skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
150,000 people die every day.

Check www.breathingearth.net and watch the counts of births/deaths, how quickly they move.

Watch the deaths. Try to imagine each one as a real human being with a funeral, mourners, leaving a gap in other's lives. It's hard - impossible? 100,000 people is a _lot_ of people.

That's not considering all the suffering that happens before many of those deaths from illness, disease, accident, war, muggings and assaults...

I don't think people could stay sane if we couldn't be dismissive (or perhaps, accepting) of mass suffering.
It seems they were anti-communist vigilantes rather than ordinary "bandits".

Anti-communist vigilantes who respect mathematics? We need more of those in our universities.
McCain is opposed terrorists more than Obama. And more trustyworthy on Israel and Iran issues.

When people say they want to kill us, it's stupid not to take that seriously.
That's what I thought. Ewww.

The discussion over there seems really worthwhile, but for some reason, I just hate that technology.

Shrink wrapped software packages doesn't sound too exciting either.

I'm a one-man micro-ISV, but the 37signals model seems much more appealing to me.
Tools for Agility - A White paper by Kent Beck
I've always been interested in the modeling of polling, so
I've recently developed a website implementing a model that I think will provide a better online polling methodology than simply allowing ballot stuffing, by requiring a minimal opportunity cost - being online also means it's (hopefully) more inclusive than the hit-and-miss technique of telephone polling.

It's wide open since I've truly just gone live with it (only one participant so far!)

Hopefully it'll be a good hack.

It's at http://www.voteearlyvoteoften.us
US-centric -- not everybody cares about our menagerie of weirdos

I'm not sure about that. Most of the world is quite interested in "international news", and the US election is one of the more important international news stories of this year. When I was in Oxford in 2004, half of the college was awake until the final results came in around 7AM.

probably not Hacker News

I absolutely agree here.
>I'm stunned by peoples' capacity to be so casual and dismissive about issues of such magnitude.

Environmentalists have been screaming "we're all going to die!" every 5 years for the last 40. Check out the first chapter of Bjorn Lomborg's "The Skeptical Environmentalist". Many of the still well-respected names in environmental policy have been drastically, self-servingly disingenuous in the past in order to push a radical environmental agenda that frankly was not backed up by evidence. Anyone who does not carefully filter the hoopla from the fact is blind to history.

Excuse me if I don't jump every time an environmentalist screams "dance!"
Kiefer Sutherland Tries to Get Early iPhone 3G, But Is Snubbed Instead
It's not spam, it's real. We are looking for developers to speak with.
Bet you didn't expect this post to kick off this type of conversation, huh, rms?
Well, I guess it would be interesting to some places, e.g. people in those countries would want to know if the US military will be in Iraq as McCain suggests, or if we'll invade Pakistan per Obama's promises (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08...).

But how are changes in US domestic policy going to affect startups in Amsterdam or Dublin?
Thanks for the comments :) I definitely see what you mean.

My partner and I were talking today about how if you really want to trace it down to the nth degree, your ISP comes into play, all the way down to the visitors' computers, etc. It's impossible to hit 100%, but definitely worth trying for improvements :)

I don't have a car since I work from home, but on my personal consumption there's also public transit to consider even still, and then water consumption that had to be purified somehow, plastics in products we use, recycling, energy and emissions in producing the meat on my plate, transportation of said items, ad infinitum. I'm aiming at a reasonable guestimate for myself personally for now anyway, definitely with the understanding that I have to draw the line somewhere!

Hopefully we can do the same to a reasonable degree on the startup side, and maybe if enough startups pave the way it could influence others to join in too...
>The north american midwest is flat because it used to be an shallow sea.

Personally, I just take the IPCC reports as the best state of the current knowledge and proceed from there. They do not predict that the central US will be flooded anytime soon. They predict 2C warming over the next century which will produce changes that are annoying but survivable. In other words, nothing worth returning to the stone age for.

All the more shrill predictions and extreme policy measures don't seem to be backed up by evidence or any sensible cost-benefit analysis.

I accept the science, I just don't accept all the panic.
Cool, thanks for the link!
Ask YC: Recommendations on company formation in the UK
Because of the much streamlined process of company formation and the fact that potential future investors prefer English over German law (Ltd. vs. GmbH, and EU statutes that allow corporations from one EU member state to have their home office in another) we've decided to incorporate in the UK.

What we're looking for recommendations for now are services / lawyers that some of you might have used in the past and have had good experiences with.

A side point of interest would be a good book on the specific obligations that we'll need to fulfill over time when running an Ltd.
More to the point, in my experience the kind of people who actually do great things are not the kind of people who spend their time thinking about how mediocre, unambitious and lackluster other people are.
what do you do about sample bias?
If it becomes harder to innovate here in the US because of tax law, labor law, immigration law, or whatever other laws, startups in other countries better be paying attention -- it means more opportunity.
>The big question is: can we do that (and at what cost)?

The problem is that the cost is likely to be very, very high especially since we as a species have only recently pulled ourselves out of mass-poverty. Even now, half the globe resides in poverty. Is it worth it to spend a significant portion of our newfound wealth on climate stabilization when half the world is still poor and the prospect for near-term economic growth is bright? I don't think so unless the climate problem is much, much more pressing than most scientists think it is.
Gun Camera Adds Graffiti to Other People's Photos
Caja is largely based on the capability security model as explored in the E programming language. There are some great tutorials and links to further work on capability security at the E language website: http://www.erights.org/
I've actually been mulling over the possibility of combining the capability security model with a continuation-based web application framework, and think a Lisp with continuations (like Scheme or Arc) might be the easiest substrate from which to start.

It seems like a natural fit: your current capability grants would be closed over in any lexical scope, which means that a continuation would also encapsulate a capability set. Resuming the continuation would implicitly restore the security context active when it was captured.
Does nickb = pg?
Except that most Other Countries have worse laws, more socialism, and bigger government.
Emacs is mostly impressive because it's a million lines of lisp with no lexical variables or namespaces. Emacs lisp has almost all the flaws that we criticize PHP for, but somehow it is actually useful and maintainable. I think that's interesting.

An emacs written in python, frankly, wouldn't look that different.

You're right, but I just can't imagine that. When I think of editing text, I think of writing Lisp to do it for me. I just can't comprehend doing it any other way... and my primary language is Perl :)
yes it is at now par, but it wasn't always: http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?from=CAD&to=US...
>We're looking at a worst case (but still entirely plausible) effect of mass global starvation within the century, and the denialist attitude is ... wait for more data?

Magical unicorns could come and eat our crops, causing mass global starvation. Why hasn't the government done anything, such as mandating unicorn shields for farmers?

My point is that the worst-case scenario is irrelevant. It matters how likely the worst-case scenario is to occur. Any discussion of the magnitude of possible damage without discussing the odds is fear-mongering at its most base. It's the same thing Bush does when he states that the terrorists could end the American way of life. Sure they could, if they blew up enough cities. But how likely is that?
Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Vacation in Santa's hood.
Just use the js widget on http://www.savethedevelopers.org/ ... no sense writing your own.

I'm also ignoring IE6, crappy old corporate computers be damned. It's just not worth my sanity.
there's always sample bias - estimating and adjusting for it is the tricky part of course. The (statistical) "correction" for it is to insure the polling crosses all boundaries - and that's probably impossible - I know for example I have never particpated in a telephone poll - the interruption pisses me off for one thing - and I know many others like me in that regard. I have been called - and even answered some questions - but it rapidly became obvious to me that the wording of teh questions was tilted in some manner - so I declined to futher play that game. Being online certainly targets a certain audience - however the model discourages excessive influence (unless you've got deep pockets), and yet incurs such a small opportunity cost that anyone who desired can easily participate. My untested hypothesis is that anyone who makes an effort (that is minimal but more major than simply clicking) to participate when there is an opportunity cost will likely actually go vote for real - those are whom I actually want to sample.

The only true test will be to compare after the election.
you should be able to construct basic regular expressions to match things like email addresses

Actually, writing a correct (per RFC) regex to recognize email addresses is far from simple.
This is the first time yet that their screams were backed up by large scale consensus in the scientific community. You can't let previous ones that weren't (like global cooling, which was more of a sensation in the media than it ever was among environmentalists or scientists) ruin your outlook on real potential threats.
That's out of context. It was an example of the kind of change the earth has seen in epochs where polar ice melts completely, not a prediction for the immediate future. And the IPCC has 4C as its upper bound, not 2, and in any case they don't predict motion of antarctic ice sheets due to lack of models. Their predictions for sea level change are conservative, basically.

And as far as hyperbole goes:

> In other words, nothing worth returning to the stone age for.

Taking the bus and paying more for electricity is "returning to the stone age?" Now who's panicking?
They should set up an experiment where different people pray for the same thing using different prayers (and different faiths) along with a control group of people reading poetry and tally the percentages of people that get results, so we know which prayers are most effective.
hahah you guys have no sense of humor
Blogger finally gets an update (but it's still in beta)
The definition of hoopla (from http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=hoopla):

1. bustling excitement or activity; commotion; hullabaloo; to-do.
2. sensational publicity; ballyhoo.
3. speech or writing intended to mislead or to obscure an issue.

Obviously, you thought I meant (3), when what I really meant was (1) or (2). I just meant that there's been a lot of to-do about "carbon footprints" and such lately, and I'm not sure how much of a real effect any of the proposed changes are really going to have on the climate. That's all. I wasn't intending to get all political.
Ask them for help pluralizing words in your HN submissions ;)
Well, we only all have to die once for it to be a big deal.
I'm only suggesting this because I'm sure there are others out there that are thinking it.

... Can you get me Kari's number? :)
Ruby books, two years later (photo)
>and pressure our governments to adopt appropriate policies

What if the policies on the table are feel-good policies meant to show that they are "doing something", but the costs of those policies are higher than any likely benefit? That is a good description of what I feel about the current state of Global Warming "solutions".
Dreaming Of Better User Interface
Sorry, just adding, "It's hacker news because..." doesn't make it true. Through a long enough chain of logic I can relate just about anything to Danny DeVito.
Bill Gates bids a teary farewell to Microsoft
>You don't like a little brusqueness in defense of human life, move to some other planet.

That's funny, I haven't heard that any serious scientist thought human life was threatened in the near future, outside of Bangladesh. The "we're all going to die" crowd seems to be on the side of unreason to me. They are once again letting there environmentalist ideology run ahead of the evidence, but this time they unfortunately have the ears of the world's governments.
hahah... touche
half of the college was awake until the final results came in around 7AM

I'm going to go out on a limb and conjecture there were not many pleased (Oxies?) on campus that dawn.
>But hasn't the earth been much warmer while humans were around? Is humanity actually threatened, or is it that our modern civilization has gotten so hard-wired to our climate that we can't deal with change?

I think the answer is that many greenies are ideologically opposed to any human alteration of the environment whatsoever. So, rather than calmly weigh the costs and benefits of current policy, they try to instill as much fear in the general populace as possible to get their way.
Better stop the Large Hadron Collider, then.
Stop. There is no meaningful argument: the current, epochally high rate of CO2 release is driving current climate change.

Wow, I'm glad you have all the answers. I did not intend to fire off a political debate, I am just truly curious. I think that immediately accepting that it's all because of us is disingenuous to the scientific method.

Whether or not the majority of climate change is due to CO2 released by human activity (which I'm still yet to be convinced of), my question was whether the small-scale changes being championed (CFLs, hybrids on an individual scale, living less comfortably (less A/C, bottled water, etc.), and so on) are really going to make a difference in regards to the climate. That's all I was pondering. See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=230272 . I think my tone may have been misunderstood.

And the land bridge didn't melt, because it's made of land, and land doesn't melt. :) What happened is that the sea levels rose due to melting glaciers on the continents and flooded it. It's still there, it's just a shallow sea instead of a connecting lowland between asia and alaska.

I stand corrected. I had learned incorrectly in grade school, apparently (not surprising). I did see my error when reading the Wikipedia page; I'm not sure why I didn't edit my post. Let's pretend the definition I was referring to was:

3. to pass, dwindle, or fade gradually (often fol. by away): *His fortune slowly melted away.*

;-)
There are far more than 3 business models online.

Here's a brief list of 9: http://digitalenterprise.org/models/models.html
You can say that again. Here's a Perl Regex to validate according to RFC 822: http://ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html. It's well over a page long.

The problem is that email validation is really better suited to being done by a push-down automata (rather than a finite state machine, which is what true regexes are). For better or for worse, perl regular expressions aren't strictly finite state machines though - so you can kind of extend them beyond what is sane.

P.S. Here's a ridiculously cool regex that can be used to determine if a number is prime: /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/

If you've got a few hours (a few seconds for cperciva ;-)) to waste, try and figure it out :-D
Even though the "concept" is a matter of common sense understandable by any 3rd grader... These "business types" surely know how to blow an average paragraph of text into an article, then into a book, then into a site...

It's almost like the dude discovered that circles are "more round than squares" and makes a career out of it.
Ask HN: How to get started with photography?
Hi. I've been interested in photography for about a year now but I've never gotten around to actually doing something about it. I've looked up a couple tutorials, checked out a couple cameras, but I'm not really sure how to start. So, I turn to you all for advice. How would you advise a photography-newbie to start off? Equipment? Pointers? Thanks!
Global Cooling is only one such dire prediction.

"We are all familiar with the Litany....Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers....The world's ecosystem is breaking down....We all know the Litany and have heard it so often that yet another repetition is, well, almost reassuring." Lomborg notes that there is just one problem with the Litany: "It does not seem to be backed up by the available evidence."

Lomborg then proceeds to demolish the Litany. He shows how, time and again, ideological environmentalists misuse, distort, and ignore the vast reams of data that contradict their dour visions. In the course of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg demonstrates that the environmentalist lobby is just that, a collection of interest groups that must hype doom in order to survive monetarily and politically.

Lomborg notes, "As the industry and farming organizations have an obvious interest in portraying the environment as just-fine and no-need-to-do-anything, the environmental organizations also have a clear interest in telling us that the environment is in a bad state, and that we need to act now. And the worse they can make this state appear, the easier it is for them to convince us we need to spend more money on the environment rather than on hospitals, kindergartens, etc. Of course, if we were equally skeptical of both sorts of organization there would be less of a problem. But since we tend to treat environmental organizations with much less skepticism, this might cause a grave bias in our understanding of the state of the world." Lomborg's book amply shows that our understanding of the state of the world is indeed biased."

http://www.reason.com/news/show/28308.html
BeOS felt really fast, on a 200 mhz computer, several years ago. While the article's example is of Assembly optimized for performance over readability/maintainability (and I know people have written entire GUI OSs in Assembly, e.g. http://www.menuetos.net/), I know a clean, maintainable, responsive OS in a higher-level language is also possible. While I don't really know the details, I think BeOS had an asynchronous scheduling / interprocess communication model that was ahead of its time. (I'm not sure if parallels to Erlang apply.)

And, I second that Acrobat is an unusually bad case, though a pretty commonly known example. (Few of you probably use the same HR software we do, for example... Not naming names.)
Please add an option for "this is pretty much the last thing I want to see on Hacker News, next to lolcats and porn".
A number of venture-backed startups I know use CO2Stats Pro. Take a look:

http://www.co2stats.com
Haven't they done the water car already?
ask them to find manbearpig
separately they fail. together they win. we need lolcats porn
Dang, I knew I should have take up Bob Greenberg (old college buddy) on his invitation to join MS back then... ;-)
My point is that we should formulate Global Warming policy with an eye on likely consequences, not the worst case scare scenarios.
Right! CO2Stats Pro already incorporates client, network, and server contributions.
Noone really, they are all the same and none of them ever keep campaign promises. + its not like my vote will actually matter.

If I go Republican, my state will go democrat with a 15 point lead.
If I go Democrat my state will go democrat with a 15 point lead.
If I go Liberterian my state will go democrat with a 15 point lead.
If I stay at home my state will go democrat with a 15 point lead.

Voting is pretty useless unless you live in a swing state.
As a long-time user of the Blogger service, it's great that Google is finally rolling out these features (even if it's only in beta) -- especially the import and export functionality. The ability to set the insertion point for images anywhere in the post (it used to default to the top) is also way overdue.

Unfortunately, these tweaks will be too little, too late for many dedicated bloggers who long ago migrated to Wordpress and Moveable Type.
What's it like being such a coward that you are afraid of a few goat farmers?

What's it like being so unpatriotic that you don't think the CIA/FBI/NSA and hundreds of other agencies won't be able to stop terrorist plots?

What's it like having to check under your bed for monsters?
Please keep in mind: the reason why politics stories are quasi-banned (or at least strongly discouraged) here is not just that they're not relevant to technology/startups/etc, but also because political debates are boring, repetitive, and have the tendency to turn otherwise-intelligent people into belligerent morons.
Here's a useful book: Setting Up and Running a Limited Company: A Comprehensive Guide to Forming and Operating a Company as a Director and Shareholder by Robert Browning (Paperback - 1 April 2003)

As for services, I went with http://www.eacbs.com/ for financial shortcuts like a printable PDF certificate (print out and frame, for instance), and I used HSBC for my bank account.

Your secretary can be anyone, which again saves money.

[edit] Companies House (the body that runs them in the UK) are great, they send reminders and instructions, and you can do most of it online. IE, when the first year was almost up, they sent me detailed instructions on how to file my accounts.
Ok, I dare you to go up to someone and say, "You're medicore and unambitious -- not that there's anything wrong with that! It just means you're not as intellectual as me and I probably wouldn't enjoy working with you."

You can judge by their reaction whether they think you're saying something about what kind of person they are.

I still maintain it says more about you than them, though.
Sure, FUD campaigns are pretty common from every political movement. So are accusations of spreading FUD. You pretty much have to tune it all out and look at the science.
Mmm, yes, and we will swat them away like the annoying gnats that they truly are. cackle
I remember you! Glad you have an opportunity to make it out here to California!
Time is the limiting factor as I am building my application and working full time. Every morning, I run 1 mile and do 25 pushups. Starting next week I'll repeat that in the evening. I make sure to stretch and do some of the katas I can still remember.

I monitor my basic nutrition intake. The only thing that is important to remember is that 3200 calories = 1 pound of fat. Eat 3200 more than you burn, gain a pound. 3200 less? Lose a pound. Muscles are formed by destroyed strands of muscle fiber and letting them be rebuilt (during recovery) with protein. So, I calculate my basic needs (~2800 calories, 60g protein, 15g fiber) and try to stay within that area.

As long as you maintain these parameters, you will stay in good condition. If your life is stable, you can of course do all sorts of other interesting things - but if you are time crunched like me, this is enough.