skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I postered a comment on the essay, I'll repost it here:

You assume the interstellar species will be living on a planet. What if they hollowed out their planet of resources long ago and now live in a cloud of asteroids instead? Asteroids are hollowed out as giant fortresses in space, and a bio dome sphere thingy built inside. As they are living in an asteroid cloud, to prevent impact they would have to attach thrusters to each asteroid they live on to dodge other asteroids.

So the asteroid from kuiper belt attack won't work... but what if the asteroid was launched at close to speed of light? 1. That would take a very big amount of energy. 2. They would've had to carry the energy to the kuiper belt. 3. They would've been noticed and a fleet would've sent in to capture it before the asteroid was launched.

What about the nuclear bomb? Well they live deep in the asteroid, it'll protect at least against some nuclear hits. If one asteroid blows up there are still 499 others. Still it would be great to prevent the loss of sentient life... Also what happens if 500 nukes were launched at each asteroid? I've got no answer to that.

I do wonder if there could be a device that would force nuclear explosives to be triggered prematurely, lets say, 2km away. That would be sufficient to protect the asteroid.
Godaddy always had a reputation for being a shitty company, I mean, just look at their website! Who would want to do business with that?
That was the right account, but it changed. Someone registered the old name and started tweeting stuff. The website was still pulling tweets from the original account a few minutes ago.

The new account for the original is https://twitter.com/#!/oceanstratagy
well, why wouldn't users abandon those services too?
I've always thought of poker as a game of skill. Sure, it's more or less dictated by the odds but a proficient player is able to make you second-guess those odds.

I agree with you in regards to online slots and blackjack. There's a definite house edge and you're always playing a losing game in the long run. These games are engineered to give a false sense of strategy to less-intelligent participants.

I don't think games of true skill should be lopped-in with slots and lotteries.
No, they indicated it was "by design" in the bug report. I suspect they decided it wasn't worth their time to maintain it.
I really liked Lucas' treatment of space combat with capital ships in Episode III. You line up next to each other and start blasting, just like they did back in the good old days of pirates on wooden sailing ships. Of course this is incredibly stupid and immensely destructive to both ships but it makes for awesome explosions.

But I think doing this within range of a planet's gravity well isn't too intelligent. Lose power and down you go.

I always appreciated the space battles in the X-Wing series of computer games. That's the way I see it, large capital ships with single-man fighters buzzing around them. But since we have semi-automated drones with human pilots on the other side of the world with a satellite link, I would have to assume those single-man fighters would be unmanned.

But Niven/Pournelle's idea of space combat is most likely what we would get.
Lion is the first OS X upgrade where I've ever considered whether it was "worth it" or not. This coming from a pretty deeply-rooted OS X fanboy. End result: I upgraded, I'm not sorry I did, it was worth the $30. There are some quirks in the UI that I don't like but can live with, but the benefits for me (iOS 5 SDK, iCloud) outweigh the quirks. As far as stability, it's no less responsive or less stable than Snow Leopard for me.
Ask HN: Is it OK or ethical to boycott movies, music if SOPA passes?
I have been wondering about this question for quite sometime now. If SOPA or any of its cousins pass and Internet is, let's say, more than regulated; would it be ethical to boycott most of the entertainment that requires you to pay towards the Music and Movie industry establishments?

For:
I am an Internet geek and I make my living coding. SOPA, PIPA etc. are a problem for me and my profession. Moreover, it is also about the most important source of communication and speech today. If the giants in the entertainment industry try to kill this medium, then it may be a good idea to boycott theirs.

Against:
Artists, entertainers associated with those media giants who are backing SOPA etc. are genuine people with a job and are hard working. Like I won't like my job to be in jeopardy, I can't imagine them being in problem.

There could be more points but I hope I have the basic point across.

Thanks a lot.
Spoils Ender's Game? Bummer. I recommend you read it anyway.
I understand, and while I do have experience in text processing I would not want to take on a project like this. The number of people responding about this raises the question, though: why is this being reinvented so much? My impression is that everybody writes their own parser, which smells like NIH syndrome.
its based on a new compact algorithm [ http://www.slideshare.net/AbhishekKr/xmlmotor ], that can be easily implemented in other languages too
Edu Startup slugfest: tutorspree vs. TutorCloud
I'm one of the creators of the the landing page that we launched recently while the product is still in development. The landing page has an interactive twist that gives people an incentive to share about us.

In the time its been up we've seen the majority of visitors coming back to the page several times, interacting with us a long time each visit and sharing about us on Facebook and through personal referral links. In addition we have seen a strong percentage of referrals coming back to sign up.

Along side to traditional email sign up using Launchrock we added an interactive element that gets visitors a reason to share and spread our message for us and increases our traffic. But in addition people are staying on the landing page for significant time, coming back multiple times and telling us that the game is addictive.

We used a modified game tied to a giveaway where a higher score gives a higher chance to win an awesome ski trip for 4. People are entered by filling out an email prompt after they've played a bit. They get to play longer, so they can get to a higher score by sharing on Facebook and by having their friends come play the game once they run out of lives.
So far looking great like a snowball picking up steam.

Would love to hear HN's thoughts!
A gambler will find a way to gamble his/her money. I'm assuming there are casino's in most states in the U.S. (Indian reservations) and online gambling laws weren't much of a deterrent to the hard core. I would rather the U.S. legalize and regulate gambling rather than leave the regulation to questionable jurisdictions in island nations I have never heard of.

Competing in this space would be difficult. Licensing is expensive. The competition is huge and well entrenched.
How much of their product portfolio requires a domain registration?
One of the most inspiring talks I saw this year was Sarah Allen's talk about teaching programming to kids: "Easy as Pie" (http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Easy-as-Pie-Teaching-Code...). A month later I found myself teaching my first programming class to kids and I'm hoping to do some more early next year.
Amazon.com’s EC2 Is The 42nd Fastest Computer On Earth
PCs, TVs, Cellphones etc. has five years warranty in Norway. See paragraph 27 of forbrukerkjøpsloven (Act on Consumer Sales) http://www.lovdata.no/all/hl-20020621-034.html#27

Ove Magndal from ElektronikkForbundet has produced a simple and abridged edition of the Norwegian Forbrukerkjøpsloven:
http://www.elektronikkbransjen.no/Stiftelsen/?pageId=2&a...
Unless you need to make a gravity-assisted course correction, why would you follow in the path of a ship? Ambushes aside, they can drop all sorts of things behind them that you don't want to run into.
There's no free lunch.

While GC requires tuning for the best performance, (pure) reference counting imposes a different cost: because it can't collect circular structures, the programmer has to break cycles herself. This clutters the application code. So you can't simply take a program written to run on a GC platform and move it to a reference counting platform unmodified.

Alternatively, you could use both: do most of your reclamation with reference counting, but throw in an occasional GC to collect circular structures. CPython, the most commonly used Python implementation, does this. I doubt it is the best thing for performance, but CPython isn't very fast anyway.
I think the difference is that sellers opt in to sell through Amazon, and probably sign a contract allowing Amazon to collect and display feedback; Yelp is operating without the seller's explicit consent. So unless the rating site can lock in a huge swath of consumer demand and so demand that sellers consent to allowing feedback, the artcle's point about independent rating sites stands.
This Guy Can Get 59 MPG in a Plain Old Accord. Beat That, Punk.
> But I think doing this within range of a planet's gravity well isn't too intelligent. Lose power and down you go.

Sure, if you're dumb enough to park yourself in a decaying orbit.
Am I the only one who doesn't have a problem with this? Sure, it doesn't benefit me as the consumer, but I don't actually see why this is something the government has a right to interfere with.
I recall reading that namecheap stores passwords in plaintext? I'd be interested if this was refuted. In any case, I'd be a bit wary to go along with the bandwagon to this particular registrar without further investigation.
Reading this recalled me that someone working at a big company once told me that he often had to look for a whiteboard pen for 5 to 15 minutes, and that it was ridiculous because 10 minutes of his salary cost his employer more whiteboard pens than he would ever need… Yet, small budget cuts which target this kind of cheap stuff seems very common.
Go Daddy is no longer on list of SOPA supporters
Gandhi said: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Nope. He didn't. The line comes from a 1914 (or so) speech by a union activist named Nicholas Klein. It hopped to "Gandhi" for the same reason the wording got more jazzy over the years - better for propagation.

Interestingly, there are signs that the correct attribution has started to win the internet.

http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&site=...
Gah. The defunct journal Medical Hypotheses is a junk source with a discredited editor, and the sensational claims of the discredited editor's editorials in that "journal" that turned into blog posts in 2009 have no place (having been discussed before) on Hacker News at the end of 2011. See

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3392967

for more details.
Had the same thing happen. Highly suspicious on namecheap part, since the second time I submitted the same code it worked.
Flash Game License: http://www.flashgamelicense.com/
Of course. Strange Loop 2011.
Just wanted to offer a second opinion. I too went from Adderall to Vyvanse; I still take the latter. It doesn't give me tunnel vision, and it helps me focus where sleep/diet/exercise did not. So don't rule it out or go for it based on our anecdotal experience. If your psychiatrist thinks it's a good idea, try it and see how it interacts with your individual brain chemistry!
She wasn't refusing screening. She wanted to read the Constitution while doing it.
Because unfortunately answering a poll is quick and painless, whereas researching and voting properly require time and intelligence.
It's not like they stopped making young adults 26 years ago.
Unless the idea is that house.gov would be hosting bittorrent trackers, this doesn't really have anything to do with this story.
Encounter with GitHub's A.I. which is "purely artificial and poorly intelligent"
No. I've heard good things about it though...
And my name is no longer on the GoDaddy supporter list.
Under her profile on that website it stated that she was a writer. Maybe she's a doctor too.

You are correct that I cannot tell what another person is thinking. I formed my opinion based on the impression I got from reading her article. Due to the nature of the topic it should be a given that anything stated is an opinion unless someone specifically claims to be quoting a law or statistic.
RESTful API Design: can your API give developers just the information they need?
I'm having a hard time coming up with a case where a platform /product achieved scale (in the age of modern advertising), yet couldn't monetize. Which ones can you think of?
Legally, this was a legal protest.
SSH was actively replacing telnet in the late 90's already in any decent institution. At universities it was pretty much the standard. (At least on my side of the globe.)
Yes. We have had a long-running relationship with Nokia, and apps for Wp7 are part of the deliverables.
We just had to deal with this, there is a fork of the repository here https://github.com/pythonforfacebook/facebook-sdk I think part of the reason they removed the repository was because there were some changes to the way they handled the cookies, this fork however fixes that and does work.
This is too little too late. Just because they are "not on a list" doesn't mean they don't support it. They have already done too much to push this through.
I thought the series was almost a word-for-word summary of the first book, and was extremely well made, even though fitting 9 characters into 10 episodes is a tough thing to accomplish.
I think it's fair to do it, maybe then their own people will revolt against them. We could also try to get those people on our side by proving them laws like these won't really stop piracy, and they will only make them more dependent on the big labels, they will lose the opportunity to make some direction connections with their fans, and so on.
The point isn't how significant GoDaddy is. The point isn't how much business damage GoDaddy is suffering, if any.

The point is about how much awareness this event is raising and how much of an impact it is having on encouraging people to do something (anything) to express opposition to the bill. One example: I had not seen SOPA on the nightly news until now.

I don't think this event has been or will be considered "inconsequential". There's a small chance it will be one of the more important events in the opposition.
This is a very interesting experiment she decided to conduct on what seems to be little to no research. I'm glad that she didn't get seriously injured or harassed or locked up for several days. From what I can tell, once they got her isolated she was treated very well. But it was dangerous. As far as I'm concerned, once you step into an airport (especially an american airport) you are no longer a citizen of any particular country and have no rights.

Unfortunately, she did not simply read the constitution. She yelled it out loud so that others could hear, thereby causing quite a disturbance. Several times she mentioned that people were staring and I imagine all security processing had come to a halt at that point. I think they had no choice but to remove her from the area because of the disturbance. Also, if somebody nearby was planning on doing something, she would have created the perfect time to do it. She could have become an accomplice in a serious crime.

I agree with all of the statements she was yelling out, and it is unfortunate that things have come to this. But please be careful when considering this kind of action. Especially if you have loved ones at home who are going to worry about you.
It's definitely very possible. There are US-based contractors who successfully charge $40-50/hour and get lots of business. The competition is steep though, I wouldn't recommend this as a way to get business if you're based in US.
You mean one of the humorous RFCs that the article refers to and links to already, right?
And yet, they're sponsoring PyCon 2012.

https://us.pycon.org/2012/sponsors/#sponsor-89

I have nothing but contempt for Facebook at this point. As a user I don't trust them, and as a developer I can't stand them.
Since, there are artists who have achieved heights began their careers on youtube, this can be pointed out to them.

There are others like Louis CK as well who may support us(?). Louis CK proved that the model he experimented with his last show worked. Didn't he?
Actually lots of American schools have metal detectors now at all the entrances.
If I'm not being mistaken, you are the one who answered my question two years ago on StackOverFlow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/763883/options-for-a-deve...)

It was a long road. I have had lot of non-related issues and difficulties but I almost got there. I made $10K doing it last year and I may make 3 or 4 times that number this year.

You are one of the persons who changed my life, although it was a simple response. Thank you.
Take a look at airport security in Israel sometime. They don't have this silly invasive rigamarole that we do. They have highly trained agents that observe peoples' behavior to look for suspicious events. If they search someone, then it's because they have reasonable cause.

We don't want to do that because it's expensive to do it right. So we have the TSA, which is just a jobs program for the most unskilled folks in the population, and creates an illusion of security without having to provide real security.
How can that be? Space is big, we cannot even properly comprehend how big it is. I'm talking just in our immediate vicinity. If I took, say, three of the world's largest ships, put them together to form one ship and then placed it in a random spot somewhere within the orbit of Pluto; how long would it take you to find it? Keep in mind I'm not talking within the orbital plane, I'm saying within the sphere of the solar system.

Unless someone is watching 100% of the sky for even the slightest miniscule changes, I imagine you could get mighty close (granted, close is Pluto) without being detected.

Isn't most of the information we have about newly discovered far away objects is how they interacted with other known far away objects?

But, of course, there's the given that if we've advanced far enough to engage in space combat then we've likely created technology to help in detection.
I believe its Hover that you're remembering.

http://help.hover.com/2011/07/07/hover-secures-passwords-wit...
What do you think of Cloud Foundry that is a PaaS which is open source and you can control all the aspects of if you don't like them?
No besides the degree, the years working at a legal clinic & the time at a firm, not so familiar. I am definitely not as familiar as an experienced lawyer but I definitely saw enough of that world to know that it is not for me and that I would rather program games. I actually never even bothered getting licensed after school but while in school I was temporarily licensed to practice in IL and even won a couple of actual hearings for actual clients working with the clinic I work with.

And i only used the word hysterical once. i think you need to look up the words "keep using." I am happy to have a conversation with you but in order to do so it's necessary that you respond rather than react, you know? Maybe you can try starting with using one or two pairs of quotation marks -- do we really need 3?

And I would appreciate it if you want to go ahead and explain to me what i have wrong here. Simply saying that i'm wrong without an explanation is not very useful. I am obviously open to listening to your reasoning. If you'd like to move this offline please email me at the address in my profile. Thanks for reading though -- I really do appreciate it.
Nope. We've tried a few in the past and they've just done NOTHING so we're not going back. We have much more success on android and apple even with the increased competition.
This is the same argument people use for not using an IDE. While I think it makes sense for the very skilled or very serious, and is IMHO vital as part of the learning process, I'm not convinced that it's globally applicable nor that it's the best thing for business.
Interesting that they've chosen to publish the list of current supporters directly in their news release. It's almost as if they're saying directly to the internet, "Leave us alone. Here are the people you should be angry at now."

Also some of those companies have already withdrawn support like the Graphic Artists Guild https://www.graphicartistsguild.org/sopa/
This isn't just a DailyKos story about the TSA on the front page of HN. It's a stupid DailyKos story on the front page of HN. It actually demeans well-reasoned, carefully-considered strong objections to the TSA by presenting a categorically bogus objection.

Here's a person who's memorized the 4th Amendment without actually learning what it means, yelling it at the airport in a one-person demonstration, and then doing a victory lap on a blog.

And here's us on HN competing with each other to see who can more stridently agree with her.

Flagged, of course. You should too.
PHaus was saying that professional writers have ulterior motives (what ever those are) and that we should discount the communication of people who are professionals. Only amateurs can be impartial.

No wait, I just put words in his mouth AND made a straw man. Now I am confused.
One additional point: Just because a big company (like a Google or Facebook) gets into your market, it doesn't mean they'll stay in it.

There's a fair amount of precedence that big companies jump into a particular category (thereby causing loss of sleep for some startups) and subsequently retracting. One example includes Facebook vs. Foursquare in the "check-in" space. And, Google has officially killed off a number of projects recently.

One of the advantages that startups have is that they can remain focused on the customer problem. They don't have 100 other business units to fall-back on if one particular project doesn't work out.
Stamen's simple project status visualizing tool ("angry, productive birds")
The correct way on Linux to run services is for each service to have it's own user. If you are just going to be running a single Django project I recommend creating a user simply called "django", putting all the projects files in "/srv/www/" because that's what "srv" is for. And then running your django project as the django user. If your django project gets hacked and you have permissions set properly then the most they can do is fiddle with all your django files. If they have root access they can get your SSL certs, SSH keys, redirect your Nginx server and all kinds of other bad things.
Javascript Demonstration of the Glicko Rating System
True. If you love doing DevOps or are an IT person at heart.
Back Story: Confidential Top 10
What term would you suggest?
The author underestimates guns while overestimating "kinetic missiles". Speed imparts a lot of energy, but it wont transmit all of that energy to the target. You'll have a <missile diameter> hole in the ship.

Your ships are closing at 1000km/s and your cloud of missiles have a 10km/s Delta? A cloud of slugs would be almost the same, and you could put up a lot more of them. Of course a hybrid approach is likely, with shrapnel filled missiles. Better to impact like a shotgun than a needle.

Edit: Also gets it wrong on point defense. If you have enough energy weapons to mount an effective defense you'd make yourself such a large/vulnerable target that you'd be impossible to miss. Once again putting a cloud of slugs in the path of an inbound missile would be easier and more effective. With the speeds/distances involved all of the missiles would be approaching from a very narrow cone, and a small deflection would mean a miss.
Walking Boots and Walking Accessories