skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article would be better titled, "How farmers and shipping companies starve the world's poor -- by refusing to grow food for free, and by refusing to ship it to starving children for free."

People want money for their work. In the case of "starving the world's poor", it's because farmers need to pay for seeds and fertilizer and land, and because we have to fly the food to the starving children in airplanes, which cost money.

The futures angle also affects the price; the investment banks need money for taking risk away from the farmers. This affects the price of the futurers, but it also decreases the actual price of the crop, since the farmer no longer has to take on the risk of a bad growing season. The investment bank deals with risk, the farmer deals with food, and everyone gets a cut.

Less risk for the farmer means more incentive to produce food, ensuring that we do actually have enough food for everyone. (Why does everyone in the US grow corn? Not because corn is inherently delicious or useful, but because the government give them money for doing it. Farming is risky; any method to guarantee that you'll be able to feed your family at the end of the season is worth considering. Hence, the futures market.)

All in all, prices fluctuate, and on average, they end up being "correct". If you can't afford food while the market is fixing itself, you should have bought the futures.

Why are rants against banks always in the form of "I/We didn't plan for something, and the bank didn't cut me a break when I realized I miscalculated."? I don't understand the evil-ness of that. I guess it's only moral to make money selling Web 2.0 todo lists or something...
Netflix's discontinuation of the friends feature, following the discontinuation of multiple queues, has pretty much proven them more feature-averse than Apple. Could this be done by a third party through the API, though?
All of which is fine, but this wasn't lost in the dark ages, this was supposedly used once, never used again, and never even recorded or noticed by the invading Romans, who might have been very interested in the novel weapon which was setting their ships on fire.

Wikipedia has an article on steam cannons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_cannon

which notes that there were various attempts to make a viable steam cannon during the heyday of the steam engine, but nobody managed to make a viable one until World War 2.

Also, Mythbusters apparently did an episode about Archimedes and steam cannons. I can't find out much about it, but it doesn't look like it was an overwhelming success.

In conclusion, I don't see a helluva lot of advantage for the steam cannon over the catapult.
Fundamentalist Evangelicals, Mormons, Baptists, and Jews have held back progress in science, human rights, civil rights, and protecting our environment.

Notice anything missing from that list? A certain other major religion often associated with "fundamentalism" and bad stuff happening?
Strongly recommend Skiena over Cormen, for what it's worth.
You know, strange as this may sound, the length of a human life is but nanoseconds when looked at on galactic scales, I think I could live with having life cut short with the trade off that I'd die knowing the answer to the question is there anyone else out there.
I don't think there is a single reason Opera is unpopular. It just doesn't have a single stand-out feature people can associate it with.

Firefox's thing was openness, and an ecosystem of extensions. Chrome's is speed (and openness, and being sponsored by Google). Opera? It's fast, but not as fast as Chrome. Not open. No extensions. Built-in mail client? Gmail is better and easier.

When switching to a new browser, people have to put up with the inconvenience of some sites being broken, in return for some payoff. With Opera I can't see an appealing reason to do this.

Finally, I think Opera has given up on desktop users and concentrated all efforts on sales in the embedded market.
Bolden on al-Jazeera:

"In his message in Cairo, [Obama] talked about expanding our international outreach, expanding our international involvement. We’re not going to go anywhere beyond low earth orbit as a single entity. The United States can’t do it, China can’t do it — no single nation is going to go to a place like Mars alone."

I dunno about you all, but reading this one day after July 4th (or any day for that matter) makes me sick to my stomach. According to this article, and excerpts from a Bolden interview on al-Jazeera, we are to believe that Obama has tasked NASA with reaching out to the Muslim world and make the Muslim world "feel good" about their contributions to science and math. Perhaps historically... but recently? I counter with: what have you done for me lately.

Is it April fools? Seriously?

To abdicate and simply say that NASA can not get to the moon or mars by itself is just the height of insanity. If you believe we landed on the moon why would you agree with that statement. The only thing that means to me is that the current white house administration and by extension NASA administration do not view it as a priority.
To each their own. "Great" is subjective.
Ha.

This is the sort of thing I would expect from a bunch of anti-theistic children a la reddit.com/r/atheism, not hackernews.
Are you using msbuild to build your project? I've figured that out and some of msdeploy so it seems like making the jump out of Visual Studio/Express should be straight forward (I came from Vim with PHP/Perl and often find Visual Studio/Express getting in the way more than it helps).
Steam's pragmatic approach to DRM is okay with me. They make the whole flow from finding the game, purchasing, and launching easy and straight forward. It's one of the rare instances the Management is a two way street. I don't need to keep physical copies of the games or track the serial numbers. I can move from computer to computer and the games that are enabled for my account are available. I'm really impressed that they don't charge extra for games that run on OS X, that was originally purchased for Windows.

What does irk me still is the third party publishers on Steam that use region lockouts. Steam's DRM does make it easy for publishers to not allow games like Modern Warfare 2 to be sold in Japan. I understand it was licensed to a publisher local in Japan and that is why Steam can not distribute. But this crosses the line of my tolerance. Same with other media such as music and videos. I wish publishers would set a global price, based on one of the major currencies, and just let us purchase and use in any region.
Have you taken a look at Mono? The Windows servers aren't always required. There are definitely some caveats but it might be an option.
What's in a Name? Uses and Abuses of Lispy Terminology
I remember back in 2003 when steam came out along with the release of CS v1.6.

The whole community complained for a long time, setting up private v1.5 servers and doing anything in their power to avoid steam.

The naysayers had their points, but now the bloated software,buggy friends list and LAN party issues have morphed into a model content distribution network making tons and tons of revenue. Who'd a thought?

Valve probably knew this all along.
Steam is awesome.

I used to never play PC games, and when I did I usually pirated them for convenience and simply because I couldn't legitimately purchasing the PC games I play (many of them are older and no longer in stores).

However, since this Steam sale came around I've been addicted. I ended up buying like 6 games with an average price of about $5 a game. It's just easier than pirating and it's cheap very easy just to click the buy button and charge my credit card.

Overall it's a great way to distribute new PC games and it definitely keeps the income coming in (although it might not be as much) for older games that no longer get shelf space in brick and mortar retail stores.
"That works out to an average of less than 5000 per day. Not bad but also not that great."

Depends how much each page view is worth. That could easily be bringing in $10K+ per day depending on the business.
Maybe they are thinking of training people from Muslim countries to be astronauts on NASA missions.
The world has been much, much more populated now than in the past, and we have much bigger weapons.

There have been very many religiously motivated wars through the ages. Do you think that, had those wars taken place in a world with similar population and weapons technology as today, they would have been any less destructive than our own?

Or is your argument that everyone, including those who love God, try to kill people, and that the atheists are simply better at it due to technology?
Use a different domain that is easier to remember.
It seems like you just strung the word atheist along with the word communism in order to make it seem worse by association. Really, atheism and communism are not inextricably tied: http://atheism.about.com/od/atheismmyths/a/Communism.htm

Blaming atheists for causing communism is sort of like blaming heterosexuals for causing the Holocaust.

Further, it is very difficult to find violence committed in the name of atheism (it seems to be almost a contradiction in terms). Violence committed in the name of God, on the other hand, has been cited in Internet Arguments so often that now it's almost a cliche.
I think you're suggesting that PHP has somehow "arrived" because there's a LISP written in PHP. I don't agree.

The LISP here is a neat project but I can't think of a practical niche. Sandboxed hosted scripting is praiseworthy, but most customers would want that in Javascript or PHP itself, not as a Lisp.

PHP already powers three of the top 10 websites. What was left to prove?
First, VS shouldn't take 20s to switch windows. I just did it and it happened instantly. And I have 60 open windows (not including tool windows).

Second, how is Vim more customizable than VS? I can't think of anything I can't do in VS. There's plenty I can't do in Vim.

Vim does load faster. Although single file load with VS isn't too bad, but certainly no Vim.

And don't use TFS... that's just bad mojo.

I say this as a person who spent 12 years of his life using Vi/Vim before touching VS for the first time.
This makes me wonder....
The dv6000 series (and probably others) have an infrared receiver on them to use with a little remote that comes inserted into the thing. Now the IR port isn't exposed as an actual IR device, because pressing buttons on the remote just sends keystrokes, so you can see where this is going...

The dv6000's are pretty common, I see people with them all the time, and although you'd need line of sight to send keystrokes, your target wouldn't need to be using any dongle, just a particular laptop. Now that's scary.
That depends on your view of Heidegger, doesn't it?
I am playing with InDinero and it is frustrating that it is not tied to Quickbooks. This is a deal-breaker since I already have to have Quickbooks for my accountant.
Which is a nice-sounding idea until the OS components are growing stale, at which point you'll be wondering why, for instance, your scripting language of choice's hash libraries don't support the modern idea of SHA256 (the answer being: because the OpenSSL version shipped with OS X was too old), or why your builds are now failing (because Apple shipped a library update without updating the headers in a Software Update).

Homebrew tries to take the high ground here, but it's just naivety. They'll wind up installing "duplicate" versions of software too -- in fact, they already are doing so. The short-cycle of Leopard -> Snow Leopard won't be happening again soon, and the only alternative to adding "duplicate" software to your dependency tree is letting software go stale (for example: python 2.7 vs SL's 2.6.1).

It's easy to say that the 10 years of knowledge that both MacPorts and Fink have about the platform is "stupid" when you haven't had the experience of maintaining a working packaging/port system through a few OS X release cycles, and aren't familiar with the problem space or Apple's policies.
I think that the (increasing but by no means new) viability of single-founder startups is an inevitable consequence of the environment for all startups continuing to get radically better. If two guys could make non-trivial web services back when making a web service started with, quite literally, programming your own HTTP server since you didn't have a hundred thousand to buy one, that implies very good things for a "team" which has a decade and change of OSS to lean on.

In addition to OSS, the huge existing distribution channels like organic SEO, AdWords, and all those things you cool people use are also a major draw. Infrastructure has improved by orders of magnitude. APIs and snap-in services are getting better all the time -- ten years ago, payment processing was a multi-week endeavor, now you can do voice calls in about ten minutes of work. Scaling is... is solved too strong a word? There has been huge diffusion of the black magic of how to setup and architect things, both in the n-tier server architecture sense of the word and in the "here's how you get capital without slicing open chicken entrails" and "here's how you get users" senses of the word.

It is a great time to be alive.
Blogging your Product: A Primer
Thanks for the clarification, I should have been a little more specific.

I meant to say that I wish there was a way to get a listing of all my public posts without having to log in. Kind of like going to someone's Twitter profile if you aren't logged in.

Just a very minor nitpick, it seems like you have a great community so far which far more valuable than features that can easily be added, keep up the good work!
This kind of one-upping (or one-downing, if you prefer) is part of the problem with ideology: deflecting criticism with a tu quoque argument to 'something even worse' means never having to confront one's own failings. The first step away from fanatical authoritarianism (regardless of which ideology it is clothed in) is to reject such zero-sum fallacies.

Incidentally, I also think this argument is flawed on the merits. Apart from the lack of meaningful criteria for establishing which Bad Things can be ascribed to religious or atheistic fanatics, it also sidesteps the legitimate question of what Good Things can be ascribed to religious or humanist progress through time - a general problem in politics of course, because people treating each other decently doesn't make headlines.
I doubt that it is a "false option" since it is so clearly based on the number of transactions.
Most religions have a fundamentalist branch and most are associated, at some level, with holding back progress. It's bad debating style not to identify "a certain other religion". Did you mean Scientology? Islam? Bahai? Buddhism? Paganism? or what? If you have not read it, Sam Harris's book, The End of Faith, is a worthwhile read.
Looks like you got some Reddit on your shoe, Hacker News. Here, let me help you with that --- I'll just hit the "flag" button.
I've been trying to learn algorithms through this not-so-well known website: train.usaco.org

It gives you questions that you write programs to solve, then judges your programs against test cases. It's fantastic. The questions are difficult, but never impossible, and they drill you well on diverse algorithms, building on previously learned concepts, so that you really understand the material.
You might be interested to know that they unofficially tolerate players having someone in another country (usually the US) buy the game and gift it to them, as long as the middleman isn't making money off of it (only equal reimbursement). If you're interested in getting the US version of Modern Warfare 2 (or any other game) via Steam, contact this guy: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/cklqm/steam_day_7_ma...

Obviously this isn't a justification for their actions, but it is an available workaround.
You dont have to use webforms, and using ASP.NET can be quite pleasurable if you dont use the "asp" controls and postbacks.

HOWEVER, the second that Sharepoint enters the equation, I turn, run, and dont look back. What a horrendous kludgefest that is...
I also like both Thecus and ReadyNAS, with Mac Mini or Xbox 360 as head-ends at the TV sets. Been using these for years. The (add-on|plug-in|module) community for both NAS servers is great.

That said, both Microsoft's Media Center and Home Media Server are also fantastic and extensible.
I understand the rate of conversion to any religion via websites to be quite low. Wouldn't it be better to encourage that children ask pertinent questions about belief systems that they can't really avoid hearing about?
I'd like to back your applause of analytic philosophy but would like to defend continental philosophy against postmodernism for a moment, as well.

I think the prototypical example of dense prose in continental philosophy would be Heidegger, but at the same time I don't think that people would say that Sein und Zeit is gibberish. Now, many analytic philosophers (including myself) would probably agree that Sein und Zeit probably falls to the same psychoanalytic-assumption-as-truth that is categorical of existentialism but I definitely didn't have a problem seeing an argument from Heidegger.

Simply, I just wanted to note that simply because a work appears dense or confusing doesn't mean that it is gibberish. Now, in the case of postmodernism, most of it happens to be both dense and gibberish.
The speech emphasizes making good choices, which has nothing to do with the quantity of choices of available. The billions of dollars, in the context of his speech, is a gift, while leaving a job and starting an online bookstore is one of the choices that defines his life.
"I/We didn't plan for something, and the bank didn't cut me a break when I realized I miscalculated."?

I think you might change your mind if you showed up at the grocery store tomorrow and found that a gallon of milk was $250 because you had to buy today's milk at tomorrow's speculated prices. Didn't plan for that?
New Zealand (Oceania), Dunedin specifically.

I'm interested to see how many other NZ hackers there are and where you're based.
I recall it being installed by default on an older version of Ubuntu.
A nuclear blast is never an awesome fireworks show. This detonation created serious electromagnetic interference that would likely fry a lot of consumer electronics if done today.

If you want fireworks, use fireworks. And even then, don't. They shoot up a ton of smog and can easily start fires. Cool? I guess. But really dangerous. Especially when you're intentionally setting off a bomb that you know will cause major destructive electromagnetic interference across a sizable chunk of the Earth's surface.
That would be a valid argument, but only from a solipsistic perspective.
I just updated the app. Check out the new "Go wide" button.
Ghc-gc-tune: Tuning Haskell GC settings for fun and profit
> Looking at the website, it seems the general "improvement" is that you can edit formulas before you install; but that's exactly why I use MacPorts! I don't want to know how to install all these things, that abstraction is something I prefer.

You can edit the MacPorts portfiles too, if you want to:

sudo port edit <portname>

I don't really understand why people are advocating Homebrew. The only real advantage seems to be the smaller dependency tree achieved by relying on Apple's shipped components, but that's a short-term band-aid that isn't going to last.
So if they make obtaining games legitimately easier than pirating and make sure that the DRM doesn't needlessly hassle the end user, people will do that instead?

Stop the presses.
I've added a new "Go Wide" button.
Yes let's make people feel good rather than actually doing something. FAIL
Communism is one of atheism's terrible and natural fruits, and many of the communist revolutionaries held as a first-rank goal the suppression, if not elimination of, religions and religious institutions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

^^ Go atheism, huzzah!

Seriously, let's learn the lessons from "God blocking", not repeat them.
I was surprised to install PHDVirtual's backup software and it involves two linux virtual machines which run a web interface based on .aspx.

I think it's the first time I've met Mono in a product.
Let's be clear, though. Heidegger was an existentialist (in the continental tradition). He was dense, but understandable. Postmodernism is just gibberish.
I'm glad you like it!

There is a way you can budget for variable expenses. Simply set up a recurring transaction. On the Dashboard page, you can edit an individual instance of the recurring transaction without affecting the others. So when you actually receive your electric bill, you can put in the exact amount and date.

If you need more help, please drop me a line at https://cashcurveapp.com/help
Hmmm... very interesting idea. I'll work on that when I finish the full API (write, not just read)
At work, a typical response I've received upon mentioning that I get most of my games through Steam is "Oh. Isn't that the one with DRM?"

At first, this threw me; I wasn't even aware that there was DRM on Steam. Well, of course I intuitively knew it, but I never associated it with the issues that people usually complain about regarding DRM.

I've never had the DRM get in my way... My experience with iTunes has been that when a bad bump on an airplane toasted my external hard drive and lost me every piece of legitimately paid for music and every legally purchased TV episode on it, I would never be able to download those purchases again. Steam, on the other hand, has let me download the same game as many times as I've found necessary, external to external, computer to computer.
Spam detection:
http://postjobfree.blogspot.com/2009/06/postjobfree-automode...
He means that the signal would still be detectable 1000 light years away. You're right that we're a long time away from that being a possibility.
I'm saying a motivated atheist communist has (in his own mind at least) no God before whom he'll stand in judgment for his blunders, failures, excesses, crimes and stupidity.
One could claim that having read enough post-modernist work to be able to successfully emulate it, he had in fact become able to coherently express ideas which he could then also look at and proclaim to be nonsense.

Alternatively, given Sokal's own description of the paper as "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics he] could find about mathematics and physics", one could argue that Sokal was merely repeating back ideas which post-modernists had already espoused, which leaves their resulting publication of his "nonsense" rather unsurprising.
Desktop Linux _is_ the best system around. It's not about quality. People don't care about technical excellence, they care about _doing things_. And for now, Windows offers the easiest way of doing things, because everything works on it because a manufacturer will never release something that doesn't work on the general swath of Windows computers.

Pretty much the entire appeal of Mac is a) no viruses/spyware (because nobody writes viruses or spyware for Mac because its userbase is too insignificant to target) and b) big icons and prettier colors, making it "easier" to use.

Windows is an institution. It doesn't just give way once something becomes objectively superior; many systems have been superior to the their Microsoft contemporary and Windows didn't magically crumble. It's about installed base.
I don't think it's too difficult to remember. But if many feel this way, I'll consider other options.
You are correct, of course, but this is religion bashing.

You see, it is traditional to attack blindly (usually against strawmen) without regard to logic, and feel smugly self-righteous about one's obvious superiority while mocking religious types for exactly that same set of traits.

Also, I think it's intended as a joke. Or at least I can hope.