skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Who's to say her ideas are wrong? In fact, what if you're ideas here are wrong? Should you be culpable for trying to convince us? Who determines if her ideas are wrong or right? I've heard evidence that in the majority of published math papers there's at least one major flaw in a proof of each paper. Are they now culpable, as are the publishers?

Effectively what you're arguing is that everyone should refrain from making any statement (opinion or fact) unless they're stating something that is universally agreed by some body. It sounds like you're describing is the church of days past.

I much rather live in a world/country were people are free to say what they like, and I'm free to believe it or not -- with only certain rare exceptions (for example judges, in their capacity as a judge, shouldn't lie).
I think you should find someone to invest, then -- either as an equity investment, or something simpler like "I plan to sell these for $200 ea. Give me $x/unit now and I'll give you the $200-x 100 on the first 100 sold."

If you're willing to put in at least half, I think it'd be pretty easy to find someone who would match, as long as he got his money + some premium first. If the units don't sell, he'd just get the units.
Actually, after a bit of hunting... an An-225[1] can carry 250,000 kilos, and a 100 megawatt SSTAR reactor[2] is projected to weigh ~500,000, with 10 megawatt ones projected to be ~200,000. A quick perusal of Wikipedia suggests other ones may be smaller yet, including a couple which have been made (but I can't find any weights except for the SSTAR).

Surely we can make a bigger plane, especially if the power output of these things is enough to significantly increase the power of the engines, meaning the plane won't have to be as light (I'm thinking a flying-wing plane). Though does anyone know what the approx. power of those engines might be?

[1] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonov_An-225 [2] : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSTAR
Main point: while there's a good argument to be made for incentivizing people to invest their capital, there's no good reason why one kind of money manager (or, really, professional of any sort) should be taxed less than another. Just because you work with money shouldn't entitle you to lower taxes, unless you're actually investing your own.
If he'd be more likely to release TM2 in the next year or two, I'd be perfectly happy to pay $250-500 for a 5-pack for my machines, vs. "free upgrade" -- $50 for something you basically live in is not a big deal at all.. I'm pretty happy with TM1 though.
BP may end 'top kill' operation
The AMOLED pixel layout on the Nexus one is actually the same as that employed in many professional video codecs, just in case anyone was wondering where it originated. There's a lot of research backing up its viability as a balanced-looking display arrangement.
Cool, I'm working a math one when it goes it will be posted at:

blog.pseudopattern.com

Alright technical details. I used GWT for the front end. Mainly because I like working in an IDE, and because I don't have to worry about browser quirks (although I need to tweak the css some.)

All the tiles are generated by a single servlet. You can sort of tell how it was developed by the way it is called:

0.23x0x14.png?...

The first number is lambda. Next is the zoom. The next number is the id of the tile. Each zoom level is broken up into (4*2^zoom)^2 tiles. I need to break the x and y coordinate into separate pieces as this scheme starts hitting integer overflow errors around zoom 15.

You may notice that the PNG files are rather small. This is because they are index based on a 256 color palette (but with 24 bit colors). I wrote my own PNG file creator for this.

This is all in Java for the most part. I prefer ruby for putting something together, but Java had all the things I needed for the most part and the speed of it is really nice for this project.
It looks like it simply uses the number of comments for highlighting comments links, and the number of points to highlight points counters.
For the home page, I request the HTML from HN, process it, and create a collection of elements that represent a HN news item: URL, Title, # of comments, ID, Posted By, Date, and so on. Then use that to generate the new HTML. I cache that for 200 seconds and store a copy in the event that I can't read the HTML from HN.

Works just about the same way for the comments , except it adds some additional functionality like collapsing comments. With the nature of comments being nested, a recursive function worked really well on rendering the output.

The article text functionality uses the algorithm from arc 90's readability project, which is in javascript. I used the main idea behind their readability algorithm for this, except mine runs server side (C#) where theirs is all done on the client.
Yeah, shouldn't be hard. I'll add that to my list.
Review my startup [styxvpn.com] + free account giveaway
That's great, next time we'll debate in my native tongue, I'm sure your grammatical errors will pique mine.
This looks like a variant of the "Lion and Man" problem which is also described as a "bounded pursuit" problem in the operations research journals:

http://www.google.com/search?q=lion+and+man+problem+&ie=...

-and-

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PursuitCurve.html

-and-

http://books.google.com/books?id=HeESjfM2geUC (good!)

This problem may have had relevance in World War II all the way to the present: dogfights between airplanes, battleships trying to sink each other, etc.
Here I am reading hn on a Droid and boy is it terrible. Text too small. Text poorly wrapped. Buttons misclicked all over the place. So bless you sir. With half a billion smart phones sold in just the last couple of years, this is overdue.

You still need to bump up the fonts on the FP about 2 points. On mobile, favor horsey big usable text over any concession to style.
I'm sure you'd agree that the quality of an idea has no bearing on the time that it was submitted.

So I wonder... Do you think you've missed any investments because the company timing didn't coalesce with a funding cycle?
But we have no clue (AFAIK) that Google makes a profit on Gmail, at least in the consumer market. Google Apps for Enterprise makes them some money but I think their main purpose is to disrupt existing players (cough MSFT cough).
Thanks for sharing that movie list, we just had a wonderful time watching Mulholland Dr. and it has been the topic of conversation whole day.
Any feedback / criticism is most welcome!

I've launched a few days ago and it's currently in beta mode. I'm giving away 30 1-month accounts to HN members. Just send me an email (admin@styxvpn.com) and I'll get your account up and running in few minutes.

We only have US servers at this point, but we're expanding in Europe and Asia in the next few months. There are no speed limits and no transfer limits.

Thank you!
Then they wait a couple months and show up much earlier in the next cycle.
Was I voted down because y'all lack a sense of humor, or was it because you didn't read the article?
Chrome says: "The site's security certificate is not trusted!" Fix that ASAP.
The dead branch that Allan doesn't even want to look at, or the new one that's not good enough for alpha yet?

XCode's editor is OK, and replacing it with TM may take more effort than adding few features it's missing.
Oh, good catch. It was Tolkien who served in WW1, not his son. Sorry about that. And I'm not sure its right to emphasise the contemporary literature from his youth as I did, considering how much he was influenced by epic medieval poetry. I should know better, I did school projects on him.
A good one-line summary of what I meant.
Thank you!

I ran into the same problem when I used a GandiSSL certificate (Firefox complained, but not Chrome). I'm now using a PositiveSSL certificate.

Are you running the latest version of Chrome by any chance?
My guess would be that there is a relatively simple analytical solution iff the raptors are allowed to accelerate infinitely, but the capped speed probably makes it a bit more difficult.
This guy did some of the research: http://blog.itlater.com/whats-the-best-time-to-post-to-hacke...

Anecdotally, mid-afternoon PST seems to have been the most successful time for my submissions. Posting before PST folks are at work is risky.

I usually save longer articles and papers for weekends, when people have the time to read them.
3 Lessons for Effective Cofounder Decisionmaking
My point is that if you can't/don't like buttonless, then the iPhone/iPad and every other buttonless devices aren't for you. Just buy another one.
Firefox says the same thing.
I've used this bundle, but had some problems (it would skip certain files). On top of that, it just doesn't feel the same as the Cmd F UI in TM. I'd call the ack bundle a nice work-around, but I wonder why stuff like this isn't incorporated into the core of TM.

I've seen a few threads now about how an "Updated UI" would be a welcome improvement from the 1.x branch; I'd agree with that.
What I look for in an artificial assistant
I have never used TM in my life but I found Allan's comment is very interesting in terms of a life of a software product written by one person at his own will.

A few points:

- His experience sounds like "Second System" syndrome.

- One-man show is quite risky psychology-wise unless you can motivate yourself endlessly

- Perhaps it's time to hire another developers and move on to a more leadership role. Coding might be fun, but the risk of getting burn out is high; one way to prevent this is to do non-coding tasks for a while and once you miss your ol' coding lifestyle perhaps that's a good time to scratch your own itch again with hobby project. Who knows, it might become your second product, expand your portfolio.
Now wouldn't that be awful. We gain your trust, lure you in and then pull the old bait and switch.

That's is not going to happen. As the post states:

> As we continue to grow we will start having product offerings as well as additional APIs.
Space travel technology too. Both fields have had massive advances in terms of the underlying technology (and safety, which you overlooked) but have "stagnated" in terms of the practicality of shuttling people from one place to another.

However, with space travel, there's a growing consensus that sending people is too impractical and, importantly, needless. We can send robots to do our job for us. Likewise, I think air travel with stagnate because air travel will become almost inconsequential for business purposes and will merely be a leisure activity where time is not of the essence.

I'm sure studies are being done in to it, but I wouldn't be surprised if advances in communications technology and work culture are starting to have strong negative effects on compulsory business travel.
Sorry, we don't appreciate that here.
They could have chucked this into a separate library, they didn't have to link it to the same one that is used to browse the web.

No one would care if the internal documentation browser wasn't updated.
Ask HN: What to do with many old pata hard disks?
I own 10+ (old) pata hard disks. All are between 100 and 400 GiB. What can i do with them?
For a file server I would need a microATX/ITX board with many pata slots.
Yeah seems that way, I just saw two comments with the same number of points but significantly different posting times and they have the same color. Thought time might be factored in too, like HN does points/(time since submitted)^2.

Also noticed that it doesn't differentiate between positive and negative scores. A score of -4 is hotter than a score of 1.
Facebook posts about a user reading sensitive information (via reddit)
Very very good interview.

So, Steve Jobs were, in 1996, 100% certain the Web Objects will be the future of web development. It didn't happen, and he failed.

Do anybody care to think why he failed?

I have a very "simpleton" theory. Just throw it out here:

Steve Jobs can almost make anything work. He's smart, and he has resources. He can make a good washing machine if he want to. But I think that "anything" will have to be something that he can use, touch, play with, i.e. Mp3, phone, laptop ... But Web Object is an enterprise server software. I can't imagine Steve Jobs playing with it. So, he picked something that he cannot love or even touch. Based on the interview, he picked WO because he believe enterprise will need it and it's gonna make a lot of money.

My belief is that an entrepreneur works best when working on a product that he personally use.
Now I'm confused. If eyes are more sensitive to green, wouldn't fewer green elements be needed to have the same effect? :-) (Or is it that they're more sensitive to the degrees of luminosity rather than the luminosity per-se?)
"But it also turns the book into a sort of puzzle, a complicated thread of back and forward reference which the dedicated enthusiast can attempt to solve. ... If you do follow all the references then, of course, it all hangs together beautifully."

Interesting that LOST looked like this sort of story, and drew in a bunch of dedicated fans on that basis, but turned out to be a more traditional character-based story after all -- where the references do not, in fact, hang together. Then out came the torches!
Only if Mozilla makes a web based version of FireFox.
I have read amazing books with boring stories. I have read amazing stories with poor writing. Both are good for very different reasons.

Tolkien still stands out in my mind as one of the best story tellers I have ever read. He was such a good story teller that people are retelling them in every way they can imagine in books, films, role play games, computer games, all sorts of media. D and D, warcraft, Diablo, all Tolkien rip-offs. Even Harry Potter.

The awe inspiring bit is the ambiguity, the hints of all the other stories untold, the heroes with bit parts, mentioned in passing. He didn't just write a story, he wrote a whole universe. What he did is rare, I can think of only a handful of other works that pull off the immersion convincingly, Isaac Asimov's Foundation, Ian M. Bank's Culture, Lucas' Star Wars (if they'd have just left it at 4-6) and Herbert's Dune (just). And none of them quite touch the awesomeness of middle earth.

He wasn't just good, he was amazing. Pure fluke perhaps, as the article hints at, but what a great one.
It'a a fluid grid. Meaning no fixed widths–otherwise it wouldn't be fluid.
A horrible Javascript misfeature, second only to default global scope. I always use semicolons, but as the article notes even if you do that you still have to be aware of how automatic insertion works.
www.sublimetext.com is what I use at work. It's very textmate-like + beautiful full screen mode + split views + multi-editing + scriptable in python. If I could somehow take the best parts of sublime and add it to textmate, I would be a very happy man indeed.
To me, the standard is obvious: our lives are only so long, and there's only so much art we can enjoy in them. It doesn't matter where in the low end you draw the line between "art" and "not art". It's the high end that matters. Do you worry about the line between almost-food and barely-food? Or do you worry about what's good food, or the best food you can get?

The reason this painfully obvious idea has trouble being accepted is that most people enjoy food, and most people don't enjoy art. They need barely-art for the same reason kids need barely-beer. They don't like beer, but they want others to think they do.
The author of the article is a huge douchebag when he says things like "we can see why people who read real books hate Tolkien like a phobia". Are you kidding me? Get off your ivory tower. Criticism of Tolkien or anyone else is justified, but phrases like that make my blood boil. Who decides what makes a real book?
The green subpixels in a Pentile display are (1) smaller and (2) more numerous. #1 is OK because to get a given perceived brightness you need less actual energy in green than in red or blue. #2 is good because accuracy in green matters more than accuracy in red or (especially) blue.

What's not so reasonable is that AIUI these displays' resolution is usually quoted as if there were the same number of pixels as green subpixels, which would only be reasonable if the human eye simply couldn't see details in red and blue at all. Which is almost true for blue, but not for red.
in the third exercise the raptors run at 10 m/s. Why, are they wounded?

The third exercise is inside a building, where obstructions and narrow paths slow them down.
Guy Who Copied Digg Slams Digg For Copying Twitter
Meanderings of fantasy's writers make me nauseous. Tolkien's no exception. What is good writing is an extremely subjective topic. Suppose his work is some sort of accomplishment... though I never understood people's facination with it.

English is not my first language, maybe thats one of the reasons I prefer terse and to the point, yet beautiful writing. In my personal opinion, fantasy is good for those with excellent reading speed.
Agreed, but again this has to be taken into context, The Hobbit was a children's story, and LotR was originally its follow-up that developed into its own.

Today, I would classify LotR as as Young Adult novel and not an adult piece of fiction. Honestly, it's themes were vastly mature compared to the Hobbit, however they weren't exceptionally mature for the time it was written. Consider that Return of the King came out in the same year as Lolita, and Fellowship/Two Towers came out in the same year as Lord of the Flies, which is another 'adult' novel that is arguably a Young Adult novel, although IMO deals with a much more mature subject.

Hobbits are a long lived race. Frodo had only recently 'came of age' when the story begins, IIRC at 33 years old. Considering the traditional ages of 'coming of age' I'd bet he was the maturity equivalent of ~15 years old, and he certainly behaves like it in the beginning.

IMO LotR was a great YA novel, just like The Hobbit was a great children's novel. They're amazing stories that you can sit down and read with you kids, but you're not necessarily going to be enjoying them as much as they are, and in 20-30 years time, your kids might be reading them to your grand kids and feeling the exact same way.
| 'Here, spring was already busy about them; fronds pierced moss and mould,
| larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in the turf,
| birds were singing. Ithilean, garden of Gondor now desolate kept still
| dishevelled dryad loveliness.'

This is bad writing because of its use of cliches ('green-fingered' larches, for goodness sake); because of the way it lists facts ('birds were singing') with out really building up a picture, and because of its ham-fisted archaisms. It's one thing to use Latinate reversals when you describing a firey demon on a bridge ('a red sword leaped flaming'); but merely irritating to do so when you are describing the pretty countryside. And what the heck is 'dryad loveliness', anyway?

"Disheveled dryad loveliness" is quite evocative for me. This reminds me of many paintings of the Romantic period, many of which are also celebrations of nothing more than "pretty countryside." Many modern people think of such stuff as pablum, but there are places in the world that can be so beautiful, one's breath is taken away. (One particular brook by Glendalough on a good day, with no one else about, for one example.) If someone has never had this experience, I would feel sorry for them. If one's cultural background in mythology is based on action-oriented computer games, I can see how one might be annoyed by "pretty countryside." In a game, this is the annoying, tedious bit one has to get through for the good parts. In real life, it is a billion times more compelling, complex, and stirring than any game ever written until now could ever hope to be.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think Tolkien is a literary god, but I also doubt this author has the background to fully appreciate where he's coming from.
What a beautiful project!
That's some cutting sarcasm there. You must be a grizzled internet vet.

Only it's asinine given that what we're talking about is CHARGING, not running ads. Meaning "To use Hacker News you need to buy a $5/month subscription".

I look forward to what your rapier wit comes up with next.
Ask HN: What do you use to make HTML tables sortable with JS?
Greetings! It looks like sorttable [www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/sorttable/] and tablesorter [tablesorter.com/] are quite popular libraries to make HTML tables sortable. Would you recommend one over the other, or even an alternative?

Thanks!
That's about an hour from my parent's house. All kinds of bizarre stuff built out there. Cheap land and labor and few to no building codes.
How can you know that you know what the US is like?

My (now) husband had done a 2-month roadtrip with his family in an RV across the northern US and Canada, and when he came to stay with me for 3 months in southern Maryland, he was shocked, and appalled, by too many things to count.

I know many Europeans who have been all over different parts of the US, and still don't know a lot of things, like how easy it is to fall through the cracks, how badly you can fall, and how hard it is to get seen by a doctor.