skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. It's possible that right now we are living in a simulation that traps all our senses into believing this right here is 'reality'.

2. As long as there is even a single component of humanity(a physical brain, for instance) that remains in contact with today's world, humanity of the type depicted in your comment cannot fully accept "the virtual world" as reality.

For humanity to completely 'believe' that virtual world to be 'real', humanity will have to cut all ties to this world and live as 'pure' virtual entities. Not impossible, and as noted in 1, the 'reality' we accept and live with today was probably a 'virtual world' in some other 'reality'.
> if in advance of the behavior, you intend to partake moderately, and in the event you consistently overindulge, and after the fact you regret your excess, then something about this behavior is bad.

(This is not at all intended to be a joke:) In many cultures, homosexual activity would meet this criteria. There are many social and psychological reasons for guilt to manifest itself, and I don't think that these alone form a robust definition of badness.

Now I don't mean to trivialize those who really struggle with, say, reading HN or Reddit or playing WoW.

But I do think that a lot of the talk about internet "addiction" is really a misunderstood type of burnout. I consider it totally normal to "waste" 1-3 hours each day, and I have no impulse to blame Reddit. If it wasn't the internet, it would be something else. There's simply a finite amount of time that I can spend being productive.

And it comes in waves. Sometimes, coming off a particularly grueling schedule, I can't get anything done for a week or more. Is this bad? I think it's pretty normal. It's a result of pushing myself past my production limit, building up a "productive" debt. I just need some time to recharge.

There's even some research to back up this view. See Galliot et al: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17279852

So again, not to trivialize long-term WoW players' addiction, but I am regularly unproductive for a few hours a day, at times for a week or more, and feel no guilt or regret. Is this addiction? Is this bad? Maybe I'm just in denial, but I sort of doubt it.
Chief of Box.net Keeps a Few Tricks Up His Sleeve
London to Dublin is an 8-10 hour drive (including ferry service). Do people seriously get on airplanes to go that kind of distance?
I wish google would just implement a way to add a list of blocked domains to your search preferences. Then I'd never have to see crap from mahalo, expertsexchange, or the like ever again.

A way to opt-in to using a community managed list of bad domains would be even better.
other than "So much has changed since 2.x," I personally think it would be great for you explain why "practically every Rails Developer" should jump in to 3.0.

Your comment is a given, right?, but other than to state the obvious, I'm curious as to your personal reasonings regarding this release.
This is one of the issues with overly strong and long IP policies: Humans aren't required to license IP out the wazoo.
It didn't work though. I always ended up slipping into using the Internet on my work computer. Even after I bought a new computer, nicer than my work computer, for using the Internet. So now I've gone back to one computer, which I basically treat as radioactive and have exiled to a corner of the room. I should add a warning notice to that essay.

Edit: Added one.
It is a good thing we have smartphones.
Discussion: What if College Tenure Dies?
Based on that post they seem pretty equal. PHP comes out as slightly ahead on web development with Python being more general purpose.

In a nutshell, not an especially useful post.
Except you can't bribe the TSA, nor are they influenced by how beautiful or "cool" you are.
Benjamin Franklin's Essay on Daylight Savings
thanks, i put that in.

the blinky body toggle was pretty cool to see though :)
The US is still the world's largest manufacturer, by a hair:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_country_has_the_largest_manuf...
10 Mistakes You'll Make When Starting a Business
Really? I recently wrote a framework to do networking with Lua. The network code itself is event based, but each TCP connection is handled by a Lua coroutine which makes it easy to write straightforward code such as:

function main(socket)
io.stdout:write("connection from " .. tostring(socket))
while(true)
local cmd = string.upper(socket:read())
if cmd == "SHOW" then
socket:write("show me some stuff\n")
elseif cmd == "PING" then
for i = 1 , 15 do
socket:write(".")
socket:sleep(1)
end
socket:write("\n")
elseif cmd == "QUIT" then
socket:write("Good bye\n");
return
elseif cmd == nil then
return
end
end
end

Makes writing simple servers nice and easy.
Inc. Magazine goes local for business meccas
The Producer, the Librarian, and the Promise-Breaker
The nice thing about facets is that you can include just the items you're interested in. You don't need to pull in every method defined in the library.
Quintura Releases Visual Search App for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch
SGN switched their core focus from Facebook games to iPhone games in mid 2008. At that time, they droped support for all of their Facebook properties except (fluff)Friends. Games on the Facebook platform are doomed to rapid traffic loss without constant adaptation and viral tuning. Even with it, user retention is hard.

Facebook giveth and Facebook taketh away.
> Thanks to Intel, Apple's laptops need to add an extra graphics chip to their already-crowded motherboards.

Not precisely. In the latest generation of chips this is in on-die. Apple doesn't have to add Intel's integrated graphics to their motherboard, Intel ships all their chips with their integrated graphics cores inside them, sort of (but technically slightly different than) how they ship their chips with L2 caches inside them already.

Intel may well be being dicks about licensing, but to ask for a westmere i7 without Intel's integrated graphics is asking for them to spin a different die process. (Though they did do that for Apple once IIRC.)

Overall, the fact that it's there isn't a huge issue, people who don't like it just turn it off and use an off-package graphics card. I think this is more about the licensing issues than Intel needing to offer another die.
Consistent luck is still luck, and Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch are 2 out of millions. Likewise, 0.47 of people who bet it all on black at the roulette table are lucky, but 0.47^N of people who bet it all on black at the roulette table are consistently lucky.

Seriously though, there are real inefficiencies as well, and someone like Warren Buffett is probably exploiting them rather than being really lucky. (Also, I hasten to point out that Berkshire Hathaway currently invests by M&A'ing smaller companies, which is considerably less of an efficient market than the stock market, which is likely more efficient now than it was decades ago--and often, M&A'ing a company can be a value add.)
The New Ask.com is Here: What’s Your Question?
I read that as "that sort of tone is generally not accepted here in regards to the 37signals philosophy."
You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

This is a great line. Never seen it articulated quite as well.
Wow, you sound like Tim May reincarnated (although I guess technically he isn't dead).
I think you might be the definition of an OUTLIER at 6 foot 7 :)
Thank you so much! I've been seeking this for months.
Many of us are also gainfully employed/work in the "real world" ;)
Maybe a $0.50 CPM * 4 ad units/page * (1 - 0.25 adblock rate) * 14.3M/1000 = $21,450/day or ~7.83M/yr
Project Euler is a great start if you want a corpus of exercises with answers.
Yes! This is the pain and joy of truly living!
Re: wheat being the same as it ever was:

http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/in-search-of-wheat...

> What we call wheat today is quite different from the wheat of Biblical times. Emmer and einkorn wheat were the original grains harvested from wild growths, then cultivated. Triticum aestivum, the natural hybrid of emmer and goatgrass, also entered the picture, gradually replacing emmer and einkorn.

> The 25,000+ wheat strains now populating the farmlands of the world are considerably different from the bread wheat of Egyptians, different in gluten content, different in gluten structure, different in dozens of other non-gluten proteins, different in carbohydrate content. Modern wheat has been hybridized, introgressed, and back-bred to increase yield, make a shorter stalk in order to hold up to greater seed yield, along with many other characteristics. Much of the genetic work to create modern wheat strains are well-intended to feed the world, as well as to provide patent-protected seeds for agribusiness.

He goes on to try einkorn bread, and doesn't get the same reactions and BG rise that he does with regular bread. Search for 'einkorn' on that blog if you're curious.
It's true that the PIN would be stored in the send history and so we always include a reminder message after every payment transaction to erase the PIN.

However, human nature being what it is, we've built a few safeguards to mitigate the risk of a lost or stolen phone:

1) instant phone lock - once you realize that your phone is missing, you can instantly "lock" your XIPWIRE account online with the click of button. A locked account will not allow any payments to be made.

2) email receipts - after every payment transaction, the payer and payee receive a text notification and an email receipt. If you didn't realize your phone was missing, the email message would alert you that an unauthorized transaction just occurred and prompt you to lock your account.

3) account limits - per transaction and daily limits on person to person transfers prevent large sums of money from being transferred in a single transaction. Increasing the number of transactions to execute the fraud also increases the risk of the fraud being exposed.

4) bank account verification - in this example, for Carol to make use of the stolen funds, she would have had to link a bank account to her XIPWIRE account. The bank account details would need to be verified using a micro-deposit transaction. Knowing Carol's bank account information gives authorities the ability to trace the funds to a specific individual.

5) Instead of xipping the money to Carol, if Alice decided to make a purchase at a merchant that accepts XIPWIRE, the Security Photo Verification mechanism, which displays a photo of the XIPWIRE user initiating a payment on the merchant's POS system, would instantly alert the merchant that the someone other than the legitimate owner of the XIPWIRE account was attempting to make a purchase and would decline the transaction.

While fraud can never be eliminated, we believe that education and personal responsibility (i.e. deleting the PIN from your phone's send history) combined with multiple layers of protection can minimize the risk associated with a lost or stolen phone.
Heh, if only it was that easy to get a release of Rails to happen! I'd use that more often myself.

This release happened because we have a candidate that's close enough to release that we wanted to get it out.
I just put my thesis project online at github. The URL is http://github.com/davidkellis/stocktrader_clojure.

Also, I bought and read Way of the Turtle. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for the suggestion.
I think the reason it seems meaningless not to want to want air is that we're influenced the apparent impossibility of doing without it. But imagine if it actually were possible. E.g. if in some advanced future technology the blood could be oxygenated directly, or our brain states were transferred to some form of computer. Then it's reasonable to imagine someone not wanting to be tied to tedious, corporeal respiration.

I wouldn't call it bad to want air. It doesn't bother me to have to breathe, though to be honest I hadn't thought about it any more than a medieval peasant would have thought about the possibility of flying across the Atlantic. But I'd be annoyed if I were no longer able to fly across the Atlantic, and it's not inconceivable that someone in x years might be annoyed at having to breathe.
I'm not entirely sure that's true. Most active redditors I know, including myself, have reddit whitelisted on AdBlock.
While a lot of what's written in that article sounds fearfully familiar, I think he's taking it too far, by referring only to the most extreme forms of burn-out. Burn-out can be temporary and mild, and I suspect this defines most of the cases. For example, a few weeks of low productivity (not 0!) with a recovery within a month or so.
If they launch a non-x86 product and it becomes popular, lots of people use it and lots of apps are ported to it.
People might begin to wonder why they need an x86 in their netbook or tablet
There has been a lot of discussion of superstimuli on Less Wrong, here is an example that ties in fairly well with pg's essay Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization
http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...
Rails 3 is now done cooking from a feature perspective. That's why this release is a release candidate, not a beta or alpha.

Rails 3 is the way to go for new projects.
The big problem is the catch-22 - to get in you need investment from US investors, but that is nearly impossible to obtain without getting in. So you are stuck.

I would think an open-door policy that lets people with prima facie evidence of a legitimate startup come in for 1-2 years to try their hand would be hugely beneficial. You might require a letter of recommendation from an investor but not actual investment. If they haven't raised money or have revenue after that then the visa ends, and you might only be able to apply for it once every 5 years. I think this would enable a flood of talented entrepreneurs to come and give it a go with very little risk of abuse - coming to the US is a very expensive proposition if it is only going to last a year or two. Just the overheads of showing up are a pretty high barrier. And any person landing fresh is going to spend a lot of money in their first year and as an entrepreneur they are by definition not taking anybody's job. It really seems like a win-win.
bdr wrote ---

The second EBHN meetup is going to be this Wednesday, starting at 7:30, at the David Brower Center (http://bit.ly/9N82Kj)! We had a great turnout last time at Jupiter's, but decided the next one should be somewhere we could mingle more and bring out the laptops. So, thanks to Jose for offering to host at the Brower.

There will be (at least some) beer and pizza. RSVPs helpful but not required.
Superstimuli and the Collapse of Western Civilization (2007)
Have you reviewed their Terms of Usage before you put in your reviews?
No, the point is that Apple has to add an extra non-Intel GPU because the integrated Intel GPU sucks. What was a two-chip system (Core 2 Duo + NVidia 9400) is now a three-chip system (i5 + PM55 + NVidia GPU).
Hack Education
Active Support 3 offers piece meal inclusion. You can grab it all at once or bit by bit as you please.
Is Google using its search monopoly power like Microsoft to crush competitions? Where is DOJ when you need them?
The article is dated, but made a good read. Miller's thesis seems to be that the consumer and the gamer are en route to extinction, while the puritan and the luddite shall endure.

A key trend that supports his claim is the drastically lower birth rates in more developed countries - it appears that as consumerism and perhaps, indulgence, rise, children become more and more scarce. The data however, is incomplete. We have no endpoint data, and so we are merely speculating about the future.

My own freshly formed opinion is that the consumer will not go extinct, but be assimilated. As Islam, India, and China rise, the western consumer will mix in among them and become their descendants. They will move toward our consumerism, we will move toward their work ethic, their pragmatism.

In an interaction between 500 million and >3 Billion people, Newton's laws of motion apply as though we were free floating masses. At a higher resolution, 500 million is 300 million with several smaller groups floating around it, and each of the 3 billion is split many ways as well - the interaction will be complex and the outcome incalculable. I think it would be neat for someone to make a simulation of that sort.

Anyway, again, good link! I haven't read edge.org before.
Of all the fantasies I've ever heard which involve a hotel room, a comely young lady, fifteen thousand dollars and all-you-can-drink cranberry juice, that's the dullest, I'm sorry.
And when someone accumulates over 50% of other people's votes, they'd become dictator.
I've seen examples of this problem when working on legacy code. There is a huge temptation to look at a mess of if-statements, inconsistent architecture, and seemingly redundant code - and decide to rewrite it from scratch. Only to find out afterwards that you're also going to rediscover every edge-case, system quirk, and dirty data set.
The obvious solution is to abolish democracy and set up a specialized class of governors.
Yup. This is always why I've questioned "technological Singularity"-type events: even if we might be subjectively much happier, from the point of view of other alien species we'll basically have just smothered ourselves in a big blanket of grey goo (nee Computronium.) If we ever do manage to get out into the galaxy, I expect to see that the vast majority of planets with evidence of previous civilization (junk in orbit, etc.) are now big grey spheres that are too busy reveling to be interested in talking to us (but may consider eating us to add to their Maximum Revelry Potential.)
TANSTAAFL, or free wireless. Any time something is being offered for "free" you can be sure those that aren't using it are being ripped off for the benefit of those who are.
In practice I would draw the line at things that are mostly consumed by addicts. So I'd have no problem being a vintner, but I wouldn't want to be a heroin manufacturer, even if it were legal.

There are various edge cases you'd have to treat individually-- e.g. if the median user wasn't an addict but all your revenues came from the addicts. In that case, again, I probably wouldn't want to do it.
On the other hand, a lot of those people really are smug. I'm sure you've met the people this is a spoof of:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mention...
Given 1 and 2, it's possible that there is no such thing as "reality"—every simulation is just hosted within another simulation, in a directed cyclic graph (e.g. there is a simulation that eventually hosts one of the simulations above it—or, at least, a simulation quark-for-quark identical to it.)

And if you accept that, you're only a little way from proposing a basis to the existence of this graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesi... — that a simulation that "runs" another is really just "connecting" to the mathematical structure of the other simulation, and so you can actually be simultaneously hosted by 1, 2, N, or even zero parent realities, and still you'd exist.
I don't see your email in your profile, but mine is is my profile, and I'd love to test you app; it sounds potentially superb.
Both your and the previous reply indicate that the blanks I filled in (the "for all" and "derived from" symbols) were indeed as I suspected, and yes I understood the definition of runST to be as you describe it. But I still don't comprehend their discussion of how defining runST thusly somehow provides safety in the example they say it would automatically detect is disallowed.
I agree (I made the comment - that wasn't a quote from the article), but I wanted to clarify to ensure it didn't come across as snarky or unhelpful.
Organize tabs easily using Tab Candy version of Firefox
I don't know about Koreans, Indians/Chinese are NOT eligible for green-card lottery program.
AMD market cap: 5.4 B, Apple: 230 B. Apple can probably just buy AMD.
Put a 12-core ARM chip in a MBP and you may not notice the difference. I started out programming on the Acorn Archimedes (ARM4 - 8Mhz), and it wiped the floor with the PC-class 12MHz 80286 hardware available at the time ('89 ish). Maybe we'll come full circle and multi-core ARM chips will once again outperform the Intel competition.

With NEON, floating point performance is coming along, and Apple have invested heavily in getting Grand Central (multi-threading) accepted by app(lication) developers.

Cocoa apis are moving heavily towards blocks, and towards being architected with efficient exploitation of multiple cores. There are likely further changes, such as tagging enumerations with 'can-parallelize', that will further increase app performance.

I believe there is a WWDC 2010 session on how to make your code run into the future. I will watch that with interest to see if there are any more clues, but in truth, we probably already have them.
As I remarked in my own essay on the subject (linked by billswift below, keyword "superstimuli"), I don't think the problem comes from the edge cases. I think the problem is that if you make a product 5% more addictive than the competition, you can steal 80% of their customers, and this creates an incentive to make things more and more addictive well past the point where it starts to hurt the median customer significantly. The edge cases are just the canaries in the coal mine - the ones who are hurt blatantly, visibly, and undeniably.
A Retrospective on SEDA
Do you have evidence that dynamic language have less overall development cost?
If you go to Braintree, you see this on the web site:

http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/services/merchant-a...
Bundled Services – Merchant Account, Payment Gateway, Credit Card Storage and Recurring Billing

Meaning they do offer some competitive, wrapped merchant account. I haven't used Braintree - anyone have comments on these guys being good vs. bad?
Cultural perception of choice
I don't drink but have no problem singing along with drunk friends.

Maybe it was those improv classes...

It probably helps that said friends are mature adults who don't use drunkenness as an excuse for antisocial stupidity.
Scent explained mathematically
Ask HN: Do Tools Matter?
Does a quality/performance of end product directly proportionals to the tools used? I mean is you are using Adode Photoshop vs GIMP or Textmate vs VI...

What are your thoughts on this?
Can't you stop crawling sites that dish up your search terms for you (without any content)? A good example is eudict.com - search for an obscure word and this is the first that pops up.

It then returns a page with your search queries and no information.

What use is a site that simply returns search queries?

Why aren't sites that scrape content blacklisted?
Having had to watch my mother succumb to lung cancer (not related to smoking) very recently, I had to hold back the tears whilst reading. Wonderful article.
I don't have evidence Reddit would reduce operating costs since they haven't switched yet, and I don't have access to their code/architecture/etc to decide one way or the other. However, based on my personal experience, static type languages are much faster than dynamic languages and use much less resources. They used substantial less servers to maintain the same SLA throughput. You don't have to take this advice and keep paying for the high cost of hardware. There's a belief that developer cost is much higher than hardware cost and thus it's justified. However, when scaling out, hardware cost is much higher than developer cost. Developer cost is a fixed sunken cost at initial development. Afterward it's just maintenance and can be scaled down, but the hardware operation cost is ongoing, increasing years after years.
http://www.reddit.com/r/ads/comments/cpm2d/i_cant_believe_so...

Here you go. Took a bit. Also it's risen about 1$ in the last year.

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090327/reddits-ad-experime...
It's really their rate, check the link under my comment thread.
Why is computer science a sausage fest?