skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Correction to my earlier comment: it was 0.1% of the world's then population, not 1%.

The size of the population in Ireland was enabled by subsistence farming of the potato. The powers that were, did not have a control on the number of children per family. The spurt in population was risky and had Malthus' projections been heeded, population based checks on resource limits working as a preventive measure would have limited population growth rather than the death rate doing so.

Plots of land were handed down by subdivision among the male children in a family[0]. The population increased, but the land available to them remained the same.

Crop loss was estimated at one third to one half [1].

So to refute your point, if there was a smaller population, the land occupied by the total population would arguably have remained the same, and one third to one half of a crop loss could have been sustained without starvation and famine.

I am still convinced that it was a real life Malthusian crisis, aided and abetted by systematic exploitation. I do not think it's a stretch to say exploitation has not been eradicated. It's a certainty that children are still brought in to the world without a guarantee that they can be provided for.

We can argue for resource redistribution to prevent crises arising, however Malthusian 'prophecy' is predictive, and the Irish Famine was predictable without resource redistribution. I would argue we have already had a Malthusian crisis. I would further argue it's hubris to say that another is impossible.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_famine#Tenants.2C_subdiv...
This paragraph only alludes to the process of subdivision, with only a small amount of research, you will see that it resulted in population exceeding the carrying capacity of the land they occupied in 1845.
"Following the famine, reforms were implemented making it illegal to further divide land holdings."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_famine#Blight_in_Ireland (look for "Crop loss in 1845")
Google's Peter Norvig: 'I have the best job in the world'
How I Instagram
There is plenty of profit in certain kinds of airlines -- cargo, certain kinds of business service (flight services to oil and gas, war zones, ...). I think there's money to be made in medical flights and maybe even pet flights (although I think the pet airline went under).

Passenger service in the US, sure, no profit there.
Not sure who in the heck downvoted this, but I proposed a simple solution for the community that would help us explore these types of topics on each post.

Called - "Proposal: HWIGS HN: How would I get started".

You can find it in the New section - http://news.ycombinator.com/newest

Edit 1: For whatever reason, this comment seems to be a battleground. Been upvoted & downvoted so many times. Guess this comment symbolizes the struggle for those of us interested in preserving the quality of the community we have come to love, and with those that just love to downvote willy nilly.
You don't know what you're talking about. Copper is very conductive compared to solder.

Pure copper has a resistivity of 0.0172µΩ⋅m while 63% tin/37% lead solder has a resistivity of 0.145µΩ⋅m. (http://alasir.com/reference/solder_alloys/) That's almost an order of magnitude difference.

Let's say you had the absurd case of 1/2 copper and 1/2 solder. I = I_cu + I_solder, and V = I_cu * R_cu = I_solder * R_solder => 8x more current going through the copper than the solder.

You would need 8x more solder than copper in order to get "more current going through the solder than the actual wire."
That paper is great, thanks for sharing! It looks like I need to buy some lego technique parts.
What happened to the age old art of giving a lecture ?

Screw slides
Sidenote: Google's customer service is absolutely horrible. I was reading the horror stories, but now that I have experienced it personally, it seems worse than I imagined.

Basically, my unit is about to be shipped on Dec 19, and I have been trying to cancel it since last week; but they refuse to cancel it on the grounds that it is only possible to cancel it within 1 hour of purchase.

I am leaving US on Dec 12, and this means the unit is going to get shipped to an address I no longer have access to, and I will have to ask the landlord to do a delivery refusal when the UPS guy appears at the door. I have emailed and called them about 10 times to cancel the order, or change the shipping date or address; and they won't bother to do any of that.

If you have been reading about Google not treating its customers properly on the net, rest assured that the situation is not exaggerated at all; they are very unprofessional.

Anyone have any advice for canceling the order, is it possible at all?
Yeah, I have always wondered about manufacturing. If I wanted to go out and manufacture a product of some sort, even something simple, where would I find the information on doing that.

There is a bit of a difference too between manufacturing base parts and assembly. There are a lot of shows on car manufacturing but they mostly are focusing on assembling mostly parts that have already been formed. I watched one on making little blow up balloons and was kind of amazed how much goes into it and even then they didn't really go too much into where the base components come from.

These days I guess with outsourcing a lot of businesses don't even know how their products are made.
> Its a literary of little things

The word you're looking for is litany (an understandable literary mistake)
Every year I read something like this. The first time I was excited. The second time I was vaguely interested. At this point I consider it a waste of time.
آدا لوفلايس
آدا لوفلايس - http://www.g2mz.com/art/?p=598
آدا لوفلايس - http://www.g2mz.com/art/?p=598
آدا لوفلايس - http://www.g2mz.com/art/?p=598
I don't see how philosophy, as a field of study, could be wrong. Even if every philosopher who ever lived was wrong, we still need to do something like philosophy to address questions like the one you just raised. Philosophy is not a single methodology or approach. Indeed, most of the great philosophers are considered great because they introduced new approaches.

Wikipedia says, "Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with reality, existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument." The attacks I've seen on philosophy are either glib statements that such questions don't matter, reductions of philosophical problems to those that can be answered by science, or anti-intellectual attacks on the validity of systematic rational argument to answer such questions.

Those who say such questions don't matter have just made a philosophical statement, yet I never have heard them give a rational argument for their philosophy. They seem to rely on the force of their personality and credentials in their field and act like the statement is obvious and anyone who thinks otherwise is silly.

Similarly, there are those who say that neuroscience or some other science answers the question, but what they have done is reduced the larger question into a smaller one that science can answer, and then declare that the rest of the question is not important.

Those who doubt the power of human rational argument to answer fundamental questions might be right ultimately, but we don't know the limits of human rationality until we get there. If rational argument has any value at all for determining truth, then we should press it as far as we can. If a person thinks it doesn't, then they shouldn't be arguing about it. One cannot argue the truth of the statement that argument cannot lead to truth.

By the way, I agree that all religions cannot be true in every respect since they contradict each other at various points, but they still could be true in certain respects, and some may be more true than others, or offer a better way to the truth than others.
The OPs tone is perhaps unnecessarily aggressive, but I think the point deserves a fair look. HN, more often than not, shares content that is the nth derivative of the same old tired tunes (which were great the first year we heard them).

HN used to be valuable, now it's mostly entertaining. The OP is also right that words like 'hacker' and 'entrepreneur' have become maddeningly useless on HN.

Saying things like 'you could vote and change that' is not a counterargument. Sure, I could invest lots of energy in trying to make HN better, but I'm not interested in that. Don't get me wrong - I applaud the people that are, but this is not my fight - I'm here as long as content is good, and it's really on the tipping point for me.

I will however voice my dissatisfaction, with the hope that someone who does want to fight this fight will be ever so slightly moved by it.
Guess it depends on definition of interesting and recently.

http://www.austinemerging100.com/list.php

HomeAway and BazaarVoice both just had IPOs. Indeed got bought for likely ~1 billion this year too. Phurnace exited to BMC for ~500 million about 2 years ago, Convio IPO that year. Spiceworks and WhaleShark seem like they are doing pretty well.

SocialWare, AppSumo, Uship, UnboundID, Outbox, Mass Relevance, Boundless, BlackLocus, WPEngine, CopperEgg, SailPoint, etc. I'm sure I'm missing tons, but point is there are lots.
Let's try with an error level analysis: http://fotoforensics.com/analysis.php?id=77d17ed4af33e85e1c5...

The black square on the left of the Apple icon looks too dark, like if someone had backed out what was there. Suspicious.

A similar screen appears in many places, for example: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/desktops

But I couldn't find an exact match: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=d&tbs=sbi:AMh...

The images that I found have a dark blue background image in the place of the Apple icon, so it looks like that really someone had erased that part of the image. And the icon above the Apple icon doesn't appear in any of the other images, so it is probably fake too.
The Economist’s Greg Ip with the inside story on business reporting
> This is a learning moment. Other people are using different assumptions about war and how to measure it maybe they have something to offer you in perspective.

Right, right. I'm supposed to sit back and think about why people are saying this stuff, while you're free to make idiotic statements about my ignorance of history. Did you ever stop to think that maybe I had some other reasoning behind my statement beyond ignorance of the death toll of WWII?

Regarding the claims, the only important one is whether we are headed toward perpetual war or not. The trend is against it. Specific timeframes are just bikeshedding.

> Expressing how irritating or annoying you find the people with whom you are having a discussion is rude. Why do you think such statements are a good strategy?

I'm hoping that it would cause people writing without thinking to take a moment before replying. No, it doesn't appear to be working well.
Lots of cool video games.
Good:
- Simple idea
- Latest blog topics
- Use of social
- Site content

Not so good:
- Pricing. Why is it tied to fans? This seems totally arbitrary.

Possible easy fixes:
- Font contrast (as previously mentioned)
- Link to clients' facebook pages instead of their website. This way visitor can see how your service is being used and also legitimizes your client claims.
- Examples/case studies of how your service is being used for success.
What's a community manager's secret weapon?
Show HN: MySQL Super Dump
> If you do give up the axiom of choice, is there a lot of cool/useful math that you'd also have to give up?

Reverse mathematics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_mathematics) is a reasonably recent branch of mathematics aiming to investigate those kinds of questions.
I know that the word "hack" is over-used these days, so I say this with some trepidation, but when I first ran across the despair.com posters, I wast quite overwhelmed with the brilliance and success of their "hack" of the motivational poster paradigm.

Having spent a number of years in corporate life, often in offices spotted if not plastered with such posters, their parody quite hit home for me.

One I remember particularly well:

http://www.despair.com/burnout.html
Every city has pockets that are bad and pockets that are safe. Atlanta has tons of safe places.
Your students can see the Pycon talks online.
Hopefully I am wrong but this could become symbolic of self-inflicted pain by a company.

Here's my reading:

(1) Twitter started off by pissing off its API users.

(2) Instagram, a company that is by most means excelling because of a great product and focus, takes the bait from Twitter and runs all over its own users and compromises its core principle by making their product shittier. Instagram thinks significantly fewer pictures will be shared on twitter overall as a result--a risky assumption.

(3) Twitter rolls out its own photo effect service and gets to be seen as the nice kid on the block. Meanwhile, Instagram Corp. remains confident Twitter's own feature can't touch its engagement though objectively, this may be a risky bet.

(4) app.net jumps in telling the Valley "TOLD YALL!"
I like the idea of games that involve getting out of the house and meeting new people.

That said, how do the makers of games like this prevent location spoofing?
Scanadu's Tricorder: A hand-held medical diagnostic system device for everyone
"But aren't you at lest curious what else could be possible?"

Well, I was, but after all the attempts over the years my curiosity has been sated.

To the extent that you did not know this has been attempted many, many, many(, many, many, many, many...) times, well, that's a measure of how successful the idea has historically proved to be.

Perhaps I too would fall into the "it should all be more visual" local optima sink trap of opinion if I hadn't seen so, so very many tries at the idea.

Mind you, if you produce a working one that actually keeps all of its promises, I will hail your success. I will sing its praises all the harder precisely because I know how hard a problem it is. (Many of your users will take it for granted and think it was easy to build.) But I haven't seen one yet.
Some people, when confronted with a problem say, "I know. I'll use Banach-Tarski!" Now they have two problems.
Lessee ...

Issued in: 2010.
Principle: $2,999,949.
Due in 26.1 years: $33,820,000

That works out to an interest rate of 10.495%. How does that compare to your mortgage interest rate?

http://spreadsheets.latimes.com/capital-appreciation-bonds/

What California needs is the power to issue its own currency, call it the CMB (the California moon beam), legal tender for all California debt, public and private. Well, public anyway. Initially equal to $1. But only initially ...
Instagram Pictures In Twitter Are Now Totally Gone and Gone For Good
Phrases that make VCs Run in the Opposite Direction
I fatfinger voted on this comment (when I wasn't intending to vote at all). I don't know if it was an upvote or downvote. Whoops! and sorry.
I choose to avoid syntax highlighting. The first time I saw it was some years ago, and I remember thinking it was interesting that the editor actually "knew" what it was looking at. It actually understood the rules of the language and was able to use them to apply different colors.

However, I also decided at that point that it was not for me. The text already has a certain vibe to it so there's no need to add any enhancement via the computer. If anything, it tends to clash with the actual business of programming.

But that's just me, and I'm probably an outlier in this regard.
It seems that the terminology is causing some confusion. The definition of a wiki is "a website which allows its users to add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser" [1], which is pretty much the opposite of "static." I assume that what you want is a static site generator that has organisational features that are common in wiki software...

My favourite wiki software is Gitit [2]. It uses Pandoc [3] to convert from an input format (such as Markdown) to HTML. Perhaps you could write a simple script that iterates through all source files and renders the HTML to a destination directory using Pandoc, creating any subdirectories as required. That minimal solution should be very easy to implement; adding organisational markup within the HTML would require some programming.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

[2] http://gitit.net/

[3] http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
1. Name your package manager, and I can list the missing packages, or missing flags which have made my life a pain at some point in my career.
2. Yup, and the only way, should you need to set any flags.
3. True. Which is why it's nice that you can mount dmg's and install pkg's via the command line.
> No, religion is all about absolutism, it is a totalitarian world view by definition. It is argument from certainty.

This strikes me as scientific fundamentalism. Many religions seem to incorporate a great deal of questioning and reflection, like Wicca and Buddhism.

> And seriously, believing something as absolute because it makes you feel good is a definition of delusion.

Few people could conceive and systematize people as tending to become trapped in a cycle of appetites and fears, and deduce ways of thinking to help escape from the cycle. The Buddha could. You need not accept every letter of dogma to improve yourself with Buddhism, any more than you need to accept alchemy to learn from the teachings of Newton.
I would think that it's based on who views your profile/pictures/friends, etc... but nothing to do with you viewing their profiles. So I would think. And I don't think its anything to do with chatting or liking posts.
Not to nitpick or assume you we're saying this, but doesn't the cardinality of the evens and odds equalling the cardinality of the integers hold even without the axiom of choice?
That is a problem only because Github uses the root domain for its own pages. They could rather use www.github.com.

To solve your case on NoScript, whitelist the full address https://github.com/ and that will keep http subdomains out.
Why This Investor Ony Goes After Over-35 Entrepreneurs
Based on the full quote (below), it seems that he was referring to Valve's offering only:

"Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment," he said. "If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general purpose PC. [...]"
Is there anywhere I can see this in an emulator?
Costs are low enough in Atlanta that you can actually start your business without raising capital. Unthinkable, at least for an extended period of time, in most other cities.

Most businesses shouldn't raise money either because they're not going to grow fast enough to fit the VC model or they're going to dilute the founders so much that the wind gets sucked out of the sails. For example, learn from an Atlantan that just sold his Pardot no-investor-raised-money business for $95 million, http://davidcummings.org/2010/05/08/when-raising-money-makes....
I had not realized that the next release of REBOL will be FOSS (Apache license). That may help.
I think the response on HN was almost reasonable. It could be summarised as 1/3 useful, plus a 2/3 measure of "the fact you're asking us this implies you have no idea how hard this will be."

Yes, it might be discouraging. However, someone with the guts, resourcefulness and sheer chutzpah to start their own cable company is not going to let a few negative comments on the Internet get in their way.
But 8 of you could get together and charge real money to create a Level 7 portal apparently :-)
This is a blog article from one of the researchers on a project to bring more immutability to C#, among other things. The paper the article references is well-summarized in a C# context here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2012/12/Immutable-CSharp
sadly, the first bit of reasoning would be much more convincing if instagram wasn't owned by a twitter competitor
Wouldn't connecting via a VPN sufficiently hide your tracks from the secret squirrels?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chargeback

Just call the number on the back of your credit card.
Sending unsolicited emails is not against the law. CAN-SPAM law states that users must be able to opt out of receiving emails after they receive the email. There is nothing against the law of random companies sending emails to any individual they like, regardless of a previous business relationship.

Opt In is a cultural idea, not a legal one.
mathematicians like it, but physicists and computer scientists seem to be able to get by without it (based on answers i've received asking the same q in the past).
Thanks a lot! I'm super interested in the outcome of these teams
A Breakthrough Against Leukemia Using Altered T-Cells
It is the same concern my sister brought up. I think the first step to making this work is to create an environment that does not treat a "fault" as a negative emotion but rather an opportunity to achieve progress via objectivity.
;) You'll find out in 2013, start building your network my man!
ZTE Closes $20 Billion Financing Deal
Introducing Trifecta, the first iPhone game to come out of the App Academy
If the shirt's well made, you can buy one and wear them both.
Ok, so I broadly agree with what the post says, and am pretty enthusiastic about it to boot, but my opinions have some nuances....

I spent about 3 years developing software systems graphically using Simulink. It was a horrible experience from an ergonomic perspective: There was far too much mousing, and it had a really bad impact on my wrists and hands.

On the other hand, I do have a very visual imagination, and I find the ability to view the system and logic that I am working on diagrammatically an enormous boon - to the point where I have thrown together crude dependency analysis tools to let me render dependency graphs with graphviz (to help navigate a hairy, undocumented legacy codebase).

So the key, to my mind, is having a set of graphical tools that enable the developer to visualise (and navigate) source documents in a range of ways, whilst keeping the underlying source as text, and the primary input tool as the keyboard.

This should encourage discoverability in the software tools that we use - which is the main bugbear that I have with Unix, (although I am beginning to appreciate it in other ways).
Create your own business
Minimum Wage January Experiment
Cdist 2.1.0: a major configuration management release
Not a stupid question at all, in fact thank you for taking the time to Google it :)

In 2013 a person's Style Influence will be incredibly important, so start growing your network and building your Influence.
I have to say that the lack of a good "visual" programming language was what really held me back from learning to code when I was young. I tried to learn programming countless times and always got bored or frustrated because there seemed to be this huge gulf between what I'd be reading about (print "Hello, world!") and what I thought coding was (being able to create applications like those I actually used on a day to day process).

In the end, it was (of all things) Actionscript/Flash that ultimately gave me the visual feedback I needed to make real progress in learning to code. These days, I'd probably recommend something like Processing(.org) to a newcomer.

All this just to say: I'm sympathetic that someone wants a programming language that's more visual and that makes it easier to push pixels. I think it'd go a long way to help teaching programming at the very least.
Is 30 years old still considered a kid?