skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As for people not being driven by pledges, again, I am a professional engineer and I took an oath when I graduated. I have so far been true to it and I take it very seriously every day of my professional life.

Yes, but you are most likely someone who strives to behave ethically regardless of oaths and pledges. The people who need the pledge the most are also the least likely to follow it when it's really put to the test.

That's why reading about the HBS pledge was one of the few times I laughed out loud - long and hard - at something I read online. Maybe I'm too cynical.

The article's tone is a bit hard to swallow, but I think the point about "externalities" is valid. In other pledge-driven professions (medicine, engineering, I'm guessing law) the interests of the professional tend to be aligned with the contents of the pledge - or, at least, not usually in direct conflict. That will never be the case in business as long as taking the moral high ground will put you at a competitive disadvantage.
The short answer is just a google search away:
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/08/12/justintv-steps-...

The long answer:
Like any site with UGC, we have to deal with the issue of copyrighted content. We deal with it by going above and beyond the requirements of the DMCA and working with copyright holders like Fox (among hundreds of others we have relationships with) to make sure their rights are respected.

I'm a founder of Justin.tv. This hasn't been reviewed by a lawyer.
You missed the best part. Get yourself an Apple II, a C64 or an 8-bit Atari.

But get the real thing. Getting an emulator is not nearly as fun.
> I'm not doing things for praise, I'm doing things in the hope that others will find them interesting

Okay

> The community (in as much as there is one) has spoken, and I will be less free with opinions that might be unpopular.

A couple of people is "the community"?
Magnetic Heat Shield Could Augment/Replace Traditional Ablative Materials
The global governance of apocalypses
This is not going that fast. I have postponed it for a while.
Science is (to a great extend) based on trust.

No, it's easier to assume trust, but science works best when there is almost zero trust in any single authority. This is why it's expected for you to present your methods, data, math, and then your conclusions. Ignoring malice a tiny mistake can drastically change an experiments outcome. So an experiment yet to be independently verified is next to worthless, but it's not sexy to work like that and it does not help your reputation.

Edit: IMO, what's missing from this discussion is the idea that independently verifying their results is a reasonable thing to do. This does not mean plugging their numbers into their code and looking at the results but starting from scratch using their methods and testing it yourself.

PS: One of the reasons that social science has such a poor reputation is the willingness to accept minuscule sample sizes as representing real research. A little less trust would go a long way to revitalizing those fields. Unfortunately neuroscience seems to be falling for this trap.
Anyone who is not willing to promise to behave ethically will have a hard time doing so, regardless of effectively promising it or not.

I would never, ever, under no circumstances, let someone like this graduate. Ethics are not optional in any profession.

And don't be cynical. Instead, try to actively be a force of good. Just a little push here and there.

It doesn't matter if it's just a trickle. With enough trickles we can make a very nice river.
> The big problem is to understand if you're really convincing an engaging a skeptic or simply feeding a troll.

Actually, that's not your problem.

And, even if it is, that doesn't justify unscientific behavior.

If you want to be treated as a source of reliable information, you have to actually be one. You don't get to complain about how other people behave.
I guess you were aiming for a +1 funny. HN doesn't work like that.
Room went quickly! Thanks
What kind of insane person indents at 5 spaces. I get 2, 4, 8, but 5 is beyond me.
I'm not an expert in climate change either, but I'm a journeyman in statistics and I support his claim that it can be correlated.
What's wrong with "map[string] interface{}"?
How did you get rent so low? When I lived there (big bedroom by the front door), I had to pay $700/month.
You seem completely confused by the scientific method. They do not have an obligation to release all data, but rather to release the method by which data can be acquired. They released data for the paper actually published to justify their statistical analysis.

Any data that you receive from another scientist with the intention of reproducing their experiment is fundamentally tainted and violates the scientific method.

Please don't argue against straw men, it's annoying.
It's unacceptable to lie to potential interns about what they can expect, but if someone thinks they're getting some acceptable non-monetary value for their time and effort and wants to so the work, I don't see a moral problem.

Whether having unpaid people help with your work is good or bad is something else. They're going to cost you your own time and effort, so you need to know if you're shooting yourself in the foot by skimping on payroll.
I accidentally upvoted you -- sportswriting isn't any more dismal a discipline than general news journalism.

If anything, it's better: they have an actively interested critical audience, they have general editorial freedom, a subject that lends itself to experimental writing, and they are expected to have a strong critical voice -- unlike news-journalism, noone wants press-release stenography.

I actively dislike professional sports, but sportswriting ain't so bad. It's a lot like a prole version of the Literature Review world (LRB, NYRB, VQR, etc.).
That's the part that resonated with me. Am working with a couple of people on a document and that very "feature" drives me nuts and makes it difficult to keep track of where responses might have been made in the context of a wave. You could put that last response on top, but that spoils the continuity of the document and treating it like Word tracks changes doesn't work either
Yes I totally agree about the sample error. I'm trying to make up for it by inviting people on reddit, small forums, Google Wave and other sources that I have access to.

But I totally expect a sampling skew because I am strongly rooted in the "Facebook" community and will find it hard to reach the MySpace group because of this "digital divide". I'm also planning to balance things out with real world survey attempts, talking to people on the street.
Sorry it made you feel defensive. Maybe you missed the fact that most of the posts before mine were quite harsh and critical. Compared to the remarks I was seeing before mine, I think my post was quite kind and evenhanded.

As for "short sighted", sometimes the best way to get to tomorrow is by making it through today. Growing pains are inevitable. It is not a question of "if" it hurts. It is a question of when and how. The things which smart tend to be somewhat personal and unique. What bothers you might not bother me and vice versa.

Peace.
Why is no one addressing the key issue that "customer development puts you in constant short-term thinking mode."?
> Anyone who is not willing to promise to behave ethically will have a hard time doing so

That is not true. Many people don't accept the authority or legitimacy of those who would demand a pledge (religious, anarchists).

I reject out of principal any pledge (and the subjugation to authority it implies). I do the right thing because it is the right thing. Someone asking me to pledge to do the right thing is an insult and an attack on my character/honor.

Pledges are also, psychologically, a cop-out. Like giving money to poor people. They let one feel good about themselves and not dwell on the consequences of all their other actions.
Pyscheme: Scheme in Python
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Just curious- do you have to pay any licensing costs? And if so, do you know offhand how they compare to music licensing costs?
Disagreements over trivia, perhaps (such as quantum mechanical interpretations)

Lol, the very nature of reality itself == trivia.
Hi Ryan,
If we are going to just play the game of pulling random sentences and saying they are all tied together and show some kind of logical connection to what we each are trying to argue, here are my two:

...The broader idea behind customer development is that you should get close to customers early...

...The broader idea behind a lean startup is that you should be capital efficient...

Your turn.
Good point. Business plan competitions are good indicators of who can succeed in cashing out during dot-com bubbles. Essentially, you presenting a business to group of clueless individuals. If they buy your pitch, you are more likely to be able to either con a clueless internet-bubble company's board into buying your company or fool collectively clueless merchant investors into buying into your IPO.
I think these are all very good ideals to strive towards. However, the real world often doesn't work that way - there is some pressing "business deadline" that you simply cannot avoid hustling to meet. That's why I would prefer writing for a purpose to writing for an audience. That's why his second point is so important - this relates directly to defining the proper interfaces for your code! If your interfaces are all beautiful, you can take an iterative approach to the implementations if there is time pressure. Crank something out that works, put out the fire and then rewrite it afterwards. I've always found that in all times of writing, multiple rewrites are a key technique.
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Tom Wujec demos the 13th-century astrolabe
problem #1 : poor documentation <ctrl+w>
http://flutracker.rhizalabs.com/

Compared to early November, it looks like the number of new cases has decreased.
According to the lean startup presentation given by Eric Ries at Web2.0 expo, (http://www.web2expo.com/webexsf2009/public/schedule/detail/7...) one key point is to "1. Identify a profitable business model faster and cheaper than your competitors." Google took VC money without having a clear revenue model at the time. So I would argue that they weren't a lean startup.

And anyway, I would say MVP and lean startup are different but related concepts.
Interesting. For me, I've found that there's a 100% failure rate, for every comment vote that I've checked.

But it is registering in one way: the up-arrow is absent when it reloads, indicating that the server knows I've already voted, but doesn't count it.
It doesn't matter if it's just a trickle. With enough trickles we can make a very nice river.

That really depends. I'm not saying social change never happens from the bottom up, but for me, this pledge is just one step up from, say, an internet petition. Show me one internet petition that has ever made a meaningful difference, and I will change my mind about this topic.

I do the best I personally can, but I don't think changes to business ethics can come from within, because too often ethical businesses put themselves at a disadvantage and fall behind. Whenever changes aren't directly aligned with business interests, they have to come from outside forces - whether it's legislation, or pressure from society, or both - and be applied evenly to all businesses. That's how we've got all progress so far, and I don't see it changing any time soon.
Lately invites have been going out pretty quickly. Maybe they're hearing all of us saying that we really can't even try it if nobody is on it.
Climate change cover-up? You better believe it
Actually I'm the one that posted this cause I'd like to see it get funded.

I am not the one asking for funding, though I have added funding in the form of a $40 pre-order.

Either Nick hits his $9800 mark and the book gets published or he doesn't and nobody's card gets charged.

The project is featured on the kickstart.com homepage http://www.kickstarter.com/
Overstatement; Hulu will soon move to a subscription model for premium content, current content stay free.
What? Power stations are far, far more efficient at converting fuel to energy than home heaters. Large turbines are incredibly efficient, and their design has efficiency as a top priority. Power plants are designed to burn fuel efficiently and transmit as much energy as possible.
This indicates that a good preventative measure would be to calm down your immune system through diet...

http://inhumanexperiment.blogspot.com/2009/05/swine-flu-and-...
"Prior to us, no one had figured out how to do this well without a special lens."

Actually, the guys at Delicious Monster figured out how to do this a while back with the macbook camera, which I believe has the same focus issue as the iPhone's. (A year ago I was looking into making this app for the iPhone as well).

Did you guys use deconvolution with a precomputed blur profile, or something more exotic?
I guess I was not alone...
Last.fm - слушай интернет-радио в крупнейшем сетевом каталоге музыки
Hmm, doesn't word wrap for me, and is unreadable as a result.
In case there was any confusion, the title 'Our Killer App' was copied from the newsweek story title. I did not to mean to imply I, as OP, was a team member at @occipital. You could ask Jeff Powers (the cofounder of Occipital), here: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jeffpowers
There is more here than meets the eye. A blog post here http://horadecubitus.blogspot.com/2009/11/csir-bitten-by-one... sheds some more light on it. In general, I have little sympathy for either side - one comes across as an imperious bureaucrat who does not know what accountability is and the other someone who assumes that India should be willing to roll over merely because he's returned from the US to fix it. Governments are hard to deal with across the globe.

All is far from wine and roses in India, but I'm not sure I'd use this incident as a litmus test.
The conclusion of this was very much in line with my proverb that "every proverb has an equal and opposite counterpart."
i was paying $350/month when i was there because i lived in a room with 2 other guys. it wasn't too bad for our group because everyone had day jobs, so we had the place to ourself for most of the time.
if they kept it the same when i left, 16mbps from comcast at $30/month (or $60, i think it went up because the promotion was a limited time thing)
the freezer isn't even that big. it's more like fast internet and a microwave (for your ramen noodles)
Powering the Dubai Overshoot
I feel that, by taking the oath I took, I was reaffirming my commitment to act on a set of professional guidelines. It's also a powerful commitment - you state the rules that will bind your professional (and many times, personal) conduct for life. That's a big thing - a rite of passage (something important we have precious little left). It turned engineering students into professional engineers.

It's insane to reject every pledge out of principle. A pledge, specially one like that, sets a good example - a model of conduct. If you are not happy with it (like the author), propose an alternative one, one you would be comfortable taking.The worst that can happen is to make an empty promise, one you know you won't keep. It's deeply demoralizing and we have had lots of that in upper management lately.

And, finally, sorry if you feel attacked, but nobody is obliged to trust you to even know what's "the right thing", much less to do it or to agree with the rest of the society on what "good" means. That's what pledges are for.
"I'm not sure anyone ever defined creativity as design."

I don't think people do it consciously, but I do know that there are a lot of people who use 'good design' and 'looks nice' interchangeably. If you want to see examples, go over to Smashing Magazine and take a look through a few of their lists of 'well-designed' pages. The vast majority of the things they feature are not particularly well-designed. What all of them are is visually attractive. Those are the kind of people I think Andy's talking about.
Comments to submitter / author:

The Race / Ethnicity box is US centric.

The music genres choice is limited (classical?) and not everyone listens to any music. “I don’t know” (a proxy for other, or not interested) isn’t a real option, it just asks the user to make a real choice.

Submitting the survey fails with Adblock plus (a common firefox extension) enabled because of the “suspicious” affilliate.php name. And on failing, the survey needs filling in from scratch.
I would pay for this in a heartbeat. I finally moved to silicon valley because I found some startup people to live with. Moving across the country is a hard thing and having people around you makes it 1000x better.
I certainly don't want to defend fraud. However, so far I have not seen the evidence that fraud is the right word for this mite-gate. I am sorry that I even spend so much time discussing this, but I am horrified at how fast many people seem to be jumping the gun here.

I see some emails that give a strange impression. How about investigating more details before calling it fraud? ESR can not even point to an actual application of the alleged corrections. I think for fraud we would need a little more.

Note I don't say it wasn't - I don't know anything about the people involved, their standing or their research. But I believe in the good old innocent until proven guilty. I think it is one of the cornerstones of civilization.
Then save it and read it in your favorite text editor.
Just look at countries where it is optional who takes the maternal leave. Didn't someone further up in the thread give an example?

Edit: reading again what you wrote I am not sure: is the law in iceland that each parent can take up to 4.5 months leave, or is it 9 months they can divide freely (ie 9 months mother, 0 months father or vice versa would be possible?). I thought they can only take at most 4.5 months each.

I only just know read the article you linked, and it didn't actually give numbers for the proportions of men and women taking the leave. So the claim in the article is worthless (it sounds like just some politician justifying their policies).

I have read before that things in iceland are quite different, though. I think it is much more common that the whole family (grandparents) takes care of children and divorced women, so maybe there is less pressure on them.
It's not an internet petition. HBS's MBAs will make it. They will say those words and make a promise.

I have no doubt many of them will just go on and rape and pillage whatever they find in front of them, but others will take it seriously, will keep their promise, remembering what they said and why they did it and, in the end, the world will be a better place for that.

It's also a statement that some of the ways of the past will no longer be tolerated. It sets a code of conduct.

Like I said elsewhere, there are very few rites of passage left in our society. It's pretty obvious there are far too many executives running companies like kindergarten dictators, overgrown babies that want everything the way they like no matter what. Maybe something that helps them realize they changed because of all the work they did in the MBA course helps.

It's a big maybe, but it's also clear it's a step in the right direction.
Actually invites are going out quite quickly at least from what I have seen. I received one about two weeks ago, only about a day after it was requested for me by another user.
FWIW: I read somewhere that for some industries, unpaid internships are becoming The Norm for getting your foot in the door for certain types of things and it is becoming difficult to make it into some of the more powerful jobs (in certain industries) without having this on your resume. The piece I read criticized this practice as being a new fangled way to keep the upper class in power because the people who can afford to take a full-time job which pays nothing at all are generally going to come from a rather privileged family background. It was cited as a sneakily exclusionary practice, a la Jim Crow laws.
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I would much rather live in a world without scammers, even if it means the current ones won't get properly punished.
I don't think that Google Wave will replace GMail for a while.

For on thing, it contradicts the theory of "do the simplest thing that possibly works." Google Wave is great for collaboration and group work and game playing. However, when it comes to replacing email it is too bloated I think. Of course they will probably speed it up and simplify as it develops.

Also there will always be a market for a simple email client, if only for the simple reason that not everyone wants the entire world to see that they can't type very well.

It is more professional to send a completed email then to have the recipient see you typing in realtime complete with misspellings, clumsy typing, and grammar errors.

That is the main impression that I have with Google Wave. Everyone watching a wave can see me type so I have to be more careful rather than just typing then looking it over before hitting "Reply".
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I don't understand why someone would care about whether one program (wave) eclipses another program (gmail)?
I like his response.

re: Wave itself: I am more enthusiastic about Wave as a platform (custom robots for back end processing, gadgets) for software development.
I would argue Google had identified the profitable business model, but needed VC money in order to implement it effectively. Their minimum viable product (their search technology) was already developed at that point.

I agree that MVP and lean startup are different but (very closely) related. (Specifically, you can't have the latter without the former.) But what's your point?
Well at least the company would use it. It wouldn't die in obscurity.
While the revelations about pressuring the peer review process and apparent slowness in responding to an avalanche of requests for information unveil something below impressive scientific and personal behavior, they can also be seen as the frustrated responses of people working on complex data under deadline while being harassed by political opponents.

"Apparent slowness"? Bullshit. The emails show a very active ongoing effort to suppress release of information and to "hide the decline", irreproducible results, appalling sloppiness in model construction. And now this apologia for anti-scientific behavior from a True Believer.
It's also surprising when you realize how rarely that assumption holds true. Far too many applications ship several versions without ever getting rid of the features that should never have been there in the first place. It's a testament to Google's reputation for quality (and long betas) that we feel we can safely assume that the marginal features will be removed or improved in a timely fashion.
I think this will be a great and useful book because the author has a defined focus. being that the focus is "making technology (not just websites but all things new/fancy) helpful" i think it will be something very necessary going forward.
In an art history context a triangular shape is most often related to strength such as pyramidal composition in paintings. Perhaps this has transferred into modern design. It also can be seen in architectural design such as truss design etc, but the arch is always very prominent as well.
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Please tell what perspective you're coming from: designer, programmer or both.