skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with a Killer Asteroid for the purposes of this discussion is that the solution would have to be extremely high tech (presumably large H-bombs on large rockets). Apart from paying larger taxes I'm not sure what most of us could do to contribute to such a project, so as far as "uniting humanity" goes I suspect we would see fracturing along lines of:

- It's a government plot to get us to pay more taxes and remove personal freedoms

- It is God's will and trying to do anything to stop it is evil

- I'll be OK if I dig a deep enough hole and take enough food, guns and ammo

- Who cares, I'm going to make sure I enjoy the next ten years
I suppose that is because of the evolutionary mechanism to keep the species alive. There's something in place that will unite us when extinction is a possibility (I believe this could be part of reason why wars eventually end..).
As history is witness, "united towards" doesn't work in large scale. It should be "united against". Human need an enemy to get united against. Alien invasion, asteroid collusion might be such thing. Otherwise no matter what, humanity will find one reason or another to form groups to fight one another.

Therefore humans are unlikely to get united to colonize a new planet few light years away. That's not in human nature.

Also check Monkey Sphere:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number
Yeah that it's nice that Germany might be more efficient, but we're still > 4 times their size. When we're talking about country "power" no one cares about efficiency.

As for Quality of Life, that's fine, but I love America and I love our lifestyle, so perhaps that's more of a personal choice than an aggregated one.
official updates are not provided by carrier but manufacturer.

and you can get many android phones unsubsidized and unlocked.
This Wikipedia section seems relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6_address#General_allocation. A choice quote:

IPv6 addresses are assigned to organizations in much larger blocks as compared to IPv4 address assignments: the recommended allocation is a /48 block which contains a number of addresses that is 248 or 7.9×1027 times larger than the entire IPv4 address space.
Ah, neat. But latin does have a word for mail in "epistula" (and probably "littera"), and a message is not necessarily a mail.
Or maybe I'm failing english and there is no distinction between the two in this language/internet world :)
Wiring a lamp in this manner is illegal in some countries. One of the off positions delivers line voltage to the lamp, making it less than idiot-proof.
I completely disagree. This is not what the iPod Nano should be, that's just a stupid sensational news title. Maybe the iWatch, but the iPod Nano is an iPod, NOT a watch (core product).
I don't know what the solution is, or if there is one, or even if I'm right. But as an example, look at the Pastor who was going to burn the Koran. 30 years ago before cable and internet news this guy would have never been heard of. But today, thanks to cable TV and the internet a huge amount of animosity has been generated, there's been demonstrations, reinforcement of cultural biases etc etc. Is this a good thing?
why are you inverting his argument to the most extreme opposite?
Makes me proud to make Norwegians proud. I too really hope this may stimulate others to push the envelope.
NAND gates is what neuromorphic engineers use to build circuits that can compute and end up emulating the function of an integrate-and-fire neuron.
What sticks in my mind the most about this was the estimates on the part of PC manufacturers, of the estimates of the probability of a spreadsheet user, for example, running across this bug. Thinking through the problem carefully, there was no way to calculate such a probability.
How bad?

What I've heard is:

A) No one liked the change from 4 Intel Ethernet ports to 2 Intel and 2 Nvidia chipset ones.

B) Joyent's last straw was that Sun kept changing the management interface on them.

As of a few years ago Ben Rockwood was saying Dell's build quality was awful; did Sun's deteriorate as well? Dell's get better or perhaps became perceived to be good enough?
SQL is pretty much self-documenting. But I still use hand-drawn diagrams showing how fields are related.
I'm curious how you come to this conclusion? Programs in any language will often be designed around immutability in order to improve code maintainability. Without fast persistent data structures this will most certainly decrease the performance of your otherwise elegant design due to considerable amounts of copying.
I'm not surprised that he has trouble understanding that. The 'meaning' of the poster frame isn't clear from that conversation. Does he want a description of what's being displayed in just the poster frame? How does this differ from the title of the video?

For example:

Title: Cat jumping on bed

Frame: Image of cat jumping towards bed

Video: Cat jumps toward bed and lands on it.

The vast majority of the time, the poster frame isn't going to be different than the title of the video.

Now, I agree that when it is different, there should be a way to specify an alt text for it. But to require it when it's the same as the title seems silly to me.
Java as a langauge is generally uninteresting to talk about. There are vary few "wow, that's a clever hack" constructs to be made in the language. But certainly, that doesn't mean software created with it can't be great.

See also: PHP
Prototypical logic bomb - 3 kilotons worth
Wiretapping the Internet
Fully automated food production, shelter construction, power production, and transportation.
Yeah, you're right now that I think about it (the example that reminded me is pluralizing walrus to walri). Personally I do this sort of thing just for personal amusement (as I imagine this persons boss did) rather then actual correctness.
> extremely high tech (presumably large H-bombs on large rockets)

How is 40s/50s technology high tech ?
Cargo Trousers 
The cargo trousers have been in-fashion since around the 90’s era. Ever since it still remains the most demanded trousers among boys and men. Why these trousers are still in demand? There are several reasons for it to be.
Ateneo Blue Eagles, 2010 UAAP champion (http//:singlefatheratwork.blogspot.com)
For the third consecutives years, Ateneo De Manila University (ADMU) Blue Eagles bagged the championship in the just concluded University Athletic Association of the Philippines (UAAP) men's basketball.
The Value of a Piece Facebook. Featuring HN comments
More likely to lead to increased competition between nations/corporations (see the dash for colonization in 19c, leading up to WW1).
There's no such thing as an evolutionary mechanism that keep species alive.
This also works out great for me since I can easily avoid the sort of startup that allows language prudishness to guide its hiring decisions.
Ask HN: Study Roadmap
I am finishing chapter 3 of SICP, doing all the exercises in the book, and I would like to keep improving my programming and CS skills, right after I am done with it -say, by 2075 plus or minus. The following is a list of titles that I consider might help me out to that end:

* SICP

* The Little Schemer

* Essentials of Programming Languages

* The Seasoned Schemer

* Lisp In Small Pieces

* PAIP

* The Scheme Programming Language

* Introduction to the Design & Analysis of Algorithms

* CLRS

* The Art of Prolog

* The Reasoned Schemer

* Programming Language Pragmatics

* Concrete Abstractions

* Introduction to the Theory of Computation

* The New Turing Omnibus

* Beautiful Code

* The Elements of Computing Systems

* Mastering Regular Expressions

* Code

* GEB

I plan to interleave those reads with some discrete math, as to help me specifically with the toughest CS stuff. This might take years, I know!

What items would you change, add, remove? What about the order?

I'm very interested in your opinions, fellows.
rent apartment lviv,travel in karpaty
Rent apartment Lviv

- Cheap and comfortable. You do not live in a hotel, you will feel much more comfortable and cozy home atmosphere in an old house in Lviv.
Ask HN: Are there any number or math based multiplayer board games? 
Sometimes we have friends over for a couple games of Scrabble. One of my friends said that it would be more fun if there was a way to play with numbers instead of letters. It got us talking about creating some kind of multiplayer number puzzle game, maybe like a cross between Sudoku and Scrabble. Surely someone has had this idea before. Has anyone played a board game like this?
You might want to note that the most common "lorem ipsum" you find as filler text is actually an incorrect quoting of a work by Cicero. The actual text from Cicero might yield better results.
Although this sounds great, you have a time telling device already - a mobile phone.
Exactly. The main task of iPod nano is to play music. Why should it be some remote control is beyond me.
I am not sure what problems does this product solve. Take a look at your arm so you can take your phone out of the pocket and then look at it?
On-arm display for the running app makes a bit of sense though.
Application Developments
Finding a good application development company can be really easy. Mentioned below are some qualities that one should check in a web application development company.
So it's real?
We had a TV show here in Spain, that as it turns out also featured in the UK and France. It was known here as "Cifras y letras" (Numbers and letters) and it went to make also a board game. You can check the English wikipedia explanation for some information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_(game_show)
I think hostile aliens are a specific example of a more general unifier: non-human common enemies. This might include hostile AI (think SkyNet), solar radiation, or perhaps even a terrestrial worldwide pandemic (bacterial or viral).

I think that enemies you can see and anthropomorphise are more powerful, however, so I imagine a humanoid alien or terminator would be a better unifier than an invisible bacteria or global warming, even though all could be considered a common threat to humanity.
Maybe not ITER (or even DEMO), but specifically nuclear fusion becoming a viable practical energy source.

I went to JET last year, which was amazing to see, but I couldn't help but get the nagging feeling that we won't see tritium/deuterium fusion hit mainstream within our lifetimes.

Mind you, once it does reach mainstream that will change everything. Hopefully there won't be a race to mine helium 3 from the moon.
1. I've just run into a couple of cases on certain types of public wi-fi network where having a public IP on my phone would have been very useful in just the last couple of days.
He is oblivious to the concepts of nettiquette, spam and social networking, but, given his age it's understandable.

I recently helped my father (also in his 50's) join Facebook, and I wouldn't be surprised if he goes on a friending spree. He already has a history of sending "free" greeting cards to anyone whose email address he has. In fact, reading this made me aware of the need to make sure he isn't inadvertently abusing Facebook.
Nice post.

a full reset takes longer than 15 seconds. for example, there are browser issues in the original K3 release to consumers that require a longer time between off/on to clear (like a few minutes I think to be safe- I know it is longer than 15 seconds though). Check the kindle forums below for additional detail.

pictures must be in a folder right under the /pictures folder that you have to manually create. you can't put them in the pictures folder or in a subfolder of a subfolder. you can have multiple groups of pictures by having them in different subfolders of /pictures folder, but that ends up cluttering up your menu, if you like having only a few things in it at a time.

mp3s can go into audible or music folder (have to manually create music).

mp3s in audible show up like books. mp3s in music can be played while browsing, reading, etc. via experimental in home menu.

PDFs can load slow as hell, and are a pain to have to resize (basically, they are not usable unless you have a big font in the PDF). Instead try to get free books from Amazon or in mobi format, which is the un-DRM'd version of the format Amazon uses for their books (AZW). Mobi format is available from Gutenberg as the what it calls the Kindle format.

Don't load up your Kindle with a ton of crap books because it is a pain in the butt to find the one you want. Unless absolutely necessary, you are probably better off keeping a small collection in it.

Pictures are in b/w so darker pictures are just usable, and this is just a "neat" feature, not likely to be used much. It might be neat for storing clear customized b/w blueprints, wireframe designs, simple electronic circuit design, simple workflows, etc. It is also kind of hard to resize so it makes good use of the screen (600px × 800px) but then you really want many rotated to look good right off the bat.

The browser sucks because it is buggy and because you can't zoom or click easily with the included controls. Buy a Kindle to read, not browse Facebook or type email. Once the Kindle has touch screen and pinch zoom and color, then the browser will be ok. No I'm not suggesting an iPad. They are too reflective in the sun and they aren't meant for reading, and they are overkill for an e-reader.

For the scoop on Kindles from a good broad section of its (not always super-technical) users that Amazon watches is here:

http://www.kindleboards.com/
Welcome to the open market.

The cured Appstore may be not the best solution but the "everybody-in with no check" of the Android Market does not seems a better solution to me.

This kind of market gave us malware and trojans on PC platforms showing that the user is usually not the right person to give control of what it's safe to install.
Why, oh why, don't such countries just make idiots illegal :(
You don't think designing a system that can deliver bombs deep into space is high tech?

It's not like we could get a Saturn-5 out of storage, fuel it up, stick a Tsar Bomba on the top and hope for the best.
Canvas Grid - JS1K entry
The Rakudo developers have never said that Rakudo Star was a complete implementation of the Perl 6 spec. They called it a useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6 (http://rakudo.org/node/75).

Anyway I'm a "glass is half full" type of person and I view the 85-90% has a good thing (and I think the "boss", ie. Larry Wall would agree :)
I thought about immortality, but I suspect you'd fail to enlist the (massive) religious populations of Earth since you'd be competing directly with their existing power structure and investment.

It's odd to think that it's already a saturated market.
You haven't been following the Zed Shaw rant threads here have you?
I'm not. I'm asking, if how I understand it is how he meant it.
Everyone's A VC
Our Moon is also in the Goldilocks zone, and rocky. But it lacks an atmosphere.

Is this because the Moon is small, and some threshold of gravity is required? Or somehow related to the Moon's cold and inert interior, thus no gaseous volcanoes? Or just a happenstance of composition?

The Moon is a concrete anchor for imagining exosolar worlds.
500 EUR per semester is not mutch in America you pay like 5000$ or something?
See - Portal
5 Actors You Didn’t Know Were Talented
Many actors who seem to be irrevocable wastes of space- actually have a modicum of talent left in their surgery riddled bodies.
I can't tell you how many times I have googled an issue only to have #10(?)on his list happen to me. Nevermind I figured it out myself...
A damn dirty trick that is.
How exactly? If you deliver line voltage to the lamp, it is on and lights.

Perhaps you are thinking of the Carter system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiway_switching#Carter_syste...), but the system in the article is the common system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiway_switching#Common_syste...).
At 35,000mph would take 402,000 years. Inter-stellar travel is not for the feint-hearted. It's probably possible to accelerate a space-craft to around 10x this speed using current motor technology. Even so, that's still 40,000 years - and 21 light years is like a nano-meter away on a galactic or cosmological scale.

Really, if you want to cross inter-stellar space in any kind of reasonable time - O(human lifetime) - you need to go faster. Possible solutions are: solar sail or new kinds of ion thruster. Both of these impart a very small force (and hence acceleration) for an exceedingly long time, resulting in very high velocities. Your target speed is about 10% of c. In the case of the solar sail it receives momentum from sun for ~ 50% of distance (assuming similar-sized star to our sun), and then is braked by the momentum from the target star for the rest of the journey.

Problem with solar sail is it needs to be GIGANTIC, and composed of materials stronger and lighter than those available today. Additionally force from sunlight is proportional to 1/r^2 so your acceleration decreases with distance.

So, nuclear powered ion thruster is probably the answer. But, obviously, this kind of project is expensive. And either way, you need living quarters for an entire society to live and reproduce.
Easter Egg: http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/3834/ishot1j.jpg
I don't share the view of the world that now somehow things are worse. This seems to be the view of a conservative person.

The opposite is true. The world is now the safest it's ever been. It's also the wealthiest and offers the most opportunities.
I am a bit disappointed by the two-switch solution: it seems to waste a lot of cable.

No idea if there is a better way (except for using small microcontrollers).
Yeah - it requires a city-sized power station to accelerate mere protons at the LHC to ~c.
Thank you for posting this comment. I don't know why but this completely makes me think of context switching in the kernel and everything then becomes clear. I am guilty of "multitasking" and at the end of it accomplishing almost nothing, only recently have I realised the error in my ways. Your recent work and comment are confirmation that focusing on one thing at a time is the way forward when working on substantial tasks.
He will earn...a billion dollars this decade!
Has there ever in history been an example of a super project uniting people?
Bullshit, he thought he was using the service the correct way.

Anyway, he should get a twitter account instead. Twitter's about talking, Facebook is about harvesting your personal data and relationships for better marketing.
Engine.Create("dbfile", CSV, "sourcefile", new Config[] { Field1, Field2 });

vs

Engine.Exec("Create dbfile CSV 'sourcefile' using Field1, Field2");

or...

Engine.Context("contextname", "var1>10").Save()

vs

Engine.Exec("Save (var1>10) as contextname");
Agreed. This behavior is an example of why I left FB. Also, people who bitch about the terms need to remember how much they paid to use the service.
Heh, if I’m really stressed out I’ll at least avoid 1v1 online. 4v4 is not so bad thanks to diffusion of responsibility. :)
Would be intressting to know why Haskell? Did already know a little or did do a comparison of more then one FP Language.
When the spec itself is as feature rich as Perl 6 is, having an 80% complete implementation still accounts for a very usable, very feature rich language to play with and implement useful programs in.
Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum
And if they do exist, which of course they don't, quite a lot of people might just decide they rather like the idea of the Culture and immediately defect/surrender.

I know what I would do given the choice!
Isn't he simply questioning an assumption? (assumption being that every bit of image always needs an alternative that is not in normal flow of page)

Ian's often repeated naive-sounding "Why would you do that? What's the use case?" has shot down many feature requests that seemed good in theory, but weren't that useful in practice.

Perhaps description of the video makes description of poster redundant? Maybe one can use ARIA? Maybe media framework can extract description from the video file?

Even if there is a way to describe the poster, will authors actually care to do it? Will they ignore it (naively assuming blind users don't watch videos) or fill it with boilerplate?
"All RIM announced was a roadmap"
Thats not what the CEO said. He didn't say "Announcing the PlayBook Project" or "Announcing the PlayBook Roadmap". He did't even merely say "Announcing the future of BlackBerry". He said and BlackBerry is saying "Announcing The PlayBook" and he walks out on the stage holding the supposed device.
Ayodhya verdict latest news
To me it makes it HN feel that little bit less welcoming. I may be being over-sensitive, but it makes me feel like I'm eavesdropping on a conversation I wasn't supposed to be part of.

Although, heck, maybe he talks about masturbating in front of girls the whole time.
Listen to the `i' in Team - Using the right tools for the job
Well, the UK was there first, with the Industrial Revolution.

It subsequently lost that lead to Germany - I don't have the link to hand, but one possible reason was the lax copyright laws in the German states allowed easier re-publication of technical manuals.

More recently British engineering ability has criminally been allowed to wither on the vine, but that's another story.
Just in-case anyone have not seen the system come into use on Facebook. It's like an automated waring system(prolly is fully automatic). First it warns about adding so may people so quickly, it only kicks i if you're adding what appears to be complete strangers. So if you're adding a lot of people and they are mostly a friends-of-existing-friends type of deal or they have something i common like they are in the same school/year/grade network then it not as aggressive. Upon each(yes there are multiple if you keep it up) warning, it states clearly what will happen if you adding people that quickly. IIRC it even says the reason for the warning is that you're adding people too quickly and you should slow down. The next stage is to stop you adding people for a short while, it tells you about this and that you could be banned if you it up. If you stop adding people for say a day or two you slowly regain your ability to add people, if you're well behaved for a while you can start adding strangers again, but for many you will be notified that you can't add them because the system doesn't think you actually know them.

To sum up, if you get banned for adding too many friends too quickly regardless of whether or not you were spamming, i.e adding real friends then you're an idiot. Also, throwing a bitch-fit about how you left before you could get banned is silly, all it does is draw attention to you for being one of the people that are ruining Facebook for people who use it. For the record, I log on to Facebook approximately 15 minutes every couple months on average but I still find it annoying when people add you when the have no intention of being your friend.
A taste of the next form-factor after smartphones?
It's been reincarnated a few times without traction, but OLED+modern batteries might change that.
Wow finally! I've been trying to bang around using http://www.translation-guide.com/free_online_translators.php... but really run into problems at times with it. It's not too often one needs to translate Latin in general, but when you do...
Why so serious?

Because people presenting deviced did not sai "hey, just kidding" at the end of the presentation?
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Top Reports for Managing Vulnerabilities
Geez, this has nothing to do with his age and everything to do with his level of web experience. Your comment is pretty close to saying "giving his race" or "given his country of origin".
That's what I found working over on the West Coast some years ago - the guys I socialized with after hours were fellow-non Americans. The impression was that Americans form their strongest relationships in their high school/college years and stick to their cliques. That may be a generalization though.