skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I could believe in a connection between vegetarianism and intelligence. I can think of three traits that would lead to both:

Willingness to consider ideas that at first appear wrong. Without this, our knowledge would never contain the counterintuitive. If we limit ourselves to what's intuitive, then we severely limit our intelligence. The connection to vegetarianism is that our culture teaches us that animals are objects that we can use as we wish, so vegetarianism at first appears wrong to us because of our social upbringing.

A sense of duty toward the truth. Gandhi was like this: he was very driven toward the truth and very accepting of the outcome. As a result, he was always performing many "experiments" and continually learning. A sense of duty toward (and lack of fear of) the truth will expose you to many new experiences and allow you to incorporate new information, which can increase your intelligence. The link to vegetarianism is this: many meat-eaters I know are not meat-eaters because they sat down one day and made an intelligent, intentional decision to start (or continue) to eat meat, they either have not yet been exposed to different ways of thinking about animals or they have been exposed but they avoid the issue.

A desire for a consistent world view. There is an inconsistency in our culture in the way we treat some animals (pets) and other animals (factory-farmed livestock). Michael Vick's dog cruelty is punished but the same animal cruelty is condoned for the sake of food. There is a logical contradiction here which takes some intelligence to notice. This, I think, is one of the real reasons why there can be a link between intelligence and vegetarianism: there are less philosophical contradictions in a vegetarian's position. If you put a meat-eater and a vegetarian head-to-head in a philosophical debate, my money would go on the vegetarian.
"... Smodels can be used either as a C++-library that can be called from user programs or as a stand-alone program together with a suitable front-end. ..."

Very interesting. I was checking through the publications list at the EIS site and my favourite so far is: McCoy, Mateas "An integrated agent for playing real-time strategy games" ~ http://eis.ucsc.edu/sites/default/files/AAAI08Mccoy.pdf [200Kb]

Are you hooking these stories up to any RL game or system?
Fortunately, if you depress the price of a 20 Trillion dollar asset, you're still in pretty good shape ;)
That is a very important distinction I think. Many people misunderstand libertarianism to be very uncaring and not compatible with empathetic and charitable individuals or actions, but this is certainly not the case. Wanting to help other people is quite distinct from wanting to use coercion and physical force to compel others to do so against their will (which is what compulsory taxation is and should always be thought of as).
Yeah, the same bit of ignorance bothered me about alchemists: The only purpose alchemy could serve would be turning gold into lead, with respect to the marketplace.
Scobleizer: The new worldwide startup
IMO there's something wrong with the incumbent defending his turf this way. If they want to out-innovate or out-compete the guy, great, but I personally find it hard to back a business who only aims to win by out-lawyering their rivals.
I was gonna say something about that too. I don't know anything about the product, but whoever came up with the name should have done more research!
I recently contributed heavily to a Ruby port of Readability, online here: http://github.com/iterationlabs/ruby-readability
The link in the article to the actual paper appears to be broken, but there seems to be a copy uploaded here as well: http://files.meetup.com/411954/Intelligence.pdf

Skimming the article, seems to be a lot of discussion of statistical correlation and some not very persuasive speculation on causal relationships.
Semantics. People who do not call themselves atheist generally tend to think that you should only call yourself atheist if you mean to say you are certain there is no god. People who do call themselves atheist generally only mean by it that they do not consider the existence of gods to be a credible hypothesis, anymore than the existence of leprechauns or centaurs. I think the main difference is that agnostics seem to think it's really important to stress that the jury is still out. For atheists, it is implied that the jury is technically still out, in the same sense that the jury is still out on invisible dragons; but it simply doesn't make any difference for any practical purpose.
Do you think the near impossibility of a vegetarian diet for infants and young children is a weakness of an argument toward vegetarianism? It would certainly be possible for adults to convert to purely vegetarian diets, but such a diet means almost certain, and very unpleasant, death for infants and small children who need large quantities of the building blocks of bone and meat in order to form their own bones and meat. I'm not an enemy of vegetarianism or anything like that, but your mention of a consistent worldview brought this to mind.
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Sinatra Book
Its not really about that. The point is that the wealth of a single small planet is insignificant compared to the wealth of even the extra bits floating around our solar system.

What could we build if titanium was free (or very close)? What would our houses and cars look like if there was a limitless supply of aluminum?

A vital step to us getting off this planet in a meaningful way is sending robots out to gather resources, both to build the ships we'll need outside of our gravity well and to return some of that abundance to the surface so we can alleviate our scarcities here.
So far as I know ideas can't be stolen. Nor can they be protected as intellectual property in the U.S., according to the USPTO:

"A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion."
Unfortunately, the actual research paper is behind a paywall. I wonder what do intelligent people think about placing publicly funded research behind paywalls.
I've had my MacBook for 1.5 years now, and my battery life is still a little more than 4 hours. I keep my machine plugged in all the time, and completely run it down once a month. On the other hand, my friends who have the same MacBook have terrible battery lives. They use the laptop on batteries all the time.

I'm inclined to believe this guy has no idea what he's talking about.
The trick is that you own the process, so you can buy up everything before people realize gold is worthless.
Does the gov't even have any profit centers outside the IRS?
If someone wants to get a group together for this, I'm in.
This might have been caused by the heat generated by the laptop.
I'm a member of a few skeptical mailinglists. This subject suddenly seems a hot topic there, on both american and european lists.
Link to the paper from the author's web site:

http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/pdfs/SPQ2010OnlineFirst.p...

(Source: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/Kanazawa/ )
What would probably work best is just allowing 200 installs per key (any more requires calling and pleading). Also, every 5 minutes the game sends something to the server and uses SSL to ensure it's communicating with the right server. This seems like an overly simple problem that isn't being approached right.
Funniest YC post in a while, I hope you find someone ;) To bad I'm in NYC :(
Would be cool if you'd put up a video and recipes, I'm always looking for new ideas!
I do know that you have to be very careful about infants and veganism, but for adults, less so. About the consistency in worldview, that's something that I as a vegan have to struggle with. The truth is that I cannot completely eliminate animal usage from my lifestyle as long as I live in human society. It's either direct (I eat animal-based products or I buy leather) or indirect (I board a bus that has antifreeze, which is an animal-based product). So each vegetarian/vegan has to draw the line somewhere, and that's a personal choice. I choose to draw the line at avoiding eating animal products and avoiding buying animal products (leather and wool).

Edge cases like infants generate some interesting discussion, but I think the real action is in the typical case. For the typical American, it's hard to defend the eating of meat.
If nothing else, a reasonable person's certainty in any hypothesis must be bounded above by their (presumably finite) degree of confidence in their own sanity. Absolute certainty is all but nonsensical.
The Story also links to this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8539198.stm

"I think on larger scales, it's not likely to have a very major impact on the global climate" -British Antartic Survey.
Javascript interpreter wars are awesome keep getting more innovation, I'm happily using Node.js for my servers now. Its pretty cool the Mozilla guys are using some of the webkit javascript engine, talk about collaboration.
Bard (a new Lisp from Mikel Evins)
Probably 90% of my time on the web is spent working with information - searching for it, reading it, manipulating it, submitting it. Sometimes I'm using Firefox and reading and typing with my own eyes and fingers, sometimes I'm copy/pasting or even writing scripts to submit forms and screen-scrape. After all, that's the sort of thing the Web was designed for - free exchange of information (modulo HTTP's 402 error code).

Flash sucks because it interferes with my usage of the web. Almost every use of Flash puts a barrier between me and the information I want to get or give, a barrier that can be very annoying (though never impossible) to overcome.

About the only thing on the Web that isn't "information" is "experience" - I can't think of any example besides games, but there may be some. You know, where the valuable thing is the interaction, the ping and pong. That's not a thing I can paste into a spreadsheet, process with a script or bookmark. For such things, I can accept that the powerful Flash plugin is a better platform than the documents-and-tables world of HTML.

Still, most Flash usage that I see on the web is just to add glitz and glamour to an otherwise informative page - swoopy page transitions, animations, sound-effects. To the extent that your website prevents your visitors from obtaining and making use of the information they came to your website to obtain, Flash sucks.
Or, to put it another way, agnosticism, plus Empiricism, equals atheism. Rationalists, meanwhile, just call themselves agnostics and see the matter as sorted.
Orc Programming Language
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If you haven't read _Entering Space_ I highly recommend that you do. Published in 1999, it was my first introduction to the basic economics and technology required for asteroid mining. It not only that, but also many other topics from possible Lagrange point space stations to Helium 3 fusion. As a bonus, it is old enough that your local library probably has it for you to check out with no reservations.
Hey! I live right by there!

To sort of bring this on topic, the location of this place previously had some lighting or interior design place. It was just a horrible location that didn't seem to get any "drop on" traffic but had a fairly decent exposure to a busy street. I'm frankly suprised to see it doing so well; I couldn't think of a good business for there.

Edit: iPhone induced typo.
"Moore's Law has given us exponential growth in computing technology, which has led to exponential growth in nearly every other technological industry."

This is very untrue.
[How-To] Bring Back Leopard Exposé in Snow Leopard
It's a legitimate question by a curious onlooker who's was just introduced to the whole concept of "White Box Cryptography." Apparently there's not a whole lot of proofs, though I perhaps it's plausible to get something useful proved.

Hopefully for it, your (non) answer is not telling.
(minus shipping and handling)
This article seems a little overly optimistic on the logistics problems of exploiting asteroids. It even compares them to Alaska.
% curl -I http://www.sun.com/
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

:,(

Back in the day, I cut my teeth on a Sun SPARCstation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This is a sad time.
Sun has/had so many fantastic engineers, and a lot of times in the past decade or more, I've felt like they've been producing fantastic work only to have it rot in a ghetto and never really get the exposure it deserves. That said, a ghetto at Sun Microsystems probably means it had more users than a huge breakout success in a startup. So, it's kind of hard to keep things in perspective. But, there are a number of technologies that have come out of Sun, and I'll be curious to see what the engineers responsible for those technologies do when they free themselves (or are freed by being laid off) from Oracle.

If we had the resources, I think I'd be trying to woo a handful of them to work for my company. Maybe they'd work for mostly equity, since many of them aren't hurting for cash.
That is one example of improper use (hence the more or less). However, "conscientious of" is an example of proper use.
You can't just write "var a = ..." because the goal is to use only "[]{}()+/."
Hanging by the yardarm also had loopholes. (Ann Bonny and Mary Read both realized this.)
It was the sales people taking over that killed Sun, IMHO, so it seems likely to hasten the demise of Oracle when they get there and start celebrating in earnest. Since most hackers don't have much love for Oracle, I guess it won't be too upsetting to see it happen.
Something tells me both game developers and crackers have been at this a lot longer than Skype... I remember playing cracked Atari games as a young kid, but back then I didn't know what "cracked" meant. In case anyone wonders, I found the games in a huge box of 360K floppies that came with the Atari system when I got it.
Yet another elf leaving Middle Earth
"For atheists, it is implied that the jury is technically still out"

I don't think this is true. I've heard a lot of atheists express their belief in no god w/ the same confidence that a catholic would express a belief in theirs. I think it's an important distinction to make.
This is certainly embarrassing, but it's becoming really common. I wonder if there is anything that can be done to really make a dent in this problem across the web, I don't mean just fixing it on the site that you/I own, but ways of making it drop dead easy for an owner to spot SQL injection or XSS issues, or maybe software layers (proxies, browser standards, etc) that make it harder for a vulnerability to be exploited.
And where does one apply for the position of Space Adventurer? I want in.
Why is more pervasive DRM necessarily more of an inconvenience for the user? It will be an inconvenience for an unfortunate minority, but a well designed and executed system could well be unnoticed by most.

I only notice Apple's DRM in iTunes when I have to de-authorize an old computer or authorize a new one, which is only once or twice a year at most.
As much as I'm a fan of space exploration, it's a bit silly to say that an asteroid is worth $20 trillion.

The ore in an asteroid, REFINED, is worth that much.

It's a fair bit of work to move that ore from pt A to pt B, crush it, smelt it, refine it, anneal it, etc.

A cubic kilometer of sea water is worth a similarly preposterous amount ... and yet, noone has become a trillionaire by refining sea water. It costs more to do it than the minerals are worth.

Will it happen some day? Sure. Is it relevant today? No.
Reminds me of: http://www.frenblog.com/illusion/dolphin-illusion/

NSFW
Those days are probably just around the corner. At least one company is trying to make 1080p streamed games playable. They could install beefy compute servers with 8 video cards per machine in ISP local offices to deal with latency issues.
Remember this? http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo...

How so many people in the comments thought that it was the actual Facebook login page, as it was (temporarily) Google's #1 hit for "Facebook login?" Well, have a look at their english. The grammar, the underlying argument structure, the confused-awkward lololols, the lot of it.

That's the majority of people in the US. Most adults stopped during or after high school. Remember high school? Remember the attitudes of students going through history & government courses? That's where they stopped, that was their final set of saved data on the matter.

And worse, they're still much better off -- even intellectually -- than many times their numbers across the planet: sustenance farmers, laborers, tribespeople, etc. (I'm speaking as someone born on the same land that my family spent centuries sustenance farming). A good portion of the human population's still living in the mode Ghandi called "more like animals than people." (rough quote from memory, sorry).
> What would our houses and cars look like if there was a limitless supply of aluminum?

There IS a limitless supply of aluminum. The top kilometer of crust all over the earth is stunningly rich in aluminum. It's just that PROCESSING it takes energy.

...just like processing an asteroid.

Dirt, though, has the added advantage of already being HERE.
Somehow I think if they dropped it to $25 the same people will argue that $25 is too much and $10 is the most anyone should be reasonably expected to pay.

People still argue that $1 is too much for music, like somehow in teh internets that dollar is worth 100x more than the real world where it gets you close to nothing.
The Postal Service and the Patent and Trademark office have had net positive cash flow some years. Not for the last few years though, I think.
In the full paper, the author makes explicit his choice to use the contemporary American sense of the word "liberal."

This, of course, differs from classical liberalism, which is similar to modern libertarianism.
It's funny. The company I work for is doing exactly what you describe. Our product is called Wildfire Platform - http://www.wildfireplatform.com. It's really great to see other people that have similar ideas.

We're all about empowering grassroots movements and helping grassroots movements be more effective via exactly the methods you mention - competition and fun for the supporters. The "pressure" concept you mention is exactly like our "Personal Impact" analytics we keep that tracks (in a hierarchical fashion, even!) your actions and the actions of those that have recruited to help the movement, and that score is available for all to see similar to an XBox gamer score.

We also have a huge library of actions like the ones you mentioned - social media actions like updating your status or outreach actions like phonebanking and walking that all tie back in to our Platform.

And finally we have the organization piece you hit on - traditionally political campaigns and non-profits organize around geographic lines and then find the most active volunteers in those regions and that's exactly what we help our users do.

I'd love to talk to you more about your ideas for "Pressure" since it seems like you've mulled it over quite a bit - and of course we're always looking to add smart, motivated people to our team :)
I shudder to think about what happens if the unemployed all simultaneously stop ... what? Surfing the web?
Hey, all the best jobs are in Boston!

OK, maybe that's not true ... but a guy can try...
The Patriot problem isn't going anytime soon. The levels of surveillance enabled by modern technology were going to get used, somehow, by governments.

Counterterrorism is just the manifesting justification of this inevitability.

The debate on privacy -- or more accurately, the debate on the inflection point between real safety vs real privacy -- will be long and hard. It's a complex question that hasn't had an answer settled by any means.

My guess is that it's going to take a lot of work by folks like Wikileaks and the courts to make understood how the power is really being used. Only after a few cycles of (massive-problem -> privacy regulation) are we going to see some rational work in this area.

Sadly this is probably the only way it can happen; there just isn't any real data on what levels of privacy are appropriate with a civilization built on current levels of cyber-interconnection.
How Steve Jobs Screws With The Press
There's "plenty" of titanium here too, most of its just in the form of titanium dioxide which happens to be very hard to turn back into the good stuff. (But its fantastic for making paint..)

As I recall, the allure with metals in asteroids that they are "hunks of cut up planets". Instead of digging and processing, you just scrape the good stuff off the surface and (being in deep space and all) its not oxidized or otherwise contaminated like it is when found on earth. You build your kickass starship out of it right then and there or encapsulate it in some heat shielding and drop it in the nearest ocean for retrieval.

A great many people who bought a bunch of gold as a hedge against inflation might be disappointed though...
Daniel/Kirin - The two of you basically agree with each other, I'm just wondering if you realize it; it's just that Kirin is trying to make a stronger argument about the effectiveness of science regarding complex systems than Daniel

And both of you would probably agree that radically destabilizing the homeostasis that is Earth's environment by pumping increasingly large amounts of CO2 into it is probably foolhardy, regardless of your belief in the ability of science to make predictions about complex systems.
They threaten to start working.
First of all, you have modified the function that I posted (you changed the type declaration from a list to an array).
Second, you do not read your compiler warning messages.
SBCL is trying to tell you that you shouldn't type something as an array when you are clearly attempting to use it as a list e.g. calling the CAR function on an array makes no sense. A list and an array in Lisp are not the same. The CAR function in Lisp only works on lists.

* (defun foo (x) (declare (type array x)) (car x))
; in: LAMBDA NIL
; (CAR X)
;
; caught WARNING:
; Asserted type LIST conflicts with derived type (VALUES ARRAY &OPTIONAL).
; See also:
; The SBCL Manual, Node "Handling of Types"

It's correctly warning you before you even try and call the foo function, because it will fail no matter what you pass to it !
Looks like you should think about an east coast tour... Boston>NYC>Philly>Atlanta!
Facial Hair Laser Removal
Ask HN: Where is Steve Yegge?
I'm sure many of you are familiar with Steve Yegge and his (Drunken) Blog Rants. He's a languages guru, opinionated about a lot of topics I care about, and had been at blogging for a long time; often silly, also poignant. After quite some time at Amazon, he's been at Google for a few years. His supposedly final series of posts, "The Programmer's View of the Universe", has not seen any attention since the third entry on May 18 2009: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/05/programmers-view-of-universe-part-3.html

Not only that, but the most recent approved comment was half a year ago and I haven't seen any murmurs or hints of Steve's online presence since then. So I'm starting to wonder: Where is Steve Yegge?

Has he gone stealth and started blogging anonymously? Is he being silent while on a skunkwork a la Building 49? Did he decide to finish his series in the form of a book? I don't know. I figure someone who works at Google or knows him personally might read this and know what's up with him though.

If he's gone stealth: I appreciate his writing and insights and would like to keep seeing fresh work from him. I'm willing not to share his identity/presence to protect him from trolling. At the very least, it would be nice to know he's alive and well! Please share what you know.