skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"It looks like we can predict which combinations of elemental atoms mimic other elemental atoms," he said. "For example, by looking at the periodic table, you can predict that titanium monoxide will be a superatom of nickel. Simply start at titanium, which has four outer-shell electrons, and move six elements to the right, because atomic oxygen possesses six outer-shell electrons. The element you end up on is nickel, whose 10 outer-shell electrons make it isoelectronic with the 10 outer-shell electron molecule resulting from the combination of titanium and oxygen. We thought this finding must be a curious coincidence, so we tried it with other atoms and we found that a pattern emerged."

It's curious how genius appears obvious in hindsight.
If you have 2, then you need 1. I'm thinking about Brazil's offshore reserves.
Perhaps a way to balance this is making flagging (up or down) cost karma points, but that would lead to them (KPs) being visible to give immediate feedback on the user's actions.

I asked last week

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006946

whether attempts to make the site better, which is what many downvotes and flags currently are, ought not to be rewarded with MORE karma rather than less. I think people who clean up the trash should be paid for their work.
It would be interesting, too, if the downvotes could, themselves, be downvoted by others, rendering them valueless. That is, if my explanation for my initial downvote doesn't pass muster, others could downvote-the-downvote, and the initial comment (which I had downvoted) would be left with its full complement of points, as though I hadn't downvoted it to begin with.
i think the update link on the status line can be use to get poll result at the moment
So how do you make $$$ from these media/events?
Is it too late to catch up?
I followed! @perezd.
T-Mobile "Officially" Confirms Google Phone
Asking this question is a good place to start, but the answer goes way beyond mere reluctance. I would say that many people are very intelligent in ways that outstrip their ability to communicate this knowledge effectively. Natural written languages are very blunt instruments in contrast to the highly-involved abstract concepts that our brains are capable of 'discovering'. Some things are very difficult to explain effectively and take much patience, forethought, style, and lengthy prose. Fewer are talented in this area, or you might say that certain skill sets intersect less frequently. (Talented writers and talented mathmeticians/scientists). Even great professors often struggle with explaining things in layman's terms.

Take the English laguage, for example. Very flexible, but still feeble at tranferring highly abstract concepts. It wasn't designed/evolved for this purpose, so this is not surprising. Talented writers can get quite far on the abstraction scale, before text becomes a verbose and confusing mess, but there must exist a potential space for a future spoken/written language to be created, better suited for explaining abstractions, somewhere between the current common natural languages and terse mathematical notation (which itself requires much textual explanation).
That would only be fair because the downvote to your downvote comment would also have to provide a reason. So, it would encourage a real discussion.
(it's hit -6 I believe at one point)

That can't be an actual observation, because the system-imposed limit on negative karma scores for one comment has been -4 for a while. A comment with that recent of an item number would have been posted with that limit in place. I can remember the days when negative karma per comment was apparently unlimited (although such comments would gray out to invisibility at about -25, if I remember correctly) and a longer period when the limit was -8. That hasn't been a problem for most of the most active participants here, even those who actively disagree with some of the consensus opinions that do trigger reflex downvotes here.
Why - do you think only people/companies who are rich should be able to bring lawsuits ?

The availability of litigation financing to people with legitimate legal complaints is critical to having a fair legal system.
Is this a reasonable vehicle for entities that simply would not otherwise have the funds to engage in legitimate litigation against an well-funded adversary?

That said, there seems to be an inherent unfairness in a system where the opponent with the largest coffers wins, and your only reasonable option as a litigant is to find an equally capable financer to invest in your redress of grievances.
It would be good if "cancelled" downvotes were deleted or hidden. I think there is a risk of downvote explanations cluttering things.
So.... someone has to ask the question, might as well be me. Why was this submitted to HN and why was it deemed relevant and upvoted to the top page? I am honestly curious.
California: Failed State
L.A. Gangs Seek Profit in Peace
In the US, it depends on the jurisdiction.

See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champerty_and_maintenance
The Third Age of Gadgets nears its end
that's the "aggressive" part. The passive part is doing nothing (in public, anyway) for five years.
Hook me up: @sant0sk1. Thanks!
In Toronto you can't smoke under large umbrellas or any partially roofed areas on patios/bus stations.
FTA: "This research was funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research."

Interesting to see the kind of practical basic research being done by the military. Their website is interesting: http://www.wpafb.af.mil/AFRL/afosr/
The only call to killing non-believers in the Old Testament (Jewish religion) is Leviticus 24:16 (King James translation), "And he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death." One other passage, Exodus 22:18 ("Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live") may be construed as such, but there's some controversy over the term "witch"---the original Hewbrew word also means "poisoner".

In the New Testament (Christianity) there isn't a clear cut statement about killing the unbeliever. There is Matthew 1:34, "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword" and Luke 22:36, "Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one" but no direct commandment to otherwise kill the unbeliever.

In the Koran, I found three passages that directly state the killing of unbelievers (translation by Mohammad Habib Shakir):

2.191 And kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from whence they drove you out, and persecution is severer than slaughter, and do not fight with them at the Sacred Mosque until they fight with you in it, but if they do fight you, then slay them; such is the recompense of the unbelievers.

4.98 They desire that you should disbelieve as they have disbelieved, so that you might be (all) alike; therefore take not from among them friends until they fly (their homes) in Allah's way; but if they turn back, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them, and take not from among them a friend or a helper.

4.91 You will find others who desire that they should be safe from you and secure from their own people; as often as they are sent back to the mischief they get thrown into it headlong; therefore if they do not withdraw from you, and (do not) offer you peace and restrain their hands, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them; and against these We have given you a clear authority.

And one passage about killing those that wage war against Islam:

5.33 The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement,

I only looked for passages that directly stated it was okay to kill unbelievers; I did not look for mor subtle passages that implied such. If you think I'm being unfair here, please point out any other passages from The Old Testament or New Testament that I may have missed.
In PDF here: http://garry.posterous.com/the-startup-library-613-page-down...
Compaq CQ1569
Dissertations on His Dudeness... (Big Lebowski)
After all the talk about what hacker news really is, I hesitated to post this. But, I really enjoyed the article so I figured that's at least one hacker who thinks this is interesting news, and maybe one is enough. So enjoy, or not!
Yes Python also has great docs. Ruby not so much. There's a command line tool for viewing Ruby docs called ri that I imagine many Rubyists use more than ruby-lang.org.

(Ruby's docs improved when Programming Ruby was first written but since then I haven't noticed any significant effort to further improve them. I reach for one of my Programming Ruby books or PDFs before going to http://ruby-lang.org , might just be me but I doubt it!)
Ten Years: Biggest Losers in Tech
Most open-source projects fall into the category "I wrote this and thought it was cool/useful, if you do too you're welcome to use it".
I observe the same thing, but I interpret it differently. This is because this happens to me even more in conversations of the more... acoustic variety. I interpret it as more of a general resistance to spin-off discussions. In an in-person conversation, if you have a spin-off discussion, you need to stop the existing discussion. This is often permanent. For this reason, if someone wants to talk about a particular thing, they will need to stop spin-off discussions.

On an internet forum such as this, that's unnecessary, but it's a habit that a lot of people have.
C# Brainteasers
Is the curation provided by the totlol users not itself content? I'd argue that it is. That is, placement into category, tagging, rating, and even the boolean fact of its presence on totlol are each nontrivial pieces of information---i.e. content---provided on the page. Which isn't to say, necessarily, that they balance the contribution of the YouTube content, but here we are again: what does "sufficient" mean?
Arduino and Mac OS X software
re 1: `set ignorecase` in your vimrc to have Vim behave the same way.

edit: why am I being downmodded for sharing info about replicating the functionality in the biggest competitor to emacs?
1. Sell tickets to the events!
2. Sell advertising around the media they generate.

But #1 is the foundation, I think. Event attendance is rival & excludable in a way digital media isn't, and people's willingness to pay to attend a cool event seems undiminished these days. Or maybe even increased!
There's already a mechanism for this. It's called upvoting.
My problem with these (except the last one) is that they are invasive. Sorry, but I'm not willing to be treated as a potential criminal quite to that degree when all I want to do is travel from point A to point B.

As others have pointed out, the mm-wave scans amount to strip searches. A full pat-down just has too many associations with a criminal arrest. Eliminating carry-on luggage is probably more under the "inconvenience" category, but it is, as you somewhat note, an inconvenience that would be a significant problem for a lot of people.

Bomb sniffers -- especially if they're machines that are used passively -- sound like a good idea. Better scanning equipment that doesn't violate my privacy, but is able to do an adequate scan of both me and my belongings, without the need to take off my shoes or remove things (laptop, bag of liquids, etc.) from my luggage, or to limit the quantity of liquids I can carry... we need all these things.

With the amount of money supposedly being thrown at "making us safer" on airplanes, why have these scanners not been invented and mass-produced yet? It's been over 8 years since 9/11, and, technology-wise, we just have a few poorly-deployed pieces of technology (the air-puffer things, whatever they do, and the mm-wave scanners that have been a PR nightmare) and no actual universally-deployed solutions. I've been seeing signs at airports for a while now claiming that they're "working on" a solution that will let us keep our shoes on... but this solution hasn't materialized. Gimme a break...
Writely used Windows and C#. (Google bought it in 2006, now it is Google Docs.)
Why do people still write unit tests? You are stabbing in the dark, in a very nonrandom way, and you're doing all the donkey-work manually.

If you care about testing, use a quickcheck clone. Bonus: it's much easier to refactor tests when you're saying "it takes an X and a Y" instead of "it does this and then that". And if you discover a bug caused by a corner case of Y and add it to your Y simulator, then everything that takes a Y gets tested with that corner case.
I was reading through a synopsis of a Forsyth novel, "" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fist_of_God and come across a device called a "Calutron" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutrons Reading through the Calutron I came across the "Ag" being replaced for scarce supplies of "Cu". In the end using "14,700 tons" from the US Treasury reserves of silver for the Y-12 Manhattan Project.

The question I wanted to know and what the article details is "What happened to all the silver"?
Not really official. Even the posted article has "official" in scare quotes.
Miller, key to obtaining 14,700 tons of silver Manhattan Project
I was reading through a synopsis of a Forsyth novel, "" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fist_of_God and come across a device called a "Calutron" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutrons Reading through the Calutron I came across the fact "Ag" replaced scarce supplies of "Cu". In the end using "14,700 tons" from the US Treasury reserves of silver for the Y-12 Manhattan Project.

The question I wanted to know and what the article details is "What happened to all the silver?"
Google might soon be the heart of the robotics industry
Rands in Repose, Erik Sink, and Joel (he gets only one mention) should all get a similar amount of play as pg, I'd say. Rands is a fantastic writer, Erik's just as start-up focused as Paul Graham, and a lot more practical and Joel is (or at least, was) the sharpest business / software writer around (and he hosts the business of software wiki - http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?W1 ).
I do a similar procedure, but I prefix the company or topic with an @ symbol to signify the underlying directory is a group.

IE:

~/code/@asf/httpd-dev
~/code/@asf/hadoop-trunk
~/code/@linux/linux
~/code/@linux/git

The @ symbol will sort the grouped directories first when sorted by alphabetical.
Windows 7 had a ton of these:

- Dragging to the side/top of the screen
- Being able to drag a window away from the top of the screen without minimizing it first
- Preview of windows when running your mouse over the task bar
- Desktop slideshow
- Progress bar in task bar (http://rurl.org/28nt)
- Functions built into the task bar (for example, you can see controls for iTunes by just mousing over it in the task bar)
- Snipping Tool

I'm sure there's a few features I missed because I take them for granted now- but I remember being amazed by the little things.
I see your point and I'll add to it. Along with difficulty in producing an explanation, there is difficulty in allowing the other person time to understand. -> This requires patience, and a lot of people I consider smart have very little patience, which makes it hard for them to explain things and often times I will see them stop explaining something to someone, or simple not starting the explanation because they view it is a lost cause.
alias

When you can make a command and its arguments simple enough that your mother, who never uses a computer, can use it, then you've done well by the world. <3 alias
Hasn't a lot of scientific advance come about as a direct result of military research?
http://blip.tv/faq/#distribution
DOD branches fund lots of "basic applied science" research.
So when can I expect to be able to stop by a Cosa Nostra franchise?
That link was pretty interesting! It's weird to think that contingency fee arrangements were banned until relatively recently.
With dynamic variable binding, there are no side effects, because the LET is undone as soon as its scope is exited.

Think of dynamic variables as constituting merely the implicit passing of a symbol->value hash table as an argument to every function call, and a LET as a local modification to this hash table.

So:

(defvar a 10)

(defun x ()
(if (= a 0)
t
(let ((a (- a 1)))
(x))))

behaves the same as:

(defun x (&optional (a 10))
(if (= a 0)
t
(x (- a 1))))
I keep getting this error when trying to add a poll:

The change you wanted was rejected.

Maybe you tried to change something you didn't have access to.
You are using the result of military research right now

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
Yeah, the title of the article is confusing. It's not clear in what sense they are "on top". I get the joke, but I'd prefer accurate to witty.

Also, some of the comments attached to it are... odd.
Fraud U: Toppling a Bogus-Diploma Empire
Physics of Wireless Broadband
Thanks! @JasonFreedman
Google Nexus One docs get leaked: $530 unsubsidized, $180 with plan
Links of london Bracelets
Space Suits
Life on the List
While I can't say why others voted it up to the top page I will say that I did find this interesting. From the guidelines: "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in finding the origins of popular things/products/services interesting - and in this case, it's about the origins of a pretty common and national dish as a result of an odd series of ethnic and economic events. More broadly you could say it also speaks a bit to how and why ideas spread.
> Aikido is extremely effective at protecting against the kinds of attacks that Aikido practitioners practice with

This is true of any martial art, when not on a MMA environment.

> You simply won't react fast enough, their reactions won't match your expectations, and (very importantly) the first solid hit they get on you will leave you in shock because your body is not used to it.

Again, nothing new here. If you are only practicing limited maneuvers, no martial art is of any advantage. True Aikido masters know how to handle the unexpected.

> Seriously, if any of the ideas were at all helpful in real fights, they would be borrowed by other martial arts

They have been, but I agree that they are not an advantage when you want to win a frontal combat. That is why the martial arts mentioned above are considered the "winners".
I thought that's why the periodic table was setup to look like it does in the first place. AKA right side are the noble gases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas

And on the left side the alkali metals Rubidium, Sodium and Lithium all both useful for batteries. (Lithium is significantly lighter, but Rubidium is more abundant etc.)
Consumer groups try to block Google purchase of AdMob
In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. -- A. Warhol

Clay Shirky updated that with "In the future everyone will be famous to 15 people."

It is obviously more complex than that, but Zed Shaw probably has a nationwide Q rating higher than your local newsreader for your local broadcast television channel.

So, for some values of 'famous', yes.
the final sentence says (in part):

> According to The Lawyer, The Judge also served as a broker, [...]

which seems very odd to me. how can a judge have a financial involvement in the case? have i misunderstood? is "the judge" not an actual judge, but a company called "the judge" or similar (the capitalisation suggests something along those lines)?
itms://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ba-net-live-webcams/id348529659?mt=8
I wonder if this type of morphing from street gangs to smarter criminal business units the way the mafia started in Europe?
> I only looked for passages that directly stated it was okay to kill unbelievers; I did not look for mor subtle passages that implied such. If you think I'm being unfair here, please point out any other passages from The Old Testament or New Testament that I may have missed.

Perhaps you are not aware of this, but Judaism's "canonical" text is not the Torah but the Talmud. Talmud is not equivocal regarding the nature (and constraints) on relations with the non-Jew ("Goyim") and its instructions are not dead-letters but accepted to this day.

http://www.nrg.co.il/online/1/ART1/964/186.html?hp=1&loc...

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=y&prev=_t&h...
What I find unfathomable is that unionization of public employees is permissible, legally and ethically.

What are the possible abuses when there's no profit to be made?
Yes, imagine being so intelligent that after 5 seconds of interaction with someone, you will mentally accurately predict a 6.8 percent chance (+/- 2) that they will eventually pick up on what you are explaining at all. So, now after 10 times with a 5 percenter, you one day realize there was less than half a chance all along, and get into a severe lonely depression and eventually end up writing highly obscure technical books that the sensationalistic bloggers will never read, leading them to blog about 'all those selfish and silent smart people.'
The Biglebowski had a huge impact on my life; I could elaborate on it, but I just don't care.
Anyone who thinks seriously that California is a failed state ought to consider that states are not allowed to used deficit financing the way the US Federal government is.

Imagine for a moment if a small portion of the Federal taxes paid by California residents could be allocated to fix the state's budget mess. Instead, one of the richest, most productive states sends most of its revenue to DC where it is spent on wars and bailouts.

It is also absurd to blame any of it on California's progressives. The citizens of California pay far more for international wars than they do for a slightly more generous entitlement system.

Personally I'd much rather have progressive policy experimentation happen at the state level (where it can be easily viewed as working or not working) than at the Federal level where a bad idea is likely to remain on the books for decades.
F12 in mac. and spaces.
Not a feature, but go to http://photojojo.com/store and add something to your cart. Always gets me.