skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow...thanks for taking the time to put together that comment!

For the most part, I agree heartily with your statements. On the topic of the Civil War, I'd disagree slightly - I'm not sure I agree that the price paid was worth it, but I appreciate that you've weighed the actual evidence and concluded otherwise. Most people just accept what they read in their high school textbook, or cling to "The South will rise again" fantasies.

The reason I drew a comparison to Nazi movies, rather than generic propaganda films, is the racial nature of the conflict in Avatar. The fundamental Big Lie of Nazism was that Aryans were superior to, and being oppressed by, the lesser races. The Big Lie of Soviet Communism, on the other hand, was about the oppression of one class of people by another, and the inevitability of a classless society. It has a human universalism that Nazism lacks.

To make my point in another way, the movie could just as easily (speaking as someone who is not James Cameron) have featured two warring factions of Na'vi - traditionalist and technological - in which case I probably wouldn't have drawn the Nazi movie comparison.

And now, I'm off to learn more about the Sengoku period :-)
I thought this was a question about programming.

And yes, I think inheritance in programming should be illegal.
I was able to load several roms with no trouble (though the UI could use some work). The performance was fine (3GS here) and the accuracy of graphics and gameplay seemed good, but the sound was very glitchy. Hopefully it can be fixed in an update before Apple boots it from the store.

Ultimately the biggest problem with this is that the touchscreen just isn't as good as physical buttons for the kinds of games that the NES had.
Here's an article from Mozilla going over this http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/autobuffering-video-in-fire...
You are taking the story further then it really needs to go.

There is really no reason to assume that these managers are not a net gain for the company. I dislike the fact that a storyline where managers/business guys are the root of all evil can always find some takers. It's silly.

Changing from a 5 person team to a 50 person team is tricky. Adding hierarchies & middle managers is potentially problematic. Moving from an engineer only company to a company that also has a CFO and an HR guy and such is also tricky.

This is all part of the story. The simple story is dumb. Just as dumb as the spoiled silicon valley rockstar story.
Basic premise: Unless you win the lottery, doing what you love isn't an option. In lieu of that, force yourself to work as hard as possible so that you can be successful at what you must do (and learn to love the success).
Can't upvote this enough. All I could think about during the movie was Fern Gully.
I don't see how the two philosophies are necessarily contrary. Nobody is saying that doing what you love must comprise one's "day job". I think the idea behind the saying is that, generally speaking, one must love (or at least like) what they do in order to maintain the drive needed to become world class.

There are already enough obstacles out there that one must overcome to become the best at what they do. Why arbitrarily add another by picking something you don't even like?
I don't think it matters if Nintendo approves.

There is a ton of 'homebrew' for the NES that contains no proprietary Nintendo code, and I doubt that any part of the 'hardware' being emulated is protected intellectual property.

A case can easily be made that it is designed with home brew ROMs in mind. Despite the obvious fact that it will inevitably be used for copyright infringement.
Another thought if you're still thinking about this and monitoring this discussion - give people a limited number of "show stopper" flags intended to draw the attention of moderators. They only get say 1 or 2 over the course of a month - much like dating sites to indicate importance (e.g. plentyoffish with their 2 roses).

These could be used either to reward or punish depending on how they're designed but people would use them sparingly if they're given after a certain criteria is reached (e.g. age of account, karma points, etc.). The purpose would be to cut down the noise that moderators/you have to deal with. Thus there could even be karma points and a red flag/green flag score.

The red flags might only be visible when you click in to their profile for example so as not to draw attention to their presumably highly offensive postings while the green flags are visible highlighting extraordinary comments.

PS I hope you figure out a solution to this as I'm sure I'm not the only one who was alarmed by your comment "I occasionally find myself thinking lately that I just don't want to be here anymore."
Wholesale baby clothes
Anna Su has been in the wholesale business since 2001. She became one of the largest <a href="http://www.dhgate.com/wholesale+baby+clothes.html">wholesale baby clothes</a> importers in China.
The only hammer I could imagine. Board of directors members would be liable to minority share holders if they allow chief executives to collect sufficiently high compensation that it diminishes the company's profits + punitive damages if it involves conflict of interest.

There, you have a mechanism for private individuals to suing companies and directory for siphoning profits away from the business and essentially force officers and directors to think long terms.

I don't know if this would work but it seems better than any scheme I've heard.
Which is it - according to your speculative theories, was salt abundant or not?

I revised it to abundant, but not as abundant as say air or water.

Your speculation on sweet being difficult to find is also nothing more than (poor) speculation.

Of course it is. However, you also need to take into account that (most) natural fruit is far from the sweetness of the cultivated fruits we can buy in the stores today. Compare wild apples to shop apples, for example.

The link I provided above is just one example showing that fruit WAS abundant

It might have been abundant 2M years ago, where those ancestors lived. That says nothing about what happened the next 2M years, which is a significant period of time in evolutionary terms (at least 100k generations). If something changed, e.g. there was less fruit, the ancestors might have started eating other things - maybe become omnivores (like the next step in the chain towards Sapiens, the Erectus). Sounds like something that fits pretty well with what's known about our ancestry.

Going back to an arbitrary point in our history and saying that that's when Things Were Right(tm) and ignoring what's happened since then is no better than my speculations. At least choose at time nearer to now if you're going to do that, maybe 10k years ago when the latest major change in our diet occurred? Even that is 500 or so generations ago, so we should have had at least some chance to adapt to a farmer's diet. And by the way, the farmer's diet is what's allowed us to get where we are today in terms of civilization.

It amazes me how much people use "evolutionary theories" to speculate about just about anything to reach just about any conclusion.

It's fun! Doesn't actually say a whole lot without actual research though.
Only 8 of top global 25 companies in 1999 are still in top 25 in 2009
Wholesale baby clothing business can be a best option to deal in
Anna Su has been in the wholesale business since 2001. She became one of the largest wholesale baby clothes importers in China.
If only their MMO wasn't so damn addictive...I had to quit a year ago for the sake of my studies and career :)

Love to play again tho.
I'm not comparing it with Twilight as far as crap factor goes. I couldn't stomach more than 20 minutes of Twilight. I was able to sit through Titanic without feeling like I had wasted 3 hours of my life, but I wasn't about to see the movie in theaters 20 some-odd times either.
I get the impression that you constantly do, but I might be wrong.

System decoders (while being a sensible idea) actually reminds me of the web before Flash when people simply embedded wmv, mov etc. Why did one stop doing that again? Because of too many incompatibilities. And that's where you would end again. A standard format is the best solution, it is a shame the W3C was not that bold.
It is good to read about a success story.

OTH it is strange that the article starts by saying "Plenty of iPhone programmers whine about their failure to strike it rich in the App Store, but Tap Tap Revenge developer Tapulous can’t complain."

It is true that many developers have said that most app store developers don't make much money. For example, a fairly successful developer (in http://www.newsweek.com/id/216788/page/2) said "We made enough to live, but not nearly as much as if we kept our jobs at a regular game company,". However, I'm guessing that very few people (if any) have "whined" about not becoming "rich"
I'm quite curious how you got the ROMs working. They download fine for me, but then report themselves corrupt. They are not.
Ask HN: How to analyse the real-time Web?
This seems to be one of today's extremely interesting problems:

How can we process an enormously high rate of incoming data such that processing latency is minimal?

What are your thoughts?

Some points to consider:

1. High rate of inserts

If the incoming rate of new data is very high, and if we store this data for any length of time, then databases tend to struggle. Why? Because, as we know, inserting individual datapoints becomes a significant bottleneck when the database is large, and the rate of inserts is high.

2. Computation across full dataset

Any cleverness on our part, to discern patterns in the data, may require our regularly crunching sequentially through all (or, at least, significant amounts of) our data. Databases are optimised for random access. To achieve this, they have overheads which mean that they are not optimised for sequential reads.

It is because of points 1 and 2 that industry folk are loudly singing the praises of Hadoop when they consider high rates of incoming data which requires persistent storage - (HDFS, with its low-overhead chunk archiving) and its corresponding MapReduce computation framework.

So, problem's solved? Not so fast.

Let's consider:

A. Inherent latency in HDFS and MapReduce

We know also that HDFS has an associated latency which prevents real-time analysis. This is for four reasons:
i) Data is inserted into the HDFS in chunks. Until a chunk is formed, it cannot be inserted - and, accordingly, it cannot be analysed.
ii) MapReduce has a synchronisation lock after the map function, so no reduce outputs can be given until maps are all complete.
iii) Reduce pulls output data from Map, so pipelining is made inherently difficult - even without the synchronisation lock.
iv) Hadoop processing only occurs after data is written to disk,

B. Order

We also know that whilst HDFS with MapReduce is great for unstructured data, many data streams are ordered - at least chronologically. This order can (and often should?) be exploited when processing. Exploiting this order across HDFS is not trivially done.

It is because of points A and B that we should probably be thinking of in-memory stream processing in addition to Hadoop - if, indeed, we believe that the community is correct in thinking that Hadoop is the perfect fit for archived data which comes in at high volume, and which also needs processing.

What are your thoughts?
Also check out Rydeheard & Burstall's 'Computational Category Theory':

http://83.143.248.39/faculty/aganchev/Category%20Theory/Ryde...

and all the SpecWare stuff of course:

http://www.specware.org/doc.html
I think what you're looking for is s/Elves/hobbits/....
Do what you love.

There, a financially insecure person just told you to do that. If you have to pay the bills then yes, do what it takes, but you should always be striving to work on something that makes you happy.
Howard A. Schmidt Tapped To Be Obama's Cybersecurity Czar
An Order of Magnitude
Overall a pretty good, albeit quite brief, article, though the description of H.265 is terrible:

H.265 will be lossier than H.264, in other words, but lossy in ways that won't be too obvious to humans and our imperfect image-processing brains. Pause an H.265 video and break out the spyglass, and you'll find many technical imperfections compared to older codecs, but it's all about perceived quality when the moving picture is, well, moving.

The way in which loss is applied to the video is generally determined by the encoder, not the video format. The Joint Video Team is still busy optimizing everything for PSNR, so they don't appear as if they're going to change the entire concept behind video coding just yet. For example, we'd benefit hugely from coding-layer improvements to increase the visual energy of the video, much as Vorbis's failure mode is noisy audio as opposed to metallic warbling.

H.265, so far, is shaping up to be larger macroblocks, a few much-wanted improvements such as a larger transform size, and a huge amount of brainstorming that has resulted in an enormous number of really stupid ideas. I'd give it at least another half decade before it has a chance of becoming a real spec, if only to filter out the bad ideas to find the really good ones. There's tons of interesting stuff there though, and it's worth following if only to read the JVT [Joint Video Team] papers.

The real problem though is that H.265 has no chance of possibly satisfying the needs of those who really want it. The cable companies really really want to be able to solve the following problems in one fell swoop:

1. They want to have hundreds of channels, but can't bother laying new wire, so they want each HD channel to fit in an SD mux (~3.25 megabit CBR).

2. They want to get rid of interlacing, but they also want the smoothness of motion that 60 fields per second gets, and they also want the marketing name of 1080, so they want to switch to 1080p60. From what I've heard so far, H.265 won't even support interlacing, which is the single best decision I've seen out of the JVT.

3. They want this all available in reasonably-priced implementations as soon as possible. Oh, and it can't have significantly higher hardware requirements for decoding either.

By comparison, x264, one of the best H.264 encoders, on its absolute slowest, non-realtime settings, can make 1080p30 look tolerable at about 3-4mbps.

In other words, they want a 2-4x improvement over H.264, for zero extra CPU cost. They want fucking unicorns. This isn't going to happen.
Python and Tcl
Makapa Lodge website - Cape Town
Brittany Murphy Autopsy
Because they make much more money selling them on the Wii Virtual Console, I guess.

Nintendo's attitude toward their classic games is much like Disney's attiitude towards their classic films - have a small release, generate nostalgic hype for a platform, then lock it away again until the next platform comes out and the cycle repeats. Of course, nobody much wants to play the non-classic games anyway.
It's already gone from the appstore.

That was quick :-)
Should giving gifts be illegal?

> What exactly is the rationale behind such an unfair concept?

What's the difference (in real terms) between giving a gift before you die and giving a gift after you die?

> ...limits how much money parents can give to their children

Why are you singling out parents giving money to their children? If we want the freedom to give gifts to whoever we please, we also must accept that most people will want to give gifts to their children.

There is also the obvious evolutionary benefit if you consider the "selfish gene" (Dawkins).
This sounds interesting. It's been a while, but the compiler I built for a project class I in college was the most satisfying thing I've ever built.

What language are you thinking of implementing?
There is great article by Neil Patel on how to hire a Good Designer.hope you might find this helpful

http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/12/02/how-to-hire-a-good-des...
The Mahjong Software Story
Being a part of a gaming software company that is headquartered in Asia would mean we would have to have mahjong
software in our portfolio of games. Why? Ask any Chinese his game of preference and mostly you would get the answer
'mahjong!'
I love the idea behind 80legs, and their Plura program is a great way to help monetize webgames, but I just can't get past their interface.

Too many of the things that I want to do require custom code- And while it's great that they support me uploading custom code right in the window, the implementation makes it pretty difficult.

For one, since all the code needs to be manually reviewed, I can't rapidly iterate. Granted, I'm only a mediocre coder, but the way I tend to program with a new API is to write a Hello World, then expand it outward. Add in one feature, test, expand it to another, until it does most of what I want. Then, I send it through a sample-set of data, and if it works, I'm good to go.
There's no way to do this with the 80legs program.

The second problem is that the code has to be in Java. I like Java. I use Java on my own projects. But java isn't a very fun language. I don't know many people who wake up in the morning excited because they get to write Java apps. The thing is, the JVM supports a multitude of scripting languages.. Give us access to them.
Let me upload ruby code, with an idea, click-and-run against some sample data, and see what happens.

I have a old test project I worked on a year ago, that identifies images and tracks their sources.. Something like 80 legs would be perfect to "seed" it, and fill it up with data. But figuring out how to make it work is too much of a hassle, versus doing the crawling myself, and the speed difference isn't worth it to me. If it gets done in a week versus 5 weeks, it doesn't make change very much in the end.

In any event, I do wish them well. It's a very innovative program, and with some implementation work, I think it could do very well.
The larger version can be done without the expr command in the if statement:

proc nearestneighbours {numlist number} {
# For a given number, find the nearest lower and higher numbers in
# a given (ordered) list of numbers.
set left 0
set right 1000000000

foreach i $numlist {
if { $i < $number && $i > $left} {set left $i} elseif {
$i > $number && $i < $right} {set right $i}
} ;# end foreach

set nearest [list $left $right]
return $nearest
} ;# end proc findnearest

proc main {} {
# Demo when called directly.
set mylist [list "58163" "62140" "66139" "70280" "74371" "78525" "82426" "86584" "90650" "94749"]
set number 67000
set highlow [nearestneighbours $mylist $number]

puts "Lower: [lindex $highlow 0]"
puts "Higher: [lindex $highlow 1]"
} ;# end proc main

main
PubSubHubbub : Bringing an end to the stupid feed polling we're tried to fight for years (see SUP from Friendfeed, AtomStreams... etc).
I liked the picture of the building directory. First floor, tons of departments...third floor, tons of departments...second floor, one item: World of Warcraft.
Take a look at OMeta and Factor.
Black Berry 9630
Buy your Black Berry 9630 unlock code from a reputable provider. We make unlocking your Black Berry 9630 by code very easy. Guaranteed with full unlock instructions.
It's an interesting idea but I think the major problem is many people are in jobs too far from what they are really interested in or enjoy. They've made safe choices based on the fact that they need money to live. Although pouring all their efforts into whatever they are already doing may be better than tuning out completely, I tend to wonder why they don't just put that effort into finding what they really want to do and making it a reality. Once you're committed to the effort it's not as unrealistic as the author suggests.
I have to disagree. Nintendo's 'modern' games are wildly successful by every standard.
The minute I read about Avatars plot, I thought of Call me Joe by Poul Anderson. Glad I wasn't the only one.

I would highly recommend reading it.
Can I ask a non-technical question about analysing the real-time web...

What's the business benefit? I don't think enough happens 'real time' for it to make much of a difference - reading a few blogs, news websites, digg / reddit & trending topics on twitter is enough to catch up on what happened in the world in a day.

Has anyone actually thought of anything that could make this useful?
Download free pc game-The Perfect Tree 
Spruce up your Christmas with The Perfect Tree, a charming, seasonal Match 3 game! Just like the traditional story, your goal is to help a lonely little pine tree become the perfect Christmas tree. Swap and match your way through addicting levels, earning valuable stars as you go, in order to buy decorations for your tree. Packed full of Christmas cheer, The Perfect Tree is a delight for the whole family.
Bowtrol Review
The manufacturer recommends taking between three and eight pills daily. Since they are all natural they can be taken as a dietary supplement for life
You're new here and you've asked what seems to you a reasonable question. You've been down-voted because you haven't done your homework.

From http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :

On-Topic: 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.

I've re-up-voted you because I don't think your question deserves to be at -4, even though it doesn't really add value to the site.
that was quick :)
Anyway, I'm guessing that zdziarski had always intended to target the jailbroken-phone market and didn't really expect the app to be sold in the app store.

What is equally interesting is that the app had already made it to the top 100 grossing list, before it got pulled out.

I looked at the itunes top 100 grossing list 2-3 hours ago (and still have that window open). On that list, Nescaline is ranked at 82 :)
The AI Systems of Left 4 Dead
It's actually not useless at all. The human eye reads optimally at about 70 characters per line, more and the eye has to work harder to locate and skip back to the beginning of the next line, less and there aren't enough characters for your brain to successfully pre-scan the line. So, depending on your font size it is very handy to be able to adjust the column width to display approx. 70 chars a line.
Permutation city.
After-death scenarios, AIs, a world were computing resources are acquired by trading (even better than the futures on amazon spot instance price than someone was suggesting a few days ago :)) ,etc...
Their service would take off much more if they offered a Python, Ruby, or JavaScript API.
A clean browser would not address the problem. I think it
is insane to browse with javascript, once you understand how
it works. You are essentially letting random people run
their code on your machine. How could that possibly be a
good idea? I realize I miss out on a few fancy sites, but
there is so much available, I just move along to the next
story.

I've never used Google Calendar. I went over the code in Google Maps before I decided it was reasonably safe. That takes some time, and I have to do it every once in a while, since Google changes it. Most sites are not worth that trouble.

I don't say you are insane for blithely running javascript. You just obviously don't care much about security. That is your decision.
Orthogonal blogging tools
I wrote this article and it was stolen from: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/top-20-mysql-best-pr...

I like all the constructive criticism. It helps me learn. Also keep in mind that the target audience of this article is very different than for example MySQL Performance Blog. It is mostly beginner to intermediate web developers.

If I wanted to talk about all the exceptions to the rules, it would turn into a book rather than an article.