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Tarski

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I agree with your first line.

I'm sceptical as to how scientific this study can be, when as you say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". A measure of beauty changes over time and from culture to culture. I'm sure, if you selected a different data set of beautiful people you could prove the exact opposite.

Well I think you hit the nail on the head, that the disclosure isn't responsible. I'm all for bringing the flaws in chip-and-pin to the public attention, however I find it distasteful that a leading university publishing the schematics of a device that can be used to commit fraud, receives so much applause for this community.

I get the impression that this has captured the public mood of "sticking it to the bankers", when really Cambridge have gone about this one the wrong way.

No it doesn't? I'm not taking the side of the banks here, just trying to understand why the author took the approach he did. It's a shame that at times the HN community is one of single-mindedness where opposite views are met with immediate down-votes.

Stallman on Hacking 16 years ago

At lunch yesterday I held my fork in my right hand and knife in my left. I was very pleased with myself afterwards...

It seems the author needs to brush up on Bayes' theorem, i.e. before giving a percentage confidence in a given theory, you need to consider the likely hood of the theory not occurring.

  #1 Analysts explain it away by saying, for example, 
  "The market was hoping for even better news than the 
  good news they got." A simpler explanation is that the 
  market is being manipulated.
This a false assumption, as I would say it is more likely that the analysts got it wrong. If analysts could predict the stock market with near 100% accuracy, then it wouldn't be a high risk investment option would it?
  #2 The lack of bombshells in the Wikileak materials 
  looks mighty suspicious to me
It is also wrong to assume that because no remarkable secrets have been exposed, that any have been leaked in the first place. This is a statement of pure fantasy based on no logic or facts.

"While the fidelity of the scans from this machine are of surprisingly low resolution, especially compared to the higher resolution “naked scanners”"

The pictures don't quite live up to the title of the article.

1,000 (bad) ideas 16 years ago

What does the HN community think of having a public ideas website? Sort of like ASK HN: Rate my startup. Users can post their ideas from inception and receive creative input, reassurance that someone would buy that, or no-way don't waste your time building that.

In his first first of the series the author states "I convened a meeting to suggest ways that we could get past this problem that everyone wanted access to computers in almost all classrooms almost all the time" - In places like Italy they make do with donated PCs running Linux, which works fine, rather than spending hundreds of dollars of an Ibad solution which doesn't work

Feature or Company? 16 years ago

Whilst you might not create a stable business out of a Twitter feature, if you can implement a feature that lots of people want for a time when no one else provides it you could make a lot of dosh in the short term.

Well you could argue that Yahoo search is just a news website with a search page driven by Bing.

I see Bing's background as a differentiator to Google, which is why I'm trying to combine the two and promote free media.

I agree with most of this. I think the post demonstrates what a chore some adventure games can be when you get stuck on a puzzle: waste hours trying to get past it (before wasting hours on the next puzzle) or cheat and lose the satisfaction of having figured it out yourself.