skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's an inaccurately bleak summary.

While the author is discouraged about the fate of the bluefin tuna, and her final note is one of worry, her last three paragraphs are mostly about things that could work:

And yet this is never where the new fish stories, or stories about the fish stories, wind up. Just when things seem bleakest, hope—dolphinlike—swims into the picture. David Helvarg concludes his memoir-cum-ecological-disaster narrative “Saved by the Sea” by declaring that, owing to a new attitude in Washington, things seem “to be looking up for the ocean.” Similarly, Roberts closes his chronicle of more than a millennium of overfishing by asserting, “We can restore the life and habits of the sea because it is in everyone’s interest that we do so.”

The way to keep fishing, according to Roberts, lies in not fishing—or, at least, in not fishing everywhere. He proposes that huge swaths of the sea be set aside as so-called “marine protected areas,” or M.P.A.s, where most commercial activity would be prohibited. In “Four Fish,” Paul Greenberg argues that the salvation of wild fish lies in farmed ones, though not in the kind you’ll find on ice at Stop & Shop. (Today, most farmed fish are fed on wild-caught fish, a practice that only exacerbates the problem.) Greenberg is a believer in what’s sometimes called “smart aquaculture,” and thinks we should be eating species like Pangasius hypophthalmus, commonly known as tra. Tra happily feed on human waste and were originally kept in Southeast Asia to dispose of the contents of outhouses. Michael Weber, the author of “From Abundance to Scarcity,” is encouraged by the introduction of new regulatory mechanisms such as “individual transferable quotas,” or I.T.Q.s. The idea behind I.T.Q.s is that if fishermen are granted a marketable stake in the catch they will have a greater economic interest in preserving it.

M.P.A.s, smart aquaculture, and I.T.Q.s—these are all worthy proposals that, if instituted on a large enough scale, would probably make a difference. As Roberts notes, it is in “everyone’s interest” to take the steps needed to prevent an ocean-wide slide into slime. But it is also in everyone’s interest to save the Atlantic bluefin tuna. Still, it is being fished to the edge of extinction, which is why a hopeful ending is not always the most convincing one.
The stakes ($$$) are likely to be a lot higher in finance ... plus finance in the US is so NY centric bullying would likely be more effective; these sort of "would it be worth their while to sue?" questions are where you'd definitely want to talk to a lawyer. Also California's law doesn't cover the highest levels of companies like owners.
Right, and by the third or fourth day, we all knew who it was. It was just too easy to pick out: this person's profile had too much in common with the person behind it (paintball team, Facebook fan of that person's company page, etc). Some of us who were asked to connect before "she" had any followers, spotted it right away.
Three other points:

1)
The other reason why Iraq was moral was that the sanctions in Iraq from 1991-2003 were actually more genocidal than the US invasion of 2003. If the invasion was a precondition to end the sanctions, it was less bad than allowing them to continue. (Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died due to sanctions! Plus, huge quality of life impairment)

2)
The number of civilians killed in Afghanistan is tricky.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_of_the_War_... is a decent compilation

In the wikileaks information, there were about 200 civilian deaths reported from US ground actions. On top of that, there were many due to air strikes. The estimates various sources publish are about 5-10k direct deaths, and up to 30k indirect deaths. That is 10x less than during the Afghan civil war of the 1990s, and far less (2+ orders of magnitude) than the Soviet invasion.

3)
If I lived in South Sudan, Somalia, or Eastern Congo, I would welcome a US/international invasion and occupation, even if it meant a 5-10% chance of death for me of my family.
Javascript(and jquery) templating on serverside and client side - with code.
Ask HN: How should I secure virtual machines on developer laptops?
I love having Ubuntu installed on a VMWare Fusion virtual machine on my Mac for development. It means I can code anywhere I take my laptop. I generally work off a data snapshot with any user details sanitized, but I worry about what would happen if my laptop were stolen. I understand that 99.99% of all laptop thefts would result in a quick formatting, but I'd love a solution that doesn't leave my codebase floating around.

My current line of thinking is an encrypted root partition on the virtual machine and then making sure that I shut down my virtual machine rather than simply suspending it.

Any other brilliant ideas?
few years of practice you can start to think about launching a cool project on your own

It's unlikely that someone who doesn't know how to program would be aspiring to do startup that takes a few years of practice in programming.
Except what do fish eat? Other fish / sea life - so then we basically need to breed an ocean full of sea life in a farm in order to eat the fish - yes it can be managed better, but not sure that will mean it becomes cheaper.

I don't think it's that simple
Google or not, Gmail or not, writing a 440KLOC Javascript server-side program seems like a really bad idea to me.
Most new games I see have cleverly disguised the tutorial as the first few levels (probably because everyone skips them).

Instead of explicitly introducing concepts, concepts are introduced in-game one by one. There's a gentle ramp-up, and the goal is to have the player unaware that they're playing a tutorial.

It's very tricky to get the right balance between teaching and action in the first few levels.

Examples of games where the tutorial is the first few levels (off the top of my head): Halo, Portal, Half Life 2
6 lessons that Nokia learned from Apple
Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Ubuntu 10.04
There is a story that one of the designers of Java was pushing very hard in favour of Java references being non-nullable by default. But Gosling rejected the idea claiming that it would be too confusing for programmers and it would kill any chances of Java achieving popularity.

Here is a relevant paper, "Non-null References by Default in Java: Alleviating the Nullity Annotation Burden":

http://www.springerlink.com/content/f197143t80671627/

"we conducted an empirical study of 5 open source projects (including the Eclipse 3.3 JDT Core) totaling over 700 KLOC. The results allow us to confirm that in Java programs, at least 2/3 of declarations of reference types are meant to be non-null, by design."
Quantum mechanics is objectively observable, consciousness is not. It's a very different kind of beast, therefore.
One more FYI: people from San Francisco rarely, if ever, refer to it as anything else but San Francisco, at least when spoken. E.g. they would not say "SF" out loud, and will never, ever, say "San Fran."
I'd certainly be interested - I love enterprise IT. I currently work as a developer in a small consultancy working on that kind of stuff.

If your internal app dev group allows telecommute and you have any openings - let me know :)
good point IMHO, the idea of using the non exactly efficient encoding of one file per key is not just because the idea is based on large values, but also because this allows to exploit filesystem-level things.

For instance if you happen to have a distributed filesystem running, the effect is to have a distributed DB.
I find it interesting that goto is in the examples. I'm not deeply familiar with program theory and computability, but I thought goto made the program impossible both to reason about and to verify its correctness. Why would one include it in a new programming language? Are there really valid uses of it? I don't think the factorial example here is a good use - he basically used it as a while(true) infinite loop. However, I also couldn't tell you with accuracy why it might be bad here other than the ingrained mentality of goto=evil.
According to the press conference with Julian Assange 91,000 is the total number and includes the 15,000 not yet released, i.e. they have released 76,000 documents.
Greylock’s Henry McCance On Why Firm Moved to CA and How Boston Needs Its Google
NASA unveils global Martian map
By "games like these" I meant "games so lovingly and artfully created", but thanks for the piece of history, it was really interesting to read...
... and if you do, check out the Long Now Museum nearby. http://longnow.org/contact/
The link is dead obvious: subliminal messaging. Not in a tinfoil-hat-CIA way, but in a product placement kind of way. It's dead obvious that that's very valuable (in a $ sense) science!
Like any technical measure, dynamic linking comes in good and bad flavors.

I generally like the idea of proper software libraries, shared code, and the one-place-to-fix-them-all mentality. For many things, that's the way it fits. However, what I don't like is the tendency to turn nearly everything into a library, even within a single program. For example, check out the directory /usr/lib/firefox-3; on my setup there are 15 different shared objects—all used by the one single executable. The same goes for a program that's merely a driver for a set of custom shared objects. And for frameworks such as Gnome: I'm pretty sure gedit* doesn't have to depend on 57 shared objects like mine does.

Dynamic linkage is good for linking through solid APIs. Like libc. Or OpenGL. Maybe some high-level compositions of Gnome or other desktop stuff. Generally, such stuff that rarely changes; stuff where the gestation period between version N and N+1 is years. However, dynamic linkage is bad for merely splitting code into manageable chunks. For that, just use static libraries for that and link them all together.
∀ is the standard symbol for the universal quantifier: some proposition is true for all elements in the universe being quantified over. This is stated explicitly in the paper: "The type given for runST above is implicitly universally quantified over both s and a."

We could thus expand the type given for runST as follows: runST is a function which, for every instance of the type a, and every instance of the type s, accepts a state transformer (with type ST s a) and returns a value of type a.

If you want to attain a better understanding of the logical concepts and notation used in the article, try getting hold of an introductory logic text. I recommend Enderton's 'A Mathematical Introduction to Logic'.

http://www.math.ucla.edu/~hbe/amil/index.html
How so? What kind of productive capacity does Switzerland have? Their have cheese, watches and cuckoo's clocks. And the finance industry obviously, but only because of their secrecy towards the tax agencies of other countries, which is going to go away in the next decade or so. So what kind of logical reasoning can lead to the conclusion that a country whose only asset is a bunch of mountains where people can ski is going to fare so much better than a country that has everything it needs to be self-sufficient (arable land, oil and other resources, 2 coasts, the most advanced technology in the world, a huge work force), plus a government that actually supports rather than just pays lip service to capitalism, the only system proven to lead to economic prosperity?

(I'm not an American and I won't say that all that the US does is great and fine but come on, if you're going to make outrageous statements you'll have to at least back them up a little, especially on a site where (I hope) people pride themselves on their rationality).
Some of it is:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/interactive/2010/ju...
If company X is a big company, they know better than you the price there can pay for your product. So you need someone than can estimate that number, that is not what is the value of your product but what is the highest price they would pay for your product.

If you can't contact anybody to make this estimate, you should do it yourself but that requires to know a lot about the company that is going to buy your product.
Version 0.3.0 adds collapsible comments.
Guys... It's IDG. It's not for hackers, but for PHBs.

"Google executive"... Come on...
Perhaps you could use a TrueCrypt encrypted volume, in an external disk (pendrive, USB disk), and mount the volume from within the Ubuntu Virtual Machine.
I hardly ever play tutorials - mostly because they are really boring.

However, I do have an 11 year old son - I usually learn games by having him explain to me the bare minimum of controller commands and learning as I go after that.

If an 11 year old can't explain in 30 seconds enough to get me started in a game then I probably will get bored and go back to playing Halo 3 online.
That argument presupposes that you are taking a risk. However, that is the point under discussion: is it a risk? You could also consider it in a positive way: people that are put off by something as irrelevant as where they stay, that worry about comfort, are less likely to be a suitable candidate. There'll be more uncomfortable circumstances to deal with.

Of course, this is from my point of view: I presuppose that 'where you stay' is irrelevant, because I consider it irrelevant. If I have to sleep on a couch in the founder's living room, so be it. Perhaps you are right that one should best err on the safe side of caution by providing a hotel. Nobody's ever been fired for providing a hotel room :P
Did you read the linked article? As long as there is a FYO point, there's a market for moving that point downwards.

Also, I'm not aiming to kill Oracle overnight, I'm aiming at slowly chipping away at Oracles dominance. Right now there's a huge market for serving apps that for some reason are locked into Oracle, and are too expensive to re-write.
Hmm, I am reminded of that (dreadful) Star Trek movie where one of the characters says "we believe when you create a machine to do the work of a man you steal something from that man" (or something like that). So wrongheaded that I barely even know where to start, yet it seems that many people did and do really believe it. Of course it's only true if the "value" you create consists only of holding people to ransom. But that's not the way honest folk do business.
What? What are you arguing against? Are you saying that all deaths in war are unlawful? Because if you are you're obviously wrong. I guess you're trying to make a pacifist point trying to say that all deaths in war are immoral, but it's hard to tell.
The author did a good job of laying out the complexities of end of life care decisions. She did talk about how important it is to have these discussions in advance, but I don't think she emphasized enough how important it is to have the whole family involved in discussions.

A child who has discussed these issues with her parents, and makes the right decisions in accordance with her parents' wishes, still faces guilt and indecision when the end comes and it's time to let go. If you combine that with unsupportive and accusatory siblings, that guilt and second-guessing can continue for years after the parent dies.

It's important to make sure that all children are involved in the discussion, especially if they don't agree with each other and the parent, and are hostile to any decision to forego care. Communication is hard, and distances are long, and it's far too easy not to have these discussions with the dying relative far away. It takes effort and will to make these discussions happen, but they are necessary.
Yes, mIRC on windows xp or vista, backbone of military command and control. It is kind of sad. People in the operations center ("TOC") sit there monitoring HF radios and watching 2-8 mIRC windows for various networks (higher headquarters, medevac, artillery fires, etc.).

http://trout.snt.utwente.nl/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=sh...

http://ircreport.com/blog/20100405170/armed-forces-using-mir...

They also do a lot of crappy conferences using the Adobe desktop VTC product (I think branded as Acrobat), and of course HUGE volumes of Microsoft PowerPoint. Email is sent out as attached powerpoints containing 2-3 lines of text, often, rather than a simple text email.

It is quite possibly the worst IT environment I can imagine.

The irony here is that the information in the wikileaks release (especially on the Guardian site) is now vastly better organized and more accessible than it ever was internally to the military!

http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/02/17/34550-a-tactical-comman...

http://books.google.com/books?id=VQQqDxmpG9IC&pg=PA34...

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Decentralized+fires+in+Afghani...

http://www.scribd.com/doc/1440756/US-Air-Force-AFD070205069
I'm pushing a lot of film criticisms onto my mind's stack of 'possibly groundless convictions' these days. I keep seeing complaints that
a) a good film needs you to 'care' about the characters who must have 'emotional depth' through 'development'
b) a good film should not be pre-occupied with 'exposition' or 'explaining' what is happening

but... says who? They sound like half-baked ideas that arm-chair movie critics have internalized and regurgitate at the slightest opportunity.

I was so much more interested in watching Nolan introduce more elegant but mind-bending ideas about the mechanics of recursive dreaming and then manifesting them with spectacular action scenes, than I was interested in the missing 'character development' milieu like watching the protagonist play with his kids, have a normal domestic argument with his wife, become a workaholic etc. etc.

The characters explained their plans and problems because it made sense for them to do so (ie. it never felt contrived for the audience's sake), and the explanations in themselves were entertaining. Deeper thematic ideas were still tackled, like the central point of how the protagonist needed to untangle himself from his subconscious regrets/guilt before he was ready to have a real life with his children, just not in the usual sappy ways that we've seen thousands of times before. And I refuse to accept that the film was confusing -- yes there were a couple of details that we discussed on the way home from the cinema but satisfactory explanations were forthcoming. All films have details like that, with Inception they're more fun to figure out.
Yes, this will be great if it happens! The manufacturer is still violating GPL, but for practical purposes it is excellent. It looks like VIA did nearly all the software development on the WM8505 devices, anyhow.

Pandigital have also promised source "will be available" so hopefully they'll hurry up and get on that too...
I use Mustache and like it very much, only I find that I wish it offered support for a few of the features in Django templates such as dot notation.

I was referring to the auto-escaping as well as to the inability to run arbitrary code inside a template (for all I know this feature is added to the newest versions, though)
Embracing the Web (in FOSS)
Or they can just move production to China.
Goto isn't inherently evil. It allows bad (and newbie) programmers to make spaghetti code. It is taught as 'evil' to prevent them from using it when it would produce ugly code.

Later, once you understand things, there are a few very rare times that it is legit to use it. Those few times can be handled without using it, though, and many programmers continue to avoid it out of habit or philosophy.

As for including it in his new language, it looks like it's basically C with some syntactical sugar. He didn't so much 'include' it as fail to remove it. He got it for free from C.
Dustin Curtis on The Setup
I don't see why the fact that it is a VM is a factor here, you should secure the HD of the laptop anyway. A VM allows you to do that twice, so it's better rather than worse, or am I missing something here ?

Have you considered sticking the sensitive data on a USB thumbdrive and removing that from the laptop when not in use ? That would be pretty cheap and very effective.
goto can be useful for "alarm exits". The linux kernel uses them a lot. See the bottom of this thread for some pseudo code http://kerneltrap.org/node/553/2131
Why does a more eloquent word choice say something about a man's morals? Why is the 'isn't true anymore' variety morally superior to the other one?
I'm sorry, but your argument still seems diffuse to me. "Not an object", "anything in there"... these are terms so vague that anything we say about them could stand as irrefutable.

Your own feelings about your consciousness are unimportant to define consciousness. It's definitely irrelevant that you can't "experience" how other people feel the colour yellow, we still regard it as observable. The only difference is that we can define "yellow" as electromagnetic radiation with certain wavelengths, whereas we'll have to wait a bit to get an equally satisfactory definition for consciousness.

We shouldn't attribute a special epistemological status to the brain/mind/consciousness just because it's complex and we don't know it very well and just because it's ours.
It sounds great when you keep debt and lending in zero-sum. Problem is, the numbers don't add up anymore, and they haven't been for quite some time.
Old School Color Cycling with HTML5 - Not just for 8 bit games anymore
works for me too. Especially useful the pomodoro log: you can see instantly what you did during the day. If you are supposed to work and you only accomplish 3 pomodori today, that will convince you to achieve more tomorrow.
Pretty much. GPL 3(c) - I think - says that provided you got a binary version with an attached notice telling you where to go to get the source code, you can redistribute the same binary unmodified with the same notice.
Actually I would say the opposite. The film wastes no time talking about how the dream-sharing technology works, there's no Star Trek style technobabble. The audience is simply presented with a world in which this technology is taken for granted, and straight on with the story.
Sure, but in the factorial example, Clay uses goto to express iteration: http://bitbucket.org/kssreeram/clay/src/b1df8340f2b4/test/fa...
Why Flowdock migrated from Cassandra to MongoDB
This was exactly how I felt when I left the cinema. Although it was a good film, I felt the execution of the idea felt sloppy. It had promise to be truly amazing, but often purposely became confusing in the aim of seeming to be clever.

I think in Inception they took things too far, multiple dream levels, weird limbo states, etc. They could've just built a far simpler movie and it would've flowed a lot better.

It's comparable to software. Often the most enjoyable user experience is one with very few features executed extremely well. Compared to a piece of software with every single feature or idea plugged in, executed fairly sloppily.

Inception was lucky it had a great core concept, cast and good effects to hold up for the on going confusion throughout the film.

The comparison I feel is Matrix compared to Existence, where 'Existence' in this scenario is Inception.
Oh, brother, that first anecdote really got to me. How the hell are you supposed to let go of life when you just brought a child into the world?
I'm not surprised that this method of writing didn't catch on, since it could be quite confusing. It would tend to minimize saccade distances when reading, but the down side is that you need to memorize 2N characters (normal and mirrored versions) plus you also need to memorize which is the current reading direction.
Hi folks, I'm the author of Clay. There aren't any docs ready yet, but I'll try to answer whatever questions I can. Also, there's a long thread over at reddit with many interesting questions.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ctmxx/the_clay_...