skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because both the government and corporations don't want to be giving you plus your 7 wives/husbands benefits.

You shouldn't be limited to one partner in terms of love/sex/living together/whatnot if you so desire. Why the hell should I care? But let's say that your job offers healthcare for you and your partner - if you have 18 partners, that's a hell of a different cost from one partner.

Likewise, let's say that you slip into a comma. Who has say over that feeding tube? That's already complicated! Let's say I'm some rich jerk trying to skirt the inheritance tax. Well, spouses are one way around it. Well, clearly my kids are also my spouses! Who gets to visit you at the hospital and who doesn't? Well, spouse 1 says your friend Joe should come, but spouse 2 hates Joe. Does it work by majority voting? What if they can't find all your spouses and you're dying and Joe really wants to see you?

So, if you think of marriage as the government telling you that you can only love/have sex with/live with one person, it seems oppressive if you desire something else. If you see marriage as this standard government contract that says you are allowed to designate one other individual for partner benefits, hospital visitation, inheritance, etc. then it makes sense.

The problem is that our society equates marriage with love/sex. Marriage should probably be seen as a contract. As such, you can see how it wouldn't really work to designate 6 people as having the right to determine whether you stay on life support. Yes, you could simply create individual contracts specifying everything that marriage entails, but that's tedious, expensive, prone to error and requires everyone who deals with you to have a lawyer to interpret that agreement - and they're not going to want to spend hundreds of dollars for a lawyer and tons more in liability to interpret your individualized contracts so they'll just deny you. Marriage is a standard convenience contract and shouldn't be confused with love or sex.

//I'm really interested to see if you disagree with this or how you think things like benefits/hospital visitation/whatnot should work in poly relationships (yeah, sociology student ;-))
Maybe. No.
I actually don't have any interest in or experience with poly relationships - I was merely asking as a rhetorical question. But everything you said makes sense - being able to designate a single person to make those kinds of important decisions is extremely useful. It would be very good if those rights/responsibilities could be unbundled from marriage.

Where it gets more complicated is in things like the tax code - it seems advantageous to society to offer tax breaks to married couples, with the idea being that this will help them have more resources for raising children. Of course this is predicated upon the notion that a husband-wife team is the best way to raise children (which I happen to believe). If gay marriage is strictly equal to straight marriage, those sorts of policies would seem to disproportionately favor gay couples (who tend not to have children) over straight ones (who generally do).
Hopefully China will loan us the money to participate!
Doesn't matter. Any distro that's worth using is just fine as a server. Just use whatever you use on a desktop to minimize niggly almost-the-same-but-not-quite annoyances between them, and you'll be happy.

Personally, I like Debian Testing on my servers -- it's reasonably recent (as opposed to Debian Stable, which gets hopelessly outdated quickly), has no releases (instead it just stays up to date as you update stuff) and is rock solid for me, but it's more a matter of taste than anything else.

Besides, I like Debian's attempts to mostly stick with Free software in their base distro. While I'm not a fanatic, I like knowing that what I use is open source, and that I can fix it and debug by hacking it up (and occasionally have) if it breaks on me.
This is dumb.. The more choices you have, the more confused the person choosing is.

Sorry, but having too many choices does not make the choice easier.

Also, of course you know that a "good" distro is, but someone just coming into the fold has no idea what a good one is.

Too much choice. Microsoft has to chuckle and feel a little security about a post narrowing down the "top 14" distributions.
Hands on with some surprising $80 night vision goggles
Web Depression...will it be as poetic as...
Since I installed Vista on MacBook Pro, I didn't boot into OS X once.
Is it at least true that (0 < |0/0| < Infinity); that is, that 0/0 is a finite, non-zero number?
I don't recall making that "dumb" claim. I said some people enjoy the choice.

I would rather have to look through a rack of shoes to find a pair that fits than be handed one that's uncomfortable. It's not universal but I am not alone.
SpaceX's Falcon 1 makes it to orbit
Picturing the graphs of y = 1/x and y = cx/x worked for me. You can make the "reasonable" value at x=0 be Inf, -Inf, or anything in between.
A Story of Courage, Will and Determination | Green Fitness World
I test drove a Tesla
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreal_number
Prediction vs Explanation: A Puzzle
There was a professor who tried to get around this a couple years ago by defining a special value called "nullity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Anderson_%28computer_scie...
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Tom Perkin's Spectacular yacht Maltese Falcon due in bay
you can see how it wouldn't really work to designate 6 people as having the right to determine whether you stay on life support.

Actually, this is done all the time.

.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22board+of+directors%22+star...

BondBook's Backers Pull the Plug, Citing Lack of Critical Mass ... The board of directors reached this decision because current market conditions in the ...

After fifty years of futile funding, it’s time to pull the plug. ...

I would send this business plan to my board of directors for approval with my .... We pull the plug when we find that the startup is not going as per the ...

rounds of financing while reserving the option to pull the plug if the experiments ...
No. 0/0 is completely undefined. For example, consider limit as x approaches 0 of (-x)/x. This approaches (-0)/0 = 0/0 but simplifying the limit given an answer of -1. So 0/0 is completely dependent on the characteristics of the convergence and had no meaning in isolation. In fact, the field of real (and complex) numbers does not even include 0 in the multiplicative group. Therefore, dividing by 0 is nonsensical as it has no inverse as it is not in the multiplicative field. According to the basic axioms of groups theory, given a field F with a the identity of the additive group in the field and b some element of the multiplicative group, it can be proven that mul(a,b) = a where mul is the multiplication operation. This explains why 0 times any other number is 0. If you would like a copy of the proof, just drop me an email.

Sorry for the rant, math major.
I went a to a presentation by some of the people behind this, and one of the presenters made the following joke:

"We set off to make in quotes both $positive_quality and entertaining, we seem to only have succeeded on the latter, but we're working on the latter."

(You will note its immense timesuck powers by clicking that little spinner over and over. Wasted a good Friday it did.)
BSD?

runs
How does this relate to the original comment? What I want to know is how you can divide by 0, so that then you can't define integers.
SpaceX launches 1st commercial rocket into orbit
It is about fundamental human rights.

What are fundamental human rights?

http://www.google.com/search?q=nonsense+on+stilts+natural+ri...
I think of it like that blank Scrabble piece - it can be anything until you define what it is, then it has to be that value from now on (in the calculation).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I suppose this means you can use git as a backend for a ruby based web app that wants to keep track of histories.

That's kinda neat, as Git was written to be a file system anyway.
>Certainly, infinity is not a number..but it has the same properties as a transcendental number in the sense that it is impossible to describe it accurately with finitely many digits.

But other transcendental numbers can be used like regular numbers - infinity can not, I thought? Or at least not as easily as those other numbers are.
for(hour=0;hour<24;hour++){
for(minute=0;minute<60;minute++){
for(second=0;second<60;second++){
ISay.innerHTML = "Edward Tufte loves it";
}
}
}
Actually this offers an interesting case study. Lets look at the results of this crisis.

Three major financial institutions (Lehman, Bear Stearns, and Merryl Lynch) had their shareholders loose most of their assets and are no longer operational or independent. The remaining two investment banks Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs abandoned this business models and are now on their way to become bank holding companies.

In all cases, shareholders have seen massive (>50%) declines in the value of their shares due to excessive risk taking.

Do you seriously think that any institution except for Hedge Funds will ever leverage themselves 30:1 based on shaky opaque assets in the near future (I say near because every ~10 years, wall street goes haywire).

Furthermore, you are happy bashing wall street but have you ever taken a look at the balance sheet of the US government?

Look at your own last paragraph:

"lot of these banks are left with hot potatoes in their hand, and brought us to this mess."

Capitalism at work. These banks took foolish bets and now they are paying for it. The biggest blot in this picture is the $700 billion bailout which is sponsored by ... the US government.
Extending Classes in Objective-C With Categories
On deployment
The idea I was trying to put forward is that employees taking a high stock/salary ratio & founders are investors. This is obvious on the theoretical level. But the point that I am making is that they are also subject to market 'whims.' In fact they constitute their own sort of a sub-market with it's own whims (as is the VC market, IPO market, etc).

A year or two of bad news & bad predictions could sour it. Employees & founders might start to favour corporate jobs.

Not saying it has to be drastic. VCs pulling purse strings a little tighter. Founders ready to bail a little earlier. Employees a little less willing to take stock. Angels preferring to take a year or two off. Most 'startups' would be affected by at least some of these.
I watched flight 3 (live webcam) and on this one I was even more tense. It was like watching a football match for space pioneers. Would they win?

Yes they did, and Elon Musk was hilariously incomprendible, probably from relief.

Screw the Chinese, let's hear it for assembly line space travel.
Awesome. This could change everything, space-wise. No more being held hostage by the Defense Contractors or the Russians to get to orbit.

I think the Falcon 1 is about 1/10th to 1/7th the cost of the nearest competitor at $3million to orbit (compared to ~26million for Pegasus).
This is AWESOME. It could change everything, space-wise. No more being held hostage by the Defense Contractors or the Russians to get to orbit.

I think the Falcon 1 is about 1/10th to 1/7th the cost of the nearest competitor at $3million to orbit (compared to ~26million for Pegasus).
I found your argument lacking. I wouldn't say I disagree, but I'm still of the opinion that n=2 couples is seriously old-fashioned the same way opposite-sex marriages are. If people love one another and want a permanent union, we should allow them to. To argue that we should open this up to same-sex and still leave it at 2 is to have a strange mix of progressiveness and conservatism.

1) People don't want to pay for it. Well, last I checked we weren't adding up figures. This is a definition change. The economics of it are free to work in various ways. For instance, companies could offer n-couple insurance with scaling rates.

2) Who makes executive decisions? ie, Who Pulls The Plug. I'd think you'd set this up the same way any n-party organization, like a board of directors, would. You could just vote. Or go by age. Or by gender. Seems like your marriage contract would be the place to put this.

We allow lots of people to form agreements with n-people. We allow people to live with whomever they choose. Why not allow these agreements to have the force of marriage? I can form a multi-billion-dollar business deal with 7 women but we can't all call each other spouses? It's just stupid. And it's cruel. Especially to me. :)
Finally some good news from SpaceX!

Way to go guys!
Suppose 5/0 = infinity. What does it buy you?

At the very least, one would expect that 5/0 = infinity implies that 5 = 0 * infinity, but that is not the case. And if you insist that it is, does 4/0 = infinity then imply that 4 = 0 * infinity, and hence 4 = 5?
Ask HN: Why do we still have an Electoral College in the US?
I live in Maryland. It will go to Obama (market predictions put the chance at 93%). If I vote for anybody else, I may as well just throw my ballot in the trash. Why do we not have a good, secure, nation-wide popular vote counting system based on modern communications technology? Are there some technical hurdles that have yet to be cleared to make it possible?
You just need to define the undefinable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreal_number
I don't see these location-based social networking apps ever gaining any traction. I used to think location-based social networking would be a huge hit on the iPhone, but I've since changed my mind.

I go to a private college with mostly trendy, wealthy kids. Almost everyone has an iPhone. I have about 30 friends with iPhones. Absolutely none of them use any social networking app other than Facebook.

I think Facebook should acquire Loopt and integrate it into their own app.
American Express "Venture Capital" Commercial
It's called the amendment process.
I think DanielBMarkham is being rather loose with terminology here (or perhaps talking about something other than the Riemann sphere, but it sounds like that's what he's talking about).

The problem isn't that you "can't define integers" when you introduce an infinity. The problem is (as the article I linked to says) the resulting system does not form a field (i.e. the usual arithmetic operations don't behave like you would expect anymore). Follow the link to fields if you want to know more.
RWW Predictions: Will eBay Sell StumbleUpon?
Oh, I thought he was saying something like you could have real numbers with division by zero as far as you didn't want to have a special class of numbers, the integer numbers. So I was very curious about that, as I studied fields and all that a long while ago and that sounded like a rare concept.
That's the thing, specialized distros are hard to know about. I did a bit of googling & came across this

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

I only know (& like) 4 from that list, plus Arch linux which is very good on old computers.
Video (09:59):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=To-XOPgaGsQ
Baltic-avenue: open source clone of the Amazon S3 REST API on Google AppEngine
I'd be very interested to see how their costs stack up, if commensurable figures could even be found.

During my senior year in the aero/astro program at UW, the space cadet half of the class (the other half were the wing nuts) got to work with a local aerospace contractor. The engineer at that firm who worked with us gave us an interesting tidbit of info about space-ready hardware. The factors of safety are engineered so tightly (e.g., FS ~=1.05) that, for a part that you've got ~$500 of materials and labor, you've got a ~$20,000 paper trail that documents every process and material source for that part. This gives new meaning to the term "astronomical cost."

The big dumb booster school of rocket design seeks to reduce this cost by using higher FS (e.g., automotive grade at FS >~ 2 or higher) and throwing away fuel.

I wonder: 1) How close to the BDB school the Chinese rockets are? 2) How much their vehicles cost? & 3) By how much do the differences in labor costs, hidden costs, and distributed costs confound the analysis?
What we need is a good, practical economic reason for any of this.

I wonder how far space tourism can take us? It's a good place to start because it'll put a lot of pressure on making it easy. Training periods, prices, competence levels will have some downward pressure.

If a decent little space tourism industry evolves, it'll be a great base to build on.
10 Remarkable Female Mathematicians
Long or Short Capital » SEC Wants to Blow Your Mind - Paying Dividends Since Q1'06
GREAT POST! :-)
Keep it up, Antonio!
reminds me of an ant farm....
I am so jealous. Not only that he test drove this but that he can afford it.
Historically, people have colonized just for the change of scenery.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamestown,_Virginia
Elon Musk's SpaceX Did It — Falcon 1 Made it to Space
Ask HN: How to decide if an idea is worth implementing as a business?
Let's say you have a great idea. You think it is something that people need and would want. There is also a viable business model.

Now with each idea, there is always a possibility that somebody else is also thinking about it. Anything short of a patent is not a guarantee of
exclusivity. Then there are incumbents who could implement it as an add-on. For eg (only for argument's sake) if the idea is about a Facebook application, then there is always a possiblity that Facebook would implement it themselves before or after you do it.

So how do you decide? What are the considerations to be weighed in? Thoughts?
Thanks, but this time it was my wife. :)
We also need a good way to clean up all that junk up there. I've head that its possible to start a cascade effect: smash one satellite, the others are so fragile that the shards will smash many more, and so on.
"... Unlike more expensive sets, this doesn't amplify light as much as it simply picks up on infrared light ..."

Non-passive, you need an IR source to see. So you can see in the dark but can be seen by others with NVG's.
Letting Our Fingers Do the Talking
Very cool. JQuery is one of the primary reasons I really started to enjoy JavaScript.
One thing to wonder is who's going to come up with the law to determine how often the price per kilo to orbit halves? Assuming it's now been lowered to 10% over government 'efforts'.
I hold a lot of respect for Elon Musk. He's making a lot of great contributions with the work he's doing, and it's exciting to see someone addressing some serious issues.
I spent days getting conflicting advice from distro partisans the first time I tried to install Linux. I wound up with Gentoo, which was the wrong choice in retrospect.
> Let's say you have a great idea. You think it is something that people need and would want. There is also a viable business model.

To me, that is all you need to know. The risk you mention is definitely present, but that is part of all ventures. Do it the way you envision it and fill the gap.

Great luck to you!
The moon isn't too rich in breathtaking views and beautiful flora and fauna... not to mention the lack of oxygen :P
Microsoft will be shipping jQuery with Visual Studio going forward - ScottGu's Blog
Those goggles almost look like they are from splinter cell.
Steve Jobs: Out For Revenge [in 1989, at NeXT]
By some bug, I'm being prevented from submitting this properly:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE6DF1F3EF935A3575BC0A96F948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

(HN thinks that it is a duplicate submission of the different, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9507E7D91030F933A15755C0A9629C8B63 / http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44944)
Freespace is easier to get to and from, and offers full-g, zero-g and everything in-between.

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

Freespace also can offer low data latency -- low-enough even for realistic telepresence (e.g. sub 400 ms) (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22400+ms%22+conversation+lat...).

The moon probably would not be very popular, except for mining crews.
If one of my startups is ever successful this will be one of my very few "I'm rich bitches" purchases.
Interestingly, the pattern of busy areas correlate with the world cities from which my website get the most traffic. It's a website about science and programming.

The rest of the world (mostly Africa and some parts of central Asia and north-western South America) doesn't seem to use internet much, neither abundant flights, neither perhaps population that can access those (or population at all).
What about mineral mining, fur hunting, cotton growing & all the rest?
dude, they're $80. I'm buying some of these.
Night time airsoft is going to be FUCKING EPIC.
Isn't the view of Earth breathtaking?
37 More Shocking jQuery Plugins
The easy answer is that the system for presidential elections is part of the constitution, and is quite hard to change, on purpose. You should know this if you've graduated high school (since you live in the US).

The second reason is that it is not clear that a "secure, nation-wide popular vote counting system based on modern communications technology" is a good idea even before we get to the technology. Our system of government is a type of federalism (state/national) and moving to a popular vote based electoral system weakens this division. I don't have much expertise here, but can assert with confidence that expert opinion is divided on whether or not this is desirable.
"... Night time airsoft is going to be FUCKING EPIC ..."

True but if everyone is wearing them it will be like walking around with torches on.
Except OpenBSD, the other BSD's have just as much firmware binary blobs as linux does [disclaimer: I am a linux user].
The other part of the equation is Bigelow habitats. These will likely be used for a space hotel.
Let's also give Wil tons of credit. No VC it seems and a great piece of software with delicious monster.
Oh yeah. I'm sure the best way to get started with linux is to compile the kernel!
I guess the argument is that you can see that from space anyway.. But The view of Earth from the moon would be better than any hotel on the planet!
I make it very much a point, being a scientist full time, not to ever drink coffee (neither tea), and to go to sleep whenever I need to.

I am glad you realized you needed your share of sleep.
I've heard that it currently ensures that more, disparate voices will be heard. As Jonah Goldberg once said, democracy shouldn't work such that "51% of the country can give the other 49% a wedgie".

Were the electoral model to be abandoned, it would ensure that candidates would stick to major urban areas as much as possible because they would have the largest amount of influence per unit of effort. Now, this wouldn't hold true in all cases, but from what I understand the Electoral College as it stands helps to ensure that the sundry opinions of different interests in this country are given more consideration.

Interesingly, before the electoral reforms of the 1800s in Britain, seat allocations weren't decided by population, but rather influenced by the weighting of the needs of various regional trades/industries. While this seems very anti-democratic to modern American ideals, at that time industries were much closer to the individual. Also, I'm not so sure it was a bad idea: you baked lobbying and the concerns of industries into the political system as opposed to grafting it on in a shadowy, behind-the-scenes system, and therefore had the ability to regulate it to some degree.
I agree. For me the trick is to balance: you can sleep 4 hours a day for several days, but only after having slept very well for several days. A.k.a. resting periods alternated with high tension, full-speed periods [in the order of days, not weeks].
It’s not a matter of which you believe – that’s not good science. Both theories need to be tested and peer reviewed until the evidence of one outweighs the other. The overarching principle is that no theory is infallible – they can always be overthrown by new evidence.