skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So.. how do we know for a fact that in parapsychology the null hypothesis should always be true?

We do not understand how it could work, but to therefore say that whenever we label some experiment as falling under the school of parapsychology, any significant results must be a fluke.. that is almost analogous to saying that any deviation from newtons' prediction of planet movements must be due to measurement errors.

In my opinion such a mindset is a sure way to hinder scientific progress: it heavily favors finding acceptable truths.
Just enter "with:public" in your inbox's search area and you'll see thousands of public waves. Wave is already itself a "chat room" (and much more ;-).
Not making conclusions, just posting interesting data. I would bet that most of the Jewish people on this list are pretty secular though, and along with all the athiest/agnostics on the list, I think the biggest shared trait is independent thinking.
I don't know about this specific case, but this doesn't seem plausible. I would assume the FBI targets egregious offenders who are deemed to be a significant threat. If they went after everyone who accidentally came into contact with questionable media, they would be inundated with cases. Especially with the proliferation of chans.
Other: POSIX shell.
Clonezilla Welcome, Symantec Ghost goodbye
How about written docs with screen shots, some of which you can click to animate interaction snippets?
Other: Objective-C (how could you forget? ;-)
What would Jane Austen have Twittered?
> It doesn't take 10,000 hours to become a master striker in football

Wrong. 25 hrs / week * 50 weeks / year = 1250 hours. So 8 years of football = 10k hours. Most pro strikers have been playing since they were 8y/o; by 16y/o, they have acquired their 10k hours.

I think it's the other way around - 10k hours doesn't really get you to true mastery - it's more like 50-100k hours.

As Mas Oyama, founder of Kyokushin Karate, once said: "After 1000 days (=10k hours), you are a beginner. After 10,000 days (=100k hours), you are a master."
The entire time I was reading this I was thinking, "wow this seems so familiar". Then I realized it's your blog and we just had this conversation two days ago. Thanks a bunch for your help the first time and again for this post!
Maybe Lala has a really good deal set up with Google for those new music search results and Apple wanted in on that...?

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/making-search-more-mu...

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...
Part of it has already played out though. The part where people who loved the product can suddenly no longer use it. That action can be fairly judged. What happens next is still in question, obviously.

I'm pretty sure Omnisio had barely any users, so that probably explains why no one was that upset about it. It's also a different kind of product. People would be more upset if they couldn't use Microsoft Word for their work, than they would be if they couldn't watch a funny video on YouTube.
Experience with Java won't get you far with Clojure. They're about as different as two languages that share libraries and a VM can be.

I think it would be easier to go Java => CL because at least you still have mutable data, imperative style, and usually a low level interface to OS threads. The object system is different, but it's front-and-center.

Clojure treats objects as something you make for unavoidable interop. It has transactional references and snapshot values. It emphasizes functional style. It has a time semantic - something you can also say for Scala, Erlang, and Go, but not CL or Java.

My preference is for Clojure, but for a Java coder it will feel a lot more alien.
Other: Objective-J
You can (as we see) knock up a bare bones copy reasonably easily. The expertise is already out there. I'd say quite a lot of people are working on realtime collaborative comet stuff, and have been for quite a while now.

The hard bit is getting people to use it.

I wrote a fun multiplayer drawing applet (Java) back in 2000, but no one used it :( sob. Actually a few did, it was fun anyway :) One of my points is, this technology is nothing new.
I'm sorry, the compass screencast was informative and interesting, but it was a marathon screencast that I lost focus on at least 17 times before it finally finished.
Interesting. Hadn't thought about it previously, but a global version of Yelp focused on supply chain partners and their production facilities would be very valuable. You'd need to start with a narrow vertical (textiles, wire-bonding, nonwovens, automation equipment, etc.), but it could be a very useful software fix to a broader problem.
Screen casts are usually hit or miss for me, but I have really enjoyed watching railscasts.com. I have learned a lot from those screencasts and I find that its easier to grep screencasts after you are more familiar with the authors style.
This is the old "dollar store" model of business. Tempt customers in with insane bargains, and they'll thing everything is a bargain even if it isn't.
Very cool, thanks for showing me this.
Sometimes the feature is the product
Am I the only one who perceives minimal value from slideshare. Without context, slides are pretty useless. I'm not saying Yehuda's presentation wasn't good. I did not see his presentation. I am saying, the slides have little value without an explanation of the slides.
"The problem is that the mechanical principles that govern each particle of our bodies (and of the things around us) already specify how each of us behaves as a whole. But in that case, there is no room for the ghostlike component to have any influence - if it did so, it would have to make some of the particles sometimes violate the principles that all particles are always observed to obey whenever we check carefully."

- Gary Drescher, Good and Real, chapter 2.1: The Case against Ghosts

At the very least it's highly likely that the positive results of parapsychology, or the vast bulk of them, are due to the sort of statistical problems that plague other sciences as well. I cannot, of course, say it's 100% certain.
Thanks, I've been curious about how that worked ever since I signed up!
I think your problem is more likely to be with class loaders than class paths. Clojure probably has to set up its own, to allow all the monkey patching it does, including dynamically setting the classpath. If JDBC was loaded already, it will be able to see Clojure objects passed as parameters, but not able to find the class by reflection on its name.
So you can add first-order generated-code errors to your generated-code errors when your javascript generator has a problem or a new feature comes into play incorrectly.

I understand that's nice and all, but couldn't you just write javascript? While it lacks macros, it is certainly dynamically expressive enough that you can do pretty much anything you could reasonably require. A cursory examination of Mootools and JQuery could tell you that.
Ask HN: Want to build a team for red balloon?
I'm pretty interested in: https://networkchallenge.darpa.mil/default.aspx

I have a few ideas that make things pretty efficient. There's also 40k attached as a prize, which is quite a few months of ramen profitability. Leave comment below if interested. If you're good with stats, that would probably be immensely useful.
Product Innovation in Materials Science: Promoting Musso
This dissertation did a good job of outlining the differences between product strategies in industries with physical goods (nano, industrial, cleantech, energy, etc.) in comparison to IT.
lala's been around for a long time. (About a year (?) in the current incarnation, much longer in a CD-swapping incarnation. I used both)
Other: Assembly (X86 and POWER mainly). Factor for some interactive exploratory tasks.
Quick Tip: Team up with Trucker Blogs. I am just guessing but I bet there are about a thousand trucker related blog sites and forums... they say the balloons are near major roadways... ummm can you think of anyone better to team up with? You can count me in for five grand of the findings for this tip :)
I don't mean to single you out, Jesse. I realize it takes guts to put your opinions online publicly.
Looks to me like Javascript is going to take this as nearly everyone who codes it codes in something else as well. Just not the same something else...
Other: PL/X, System Z Assembly
Is this even true? I know some folks who have (or had) trouble programming a VCR, but most didn't. So, aside from amusing anecdotal evidence, on what is this claim based?

The book A Small Matter of Programming suggests that people adapt quite readily to assorted complex systems (e.g. knitting patterns, baseball box scores) given a proper context.

This is not to argue for complexity, but that people will raise to the occasion if they think it worth it. Don't sell your audience short (but don't make things harder than they need be).
> (what, exactly, does Parenscript have to do with HTML?)

Because we frequently see Parenscript used in isolation from sexp->html compilers? I sure don't.

I'm not ending with a red herring, I'm saying you're creating a huge integration hassle with the rest of the web application world. Heck, even pattern-substitution templating systems are falling out of style as it becomes feasible to do structure-substitution templating. Most designers and javascript experts do not know lisp, and further don't want the equivalent of a wet blanket separating them from their medium.

And I don't mean to upset you, but I also notice that you didn't exactly provide any justifications for parenscript. It's a cool project, and I've even used it for production work. However, I never felt it was anything more than a stopgap solution, and my impression from the CL community was that they didn't like HTML+JS because it wasn't lisp.
Google returns NXDOMAIN by default, without having to setup every IP I might be making queries from. That's "better" for me.
Building Standalone iPhone Web Apps
I work in vb.net everyday at work. Maybe my brain is melting, but I don't hate it nearly as much as I used to. My previous .net experience was c#, so I think I just had to retrain some habits out of my fingers.

Also, voted for python. Loving it for all my randoming glueing and bit moving needs on my windows machine at work.
What's New: http://docs.python.org/dev/whatsnew/2.7
It was there when I signed up a month or so ago. Beyond that, I cannot (obviously) say.
What an overwrought headline. It's a pity some people are getting burned, but on the other hand those same people were expecting to make out like bandits on relatively cheap real estate built with cheap labor. It's not like the place is about to be overrun by barbarians or the like...by 2015 they'll probably be back on track and it wouldn't surprise me at all if the place is (financially) hot within a decade.
Ask HN: Which US tech events in Jan-April are worth going to?
I have been asked to talk at a conference in the US in February next year, so I'm going to go out for three months and plan to work from anywhere with WiFi.

Is there anything that you can recommend as being particularly worthwhile? (Or, alternatively, are there any HNers on route who I should visit.)

The rough itinerary is:

Jan - NY, Boston.

Feb - Atlanta, Boulder.

March - California.

April - back to Boston/NY.

I'm still bootstrapping so low cost suggestions are more welcome :-)
Watch Downgrade Psp OFW 6.00 Online - VideoSurf Video Search
Picked py, pl, c, but also other: http://ooc-lang.org/ (it's pretty interesting lately :) )
Click-able link to a map and more information: http://theplanis.com/trip/

I'm really impressed with how well Raphael JS works for animations - getting it working on IE6 only required one tweak.
Thank you for a serious response!

So you view it as a net win in rapid prototyping?
> I understand this is fashionable in the CL world, but I've never seen any good justification for this practice outside of saying, "Now everything is in lisp."
[...]
> I understand that's nice and all, but couldn't you just write javascript?

I agree with you on this point (JQuery is quite nice), but this is orthogonal to the CL vs. Clojure vs. $Framework debate.

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/Protot...

http://clamato.net/

http://github.com/collin/jabs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-J
After watching the CEO of OpenDNS spread tons of FUD on Hacker News itself, I will be switching to Google.

Pro-tip: compete by being better, not by spreading FUD about your competition the second they appear.
people who loved the product can suddenly no longer use it

That's not 100% accurate. I think most people who really loved it, myself included, signed up for etherpad pro. You can make fully private pads, and it's free as long as you don't want private pads w/ more than 3 users on it. I can still make as many pads as I please. Obviously, that won't be true when they shut etherpad down.

I'm still not happy that they're killing it.

I'm hoping that they think if the Appjet guys help on wave for the next few months, wave will be a much better replacement by then. I guess we'll see.
* 24 "tiles" with two IA cores per tile
* A 24-router mesh network with 256 GB/s bisection bandwidth
* 4 integrated DDR3 memory controllers
* Hardware support for message-passing

IA x86 compatible. Availability not announced. Experimental.
I say Clojure, because I would be hard pressed to think of a platform better than the JVM. Garbage collection, speed, deployment are all top notch in java-land.

Postgres support will probably be easier w/ Clojure, because everything is writen in terms of JDBC. Postgres is also routinely integrated w/ clojure apps.

Clojure supports xml parsing out of the box, and there are json abilities in clojure-contrib.
Also newer shells would be worth adding too: bash and zsh.
The problem is that Apple claims:

"Applications on the device are 'sandboxed' so they cannot access data stored by other applications. In addition, system files, resources, and the kernel are shielded from the user's application space."

http://images.apple.com/iphone/business/docs/iPhone_Security...

The research demonstrates the opposite.
Other: Delphi.
Suggestion: after "If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title." add another paragraph:

If you submit a link to old news, please warn us by appending [year] (the year of publication) to the title.

Justification: Revisiting "old" news can be very worth while, but we appreciate a warning that it isn't current.
So, basically, this issue doesn't affect you at all. No wonder you are nonchalant -- you still have full access to it for a few months and are able to gradually migrate onto a new product at your own leisure!

Try to put yourself in the shoes of everyone else who love it as much as you, but suddenly and without warning are no longer able to use it.

If Google had given me even one day of warning, I would have bought a premium account as well.
Other: Actionscript 3
Dup of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978140.
I see process-title has been fixed not to mangle "iPhone" as the first word in titles. Much better.
If you are using all the higher-order features of javascript to make it terse and expressive, you are probably "doing it wrong" in terms of producing fast code in a selection of browsers. From this perspective, javascript is the compiler output language, like machine code. Parenscript would then be like assembly - a 1:1 mapping - but embedded in a powerful enough macro system that it can be wrapped into a readable DSL.
I posted a comparison here, from AT&T in IL: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977389

Short summary:

nsping -z amazon.com 208.67.222.222
nsping -z amazon.com 8.8.8.8
nsping -h www.amazon.com 208.67.222.222
nsping -h www.amazon.com 8.8.8.8

Pretty straightforward (-h tests a single A record, -z, the default, tests random labels under a zone).

OpenDNS was faster than Google for me, but slower than my own ISP. However, the numbers are under the noise floor; Google DNS is plenty fast, and bound to be more reliable than your ISP. It also doesn't break the DNS like OpenDNS does.

My point isn't that I know which is faster, but that it's really easy to just test for yourself.
Other: Oracle PL/SQL on a daily basis at work.
One thing I've learned over the years is that there is a certain level of tact one needs to have when talking about other peoples' work. It's very easy for people to be offended when you talk about things they've worked on negatively. As I've matured as a software engineer I've come to realize that no, my code is not a beautiful unique snowflake, and yes, I am probably the dumbest guy in the room.

This means that generally I've shifted from the thinking "this other person's code is shit" to "I'm betting there was a reason they did it this way." As it turns out, there almost always is. With the benefit of hindsight, those reasons can sometimes seem foolish, but that's the thing about hindsight. More often than not though, once I take the time to understand them, the decisions of the original author turn out to be better than my knee-jerk response.

When your overall attitude is still in the "everyone else's code sucks" mindset it leaks out through your language, and I think that's what is happening here, however slightly. There is no reason to use the word "failed" or use the word "sucks" when talking about another person's work, particularly when it's work that people are using in production for free and work that is open sourced, like Sinatra or Prototype. Even moreso when you're promoting an iteration of improvements on a platform that benefits from the work and experience of many man-months of volunteers, an iteration that is still not even released yet.
I am curious about your experience with less, is it a significant time saver? Are there Java based compilers or others on Linux/Unix?
a forever qualm about online code editor i have is that they don't do automatic indenting properly. I have never used etherpad, i'm not sure how well they did this, but textmate is a good example to model after :D
And I'm sorry I'm apparently so culturally myopic that the thought that you could've said what you said because you were actually from Eastern Europe didn't even occur to me.
Ross Hemsworth Bankruptcy and Donations
Not sure what you mean, NVIDIA hardware works great on Linux and I use it on a daily basis.

Are you referring to the fact that NVIDIA's drivers aren't open-source? Well, there is no reason to expect that Larrabee's would have been.

In any case, there is probably nothing interesting in the driver source code anyway. (A lot of "copy this buffer of instructions to the GPU, this buffer back" and not much else.)
I think screencasts are as good as the presenter. The best screencasts are much like a good 10 min pitch. They should tell me the problem, show me the solution and leave me excited and wanting to find out more!

One of my favorite ever screencasts was Rob Conery's on BDD with C# with the MSpec framework[http://blog.wekeroad.com/mvc-storefront/kona-3/] It was put together so succinctly that it really clicked with me what BDD was all about and I came away wanting to download the tools and learn more!

If your screen cast is on Vimeo you could add the little bookmarks on the video time line. This could help users skips to sections appropriate to them.
Other: Groovy
Apple’s Game Changer, Downloading Now
Other: R
You mean like Wiktionary?
Does a VC’s brand matter?
Which one do you feel is not being taken seriously? Just wondering.
VBA when employed to do financial modeling.
Pattern Insight is using YUI to provide a Desktop like experience with a Web app
What Exalts Stradivarius? Not Varnish, Study Says
Yeah, TextMate's auto-identing is very smart and usually perfect at reading my mind. I'd like to see something like that in an online collaboration notepad like this because it's a lot of work to do it manually after using TextMate so much ;-)
> How does the OrderedDict work? It maintains a doubly-linked list of keys, appending new keys to the list as they’re inserted. A secondary dictionary maps keys to their corresponding list node, so deletion doesn’t have to traverse the entire linked list and therefore remains O(1).

Hmm... shouldn't that be `O(log n)` or something like that? Or do they really use cuckoo (or similar) hashing with O(1) hash access?
Article is so light on details that it's pretty much worthless.
> ... of course there's that nice feature that Python has that Perl never had in any version....

I expect better from HN comments.

"I've tried, repeatedly, but I still find sigils difficult to understand" is fine.

"I prefer postfix method calls to infix or prefix symbolic operators" is fine.

"I've never figured out how to use Perl's copious testing libraries or static analysis tools to write maintainable code" is honest.

"I believe that consistent indentation is a primary factor in long-term maintainability" starts to trip my hogwash-o-meter.
Getting early adopting customers might be easier if you are funded by a big VC and your target customer profile is quite SV centric.
What if instead of doing a traditional screencast or traditional howto, you create a hybrid. A how-to document with a short video explaining each section of text. That way steps that are trivial can just be read through, and where a demonstration is needed, the user can watch the video.

The problem is, of course, that few people will find the same steps trivial, so you'll have to do double the work (video and text). On the other hand, this will solve the problem of pacing.
Same here. I want to reach a level where computer technology is a tool in my hand that I can wield skillfully to accomplish any computer related application.
The mechanical principles that are referred to are our theories about those mechanical principles. They may be very accurate in describing them, but they are not 'fact'.

I think the new age / hippies / spiritual / mysticism explanation is that the moment you do an experiment in which consciousness is heavily involved, you are going to see violations of the principles that work soundly when there is noone exerting whatever the name of this consciousness-force is upon particles.

Anyway, to plead my case ;), there is this thing called the sheep-goat effect. People that belief they can exert an influence ("the sheep") tend to do better in parapsychological effects than people that do not belief. Worse even, people that do not belief in parapsychological effects ("the goats") tend to do worse than random. This effect has been reported and studied for over 60 years now (see first source)

I'm not sure how to explain the sheep-goat effect in terms of statistically slacking methods. From a 'the null hypothesis is always true in parapsychology' point of view, there should be no difference between believers and nonbelievers, so both groups should have an equal chance in performing better than the other group. The skeptics also have a problem explaining this one (see second source).

Source:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2320/is_1_68/ai_n1369...
http://www.skepdic.com/sheep-goat.html

p.s. love the name sheep-goat effect ;).
> That's ok though, it's still a correct decision.

It's a convincing article.

I still don't know if I would have made that decision if it were mine to make, but now I understand and sympathize with it.
Git-wtf : Displays the state of your repository in an easily readable format
I actually don't have a problem with this. I've long since trained myself to check the date in all circumstances when I'm looking at something online. My main complaint is when something on the web doesn't have a date (or it just has month and day but no year), how do we push guidelines out to all web publishers?
> Python's Perl 6 moment

What does that mean?

Look at the growth of the CPAN and Perl related projects in general since the Perl 6 announcement (a couple of months after Guido announced he was going to BeOpen to work, in part, on Python 3000).

Python would benefit greatly from a minor revolution like Perl had: http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2009/07/milestones-in-the-...