skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why hire the accountant? Hire a lobbyist, and you squash the problem before it gets off the ground.

That's proactive thinking.
"My question for reddit: what would you do if you had $20M in the bank?"

Thats a hard question, with that kind of money I can't think of any obvious ideas that would have a big impact on humanity.

If he had said I have $20 billion heres my ideas:

- Make Creative Commons text books. Hire a group of editors and staff that over see super star teachers who write the books. Release them under the CC licence.

- Startup Apartment Complex in San Fransisco. Build a large building in San Fransisco with small apartments. Small on size big on quality. Some floors would be modular office space. Subsidize the rent for equity in Startups that move in.

- Rethink college: Start a college a new college. It would be like a start up but instead of starting a business your creating a new college.

- Create an ethical version of Best Buy. An consumer electronics store that actually puts the customer first and treats it's employees well. The same for an ethical version of Kmart.
By definition, something that is reasoned is NOT arbitrary.

arbitrary
adjective
based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system

With the automatic bug report generation in OS X, Apple has direct evidence of Flash stability problems, so their knowledge of instability is NOT anecdotal either.

anecdotal|
adjective
(of an account) not necessarily true or reliable, because based on personal accounts rather than facts or research

Stability problems go hand in hand with security problems. A search of the major security sites will produce a long history of vulnerabilities and also demonstrate that fixes have been slow in coming.

And on an individual level most of us can likely see an example of the instability on any platform by visiting http://flashcrash.dempsky.org/

(The 10.1 beta, which is not in any OS/browser by default, is reported to have a fix. Of course disabling Flash from loading with NoScript, Flash Block etc avoids the crash also)
Would it be possible to have AMAs and AMAAs here?
This is a tiny technical issue and isn't worth reading about. Long story short -- they need to paint the turbine black or use a tiny bit of energy to heat the fluid.
The original title was

4Hg(SCN)₂ Δ= 4HgS + 2CS₂ + 3(CN)₂↑ + N₂↑

The moderators changed it.
Pretty much anything launched into space uses radiation-hardened electronics. I don't know what Cassini has on board, but this is popular: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RAD6000
History helps shape our worldview and that in turn shapes our very thinking - how we see what is or is not important to our immediate society and to world developments.

The one thing I learned from my former life as a history major (wanting eventually to be a history professor) in my undergraduate days was the absolute primacy of original sources. We all make our mark as we go and we want to write about it. We know and understand the oral traditions of our own generation but what gets passed down from one generation to another is that which is put into writing (or that is otherwise preserved in some lasting form). And that is what is fascinating about history: seeing what the men and women living in a particular time and place had to say about what they were doing and why there were doing it. Such writings bring to life the world in which they found themselves - its problems and challenges, its hopes and fears, its expectations for the betterment of the society in which they lived. Thus, it is contemporaneous writings and chronologies, not necessarily written self-consciously as history, that make for a fascinating view of the human condition in any given age. And this in turn inspires or depresses, as the case may be, but inevitably offers lessons on how the world might be profitably viewed and shaped to those who are attuned to learning from those who have preceded them in facing life's challenges.

The more common approach to how history is taught is to wade through survey books done by academics who have tried to sum up ages long gone by while sitting in their remote seats of learning. This can work, depending on the imaginative strength of the historian, but it is inherently inferior (in my view) to a study of history based of immersing oneself in original materials from the era itself. The survey emphasizes "facts" as ends in themselves; the absorption of original materials, in contrast, gives one the sense of a living drama of life, where the "facts" are indeed important but only as woven into the desires and yearnings of the generation that lived out its challenges and then sat down to write about them.

History can be invaluable to our learning but, unless it is well taught, we can so easily miss its significance. The author of this piece emphasizes this point and is correct in it. But the "original source" idea adds an important dimension that is missing from his analysis, though it is, in my view, perhaps the most important piece of all.
Ooh, I had this dialog recently:

Customer: Hello? My bingo cards are wonky.

Me: Do I have your permission to log into your account?

Customer: Sure.

Me: Wow, they're certainly wonky. taps commands into console Fixed. Have a nice day.

Good golly I like having all the data on the server. I've even started using this with my desktop app. One of the first things I ask for is the users to try hitting one feature that will give me an exact copy of their word list, to try reproducing the issue. If I had been thinking ahead I would have built a Get Tech Support button which would tell me everything about the running program and the relevant portions of their environment.
Reason's Nick Gillespie debates Larry Lessig (Video)
basically you have 3 choices.

- try to help others(less fortunate). Setup/contribute to charities, teach, cure, feed...

- try to change the world. promote democracy in russia, try to figure out how gravity works, actively support/participate on a team that does something visionary such as new energy initiatives or space exploration.

- defer the question for some time. Try to turn 20 into 200.
Also, random comparison of Redis performance on NewServer vs a Linode (dedicated vs VPS):

https://gist.github.com/e115e1f62f5f5bad55ee
FIXME: zero ideas in the dept. of education's open government idea board
I just googled for that option and I couldn't find it. What's the option supposed to be?
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Scott Adams: Knowledge that Matters
The one thing that would improve a non-designer's site designs more than anything else I've seen is to make your padding around an element relatively uniform... if you have text in a box and its 25px from the top of the box make sure its also 25 or so pixels from the right left and bottom as well. When in doubt err on the side of extra padding
As an older gamer, I found that general fitness has a huge impact on reflexes. It's an ironic but effective motivation for making time for exercise.

There also seems to be a crying need for tiered online playing. Every other sport has them, often A, B, C etc level teams, to solve the same problem that it's not fun to be totally outclassed. The frustration level has to be challenging but attainable.
- have a bunch of fun

You should probably do this, plus one of the other three.
We use AMF protocol as XML is slow to parse on the client
With a station wagon full of tapes?
Of all ways that Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection gets online gaming wrong, at least it's hard to be an asshat on there. No voice chat actually makes for a better experience in ranked play, in my opinion.

(Incidentally, you can get sorta get around the community issue by setting up games to be friends only, or setting up a dummy account that all your community members are friends of and using the friends of friends feature)
It's so frustrating that anytime we talk about any new idea the same old battles have to be rehashed with a lack of perspective on the current status quo having its own set of problems. I'm pretty sure we can figure out how to make a turbine that works and harness solar & wind power efficiently and reliability. I have doubts we can convince OPEC nations to keep selling us cheap oil as their production peaks and declines in the near future. I have doubts that the existing energy cartels will ever invest serious time and resources into making carbon energy cleaner. I have serious long term doubts that we can continue to extract carbon energy sources from the Earth in the required quantities to provide energy for 6 billion+ people. I'm almost sure we can't do it in an environmentally friendly way. Doubts? Yeah lots.
Agreed, P.E.I. has countless wind turbines and I've never heard a problem. They're on an island unprotected from the brunt force of the Atlantic all year round, if this was a common problem then P.E.I. wouldn't be covered with turbines.
The writer certainly didn't show any effort to demonstrate non-viability of fixes, and he also didn't provide any information on performance of newer turbines or those from other vendors.

This was a case of 20 year old units being purchased used and moved to a much harsher environment. I would not be surprised if the people involved didn't even check to see what operating temperature range was specified by the manufacturer.

I don't think anyone has claimed that wind power is practical everywhere. Sites must be studied in adequate detail, and in some cases a test installation is appropriate ahead of wide-scale deployment.

There seem to be far too many writers and anal-ists giving opinions where they're not qualified to.
Sounds like there is a new gaming market needing attention. Or maybe handicapping players.
"Time to play" is a big factor, certainly. I've been playing Bayonetta lately, a Devil May Cry-style fighter, and while I'm pretty sure I have the raw skills to master the game, I sure don't have the time. (Or, if I had the time, the desire. But I certainly don't have the time.) I'm not lost in the action on the screen or incapable of understanding what I should do or what's going on, I simply don't have the time to put that stuff in my cerebellum where it needs to be to play at the highest level. For example, in the "Hard" mode, there are sounds that when you hear them need to immediately trigger a particular button press (dodge), ideally with a high degree of accuracy as well. I can do it when I concentrate, but you need to be able to do it without concentrating because there's other stuff to concentrate on, too.

But I also observe that these are also exactly the games you hear about the younger folk being so dominating in, that is, the games you need to have the time to download reflexes into the lower brain.

Oh, I don't deny that you get worse as you get older, nice and slow so as you can pretend it's not happening, and in a hypothetical fair fight my 15-year-old self could presumably beat my 30-year-old self in reaction-based gaming. But I don't think that explains the utter domination, I think that explains only a small part of the difference. The utter domination comes from having the time to train reflexes.

Also, interesting counterpoint: http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1399 , the part in the first blockquote.

The other thing I would observe is that the controllers I grew up on were terrible. Everything pre-Nintendo was mushy and introduced what I now consider readily-visible latency into the game control. In hindsight, the Genesis controls were pretty mushy too, and even the Nintendo I call out was noticably more mushy than the Super Nintendo controller, the oldest controller I can still use today without cursing at the latency. This robbed my generation of valuable years of high-feedback gaming. I've played some of these old games in emulation in the past few years, and they are distinctly easier than I remember them, and I think that's mostly because when I play them in emulation I'm using modern controllers. (In particular, I played Beamrider on the Atari 2600 with original controllers and on the GBA through the Atari collection cartridge, and on my first try on the GBA I got further in the game than I could back when I was 12 or so on the original controllers. (If you think that doesn't jive with my age, you're right; it was old even by then, but the device was still functional. Those 2600s were pretty robust.))
Why ChatRoulette Fails
Awesome, but, it's WWI ship camouflage not WWII.
Mathematica probably has 3 orders of magnitude more code coverage than code underlying scientific papers. What's more, WRI encourages people to publish interactive Mathematica notebooks as a kind of literate programming that allows people to run code as well as read and view the results. I think it's an overall net positive.
That sounds really rough. I had some relatively minor digestive issues this year and lost 20 lbs in 1 month. I felt, for almost an entire month, as if I would get sick at any moment (yet only did twice).

It really sucked, though it's largely over and I can't imagine what someone with serious issues goes through.So good luck with getting well!
Yeah, if they were topical (like this guy's AMAA at reddit would be) then I'd definitely be interested.
I find it disappointing in its current form. I assume you aren't doing much more than a few ajaxified api calls to the 5 or so engines you're aggregating which is neither technically challenging nor technically interesting.

However, if you applied relative rankings for the individual items from each engine and aggregated them into a single results page instead of multiple "framed" result sections, you might have something I would actually want to use. This would also overcome many of the usability and UI problems I find issue with.

It certainly has potential to become something.
Even more than that, design to your body font size. The vertical rhythm of your design is incredibly valuable. Far more so than any fancy grid CSS framework or other tricks. Every non-designer (and possibly some designers) should read http://24ways.org/2006/compose-to-a-vertical-rhythm
Woops, I fixed that. Thanks :)
Wouldn't switching the hydraulic fluid be sufficient? It's not like there's one single hydraulic fluid in existence, there's thousands of natural and artificial fluids that can be used in hydraulics.

The hydraulic fluid was obviously chosen for California weather not Minnesota, so the hydraulic fluid could suitably be changed for operating in lower temperature ranges.
Nintendo Dominates 2000s - 9 out of 10 top selling games
Took this down to clean some things up.
or buy an Android.
Thank you. :-)

But I am mostly well. Finishing up the process is basically just a matter of time. :-D

Next project: Figure out how to support myself without a day-job! ;-)
Where does it say he is paying $7 a month? They have more expensive plans than that.
Don't diamond sizes follow a power law? i.e. maybe 80% of mined diamonds wouldn't be big enough to facet and set on a ring.
When you can't respawn, it's horrible hard to learn the technique where you get nearly no damage.
Good interview. He makes some good points on the cloud versus local security. Also, agree with his thought on interruptions and roles managers play in most companies.

I like that he sticks to his guns, he doesn't seem willing to compromise quality to make easy money.
I think you've missed specifying the filename, but otherwise cool.

Here's Ruby for comparison:

file_content = IO.read(filename)

file_lines = IO.read(filename).split("\n")
Not all of those methods were in .Net 1.0. I worked through the painful years of .Net 0.9 to .Net 2.0 and it wasn't always roses. The core libraries were really terrible and sparse in the early versions.

Microsoft was a lot more aggressive in how they extended the core libraries post-2.0. There was an amazing amount of baggage in the language by the time 2.0 came out.

FWIW, you can do the first two items you mention using the Apache Commons IOUtils class in Java. The latter is part of Java:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/io/FileInputStr...
No, not really. I did lots of interviews while working at Yahoo, and groups I worked in always made a hire-no hire decision within 24 hours of interviewing someone. Sometimes the lead up to an interview might stretch out, and sometimes salary negotiations might take a while, but we wouldn't have ever strung someone along for 6 weeks post-interview if we didn't intend to make an offer.
This article is indeed about WWI usage, but the US Navy used disruptive designs in WWII as well, for example see http://www.shipcamouflage.com/camouflage_database.htm
Disagree. There's 'boilerplate' introduced by the framework/pattern, which may be necessitated when you throw out default assumptions to scale (which I, wooster, the OP, and yourself probably all agree are not so cumbersome after all). Then there's boilerplate introduced by the language. That's where wooster diverges, and I agree.
More on this from Tate Etc. magazine: http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue4/camouflage.htm
Hayao Miyazaki Dvd Boxsets
"As new sources of renewable energy are developed like thin film and solar thermal, for example more and more doubts about wind are coming to the fore."

So technology doesn't stand still. Passive voice is a sure-fire red flag. Who is raising these alleged doubts. Where are the numbers comparing the other technologies to Wind. Why are a few 20-year old turbines that some one forgot to change the hydraulic fluid relevant to the current tech level in Wind power?

As Heinlein said, "What are the facts, and to how many decimal places?"
File enumeration has sucked for a long time in Java. java.nio.file should hopefully fix this in 1.7, but I haven't had a chance to play with it.
Agreed. I love the craftsmanship. Who makes hardware that can last more than 45 years?
I don't think it's sad. He felt that the project put forward a way of thinking he disagreed with - I too disagree with that way of thinking.

My last boss told me "there are programmers who produce code with absolutely no bugs or problems". I would prefer no to give that kind of misconception any more ammunition.
Good luck to you too! You've got an interesting approach to scaling, hope it works out (cheaply).

Yes, I've looked at Neo4j, and I would've tried that if it weren't for this (from their home page):

Neo4j is released under a dual free software/commercial license model (which basically means that it’s “open source” but if you’re interested in using it in commercially, then you must buy a commercial license).

Thus MongoDB. I just heard of Riak the other day, and might check that out too since it has the concept of links built in. I'm also still early enough in the work that I can afford to switch still.
Yep. Or Windows Mobile (shudder). They all got in-page search. How that got left out of the Safari design is beyond me.

The other thing that got left out is the ability to scroll to the bottom of the page - there is scroll to top, but no scroll to bottom (a real problem on long pages - it may be practically impossible to flick your way to the bottom of a long page). So, I made another app - "End Of Page" - this one's totally free and hits the App Store on Friday (Apple willing, of course).
I don't there are any abstractions that universally improve the understandability of code. It always depends on context.
Don't forget the obvious of http://www.thefunded.com/, which is a site designed to keep tabs on VCs.
Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome
Don't you mean overvalued? The effect is calle the "winner's curse", if anybody wants to read up on it.
> "My question for reddit: what would you do if you had $20M in the bank?"

Fight death.

- Fight death of individuals:

Cryonic preservation: http://www.cryonics.org/ -- see also http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Cryonics

Basic research on aging and fighting it: http://mprize.org/

- Prevent the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life:

Oxford Future of Humanity Institute - academic research on global catastrophic risks. http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/

Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence - http://singinst.org/

- Where to hang out with other people interested in rational philanthropy with maximum utilitarian impact per marginal dollar: http://lesswrong.com/ and http://felicifia.com/
Thats a hard question, with that kind of money I can't think of any obvious ideas that would have a big impact on humanity.

Hypothetically supposing you were to automate a labor-intensive process in the field of your choice, and market that successfully to 100,000 people saving them each one hour a year, you'd have contributed essentially fifty full-time workers of your chosen profession to the community. Those could be nurses or teachers or priests or what have you.

That is very doable on dollar amounts much, much smaller than $20 million. Plus, the Internet chews up numbers like 100,000 for breakfast.
Good point, but one could also take note of the number he dialed on the telephone in the video.
I am glad the De Beers advertising campaign hasn't been that effective in all countries, yet.
The two best books I've read, which provide the broad historical narrative more so than dates and trivia - Peter Watson's A History from Fire to Freud - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ideas-history-Freud-Peter-Watson/dp/... and John Keegan's A History of Warfare - http://www.amazon.com/History-Warfare-John-Keegan/dp/0679730...

I don't think either is necessarily the best on the subject, they're just two I've found and found much value from. In addition to allowing me to provide historical stories to make relevant business observations, they (and a History major I suppose) allowed me to write my favourite ever HN comment - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=812221
Weird. This was killed earlier today, not sure how it came back.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1109895
How about the idea that there shouldn't be any public schools?
no, i'm talking about marginal utility and ordinal preference ranking. ?_? not really sure where you pulled the randroid insinuation from?
Styles of Play - The Full Chart (analysis of the four types of play)
As an alternative you can just go with Zirconium dioxide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_zirconia).
Given that the guy's nick is phreakmonkey, I assume he took that into consideration and used a throw-away password that was gone before the video was posted.
Players tend to fit within certain play styles. The most famous is the Bartle study which has four categories: Killer, Achiever, Explorer, Socializer. Your style of play falls into the Explorer category, which favours strategy. The people who are really fast at killing are Killers, obviously.

If you want your target market to include all four types you must provide something for all four types. The problem is that the Killer group is easiest to provide for so it's very easy for it to dominate.

http://flatfingers-theory.blogspot.com/2005/01/styles-of-pla...

I've submitted the link to HN so it has its own thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1111406
Where to hang out with other people interested in rational philanthropy with maximum utilitarian impact per marginal dollar

As far as the human race is concerned, pretty much everything you listed (cryonics, anti-aging, preparing for AI that may never be invented, etc) has the least amount of utility per dollar spent.
If you successfully exit a startup, you will likely be wealthy: i.e., you will never be forced to take a job in order to eat. If you successfully finish grad school, you will probably be no closer to becoming wealthy than you are now. So if you're ultimate goal is to become wealthy, start now.

What keeps most people from becoming wealthy is not a lack of grad-school-type knowledge.
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