skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ultimately, isn't what matters that the most aid possible gets to where it's needed? I don't understand the criticism of organizations that spend money on "overhead."

I think Dan Pollatta's book, Uncharitable, is pretty interesting. In your comments on the other thread you talk about not accepting the status quo and having a hacker attitude towards charity, but it seems like your criticisms of the Red Cross are because they aren't status quo enough -- they spend some non-zero amount on things other than direct aid.

We should judge a charity on it's efficacy, not its tactics. If it costs $500,000 a year to convince the most talented people to spend their time working with a charitable organization, and if that person proves to be worth the money, why shouldn't that be encouraged?
This is a real problem for me also. My last name Graham-Cumming causes problems.

For example, none of my family members were able to have Hotmail accounts with our real names (although years ago signed up for one with the name Ivana Watch-Teens-Give-Head to point out how stupid this is).

Eudora's built in profanity filter flags any email where people reply to me (because of the John Graham-Cumming wrote: lines).

Google used to serve pornographic ads against my name until I complained.
Internet addiction: one of China’s most feared public health hazards
Senior Dating Tips
No one is too old for a receiving some help and tips when it comes to dating. Even those who have a lot of experience in dating can make mistakes. When it comes to dating, each time it is different because you date different people who have entirely different sets of tastes preferences and approach to life so no one can be over confident about their dating skills. Here are few useful tips for senior dating.
Meet Bob. He's a swell guy. Would you invest in Bob's startup at a valuation of $10 million? I won't tell you what industry the startup is in, what its business plan is, or whether the startup actually exists or will exist in the future. But Bob's a hungry lad with a gleam in his eye, so that's alright then.

Seriously, if you really wanted to give Bob $300k for an angel investment, wouldn't it make sense to wait until he actually had a startup to invest in?
I couldn't see your buy now button at first, I scrolled all the way down and went back up to find it.

Maybe it is just me but the combination of shape and colors and placement was hard for me to read, I might just be more used to a button on the right and screenshot on the left type layout though.

Edit: To clarify shape I think my brain just assumed they were ad boxes and moved on.
Google stops its self-censorship in China
hey, for what it's worth, I commented on this blog post, when it originally went up, saying that it's better to be the change you wish to see, HINT HINT, which means (in other words) I think it would be cool to actually DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS as opposed to chin-stroking about it all day long. (Or indeed, as it turned out, chin-stroking about it for years to come.)

If anybody feels the same way, e-mail me (gilesb@gmail.com), because I'm totally not kidding. Actions speak louder than words. Less yammering, less yanking our weiners about how futuristic and enlightened we are, and absolutely NO MORE of the boring nitpicky dickwads saying why it won't work for some blah blah blah bullshit "I'll say anything to avoid getting off my ass and helping people" reason.

Fuck all that. Let's teach some kids tech literacy who wouldn't otherwise learn it and change the world already, even if it's just some tiny little piece of the world. Still better than nothing.
Rhett & Link Turn ‘Local Commercials’ Into Internet Love
That's one way to look at it.

Another way is to look around yourself and ask whether perhaps there's just a little something fucked up about a society that would force this couple to go bankrupt financially and emotionally because their peers will send them to a life of misery in prison if they refuse to keep two completely handicapped and malfunctioning children on feeding tubes for as long as is medically possible. Children so young that they, thankfully, are not even aware of their own miserable prison of an existence.

Most of the inhabitants of this planet unfortunately suffer from mass-delusion. We have not yet advanced spiritually or intellectually enough to grapple with these kinds of situations. When a society insists on keeping someone or something "alive" at great cost and for no purpose other than to satisfy their own neuroses, something is deeply wrong, and some people decide, "To hell with it all."
Space Station Toilet Clogged with Calcium Deposits
They do live streams.

I use them for ww.com.

Most of the time wowza is used for videoconferencing and video chat.
At 80 this makes perfect sense. Too bad I'm 23, wherein this makes no sense.
Ask HN: How can I remove my submissions?
How can I remove my submissions or delete my account?
That author actual inverts that ridiculous argument and explicitly says that all the highest earners live on the coasts and are propping up those salt of the earth types "in the middle".
Four monks decided to meditate silently without speaking for two weeks. By nightfall on the first day, the candle began to flicker and then went out. The first monk said, "Oh, no! The candle is out." The second monk said, "Aren't we not suppose to talk?" The third monk said, "Why must you two break the silence?" The fourth monk laughed and said, "Ha! I'm the only one who didn't speak."

Edit: Source: http://thelab.fisica.unige.it/grosso/modules/news/article.ph...
Final edition: Twilight of the American newspaper
And probably clear to anyone taking the quote in context.
Got it, thanks. It wasn't clear to me from the paper or the reference implementation that it did that, but it makes sense it would.
Lazy sequences in Javascript
ENUM: Dragging telephone numbers into the Internet Age
Facebook | Beranda
I'd like to purchase a head-mounted display for coding. Anybody here with experience using a HMD who could recommend one?
I wonder how I would feel if my "asset" filed for bankruptcy and discharged this obligation after taking my money and squandering it? O tempora, O mores!
Most Popular Posts from Creative Blogs
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Does this qualify? - http://www.amazon.com/G2-Full-Metal-Airsoft-Pistol/dp/B0026E...
So these people are asking for a slightly high valuation. The basic concept isn't terrible though. http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa072602a.htm gives some numbers for average lifetime earnings. People with professional degrees earn over a lifetime an average of $4.4 million. Sure you need to calculate a net present value of that, but it's possible to estimate someone's potential future earnings.

Then you can pick a portfolio of people who you think will perform above average, in a variety of fields to hedge your risk, and provide advice and mentoring and....
I can make you a voice recording for the screencast, if you like, just give me the text to read. That's my little hobby. See examples in my blog.
Buy my Awesome Travel book for $20 and I'll donate the $20 to Haiti
A more direct way of saying it is that academics at research universities are mostly motivated to publish frequently in reputable places by grants and tenure, and nothing has forced either the way grants or tenure are given out to change from what they were pre-Internet.

(That said, innovations that allow people to write more papers or get cited more have been taken up very rapidly.)
Would you mind expanding on the issues you ran into with Vimperator?
The Spies Who Got Left in the Cold
counter points:
1. most content isn't live-streamed.
2. content that is live-streamed fits very well to p2p , which is very cheap , and might even become embedded in flash.
3. the buffering issue holds some of the characteristics of disruptive technology:worse in viewing quality , but better in other dimensions - viewing options /price / experience. and as any disruptive tech , it's always improving.
4. regarding 3 internet video service providers : given a lot less customer lockup then cable companies , the competition between those 3 are better .
5, Alot depends on which advertising model(web vs cable) , will be able to offer better results.
Bankruptcy isn't criminal, it's civil. You wont go to jail for bankruptcy, at least not in the US.
You honestly don't know the history of Congo? Here's a starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State

The baskets of severed hands, set down at the feet of the European post commanders, became the symbol of the Congo Free State. ... The collection of hands became an end in itself. Force Publique soldiers brought them to the stations in place of rubber; they even went out to harvest them instead of rubber... They became a sort of currency. They came to be used to make up for shortfalls in rubber quotas, to replace... the people who were demanded for the forced labour gangs; and the Force Publique soldiers were paid their bonuses on the basis of how many hands they collected.
All it will take stream massively-watched video at orders of magnitude less cost than either airwave or cable broadcast is TCP multicast. Granted there are some barriers there, but it's fundamentally more efficient than any other broadcast method. It just hasn't been worth it yet because for those few events we've already had long-existing broadcast TV networks.

Hell, you could even do it purely at the application level with BitTorrent.

Cable is cheaper now because of sunk costs, but cable companies are much too fat to innovate at this point. They will do whatever they can to keep prices high and cling to their cash cow, while Internet bandwidth inevitably becomes cheaper fueled by thousands of disparate interests. Cartels may drag out the endgame, but eventually content producers will have no choice but to go where the eyeballs are.
9 Useful Tactics for Paying Back Technical Debt
As I wrote in the comments of that article, their approach suffers from a number of fundamental limitations, that are addressed in the alternative "investing in superstars" idea discussed a while ago: http://bit.ly/jQGzg.

Nevertheless, food for thought!
On a related note, Google Experimental Labs lets you enable Vim-style navigational shortcuts for search results: http://www.google.com/experimental/
How about Power Ranger Nunchucks?

http://www.amazon.com/Power-Ranger-Nunchucks-Jungle-Fury/dp/...
Strange, the sound level seems to be reasonable for me on all the machines I've heard the video on...
Try bringing that in to NL and you'll be arrested.
>The article states that "Europe was massively enriched by the genocides in the Americas"

Whether Europe was successful or not in profiting from the genocide, genocide did happen and I think the author is merely saying that the western world for the most part doesn't own up to this.

Regarding the profitability of colonialism, while I agree that it's debatable whether Europe itself was massively enriched by the colonies, Europeans profited. European immigrants to North America were able to create an empire by consolidating their power over the indigenous residents then leveraging North America's land and natural resources.
You're right that CEO pay doesn't mean that much in the scheme of things especially if they increase the effectiveness of the organization, but it's an issue that concerns people who make a lot less and are deciding where they should donate their hard earned dollars.

http://www.slate.com/id/2220596

Non-profits also use their allure of helping others to recruit and often pay rank and file employees less than market rate wages (see some comments in the slate article).

For example, doctors who work for these organizations could likewise be making $100's of K per year. Some doctors also work much harder than their market counterpart, performing more surgeries under difficult conditions.
Fortunately, there was a startup–which has requested not to be named–that saw the potential here. With a few features, x264 could be turned into the most powerful low-latency streaming platform in the world.

...

Videoconferencing? Pah! I’m playing Call of Duty 4 over a live video stream!

October 2009 seems a little late for it, but could the startup be OnLive? http://www.onlive.com/
Perhaps Google finally came to the conclusion that the Chinese government has its thumb on the scales. It doesn't matter how much potential the Chinese market has, if only Chinese companies are going to be allowed to succeed.

The hacking probably isn't significant in itself, except to demonstrate that Google is only permitted to operate in China to facilitate industrial espionage.

It's an open question whether any foreign companies can succeed in China over the long run. It will not be long before Chinese companies have absorbed their technology and skills, and no longer need them.
Avatar Augmented Reality toys
Nope, not OnLive. They have their own system which I could talk about rather at length if anyone wanted, but in short is really not very good (but is probably passable). They split the frame into 16 rectangular slices and encode them in separate streams, each of which runs at a constant bitrate. Updates to each block are staggered 1ms apart, for a total frame latency of about 16ms.

More problematic is their awful business model, which, given that it's thought up by the guy behind WebTV, is probably not very surprising.
First techzing of 2010 (audio)
You should definitely make this configurable. I used to use hit a hint (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1341), but found it would sometimes capture _all_ presses of the spacebar/ctrl key/whatever you configured. This made it practically impossible to enter text on some websites. It started happening more and more often, which meant I ended up turning HaH off.

GleeBox looks great. Echoing another posters comments, the mouse-centric navigation of the web really gets to me. Anything that lessons mouse usage gets my vote!
They do, last time I checked:
"""

The following organizations are accepting SMS donations in the US only:

* SMS text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts

"""
Thanks for the feedback, will toy with the idea of custom modifiers. We experimented with a couple of other options before choosing !, it just felt right in combination with the other modifiers.
I'll be waiting till they have the story.

No need to wait:

A new approach to China http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china...

Google to Stop Censoring Search Results in China After Hack Attack
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/google-censorship-c...
Absolutely!!! What's more, in the past 15 years or so, it has become more and more essential for a research scientist to have an excellent publication record in order to have any chance of a permanent job.

This has had the pernicious effect of increasing politics and popularity costs in, at least, the physical sciences. I know several research scientists with several hundred publications to their names which these 'authors' have not even read.

If you can solve the problem of requiring scientists to amass a large publication set by any possible means then you'll definitely change scientific publishing. No-one really wants their papers to go unread due to an access fee. That's why www.arXiv.org was invented. However, the only solution I can think of is to separate science into management and technical (this already happens to a certain extent in High Energy Physics) and allow the heads of group more freedom in choosing who to hire, and how.

This requires a bit more trust in the scientists and reduces jobs in the administration, so I fear that it will never happen, alas! Furthermore, you'd need to make both streams formally equal in order to remove the suspicion that scientists become managers because they don't have sufficient technical skills.

Both these hurdles can only be cleared with social solutions though; technical solutions can only go so far.
If your submission/comment is older than 2 hours old, your ability to delete it expires. I'm also pretty sure you can't delete your account so that your comments that you don't delete within 2 hours or that admins don't delete remain on the record.
$ ls ~/project | wc -l
62

all current (pet + primary) projects
Aren't compilers close to the hardware? (you might be referring to web development tools, but they build VMs too).

And SharePoint is hardly good software.
Will it play in Flash, like http://www.gaikai.com/ ? That would be awesome...
works for me in Chromium 4.0.266.0
From the NY Post article:

"His wife had recently given birth to preemie twins, the sources said.

"They were in some kind of argument over caring for them and all of a sudden, in the middle of the argument, he jumped over the 16th-floor balcony," a source said."

This was a spur of the moment impulsive thing. It wasn't some sort of calculated plan to cause his wife distress.

Given how unimaginably hard caring for premature, permanently-disabled twins would be I don't think it's fair to take him to task for not being able to cope for one tragic instant.
Favor - Help Us Test .NET 4 Beta 2 on Windows Update (WU)
After China attacks, gmail will now default to https for email traffic
Ok, I'll have a look. By the way, you have no contact information or anything in your profile, so I have no way of getting in touch with you.
I don't think it needs to be disrupted. While the philosophy behind reforming is noble, my own discussions with researchers have convinced me that this doesn't matter to them.

They know there are flaws, but they also believe that good research will still float to the top, and so they spend their energies on what is important, which is doing good research.
The listing is contrained to 72 columns width, so it really couldn't be one line.
Eric Schmidt is always in much greater danger of losing his job based on missing large market opportunities than Sergey or Larry ever will be, so it makes sense that he would be the one who wanted to stay in China.
Suggesting renting a time slot from cable/satellite providers as a solution ignores the shift in watching habits from being pushed content to pulling it.
A Fairly Normal Distribution
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I always wonder why state spending isn't limited to, say, the average of the last 10 years receipts.

Of course, if there was surplus, it'd go into a fund, and politicians would vote to spend the surplus.
Annoying landing page to get to the PDF article but amusing when you get there. Now you can play - "spot the faulty assumptions".
SGN Founder Steps Aside. Randy Breen Takes CEO Role
How to Make Municipal Wi-Fi Work
Please don't use link shorterners, there is no need for them here.
What's wrong about LGPL?
Ask HN:Does Higher Resolution screen helps in programming?
I am planning to buy a new 15" laptop. I am just wondering will a higher resolution screen help while programming (max available is 1920x1080). I think it will allow me to view more code in single screen.

Please pitch in your feedback on Higher resolution screen(true HD) while programming?

UPDATE: I am stuck with single laptop, and can't have multiple screens.
Daniel Lemire of UQAM has a number of good blog posts on new forms of scientific publishing:

http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/01/a-simp...

http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/09/02/author...

http://www.daniel-lemire.com/blog/archives/2009/10/28/the-se...
Credit goes to a poster on forum.bodybuilding.com
Hack HN: quick user profile lookup (Firefox plugin)
I think this is the best thing that ever happened to Bing, not Baidu. Google users in China will not switch to Baidu, they will switch to Bing; they use google because they feel it has more unbiased results coming from a non-govt backed entity. To a chinese google user, Baidu is an ad search engine and a govt lapdog. I wouldn't be surprised if google's market share got snapped up by Bing if they do leave.
It's just advertising/goodwill.
PHP functions you (probably) never use
Of course more resolution is always better. Most of the good developers I know use a 2 monitor setup. There are guys who use 3 monitors too. The more screen real estate you have, the better.

See: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001076.html
I boarded a plane in china once and they explicitly asked me if I had nunchucks. They do the spiel on sharp/flammable items, but nunchucks don't fit in an obvious category like that, so they spell it out (makes sense, but was hilarious at the time).
Interesting Technique For Cross-Domain AJAX Requests
Actually, the code seemed to be a mess but was quite readable. I read it through. You could almost see all the code in once glance which is when you pretty much don't need formatting anymore, just some time to initially absorb the code.
Sure, but I never agreed not to speak. The rules apply to everyone except me. Duhhhh.
An entrepreneur is not always a computer geek who starts a software company :)

And I think some of the more outgoing and sociable kids might be great entrepreneur too - you have to sell and selling requires energy to deal with people.
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I think this is interesting, I've never heard nothing similar. Do you feel tired during the week? Can you concentrate on difficult tasks that requires attention?
A collection of awesome Google-related projects from people around the world
If the Chinese population would figure very high in their book then they would have made the statement earlier, and that statement would have been in Chinese, not in English.

It is clearly intended for consumption by the rest of the world.
The Reality of Freemium in SaaS
" He asks the simple question of “how is it the Youtube , with all of google’s resources,. cant solve their buffering problem ? ” ....Now maybe Youtube will fix their buffering problem someday, along with the other issues that Dan addresses, but it wont be easy and it wont be quick."

Begging the question. There's no evidence of widespread YouTube 'buffering problems' in the article or the link.
I think it's more like you tell your friends about a place that sells great donuts, then they go to the donut shop and yell at the proprietor because his donuts aren't free.
I actually had to look up the non-animal meaning; is this a north american term? I'd never heard of it before.
I was under the impression that this is generally considered a bad idea because copyright law in some countries does not recognise the concept of a "public domain" (i.e. you can't disavow copyright even if you want to).

I don't know if that's correct, but if so it would seem that something like the ISC (or modified BSD) license would be superior.
My discussions with researchers and my own reading of scientific work have convinced me that the main problem is how much researchers have to publish in order to be ranked highly.

It leads to a huge number of rehashed, low quality papers. Some of the issues on the publishing side could be solved simply by reducing the amount of rubish that hits the system.

And the second problem I see is not a technology issue either. It's that, at least in europe, academic research is funded by the public. In spite of that, the work of scientists is given away to publishers who hold the entire system hostage. Publishers are in effect running an elaborate scheme to blackmail the tax payer into paying twice for the same work without adding any value themselves. The peer reviewers are funded by the tax payer as well.

If universities did what other employers do, which is to take ownership of what their employees produce and manage it properly, access to scientific work could be much improved.