skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's incorrect to blame the Africans. Aid failed not because people there are somewhat less civilized (hypersexual bullshit), but because foreign aid money is feeding the dictators that maintain the system. The big cash doesn't come from exports, but from naive westerners feeding them aid money. That way, whatever leader crops up, he would have a stake in maintaining a poor, half-starving people.

Africans are no different human beings, they're just subjected to the same incentives everyone else is.
> More specifically, what law can be applied to WikiLeaks

Doesn't matter if it is protected or not; Amazon doesn't want to find out nor deal with it.
Yep, but a karma-whoring comment pointing out an obvious troll contributes a lot, congratulations.
Do you think it was the fault of antiquated machinery, the doctor, or your eyes that caused the discomfort? How long ago did you do it? I have been doing some research on it after posting my query and it seems like they have improved the process behind it. ymmv though.
This thread seems possessed of an almost Gödelian self-referentiality.
Arguably this is more sound advice than the one in the article. More often than not (particularly in relationships) complaining is a toll on the road to getting over it, whatever it is.
So.... what if I already make more than 100K? Is he going to bring his value proposition and triple my salary?
I have socks on my list. Smartwool. After trying merino wool socks I'll never go back to cotton.
There are plenty startups that sponsor H1-Bs. Sponsoring an H1-B is not the bottleneck sometimes when it comes to hiring. Even small consultant shops with less than 5 people do H1-Bs. But many applicants will want to think twice about it in case they plan on applying for employment based permanent residency. An H1-B is valid for three years and can be extended for another three for a total of 6 years. After that you can continue to extend it IF you have a permanent residency application that is pending.

The issue for startups happen when you take a permanent residency application into account. For instance, I had a friend who got into two great startups who were willing to sponsor H1-Bs. He really wanted to work at either. However, he also wanted to apply for his permanent residency within 2 years to continue staying in the US. However, a company needs to have certain revenue (besides other minimium requirements) to be able to apply for a green card. Both the companies checked with their lawyers and they did say that it was a big risk factor when it came to applying for a permanent residency. So he actually ended up passing both offers.

In retrospect he would have been fine since both companies ended up getting acquired by Intel and Google, where he would have been fine. But that is part of the risk involved.
Each time a declaration section is added to a selector the contents of the corresponding tag have to be re-stringified. Having a single tag would require the entire style sheet to be rebuilt whenever a rule was modified.
I discovered Browning brand wool socks at Fleet Farm (in Wisconsin; I'm not sure about where else they have stores) a couple of years ago. So far, they've been quite comfortable and durable, for me. Two years ago, they struck me as quite inexpensive, although I don't recall the price -- they might have been on sale. This summer, $6.99 a pair.

The ones from two years ago are still going strong, despite my walking around a lot in socks, at home.

Edit: Although the particular line I purchased are not the very heavy, thick socks that one may sometimes want for outdoor wear.
Previously I've lived in Stuttgart, now in Zürich.

But if you're planning on a regular meetup, I probably can make it some time.
Hi, I actually don't think it's politically incorrect to mention inherited intelligence is necessary in some endeavors. Just impolite, if the person you're speaking to needs a higher level of inherited intelligence.

The point of public schools is to prevent a calcified aristocracy from emerging. Inheritance isn't deterministic, and recessive genes exist. If we don't give everyone some bare minimum shot to improve their intelligence and move up in society, we'll either stagnate in the best case or have violent revolution in the worst.
Let's look at these costs a little bit, and whether they still apply with the internet --

Printing: No need to have printed journals at all ever again. If a library wants an archive they can do it on their local hp and bind it. Free.

Reviewing: Done by volunteers. Free.

Editing: Done in the reviewing process, plus journals don't "work with" authors helping them to craft their paragraphs. There is an editor who might say "this is unreadable, resubmit", but that's all. Free or darn close.

Creating PDF's or publishable documents: This now happens on the researchers desk, and is basically free once you buy office software. There are plenty of people in a university to prep an article to be really, really pretty if you bother to print it out. Free.

Hosting PDF's and data: Universities have enough leftover computers and FTE's that they can do this without charging an account. Free.

So what is the cost to an open journal? The fact that it is going to inevitably do to the academic journal business what craigslist did to the newspaper classified business....

Sorry, time marches on.
holy hell that's so AWESOME. I mean there are a few parts where they had to cheat (assembly of the apoptosome) but that's kind of understandable on the grounds of the video would have taken forever otherwise =).

I think also, it's part of the reason why a lot of people who see the life of the cell video get this impression, "it's so miraculous, it had to be designed (by a creator)". this video really captures the messiness of the whole process.

Haha the only gripe I have is how the intro makes it seem like the etymological root of the word apoptosis is the word "pop".
Anyone else looking for a Swiss (Zürich) Meetup?
Suggesting that the cost of organizing, judging, critiquing, and hosting those papers is basically free is not supported. http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/11/the-economic-cas...
This nice article by ars does quick job of pulling together those costs. Also, just slapping a search engine on a whole bunch of articles exists in Google Scholar, but that hasn't revolutionized anything. It is nice that one can see where all the copies of an article exist, but it is still missing je ne sais quoi.
In the case of the recent Oregon terrorist, supposedly he was trying (and failing) to get into contact with terrorists because he wanted to 'go radical.' The FBI (supposedly) just stepped in pretending to be terrorists and provided him with the rope to hang himself.

I still think that there is a moral line that is crossed here though. One of my co-workers mentioned it like this:

If someone was a threat to himself or others, they would be sent to the
psych ward and medicated. If someone is a threat to masses of people,
the FBI tries to help them make an attempt at killing people, then send
them to jail for it.

When someone is still at the 'talking' stage, even when they seem to have made up their mind, it becomes morally ambiguous to help them attempt to commit a crime, then arrest them for attempting to commit that crime.
Dude: wait, what???
What would happen if they didn't took steps?
And you aren't a blogger.
I drink manhattans, which are like martinis made with burbon (or more traditionally, rye), and I can certainly taste the difference between shaken vs. stirred. shaken ones have a foam on them and taste muddled, rather than crisp. I don't like specifying stirred when I order my drink because I think it comes off as a bit pretentious, but when I see the bartender pulling the shaker up above their shoulder, I'll usually stop him and quietly ask him to please stir it instead.
Put yourself in Bezos' shoes. If hosting WikiLeaks could potentially make you the victim of DDOS attacks, cause you bad PR, open you to lawsuits, give you trouble with the government, etc, etc, would you really put your company, its employees, everything you have worked for at risk to support this political activism, even if you did believe in it? It's easy enough to say what you think Amazon should do, but if you were the one making the decision it might be more difficult than you imagine.
The Apple fear factor
So this article says that every people is equal and things like savant syndrome doesn't exists ( http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=+savant&aq=f ).
What do you do when the answer is, "Nothing"? I find myself in situations that I really really want to change but can't come to a solution that I feel will work for everyone involved (family). My solution is basically to delay action and tell myself that THAT is my solution, for now. One of the comments in the post was to "change your mind". Maybe that's what I'm doing.
Facebook announces new Facebook Profile
Facebook has now posted the official announcement and an Apple-like teaser teaser video giving you a look at what should be going live tomorrow.
I've used BB/forums which indicated new posts that came in during the time taken to compose a post. 98% of the time, it was just in the way.
Honestly, probably nothing. The ideal step would have been to turn a blind-eye, but when you have lawyers and marketers....
Removing barriers to increase citation count, h-index, etc is the primary argument for open access from an author's perspective. I went to a talk at Georgia Tech on open access recently, put on by the library, and they harped really hard on this. Removing barriers can even increase the reputation of a research institution with more highly cited faculty.
Would Any Windows Phone 7 Users Be Willing to Review My Nerd News App?
I have an application in the Windows Phone Marketplace called Nerd News. You can get it through this links from this freeware site (http://www.freewarepocketpc.net/wp7/download-nerd-news.html) or you can just search for Nerd News in the Marketplace Search.

My application aggregates Hacker News, Programming Reddit, and Geek News Central. It is free and I don't know anyone locally with a Windows Phone 7 (insert jokes here) and I wondered if you guys wouldn't mind giving me feedback, preferably through the Marketplace Rating System, but on here is fine as well.

Thank you all very much in advance.
Introducing the New Profile
Firstly, I don't see where you get that Wikileaks is "like a homeless beggar," because they are paying for everything (in more ways than one). This is more like a lunch counter metaphor: the proprietor should be able choose who he will sell to. Is that a reasonable interpretation?

Secondly, your solution depends on streaming bittorrent, which to my knowledge doesn't really exist yet.
You don't think that there is significant technique to be mastered in world-class athletics like that?
Introducing the New Facebook Profile
The comments are great too. In particular I like what chemDroid had to say:

Hi. I have posted on many places, they should not be
doing standard DNA preps and the experiment we need
to see is to see a caesium chloride density gradient
ultracentrifugation (not a gel)... If indeed the DNA
has arsenic, it should be getting denser and we would
see that as a band shift. Ethidium bromide's mode of
action would not be affected by arsenic substition.

Gels are used to measure the length of a DNA fragment. Here's how they work: Ethidium bromide (EtBr) is an intercalating agent -- think of the DNA as a ladder, it slides between the rungs and gets stuck there. EtBr is also luminescent under UV. Agarose (purified seaweed extract) is used to make a gel doped with EtBr. A DNA sample is placed in a well on one end of the gel and an electric current is applied to the gel. The sample gets dragged through the gel, the longer it is, the more slowly it progresses.

As chemDroid wrote, there is no reason to believe that arsenic would have any impact on this process.
I'm assuming the core audience invested more in the event;

1) They paid money for the ticket.

2) They travelled to the auditorium.

3) They did so, with some prior knowledge of what the event was going to be about.

In my opinion, a smaller investment should equal less return. It's difficult, if not impossible - to please all of the people all of the time.
This really isn't a lesson in customer service, it is a lesson in that "last chance" attempt to keep you paying money when you really don't want a service anymore. It is canned text based on two list boxes.
Nearly every journal? Taylor & Francis, Springer Verlag. They are for-profit. To name just two that popped to my mind.
That's mostly the trainer's job, I would think.
Just used the service (twice!) and I'm very happy with the results. Just wanted to have 2 works of digital art from 2 ideas I had long time ago.

Thanks to cogstar I made finally have it.

You can see it the artwork at:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=6214500&l=3263b382...
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=6241999&l=1da74b8b...
C-x C-f was the intention. When I realized what I wrote, it was too late to edit. :(
Scwilio: A Scala Twilio library
Yes, but the question is about the ones that are asking for money. They are always behind for-profit organisations.
One I'm sure was before it, not sure on the others.
That was a lot cooler than I expected. I did a software-only one on my mac: http://dustin.github.com/2009/02/09/caps-lock.html
Google is already in the process of doing this. It's their company, they have access to all the data, why would they need individuals to ferret out underdeveloped keywords for them?

See recent patent: http://www.itproportal.com/2010/6/17/google-patent-looks-eme...
I don't mind the "duplication" of Finder in the Open/Save dialogs because you can use the same keyboard shortcuts to whizz around the filesystem (Cmd-↑ Cmd-↓ Cmd-Shift-G), which is preferable to clickity draggity to me.

Time to subscribe to that blog though. Every time I end up there it's a good post.
>Investments must be made between September 27 and December 31, 2010 to qualify for no taxes on the gains.

Not much time left at all for that.
I read the article, but the HN headline is just priceless.
Jason, I'm a JNation subscriber, big TWiST fan and have to say that the abuse here is a bit much without knowing your contribution to the community.

That said, the quote above sounds like a Czar in early industrial Russia. I agree that you have high standards for your employees and applaud you for being upfront about expectations: your employees are adults and can make informed choices. But, that you would expect truly talented people to fall in line for that kind of industrial revolution era treatment defy's logic.

Yes, you can deliver 50x in mentorship/support post-hazing, but it is still a hazing. As someone mentioned earlier, why would a talented person want to work for you again? Truthfully, they could get similar support working at Google or Fb or any of the other successful startups in the valley.

I know that you "go for the gusto" approach has served you well in the past and has earned you the success and renown you have today. But, perhaps it is time to rethink that strategy, especially in these times and especially if you intend to stay relevant.

Keep on keepin on.
Sign up here: http://www.facebook.com/about/profile/
In the Netherlands news agencies are developing search tools to make it more manageable. Something like: http://cablesearch.org/
ah, I see I was reading completely wrong
Interesting comparison to the Speed-Freak Football article from yesterday (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1969332).

For those who missed it, the Oregon football team's offense is playing faster then the referees move the first down markers and return balls, changing the sport. The fans respond by booing the refs!
Dterm (http://www.decimus.net/dterm.php) allows you to use 'touch <filename>' wherever you are in the Finder!
Extract the DNA. Do X-ray scattering and crystallographic studies, which would clear this issue up nicely.
Notably Wikileaks has released only a small amount of the 251,287 cables, and while the US government refused to vet the cables from Wikileaks, they did vet them when the NYT asked them too.
Maybe 'focused in' or 'zoned in'.
It looks like the update is mostly with photos, but I would really prefer an update to the tagging system. Easier control of who is allowed to tag you, what they can tag, and who is allowed to see it.
I know its frowned upon here, but I though this was just too good. The original headline didn't do it justice, so I changed it...
You can extend the density gradient experiemnt and get the DNA out in super pure form and then run mass spec on it to show that arsenic has indeed been incorporated.

With a claim this important, we cannot do enough to try to disprove it. Only after we try everything we know and get consistently convincing evidence that arsenic is indeed incorporated into the DNA can we start believing it.
Just because it was always supposed to work that way, doesn't mean it actually does work that way. In practice there's approximately nothing that can't be eventually related back to interstate commerce.
I was giving my neighbors tech support for their computer when I was 2 and a half. Is that because of all the pre-natal time I spend in front of an Apple IIe?

Just because this guy doesn't think he has a talent doesn't mean that nobody does.
The comments on that page hurt my brain.
Except that we know that the government did contact Amazon and ask them to stop hosting wikileaks.
This know-nothingist piece doesn't belong on HN.
For what it's worth, Lipton writes an excellent blog. It had very good coverage of the Deolalikar P=NP question, and continues to be interested even to those of us without a theoretical computer science background. Well worth adding to your RSS.
I'll be coming, see you there!
Context: Opinion column from 2008 in an Irish independent newspaper.
So what can I, the average Joe Hacker, do to genuinely help Africa to start on the road to recovery?
Where do you suggest?
[Posting from my Kindle 3] buy a kindle! ;)
http://piratenpad.de/CBlttttTHT
RE: the 9th, I think more precision is needed-it's still too easy for a court to reject certain things as "not rights."

I think there should be an amendment that in essence makes it unconstitutional to ban any action which does not negatively affect another human being, with maybe a bit more specificity on what "negatively affect" means. But the anti-drug lobby will never let that pass, and the RIAA/MPAA might have problems with it too. (And it should be clear that it only refers to people, NOT corporations or organizations. They should have rights, but not the same rights as individuals-look at what the S.C. did to campaign financing.)

The problem with the 9th amendment is that it's far too vague. Without specific regulation, the court will always move in the direction of taking away rights.
If you want an old paper with a summation symbol, you could do worse than the book where the symbol was first used, by Euler: http://www.math.dartmouth.edu/~euler/docs/originals/E212sec1...

(He uses x as the index variable there.)
What about South Africa?
Invest in wine
Elliptic curves and their implementation
The calculation experiment ignores the learning curve effect Something like this would provide a more accurate result.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects#The_ex...

Formulas don't make for good blogging though.

As for the talent angle: I'd rather phrase it as "talent exists, but its useless unless applied in conjunction with effort & passion".
Why is it for such a short period? It seems like this kind of thing should be for a full year after the law is passed or something similar.
It was enough to mention Wikileaks on a post about Amazon at Hacker News to get plenty of downvotes. And I don't see how anything other than a court decision should make the hosting service provider to selectively discontinue the service to some of its customers. Hosting providers should not censor proactively.

Amazon simply proved that their "cloud" services are subject to corporate (= unregulated) censorship, and cannot be relied upon. What's worse, they proved that their services may have zero availability and no scalability at all precisely when the customer really needs them.
It's ridiculous to say that there is no talent. obviously, talent, passion, zeitgeist, deliberate practice, luck etc all matter. each factor in your favour nudges your probability towards success.

If we could live for a million years, then talent probably doesn't matter compared to deliberate practice even in fields such as pure mathematics. But life is short and that in many fields, success is relative (ie good is irrelevant, you need to be top 1 %). In those cases, once you are behind, the probability of catching up to other people in your field is slim.
Why do people care so much about minute differences in terms of functionality and layout on facebook?
While that's an argument which sounds good, I find myself wondering why the population is increasing so much if the populace is half-starved. Having children when you are unable to feed yourself is extremely counterproductive.
Full Details On Facebook’s Overhauled Profile Pages
I'm impressed by how small the teams remain at Facebook. His profile shows that he worked on this profile revamp with only 6 other people, as well as Chat with 5 others, and the iPhoto exporter himself at a Hackathon. While there have been reports of Google's teams burgeoning in size, it seems that at least for now Facebook is keeping them small. Obviously, these products have had perhaps less depth than Wave for example (which had a 30 person team http://www.businessinsider.com/why-google-cant-build-instagr...). But, still, it says something about Facebook that they are attempting to keep team size small.
Guidelines: "If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate "10 Ways To Do X" to "How To Do X," and "14 Amazing Ys" to "Ys." Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. "The 5 Platonic Solids.""