skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I personally feel like I've already won the lottery for all of the things I have no control over: living in a wealthy country, not having to worry about food or water, being reasonably healthy and having access to healthcare, etc."

Do you actually feel like you've "won the lottery" or do you just try to remind yourself how lucky you are? I've read a number of studies that suggest we internally compare our status relative to those around us. So while I don't have to worry about access to clean water (which much world doesn't have), I don't personally know anyone without access to clean water, so I don't really feel all that lucky about it.

Conversely, I don't personally know anyone with $100 million, so if I won $100 million in the lottery, I would feel quite lucky.

I guess I ask because I'm curious if you can actually "force" or reason yourself into feeling lucky, or if that feeling is dependent on your environment.
Maybe there should be a 'jobs' link that links to a pleekant installation for jobs at pleekant that could also serve as a demo of sorts? :P
How To Root Pantech Crossover P8000
Good idea. Thanks for the feedback.
You can work/sleep while on the flight. So now it come down to 2 x 2 hours of lost time vs. 36 hours in which you're surely not as productive/relaxed as you would be in your home or office.

Even the top tier of business travelers, who fly first class or business and stay in very good hotels, tend to prefer being home. I don't see how a driver-less car makes "being on the road" a zero-drag experience.
Blogging is dead.

I ran a fairly successful blog (front paged here a number of times). I recently cut the cord and abandoned it. The blogging tail is getting shorter and shorter as more and more people move to the closed and walled gardens.

I shut it down because it was the illusion of accomplishment: every time I got a hit entry I would assure myself that I've moved forward in some way, achieved something, etc. Whenever I thought about doing something actually beneficial, the easiest procrastination was to just go do a blog post instead, imagining that every hit actually meant something. That I was somehow accumulating assets in something worthwhile.

It achieves nothing, at least if you're already established. If you're new to the industry and unproven then it's a good way of trying to fake it before you make it, but if you're professionally grounded, it's a liability as much as a benefit.

Worse there is a tendency for readership to start to control what you write about, which is one reason I moved to more free-form content on a walled garden: I'll write about a caterpillar in the yard, my new lawn tractor, and some new development in Android, all because I no longer fool myself into thinking the blog is a business. It's just some random thoughts, whether read or not.

The time spent writing it -- even if you're pretty successful at it -- would almost always be better spent on other endeavours. To bring up some examples oft cited on here, John Gruber is one of the most successful bloggers, as is Marco Arment. They're reduced to trying to pitch t-shirts and affiliate links. Neither of them -- despite volumes of words spilled onto epaper -- change anything in the industry through their respective blogs. A lot of words evaporating into the ether, the converted incited into a chorus of the echo chamber.
I found one bug: you cannot create a zero argument lambda, e.g. (lambda () 42) will not work. You could also benefit from separate `let' construct, because simulating them with lambdas is a bit painful.

Apart from that, it works quite nicely (I was positively surprised you went for lexical scoping), but without macros, you can hardly say it's a Lisp, it's a language with Lispy syntax.
My 1st Weekend Hack: SouthWhere, for when you're not sure where you'll end up
What about watching humans race against robot cars?

That would be something I would consider watching.
Have you ever watched humans race cars? I would watch robots race simple courses before I'd watch people, especially if different algorithms are competing. It'd be more like watching StarCraft bots compete.
I'm using version 21.0.1180.79 on Windows Vista. Any time I try to do something I get this in the console:

Uncaught TypeError: Property 'css' of object [object Window] is not a function button.js:349
$.extend.paint button.js:349
$.extend.repaint tweaker.js:121
editorChange tweaker.js:102
f.event.dispatch jquery.min.js:3
f.event.add.h.handle.i jquery.min.js:3
It's funny you call that late at night, I call it early in the morning. But I totally agree with you. I wake up daily at 3:10 and can get about 3 or 4 hours of good uninterrupted work done. It's also a great time to go to the gym because few else are there.
As a Founder, how do you handle administrative tasks?
The Textbook Industry & Greed: My Story
Are virtual assistants, automated accounting like mint, what services you use?
You need only one process, and, furthermore it being push means it's possible to handle it with way more resources (you don't really have to maintain anything on the client, excluding the relatively rare situations when something important changes and you have to tell about that to the server).
Ask HN: what to do after getting let go?
I'm in my 20s & I'm a self taught rails & javascript developer & I was recently let go. I believe I was let go due to a personality conflict with my supervisor but the why is less important that what's next. I would really appreciate some advice because I'm still new to the dev career path & I've never left a job involuntarily before. I'm thinking I could use some time off to work on projects that make me a better candidate.

I have a year's worth of experience with Ruby, JS & RoR but I've been coding off & on since I was in my teens. I want my next job to be with people I can learn from & do great work with while having few work-politics concerns & working with innovative tech. When I look at my resume, etc. my gut is that I come up a bit short of what would make me a standout candidate at the kind of place I'd like to work for. I always get feedback from co-workers that I'm smart, & fun to work with, so I think I need a technical accomplishment that makes me look GOOD rather than good enough.

My initial plan is to write a small node + backbone app that uses a big API like twitter, facebook or instagram to work with tools innovative companies use. I think I'll enjoy that but I'm also hoping to show potential employers that I am working with timely technologies (my old job was a Rails 2.3.x app). I have also heard from a lot of employers that they'd like to see contributions to open source, & I'm hoping by working with newer open source frameworks I will use some interesting open source libraries that I could contribute to (everyone says contribute to open source that you use but when I was working with Rails 2.3 I was always using old libraries no one was contributing to).

Is this a good plan? What would you do if you were me? Thx!
It doesn't seem unreasonable to split water using a solar or nuclear energy source, and then use the hydrogen and oxygen as rocket fuel to actually move the asteroid. Anderson's goal is not a net energy gain, it's to move the asteroid.
I think he's not de-hydrolyzing water to get energy per se, but to generate thrust.

Say, you've got a nuclear reactor (or whatever else is more practical) on an asteroid. You cannot use the energy from the reactor to propel the rock, you need to generate thrust. So you take water, you split hydrogen & oxygen, you burn it, you get thrust.
The part of this that surprised me is that the amount of radioactive fission products in the reactor is fairly insignificant for the first part of a mission -- a nuclear thermal rocket can be well out of Earth's orbit before it's as radioactive as the RTG that powers the Curiosity rover.
Ask HN: Are websites generally considered to be free or nonfree software?
I was listening to talk today by Richard Stallman regarding free software. He spoke about Facebook and it dawned on me that nearly every website does not meet the criteria for free software.

Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

While client-side code for websites is freely available for review, most websites contain server-side code that is not. To me, it seems this would not be free software.

To judge this criteria I went to www.gnu.org and was unable to locate any mechanism for obtaining the source code for the site. There is, for example, a search function. That POSTs a request to the server which runs some algorithm and returns data back. However, it does not seem to be possible to determine what's happening on the server side.

So my question, and maybe I'm looking at this wrong, is do members of the free software movement see web sites as free or non-free? Is there such a thing as a free web site and what would one have to do to make sure that a website could be considered free?
I think this also has to do with your own experiences in life so far.

I can identify with il's point in that regard. My life so far has had its share of downs. So now that everything is going well, I keep being reminded of the importance of having the simple things in life and how I am very lucky to have a roof over my head, a decent meal every day and close friends I care about and who care about me. As far as that goes, I do actually feel I have won the lottery. What else could I possibly want or need?

All this has completely done away with any sense of ambition I had years ago. back then, I had to have a high paying job, fancy gadgets and everything that came with 'being successful' (or so I thought). I have now realized that none of this matters even a tiny bit. To me at least it is all completely irrelevant. I learned to take nothing for granted and its the simple things I mentioned which make it all worth it for me.
You give a list of things you'd have to teach before you can explain how the #each works, but are you sure you really need to teach how #each works to explain what it does?

I think I would rather teach that #each is a method that iterates over the elements of the array calling the code block for every element.

This only requires you to teach variables, arrays, the if statement, goto/jumps and objects with their methods.

And frankly it being ruby, I don't think it's bad at all to teach objects and their methods, before teaching iterations.

Maybe it's not in line with your hard way philosophy, but explaining for loops with goto/jumps seems a bit abstract to me. Don't you need to explain how instructions are mapped to memory addresses and the instruction register to really do so?

An each method can be explained with a simple recursive function, no need to dive into hocus pocus CPU details.
The article views only a single definition of "idiom", ignoring several that actually define a "social more".

The useful content of the article is overshadowed by the vainglorious hyperbole.
I didn't see anything about using the H2 O2 as an energy source. Presumably, he meant that they would use some other energy source (presumably solar) to hydrolyze the water, then use that to generate thrust.

I have no idea if that's the best way to convert solar energy to thrust, or if it's even feasible, but bringing perpetual motion into it seems a little harsh.
This is beautiful. I plan on using this, thanks.
Saying sorry doesn't justify doing it ...
Over the years Bitcoin has had a tendency to have spikes of speculative trading. Most of these spikes last for fairly short periods of time and tend to settle a standard trading rate.

I don't think it's indicative of the viability of the currency itself. Just think of oil. There are frequent speculative spikes in price and subsequent falls in price but the oil still flows and people still buy it.
Yeah, I JUJ'd it.™ (just use jQuery)
8. Write for techcrunch, without solid examples.
for people that are pro apple - apple didn't revolutionize anything, there were plenty of third party apps and companies prior to imessage that were providing the same service along with being cross platform. Apple is actually cannibalizing those services that were providing a valuable service to their customers and now are cutting them out. This is nothing more than further attempt to lock in users into their ecosystem.
Why I Hate Buying Tickets
>I'm not sure that teaching a construct that you'll never end up using is helpful.

But that was precisely Zed's point! You will certainly end up using it, though you may never use it in Ruby. .each is not transferable, and for-loops are. Zed's teaching Ruby as an introduction to programming, not just to Ruby in itself.
Awesome! Yeah went out of town and my server crashed. :( Should be good now.
Adobe joke goes here.
do the man the basic favour of assuming he isn't an idiot. the problem here isn't energy, it's momentum; storing energy over a long time and then releasing it in precisely timed bursts to eject reaction mass when you need a course correction is perfectly feasible way to do things. you could probably even supplement the energy collection with some sort of moon-based laser if you threw enough up-front resources at the problem.
Why won’t Microsoft let you store porn in the cloud?
Yeah, im not much of a designer. I'm working on it. But im not planning to make money off it so its not getting my full attention right now. But if any designers would like to work together. Let me know! I think it could be a cool service!
Agree, great post
I wholeheartedly agree, having also tried both ways. However, too many businesses "spike and move on", and the "stabilize" never happens. This is why people advocate for TDD.
How is iMessage better than GTalk on Android (except for the end to end encryption)? GTalk BTW. is a slighlty modified XMPP. It is not even incompatible with regular XMPP clients. It seems to have some additional features to save power by not sending presence updates when its not necessary.

AFAICT Apple did not revolutionize Instant Messaging with iMessage.
If you're just doing GUI stuff and don't need low-level access, AIR will do just fine.

It's a bit bloated and slow and doesn't have native widgets at all, but for a one-time wizard it should be fine.

Download TweetDeck (which is an AIR app) to get a feel for what to expect.

Also, AIR is still alive and kicking. It seems like Adobe is planning for Air to outlive (in-browser) Flash.
Two Barclays commodities analysts produced a gleefully scathing research note on this project, and the Financial Times concluded that "The space mining talk amounts, however, to no more than hot air and gobbledegook", all based on laughably inadequate points of comparison. For example:

"Their calculations were based on Nasa’s forthcoming OSIRIS-REx mission, which aims to launch a probe in 2016 to pluck samples from an asteroid called 1999 RQ36 and bring them to Earth.

Nasa hopes it will be home by 2023, with a couple of ounces of dirt. By then, the cost will have reached $1bn – made up of $800m for the vehicle, plus another $200m for the rocket launch.

Since that outlay will return just a couple of ounces of material, Barclays says it could use it as a baseline to estimate break-even prices for asteroid mining. Using the metrics proposed by Barclays, the Financial Times commodities team estimates that copper prices would need to rocket from today’s $3.81 an ounce to $476m for a similarly funded space mining project to cover its costs.

Clearly, it does not look like base metals from space are likely to provide a good return on capital.

So what about precious metals? Gold trades at $1,665 a troy ounce, setting a price of $518m a troy ounce for space-gold to break even."

"Asteroid mining is for space cadets", The FT, April 30, 2012 - http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9387fdc4-9081-11e1-8adc-00144...

Astonishing that anyone can take this seriously as a baseline. You don't become a commodities analyst for being able to include flexibility and imagination in your analytical capability.
Pineapple.io: Like reddit for design resources
In my opinion, writing and hosting a blog serves several purposes. One, to hone my writing chops. Two, to express my own ideas in my own way... because it's my own "house" online. Three, I've actually landed some fairly lucrative client opportunities because of my blog. Four, it gives me a "home base" content repository from which to draw other ideas, participate in other discussions etc...

There are others, but these are the main ones.
It's hard to spoil superior technology with just single extra button.
Happiness is a fairly broad category of mental states, which encompasses contentment. Happiness is linked to both a set of internal subjective feelings (impossible to describe, as there's no reference point. See also: the color red), and to a particular set of external behaviours which are consistent across the majority of humans (smiling, laughing, etc). If I wanted to communicate the internal subjective experience of happiness, I'd do it the same way I would the subjective experience of a color- I'd wait until I saw you experiencing it, and then I'd say "That feeling, right there. That's happiness." This is easier with colors, because I could just point to one, but it works with emotions too.

Much like yourself, I tend to think of happiness as a barometer of sorts. If I'm unhappy, it means that something's wrong which needs fixing. It's not hard to see how this perspective can be reversed, though. To say that I seek to be happy and I do so by finding/building a satisfactory environment, or to say that I seek a satisfactory environment and I gauge this via happiness- in practical terms these perspectives are indistinguishable.
I can understand, however, did you know that Svbtle is 'inspired' from http://drawar.com/ ?
No, he's completely failing because the CEO identified regular one-on-one's with team members as a high priority, and he wasn't doing it.
Not exactly. I've been using Emacs for years and am idly learning Vim. There are just some UI and interaction ideas I wanted to try out.
I wish Google would integrate "I'm feeling lucky" into Chrome.

For example, I Google "bootstrap" a few times every weekday. I know Google's first result will be correct. I'd love to be able to shift-enter or something in chrome after entering a search term to skip the Google SERP entirely.
What time do you go to bed? Or are you in polyphasic sleep?
I wonder if this approach supports separate virtualenvs for each gunicorn server? (Each with a custom set of packages.)
On the contrary, I think the observation that Bitcoin's behavior is similar to that of other commodities speaks volumes about its (non-)viability as a currency.
It still is. In fact AIR might be the simplest choice out there, since you can develop for it with web based technologies. But it is severely restricted when it comes to accessing native desktop APIs. The default look and feel are very ...web-ish, that might or might not be what you want. One thing for sure is that the look is pretty consistent as they include a Webkit rendering engine.

My biggest gripe with with AIR is that the user has to install Adobe AIR before he can install your application and you know how Adobe installations are.
It's the 90c rating.

Got some new numbers after checking welding cables, looks like 1/2 inch radius will do, I calculate weight of 128 pounds for 15 feet, which is "better" - but still completely impractical.
And here comes the backlash. The last remaining people who use that button and those who are just upset because they were alerted to a change anywhere will all come out of the woodwork to try to convince us all that Google is evil, stupid, etc. because they use the button or they somehow know better.

Google doesn't just make changes at random. There must be a very compelling reason to change the "I'm feeling lucky" button. The simplest explanation is that no one uses it anymore. Good for them. The few who do use it will survive and continue using Google despite claims to the contrary. I think what they've done with it is cool. Why keep a UI element in place that no one uses?
Why is that? I worked with exactly one good product manager in the last 5 years, and she used to be a manufacturing engineer. I think the reason is a lack of respect for the product they're developing (or maybe just the coders making it).

I work for one of Zynga's competitors. We have the same culture of product managers running the show. None of them understand how software development works or how to get the best work out of their engineers. Maybe I just need to realize that building the actual product is only 5% of running a business. But I'm having a real hard time believing that.
I'm sorry, but this post is absolutely ridiculous in every way.

I think most programmers understand what is meant when people say a programming "idiom", just like most people understand that it's OK to call small representative computer graphics "icons" even though they're not physical religious symbols.

Words gain new meanings in new contexts, that's how language evolves. Complaining about it after-the-fact is just stupid. Nobody's going to start calling these "social mores" because of this article.

And as to why ".each" is a horrible looping construct, the only justification is that it's harder to teach. Well, sure, if you're teaching someone programming for the first time it's probably better to start with "for". That doesn't mean ".each" isn't superior for experienced programmers, though. The author doesn't address any of the advantages to ".each".
How does your phone know that another phone has iMessage? Is it set up manually by the user or do phones lookup the phone number on Apple's servers? If the latter then would it be possible to reverse engineer this to test if any number was an iOS device?
The Strokes - Alone, Together
The presentation was made at the NASA Future on space operations workshops
Why is being in love not mentioned? Or sex?

Are you just happier being alone?
This is completely false. When i'm out at a bar and I meet a cool girl, she gives me her number. I type it into my phone and begin sending her a text. Instantly my [Send] button shifts from green to blue to indicate that she is an iMessage user. It's seamless. It falls back on SMS automatically if iMessage fails. Otherwise, it just works.

Having multiple platforms for messaging is silly. Absolutely silly. If I have an iPhone and so does my sister/mom/random-stranger what am I guaranteed that we both have in common? One single messaging app. I don't want to ask a random stranger if they've used X Y Z free messaging app, that doesn't fly.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity fired its laser for the first time on Mars
I've gotten just north of 100 on Infineon. I wonder if Thunderhill has more straightaways.
Sadly there's very little space for startups to fix this. Live Nation/Ticket Master have a monopoly. I'm not sure how on earth they were allowed to merge. It's like merging all of the record labels with Apple/iTunes.

Yes, you can buy tickets on other sites but there's very little space for innovation and they hold the key, if they don't want you to do something innovative they can stop you and if you do succeed you're still funding your competitor.
Most likely because people expect to see it but few use it. So now the few who still use it will be surprised (pleasantly or otherwise), word will spread, and people who didn't use it before will start using it again with the new functionality. So instead of removing a classic UI element of the classic Google homepage they just changed the functionality. I think that's logical.
Websites are like software : they are non-free unless they're free.

gnu.org is not free. Some websites are free, but they are very rare.

I still got an example[1] (although in french). A website about functionnal programming, featuring courses and a forum. Link to the code is in the footer ("Code du site", i.e. "Website's code") linking to http://gitorious.org/pm/pm

[1] http://progmod.org/