skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Personally I don't see much reason why we shouldn't aggressively terraform Mars, including bombarding it with ice-rich asteroids to thicken the atmosphere.

Having to walk around in space suits indefinitely if you want to go outside sucks, even just getting the atmosphere to a point where you won't suffer bruising from decompression if you go out with a face mask would be a huge improvement.

Why would you want to keep it as it is?
> However, I have no way to separate my past, present and future or the different people that I want to be known as right now.

Yes there is. I wrote about it a year ago -finally demand is catching up with that :)

http://superuser.com/questions/29177/best-practices-for-mana...
My droid is saying it wants to update, even though I updated to Froyo manually a couple of weeks ago. Is there a way to shut it up, or should I just let it go ahead and do it?
Whoever wrote this has a clear anti-trademark agenda, so in their mind it is impossible for Mattel to be right.
This is not an idempotent operation, and I would not recommend this for anything besides a one-off event.
It was my mistake for not mentioning the upcoming digital issue will be paid. We've exchanged a few email from 13th August till 26th August while I've made the announcement (for subscription and charging for upcoming digital issue) on 18th August, so I assumed you already know by then.

The main focus of Hacker Monthly is always the print edition. It is the reason I've created Hacker Monthly in first place. Because the print edition remains the same (it's actually cheaper), that's another reason I didn't mention in the email.

Still, I regret these assumptions and for that, I sincerely apologize to you. I'm sorry.
Uniting through UNIX: Free Logins for NY Hackers
Talk to Benjamin Yosko => http://www.instigatorblog.com. He is very approachable, lives/works in Montreal, and recently sold his startup. Tell him Captain Recruiter says hello.
> advocating putting one's feet on a (step)stool in order to achieve a more optimal position when using a traditional toilet

I haven't seen the NHS flyer but I have seen a photo of a sign from Japan indicating that this is a good idea (also that you should rest your elbows on your knees and bulge your stomach out). I think it certainly helps things (this has got to be the oddest thread I've seen on HN in a while).
Milan 2010: Human-Powered Lamp by Gionata Gatto « Lighting Universe
Sure, it's just that the whole thing has a big "Google's all about stealing your data" vibe in its advertisements.

When in fact Google would be happy to take his patches, and most of those data-sharing features are improving the user experience (like type-ahead suggestions etc.).

That just rubs me the wrong way.
Google.ca and Google.com.au ~ Ah the Difference
Creating a declarative XML UI language
Technically. In two different jobs now I've seen a small army of consultants unable to keep an Oracle cluster running as reliably as a single Postgres instance, despite jaw-dropping license fees. It's also pretty painful to use, from simple command-line interactions to dumping & restoring data to interfacing with any code that isn't "enterprise". Blob performance was also astonishingly bad.

I guess you're stuck with it if you need to run Oracle financials or Peoplesoft or something like that but one of my professional goals is to never work for another company big or dumb enough to use either.
Face Detection API: Face Detection Made Simple
Your statements are valid, but I'm not that concerned with the character of the OP or the exact details of his situation.

The point I'm trying to make is that Google could have done a lot more to prevent situations like this with very little extra cost to them. Sure, technically Google doesn't owe this guy anything, but I think there is a lack of empathy on Google's part here and it's one of the reasons they are struggling with social.
you should move into contracting and plan your exit stategy!
Don't forget about Google Public DNS.
A silly analogy: Human nature and programs are the same
Beliefs in human nature are like complex nested loops with a bunch of conditional statemetns thrown in.

For quite some time, I have had this belief that people run on beliefs, whether they are conscious of their own beliefs or not.

Now as I am getting more and more into prgramming, this is an anology that stuck me:

Beliefs are like a complex bunch of nested loops with a bunch of conditons thrown in. On the surface, individual actions of a person may appear as if they are independent from other actions of the same person, but they are just the result of the underlying belief systems, its similar to intsances of code execution that may appear to be unrelated to somebody who can't see the underlying network of conditions and loops.
You have to buy all your OS X apps? Where is that coming from? The only paid app I have on my Mac is TextMate. Everything else is FOSS.

I have no idea what the OP is trying to say here.
Github is just so awesome. They really nailed making code social. You really get the feeling of participating in a living, breathing thing with Github. It compels you to collaborate. It's frictionless.

Every other hosted RCS just feels hopelessly static, a step above a download.com.
You make it sound like India's the only country with these problems. I could easily list all of these for other countries as well, but I'll refrain from doing so. This is not the right forum for it, and secondly armchair activism is a futile cause.
I think you hit the nail on the head by saying that Linux doesn't attract UX guys. To ne feels like open source projects are always about getting good code that runs well and the user-interface is very secondary (if even that). Apple (and now Microsoft [finally]) have enough resources to throw around to invest in the user interface, where as open source projects tend to only have enough resourses to get the actual program running. Investing in a better GTK is less of a priority. Apple clearly makes one of their main priority. Even if the prgram sucks / buggy / whatever, they will make sure that it looks beautiful because it's important to the average customer.
Neal Stephenson's merged historical fiction with science fiction before, quite successfully (e.g., the entire Baroque Cycle, including the Cryptonomicon). I'd be surprised if there weren't some fairly heavy sci-fi motifs.
It still assumes that the teacher has the most influence over their students, rather than the parents & the environment. I do not know if studies show results one way or the other here (suspect it's rather hard to tease apart).

A possible analogy would be that my bonus depends on the work of my teammates (and by extension, their environments). Except, in that case, my teammates have control over their environments are possibly more skillful than a student at managing their situations.

Mind you, I'm not saying that teachers shouldn't be evaluated. Just don't think this will be a magic bullet. And numbers have a way of taking on a life of their own, as if by quantifying something we are establishing something meaningful. In reality, the numbers will be used to justify whatever political agenda is running the show.

That, quite reasonably, is what the teachers are concerned about.
There does exists a strategy to get %50 for two people (hint below). But the case of two people does not help much to solve the more general case (imho).

HINT:
Suppose each prisoner picks a box at random. They can (randomly) decide what box to open before they enter the room with the boxes, at a time when they can still communicate. In some cases they will then be able to determine that they have no chance of both finding their number. So there must be a better strategy.
Well, trying to make linux more like OSX or win (which is what xfce, KDE and GNOME do) is bounded to fail. I think there are qualities on linux that are both unique and elegant, for example tiling window managers. This is where most research in UX should go. Users of others OSs are not stupid, they long for enhanced productivity. If they see it in say a tiling WM, they may want it, and currently the only way to get it is in linux (more or less).
The Top down transparency imposed by Google, facebook etc (as well as the increased surveillance by other entities) seems to be tempered by a bottom up demand for State and corporate secrets being leaked in increased frequency (WikiLeaks etc..)

It will be interesting to see how transparency (by design or not) will effect corporate governance and state behavior.
What I thought was a YC book for a second
I can't agree with you more. I have Logic Pro because I do a bit of audio work, but other than that it's all FOSS. (BTW, I use TextWrangler instead of TextMate. It's a reasonable free replacement although not as good.)
“Editing” trees in Clojure with clojure.zip
Doesn't the Wayback Machine (archive.org) defeat such efforts?
Leave it up. According to the current upvotes, at least 12 people haven't seen it before (like me) or think it's worth seeing again.
That says more about consultants than it does about Oracle ;-)

Oracle (the database) in the hands of anyone basically competent is easily capable of 5-9s reliability. Not that I'm saying Postgres isn't mind. I'm just saying, use the right tool for the job (and hire the right people).

I find DataPump very easy to use, and very fast, it's I/O bound even on serious storage arrays. YMMV. SQL*Plus is definitely showing its age I agree.
I do use it on one project and am semi-satisfied with it.
:-) right you are - I had not thought of that.
It would be surprising if consultants could keep anything running reliably. In my experience, they provide nothing but chaos and half-baked solutions.
I couldn't quite understand how it works. Was the idea as simple as just creating the infographic, then putting it somewhere on the site you want to juice up? (There were details about links I couldn't really follow on Reddit...)
Nah, it was a while ago, and it's a good article :-)
The best desktop linux is Android. Wait a few years. I can already hook my phone to a tv via HDMI.

It's just a few steps to full desktop love. It's got most of the features I need, now I just want a bigger screen.
Another example of a useful law that's on the books and have not been enforced by any government agency.

Imagine how many laws out there are like this?
William, I assure you it's not a bait and switch. As somebody mentioned in Twitter today, I tweeted this 2 months ago (http://twitter.com/hackermonthly/status/17978114821): "The PDF version is free and always will be."

That was the ideal plan. Make around $1 for each print copy sold. Sell some advertising. And hopefully I can get it thru month after month.

No, that didn't work out well (I could show you some proof of the total revenues we made from the first 3 months).

That's when I've decided to charge, for digital issue. Because it's either that, or the magazine dies somewhere down the road. I love the magazine. I love making it. I love it when readers tell me they enjoy reading it. And I wanted to keep on doing it for as long as possible.

So I've got to make that tough decision, sooner rather than later.

On the other hand, I DO plan on compensating the author, but I have to see how's the numbers performing for the first issue before making any promise.
Um if I remember correctly, Windows 1.0 had a tiling window manager. In fact even now if you right click the taskbar you have the option of tiling windows.
who's been suggesting that we "improve [the] environment by force" on Mars?

I think this was a poor choice of words by the writer in question.

What I believe they meant by 'force' was instead of deciding on a formulaic approach with an expected outcome, why not just throw some stuff up there and see what happens.
Related question: I'm moving to Boston -- Waltham actually -- in less than a month and want to get involved in the local startup scene. This Hackers and Founders meetup seems like a great start and I'll definitely attend once I get up there, but for those of you in the area, what else would you recommend?
Yes it is staged.

If you don't want to wait: http://www.droid-life.com/2010/08/31/manual-update-droid-inc...

I did this yesterday morning. No problems.
If it was for a product that mattel makes now it might make sense, but this is for a toy made in the early sixties.
Ask The Reader; Favorite Android Applications?
Lahore: Blasts at shia procession, 6 injured
Lisp Style Rules
This is the definition of irony. Patents coming back to bite you for having them!
There is perhaps a difference between being right and doing right. A graduated response to what may well be trademark infringement might be more socially acceptable than using your 3 million dollar lawyers to clobber a company founded to help special needs children.

In some states, you can legally shoot any animal that wanders onto your property. You should almost never do this.
Sometimes, that conspiracy is what keeps the business running. Whithout it, there would be no jobs.

Not that this is the case everywhere and everytime, but if technical decisions were left solely in the hands of people that lack technical skills, the situation would be even worse that it is now, with all the "enterprise software" floating around and causing trouble directly proportional to their cost.
subscribe to http://thestartupdigest.com , I'm the curator for events there. Also feel free to drop me an email j@jasonlbaptiste.com
OK, I wrote a lengthy post only to delete my writings. It was a defense against trademarking generic words... but then I did some searching.

Mattel is right here. Their product is a didactic toy SEE'N'SAY registered in 1963-1965. Super Duper's trademark were SORT AND SAY, FISH AND SAY, FOLD AND SAY, and SEE IT! SAY IT!

They both fall into same category - didactic toys. Apart from SEE IT! SAY IT! I can see where dispute is not frivolous.
This is the first I've heard of actually being able to get a 2.x series OS on my MyTouch 3G. T-Mobile has promised it, but we've been waiting for months.
I don't know, the only problem I found so far is the lack of tag display.
It is a bit harder to install than gitosis, but you also get much more (for example, people can create projects and repos without your help, all the visual stuff, etc..)
Check out http://thestartupdigest.com/ and select Boston, lots of great events posted each week. Jason just happened to take over as the curator as well.
3 easy ways to spoof your location using Facebook Places
In short, it seemed that the proof was flawed at a meta-level -- there were certain results, such as that k-SAT has different behaviors (or tractability) at k < 7 and k >= 7, that the proof failed to explain or incorporate.

The consensus was that this was a welcome attempt at answering P ?= NP, but it wasn't sufficient.
.. and chmod +x on it, IIRC
Easy Ways to Fail a Ph.D.
This is a great example of why the net still needs a lot of work to make it less centralized.

The problem here is that Wikileaks is Wikileaks. It is an entity with a face, a central location, etc.
I found it hilarious how they outruled everything but Java on slide 6, without any proof why the others would be inferior.

I also found it quite funny how the slides dissed Javascript just a few pages later, only to come back to it a few pages later: except now it's generated on the server side, and never directly written. Makes sense if you're doing everything in Java, but still.

On the plus slideshow does have a few good slides (29-33, for example), which show good practice, regardless of the framework used.
It obviously depends on used tools, technology and programmer's attitude. I'm glad I'm not in the same situation as you.

PS. I just cannot resist to guess - are yeu a java guy?
> So, the writer of the article had one complaint. The forms cannot take passwords.

We don't know this. We have no idea how many complaints rackspace has against this guy. It could be one or it could be dozens.
Cyc failed because it succeeded.

Doug Lenat was able to run a very good business (hiring about 50 people for 10+ years) running about 50% off government contracts, about 50% off sales to big companies that could use better KB management tools that his competitors had.

Cyc didn't need to change the world in order to succeed, so it didn't change the world.

That said, the fundamental trouble in NLP is the lack of common-sense knowledge. The proper word-sensing of pen in "the pig is in the pen" vs "the ink is in the pen" is a matter of semantics, not syntax. You can do Noam Chomsky stuff until you're blue in the face and it will get you nowhere... But then some stupid Markov Chain comes along that conflates syntax and semantics and beats it.
I would have assumed MS would use some encryption on the data they send, which would mean that nobody could ever know except Microsoft. That said, I don't know that any sort of encryption is used for Windows Updates. But they could do it...
That picture is a "sack with a couple more holes" however if rather than cloth connecting the straps they tied together in a knot. In that case the knot is a topologically distant feature which is maintained regardless how you deform the garment.

I can't find a picture of it. However while this is still a "sack with a couple more holes" http://s7.kmart.com/is/image/Sears/049B018579550001?hei=500&... if you picture having that strap be wrapped around at the point of intersection it can still be unwound. However, if you form a slip knot at the intersection it can not be removed by deforming the garment.
I can't visualise what you've described, can you give an example?
Uhg, talk about a community that I don't want any part of. Can you imagine submitting sample code to be 'allowed' into Hacker News or a similar service? No thank you.
Are you talking about derivative securities built on top of loans?
It's the first time I heard it. But I wuld do it because the name sounds so funny at the end of a rant.
Since this is the first non-free issue, it will give you a good idea of what your revenue/profit is (including advertising), so you have an option on the next issue to provide the authors with the option of accepting a nominal sum for their work.

That would remove any ambiguity and provide an additional incentive for writers.
Well, on the surface of it, yes. What is far more intriguing to me about it is the quasi-actuarial business model ...
Will do -- thanks. And double thanks for all the quality comments and blog posts.
There's a website I visited two years ago all about sharing ideas. Some funny, some business, some absurd. It was an amazing place, but I cannot for the life of me recall the URL!
That's not what "tiling window manager" means in this context. See for example http://xmonad.org/
No so sure informing your competitors that you want out is such a great idea. Depends highly on your market or product/service but I'd be weary of anyone approaching me with the same offer.
Ok maybe I'm new on HN but I did read the "Welcome to Hacker News" (http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html) guideline which said:

'Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks."'

And the definition for a comment worth downvote is "What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling."

This is all to ensure a positive, encouraging culture on HN, thanks
I'm also wondering if this person has a history of complaints.
The Extraordinary Tale of Red Rain, Comets and Extraterrestrials
Fun with debugging a complex Cocoa app, with Dr. Greg Parker
People in small towns never had this luxury. Everyone knows everything about you. It sounds like in the future, the whole world will be a small town.
Super-summary: companies are getting sued for putting expired patent numbers on their products. Previously, for a maximum of $500; last december, a ruling allowed up to $500 per offense (with potential(?) speculation that this implies per individual item produced). And for some reason this includes retailers, not just producers, though I don't understand how.

I'll count this a good thing, though $500 per item on the shelf is excessive. As long as those patent numbers are on a product, people won't be as likely to do anything similar for fear of patent violation.

If the retailers are also held accountable, I feel sorry for them. That's a redonkulous amount of fact-checking they'd have to do, especially since some patent numbers are inside the items, on the motor housing.
This kind of debugging tale is exceedingly fun for hard-core hackers, so thought the HN community would enjoy it.
Go is certainly there. It even has an easy to use Syscall module.

See the File example
http://golang.org/doc/progs/file.go?h=syscall
It may take a while to sink in, but even if it does, the general public probably won't care enough to change their behavior. People want instant gratification; they'll see it at most as a gamble: "What are the odds that this company will do something wrong with my data?"... or at worst, they'll just ignore the risk of consequences completely, like many people do in daily life.
This is why there are lawyer jokes.
That's correct, however the Droid Incredible only just starting rolling out the Verizon-branded update now, and the Droid 1's release was starting to hit a lot of phones last week.
Google's `Huge Hoof' Angers D.C. Allies After Web Accord
I think you are correct. My mistake, I didn't properly visualize what you were describing.
The thing that really bothers me is future-dated copyrights. For example, buying a textbook and the copyright date on the title page is 2012. How is that not illegal?

edit: If I were just to scan them and host them all online would I be doing anything that could be considered infringement? Because as I read it, what they are saying is that this textbook is considered public domain for another two years.
8 Blogging Lessons from My 8 Months of Blogging Experience
It’s amazing sometimes to look back to see what you’ve done, what you’ve learned and whom you’ve helped...
So the key idea is, if you get arrested, take a mathematician with you...
Seeing "I'm guessing" paired with "QED" is... strange to say the least.
For the people who would go for an analytical solution rather then monte-carlo: for a large number of prisoners the probability that they all find their numbers tends to 1 - ln(2) ~= 0.3069
There are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the site or in the application, and interact with other readers.

If characters in Snow Crash or Diamond Age were "earning badges" or tweeting, I'm pretty sure I would have put the book down. Why can't the "social" interactions take on a more mission-critical function?
They will also honor take-down requests.
While I'm a bit dissatisfied with the XML bit, any excuse to write a parser is a good one for me! I haven't given the spec for their Markup language a close reading yet, but this seems like as good an opportunity as any to fool around with a precedence-climbing recdesc approach. I also like their approach to the [non-?]competition generally - commenting on interesting entries rather than just ranking them.
I updated my Incredible to Cyanogen 6 and am fairly impressed. I'm not a Sense-hater, but there were a couple annoyances that got to me, and the mostly-vanilla UI feels like how the phone was meant to be. The performance is hard to beat, too.
I should mention that one thing I don't like is how some of the jamo are multiple independent lines, which interacts badly with the 'squish the jamo together into a single block' - eg. ㅍ, ㅊ, ㅎ or ㅔ (the last 2 being particularly egregious).
I didn't rtfa because it looks like flamewar linkbait, but to me anything would be better than a blank rectangle.
Until they move to Canada - then they remove them again.
I always got looks for removing my shoes at work, it's much more comfortable to wear socks.
And it's not as though there's an open-source alternative to Logic (or Final Cut etc) anyway.