skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus?
The challenge is definitely liquid fuels for transportation, especially aviation. Stationary applications can easily go electric, and conceivably maritime transport could go to electric powered by nuclear or bulky non-hydrocarbon fuels, but aviation is weight and volume limited.

The US Air Force has a goal of qualifying all of their aircraft to fly on biofuels by 2011; they've flown B-52s and other aircraft on 50-100% biofuel mixtures. Currently, most biofuels for aviation use cost several times what petrochemicals cost, but I could definitely see this changing. It's actually pretty easy to get a jet turbine to run on anything, but the difficulty is more with qualifying the entire storage/supply chain to be stable, and stability at temperature extremes. If the Air Force can transition to biofuels, it will be relatively easy for scheduled commercial flights to transition.

Given relatively cheap electricity to input, there are plenty of processes to make liquid hydrocarbon fuels -- algae biodiesel, some forms of intensive agriculture, and CO2 sequestration from the air, as are pointed out in the article. These would be "carbon neutral" in terms of atmospheric CO2 as well.
I love: http://culturedcode.com/things/ipad/ the one for the iPhone app is pretty good too
Inspiring. Somebody recommended this essay a couple of months ago and I never got to reading it until today.
I have a blog and almost no readers. My take on this is that I write for myself some sort of public notebook.
I have been using this for the past 30 minutes and it rocks for someone like myself who can only check HN every few days while I am working.

Good job.
Yeah, honestly, our pricing was set by wild-assed guessing. I'm still not sure it's high (or low) enough.
Beauty Of South India
Check out the PDF of the draft of the Perl 6 book in the R * distribution (as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf or something similar).

The Perl 5 to 6 articles at http://perlgeek.de/en/article/5-to-6 are very helpful even if you aren't familiar with Perl 5. One thing to remember about them is that they describe Perl 6 as specified, regardless of whether any of the implementations fully support the relevant features.

The Perl 6 Advent Calendar from last Winter (http://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2009/12/01/perl-6-advent-ca...) is more of a "Here are some really cool things about Perl 6" series of articles, but they are also pretty good reads for learning the language.
I do! A killer tip too.

The Linode tutorials teach you one way of installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL... but there is another.

If you're using Ubuntu and you run the command "sudo tasksel", that'll launch a program that lets you pick from a bunch of preconfigured options. Need a LAMP server? Just "sudo tasksel" and select LAMP. Need a mail server? Same thing. Need an SSH server? Well, you get the idea.

In the past, I've had problems getting Apache, PHP, and MySQL to play nicely when installed manually, so this can sometimes be helpful.

As far as security tips:
1. Use password-protected SSH keys to login as opposed to just using a password. SSH is the protocol you will use to manage your VPS. It is also what you should use (instead of FTP, which is insecure) to transfer files.
2. Use UFW (it's short for uncomplicated firewall) to block all traffic by default and allow only necessary ports (80 for HTTP, 22 for SSH, etc). UFW is one GREAT reason to use Ubuntu. With other distributions, you have to use iptables to setup a firewall, which is incredibly complicated. UFW is easy as pie.
3. Run the command "sudo mysql_secure_installation" to secure your MySQL server
4. Keep the software on your VPS up to date. Run the commands "sudo aptitude update" and "sudo aptitude safe-upgrade" to do this.
How to Send common SCRAP to ALL ur Frnds in Orkut
I tried to start something similar to the Data Drinking group in valley here in Bangalore with a bunch of Google, Yahoo ML/Distributed Computing guys but it didn't work out because of weird reasons. Maybe, its worth another shot. Ping me on my email address if you are interested in helping organize something like this.
We're working on making a video demo for our payment system (http://www.facecash.com) that's as good as Square's video or better. (We think our system is already better, but their videos are really good.) If anyone has any ideas that you think we should incorporate, let me know!
Conrad Black: My prison education
Halo debuts on the Atari 2600
Clairvoyance as a Security Protocol: Reading Terrorists' Minds
Secrets of Farmville Revealed Here
That's a real surprise to me! (was it to you?)

The way tarsnap is marketed I'd never ever expected it to be b2c, most private individuals I know outside of computing would have a very hard time understanding what it's all about without a lot of explanation. That's really interesting.
While I'm just another anecdote, I haven't found RBLs to be anywhere near the level of trouble you've accused them of. I've been a system administrator for over a dozen years, and built and maintained a number of mail systems, on the order of hundreds, and my company/project user base includes at least a couple million mail server administrators.

I can think of a couple of folks among our community who've raised a ruckus about RBLs, but they're folks that I know from experience raise a ruckus about everything (not to say you fall into that category). I can also think of another handful of folks who complained, who when I found more information found they actually are spammers, they just don't consider themselves spammers. It's strange how few spammers consider what they do wrong, and how indignant they become when things work against them. (Again, not to suggest that you fall into that category.)

Granted, RBLs don't really work all that well as a spam control mechanism. They aren't worthless in that regard, but they also aren't the most effective single tool. But, when used as a weighting factor, as in SpamAssassin, it's a perfectly sane addition to any mail server, and I wouldn't want to see them disappear.

In nearly every case of RBL listing I've ever seen in the years since RBLs came into existence, there actually was some reason for the listing: open relay, accidental spamming user with a virus of some sort, misconfigured DNS, etc.

Frankly, as someone that has maintained mail servers for all those years and for so many customers, RBLs are something I think about so rarely that I'm kinda stunned you have such a strong emotional feeling about them. I'm just not sure how my experience and yours can be so very different on the very same Internet.
DIY $1500 cell-phone tapping device
Then rephrase it as how many "cool" products existed under the Microsoft brand.
I was arguing using your incorrect assumption that the topic of the discussion was "which one could you live without", and tried to explain that the necessity to live was not the sole criteria for measuring the degree of fundamentality.

I myself believe it is just as fundamental as food and shelter, as some people are willing to give up both food and shelter to attain it.
Writing code is easy, reading and understanding someone elses code is hard. At least, initially.

'Your Code Sucks' can be shorthand for 'not-invented-here', 'I'm not able to grok your datastructure' or 'I don't have experience enough to take this all in but if I scrap it and rewrite it it will be on my level' as frequently (or even more frequently) than that it really means your code sucks.

I'll say 'my code sucks' easily (especially the morning after), but your code might need some incremental improvement until I understand it thoroughly enough to make a judgement call. And in the interest of diplomacy I'd probably give you a hand refactoring it instead of passing judgement. I might even learn something.
Imperative I think.
Ask HN: Would you use a good RSS rewinder?
I needed something that could replay blogs from the beginning. I thought of doing it quick and dirty, that is parse the HTML of the blogs I want to replay by hand.

But then I realized that there is a more general problem about blogs, podcasts, etc. to be solved; that is how do you make a machine understand the chronology of the posts, file them by categories, tags, etc.? The HTML structure is different for every blog, so I could build a general-purpose web service which would turn any blog into an xml file ready for consumption by a machine.

Right now I don't see good uses for it apart from RSS replay but let me know if you are interested/have ideas about this.

By the way I plan on implementing this using something similar to Opera's fast forward button and then walking up the posts. Shouldn't be too difficult.
Google and the CIA to invest in the future
"getting a user to visit a page" knowing they're using a vulnerable browser could be all you need.
Yeah, I'm stunned too, especially since you've had so much more exposure than I have.

My first collision with RBLs was actually back in '97 or thereabouts. I was just starting to really mess around on the internet, had visions of becoming a dial-up ISP, all that good stuff. Anyway, my ISP at the time ended up on the MAPS RBL due to the actions of a customer-of-a-customer. Rather than give in, they decided to fight them, and I got stuck in the middle.

For various reasons, I didn't have to deal with RBLs again for quite a while (I worked for other/larger companies, where it was someone else's problem; I left the computer industry entirely for a few years; so on), but eventually I got to be a tech-support/sysadmin monkey for a local ISP. They occasionally found themselves blackholed by one list or another for various reasons, whether it was a root'd box or a customer doing something dumb, usually a mailing list. Still, dealing with RBLs happened at least monthly.

Since starting my own business, I've had to deal with RBLs probably 3 or 4 times a year. Not super often, but I don't have a really massive list of clients yet either.

As yet another data point, nearlyfreespeech.net refuses to send out email notifications for planned outages. One of the reasons they give is that some percentage of their customers will lazily or mistakenly flag their message as spam and they'll end up on an RBL, which they don't want to deal with.

I'm actually not opposed to RBLs being used as a factor in products like SpamAssassin. For one thing, SA can be configured by the end-user, which means that if they miss out on anything, they only have themselves to blame; and secondly, so long as the RBL isn't the sole reason for dropping a message or connection, it doesn't bother me nearly as much.

At the ISP I worked for, "missing email" was probably the number 1 complaint, or close to it, and we spent an awful lot of time trying to fine-tune things so that legitimate messages wouldn't be lost. So, color me equally surprised that you've had no trouble with it at all. :-)
Career Tips From Don Draper
I'm kinda stunned you have such a strong emotional feeling about them.

The lists themselves don't bother me so much. The people behind them, though, scare the bejesus out of me.

There's a line in Nancy Kress' novel Beggars in Spain, where one of the main characters says, of another (a woman whose paranoia has driven her to do some fairly extreme things), that she would nuke the world if it would finally make her feel safe. Too often, that quote floats into my mind when reading things like the SPEWS FAQ.
How's the pay, though? I moved to the Valley because the extra income is much, much more than the extra costs. I wouldn't want to move somewhere cheap unless I either stopped working, or started a business with income not connected to the local wages.
Tarski's undefinability theorem
Except that in Communist Russia he would have probably "disappeared" into some labor camp in Siberia. We are still far from that.

That's what happened to Maher Arar when his plane had to make an unplanned landing in the US a few years back. Except it wasn't a labor camp; it was just a Syrian prison, where he was tortured, for months. If he hadn't been able to send an SMS to his wife while he was being disappeared, and if he weren't completely innocent of any wrongdoing, he'd still be there. We have no way of knowing how many other people this has happened to.
My experience with the RBL has been exclusively negative to date. We used to send out a mailing every couple of weeks, double opt-in and all that jazz. In spite of that there would always be some percentage of clueless people that forgot they'd signed up and that would go all vigilante on us, list us with every known spam blocker and so on. This would lead to password recovery emails not making it through any more (same server), tech support emails being lost and all kinds of other hassles, including direct loss of revenue because paying subscribers could not receive their payment confirmation emails.

In the end we gave up, email is a wonderful medium but if the reliability of the medium is left to people that are well willing to throw out the baby with the bathwater in a well meant but incompetent attempt at improving the situation then you're better off without it.

Blacklists are not the solution to any of these problems without a very rapid and transparent problem resolution process.

Spamhaus is one of the few such institutions that we've never had an issue with.
Deldo - Vibration Control and Teledildonics Mode for Emacs
My experience just this afternoon: An unknown person approached me in the hall of my office building and asked if I had a screwdriver. He said he'd just moved in down the hall and had accidentally locked his keys and phone in when he went to the rest room. He wanted to remove the cover on the mail slot so he could reach in and open the door.

Being aware of social engineering hacks and having just read this article I was slightly cautious as I'd never seen him around. I knew the stakes were pretty low but I quickly came up with what I thought was a good enough way to verify his story. Standing in front of the door, I asked for and dialed his cellphone number. It rang inside and I handed him the screwdriver.

Once inside, he was able to positively confirm he should be there. Of course this is a pretty silly example, but also illustrates that it's often not that hard to counter social attacks.
Ask HN: Where do you host your webapp?
Which web hosting provider do you use ?
Straight up, Shopify made my favourite promo video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVVui4oXL4Q&hd=1

Aside from high production values, the reason this is a great clip is that they start with "Why?". If you're not familiar with Simon Sinek's awesome TED talk, I highly recommend it:

http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspi...
Sounds really interesting! You seem to have some domain expertise as well.

Can I help you out? I've always wanted to do something in the online dating space.
The border example was a bad one, I meant what you said.
What will, e.g., China do with this technology?
Joe Newbie says he can do it, why can't you. By the way you're up for your annual review next week, maybe you can find some time somewhere because this feature is sorely needed ;)

Big companies have their own way of dealing with that sort of thing, you might get away with it in a company where there are not enough people waiting to take your place (sometimes literally).

And you can only pull that one so often before it starts to look like you're using it as a way to slack.

Maybe a better way to do this would be to say you'd do both but it will have a such-and-such effect on the deadline we all agreed on when taking on this project. That way you don't have to make it seem as though there is only a 'you can't have both' solution.

The other side of this coin is that any programmer will normally speaking use all the ram, storage, run time, CPU cycles and wall clock time available to implement something.

And make sure you do that in email, not verbally.

Office politics like this is one of the bigger reasons why you won't find the best-of-breed programmers in offices like that, or at least not for long.
She makes a good point, but sometimes, code does suck.

Personally, my worst experiences have been inheriting software written by kids just out of school who have read a lot of books on design patterns. On the bright side, I've learned some really interesting things from these guys here and there, they are typically really, really bright and extremely well read.

I've had instances where I rewrote core code from these type of guys and gotten it down to 30% of its former size, much more understandable, much faster, and much more flexible. But if we went into a meeting to discuss which is the better way, they would likely blow me out of the water (despite public failure) because they are young, inexperienced, and supremely confident.

I think maturity of attitude in software developers typically doesn't set in until 10+ years on the job. So many of the young people entering the field are all educated on the new "yet another revolution" practices (TDD, Agile, etc), and they are so confident, because they are smart and educated (which they are) that it makes interacting with them almost impossible. I've dealt with junior and intermediate developers that seem to think its impossible they could be wrong, they will cling to an idea even though you can easily give several examples where their theory breaks down.

I guess this is just the nature of our business, it is a bit too abstract, and education can be too easily mistaken for knowledge.
You (or Siegel) may suffer survivorship bias. Yes, the US stock market has performed well. But what about early Russian stocks, German stocks, French stocks? I'd venture a wild guess that investors got pretty much wiped out between 1917, say, and 1945?

Also, the chances are high that you can find some time grid for which "every single decade" will show whatever you want it to show. For example, between 2000 and 2010, US aggregate stock market performance is... roundabout zero?
off the top of my head, US stocks in the 70s were also flat over about a decade; as they were in the 30s (counting from '29); and probably some other decade before that, but stocks were not mainstream then
From the transcript:

Naval: Generally, even in the startup side, it’s probably better to do a preferred round because these are the times to set your terms very favorably for yourself, and they form a precedent for what happens when you do later rounds, whereas if you’re negotiating, if your first negotiation is with a VC you’re not going to set yourself the friendliest terms. So there’s nothing wrong with doing a preferred round, it’s just that the expense is slightly higher, but it’s not tremendously higher.
It sounds more like an optical sink to me.
This appears to be a good read on the topic:
http://www.wifiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/1368661/8021...

Hope that helps
I believe Rop Gongrijp is getting more involved (founder of XS4ALL).
A somewhat related question, how come in baseball they are so happy to give away any ball that even goes remotely near the crowd? Wouldn't each ball be worth enough that they would want to cut down on the amount needed per game?

Here in Australia on cricket ball condition effects the game so you'd defiantly not want fans taking the ball and in AFL they don't want people taking the balls although they do switch balls around often during a match. I guess that would be virtually 0 chance that the player could get the 600th run ball back for himself?
I wrote about exactly that: http://jacquesmattheij.com/In+defense+of+wikileaks
Look at the name, its called Hacker News.
Well, it's betting on some other factors as well, like the portion of the growth that publicly held firms will capture (versus more of the growth going to new startups or privately held firms). A stock portfolio is by necessity non-diversified on that measure, though large investors can diversify by putting money into VC, angel, and private-equity funds, among other things. It's probably also geographically non-diversified, since some of the fastest-growing markets are hard to buy into (e.g. China is very picky about what kinds of shares it lets foreign investors buy).
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ms. blonde html-girl knows it better
RingoJS Modules and how to fix the Global Object
> The argument is that stocks have been the best asset class investment in each decade for the last two hundred years, not that it takes two hundred years.

But that is factually incorrect. "stocks have been the best asset class investment in each decade for the last two hundred years" That is a totally incorrect statement.

To be proper I should post specific statistics rebutting this, but I don't have them at this time. If you are genuinely interested you can look it up yourself.
Don't do that, if you are unexperienced with linux. Most people don't realize that, when running a VPS, they become an administrator with all the responsibilities. If your VPS gets hacked, it is a danger for the whole net.

My advice, go for a managed solution.
Um, I am afraid that she doesn't do that.

Even if she did does it matter what some random person on the internet says? Really?

On the other hand if she did improve her text color a bit then it would be awesome. I loved her theme though. It's quite pretty in a girly girl sort of way.
Nope. Parts of speech of words are ambiguous and you need some statistical method of disambiguation. Plus, you need something to guess the possible tags for unknown words (e.g. speakers of English are able to guess that 'supercalifragilistiexpialigetic' is an adjective even when they see it for the first time because they can generalize from other words with -etic.

Still, I wouldn't call part-of-speech tagging parsing.

Here's some parsing demo:
http://nlp.cs.berkeley.edu/Main.html#parsing