skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There could be a whole host of confounding factors. One other explanation:

Where there are strong knowledge-based economies, there's a need to delay childbearing until one has the necessary education to be economically competitive. This results in low fertility rates, and it also results in high education levels. High education correlates with a liberal political orientation. Therefore, liberal political orientation correlates with delayed childbearing and lower fertility.

or:

Where there are large numbers of skilled immigrants, people tend to lean liberal, as the cultural melting pot "desensitizes" them to new ideas. This exchange of ideas also spurs a bustling idea marketplace and healthy startup economy. This, in turn, results in higher levels of income inequality, which means that people have a large incentive to play the lottery and delay childbearing until they've had their shot at the big bucks. Therefore, liberal political orientation correlates with delayed childbearing and lower fertility.

or:

Smarter people tend to be educated. Educated people tend to be liberals. Smarter people also tend not to get pregnant accidentally. Therefore, liberal political orientation correlates with delayed childbearing and lower fertility.
I use a Moleskine for keeping track of day-to-day records (calories, my adherence to habits I'm trying to adopt, etc), but for everything else, I use my own app ShoveBox (http://www.wonderwarp.com/shovebox/).
Community by the Numbers
Thanks, we've looked at those before and they still seems a bit too complex. I do like their audio-text bridge.

We are building something even simpler, a personal syslog synced across phone/web/command line.
cool, you have my attention as well
Tribler. Almost so cool What I would do.
Ask HN: best/most popular hosted server monitoring services?
I'd like to hear your suggestions for reputable, fairly large server monitoring services. The kind where they'll send you an alert if/when a service or server goes down, for a fee in the range of $20-100 per month. If you know an approximate number of customers your suggestion has, that would be great, since the major thing for me with these kinds of services is that most are too anonymous and hard to trust, since these kinds of businesses are relatively cheap and easy to set up in your parents' basement. I'm not interested in installed software, since I'm not at the scale needed to set up my own independent monitoring infrastructure.

I appreciate any ideas or suggestions. Thanks!
Question about moleskines:

I went to the bookstore last night and decided to pick up a couple of notebooks since they were on clearance. I noticed there was a Moleskine section, and since other folks seem to talk about them all the time (many in this thread), I decided to see what the big deal was. I flipped through a couple of them, and they didn't seem to be any better than any other notebook. They were also much more expensive. Are they just popular due to their marketing? They market themselves as being the same notebooks used by Hemingway etc., but that's not true. And even if the notebooks were used by smart people, so what? You aren't going to write like Hemingway or paint like Picasso because you use the same paper. So what's the deal? Is there something better about them that make them cost so much?
"There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.”
Norman Mailer
A walkthrough guide to Google's BigTable
I use the "Notes" (default app) on my iPhone. It's great; the only thing that's lame is that it doesn't auto-sync with iTunes and my Mac.
How much would you pay a chimpanzee to run your hedge fund?
At the risk of running afoul of Muphry's Law, your example needs double-quoted strings and curly braces (or your identifiers need to be moved outside the quotes and concatenated in).

At any rate, a downside to this approach is that you can't easily add a class or target (or any other attribute) to the A tag (at least in your simplified example).

Of course you could have an optional named parameter that would allow you to pass them in, e.g.:

function user_profile_link ($user, $attrs) {
return build_tag('a', array_merge(array('href' => "/user/profile/{$user->profile}"), $attrs), $user->name);
}

function build_tag ($tag, $attrs, $content) {
array_walk($attrs, create_function('$value, $name, $list', '{$list[] = htmlentities($name, UTF-8) . "=\"" . htmlentities($value, UTF-8) . "\"";}'), &$list);

return "<$tag " . join(' ', $list) . '>' . (($content !== '') ? htmlentities($content, UTF-8) . "</$tag>" : '/>');
}

But trying to do method-chainey sorts of things in PHP quickly runs into the language's clunky syntax, not to mention keeping track of exactly what level of quotation you're at, and so on. This is one of the reasons I like Ruby, as this kind of stuff is much more natural. Something like this:

def build_tag(tag, attrs, content)
attr_string = attrs.collect { |name, value| h(name) + '="' + h(value) + '"' }.join(' ')
"<#{tag} #{attr_string}>" + ((content != '') ? h(content) + "</#{tag}>" : '/>')
end

Both of these are probably a little denser than a sane person would put into production code, but the Ruby example is much more human-parseable to my eyes. (I'm using rails helper 'h', which could easily be defined in PHP as well).
(Bear in mind I think it's a great idea)

Legally speaking if the game (or whatever) doesnlt make 100% clear what is going on ("we are going to be using your CPU") then I'd say it's very shaky territory.

Also I am pretty sure that in a lot of countries you would be pretty much required to either have a splash saying "click yes to play this game and work some units" or have a workable opt out (I dont know if that exists??)
Matt Biddulph of Dopplr on message queueing
I have found the iPhone to be good at everything except being a phone. We have two in the family (a v1 and a v2), both on the same network as me (I have a Razr). I get great reception with the Razr where the iPhones don't. Dropping calls is common for them. My phone is my business line and I can't risk that. A good alternative would be nice (or a better iPhone!).

Anybody else have these issues with the iPhone?
Great, now "all three" provide it and it's still a complete cluster $%^& to use, manage, code against and maintain.

Previous discussion about confusion caused by openid can be found here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=334800

[Edit: Added link]
Steve, did you think of putting a female in there?
So, in most cases I guess that would work. Not in my case (all email to my public company addresses goes to me). But in most cases, that makes good sense. I guess I don't really think about that since it's been so long since I've worked for someone else.
With Smarty 2.x you're left needing to do something like:
{assign var=foo value="some string"}
{$user[$foo]}

Smarty 3.x has a legitimate lexer/parser so the templates will be much more flexible. I think they finally realized that since they are compiling the templates anyway the parsing can be slow.
I don't have any tangible credentials (read: I'm not a doctor), but my data comes from being mildly obsessed about nutrition (heredity isn't on my side) and from reading as much as I possibly can about nutrition (American Society for Nutrition, the National Agricultural Library, etc). Plus, it helps that I'm an engineer, I tackle most problems by amassing as much data as I can before actually doing what I should be doing.

Carbohydrates are important... they just shouldn't be overdone. Especially the refined ones. Milk = good, fruits = good, whole grain bread = decent, Wonderbread = crap.
dfranke@feanor:~$ wc resume.txt
99 620 4016 resume.txt
End users do not equate a URI as being anything that identifies them. To them, that is a website.

Why is openID hell bent on trying to spin the tables on everything that people know and are used to? They know email address = my identification/username.
This thread branch looks like it could go on for some time.

http://xkcd.com/451/
ASK HN: Hacker Bibles
I'm trying to build the ultimate collection of hacker bibles. These include books on programming languages, algorithms, mathematics, theory, engineering principles and methodologies, design, paradigms, operating systems, frameworks, industry commentary, business/startup-related, etc.

Below are my favorites (in no particular order), what other "greats" am I missing?

The Art of Computer Programming (three volumes + fascicles) - Knuth (aka TAOCP)

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Abelson and Sussman (aka SICP, aka The Wizard Book)

Introduction to Algorithms - Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, Stein (aka CLRS)

Design Patterns - Gamma, Helm, Johnson, Vlissides

The C Programming Language - Kernighan, Ritchie

The C++ Programming Language - Stroustrup

The Scheme Programming Language - Dybvig

Practical Common LISP - Seibel

Programming Perl - Wall, Christiansen and Orwant

ANSI Common Lisp - Graham

Refactoring - Fowler

UML Distilled - Fowler

Introduction to the Theory of Computation - Sisper

Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms - MacKay

Modern Operating Systems - Tanenbaum

On Lisp - Graham

Hackers & Painters - Graham

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence - Norvig

Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning - Bishop

The Java Language Specification - Gosling, Joy, Steele

Learning Python - Lutz & Ascher

Programming Erlang - Armstrong

Programming Ruby - Thomas, Fowler, Hunt

Calculus - Spivak

How to Solve It - Polya

The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 FreeBSD Operating System - McKusick, Bostic, Karels, Quarterman

The Design of the Unix Operating System - Bach

The Unix Programming Environment - Kernighan, Pike

The Art of Unix Programming - Raymond

Godel, Escher, Bach - Hofstadter

Metamagical Themas - Hofstadter

Joel on Software - Spolsky

Code Complete - McConneli

The Mythical Man-Month - Brooks

No Silver Bullet - Brooks

The Long Tail - Anderson

The Art of the Start - Kawasaki
Apple’s $24.5 billion: The case for a big stock buyback
Yes, I do indeed believe it.

How, pray-tell, do you know how your life would change if we couldn't die? It's not something you'll ever be able to experience. Hell, as humans we can't even comprehend infinity. That being said, I'd argue that "life" would change a lot if it were no longer actually "a life." Would you plan to jump out of that window to get downstairs to go to work or whatever for the rest of eternity? How many centuries could you live until it just became... meaningless?

Of course pain is simply "your body's way of getting your brain to stop breaking it" (or something similarly boring, at least). I'm not arguing that there's some deep philosophical reason that pain exists. I'm simply arguing that if you had never experienced pain (physical, emotional, or otherwise) you wouldn't know real pleasure either because you couldn't define it. Logically, you'd have to be happy all the time if you could not experience sadness, but you wouldn't know what happiness was because you never experienced anything else. I suppose you could be truly neutral, but that's the same thing as feeling nothing which, consequently, is what happiness would feel like if it's all you could experience. I'm not saying you need to consciously remember a time you got punched in the face in order to enjoy sex or something asinine like that.

Finally, it's not about looking to others to define you. It's simply about realizing that your "being" or whatever you wish to call it is based entirely on context and circumstance. For instance, if I hadn't read your comment, you wouldn't exist to me. We've never spoken before, I don't know you, etc. Luckily for your psyche, you have friends and family and lots of other people/things to define your existence. If you didn't, well, the fact that you are physically here wouldn't really matter much at the end of the day. Of course you wouldn't just disappear off the face of the earth, but for all intents and purposes you wouldn't exist.
From what I can tell, the goal is to make the experience easier on the user by doing the email domain to URL transparent.

The reality is that users don't know URLs as identification mechanisms. They do know email addresses.
That's probably true. A couple of phone calls, and a well-place email to acquaintances would probably do the trick. My point is that if it's hard to find my parents (given my very long, very public, history on the Internet), and I believe it would be, without resorting to background checks or other somewhat pricey processes, I imagine it must be much harder to track down the parents of someone who you only have a couple of snippets of information about. The Internet trail is far shorter, as well...finding friends and others to contact could be challenging.
Errr, I'm sorry Speek, I wasn't pointing my comment at you (I realize how it could look that way due to the way comment parentage works here).

Kingkongrevenge has some.... interesting viewpoints on diet, so I was asking him where he got his information; sorry for the confusion!
NIST crypto hash algorithm competition set to begin
Oh well, most Flash stuff already runs my CPU to 100% even when it's clear it shouldn't. (100% CPU to display a static "Game Paused" screen? Give me a break!).

---

"After receiving the WU, the user's computer will perform the computation. The game developer can control how much of the user's CPU is devoted to computation by setting the % usage (either statically or dynamically)."

How do you accurately control the amount of CPU a program takes in user-space? Can you really have a process that will restrict itself to using no more than 25% CPU? (Also, 25% of a fast CPU is more than 25% of a slow one)
This is true, but as with many other diseases, now is the best time in history to be schizophrenic (though it will hopefully continue to get better). In the past ten to twenty years there have been some drugs introduced that actually work. They have some negative side effects, and seem to effect ambition among other things, but it is possible to control schizophrenia in many cases without hospitalization or constant supervision. Leading a normal life seems to be feasible for many, though it does currently require lifelong medication.
I saw one of thee in action. They material is, I think, a metallic powder and a plastic powder. It produces a somewhat gritty model, using a vastly different process than either the inkjet/glue/powder models, the extruded type, or the laser sintering.

The more the merrier, I think.
I can't read the article. Did you pay?
Just reading the article, it looked to me like the "clickable" touchscreen has the potential to be a "killer" feature -- or, barring that, a widely copied one.

I haven't heard of any touchscreens that distinguish between pointing at something and clicking it, without adding an additional tap gesture or a press of an external button. Allowing both actions in a touchscreen interface combines the expressive power of a mouse (hot zones, tooltips) with the intuition of a touchscreen. It also lets you distinguish between a swipe and a drag -- gestures that are intuitive with this pointing device but difficult or impossible with others.

This feature gives Blackberry a slight edge, like the iPhone's multitouch... Actually, in light of the swipe/drag distinction, I think this feature is more desirable than multitouch. Looking at Apple's recent laptop touchpads, it's obvious that they, too, see the value in such a feature; I wouldn't be surprised to see a similarly clickable screen appear in a future iPhone.
No, but something tells me you do...
I've found the quality of the paper to be substantially better in a Moleskine in comparison to your standard drug-store notebook.

However, the hardbound Moleskines are a bit pricey, so I use the tan Cahier notebooks. They are less expensive and they have the added benefit of being able to write on the cover.

I add cataloging information to the front of every notebook; date ranges, project names, any other major items that may be relevant a year down the road.
Actually, you're right. My study is in Computer Engineering with focus on robotics, so my focus has been different so far.
It's really sad. I went to college to be an English major and switched when I realized how full of crud a lot of this can be.

If this goes on, I promise to be down-to-earth, and to never once mention Derrida or deconstructionism.
Are those populations also traditionally buxom?
This was the first result in google for "uptime monitoring": www.uptimesoftware.com

Given that they have a free plan, why don't you just sign up and see how reliable they are for your self prior to buying?
Ask YC: Reliable and quick smtp relay service
Hello everybody,

I have a site which is ready to be launched in couple of weeks. Unfortunately we realized that the service we were using until now to deliver our notification emails is not passing performance bar.

We need to find an smtp service which we can use to deliver emails after account creation, password resets and account activity.

Any recommendations ? Here are the requirements we are working with -

- Need to integrate with Rails

- Need to send it using unlimited from addresses or allow us flexibility to add reply to address in header

- We prefer somebody from US.
Nice display of historical world data time series
Opera CEO: Chrome has been very good for us
Man’s greatest weakness is what makes men so great
Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman (or anything else by Feynman is very relevant)

Understanding the Linux Kernel is surprisingly thorough not just in its coverage of the Linux kernel, but also architecture and OS design in general

The Design and Implementation of FBSD book now covers 5.3, which is much less dated than the 4.4 text.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach is one of my favorite CS books and covers AI topics with surprising clarity.

The Design of Everyday Things

Linkers & Loaders, I'd hesitate to call this a bible of any sort, but it's a rarely-referenced gem that covers a topic few others do and it's relevant to me, at least.

Probably others I'm missing. This is a very good list though.
AT&T Finally Offering Free Wifi for iPhone Users (Includes Starbucks Locations)
The Irony of Poverty
A general rule that I've read is that two (maybe three page) resumes are OK but the most important information MUST be on the first page.

In essence, if I were to take a multi-page resume and the last pages were ripped off/somehow went missing, the first page would still be strong enough to make the applicant's case.
I dig the existentialism in your last paragraph, but I'm not sure that existence has to necessarily be divided into happiness and sadness, for example. Without pain, we probably wouldn't feel the contentment or satisfaction that comes from a long struggle (for example, the entrepreneurs here probably would agree that the end result of a successful company, whether you define that as an IPO, acquisition, being profitable, whatever, is a lot sweeter because of the struggles and the pain that went into getting there).

But I don't think it follows that all types of happiness and pleasure would cease to be. Some things might be inherently pleasurable, or rather are pleasurable just because of the qualia (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/) of such experiences, and not because of a reference to a prior pain. Orgasms. The taste of a delicious meal. Etc, etc.

Lastly, the absence of pain and death wouldn't necessarily mean that all our goals would be attained - there could still be room for struggle and therefore satisfaction. For example, I don't doubt that if someone with a lot of intellectual curiosity like Aristotle or Isaac Newton or Einstein were immortal and still alive today, they would still be able to find plenty of interesting challenges and probably wouldn't be bored of life yet. For the curious among us, as long as there is the unknown there will always be challenge and there will always be something interesting to do...and in the end, who knows if the unknown is even really finite?
The Danger of Stress
This article closes with a meme I'm getting pretty annoyed with.

"Don't be evil" is not the same as "don't do anything that the author disagrees with".
I would love to see a live, updating vote count on the front page.

In the next election cycle it is probably worth getting this out earlier though not sure how to keep driving traffic over an extended period of time without content that keeps you coming back. As a voter it'd be neat to see how other people's tastes compare with mine - maybe an auto email which runs stats after the election.

Campaign sites should not do what this guy did: http://crowley08.com/

(Also, there doesn't appear to be a clickable link. The website is http://www.votethesite.com/)
What is this "bigger picture"? So far you've offered a smaller picture, by telling us what should not be learned. What should be learned instead?
Finally, Wifi Free At Starbucks for iPhone Users
Thanks for adding to it yan! I have been meaning to get my hands on the Feynman books...
We're working on the vote count. We'll probably add that tomorrow morning once we're back in the office. Right now it stands at 5500 in the last 24 hours. We're really excited about that.
Motorola going leaner with mobile Linux, Android
User Privacy Concerns By Geography: A Flickr Study
Has he long been known as a socialist? It was news to me.

I hope I'm not the only one who found this piece alternately very creepy and idiotic. Creepy for the naive statism and high hopes for government power and efficiency. (You WANT the government to regulate the internet? Really!?) Idiotic in the ignorance of economic matters: blaming laissez faire for the current crisis; misunderstanding that Obama and the democrats get much more wall st. money.
Google's Vulcan death grip
We've been very happy with pingdom.com. Plans range from $10-$35, they have a lot of options to verify your machines are actually up (APIs, ping, string matching, https, etc).
What the hell is the article doing up here on a tech news aggregator?
Search engines and scientific computing spend a lot of time searching for more efficient algorithms and more efficient approximations of algorithms when the size of the data sets become ridiculously large. They might not be "real world" enough for you, but I would like to work at a search engine after I graduate.
Yeah, Pingdom is nice, I've actually used their free alternative GIGRIB for personal use and worked at a company who used their Business account. I'd like some more alternatives though. Thanks!
I use Things, an iphone app which syncs wirelessly to a mac desktop app. it's primarily a todo list type application, but I've found that I can keep track of ideas that I have as well. the UI is great, and I always have it in my pocket. if I want to do any serious note taking, I can use the desktop app and then sync the notes over to the iphone.
I enjoyed it... Clearly you didn't read the squoia notes...
Well, the thing with monitoring software is that I'd really like to have a reasonable level of comfort with my choice before starting to use something, since the only time you need the service to be rock solid is when the faeces hits the rotating blades, so to speak.

edit: also, after looking at the site, that's downloaded software, which requires me to set up trustworthy infrastructure myself.
With respect to authentication, this is like Facebook Connect, but with a larger audience.

And it's like OpenID, but without 'send data' and 'server/delegates.'

I really like this.
This was always my biggest complaint with OpenID. I'm glad Google did something about it. Perhaps others will follow suit.

Users are comfortable using an e-mail address as an identity. Everyone has an e-mail address. This makes sense to end-users.

E-mail addresses are unique and they accurately identify who someone is. I have no idea why this wasn't the standard in the first place.
NO. I am a non-citizen volunteering to prevent fraud. You are the one here who brought this up without any real facts (besides that hit-job "research" you linked to).