skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Overpopulation is the elephant in the room that no one talks about, and I believe that most of the issues today have it at its core. Much of propaganda is designed to dance around the issue of population control -- "the primary responsibility of government is to project the minority of the opulent from the majority" (listen this Harvard talk on "Propaganda and Control of The Public Mind" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0OnTHz--7I&playnext=1...).

In the 1960s Henry Kissinger completed National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), which is more commonly referred to as the "Kissinger Report" (http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PCAAB500.pdf). Kissinger says that the greatest threat to America is not the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but the overpopulation of third-world countries. NSSM 200 discusses several mechanisms that control population growth, such as war, famine, disease, pestilence, poverty and immigration.

Dr. Al Bartlett's (http://www.albartlett.org/) says, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function" (you can watch his famous lecture on population growth http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9znsuCphHUU&playnext=1...). He then goes through the stark reality of what will happen if we continue our exponential growth against finite natural resources.

Research by economists John Donohue and Steven Levit at the University of Chicago (http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DonohueLevittT...) showed that the legalizing of abortion started to reduce violent crime by the 1980s because would-be impoverished people weren't growing up to be criminals. You may have read about this is Levit's book, Freakonomics (http://freakonomicsbook.com/).

Abortion, one of our most controversial issues, is primarily about population control, but this rarely gets talked about. It's the establishment's pink elephant that's been sitting in the room since the 1970s (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12ginsburg-t.html...). We argue about "right to life" and "right to choose" and most have never even considered the bigger issue because that's the way the issue has been framed.

The question we should be asking is, "Do you believe that population control is a good thing or a bad thing?"

At the end of Dr. Bartlett's lecture on population growth, he presents the "Great Challenge." He asks, "Can you think of any problem on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted or advanced by having larger populations at the local level, the state level, the national level, or globally?"

My answer to his challenge is: Yes, larger populations mean we have more of our greatest resource -- ourselves. Our creativity and ingenuity has developed solutions to our greatest problems, but we need true and accurate information so that we make better decisions and work toward a solution.
The problem with ssh on iOS and then especially iPhone is the size of the screen. When I'm eg. connect to irssi I can maybe see one line of previous conversations.

And regarding 'Prompt', I dont see how Panic has made something 'new' here. There are several ssh clients with favorites, shortcuts and nice designs. Some are even free.
I've flagged this article, but I just have to post to say - this is one of the worst contributions I've ever seen on the front page of Hacker News. For all of the value of the advice and content, it may as well be named "Top 100 funniest domain name mistakes!" and forwarded on to me by my uncle.
Sweet. I did a lot of this kind of experimenting about 6 years ago (ironically, during the first semester of an MBA...) and built a full featured simulator that had critters with genomes which were used to build a grammar which was used to construct a neural network which was used to guide the critters on a heat map and the critters with the best temperature had their genomes selected for breeding. It's fascinating to watch the critters go from acting randomly to acting purposefully over the couple of minutes.

One of most impressive things (to me) about my experiments was the insight they gave me into the real world.

At the risk of mentioning Java, you might check out Repast (http://repast.sourceforge.net/). It's a great, though overwhelming, framework in which to build these kinds of things and it's what I used for mine...

[Hmm... This post inspired me and I booted the simulator up again... Maybe I'll clean it up and put it on GitHub...]
3D Jetski Racing | Y8, Y8 New games, Free Flash Games, Play Free Y8 Games Flash
Analysis Of Apple’s A5
The main thing here is that in good times an agricultural society was able to produce surplus. And the existence of this surplus made hierarchies possible: suddenly the society could afford to have a non-working ruling class.

Organized religion probably arose from the possibility of surplus combined with an agricultural society's need for having someone observe the seasons and predict weather.
Yes, my litmus test, as I explained it, is simplified. It's a great way to start a conversation on what's really important, but it's not a yes/no question that can be settled in 2 seconds of course.

That being said, I prefer that people don't give bad advice online. When you recommend 50/50 split, what is your experience for advising so?
Anyone got any ideas on getting a .pem key from EC2 into this? I got my non-EC2 id_rsa into it just fine, but .pems seem to disappear.
I wonder why his choice is limited to 1) seeking to have a lucrative career at a big company, and 2) apparently seeking to hit a home run with a start up.

A third choice would be to immigrate to a country which still has cheap land and, as a single man, perform whatever is work necessary, for a few years, to buy and own a homestead outright. This could be done in about five years if he was frugal enough. Then... just do whatever the heck he feels like: get an education, start a business, save the world, whatever.
Great initiative. Agree on crawl before you sprint -- that said, please put Seattle on the list as well!
The SSH clients I've used on iOS - iTerm, iSSH - have been decent but unpolished. This one feels a lot more usable thus far.
I've tried the GitX integration to no avail http://justinhileman.info/git-for-coda/

I'm sure they're already working hard on Coda 2. I wonder if this might have been an experiment to see if Transit code could be ported to iOS
It's definitely one of the prettier SSH apps, but it faces the same barrier I've seen with other SSH apps - typing is too slow! It will sometimes be a full 2 seconds between when i finish a word and it starts appearing on the screen.

Has anyone else noticed this or found one that doesn't do this? I'm doing this on iPhone, maybe the iPad is better, but I don't see any reason why.
I agree with you, but the characterization in your second paragraph of hunter-gatherers and farmers might be construed as two static ideologies battling for supremacy (which isn't true). Indeed, as you say, the transition from nomadic to agricultural was messy, happened over centuries, and was a result of many factors.
They are re-using the term literate programming / programmer in a non-standard way. Confusing.
Hypertable 0.9.5.0 "pre3" patch release available for download
Anatomy of Google analytics cookies
I wonder if any of it has to do with better results for someone typing "XXXX for creative directors" into Google.
As I understand the wording on the blog post, it's 5 plays ever and not 5 plays per month.
Homage to H. P. Lovecraft: A LEGO creation by Mr. Xenomurphy
The Justice Department is suing Google and ITA to block the merger by requesting that the court determine that it violates the Clayton Act.

The claim is that ITA's QPX product is the most advanced and successful of all the available P&S systems (airfare pricing and shopping systems). There are 4 other competitors, including Expedia (which doesn't license their software).

QPX is used by competitors to Google, such as Microsoft.

If Google were to acquire ITA, Google would have an incentive to block access to QPX from competitors, and thus exercise an unfair advantage over the competition.
I second that.

On a side note - It's very strange that there's no email address, no name of the person/persons behind this, no twitter account etc. Just the contact form.

I mean, I'd like to follow whoever did this on twitter.
So, as a UNIX hacker, here's what I don't get about the iOS community. There is way too much excitement over the simplest things ever. Let's break down some of the copy for this app:

Prompt is a clean, crisp, and cheerful SSH client

What does that mean? What does a clean ssh client do; not commit any protocol violations? What is crisp? When you bite into it, it's like a ripe apple? What does cheerful mean? Is the ssh client really happy that it can make a TCP connection to the intarwebs, especially for me?

What does this sentence mean to someone that wants to ssh from their phone?

it helps you when you need it, and stays out of your way when you don’t

So when I want to be sshing, I can run it, and when I don't want to be sshing, I don't have to run it? Splendid. It works like every other computer program ever made.

Perfect for system administrators, web developers, movie-style hackers (“Let me just TCP/IP into the UNIX port!”), or any person who needs to connect remotely and type some magic.

So I googled for "ssh client", found your page, and you're telling me who uses ssh clients. How would you get to this page without knowing what ssh is, and how would you know what ssh is without needing to use it?

Anyway, a lot of happy-sounding words for ... a program that decrypts text from the Internet and writes it to the screen.
you have to pretty sure you know exactly who your customers are don't you?

Yes, and that is itself a huge benefit. If going this route forces you to think about who will use your product (hint: it's not "everybody!") then it's a net win for everyone involved. Understanding your customer is key to building a useful product.
Network Solutions has a certified offer service that favors buyers but it just emails the whois address. Nothing special really.

Sedo, Moniker and few other places will help you and broker (assuming it's worthwhile).

There are a handful of experienced domainers who broker as well, also domain lawyers do this stuff.

The biggest issue is what ballpark you're operating in. If your budget is <1000, it's not worth bothering with anyone else. Between 1-5k, maybe some individuals will help out/lawyer. As that number gets higher, more people would be willing. Other big factor is expectations, having a 100,000$ budget for sex.com is all but a waste of time too. So the domain and budget need to be approximately in tune.

If you want some specific help on the domain you're trying to acquire I may be able to help you out some (free advice), contact info is in my profile.
Highlight TSA Misconduct
If you started a web site to highlight TSA misconduct, what would a good domain name be? What are some good domain name registries and hosting sites outside of the U.S.?
Anyone downloaded this? Anyone have a sense of how it compares to any other ssh clients?

I was super excited when I downloaded TouchTerm, but it was just so difficult to do anything with it on my iPhone that I gave up, despite thinking it was very clever. The Prompt screenshots at least look a lot cleaner than TouchTerm's, but I don't want to go through another fit of excitement only to never actually use it.
"Very little engineering was done before agrarian societies, and I'm fairly certain that most ancient wonders required no small amount of engineering chops."

Göbekli Tepe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Göbekli_Tepe) disproves that assumption, and calls to question many others about pre-agrarian society.
What does Bilski say that conflicts with them?
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has a good book called Civilization: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature that talks a lot about this, among other things.

http://www.amazon.com/Civilizations-Culture-Ambition-Transfo... (Not an affiliate link.)
I agree with what you are saying. I think what has changed is that having a harem is no longer socially acceptable. People still cheat all the time, but the era when a high-status man can have 20 "wives", and in which a lot of low-status men (to be made soldiers) can't find any, has ended in the civilized world.

Humans are probably "naturally" polygamous and violent, and also willing to enter violence if it can increase sexual access. This is "good" for the "selfish" genes, but painful for the organism and outright bad for society, which is why societies steer toward mostly-monogamous arrangements as they mature.
"The only freely-available tool that attempts to provide both of these is zookeeper, but zookeeper is specialized, focused on locking and server management. We need a general-purpose tool that provides the same guarantees in a clean, well-designed package."

I think they dismissed Zookeeper too quickly without trying to understand it first. The zookeeper primitives (get/set nodes and their children) seems simpler and cleaner than doozer is client protocol, AFAICT. Zookeeper should scale better (especially for readers) than typical Paxos based systems as well.
Ask HN: Critique our pre-launch page
Hey guys, we've been developing MyCourses for the past month or so. I only learned Ruby 3 months ago so it's been quite a tough time, but we're getting through it. Because of deadlines and such, I decided to put up this pre-launch page to gauge interest and get the word out. Let me know what you think about it, any advice would be very much appreciated. Thanks guys!
Clickable - http://mycours.es
Why Is RIM's CEO Freaking Out?
"legalizing of abortion started to reduce violent crime by the 1980s because would-be impoverished people weren't growing up to be criminals"

That's wise. Crime should be left to the professionals: Washington and Wall St.
Agree, but iSSH is also crammed with helpful features like public key authentication. Prompt is going to have to match those to become a favorite of the hacker crowd.
I was surprised they didn't mention this as well.

Plus, the Timing of Deliveries section.
i would add colors. when you go to the website, the first color that hits you is the disgusting link colored blue. that is very a very 1999 look. add color basically. oh, and take away the peace sign favicon.
you're going to have to spell this thought out for me. i don't see how some middleman taking 80% is redeemed by the success of "humble indie bundles".
You can convert the .pem by doing something like:

openssl rsa -in test.pem > test.rsa
Right, it's called marketing. And it tries to describe what the authors were aiming for.

F.ex. //it helps you when you need it, and stays out of your way when you don’t// I read as "We don't use UI chrome that's distracting, only showing those things that you need contextually".
Why the Flip Failed
I remember when Voyager II reached Neptune and we watched it in science class in primary (grade) school. Different specific events, but a shared experience across a generation.
I would argue that it doesn't say anything that conflicts with them. But you were citing old cases as authority for software being per se nonstatutory subject matter, and that's pretty clearly not true in the post-Bilski world.
No, we actually have a group of 7 with an even split of 51% of the shares. That 51% is in a block so the group as a whole has controlling interest in the company. We then used this calculator to split 29% based on sweat equity and contribution to the project.

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fd0n/35%20Founders%20Pie%20Ca...

I used the formula from this site to create a calculator in excel. We didn't like an even split because not everyone was contributing equally to the project. By doing this, we were able to quantify everyone's contribution and because of this everyone was able to agree on the split.

We left the remaining 20% authorized, but not issued for future investment.

This seems like a convoluted way to split the shares, but in the end, everyone was happy because there were numbers to back up the method.
Danae Ringelmann: Start Fund Raising by Crowd Sourcing {video}
what this article does not mention is that the viability of hunter-gatherer lifestyles may have eroded significantly during the (ongoing) quaternary extinction event that began in the late pleistocene. the proliferation of hunter gatherers and their comparative excellence at hunting may have in fact caused this extinction (see overkill theory). furthermore, declining game reserves places strong incentive on creating reliable alternative food sources, so agriculture may be a direct consequence of this success of our ancestors' lifestyle.

when considered as an alternative to sudden, significant population decline as a result of collapsing prey biomass rather than to a literal (and possibly the mythological origin of) eden, the choice to live agriculturally is the best mistake we've ever made.
One of the reason the humble bundles do so well is that people have the option of paying more than the asking price (of free). There is no option to pay more than the $0.38 (number pulled out of my ass) amazon charges because of a promotion. Comparing the humble bundles with an app store makes no sense.
His arguments suggest that optimal nutrition is close to what we ate as hunter-gatherers. I wonder if Diamond believes in the paleo diet.
It seems just like ConnectBot for Android, except it costs $5.
Way too little information to convince me to give out my email address.
It may seem like "pretty simple functionality", but...

Active Merchant "raison d'être" was Shopify's requirements for a simple and unified API to access dozens of different payment gateways with very different internal APIs. Abstracting the APIs for dealing with credit cards and payment processors was core to Shopify's business, and they open-sourced what could have easily been kept closed. This abstraction is hard work, not the kind of work I want to do, and I'd rather use their robust library than roll my own or use another poorly-tested one.

We package and deploy Active Merchant in a single, stand-alone .jar file. We don't use Rails (Active Merchant works excellently as a stand-alone library). It's not as complicated as you think.
What do you plan on using as your standard rate for other contracts?

My suggestion would be to use that rate with a 5 or 10 dollar discount due to your relationship.
Does this have 256 color support? Anyone know of an iOS Terminal with 256 color support? Too much to ask for in a terminal? Heh.
Bubble-sort demonstrated by Hungarian ("Csángó") folk dance
Scientists 'prove' that time travel will always be impossible
Oprah is on Flipboard
I'd been using touchterm for a while, and had experimented with other iOS ssh clients. They... worked, but the experience always felt a bit clunky.

I've been using prompt for a day now, and so far it feels better than the others. The app design feels really clean, the method of expanding the keyboard to handle modifier keys and frequently-used non-alpha keys works well without grabbing too much screen real estate (this is clearly visible in the screen shots for what it's worth).

Finally, the terminal emulation has been flawless for me so far. Emacs runs well (and is quite usable with Prompt's modifier key placement, unlike in other iOS ssh clients I'd tried; remember, folks, ESC is Meta, Meta is ESC). touchTerm had some screen lag/partial refresh issues for me with Emacs -- these may have been fixed in later versions, though, as I gave up at some point.

In short, I like it.

obDisclaimer: I don't know the developers. I don't have a dog in this fight. I do like the app. I'm not the only one who likes it though -- see the daringfireball take here:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/04/14/prompt
Do you know of someone with the skills they need who you could provide a reference for? I would think that would go a long way towards smoothing over your departure if you're concerned about that at all. Are they looking for anything particularly rare?
BlackBerry PlayBook: Here's RIM's Only Chance
You are substantially mis-characterizing modern linguistic theory/linguists. The 'grow them like you grow teeth' is meant to indicate that, given certain inputs/environment, a child will develop normal language function. You don't need to 'learn' it in the sense that you do need to learn e.g. how to read. The reason for the contrast (argues a linguist) is that we have some internal cognitive structures that react to certain kinds of input, namely linguistic input, and that that reaction is called 'learning your first language(s)'. They disagree with the 'common sense' approach, that learning your first language is just like learning anything else.

I would characterize the debate between linguists and a certain class of cognitive scientists like this:

CogSci: Hey, you keep talking about UG/Innate mechanisms! We don't like that/it seems implausible. Instead, we should just have general learning algorithms that can be utilized to learn language!

Ling: Cool! Show us! Show us!

CogSci: Well...Here's a machine learning model that can learn English past tense with the following training data.

Ling: Oh. Um. Hmmm. Yeah, the data is more complex than that. How far can you get with this data (unloads data by the truckful). Also: that looks like how adults learn things (the kinds of errors made), not really how kids learn language (they make different kinds of errors). Can you model that?

CogSci: It's a simple model! It can't handle that data. That's for a later paper! Also, we don't care about the error classifications, as long as it looks like learning.

Ling: Ok. Let us know when that paper comes out. Have you seen this Bantu data? It's pretty cool too.

CogSci: later: Ok, look. We didn't get the model to work, but we really think your multiplying entities. I mean, it's just crazy/biologically-implausible/ugly to postulate this innate knowledge.

Ling: Yup. But here's the deal. We can't manage to actually explain everything we want even if we postulate innate rules/knowledge like crazy. Maybe we have a fundamentally broken model. Maybe machine learning really will come and eat our babies (or maybe the kinds of things we're postulating will turn out to built on top of machine learning, as explanations at different levels). But so far, it's the best we've got.

Obviously, people write books on these arguments, so some massive simplification was done here. And there is some really cool work being done by general cognitive scientists in the language space.
My demo also suggested sluggishness when typing. I figured it was my network connection.
Build your own App store?
The problem of target URL being unknown until you follow the link still applies.
They're talking about the interface, dude. Making a pretty, usable terminal for iOS is non-trivial, that's what they're selling.
Except that would take three times as many judges; and if you had that many they could just take a break after every case.
I haven't tried out many other ssh clients, but I just bought prompt. I'm really digging the little bar above the keyboard that adds the most commonly used keys like esc, ctrl, tab, @, arrow keys. It makes my server admin jobs a lot easier.
These are part of NASA's Deep Space Network, used to communicate with the fleet of interplanetary spacecraft (as well as plenty of satellites and the ISS). The you mentioned the three largest ones, each with a 70 meter dish.
I certainly wouldn't generalize that to _ALL_ middle men. Have you heard about sub prime mortgages..?
I learned and and grew more in the intensive 2 months @ AngelPad than in any 2 months of my life post college. The only other time was I learned as much when I traveled through countries.

The mentors can make intros to many of the top VCs and angels when you're fundraising. Their advice all make sense at the end. One of my favorites was speakers every week.

In addition to the mentorship, I liked the sense of community @ AngelPad. Startup life is unique - others can't relate to it as much. AP was its own support network (like a gender-neutral frat).