skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's the "DejaNews simplicity replaced by a Web 2.0 PITA which drives readers away and disperses fragments of technical knowledge across the Internet" date?

Not that I'm bitter.

-sigh-

I miss Usenet.
"Mostly" true, but if you accept this statement as-is, it's a little misleading.

The integers (with standard addition/multiplication operators) are indeed a ring, but a ring is a very loose definition that does not reveal say too much about the integers themselves. There are several stronger algebraic structures than integers that don't have division.

The integers themselves are an example of a general algebraic structure called a "domain," (or, more commonly, "integral domain") which is a commutative ring (that is, commutative under multiplication as well), has distinct additive and multiplicative identities, and has the property that if a and b are integers and a*b = 0, then either a or b must be zero.

When mathematicians in the past were studying divisibility in the integers, they have generally studied domains, because they essentially isolate the division property among different operations. Even an integral domain is not the strongest structure you can place on integers. There are even more specific subclasses of integral domains that the integers fall under, but that's best left for a class on algebraic structures and not a comment on HN.
Great article. For folks that don't understand what depression feels like, an article like this is great.

I think a good explanation of depression for someone that has never really experienced it is: "Take the worse day of your life. Feel those feelings. Now pretend that every day of your life is like that from the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep." If there is hell on earth, it looks alot like depression. Unfortunately, most of this is just biochemistry happening in your brain. Fortunately, there are tools today that can help.

It's funny, people can relate when they see someone with a broken leg or a huge scar. You can't see mental disorders and if you haven't felt them, they don't seem very real.

If there is someone you love that has a mental disorder, nothing you can quickly spat at them will help, "Oh, you'll get better" or "It'll go away, just be patient." anymore than you want to hear the same things when you break up with a girlfriend or lose a family member. See if they want help, help them get help if they do, and support them.

If YOU think you have a mental disorder like depression, please go see a professional. They are trained in a variety of techniques that they can give you to help manage your life better in the face of whatever problems you feel you are having. They want to help you, they want to heal you. But you have to take that step first.
Until the site comes back up:

"To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide earnings assistance and tax relief to members of the uniformed services, volunteer firefighters, and Peace Corps volunteers, and for other purposes"

According to yummyfajitas
This article somewhat touches upon the issue of "bio-programming" but it doesn't give credit where it is due.

People have been studying "bio-compiler/machine code" for decades. The difficulty is that there are many different compilers at work. Just to name a few: protein folding, chemical gradient regulation, inter/intra-cellular signaling, etc. All of which "compiles" chemical composition into actual physical function. But each of the process alone is so complex, it takes years to un-cover a small portion of the black box, not to mention most of these "compilers" are inter-dependent with each other. So it is close to impossible to use the limited knowledge we have un-covered to predict other novel code -> function compilation.
I worked in a protein folding lab before. Just to be blunt here, no one really has a clue.
http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ENF_Exploration_drives_ura...

Those are "identified resources", which means that they are irrelevant. There are 2 trillion tons (5 billion years' worth) of economically-recoverable uranium in granite, alone.

http://nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/UraniuamDistribution
Good point, I had forgotten about IDs.
It's frustrating that almost any comment to be made on this will be offensive to someone
Things an enterprise gets with Xen/VMWare that they don't get with Zones:

* A security model that extends through the kernel

* A performance and resource sharing model that extends through the kernel

* Push-button migration

* Support for anything other than Solaris

* "Hardware"-level suspend/resume

* Centralized management

I can go on and on about the security implications of Zones (and Jails) --- I don't think this model is well thought-through. But on the feature-list alone, Zones (and Jails) are a pale shadow of what the "mainstream" OS's offer today.
Make it continuous ;)

Maybe a good compromise would be to make each line a "block". If you're the first to click a line, you get a lock on it to edit it. Make a new line (i.e. block) by hitting enter/return.

I disagree that people typing over each other is a problem with continuous editors. If you're editing different lines it's not a problem at all. If you're editing different parts of the same line SubEthaEdit can handle that fine. The only ambiguous case is when your cursors are at the exact same point when you start typing. Since SubEthaEdit shows you where each user's cursor is you can clearly see if you're about to conflict with someone else. The key to this type of collaboration is it need to be very much real-time, the lower latency the better.
While I agree with much of what he says (despite working in derivatives), and while I realise the message is what should be addressed, and not the messenger, I think it's worth noting that Will Hutton's wife profited very nicely from the debt explosion here in the UK, as part owner of a company called First Premise, a buy-to-let landlord, and that this may be why his increasingly shrill rants never place any blame on the greedy "man on the street" who was only too happy to sign up for a fraudulent loan and thereby contribute to this mess.

For the last ten or more years of my life (in Australia and the UK), I've been living in a strange world where every single social conversation eventually converges on property prices, property investment, buy to let, negative gearing, renovations, decking, auctions... I'm willing to suffer some hard times if it means all of that will disappear and we can go back to being normal humans again.

At least until the next bubble. :-(
NFS is a great example of something that has subtle, bad security interactions with zones.
Reserves, in mining means the amount of ore that can be economically removed from the earth.

No, it doesn't.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ajuliansimon.com%2Fwrit...
Well... it is impossible to deny that the whole 2.0 social/sharing/blabla is possible with resident applications, distributed by definition in users PCs, faster, without javascript magics.
I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-) -- Andy Tanenbaum to Linus Torvalds

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/browse_frm/thre...
> I think RMS would have no problem with people using open-source software ...

... as long as they made sure to call it free software, of course.
I just love how the implicit subtext is that anyone with faith is a loony redneck. "How could they possibly believe this stuff?"

Well, I'm a Harvard/Columbia-educated old-time hacker (53 now), been through several start-ups, have run my own software "lifestyle" company for nearly 20 years, and I'm also an enthusiastic Roman Catholic. (Gasp, the horror.)

I believe I can give a good defense of my faith to anyone whose mind isn't already completely closed, but this wouldn't be the place to do it... Maybe over a beer late some night.
Thorium required a breeder reactor in order to produce the U-233 necessary for fission, and as stated in another comment, these reactors are still in experimental stages and have a much lower level of operational safety record.

A thorium breeder is not the same thing as a uranium breeder.

http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com
Don't abandon websites to spammers
possibly the big thing that's confusing you is that you can't have an infinite number, even if there are infinite numbers

Yep, that's new to me. So one followed by infinite zeros is not a rational number number. I have read otherwise, but I assume it was a sloppy definition of infinity that works when your not talking about countable numbers.
The New MP3 Phone is LG KP260
This slider phone has better communicating features; including tri band GSM network, GPRS, Bluetooth V2.0 with A2DP, USB V2.0, SMS, EMS, MMS, and WAP 2.0/xHTML browser. The media functions of this phone are good; comes with MP3/eAAC+/WMA/WAV player and MPEG4/3gp player also.
Retail banks for the most part are doing fine. The recent crisis isn't really going to hurt First Bank of Wherever much. They generally weren't involved in CDS, and sold their mortgages to Fannie or Freddie long ago.

WaMu was really sort of an exception in retail banking. Most of them aren't sexy enough for the guys who really blow companies up by gambling on complex derivatives.
I'd love to have a friendly conversation with someone like you, who my arguments (probably) won't necessarily offend. Whenever any conversation trails to religion, just by its nature, will undermine everything the other person believes in and bound to get someone upset.
Ya, the vendors of alternating current are the electrical utilities. And the issues your talking about happened in the 1880s, between Edison's DC vs Teslas's AC. Obviously 110V AC won (not 220V) and market forces and regulation have kept that standard and the price stable.

The point is that if we feel okay paying for electricity as a service, why not computing? Data ownership and security is one reasonable concern but they're not show stoppers.
What a dumb chart. It obviously left out data that wouldn't make its point: Canada, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Italy, ...
DoodleBuzz: Typographic News Explorer
Why The Enterprise Space Needs To Build Companies Like The Consumer Space
Digg to Expand its Data Center Network
That's sounds close, so I guess the Neurochemistry is probably similar. How do you find this useful? I can concentrate on one thing when coding but I can still direct my thinking process, but this seemed to be just build a model without anything spare to manipulate it. It also seemed fairly draining as I was out of it for a while.
it's here as well: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/vote.xpd?vote=h2008-674
I've had many great conversations about religion with christian friends, which didn't get either of us upset.
That's pretty funny, as I have frequently argued for keeping things more diverse on HN. Ad nauseum, I would have said.

I would take their remarks with a grain salt [...] Give shoving your ideologies down various posters' throats a rest.

Is that what you call "a grain salt"? I'm glad you don't go for a pound!
Unfortunately, it isn't clear that even the people selling these mortgage-backed securities knew how risky they were.
More wisdom:

Get money.

Fuck bitches.

Smoke trees.

Stay true.

(The above is not any less condescending or meaningless than the content of the OP)
Julian Simon was a professor business administration, not a mining engineer. Those articles refer to scare tactics presented in terms of resource scarcity by environmental fanatics. He says nothing about the definition of a mineral reserve. But I can help us with that.

Reserve definition

Reserve definition is undertaken to convert a mineral resource into an ore reserve, which is an economic asset. The process is similar to resource evaluation, except more intensive and technical, aimed at statistically quantifying the grade continuity and mass of ore.

Reserve definition also takes into account the milling and extractability characteristics of the ore, and generates bulk samples for metallurgical testwork, involving crushability, floatability and other ore recovery parameters.

Reserve definition includes geotechnical assessment and engineering studies of the rocks within and surrounding the deposit to determine the potential instabilities of proposed open pit or underground mining methods. This process may involve drilling diamond core samples to derive structural information on weaknesses within the rock mass such as faults, foliations, joints and shearing.

At the end of this process, a feasibility study is published, and the ore deposit may be either deemed uneconomic or economic.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mineral_exploration
Big electric motors are indeed quite efficient.

You don't connect them directly to the battery pack, though. You need "something" in-between (power electronics) to drive the motor. I'd estimate the efficiency of such a controller to be around 80/90%.
But that's not true in Stallman's case. He openly acknowledges it by stating that we should choose freedom over convenience. He recognizes the burden and encourages people to choose it anyway because freedom is worth fighting for. That's at the core of his message. Its not in the article unfortunately but he does say this at his talks.
Crux of the article:

If Kroah-Hartman is unhappy that Novell and Red Hat are doing the bulk of the work and Ubuntu is reaping the benefit....
This bill cannot pass. We will only make the problem that much worse in the end. We will be proping up this failed system to continue on. The legislation is so vague and flimsy it's virtually worthless.

The patching of the credit liquidity crisis right now is like using corks to patch a leaky submarine. Not only that, but you don't have enough corks to patch all the holes.

We are going to see a large recession in all of our markets. Even if you pass this bill, no serious economist knows the extent of the financial crisis. All of them can gaurentee, though, that it will be far above $1tril.

Don't fall for this nonsense the politicians and the rich are spouting about. They only want to sustain this failed lesse faire market and continue to benefit from it. We need our economy to be entirely restructured and this is the time to do that.
Why not have choices? Cloud computing for those who don't want a bunch of admin work (me), and pure freedom for those who want it?

Why does it have to be black-or-white?
enterprise is where the $ is but not as sexy.
From the same thread: If you write programs for linux today, you shouldn't have too many surprises when you just recompile them for Hurd in the 21st century. --Linus, in 1992
Financial crisis would have worsened in spite of the bailout
Yup, but it's very possible to make it sexy. Hoping that changes soon.
> A banker's job is packaging risk, which they did.

It seems as if they hid the risk, and may even have increased it, along these lines: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/01/straigh...
Crux of the problem: "free riding" is part and parcel of open source. And Ubuntu isn't really that bad - they do good work and promote software that's almost entirely free.
I look myself in the eye in a mirror, smile and say out loud: "Everything's going to be alright".

I try do this at least once a day. It might sound stupid, but I find it gives me a bit of a lift every time I do it...
101 Ways To Destroy Your Tribe
Plenty of smart hackers are Christian (to pick a specific example), including Ruby's Matz, SQLite's Richard Hipp, and Perl's Larry Wall. Two of the smartest people in security (I won't name them, because I don't think they're "out") are practicing Christians.

I'm a nonpracticing Catholic, but I don't rank in the list above.

I think the "militant atheism" meme is a product of pop culture and a misplaced projection of anger at our current political regime. I also think that few "devout" atheists think that Barack Obama is a looney because he's a practicing Christian, so I think this has more to do with culture than with religion.
> Should we also home-school our children, keep our money under our mattress, grow our own food, give ourselves medical exams? There are companies/service providers out there

grow some salad greens and tomatoes and eat those instead of McDonalds?

self check for breast or testicular cancer (whichever applies)?

take an active role in your child's education? I should hope so.

I'll give you the money under the mattress point. No return on investment. However you should be managing it yourself in some form.
I'd still want to diversify and put my money in more than one bank
Yeah, let's all use your comment to vote on whether we think religion is ever abused for "mind control".
If your electric utility is telling you that you can't modify the electricity that enters your home then I think RMS might object.

I know I would object if I couldn't convert my AC to DC. My computer wouldn't run!
For resources to be counted as reserves, they have to be found. If no one bothers finding more resources, the resources that lie in wait are not counted as reserves. Here is some finding-cost data:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html

the finding costs of crude oil have averaged around US$ 6/bbl over at least the past three decades. When finding costs of the two fuels are expressed in terms of their contained energy value, oil, at US$ 1050/MJ of energy, is about 300 times more expensive to find than uranium, at US$ 3.4/MJ. Similarly, the proportion of current market prices that finding costs comprise are lower for uranium. Its finding costs make up only 2% of the recent spot price of US$ 30/lb ($78/kgU), while the oil finding costs are 12% of a recent spot price of US$ 50/bbl.

By these measures, uranium is a very inexpensive energy source to replenish, as society has accepted far higher energy replacement costs to sustain oil resources.

.

If those finding costs were considered too high, one would additionally have to hope that no one would be able to find the sea, or that if anyone were able to find the sea, that they would not be able to figure out how to extract uranium from it for, perhaps, only several hundred dollars per kg -- something which in fact has already been done, and which is being improved-upon by current research conducted by Japan and India.
Stallman is a commie crackpot and everybody knows it. No respectable business person of note takes him seriously.

You can't have Falstaff, and have him thin.

Meaning, you can't have superior computing power like the "cloud" provides and expect to retain total transparency/privacy. Something has to give. I think it is inevitable in the long run that business will decide that the help to their bottom line that the cheap resources of the "cloud" provides offsets any theoretical leftist concern about transparency, privacy, etc.

Asking everyone to do their own computing is like going back to an agrarian culture where everyone grows their own food. Seem to recall Pol-Pot tried that, and I don't think history looks upon him too favorably. 'Nuff said.
Insulate Your Startup Against a Nuclear Winter
Ubuntu is by far the best thing to happen to desktop linux. Them & their free cds. Novell has no one to blame but themselves. They should have been paying close attention to Apple all those years.
I've been thinking of applying agent based simulations as a new way to measure risk. That's a bit different than what you're thinking of but I think it would be self-consistent, or at least the way I understood it.
Given that they try to market themselves as an easy gateway to get your web address, this is true. However, given how many supplementary products they try and market as you checkout, this isn't surprising. If someone isn't familiar with what you need for your own .com, it's too easy to get sucked in by their checkout process.

At least they haven't tried any of the tricks that Network Solutions has (http://blog.domaintools.com/2008/01/network-solutions-steals... although this problem has been at least partially resolved since...)
Real numbers can have infinite digits, but only after the point, such as pi. The size of any number, even if it's real, can't be infinitely big (a real is between two integer numbers, and integer numbers have to be finite). So yes, 1000(...)00000 with infinite 0s doesn't exist as a number.

Nice conversation anyway.
They should be out of their houses. They are lucky to have lived in such houses in the first place. Also, those that acted improperly should be brought to justice. New rules should be in place to stop this from happening again. The greed and vice that led to this won't go away with the bail out. Power is all too abused.
I'm a very happy Ubuntu user, but I can sort of understand the frustration. If everyone did what Canonical did, who would do the work? That's not an entirely solved problem with open source.
I don't get this; "nobody wants to talk about enterprise intrusion detection"? Enterprise security is one of the most overfunded sectors in technology.
It's not about open vs. closed source:

The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party.
Stocks plummet, but tech stocks fall even faster
Using individual accounts, joint accounts, CDs, and IRAs, it's possible to structure ~$900,000 in FDIC protection (see table: http://home.ingdirect.com/faqs/faqs.asp?s=FDIC)
Here at salesforce.com (the company that does cloud computing/saas for businesses,) we have the data loader tool that customers can use to download all of their data locally as often as they wish. Also, there is an API so people can write their own backup/restore/integration code.
I think one of the commonly held misconceptions about this whole 'bailout' thing is that fixing the mortgage market NOW will fix the problem. Fixing the mortgage market in 2006 might have helped, but it also might not have. We'll never know.

While subprime mortgages got this whole ball rolling, the credit crisis extends way beyond that now, and has taken on a life of its own. This bailout plan was to try and fix the credit crunch by restoring confidence in the financial sector, taking toxic assets off their books, and giving them a more stable capital base. The housing crisis is now a separate issue, and if lawmakers want to address it, it should be in a separate bill.

If the housing crisis continues, it hurts a lot of people that made bad borrowing decisions and it hurts a lot of banks that made bad lending decisions, but the turmoil is mostly in the financial/construction/materials sectors. If the credit crunch continues, just about anything could fail unexpectedly, including things as diverse as insurers and big manufacturers, which could leave a lot of people out of work, and turn this from a Wall St crisis into a Main St crisis.
Certainly - for the long term, this is a buyer's market. Since it's too hard to predict when the bottom will hit, dollar cost averaging is a good strategy.
Great article! What struck me was how difficult it is to automate such "policing" tasks and how much work is put in to keeping a community on track. I'm always trying to automate things but I guess in this case it's not so simple.
What's astounding is that 205 of our very fine elected representatives thought it was a great idea. I think I need to dig up that list and send 20 bucks to each of their opponents in the upcoming election.
On a related note, I increased my client's daily spending limit with Google AdWords 10% today.
Palin Claimed Dinosaurs And People Coexisted
How to get into the Hottest Restaurants in Town
I've been thinking about this lately - about giving all of your data to a third party and hoping they don't go out of business or erase your account (for whatever reason).

Or be forced to give up access statistics via Pen Register.

Or provide governments the ability to access your data via CALEA compliance hardware/processes.

I value the privacy of my data as much as I value the integrity of it. I don't see myself doing much cloud computing in the near future.