skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting thought experiment (perhaps an idea for a short story or novel?)

You're some average Joe tinkering in his basement. Somehow or another you manage to invent true field propulsion -- direct conversion of electricity into electromotive force. Point the antenna, turn a knob, and you get a push.

Let's assume for purposes of making a better story that you are anti-government, eccentric, cranky, and ill-tempered.

What would happen? Could you buy some kind of second-hand pressure suits and go into space? Would that be legal? How about land on the moon? Does the treaty dealing with the moon allow individuals to visit? To set up occupation? I think the rules are the same as Antarctica-- individuals can't visit except as a science mission.

How about Mars? Could you build a big space barge and move to one of the ice-soaked canyons on Mars? Finally, what if microbial life were on Mars and the moon. Would it be possible for groups to sue to prevent you from moving somewhere?

There are a lot of interesting details here that most people don't know, such as the ability for folks in the United States to build their own airplanes and fly them without a license under certain conditions. Or the ability of governments to control their citizens even when those citizens are no longer reside inside their borders. Or the growing opposition to humans living on planets that already have life on them.

Nevertheless, when humans are exploring space the principles and policies of planetary protection, developed by COSPAR in accordance with the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, still apply. Implementation guidelines include documenting and minimizing contamination of the exploration targets, control at the most stringent levels for locations in which Earth life might grow, and protection of humans from exposure to untested planetary materials. Preventing harmful contamination of the Earth must be of the highest priority for all missions.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...
8 of the Best Free Linux Astrology Software
Doesn't work in Safari because he only used Mozilla CSS extensions.
I've been brainstorming a new app idea for helping create lifestyle health wellness changes - “pay for prevention”.

If anyone is interested in developing in this area connect up with me; I'd be interested in hearing from you.

We are a team of two and have some prototype code.
donna (at) genuus (dot) com
They aren't prejudiced and they do not discriminate

I am pretty sure that picking only people with a university degree is called discrimination.

Now, is it a good discrimination is a whole another matter.
There will be negative comments for every hosting service you find, and unfortunately it's difficult to tell by reviews alone if the host is good.

Look for one with an uptime guarantee and good customer service. Most have a 30-60 day money back guarantee as well, so you may need to use that if what you get isn't what you expected.
It looks like these are called SiteLinks, and there isn't much info about how to get Google to add them, except for "make your site easy for their algorithm to parse".

Anyone have any tips?
The post seems mistitled. It is not a set of instructions on how to defend your reputation. Rather, it is a single example of someone actively defending their reputation online. That is, the only real content in the post is an example of someone attacking the author (their are no details about the attacker other than as "someone with an axe to grind"), and someone else coming to the defense of the author, implying that his reputation is so solid only people with poorly defined axes to grind would attack it.

Which is not to say anything bad about the author. I would probably try to defend my reputation if someone were attacking it, as well, but I would not have the wherewithal to be nearly so effective at it.
I was rooting for a full WYSIWYG editor, but it doesn't look like they'll be doing that. I wonder how the new edit toolbar does in real world usability testing.
Another possible explanation is that interstellar travel is impossible. Perhaps there's too much debris between star systems, and it's not possible to create materials strong enough to make a spaceship that can withstand a collision with the debris at the speeds required.

This doesn't quite explain the lack of communication signals. But if nobody can colonize the galaxy, then there would be less sources of signals.

BTW, the Wikipedia article on the Fermi Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox) does a very good job of detailing all the possible explanations.
yep, zip car in SF is similar. Cars are just still too cheap, if you don't let your pride fuck with you in which one to pick.
In a world where interstellar travel is impossible, civilizations can't strike out too far for resources; they must make do with what is nearby. So as they get more and more efficient with their energy usage they'll emit less and less. Compare our solar system with a dyson sphere the size of the solar system, for example.
You need to add following lines into your .bash_profile and restart Terminal.app.

# Get the aliases and functions
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
. ~/.bashrc
fi
As a Man Thinketh - Free (legal) ebook
Long, slow, fizzle.. I believe the image which most resembles our universe is a puff of dissipating smoke. Why do we entertain the idea some miraculous design will reconstitute a cosmic puff back into it's original structure? The universe cannot care about a smoke puff, and it cannot care about itself.
EC2 is significantly more expensive (expressed as percent change) than VPS when you total up bandwidth etc.
I'm rather fond of a variant of the "we aren't listening properly" argument. If there exists a medium of which we are unaware, and which can be used to communicate effectively at large distances, perhaps interstellar travel is simply unnecessary, or overly dangerous.
It's certainly not the clearest post the man has ever made but I think there are some lessons to be learned from the meta-content of it all.

To my eyes there are two lessons here...

1. If you treat people fairly and truly have a good reputation in a community that will do more to defend your reputation than anything else. Because people will stand up for you.

2. If you are a person who has been treated fairly by someone else you should start thinking of it as your duty to defend them against attacks. Because in a world where an anonymous person can ruin someone's reputation it's up to all of us to protect each other against such attacks.

Again he wasn't very clear and I have no inside information but those seemed to be the clear lessons (at least IMHO)
You want a virtual private server. Like another poster said, linode has a consistently good performance/cost. I'd highly recommend you host your own DNS (I use dyndns).
I would suggest reading innovators dilemma, todays "less powerful devices" can very quickly become what everyone is using tomorrow.
YUI3 and a Quiet Revolution
YUI3 is developing an 'apt-get' for extensions and web services.
Simple probability, if you assume that there are lots over the whole space of time then the chances that you are the first is one divided by lots :)

And I do think it's fairly safe to assume that we're not perfectly adapted to everything, that quite a lot of how we work (and therefor look) is down to chance turnings during our evolution.
I would like to recommend my own PythonTurtle: http://pythonturtle.org

It was created to make a more friendly version of Python's turtle module.
HTML is not hard to learn, but you may also need to learn CSS.

First ask yourself a question: Why Am I learning JavaScript?
If you want to build a dynamic website, then here's my suggestion.

First, I suggest that you get a look at Mozilla Documentation (https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Guide)

You don't need to learn JavaScript from scratch if you are already a coder (let say C++), you are already familiar with things like loops, if..then. Even if not, the Mozilla documentation has got all you need.

Second, after this quick overview, I suggest to learn a framework (I'll recommend jQuery); now you'll need a book and I'll recommend that you read it fully (http://www.packtpub.com/jQuery/book). This will introduce you to jQuery, teach you all the concepts (you'll even find an appendix about JavaScript Closures).

Now unleash your hidden! I have took this road 2 months ago, and now getting some jobs on freelance sites to make an extra income.

Good luck!
Similar frustrations, similar daydreams.
IPad Sold Out
CTIA 2010 in Review: Top Trends in Mobile
History has shown that the tolerance road doesn't always take you to a happy place like lots of people think. Laws can change easily, but morals?
you may want to consult a dictionary on that...
As a smart person

I don't think it's possible to judge your own smartness. Who wouldn't say that they are smart? Either way, at least you have humility.
Wikipedia has still this cutesy olden times feel to it. A skin with gradients can’t change that. I kinda like it, but sometimes I wonder whether a optically sleek Wikipedia would be even better.
> Well, what you describe is all but the very definition of prejudice.

Actually, it's not. When insurance is correctly priced, the payout for a group is close to its premiums, no matter how the group is defined. (Yes, including factors that weren't considered by the insurance company.)

If you don't price that way, some group is getting a subsidy and another group is paying one. An insurance company that figures out how to identify the latter can offer its members better rates than a company that doesn't. Or, if the smarter company can figure out how to avoid the former, it can have higher profits (which attracts competitors).

Insurance companies like to make money. People like to pay the minimum for their insurance. These two facts have economic consequences.
The best frakking books about the financial crisis
Until the Sun turns supernova, at which point we'd better hope that we discovered another planet to live on.
10 Must-See Google Street View Sightings
NYC Police Internal Affairs Records Obtained by NYCLU
Apple still has to contend with Nokia for the largest mobile computing firm slot, as far as it concerns mobile phones. Granted, Apple has the larger profit because of its iTunes/Apps ecosystem which enables the iPhone, but Nokia still has the larger sales numbers and is working hard to build its ecosytem with its new Maemo OS. I also find WinPhone 7's concept of ''hubs'' radically innovative and superior to the the apps concept. In other words, no one is sitting still...
How about they just want to leave us alone ?
No incentive to performs equal run-away budgets!

I wonder how many corporations can run up bills like that.

I am glad that I am not a taxpayer in New York City or an investor in one of those corporation. Or maybe I should be worried about government officials?
So, does it work on Windows, or is there a version for Windows?
The other way to look at it is, technology is delivering into the hands of individuals the ability to do what only governments could do earlier. Thus you have Burt Rutan and other ragtag teams able to compete in the new space race to LEO and the moon.

Let the government take care of the weak and protect and preserve, that's what it's mainly for in a society, and leave the adventurism to the adventurous. Obama's steps seem consistent with this.
Deluxebb
Probability.

Drake's equation suggests there are millions of intelligent species in the universe (assume 1,000,000). Thus, the chances of us really being the first is only 1 in a million. Taking into account that the Earth was a relatively late bloomer (the universe was around for ~10 Billion years before there was any life on Earth ...) it becomes far less likely.

Similarly, the chances of evolution creating two identical 'solutions' to very different environments (or hell, even nearly identical environments) is practically nil. Even if you buy panspermia (which is perfectly reasonable ...), there were still billions of years of evolution between then and now, and we should be unrecognizable from something we 'branched' from ~4 billion years ago.
> Fermi listened patiently, then asked, simply, "So, where is everybody?"

And, shortly afterward, they stopped eating lunch with him.
I understand that you (part of a small company, I presume) have a need to be found, but the author is in fact right when he says that blogging and tweeting by companies is really just advertising, nothing more and nothing less. Most people do not "start conversations" with companies, they start conversations with other people.

What company blogs and tweets and Facebook fan pages are, of course, good for, is providing an avenue for companies to push their marketing onto consumers that care so much about the product they've actually subscribed to the blog, twitter account and Facebook page without bothering anyone else. In that sense they're a huge improvement over traditional advertising. That does not mean, however, that they're not still just that: advertising.
Ask HN: any type theory book recommendation?
After spending some time with Haskell, I was considering diving into some more type theory. Any recommendation for the good type theory book?

I know about Pierce's "Types and Programming Languages" and "Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages" but would like to learn whether there are any comparable alternatives.

Thanks in advance!
IPad screenshots make this thing seem less like a giant iPhone
It's more likely that Windows, when it finally does die, won't die because of a single product like Chrome. Rather it will die slowly of a thousand cuts.
Economics Teaches Us Not To Fret
I've always very much admired the elegant simplicity of Lisp and Scheme. I've done a bit of CL and, lately, Clojure hacking and I do think that learning Lisp is an enlightenment that no good programmer should deny himself.

However, I'm also less and less convinced that the one really killer feature that Lisp allows, macros, really makes up for the downsides of the s-expr syntax. Modern languages with closures and first-class functions and easy, powerful metaprogramming facilities give you enough flexibility without macros and history has shown that s-expr prefix notation is just not something that many people enjoy.

A previous poster's claim that Lisp makes a good extension language because it's scriptable is a good case in point. Dealing with the s-expr syntax in a capable editor like Emacs isn't a problem but entering complex, ad-hoc s-expr expressions on a command line is just gross. I'd much rather use something like Python or Ruby or Lua for that purpose.

I'm not sure that any of the existing statically typed, type inferencing languages have really found the sweet spot yet but, as much as I enjoy the current crop of dynamic languages, I'm still much more inclined to believe that the next step in the evolution of highly productive languages is going to involve reintroducing static typing in a less cumbersome way, not revisiting the Lisp paradigm in a new context. When I look at the work that the Rails 3 team is doing to clean up and modularize the Rails internals I just have to think that their task would be much easier in a language with explicit, static support for interfaces.
FWIW, here is my take on this from an article I published in 2005:

"Look for success

There is an increasing trend towards feigning offence at trivial issues in order to look like a moral hero. I'm sure only half a dozen people through the United States were actually upset about Janet Jackson showing her breasts on television, but politicians around the country reacted with outrage. Fortunately this trend will be short lived.

In Scott Adams' book The Dilbert Future there is an anecdote about why all politicians seem to be crooks. The possible reasons he gives are

1. Crooks are the only ones who run for office

2. Politics turns people into criminals

3. All politicians are being framed

4. Every person on Earth is a crook, but only the only people we check out carefully are politicians

There is no reason to believe the first three are correct, so probably the best explanation for this phenomenon is reason four. Now clearly not everyone is really a crook, but it is true that we have all done both good and bad. The problem is that a scatter shot of everything that each person in the translucent generation has ever done is available online through a quick Google search. This is a great tool to find out if a potential employee has committed a felony. The problem is how should one react when reading logs of that person's online chats from when they were ten?

No matter how stupid, racist, offensive, or pathetic ones comments were as a ten year old it is unlikely that they would have a statistical correlation with job performance at age thirty. When everyone has dirt on everyone else, it won't be about the number of failures, it will be about—within reason—the number of successes. Instead of being judged on your gravitas, you will be judged on your ability to act appropriately in any given context."

If I were to rewrite it today, I think I would add that reputation is more important today than in any other point in history, but that what constitutes good and bad karma is rapidly changing.
Isn't the trend going away from anonymous interaction on the web? Facebook Connect is an example. Just like anonymous comments on our blogs, we see them with very little value and often just trolls causing trouble. I would never believe anything about anyone that was submitted anonymously.
A religion attempts to relate a human being to the Eternal, to the Highest Things, to God, whatever. If there is anything to be called the Eternal, The Highest, God, etc, then true religion will get you right with it.

An ethics, or the most important part of one, relates a human being to other human beings. If there are other human beings (there are!), then a true ethics will get you right with them.

This definition, which is more or less traditional, is broad enough to allow egoism, Hobbesianism, etc. as forms of ethics - so that it would be intelligible to say that one gets right with others by taking adequate advantage of them.

Your suggestion that ethics (or the part of it that relates people to each other) must be some form of religion is in fact a reductive claim about religion. But it also threatens to destroy the specific character of the ethical.

It entails, for example, that one person does not wrong another by, say, killing her or lying to him, but only ever wrongs God, or the Eternal or the Most High. Killing someone on your account (supposing Christianity as the background religion) would not be formally different from, say, not going to church on Sunday; they're all just cases of going wrong by God.

Every human experience of grievance and anger at someone is a rejection of this nonsensical idea. The content of these passions is "He done me wrong", not "He done God wrong". The distinction was always been maintained in classical theology. The reduction of ethics to religion is a specifically American phenomenon, though it has precursors and echoes elsewhere.
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Incidently, the term TANSTAAFL, or There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch was an invention of science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
If you want to follow that thought through, the future us would probably like higher fidelity of their memories and recordings, approaching real life quality. The limiting factor in doing this is likely the energy consumption (and in many other ways as well).
The cheapest energy source by far is the Sun, consequently we will need to build Dyson spheres, thus pushing us off the Earth. Once we are at that stage the only way to get more energy (to support further fidelity or population growth) will be the other stars and similar mass concentrations, which will eventually lead to colonization of the galaxy and beyond to galaxy clusters/super clusters. Even the light speed barrier can't prevent such a movement for too long.

A Singularity will likely only hasten the process (there will be nothing else to do).
Actually he refers back to a post a few weeks ago that does actually tell you how to defend your reputation online(albeit a bit indirectly).

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/02/own-your-online-brand.html
I agree. I would also say that in cases where the abstraction doesn't make sense you have to know what's going on inside the box in order to trust it.

Recently at my day job, I came across a string trim() function, which started with this comment:

// removes leading and trailing whitespace. Also removes commas.

The code itself also removed single trailing periods. That really hurts your trust in the code base - you need to read everything a function calls to understand it, you can't trust the method names. This makes it take longer to understand any particular piece of code - even if in the end the methods called actually do what they claim to.
Is it just me, or did most of that article make no sense whatsoever?
Use Linode. Also, don't miss out on their library of HOWTOs, they are quite good.
Not to mention YUI 3.1 is released this week, 3/30/2010. On top of some new functionality, the development team is porting a lot of YUI2 widgets, fixing memory bugs, and cleaning up some of the abstraction.
Hmm, not working my version of Mozilla either.
I use magit right now, but one thing about using emacs and the commandline that bugged me when I tried it was that when changing branches, I would be prompted for what to do with each open file that had changed. Is there a good workflow solution for this?
Interesting, mostly because I have no idea who avc is but I do remember fnid2 as someone who really annoyed me at one time or another.

I think we have better memories for people who piss us off than for those we respect ^-^
User signups. Unfortunately signups are free. LOL.
But I'm working on the paid conversions.
Yes. You create a stash with your changes, or commit them before switching branches.
the project we are pitching can be found at http://collegejobconnect.com - should have included that in the posting
The original poster's first suggestion was Squeak. It is a variation of Smalltalk, a "real" programming language, that is focused on being approachable and fun for children. I find it rather fun as an adult, too, and would highly recommend trying it out.

If you are using Smalltalk to introduce programming to a child, I suggest downloading the eToys version from Squeakland: http://www.squeakland.org/

Adults interested in using Smalltalk for developing sophisticated web applications should take a look at Seaside: http://seaside.st/
This was available a while ago if you had an account (you could turn it on). I have been browsing with it since.
Correct, because stocks are a thing in themselves and not something related to the actual or expected value of the company.
That sounds like it might work. I've also started to consider the Zii Egg as a platform instead of trying for a Tegra based device.
Square redesign of the Coke bottle
Another vote for Alice.. I had an intro to engineering course freshman year that spent 3-4 weeks with Alice to teach basic programming concepts for non-comp sci people and beginners.

It's the perfect tool for developing basic concepts of programming, but in a fun environment that doesn't "feel" like coding.
Ask HN: Review my app, UnusedCSS.com
I built this because the only existing solutions to finding old legacy CSS that aren't being used anymore that I could find are Firefox plugins. Dust Me Selectors and CSS Usage being the two big ones.

I found that I am often at a machine without Firefox, or I don't want to install an addon (or addon for an addon in the case of CSS Usage) just to quickly find out what CSS selectors aren't being used on a given page.

All feedback is very welcome!