skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I know socialism doesn't work without either one of these articles.

You should share this proof with everyone. I certainly would love to see concrete proof for and against any general economic policies. The intricacies of such a proof would be fascinating in and of themselves, I'm sure.

And also, who was really critiquing religion here? The author is upset at people who are using incorrect information to reinforce an unsupported bias in their lives. He's clearly not Christian, but I don't think that he's arguing that this is a specific Christian belief or that Christians have a unique defect that makes it susceptible. It's just a matter of fact and coincidence that most people retelling this story are Christian Americans... their news has pushed this story harder and more loudly than any other.

My impression from the data you've given me so far: You think capitalism is better and you're not interested in arguments to the contrary. I cannot tell if you are being serious about socialism being obviously wrong or not.
Ask HN: How to market test for new webapp
We are considering developing a webapp for some government reporting that is done by companies in Canada. Typically this reporting is done first in excel, then multiple sheets are compiled and then manually inputted to a government website.

The webapp would allow all the work to be done in one place - saving time. While this sounds like a good idea, the market is quite small - probably about 4000 industrial companies at most. We have been sending out emails to potential clients asking if such a product would interest them, but there has been little if any response. We have also placed Google Ads to see if anyone clicks through - few do.

Does the HN community have any ideas on how to test a new idea out without building the actual product. The app would only be used once a year and would have to work very well the first time around, so we cannot do a half-development and see if people start using it.

Thanks.

JB
this is a cool idea. (projects like these make for fun hacks for learning new languages or concepts.)
At the first sight this looks like a solution to knight's tour problem on the US map. :)
At the beginning of the clip, they mention that this farm is situated on 350 acres of land but I didn't hear how many people they expected to sustain with that. Will it all be self contained? Also, how many people outside of this pre-industrial society are required to supply solar panels, wind generators, tools and other materials necessary to keep this kind of facility going and where would they live?
True, it is a "common" mistake. It is also amateurish.

I run a few sites on MT. We pay the ~$20/mo hosting fees with the expectation of well-configured apache servers, fair customer support, and the ability to handle an occasional Slashdot, Reddit, or Digg effect. While we keep our CMS' up-to-date, we are happy to pay for the overhead of having someone else deal with OS, network, and server issues.

Unfortunately, their "amateurish" mistake pretty severely attenuates our confidence in their competence -- for existing and future features alike. Worse, it equates to real lost time for us to recover, additional lost time as we implement new security measures (e.g. Tripwire IDS), and frustration with the fact that we found out about our sites being hacked back on Nov. 12th and yet they are just now notifying us of the larger issue!
Idea of the Day: Ideas for free
The data isn't being "shifted", and it's not arbitrary. Again, the graphs are being used to illustrate changes in temperature, not actual temperatures. And, again, this is a very simple analytical tactic.

This is not unlike a non-programmer being skeptical of Quicksort because it's "arbitrarily dividing data".
No one goes from Django to Rails...
Silverlight OS
Google stretched the definition of OS and now some dev is suggesting an alternative Silverlight OS. I'm sure there will be new OSs like Flash OS or Lisp OS or even more scalable Erlang OS for servers.
It's pretty crazy the grunt that some people can squeeze out of tiny, slow chips like that...
Nice, it has really improved since I tried it last. Way faster.
On Mac you can also just enable the character palette, then you can click on it in the topbar and have instant access to all unicode chars which you can then insert.

I don't think the compose key would be intuitive for me. I'd rather select from a palette.
Fred replied on Twitter:

http://twitter.com/fdestin/status/6086581017

@swombat yes of course there is a time to disclose, that's implicit. information is valuable, use it wisely.
The way Apple has set themselves up with OS X actually does make themselves a class of their own. The decisions beyond just looks (e.g. will the software I need run? Do I prefer OS X to Windows? Do I need antivirus software?) make it so that comparing an Apple to anything else really is like comparing a Hummer to a Porsche.
London Stock Exchange timeline of technical problems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Molasses_Disaster
For people who read this and didn't notice, the immediate conflation of Socialism and Marxism was a classic example of how radicals try and pollute a larger issue with their own specific dye. This is not a specific value judgement towards Marxism on my part, but rather a value judgement on the way that many Marxist groups try to insinuate themselves in every conversation. I saw them during the Proposition 8 rallies I attended as well, trying to argue that Marxism was the only way to get gay marriage approved.

It's perfectly possible and reasonable to engage in socialism without engaging in Marxism. It's also possible to mix Socialism and Captialism in rational ways... the US currently does this with the medicine market and it provides a much more stable system for consumers to buy medicines that are proven to work (although this new health care bill contains provisions for the government paying for christian science mysticism, which is a terrible thing in my opinion).
And this is why [the rule of the working class] would ultimately feed everyone and house everyone and destroy racism, homophobia, sexism, etc.

Are you joking? The class (insofar as that term means anything in Western society anymore) you're referring to probably has the highest concentration of racism, homophobia, and sexism.
No, there doesn't need to be a justification or a "theory borne out by observation" for this particular method any more than we need a "theory borne out by observation" for the distributive method in algebra.

There's no gentle way to say this, but: you're trying to argue in a field in which you clearly have even less understanding than I do. The "adjustments" made to the graph do not make it any less accurate for what it is representing; it is not just fiddling around with numbers or making up data. It's a very simple, and very well-understood, way to represent data.

> These effects can cause an increase in measured temperatures over time even if overall the local climate saw no increase in temperature.

How does that even make sense? If the human activities at the airport location are causing an increase in temperatures at the airport, then that by definition is an increase in the temperature of the local climate.

If the temperature is simply slightly higher than surrounding areas, but the overall trend of the temperature is not, then it can still be adjusted into a graph with temperature data from surrounding areas using the exact same methods that were used in the linked example.
Hmmm.... I do Django stuff but I'm working on my first Rails project right now. A Django -> Rails guide would be useful to me.
I celebrated Thanksgiving in Canada and now I'm celebrating it in the U.S. Twice as thankful as most.
Absolutely right.

Now that that's settled, I think we need to start giving some serious credence to the scientific theories of everyone who earnestly believes that the moon landing was a hoax.
I've found that arguing about socialism is like arguing about predicate logic: tedious and pointless if both parties don't get it. How many examples of failed socialist policies does it take to find a pattern? For some, no amount will ever do. And these are not hard sciences -- the best we have is empirical evidence, failed experiments from the past, not theory. So no, right now I am not interested in discussing the role of countless historical examples in forming a pattern. I was hoping for a nice, meaty historical piece in the rebuttal to the pilgrim article, but that's not what I found, sadly.

But you guys can carry on. Socialism versus Capitalism has been done many, many, many times before, and it will be done many, many times again.
It depends largely on how you define "capitalism" and "socialism". Defined such that the US is capitalist while Sweden is socialist (in 2009), the systems are not very different in the first place -- at that point, you're discussing the details, not economic systems. To get a meaningful distinction, you have to move them to the extremes, but when you do that, someone will cry foul and say that's not what they mean by [capitalism|socialism].
This looks like a pretty amazing accomplishment, I'm somewhat skeptical of it, especially since the source blog only has 2 posts on it. The technical details are fairly detailed, but I really want to get a look at the code and schematics.

Ok, I've done a quick skim of the schematics and code, and it certainly doesn't look like a hoax. I'd have to upgrade my opinion to 'pretty damn impressive!' Good work Peter!
Catchy title, lazy title. Text conveys meaning more carefully: be very selective in your disclosures.
Inane and (of course) overblown. "The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed", he says. He offers the same out-of-context snippets as everyone else. Blah blah "eco-fascist" blah blah "Libtards" blah blah. A volley of links making such sensible claims as that the Copenhagen meeting is "a step closer to one-world government".

Nothing new to see here.
Let's repeat yet again: unintelligent, mean, illiterate, crackpots with horrible political views can get science right. And wonderfully credentialed, polite, intelligent, well-renown scientists can screw up science horribly. Science is not a popularity test or a beauty contest. We're on an equal playing ground where data and reproducible experimentation is all that matters.

Sure, it's always possible.

But the prior probability that the crackpot got it right and the thousands of mainstream scientists all got it wrong (or worse, actually committed perhaps the furthest reaching fraud in the history of science by falsifying dozens and dozens of data sets, which is what is being alleged here) is properly very low, and we'd have to be fools to pretend otherwise.

That doesn't mean that we should ignore the questions altogether, but it's all the more reason to be skeptical. The behavior of some of these clowns when talking about evolution indicates that they haven't a care in the world for truth or science, and while that may be an ad hominem indictment and not a proof that they are wrong, it is more than enough to tell us to treat anything they say about science with some suspicion.
I still prefer the dead-keys way of doing this.
Study shows 3- to 6-year-old girls worry about body image
It's pretty good. Nice that it's PDF files (at least, the only search results I got for my query (memcached) was PDF files)

'Amazing' is a very strong word.
Trying to pin down exact concrete meanings is somewhat pointless in an economic policy discussion. They are conducted at such a high level that it's often difficult to get more than a few concrete examples in.

But there are a surprisingly large number of people people, here on HackerNews even, who decry Sweden as a socialist country that is destined for failure. My observation is: when people talk about "Capitalism" they tend to talk about the more extreme aspect of it. When they talk about "Socialism", I've observed they tend to be talking about "our current form of government and onwards."
I am far far away from being considered a designer and I consider the Django documentation to be excellent for programmers. Just because it also caters to designers, the documentation is not necessarily watered down.
It's interesting that this information isn't offered on articles describing emissions caps that are being agreed to in advance of these upcoming talks on climate change. I'd imagine that from now on other climate research departments will keep a tighter lid on their internal communications at any rate.

I never really thought I'd miss Bush but at least he was smart enough to not take the global warming stuff seriously to begin with. Even during the worst depression since the 30s Obama still wants more regulations. This is just amazing.
To an extent, making `fancy looking PCs' was Apple's initial strategy upon the return of Jobs, to try to obscure the creaky old OS 8 / OS 9 which they were stuck with until the very time-consuming task of turning the Next OS into a version of OS X ready for the big time was complete. Quickly make a bold, attention-grabbing statement with the iMac casing, and milk that as long as possible until the real big attraction (OS X) is ready.
This is a large issue to address... But think about why those things exist at all? Racism in the working class during the United States' beginning, whether its against the Irish in the Northeast or the Blacks in the South, was beneficial to whom? The bosses. The same is true for homophobia and sexism. When the working class comes together to overthrow the ruling class the ONLY way this is possible is if they throw out these ridiculous ideas, otherwise they have no chance.

Check out works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Theodore Allen's 'The Invention of the White Race', Sherry Wolf's 'Sexuality and Socialism', Sharon Smith's 'Women and Socialism', and many more...
It's so funny that all Apple fanboyism is automatically voted up. Incidentally I currently use a MacBook that is less than a year old. In recent weeks I frequently had to hard reset it because it froze to an eternal spinning sand clock. Earlier this week I noticed with Disk Utility that there were errors on the disk. I tried to repair them, had to boot from DVD for that. The repair failed. After that OS X didn't boot anymore. I ended up reinstalling OS X (which was only possible after overwriting the disk with zeros, before that the installation failed), losing some data despite of Time Machine. (Incidentally the hard disk seems to be fine, so it wasn't a hardware failure - it was the OS).

Just saying, the "easier to use, no rebooting, no blue screens of deaths" are a complete marketing fabrication. Except that on OS X the death screens are not blue.

Edit: as for your edited part - I am not saying Apple PCs are bad (holding my opinion back), but the article made it out as if they are revolutionary. That is what I am arguing against.
Plus, can any non PhD even get access to a scientific journal? Can you or me even access most of them without a paid subscription?

Yes - go to any local university library, walk to the section labeled "scientific journals" and go nuts. You won't be able to take the journals home with you (they're too damn expensive for libraries to have multiple copies), but most decent university libraries will let anyone in to do research without paying anything, and photocopies are relatively cheap.

Obviously that's much more difficult if you're not near a university, and it is a sad state of affairs when publicly funded research is not instantly available for free online - anyone in academia should fight against this trend, and I think many are starting to, which is a good sign for the future.

But it's at least possible to get to this stuff in person, and worth doing from time to time if you're interested in academic matters.
Yeah but so is Linux or whatever. They are not significantly better than other PCs, just different in matters of taste. Come on, they even use the same hardware as other PCs (CPU, GPU hard drive...).
Win32 firefox is hijacking the Control key.

Impressive web app. It's written with the author's own javascript library http://www.dynarchlib.com/ which is both beautiful and extensive.
Two, the iPod was in development at Apple before he returned (IIRC).

Link? IIRC the term "iPod" was intended to be used for another product that may have preceeded Jobs' return but I this is the first I've heard about a portable mp3 player being developed at Apple before Jobs came back.
If you've every wondered why some smart people are able to climb the success ladder while other, equally smart people stall, lesson 15 is your answer.

Some great lessons here.

As for Powell - this guy was on track to be the first black President until the Iraq war. For whatever reason, he made a huge blunder there that cost him his career. I'd like to think that he was swindled, but maybe he just made a mistake.

It's funny, but for all the talk of left/right polarization and how Obama was the solution - which he clearly isn't, even though I tend to agree with him on many things - Powell could have certainly been the bridge.
For some values of true.

While PicoLisp is certainly interesting, the bulk of Lisp and Scheme (and Dylan) implementations since the early 1980's have gone into a different direction.

For me, true Lisps are languages like T, EuLisp, Dylan, Goo and CL of course (their kernels are mostly equivalent, and can be compiled to run well on existing (virtual) machines.)
Why is Haskell so popular?
Lisp has been around for much longer, and is the same paradigm. So why has Haskell captured all the attention in recent years?
Brainport Lets The Blind See With the Tongue
Agree. What we probably need is a nice way to switch between deployment/development setups, possibly by splitting settings.py like rails
I've only read about a third of this, but it strikes me as considerably more productive than most of the product/business design meetings I've been a part of.

Interesting to see how other industries build their ideas.
Thank you very much, i was searching back in the edit history but, due to all the redirects, couldn't find the original.
Switch to Hostgator. They will migrate your previous hosting setup for free after you buy an account. Their most expensive shared plan is only $13 per month. And their support is generally fantastic.

I'm not associated with them in any way other than being a customer... And I (and my company) have been a customer for over 4 years.
For my credit card not to be maxed out after paying for Facebook and Google ads :-p
Not sure what the point here is, other than to reaffirm that the US has historically supported private property, evidenced by the fact that we've never elected a Socialist administration (no, not even Roosevelt). To those who think Obama is socialist, I suggest you familiarize yourself with history before using a term you don't understand. Politically Obama is no more socialist than Richard Nixon.
Er, no, he doesn't say that the main climate model is useless, or that "it's rubbish and doesn't work". He doesn't say anything even slightly like that. The particular thing he's saying is "meaningless" is a figure that has basically nothing to do with actual climate simulation.

Clearly he's not impressed with the quality of the code. Fair enough. There's a lot of very poor code around doing important things. It looks to me as if after all Ian's cleanups, he ends up with code that produces essentially the same as the pre-cleaned-up code, which suggests that the code-quality issues he found don't invalidate the actual calculations.

Another thing that's notable: here we have a lengthy, ill-tempered diary of someone's attempt to wrestle with this big hairy codebase and the big hairy pile of ill-formed data (supplied from the outside world; this isn't all CRU's fault) that it processes, and in all his notes of what he's doing and his interactions with colleagues we don't see anything like "Ran the code again. It's weird -- it doesn't predict any substantial warming at all" or "Joe told me to change X and Y to make the figures look scarier" or "Wait, this bit here is obviously fudged". This despite a clear willingness to moan about his colleagues' work.

In other words, this seems like it would be exactly the sort of place where you'd see evidence of conspiracy and dishonesty if there were any, and there is no such evidence there.
Ulteo introduces open source virtual desktop OVD 2.0 - Linux Critic
Advanced Git Tutorial
Imagine that the pilgrims had been shown how to cultivate rice instead of corn, then the moral of this story would have been reversed, since growing rice requires a large collective effort, unlike corn and wheat and potatoes which can be grown by a single individual and scaled up based on need.
This picture (Powell waving a vial of white powder on the floor of the U.N.) says it all (for me): http://twitpic.com/r12s0. He let himself be bullied. He failed to stand up for himself (and us) when we needed him most.
so is he a sociopath, loser, or clueless?
Ideas are a dime a dozen. The details and implementation are key to making it a success. If you're bringing more than just an idea like funding, connections, and have committed sales contracts already in hand then you'd be worth more than 50/50.

A 50/50 split just says I haven't really thought it through what both of us will really contribute. No offense.
Is this using Google's AJAX search API?
My observation is: when people talk about "Capitalism" they tend to talk about the more extreme aspect of it. When they talk about "Socialism", I've observed they tend to be talking about "our current form of government and onwards."

The thing that libertarians often forget is that libertarianism has never worked in the real world.

(For a certain value of "worked", anyway. I'm mostly just playing off the same argument as applied to communism, though.)
Human genes should not be patented. However, This shouldn't be a call to end all intellectual property.

It would ruin most IP industries as we know it (music, software, etc.). This is because once a company got large enough, they could cherry pick smaller companies and essentially run them out of business before they even got started.

IP can be bad for small companies, but it can also protect them.

This might lead to many software companies going to a service, which is where piracy is pushing them anyway.
We're not in a depression, we're in a recession.. and it was the lack of regulation that caused it not abundance.
I, too, plead guilty of not reading the text before trying the demo. I mean, if there's a demo, why bother reading?

See also "Treating user myopia" on Coding Horror.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001306.html
Try Rackspace Cloud if you're ever looking to switch. I host my Rails application on Cloud Servers but they also have Cloud Sites which is the managed web hosting. They say their support is fanatical, and they're not exagerating. An upgrade in ArchLinux took my server down, I tweeted about it, minutes later they called me on my cell phone at 11:00PM and resolved the issue quickly and happily.
Modeling Logical Conditions
If you need a mobile version of HN which displays nicely on the iPhone : http://www.icombinator.net
the usual trick is to use a local_settings.py.

put all of your environment-specific variables in there, and put 'from local_settings.py import *' at the end of your settings.py
Anarcho-capitalists are anti-democractic, full fledge individualists. So of course, we are opposed to Marxist policies. Specifically, we would be opposed to any involuntary reorganization of ownership to the means of production.

Anarcho-capitalists(at least some) do have a definition of social classes though. The parasite class are called "political class", or the "tax-consumption" class. It is exactly as they sound, it just means that use political means to obtain the goods of society. The one that are being oppressed are called "tax-producers", those who provided the net tax positive and actually the driver of prosperity in society.
Tool of the day: Twitglry: Find Cool Twitter Apps