skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Be glad that patents have inspired Russ Parsons to improve the way we make turkeys. What, he never filed for a patent on his improvements? Whodathunkit?

For those who have no clue what I'm talking about, see http://www.food52.com/blog/2713_russ_parsons_drybrined_turke... for some history on drybrining Thanksgiving turkey. (The technique has only been used on turkeys since 2006, so the history is mostly recent, even though dry brining is older.)

If you don't know what that is, for your next turkey you cook I highly recommend mixing 1 tablespoon of salt for every 5 pounds of turkey with whatever spices you'd like to taste in your turkey, sprinkle it over the turkey, put it in a plastic bag, and leave it in the fridge for several days before cooking normally. (You may have to search a little to find a turkey that has not already been brined, but you really want that because otherwise the salt balance is wrong and you don't get YOUR herbs in it.)

You will get a much better turkey. And no, it is not patented. True innovation and patents are orthogonal.
Ah, I guess I misunderstood. Apologies.
The radioactive waste discussed is Thorium. If we develop Thorium reactors, we could have carbon-free power with greatly reduced weapons proliferation risk, two orders of magnitude more plentiful fuel, and less waste which only lasts 300 years, as opposed to 100,000+. Also, this would open up domestic US reserves of rare earth metals.
> Rare earths always occur alongside the radioactive elements thorium and uranium, and safely separating them is a complex process.

http://www.motherjones.com/documents/463290-ntn-lynas-report
When you mine rare earths, you often get Thorium.
He also mentions switchgrass as a problematic source. What other plant sources of ethanol should be considered that would offer a better tradeoff?
Hacking Meat: Tom Mylan on Better Bacon & Technology
It was 1.3, but the interesting features were disabled in production builds until 1.5, http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-0-prefa...
We don't know for sure because we don't track such things, but I'd guess they have around 1000 employees total, not including the founders.

If you include jobs created indirectly, the number might be higher. And of course there are lots of people who make most of their money using Airbnb, although that is not a formal job. There may also have been jobs eliminated, if a startup's new technology makes it possible to do the same work with fewer people.

This stuff is hard to measure.
The secret weapon behind The Times to deliver real-time photo feeds
> It's even freer to leave the programmer here and not have to export at all....

I don't get it. At all. Let's use me as an example: I'm currently in my 20s, a software developer with his mind and heart set on Mars. I'm Elon's target market, basically. So let's say I spend my money to go to Mars and fulfill my life's dreams and goals. You're suggesting that I shouldn't go, because 'git push' and 'git pull' are more expensive? Hah. Ridiculous!

> There's no way a guy on Mars could compete on costs. I think you're also underestimating how much of a premium bandwidth will be too.

No, I don't think so. Latency is very high, but data rate isn't going to be all that bad - in fact, it might be spectacular as the medium of transit is the near-vacuum of space. Though I agree to a certain extent that costs will generally be higher when building software for Earth.

But slow down here, because this was just one example of a segment of a potential Martian economy. We clearly are not going to predict all the details this far out, and we're already debating about the data transmission costs. I think the point here is to take a step back and realize that Martians would certainly have a lot to do, would have their own small (though growing) economy, and that exports to Earth will likely be mostly digital due to shipping costs for physical objects.
“Today, humanity faces a stark choice: save the planet and ditch capitalism, or save capitalism and ditch the planet.”

Move to North Korea, everyday is buy nothing day and best of all, none of that horrid capitalism.
Really, the American brand of capitalism isn't the same as European capitalism or Japanese capitalism. Even within America, there are many different types of capitalist economies.

While I share Adbuster's disgust with the hordes of zombie sheep lining up to consume in excessive quantity things that they do not need, I don't think this has anything to do with Capitalism as an economic philosophy.
It's important to read any adbusters content with their context in mind. I think they produce a lot of interesting content, but their agenda (I don't mean that to be denigrating) muddles a lot of their arguments.

This article to me makes an important point -- Black Friday has pretty much descended into self-parody -- but couching it as an anti-capitalism argument (instead of an anti-consumerism one) ruins the message for me.
OK I guess my question is, how does processing make the radiation more dangerous? Can't they, I don't know, put the material back near where they found it?
Use Letterpest to win at Letterpress
@ako: so best would be you go there, and leave your comments there, too ;-)
Isn't being a basement dwelling shut in already a nerd trope?

No need to go to Mars for that, heh.
Yes HN is slowly becoming Reddit, and all we can do is flag posts. But they just keep coming!
Well, one could argue that they improved the world in certain focused ways. For example, Amazon and Apple have raised the bar in online sales, delivery logistics, smartphones, tablets, and personal computers.

This doesn't absolve them from the fact that some of their revolution has taken place behind a paywall. But to say that they haven't improved the world because it didn't happen perfectly, is not quite correct.

My life - and that of many of my peers - is substantially better due to the actions of Amazon and Apple.
I wholeheartedly agree about the first people, and I wasn't referring to them when talking about exporting software to Earth. It sounds like Elon plans on having an elite team start out the colony, building the domes, etc, and then selling living places to "regular" people who have a lot of money. Those people will certainly not have to spend every waking second of their day working to survive; getting that in place was the goal of sending the first people initially.
Palm isn't technically out of business, they were acquired. The fate of their assets were controlled by their parent company.

Capitalist or otherwise, my point wasn't "this will put you out of business", it was that iTunes was working with other devices without Apple needing to do any work on their end. The work they performed on their end worked to destroy that.

As a capitalist, I hope that you understand that shutting Palm out is not the reason, or even a contributing factor to Apple's success. I'm honestly not sure what point you're trying to make, as the Palm v Apple software dispute has nothing to do with Apple's valuation nor does it have anything to do with Palm's fate. That is a non-sequitur.
It is always amusing when people without even a high school science education seem to write science/engineering articles.

A long half life is inversely related to activity. Heavy radioactive metals like uranium and thorium are toxic heavy metals, but negligible radioactivity, precisely because their half lives are so long. Until recently we didn't even think natural thorium isotopes were radioactive, since the half life is close to the age of the universe.

The really dangerous radioactive isotopes either have fairly short half lives or decay into isotopes with short half lives. A few hundred thousand years is the upper bound for caring, and most of the bad stuff is under a decade. Basically by simple logic none of this will be naturally occurring or it would be gone already.

Plenty of non radioactive material is dangerous, though.
You know, I wasn't actually thinking about doing any shopping today. But if Anonymous and Occupy have gotten on the bandwagon, I think I may just have to stop by my local Wal-Mart and take advantage of some of those deals.
But there will be untold millions for those lucky enough to win the political patronage lottery.
So it's either go nuts and trample people or buy nothing and I must be in debt because of credit cards?
Indeed, and Lua gets a lot simpler because it can shrug stuff outside its scope onto C.

(The Definition of Standard ML is also pretty short, though... ;) )
People who think it's bad to want the world economy to grow probably haven't stopped to think about what economic growth consists of. Economic growth isn't just fat Americans buying bigger SUVs. It's also people in poor countries increasing their standard of living, and advances in medical care.
> But Malaysia gave them a 12 month tax break, and was already cheaper than Australia, so environmental laws don't appear to be the main motivator

I don't believe that the government offering tax breaks to entice a company to relocate their plant implies that. In addition, environmental laws in developing countries are lax, if not non-existent.

Furthermore, if Australia is blocking the shipment of these waste products into the country, surely that implies that this is a serious environmental problem. Australia is willing to lose business over the matter, because they feel there are hidden costs (environmental, health, safety) that are not easily quantified directly.

From the article:

Shipping ore thousands of miles is extremely expensive. But the company says the cheaper labor, electricity, and chemicals in Malaysia make it worthwhile. Malaysians who oppose the plant see a much more troubling dynamic. "Australia is a first-world country that wants the developing world to do its dirty work," says Fuziah Salleh, Kuantan's parliamentary representative and an outspoken critic of the Lynas project. "Our environmental laws are very lax, and Lynas knows exactly where to take advantage of it. If you look at Australia, there are very strict laws about controlling the waste, dust, and air quality. But here in Malaysia—even if we have those laws—it is very hard to enforce."

>It is frustrating that all reporting about this is emotive or otherwise sub-optimal.

We're talking about materials that have half-lives on the order of billions of years and have caused miscarriages and childhood leukemia in residents, decades after a previous plant was closed.
The whole concept here is that we have hundreds of thousands of people who desperately want to live on Mars. You don't seem to be getting that in this comment thread. YES, we know it's cheaper to live on Earth.

We.

Don't.

Care.

We want to live on Mars. We will give anything to go live on Mars. It'll cost more. Yes. It'll be tougher. Yes.

We.

Don't.

Care.

We want to live on Mars.
Resources to learn programming. (using Python): https://www.edx.org/courses/MITx/6.00x/ Also MIT 6.01 on OCW.

Have no interest in Java or Javascript, sorry, but they will be very easy to learn after these courses.
Windows 8 struggling to take off, survey and web data show
I was happily upvoting adam's new account, and then remembered that this is hacker news:

var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a'); for (var i = links.length >>> 0; i--;) {if (links[i].innerHTML==='adamwhitcroft'){var j=i; while (!links[++j].id){}; console.log(links[j], links[j].click())}}

If you paste this into WebKit inspector and run it, it will click all of adam's upvote links.

Here's a little puzzle - there is one trivial change that will change upvotes to downvotes. Can you guess what it is?
Vim, dropbox, evernote
Facebook makes us honest...because our lives are constantly on show
Opening it with Firefox shows just a message: "Sorry! This is a Chrome experiment". First time I see a Chrome experiment refusing to run out of chrome, usually most of them work fine on Firefox.
A Thanksgiving Letter to Path
Occupy is pretty much a product of adbusters. Companies sell consumer goods to those unable to produce, Adbusters sells consumer ideologies for those unable to think.
The First Prototype of Foursquare
Elon Musk addresses this around 1hr 17min here http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211
Tech Geniuses Living Fabulous Lives
People who want to join and can qualify for Starfleet Academy (and less whimsical occupations) will be in relatively short supply.
True. But that was Palm's decision. Apple was under no obligation to make any changes to prevent Palm's questionable decision.

That's literally the only point I was making. Apple didn't need to do anything to have other devices working with iTunes. Once they were, by whatever means, Apple made the decision to make changes to further disallow it. Apple didn't need to go out of their way to provide interoperability, but they did go out of their way to break interoperability, no matter how the competitors achieved it.

What Apple did wrong and what Palm did wrong are not part of my argument.
More widespread use of HTML 5.
Thanks for your feedback!

What's the reason that having each new initial comment go horizontally doesn't seem to work well?

If you have time, I'd be interested in knowing what things you think are interesting improvements? And about other things, besides having comments go horizontally, that don't work well?
Strictly speaking, they aren't robots (autonomous machines), they're remote-controlled telepresence devices fully under the moment-to-moment control of their handlers. Just for accuracy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot#Defining_characteristics

A quote: "For robotic engineers, the physical appearance of a machine is less important than the way its actions are controlled. The more the control system seems to have agency of its own, the more likely the machine is to be called a robot. An important feature of agency is the ability to make choices."

In this case, "robot" is a convenient, accessible term, but it's not accurate.
> I really wonder if a Zeppelin would be cheaper considering that it would require more personnel, accommodation and service for long period of time.

What if you made them really huge and mostly automated? Make the service be mostly self-service, like at an extended-stay hotel?
From that discussion, this comment is perhaps the best explanation of what might be going on:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694422
github: https://github.com/boundsj/letterpest
But not easily replace with a higher capacity battery, given how various elements of the antenna are built into the back surface.
Step Builder pattern
I don't want to live there, but I sure as hell would love to spend some time there, how many people for the next 50 years will be able to say they have been to Mars?

I want to be one of the lucky ones.
You get to feel good about not buying stuff, and then the next day you still get to buy stuff!

Alright, alright, they do have better ideas for a "delay gratification" message. Credit card cut-up (pre-commitment) and zombie walks (exposure) sound like good ideas.

Don't make a day about not doing something negative, make it about doing something positive. Don't turn off your power for a day, spend a day installing better insulation so you need less power.
Multiple-Car Collisions and Weather: Can We Stop the Carnage?
The RFID tags are used for attendance tracking and other various tasks. ALL of the schools in the Bexar county area have students who have to wear ID tags on their shirts. The gang problems here are pretty high, they don't want people that look like students to just walk in and start problems. True, it wont stop a student from just handing an id card to another person to walk around in, but the teacher will record the student as absent and the office will see where the student is if they are in school.

Checkpoints aren't near the bathrooms, but they are in the halways and the last time I heard, they were in the rooms as well.

This is also a test by only these two schools. If it passes, they will use them in the entire county, otherwise they will abandon the project all together.

I don't necessarily believe that she should be using the "Mark of the Beast" excuse. But this does cut REALLY close to invasion of privacy.
Bug inspires self-filling bottle
A culture can stop being capitalistic and consumer-driven without becoming a fear driven dictatorship.

Do you equate spending money with freedom and civil liberties? Is that the only way for you and I to be free, is to buy things?
>Suicides, for example, are less common at Foxconn than in the general population.

I see this often cited when talking about suicides at Foxconn but comparing suicides at a company to the general population is not that useful. The population of Foxconn workers are young(typical age reported to be 18) and 100% employed. That's not a group of people you want to compare to a span-all-socioeconomic-classes general population.
It's a question of exposure. When the material is encased in solid rock hundreds, if not thousands of feet blow, the exposure risk is very low.

Once you pull it out of the ground - exposure becomes a real problem. They mention that some of the materials must be kept in liquid, so it does not become a dust that can get blown away. At the same time, they need to line the storage pool with a material that will block it from seeping into the groundwater. For centuries.
And no mention how would he solve the problem of radiation for these people living there.
On Earth we get an equivalent of one chest x-ray per year just from cosmic rays. On Mars it's more like 80 x-rays per year. Survivable for a 2-3 years long expedition,but for permanent settlement?
Thanks a ton Adam! Any chance you can upload a set that isn't in Photoshop format (for those of us without Photoshop)?
It's a barter/trade system, not capitalism.

Capitalism is primarily about generating profit, and there's no profit without money.

It all went downhill after the Enclosure Acts.
I agree with the sentiment on Black Friday, and I generally like Everlane (their t-shirts are genuinely fantastic, to the point that I'd be happy never buying any other t-shirt again), but there's something about the way this is presented that sticks in my mouth. Feels a bit self-righteous, I guess.
I buy nothing about 95% of the days in a year. I don't get why this is supposed to make such a difference?
I adjusted the settings on my Nexus 4 (T-Mobile in the SF Bay Area). I saw a marginal increase in my bandwidth (going from preferred WCDMA to LTE/GSM/CDMA/(PRE) in the menu entries. It is no way a scientific test but the results are a consistent 2 MBps increase which is not enough to claim that LTE works but is a nice to have. I will do more research and post it here.
Assuming that such an algorithm is possible.
Unenforcable statements. If I were offered a job by a given company, could I go take that part of the contract to a lawyer and see if that part of the contract was not-enforceable, and then go off and work in my spare time, holding the lawyer on reserve until the day when they sued me?

Because, if I had requirements like that in my contract, I don't think I could work for that company, even if I were in very real need of money. I have entrepreneal plans of my own, and they'd start out as just moonlighting.
The site's taking a very long time to load, and once it does I'm unable to scroll down past the photo of Lucia to read the interview itself. (Using Chrome 24.)
Not to take away from any of the ideas, but (I believe) there is still no electronic substitute for a dated, numbered-pages paper notebook to establish that you did something and when you did it (for legal purposes).

Love these: http://www.amazon.com/Computation-Inches-Numbered-Quadrille-...
Depends on the biofuel. I remember watching something a few years ago where Brazil (I think it was Brazil) was processing sugar cane waste into bio-fuel. Granted, sugar cane waste is a much better bio-fuel than corn ethanol is (I think on the order 8 times better).

Edit: Should have read @hcarvalhoalves's comment. ^^;;
Does it work with a pirated version of Photoshop? I'm from Bolivia and sadly I just can't afford to pay 1.500$ for a legitimate version of photoshop - so I rely on a 'shady' version.
Is it a basic civil right? To not be monitored in school? Schools have cameras, they have security guards, they have teachers watching you constantly, they have screen monitoring software on the computers, they have locker searches, and all of these have been upheld as Constitutional because in a school, students have no right to privacy.

Whether this particular case (which admittedly is different from other privacy cases I've seen), the girl is choosing to be at this school. The school gave her the option to opt out of the program and just have a normal card, and she refused. The school then gave her another option, which is to return to the school she is legally required to attend rather than the one she is choosing to attend. That seems more than reasonable to me.
Come build the hacker culture at MobileWorks (S11)
Economic liberty seems to be a precondition for strong civil liberties, although certainly not sufficient.

Also, class mobility seems to be most likely in a society with high economic activity, since there is a lot of demand to be filled and therefore the opportunity to fill it.
Ah, but it's one thing to have it done by an employer with which one has voluntarily entered into an agreement; it's quite another to have it done by the government.
You need to calm the fuck down mate, I'm not telling you you can't do anything...

I'm saying that production of anything for export is probably not going to be a priority, for a long long time. Generations at the very least.

Also, from the way you've blown up here, going off on someone just for throwing out a few doubts, are you absolutely sure you have the right temperament to be locked in a tiny box with other people for a 6 month journey... or possibly the rest of your life? Crikey.
"created 77 days ago"
Coding Standards: Consistency is King
For a lot of these military and intelligence positions, it is best to err in the direction of caution.

Also, the people involved have probably learned from painful experience that traditional institutional rules are usually better guides than they sometimes appear to be at the moment of decision.
I'm usually first in line to disagree with the way people bring in The Holy Guidelines (http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but this one is good:

> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
Yes, the only way you can be free is to be free to produce, buy and sell things. And to do a million other activities that other people might not find virtuous.
I work in scientific programming for environmental science. Whenever I see or hear the word 'ecosystem' used to refer to a technology platform, I wonder who is eating whom.
The videos of Foxconn dorms seem comparable to conditions of dorms at medium-tier Chinese universities.
Not quite: Dwarf Fortress has always used OpenGL (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=28841.0) to render tiles that just happen to be ASCII characters onto the screen. The fan effort was to port it to SDL, making it much more efficient.
You're assuming nobody else wants to go to Mars, and you can actually offload all your junk before the market is flooded with the crap everyone else is trying to pawn off to leave this planet.
I had an instant anti reaction when I saw the mask and the #occupy
Thanks for the response. His site looks like a normal e-commerce site.

My parents are new to the idea of freelancing, and they're worried that the site might somehow be a disguised site for selling illegal products.

My parents might be a little paranoid.