skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very sustainable?

"Food production requires application of fertilizers containing phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium on agricultural fields in order to sustain crop yields. However modern agriculture is dependent on phosphorus derived from phosphate rock, which is a non-renewable resource and current global reserves may be depleted in 50–100 years."

Raising animals to eat is a much less efficient use of non-renewable phosphate than eating plants ourselves.

Source: Dana Cordell, Jan-Olof Drangert, Stuart White. 2009. The story of phosphorus: Global food security and food for thought. Global Environmental Change, Volume 19, Issue 2, Pages 292-305.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378008...
First, Goedl's Incompleteness Theorem comes out of philosophy through the early 20th century's focus on logic and positivism. I'm sure you consider that well-defined, non-trivial, and correct.

Second, there is no requirement for philosophers to "settle things", and it's undemonstrated that, in order to settle things, the answer must be well-defined, non-trivial, and correct. One example of that is Wittgenstein's dismissal of a significant number of previous philosophical problems as empty language games. The field advances; it doesn't "settle things" in the sense that mathematics lays down proofs upon which the edifice later builds. Sometimes the advance is dismissing large portions of what went before as mistaken.
> Dogs and apes and all social creatures have an innate sense of morality.

Yes, but not the same morality. The point is that all morality is relative, and your example supports the thesis -- dog morality is not chimp morality, which is not human morality.

> Nature has evolved that, in humans it has created certain rather strong thoughts and feelings on the subject. So in that sense nature does care.

Absolutely false. You're imagining an intent in nature for which there is no evidence whatsoever.

Your child is starving, and a dolphin is available as a food source. You have to choose which moral standard to adopt -- yours, or the dolphin's (another thinking creature). They aren't the same, indeed they absolutely conflict.

> So in terms of outcomes nature cares as well.

You really need to expel this idea -- it's quite false. Nature is morally neutral, and does not care.
I was thinking about that movie when reading the article :)
Also, make sure that every time someone performs an action on the site, you generate a random number. Add that random number to the number of seconds since their last performed action. If that number exceeds a threshold (that is assigned randomly and valid for a randomly assigned amount of time) delete a random part of the session.
If you host your own email, you may need to know more and do more than you think you need to do.

I tried it for awhile, it was easy to set up with postfix.

The problem I ran into is that large services like gmail and linked in would not send to me. They weren't rejecting mail from me; they wouldn't send to me. I think because I didn't do enough with <vague> reputation mechanisms </vague>, but I never really knew because I realized I wanted to receive mail now, not when I eventually worked it out.

That's just one surprising (to me) example. Mail has a reputation for being easy to get started and hard to get right. I think that's a deserved reputation.

I forward my domain's email to fastmail.fm, a paid service. I'm happy with it.

Good luck.
"Enough for what? is the question. I hope it is enough to disrupt the FB and Google from from getting a total view of my activity but I don't think its enough to stop all monitoring and tracking.

My main browser is Firefox with NoScript installed and I've been known to back away from sites that won't work without a number of different domains being authorised. Flash isn't installed at all. I use Chrome with Ghostery for Linked In/Facebook and any Google logins plus anything that needs Flash (as I trust Google to keep that up to date even though I don't trust them not to track me).

I never log in to Linked In/Facebook/Google on my phone or tablet although I don't have much other protection from tracking there.
Where's Ryan Dahl?
Did he specify any reasons?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4691994

Twitter http://twitter.com/ryah

Not on G+ http://plus.google.com/115094562986465477143

Not on reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/node/comments/h1m2o/i_am_ryan_dahl_creator_of_nodejs_ama/

Livejournals are deleted http://four.livejournal.com/ http://ry-comic.livejournal.com

Github http://github.com/ry

Website is redesigned (it had a hand drawn sketch for a long time) http://tinyclouds.org/

Sorry Ryan! I am just curious.
This is one of the huge reasons I'm still an emacs user in the face of so many IDEs. Until you've used emacs for a while you don't realize that emacs was built in emacs and has great tools like the ones described in the article to poke around its innards.

Writing emacs lisp in emacs is a joy because it's so easy to drill down when things don't work and figure out exactly what is going on.
Drifting into a state of perpetual war? Isn't the current period the most peaceful in known history?
> Meat is good. It's healthy, it's very sustainable, it's got an incredible protein:volume ratio, and it's delicious.

I had been doing the low carb thing recently, so I agree with most of this. Unfortunately, the relative scarcity of meat in our history has resulted in our wanting to eat too much of it for our health.

That said, imbalances in our global civilization's distribution of food is a much bigger problem than calories per acre. (I guess one could argue that realistically we need to produce an overabundance of food to compensate.)
Some people in western culture choose not to eat animal products or meat, and have historically referred to themselves as vegans or vegetarians, respectively. Some of these people make the choice due to their ethical concerns about the food producing animals involved in the process. In this comment, they will be lumped into the group of "ethivegs". In my experience, a fair percentage of ethivegs are either luddites and technophobes, and vanishingly few of the technology embracing ethivegs are generally interested in science. Absolutely no ethivegs that I have met has been aware of in vitro meat research. Which is odd, since in vitro meat research meat has the ability to almost completely remove ethical concerns for an animal from the production of food.

Interestingly, PETA has heard of the technology and did a little advertising stunt for the research. Anecdotally, none of my NPR listening or PETA supporting acquaintances have ever heard of this stunt (which was on NPR) or the concept of in vitro meat. Happily, every single ethiveg that I have introduced to the concept of in vitro meat has felt very positive and excited about it.

So in my experiences with ethivegs, the consequence of in vitro meat research coming to fruition is this: eating meat will no longer require an animal to be treated unethically. Interestingly, many ethivegs have lamented that currently "unethical meat eaters" will no longer be punished with mad cow disease, high prices, or nutrient imbalances. However, they are generally more concerned with the ethical treatment of animals than they are with punishing humans who currently eat meat.

I find this interesting because some groups are less interested in correcting the sin, and more interested in punishing the sinner:
http://i.imgur.com/Irgo2.gif
"Male/Female" genders are social constructs.

Had they asked something along the lines of "Sex: Man/Woman?" or allowed for an LGBTQ (etc.) answer, the answers would have been more useful. Of course, it is often a good idea to ask a question, only if you are looking for a way to use the information.

It's really sloppy for an MIT survey to half-ass a question like that.

I'm sure I'm getting some terminology wrong, but this is the gist of it.
It strikes me that an ISP preparing a "test" page for a court order suggests they already anticipate the direction the court will take, an action they are content with so long as responsibility doesn't fall on them.
Other could be somewhere on the spectrum between male and female without quite feeling comfortable calling yourself either. (Transgender, maybe even pre-op or post-op gender change.) Or it could mean asexual.
Show HN: X-Browser Autocomplete using HTML5's datalist element
The list of fonts is only available through flash, so if you get rid of flash (either permanently or with flashblock) that should cut down your fingerprint a bit.
His blog post goes into a little more detail about the actual "code" that runs than the forum post

http://aurellem.org/vba-clojure/html/total-control.html
> Many people think that good things happen to good people because nature/god cares.

Any realistic, objective sampling of human experience instantly falsifies this claim. The correlation coefficient between "good" behavior and "good" outcomes (and the reverse) is precisely zero.

To many people, the single most annoying thing about science is that it quickly demolishes such romantic notions, using logic and objective statistical sampling.
That is a good comparison. StackOverflow has a good API, but maintains itself with carefully thought through and zealously enforced moderation rules.

I grant the existence of useful content there and a good API. However after one too many brushes with how differently moderators think about stuff than the people who I liked talking to did, I have demonstrated the truth of my comment by choosing to leave.

StackOverflow works for a lot of people. But for me, personally, a stripped down interface and less moderation is a better experience.
"Meat is the biggest thing you can steal from some creature, it kind of destroys her presence, and discontinues her future. meat-eating is killing for theft of the functional body.".

Every organism must collect their energy, aminoacid, vitamins themselves rather than stealing from their peers. I am against all eating including eating of vegetables, honey etc and critical of the current earth-based life.

when designing the post-humans we must exclude "eating" for body build-up and energy intake.
Ten years ago, this would have been major news. But today?

Somehow, that seems like it's not even worthy of a news item anymore these days. So many governments and other similar organisations seem to have done this that it seems like a no-brainer, almost. It's great to see more (particularly Switzerland) doing this, but the real victory here is that this is no longer a major news item, but business as usual.
In this sense, TED should be more like Wikipedia: requiring evidence of notability instead of making those decisions itself.
How I coached a basketball team in Afghanistan and what went wrong
Sabayon is based on Gentoo, should be in the Other Distro's section.
There was an article in The Economist about this as well[0], which points out something that most other sources I've seen seemed to have skipped over:

"...much of the effect could be caused by changes in how sperm quality is measured.. the World Health Organisation’s manual on the subject has been revised four times since it was first published in 1980..."

"...a continuing investigation of Danish conscripts, is notable for having been established with a consistent method of measurement from the start. Its data show no changes over the years. And Dr Rolland and Dr le Moal admit that, despite the apparent drop in sperm counts they found, there was no increase in the number of infertile men during the period of their study."

I haven't actually dived into this new study to see if the authors accounted for these factors. Even if they did, it seems odd that the one study which has maintained the same method of measurement is the one that shows no changes.

[0] http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2156787...
Mint’s Original Marketing Plan
Spotify Kills Discovery With Discovery Tab
Panopticlick is a bunch of fearmongering nonsense. I'm on an ipad right now, and they tell me that "only one in 350000 browsers has the same fingerprint as mine". All fully-updated iPads have the exact same fingerprint, you can't even come close to uniquely identifying me with that.
thanks, never saw that before. what a beautiful idea
> Drifting into a state of perpetual war? Isn't the current period the most peaceful in known history?

Let's look at the evidence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_military_confli...

The only reason we aren't aware of the number of military conflicts taking place is because they aren't on the evening news.

And yes, by any objective measure, this is a more warlike time than any in prior history, simply because there are more people available and willing to fight.
Alfred Extension to display IP in large type
Review : Hacking S3crets - beginners guide to practical hacking
IIRC, the author didn't even really object to the computational model (aka "Newtonian Schema"). He just argued that it should not be the only one taught, as the "Lagrangian Schema" has some distinct advantages.
Quite a large number of keyboards, including some surprisingly obscure ones, have available USB converters using free software on hardware of this class. http://deskthority.net/ is probably the best place to find out more.
Why you may not qualify to donate blood - Staying Healthy Plus
The real "DRM" of that game were the cartridges - even if you cracked the same, you couldn't burn it to a CD like the Playstation games, and N64 emulation on PCs was mostly a pipe dream at the time.
Technically speaking (and not trying to nitpick), it would be a Taiwanese company (the ROC as distinct from the PRC), but yes, I definitely do see the irony.
It's also exposed to javascript and CSS. With a list to test, you can generally evaluate the fonts installed on a system without using Flash.
Ghostery is fantastic. It takes a little while to get setup and maintain as you'll want to disable everything by default then reenable services when things don't work. But it's well worth the effort.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And some of your claims are extraordinary.

>What is it with this modern obsession with not eating meat?

It's not a "modern obsession". Varying degrees of vegetarianism have been part of human culture since ancient times. People, especially Americans, are eating far more meat than they did 50 or 100 years ago. There is a greater variation, but the mean is definitely rising.

>Meat is good. It's healthy

Meat consumption (particularly red meat and processed meat) has been linked to higher rates of cancer, cardio-vascular disease, and overall mortality in a dose dependent manner. Furthermore, some vegetarian populations are extremely long-lived compared to the their omnivorous peers.

>it's very sustainable

Meat eating is not sustainable at our current technological level. Mass production of animals to be slaughtered for our consumption accounts for the majority of human-caused methane production, causes the majority of anti-biotic resistant disease, requires many times the energy expenditure that growing plant-based foods do and is an enormous threat to bio-diversity.

If all the world ate as much meat as Americans, it would be a disaster in terms of public health and the environment both.

>* it's got an incredible protein:volume ratio,

Protein != intrinsically good.

>and it's delicious.

Taste is subjective, but a lot of people would agree with you.
Do not look at the author's post from an internet product standpoint. India has an overall internet penetration of 11% and a the % of people who do actual commerce via the web would be about 2%. "Good" Internet products originating from India are extremely few..countable using your fingers.
So yes, not an attractive market for the average HNer.

But if you are interested in hacking life...India is the place to be. The author goes on to point out the example of Amul (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amul)
It is a co-operative firm (kinda like a non-profit) that generated $2.5 Billion in yearly revenues and has become one of India's most trusted brands.
What is moot is the way that it has not only helped local farmers and lifted the living standards for millions of Indians but has also gone on to generate truck-loads of revenue. It is quite an innovative but a very simple idea at the end of it.

THAT is Hacking Life...and that India needs a lot more of. Customers guaranteed.
Why Too Much Data Disables Your Decision Making
Tor uses either an isolated browser or VM. You'd be moronic to use the same browser both in and outside of the onion router.
Tech flops of 2012
Show HN: Miyagi - A Journal of Application Development
I tried it and really wanted to like it. The graphics are great, the polish (aside from English) is high. Dive in!

Then I got to the first task. And it's annoyingly complicated for a first task (which should be Hello World).

I'd propose something like the following for the first two tasks:

* 1) Message : you get a message, but you can't see what it is... It's stuck in a variable! Perhaps you should print out the message? "print checkio()"

* 2) 2 Messages : it looks as though you have a message, but it seems to be broken in two and stuffed into two variables! Print them out, but compose them first. "print checkio(1) + checkio(2)"

Then step through all the annoying things like "if-then" and "for".

Or something really simple. I'm an experienced Python developer, so, although I wouldn't learn anything about Python, I would learn about how to work within your learning system. As it is, I won't invest time in reading some confusing ATM instructions/story if I don't know how to work with the system.

In addition, it'd be great if you would move the registration to after early interactions. e.g. "You've completed the first two challenges, so please register now so that we can save your work!"

But it's damned lovely and exhibits a lot of hard work. Focusing back on the early interactions and on the early puzzles will be more valuable than polishing the app further.
John from Braintree here. In the case of our client-side encryption library we use sjcl (http://crypto.stanford.edu/sjcl/) to generate the symmetric keys for encryption. This library uses Ferguson and Schneier's Fortuna PRNG to generate random values. The main entropy source is crypto.getRandomValues (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/window.crypto.g...) where it is available. In other places it uses mouse movements to provide entropy for the PRNG.
> That would be an interesting twist: made in U.S.A. by a Chinese company.

Much of the modern quality driven industrial culture of Japan came from ideas born in the USA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

The whole history of the world and of technology is one interesting twist after another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
I read Moonwalking with Einstein recently, and although there aren't many specific memory exercises to practice, the notion it incepts into your brain that to recall information better you need to encode it in the first place has changed my ability to remember on a daily basis. To remember a name, you need to first listen to what the person actually says instead of anticipating when you get to say your name.

I've specifically been using the mneumonic talked about in the book for remembering names and it has been working great. The idea is to turn Billy Baker into a visual image of that person riding a BILLY goat dressed in a BAKER's outfit. Then the next time you see Billy, you can recall your mneumonic and therefore his name.

Sidenote: Ed Cooke, the mneumonist who mentors Joshua Foer, is now working on a startup called Memrise which teaches language through memory techniques.
When we look out at the world today we have trouble finding a trusted source for high-level technical content regarding application development. Miyagi is our experiment to address that need.

While initially seeded with content from within Heroku the intent is to publish and promote good ideas independent of their origin. I'd be interested in hearing 1) if you feel, as we do, of the need for such a site and 2) general interest in contributing to or reading such content.
I was a Vim exclusive for several years before shifting cold turkey to emacs on the 01/01/2012 (first new year resolution I keep in my life!). My impression is still the same as day one: I will never reach the same raw speeds in emacs as I used to (and still do) in Vim, but I've never had as much fun exploring the inner workings of any system as I have with emacs.

The functions described in the article are crucial. You should rewire your brain to type them every time you ask yourself a question.

Generally speaking, Unix is very good at self documenting. Whether it's text editors (vim/emacs), shells (bash, zsh, ksh) or just plain man pages (did I mention the info pages for GNU tools?), the systems are great at holding their own full documentations.

I cannot recommend enough adopting the reflex of checking the local documentation before opening your web browser and hitting Google.
I'm not even going to mention the horrendous ethical issues of meat production industry, but sustainable?

"[...] current production levels of meat contribute between 14 and 22 percent of the 36 billion tons of "CO2-equivalent" greenhouse gases the world produces every year."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-greenho...
Treat your competitor’s software as prototypes
Using the New ASP.NET MVC 4 Template in MonoDevelop
A few months he was being harassed on twitter and just left the Internet.
Ryan caused a lot of drama not so long ago saying some things that escalated into quite a lot of people flaming him on Twitter - I'm unsure if this is why he's abandoned the other websites as well.
That's not actually evidence related to the assertion at hand. For that, you'd need a historical comparison, which that list does not provide.

You may be right about absolute numbers, but absolute numbers are pointless here. From what I've seen before, in terms of the relative number of people killed in war compared to the overall population, this is the most peaceful time known. If 2x as many people get killed in wars, but there are 4x as many people alive, that world is more peaceful, not less.
Fascinating. I always wondered if this sort of thing was possible when I noticed as a child that pressing multiple buttons at the same time on my parents calculator made the screen show stuff that wasn't actually real numbers (things like a 2 with a part missing, etc.). Likewise seeing which buttons on the VCR have precedence (e.g. if I hold down "play" and press "stop" then what happens? And vice versa?). I always assumed the device wouldn't be designed comprehensively to handle all possible inputs like that, so there was a chance some of them would allow you to do funky unintended stuff.

Given the complexity and freedom of access that a videogame has, I'm not surprised that this hack is technically possible, but it is very impressive that someone's managed to do it!
That's not an ethical dilemma, that's a choice between you being an asshole or not. An ethical dilemma is when two choices have both a moral upside & a downside.
Show HN: Boldfaced, a portfolio designed for showing off writing
I'm working on a new product for writers called Boldfaced. Its goal is to help writers of all kinds show off their best work, by giving them a great-looking portfolio designed for showing off the written word. If you're a writer, I'd love to have you get set up, and to hear your feedback. Longer term, my goal is to facilitate connections between great writers and great gigs.

Signup here: http://www.boldfaced.net/signup

Sample profile: http://simon.boldfaced.net/

Feedback: kyle at elepath dot com
I will gladly buy a Space Cadet keyboard converter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-cadet_keyboard
I'm a highly technical "ethiveg" vegan and every vegan I've met have not only heard of in vitro meat but strongly supports it.
Email seems to work fine for most places.

Of course, if the startup is 'sexy' enough, email is no good and you might have to submit a POST request instead.