skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
LARGE SPOILERS AHEAD:

I liked Avatar, but to me the obvious science fail was the telepathic connection between the Na'vi and the animals. Evolution doesn't work like that! Rattlesnakes do not grow rattles for your benefit! I'm afraid that yon astrophysicist knows rather a bit more about physics than about evolutionary biology if the inter-species universal complex adaptations didn't jump out at him.

As for the planetary tree-mind being able to read out human brain networks using its own standardized equipment, who are they kidding?

Yes, the whole plot would have worked without it! The central tree could have been providing a vital nutrient without which the local ecosystem would fail, or something that their women needed to reproduce. There's no reason you need telepathy to ride a horse. The final stampede could have been started by one or more heroes, rather than being magic. And the final body-swap wasn't really necessary (just keep using the old equipment), but it could have been an effect of running the interface for a sufficiently long time (the alien brain gets reprogrammed).

And then it would have been hard science fiction, which would have made a visually-awesome, okay-plot movie into one of the greatest SF movies of all time.

Also, I will accept pretty alien ladies for the sake of plot, but having them cry tears is going too far, and it's not necessary. That really jumped out at me.

Avatar was good, but it could have been so much more if they'd spent five minutes thinking about how to get the plot effect they wanted via science instead of magic.
The rumors are saying Jan. 5th.
Hi. I wrote that blog article. I think you may be missing the point. It's not that BASIC is bad at being a learning language. It's great for that. I learned programming with BASIC myself in that same timeframe.

But today we have languages that are superior and don't have the hang ups that BASIC has. I don't see why we should be devoting resources towards new (and mutually incompatible) implementations of BASIC. Python is easy to learn and can scale to any level of sophistication (but it doesn't require you to know the advanced stuff to write little games, like Java requires you to learn OOP).
Author here. I also wrote a free book on Python programming for beginners called Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python, and you can download it from http://inventwithpython.com if you're interested.
If they're specifically looking for someone who needs to hit the ground running almost immediately doing work tightly connected to package management, automated updates, or relations with the vendor, then yes.

I could only see that being the case for short-term contract work.
It is really, really hefty. I have a copy from 2007, and it's 910 pages.
Amazon goes down; takes S3, Salesforce, Target, and others with them.
Quiet Sun Means Cooling of Earth's Upper Atmosphere
You can be blissfully ignorant about the advanced features of Python and still program small games, just as you don't need to know everything about BASIC's syntax in order to code in BASIC.

The problem is that most books about Python are aimed at adults, when you can just as easily make them for kids. (Which is what I did, and released it for free under a Creative Commons license at http://inventwithpython.com )
I'm so happy this is being discussed - a bit suprised that so many are so quick to jump to the defense of the status quo of a private for-profit central bank - but still happy the subject is gaining some awareness.

I have always thought that a better model would be to call it 'dilution' instead of inflation since this is the primary mechanism in operation. 'Dilution' would draw a natural comparison with shareholder's equity being diluted by a new share issuance. Inflation makes it sound like something that is either inevitable or is a good anti-dote to the notorious 'Deflation'

In the words of the great George Carlin, "The game is rigged! It's a big club and you ain't in it."
We use stats like this to help us gauge the project as a whole, but its considerly likely to be useless for measuring individuals productivity etc.
Ask HN: Is AWS down for you?
http://status.aws.amazon.com/ says everything is fine, but we've got major issues with AWS services.
No worries. Canada is nominally a metrickified country, but the enthusiasm kind of fell off somewhere in the 1980s, and we never progressed much beyond soft metric. That is to say, we still extensively use imperial denominations, but expressed in metric terms - like the 454 g bar of butter, or the 341 ml bottle of beer.

Other areas, like home construction, are still exclusively imperial. We use 8 foot 2-by-4 boards, not 2.4 m 5cm-by-10cm boards.
You are probably right about these fake crystal structures. The moment someone tries to do some chemistry based on these structures, they will fail and eventually figures out that the structure is wrong.

However, your conclusion doesn't follow for fields where experimental results are few and far between. Fraud would be much harder to detect in a field like astrophysics or econometrics. There simply isn't enough data, so rather than contradicting the fraudulent results, you will probably just average truth with lies.
It looks like a DNS issue, since while http://amazon.com isn't working for me http://72.21.207.65 is (kind of).

EDIT: "No A records were found for amazon.com" http://www.zoneedit.com/lookup.html?host=amazon.com&type...
Data Point per wikipedia, and meant in no way to dismiss your observations - the Zimbabwean Dollar officially ceased to exist on 1 July 2009. Zimbabwe is now officially pegged to the United States Dollar.
Waking up in the morning is living against bodily clock in my case. I go to sleep when I feel sleepy. I wake up when I have enough. My sleep time usually somewhat overlaps with nighttime but I can occasionally skip a night by waking later and later in subsequent days. I eat when I'm hungry. I should have serious health problems by now according to any chronotherapist.
From the HN guidelines:

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it."

The original title was just "editorial," but adding the word "prominent" does sound like spin to me.
I'd argue that he's using a bad FP approach. He focuses on one aspect of shapes: testing whether a point is inside it or not. But this is far from a complete, usable representation. How do you draw a shape? Find its edge? Find its bounds? Convex hull? Transform? Test for convexity?

Basically, the original post is just another newbie FP realising that - hey - if you're only every going to call one function of a class then the class is completely defined by that function. He presents a poor and incomplete solution.

There are much better blog posts on FP design than this. Please don't upvote this one.
Indeed. That is also why the "Fookin' Prawns" of District 9 had similar huge, yellowish, humanlike eyes: give them large compound insect eyes and they become a target of revulsion rather than empathy. Already pretty creepy looking if you ask me.
I wonder how much money amazon loses per minute 2 days before christmas. Ouch.
Video hacking; HDMI 1.4 specification will include 3d formats
FYI I am not affiliated with this industry group. 'Virtualpressoffice.com' looks weird to me, but the linked content is not any kind of spam.
I can't load http://status.aws.amazon.com right now, but everything else is working fine for me.

(Where "everything" == my EC2 instance, S3, and SDB in the US-East region.)
Or perhaps their server keeps track of GPS coordinates to know when two online players are in target range of each other?
Hey thanks for the zip download. You can easily un-minify this source using http://jsbeautifier.org/.
What are your favorite references to back up those predictions? Couldn't there also be currently barren areas that become arable?
It is DNS. If you put the EC2/S3 address into /etc/hosts, the services work fine. Affecting lots of other big websites as well apparently (target, salesforce) because they all outsource to UltraDNS
It's not certain technology evolves in the same direction everywhere. There were a million paths our civilization could have taken that would land us on very different societies than the one we are in now.

It is one of the very few scenarios where a war between different civilizations would be interesting: one where the technologies are so different engagement is almost impossible and you simply can't tell which one is more advanced. I think Starship Troopers explored this idea very well: there were planets humans were not even aware they were bug colonies. All weapons are designed making certain assumptions about their target. If all assumptions are wrong, the weapon is very ineffective. You can't use a torpedo to sink a mountain.

I didn't watch the movie, but from what I saw, I gather human technology can barely function there due to the magnetic fields of the gas giant and/or its moon. It's likely the technology evolved in such a place would be very, very different from ours.
Most people here are jumping to the defense of money as a medium of exchange, not "the status quo of a private for-profit central bank." I think discussing the status of the Fed would derail this thread.
I've heard that inflation doesn't actually 'tax' you because all nominal prices adjust so they have similar (previous) real values. If inflation increases, so do your wages, prices at stores, and interest rates (savings rate, loans rate, etc).

> Think of the Fed... charging you interest on every dollar in your pocket every second of every day, without your permission or consent.

Like I said before: ceteris paribus, the real value of your money remains the same. A dollar may be worth less, but that is compensated with higher interest rates, wages, etc.

> At any time, the central bank has the power to increase the interest rate...

Yes, and that is part of their monetary policy. HOWEVER, interest rates are used as a signal for the macro economy, not a cause. Let's say there is a sudden upward shift of the demand of money (because of a speculative bubble, for our example; a sudden explosion of investing). This shift in demand would therefore change where the supply of money intersects the demand of money. This point is higher. As I've said before, the interest rate (price level) is a response variable. With this situation, the theoretical price level would increase to where this new intersection takes place. The FED can, as a response, increase the supply of money, shifting the supply to the right, hopefully returning the intersection of the (new) demand and (new) supply curve to a level where the interest rate is constant. That way, a constant price level (might) be maintained.

One aspect you've neglected to mention is the breadth of our global economy. The dollar is the global currency (or so I've heard). Let's say that our currency is weakening (becoming less valuable) compared to the euro. The Europeans would then take their money out of the market for dollars, thus decreasing the supply of dollars (a leftward supply shift). This shift would then cause our signal price level (interest rate) to increase. The change in interest rate is not our doing (partially).

There is a way around inflation. If we back our currency with gold/silver/something whose value is stable and makes good commodity money, then the value of money is much more stable. However, the US won't do that.
I think management uses salary to keep people at the company rather than to motivate them to be more productive. And if you're a manager, you want to keep people who have a lot of knowledge of the code that isn't either well captured in automated tests/documentation or easily figured out from looking at their code, ie. crappy programmers. Good programmers are able to write simpler, better tested and documented code so it's less work for others to maintain it if they leave. Paradoxically, if you're working at a 9-5 programming job, you have more incentive to be mediocre than great.
NANOG chatter confirming it is an issue with UltraDNS. Seems to be west coast related.

EDIT: Potentially a DOS attack. From NANOG:
"We have some DNS providing type customers (not UltraDNS) receiving a few million packets/sec of UDP/53 DoS traffic, starting at about the same time as the UltraDNS problems. No clue if it's related, but it certainly sounds suspicious. :)"
It's actually UltraDNS that went down. Many, many sites are unavailable right now.
And people told me I was crazy for hard-coding IP addresses for s3.amazonaws.com and sdb.amazonaws.com into the Tarsnap code... :-)
Are women “too smart” for a career in the game industry?
If you end up following through on this, please make a post or message me a link to a github/source post.

I'm bored. :P
I thought DNS was supposed to try backups servers automatically... any DNS experts able to explain what's going on? Some of the ultradns servers are returning (correct) values, others simply not responding.
Awesome ... was that for security or for redundancy? Did you have a solution for what would happen if the IP address changed?
Unacknowledged differences of that magnitude would imply a massive arbitrage opportunity that has persisted for many years.

Only if "programmer productivity" is a primary limiting factor and one can reliably distinguish relative productivity beforehand, both of which strike me as unlikely in most situations.
The differences among Linux distros is so slight that any otherwise qualified/competent admin can be expected to easily learn everything important in days or weeks.

Not sure I agree. After years of using Debian, I had a hard time administering CentOS. yum is a cruel joke... and that's when the dependencies aren't messed up. The quality control and the intrinsic design is ... inconsistent. This makes it hard to administer, and I would certainly never take a job where I would be responsible for CentOS or Redhat.
It looks to be back up now.
Ask HN:  Is there an easy way to post to Facebook as you can to twitter?
With twitter, it's as simple as this:

http://twitter.com/home?status=hello+there

Is there something like that for Facebook?
The Pirate Bay has ebook torrents.
I'm very surprised that they rely on a single vendor. But I guess DNS is one of those things you don't think about until it fails.
>>But I've not found any primary or objective secondary sources on how this went

It's definitely true. Progressivism is the memetic leftover of north-eastern US Mainline Protestantism. The poster above you makes the mistake of comparing it to actual religions, when progressivism has evolved to drop the religious components, which still makes its followers the cultural descendants of creepy religious maniacs even though they don't believe in a God (also, as a side note, consider that this makes progressives not "anti-American" as right wingers make them about to be, but "ultra-American" in the sense of trying to make the US progress into a more 'pure' and ethical state, as the Puritans wanted it to be. Edit: also consider that this might make the right/left 'culture war' more of a religious war between two protestant-influenced sects). This was mainly done for political power. Think about it, there is supposed to be a disconnect in the US between the state and religion, what better way for a memeplex to adapt to its environment then to drop the supernatural bits, and focus on propagating the values, mores, and aspirations of its believers through political power.

You asked for evidence, here is a number of excellent sources:

The main book you should read is "The Puritan Origins of AMerican Patriotism." That pretty much lays out the argument.

Also check out "The Making of An American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts." It makes the case that Puritans are the forefathers of American radicalism.

I also recommend these:

God's New Israel: Religious Interpretation of American Destiny.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Authoritarianism.

Hellfire Nation: The politics of sin in America.

Also check out Michael Burleigh's two books on political religions (Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes). This isn't an aberration of history. Religious movements often drop their supernatural components under the guise of 'reason' and 'rationality' so as to adapt to the culture and politics.

And if you are still not convinced, here is a large list by an American urban historian: http://www.amazon.com/A-History-of-American-Radicalism/lm/R2...

Edit: I also forgot to mention there is a blogger that writes about this topic often. I generally disagree with a lot of what he says, but he comes up with a number of primary and secondary sources for this historical hypothesis.

Here is one post that sums it up: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/univers...

And the multi-part Open letter series is also good: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-le...
I'm really looking forward to the Chef Platform mentioned in this article. It seems like chef is a set of great core tools, but putting them all together and getting an environment going is still more work than it should be.

The two times I've used chef (first chef-solo, then setting up a chef-server) ended up being far more work than just setting up a server manually (haven't had to scale out tons of servers yet, which I assume makes the current chef setup time worthwhile).

I'd like to see chef evolve into something more like Heroku, where I setup a few config files and then run a simple command line script.

The benefit of Chef Platform is that it would (hopefully) be a simple monthly fee (like say $10/month) instead of fee on top of every server resource I use. Also, I like the idea of creating my own recipes (instead of relying on Heroku to have an addon, which is problematic when they lack the addon for something like MongoDB).
Related note: I wrote a program that collects all the HN, Reddit, and Digg Technology articles and ranks them. It was a fun quickie-project in F#

Instead of stripping the intersection, I find that dupes usually indicate a more important story, so I check on those first.

I find that by indicating relative movement (is the story moving up or down in rankings?) and relative comment change I can get an indication of what's hot or not. Whenever I'm bored and want to do a bunch of reading, I can control-click my way into dozens of useful stories pretty quickly! It was a fun project.

Here's the site if anybody's interested:

http://project-management-methodologies.net
It doesn't turn up anywhere in the first page of results. Towards the middle of that page, though, is this comment.
Bookmarklet for Sharing on Facebook (I guess that one is FF specific):

javascript:var%20d=document,f='http://www.facebook.com/share,l=d.location,e=encodeURIComponent,p=.php?src=bm&v=4&i=1255717032&u=+e(l.href)+&t=+e(d.title);1;try{if%20(!/^(.*\.)?facebook\.[^.]*$/.test(l.host))throw(0);share_internal_bookmarklet(p)}catch(z)%20{a=function()%20{if%20(!window.open(f+'r'+p,'sharer','toolbar=0,status=0,resizable=1,width=626,height=436'))l.href=f+p};if%20(/Firefox/.test(navigator.userAgent))setTimeout(a,0);else{a()}}void(0)
I don't know. To me, "would of" is not a typo such as "mroe" instead of "more" caused by a slip of the fingers, or skipping over a word because you are hurrying, and it's not a minor mental slip such as continuing a short-term pattern of apostrophe use, e.g. "the cat's over here, the cat's over there, the cat's everywhere and the pigeon's are in a state", and it is not in the same category as the mixup between "your" and "you're", because both are in very common use - "would've" is in very common use but "would of" is not (500M Google results for would've plus would have, only 5M for would of).

"Would of" gives me the impression of someone who either doesn't read much (where do you ever see 'would of' in a formal published paper or book outside quotations/dialogue?), or doesn't pronounce what they say clearly (because if they did it would reinforce that 've and of are different), or doesn't pay enough attention to what they are writing to think 'oh that's not right'.

It was also because it was in the midst of a post about how the author was great at a foreign language and should have been allowed to finish schooling sooner, even though this is the sort of mistake that seems to be made more by uneducated people which would counter the idea that leaving school sooner would have been a good plan.

I was trying to draw attention to it by butchering a famous speech to make it stand out, and because I don't just want to say "dumbass ha ha", but wonder whether it is in a different class of mistake to the usual mistakes seen on the internet (possibly along with "if I would have known" - how can people say that instead of "if I had known" without realising that it means something completely different?).

Also, interesting how as soon as I posted it it was voted down, then over a day or two it climbed back to +4 or so, and now has been knocked down again. What kinds of people are doing which kind of voting?
How do you share a url with an arbitrary message?

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=<url to share>&t=<title of content>

I tried changing the title above but Facebook ignores my change.
surely they mean "Amazon goes down and takes the Internet with it"
That's impossible, at least the way I understand biology. The definition of a plant is that they produce food. An animal produces no food of their own and only takes from others. So plants have to evolve first.

You could potentially have motile plants (maybe going directly from free-floating algae to something that swims). But generally, plants are stationary or move passively on Earth because they just don't have the energy. Animals hoover up many times their weight in plants over a year so they can do stuff like intentional motion.
"open source" has a specific meaning, not just "you can read the source:" http://www.opensource.org/
Mostly security -- DNS is one of the worst offenders when it comes to protocols with security problems, both in terms of protocol issues and bugs in implementations.

Amazon doesn't move endpoints very often, and I round-robin requests to several endpoints; so in the rare cases an AWS endpoint changes I see a slight decrease in Tarsnap performance and can make the Tarsnap server stop using the dead endpoint before any users are likely to notice.
Also, the link works even in areas which apparently confuse radio waves, like the floaty-mountain parts. Furthermore, there's no way for the army to jam or hijack said signals, or at least, they don't think of doing that.

On the other hand, once you have floating mountains, the science has gone out the window.
I haven't seen the movie and don't intend to, but according to the reviewer, he gave it a plus because the planet DIDN'T have an oxygen atmosphere. Which I considered a negative, since any biologically-realistic alternative would be significant and would be particularly mentioned, and again according to the reviewer the movie didn't discuss what the gas was.
Academia vs Industry: an Updated Opinion
Thanks for the clarification crc32 while I was away
Compared to past cube jobs, I find every day is a holiday.
Thanks! Right back at ya!
> When Apple is scared of web applications, they'll stop improving WebKit.

And WebObjects.

Oh, wait... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebObjects#2009:_No_longer_supp...
Haskell types do not have an inheritance structure. Typeclasses do, however this still does not allow you to create a heterogeneous list. This is probably a bit terse, but you'd really be better off to go read an introduction to the Haskell type system than to have me try to explain it here.