bOR_

From the FAQ:

"Do we know the exact locations of our servers, and, if so, do we have physical access to our servers?"

"We do not know the exact locations of our servers.We do not have physical access to our servers."

"Rest assured that we do have something in place that will destroy our hard disks in a matter of minutes and turn them into little more than coasters."

Those two answers seem contradictory.

Because many programmers are not in the website business. I'm a scientist, working with long-term simulation models. My problem is trying to find a good model representation of the data that I observe. I keep my eyes open towards probabilistic relational programming languages (such as http://www.openbugs.info ), but so far I haven't found a way to apply it to my work.

Lisp is useful to me (more useful than ruby or C was), predominantly because I can work with emacs/swank/slime and change and query my program while I'm observing its output.

He's a big data consultant, and all he has is a hammer :-).

Isn't it actually the reverse?: don't the EU actions actually stop the previous practice of Telco's to subsidize the calling behavior of the majority by adding additional fees to a smaller group that heavily uses roaming?

I'm not sure what the free-market theory on that is (it is an interesting topic though) - making a smaller group of customers pay (and have limited alternatives but to pay) to be more competitive in other parts of your market.

I understand the the telco's are very competitive, but for some reason, free market competition appeared to fail to have an effect on prices like texting or data roaming. Oddly enough, you roam through various network using the internet, and there free market seems to have worked between fiber providers into keeping the prices low and efficiency high.

It seems that Kroes only launched the inquiry into telco's as part of her commision on competition. The price regulations came after her time there (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission_roaming_reg...)

She's great (or at least the dutch think she is), and did a good job as well when she was commissioner on competition, handing out some big fines to business cartels. see

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a854010e-dd84-11db-8d42-000b5df106...

I think we first were a bit disappointed that she was no longer keeping businesses on the straight and narrow, when she moved from competition to the digital agenda: it seemed like she was rearranged to a position where she would be less dangerous. In retrospect, that impression might have been wrong, and she might have just decided that keeping the digital world from being corrupted (by roaming fees, broadband prices, copyright agreements) was a more important thing to go after now than business cartels :-).

Wish there were a bit more instructions on how to get it running using lein2 / project.clj. Maybe that happens this weekend :-). I am a bit at a loss how to start the webserver used by c2 (and if its even included) from within emacs/slime/swank.

So, can google put a patch in Chrome that whenever it runs at VUPEN, everything VUPEN has on that computer is shipped over to Google? :-).

Google has/had the 'do no evil' in their philosophy, and disabling a scheme that misuses their software for cyber-warfare sounds like a good thing.

They test a few different schemes, but it is sort of embarrassing that in their final summary graph (figure 9), they use the arrowheads again to indicate which representation performs best.

http://www.hiv.lanl.gov/content/index

For sentimental value: HIV sequence data (and other data) from 1980 till now. Did my thesis on these ;-).

In general, there is an enormous amount of gene sequence data around, not just HIV.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/

Whole genome sequences of eukaryotes (including humans): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/leuks.cgi

In my perception the wikileaks of iraq / afghanistan / cablegate got far more tv-news exposure throughout the year than facebook did. It is true that wikileaks itself became only an issue until nov/dec, but its leaks before that had high news value.

Its tricky to answer, as I am limited to browsing wikipedia pages on these topics and no more knowledgeable than you are on the topic :-). One obvious alternative to your line of thinking is that the matter+anti-matter that is created in a vacuum is not 'normal' (using your position on normal matter), and has no mass.

One of the wikipedia pages seems to support that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particles "As such, virtual particles are also excitations of the underlying fields, but are detectable only as forces but not particles."

It seems to have something to do with normally existing only for a very short time, and affecting the universe only on a very short range that these virtual particles get away with appearing to not having a mass from the point of view of the rest of the universe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_particles

I am not a physicist either, but your concept of vacuum does need updating.

The idea of matter and antimatter particles popping up out of vacuum has been around for some time, and appears to be the driving force behind black hole evaporation (hawking radiation) . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

According to wiki, there's a few other natural processes where we can detect particles forming and disappearing again in vacuum, but my understanding of these processes is nihil :-). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_fluctuations#Virtual_par...

Anyway, to me the article is exciting.

The point the guy himself makes is that lisp allows him to be a great programmer.

Of course the program could be rewritten into qbasic. It is getting your ideas and thoughts into a form that is not a compromise to the language which matters.

trying to understand the stream. Facebook emails' biggest feature is similar to gmails priority inbox?

Dropbox works for me where bitbucket doesn't (jay to corporate firewall).

Start educating your social circle then, they are part of the electorate. At least, that is my view. I don't like things being unmovable :).

I think the Chinese government only arbitrarily declares that as they own the internet connections in their country, they can decide what information is allowed to flow through them, and they decide such which is in their best interest.

That's still a tad short from declaring ownership of other people's minds.

Sidetracking: Say you are Bose, and use commercials and tech-speak extensively to convince people that your speakers sound heavenly. Is that trying to control people's minds? Brand building, especially when it is more than just making people aware of your product, is a form of mind control.

The end is when you die :). Money doesn't travel over that well.

But as long as you're having fun finding ways to make more money, there's really not that much wrong with playing the money game. Just don't care too much about money :).

Many times, apparently (see recent articles). There's just no explanation except fraud or misformed experiments that fits well with our current scientific understanding of the world, and those shouldn't be invoked just to keep your comfortable world-image :).

Not the easiests of problems though. Do you know what statistics you would apply?

IQ measurements seem to have a similar problem: doing test a, influences your score on test b, because you get more used to the problems presented.. but doing test a and b just marginally increases your general intelligence, which is what you are trying to measure, while it might have a big influence on someone's score in these tests.

With IQ tests, you can expect that doing test c till z will eventually saturate someone.. but that might only work because you generally do not get the answers. In coding, you do get the answer back (whether your code compiles/works or not), so eventually both programmers will just be limited by the speed with which they type.

This sample-size too small thing is becoming ridiculous. You do realize that although something might not be significant, in a hundreds of situations in real life, you are perfectly willing to draw real conclusions from a sample-size of 1?

Stupid example: You are with a group of people, and wonder if it is safe to swim in this river. The first person that walks in gets grabbed by a crocodile. Do you ridicule the rest of the group for not going for a swim? Especially since the only crocodile you observed will not be needing another meal.

Occam's razor is frequently misused. It is not a law, and using it to forbid something that cannot easily be explained is counterproductive. Occams Razor works nicely when deciding whether to use a linear or a nonlinear function to describe some mathematical relationship, but beyond mathematics, what of two things is 'simpler' can be highly subjective.

P.S. I think the whole topic of this thread is sort of not within Hackers' News interest (just peeked at the guidelines). Calling it quits for now.

I agree to what you say :). Had pretty much the same line of thinking myself.

Coming from biology: I know our brains are complex machines, and highly skilled and skewed pattern recognizers, and that therefore many things can be explained in terms of subconsciously picking up signals, or just plain coincidence.

Still, some of my experiences (knowing where someone's attention is at, or feeling flow of energy between bodies) seem to suggest that we can experience more than just the input of our five physical sensory organs. And rather than ignoring these more esoteric senses, I try to use them in a practical sense - as a source of information. Maybe I'm making stuff up ;), but so far my life is more fun allowing for the possibility of these esoteric senses to exist, than going for a purely material world.

I understood that people were asked beforehand about their beliefs. Afterwards would indeed be silly, and I would have been very surprised if 60 years of peer review would not have caught that.

Just checked the two links I pasted earlier. The second link (skeptics dictionary) quotes:

    The expression dates back to 1942 and Gertrude Schmeidler, 
    a professor of psychology at City University of New York. She 
    asked her students whether they believed in psi *before* 
    giving them an ESP card test. 

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 ;).

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.

Had the same impression. The most interesting advances I saw when visiting Alife XI last year was in cognitive robotics. Using MRI scan information from thinking persons to unravel the global structure of the brain, and then implementing that in computers.

The global workspace theory definitly seemed interesting.

I jumped on ruby at the end of 2003. Wasn't that bad a choice either. Clojure seems a nice next thing to learn.

Partially managed to fix the 'read the mail, websites' urge by replacing it with a distraction that is still useful to my work 'scan the titles / abstracts of new HIV publications'. I just need a distraction occasionally, and that one works just as fine as reddit.

Find yourself a useful dstraction :)