skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The past shows that, while geography shapes the development of societies,

I wonder if Morris has read UC Davis economist Greg Clark’s material?

“In my recent book, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World I argue two things. First that all societies remained in a state I label the “Malthusian economy” up until the onset of the Industrial Revolution around 1800. In that state crucially the economic laws governing all human societies before 1800 were those that govern all animal societies. Second that was thus subject to natural selection throughout the Malthusian era, even after the arrival of settled agrarian societies with the Neolithic Revolution.

The Darwinian struggle that shaped human nature did not end with the Neolithic Revolution but continued right up until the Industrial Revolution. But the arrival of settled agriculture and stable property rights set natural selection on a very different course. It created an accelerated period of evolution, rewarding with reproductive success a new repertoire of human behaviors – patience, self-control, passivity, and hard work – which consequently spread widely.

And we see in England, from at least 1250, that the kind of people who succeeded in the economic system – who accumulated assets, got skills, got literacy – increased their representation in each generation. Through the long agrarian passage leading up to the Industrial Revolution man was becoming biologically more adapted to the modern economic world. Modern people are thus in part a creation of the market economies that emerged with the Neolithic Revolution. Just as people shaped economies, the pre-industrial economy shaped people. This has left the people of long settled agrarian societies substantially different now from our hunter gatherer ancestors, in terms of culture, and likely also in terms of biology. We are also presumably equivalently different from groups like Australian Aboriginals that never experience the Neolithic Revolution before the arrival of the English settlers in 1788.”

The Domestication of Man: The Social Implications of Darwin

http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/07/social-darwinism-21st-c...
I agree. As more and more services close, customers will be wary of putting content online or using a public online service. Thats the reason we started Tonido.
"A relational model of data for large shared data banks"
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.110...

He gives criticism of the then existing databases (hierarchical and network), then proposes the relational model and the concept of a query language (though not an actual languages - this predates SQL).

Interestingly, one of the hierarchical databases (IMS) is still going strong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Management_System#H...
VLC developer takes a stand against DRM enforcement in Apple's App Store
It's also more complicated because medical marijuana is actually legit.
coffee + weed = the hippie speedball
well, of course recent research has linked the highly modified strains of marijuana (ie, very high THC, reduced companion and modifying compounds) with schizophrenia and other disorders. This has fatal consequences, as I can attest to. See: http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/2010/downside...
Checkout Tonido (http://www.tonido.com/Tonido_Welcomes_Drop.io.html)
Hm, someone just asked me this week if their data will last on Drop.io--I told them yea for sure, they've been around for a long time, they're not just gonna shut down all of a sudden.

And then this.
The recent financial meltdown should have made it abundantly clear that the "watchers" were in fact not watching

That's true, but it's a very specific example that has a clear explanation in two parts, those being the government and the private sector together creating the problem.

First, there was the government (e.g., Barney Frank's efforts) that was forcing industry to accept risks that industry would have avoided under more natural market conditions. Second, forced to absorb those risks, industry experimented with ways to mitigate and dissipate that risk -- but the experiment failed badly.

It showed that nobody knew how to properly model the situation -- neither the regulators nor the industry. And for that reason, it's not really an instructive lesson to draw conclusions about industry. We've learned those particular lessons now, so you shouldn't see this repeated again.

Shareholders do not watch companies for waste, they just watch the stock price

That is patently absurd. It's not even true for any responsible individual investor, but for any fund manager that would be outright negligence -- and then the yields of his funds would tumble, and even the stupidest of individual investors would throw him out on his ear.

By contrast, I offer government idiocy, programs that have blatantly failed by any objective measure, yet continue to be money black holes. Consider public education, and the war on (some) drugs. Both actively damage society, and waste uncountable sums of money in doing so.

In many cases government agencies are better managed than corporations of an equivalent size; there are usually better internal auditing and fraud controls in place

Citations, please? Here are some counters: Aside from my examples above, consider Medicare, a well-known money pit that politicians have said they'll clean up for years if not decades. Indeed, government does all it can to prevent us from seeing the depths of its waste. I have a friend here in NJ who works tirelessly to uncover government waste, and the reason it's such a big job is the constant resistance to the use of open public records laws.

And the military (the remainder quoted from http://www.wanttoknow.info/corruptiongovernmentmilitary ):

"'According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,' Rumsfeld admitted. $2.3 trillion -- that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America."
-- CBS News, 1/29/02, U.S. Secretary of Defense raises evidence of government, military corruption

"A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the U.S. Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units. When military leaders were scrambling to find enough chemical and biological warfare suits to protect U.S. troops, the department was caught selling these suits as surplus on the Internet 'for pennies on the dollar.'"
-- San Francisco Chronicle, 5/18/03

"The Defense Department spent an estimated $100 million for airline tickets that were not used over a six-year period and failed to seek refunds even though the tickets were reimbursable."
-- New York Times, 6/9/04
Man. Prison guard unions. Those don't seem like a great idea. I guess having that right to unionize is out there, but in this case it certainly doesn't seem right.

Sounds ripe for corruption.
The european approach (de facto decriminalization) doesn't solve most of the problems americans are concerned with. Basically, the last link or two (user and/or retail supplier) are decriminalized, but the rest stay illegal.

This keeps production and supply in the hands of actual criminals that deal across countries. The legalized links are operated by borderline criminals and shady people.

It makes life better for the consumer (I have no problems with this), solves a lot of the policing issues but doesn't tackle solve organised crime, quality issues etc. If you are only interested in legalising marijuana, this policy doesn't create the wall between soft & hard drugs either. That is, marijuana stays in the "drugs" category and doesn't enter the alcohol category (where regular users will be appalled at the thought of their adult children using, for example, marijuana).
makes sense... on an 1800 dimension sphere as you move away from any orthogonal direction the other 1799 dimensions can only share what you lose in the original direction so they all add up to 1... well.. you know... pythagoras and all that.
> On the other hand, the shareholders are watching the actions of the corporations every day of the year.

This is simply not true in any useful sense. What is Lockheed Martin's entertainment budget? How much money did Pfizer spend on airline travel for doctors? What percentage of the doctors who flew in better than coach seats could have flown in coach?

There's no way for a share-holder to reasonably find out this information.

> And that's why you'll never see a private organization as poorly run as a government agency, at least for any period of time.

This is just dogma. As long as the overall organization is profitable, sub-domains can be spectacularly unprofitable for surprisingly long. You just don't get to see it as an outsider.

> But it doesn't absolve government of its responsibility as stewards of our money.

So, how do they do that wrt sub-contracting? They try to cover their butts with more and more regulation. Then the same people who are robbing them blind scream about government interference.
I'm glad to see this comment. It's results and behavior that matter, not chemicals in your urine. If only employers would realize this...
Excel does "cosmetic" rounding, that ends up producing some surprising results - in the words of this author, it "confers supernatural powers upon some (not all) parentheses": http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/Mindless.pdf
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software

What do you think?: Good Idea

Valuable?: Yes, worth $34.59 according to Amazon

Does it exist?: Yes, see above

Worth creating?: Yes, if you can do it better than GoF
Do you think Sencha is worthwhile?

Is learning to code natively always preferred, or do you respect the idea of generalizing your platform?
Ask HN: Recommend an Online Encyclopedia for Home-Schooling
My kids are a bit to young for unfettered access to Wikipedia. ("Daddy what's 'fisting'[1]?")

Does anyone have any experience with any online Encyclopedias? Please and thanks.

-----

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisting/ <-- NSFW
One intends harm, the other doesn't.

...but then...

Why he did it isn't relevant.

I am at least as uncertain as to what your position is as you are. Also...

He owes these people nothing.

Nothing, of course, except the common courtesy of not violating their privacy. Yes, even in New York.
If you want to claim that only the government is an inneficient actor, I can only deduce that you've never worked in a Fortune 500 company with more than 100.000 employees.

Inefficiency is built into most of the large human structures. In large corporations few people have real incentives towards the bottom line, so we have industries that live off their cash cows while the rest of the organization is a complete mess.

You are also discounting the fact that inefficiencies are not necessarily a sufficiently important factor in productivity. American military contractors are some of the worst providers of value in terms of efficiency, yet their ability to play the political and legal game gives them all the advantage they need.
The 'war on drugs' has had a lot of bad side effects. Look up the stories sometime of people who were stopped by the police and happen to have a decent amount of cash on them that gets confiscated because clearly it's drug money.
I'm working with 3D datas, and I'm wondering how I could use that map reduce thing on them now ... I have to figure out what kind of stats I could do. I should probably read the PageRank and other samples first ...
I was shocked when I didn't get an empty white page.
What I've always found odd about pot smokers:

They will generally have a diatribe about "evil corporations are poisoning us with HFCS/Vaccines/GM food/etc..." Meanwhile they are saying that the federal government shouldn't regulate what someone puts in their body.

Personally I'd like to err on the side of freedom, but all the same there are real risks out there. We can't expect society/government to take care of all dangers, then turn around and say "I should be able to take whatever I want!"

Or to put it more bluntly imagine medicare costs if we legalize all drugs. Imagine the emergency rooms?
It's been proposed and is probably feasible: http://www.infrastructurist.com/2009/10/22/crazy-or-brillian...
I've only looked at the abstract (damn publishers), but superficially this seems to be a great study. I'd just like to underscore how amazing their samples are. The mean survival time of their patients, 2 years, is also surprising. (Survival bias?)

Getting at metastases is hard. In general it simply isn't medically necessary to biopsy them. Without medical necessity it's unjustifiable to put a patient through that risk and discomfort. Why are metastases important? Mostly because they're presumably cleaner than primary tumors.

In a primary tumor you start out some founder cell that has lost the ability to undergo programmed cell death. In general, DNA repair mechanisms are also awry. The cell divides producing daughter cells, the mutations add up and so on. The tumor becomes heterogeneous. The daughter cells diverge from one another. If you sample from the primary tumor you get plenty of mutations related to cancer, and plenty of mutations unrelated to cancer, simply because the genome is a big place. It is no fun to work with this data.

OK. Metastases. Some immortalized cell has lost basal lamina adhesion and migrated to another site in the body. This is a selective bottleneck -- all of those randomly mutated cells that didn't lose adhesion are stuck in the primary. The secondary should therefore be enriched for mutations in oncogenes and tumor suppressors. This is why this data is so important and could give some great insights into oncogenesis.

Heck, here's an experiment I would love to run:

* Collect biopsies from primary tumors in non-metastatic cases.

* Collect biopsies from metastases in another patient population.

* Look for mutations and changes in genome architecture that are unique/overrepresented in the metastatic cases.
Why not post what you need as a comment up here? People could then collaborate on what they see as the solution plus it might help others who come back to look at this in the future.

PS Not sure about (b) being a great humanitarian reason :)
I'm curious about the "Eliminate Agriculture Subsidies" one. I don't know enough to give a good opinion, but it seems to me like that could wind up pricing basic, quality food out of the hands of the poorest people, and they'd either have problems with starvation or be forced to eat junk.

I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I could have sworn it was The Man that is keeping eggs down at around $3/dozen and milk around $4/gallon.
Actually according to the article it's not confirmed that he's heading for Facebook.

It'll be hard to top Google Wave. I wonder what he'll work on next?
Care to explain what you mean? Given that...

- Crockford originally thought it worthwhile to emulate classical inheritance

- so many, many other frameworks (and technique essays) provide various flavors of class-based inheritance

and that:

- even embracing true prototypical inheritance requires additional helper functions (or at least did in EcmaScript 3)

...I'm a little confused that you disagree that "there is no self-evident approach" for dealing with JavaScript's 'conflicted' (as the linked article correctly states) way of being a so-called prototypical language.
Like with alcohol it always depends on the person. Some people can have a drink or 2 and think nothing of it. While others can't drink without going to black out drunk.

I look at pot and people the same way. I've had friends who smoked and were the laziest people you ever met. They were lazy pre-pot and only became lazier. I've had other friends who smoke and they became super successful, quality people.

A girl I dated in college occasionally smoked with her sister. I would give them grief about it, but turns out in HS they smoked every day with the eventually valedictorian of their school. Oh, and they both finished college with 4.0s in finance.
I'm not defending poor teachers, nor am I defending teaching poorly. Teachers should teach students well.

But if a student isn't learning, they have choices. That's it. If a student has a problem asking peers for help (who may be better experts than their teachers), doing reading beyond their book (which may offer better or more recent information than available in the text), or finding a way to learn what they need to learn, then they aren't going to be able to function in the real world. Because in the real world, people don't teach you things, you must seek knowledge.

I am not being paid to teach anymore, I went off to industry after grad school because I needed to make a living. When I taught, I was engaged every day, and was the best teacher I could be. That included 6 hours teaching every week, 3 hours of attending the course that I was teaching (I sat through the same course 7 times), with another 4-6 hours of office hours every week, in addition to any other courses, research, and contracting work that I was doing.
Ask HN: Kill it or use Flash? (don't say flash please)
I've had this weekend project for a while now that's more or less reached it's natural end. Here it is:

http://www.ZoomRead.com

One frequently asked thing I've found is that people don't want to use Silverlight with it. I've implemented a pure script version (you see it if you don't have SL) but the performance is nowhere near as good. This just now leaves flash...

I'm not keen to use ActionScript etc but not sure what else to do. So HN, is it time to kill my weekender just as a fun learning project or is it worth knuckling down and going flashy/flexy on this baby?
Great post, thanks for sharing it. the story about breastfeeding on the plane just a row away from somebody you were in a meeting with and then having to pump in the airport is the kind of stuff that guys (or for that matter women who aren't moms) don't have to deal with.
It depends on how much performance you need vs how much capacity you need. Since SSDs can do more I/O in a single drive, even if that drive costs twice as much it will still make more sense than a 4 drive RAID array, for both price and power.
> Prisons don't create model citizens, they are a breeding ground for suffering and are a waste of human potential.

Couldn't agree more; in fact, this is a problem far above and beyond drugs alone. I dare say that prisons likely have the lowest efficacy of any social program in the history of the world. :P

That aside, prohibition being evil and ineffective doesn't change the fact that drugs are dangerous. The worst ones are capable of altering a person's judgment and personality, and creating harm to others. Taking prohibition away solves the problem of prohibition; it does very little for the problem of addiction.

(For that matter, I'm also in favor of socialized mental health care, which could be a highly effective harm reduction technique for drug addiction and alcoholism, but for some reason you get labeled a freedom-hating commie for suggesting such things.) :P
Facebook has an email platform / inbox metaphor thing. I bet (i.e. I have no idea what I'm talking about) that he's probably still interested in new forms of collaboration. Maybe under the guise of a Facebook tweak we'll see some Wave concepts reappear. I did always wonder if Wave would be some sort of gmail labs bolt on, and perhaps Facebook is keen on that for their platform...
Do you have a dashboard of some kind to visualize your tests effects? I am curious about the broad kind of insight one could have with such a programmatic access to this community. Perhaps I missed an essay about HN/REPL?
> I don't tweet links to my posts on HN.

I used to until your post :)

Now I wait a couple of hours just to make sure that that's not going to make the difference. I highly doubt people would submit those links anyway, but on the off chance that they would, I'd hate getting people banned or their votes discarded because they appeared like a voting ring.
Nice article! I think it hits a lot of the philosophy behind rich JS Apps. Taking some key points from it:

* Do not store state in the DOM. You'll live to regret it when you need to represent the same model in more than one place at once, or refactor your UI.

* Events are the way to go, when connecting changes in the model to updates in the view. Ideally, models know nothing about what UI happens to be on the screen at any given moment.

* If you're going to be doing interesting business logic in the client, it helps to have collections (in this case, Backbone.Collection) with a richer API than JS arrays: filter, any, map, reduce, reject, include, invoke...

* Lots of little testable JS files for development, one minified gzipped file for production.

The one point I'm in disagreement with is: "Keep your models as simple as possible". In my opinion, client-side models really shine when they contain a large part of your important JS business logic, and you can use the same models in different situations to provide access-control, URL generation, data munging, etc.

For example, here's a list of some of the methods we have on a Backbone.Model called "Document": viewerUrl, publishedUrl, canonicalId, openViewer, openText, openPdf, allowedToEdit(account), checkAllowedToEdit(account, message), checkBusy, notes, uniqueEntities, isPending, isPublic, isPublished.
Many of the more modern programming books deal with the process of creating the software rather than the abstract bits that make up the individual steps.

Have you seen books like http://railstutorial.org/book and similar? Is this sort of what you mean?
I don't mean to sound glib, but I'd think you would -- less for the social stigma or potential for doing something idiotic while stoned, but if I were about to invest a significant amount of money in a company, I think I'd consider 'probability of a founder going to jail' as something that mattered.
So Fedex also supplies the local contractors with branded trucks and uniforms for the Fedex Home delivery? I have seen such people pull the not ringing the door bell stunt and had to go run out after them. If those aren't Fedex employees it seems like a sure fire way of ruining their reputation.
Police use the word antisocial here to when referring to it. I think they are using it in a completely different context though to how we normally use to word though.

More to do with out of line with how wider society expects people to behave or something similar.

In terms of the way we mostly use the word, yes it is a very social thing in bringing people together and having them interact.
So Fedex also supplies the local contractors with branded trucks and uniforms for the Fedex Home delivery

They do indeed: http://www.braunconsulting.com/bcg/newsletters/winter2004/wi...

(When I was a contractor for Bank of America, I got the same Bank of America business cards that everyone else did. Contracting does necessarily mean "setup this one webserver" or "deliver these 83 random boxes today"; it can also be a full-time thing.)

I assume they don't mind the reputation damage because the price is what matters in the "home delivery" business. They care that their $100 overnight letters get delivered on time; your 60 pound box of laundry detergent doesn't mean much to them.
Sorry, done manually from the phone. I will check the link after posting this time.

http://ourdoings.com/brlewis/2006-05-01
See How Non-profit Organizations are using Social Media
Way to go. Just host it in a safe country, like Turkey.
Remove private & protected from wordpress posts
A more conservative (i.e. closer to the generated javascript) approach is pythonicjavascript (http://code.google.com/p/pythonicjavascript/). Personally I prefer making Javascript look more like Python (http://classy.pocoo.org/) than creating yet another language variant with subtle differences from the original.