skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Abstract of "Should Human Beings Have Sex?"

Abstract/Extract
Since the first sex reassignment operations were performed, individual sex has come to be, to some extent at least, a technological artifact. The existence of sperm sorting technology, and of prenatal determination of fetal sex via ultrasound along with the option of termination, means that we now have the power to choose the sex of our children. An influential contemporary line of thought about medical ethics suggests that we should use technology to serve the welfare of individuals and to remove limitations on the opportunities available to them. I argue that, if these are our goals, we may do well to move towards a “post sex” humanity. Until we have the technology to produce genuine hermaphrodites, the most efficient way to do this is to use sex selection technology to ensure that only girl children are born. There are significant restrictions on the opportunities available to men, around gestation, childbirth, and breast-feeding, which will be extremely difficult to overcome via social or technological mechanisms for the foreseeable future. Women also have longer life expectancies than men. Girl babies therefore have a significantly more “open” future than boy babies. Resisting the conclusion that we should ensure that all children are born the same sex will require insisting that sexual difference is natural to human beings and that we should not use technology to reshape humanity beyond certain natural limits. The real concern of my paper, then, is the moral significance of the idea of a normal human body in modern medicine.
Project Vigilant and the government/corporate destruction of privacy
he is not. for example, i know for a fact that denmark as a country will not accept equipment for the sport of fencing (they are not actually dangerous blades, all are totally safe) under the premise that they appear to be weapons.
I rather enjoyed the article, but the fact that:

* The site isn't https by default
* Going to https://www.blueleaf.com (or non-www) shows an untrusted warning in Firefox

made me weary of signing up. It looks like a beautiful service, but any website handling real money or financial information should be secure by default.
Scott Adams: First Impressions
Unethical? Get yourself a dictionary. While you look up that word, also look up the words probationary and period if you are in Europe and employment, at and will if in US.
I'm not sure why you are surprised. Huge parts of the study of Law is the study of oratory, and that's to what Godwin's Lax refers. Given that the internet must be amongst the most interesting places for a lawyer to be involved, I'm actually surprised that more lawyers aren't more heavily involved in the subculture.
DDDDRIBBBLED: the awkward love child of dribbble and FFFFOUND
There was something fishy about that Forbes Project Vigilant story the other day, Greenwald followed up, quite shocking really.
> What Europe can be quite proud of is how not only war was avoided during the last decades but also that war was made less likely over the decades.

Umm, the credit goes to US occupation of Germany and tension with the USSR.

Europe has yet to handle a reasonable problem on its own.
so your argument is: my programming language's concepts make it easier to read as long as you use them correctly, and all of MY friends write the same way anyway so our language is SUPER easy to read.

breaking news: it's not. the problem with your argument is you're not c++ programmer, and you saw this post on hacker news and decided to come here tell us how much better whatever language you use is to C++.

you don't seem to consider that this language is the way it is for very specific reasons. I'm trying to say that this article is VERY poorly written with very biased opinions and refuses to look at the language as whole.

I'm not saying C++ is the EASIEST language to read, it's not. And his examples could have passed off as hard to read for ANY LANGAUGE. honestly? bar = foo(bla); like who the fuck writes like that anyway?

Readability is the trade off the C++ standards committee will always make because readability will come in the way of the things most important to the language (C compatibility, speed, high level functionality) but that doesn't mean you get to take a dump on your keyboard and click the send button.

if you don't understand the issues at stake then don't release you diatribe into the conversation. C++ isn't python, or C or Ruby nor is it supposed to be. just accept it.
Agree. His MacBook Pro configuration costs a whopping $3,899.00.
Poll: A/S/L? Let's chat!
A little rule engine (in Scheme), on top of which I can then build interactive fiction, card games, etc.
Is this really necessary? Everyone knows that all the tech sites out there are sausagefests. There's no need to reiterate that point.
As someone who has gone to college and worked in a college, I couldn't agree more. It was great to work there as a staff member (IT), but as an adjunct professor, the pay was laughably low and not even close to worth it. Having a large amount of debt now is a burden, but bearable because I went into a good field. However, if I was a student today, just a decade later, I'd be taking on twice the amount of detb, and I'm not sure that'd be worth it.
I agree. I recently unsubscribed from Metric Mail because I didn't want to look at PDFs of my analytics. I want them right in the email. Once you push that feature I'll likely resubscribe!
I like this podcast too. I don't understand why people are complaining here. Yes, I know listening takes more time than reading. Yes, I can also read much faster than listening. But there's a demand for podcasts from HN folks (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:news.ycombinat...). If you don't like podcasts just don't listen to them.

I don't have a long commute (I live 5 minutes from my job) but I'm starting to get in the mode to listen to podcasts. After staring at a computer screen for long hours, it's nice to get information without having to use my eyes. Also, I can listen to it when I'm doing house chores, working out, or going for a walk.

One of the guys from the podcasts (Rob Walling) has written a book, "Start Small, Stay Small", that is pretty good:

http://www.startupbook.net/

Here's the TOC:

01 | The Chasm Between Developer and Entrepreneur
39 | Why Niches are the Name of the Game
91 | Your Product
113 | Building a Killer Sales Website
145 | Startup Marketing
165 | Virtual Assistants and Outsourcing
181 | Grow it or Start Over
201 | Postlude

I'm in no way affiliated with them.

edit: fix formatting.

edit2: fix the author's name.
For sure iPhone 2Gs are being thrown out at this point. But are Android phones' stale dates any better? They much much worse.
Sport people have short half-life.
I think the writer's point at the end about hardware migration is an undersung point about the Mac experience. Being able to transfer your files, apps, your whole OS configuration experience from your old computer to a new one is painless and has been for quite some time.

I always feel like I need to set aside a day or two when I have to do something similar to a Windows system. Has that improved with Windows 7?
I'm a huge, huge fan of #3 (treating content as something more than blog posts). Calling something a blog post is a lot like calling something a newspaper article: it gives you an instantaneous framing for the value of it. That framing is not the one you desire in most cases.

You'd be freaking amazed how much the presentation of something influences how much people trust it, how long it's shelf life lasts, and whether it spreads. This includes transparently superficial bits like whether it has a decent logo or illustration accompanying it or whether you date the content. (Don't date evergreen content! It only compromises perceived value to know that your article about elementary school arithmetic was first published in 1993. Addition hasn't freaking changed!)
This - it seems like Apple's work on iOS has paid off with perfect integration with Exchange server. This is a welcome thing that OS/X didn't even have before Snow Leopard.
if you're going vim try these plugins:

NERD_tree

minibufexplorer

command-t

good choices not only for books but also for coding.
exact phrase

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=+%22I+am+so+bored%22
My thought as well. People talk a lot about how social networking services tend to leak information and violate privacy. Scraping those services for your own business purposes just seems shady, especially when done through a third party.

If being an influencer and having a lot of Twitter followers is what gets a potential user beyond the velvet rope before everyone else, then why not be overt about it and let them volunteer that info?
Not to be a pedant, but that's 'wary' and not 'weary'. :)
Evil circle of ...

Please stop. This is what every single company on the planet does. Few things are inter compatible and you'd be naive to hope that they would. Apple has solutions (implementations) to a problem which are different to everyone else's.
Everywhere mid-management strategy is Heads I Win. Tails You Lose.
The one thing you have to remember about voluntary response polls is that they tell you essentially nothing about the underlying reality in the population of interest.

http://mrho.net/blog/?p=782

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517143

http://books.google.com/books?id=u_rpJMy8R3EC&pg=PA15...

The classic example in any good statistics textbook is the Literary Digest poll to predict the outcome of the 1936 presidential election in the United States.

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

The poll failed despite a huge sample size and high response rate. The failure of prediction was because of convenience sampling and response bias.
The "intellectual property" of art is a blip. For thousands of years, people have made art. Currently, we are in the odd situation where the is value in the idea alone, and the artists are not selling art, but selling instructions. It seems we're heading back towards the artists selling actual art again.

Frankly, I'm kind of on the fence about this. It seems like a nice idea, that one can build a business on selling ideas on the internet, and kind of callous that people no longer sufficently value it.

But then I suppose no-one worries how a verbal storyteller is to make a living in this age of cheap newspapers, or war painters in the age of digital photography. Sewing instruction salesmen seem destined to go the same way.
I'm actually going to disagree with the "don't date evergreen content", at least for us. Because we're writing about financial information, we're going to datestamp revisions because we want someone who comes to us via Google/Bing/DDG to know that we're on top of changes to the law/investment environment/etc.

The only reason we haven't yet is because I haven't figured out a way to have it appended automagically to Pages in WordPress.
In a market full of speculators that is true. I think the money manager is talking about people who are moving money out of the market because they want to retire, medical expenses, income, etc.
> That's one of the things I miss most about New England, having moved out to California. Here, everything is cookie-cutter suburbia, built in a hurry during the 70s and 80s.

San Jose was founded in 1776. The houses in my neighborhood were built in 190x, mine in 1902.

All of the "mission" cities date from about that time. They're all full of old buildings. (Yes, there are Victorians in Monterey.) Heck, the Sacramento and Central Valley are full of towns that date from the 1850s.

Don't confuse Palo Alto with California.
Preview HN: match-making site for food
usablehealth.com is my startup that I've been working on for the past year or so. We're funded through research grants from Georgia Tech. We've also partnered with restaurants, gyms, and self-insured employers and health systems. Our first official launch is Aug 9, with our second Sept 1.

Our algorithm uses some key metrics about you (age, height, weight, activity level) to give you the optimal meals from your favorite restaurants that will help you achieve your health goals. We also allow you to choose a starting meal, and then swap that meal out for something healthier. These recommendations are something we call "Health-Based Meal Swaps". We are trying to become the Netflix or Amazon of meal recommendations.

I want to give the HN community a preview before we launch. You can do this two ways, by going to http://usablehealth.com and clicking on 'Sign up for free' with the promo code 'hackernews' or you can sign in right away with a generic profile with username 'hacker' password 'news1'. This promo code and test user will be removed at the end of this week.

We would love your feedback about anything on the site. There is a 'Feedback' tab on the right of every page after you sign in, or you can send me an email at andre at usablehealth dot com.

Thanks, and we look forward to your feedback.
Want not, waste not.
Why would you insist on a homepage, with no secure information or login form whatsoever, have SSL security on it? Neither Quicken nor Mint do this on THEIR home pages.
Female hackers are only present in SyFy Movies, TV Shows and books.
I keep seeing this...misconception? I don't know what to call it, over most comments. The article doesn't talk about optimizations. It talks about design decisions. Someone actually took the time to sit down, ponder what kind of workloads will be handled by his application, came across an interesting dilemma, measured and tested them both, and finally reached an educated conclusion.

That right there is how you correctly choose how to implement things, contrary to popular belief. Think first, write code later.
Here's to hope for change when men stop constantly reminding them of it. And respect them for their talents, not their anatomical features.
HTTPS for the marketing site increases page load times; there's no real reason to force people just browsing by to a secured server. The app itself, of course, is secure; it's just on a different subdomain: https://secure.blueleaf.com/signin

My todo for today (assuming my cold doesn't lay me low) is to write about our approach to security.
Quebec City is also quite "old world".
"I think there's a good argument to be made that companies like Google know what to do with the money they're making."

There's a good argument that a company like Microsoft doesn't anymore, which is why they were pretty much forced to pay out a big dividend a few years back. Just to give an example at the opposite end of the corporate life cycle.

Just found this article suggesting it's still an issue:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-22/microsoft-may-use-c...
New recycled clothing line. Woo.
am I the only one who sees a flaw in the math here? I mean I wasn't a math major in college, but i did take financial math, and think he's forgetting a key thing called compound interest.
Yes, indicative of positive mutual feedback, not a round area of slow and sticky fluid flow:) Thanks.
Cooking preceded agriculture in the development of the ancestral line to Homo sapiens by hundreds of thousands of years.
"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild's need to credentialize its members."

A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocational training programs, but I've never seen such dismissal of the work produced by academia in such a high profile outlet, with no evidence to back it up whatsoever.

EDIT: Reading further, I see that they did look more closely.. at sociology journals. Why the strange choice? Biology, computing, medicine, physics not interesting enough?
Clients that Care
> Except people rarely die before breeding age from smoking (ever?), so no effect.

Grandparents provide some survival and family size benefits.
I'm drastically simplifying the setup process for OurDoings Dropbox integration. If you use Dropbox, just share a folder with box@ourdoings.com to try it.
Rather than mod you down : 64bit servers is where it was at. All those AMD64s in the data centre with >4Gbs RAM

XP64 was crippled by bad drivers.
The cost model to this is proven - there are MMOs that operate this way already, with monthly subscriptions but no upfront cost. EVE Online works like this - you start with a free trial for 21 days, then pay for each 30 days of access to the server. There are optional boxsets, but with those you are essentially paying for the included 60 days of access and some physical items, rather than the game.
[citation needed] It's important to be clear what people are talking about when they mention epigenetics. What examples did you have in mind?
Doctorow's First Law
Keep calm & carry on: What you didn't know about the reddit story
The server doesn't need multiple IPs to handle > 65535 connections. All the server connections to a given IP are to the same port. For a given client, the unique key for an http connection is (client-ip, PORT, server-ip, 80). The only number that can vary is PORT, and that's a value on the client. So, the client is limited to 65535 connections to the server. But, a second client could also have another 65K connections to the same server-ip:port.

edit: You may be limited by number of open sockets or file handles. It's likely a per-process limit. Google or some linux guru could help you track down what limit it actually is, but it's not the number of server ports available. It might be a number you could raise.
Yeah, nutrition is funny with all the conflicting advice. I did some looking into it and the rates of mercury poisoning are extraordinary low - fish-eating societies like Okinawa and Japan tend to be quite healthy and long-lived, and it takes eating an immense amount of fish to get mercury poisoning (something crazy like 5 servings/day, if memory serves). I feel pretty comfortable eating 1-3 servings of fish maybe 3-4 days per week, chicken or no meat on the other days.
> increased energy intake and brain size

Human brains have shrunk since the establishment of agriculture. Brains are smaller now than during even the middle ages.
Also notice, time is plotted on a log scale.
i found this review more informative than the recent post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1559480 about the interview with the authors in the atlantic magazine

what the authors are saying is true in general for any -bureaucracy- and education is the oldest and biggest existing bureaucracy even after it divided itself into secular and religious education in the 18th century

any bureaucracy must -grow- continually to perpetuate itself - education does this by making education longer and longer
> that when you try to correct them

Why are you trying to correct them?
> No it doesn't. Linux, OS X and Windows all use memory not used by apps to cache storage (and other things).

That's a very blanket statement for a segment of the market that covers only about 5-10% of desktops.
Edit your theme's page.php to include something similar to:

Last modified <?php the_modified_time('F d, y') ?>

So your understanding of evergreen content and my understanding are a little different. I agree, if I covered topics where my advice would get stale, I would prefer to let people know that I have updated the advice recently so that it was not stale. I just disagree that writing pieces which are capable of getting stale is a good use of my time, since I am time- and resource-constrained.

Writing anything which could go stale is time debt for the future, since I will have to rewrite later, which is extra work for rather little marginal benefit. Worse, it means I'll have to periodically review and rethink everything I've ever published to see whether it needs updating, which is extra work with no benefit that gets progressively more expensive over time as I grow my little content forest.

I think there are virtually infinite topics in investing which are truly evergreen, where you could let the article sit for a hundred years and never need to touch it again. "What is a preferred stock?" is one. "Should I invest in mutual funds managed by a human being?" is another, though that is more controversial. (cough No. cough)

So anyhow, plant evergreens.
http://www.hackerblogs.com

Working on hackers white pages, events, jobs, consulting, startups database and stuff like that.
The demise of OCaml?
This is a cool project, throw in an iPhone app and improve the design/UI a bit and I can see it getting even more traction.
Oh God yes, I can't agree with this more. My wife worked as an adjunct at Indiana University, killing herself with a 15-hour load for eight thousand bucks while the president of the university, who arguably contributes nothing whatsoever, earned a cool $425,000 and had a free luxury house on campus.

This year, she's got a real job (for a year as a visiting professor) for $35K and benefits; it's going to feel like we're rolling in cash. This is after 30 years of education, including a doctorate in theoretical physics.

The American university system may well have jumped the shark.
I think that one of the interesting areas for Elo-type ratings is in online video games. Especially where teams are involved. How do you rate a single player based on what they did in a team game?
America's supposed moral superiority depended quite a bit on believing the rhetoric and ignoring both our foreign policy (support for anti-democratic forces in Iran, Iraq, Central & South America, Africa) and our internal problems (civil rights, income inequality).
Another theory:

"How much intelligence does it take to sneak up on a leaf?"
- Larry Niven (The Ringworld Engineers)
Exactly, I could live in a world you describe and be perfectly happy.

I could not live in a world where MPAA gets their will and be perfectly happy.
Fair enough. Exchange in particular seems to be a big deal. So maybe this is a nice example of the "halo" effect: people see exchange working on their newfangled iOS devices and realize it will work on Macs, with the added bonus that it's easier to sync those newfangled devices to Macs.

This effect also seems to be working on Apple, not just it's customers: selling mobile devices seems to be making Apple more enterprise friendly, so that they work more seriously on things like Exchange support.
Arguably, yes, which is a reason we have such a mess and situations like WikiLeaks. Former presidential candidate, Congressman Ron Paul advocates sensible advice saying that if the people want a war, then declare one; fight it, win it, then come home; when you go to war over resolutions the wars don't end. If John McCain had won the presidency, for example, he was quoted as saying he didn't care if we were in Iraq for the next 100 years.
No, no, it's just the incredibly delightful fact that Godwin's Law was drafted by a real live lawyer.
> They didn't develop civilisation

They didn't make very many durable stone structures. That's about all we know. The complexity and quality of their societies may have generally exceeded ours.

We do know they had transcontinental trading routes and fairly advanced astronomy, in Europe at least.
There have been a lot of articles recently attacking higher education. Maybe there's some merit there, but one might also ask 'who is served by denegrating higher education as an option for the people? who benefits by a less educated public?'
A new WordPress framework for a custom themes shop I'm building.