skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I have no idea what the solutions are.

...actually, that's not quite true. I think I know of one solution, I just don't talk about it much because it's unrealistic. But here goes: the real colonization of space.

I think that extreme poverty and conflict are symptoms of a deeper problem in human societies. Unfortunately, at this stage of our technological development, human economies must be continually and steadily growing in order to be "healthy" (low rates of unemployment, reasonable consumer price indexes, low homelessness, etc.).

Further, while it's theoretically possible that the planet could support vastly greater human populations, you must take into account human territorialism, cultural divides, and other social-psychological factors. So, in practice, it's hard to imagine the planet supporting, say, twice as many humans, in peaceful conditions, at our current moral and psychological development.

So, there's a kind of "rebound" effect in population growth: rather than trying to grow in the most efficient, compact manner possible, human populations tend instead to grow and explore as quickly as possible, until some barrier stops the growth. When that happens, two interesting effects seem to occur: the barrier area tends to develop denser populations, and the original population centers tend to decay.

Also, you have individuals (and groups of individuals) that tend to vastly out-produce the rest of their society. This is one of the parts of the engine that causes human population growth. However, it also has a tendency to create greater efficiency, which both takes advantage of the poor as well as creates more poor people. (There is a counter-argument that this also leads to better living conditions for the poor, and it's true, but that doesn't resolve the much greater economic divide between the various socio-economic classes.)

If these industrialists don't have some kind of frontier to grow into, then they inadvertently magnify the problems of barrier growth: they create lots of wealth for a small group, at the expense of a much larger group.

This is a very poor, hasty description, but the basic essence of it all is that at this point humans simply need some frontier to expand into in order to maintain reasonably healthy societies, and we don't have one.

I don't think we'll be getting one anytime soon, so I expect the human condition to get a little grim for the next century or so.
I think the operative word is 'appeared'.
Emscripten - An LLVM-to-Javascript compiler
A social network aimed at career planning
My name is Gary Bosworth and I'm currently a 22 year old college student majoring in business administration. I am starting a new online network that will help college students and even career professionals connect with different industries. Sometimes people need an intermediary to connect to professionals whether it's to ask about a specific career, or maybe wanting some friendly professional advice. The main point for me putting together this site, however, is to help college students in choosing their college majors and careers before they make a mistake and go into something they don't enjoy. Through my site, students who choose to major in 'English' or 'business' and are interested in becoming an 'editor' or 'financial planner' would be able to search for an individual, such as yourself, and request to ask you questions about your career to find out if they would actually like to go into that field.<p>What I am requesting from you is your registration and help for college students. This site is completely free, I am not trying to make money on it, I am only trying to helps students and possibly even other professionals interested in career change. If you are interested in signing up I would really appreciate an email back or you can sign up on the web address below. Also, if you happen to know of any other professionals, possibly in your office, or even friends, feel free to invite them as well. Every user is allowed to create their own contact lists/friends list, and unlike linked-in, the site is completely boundless and free.<p>Thanks very much for your time.<p>Sincerely,<p>Gary Bosworth
The more I hear about this, the more I think that reddit could pull it off. If they came clean, I really doubt there would be any discontent at all. The only problem might be that most of the links are imgur links nowadays, but they could make lots of money even from the occasional amazon review link.

If they stuck to pay-per-action affiliate links, like Amazon's, for example, they wouldn't even need to police it for gaming (I don't think Amazon would mind people buying things to help reddit out).
Agreed. Most of the time, we don't eat until we feel full, we eat until we finish what we've got.

I can see the benefit to those who like to snack because they're hungry during the day - regularly drinking water will help ward off the hunger until meal time. In the end, though, it all boils down to common sense: the less you eat, the less weight you put on.
Getting over the cultural teaching that I must eat everything that is served in that sitting was the KEY to my weight loss, personally. I had no real dietary changes. I found that if I just ate slower and stopped when I felt satisfied most meals were nearly twice the size they needed to be. Another upside of this is it is cost effective to grab lunch and have the left overs for dinner (or the reverse)
I like the idea of cross browser flexibility built in and I'd like to try this on a Rails app but not quite sure how I would actually use it.

Can you combine the columns for the ability to build larger boxes? Or use less than 5 columns on the widest site?
Beware Choosing the Most Complex Tool for the Job
If you are interested, shoot me an email at gary@alumscout.com
How to help someone use a computer
Last time I checked, MyWi had to use MobileSubstrate extensions, which inject code into running processes. Obviously, a legitimate app can't do that, so it may not be possible.
I seemed to be the only Python programmer who doesn't like its documentation page.

Programming tool that have the best documentation, to me, is jQuery. I think it's even better than php.net
You were probably joking.
But just in case somebody from another country is reading this (and missed the reference):

I am female, and have never read a Harlequinn romance novel. None of my female friends have read them, either. None of my older female relatives have read them either. (I'm not saying some people aren't reading them. Just that they're like daytime soap operas: Cheap enough to make, and popular enough to survive, but not necessarily relevant.)

Must be something wrong with my friends and me. Lately many of us have been crushing out on guys who work at coffee shops.

But my point is this: There is such a thing as sub-culture. This means not everybody likes the same stuff. To put it in start-up terms: it's the long tail... of attraction.

This is 2010, people. :D

#dowatchalike
Plenty of it, but that's also because typically people will prepare (or expect to be prepared for them in restaurants) unbelievable amounts of food.

I weigh about 70 Kg and a half portion in any US restaurant is more than enough for me. I always feel bad about sending food back to the kitchen but I'd feel even worse for overeating.
I use backtick as the screen command, which is fine unless you write a lot of bash scripts.

$ screen -e '``'
That's one part of it, the other part is that subtle changes to the memory model will take a while to be taken advantage of, most code is now optimized for the 200 series chips (of which the 480 mentioned here has two).
Quantum cryptographic systems cracked by lasers, leaving no trace
Could we use this to make a new heuristic for knowing when one is being closed-minded? You're good at coming up with those sorts of things.

The "X is exactly the same as Y" is one, I think. I got in an argument with someone who asserted that Twitter was exactly the same as the old Unix utility 'talk'. Of course, how do you distinguish between obviously boring reinventions and stuff that really will have an impact?
As another commenter noted, it's possible to get this functionality on iPhone if you jailbreak and purchase a tethering app. There are apps that will let you run a wifi hotspot, but I personally just spent a few bucks on an app which would allow me to use the iPhone's native tethering, which is very nice, automatic, etc.
This applies to more than the truly destitute. Have you ever seen (or been) a reasonably well-off college student who suddenly has a whole semester's worth of work to do in the last week of classes, then goes out partying all night before finals?
Postmortem on Steambirds and the Flash game industry by Andy Moore
Well, Dave Winer brings his own personal baggage that's not related to general ageism. But maybe other experienced people just need some help presenting their knowledge in a way that's easier for young people to take. It's really easy to come off as grumpy and entitled otherwise.
I got the precisely opposite impression. He expresses that he is very happy with his accomplishments and his work, and says that his biggest regret is not being able to finish The Dreaming Machine. If what you took away is "spend less time at work, and more with your loved ones," I think you are projecting whatever you want to hear onto his words.
There's also a great breakdown of his monetization of the game here:

http://www.andymoore.ca/2010/03/steambirds-by-the-numbers/

And of course the game:

http://armorgames.com/play/5426/steambirds or

http://www.kongregate.com/games/weasello/steambirds with badges
I have already posted this once in a similar thread, but thought I would post it again as it quite relevant to the article and others who have not seen it before may appreciate it:

"Instantes" by Jorge Luis Borges:

If I were able to live my life anew, In the next I would try to commit more errors. I would not try to be so perfect, I would relax more. I would be more foolish than I've been, In fact, I would take few things seriously. I would be less hygienic. I would run more risks, take more vacations, contemplate more sunsets, climb more mountains, swim more rivers. I would go to more places where I've never been, I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans, I would have more real problems and less imaginary ones.

I was one of those people that lived sensibly and prolifically each minute of his life; Of course I had moments of happiness. If I could go back I would try to have only good moments. Because if you didn't know, of that is life made: only of moments; Don't lose the now.

I was one of those that never went anywhere without a thermometer, a hot-water bottle, an umbrella, and a parachute; If I could live again, I would travel lighter. If I could live again, I would begin to walk barefoot from the beginning of spring and I would continue barefoot until autumn ends. I would take more cart rides, contemplate more dawns, and play with more children, If I had another life ahead of me.

But already you see, I am 85, and I know that I am dying.
That's not entirely fair. If you benchmark a sorting algorithm you normally don't measure the time it takes to bring the records in from the disk either.

Of course there is overhead, that's obvious, there would be overhead in any co-processor driven situation, but that overhead depends to a large extent on the host machine and the bus used to connect, so it would be reducing the value of the benchmark to include those figures in the timing.

Also, there are plenty of applications where the input to the radix sort would come from other kernels and/or where the output would go to other kernels.

In those cases there is no overhead.
Right, but how do you do disk imaging (for example) if the OS doesn't give you access to the entire drive? The OS could say "OK, you can modify any drive's boot area but the one I'm on", but that doesn't help if you're booting from another drive and using chainloading.

Hell, you can flash motherboards from an OS... writing to the boot area is just one example of many 'giant holes in your security'.
Bubble Blinders: The Untold Story of the Search Business Model
Grub is not operating within the OS sandbox though.
Ask HN: Why are there no Slideshare competitors
Slideshare is great, and from the start provided clear value (youtube for powerpoints). So why are there no Slideshare competitors (where there were heaps of Youtube competitors)?
Agreed. I now try to stop eating the instant I feel the slightest desire to stop. It seems to me that I've been programmed to ignore this impulse.

This is especially true of America where portion sizes are gigantic and people consider themselves primarily bargain-hunters rather than experience-seekers. It is amazing to me how much Americans will complain if a restaurant offers portion sizes just a little bit smaller than other restaurants in the area, even if the quality is much higher.
User Interface Lessons from the New Digg
As a point of clarification: Does the contest involve you uploading the source code? Or are you only to upload a link? (I'm guessing they want source, but I just wanted to be sure.)
Towards a Statically Typed Universe?
The minor side-story here is that all these cards probably ended up, even if further used by the author, with small balances remaining on them. Pure profit for the issuer.
CrowdSearch: Exploiting Crowds for Image Search on Mobile Phones
As others are pointing out, options and stock in private companies are, as a rule, worthless. (Unless you're the majority shareholder, and often even then.)

The only protection you have against having your shares be made worthless is that the company wants your ongoing goodwill, because you're a current employee in an acquisition. If you're an ex-employee, you've got no leverage whatsoever.

Suppose you owned 90% of a private company, and an ex-employee who resigned a few years prior owned 10%. You have an acquisition offer. Would YOU structure the deal so that the ex-employee got his 10%? Or would you structure the deal so that he got nothing and you got it all? There's no legal penalty for following either option. I think most of you reading this would invent some sort of rationale for screwing the ex-employee (he didn't stick around when we needed him, he didn't pull his weight, he doesn't deserve this payoff that I worked so hard for...), and would then proceed to do so.
It's a privately owned company. The stock is worthless. He can't buy it and then flip it on the open market because there is no market.
You use the mobile version of the site on the desktop browser too? High five!
Rails 3.0 final coming
Not sure about the "science" behind this, but this technique has definitely worked for me. I've been drinking ~3 litres of water daily for the last year - and along with other changes in my lifestyle, have lost ~65lbs in that time.

If for no other reason, drinking that water reduces my urges for fizzy drinks - which helps a lot. Additionally, as others have said - reducing the amount you eat, in whatever way that works for you, has helped a lot.
I think a decent number of people recognize it's something of an issue, especially in corners of the Unix world (at the extreme, folks like rms, Theo De Raadt, and Ulrich Drepper are, uh, rather abrasive), and not only for gender reasons. There are a lot of "write good docs, be friendly to questions" kinds of initiatives floating around, and to pick one example, it's one of the nicer aspects of the Clojure community versus (parts of) the CL community. Not saying it's solved the problem, but I do think recognition that the classic RTFM approach isn't the best has been one of the bigger changes in the open-source community in the past decade. Projects also seem to increasingly write web-pages where the front page tells me what the thing actually is, instead of assuming I must know, which is great.
Yep, netbooks get the 768 px layout. I figured fully supporting tablets and 1280 px laptops is more important than using up a couple hundred more pixels on netbooks. Tradeoffs, tradeoffs….

No custom layout generators or bells or whistles, sorry. Kept this intentionally simple. :)
For this reason, I generally share a meal when I'm eating out.
Not LESS, not LESS CSS, not Less, not Less CSS.

Just Less Framework. :)
Also, curly braces!
One thing to note about this article is that it's about Twitter. There was - and still is - a pretty huge Green Movement presence on Facebook. The Green Movement is plenty internet-based, certainly. I don't know what purpose it serves to point out that there wasn't much of that going on specifically on Twitter, but I guess it's more interesting for us geeks to note.

Anyway, my sense is that the planning for protests usually happened on Facebook pages, not on Twitter accounts. Make of that what you will.
Why would an early investor prefer a convertible note to straight equity?
A VM in a puny chip is the price one pays for a developer audience, to build a thriving ecosystem of apps so that consumers will want to buy the device.

Too bad Apple didn't pay that price, because otherwise, they might have had consumers and a thriving... oh, wait...
That would be 'not done' in plenty of places.

I've asked for half portions for the full price instead, they just laugh at me.
At the seed stage, it's people that get funded, not ideas.

To what extent do ideas influence your judgement of people? It seems to me that -- for all that you're funding people, not ideas -- it would be very hard to avoid saying "what sort of idiots came up with this idea?" at times. (The opposite, namely forming a positive impression of people based on their having had a brilliant idea, seems also possible but likely far less common.)
Definitely appreciate the attention to detail. :) I’ll consider coming up with something more, err, proper!
I find this is somewhat dependent on the restaurant I'm at. I'm a stable 60-65Kg, but I hungrily consume almost anything in front of me, except at the most excessive of restaurants.
I'm visiting the UK from India, and I can confirm that it is not just hard - it is impossible to get an unlimited data plan. Among all the service providers, there are only two that even advertise one, and even that says "3 GB fair usage per month" (wtf?!) in the fine print.
As soon as there's a law about how to calculate square footage there will either be an agency to do the calculate the square footage, an agency to enforce it, or both. Oh, and some sort of tax/fee levied against commercial land-lords and the possibility of lawsuits all around

You'd prefer it to be legal if your gallon of gas only actually contained 3/4 of a gallon?
How Tech Startups Can Disrupt Education
The "science" behind this is a randomized, controlled trial. Why the scare quotes?
Why do you think products have an MSRP? It's a number that has no bearing on the true value of a product.
How Enterprise Carbon and Energy Management Helps in Sustainability
That seems kind of weird, most places will bring out an extra plate for you to share/split with someone as soon as you ask.

I can however see them laugh at the half portions at full price (just take the leftovers if you feel bad for wasting food, maybe you could even give it to a bum if you can't bring the food home).
In American restaurants, it's pretty typical for patrons to get their leftovers wrapped up to go (though this is less common at fancier restaurants).
High metabolism?
Railscasts didn't exist when I first started using Rails in the fall of 2005 - they are an invaluable resource and just one of many the author points out.

For someone who has not used Ruby before, it will likely take years to go from 0 to Ruby/Rails "Zen Master". The Ruby language seems simple at first but there are many nuances and powerful methods (such as #inject and #map) that few will master right away.

Also with regards to Rails, there are a lot of "moving parts". Randomly picking something out of the API and expecting to understand it, outside of its context etc., is not the right way to go about this.

Having been learning and working with Rails for several years now, I can tell you that there is must more excellent content now than ever before. And there will soon be plenty of Rails 3 specific books available too.
It's a cultural thing. As a European in North America you find lots of those things where the 'right' thing to do is less than obvious, and restaurant etiquette is one of those.

Americans visiting Europe would find themselves in a similar situation if they asked for a doggie bag. Most places wouldn't even be prepared to handle such a request.

But then again, the portions are so much smaller that a request of that nature is unlikely.
Tbh, I'm not so sure about the accuracy of this study (and of 'experimental' social psychology in general - though that's another issue altogether)...but I guess I always new those tidy, short-haired bastards were uptight.
I tether with my iPhone on Rogers in Canada without jailbreaking and without paying extra. I have friends on Telus and Bell that do the same. Don't lump us with the poor service of AT&T in the US.
On the theme of the difficulty of making definite judgement with social-scientific experiment, I would say it's hard to separate out rather a specific state/behavior like "cleanness". Whether it is induced or normally occurring, it goes with a lot of broad social tendencies.

In the first phase of the experiment, it's possible that asking people to do some other ritual-type behavior might or might not have had the same effect.

In the second phase, having people read "I am good/bad" or "I make correct/incorrect" decisions again might or might not have had the same effect.

Move over, while reading about cleanness and cleaning yourself seems like a way to do this separating out, this approach relies, at the very least, on the assumption that imagining something is comparable to experiencing it.
This is really a factor if you make a factor, or better yet - let it dictate who you are. If you think you are 'too old' then you probably are. But what if you don't think about age because it's silly and instead you continue to improve yourself, learn the latest tech and generally make yourself someone worthy of being in a startup? Granted there are other factors such as financial/family obligations (mortgage, college tuition for the kids, food on the table, etc) that might make not ideal for a start-up - but age shouldn't be something that enters the equations (well up until I point though I have no idea what that 'point' would be).

I know I've thought that this ageism thing could be a factor. Hell I was nervous 'admitting' I am 43 in another post and when I signed up for the start-school (like it's wrong or something). But the thing is, because I don't think about age, and because I continue to learn and grow, it's never come up. It probably helps that I played a sport at a near pro level and know how to 'train' and consequently look 34 instead of 43; but the reality is we influence ourselves more than we realize (it's a internal mental game thing). Bottom line is if you want it bad enough you make it happen.
You use framework to position on grid, the actual size is whatever you want.
On early-stage hiring at tech startups
We might be agreeing here already, but my understanding was that the mindset Java fought against -- and finally won -- was: Interpreted, garbage-collected languages, or basically anything with a substantial runtime component, will be too slow and unpredictable to use in serious production environments.

So Java went all-out with (1) a static type system and basic language features that C++ coders could respect, (2) a level of hype and corporate sponsorship/support that PHBs could respect, (3) a portable, eventually fast VM, opening up some nice deployment options. There was no need to introduce really exciting language features, only to keep promoting the OOP concepts that C++ thought-leaders were so enthusiastic about at the time.