skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I have to agree with your overall point, I'm not ready to cede that the shuttle hurt manned space exploration more than it helped. Despite its' shortcomings, the Space Shuttle has been a point of national (and I would imagine international) pride, it's an incredible machine that has inspired the dreams of millions.

Perhaps it did hurt more than it helped, in that it made the phrase you use, "routine low orbit missions" not sound ludicrous. Perhaps it was all just a massively expensive house of cards one gentle breeze away from failure, and on the occasions it did fail, people were surprised. We've only been sending people to space for fifty years, there's still nothing "routine" about low earth orbit, and every astronaut that has died in a shuttle knew exactly the risks they were taking.

My greatest hope is that the retirement of the remaining shuttles won't be seen by Americans (and the world in general) as a failure or a "sign of the times", but will be a rallying point. It's time to move on to bigger and better things.
Thanks for that link... amazing how well bitcoin fits into that picture.
There is nothing like hard numbers. Thanks!
Bathroom Supplies
At Sydney Bathroom Supplies we sell quality bathroom, kitchen and laundry accessories including tapware, basins, mixers, shower screens, bathroom accessories and laundry tubs at real wholesale prices.
A correctly written regex is not a bad programming practice. The insinuation that most programmers can't write or debug a regex correctly is disingeneous.
URL please.
ck2, I work on Ghostery. Ghostery does not auto-whitelist.

If you'd like to see for yourself, feel free to look around. Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera browser extensions are mostly written in JavaScript.

If you are having issues with Ghostery, please post on the support forum at http://www.ghostery.com/feedback.
Apple store artist raided by Secret Service
I was enjoying reading this back and forth until it ended with petty insults :(
Artificial Stupids - Charlie's Diary
http://twitter.com/#!/NASA/status/89341036589101059

"The countdown has entered a 45-minute hold at T-9 minutes."
Good start! Don't be afraid to increase the font size - my eye sight is okay, but it's not easy for me to read the text surrounding the headlines unless I focus on it.
> I agree that death is an unlikely outcome, but i beg of you, never bet your life on the rationality of petty criminals who engage their "fight or flight" reflex.

This seems a pretty unhealthy attitude. Basically you're saying to never, ever attempt to protect your belongings from a petty criminal.

If you have reason to believe that your life is truly at risk (e.g. you're in a dark alley, criminal has a gun), sure. You should probably surrender your property. If you do not believe that you are in danger, there's no reason to give up your property. You're just sacrificing your property for nothing, and emboldening those same criminals. Sitting in a crowded Starbucks with a couple of guys who are not visibly-armed is not a high-risk situation.

There's always some danger to your life. A random person on the street could snap and kill you for no reason. You can't dedicate your life to avoiding it. Don't make yourself powerless.
Huh. I didn't specify my politics at all (not that they're secret) - I was commenting on how regardless of politics, we all consider people who don't agree with us to be idiots, and the fact that communities that I had considered pretty homogeneous on 9/10/01 turned out not to be. That's universally human, and regrettable.

If that offends you, well, I've got no response.
So he's saying extend the ability to make profile details private to the gender field. Sounds fine and logical to me.
it is obvious that flows are conserved

Given that government can issue additional currency, conservation of flow doesn't seem particularly obvious to me.
Google's Offline Maps Undercuts Its Connected Vision
Why is Lifehacker telling me how to use my IM statuses?
This seems a little off-mark. Nobody[1] is suggesting that public G+ genders are going to result in more cases like Amy Boyer. That would just be silly.

If someone decides they want as much privacy as possible, and maximally locks down their profile, they are exposing exactly two things: name and gender. The argument is that this is calling undue attention to that one particular field. No doubt Google has a reason for this -- it is an exception, after all; why implement an exception without a reason? The question is whether this reason (that we don't know) is good enough.

[1]OK, maybe somebody is, but it's not Randall, and it's certainly not me.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...
A republic or democracy presupposes that the majority of representatives will get it right eventually. However, we've seen in the Roman Circus and we see now that there is a weak spot to this thinking. Eventually the elected body will split into a faction that represents business interests and a faction that trades entitlements for votes. The latter faction eventually gains control to an extent that they bankrupt the whole. We are nearing that stage now. Few Republicans will oppose entitlements and both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama are guilty of ramp ups in deficit spending.

Buffett's proposal would patch this historically reoccurring weakness of representative forms of government. As hnsmurf points out, it would also create a slippery slope where no representative could be reelected if they vote for X, Y and Z policies that are not systemic threats.

As our government is not responding to an issue which can literally ruin us all, it seems to me that Buffett's proposal is the lesser of two evils. Stability demands a solvent government.
No, it's 3:30pm GMT. It's 4:30pm BST aka. London time. GMT is not whatever the time is in London.
They is traditionally plural.
Two reasons: First, this is a lot of work, and in really scary parts of the kernel. Second, 99% of places using Xen are now running HVM, so improved PV Xen support isn't as useful as it sounds.
Buffett's father was a 4 term congressman and an almost Ron Paul-like libertarian, btw.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Buffett
For my part, I feel that space robots supplement the exploration efforts, but are a poor substitute.
History repeats itself...In 1974, public spending cuts instigated by Gerald Ford led to Congress cutting all funding for the telescope project

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Quest_fo...

And yet, it eventually worked itself out, we got the telescope in a scaled back fashion, and some of the best science of the past 2 decades in astronomy.

Do write your congressman or woman about this and remind them how short sighted they are being (if you're in the US).
There's no betting going on at all. We're using the Russians (Soyuz) for now, and for the foreseeable future. Private firms like SpaceX or another NASA vehicle are a possibility, but neither of those options has been proven out at all, and certainly will not be ready for at least several years.
To be fair, it actually is hard to parse - I'm re-reading it, and trying to work out how to word it better, but the fact that I'm actually using a freeform gender, and the academic term genderfork, makes it hard to see how.

I'll have another stab later if I have time - My gender is currently busy.
Try Making Light. I can't stress this enough. Their comment sections are unthreaded, but lively. The hosts are science fiction editors in NYC, so that tends to shape the topics somewhat - but only somewhat.

http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/
I don't see how you arrive at the statistic of "one in five american women experiencing a rape" from 28 rapes per hundred thousand people. Even if we considered that only women were victim of rapes and that half of the incidents weren't reported, it would still amount to something like 112 rapes/100k so around 0.1%.

Anecdotically, none of my female friends were ever raped which doesn't match with your assertion that "one in five American women experiences a rape".

I do think that our culture tends to objectifying women in the medias but I don't think that rape and sexual assault is as prevalent as many people think it is... There's also a lot of paranoia due to the media looking for good sensational stories and latching on any sexual assault story they can find.
Firstly - I wouldn't put it past him to do something like that if he thought that would maximize his investment. The market doesn't view a debt of +10% of earnings to be that big of a deal however, has priced that risk accordingly, and Buffet has never been put in that situation.

Secondly - there is always a problem with equating governments to corporations, since governments are formed for public good and corporations are formed to maximize shareholder value. Their roles and motivations are quite different.
I hope Amazon will do something about this, like providing HVM-based Unix instances.

We can hope. I have a feeling that the larger the number of people running FreeBSD in EC2, the more likely they are to change this.
If you use all three sets (?set=any), plus backgrounds, that adds two additional choices, which brings us into the 100+ Million category. As a signal to review the Pubkey, that's probably enough.

I could have made up more Random elements, but that'd take more time/money, which isn't worth it unless anyone outside of me actually wants it ;)
I think the US government is one company that needs to have most of its management fired, or at least scared shitless.

It's not the best solution, but we really do need to do something.
Please don't editorialize in the submission title

"Exactly how record companies screw over successful artists [2000]"

would work just as well.
Good point. I forgot we learned about "slices of a pizza" that early.

By the way, the history of the degree is somewhat interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degree_(angle)
"This same logic, if we allow it to be applied to the deficit, could be applied to other things."

There are legitimate reasons to discern between the deficit and those other things. Most law systems are based on a small set of core values which are deliberately made hard to change, i.e. made part of the supreme law.

I believe that the (preventing of) deficit has the characteristics shared by those core values: there is a consensus that it is bad (especially in the long term) and yet there's strong temptation to create it for the short term benefits (buying votes.)
It's really not that ready for public consumption yet, but, I've added you to the project, and made it public.

https://github.com/e1ven/Robohash/
Changing the constitution should not be something that can happen based on a (perhaps very temporary) swell of public sentiment
OMG - π-bot has a cylindrical head! http://robohash.org/3.14159
why doesn't amazon just have a HVM flag on instance creation?

Probably because they didn't need it. Amazon is the most customer-centric company I know, but this cuts both ways -- I've never seen them add a feature unless they have customers asking for it.
Warren Buffet for Secretary of the Treasury
I find the Nasa stream is timing out. The UStream one is more stable for me:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ustream.html
Cyber Kool Tour: Moody's website has been hacked by AnonLusitanWarriors
The correct response to that saying is to point out that regular expressions are significantly simpler than general-purpose, Turing-complete programming languages.
The one ultimate mystery... practically everyone is absolutely certain that about 90% of the people are idiots and 10% are pretty kick-ass!
Working on it. ;-)
that is a good question. I'm sure a lot of them are defensive patents, but then you have the whole "App Store" name debacle between Amazon and Apple, and then I start to wonder...
What about laws that state only Congress can declare war or the rules of the War Powers Resolution? These don't stop the executive branch from engaging in war. Similarly, Buffet's simplistic solution wouldn't stop future deficits, because the ruling party could so easily redefine what a deficit is or what the GDP numbers are.
Text-only version comes up for me: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
What do you mean by "can't do recursion"? A regular grammar can definitely be recursive.
When I was at university we did a course on the "Personal Software Process". During the course we had to write / revise / extend a very basic application that tracked this process. Naturally, we had to use the process while developing the application to track the process :)

Either way, a couple of years ago I found http://www.processdash.com/ which discusses the process and has a download for managing it, too.

Anyway, it's a free download and it does just what you mention in your two last points: use historical data and compare like tasks.
I hadn't thought of that, but you are right.
If the price was low TLD squatting might be a concern.
>Secondly, do you think that "other" is enough? To what lengths should developers go to handle rare corner cases?

Other is enough. It covers all the possible alternate cases. If the person really doesn't identify with either gender, they can select it. If they don't want it to be public, it's broad enough that selecting it doesn't reflect anything on the person, especially if they post pictures(like several people in the "other" camp do in the comments have).

Randall even admitted in his blog post that it's simply not worth the effort to cover all the possible cases. The problem with this entire thing is that it's so complicated. The original survey apparently wasn't good enough for a segment of the population, and the question was framed for pure genetics. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't, because you'll get complaints no matter what you do.
I don't think it would stop the deficits. Instead we would get a new Congress every 2 years with crazier and crazier representatives.
Any open/permissive license on the output and/or code?
Hasn't this been around for a while now? It says (c) 2010, and I could have sworn I've read this spec before.
LovblApps presents FeedTheRat an awesome iphone game
Hey, i built this: http://textchannels.com/ some time ago, it even looks a bit like HN!
There is a good quote that is always passed around in education circles: "The soft bigotry of low expectations"

Educators that have low expectations for certain students will not challenge them and hold them accountable for their work and studies. The student will pick up on this fact. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy.

I'm glad that they are beginning to quantify this piece of common wisdom. Perhaps this will break the bad habits and mindsets of some educators out there.
That. No matter how good the software, its the seeding of the community that's the hardest part.

also HN is heavily moderated
"them" in the sentence probably referred to "gender issues" not "folks".
>Could we see a top down view of the rise of man? The huge caveat is that you have some capability of travelling faster than the light leaving earth, so that you can then look back and absorb the rays.

Easier: look at the light as it was gravitationally refracted around a black hole; some paths will probably reverse the relevant light and send it back towards the Earth.

Unfortunately the size of the lens required to actually view this is impractically huge, possibly larger than the Solar System itself -- but it's fun to think about, I guess.
CC BY 3.0 on the Images, BSD on the code.
There are more names than you realise that give away little about gender, or are used by people across the gender spectrum. For example, Alex, Sam, Rowan, Raven, and Kim.

And as for photos, it's harder to tell than you think from a static photo, as a lot of gender presentation comes from body language. Speaking of which, photos only give you gender presentation - which can be quite different to someone's self-dentified gender.
It would, however affect most payment systems in Canada. When you eat out at a restaurant, the server comes around with a payment device that takes PINs.
Google Picasa and Blogger to get new names soon.
2 is easy to work around- many women use generically male nicknames (such as Sam for Samantha) or have names that could be either gender. Photos can be kept private.
Surprise The big bad bailout is paying off
I think people are missing the point, his suggestion is not meant to be taken literally. What he's trying to say is that reducing the budget deficit is more a question of political will than economics.
Selenium 2.0: Out Now
The thing about TLDs is that everyone thinks this one will be the next big thing...then when it comes out people just shrug and continue to use .com. Remember .name? .mobi? .biz? .info? .xxx? .tel?
We've already _got_ a pack of thieves, idiots, never-do-wells and politicians (but I repeat myself) in Congress.

It can't get much worse.
Lufthansa to become first airline to run regular biofuel flights
Is it a coincidence that Google owns duck.com ?
:) You are probably right. I have a small font bias. Thanks for the feedback. Let me know if anything else strikes you one way or the other.
That's an awesome coincidence. Now I'll have to check for others ;)
In America you can pretty much guarantee that if the bill has a name that makes it sound like it is good for you...it will definitely be bad for you.
I ask this here because this is a hacker forum. Why is it that in this day and age that we still implicitly entrust another person to make decisions on our behalf? What do you think would be the kind of systems we need to build to make democracy more participative? What do you think would be the pitfalls we should avoid with such a system?
no, hell no - not with 24hr news, pundits, and political correctness.
> Also, keep in mind that a man is twice as likely to be assaulted as a woman so from a statistical perspective it is men who should be fearing for their safety as they post their gender online.

He was obviously referring in this context to sexual assault. Maybe you're not one of them, but most men seem to be unaware of how common an experience rape and sexual assault are for women. You can look up the statistics if you're curious.
You are coming off as incredibly insensitive and bigoted. Do you incidentally also believe that Google+ is a better place without gay people or their ability to select who they are attracted to on Google+?

Also, people who've had hormonal treatment often look like the sex that they want to be. I know this because I know some of these people, and I would not have guessed that they were born with another sex. Perhaps you even know some of these people without knowing. For the people who are not so lucky, your "Even the folks who go to all the trouble of dressing up to look like the opposite sex are usually identifiable at a glance." is disrespectful.

Does the ability to hide your gender or to select "other" harm you? Just like some people seem to think that other people being gay harms them, even though it has no significant influence on their lives whatsoever.
SpaceX has the Dragon.

http://www.spacex.com/dragon.php
Looks better than Tau-bot :)

http://static1.robohash.com/6.28318
Well, for one, Apple has been doing mobile device sales in their stores for longer than Square has even been a company.
VisualSearch.js: enhance search boxes with autocompleting faceted queries
Every single reply to his post includes a picture. Tempest in a teapot.

It seems even people who care about this issue enough to post don't care enough to protect their likenesses.
What about the moral implications that deficit spending is inter-generational taxation? I think that is a clear case of taxation without representation.
The balance of power is all wrong in many areas. E.g.: There would be no Wall street without Main Street but they still get all the power. Main Street could exist without Wall Street.

People with lots of money have the means to shape laws their way and to produce propaganda so everybody believes they are important. The same could be said for venture capital.
I love manned spaceflight and I'm glad the space shuttle is dead
Ah, sorry. I meant UN, not EU. The article I linked to in the great-great-grandparent says UN, not EU.

Western Europe sucks. Too much MAFIAA influence there.
Why doesn't Lifehacker's page degrade gracefully if Javascript isn't present?
I have a few thoughts about this:

-Why are we making such a big deal about exception cases? (1%, as you say)

-You know, right up front, G+ is asking you to do something you feel uncomfortable with. They aren't being sneaky about it, making it opt-out, or changing policies after the fact.

-You have to evaluate, for yourself, if the usefulness of G+ outweighs the level of uncomfort

-G+ will probably fail if they can't get a large and diverse userbase, this will probably cause G+ to evaluate why and possibly change their policies

-Munroe, as someone with a lot of followers, is correct to voice his opinion because it will be heard. Someone like you or I will actually have to do some work to be heard, so we'll have to go right to Google with our complaints. Please tell me you have brought it up with them...

I don't like the idea of people feeling that, every product (especially global products) being made needs to be tailored to their views of the world (ESPECIALLY at an initial beta release). Give Google some time to learn and react to these "bugs". If G+ wants to have a narrow view of this, let them and watch them fail, as other companies learn from those mistakes and put out a better product.

You can deal with jerks at the bar, tell the bouncers to remove them and see if they do, go to the bar down the street, or build a better bar yourself.
You're making this into a business decision. I'm sure that google has put a lot of thought into this and made what they think is the best business decision (in addition to the fact that they are testing it in beta).

There are, however, concerns above and beyond profits that could drive this decision.
So THIS is what the Googlebot looks like!

http://robohash.org/google
Stability also requires a stable government. Throwing all the scoundrels out sounds good, but would probably happen (I think they are all too selfish and would play chicken down to/past the wire). Resulting in chaos at the next election - an entire elected body of unknowns with no experience.
They came out at the start by saying "there aren't many private profiles anyway". So why screw them? It has to be a 2nd-order optimization.
I'm guessing the oracle wouldn't fire a team for taking on debt of 10% of earnings but would likely fire the management of a company in a low growth industry that incured a debt level of 5.5x it's annual revenue (public debt / tax revenues) though. Unfortunately the current discussion is more about people's frustration over the notional amount (long term issue) than the marginal amount (short term issue).
Well, post-Keynesian economics (the only school that even asks this question) seems to be underrepresented on the Internet to nearly the extent that the Austrian school is overrepresented.

I agree that it is silly (from a fundamental standpoint) to make such a big fuss over the federal budget deficit while completely ignoring the trade deficit, but I understand why people do it. If the powers that be were monolithic, it would be easy to fix the budget deficit. The trade deficit is more of an emergent property that people don't understand that well. Since in reality, it's all smoke and mirrors either way, I can see why people go with the easier story to tell.
It will be interesting to have a central place where everyone can share information about estimation vs reality.
Indeed; this is not clean at all while Apple usually is. I tried it a few times and just find it annoying :) But i'm over 30 as well.
He's So friendly!