skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
dama steel is not that amazing, you can buy straight razors and kitchen knives made from damascus steel aka "wootz"

but guess what? for most uses it SUCKS. why? because it is almost impossible to sharpen

most surgical-quality steels are more than hard enough, but soft enough to actually be sharpened on a garnet (belgian coticule) or synthetic hone. my best straight razors are the ones from the 20s and 30s....before people knew how to make even today's surgical steel. i can actually sharpen them. harder steel requires hours of honing and doesn't work any better.

look at some web forums for straight razors....very few fans of damasteel can be found
I don't doubt that for totally standard three-tier apps with no OS-specific customization, on a J2EE stack, Solaris will run your app "better". I strongly doubt it runs it better enough to cost-justify. Many of the largest web apps today scale horizontally, instead of trying to squeeze blood from stones in the VM system and thread scheduler.
You are in fact correct already. One of the research goals of ITER is to experiment with different materials being subjected to the neutron flux in order to determine the radioactive byproducts and their theoretic half-lives. They are also proposing that the neutrons be used to facilitate the production of tritium from lithium and hydrogen as well as using the neutrons as the main source of energy output for the system.

While the article is extremely interesting I find that costs and time periods for this kind of science are misrepresented. Not that $5 billion isn't a lot of money, but it is on par, if not lower than many other energy projects. The Alberta Tar Sands alone have had more than $30 billion invested in the past decade. It also does not come close to the investment originally made into fission power production and continually made to produce next generation reactors. Without 'risky science' we don't move forward. Our efficiency may increase; a better stone for making axes means a tree can be cut faster, but by making great leaps forward in science, we may no longer need the axe, or even the tree. The ITER, the LHC, the Manhattan Project, are (were) investments in our future and the future of science and understanding. While some of these projects may fail, the cost of not trying is far greater.
Countability is considered a one-to-one correspondence with the infinite set of natural numbers.

Well let's count the natural numbers in binary, ..0000, ..0001, ..0010, ..0011, etc.

Now take the first digit of the first number and flip it,1 and the send digit of the second number and flip it, 1, etc. This is 2^x - 1. Is it countable because the natural numbers are countable? It's the same type of number you created on Cantor's diagonal. But it's never in the set you have counted. However, the same thing is true of x + 1.

The problem when constructing such numbers is there is not a final number in the set. So saying go to Infinity and add one or take 2 to the power of that and subtract one has no meaning.

PS: I think people don't equate them because they assume there is a difference between making a number larger and making a fraction more precise. So, 0.1, 0.11, 0.111, 0.1111 means something different than 1, 11, 111, 1111 etc.
if 400 years later we still can't really reproduce it?

we can, lots of people sell damascus steel razors and kitchen knives, but very few people are interested in a knife too hard to sharpen
Unintentionally hilarious given the way the FSF worked to make itself irrelevant by ignoring hosted apps for decades. I mailed them in the late 90s asking why it was that running an app on my computer meant I should get the source code but running the exact same app via telnet meant I shouldn't. At the time I was writing a MUD server I wanted to open source, but I was also thinking of websites. The only answer I got was that, yes, the GPL doesn't cover this and they have no interest in extending it to do so.

Stallman can whine about it if he likes, but he can't pretend this is some sudden terrible attack on Free Software - it's been a problem for a long time, and it's been ignored for a long time.

(Yeah, I'm aware of the Affero GPL. AGPLv2 was just bad. AGPLv3 is decent but way late and inexplicably separate from the GPL.)
And this article has been posted to Hacker News for what reasons?

http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/ appears to be a better place. Don't upmod me. Please downmod TFA.
I've done more than "use" zones, but I'm not going to go into details; you can infer what you'd like from my background.

On the other hand, you didn't actually make any arguments here. All you did was assert that I'd never used the zones feature, make a point about something unrelated to zones, and then say that you made money with zones. Nobody is disputing that there is money to be made selling people Solaris instead of Linux.

I would at this point be more comfortable running applications under FreeBSD jails than zones, but, for obvious reasons, I would be much more comfortable running those same applications under virtualized Linux.
I disagree completely.

For it to be object code, it would have to be compiled from something. If anything, DNA is the thing compiled (and modified) several times from the ACGT form down to the protein form. Nature doesn't operate on the "hidden abstraction layer", it modifies directly the DNA, which is a very very strong clue that the meaning is there, not elsewhere. Why does cross-over mixes large sequential swaths of chromosomes? Because genes (the meaningful units) are sequential, and are relatively unlikely to be messed up by such an operation. The requirements of evolution impose much structure on DNA.

I wouldn't call DNA source code either.

Furthermore, while the idea of building higher abstractions sounds nice in theory, it fails, because it's not an engineering problem. It's a science problem, and anyone who has some experience with physics or chemistry knows that models have to remain simple for them to work at all. Meteorological models suck. Climate change models suck. Modelling a single cell is super hard. I wish we could get better models for biology, but it just seems really unlikely. The current approach to discovering gene function seems very reasonable to me.
What does an employee offer letter look like?
You're almost making an apples-to-oranges comparison here, albeit a comparison I begged you to make.

Solaris Zones aren't virtualization. They're an isolation feature that tries to find all the shared kernel namespaces between applications to present the illusion of multiple machines. "Zoned" applications share a running kernel instance, and share a number of kernel namespaces that are not carefully isolated.

VMWare images do not share kernels. Their entire running state can be frozen and shipped across a network (or marshalled out to an iSCSI SAN) on demand.

I think Solaris Zones are a pretty crappy answer to "virtualization". It's basically just a stronger version of chroot. It's inferior to VMWare-style virtualization on security (all zones on a single Solaris instance are vulnerable to the same kernel flaws, and kernel flaws have been the majority of Solaris security issues over the past several years), and they're inferior on management and logistics.
Large financials that run RHEL get enterprise-grade support.
You will want to find an angel investor that knows you, and is willing to back you and the team. Doesn't desparately matter where that is, but a prior relationship / trust is very important.

There are more angels like that in the US, but there are also some excellent ones in the UK.

VC (and there's plenty of that in the UK) comes later -- after you're full time on the project, have built (at least some of) the product, proven its value (to some extent) and need a lot more cash (millions of dollars' worth).

Check out seedcamp.com. Watch all the videos, and start to connect up with the UK/Euro start-up community.
If you tried to quantify and sum each of the various innovations which enable twitter, you'd find a relatively small amount of consumer led innovation in the application layer, served by a huge amount of top-down innovation in the technology stack. And regardless of the implementation tech (IM, email, etc), I'd imagine you'd find the same thing to be the case.

I don't mean to say that consumer-led innovation can never produce radically new technologies, just that the general direction of innovation is still top-down.
It really just depends on if there will be market competition or not. Desktop processing could suffer the same closed system-high-price fate if there weren't any competition in the hardware market (IE: Intel vs. AMD). The question isn't really cloud vs. clientside, it's Company A's cloud Vs. company B or C or D. As he said, it's mostly branding and the underlying technology exists and is pretty freely available so my sense is that cloud computing could be a more competition-rich marketplace than clientside processing is today since it's pretty dang tough to build chips.
Still was 6 months ago.
The majority of users out there do not have the computer savvy that Richard Stallman has. What about my mother who's hard drive is always on the brink of failure and doesn't care to know what's involved in properly backing up her photos or documents? I encourage her to use services like flickr and Gdocs for this reason. The benefits far outweigh the drawbacks like privacy or portability. Anything that is so sensitive or important is on paper and in a fireproof safe like it should be. Don't get me started on Privacy.. what are you people doing that's so sensitive??

Until every computer user has sys-admin capabilities, making use of the "cloud" makes perfect sense in my opinion. That being said, I think its important to pick services you trust and who make it easy to export your data at will.
It also does not come close to the investment originally made into fission power production and continually made to produce next generation reactors.

The difference is that there is no place in the market for fusion reactors. In light of the existing half-billion-year [Edit: half-trillion-year] fuel supply for fission reactors, the drive to create fusion reactors is nonsensical.
I agree; they should of written it in Rails so only 1% of the population can use it.
Adapting to Changing Customer Needs
In the present highly competitive scenario businesses have to change according to changing customer demands or else they will become extinct. Day by day there is a huge increase in online sales, e-commerce, marketing and services. The one who adapts to the changing conditions and new emerging strategies will be successful. Novel and innovative ideas need to be implemented to develop and run business and the customer continues to be the King and they demand to be treated like one. One of the ways that is used by companies to make their customers feel that they are in control is toll free numbers.
Easier said than done, as I'm sure Andres Yates knows. Biologists have DNA libraries, they can mark expressed genes for debugging, they can link and run this object code (with varying results) -- but there's no general compiler to generate this code, and it's nontrivial to write one without fully understanding the machine architecture.

There are about 30,000 human genes, spread over 3 billion base pairs, coding for tens of millions of different proteins. Given how proteins and RNA interact with DNA, and DNA interacts with itself, the language for describing molecular biology usually isn't discrete math, it's statistics.

I think this is why Yates is accusing biologists of treating DNA as the abstraction that represents proteins, when really, it makes more sense the other way around. It seems like in the past couple of years the best fundamental research has been in proteomics, rather than genomics, probably for this reason -- bioinformaticians are recognizing that analyzing the expressed proteins, done efficiently, can give better information than raw DNA about what's actually going on in a cell.
Hmmm, reading the HN guidelines I find that I am encouraged to post anything that piques my intellectual curiosity. I ignore almost all articles about US politics (I'm a Canadian), but this one was interesting because of the discussion about body language, and most especially interesting because of the implications of never admitting your political opponent is correct in a negative-style campaign.

That's an interesting aspect of game strategy, which seems to tickle the same part of my brain as many other things I associate with hacking. Well, now you have my explanation as to why I feel posting this complies with the HN guidelines.

Now, help me out: What's your explanation for posting a comment complaining that something isn't hacker news, something specifically discouraged in the guidelines???
Getting started with FPGA DSP designs
He's kind of like our own modern day Don Quixote. Except he tilts at clouds.
it specifically quoted a critic as saying that fusion was desirable

...Which is an absurd thing for that critic to say when even fusion's proponents admit that even if it could be made to work, it would not likely be economically competitive.
Normal computer systems use microprocessors which execute software instructions to perform a wide variety of tasks.
In some psychological tests, people with clinical depression demonstrated a more accurate view of reality than mentally healthy people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depressive_realism
http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr05/realism.html
One nitpick on the "peaceful" part. Foreign peace, nowhere close. But on the domestic side we've seen a steady decline of violent crimes for the past 15 years.
What a coincidence! I'm competent and elite, and I feel pretty alive. This article just reinforces with what I've known all my life.
I remember reading some Eben Moglen & i think he mentioned that they didn't hardcode this into GPLv3 because the rights of someone using an ATM are (should be?) different from those of someone owning the machine with the code.

When trying to grok the GPL, it helps to keep rms' MIT printer story in mind. It's on wiki.
The Google 20 Year Usenet Timeline
Looks like the problem was something wrong with the Backup module, which was dumping the database to the /tmp directory over and over again, eating up storage.
http://drupal.org/node/313496
My entire youth + part of my adult life was spent reading his books and doing his projects. He taught me everything about electronics that the basic school system could not.

Ok, now I'm going to dig them out + go through them. How he can write so much uppercase always amazed me. (please don't tell me it was a font!)
I like this article.

Its like saying "Lets not use banks cause they can just take your money, profit from it, and may not even give it back to you." Which, ironically, is true because of the financial crisis.

The solution though is not to "use in-house computers" (or store your money under a mattress). I think it would be to build your own cloud computer services based on a free software model.
Yeah, there's a strong economic case for cloud computing. I'm not worried though. If control & source code availability become important, I'm sure people will switch again to the AGPL as they once switched to using GPL.

Best part is you can link the two & distribute.
Download Life Episode 2.01 Find Your Happy Place
We meet John Armstrong, a man who works at a stationary store with greeting cards, is suspected of murdering people by putting people in trunks and letting them suffocate. Also, an ice cream truck driver sells more than ice cream from his truck.
data loss and temporary outages at those big companies are not unheard of.

using flickr to share your photos with everyone is not the same as using google docs to store all of your personal and private documents.

but why not simply set your mother up with an automatic online backup system to store a copy of her files in the cloud instead of requiring that the master copies be there? that way she retains privacy (assuming the encryption of the provider is trusted) but gains portability by having a copy available online. something like dropbox comes to mind here.
Download The Hills Season 4 Episode 8
The hills season 4 episode 8 right now, is hot! You can watch the hills season 4 episode 8 streaming here, if there are videos available. Japanese animation or rather “anime” has become part of all our daily lives. the truth is, a whole lot of people prefer anime to any other types of shows
At first glance, I think it would be a capital intensive business. The only way I can think to make money would be licensing, which is expensive in terms of getting the legal work done and protecting and enforcing your intellectual property. Of course, you can always license it to someone else who can resell it, giving you royalties.
Anatomy of a flawed microbenchmark
I hope they don't close the branch by me.
How The U.S. Government Engineered The Current Economic Crisis
Hair loss
I`ve always found it hard to find a really good hair restoration product that wasn`t all marketing hype and no results. Thank GOD I finally found one!! It`s worked great so far - one month and my wife and I can already tell a major difference.
> Getting the 'source code' is not the stumbling block - this is becoming far easier with high throughput sequencing methodologies.

I don't really know anything about biology, but as a programmer, the article's suggestion that DNA is "byte code" and not source makes sense. To get actual high-level human comprehensible source, I think we'd need to build abstractions on top of DNA object code. Not that I have any idea what these abstractions might look like.

The article compares genomes to Windows, and I don't really know anything about biology, but it might actually be easier to reverse engineer ourselves than Microsoft's operating system, since (as far as I know) our "binary" is much smaller :)
Facebook Tries Fair And Balanced Route, Adds Republican Lawyer
Congress Gets Closer to Forcing a Broadband Census
Well, I think you may have a different definition of desirable. The exact quote from the article is:

Nobel laureate in physics Pierre-Gilles de Gennes is once supposed to have said about the problem of fusion power in general, "We say that we will put the sun into a box. The idea is pretty. The problem is, we don't know how to make the box."

I'm thinking that when a Nobel laureate in physics says that an idea is pretty, he is not suggesting that it is economically feasible or even workable. Nor is he saying that we should build it regardless, he is merely saying that it's an attractive idea, but technically impossible given what he knew when he said it.
How many times do we have to go through this? You could have just used your favorite search engine to find the answer and the rest could just ignored you. By the way am I being too anti-social? Excuse me, please.
> I'm still of the opinion that n=2 couples is seriously old-fashioned the same way opposite-sex marriages are.

I think finding n > 2 people willing to share each other is more than a little problematic.

Besides, if you really love someone, like enough-to-marry-her lot, do you need to have anyone else?

On the other hand, would you be willing to be married to a woman with 6 other husbands?
I believe the same argument was used for why we should just stick with oil.

The energy density and potential output is far higher (theoretically) with fusion than with fission. You may also want to check your figures on the half a billion year fuel supply. At current rates of use, uranium fuels will last about 1000 years. Thorium is an alternative option for fission power; however, this is yet unproven in large scale deployment. There is also the fact that fusion reactors will produce far less high-level (long half-life) radioactive waste.

50 years ago, and even today, critics believed that there was no place for fission power but now it appears to be our greatest alternative to providing base load power over hydrocarbon based plants. The uses of fusion technology are not only limited to power production either. Fission power has resulted in advances in materials, medicine, the understanding of basic atomic science. There is no doubt that properly understanding fusion will lead to many advances in other fields.
First class MS languages fit into the entire "environment" in a way that the less important ones can't even begin to approach. There are a bunch of super interesting languages that are extremely tedious to use in a mixed language .NET environment. Things like MS Build support, VS integration, and everything else are really nice to have.

Even F# suffered before MS really bought into it. It had basic VS integration, but no MS Build support, and other quirks that just became a headache to deal with every day. With the CTP, I can add an F# project to an existing .NET solution and use it like I would C# or VB. It's saved me a ton of time already.

As to why you want more: I want more because it's good for my brain. :) I also want more because I can attack problems with a tool that may be better for the job without breaking out of my applications.
A truly brilliant book!
The same personality traits that cause him to spend inordinate amounts of time focusing on pedantic bits of terminology are the same ones that allow him to persevere in hammering home the same basic message over and over for 25 years in the face of setback after setback.
"That is, you don’t have to write object-oriented code with F#; you can think in more procedural terms to solve a problem."

Ouch. I don't think the author knows the difference between procedural and functional.
The State of Social Media 2008
I'm so bored of listening to this! just let them go bankrupt! Is this capitalism or what???? Nationalize insurance industry, finance industry, automotive industry. Let the Market clean up the excesses as it has been doing for hundreds of years! This time is NO DIFFERENT.
I meant my statement as irony.
For the consumer adopting a new technology is an individual decision which is increasingly becoming monetarily inexpensive requiring mostly a time investment. For the enterprise a change in technology is an organization decision that will impact internal processes that could cause changes to the way hundreds or thousands work leading to a large expense. Because of this cost difference the consumer will be more likely to experiment with new technologies than the enterprise, also, since changes in consumer technology is driven by many individual decisions not a organization decision the changes will occur faster. Currently, this change in the flow of innovation is focused on information technologies. Over time as the cost of other technologies (biotech, custom manufacturing, ...) fall I would expect to see a similar result.
Startup Scalability Strategies: How Important Is Being Scalable?
I can't remember ever losing an email or photo from gmail or flickr. Yes, there's some downtimes (one big one with gmail and a few small ones spread out with flickr), but nothing show-stopping (note: you could still access emails with html-only gmail if you needed)
Iceland’s Future Could Be Electric (freedom from fossil fuels by 2050)
Firefox Minefield: Faster Than Chrome
E Wants To Be The Future of Networking
Multihoming with INETS
Novell Engineer Blasts Ubuntu for not Helping Linux