skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I remember reading somewhere(?) about attempts at reproduction, where the experimenters grounded leaves into the mix. I can't find it now (i.e. can't back it up)

But anyway, there's apparently lots of attempts at reproduction. Here's one interesting read I found about the spectral analysis of the swords

http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.htm...
I totally agree, except for one thing:

Being right doesn't preclude bias.
2^n - 1 is the Mersenne prime, not the exponent, right? (Even though the exponent is always prime).

So therefore, the new prime should be 2^43,112,609 - 1, and not just 43,112,609
Element Harvest Festival : Sk8prK - The Best Skateboarding Community
Relativity, Uncertainty, Incompleteness and Undecidability
Towards a new test of general relativity?
Journalist Goes Missing After Outing Google's Latest Evil Plot
>richest country in the world

To be more precise, a country with the most rich people in the world. Furthermore, it is a country that is quickly growing rich less relative to other countries.

>one of the best educated

Not even close. The general population in US is poorly educated relative to other countries. This has been repeatedly shown in many international competitions.

>peaceful

really? Are you forgetting Iraq, Afghanistan, or even perhaps Oklahoma bombing?

>law abiding

This is is actually true, especially considering the how religious most of the US population is.

>willing to vote ethnic minorities to the highest office

Lets wait until this one actually happens
We're supposed to discuss ... a discussion on Reddit?
It's difficult to follow, and I haven't read all the legal proceedings, but here is what I have gathered:

* Think Computer coined the term "The Facebook" to describe an in-house portal system at Harvard University which they built, back in 2003.

* At some point Mark Zuckerberg registered "thefacebook.com" and started making a competing student portal. He later renamed this to facebook.com (thefacebook.com still redirects to facebook.com to this day)

* Think Computers was content to let sleeping dogs lie for the most part, but decided that they wanted to publish a book about their portal system and the title of the book contained the words "the facebook".

* Facebook.com sued Think Computers for trademark infringement and got advertisement for the book blocked.

* Think Computers countersued facebook.com, claiming fraud in their trademark, because Mark Zuckerberg was classmates with Think Computers CEO at the time and knew that he had previously coined "the facebook" for his portal system.

* Facebook tried to get the fraud count removed, presumably because if they are found guilty, penalties may extend beyond the loss of the trademark "Facebook".

* The court just ruled that the fraud count will not be removed for the upcoming trial.
Just a few clarifications (upon reading, it doesn't look like hn supports html markup; I'm leaving the tags so that quotes are at least visible...):

<i>Messaging: Sending a message is fast. But remember you are doing a copy of the data into the other process memory space (unless you are sending a binary, see above). For small messages, this doesn't matter, but you shouldn't be tempted to send that one million node binary tree ;)</i>

Two points here: as you stated in the point above this one, large binaries are shared, so sending a large binary as a message isn't terribly expensive. For everything else, copying messages is an implementation detail, not a specified behaviour. If you run erl -hybrid, then all processes do share a single heap and messages are not copied (unless sent between nodes, of course). Hybrid mode is still very unstable and you don't want to use it unless it really does happen to work for you, but it's proof that the copying of message data isn't a requirement of erlang, but instead is just a current implementation detail.

<i>A string of 100 bytes takes up 1600 bytes on a 64-bit machine.</i>

Erlang strings (i.e. any string literal, such as "hi there") are implemented as linked lists of integers. If you're doing string processing on large strings, you probably want to use binaries, which are 8 bits per character (plus the binary head, which is a varint, IIRC). These can be stated as <<"Hi there">> and are much more memory-efficient, although not as convenient to work with as linked lists.
OS X on PC : Getting that pesky cat to run on a PC
MessageLabs names UK spam capital
Aids, Cancer, Malaria, Darfur, Earthquake in Sichuan, Tsunami, Pandas, Eagles, Dolphins, Whales, Cats & Dogs, Zimbabwe.

Don't be so quick to trivialize cancer and aids. I assure you: if you ever have to see someone close to you suffer and ultimately die of one of those nasty diseases, the problem of getting a marriage license for gay people will pale in comparison.

Sometimes the media serves a good purpose. Not all the time, but sometimes. I personally think that cancer and aids, darfur (last i checked something like 400,000 people, mostly innocent, were massacred), are much weightier issues, and therefore deserve the bulk of media attention.

This is not to discredit the honorable work of people working on relatively small societal problems such as gay marriage, but in most of the above problems, the core argument is that lives are being lost. Think about that.
I think the best intro is http://www.pragprog.com/titles/jaerlang/programming-erlang, which comes in PDF form but also costs $22.00. As far as free resources, there's http://erlang.org/doc/getting_started/part_frame.html , which isn't nearly as fun as _why's guide, but is informative. I personally just bought the book; it's really well written and actually got me interested in using the language.
The Unit: Sacrifice - Sept 28 2008 Preview
The fourth season begins with the team attempting to stop an assassination plot targeting the president-elect and vice president-elect. The situation raises suspicion among high-level government officials. Back at the base, the Unit wives are relocated for their own safety due to the sensitive nature of their husbands’ mission.
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.
Watch out TinyURL, Cligs is much better for us
"The most obvious reason, of course, is that the division of labor between the sexes is inevitably derivative of the constraints created by pregnancy."

You are claiming that this is the primary reason why we have state-regulated marriage? Two words: [citation needed].
Interesting. I suppose it depends on what you're doing, but I typically see the speed taken getting cut to half vs -O and -O2 in C/GCC, so things will typically run at 50% the speed. Flipping around between -O, -O2, and -O3 don't make much difference though. The big thing to note is that once you start enabling some major optimizations (doing good register allocation, strength reduction, loop-invariant hoisting, and tail-call elimination) you've already got 95% of the optimization you're going to get. The rest is far less important.

This, of course, won't matter if you spend most of your time in I/O or libraries.
Darfur is utter nonsense. Remember Sierra Leone? Liberia? I saw the videos coming out of those countries, and yes, that place was a war - a REAL war. Remember the Hutu Tutsi thing? Another real massacre. There are pictures all over the net.

But Darfur is just wierd. In this age of Cameras, Camera People, Live streaming, how come 400,000 people have died, and there are no videos of actual combat? Darfur is the strangest "war" I've ever heard of - it seems to be a theoretical war. I've never met the people running from there, I've never seen the videos of the actual war, I've never seen real photographic evidence of any massacres.

People want to constantly hear about wars in Africa. But that age has suddenly ended. All the wars in Africa have ended, what's just left is just local clashes and conflicts between ethnic groups, and various organisations who have a vested interest in there being conflicts in Africa push up these topics. Do some real research, you'll see how wierd the Darfur war comes across compared to Sierra Leone or Liberia. Also, research the role of China in the region.

Cancer sucks, but cancer has been there since the beginning of time. People get it, people die. The only reason so much focus is given on it is that it is the one disease that being rich has no effect on. So the rich people have vested interest in getting rid of cancer before other diseases like Malaria.

Aids is of course a problem, but seriously, remember 10 years ago? 1998? The news about Aids was the same panic as right now. But the thing is this - for an exponentially growing disease, with drugs that are ensuring that the people infected stay alive longer, should it not have been more devastating than it turned out?

The Aids projection seem to be staying at roughly the same number. I'm not saying it's not there, I'm just saying that it's not an explosive epidemic.
In this age of Cameras, Camera People, Live streaming, how come 400,000 people have died, and there are no videos of actual combat?

Perhaps if you did more research you would actually find that its kind of hard to get videos of actual combat. Even if you could get said footage,how easy do you think it is to publish stuff like this when there is a suppressive government? Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

And i'm not arguing about whether or not these are problems. I'm saying that they are bigger problems than the one posted.
I've done this, and find that it works really poorly for me. If I'm not going to bed at roughly the same time and getting up at roughly the same time, I just stay muddled all day, even when I'm technically getting ~8 hours. If I stay on a schedule, I wake up without an alarm after 6-7 hours and I'm fully awake all day.
What is so brave about taking the politically correct view?
As the father of a gay son who one day wants to marry, I am opposed to same-sex marriage. The word "marriage" has significant religious and cultural significance and this significance should be preserved. Same-sex unions with all of the benefits? Sign me up.

More significantly, I disagree with Google's taking a position on this issue. I think corporations should think seriously about taking positions in domestic, cultural issues. Civil rights issues? Go for it. Changing the definition of religious terms? Out of bounds. I'm not religious, but this seems to make the most sense in my own life. Google should do the same.

If Google wants to wade into politics, then welcome to the party. I'm sure they are comfortable with the results of becoming political -- when people with opposing views make and change the laws in order to diminish Google's political power. That's the way politics works. I'm also concerned with idealists who only whine about things that are easy and never take a stand where they could make a real difference or where it could really hurt. What about billions in China not getting the full internet? Well, to listen to Google that's a much more complex subject.

Right.
This government hand is plundering the taxpayers' wallet.

I heard Rick Edelman crying for the bailout this weekend. He listed at least 50 associations that supported the bailout, not one that wouldn't benefit from it. His "appeal to authority" fell on deaf ears.

Edelman said Congress inadvertently offered Wall Street a lollipop and, now that the lollipop might be taken away, we _must_ give it to Wall Street. Otherwise they'll throw a tantrum and send the Dow crashing. I say let them commit suicide if they wish.I don't think they're crybabies and they're certainly not suicidal.

I'd agree to a bailout if

1) all companies involved are declared bankrupt and their assets liquidated. No zombies allowed afterward.

2) every person working for the companies bailed out is fired with 2 weeks' severance pay & no golden parachutes,

3) Stockholders and bondholders aren't paid anything and

4) every cent that goes into the bailout is paid back from the proceeds of the liquidation within 7 years.

Item (4) is unenforceable but at least a target.
It's brave because we can all pat ourselves on each others' backs and talk about how brave it is.

Don't question the mob. The mob is always right.
How in the world did they come up with this process in the first place, if 400 years later we still can't really reproduce it? Either there was serious genius at work there or they made one hell of an accidental discovery.
But it doesn't matter because many people still read his blog. That means that many people don't care if he writes well. They only care what he writes about.
The universality of marriage within different societies and cultures is attributed to the many basic social and personal functions for which it provides structure, such as sexual gratification and regulation, division of labour between the sexes, economic production and consumption, and satisfaction of personal needs for affection, status, and companionship; perhaps its strongest function concerns procreation, the care of children and their education and socialization, and regulation of lines of descent.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/366152/marriage
The other people commenting here are missing half of his point: He's saying, Let's stop focusing so much on squeezing out another .2% of CPU efficiency and instead look at languages that make _programmers_ more efficient.
No, we're just supposed to wave as it sinks and disappears.
I suspect it wasn't so much accidental discovery as a trial and error refinement of their craft. Metalworking began long before they knew the science of it all.

History seems littered with these practical applications of phenomenon without full understanding. You can even say software development is done (programs are built and used) without true understand how to do it "correctly".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalworking
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/samurai/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy
Google "In Quotes" from google labs
So it's a typical arts/humanities paper. His GPA must be through the roof!
I agree with what several others have said: I don't like the huge text in the search box, and I need to see more results on a page.

Search results were relevant when I tried "how to make a damascus blade". When I tried to find a story I've been looking for (that I haven't been able to find in other search engines either), I wasn't successful, although I didn't try for very long. Things I'd like to be able to search for: it was linked to from a forum but was not, itself on a forum; near the beginning the main character was hit by a truck; he woke up and found that his life had been a simulation.

So if your search engine would let me find that, I'd be sold. As a general purpose search engine, it looks promising but I'll stick to Google for now.
If you want italics, put whatever you're italicizing in asterisks. This is italics, and I typed that by writing "(asterisk) This is italics (asterisk)"
Oh I see what you mean. Then you want eXponent CMS. www.exponentcms.com. I'm good friends with the people who developed it, and I've used it myself it's a great package.

Lets you edit pages with a WYSIWYG interface instead of plugging in code or dealing with text templates. Give it a shot.
"People tend to think of Common Lisp style hotpatching where you can dynamically build up your application from scratch without restarting the CL environment. Erlang doesn't really support that, but you can hack it to give you somewhat of the same."

I (almost) never restart my Erlang server, and that lets me develop just as you described. Why do you say it's not supported?

(Btw, it really sucks to go back and use languages that don't have hot code swapping. Developing in them feels terribly slow.)

Fast: if you put is_float() guards on your function definitions, Erlang will optimize their computation. If you worry about memory consumption of strings, use binaries.

"Note that the language was originally built for concurrency rather than parallel computation." I don't follow this argument. Isn't the point of concurrency to implement parallelism?
Then how come there is so much footage of Liberia and Sierra Leone? And Sudan is not a supressive government, it's a failed state where the central government is weak and cannot control the country.
Add my vote to the Arduino. I picked one up a while ago, in the same situation as you. There are lots of DIY projects that integrate the Arduino. Make magazine (makezine.com) for instance has quite a few projects that are not too complicated.
There is still more capital in the US than in all other countries combined.

Anyway, it's not a race nor a zero-sum game (there's no real point in being the "first" country); every country can be a winner in the global economy (or could be, if the bureaucrats running them understood this concept).
Nanotechnology + Swords = Awesome
Comment on my 10^100 submission: Reddit on cellphones for geotagging interesting news 
Community voting (a la reddit) using cellphones to promote (and subsequently view) interesting news/stories within a vicinity

The news to be voted on are tied to a specific location and time. You are allowed to upvote/downvote a news with your cellphone only when you are present in that location. The score of the news degrade with time, so news that have not been upvoted for some time fall below a threshold and disappear. Using your cellphone you can view the news in your vicinity, upvote/downvote/comment on the news, or submit a new piece of news [with picture]. The system uses karma to reduce the spam.

This idea allows local community news of interest to be disseminated quickly and efficiently. Students on campus can use this to promote club meetings, events, pickup soccer games. Customers can use this to rate vendors at bazaars, festivals, shopping malls. Tourists/hikers can use this to share hints with fellow tourists/hikers. Community organizers can use this to organize events. Craigslist functionality may also be implemented with this system.

A web service needs to be implemented to serve the news to each affixed locality. Cellphones need to implement localization preferably via GPS or based on celltower connectivity. Reddit like karma system and community voting should be implemented by the web service to reduce spamming effectively. To avoid privacy issues initially this system may need to be restricted to exclude residential areas; privacy and misuse issues need to be considered carefully.

Please evaluate. Also comment on other possible applications for this system.
Not unlike eating a popsicle, reading this made my brain hurt. +1, but ouch.
You can also drop the selected text just to the right of the rightmost tab, left of the "scroll tabs right" arrow. When you're over the right spot, a down-pointing arrow appears indicating that a new tab will be created there. This actually works between any two tabs too, but the drop area can be smaller.
Translation programs and devices
http://www.harveycartel.org/metanet/corporate/letter16072004...
From the link I posted:
"Based on our studies, it is clear that to produce the damascene patterns of a museum-quality wootz Damascus blade the smith would have to fulfill at least three requirements.

1) the wootz ingot would have to have come from an ore deposit that provided significant levels of certain trace elements, notably, Cr, Mo, Nb, Mn, or V. ...believe the blades with good patterns were only produced from wootz ingots made in southern India, apparently around Hyderabad.

2) ...wootz Damascus blades with good patterns are characterized by a high phosphorus level. This means that the ingots of these blades would be severely hot short, which explains why Breant's9 19th century smiths in Paris could not forge wootz ingots.

3) a smith who developed a heat-treatment technique that allowed the hot-short ingots to be forged might still not have learned how to produce the surface patterns, because they do not appear until the surface decarb region is ground off the blades; this grinding process is not a simple matter. "

A combination of the right technology along with the right materials set the stage to allow trial and error to make incremental discoveries.

Besides, back then, there was a commercial need for swords, so people worked on it day and night for hundreds of years. You can get pretty good at something when you work on it long enough. Nowadays, our effort is put into semiconductors, among other things.

Maybe one day, when a new technology surpasses semiconductors is being used, and the 'art of semiconductors is lost', people of the future might wonder how we built things that were so damn small and hot with [yet unnamed or not understood physics effect].
But websites in China really suck,where are these contest winners?
Ask YC: basic text parser?
I'm working on designing a form for submitting large blocks of text, and out of curiosity: is there a basic text parser for breaking up lines and processing HTML? Or is that something that you feel just ought to be made from scratch?
Product: Happy = Hadoop + Python
I'm taking a Money, Media, and Power class that looks at the history of the United States since the 80s in great detail. It considers how America has become extremely capitalistic, which isn't bad as long as open, competitive markets are encouraged.

What we've seen happen in history is the massive consolidation of companies. Look at the media industry, for example. It is now impossible to create your own TV network, and it will probably soon be impossible to compete freely on the Internet because the same conglomerates that dominate the cable and phone industry are trying to do the same thing with the Internet. I have two words that can summarize the entire thing: network neutrality. Complete deregulation is a bad idea; what happens if you take all the rules out of a football game? Everyone will cheat.

How does this relate to the topic? We don't like people who get their money for two reasons, in my opinion. We don't like people who are anti-competitive, and who try to dominate markets (such as the Internet, cable, and television industries) and intentionally want to stifle innovation. That's not contributing to society, and we all know that once a monopoly is established, a company has no incentive to innovate.

The other reason I personally dislike people with great wealth is because they're not being fiducially responsible. If America is going to be more capitalistic, the people with the money should be driving innovation, not stifling it. They need to act responsibly with their money, and that includes being philanthropic and charitable. When they just hoard it all and it becomes a competition to see who can hold the biggest pot, I don't think you deserve to have it in the first place (think Elon Musk, and how much money he has invested into SpaceX and Tesla Motors). What we have now is a massive gap in income disparity, and that's pissing off the lower and middle class. It's actually driving the middle class out of existence, and I would say at that point the wealth isn't being distributed evenly enough.

That's my take on why we dislike wealthy people. At least some of them. As the article pointed out, I really do think some self-made rich individuals rightfully deserve it and are acting responsibly.
(Nanotechnology = Awesome - Swords)?
That's... interesting.

Its too much of a uni-tasker for me though.