skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Political scientist here. The United States has tried relying on charities in the past. Here's (partially) why it didn't work out: people are selective to the charities they donate to and charities are often selective to the people they choose to help (some charities target war veterans, some children, some minorities, some certain neighborhoods). This leave a large, noticeable gap of many people left ignored. It's not a matter of whether people wanting to be taxed or wanting to give to charities; of course no one wants to be taxed. The government took the responsibility from the church and various charities because they weren't providing enough help across the board to citizens in need. I'm not saying don't donate to charity or volunteer, you should, but I am arguing that government, albeit in need of improvements, is one of the best mechanisms for helping the needy.
Anyone who refers to themselves as a "rockstar" should never be hired. Real rock stars get laid by any women they see. It'll be an HR nightmare if what they say is true.
On a mac, the a quake like drop down terminal (or as a prefer, non animated full screen) can be had with TotalTerminal, previously called Visor, but now without SIMBL, or iTerm2. I find absolutely indispensable!
I can't speak for him but on the smallest (7''?) Kindle reading abstracts is a bit of a pain, reading single column per page is fine but double column is annoying enough I'm considering getting reading glasses or a magnifying glass. (I'm 27) I meant to email amazon to find out if you can dismiss the progress bar because with some pdfs it obscures the bottom line which is annoying as all hell. Still highly recommended.

Edit: 10'' would almost certainly be fine. The zoom doesn't really fix the problems with double column pdfs either.
Apple’s Museum That Never Was: Why Does Stanford Keep it Secret?
There was anti-hydrogen that was made and trapped for >1000 seconds in Dec 2010 (http://massen.web.cern.ch/massen/physics/andresen2010d.pdf). Is that what you mean? There are certainly efforts in this direction.
Those adjectives are inherently subjective: the opposite of objective.
Interview with Ann Arbor startup community leader Dug Song
This seems unrelated to my point, but anyway, I don't understand why you would use Gmail if you both loathe Google and prefer an IMAP client.
is Lean Startup just a fad or does it generate real value for venture capitalists and founders?

Why hello, False Dichotomy! I haven't seen you in so long. Must be the US presidential run that's been keeping you so busy.
Pascal was the primary high-level language used for development in the Apple Lisa, and in the early years of the Mac. Microsoft assumed Pascal would become the dominant application programming language, so the early Windows ABI used the Pascal calling conventions. That's why we're stuck with Windows' PASCAL/WINAPI/stdcall and cdecl ABI mess today.
Chinese vendors form alliance to battle Apple and other patent predators
I'm not talking about what's possible, simply what is. Emacs is what's equivalent to a Smalltalk environment for Lisp today.
Ads are not the only model for providing free rides. Other Sustainable models exist:

Peer balancining: producers earn free credits for consumption. This is how Internet backbone peering and Team Fortress 2 work.

Freemium, or light users are too cheap to meter, while heavy users pay. This powered Zynga's IPO and many prosumer niches like Photography and web analytics.

Open core with professional services for customization or support (a mix of Freemium and free software). Cloudera.
Why yes, for example this quote from the Ron Paul Newsletter proves that's he's a filthy racist:

But outside of a minuscule band of KKK members, there are few whose racism is the defining fact of their lives.

Case closed! Ron Paul is a racist!
Your Team's Plus One
Passing a law outright banning it is unnecessary if life is defined at the federal level as beginning at conception.

This is false. Such an official definition would probably be only symbolic. The thing is, the federal government does not have any general police power.

Even if, by their definition, abortion were murder (and there's a lot more defining to be done before we could arrive at that conclusion), it really wouldn't matter. Consider that today, we would define all living people as "alive" (duh), the federal has no laws forbidding murder! Any murder charge is the result of state laws (other than in national parks and in DC, but those are a different argument).

The only way this could affect real life legalities is in the way it interacts with the 13th Amendment. But since that's got the goofy doctrine of incorporation, there would be no net change unless the Supreme Court were to recognize the right with respect to this new/clarified definition. And that just puts the ball right back into the SCOTUS court, which is where it sits today anyway.

(I upvoted you because I think it's worthy of discussion, but this is the way the answer is going to fall out in the end)
I like these types of questions, but I've never been given one. How did you respond?

Here's my take:

My first inclination would be to think about all the gas stations in my neighborhood, and all of those I pass as I travel somewhere. The gas stations start to spread out the further from civilization I go, but I've never gone more than a quarter to half a tank of gas before seeing another. (I have a phobia about running out of gas in the middle of nowhere.)

But the difficult part it is thinking about how gas stations are set up. There is definitely a relationship between population density and gas station count. The less people, the less gas stations -- but conversely there seems to be a point where the population is so saturated (SF proper) that gas stations are scarce inside the city.

But maybe I just think that because of the relative distances I'm traveling. Inside the city I'm walking and see less gas stations, but outside the city I'm driving and covering a longer distance in the same amount of time and see more gas stations.

Also, we seldom see huge lines at the gas stations which means they are plentiful enough to service all available commuting cars without significant queue. If there are just enough to service cars without a queue, maybe we can say this (naively):

X number of people in the US. Three people per family, so X/3 = Y number of cars. (A lot of families have more than one car, I know) If each gas station has an average of Z pumps and is utilized constantly at an average of W% through the day, we need at least Y * Z * W% gas stations to service everyone appropriately.
Flame: My 2d Game Experiment
In C a function pointer can be passed around, and usually a pointer to contect structure is passed around. That happens to be more practical.

References are cool. That makes one point for Pascal.
GoDaddy profited from "Move your Domain Day"
You're way off. Possession, contrary to popular cliché, is not 9/10ths of the law. Property, real or personal, has an owner. In the case of real estate and certain other property (such as a car), that ownership is usually even on record with the county or state.

Short of actual abandonment, which is a narrow, and generally hard-to-prove case, ownership of property in any form cannot be transferred without some sort of contract. Although some property might be transferred by oral contract, that still requires evidence that a contract was formed, which requires a "meeting of the minds". You actually have to prove there was an intent by the owner to transfer the property.

That's a high bar to clear, especially with something as inherently personal as a linkedin account, where any reasonable person would assume the account belongs to the individual, not the corporation.
You have to understand that he hasn't shifted his positions in 30 or so years, except on DADT and the death penalty. So to say he isn't a straight-shooter is absurd.

As for the newsletters, they dealt with economics primarily. Could he have done a better job of overseeing the newsletters? Sure. But they were released over the span of a decade or more and as a whole contained only a few articles with questionable content. I mean, is someone making noise about Gingrich's or Romney's questionable ethics and corruption? Is someone asking why Romney's people bought all the HDD's from Mass. state computers before leaving office? Is someone calling other GOP candidates racist for supporting racial profiling and the drug war? Of course not. But a 20-year old ghostwritten dead horse has been re-re-exhumed and is being paraded on every network "news" show. Am I the only one who sees something wrong with this picture?
This is such a great thread.

I've been hoping to see something tangible from VJ on this for awhile now. He was doing content-based networking even back when he was at Cisco.

To an extent I think recognized by a lot of networking researchers, including IIRC YC's Robert Morris at MIT, the future of the Internet is probably not IPv6 and a network consisting of operating systems addressed by scalar integers.

Instead, IP-type protocols are going to assume the same role that Ethernet and 802.11 (and ATM) play today, as a substrate for connectivity on top of which real applications will be built. The wide area discovery and "session" (OSI style) management roles played by IP and TCP will be played by overlay networks. We have primitive overlays now (DHTs, BitTorrent, Skype) and proprietary ones (CDNs like Akamai, whatever the cable content providers are using to push VOD to the edge), but eventually we'll get a general-purpose open one and the game will be on.

I think this follows straightforwardly from Reed's end-to-end argument. Intelligence belongs to the edges, not the core of the network; intelligence at the core is necessarily a lowest-common-denominator affair, and is hard to scale. That's a key reason why we don't have multicast today. Routers are so bad at scale that tier 1 NSPs filtered BGP announcements by prefix length, because they couldn't handle /32-granular routing for even the tiny subset of machines that actually wanted it (begging the question of how we ever expect IPv6 to do the things the typical HN reader hopes they'll do, like provide them with their own portable /16-equivalents). Multicast effectively asked those same overtaxed routers to address web pages, individually.

That's obviously not going to work when the service model involves random people demanding that AT&T and Level3 add routing table entries for their podcasts. But it scales just fine when the thousands of machines interested in those podcasts share a protocol and an infrastructure for arranging a fan-out overlay.

So many unsolved problems here, from "what is the most reasonable kernel of overlay assembly, group management, and routing to deploy to end-systems" to "how do we avoid congestion collapse in arbitrary group messaging protocols" (a study of multicast reliability algorithms --- at least, from the late 90s when I last did this stuff --- will probably horrify you). But the great thing about it is, nobody has to ask permission to make this stuff work; we can evolve to the real next Internet without getting Comcast's permission, or for that matter (more perniciously) the IETF's.
We have a tab and a mailto link on www.trybloc.com, no one uses the email link and everyone uses the feedback tab. Totally worth it IMO, but we built our own in a day and aren't paying for a third party service.
To be honest, the appearance of Bootstrap is what I like the least about it at this point. Too few people customize the UI, and we're seeing a lot of similar sites as a result. The last thing I want is to see more sites that look like Bootstrap. Might be interesting to start developing Bootstrap themes so we get some design variety yet keep the friendly gridding and robustness.
I recommend Guenther over at http://www.androidicons.com/ — great guy, excellent work, and very reasonable prices. He will work with you and sketch out a brand new icon.
He's an MD not a PhD, as for showing ability to take science into account, I'd say that the politicization of science has been extremely detrimental to the publics trust in it. I've done a lot of research into the philosophy and history of science, and basing policy on "cutting edge" research seems to be wrought with disaster. In general scientists and engineers are extremely optimistic in the systems we can design, control, and understand. In government, we need a conservative approach that waits for science to be firmly established before acting, though a case be made against it, and in general it's better to directly convince the public to do something than use the threat of violence. Of course counter examples do exist (leaded gasoline and CFCs).
Print "e"

is even faster, but also missed the point.
Rare earth crisis: Innovate, or be crushed by China
However if a project was useful for military it would have gotten the funding from military budget. I don't think Ron Paul wants to dismantle the military.
http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/11/how-to-exploit-your-emp...
Ooops sorry, downvoted by accident.

I have a question though: how do people get bitten by this lack of instance persistence?
I haven't heard anything from him that sounds anything like that at all, and it definitely isn't how I understand his position to be.

In the absence of asking the man directly, can you cite a source?
Winning Iowa, or at least winning expectations, correlates with additional fundraising and additional support leading into the following states: NH, SC, FL, NV. A winner is able to build up momentum into those states and have the chance to continue a successful campaign (Obama for America 2006-2008). And to be honest, Iowa and New Hampshire both are special. I've been to both states countless times and the people are fervent in understanding today's issues and the candidates' stances on those issues, more so than any other state in the country. But you are partially correct with your final assessment, winning Iowa does not guarantee a successful campaign run.
That's storage, which is one possible component of practical anti-matter propulsion. You could generate a lot of it efficiently, store what you made, and send it as lightweight, high yield fuel. The other alternative is to somehow make it as you go: find some way to create pairs and annihilate them in the direction opposite to the direction of thrust you desire.

If there were a cost-efficient, energy-efficient, weight-efficient way of generating even very small annihilating pairs, it would be a major propulsion technology. It would also be a major weapons technology, and the fact that we don't know about research being done on such a cool-sounding thing it means that it probably isn't being done, or is being done with surprising secrecy (kind of unlikely).

Going out on a limb, I think that means we probably have solid theoretical grounding for believing it's infeasible.

(obligatory disclaimer: I am (obviously) not a physicist)
I guess I'll just use December to summarize the entire year. As a non-technical co-founder I helped acquire 5-figure investment from a billion-dollar hedge fund, organize a team to form another bootstrapped one and came very close to closing a deal with another simple project that cost me $10 to start...

...then I butted-heads with the investor in the first project and have all but been pushed to the side. Then my technical co-founder for the bootstrapped project started to beef up his own profitable project instead of working together with me, then the deal fell through on my $10 investment. The greatest part was that I even took some time off from school for that (and other things)!

I know - sounds like a failure. Well, it was. In any case I learned a TON about things I like doing, things that do and do not work, and most importantly, I learned a lot about myself.

I'm working on some projects on the side, but I am re-entering school full time in Jan. to get my BA degree. Let us all hope 2012 is prosperous.
Go Slow to Go Fast
The U.S. has sizable rare earth metal reserves http://topicsnw.com/r/map-of-rare-earth-metal-reserves-in-th.... However, when China began selling them on the cheap, the U.S. shut down those mines. Environmental regulations will make reopening these mines costly and a long-term endeavor.
Here's hoping no samoans have their birthdays on December 30th. It would sure suck if my government cancelled the entire day of my birthday!
> He's not even a libertarian: he's perfectly fine with States grossly abridging freedom, just not the federal government.

Exactly this. He's not a libertarian, he's a states rights guy because he wants the power to do things like ban abortion in Texas. I think he has a very regressive political philosophy, that would empower local governments to discriminate against minorities, women, the disenfranchised, etc. People talk about how he wants to legalize drugs, but he would be perfectly fine with state governments creating even more draconian drug laws.
In English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme
Most freelancers I know have registered for VAT, even if they don't have to.

In the UK, you have to register if your turnover is more than £73,000, and the benefits for registering even if you're under that threshold are compelling (except if you almost exclusively provide services to non-registered entities)
Raytheon Books $50 Million in Electronic Warfare Contracts
And the government would post it... why?

As opposed to just keeping the information to themselves, so the leakers wouldn't know they were discovered?

The 'govmint did it' theory makes no sense.
Building web app to help expose government corruption, who should I talk to
I won't get into a long rant here but I have had enough experiences with law enforcement, the "justice" system and other aspects of government to where I am fed up and not going to take it anymore. I'm a web app developer, I've built web apps from start to finish before so I'm going to build something that I feel can help expose the things going on behind the scenes. I personally feel that there is enough info out there on the web that, if intelligentally aggregated and presented, can strike a chord with people, nothing extremist, no propaganda, just links to (or copies if legally permissable) of documents and short explanations of what they mean and why its f'ed up, so to speak, as well as perhaps links to and names of relevant people whom they should consider contacting to voice their displeasure. It would probably be best too to start with a few issues and focus around those at first rather than just a broad application about every issue under the sun.

I already have a lot of experience writing web crawlers, etc to scrape info so this part shouldn't be too hard for me, I am hoping, however to get in touch with others who share an interest and who may know more about the issues to help lead me to places that I can find document sets worth sorting through. Anyone know of any organizations, etc that I should consider getting in touch with?
I like your advice, except for the insistence on 1:1 meetings only. When there's a dispute on the team, the best option is often to grab a meeting room with a whiteboard and hash it out right then and there. Trying to mediate via 1:1 meetings or e-mail threads often just lets the dispute fester and poisons interpersonal relationships among team members.
Angelina Jolie On 'In The Land Of Blood And Honey
Angelina Jolie On 'In The Land Of Blood And Honey
' Authenticity In Serbia
Thanks, I have dyslexia so that would be a great help, it is one of the reasons that I am hesitant to write articles and one of the reasons I post prolifically, writing is a challenge that I must always exercise to keep my ability to do so.
I'd recommend reading "Being Geek" by rands. Its great.

http://beinggeek.com/
What's to follow? It's just a one-time change that makes a lot of sense given their location. They aren't permanently getting rid of Friday. Besides, Hebrew and Muslim calendars are lunar-based and I would imagine not affected by this.
More than 1.5Mbps for starters... appearing at the drop of an API call is another... you can fill in the blanks from here.
Imagine Louis CK as President
Ron Paul is not a racist, and in fact sees racism as the lowest form of collectivism.
The second article, posted by cat, seems to indicate that DCA works: 4 out 5 patients had their life span extended. What is curious is that follow-up (expensive) double blind tests were not performed. Was it because there was no money to be made because DCA is not patentable or was it because the efficacy was marginal?
Insync (“Dropbox For Google Users”) Gets Major Revamp, Goes Free
It should be possible to simply embed or shell out the editing to an external program… I think this'd be the ideal solution.
"Why, sir, there is every possibility that you will soon be able to tax it!" - Michael Faraday
OpenBSD has supported RED for a long time as an option in the packet filter configuration (http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/queueing.html#red). I don't know how closely it follows the original paper, although they do cite it as a reference.

I used RED on an OpenBSD firewall years ago at a small ISP that had too small of a pipe for the number of sites they were hosting out of their closet. It didn't seem to make a remarkable difference, but I wasn't responsible enough at the time to do careful metrics before-and-after.
This is very important imho - the temptation to just do it yourself is for me personally a hard thing to resist, but you will definitely strengthen your team this way and gain more respect from your developers. You obviously want to be there for them for any help and advice, but allow them to be the ones to solve it in the end.
In many cases, there are people who don't do their homework and set up regular, VPS-like web servers on EC2. What happens then, is that they have a real, established website that, weeks, months or years down the road, eventually gets rebooted, and disappears.

The EC2 instances boot to 'boot images', basically. Most of the images are like CDs, and contain just enough to get you ready to install your webserver, database, yadda yadda.

You can configure your image how you like, and then create a new 'image', which will be what your machine looks like after a reboot, but unless you use a persistent data store or external storage of some sort, you can't add new blog posts and expect them to be there after a reboot.

There are easy ways around it, and in fact, are best practices for application design, but compared to the normal shared hosting or VPS configurations that most people know, it is completely different.
first thing that comes to mind.. do your research. A lot of people have gotten in trouble for things like recording a police officer with a cellphone.. make waves, make enemies..

but fight the good fight! best of luck
Show HN: Digital Effects Touch Pad (DEfT Pad)
Hey guys, I'm a long time reader and finally decided to start posting on HN.

I wanted to show off a proof of concept I've been working on (with 4 other friends), the Digital Effects Touch Pad: A touch screen device that gives guitarists the functionality of a distortion pedal with a user interface you don't even have to look at.

Landing Page: signup.deftpad.com

YouTube Demo: http://youtu.be/uviqezxvPdg

Survey (in case you're interested in the device): http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2K6RQBZ

I'd love to get some feedback!