d, just as they account for tips when setting the waiters' wages. Thus, the restaurant captures the value.

If this became prevalent, I would expected restaurants to move back to a model of calling names, or asking the name as if they can't tell from what number buzzer you had. Psychologically, buying a buzzer would seem okay to a lot of people who would not be comfortable if what you were selling is "listen for Charlie, party of 4, and say you're Charlie".

All the above applies equally to buzzers or waiting in an physical queue. If the queue is visibly large or if the host says it's a 45 minute wait rather than a 20 minute wait, some patrons will go elsewhere.
We never heard what Arrington said to them. :)
Fair points and perhaps I should have refrained from commenting until I had clearer understanding of the types of offers this article is referring to. The more I've read about some of the offers (sms in particular) in the article and in the HN comments, I realize I spoke too soon.
The problem was 'you are given X amount of seed money and two hours to make as much money as possible.'

The problem was not 'you are given X amount of seed money and two hours to make as much money as possible; however, you must use, and only use, that money while buying the materials you are going to require.'

The problem was not designed to make students money but to show them that there are lots of possibilities in the world for success with hard entrepreneurial thought (they were given four days to think of a plan).

I can be wrong, but I am pretty sure that the rules did not even matter (in the strictest sense). They could spend six dollars on buying signs and a bike pump to make their project a success because the goal of the "problem" was to open the minds of the young entrepreneurs.

If each person did not come up with a brilliant idea, then there would be no harm. However, in mind of the problem, the students were supposed to hear what the other students did to achieve success because the path to achievement is the path to success. -> And that is why people take the class. They want to discover the path to success.
Then the VCs that fund Zynga are equally culpable for these scams - http://www.zynga.com/about

Kleiner Perkins, Foundry Group, Union Square Ventures, Peter Thiel's Clarium Capital, more...
The New York Times - Innovation Portfolio
Short Heels and Long Toes: A Surprising Recipe for Speed
Not being able to go mammal-a-mammal with a bison, but really wanting to eat one.

I think it's a combination of succeeding with what genes you have, in the world you find yourself, where both what you have and your world change randomly and slowly.
If most app time is spent in database calls, or network, etc., then Ruby and JRuby are definitely fast enough.

For some work, the order of magnitude faster performance of natively compiled Lisp, or Java is required, and in those few cases, I will not use Ruby.
Fiscal darwinism.
Apples iTunes University seems like a good adress. Quite a number of universities upload podcasts and lectures on all kinds of topics. I do not know whether mathematics and electronics are covered, but I'd guess so. They are free, so take a look there.

If you are interested in other disciplines I enjoy audiobooks on economy by the Mises Institute ( http://www.mises.org/ ) and one of the most enjoyable podcasts on philosophy is to be found on freedomainradio.com by Stefan Molyneux.
Aptly summarized by Huxley's quote from the text:

"Perhaps men of genius are the only true men. In all the history of the race there have been only a few thousand real men. And the rest of us--what are we? Teachable animals. Without the help of the real man, we should have found out almost nothing at all. Almost all the ideas with which we are familiar could never have occurred to minds like ours. Plant the seeds there and they will grow; but our minds could never spontaneously have generated them"
Exploit:
- take advantage of somebody: to take selfish or unfair advantage of a person or situation, usually for personal gain
- use something for benefit: to use or develop something in order to gain a benefit

Scam:
- dishonest scheme: a scheme for making money by dishonest means
- trick somebody: to obtain money or other goods from somebody by dishonest means

I was contending that I felt like the tactics being used in these games were shady and questionable? Yes. Dishonest? No.

However, as I pointed out above, I've changed my tune a little bit after delving deeper into the article and the HN comments. Without question, I should've done that before commenting in the first place.
blurtt.com web to postcards
Nice article, but somewhat incomplete. He misses many fonts (like Lucida Console, Envy Code R, Anonymous, Redhat's excellent Liberation Mono,Pragmata and a whole lot of others), he doesn't explain the font differences other than noting which he likes more, like serif/sanserif, hinting quality, character set coverage (Greek? Cyrillic?) etc.
I'm planning to get one as soon as it comes out--I'll report back.
What was the original vision?
I'd be surprised if you could get good courses on either of those topics in pure audio form... but if you do, let us know, I'm sure it'd be of fairly general interest around here.
I guess not everyone uses an OS that comes with the Bitstream fonts.
Heavily debated making this post, will not make it on my account due to courting accusations of showboating, but in all earnestness this article struck a chord with me in a major way.

I ask here only because I respect this community and consider the inhabitants peers, and I genuinely want an answer. What can one do about it? I quite literally feel like an alien trapped on a planet full of people that alternately infuriate and bore me.

Has anyone successfully addressed these issues before? I believe that my growing misanthropy and detachment does not serve my interests in the long run.
Cambridge Geek Day
Cambridge Geek Day is a full-day, one-track web conference based in the beautiful British city of Cambridge. Join us on November 21st for inspiring talks, a great atmosphere and fantastic networking opportunities - you'll love it!
I think the next step will center on Facebook outlining rules against those ads that are deceptive. I highly doubt Facebook doesn't want to put a stop to it because "it makes Facebook a quick buck." The numbers they yield are a fraction of a fraction of Facebook's revenue.

Those ads aren't the cash cows--they're small, extreme and unethical elements that have slipped through the cracks of the application ecosystem. If you're going after them, you might as well go after Google for allowing Acai Berry ads to be shown on Google Adsense.
Do you ever reply that while you never see spam, you frequently have to deal with other kinds of unsolicited e-mail, hinting softly?
There is also a rails plugin: http://github.com/dan/hivelogic-enkoder-rails/tree
I worked on the online strategy of a non-profit campaign in my country.

The people I worked with were really smart, but when it came to writing web articles other people could read, they were blissfully ignorant.

The CMS I built had an intuitive interface with a WYSIWYG editor. I made the choice to have less functionality than TinyMCE because their already written articles were terrible ... no correct alignment, no intuitive paragraphs, verbose sentences that could make you yawn from the first 5 seconds, content that used medical jargon, and complete disregard for their audience.

I tried to write them emails explaining to them what one should or shouldn't do when publishing to the web. I trained them face to face. No effect.

I later discovered that they copy/pasted the documents from MS Word. The copied text carried over Word's formatting, and because it didn't look like in Word, they tried to make it look better by visual editing, or by totally ignoring the results.

One day I deactivated the WYSIWYG editor, telling them that they should learn HTML. Enough to say that they were so upset that I'm now no longer helping them with anything.

I'm not even talking about using technology here. I'm talking about basic skills you need when writing a clear essay ... kids are supposed to learn this stuff in school.

This is not necessarily about people being trained by us to be ignorant. This is something more deeper than that ... people are becoming lazier and more ignorant and disconnected from their work and the world at large. Maybe it's information overload. Maybe it's the paradox of choice. I don't know.
But at least we have found someone more arrogant than Mike! ;-) That will be for an interesting fight. ;)
I really love the comparison between the CTA/Pitch of Zumbox compared to EarthClassMail.com. EarthClassMail is also not free, and also is far to involved to get me to be excited and sign up.
Changes, and the Fear/Danger Quadrant
Ask HN: How can we make better, more readable privacy policies?
I was thinking about privacy policies the other day and today I came upon this post:

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/making-privacy-policies-not-suck/

I had the same idea as Aza, a CreativeCommons-like approach to privacy policies. I also put "make an HN thread about privacy policies" on my to-do list, so here we are.

How do you think we can improve the current state of privacy policies?

(Some brainstorming is also taking place here:
http://aza.etherpad.com/privacy )
Wouldn't the traps also make the web page unusable to regular users' browsers?
It wasn't clear in my first comment, but it is representative of a company, not an individual. We're fortunate to have a great team estimating and scoping projects and great developers on staff staying on budget; it's rare that our actual rate is less than what I've cited, and we don't cut scope to stay on budget. Estimating, by far, is the hardest part.

If the app isn't to our internal standards, we'll do whatever it takes to get there, even if it pushes us over budget (ie, staying up until 4am).
A related link from Aza's post's comments:

http://www.privacychoice.org/

Clickable links from my comment:

http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/making-privacy-policies-not-...

http://aza.etherpad.com/privacy

Related projects:

http://www.w3.org/P3P/

http://commondataproject.org/

Privacy policy generators:

http://www.dmaresponsibility.org/PPG/

http://www.oecd.org/document/39/0,2340,en_2649_34255_2886327...

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/easy-privacy-policy/

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/terms-of-use-2/

http://www.professionalprivacypolicy.com/ (free trial)

http://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/privacy-standard.php (free trial)
Hmmm... at least the OP could say they didn't know about the policy. Your post, however...
Epiphany: the programming language is the UI...
...and the user interface is the programming language. In the next 5-10 years, the operating system of the future will take shape, and it will be run on mobile, wearable computers connected to a ubiquitous geo-located, GPS3 connected grid. Users will interface using body language, gestures, voice, sub-vocalizations, eye movement and yes, virtual keyboarding. Augmented reality will be superimposed on the GPS3 connected grid via eyeglasses and contact lenses used as heads-up displays. This new technology is already being integrated in the lab, especially in military electronics. Who will create the operating system? Google? What programming language will take the lead in this environment? Python? What do you think?
When I was a student at the University of Washington I worked at the Business School's IT department for a couple years.

One of my jobs was to set up Blackboard course websites for instructors. It was about as much fun as filling out a tax return. Nothing but filling out forms, selecting options, and other monotonous things like that.

Using it in my classes was about the same experience. We really just used to it download the syllabus, assignments, and other documents the instructor posted. No one used the Discussion Board or any of the other Blackboard features.
Well alcohol already has been demonstrated to cause cancer because it depletes thiamine.

Can someone please explain how tissue becomes mesenchymal from epithelium? I thought they were two different tissue types and therefore discrete classes of cancer.
I'll give your question a serious answer. Growing up, I knew I had a high IQ score (my parents actually lowballed in hinting what my IQ score was, but I found out the actual score in adult life from my schoolteacher who referred me for testing), and I read in a story by Philip K. Dick that high-IQ people feel social distance from most classmates, which became a self-fulfilling prophecy for me. But later in life I lived in east Asia as a student of the Chinese language, and I discovered that Confucian philosophers expected smart people to use their smarts to get along with everyone, summed up in the saying of Confucius, "三人行，必有我师焉" "Wherever there are three persons walking, my teacher is surely among them." I learned from my experience overseas that I could appreciate other people for their abilities, and expect to learn from most people of my acquaintance, whatever their IQ scores. Since then, I have been more socially comfortable with a wider variety of people, and have felt less isolated. I still devote a lot of my free time to activism on behalf of gifted learners, which provides me with a social circle of people who understand my personal background.
Most confirmation mails (and the like) end up in my Gmail junk folder. E-Mails from normal people never. And for me it has just become a automatic process to look in the junk folder for those.
Perhaps it's just me, but this article seemed a bit of the self-masturbatory side. Perhaps that is because of the venue it is presented in.

I did find some useful information, however. And I think there is an important point here. But it also was a bit over-the-top. As an example of this nonsense, Perhaps men of genius are the only true men. In all the history of the race there have been only a few thousand real men. And the rest of us--what are we? Teachable animals. Without the help of the real man, we should have found out almost nothing at all.

Ludicrous malarkey.
It's disappointing that the highest rated comment is essentially ad hominem. I've been aware of the CTMU for many years and was hoping smart folks would engage his ideas. Sadly, it appears the intellectual insecurity here is as great as that attributed to Langan.

Arrogance and insecurity may be regrettable traits for getting along with people, but are irrelevant to the truth of a matter. Truth/falsity should be judged on its merits.

> Still, I don't doubt he has some mental agility

Pretty condescending. That's sort of like finding someone who has a vertical leap 8 inches greater than Michael Jordan and saying "I don't doubt he has some athleticism..." Maybe you don't think transcendent jumping ability necessarily makes you a good basketball player, but you'd sure give someone with that trait a harder look. In a similar vein, you may not think an IQ score is the final word in apprehending great truths, but you should certainly take a little extra care, I'd think.

At least, when I encounter analysis by someone who is significantly smarter than I am, and I don't fully understand their claims, my first impulse isn't to be dismissive or make ill-defined, hand-wavy criticisms.
Are you interested in releasing the code? :)
Listen to the full podcast exploring this subject at http://www.awaretek.com/python/index.html
I suspect 'on-the-fly' could mean automatically, as in the server generates them as needed. I'm not sure if Google Apps can do that.
Somebody from TC responded to that already.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=914738
If you're looking for a shared host that won't stooge you I highly recommend HostGator. My company uses them for all our clients and we couldn't be happier.
It's great you are aware your pattern is harming you. When I was very young I had similar feelings too.

That which you oppose you maintain. You are trapped by your misanthropy. The article makes this point.

You can only move forward by finding another path that is positive for both halves of the equation. You have to begin with empathy. I have a rule of life: my next set of friends are the people I dislike the most. It's amazing how much you can learn from other people that you would never have guessed. Negative feelings create blindness.

I don't understand all these people obsessed with IQ. Life has more to it that logic and rationality. Tell me how much IQ you need to appreciate a hot dog at the carnival on the first beautiful day of summer. Live beyond this single measure of you.
Touching, but doesn't belong here. Downvote.
I don't include Peter Thiel as equally culpable. As far as I know, Thiel failed to invent a state-free currency with Max Levchin, and over decades, he witnessed the defeat of uncompromising humanity over unconditional growth, and now Peter Thiel probably understands himself as like the Adrian Veidt character from the Watchmen.

That is my best hypothesis. Who has obsessed more about the cancers of human behaviors than Thiel and his circle? He seems like a person who would feed cancer now if he projected his culpability as minimizing E(cancer).
I've already adopted a general philosophy of attempting to benefit from interpersonal interaction as much as possible, I try to figure out how a person works on their own level, including if I could assist them in any way, and if in doing so I may be setting up a mutually beneficial arrangement. In some cases, this works, but these cases are few and far between.

It seems the majority of people, if one were to pursue this philosophy, ought to be left to oblivion. Entanglement with them will only result in encumberance rather than advantage, even if you were to attempt to selflessly better them without regard to the benefits to yourself, typically they would be incapable of making use of your assistance.

What then is the purpose of humanity at large, those who fall outside the sphere of which can be of any advantage to you and are more valuable avoided than utilised?
I wouldn't call science and engineering "high powered jobs", but the truth is there are only two choices at college: learn to do something people will pay you for, or pursue your hobby full-time for a few years. Some people are able to combine the two successfully and of course that's the ideal. But the hobbyists have no grounds for complaining that they're unemployable. It was never a secret that people without useful skills aren't in great demand.
Do you read scientific journals much? Papers are usually filled with long, grammatically complex sentences full of obscure technical jargon. Given the subject matter, it seems a bit silly to hold the author to a different standard.
I tried doing something like that, but it ended up being a hassle using my multiple email address versions to log in to sites. Actually, it would be nice to have a browser smart enough to do something like this automatically. I'll bet there's a FF plugin for that... but I use Chrome.
Bear Naked ambition: The inside start-up story
There's a fine line to walk. Nokia went over it a long time ago, and now they're on the opposite side of the line.

Keeping phone and provider separate is great for the consumer, but not in the long run since the phone companies don't get the market they need.

i.e. it would be great if I could use the iPhone on any network I wanted, but without an exclusive deal with AT&T, Apple wouldn't have made the kind of cash it needs to be truly profitable and stay at the top of the market.

Nokia pandered to cell companies for too long, but then went in the exact opposite direction and lost a huge chunk of the US market with them....
This is exactly what I'm referring to, I simply don't connect with what you're trying to illustrate. I understand you're trying to draw a scenario that has some supposedly appealing emotional quality to it, but I'd just be thinking I'd rather be doing something useful than going to a carnival and I don't like hot weather.

This is not simply a case of a single example that would not hold up under a barrage of alternative options, simply put I want to learn, discover, build and create and passive experience holds little to no value to me.
If by flawed you mean scalable.
It seems the majority of people, if one were to pursue this philosophy, ought to be left to oblivion. Entanglement with them will only result in encumberance rather than advantage, even if you were to attempt to selflessly better them without regard to the benefits to yourself, typically they would be incapable of making use of your assistance.

If you seriously go through life with that much of a sense of superiority, it would be no surprise at all to be socially isolated. I don't think that way. Most people are important and useful to humanity at the individual level. My default is to treat all people as if they are, and that default assumption is generally born out in my interaction with people in many settings. I don't merely seek PERSONAL advantage in dealing with people, but the broader advantage of a better human society for all.
The base OS, libraries, and functionality is GPL, but Google's apps (gmail, maps, youtube, gtalk) are not, as was made clear with the the alternative android install that included a copy of these apps.

Also, I suspect there is some kind of revenue sharing agrement with the use of these apps, so carriers that provide the google branded apps get a cut of related search revenue. This could help keep licensees in line and discourage things like forks or going it on their own with the pure GPL version.