skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't mind if I do!

A popcorn kernel has about 1/10 gram of water in it. We have to boil this water to pop the kernel.
How much power do we need to turn this much water to steam in the time in the video (about 10 seconds)?

First heat the water from room temp (21C) to 100C: dT * .1g -> 79 * .1 = 7.9 calories = 33.0536 joules

Now add to that the latent heat for boiling to get our 100 degree water to steam (2260j/g) 2260*.1 = 226J

Add it together and we need about 226 + 33 = 259 Joules of energy to pop a kernel.

So how much power is that? 1 Watt is of course energy expended at 1 joule per second.

A 10 second pop of a kernel would need a steady 259/10 = 25.9 watts of continuous power to be fed directly into the kernel for 10 seconds to make it pop!

Do you think your cell phone transmits at 26 watts? (Much more than that actually since there is no way even a good fraction of all transmitted power would make it into the kernel). Even with 4 phones, each would have to transmit at at least 6.5 watts, have perfectly directional antennas, pointed directly at a single kernel, for ten seconds.

Checking with the FCC filing for my moto shows a max transmission power allowed at 1 watt. Typical being 0.2 watts. I call bullshit.

Don't believe the math? Go to the medicine cabinet and get a thermometer, put it in a little bit of water at the bottom of a glass and see if there is anything you can do with your phone to heat the water even one degree. You'd have more luck shaking it vigorously.
Just curious, has anyone here ever been in a situation where a company tried to enforce an NDA/non-compete on them? How common is the actual enforcement of these things? My guess would be that most companies would only consider this worthwhile if they think the ex-employee or contractor is doing something that would harm them (which of course could be a false accusation). I suppose if someone was really unprofessional they could use that power just to punish someone for leaving them, or to hang the threat of retaliation over their head to prevent them from leaving (but that seems like it must be illegal, or should be if it isn't).
The best aphorism was cleverly hidden amidst a joke: "Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement." Remember her point: the 'crucial importance of imagination' is not quixotic. Too many people I know like to 'dream the impossible dream', and that's just how far they get.

Another I liked: "Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two."

A very well done speech, and a quite decent speaker.
The books in the Ender series are my favorite books, and I have never read the Harry Potter books, so I must ask those who have, is his description of the parallels between the two series correct?

> "A young kid growing up in an oppressive family situation suddenly learns that he is one of a special class of children with special abilities, who are to be educated in a remote training facility where student life is dominated by an intense game played by teams flying in midair, at which this kid turns out to be exceptionally talented and a natural leader. He trains other kids in unauthorized extra sessions, which enrages his enemies, who attack him with the intention of killing him; but he is protected by his loyal, brilliant friends and gains strength from the love of some of his family members. He is given special guidance by an older man of legendary accomplishments who previously kept the enemy at bay. He goes on to become the crucial figure in a struggle against an unseen enemy who threatens the whole world."

If so, that is both amusing and relieving. Since I know Ender backwords and forwards, I can save myself the time reading Harry Potter.

Regardless of the lady and her tactics in the publishing business, you have to admit this is quite a good speech. When I first saw it at the top, I thought to myself: "holy crap why is this on HN?" But after watching it, I can't help thinking how nice it was to have my optimism needle bumped up a notch.
The best advice is try both PHP and Python and choose the one that matches your taste.

http://www.google.co.in/search?q=php+sucks
http://www.google.co.in/search?q=python+sucks
http://www.google.co.in/search?q=django+sucks
Good examples, which confirm what I said: you have to introduce an element of scarcity somewhere, that is not the software itself (with the possible exception of GPL'ed libraries, but that's sort of a special case).
AIDS: Aiming Propaganda at Heterosexual Teenagers is a Waste of Money
> "jQuery is an interesting language. But I feel like it's no more "javascript" than C is assembly."

To me, jQuery feels like a better javascript than javascript itself. Manipulating the DOM with plain old javascript is what feels like using C. All the quirky function names, all the weird browser variance. It's like being in college again, trying to get C++ I wrote in Windows to compile in Linux.

While jQuery is merely a library at the moment, I have to wonder if there would be any drastic speed improvement (other than negating the download time) if someone implemented the jQuery API as a browser plugin (or just tacked it on to the JS spec itself). I'm not saying that this would have any immediate practical application (since no one installs plugins anyway), but the idea sounds just silly enough to be interesting at least.
I agree with the sentiment, but notice the article is about his first impressions and not what happens after the train starts moving. Amtrak spends most of its time going less than 30 miles an hour. If a freight train needs to go through, you wait. If the freight railway they lease the trackage rights from doesn't feel like maintaining the tracks or signals, you spend 3 hours going 5 miles per hour.

And finally, for longer trips, it's fucking expensive. I really wanted to take Amtrak from Chicago to Portland, but it was like $1400. Flying was much cheaper.

I really want Amtrak to work, but as long as it's continually ignored by people with money to pour into it, it's going to suck. The sad part is that it would actually make money if it were reliable, unlike the airlines which are just creating billions and billions of dollars of debt that they'll never pay.

(BTW, my experience with Amtrak is mostly St. Louis to Chicago, and Chicago to Grand Rapids. The CHI/STL route has gotten a lot of money, and is decent now. They call it high speed, but it's not really. CHI/GRR is a short distance, so it doesn't matter that the train never gets above 50mph. It would be so much nicer if it got up to 90mph and stayed there until the train got to GRR.

Oh well... at least those routes are reasonably priced; about $50 round-trip.)
That's the most outrageous non-compete I've ever read, and yes, you interpret it correctly. Don't even consider signing that. The bit about associating with other employees is more standard. I'd argue over that part too but it wouldn't be a deal-killer.
I wonder if my Fortran skills would get me any lucrative consulting gigs. But... then I'd have to use Fortran.
Not sure if first class functions matter to you, but last time I checked, PHP didn't have them, which is a major annoyance for me.

I also find PHP to be quite the cognitive overhead. The libraries seem to lack consistent naming conventions and since it's all one global namespace, there are a LOT of names to remember. Coding in PHP often feels like repeatedly looking up library functions and 'assembling' them, rather than 'writing' something.
we are running a music-related startup out of berlin (soundcloud.com) and it's really great in terms of costs & quality of life. If you're in Berlin, make sure you have business elsewhere, because the city in itself is quite poor. It's almost like outsourcing to east Europe, but you have a lot of credibility in the west still...
Good read. But if there is a conclusion to be drawn here, it's that we have a severe lack of common-sense POVs about human enhancement. On one end we have Ray Kurzweil, and on the other we have articles like this. The real useful path is provigil-like incremental steps, which are utterly marginalized and looked upon with suspicion.
And this kind of small steps can be seen quite often in the past few years... from a flash game that increases IQ to electrodes that greatly enhance memory making to 100 times more cognitive science articles then 20 years ago.

You don't have to upload to live 120, You just have to get over Alzheimer and cancer and strokes.
You don't have to be able to completely understand the brain in order to learn faster or be more productive. There are already many many things we can do, but as far as I can tell we have a problem of perception: making medicine to cure dandruff is commendable, but any kind of enhancement is frown upon. This also is religion at work.
SoundCloud: Send & receive music like never before
Would you like stock options with that?
I don't understand most of your post (too many ...s that aren't clear), but you should probably stay away from the word "type" when you are talking about Perl variables. "Scalar" doesn't really mean anything. If anything, it describes the cardinality of the contained value, but certainly not the "type".

Even values stored in variables have very flexible "types" that I wouldn't really call a "type".

If you store "42 is a number" in a scalar, you still don't have a type. Maybe it's a string, maybe it's an integer, maybe it's a boolean. Types only show up when you apply an operator. If you say "42 is a number" - 42, then the result is 0 because "-" coerces the string into an integer (actually a SvPv to an SvPvIv, and then looks at the integer part of the data structure). This is different from other languages that choose the operator based on the type of the value (look at how SBCL chooses the right + operator to used based on the types of the contained values. the exact opposite of Perl).

As an aside, this coercion isn't an implementation detail; Perl exposes it all to you. If you "use overload", you can have "boolify" subroutine called when someone does "!$your_object", a stringify subroutine that's called when someone does "$your_object =~ /.../" or "qq{$your_object}", a "numify" subroutine that's called when someone does "$your_object - 42", etc.

Anyway, not sure what my point is... but don't use the word "type" to talk about values or variables in Perl. It just doesn't make sense. Perl is totally different from other languages here, and the word "type" has too much incompatible baggage associated with it.
Legitimate Sites : Hosting Web-Based Malware 
"The amount of web-based malware on legitimate sites has increased by over 400 percent since last year. 68% of all internet-based malware was now being hosted on legitimate sites."
Seeking FriendFeed users for HeadUp private alpha
SemantiNet (www.semantinet.com) is currently seeking some hackers to join our private alpha and help us test our product.

HeadUp is a browser addon that acts as a personalized content recommendation agent while you browse the web.

In short, it understands which site you are currently viewing, as well as what “entities or objects” exist on the page, and it discovers and retrieves semantically related content from other sites.

Relevancy is determined based on what’s the object that you are viewing, who you are, what you are interested in, who are your friends and what they do online, etc…
Such information is retrieved using various popular sites.

Our users' privacy is maintained by storing all private content locally on their computers rather than on our servers.

In order to use the product, you must be running firefox on windows, and you need to have Silverlight 2.0 installed.

At this point, we believe that our product offers the greatest value to active friendfeed users.
You can see a short video about the product at www.semantinet.com/videos

If you are interested, please drop me an email at talk (at) semantinet.com and I will invite you to the alpha.

-Tal
If I recall correctly, a PHP "array" doesn't necessarily iterate (with foreach) in numerical order. That's just weird.
Incidentally, I often see people complaining about non-idomatic python tutorials here.

What I see from this is that people will try to TMTOWTDI regardless of whether or not that's the language's philosophy. At least Perl prepares you to expect people writing code that doesn't look like yours.

(And I'm used to people's weird styles. I have one friend who makes every line of code its own subroutine, and another that gives every method a super_descriptive_but_way_way_too_long_name. You get used to it, and emulate it when appropriate. It's better to decide on a style with your friends/coworkers instead of being told what to do by some guy that works at Google you've never met.)
There is another clause covering that:

15. Governing Law, Jurisdiction and Waiver of Venue. This Agreement shall be
governed by, construed and enforced in accordance with the laws of the State of New York
regardless of the fact that any of the parties hereto may be or may become a resident of a
different county, state, or jurisdiction, and without regard to New York choice of law rules.
I could see trains working better in smaller areas, like around the bay area, Eugene-Portland-Seattle, LA-San Diego, and so on (lots of places back east probably qualify), rather than on long-haul trips where most people are either going to drive or fly.

One of the things I like about Italy's train system is that while, no, they sometimes do not run on time, they are relatively frequent and cheap, meaning that you don't have to think and worry quite so much - you know you'll be able to find something.
If anyone reading this has about $10MM to invest in a capital intensive but relatively stable venture in the building intermodal train/truck yards let me know. The venture requires a $6MM land purchase.
So someone offers to upload your brain into a computer and you go along with it?

"In other words," said Benji, steering his curious little vehicle right over to Arthur, "there's a good chance that the structure of the question is encoded in the structure of your brain — so we want to buy it off you."

"What, the question?" said Arthur.

"Yes," said Ford and Trillian.

"For lots of money," said Zaphod. + "No, no," said Frankie, "it's the brain we want to buy."

"What!"

"I thought you said you could just read his brain electronically," protested Ford.

"Oh yes," said Frankie, "but we'd have to get it out first. It's got to be prepared."

"Treated," said Benji.

"Diced."

"Thank you," shouted Arthur, tipping up his chair and backing away from the table in horror.

"It could always be replaced," said Benji reasonably, "if you think it's important."

"Yes, an electronic brain," said Frankie, "a simple one would suffice."

"A simple one!" wailed Arthur.

"Yeah," said Zaphod with a sudden evil grin, "you'd just have to program it to say What? and I don't understand and Where's the tea? — who'd know the difference?"

"What?" cried Arthur, backing away still further.

"See what I mean?" said Zaphod and howled with pain because of something that Trillian did at that moment.

"I'd notice the difference," said Arthur.

"No you wouldn't," said Frankie mouse, "you'd be programmed not to."

Ford made for the door.

"Look, I'm sorry, mice old lads," he said. "I don't think we've got a deal."
I don't run Silverlight, but it sounds good.
Crappy article. Here's the only new info:

"Detailed measurements made by the satellite have shown that the fluctuations in the microwave background are about 10% stronger on one side of the sky than those on the other.

Sean Carroll conceded that this might just be a coincidence, but pointed out that a natural explanation for this discrepancy would be if it represented a structure inherited from our universe's parent."
Do a stack trace of the human cognitive algorithms that produce debates about 'free will'.
The Perfect Desktop - Ubuntu Studio 8.04
Ballmer Is Bad News for Microsoft
I'm not saying YOU want a link to that site, and I'm sure it's not your site. I'm saying that the owner of that site is interested in just getting links for his other make-money-on-the-web scams...
Malware found in Florida vote-counting systems
Using Amazon S3 for Personal Data Backup
Free Will: Hacking, Phreaking, and Anarchy (video interview with Aaron Swartz)
I love the watch at 1.4x button though not enough to watch the whole thing.
My point was that it is an additional bit of friction that isn't present in Ruby or Python (though they also have their own bits of friction). Even though I've written a lot of code in my life, I've never been a full-time software developer, and so it's one of the tricky bits that drops out of my head during the breaks in between writing code. I'm interacting with code written by someone very comfortable with these idioms, and so they show up all over the place, and I never quite get them right the first time. I just think it's an area that makes Perl trickier than it ought to be...it's not a deal breaker (PHP's lack of first class functions, for example, now that's a deal breaker). I'm basically a raving Perl fan, but arrays only holding scalars is a nuisance.

And, as I mentioned, Perl 6 goes a long way to correcting pretty much everything I don't like about Perl 5.
Trains work well for short distances. The commuter rail from Baltimore to DC for $7, and 45 minutes is great. But if you're traveling 3+ hours, it's probably cheaper to fly.

I recently rediscovered another underappreciated mode of transportation: the bike.
I am skeptical of this data. Also is the average a median or a mean? Perhaps we also need some standard deviation or span numbers for a better perspective.
The author pooh-poohs CSS, and pooh-poohs bulky sites, but the table-heavy pages on the site have many repeated, wasteful inline styling tags. Some trivial, cross-compatible CSS would streamline the site further (admittedly, down from almost never more than 40kB HTML, but streamlining is streamlining).

That said, I was jonesing for Zelda seriously less than 10 minutes ago, so he can do whatever he wants for so long as he makes getting my fix possible.
It's keyword based, and there are lots of uses of Tcl. For example, it's the scripting language of Cisco routers, so that number may include the salaries of CCIEs.

I myself am quietly delivering Tcl/Tk apps in my organization, people are liking what they see and not questioning the language :-)
If by "best" you mean "most pointless" and if by "FAQ" you mean "uninformed rant".

There's no real substance, it adds nothing to the debate, uses unjustified hyperbole ("CSS is flawed"), doesn't show the added flexibility of CSS, overstates cross-browser CSS incompatably horribly and abuses half-truths to twist the argument (unless magically you think my low-resolution phone is going to love your table-based layout). CSS scales in big sites, reduces load times and lets you do many, many clever things you couldn't do in raw HTML and makes life easier, especially when combined with a CMS.

And that site is ugly and it's not because of tables. The site would look better without any graphics of styling at all. Hating Photoshop is not a good reason for having a site that's horrendously ugly.

But I do agree content is king. Just as well that he has something worthwhile that makes people look past the godawfully bad site.
I would be fine with this... Provided they agreed to go on paying my salary for the 2 years in which I was unable to work.
Agreed. Here in the UK, for any journey over a couple of hundred miles it is cheaper to fly. I used to regularly travel from London to Nottingham by train, which cost 2-3x as much as it would have to fly to Amsterdam or Paris.

On the other hand, I'll happily pay the extra cash for Eurostar as it just saves so much hassle either end. But I'm fortunate enough to be able to do that; if I was on a shoestring then easyJet all the way.
No... but I'm not sure why. Go English.
It reminded me very much of the line from fight club:
"You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world. "
Are they still trying to claim the bs 5% of your company?
email to phonenumber@txt.att.net / messaging.sprintpcs.com / etc... once you receive the text, a reply will (should? works for most major carriers - att on my iphone tested) send the message back to the original email address.
The author should have submitted the last two paragraphs, and left it at that. The singularity does indeed seem to be more of a religious than a scientific vision - rapture for nerds. This is the only worthwhile sentence I find in this article.

John Horgan sounds like so many other critics declaiming that dramatic technological progress is impossible. History has in many examples proved critics wrong in a spectacular way. Although he doesn't say it directly, Horgan implies that "thinking" machines will not be created in at least 50 years - which to me sounds just as ridiculous as declaring heavier-than-air flight or space flight impossible.

The article doesn't really contain any decent points at all - the author cites neuroscience researchers east and west claiming that any dream of smarter-than-human machines are impossible, which seems to me as far from refuting any central argument. 'We don't understand the brain, so intelligence and consciousness can never be understood in a decent time-frame' seems to be as close to a key point as any I am able to interpret out of this.

The implication of his thought experiment is that our
psyches will never be totally reducible, computable,
predictable, and explainable".

Never explainable? Just like the stars, motion, nuclear physics and the rest of the human body?

Cochlear implamts are also cited as having "poor sound quality" - how does this prove that implants won't get better?

There is really nothing to see here - perhaps there would be if the author made his points a bit clearer.
Mod up for saying that language choice is primarily a matter of taste.

But, there were a few other considerations for me when I chose Python as my development language over PHP and Ruby.

I think that as far as language growth is concerned, Python has more buzz right now (no disrespect to PHP or Ruby intended). Google's app engine is all about Python right now, and that's going to dramatically increase the traction of Python in the web development world. Google is actively supporting Python development. Google has a lot riding on Python because it's one of the 4 sanctioned languages at the GOOG. I could be wrong, but I get the impression that Python is growing as a community and as a language faster than Ruby. This is why I chose Python over Ruby.

I also chose Python, because I think that there's aspects to Python that will broaden my horizons and stretch me as a programmer as I learn it. I don't really get that impression with PHP. All things being equal, I'd rather learn a language that will stretch me as a programmer.
Just ask them to remove those clauses you are feeling uncomfortable with. You don't need a lawyer for this.