skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Does anyone else appreciate the irony of a Python app losing whitespace?
1. If we find life very close to us, that does indeed increase the probability of the panspermia hypothesis.

2. The probability of panspermia will still not be 1, or even approaching 1. That leaves enough room to avoid "bullshit argument" in favor of "questionable argument," which is a caveat Bostrom (and Hanson, in his Great Filter) would happily agree to.

3. Even if single-origin life has seeded multiple planets, if the seeding occurred far enough in the past and widely enough, that still leaves us with an anthropic filter problem.
...thus making the job of finding Assange easier for the hired assassins
I think the key, underlying, fundamental thing is applicable to all programming - as far as possible, write your code to be understood by other human beings.

To me all good practices stem from this - I often get annoyed by cargo-cult, dogmatic, programming practices which remain detached from this 'golden rule of programming'...
Sorry, you're correct. I was inaccurate with my claim. The antipathy towards the US is much stronger in Central America and the Andean regions (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, etc)

As for being childish, the US has done a whole lot to earn that enmity. I'd recommend reading Open veins of Latin America, by Eduardo Galeano. It's a difficult read, due in no small part to the author's support of the Cuban Revolution and Castro's government. It helps, however, to recognize that the book was written in 1971, long before it became apparent that the Cuban experiment with Communism had some serious humanitarian costs, despite its successes. At the time, Cuba was the only real counterpoint to American economic imperialism in Latin America, so it's easy to see why he would offer such strong support for that regime.

Despite that, the book is meticulously researched and cited, and many of the events it details are frankly despicable. It's also by no means an attack on the US, as it covers 500 years of history since the Spanish invasion of the continent. It really is a good read.
If you want a fictional account of a post-singularity world, you can do no better than Greg Egan's Disapora: http://www.amazon.com/Diaspora-Greg-Egan/dp/0061057983

Not only is it a highly detailed and well thought out vision of the possibilities and philosophical challenges of "living in a computer," but the plot is driven and defined by hard physics. Do not underestimate how literally I mean this last sentence :)

The opening chapter is available free as a short story. In fact I think I will submit it right now.

edit: here we are: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/DIASPORA/01/Orphano...
Not sure if you mean how was it decided that was going to be our topic or how it was decided who won the debate.

The topic was proposed by a student in the class who had actually thought about it beforehand, no one else had any good ideas.

The "winner" of the debate was determined by a panel of other teachers (part of the reason he got in trouble the teachers were "ruling" on gov't policy). Nobody seems to understand that the people (me and a few others) defending the US's policys could actually win. Everyone assumed that it was biased by his politics such that obviously the result would be anti-American. It was actually quite fun. Though I'd say that the reason my group won was largely becuase in 2006 a lot less was known about Gitmo. We could do a lot of "you can't prove that X Y or Z is happening, that is just conjecture", that we wouldn't be able to do today.

As a side note, I'm firmly in the anti-toture and anti-DU camp, but I always find it more interesting in debate to side with the group you disagree with.
Orphanogenesis: One SF Author's imagining of AI "reproduciton"
Whenever I start talking/thinking about Yet Another Website That Requires User Profiles, I go to OpenID and inevitably there is an issue. Here are some things that have held me back recently:

* No support for iPhone/Android/etc apps
* Users may be firewalled in, without access to google.com, etc
* Facebook does not support OpenID directly
* All users would be working for a particular org who is not an OpenID provider
* Not all providers support discovery yet
* Hybrid approach feels wrong for new websites,
but so does making users sign up for an account
with a third party first

I use it for my own accounts, but don't recommend it to others yet.
Not to mention the holodecks which trapped crewmembers in deadly fantasy worlds twice per season, but were never given a physical "power off" switch.

(Admittedly, a phenomenon of later trek shows more than the first two.)
My favorite tool for offline reading on the iPhone is actually another browser. Before I go on a flight, I load up HN, open up links to stories and comment pages I want in iCabMobile, which then saves them for offline reading. I've found it be more effective than Instapaper because I only need to load it once, and I end up reading a copy of the webpage itself, with all formatting, images, layout, etc.

If Cyberspace can support a similar feature, I would gladly purchase it, because iCabMobile's offline support isn't as well supported on the iPad.
a pdf inside a zip file inside cnet?

that's just as bad, if not worse, than scribd.
Wikipedia bio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Wilkes

Sir Maurice was one of the giants. Also prescient, from his memoirs "It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that 'hesitating at the angle of the stairs' the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent finding errors in my own programs."
Hurrah! Thank you fellow scribd-loather. I flagged the other article out of disgust but was annoyed as the topic interests me.
Interesting point, I was going on the fact that I keep a lot of mechanical engineering books for the tables in the back of various material properties, and having a kindle instead of a 6 testbooks would be physically so much smaller on my bookshelf, but for actual content the kindle might not be the best choice.
I think the fact that Rust is older and yet Go has 1000s of active programmers is indicative of something. "Ship early, ship often" springs to mind. The Plan9 community has been working like that for years, almost every day an updated version is available (the distro cdrom is rebuilt every night) with bug fixes / improvements / new stuff.
His question was, paraphrased, "Is there some obvious evidence I should have been aware of—perhaps because I was previously presented with it but ignored it—such that I would not be as startled about this as I am now? Did I make a misstep in the past which has led me to become the me I am now, who has to make such a large shift in perspective?"
About a year ago I had lucid dreams on regular bases and they where amazing I have been trying to recreate the same experience again to no avail. All of a sudden my lucid dreams stopped about a year ago and not knowing that they where called I couldn't research them but now after reading this short ebook I finally know what they where and how I can induce them more consistently.
* Go has 1000s of active programmers
Building hype and waiting and releasing information in parts also dilutes the Wikileaks brand as a publisher of important information, so there is a trade-off involved.
Is there any way I can take these principles and use them to motivate myself to work harder / get more done?
Go has users
Point taken.

Edit: How is this a joke? You mean, the cartoonish style?
Ach! Accidental downvote.

Thanks for the detail.
> As for being childish, the US has done a whole lot to earn that enmity.

That's quite an understatement.
The number of times the US have tried to meddle in these countries' business may have something to do with it: http://www.zompist.com/latam.html
Would I be right in thinking that if I was serving my app using an evented web server (nginx) this would not be such a problem? Or would it still be tying up a passenger instance anyway? If my request hits the router and then goes straight to a seperate rack app, does this still require a full weight passenger process and one copy of my full app stack in memory (albeit shared memory?)
Perhaps but I think he still makes some good points. From the average user's perspective the implications of providing a user name and password are totally clear and the process is completely under the user's control. The security implications of using a third party site to do some kind of behind-the-scenes techno-magic are completely unfathomable.
Take the average user, the kind of person who has a Facebook account and shops on Amazon, but who doesn't know their browser has a "view source" option in the menus.

Show that person an OpenID login and ask them to figure it out.

10 times out of 10 they will give up and either A) create a new user ID without OpenID, B) not register at all, or C) use Facebook Connect.

People seek the path of least resistance. The average person does not see a tangible benefit to OpenID, and it's easier to ignore it than to take the time to figure out what it is or how to use it.

Want an example? Try the link for "Get an OpenID" http://openid.net/get-an-openid/

Show that to your aunt, and see what she does when faced with that page.
In the limit (as you must know already), there is nothing you can do in code that could only be possible through the creation of a new programming language. New languages don't make the impossible possible; they make some possibles tractable, and which ones are more so varies by language.
I feel sorry for http://www.sleepwarrior.com/ that their site is in "maintenance mode".
Notation And Thinking
Radiohead used the Mac voice a bit on their 'OK Computer' album. Obviously on 'Fitter Happier' and in the background on 'Paranoid Android'.
Think Marv Albert the basketball announcer: "Yes!".
Poor choice of words. It looks amateurish and is very ugly on the iPad screen next to the icons of everything else I've got on there.
The Ten Big Steps From Idea to Winning Execution
In that case, also from further down in this same discussion, a direct link to a PDF:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/578454/3932344-40-Sleep-Hacks-The-Ge...
Another similar project is http://wrttn.in/ (it's a royal pain to spell). Is it true that tidypub really has no admin link to edit the original post from?
A good analogy for this is flipping a coin. What is the proportion of total heads to total tails if a population of people each flip a coin until they get a heads. The answer is fairly trivial, as each coin flip is independent. Given a fair coin, you would expect the answer to be near 1. You could always calculate the variance given the population size using the binomial distribution.

A more fruitful question might be: what is the average family size in a country with these birthing habits?
If ZoFreX's top 10 website list became a monopoly, you would have to abide by the rules for the monopolies. One of which is that you can't abuse your position to increase your market share in other industries.

For example, it would be against the rules to utilise ZoFreX's top 10 website list to display ZoFreX's skin cream website at the top of the list.

The key in this case is whether your other site that you are promoting is considered a different industry or market, and whether your monopoly in the top 10 lists market has unfairly influenced your position in another market.

There is probably a grey area if the list rankings were generated automatically in some way, but it could still be argued that knowledge of unpublished details of the list algorithms have given you a advantage, and unless you published full algorithm details you would probably be subject to accusations of fixing the list anyway. The rules are there to ensure that the markets remain competitive for others to do business in.
Dupe, HN discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1953150
You should always have a "safe word" for when a fantasy starts to get too dangerous.
While I can't promise when to add offline support to Cyberspace, I can definitely say that it's on the roadmap I envisioned.

Edit: Have you tried Wikipanion? It's only for Wikipedia browsing, but its feature set is amazing. The offline support is very robust, too.
Failed miserably trying to write an app for my personal use within November. I have my back end done and ready and i need to put together a front end still. Was not possible to spend much hours due to work and also to be honest, time spent was not exactly productive i would say. Need to proceed and wrap this up soon.
How not to feel sooooo small and insignificant after that !?
Am I the only person who does not enjoy mobile gaming? I like a few rounds of some game occasionally but would really rather just read.
Earlier submission with some discussion ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1952033
Other implementations you haven't mentioned like MacRuby are much faster. In my totally unscientific and completely biased benchmarks (small tests related to the type of work I do mainly - Machine Learning) MacRuby is now faster than Python (2.6) and is closing the gap on V8 (which, in the tests I wrote, was even faster than Go, and less than twice as slow as C).
Would you mind sharing me your screenshot? You can either post it here/shoot me an email at support@cyberspaceapp.com

Thanks!
طريقة الحمل بولد
Level 3 vs. Comcast: Peering Dispute or Breach of Net Neutrality?
Direct link to a PDF:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/578454/3932344-40-Sleep-Hacks-The-Ge...
Surely I'm not the only person who thinks a PDF inside a ZIP is worse than Scribd.
No comments about licensing on the blog post or in the source code. (http://quplo.com/scatter is not responding.)
Been every year and it's an extremely well organized and fast paced event. Loaded with a ton of smart and interesting people!
Link to updated article: http://daringfireball.net/2010/07/improved_regex_for_matchin...

Save you a click.
Interesting. What I like the most about it is that it ends up looking very similar to my Readability setup. :-)
Here's one in Hindi :)
http://translate.google.com/#hi|hi|%E0%A4%AC%E0%A4%AE%20%E0%...
Brucee used to assign "Lisp in C" and "C in Lisp" when he was teaching.

when he wasn't messing with people :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_Shaney
How secure is Windows Phone 7 app code?
I downloading the js file, followed the instructions and it didn't work

A suggestion - when you post code, it's nice to have:
1) a working demo page
2) the example source code not in an image so it has to be re-typed to try
Auto blue benie (JS face detector fun)
How crap, I haven't heard anyone say Earthlink in years. Next thing you know someone busts out Sprynet.
I don't think they're after the same thing, despite the similarities. TidyPub is pretty, readable, and, to use a term from the site, 'classy'. It's about ONE entry. One page.

Jottit is about making a website -- multiple pages, themes, etc. It's more like a quick wiki. It's certainly not as readable or pretty, but is quite utilitarian -- not a bad thing, just different.

So, despite the two both beginning the process with a simple textarea and a button, they're not the same, and neither should strive to be the other.
The European Commission should be very careful in distinguishing between illegal activity and success as a good service that people overwhelmingly prefer.
A company (just like an individual) should not be expected to sabotage itself by promoting competitors' products. It is only natural that a company supports and advertises its own offerings first and foremost, and any attempt to force it to do otherwise (given that the company has not acted illegally) is unethical.
In a related article on the BBC site, the founder of Foundem (a firm that filed a complaint against Google) says "We just want a level playing field." The proper response to that would be: "Well, go out and create a compelling product that people want to use." Nothing in business (or in life) is on a perfectly level playing field; you have to work hard to create opportunities for yourself. Asking the government to hinder a competitor is morally questionable and certainly not a viable long-term strategy. An even bigger problem is asking the government to provide "level playing field[s]" that go beyond the existing anti-trust laws.
I hope the EC will be prudent enough to punish Google if and only if clear law violations are found, and not because some competitor is unhappy with the Google's size and customer engagement.
Where to Keep Up with Google SEO Changes?
We used to have this problem at the Minnesota Daily, the U's paper of 40,000 daily print circulation, and found 4 strong sources for hiring.
1) Craigslist
2) Talk to the CS profs and ask to promote your on-site event with free pizza to get feedback on what should be done with the papers site.
3) Talk about the pay, despite objections to keep it hush hush. The recruits need to know they're getting paid a decent amount, like $11/hr (which is still fair for on-campus work with flexible hours)
4) Find alumni to talk about the experience and how that was worth more than the pay.

If you have questions, ping the active staff at the Daily - they're always open to sharing ideas.
The VC Pitch – Confusing the Destination with the Journey
Even more reason to get tested before starting any supplements.
This truly is the clearest articulation of the economic danger of net neutrality I've ever heard.
Thank you. I have a feeling that my brain works best during nights, but I have to start tuning to overcome that feeling.
Thanks, I'll take a look next time I need it.
Nokia's MeeGo is doomed - A summary of Dublin's MeeGo Summit
What happens when he releases information that is sensitive to Ecuador's interests?
license information is on the download page http://code.google.com/p/scatterjs/

but agreed, it should be in the js file itself
Proof in point: When IT blocks YouTube, the slackers groan. but if the exchange server goes down...
My bad. Thank you.

Edit: For the record, the license is MIT.
And I was getting big-headed this morning for solving a silly problem for a client. Thanks for reminding me of my place. :)
You may add TeX to the latter list :)
That... is spectacular...
Agreed. Also, the screenshot on your homepage doesn't tell me much about your app (and the screen is out of date).

Granted most of the users that would find this app useful are power users, the teaser text on the site is probably more technical than it should be. Sentences like "There's no need to get out of your current context to check out a random link - just queue it to visit after you finish your current article" come to mind when I say that.

If you're interested I'd be more than happy to send you a couple other copyedit/text edits to that landing page. Just email me.
The Fat Lady Cometh - Shutting Down startupSQUARE
How a capacitor popped Dell's reputation
While on the face of it it may qualify as a 'Geek's guide', there seems to be a fair amount of woo.

"It is estimated that 70% of the population is lactose intolerant (dairy). 33% have yeast sensitivity. 15% have gluten sensitivity (wheat). And 35% have fructose or sugar sensitivity."

Really? Any references to back that up?

"Some raw-foodists say they need less sleep on a raw food diet compared to a cooked food diet."

Again no evidence, or references. And they would say that wouldn't they?

One source he does link to (on the page the above quote comes from) is Stanley Bass, a proponent of Natural Hygiene, and Orthopathy - very much in the realms of alternative medicine (if you look at the website linked to - http://www.drbass.com/, it is obvious quackery,and an assault on the eyes).
Framing the conversation in the context of ranking always bothered me, a search engine is a question answerer not a traffic pump.
Google has different verticals to handle different query types, geographical, financial, etc. After sending a query you are presented with the results on the Google SERP from one or more of these verticals, that is the whole concept behind the ‘universal search box’.

Google’s obligation is to user experience not to to self-proclaimed ‘competitors’, it should provide answers not send users sifting through another set of results or to conduct searches elsewhere.

And what if in the future search engines evolves beyond the ranking of blue links will the EU force Google not to change anything? And what about personalized search?

This is all quite ridiculous.
Nice looking service. I'm not sure it's something I'd use but I could see it being used. One thing to look out for is spammers.

I find that the most of spam that I get on paste site I run is deplorable link spam for illegal content. I'm not talking about warez or torrent links either. I ended up having to write a filtering to look for keywords and url to content analysis and then submit content that triggers the filter to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Best of luck.
say -v Fred Fitter, Happier, More productive
Did the universe exist before the Big Bang?
MicroformatShiv JS - the semantic parser that should be standard in your browser
Windows Phone 7 Sales Eclipsed by Android – and Symbian
it's still nice but it's been here before:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1835460

BTW: since there's no search feature to check for older posts, I suggest you use google:
site:ycombinator.com
Ask hacker Phillip Torrone anything
Phillip Torrone has been a recurring name in the hacker scene for many years. From 2600, to Hackaday, to Make magazine, Phil has had some major influence on the current state of DIY/Modding/Hacking. Send in your questions, he's promised to answer some.
Hah, I doubt he'll go, I think he'd rather stay in Switzerland or some other 1st world country, than going to Ecuador where he's at mercy of US' interests.
The deal is in the "$5 billion to $6 billion range".
Vitamin D, Calcium Supplements May Be Unnecessary
magic_quotes is turned off by default for a reason too.
Just got it. I like the focus on working though a bunch of links. Currently for a site like hacker news I open a lot of tabs but I always have to switch back on opening the tab and it uses up a lot of memory loading them when I not actually going to read them yet.

iCab solves the first problem as it can auto background tab any links to a different domain. This is a actually smoother than the flow here: tap-hold-selecting is a slow operation I don't want to have to do it for every link on a page.

Instead I'd love a toggle that turns on add to queue as the default operation for the duration of that page. (This would be an improvement on the iCab option as the background loading is easy to forget about and then immediately becomes confusing.) The toggle should be a main button like the plus and would cease to apply if you navigate anywhere else or start going though your queue.

Another option would be certain pages always open in auto add to queue mode (eg set on the the bookmark). And some people might prefer add to instapaper as the default action etc.

EDIT: I actually really like this. Feels very smooth.
Exclusive Video of Jester's XerXeS DoS Attack
Is there any way to simply "hide" and "show" the menu at the bottom? It seems like there's only an option for "auto-hide: off" which leaves the panel open the whole time, or "auto-hide: On" which means it keeps popping up and down the entire time I read the article, which is even more distracting.
Who gives a shit about sales from a single retailer ?
Colorful Images to Help Illuminate the Brain
Your only hope is powerfully mindbending chemicals.
Nah, if I want to download the pdf from scribd (to, for example, use a search function that actually works), I have to upload a document of my own or pay a subscription. Cnet is much less of a hassle.
>Why can't Google maps do that?

Because, fortunately, the world is not vector-based :)
Thanks, email's on the way.
I know there was already a shorter solution but

instead of '||'[1-9]

one could have searched for

'!=' or '<>' thus opening up the search space