skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Ultimately though agriculture itself is a non-sustainable process. That is why the fertile crescent, cradle of civilization, is now a desert." It was a desert before as well. The Sumerians used irrigation to be able to turn dry but fertile soil into farmland. This requires a lot of hard work, ingenuity, and collaboration, which might be why civilization started there. It's relatively flat, with a hard subsurface, which makes salt buildup a problem, making farming there rather more fragile.

If what you are saying is true, then why is there still farming after thousands of years along the Nile and Indus river valleys?

In any case, what do you suggest the people of L.A. do? They grow a lot of their food locally, in the Central Valley, but that water is pumped from across the state and the Valley has the same problems as the Fertile Crescent.

Should they grow the food in their backyards (more locally), and if so, will there be separate water systems for crops, because it needs less water treatment than humans need?

Or should some large fraction of the population move, and if so, where? Since food forests aren't going to grow well enough in LA to feed its own population, at least, not without non-local water.

Personally, I would rather pay people to grow my food for me while I get to sit on my porch and enjoy reading and commenting on HN.
They did absolutely nothing, that's true.
How did those founders get Visa to come here and build their firm? Did they all start with 1 million dollar?
Oh, of course - Maxwell buckets will do the trick! Just need little robots with mirrors on each one to let light in and not let it out.
It's true that the FTC has expressed concern over app store rules, but the FCC was specifically investigating the circumstances of the iPhone Google Voice app: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/apple-answers-fcc-questions/
And bunch of people getting the jobs/contracts. Like anybody who've been working with big enterprises, i'm sure it would be a net positive effect :)

Btw, while everybody's salivating over "Oracle failure", was it really Oracle failure, ie. like failure of Oracle?
I've seen your posts on WF- price of weed is probably the most legitimate/least sketchy project discussed on there.

So it depends on the industry and company. If,as I assume, you're looking for a job in the performance marketing space, nobody will bat an eye about your projects.

If you're working for an agency that does branding, that would be a different story. But, really, who wants to work for an agency?
I'm starting to build one right now. I'm actually procrastinating on another project.
The paraben tool requires blackberry desktop manager to be installed, and just hooks into their application for support. It then puts the data into a paraben-specific file format, preventing someone from being able to analyze the data with other tools. If you are interested and want more specific ideas for development, id be happy to talk about this in a less public venue than an open internet forum.
Ask HN: Would you pay to win an award?
Our company has been up for a few of awards over the past 12 months. Great stuff I know....but I was born a sceptic. In the words of Groucho Marx, "I don't want to belong to any club that would accept people like me as a member". The self-deprecating pessimist in me says that any award I'm likely to win is most likely not worth winning. We've let most of them slide, haven't bothered filling out the paperwork, or just "forgot" to even respond.

These are typically the types of awards where you get to pitch your idea to a room of "investors". You then go to a fancy cocktail party where you get to schmooze and chat up people with wallets full of cash. Of course, to be honoured with this award you need to cough up cold hard cash. In this case $2k.

Now I don't know if actors have to pay for a seat at the Oscars, but to me something doesn't seem quite right about paying to receive an award. I can understand that these things are part of a larger conference and that there are costs associated with running such conferences, but it seems odd to charge the people you want to appear.

What this says to me is that the people who end up receiving awards are the ones who are willing to cough up $2000 to do a sales pitch, not necessarily the most deserving. Perhaps we're only even in contention because 400 people before us said, "screw that!"

In short, is an award you have to pay to receive worth winning? Is paying $2000 to speak to a room of investors worth the admission price? Are these things just thinly veiled scams designed to take advantage of those desperate enough for capital to fall for it? And most importantly, has anyone attended one of these things and actually found it at all beneficial?
I also like to cache resources as JSON and then render them into a template with Ajax.
Apple Finally Approved a Native Google Voice iPhone App
Link to view in iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gv-connect/id347835665?mt=8
Yes, I was aware those programs when I made the post ("there have been half-baked efforts, but nothing terribly inspiring").

They're limited in that they don't have the same abilities as professionally produced games. What I'd like to see is a leveling of the playing field when it comes to online digital game distribution for consoles. Restricting some of the system's abilities (ala iOS, etc) is naturally going to happen, but anything a professional title can do, my (hypothetical) game should be able to do as well.

There are also a lot of interesting possibilites for streaming video, etc like what you're starting to see on iOS devices. The situation for content might be a little sticky considering that MS does its own distribution deals. At the very least opening the field up to smaller shops and lowering the barriers and costs to entry would be a huge step in the right direction and MS would still get a cut as the apps/games would be bought with Microsoft points.
There's definitely more to the original game than what I was able to put in up to now, but I figured releasing it early would ensure I continue to work on it. Thanks for the feedback!
Now that is Pandora box of creativity. It sounds nice if algorithm finds you improved the artwork - you're getting paid your share. In case if it finds that you ruined it ...
I dont think its got anything to do with wages. Especially for founders of technology/science-based companies.

Rather I think Americans dont take tough courses in college - ie science/technology courses. How many computer science (for eg:) MS courses even have Americans enrolled in them?

Americans take it easy in college. Heck, if I'd been born here I'd have done the same. :)
Perhaps you don't understand how RAC works. A RAC cluster is cache-coherent with a shared disk system, in this case an EMC SAN. It's designed to be both scalable and fault tolerant. The replication would have been handled by the SAN itself, at the block level. There would be two completely independent (edit:DISK) cabinets that would replicate synchronously. Some software assumes synchronous replication and it's cheaper to just spend a ton of money on an expensive replicating SAN and Oracle RAC than it is to rebuild the software, so an async replication scenario is out of the question.
With the same experience you have, I am not shocked at all. People design and implement "processes" to "prevent" production issues from happening, but they are mostly feel-good sounding things on top of "let's cross our fingers and hope nothing bad happens".

This usually works, which is why people think it's an acceptable policy. But real planning involves things like software correctness, proper test procedures, ways of making a test environment that's exactly identical to production, and so on. This is hard (and slows down development... "tests, what a waste of time!"), so people instead say, "let's try really hard to not fuck something up".

Trying hard only gets you so far, as JPM learned.
The rejection of the Google voice application is the primary reason I have not upgraded to iPhone4 and was instead planning on switching to Android when my contract was up. I always felt they had the right to reject the app but for me, it was a case of Apple making a decision that was bad for me but good for them, which is exactly the kind of behavior from the carriers and other that I was trying to avoid by buying an iPhone. If they do approve the official gVoice app, I may consider sticking with iPhone over Android. I may finally be able to get rid of my gVoice text message to email to Prowl setup that I am currently running.
Ruby Conf Bingo Rev 2 (Interactive and randoming (works better in webkit))
Phase two. I made it interactive. Let's play! Sorry I had to submit again, but couldn't have the same URL scheme.
So if the ritual components aren't spelled out in the version history in exactly the right order, the voodoo spell doesn't work? Or is your OCD just wasting a bunch of your time?
The new requirements on loan level data are fairly extensive and will certainly facilitate micro-analysis of portfolios of asset backed securities. The problem is that this will result in even more financial engineering. The government basically doubled the amount of informaiton that loan underwriters have to take when writing loans. It even requires information such as how far the recipient lives from their primary work place (in the case of home loans).

That kind of information is not easy to come by and it's certainly not easy to incorporate into an analysis. It raises the cost to the loan underwriter, to the loan issuer, to the securitization underwriter, which ultimately goes full circle back to the end consumer (credit card rates are already at 15 year highs due to the Dodd bill). There is also another side effect, this legislation, pariticularly as it pertains to securitizations which fund the majority of home loans and consumer debt, will facilitate further complex financial engineering (the more data you have, the more you're likely to use it). It will also give certain funds the opportunity to discern demographic information, which is currently not "technically" possible but will be a lot easier to do once the flood of data comes in from issuers. What i'm hinting at is that institutional speculators and investors will be able to discriminate against pools by analying income, location of workplace, years of employment (another factor), income history etc.

I may be ranting so I'll cut short here. Long story short, the costs of banking are about to sky high for everyone. I am not sure the American public would support this legislation if they realized just how much it would effect their lifestyle, access to capital, cost of capital, and consumption.
This is really really difficult. I know of only 2 people who have ever managed to do this.
I made it interactive. Let's play! Sorry I had to submit again, but couldn't have the same URL scheme. Also, batteries are running low, so I couldn't get the clicking working in FF.
I agree with "Ugh." There are way too many stack exchange sites. And moreover, the pedantic "on-topic/off-topic" debates work well with the programmer culture, but it gets tiresome really fast when you want to just ask a question about how to do something simple on a basic web app.

Hopefully the core team will make strides to eliminate the duplication and over-segmentation of all these Q&A sites.
What do you mean by "local SYSTEM"?

I eagerly look forward to details on it. Where might I find them?
That's really a good comment. It's not a true/false issue, so thank you for reminding that. Interest for tech doesn't mean screwing the rest of one's life.
Are Business Schools Failing Women?
That's a nice shtick (the defensive bit was my favourite addition). It's also facile.

They specifically detailed that it's an AES cookie encryption attack, yet you're acting like I'm going on a limb saying that?
This is what I hate about the times we live in. When someone comes up with an idea of how to solve a problem, all we do is discuss. We discuss and we discuss. We argue about the plausibility, we may even do some calculations to see how plausible the solution is. But we never actually try it.

In other words, if some guy thinks a vertical farm would be a good idea and a possible solution to a problem, then why the hell doesn't he just, you know, make a vertical farm and see what happens? If it works, then that's fuckin' awesome, we've got vertical farms! If it doesn't work, well then hey, no biggie. Let's try something else.

Of course some problems have very expensive solutions that are not feasible to just "try out", but I don't think it would cost a ton to make a small scale version of a vertical farm. Even if it was only like 10ft by 10ft and as tall as a two story house, you have to start somewhere.

But I guess we'd rather just talk about the possibility, and never take it any farther than that.
1.the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
3.the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4.the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

It was for personal use, not much was taken and there was no market effect so it very well could be fair use.
> Americans dont take tough courses in college - ie science/technology courses

... because an army of H1Bs and green cards have driven down wages and thus the incentive to pursue science & tech careers? Seems at least plausible.
"Do we really need a site for each individual content management system?"

It's interesting that CMS specific sites were even proposed. In my experience (mostly with the Drupal community) CMS advocates tend to be pretty tribal and desire a narrow focus. A cross-CMS Stack Exchange site would probably seem like it was full of noise to everyone involved. What would deemed to be signal VS noise would depend entirely on one's CMS of choice.
You mention product managers here, while I certainly agree with you that this isn't a technical job per se, most job ads mention a CS-related degree as a requirement. I'm always looking at PM positions in the valley, but I can hardly find a job opening that does not require a BA in CS.

What would you suggest to do as a non-technical person trying to get into PM? Could anyone share a story/some tipps here?
Companies to Watch in the Mobile Payments Space
Ignoring the hearsay for a moment:

Indicating copyright ownership has nothing to do with the licensing. The people who wrote the software own the copyright. Being AGPL, or whatever else, defines how other people can use the software.
Per year.

I also looked up the average cost of agricultural land per acre in the US, which comes down to about $1200 per acre, or about 0.3 cents per square foot.

This means that for the cost of buying outright the average agricultural square foot somewhere in the country, you could rent that same square foot in a big-city skyscraper for about 45 minutes.
Facebook Job Hunting App BranchOut Raises $6 Million
Is my credit card stolen?
ohh yeah. i totally agree. I'm pretty sure if its an oracle issue, ibm is going to put its sales pitch for db2 in overdrive to jpmc
For those that don't want to read it:

He posted on Hacker News and got up to #2 on the front page and got a lot of good suggestions. He then got mentioned on TechCrunch in the first paragraph of an article. He had to shut down invites due to technical issues.

Honestly, this seems pretty standard for getting those 2 things, only 1 of which was his doing.

He is very thankful to the HN community, though.
It was not for nonprofit educational purposes. It isn't even reasonable to say it was for personal use given that Jeff's last blog entry was packed full of affiliate links.

His blog is a commercial enterprise.
He can mark it as 'unlisted' to overcome that problem.
Let me help you with that.

http://img.skitch.com/20100917-84gr9ftx22rpcu9f3keuu3xpq8.jp...
UNIX has a history of names that don't make sense to an outsider. The first time I came across bitchx I was very confused.
Awesome! Works on the iPad!
Startups don't usually have mail room jobs.
Flash vs. HTML5: Adobe Weighs In
Ok...
I'm no clearer on what the problem is than when I started reading the article.

All I got from it was they have security problems. What exactly? where exactly?

"Really, Really, Really Bad" is really subjective. When stating a problem try to be concrete and objective and give examples. For instance, if you think someones cooking is a bit off and you are a chef, say you need a little more salt or pepper or whatever the case maybe. A chef can't simply say it is really, really, really bad, leave such comments to amateurs who don't know what exactly they are experiencing and how exactly to fix it.

If you don't really have the time to address each particular concern then give them a reference to some security books that are essential when developing something like this.

As it stands the community is no better off before than when you wrote this. You should have written an article about "10 security books that are a must read to prevent diaspora mistakes".[I would appreciate it if someone who is knowledge about this wrote something like this]
In that case, it's kind of cool that this preserves that behavior.

Suggestion for optimizing, especially for larger multi-part circuits: allow a sub-circuit to be expanded / collapsed. When expanded, show the full animation & whatnot. When collapsed, run an optimized chunk of code which has the same behavior, and just output the results at the proper times. When it's collapsed it's a "black box" anyway, might as well take advantage of that.

This way, if someone builds some massively complicated integrated circuit, you can run it as fast as possible when it's not being animated.
Wow! I'm impressed. Me and a partner submitted a similar app during the facebook fbfund grant competition. We got rejected. The crew got busy with life's problems, and the app was put on indefinite hold.

I wonder why no one else tried this before? A job search company based solely on the facebook platform. The big players in the business won't do it, because still make money as destination site and through career services
Right, debt is the burden that keeps all americans from becoming job creators. I am scared to think of what would happen if I don't repay my student loans.
This is in the man page for bash on Snow Leopard, but it doesn't seem to actually work. Does anyone know why?
> The companies that make the vaccines are immune to prosecution, so they don't have an incentive to produce a quality product.

Actually, it works sort of like this: the companies that make vaccines are immune from prosecution in normal courts, all jurisdiction for these cases goes to a special court (the Office of Special Masters of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims) that weighs scientific evidence, the facts of the case, and the relevant law to determine the outcome. The general idea is that there is a higher bar to cross regarding evidence and there is no jury for an ambulance chaser to sway. The court deals with specific instances of harm from vaccines and not general classes of claimants (e.g. no "class actions" in this court.)
This was released when Chrome first came out.
Quora is doing just fine with one big site only.
When someone comes up with an idea of how to solve a problem, all we do is discuss. We discuss and we discuss. We argue about the plausibility, we may even do some calculations to see how plausible the solution is. But we never actually try it.

That's not really true. An awful lot of the time, someone comes up with a solution to a problem, tries it, and it works.

In cases like this, though, it never gets beyond the discussion stage because the idea is a complete useless crock of shit and the major flaws in it are so obvious that a nine-year-old (or even George Monbiot) can see right through it.

And yet the discussion goes on, because the guy who has the idea (and a number of hangers on) is religiously wedded to it refuses to acknowledge that "wait, actually, yes, this makes no sense on the grounds of physics or economics", so I suspect we'll continue to see this idea pop up from time to time.

In conclusion, sane and workable ideas get implemented. Stupid unworkable ideas with horrendous flaws get endlessly discussed.
Is it really for personal use when it's being broadcast over the internet? The feedburner stat on the side of his blog says he has 111k "readers" so it seems pretty impersonal.
That's what the parent said. The system didn't decide, the content owner did.
For a modern CPU, it would have about as many transistors as there are warp/weft crossings on a bedsheet.
Have you thought about making a Flash version to promote the game?

Terry Cavanagh did that with vvvvvv with some success, realistically with a game of your quality a Flash version is going to reach a few million people at least and some % are going to convert to sales.
Your's truly just applied to be a beta user. The product looks awesome. I would love to try it with my app.
I nearly expect it to have already been done, given that there's a gameboy emulator in JS: http://www.codebase.es/jsgb/
Blood disorder cured – a first for gene therapy
They spend more than that on humans. From the ones I know, they seem to be quite smart and good at getting computers to do the computing work while the humans can think of better stuff for the computers to do.
Sweet wood floors.
Choose your own adventure: MongoDB crash recovery edition
Did any of their partners really think they'd push PlaysForSure as the DRM platform for Windows media if they were going to abandon it once they launched their own player hardware?
How about a driver for a computer with an hdmi port?

How about a virtual video card driver?
Workplace Upgrades at Boxee, Mint, Google, and More
A bit of background on this post:

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/07/08/2311225/Open-Source-M...

Basically, Shazam sent the author a cease and desist. The post was removed for a bit, but it's now back up.
I have a simple question:

How would this acceleration work with Windows Remote Desktop? It would work with VNC as it grabs the whole screen, but RDC replaces the video driver and it stops being accelerated.
From SX: it is when you have 130,000 daily readers. 130,000 times ~20 megabytes is ~2.5 gigabytes of bandwidth in a day. I guess that's not so terrible for a few days based on the Amazon S3 cost calculator -- but over the long run, I'd have to pull the video for fear it getting hard-linked elsewhere. - Jeff
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/6445/web-video-sh...
Can you find somebody else who would do a better job than you? It sounds like you have a responsibility to your friend, one which you took on yourself. This means do everything you can to get the job done, even if you're not the one personally hands-on doing the work.

If you bail, it would be a deserved ding on your credibility, I'm sure you would agree.
Yes, the simulation controls were part of a toolbar near the design canvas. I had some trouble coming up with a combination of good answers to these questions:

1. How do you set an initial state when controls are also interactive? This is probably easier to do now that I have a floating property editor window. At the time, all interactions with components were direct.

2. If something is interactive, like a switch, what's the best way to handle dragging it with the mouse? Previously, the "wall plate" of the switch was the only draggable part, but it didn't seem like the best choice for usability. Also, it limits the visual design because draggable areas must be large enough to be discovered. I've considered having an extra draggable handle appear when a component is selected, but I'm not sure if that's ideal.

Forcing a separation between a design perspective and the simulation made the answers obvious. However, now that you've made me explain my reasons, I can see that it might be possible to go back to the old way without sacrificing too much.