skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The vast majority of natural populations that I've looked into have s-shaped population growth without any particular unpleasantness; as population nears its carrying capacity, birth rate naturally tapers off, leading to near-zero population growth. Humanity appears to be in the tapering-off stage of this already (since around 1980), and I don't see any reason to presume there will be unusually high levels of conflict or tragedy as that tapering-off process continues.

The typical Mathusian "overpopulation" argument (based on a shallow misreading of Malthus) is not that we'll have an S-shaped population growth curve, but an A-shaped one -- that we'll have population grow out of control, and then come crashing back down through some massive tragedy (akin to the Kaibab Deer population [0]). The A-shaped scenario is reasonably unlikely for humans.

[0] http://depts.alverno.edu/nsmt/youngcc/research/kaibab/story3...
I really don't like most news sites. The average site like Guardian or Fox News is just "meh." CNN's "above the fold" is okay, having image thumbnailed stories and then a text-heavy list on the left side. That said, I don't actually "like" it. The pictures don't actually convey what the story is about, just a general "Oh, hey, dude standing in front of fire. And an Osama story." But the layout itself isn't bad.

Is there any reason the NY Times doesn't recreate their front page on the website? I mean, the "top fold" concept ("everyone, this is the big story,") is pretty much directly applicable to the web, after all.

The "blog" approach is wearing thin, (especially among aggregators) and the "top rotator" that so many sites use is pointless at best, and goddamn annoying usually.

But, all of that said, Google News is my homepage. newsmap.jp is no stranger to my browser either. Maybe I'm a sucker for flash (the concept, not the tech,) but allowing me to select which sections I'm seeing, color-coded, and size/coverage adjusted, just makes sense to me.I wish it also translated too. I'd love to be able to get a better idea of foreign coverage from it.

Wow, this whole wall of text, and I guess my point is "the best anyone has done so far, is in not being a COMPLETE pain in my ass." Sorry.
I'm pretty sure they limit their customer base to NATO signatories.
I don't believe this crappy little security firm has more resources than Google, even in the Security Research Dept. They can go find it themselves and fix it. Anyway, it's probably mostly a windows bug. If you line the right bytes up together in windows' RAM, it will void itself and yield 'root' or whatever wiener name they have for it. Who knows, maybe they Govt is trying to screw google, and told them to do a fake release. Their post doesn't make them sound like real pros.
Xenophanes of Colophon supposedly lived to 95. Pyrrho of Ellis lived to 90, and Democritus to 109. On the other hand, Epimenedes is supposed to have lived to the age of 154 or 290 depending on whom you believe, so take these numbers with a grain of artery-clogging sodium chloride.
Skimmed through a few seconds of The Patriot on here. Unfortunately the quality was not very good, and there are no resolution options like normal YouTube videos.

Are they all this bad? Why can't we watch movies at the same quality we get on cable TV? Ad revenues are that much lower, or are the studios just clinging to old business models?
Do you know the range, roughly?
Civil servants, government ministers and heads of state in many if not most democratic countries are not elected directly by the people. There's nothing special about the EU in that regard.
Enough of the future predictions already. Nobody even knows when Apple is going to release the iPhone 5, or when Android 2.3 will be available on more than a single digit percentage of devices.

Predicting what appstore or handset or manufacturer will be dominant X years from now is just linkbaiting.
College is a culture, not just an institution. You think differently (as evidenced by the large blog entry describing exactly how he thinks differently). Others who shared a similar experience have a huge common ground to speed up communication etc.
so, avoid .gov and similar :) it's a silly TLD anyway.

Did the .gov pwn TPB and put their exploit up there?
I know HTML5 and CSS3 are cool and exciting new opportunities, but these examples use just as much CPU (if not more) as they would if built in Flash. Insane CPU usage is part of the reason I ditched Flash.
> he merely pointed out (correctly) that there will eventually be a limit to productivity

I don't understand this point. Why would there be a limit to productivity, especially with machines and computers to leverage our efforts thousandfold and more?

And how could anyone know that such limit exists, even if it is actually reached one day? That would require predicting any possible innovation of the future.
I find it inefficient to have an entire film download in the background when a user may close up at the 10 min mark. Either optimized download speed, or on-demand live streaming would be a better idea.

Maybe there's a technical solution that could be developed by a startup in the issue - reduces YT's total upload amount, and saves money on both sides.
I would say:

1) First thing in the morning, don't check your email, Hacker News, or any other distracting sites. Not even for a minute. You can spend a bit of time figuring out your tasks / biggest rock(s) for the day (see #2); but after that, the next thing you should do is get to work.

2) Set a 1, 1.5 or 2 hour timebox where you get your "Biggest Rock" of the day done first (it's okay to split this across multiple timeboxes.

More on the Big Rock stuff here: http://zenhabits.net/big-rocks-first-double-your-productivit...

3) Work on your email in batches. So, when you open your email, set 45 minutes (or whatever) to reply / respond to whatever is in your inbox. Then close it until it's time for your next email batch.

4) I haven't gotten into this one yet, but I think it would be good to deal with each email once it's opened. Don't mark it as unread or leave it in your inbox. Respond to it or archive it (or do something with it that would make it "done.").

Yeah, I think those would be my best tips at the moment. The biggest one being #1.

I hope this helps.
SpaceX is one of the few companies in whose IPO I would invest even if I didn't think it was a rational use of my money.

And honestly I'm not sure if it is, but if I'm going to lose my money in a poor investment it might as well go into making rockets!
Interesting to see json schema used. I was just using it for something similar in my own api framework (although mostly for validation and serialization, not just discovery) and the public interest in the spec seemed mild at best. Good to see the idea catch on a little, though it would have been even better if they released a full python implementation of it instead of just hard coding around the few pieces they actually use. There actually aren't any full implementations at all right now.

http://json-schema.org/
This would be very tough to negotiate, but I'd most prefer to work with people who can actually teach me something that I didn't know I didn't know.

Honestly, though, you're assuming the biggest factor of my preference - interesting work. I would take a hard look at that long before many other factors (e.g. culture, telecommuting, benefits).
Yeah, and Noah reportedly died at 950, so I'd definitely take these numbers with a drop of hemlock :)
Good point. It's not just what you're doing in your downtime, but how you're doing it. Anything that you can make challenging, relaxing and significantly different (from work) can actually leave you more able to focus, and therefore go towards increasing your productivity.
> You don't think it's exciting that we can show that we can show that routing FedEx trucks, scheduling university final exams, and finding mathematical proofs are, in a very strong mathematical sense, the exact same problem (NP-Completeness)?

I think that it's exciting, but it's not generally exiting.

> That if someone at FedEx could came up with an efficient way of finding the shortest paths for their trucks to follow, they would in the process have broken all modern cryptography

Slow down there there cowboy. Polynomial time is not enough. You need a reasonable constant factor and a small-enough degree.

To put it another way, N2 is too slow at Google-scale. (Actually, N lg N is too slow for some of their problems.)
Go back far enough in history and numbers get even less believable, just think of Methuselah.
Oh, thank you for this comment. I wasn't aware that literally everyone who uses vulnerability research as part of their job had had a meeting and elected a spokesperson.
Ah, but do I want to read a book on design from somebody who goes around putting things in ALL CAPS?
It's called lingerie modeling.
How the feds can help entrepreneurs
Arguably, that's exactly what VUPEN is doing here. They're keeping it secret, and only letting those who are willing to pay have the necessary knowledge regarding this vulnerability and any possible workarounds. It might not be a scam, but I do find it morally questionable to hide the details of a bug of this significance.
Apple won't do things for me for free. They are INHUMAN!!!
Yeah, I understand that tutorials are usually written with the focus on one thing but pointing people to even a link for security or unit testing techniques would be helpful.
Tracking Human Lineage Through a Bramble
LOL - lots of folks defending TV :)

I completely agree with Josh though. In my case, I haven't watched more than 30 minutes of TV (usually zero) in a week for probably 10 years now. Instead, during the evenings I worked on my business while my spouse watched TV. Now I have a great business to show for all those hours. Don't have anything to show for the TV-watching hours from the previous 10 years though. YMMV (though you'll never know 'til you try it!)
They haven't cut saturdays in my area, so it's probably just a regional or maybe rural thing?
Is this exciting? To whom, and why?

If this is all NFC is actually good for, what a worthless tech it is. But as it stands, it’s a foursquare check-in, that most pointless of all social actions.
I'm not sure I agree. The technologies and expertise needed for a Mars mission are not necessarily the same as needed for a lunar colony. And the difficulty of setting up a Martian colony may actually end up being less than setting up a lunar colony (due to the ability to heavily use local resources on Mars, such as for generating fuel).
Is Google going to give out the Nexus-S, so all attendees can check-in and become a Mayor?
This is part of ISM and it's a fairly common frequency for low power tx/rx modules

http://www.google.com/search?q=433.92+MHz&ie=utf-8&o...

Even car keys operate around this frequency.
I have to imagine everyone is referring to the same government agencies referred to in the article.
Here is Megaleth. This artefact generates raw, Universal Magic. Universal Magic is beyond the comprehension of most mortals, though very useful to most. Ignorants only enjoy limited use however. Going beyond requires the arcana and the rituals. Learn them, and you wield more power than you ever dreamed of.

I mean it. You write hermetic formulas, and the thing does stuff for you. It can even do things you can't (like beat Kasparov at Chess). This is as close as the infinite wish-spell as you can get (besides strong AI, if we ever get it).

Sure my analogy points mainly to programming, but theoretical computer science can help you improve that, making you even more powerful. Now if that doesn't interest the general public, I don't know what will.
We don't want to know what follows the "two enormous cups of coffee."
You don't decide the length, but while copyright is still in effect for your work, society has decreed that you get to decide when particular copies are first made available to the public.
The two things I noticed were that 1) The user of the device is named "IAmAdmin", implying that they have admin rights, and 2) The "integrity" of chrome.exe is changed from Low to Medium at somepoint during the attack. Could this somehow be related to breaking out of the sandbox?
I often take 20 to 40 minute showers in the morning. This is my meditation.

There isn't too much going on to distract me.
What would those "plenty of interests" be in this case?
Calling bullshit aloud is usually risky for the person doing the calling. Even when the message is well-taken, the messenger is always surrounded with a halo of negativity. Yet, calling bullshit aloud is probably the most effective way to get rid of bullshit, so it must be done!

To call bullshit aloud without worrying about Godin, Fried, or Spolsky, we created "Blackspots". Blackspots are bullshits called aloud. They are anonymous, they are what you think, and we (the spottiness.com team) use our brains to moderate them.

There are also Goldspots and they are exactly the opposite, because excellence should also be appreciated anonymously. Nothing to gain, nothing to lose, just seeing the real perception emerge.
And the difficulty of setting up a Martian colony may actually end up being less than setting up a lunar colony (due to the ability to heavily use local resources on Mars, such as for generating fuel).

There's a few ways in which Mars is an easier problem than the Moon, including fewer worries about micrometeorites. As far as fuel goes, though, if you can find a good supply of water on the moon then you can start fuelling your hydrogen-oxygen rockets, no worries.

edit: Others have suggested making rocket fuel out of aluminium oxide if you can't find enough water: http://www.asi.org/adb/06/09/03/02/095/al-o-propellants.html
It's important to note Zynga will not be acquiring cocos2d itself, just two of its developers. I'm also glad to see Zynga will continue paying them to work on the platform, though I do wonder what sort of in-house tools they'll build for competitive advantage.
Youth Is A Power Of Tomorrow: New Horizon For Smart Phone: LG Optimus 2X
How to hire programmers ... seriously.
The example I gave in the blog post was a real-world example: a link to a user's profile page that includes the username in the URL. This is extremely common.

Naturally, only a fool would allow usernames to contain unsafe characters, but there are a lot of fools writing web apps.
The "Redefining Entertainment" part of this post reminded me of this Rands one, about finding what actually relaxes you:

http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2010/06/22/chill.html

(Not that I've tried that technique. Can't find the time with so many things on TV & HN. ;).)
What about infant mortality? If a million babies are born in the year 234BC, and die before 233BC rolls around, they won't be counted in the population for either year.
> First item of interest is that Chrome shot up to over 400 MB of memory used which indicates that Flash is almost certainly involved.

Is this really the basis of your claim? A complete guess that a 400MB increase in memory must be due to a secret use of Flash?
Not to nitpick, but bulls are color blind...
"Mutiny" has no meaning when there is no authority to which one can object. I don't know what the right word would be here, but it's definitely not "mutiny".

I also strongly suspect no one of any significance in this story is particularly worried about this exposure. Anyone smart who is participating in potentially illegal activities would be particularly careful about using proxies for sensitive work; and planning is definitely sensitive. I would also assume, were I a participant in Anonymous activities, that any site claiming to be representative of Anonymous has at least a 50% chance of being operated by the FBI or a rogue security company running black hat operations along the lines of HB Gary Federal. It'd be absolutely foolish to connect to such a site directly, and the members of Anonymous who are doing the real heavy lifting are probably not fools.
On an otherwise empty page? Yes, it is extremely likely when combined with the payload delay. If you manage to make a single tab commit that much memory as a delta without Flash (remember, 13 MB to > 400 MB) please screenshot about:memory and get back to me.

The scroll bars on the tab are revealing, too. I may be guessing but it is an educated guess. Additionally, there were multiple claims so I would not call that specific data point a basis for a claim, singular.
There's a bitbucket account with the source of the book: https://bitbucket.org/alfonse/gltut/wiki/Home
Ebook apps not leaving iTunes after all
Hmm. I can push that back to the doomsday book.

And probably every single tax collector in history.
The democratic legitimacy of that working group derives from the democratic legitimacy of the governments that send their representatives. I'm not happy with these proposals at all, but it's not exactly unusual that such proposals are being worked on by civil servants and ministers.
Liked it. I think he missed one good option, though: Getting a Doctorate aka Grad School aka Phd.

At least in Europe its, very well payed if you're an engineer. Depending on your advisor you can have a lot of freedom and still earn similar to the start up work he did.
In Germany, as an engineer, you usually you get a full position at a lab which is, according to the contract, a bit less than 40 hours, starting at around 38k Euro per year. Thats about 54k USD. I don't have the exact numbers but I think after tax and considering life expenses its not to different for US Grad Schools.

Even if you have to do some course work or teaching, I think its a good base for starting new projects that can become companies. We all know famous examples.
We have an update! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2530086
Do we know they are LGPL? The copyrights in the headers don't seem to list any years earlier than 2005, which could indicate they are all files that were completely written by Apple and thus can be under whatever license Apple wants.
That's what Jesus said, "the poor you will always have with you"
I'm incredibly happy for the team, and hope they made out well. Cocos2D makes iOS game development a pleasure. I remember reading that one of the developers, riq, supports his family mainly on income from people occasionally buying the sample Cocos2D game source code ("Sapus Tongue"). This should be a nice change, especially if it allows him to continue working on the platform.
This could lead to problems in the future. With Ricardo working for Zynga, his priorities are going to shift--meaning lesser updates for Cocos2D. While I'm not completely sure about Zynga's business practices, perhaps it's time to look at the Cocos2D license very closely and fork it, if possible.

Also, since Zynga is already using Cocos2D, it is possible that any improvements or further work on the framework will not be released to the public. Purely speculation, but I can't see how Zynga would have any profit or benefit to having Cocos2D or improved versions of it in the open. Especially if it means that other developers/companies can develop with it.
The same way you discover google: Go to a well-known uri.
Map of All Android Lawsuits Pending
@happyfeet, most of Indian companies have certifications (ISO and whatever), in practice how many follow things? I am not sure how they got PCI DSS, but I know - how easy it is to get ISO XXXX certifications.

Certification doesn't mean anything. In reality, whatever it takes to protect data, companies should do that; Even if it means doing things, which is not written in books.

@kamaal, I agree with you. CCAvenue must have had these since it's first version, they were fortunate no one ever tried sql-injection attacks on them.

It looks like either CEO is not technical or he is misinformed or engineers who implemented have no idea about hashing, encryption and other terms. I bet, most freshers or even experienced engineers here in India, would not know about sql-injection and storing passwords as hashes.

Having said that, there are brilliant guys here as well, hence all those R&D centers of Y!, Google, et al.
I agree that b) is the correct interpretation of events. And I would add that they shouldn't be let off the hook if they are late again. However, if corporations see that:

a) the community's response to non-release is complaining

b) the community's response to remedying the non-releasal is more complaining

then the community is not giving very strong incentives for corporations to change their behavior. I think Apple should get some praise for releasing the code. Not because they were right all along, but because I would like the corporate world to see that there are good will benefits to playing by the rules. Stick, yes. But also carrot.

Good job for fixing the situation, Apple. We all like things much better this way. Let's not go through this again, okay?
I don't understand this point. Why would there be a limit to productivity, especially with machines and computers to leverage our efforts thousandfold and more?

There are limits to what you can do with matter. It's unlikely the economy (our productive capacity) will continue to grow much for 100,000 years after all mass we can get at is weird ass artificial quark composite computronium.
You're right about the what but not about the why - IP laws should be protected to encourage the progress of Arts and Sciences. The producer's prosperity is secondary and not the goal, it is merely an effective means to that goal.
Well, I was close...

- Gov. and Law Enforcement Agencies in Countries Members or Partners of NATO, ANZUS or ASEAN

http://www.vupen.com/english/services/ba-gov.php
La Reina Del Sur Capitulo 48
Fountains of Optimism for Other Life Out There
Ask HN: Best Engineering Teams?
Who has the best software engineering team? Why? How did it get that way?
Coffeescript Matrix
At one time, most people believed slavery was a good thing. Discuss.

This may be true for some places and times, but societies that practiced slavery commonly suffered from the demographic problem that the slaves outnumbered their masters (and other freemen). That is to say, most people were slaves.

When and if you become interested in someone, you open up their file and voila!

The file is just data. That data can be used to establish the guilt of the guilty or the innocence of the innocent. It can also be used to make cool looking graphs and heatmaps to post on your blog, improve the flow of traffic, better design cars and cities, tax emissions, target advertisements, set insurance rates, get you laid, etc.

It's not that I disagree with you, but I think with time we need more specificity as to what the onerous scenarios are. Is the collection of that data the problem, or is it the collection of that data directly by law enforcement that bothers us? Is it the collection or is it the ease with which they do it? Is it the access to that data by law enforcement or the potential for abuse, misuse, and falsely convicting the innocent? And so on.

To take it in the more general direction: When exactly does more and better data become a bad thing? When exactly is the ambiguity in our lives sacred enough to shield against the tide of data and the changing dynamics that enable it?
A security bug in a web browser on windows may not happen everyday, but I've heard more extraordinary things.
Mississippi Floods- fishing for tourists - Memphis Travel | Examiner.com
Isn't it obvious? They don't have right culture within their organization. Had they been like Amazon, Twitter and others, they would have accepted what happened.
I still don't understand why the average is used instead of median (or average of data between the first and third quartile), when people talk about life expectancy. It leads to misconceptions.
Will Women Ever Outnumber Men Among the Ultra-Rich?