skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it makes you feel any better the subsequent Nuclear Winter from the roughly 25,000 warheads in existence would be more than enough to finish off the rest of us. Even if it didn't the 2.5 billion metric tons of soot thrown into the atmosphere would destroy the ozone layer along with any hope of survival.
I feel awful. I really do. This is so simple yet somehow it's not getting through.

1. We don't really know anything. So let's all get that out there and get over it.

2. Some things we have a lot of examples of. Stuff like atoms, people, animals. Some things we have only one example of, like the climate. Those things that we have a lot of examples of, we can make better guesses about what might happen based on prior outcomes. Those that we don't, we can't.

3. In the past, over hundreds of years, we have examples of two types of science, science that speculates by applying rules about structure and theory to unobserved phenomenon, and science that has no idea how things work but can make lots of measurements and guess what might happen. The second kind of science has done much, much, much better than the first, for lots of reasons (too many to go into here) The structure/rule/extrapolation guys do best when it's only a degree or two of extrapolation (which is not true in climate science to any degree)

There's no double standard, because we're not taking the same thing and looking at it two different ways. We're taking many different things and looking at them many different ways. Which is the way it should be, right?

EDIT: The reason we know where Pluto will be in 9 years is that we've been watching the solar system for two thousand years. Plus we have solid observations about all the theory that goes into predicting where Pluto will be. We have observations. We have falsifiable theories. They both agree. That makes orbital dynamics about a zillion times different than, say, psychology. Different kinds of science are not all the same. There are important differences to understand. Medicine is not biology is not physics is not sociology is not climate science. This is NOT about argument from ignorance versus science. It's about the true nature of science, a very important thing to grok. sigh
Amen. When I see "So now ads are made in the “vernacular” of Digg.", I translate that as "We're trying to trick our users into clicking ads"

I suspect advertisers' click-throughs will rise but their conversion rates will drop through the floor. Eventually they will get wise. I'm not sure Digg can keep this alleged gravy train rolling.
> Rather, they're passionate about making cool stuff.

And also, just like carpenters, the tools they use.
OS X share up 29% in past year, slowly chipping away at Microsoft
Social Media Will Kill Your Brand (video)
Seriously. No one jumps all over NASA yelling about how the science "isn't in yet" when they want to send a probe out to where Pluto will be in 9 years.
Nor is population density factored in. Urbanization ought to make it easier to kill the first 60% of the world's population. You probably don't need very many bombs to achieve that. Trying to track down and kill every last human being with nuclear weapons is impractical and beside the point.

If you kill 60% of the industrial, technologically advanced urban centers of humanity, you have essentially destroyed civilization. Who cares if 40% are still scampering around if they have no energy, no infrastructure, no libraries, no communications, no industry, and agriculture spoilt by nuclear fallout and potentially nuclear winter?
Source please?
Yes, I had the same reaction. Cool stuff is alright, but I really like elegant code and algorithms, the more mathematical side of it all.
This reminds me of UltraGleeper, a recommendation system with "indie rock" sensibilities:

http://www.crummy.com/software/UltraGleeper/IntroPaper.html

Past a certain threshold, additional links to an item decrease its score rather than increase it. This is useful because you've probably already heard of (or will hear of) the most popular stuff. The recommendation system instead tries to find things that you aren't already finding on your own.
Except for all the people who read the bad reviews, then write their own bad reviews without even going to the restaurant. I gave up on Yelp long ago after realizing that many of the reviews could not possibly be written by people who had eaten there.
Good cite that the nuclear fallout is a big deal?
IPad Rival JooJoo Will Ship March 25
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>It works by using a Mac/Safari plugin that installs in seconds and doesn't require a browser restart. It makes uploading a cinch. Why don't all photo sites do this? We have no idea.

I would be willing to bet that some people don't like installing a plugin and that is why the other photo sites don't do that.
1 statement, 2 questions.

Statement: awesome

Question: can it handle RAW files?

Question: any business plan that you can share? I ask because we deal with pro photographers (lots of them). If you wanted a paying customer, I would license this from you.
Guile and Delimited Continuations
Press releases disguised as breathlessly praising blog posts also seem like bad business.

Edit: s/described/disguised/
Crop Mob - Landless farmers helping sustainable farms.
Why not got for the ultra messy fully loaded configuration of the "Tsar bomb" design? 100Mt and a god awful amount of fallout.

I seem to remember that device could take out Belgium with blast but would have killed people way back into Eastern Europe/Russia with its fallout.
Einstein wrong?
This experiment seems to show some factors predicted by the theory of relativity are off by a large amount.
Two-dimensional keyboard layouts mostly use regular chord shapes. It makes both theory and playability come a lot more easily - two fingerings per scale and chord, no adjustments for different keys. I own an Axis 49 and while I'll admit it isn't perfect for existing repertoire, it excels in every other respect. If you want to "learn music" this is the fastest way to do it.
The reason we know where Pluto will be in 9 years is that we've been watching the solar system for two thousand years.

How long do you think people have been watching the weather for?
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Yeah, I'll say it: this makes me feel old.
No data available nearby Somalia. GL pirate :)
Strange things happen when you apply Readability to a Hacker News thread. Only a fraction of it shows up.
I think the writer is spot-on with his criticisms.

Being involved with a startup is risky business. And the risk-return premium (since when did a visa become a reward?) in the case of the startup visa is pathetic.

Overall, this startup visa is a pedestrian, half-hearted effort, at best.

A green card is a much better way to incentivise.
It's not really surprising if you consider the options that were available:

1) Renew the current law. No real upside for any legislator, but no significant downside.

2) Reject the current law. Very little upside: the doves, paranoids, libertarians, and tea party activists who might actually care about this options are insignificant minorities within the electorate. Significant downside: it opens a legislator up to all sorts of "<insert incumbent name here> is making it easier for terrorists" attack ads regardless of the actual merits of the argument.

3) Amend the current law. An effort which would have needed to start a while ago. With enough bi-partisan support this could have limited the downside risk and enabled supporters to make the sort of "we are being smart about protecting ourselves form terrorists while protecting liberties" arguments that would have electoral upside, but given the current legislative climate it would have been a hard task to get the early defectors form the status quo which would have provided a bit of momentum.
If you're a Chinese engineer that can create 4 jobs and generate $600,000 in revenue at a company you create in the US, you should be allowed to immigate regardless of whether a "qualified super angel investor" "sponsors" you. You should be able to immigrate regardless of whether you can purchase a postage stamp to request the visa. You should be able to immigrate regardless of whether you're willing to wear pants.

Immigration carve-outs, like this one which clearly targets VC-based companies, come with a raft of unintended consequences. Look at the massive abuses generated by the H1-B visa program, where employers use their untenably lopsided negotiating position to lower working conditions for everyone by cheating immigrants. Here, we've substituted VCs for employers, and given immigrants 2 arbitrary escape hatches (generate 5 jobs, generate $1MM in revenue).

This is the wrong path for immigration reform.

Anything you do to make it more fair makes it more gameable. Graham likes to point out that people like Ron Conway are excellent people indeed, who would never game the startup visa. Who cares? You've never heard of the people who you really have to worry about with this bill.

Anything you do to make it less gameable makes it less fair. VCs are compensated for their investments by investment returns when their companies are acquired or go public. We don't need to create a new form of compensation for them by giving them a feed of entrepreneurs who are beholden to them for their family's residency in the US.

Immigration reform is a hard problem. Immigration is broken. This problem is urgent. We should address it. But I think this bill is a terrible way to do it, and that it creates more harm than it ameliorates.
No. The statement simply means that experience is important. The same holds for any language that you use.
The 'private travel sale' is one area where Europeans have long been out-innovating American companies. Voyage Prive (www.voyageprive.com) was founded back in 2004 and is pretty huge. Surprised the Times didn't mention them, since they just expanded to America this week.
Fair enough, but your thought experiment boils down to a survey of people's opinions on the definition of 'passion'. Essentially, you're arguing that the subordinate definition of 'passion' is more valid than the top-line definition of 'passion' (in my dictionary -- see below), and I think that's pretty unconvincing, as arguments go.

When we refer to 'passion' colloquially, we're usually referring to something so intense that it cannot last for long (e.g. 'passionate love'). Even if you, personally, don't believe this is true, it's become the basis upon which certain wankers in our industry exploit their youthful and naive employees. I think this is the core of the essay, and it's a valid observation, irrespective of the definition of 'passion' that you happen to prefer. So the definitional debate is a dodge for the real issue: there are a ton of "entrepreneurs" these days who are dressing up exploitation in a fancy suit, calling it sexy, and describing it with words that are conventionally used for love.

---

Now, as promised, the definition rom my Mac-tionary:

passion (n):
1) strong and barely controllable emotion: a man of impetuous passion

I grant you that the third and fourth bullets below this definition concern 'enthusiasm', but it's still quite important that the derivation of the word is from Christian theology, and ultimately from the Latin 'pati', which is 'to suffer' (the implication being that 'passion' is a form of suffering for a cause). I think that's intersting, in the current context.
What I Learned This Week: The Power of Preparation...And Style
Tsar bomba was a very clean (as far as nukes go) bomb. Its yield was halved for the test to reduce it even more.

There is little limit to how big you make a fusion bomb. If you have enough Deuterium, you can make is as big as you like.

Or, at least, as big as you can carry.
so what you're saying is that hackers are a part of the "washed" masses?
A couple months ago I coded a server side version of the readability bookmarklet. I made it to be able to link to a page and have it converted by the script. http://cold-sunrise-39.heroku.com/

There's also a bookmarklet there so you can easily process urls.
OpenSSH now supports certified/signed keys for users and hosts
Unless You're Changing It, Quit Your Bitchin'
"If confirmed, this would be a major breakthrough"

Well... has it been? This article is from 4 years ago
Lady Gaga as the Killer App: Moving Identity into the Cloud
I don't think destroying the 20 largest cities would end civilization per se.
Professional Designer Seeks Experienced Coder for Mutual Consultancy
Looking for a sort of coding 'mentor' who would like the same opportunity from a design perspective. Usually mutually exclusive skill sets, mutual consultancy could be equally beneficial.

DarrenMills@digitalshiftdesign.com
Widespread watching and recording, like astrologers did with the planets? Maybe 150-300 years or so? And that's with varying degrees of precision.

It's interesting to note that there was a huge gap in time between observing the weather and recording it. There was a further gap before we started predicting the weather. For most of that time, people substituted superstitions about the weather for science. The sky gods were happy, the sun came out. The sky gods were unhappy, it rained. If we would only do the right thing, the sky gods would remain happy. If we want the weather to be agreeable, we must change our behavior.

With the worldwide climate, we are only about 20-50 years into simply observing and recording. It could be quite a long while indeed before global long-term climate predictions is anything at all like the 3-day local weather forecast.

Remember, three stages: abduction, deduction, and induction. Abduction: gathering data and spotting patterns. Deduction: taking patterns and positing relationships. Induction: taking those relationships and extrapolating to future behavior of the system.

Climate science is currently mostly abduction. But folks like to describe it in terms of induction because lots of pieces of the underlying physics are at that stage. But it doesn't work that way.

I don't know if that strikes you as some kind of big hand-waving philosophy bullshit, but it's just the way things are, whether I point it out or not. I'm just the dumb schmuck stuck with trying to explain it.
DevCentral Top5 2/26/2010
They are not clearly labeled they have the same look and feel of a digg submission and are only lacking some of the touches at the bottom like comments.

The top says sponsored by but it says sponsored by in the light unreadable text that is nearly impossible to see if you're just navigating the site like a normal user.

I've never used digg but this and their digg bar debacle are such shady business tactics that I feel I should lump them in with cash for gold.
The thesis of your argument is thus that Yelp has no reason to exist. We differ on the reasons but agree on the conclusion. Let's call it a push.
People interested in this will also like The Road by Cormac McCarthy:

http://www.amazon.com/Road-Cormac-McCarthy/dp/B001OV2GRE/
Not always. A few years ago, I demonstrated for a business owner a simple set of breaks to his website that allowed me to download, install, and execute code on his server and then use it to look and and download every file on the system. He understood that his source code (the "crown jewels" as he called it) was therefore vulnerable, but never did anything about it.
This Game Is Fixed: Democratized Content v. Voting Rings
I went ahead and posted it anyway.
That's true. However, a lot of photos sites have uploaders to make upload more convenient. (I believe there's usually a 5-file limitation when doing HTML upload or something like that, right?* Plus, you need to select each picture one by one)

This is basically the same thing. Except that it's right in the browser rather than a separate tool. And looking at their product, it seems to make a lot of sense.

But, I wouldn't be surprised if the thought process for many of the photo sites was: do we make one uploader for Windows and one for Mac or do we make a plugin for Safari for Mac, Firefox for Mac, Safari for Windows, Internet Explorer… (without even thinking about versions of OS)

* edit: apparently there are no limits but the one sites put themselves. The biggest limit is the need to go file by file.
Yes, the bomb tested was very clean because it was only two stage. Fission primary and fusion secondary.

The full 100Mt design would have had the usual 3rd fission stage that would have been incredibly messy. Khrushchev announced they had a full 100Mt bomb even though they could only really test a limited version of the design - not really a weapon as it wasn't practical for a number of reasons.
... to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop? The world may never know.
No offense but what advantage does this have compared to phrack other than being more formal?
Otavio Good created a computer simulation on what it would take to blow us up. http://otaviogood.com/RandomStuff
I think plagiarism is worth flagging for.

EDIT: And unflagging when someone re-points it to the original link.
I can not see how it's possible for people to produce such crap and be okay with it. I couldn't work there without having my perfectionist tendencies causing me to go insane.
Pretty much anywhere the effects of nuclear weapons are described. Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout
What about sites like Wikileaks, where someone can anonymously post documents that are of political and social pertinence?
JooJoo Is Going To Be Delayed
That would work, but with the downside of lowering the accessibility of your site. Not everyone has JavaScript enabled, and so dynamic insertion of text wouldn't be accommodating to them.
There was an error in your browser. Please reopen it and try again.

No, thanks.
How are they out-innovating American companies?
http://www.amazon.com/Effects-Nuclear-Weapons-Samuel-Glassto...
Asimov had a short story once in which spacecraft propulsion was dependent on water as fuel, and a colony on Mars (in response to an anti-space-exploration political movement on Earth) started harvesting huge chunks of ice from the outer solar system, wrangling them into Martian orbit with webs of high-strength cabling (and using some of the ice in the process as fuel to move it all around) and letting them crash down in uninhabited areas (where, under Mars' lower gravity and frigid temperatures, they'd hold together enough to be mined for water).
Their code is

import qualified Data.Vector as U

main = print . U.sum $ U.enumFromTo 1 (100000000 :: Int)

Possibly it's just because I don't grok Haskell, but that strikes me as incredibly ugly for such a simple operation. As a contrast, here's the Perl 6 version:

say [+] 1..100000000

(For sure there is no Perl 6 implementation that will run the code as fast as they show GHC running it -- odds are, in fact, that the current Perl 6 implementations will be drastically slower.)

I suspect there is a more elegant version in Haskell, too -- it probably just doesn't run nearly as fast. This has been one of my main gripes with my experiments with functional languages. It seems they are always showing you this beautiful elegant code, and then explaining how if you want it to be efficient, you need to use a different, much uglier, approach.

Of course, the other thing with this is the example is completely unrealistic. If you actually wanted to compute that number, the fast way to do it is to use the good old formula

(N * (N-1))/2

If for some reason you wanted to compute that sort of thing a lot, to would make a lot more sense to make a simple function to calculate that...
I believe there's usually a 5-file limitation when doing HTML upload or something like that, right?

No, there's no such limit. Although most people have their web server set to disallow more than say 10 uploads at once.

You can do some awesome uploaders with Javascript, and either iFrames or Flash. But to do the camera import you need to get outside the browser sandbox, so a plugin does seem like the best way.

I agree, it looks like a compelling product. Many of my family members use sites like EasyShare instead of a "better" site like flickr because they can import directly from the camera.
Does that mean it's impossible to use Template Haskell to add new syntax? It strikes me as a serious limitation if you could only specify different ways to evaluate code that is already well-formed Haskell.
Please report back with how many of these you actually sell.
There's an unfortunate reality here which is that the Government can't really prevent terrorist attacks. Israel is much smaller and they've tried much harder and they can't prevent them so the U.S. stands very little chance.

So another attack will happen some day. It's a given (and both the Bush and Obama administrations have said as much)

That's where the Patriot Act comes in. Every politician believes it would be the death of their career if they change or reject the existing law only to have that inevitable terrorist attack take place right after. And given how irrationally people act after an attack the politicians are probably right.

So we're stuck with the Patriot Act until politicians become brave or the public stops acting irrationally after an attack. I won't be holding my breath.
nope, unwashed loners :)
Not to get into a flamewar about OS'es, but why start out with Safari? If you're looking for a large demographic, which I presume is the case, it would make the most sense to develop primarily for IE,then Firefox, then Safari.

Is it a question of trying to get opinion leaders (typically mac users) to try it out first, are there technical reasons or is it something else?

Just curious.
Your winnings, sir.
I don't quite understand why it's such a bad thing to worry about, suspect, and try to fight climate change, even if it doesn't exist.

It's like Pascal's Wager, imho.
"The system must be completed tomorrow."
You have got to be kidding. 150-300 years?

Agriculture dates back to at least ~10,000 BC (the "Neolithic revolution"). Effective farming (i.e., not dying of starvation) requires planning for changing weather conditions. If you think Neolithic farmers didn't have a vested interest in detecting patterns in weather cycles, you're sadly mistaken.

Hell, the term "meteorology" was coined by Aristotle... in a book he wrote... called Meteorology... in 350 BC.
Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer and entrepreneur. He co-founded Open Text Corporation and Antarctica Systems. Tim was the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems until his resignation on February 26th, 2010.

Yes, Wikipedia is already updated.
Phrack is about hacking in the cracking, reverse engineering, finding exploits meaning of the word. Code Quarterly is apparently about hacking in the Hacker News sense: have a quick look at the "types of article" list. They mention history, book reviews, interviews, etc.

They look very different to me...
Behind the scenes - Youtube
I'm sorry I used a trivial example -- the point was to show how the assembly corresponded to the fused loop, which necessitated a simple example. And this is the internet, so everyone tries to find a closed form for everything. Which misses the point!

Of course, the Haskell:

print (sum (enumFromTo 1 n))

isn't exactly bad. And you can use any of these other 134 functions to get fused loops: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/vector/0.5/doc/h...

And there's lots of interesting problems you can solve with that rich a set of primitives.

This isn't an example benchmark, it's an example translation, so you can see the optimization at work. Bigger examples yield assembly that no casual reader could follow -- so don't get distracted by the fact there's a closed form!!
I wonder if visualizing this kind of data can help people find what makes "popular" or "good" music.
NASA Be A Martian Pathfinder Innovation Challenge