skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reports from the field of the effects of OLPC in poor villages are extremely encouraging. See http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Peru/Arahuay http://www.technologyreview.com/video/laptop for more.
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html is a wonderful resource.
What they need is simple -- opportunity.
They are misleading by showing only part of the truth.

Yes, IQ contributes to the successful civilization, but it is not the only factor.

There's also good heart, self-discipline, empathy, sympathy, and lots more that high IQ will not guarantee and is essential for happy civilization.

People with high IQ very well might be ignorant, self-focused, narcissistic, etc., and people with lesser IQ will be more good hearted, compationed, altruistic, and this might contribute more to civilization than high IQ.
One potentially untapped source of biomass might be grass clippings. It the tanks could be small enough to be operated at the household level, then perhaps one enterprising neighbor could buy the neighborhood detritus or offer to convert it for them.

Even if it's not competitive price-wise there is significant value for (some) people in feeling environmental; burning carbon negative gas in your car from your yard would probably fit that category.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what your saying but I'd like to point out that I can go from MySQL to PostgreSQL in a matter of minutes.

Specifically, I would need to change my database.yml file with my new database info and run a migration.

Did I miss something?
Whenever there are negative consequences to those who express concern or doubt about aspects of the design or implementation, there will be a strong temptation for developers to "go dark" for a little bit while they investigate assumptions that they can't discuss publically with the rest of the group.
ask in jquery's site
What can the Semantic Web do for me? from JasonKolb.com - The life of a technology entrepreneur.
Equal opportunity.

Respect for basic human dignity.
Erlang: An Introduction to Records
The real problem is not what children need, but what societies need. Tragically, these two are are in opposition. If you give Africans (for example) their Levels 1 and 2, in 20 years you'll have a tripled population that's just as destitute and dysfunctional as before, if not more.

It's the food and medicine programs that are "feel good". Without reducing African birthrates (which are the highest in the world), they probably only make things worse in the long run.
My neighbor is...Im sure of it!
The information is still valuable. They could expose you to other applications which will interest you and in turn generate profit.
A slight tangent, but I never understood the philosophy of being database-agnostic. Every database has its own set of features and does things in a certain way. For example, in some databases cursor operations are expensive and temporary tables are the way to go. In some, the opposite. Remaining neutral means using only the most basic SQL and still you might not get the expected performance...
Going Dark (a response to Jeff Atwood)
Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore
Microsoft stops Windows Live VOIP services from July
Army Imitates Apple To Draw New Recruits
Time to take on the file sharers
which is why I wanted to make a dating site based on how closely related two people's book collections are.

librarything seems to be getting it right.
Guido worked almost alone on Python for a good 5 years. The best ideas are made by 1-3 people. I agree dont' go dark, but coding by community/design by committee can be horrible on the other extreme.

At a certain point projects can be ready for more collaboration, at a certain point they are too young and might get spoiled by project wreckers. Showing incomplete code/systems to the wrong people (i.e. non programmers in many cases) can be the death of good ideas.

Look it up, find your favorite tool, platform, language etc, I guarantee you there is 1-3 guys that made it happen at the first iteration at least.
The Turing Test is not an element of the singularity--it pre-exists the idea of the singularity by a sizable margin, and was an effort to define the idea of artificial intelligence. I would certainly encourage people who wish to believe in the coming singularity to set similar concrete goals for their vision of the future. But, even then, the idea of the singularity will not be science--although the specific, falsifiable claims might be.

Claims made in 1994 that the internet would change the world were not science (although some specific claims might have been)--this does not make them useless or wrong. It isn't a scientific claim that the Mona Lisa is a good painting, or that dogs are loyal. But most people would agree with both of these statements.

Most predictions (ignoring those of incredibly limited scope) about the future are unscientific. This, by itself, does not make them false. But trying to pretend to be science is rarely a good sign.
Firefox 3 Brings Ugliness to the Mac
I've noticed this before but it is described well here. General sloppyness all around in Firefox.
It doesn't matter, if you are a competent programmer you can use .NET, RoR, Python, Java, PHP or anything to make it work efficiently. Tools do not make the system better, the people working on it do. There is 'magic' in both the systems that you mention but you should be aware of the underlying 'magic' and architect a solution that works best. Rarely today are programmers limited by platform. The only concern with .NET is platform lock-in but if you go with mono there is no concern.

You will find languages and platforms are like religions or brands, everyone has their favorite because it worked for them but it doesn't make them the best. Just the best for them and their conditions/constraints/knowledge.
What is it like to write a technical book?
I think "is expected to generate" is much more appropriate than "generating" since it doesn't exist yet. I would have been suitably more interested if it was real instead of a prediction.
There's many other problems with FF3 on OS X then the basic GUI.

Because Mozilla chose to use XUL for as much as possible instead of taking it from Cocoa or Carbon. Nor do they share the same keyboard shortcuts (when typing, to move to the front/end of a line in Safari, then in Firefox for example).

By using Carbon, FF doesn't take any of the Accessibility features most other OS X applications have (like Voiceover). Not to mention the devs will have to rewrite these bits for 64bit support.

Grubar did a write up of FF3 vs Safari 3 awhile ago: http://daringfireball.net/2008/04/firefox_3_safari_3 - other then the Background/Foreground bit at the very beginning, it's still accurate. Though there's still Background/Foreground issues if you look closely (the tab bar when there are no tabs looks like a foreground window no matter where its located for instance).
Urbanization is reducing birth rates. Fast.
EU Science Promotion: 'Chemical Party' (1m30s) [video]
There's really no reason to choose Firefox over Safari any more.

The only thing Firefox has on Safari is plugins, but the most useful of those, Firebug, is now essentially built into the new WebKit with it's excellent debugging tools.

The JavaScript performance is blazing too. Just check out the WebKit nightly: http://nightly.webkit.org/
I run a small website that hosts wire feeds (AP, Reuters, etc.). When a reader asked for comments, I originally said no b/c building my own infrastructure + spam protection would take way too much time. I heard about Disqus and I literally had comments on every single news article in 5 minutes. This in turn created a forum. Now, I saw little usage of comments and took them down, however, the ease of use was incredible. Basically, if you have a website with content that isn't built on blogging software, Disqus (or InstantDebate) is a quick and easy way to implement comments.
+1 for Safari. Develop > Web Inspector is a very good Firebug replacement. I only ever open Firefox to a) test it in the browser or 2) to use more advanced Firebug features.
I would think that most passionate programmers have this personality to some magnitude, but it's the magnitude that really counts. There is a threshold where a hacker's isolation outweighs their technical flair. It's a potentially dangerous situation, because when there is no chance to challenge a hacker's perceived authority on what would otherwise be a reasonable conclusion, the hacker can remain under the notion that the conclusion (and often subsequent, unrelated conclusions) are infallible.

At some point in a hacker's career, no matter how smart they are, they're going to be wrong about something. They will respond one of two ways: they will retract into their shell and fortify their position, or instead, poke their head out and learn how someone on the outside formed their opinion.

Curiosity begets discussion begets socialisation. Hackers are touted to be curious by nature, and I wouldn't imagine that curiosity excludes human beings. We are, after all, the strangest contraptions we're ever likely to encounter. If a hacker's reasonable conclusion is rejected, then isn't the better response to open a dialogue as opposed to assuming that your rejector knows no better?

The hacker needn't have been rejected by management either. If the hacker disallows a fellow hacker the opportunity to understand and challenge their perceived authority through deliberate interference, how can they claim to be a hacker? They're applying the same management practices they claim to detest to achieve superiority.

In the end, it comes down to having a curious mind and an open ear. If you don't have these traits, you can't seriously consider yourself to be a good hacker - or a good manager.
"No special relevance to hackers": therefore it does not belong on Hacker News.
It is true, and I think it is short sited of the Mozilla devs, sure porting to use the standard toolkits would be a bitch, but basically they just re did all the work to copy the "Look" of the different kits. That doesn't scale well, instead of a project to make it native on a couple systems once that would take a lot of time NOW, they have a new system which will require getting upgraded with all the new OS version.
I upvote to say "this is worth reading". I downvote to say "this is not worth reading".

"Worth reading" means "worth reading and appropriate to Hacker News". No doubt what I, or anyone, considers worth reading has some correlation with agreeing, but not 100%.
Sometimes it's just enough to build a valuable tool that is worth something to someone else...happens in high tech all the time when small one product companies are purchased. Disqus will be valuable for a larger platform that would like to bring in its userbase and believes that time to market is better managed through acquisition. Why does every web startup have to be a $1 billion idea?
MobileMe backend using Sun's Java Messaging platform?
30 Firefox add-ons to make your GMail better
I agree.

Look at programming.reddit.com. Many posts have a bushel of upmods but the majority of comments on those posts are negative.

Thus, you have a weird behaviour where peopel who like something are less likely to speak up than people who dislike something.

It may have something to do with the fact that praising something doesn't seem to add value--what's the point of a comment that says "great idea"??? Thus, people who like something upmod it but have little to say.

On the other hand, people who dislike it have lots to say, and it feels like criticism is adding value to the community.

But from the perspective of the person doing the work, putting something on display before it is bulletproof and perfect is much more likely to attract flames than praise. You hvae to have an asbestos ego to deal with that on a regular basis.
I use Google Gears for Google Docs and unfortunately it doesn't work with Safari, which is a shame so right now I need to use Firefox still.
I tried to use WebKit debugging tools since I like Safari and Firebug is the only thing keeping me tied to Firefox.

Webkit Debug is ok for dom inspection, but it's horrendously bad for the on the fly CSS modifications that Firebug excels at. It's also missing the js eval console and several other crucial firebug features (+ yslow & firecookie). It's really a poor substitute at the moment.
There doesn't seem to have been anything in this meteorite that the Miller-Urey experiement didn't cook up over the space of a couple weeks. So while it's interesting that these chemicals can form in space, I don't think it tells us anything interesting about where life began. Starting from nucleobases rather than from nitrogen and methane just isn't very much of a head start.
Yeah, aside from all the interface flaws the number one reason I prefer Safari is the text rendering. Text in Safari looks phenomenal.
I second the SEIA recommendation - it helped me out a lot when I started. I also suggest the HTTP definitive guide book. http://www.http-guide.com/ .
1) olance.com and elance.com are two of the biggies. I've had mixed success on elance but, when it was a success, it was a good success so I've continued to do business there. Craigslist for locals is possibly a try...
This article inspired me to add Disqus to my blog (http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2008-06-15-now-with-comments...) -- I hadn't bothered until now, but the simplicity (just add a few lines of javascript) convinced me.
"It's also missing the js eval console"

It's there, click the "Show console" button on the bottom left (looks like a ">" with 3 horizontal lines to the right)
30? You have to waste my time w/ this link bait crap? Just pick 5 really good ones instead of going to mozilla.org and searching for "gmail" in the Addons. (and the article's title is "40+ Tools... for Gmail"
Yeah that's unfortunate, but they are working on a WebKit version, which I'm eagerly awaiting.

Yahoo's BrowserPlus, on the other hand, supports Safari right out of the gate. Hmm...
I have no clue on how to respond. Did I patent my website? No. One huge challenge w/ technology like the web is how do you patent an idea (like the algorithm for search or popularity)? Go ahead - patent "x = (1/y)z" or whatever your algorithm is and, while you're doing so, a competitor is creating a website based on a=b(1/c).

That sort of thing isn't patentable or, to put it a better way, it isn't defensible if you do patent it. If you are a startup, are you going to sue netscape.com when they come up with a copy of your algorithm (like they did w/ digg)? Nooooo.
Oh oil will reach $250 a barrel eventually, sure...
The argument against "downvote". A slight violation of the First Amendment
There has been several discussions lately about the quality of stories/comments on HN and several users are growing angry at certain stories ranking high on the front page.

Several users including PG have proposed to add "downvote" for stories, thus prevents news "lynching" Michael Arrington, Twitter etc... to go far up the hill.

Assuming a story or comment meets the YC standards (grammar, vocabulary...) and is not disrespectful to anyone or any group of people, I think "downvoting" is against evolution. It is a few step backwards for a community driven news portal.

I have witnessed several times users being downmoded simply because they did not agree with another user. Although they may give a valid reason, they are being prosecuted for having their own thoughts about a particular subject.
This is bad to the point where if one cares for karma, which noone should, they may slightly alter their thoughts so they won't be condemned for thinking differently.

"Thinking differently". Now this is not to say that all users must have opposing views, but it is truly acceptable to have a different opinion, and noone should suffer the loss of karma points for having an opinion. This reminds me of Galileo's story.

I suggested yesterday that "silence is louder than downvoting" and that cost me 3 Karma points. Being hit for speaking your mind is clearly a "violation of the first amendment". Now, how is this different from firing an employee who doesn't agree with a certain company policy. I am confident that if a user could see who downvotes his stories, there will be a lot less of that. If you are doing something you would not do if you knew your identity will be made public, then there is "integrity" in question here.

Downvote is a clear step backward. How can you evolve in an environment where you risk being prosecuted for speaking your mind? This concept sounds like Iraq under Saddam Hussein. If one does not agree with another, then one should simply reply and make his argument in a civilized manner. Words are your tools, and if ones need "immunitions" to get his point across then one needs to learn how to communicate. Only those who cannot defend themselves using words, would use bullets.

I truly apologize if anyone feels offend as it is not the purpose of this article. Each and everyone is free to speak his mind respectfully and elegantly without fear of retributions.

EDIT: The first amendment enforces the FREEDOM OF SPEECH, which is disencouraged by Donwvotes.
And how much extra did it cost to build the tower? This isn't free energy. It has a cost. Any serious analysis would consider how much energy we could get spending the same money on additional power plants.
Looking at the user, I think it's fair to say that this is a (fairly well-executed) troll. One post since registration, and all you'd need is two sock-puppets in rapid succession to push it onto the front page.

I have to say, I've been wondering why this hasn't happened sooner. It's worked for spam, with only a couple of upvotes per article. Why not trolling?

Incidentally - and I want to say this very carefully - I believe it should not be out of bounds to examine, for example, the influence of genetic heredity as opposed to environment upon various societal issues. I'm largely discounting this article as a troll based on wild-eyed paranoid claims and red-baiting, rather than claiming enough of a knowledge of the subject to rebut every single one of its claims. (Although if there is, say, an equivalent to talk.origins on this subject, I'd be interested to see it.)

EDIT: Okay, make that "paranoid claims, red-baiting and rejecting 'mainstream science' as conspiracy". Yeah, I'd call that a troll.
Unless the US government has taken over Hacker News, the first amendment is not relevant.
Creature creator only. Torrent of same available at usual places.
So Gazprom has stopped selling its $140 oil and is instead waiting a year in order to sell it for almost twice the price?
Such an utter lack of understanding of SMS messaging I've rarely seen. Twitter is a joke compared to what it takes to do SMS properly. Not only SMS needs to be persistent, but they also need to be stored and accurately retreived for up to 5 years, which is a goverment regulation in most countries. Moreover, delivery rate needs to be 100%, period. SMS is not a time waster, even pacemakers send SMS messages from inside of human bodies when their batteries need to be replaced. You can't afford to drop those.

I know that the "culture" of Silicon Valley is not to criticize, so let me put it this way: HIRE CAREFULLY for your startup, especially when it comes to engineering. Even if you're solving a trivial issue.
i couldn't have answered this any better than danielle did, so i'm going to let it stand. heh!

i guess we're all somewhere along the cubicle-worker-bee/cowboy spectrum. i'm closer to the cowboy end. as is anybody serious about being involved in a startup, i think.
I just want to point out that this isn't Spore; it's only a demo of the "Spore Creature Creator" which is scheduled to be released on June 17th, 2008. The purpose of this is that when Spore is actually released later in 2008, it will already be populated with user-created creatures.
First, the first amendment has absolutely no relevance here, since it is a restriction being placed on government, not on individuals. There is a chronic habit to misinterpret this as "I can say what I want, wherever I want, whenever, however", which is an interesting opinion, but one with no correlation with the legal definition. The 1st isn't intended to--and doesn't--defend the imagined right to express your views on other people's servers.

Next, your real life examples are a bit sensationalist. The difference is that Saddam was killing people for expressing opinions, whereas we want to downvote poorly expressed and undefended opinions. A more apt comparison would be the university setting, where challenging opinions will be accepted on the merits of their presenter's ability to defend them. The same applies to Galileo, who was persecuted for his theories (not, note opinions). I believe that we'd be overjoyed to have a Galileo posting here, since he would link to his mathematics and let us examine the feasibility of his theories for ourselves.

Finally, to address the meat of your argument against downvoting, I think you have misdiagnosed why people are downvoted. I rarely see people downvoted for their opinions, but frequently see people downvoted for failing to effectively defend or explain their opinions. Since we are trying to foster discussion, the actual opinion is usually less important than explaining how they have arrived at their opinion, and why their opinion is viable. Simply expressing an opinion is noise in a conversation often boils down to noise, and opinions on their own won't feed the starving mind: the meat of the argument lies in explaining opinions.

Thus, I believe that the downvote allows the community to exert a stronger preference for comments that add value. If you want to avoid being downvoted, express you opinion and then defend it.
I am the exact same way you are. My brain tends to kick into high gear around the exact same time that society dictates that I go to bed. The only thing I have found to help me is some form of sleeping pills. I'm not sure what they are doing to my body, but it's really the only way I can fall asleep after 8 pm.

I've always wondered if there was a job out there for me that didn't involve working the third shift in some factory, but I have not found a tech or finance job offering the third shift. Until I do find this type of job, it looks like I will need to continue taking sleeping pills.
Axod, you're absolutely right, I am amazed that your voice is drawning in this river of absurd. Twitter IS a freaking reimplementation of SMS, a not-too-hard problem that has been solved many many many times before (on a much weaker hardware). Most folks here just don't get it. Perhaps it's because texting has never been really big in US like it has always been in Europe.

Moreover, Twitter's load is a joke compared to what leading telecoms have been dealing with for many years. If there were serious about recruiting they could have hired someone with experience to do just that. Without this typical "distributed everything" mantra. Twitter isn't freaking Google or Amazon, they have ZERO computational complexity, they simply move (and store) up to 400 bytes of data for _not even a million_ of active daily users, how hard could it be?

I suspect the reason we see such embarassing technical failures is because software engineering these days is less about engineering and more about playing Lego with pre-existing open source parts, even if they don't fit together or even don't fit at all.
There's the link with some actual info:

http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/06/09/rotating-wind-powered-to...