skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our existence here isn't guaranteed. Spreading out raises our chances our survival.

But you're right. What we get from space is intangible. And that shouldn't be underestimated.

Visionary projects expand horizons; they're the essence of life; And that's just what "we" need.

A Mars missions must be manned, for these reasons. Sending robots is killing NASA; the public isn't interested.

We don't need another burning Alexandria. We need a big project, we need growth, we need to show our vitality.
"Most Americans who describe themselves as atheists, for instance, nonetheless believe that their souls will survive the death of their bodies."

Wait, what? How does that make sense?
Yes, you are correct, it is a service.
Tell HN: Anybody else Noticing how Fast Google Indexes Here?
A few times in the last week a HN'er would submit something as a quote where I didn't get the allusion. So I google it -- only to get the same comment coming back from Google as being quoted here, many times only an hour or so old.

A couple of times they were using famous quotes -- but Google ranked the news.yc comment higher than things like Wiki who contained the original plus a bunch of source material.

Wonder how we got so high on the priority list? They must be hitting and updating several times per hour.
Now, I'm sure you are a splendid, law-abiding 100% legit operation.

However from a potential customer point of view and without additional information this could look like a brilliant scam designed to phish for various types of high-value, possibly company-confidential information.

In your FAQ you have:

Q: Are my files and data secure?

A: Yes, your files are uploaded using a secure SSL encrypted transfer service.

To be honest, if I were using such a service, transmission to your servers would be the least of my worries.

This may be something that you could address, perhaps by beefing up the how does it work section. Do you have a little sweatshop somewhere with people retypring data?
Some desktop wallpapering, because I liked that quote.

http://files.markbao.com/entrepreneurialism-1440x900.jpg

http://files.markbao.com/entrepreneurialism-1920x1200.jpg

http://files.markbao.com/entrepreneurialism-1280x1024.jpg
That, and:
"The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong communities. In fact, Zuckerman points out that most Danes and Swedes identify themselves as Christian. They get married in church, have their babies baptized, give some of their income to the church, and feel attached to their religious community—they just don't believe in God."

Any Danes or Swedes want to weigh in on this? I don't understand this at all.
If you rotate the favicon of HugeURL by 90 degrees to the left,you'll get the favicon of Foo Hack. Were they made by the same person?
Business friendly in New Zealand would be considered downright hostile in the US.
Doing > Reading if you are that way inclined. I learned by buying an arduino starter pack + a couple of shields from ladyada, putting them together.
Some of the worst serial-killers were deeply religious ("even after all I did, I know God forgives all"); doesn't that hint that you don't need to be religious to be nice?
Java will never, ever replace c++

Of course not.

Because there will always be a need for stuff that "really compiles" rather than "compiles with respect to
the JVM" for both performance, and reliability issues.

Compile-time optimizations are great and GC kills caches and locality, but there are run-time optimizations too to balance that argument.

In my personal opinion, Java is a fad for children. However, that may be a bit harsh.

Yes, too harsh and not rational. I dislike languages that imposed themselves by hundreds of millions of advertisement and lobbying instead of having programmers freely choose.

<the car and teenagers rant>

Sorry, no. The equivalent of the teenagers in programming actually dislike Java and are into more dynamic languages, like Python, Ruby, and even Javascript.

not as "easy to program"

It is amazing how easier it is nowadays to program in C++ with the latest template libraries (STL and Boost.)

<the pointer rant>

C++ is distancing itself from the low level C-style pointers (well, assembly-style for the purists.) You need them less now. It is kind of tricky to avoid leaks but if you memorize a dozen patterns you are safe.
Being famous doesn't preclude being illogical.
Corolla fanbelt to help reveal Apollo data
Pretty cool business idea, your solving a real problem in a way that generates actual revenue.

Also, since your already writing software to process pdf data, you might want to leverage that to start a side business providing spreadsheet info on SEC filings. Alot of traders and businesses pay good money for that kind of data.
Make that clear then. I thought it was automated as well.
I think this is spot-on Mr G. I wrote a similar blog recently, although targeted more broadly than just IT: http://www.aliveworld.com/members/pengo01/blog/archive/2008/...
http://catb.org/hacker-emblem/

The glider is an "animal" from conway's game of life and has been popularized as a "hacker" symbol for a while, though I don't think it ever caught on in a huge way.
I've been through the situation. There is no magic sauce, it literally takes years to work through the process. Find people that can support you through the process.
While I do agree that electronics is learned by experimentation, IMHO the Arduino board is a bad starting point.

I think that the best way to learn electronics is to start with the very basics (resistors, capacitors, coils, voltage dividers, simple RC and RL circuits, etc), then learn something about op-amps, then move on to nonlinear devices such as diodes and transistors. No math is needed, and simple circuits are easy to build. Building an analog amplifier is not hard, and it's quite rewarding to design and build something that actually works. If one is really devoted to the art of electronics, building a tube amplifier is even more rewarding ;-)

After the basics of analog electronics, one can move to digital circuits, learn about interfacing, what the difference between RTL and TTL is, etc, etc. Playing with logic gates on a breadboard is fun and instructive. The basics of DAC's and ADC's are fundamental too.

Finally, one is ready to move to microprocessors and stuff like the Arduino. Knowing the basics, one can actually build cool stuff with microprocessors, simple actuators and sensors. One knows how to build and connect sensors to microcontrollers, one knows what's happening in the ADC, one understands what makes it all work.

I believe that starting with the Arduino board right away is like choosing Visual Basic as a first programming language: it hides the interesting details, and it prevents one from seeing the big picture. Just a personal opinion, of course.
That is a really good point. I'll think about ways to beef up the How It Works section and possibly the FAQ's. I'll also think about ways to assure the legitimacy... perhaps registering with the Better Business Borough, et cetera... No sweatshop yet with people retyping data, just using a variety of tools and software to do it in house for now.
My question:

Are "Capital gains rates" different from "capital gains taxes"?

Because he says:

"Capital gains rates will go up, too." - http://awurl.com/GC4ypKrSY#first_awesome_highlight

and then he says:

"He also plans to eliminate all capital gains taxes on startup and small businesses to encourage innovation and job creation." - http://awurl.com/hICQbvM3H#first_awesome_highlight
The article says this:

And women really do feel the cold more than men, but this is because they are better at conserving heat than men. Mark Newton, a scientist at W.L. Gore, the company that makes Gore-Tex, and a researcher at the University of Portsmouth, explains: “Women have a more evenly distributed fat layer and can pull all their blood back to their core organs.”
There's something weird about reading an August 2008 presentation that says "Source Control: RCS, CVS, Subversion" -- right between slides mentioning "64-bit" and "cloud computing".

I haven't used CVS in at least 5 years, and I've never even seen RCS in use. Part of me wonders if RCS is Rackspace's secret weapon.
A lot of this points out why I don't understand "left-leaning" folk.

When the minimum is forced up, being better than the minimum gets harder.

A lot of that can be drawn out in a straightforward way on an introductory Economics class chalkboard. It makes sense & no one rational would argue that regardless of the lvel, employment would stay the same. At $100 p/h, the level of employment would decrease. On the chalkboard, the biggest most straightforward effect would be that most jobs paying less then that would cease to exist. The other effects of pushing the remaining low pay jobs over the line & a few of the ones close to it up a bit seem to have a hard job of it to make the whole thing worthwhile.

But the real world experience doesn't paint such a grim picture. Minimum wage changes, have not been shown in real world case studies to have very much of an effect on employment rates. The effects are usually cloudy & cannot be distinguished from the effects of say, a credit crisis.

Now economists can rationalise this in lots of ways. Maybe the labor market tends to place employers of low wage employees in better bargaining positions, so when you look at the difference between what a worker is willing to earn (there is no floor other then what his other options set) & what an employer is willing to pay (the marginal output of that labor), they settle closer to the bottom. Perhaps the various wildcards of social & psychological effects of the difference between a minimum wage job & welfare supplements or some such wishy-washy effect is screwing with things. You can even come up with all sorts of circular sounding arguments about stimulating spending by putting money in the hands of the poor. To put it on the chalkboard you need to talk abut it in terms of information availability, market power, mobility, secondary effects etc.

But when you take a step back, there just aren't many good examples of minimum wage humiliating itself in the same way that grain price floors or wool subsidies have. For such a heavy handed economic policy it has remarkably little catastrophe that goes with it. No stockbroker surpluses being dumped on unsuspecting thord world markets. No stockpiles of teachers that need to be refined into ethanol at a cost of 20X higher then cane ethanol.

The automatic rejection of minimum wage increases based on the classic economic theories is not rational.
Given the author's political leanings, I couldn't help wondering if this was a veiled argument for bringing back child labor. :-)
would you happen to know if the arduino starter kit make sells now comes with the new arduino duemilanove? in fact, I can't find that on the make:arduino store at all, only the older diecimila...
Leveraging parallelism on a single multi-core machine has a definite resemblance to leveraging parallelism in a cluster of machines: memory access costs are likely to be non-uniform, for example (the cores on chip X are "closer" to memory region A than the cores on chip Y, etc.)

This paper examines Map/Reduce performance on multi-core/SMP machines:

http://csl.stanford.edu/~christos/publications/2007.cmp_mapr...
You don't get quite the same image, though. Note that mine is anti-aliased, and thus the circles appear a lot more circular.

The glider emblem was made famous by ESR: http://www.catb.org/~esr/hacker-emblem/

A lot of sites use the glider as their favicon.
You won't be able to hide all of it that easily.
The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging ... And When To Use Each One
Perhaps with a lot of people having HN in Google Reader helps them index it a lot quicker (they don't really have to crawl, seeing how they're already fetching the feed fairly often). I notice updates to my personal blog will appear in google very fast (30 minutes).
How people really use the iPhone
In season 3, episode 32, "The Cryonic Woman," Fry and Leela trade career chips. He thaws his ex from the 20th century, and she delivers pizzas.
In my experience, MS does not seem filled with puzzle-oriented smart people.
Google picks up blogs very quickly -- we get the same thing happenning at http://www.amahi.org
Why should a single mom have to bust her butt to support her 13 year-old son...

Because she birthed him. Look, if a 13 year old kid wants to get a job, more power to them. However, if they don't, it's the parents' responsibility to provide for that child until they're an adult mainly because, at least in this society, kids aren't raised to be factory workers by 13.

You're looking at it from a perhaps pragmatic point of view, but you're missing the human factor; children aren't some investment you can liquidate if it doesn't work out. Having a child is a conscious decision to bring another human being into this world -- a human being who never actually asked to be brought. Once you do that it becomes your responsibility to care for and raise that person (or find someone else who can) regardless of whether or not they provide a return on investment.
Sadly, most of these fail horribly if you're looking for Common Lisp code.

For example, on Google Code Search, "lang:lisp" turns up Elisp files. "lang:cl" gives Tcl code (!), and "lang:commonlisp" returns nothing. There doesn't seem to be any way to search for Common Lisp code.

github Code Search has a popup menu with the entry "Common Lisp", which looks promising, but it returns a bunch of *.el files (which it labels "(Common Lisp)", strangely).

Other code search sites I've tried are similar. If I want to find Common Lisp code, the best place is still pulling Norvig or Steele or Kiczales off the shelf.
Everyone is born an atheist. Even the pope was an atheist at some point. It's not that hard.
Google likes YC companies.
I don't think people who choose not to have kids are immature, it's a legitimate choice. I just mention it as a measure of certain changes. Nothing necessarily bad or good about it.
Wall St jobs axe threatens 70,000
ITunes to finally add another major label’s DRM-free music?
One of me!
Lazy Linux: 11 secrets for lazy cluster admins
He claims he was misunderstood.

His page on the speech: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~varanus/Controversy.html

Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mims-Pianka_controversy
Have you had much experience with Microsoft employees?
Excellent idea, I'll definitely think about that.
November Australian Startup Index Is Out
Can I get a 1280x1024 version? =]
MGM to post full movies on Youtube
I think the title above is a bit misleading. Nowhere does the original commenter say they are "turning into an atheist"

It seems this is a case of doubting the faith your were raised in. After all, if your faith is only what your parents have passed on to you, then it's not really your faith.

I personally think part of growing up is finding your own faith (which could include becoming an atheist). Part of that process includes exploration, doubt, and questioning what your parents believe.

That seems to be what this commenter is doing.
prospero, I have been looking for C++ replacement for desktop programs non-stop for at least 5 years and found nothing. Rubies, lisps and pythons are great in a little dark corner of server-side development where everything is under your control, but for targeting thousands of varying desktops you just can't take that route since many additional variables come into play: size of downloads, performance, startup times, windows compatibility, etc etc etc. Plus, all VM-based languages suffer from so-so integration into native OS or/and excessive weight. You can write an IDE or an Excel replacement in them, sure, but most desktop software tends to be much smaller.

My last C++ project was a background daemon that would download your RSS feeds and do some fancy parsing. I wish I could show you how much memory Java prototype has eaten vs C++ version processing the same OPML file.

No, C++ is not "essentially worthless" without Boost. In fact I never use all of Boost: your build times becomes #1 conversation topic in the office when you do. It's better to cherry-pick a few important and lightweight pieces (like pointers, any, functional, etc). Don't forget about HUGE selection of plain C libraries too.

Whatever C++ has been used for is still being written and re-written in C++ as we speak. Newer languages and paradigms wiped out the giant Visual Basic army of developers (yes, this is what people used to code "basecamps of the 90s" in, but I don't see these languages threaten C++/C/Obj-C domination for desktop software on Win/Linux/OSX.

In fact, how many native Python or Ruby GUI libraries are out there? I haven't heard of one. Only bindings to GTK/Qt.

With all that said, I will be the first to jump the wagon. If I ever get so lucky.
You discarded all of it because you didn't like that one part? This type of behavior always annoys me. There are lots of interesting and important thoughts here. I agree that these ideas need to be closely examined and refined a great deal before being put into practice -- but I'm not just going to shout "FAIL" -- because while that may be gratifying to the ego, it is utterly counter-productive.
Seriously? What's with spreading stupid shit like this?
The way I understand it, atheism is an explicit rejection of the existence of gods. You can't be born taking this position because you have not been introduced to the concept yet.

But I do understand that you are saying everyone is born not believing in a god or gods because they have not been introduced to the concept.
Oh, but he delivered that speech on April Fool's day!

Indeed, there will always be some pretty evil people in the world with designs like these. Let's hope that he doesn't have the specifics nailed down...
Is this part of a new generation of pointless web apps? I don't see how this is useful?
When the American elections were nearing the close I saw a headline on CNN that said that McCain had conceded flash by. I couldn't go to the snippet (it was video which my work computer isn't allowed to look at) so I Googled 'McCain Concedes' the first query got me two results from very obscure news sources outside of the US, I hit search again immediately and got three more hits including CNN and Fox etc. Hit search again and got screeds of results including the major news sources. In less than 30 seconds Google had managed to index a huge number of news articles as they got published. I was very impressed.
Makes perfect sense: they've clearly separated traditions and habits from religion.

The tradition of getting married in church is no different from a habit of screaming "jesus motherfucking christ!" when faced with a scary chance of seeing Texas Tech playing in a national championship game: no reason to call someone religious on both grounds.
yup it does now.
"It's not that hard."

You have no clue what you are talking about.
If you've taken part before, you will realize that the goal of CPC was never to hire the winners. There are puzzlers at Microsoft, and people who like solving puzzles at schools, and the event brought such people together. It's really meant to be a day of fun, doing something intellectually challenging, that gosh isn't like your all the homework you have due the next week.

As quoted from their FAQ, "While this is not quite a recruiting event, we will be accepting résumés, so feel free to bring one along! And of course, we’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have about working at Microsoft." I also vaguely remember a previous version of their website crediting the fact they the CPC was inspired by the MIT Mystery Hunt.

The technical interviews that they conduct on campus and on site are wildly different. In fact, from my recruiting experience, it was more the finance companies that had brainteasers for interview questions.
Sure. Just updated the comment for both aspect ratios.
New Deal 2.0
I think most "internet atheists" (for lack of a better term) would define atheism simply as a lack of a belief in god(s).

Beyond that there is usually the distinction between those who claim that there is no god or gods (strong atheism) and those who simply lack a belief (weak atheism).

Edit: Wikipedia has a pretty extensive discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism#Definitions_and_distinc...
I've worked for a market consulting firm and so have experience working with many reports and large spreadsheets and I think this is definitely something that can be valuable to many firms.

My two biggest barriers for using the service would be your price and time. I understand this isn't a fully automated service, which is why it's expensive and time consuming -- but this is exactly the problem. If this was an automatic conversion app that took a few seconds to do the work and cost $20 a month it would look very appealing. As it is, $200 or $100 per report is too expensive in my opinion.

But these are just my thoughts -- I'm not part of your target market anymore so cannot honestly comment whether I would use this or not.
Does participating in these debates make us dumb?
In the technical sense it makes sense: Atheism means non-belief (or disbelief) in theism (& maybe also deism). You can hold all sorts of supernatural beliefs without a god-equivalent. So you can vaguely believe in souls, reincarnation, afterlife, spiritual energies, qi, prana, karma, darma, etc & still be an atheist.

In the looser sense of common usage, people often call themselves atheists if they do not believe in a formalised or institutionalised set of beliefs & do not explicitly believe in (a) god.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Tell+HN%3A+Anybody+else+Notic...

http://files.markbao.com/hngoogle.png

Indexed says 52 minutes. At the time of this comment (and screenshot) it says it indexed it 21 minutes ago. Index speed looks like about 30 minutes here, though you can never tell.
You know, a teenage mother raised a man who was just elected to the most powerful position on Earth.

Anecdotal, yes. But your comment relies on a stereotype. How do we know that teenage mothers do not quickly start maturing from the point they become teenage mothers, relative to their peers? They almost have no choice.

(I say that knowing of some concrete counter-examples to what I just argued. But that's just anecdotes, too.)
"I've been trying to work out how I can 'clear the decks' and then rebuild with whatever is worth keeping..."

These are the people I respect the most, whatever belief they finally decide on. This personal journey seems to set apart all of the most courageous and intelligent people I know.
On the Consistency of Quick-UX
Ditch the laptop and suit if you wanna stay alive, Mr Corporate
A writer of unique talents, I hope
OK, but you can't "identify yourself as Christian" and then not believe in the existence of God. That's mainly my confusion, maybe it's a poor choice of words for the writer.