skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to leave the ad homs to one side, though I suspect a review of your comment history would reveal a parade of unwarrantedly self-assured geek autodidacticism... hey, it's milder than 'asshole'. Here's a deal; I'll be less snarky if people like you can be less pretentious.

I'm still baffled as to your evidence; apparently the Mongolians are hard bastards and like fucking, or something. What's asinine is that you have no evidence for your wild, extraordinary claim. None. Never mind PhD level. Give a couple examples that you think support this idea that aren't equally well explained by the traditional 'stone broke and ignorant and breeding like mad to make sure at least one survives' model. Explain why Russia is at a fertility rate of 1.34 and Iceland is at 2.05, for example. New Zealanders are breeding like rabbits compared to Belorussians, etc. Not sure who has the Burberry and who has the fighter planes there, but I doubt it bears out your ideas...

I don't want a PhD thesis. I want you to come out with a single convincing case where your 'let's be warlike' stuff explains the way the world is better than the default "broke people breed more" model.

Appeal to authority are all very well (your idea has been 'noted' by 'notable' guys!), but Gibbon is a contentious source for any kind of assertion about the modern world, having not, well, seen it. Like many pretentious high school students, I've read him, but may not be the better for it. At least you could name-check Spengler or something; this would be just as embarrassing as anything else you've written on this thread but at least more topical.
How is it that people don't at least wonder why cars...haven't lead to mass systemic unemployment...

They have. At one time, there were millions of horses employed in the transportation sector. As technology advanced, they were unable to retrain in other fields because no matter how bright, a horse is fundamentally not as useful as a car. This hasn't happened for humans yet. That doesn't mean it never will.

Technology is improving. People are not. The fact that an increasing line has not yet crossed a flat line is not evidence it never will.
I write a fair bit of wxPython code and one of the things that always struck me as surprising is that you can use widget.Color or widget.Center interchangeably with widget.Colour and widget.Centre!
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Founders at Work was a good one. Some that I really liked (not all biographical per se, some more non-fiction, and many non-SV related):

------------Tech------------

"The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison" (Oracle, Ellison, the birth of the DB)

"The New New Thing" (about Jim Clark, netscape, SGI, what became webmd)

"In the plex" (Google)

"The Nudist on the Late Shift" (kind of like founders at work, a bit light but hey)

"Hackers" (by Stephen Levy, again, kind of light, but entertaining)

"The Hacker Crackdown" (by Bruce Sterling, entertaining)

------------General Business------------

"Losing My Virginity" (Richard Branson)

"King of Capital" (Steve Schwarzman, guy that started Blackrock)

"Art of the Deal" (Trump)

"The Age of Turbulence" (Alan Greenspan)

"Barbarians at the Gate" (RJR Nabisco takeover in 80s)

"Liar's Poker" (the mortgage bond)

"Den of Thieves" (Milken, Boesky, the junk bond)

"Conspiracy of Fools" (Enron)

------------Historical------------

"Carnegie" (by Peter Krass)

"Dark Genius of Wall Street" (Jay Gould + most of the robber barons)

"Titan: The life of John D. Rockefeller" (Rockefeller)

"The House of Morgan" (JP Morgan, etc.)

"Disraeli: A Brief Life" (Benjamin Disraeli)

"Hitler: Hubris", "Hitler: Nemesis", "The Hitler Myth" (all by Ian Kershaw, all really good, covers a lot of territory)

"Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945" (not biography but REALLY good)

------------Cool Story------------

"Life" (Keith Richards, still in the middle of it but so far so good)

"Blow" (the book that turned into the movie, they left a lot out of the movie)

"Catch me if you can" (book that turned into the movie, again, they left a ton out of the movie, the book is autobiographical)

That's a pretty good list of some of the ones I've enjoyed over the years, hope someone finds some of them enjoyable.
> There's no way that a tree array of panels that are half not even pointing at the sun will outperform a linear array of panels that are mostly pointing at the sun.

While this is so very true in the theoretical sense of the term, I gave this a very short thought, and there might be edge conditions that could indeed lead to "better power with tree-shaped panels" (1), now that I think about it. There is a term that you are (rightfully) neglecting: the size of the system, and incurred energy loss due to Joule Effect.

If the distance between panels arranged in a linear way is large, then it might be more efficient to place additional panels closer to the output circuit, maybe above it, in such a way that it doesn't overlap and yep, maybe even with a different orientation, just to optimize the distance between producer and consumer, and thus reduce resistance and energy losses. But that would probably only be valid for specific sets of distances, positions, hour of the day (seasons, voltage, quality of the conductor material...), but that's only because the studied system shifts to be more of that of an Energy Transmission System than that of an Energy Production System

(1) or sphere-shaped or pyramid-shaped or pokemon-shaped for that matter...
"Asylum Seekers" will be involved somewhere.
I would imaginr that the flat panel could be hooked to a servo and a control loop be used to optimize poiting attitude in real time to compensate for the sun's natural cycle.
http://www.di.fm/electro/
Strangely, I do that too. I tend to blame my education :)

Amusingly enough, (though not strange, if you consider its origins) Haskell uses the British spelling. Off the top of my head, the colour types are defined in the Data.Colour module.
This doesn't address what I thought was the insight, which is about finding optimal placement and facing for stationary solar panels when the light source (the sun) is not stationary. Neither throughout the day or through out the year.

It doesn't seem impossible that some placements are better than all-in-one-direction, especially over time, and that's what I thought the experiment was about.

Am I misunderstanding something basic?

EDIT:

Going back and reading the kid's writeup at http://www.amnh.org/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/201... shows some interesting details.

He's not using voltage as a proxy for power, he's using it as a proxy for "sunlight collected". There's two voltage graphs on that page that are machine drawn, not hand drawn. The point of interest in the two graphs is that the Standard graph has narrower peaks of voltage, whereas the Tree graph is broader. This represents the idea that the Tree was generating electricity over a longer period of time. NOT that it was generating more power, but that it was collecting sunlight for a longer period.

The 20% and 50% pie charts indicate this same idea. The percentages are hours, not watts or volts. 12.5 hours vs 8 hours in one timeframe, 13.5 vs 11 in another. Hours. Not volts, not watts. Time, not power.
But the article pointed out that 22% of the dollar store audience is now people making over $70K - and that was what I was referring to.
Anonymous Hackers Release FBI Contractor's Drone Data | Common Dreams
There's also Belenix, which was the second distro after Schillix, and the first full fledged desktop distro - both based on the opensolaris ON codebase.

Work on Belenix had paused until recently since the active developers got busy with their jobs.

I've now begun work on Belenix again. See here for status : http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/belenix-discuss/2011-J...

We've decided to use rpm5 and the smart package manager. See http://www.belenix.org/content/Proposal-use-rpm5-package-for...

There are things to set in place (updated website, upload rpm5, createrepo and smart for developers to download and use) before we open up for more developers.

At the moment, I'm testing my rpm5 and smart package manager work on a fresh boot environment, and hope to have something available for download by Monday.

So, there is active development happening in the opensolaris community, on a variety of fronts.
The iPad stream is surprisingly good. Very high quality, and makes for a great way to keep up with this while working on other things.
Yes, I'm very grateful to Peter for writing about this so candidly. He really made himself vulnerable, and is even publishing comments from jerks who are taking advantage of that (http://geekstack.com/blog/geekstack-postmortem/#comment-197)
Would love a stylus version to use with nodejs
The problem I see is that fears of inflation swing much more wildly than actual inflation. If the gold price were a reflection of actual dollar instability, a chart of the inflation adjusted gold price should be a flat line. In fact it shows swings of several hundered percent.

The price of gold is a reflection of inflation fears, not of inflation. I'm not saying it is too high or too low right now. But gold is clearly unfit for purpose if you're looking for a safe haven or a store of value.
Wait a second bro.

Trees don't rotate to face the sun.
In order to have an optimal angle throughout the whole day, it would have to keep facing the sun, i.e. rotate.

I believe he may have missed this point.

As for the voltage measurement being the wrong metric -- agree.
Unrelated to the content of the article but by the UI - is it just me or does have pitch black background with white text is a bad design for the eye?
Interesting then that the Wikipedia article on Radiology says:

"The field is rapidly expanding due to advances in computer technology"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiology

So it sounds like technology is allowing them to do more things better rather than simply replacing them.
> I don't hear a lot of complaints from the Python or Ruby camps about how much they desperately miss static typing. It would have to be via a seriously 'get out of my way' type-inference for me to want to allow all that ugly back into the language.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I do miss static typing when I'm using languages like Python and JavaScript for web work. However, I think it would take more than just type inference to make a strongly/statically typed language that was good for the same jobs. You also need powerful tools for parsing freeform input such as JSON or XML, both to bring valid input into your static type system with little effort and to give as much control as you need to recover from unexpected input.

The first problem is solved by many languages; the second one, not so much. I think that is part of why dynamic languages are so popular for web development today.

As an aside, there is also a design/architectural question here. The theoretician in me says of course I should parse and validate all incoming data as close to the point where it comes into my server-side code as possible, so everything internal is clean. This fits nicely with the whole static typing thing. On the other hand, the pragmatist in me says that sometimes, particularly while prototyping, it's useful to keep the parsing and error recovery logic close to where the data will be used. That's much easier if you can just dump all the input into a nested array of hashes of objects of dictionaries of widgets when it arrives and worry about the details if and when you get to the code that cares.
Threats in shopping online and safety tips
If you ship and it works then I think you'll be fine.

Also if your burnt out you need a few weeks to just recuperate from crappy job. So take a few weeks off first. It's very difficult to follow this advice because I didn't do it either.but what ended up happening I just sat there doing nothing at hone. So go ahead and take those 2 weeks off.

Also goto a Coworking Soave to work. Don't try to work at home. Again I know now by experience :) ... It'll run you 300 in NYC.

Also choose your problem while you have your day job. Talk to customers. Again this was something I didn't do. It's very time consuming because people flake a lot. And doing this not as easy as it sounds.

If you do these 4 things you will be well on your way and those 4 things should save you about 1,5 months of learning.

Best of luck. My email is in my profile. If your interested in travel apps or the publishing industry we should talk.
Flipping 10 heads in a row - a small probability demonstration
Genuine (if idle) question- why do plants have leaves which permanently face away from the sun? It's not zero-cost to the plant to produce such leaves...so why does it?
Employees bid goodbye to corporate America
What can I do with my failed portal?
About five years ago, I had started a classifieds portal (sixteen2sixty.com) for the Indian market. I was naive in my execution and it didn't eventually go anywhere.

I have 8000+ people signed up on it, and people are still posting some stuff on it.

About 900 visits a month. Can I sell it for something useful? The domain (I know not!) or anything else?

Thanks guys...
Raj
Ball Tapp - Best soccer / football juggling game
48 Hours Cash System
What did u build?
TouchPad 16GB on Sale for $99
Warren Buffett's Tax Plan by the Numbers - $300b at best
How? I assumed one could not until seeing it alluded to on this page.
Good point. But I meant working as in "your eyes only"
A colleague once complained because I wrote 'initialize' with a z...
It isn't vital to me either and I don't own one, living as I do in an area with great mass transit and where parking the thing would cost more than housing in a lot of places. But to be an adult and not know how to drive, regardless of whether you actually have a car, is a pretty shitty situation. I went on vacation recently and it was great to be able to drive, because the area we were in demanded it.

None of this addresses my point, which is that computing is an essential skill. Are you disputing that as well?
Big shake up at Twitter continues
How terribly unconstructive of you.

1. Sarcasm is not wit.

2. Dismissal by analogy is no dismissal at all.

3. The polite individual addresses well intentioned questions in good faith or not at all.

Now, I've asked my question because, in a community of peers of various stripe, it's entirely possible that there will be members more versed in character encodings than myself and that there are, indeed, more optimal ways to encode characters which are not taken for need to maintain backwards compatibility with the ASCII character set. One poster mentioned UTF-32 as a non-backwards compatible example which, while space inefficient, is a good-faith answer to my question.

As to your clumsy dismisal by analogy question, here are some things off the top of my head:

* Substitute byte-code standards for browser javascript.

* Specify parsing, rendering semantics from the start for all markup/presentation languages.

* Automated browser compliance testing from the start for all standards.

* Effective client-side user storage.

* Include stateful communication channels from the word go.

Innovation in a field of endeavor only occurs by examining the assumptions of the field and invalidating them as the context of their being changes. Those that don't care to do so are absolute hacks, stirring the sewer's mirk in the hopes that a shiny bobble will ocassional bubble up from the depths.
Wordpress Disable self pings with pre_ping hook
Same here. I think a back button would help a lot.
HP should just open-source WebOS and see some real competition. I personally think WebOS could very well be the WebKit to Android's Firefox. It's extremely elegant. So sad to see it go to waste.

Rather than have it die in a proprietary silo, open it up like Netscape did with its codebase. Once it hits the scene I really think it would capture people's imaginations. Plus, it ain't Java (tm)
Scala ticks all those boxes. http://www.scala-lang.org/
It seems likely to me that for today, the mass unemployment is more likely a result of failures in the economic policy arena. Automation simply hasn't advanced far enough yet, there are still far too many human-only jobs for the technology argument to fly. We don't really need wild explanations to explain where we are today, rather simple business cycle theory can take a pretty good run at explaining it. (I even saw people using business cycle theory to predict it in advance, including the fact that we've still got years of a down economy to go through yet.)

I really don't expect mass unemployment due to technology to be a problem until we get a lot more jobs disappearing to robotics. When you see a purely-robotic McDonalds, start wondering.
Software counterfeiting error in Windows XP
Econ 101 says "Incentives matter." In this case, if we remove the incentives to pursue careers in fields capable of being automatized (through automation), we will see a rise in demand for and pursuit of careers not easily changed.

For instance, you might see less traditional blue collar workers and more "robot maintenance" workers responsible for performing diagnostics and repair on malfunctioning automatons. You would also see an increase in the number of software engineers writing robot control software, not only out of demand, but also as a fail safe to keep humans in the loop.

The economy wouldn't collapse, it would shift and adjust.
"[x] I declare, under penalty of perjury, that the information in this notification is correct."

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--qy3pZh_8qI/TkFAOdMMLvI/AAAAAAAABi...

No idea how enforceable that is, from any legal standpoint, but you can't claim you didn't know about it, at least.
Si's Parade : Photo 386729
Using the MAC address as a unique identifier alone seems like a terrible idea(that is, without other secret, constant data included in the hash, similar to how UDIDs are generated.)

Your device is literally broadcasting your unique identifier to everyone in a several hundred foot radius.
Yes. If you subdivide a solar panel into, say, 10 pieces and orient each of those 10 pieces in an orientation different from the orientation that produces the maximum power output over the course of the day for a single panel, the sum will still be less.
this girl should be a star in her own right for just being different and unquie to wow
me im on bout lol blossom brown brighton watch this space lols who else do you think i was chatting bout hee hee vain i know lol just being me mrs poser lol
HP, Dell, SAP, Oracle, Motorola, Autonomy... it feels like 1999 all over again. These companies made their own beds – rather arrogantly, too – and now they pay the piper. The whole phenomenon of the "enterprise" is drying up. I see it first hand in my job every day – big companies are moving to smaller web-based operations in every area except where the 90's-era integrators and software vendors have them locked in. The House of Cards those vendors built (with their take-or-leave it anti-user attitude and ever-growing army of aggro sales-bots) is collapsing inward on them. They're all pimping "services" that, when you read the contract are essentially a "pay us and we will do as we please" arrangement. I have never met a salesperson from HP/EDS, SAP, Oracle, etc. who didn't evoke the Pink Floyd song "Dogs":

And after a while, you can work on points for style.
Like the club tie, and the firm handshake,
A certain look in the eye and an easy smile.
You have to be trusted by the people that you lie to,
So that when they turn their backs on you,
You'll get the chance to put the knife in.
You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder.
You know it's going to get harder, and harder, and harder as you get older.
And in the end you'll pack up and fly down south,
Hide your head in the sand,
Just another sad old man,
All alone and dying of cancer.
If we change the sigils, can we refer to objects as "quiddities"?
In Voyage from Yesteryear, the author (James P. Hogan) describes a post-scarcity society. Quote from a summary of the book:

Since the availability of power from fusion reactors and cheap automated labor has enabled them to develop a post-scarcity economy, they do not use money as a means of exchange, nor do they recognize material possessions as symbols of status. Instead, competence and talent are considered symbolic of one's social standing – resources that cannot be counterfeited or hoarded, and must be put to use if they are to be acknowledged. As a result, the competitive drive that fuels capitalist financial systems has filled the colony with the products of decades of incredible artistic and technical talent, and there are no widespread hierarchies. No one person or group of people can know everything, so no one person or group of people is expected to speak for all. They have no centralized authorities; some would say they have no government at all.
Learn Javascript In a Fun Way
That's neat and I'm glad to see it's so high-touch. I tried writing an app for my phone, but got stymied... by the sign-up/verification process. Tried using DreamSpark (https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx ), and unlike the Apple sign-up there's this weird third party verification that you're a real human developer or something and after weeks of trying to figure out how to get them to actually validate me so I could install apps onto my phone, I just gave up.

And mind you, I pretty much know what I'm doing. I was on the Visual Studio team for 7 years, I sold > $100k in iPhone apps, and I do work on compilers towards my PhD right now. A poor undergrad might not even be able to get as far as I did...
COBOL. But I think the author didn't know that the preg_*() functions use regular expressions the same way Perl does.
$ is superior though, simply for its ease of access using the left index finger.

£ would require the use of the middle finger.

To British sensibilities, it would mean swearing at PHP on every variable declaration! Actually, that said...
The obvious question is: how difficult is it to load Android on it?
I have lost count of the number of things I learned. Particularly new ways of doing things.
Tablets will really take off when someone finally implements the unified stack--capable of working across manufacturers. By this I mean, automatic syncing with my desktop/laptop. If I have a webpage open in my browser, it shows up on my tablet when I open my tablet browser and the changes get pushed back to the desktop when I sign back in. Yes, I know WebOS had/has this, but no one integrated it into the desktop stack. Same goes for documents, email, etc.

Prime example: I create slides for a presentation on my laptop. When I'm done, the desktop pushes the slides to my tablet and I can edit them on the fly, present, whatever. Any changes I make on the tablet then get pushed back to the desktop automatically when they are in range of each other.
Simulating Harmonographs
I think the argument is slightly more convoluted, so it survives your criticisms.

Let's imagine a society where there is one thing which everybody wants (say, food) which is controlled by one big corporation (say, monsanto) with few owners. There very well can be a parallel economy between people, but for the economy to function the few owners of this big corporation must want stuff from random people just as much as people want food. The moment this small number of people control something which far more people want than they want anything you will have an infinite sink; that is, each year a certain supply of everybody's wealth will be "eaten up" by the corporation without anything flowing back in return. With technology you can conceivably have a few of these (say, Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg can't possibly want enough things to not be effectively huge money sinks in the short term), and if you have enough of these you will have a crippled economy.