skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You say you "don't understand", apparently disingenuously, because you then go on to announce what the argument supposedly is, object to it, change the subject (what, exactly, does Parenscript have to do with HTML?) and end with a red herring.

As someone who works in Parenscript every day and hasn't had his coffee yet, I find that irritating.
There is no need to analysis - simply demand the app declare what it plans to use and then deny all other APIs at runtime.
This helps me clarify my thinking on your posted question. It seems that what I like about this community is that it is started by and run by and for Makers.

I have little interest in building a machine or spending effort talking about a machine that acts like a human. I am more interested in building a machine that is a tool that enhances human abilities. For example, we used to keep track of our resources with pen and paper. We have built machines that make that easier. We used to walk to school, now we have cars and busses to drive us there. We used to dream about flying, now it is routine.

The classic AI approach (speaking of Minsky and others there) seems to be aimed at replicating a human.

Conversation about consciousness strike me as ill-informed and are not of any interest to me. But perhaps I am a simple country boy after all.
Can I add a suggest adding something about comment moderation to the Guidelines? Perhaps:

"Don't downmod comments just because you disagree with them. Similarly, don't upmod a comment just because it takes your side. Instead, vote up for comments that further the discussion, and down for comments that do not."
Evangelicals are Protestants. "Protestant" is basically a blanket term for "not Catholic". We're pretty different across the board from Evangelicals, who are by and large turbo-fundamentalists. In 12 years of Catholic schooling, for instance, I was specifically and repeatedly taught that the world was not 10,000 years old, and that people did not ride dinosaurs.

This is my guess as to what Patrick meant.
How can we encourage people to take more risks in the USA? Clearly, we’ve got a great startup culture here–particularly in regions like Silicon Valley and Boston, but could we be doing more elsewhere in the country?

Decouple health insurance from employers.
When you can generate javascript from s-exprs, you can use macros with javascript.
1 part genius, 1 part insanity?

As for the parent post, people will get sick of it after spending $12,000 to win an iMac - weeks after signing up. If the house is so greedy to take 12,000, they can't expect this to happen forever. Casinos probably know that you can only take so much for the house pot.
They used to be taken seriously.
Try OptimizeGoogle (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/52498) instead. It allows you to remove click tracking, as well as other features.
Usually it's the comments I agree with that I want to see discussed more.
Does user experience or developer experience drive platforms?
They seem to be talking about different things. The NYT article talks almost exclusively of the Danube valley between the Carpathian and Balkan mountains, whereas the wiki page lists the cucuteni culture as being centered around the Dniester river, north of the Carpathians.
In video, your failures are magnified. As with text it comes down to quality, taste and respect for the viewer. The default in video is poor quality because poor quality is easier to make. Screencasts can be much more powerful than text, after all you have more tools at your disposal - you get to play with audio and the pictures move. The trouble is, to make great video you have to think very carefully about how you want to convey your message. How tight is your delivery? Is it well edited or can I hear you breathing into the microphone? Most people are terrible at delivering on even these basics of video. For people who respect the medium producing screencasts can be time well spent. Consider that there are right now myriad untapped markets on the web in which you can teach via video and charge for quality downloads.
A much deeper article by software entrepreneur "Mencius Moldbug":

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/12/gold-an...

"If gold will eventually be remonetized, gold is insanely cheap. If gold will never be remonetized, gold is insanely expensive. It's one or the other. Therefore, if you guess right about this question, you will make huge profits, and if you guess wrong take huge losses."

"The reason I still expect gold remonetization to happen - in the long term, not tomorrow! - is that there's simply no other viable alternative. Everyone knows that the global economy needs a new currency. Most can see that the dollar cannot be saved or replaced by any other sovereign currency or basket thereof - because no central bank could tolerate the economic effects of the upward revaluation that would result if its currency replaced the dollar in C[entral] B[ank] portfolios"
(Submitting my own post.) I'm taking on Paul Graham and Dharmesh Shah in this one, so I'd love to hear people's comments/responses.
MobileMe is pretty kickass. Hell, so is the iTunes store, which is entirely web-based. Apple can do the web.
The difficulty I tend to encounter in promoting Bayesian statistics among scientists is the "sudden" appearance of a statistical model. Too many people go one further than believing frequentist statistics are answering "What is the probability that H0 is true" but instead just fully over the analysis and believe that frequentist methods tell you, simply, accurately, objectively, whether an experimental treatment is "significant".

If you try to press on what people believe "significant" to mean it gets ugly fast, but it's generally a good thing and definitely necessary to publish. If you don't get significance it's just because you need a bigger n. If you can think of some factors or covariates then you really need to use ANOVA.

Stating that there is anything more complex to looking at data and deciding what it means is practically unthinkable.

Likelihood ratios are definitely nice, though. I've sort of gotten people to think about it at a high level by talking about "information flows" and log likelihood values.
China's got a lot more to lose with a strong Yuan that we do. They'll price themselves out of their entire manufacturing chain.
Daily Mirror's Matt Kelly: put SEO in its place
The Blues Brothers are between Frank Sinatra and The Beatles?
How Google should have acquired EtherPad
OK, feel free to reword it to "upvote the comments you want to see discussed more". My main thrust is that an explicit guideline should be given for comment moderation, not what the exact content should be.
End users love them. Think how much TV people watch vs. how many books they read.

For developers, use them for intro's and beginner material, but not a primary reference. Developers read a lot more than normal people.
I haven't read these in quite a while, and had hearty chuckle at:

"If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)"

Was that in the original guidelines, or a recent addition? It seems almost too perfect in response to the comment that iamelgringo was responding to. (As malte pointed out elsewhere in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=978170)
This isn't exactly an uncommon practice for the Canadian government, nor for its provincial governments. First the federal government has an incentive because #1 it boosts revenues, #2 it boosts educated immigration (Canada, like the US and many other countries just need to get most European immigrants into the country and they'll find they love it in seconds) as most game firms hire internationally, and #3 it makes good publicity. The provincial governments are offering their own subsidies for much the same reason.

Canada has a high rate of fluent English and French speakers, which makes it an ideal place to develop games for the international market as both languages can easily be done 'in house'.
I am sorry I didn't qualify my statement but I am from Eastern Europe. So we learned about it quite early.

I was being sneaky a little but the point was that when it come to "the oldest artifact...X", the "earliest...Y" it should be something that is taught and studied world-wide.

The downside is that we didn't study much American history, or at least not as much as I would have liked.
If you look at the FAQ at the bottom, one of the question/answers has a link to the formatting rules.

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
If any thing the myspace story demonstrates how important the technology underlying your web prescence is. MySpace used to be held up as a poster child for how little the Technology and presentation mattered. Now though it's obvious how much it did.

The article doesn't come right out and say it but you could see hints that the technology was a barrier tucked in here and there. I almost feel bad for the News Corp execs cause it sounded like they inherited a crappy technology platform and the myspace execs fought them tooth and nail when they tried to fix it. That combined with a misunderstanding of how web advertising works (Murdoch still doesn't get it even now) and Zero empowerment for the MySpace engineers is what caused MySpaces fall.
You should add a bit of space between the edge of the beige and the text.
There are a ton of things to clarify, but I'll take a stab at it.

A proper Bayesian who is betting and doesn't want to lose badly and still ends up as a fan of the 'da Bears' has probably got a prior that gives some confident edge to them winning. Belief A could be stated using this joint distribution as the product of their predicted chances of winning each game in order. If it's actually 'likely' then that means you've got a pretty incredible edge on them winning (the size proportional to how much season is left).

Belief B is a weird one though. It's a meta-hypothesis about the calibration of your own personal beliefs. The evidence you use to update on this belief is the discrepancy between what you would honestly predict and what actually happened. A proper Bayesian with money on the line would want to recalibrate as best as they could using data already available in order to get the probability of B as low as possible before starting to look at A.

So our proper Bayesian first looks over old predictions he has about the Bear's performance, reworking whatever internal understanding of the factors that go into winning in football he has, until he is well calibrated. At this point, his probability for belief A has almost certainly dropped because it's a pretty unlikely thing for a team to just take a thing apart at every single game for the whole season, but if he still ends up with a strong prior on them winning then a single loss, even if it's pretty bad, won't shift it around a lot.

In short, he'll think about it a lot, cancel out whatever personal biases he can manage, then bet conservatively unless he has some sort of knowledge that provides a really, really strong edge on them winning. IMO, he's got an inside line with some dirty, dirty men.
Except that is NOT what happens. Take the case of a large Chinese network company that now competes with Cisco. This company stole intellectual property from Cisco via a corrupt Indian software engineer. This code formed the basis for a company, funded by the communist government, that is now quite large and succesful. This is not a case of innovation but, rather, Industrial Espionage.

The problem US companies have to worry about (and by extension US workers) is not a hyper-innovative third would. We have to worry about unfair competition from places like India and China. Dear Professor, would you kindly address that in your next "research" paper?
One reason to generate JavaScript is if you need a piece of code on the server and on the client. Stuff like validations comes to mind.
OpenDNS vs Google DNS: Which is Better ?
If you waste a weekend on something (fun), that's not really a significant loss. I'd be more than willing to waste a weekend building something even it doesn't work out. However, most of my partnerships are have lasted much much longer than that. It's very costly work on something for even a few weeks and have the partnership fall apart.

Just recently a friend of mine had a serious break-down with his designer. This wasn't a partnership relationship, he was contracting the designer. But when the designer flaked out, misappropriated other designs, and disappeared for weeks that ended up costing my friend a lot of time and money.
My largest problem with the "release early, release often" cycle, as well as being adaptable, is that it's hard to release a product that I feel isn't complete. I have to fight the compulsion to cram features in that I feel are killer features (despite whether they really are or not).

It seems like big products have huge releases. How can we prevent people from quitting our application if they don't like the big first release?
I'm 36, and my interests vary so much that I find having a community of smart people discussing multiple topics nice in and of itself. Most communities are either full of not-smart people or much more specialized. Of course, I still read both other types of communities, so perhaps I just have too much free time these days.
Hacking destroyed ecosystems
Fund-raising is done wrong
I already do this. I don't need the government interfering.

Welcome to the nanny state. We know better than you do, just ask us.
Poll: Language Use
I'm curious what languages you work in on a daily basis. I do not want this to turn into some kind of silly language flamewar, so please, none of that. Feel free to select however many you actually use. If you pick Other, please leave a comment.
Coldfusion
I'd say you can tell if the startup has been around for a year or 2. If so, they're probably going to stay around for a while.
Can somebody enlighted me why my comment shows up only when I am logged into my account? It doesn't show when I am logged out or when I am logged in from another account. Is this a bug, or, what?
Details:
http://walkie-the-talkie.blogspot.com/2009/12/hacker-news-us...
>> "combination of Operational Transforms on a federated XMPP layer with a web interface."

This is why I hate XMPP. Over-engineered to the point of absurdity.
Ask HN: Has the GMail graph been published?
When GMail launched, it was invitation-only, and there was a limited amount of invites to give away. My immediate thought was that Google was building a graph of all users, and that the nodes were being kept artificially small in purpose for some reason.

The other immediate thought was the prevention of spam agents using GMail for their purposes.

Sampling users a few at a time, starting with trusted users, also enabled the creation of a profile of a "good user", to further prevent spammers from using GMail--their profile would be very different.

Is there any publicly available graph of GMail or other email systems, quantifying the connectivity of the users (I expect a power law)? And any analysis of GMail "good" and "bad" users?
To clarify. I'm doing this to bootstrap my business.

Now if the gov't gets involved and forces me to put my savings into some kind of plan for the future, where I can't touch my money without a gov't sanctioned reason, how am I better off?

Make it tax free? But if it's savings, what is a "qualifying event" that would allow me to withdraw my savings? With retirement there's an age qualification. What about savings?
> You don't need 10,000 hours in virtually anything to be an expert. 10,000 hours to be a master of tic-tac-toe? No. Does it take 10,000 hours to become an expert coin-flipper? No. An expert dish washer? An expert waiter?

I agree with your point, but these examples are flawed. The "fields" of tic-tac-toe, coin-flipping and dish washing are insufficiently complicated that it makes sense to talk about being an expert in them.

Waitering, on the other hand, is definitely an art. Sure, anyone can, with a minimum of training, take an order and put a plate of food in front of a customer. Knowing all details about all dishes on the menu in a fine a-la-carte restaurant, being able to remember an entire tables orders, deducing taste and matching wines from a huge wine list, keeping an eye on everything and understand the timing, so dishes are served and glasses filled exactly when the customer expects it -- and, by the way, doing this for maybe 5-6 tables simultaneously for 6-8 hours straight, on your feet, without missing a beat -- that takes years and years of hard practice.
I don't think I've discovered anything as profound or fundamental to the way I think about business than when I (not so long ago) started trying to build systems instead of products.

Your business is a money making machine. There are many components. Absolutely all of the components are hot swappable. Make each component work until the entire machine does. If one component fails, swap it out with something entirely different if you have to. As long as it keeps the machine working, it doesn't really matter what it looks like.

Become attached only to the machine as a whole, not the individual components it's made of.
I love how everyone seems to have advice for Google with this recent acquisition. I say wait and see how this plays out before grabbing the pitchforks.

Calling it un-google-like also strikes me as odd; after all, didn't the Omnisio acquisition take a similar path? OK, the site is still up to this day, but it's not actively maintained and you can't add new videos.
What are the thresholds for voting down a comment? I looked in News News and it says karma of 100, but there must be something else because I have over 100 now and I don't see any down arrows.
can you back up your statement that his proposed solution would send the entire world into a recession? I always find it interesting that people say this and yet don't give any reasons why. I'm not financial genius myself but surely just collateralizing the dollar with something automatically cause a recession. What exactly is the mechanism you think would cause this? Asking cause i genuinely don't understand myself.
Using Technology To Catch Your Significant Other Cheating
I'm sure the buildings will stick around. Detroit still has many of the buildings from its glory days.

They're pretty empty now though.

I have no doubt that Dubai will still exist as a city in the future. Rome is still a great city, after all, and Detroit is still one of the largest metropolises in the US. The question for Dubai is near-term trajectory. Do they maintain their economic relevance or does it continue to decay?

I think the most likely outcome is that Dubai will become a satellite city of Abu Dhabi, and the economic (and possibly political) activity of Dubai will increasingly become dependent upon that city.
I was running a mailserver in a network where OpenDNS was the default. Outgoing e-mail where the domain-name was misspelled would linger in the queue for five days, instead of failing immediately, while the SMTP server attempted to deliver to OpenDNS' catch-all host. Apparently, if there isn't a MX record, it's standard to attempt delivery to the A record.
Can somebody enlighted me why my comment shows up only when I am logged into my account? It doesn't show when I am logged out or when I am logged in from another account. Is this a bug, or, what?
Details:
http://walkie-the-talkie.blogspot.com/2009/12/hacker-news-us...
I am posting here because I don't know where else to post.
The art market explained
The iTunes store is WebKit-based, which isn't exactly the same thing. A lot of what you can do easily in WebKit can't be done nearly as efficiently or easily in other browsers.
Wouldn't it be funny if this was exactly what google intended when they shut it down? Surely it helps Wave and future products if a bunch of engineers start building expertise with this type of tech.
Some of the best ideas come from intersections of knowledge. I typically enjoy and learn something from articles that are not tech related but are still voted up by the HN community.
This is weird. Even my complaints are not showing when I am not logged in. Is there any body there listening to me? The link to my comment does not work when I am logged out. It gives the message: parent [dead] . But the same link works when I am logged in. What is going on?
it comes down to your economic philosophy.

a keynesian will say that if you need to stimulate the economy, government spending will help get us out of crises.

the problem that arises with a collateralizing program, like the gold standard is that the monetary supply would be inherently confined by physical discoveries and captures of gold. If it is the Great Depression and you cannot find any more gold, you'd be pretty screwed.
Python 2.7 alpha 1
I think it's around 200 now, it increases over time to deal with karma inflation.
I preferred Postmodern last year, for interacting with Postgresql. Around that time, I vaguely recall it was considered faster than CL-SQL as an Elephant backend; and I found it far easier to install than CL-SQL. (I recall during CL-SQL's installation, it kept signalling errors for each DB it supported which I hadn't installed. Someone at the office said I was supposed to just keep telling Slime to ignore the errors, prodding the install forward. That actually worked.)

Maybe things have changed in the interim?

If the OP chooses Clojure, then I'd note that the Java classpath really demands you respect its inflexibility. add-classpath is a second class citizen; I've had JDBC (the Java DB manager) swear up and down that it registered the MySQL driver I loaded via add-classpath. But come time to read from the DB, it only worked when I ensured that the MySQL driver was loaded at the beginning in the normal way. What that implies is that if I want to load a new DB driver, I'd probably have to restart the JVM. (Or do something absurdly tricky, or debug more deeply.)
Sorry, what I was trying to get across is that I don't expect to hear "legacy" unless there's a problem.
I'm 21 and open to all things hackish and interesting, tech or not. So... nope.
Other: ARM assembler, (a variant of) BASIC, GAWK, Matlab.
Interesting--the Python-Dev folks are moving more and more of 3.x into the 2.x series (2.7 corresponds to 3.1). They're pretty effectively shortening the gap that people will eventually have to jump when going from 2 to 3.

I wonder how this will turn out, long-term? Seems like a good idea on the face of it.
Again it's a question of definitions. Israelis define "religious" differently. About 20-30% of Israelis are what Americans would consider "religious", about a 1/3 of that is "ultra-religious".

The 20% that consider themselves "secular", REALY mean secular. As in, hard-core-athiest. They eat pork, and it's not a statement, it's just meat. You'd love them.

To clarify what lies between let me explain. In a recent survey some 75% of Israelis claimed to keep some form of kosher. For the majority of that sample space "kosher" meant lobster but no pork. Both equally unkosher, but there is a stigma attached to pork. All the same, these same lobster-jews would be very offended if you called them non-religious, they are in their OWN WAY. In American definition they are "non-practicing", but not in their own.

The "subsantial-minority" is a weasel word. But is largely limited to what would be termed "ultra-religious", and they are entitled to their opinion, thats a democracy for you. Last I checked, there was a substantial-minority in the US that considered seculars dangerous, their called the religious right.

Either way, this has NOTHING to do with startups.

Israelis, like anyone else, are complex people. Up close, Israelis are hard working, an incredible combination of the empathic and the aggressive. Some are good some are bad, most are a bit of both.

And speaking as a religious person, everyone questions their faith, and even more their "religion". I don't know anyone who is that simple. Don't turn people into caricature.
I appreciate a wide range of topics on HN so long as the discourse is civil. I'm 40.