skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To pay and care for the current population.

People live longer; diseases of old age are not cured yet and are considerably expensive and labour intensive. You need lots of people earning money and paying taxes to provide for that older generation. You also need lots of people to do the physical care of that population.
Great I think you have me sold :) I want to give this a try since a standard db is what I would normally use to keep the data. This would be an interesting experience. I will be reading up on sphinx and mysql etc, and do any future data scraping straight to sphinx through xmlpipe. Last question :) - Do you have any useful links you can provide on the matter of sphinx etc? Thanks.
On the flip side - carefully studying the impact on the global environment of naturally occurring phenomena such as volcanoes, can't hurt, and can give us some good background information should we have to rely on such large scale intervention in the centuries to come.

One way, or another, it's important to recognize that regardless of what we do, or don't do, we will be having an impact on the global environment. For example, we can either run a massively carbon-based industry-ecosystem (Such as we are right now), or we can go out of our way to reduce the carbon output into the environment.

Either way, we will be making radical injections or removing injections into the ecosystem. There is no way to avoid it.
I can see how on a slow connection (dialup,midband,slow broadband) this will speed up the connection, however on a decent-ish internet connection the compression will probably just offset the latency to peers. For web pages the only increase that may be noticeable is through its cache, and all modern web browsers have a cache built in making it redundant. As for the video cache, it implies you are reloading the same video over-and-over again, I seriously doubt it caches every video you watch and if it does that seems like a poor design choice.

Lastly it seems to go on the assumption that all peers have a large upload speed, so that multiple peers can match content coming from a CDN; whereas those who would likely benefit from a web accelerator probably have a minuscule upload speed.
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FlipSide gaming case arrives on Kickstarter with claimed support from Apple
Unless we see huge advances, I think we are doomed with space colonisation, since we put more energy in than we can take out, i.e., it produces non-self-sustaining space colonies reliant on Earth.
It's just the matter of cost. Soulless machines are just more expensive to design and slower to roll to market. Some of the technologies (like self-checkout registers at supermarkets) make no economic sense until a certain price point is reached.
On the other hand we are already implementing geo-engineering by default. Humanity is already impacting a complex system and we have to do something or face the consequences.

Of course I don't mean to downplay the risks, more research is vital.
Interesting, my guess is this is the demographic the Obama campaign was courting with the Life of Julia [1] slide-show a while back-

http://www.barackobama.com/life-of-julia/
This reminds me of pg's Relentlessly Resourceful essay.

http://paulgraham.com/relres.html
Hilarious. Good PR, regardless if it's real or not..
A direct link to the actual challenge, with more information.

(http://www.darpa.mil/spectrumchallenge/)

> Can you engineer software-based radios that transmit data faster than a competitor using identical hardware?

The [rules], [q&a], and [register] tabs are not clickable yet. I guess this is going to be more interesting when we know what the rules actually are. What kind of traffic and 'jamming' are you competing against? What frequencies are available to you?
Yes, because clearly the only way to see a list of files is by typing something in a command prompt, and beginners should install lots of apps to handle different edge cases so they can't program on their own.
First of all, GitLab is awesome! However, I have to agree on making the installation steps easier. I was running GitLab 3.1 and followed the instructions on the official "From 3.1 to 4.0" update guide but when I checked GitLab's status at the end, there were several errors or uncomplete parts. Considering its a major release, I decided to reinstall everything from scratch instead of trying to manually fix everything displayed on the GitLab status check.
Yeah, but I'd bet on huge advances over the next millenium, assuming we don't seriously screw things up. I'd bet on robots doing a lot of the work.

There are clearly mineral resources in space which seem worthwhile -- asteroids, and potentially fuels or consumables from some planets.

Something which consisted of U-235/Pu-239 exports from Earth to space, where space then returns some minerals.

I doubt we'd get appreciable human population off the earth and into the solar system, unless we intentionally went for that. It would probably be easier to do high-density earth colonies using resources brought in from off-world. The surfaces of Mars and the Moon don't seem particularly hospitable compared to the Sahara or Antarctica or the oceans.
I wouldn't blame Facebook for having bad judgement.

It's wise to be discreet in your opinion on a public forum... especially if you care what the people who read it may think about you afterwards.
I view religion in terms of evolution and natural selection. A religion which favors converting others will become more widespread than a religion that doesn't emphasize this, the same goes for emphasizing having many children.
Isn't this a perfect example of a service you would want to keep paid for by everyone so it does not die? To me it is a part of important infrastructure and thus should not be thrown into the profit-needing waters of private capitalism.
I'm just amazed someone is a sad enough individual to take time out of their day to write a nasty email to someone they don't know. Don't sane people just close the browser window and move on?
>before you ask for iOS, you might have a surprise soon.

Xamarin...?
When I lived in the US I had no problem to call girls for a beer, even one that called herself a feminist and studied feminist literature in her MSc... maybe this is just a moral panic where you live, rape is not that common in New England and people are not paranoid about it, at least this was true in the cities I lived.

But I never approached strange women on the street, only people that I knew or was introduced before.
I have to say that I am pretty happy to see some CSS frameworks are embracing SASS, but one thing that Bootstrap has is a large community of pre-made templates that are fairly easy to modify. I wish there was a slightly better ecosystem for the alternatives. I would totally do it except that I am a) a terrible designer, and b) I don't want to commit code base to alternatives that may not go anywhere. I don't mean that as a stab against this framework: I'm just not the early adapter type when it comes to new technologies. I really hope a viable alternative to Bootstrap comes along soon. The real challenge will be creating something that doesn't "look" like a Bootstrap or, in this case, a Centurion design.
I'd strongly suggest re-working this to remove the grid layout styling from the HTML. It inhibits the ability to properly control the layout for different sizes.

Recommended reading: http://framelessgrid.com/, http://wail.es/post/really-responsive-design (disclosure - I wrote this), http://wail.es/opendaws/ (an example of the idea)
I love that Facebook is blamed for making one's internal dialogue external. That's not Facebook MAKING you an asshole. That's Facebook REVEALING you're an asshole.

I think Facebook is guilty of a lot of things, but this isn't one of them.
How about we make a Kickstarter project to fund removal of the fussy new UI that VLC got a few versions back, and which now makes VLC slow and annoying to start on my macs.
I want proof that the "Entitlement Generation" actually exists. I see it talked about everywhere, yet never experience it. Why, exactly, is my generation different from an older generation that thinks it's entitled to social security that a shrinking workforce could never possibly sustain? If we have entitlement problems, our entire society has entitlement problems, not just a bunch of sheltered kids.
The problem is health-related - physical, mental, and emotional - along with not getting the proper support of the community that it takes to raise a healthy child, not just for the child, but for the parents.
I agree. On the scale of things that would make me write 'f- you' to someone, not linking to a video at the start of a post is, I would have thought, fairly close to the bottom of said scale.
The pay-go pension system is a huge ponzi scheme because it needs more and more people into the game with each generation. It lasted less than a century and it's on the edge of collapse now. Why should we postpone the inevitable?
It always amazes me that the "efficient", market-driven private package-delivery companies in the US... actually use the government-run postal service as an integral part of their system.

It also always amazes me that people outside the US, or people who've only looked at models of other countries, think we could have universal delivery from a profit-driven private entity (hint: the US does not have the population distribution or density of European nations).
Apple employee vandalizes "Apple Inc." page on Wikipedia
You are promoting the economic equivalent of a Ponzi scheme that by its very definition is not sustainable.
This works in some kind of flat tax system, which isn't really how it works in the US.

Fresh college graduates end up with significant education debt, and interest payments on student loans are deductible. For the rest the system of credits allows for zero net tax obligation as far as federal budget is concerned http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Donald-Marron/2011/0728/Wh...

US economy is dependent on high income earners, which might or might not be younger people.
The main reason for the USPS is coverage. The US has a whole lot of sparsely populated, but not unpopulated, land. Covering these people is part of what makes the USPS unprofitable.

The same problem exists for telephones but the main approach has been to set high minimum prices that non-rural carriers have to pay rural carriers for traffic flowing from the former to the latter. This enables the rural providers to make a profit but leads to unintended consequences like free conference call companies set up in rural areas which get a kick back from the local provider for the incoming traffic they engender.
I ignored the existence of foldl1 and foldr1 because though they're available in Haskell and make a lot of things easier, they're not available in every language and not fundamental to understanding the concepts themselves.
But if everybody lives like Julia, who the hell will do the hard work anymore?
Why 'follow your passion' is bad advice
Hell, it's even low on the scale of things that would make me write to someone.
Point taken. I might redo this with Ruby at some point in the future -- the functions are all available and it might be interesting to see the differences between the two.
> If genetics can eventually correct this trend, then why hasn't it already done so?

Is this a joke? Evolution takes many generations. It has been less than 3 generations since 1957.

The question then becomes whether evolution has any pre-existing raw material to work with. The data give a resounding yes. Attention deficit hyperactuvity disorder is almost certainly genetic, and is strongly correlated with early reproduction and more children. Ditto for IQ.

And societies are also subject to cultural evolution. Catholicism and Mormonism confer a high fertility rate, and it appears to be heritable.
I snapped and wrote to Gruber once, pointing out exactly how he was factually wrong about some Android issue. I believe he continued to write and be wrong about it.

Clearly a waste of my time. I was at least polite, though.
> Any U.S. academic institution, business, or individual, is eligible to compete, with certain restrictions.

Any reason why it isn't open to people outside of USA ?
The problem is the world isn't shrinking. It's just the wealthy educated bits of it that are. So we're going to have a shrinking number of first world citizens surrounded by ever increasing numbers of the global poor.

Now, if you wipe out poverty entirely and bring everyone up to the same standard of living and education you'll probably see a shrinking global population. But that isn't happening yet and won't happen for a long time.
Ask HN: Creating passive income online - myth or doable?
If you've read the "4 hour work week" you know what I'm talking about. Do you think it's doable to create a passive income stream online "on the side" with a small investment. What techniques have you found that work?
Interesting project.

In the past I've had a side project involving automating casino games for fun. I followed this tutorial for automating simple web games with Python:

http://active.tutsplus.com/tutorials/workflow/how-to-build-a...

This tutorial uses Python Image Library (PIL) for 'reading' the UI and PyWin to manipulate the mouse in order to play the game. I would suggest using AutoPy instead of PyWin to give platform-agnostic GUI manipulation:

http://www.autopy.org/

Cool project overall though, nice AI example.

As an aside, I find the whole area of bots automating repetitive human tasks fascinating, here's an excellent book about this topic (did you know a guy wrote a Lisp program that can compose orchestras in the style of Bach and fool human critics?):

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1591844924
Heh, now you've gotten on the front page twice. Yay?
I'm very sorry for the author of this post. She clearly has messed up emotional and social life - she's hanging out with people incompatible with her but has an emotional attachment to them and can't bring herself to do what she should have done years ago: just forget about all those people (cousins, parents, sister, friend from high school), remove their phone numbers and block their very first attempts of "friending" on Facebook.

Not talking about someone's thoughts is not the way to go; why would you want to be around people who don't want to know what you think? Why would you want to be friends with people who are offended easily?

If anything, Facebook did her a favor: it showed her how toxic and dysfunctional her relations were. It's time to end those relations and move along with life - with or without Facebook, which doesn't matter, as long long as it is with the right people.
I can't comprehend how this individual is considered to be influencial when, looking at his achievements, he has not really contributed anything of substance. I don't mean to be a killjoy, I just honestly don't see why he is considered to be an authority on, well, anything.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier#Works

He wrote a couple of books and gave a few speeches? Perhaps I'm missing the point - if anyone would care to enlighten me, I'd appreciate it.
Presumably, because DARPA is funded by tax dollars and it would be embarrassing to have these go overseas; also, because the military may want to hire the people who made this, and getting a high security clearance for foreigners is a headache.
Yes, for $250/hour Corp-to-corp billing.
Be cheaper to have a largish silverish baloon aligned to block the sun at altitude, also knowing how we do freezing currently it will on balance not add more warm air.
RSA public/private key crypto for Node
Devlin's Angle: The Darwinization of Higher Education
Thank god someone else picked up on this. I'm willing to take the article at face value in its description of the results of the research; but the analysis is all nut job territory.

The singles not caring about the future is one perfect example. If it were true, and it were only the regions with high concentrations of parents caring about the future, then you would see much stronger support for actions to prevent climate change in areas where there are higher birth rates. The thing is, you don't - it's the cities - the places that the author is bemoaning for the lack of kids (he even calls cities "pleasure centers") that are at the forefront of trying to fix the big problems. The areas with the high birth rates are the ones that seemingly don't care about the future.

So yeah, take every last bit of his analysis with a grain of salt. He strikes me as a "America has been going backwards since the 1950s" type and he's trying to back the data in to fit his preconceived notions of how the world should work.
I thought the reason the USPS was unprofitable was that they had to fund employee pensions 75 years in advance
This strikes me as a much better idea than the standard process of awarding a cost-plus contract to a military contractor and then watching as costs blow out.
Virtual Bach in Lisp
I'm surprised that he got fewer than 1000 hits. I always thought that HackerNews and Slashdot (probably much larger, I guess) would send way more people, for some reason.

I guess HN traffic is quite targeted and valuable to some people though.
Jekyll blogging at it's finest. No really, even finer than Octopress ;)
I was on the front page the day I released my "blog" website. I ended up being on the front page for a few hours, but that is partly because I released on a Saturday evening. The traffic was shocking.

I didn't end up with any really bad feedback. In fact, I was immensely pleased with the feedback I received and the commentary I had here on HN. I think it was obvious to those who visited that the site was brand-new and rusty. I considered adding a comment area to the site, but I decided against that for several reasons I don't want to get into here.

I also thought I missed out on the social media stuff, but I don't think I did. The traffic was very healthy from social media because people wanted to share my article, and I don't think that any real reminder would have caused people to share that would not have. I did add social sharing buttons on the site for about a week and the sharing decreased during that time. Also, there was a lot of traffic from "other" social media outlets, so how many buttons would I really need?

Congrats on front-paging again. It really is a nice feeling.
It's interesting what Total Information Awareness does to relationships. I'm reminded of the (excellent) episode of Black Mirror, 'The Entire History of You', which is apparently available in full on YouTube here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImbpjWRMy2k
[if] variations in outcome are orders of magnitude greater than variations in valuation [...], then Graham's argument is mathematically obvious: get in to Youtube or Heroku at 1/10th the stake you'd get in Carsabi and you're still way ahead.

That assumes that variations in outcome are correlated with variations in valuation. If they are not (which may be the point of mentioning “black swans”), then an investor is better off investing at lower valuations.
People pay small amounts of money into their pension (401k?) schemes throughout their life.

The growth of those schemes requires people to continue to pay money into them.

This ponzi scheme is either my poor communicating, or is a feature of many pension systems around the world.

(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/a-look-at-p...)

I agree it's not sustainable. What do you suggest? How should people fund their old age?

Prisoners are already being used to care for other old age prisoners. This moving NY Times article is fascinating. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dement...)

Fun sci-fi noodling would have criminals being sub-contracted into institutions that care for poverty stricken old people. The prison / elderly care industrial complex grows to a huge evil empire. (Throw in a bit about making and selling coffins and it's complete.)
That's exactly what I was expecting, there was a home made one the other day posted, I was expecting to see that productised and available for preorder or something..
In case of homosexuality it could be that the genes which cause this in a man are also helping his sister in becoming more attractive to other men (and the brother of a homosexual woman to be more attractive to other women).

I have no stats on this, but it would be interesting to see if the sisters of gay men and the brothers of lesbian women do have more kids than the average (for the same education and income levels, of course).
just like yeti, and nobody has seen any of them
Just set a 5 dollar rate for standard envelopes and slide everything else that was previously less that 5 dollars up a bit. Things that were previously 10 dollars or more would stay the same.

People who are running businesses that involve sending legitimate mail cheaply will just have to start collecting larger shipping fees. It needn't affect anyone shipping anything but small things.
Astrology For Businesses
Nice, but why does it overflow the viewport between 920 and 950px? Is it deliberate?

Edit: This only happens if you resize the window, it never overflows when setting device width
Some people willingly embrace the future, some have to be nodged and a few won't come if they can't help it.

Kill mail, keep package delivery.
I haven't done anything in Haskell, but I doubt that makes much of a difference.

Maybe more inspiration than introduction, but the "Game of Life in APL" video is a must see (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4&fmt=18)

The description on YouTube points to a "Game of Life" tutorial at http://tryapl.org. I haven't tried it, but it looks nice.

For a more academic (as in "read about, don't play with") introduction, I found Iverson's "Notation as a Tool of Thought" (http://awards.acm.org/images/awards/140/articles/9147499.pdf) a good introduction.
Empowered Amazon Rep created sales discount in response to Reddit comment
It's more about culture than Facebook when social ties (especially family bonds) are so weak that they can be broken with a status update.
Were I to have written this, I would have included a link to the post in question. That seems a pretty obvious traffic acquisition strategy to me. When you write a followup about how this post was included on the front page perhaps that will be a point under "The Bad" :-P

The few times I've been on the front page of HN I've had a fairly consistent 1000 visitors per hour, FWIW.
Try it with alt-up/down, works for me in Chrome.
I've always wondered how can Amazon's customer service be so good. This Reddit thread just provides some insight.
Half off all books 24, 25 Dec on manning.com
Hey Noel,

Thanks for the tip! I've made that edit now, can't believe I overlooked that. Too much Christmas cheer in my system!
That helps get banks from sending you junk, and it's worth the time to do, but you will still get junk mail from others.
The funny thing about the argument that people have about where logic should go in an application (models, controllers, or separate objects) is that everyone assumes that there is one right answer for an application for all time.

We should probably move toward guidance like: "this is when you move your logic here" and "when this happens, it's time to move it out of the controller."

For what it's worth, I think it is okay to start doing things the naive way in Rails as long as you know when to refactor toward a different scheme. The bad thing is that it is usually earlier than you think.
You are forgetting the chemical and pharmaceutical companies, which always had R&D departments that employed chemists and biologists.

Employment in discovery has shrunk, both because it has become too expensive to bring a new drug to market, and the process end was offshored to China, starting about ten years back. No need to invoke the government here.