skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The decreased birth rate we're experiencing is quite an amazing biological anomaly. People who have many children (say 5) will reproduce much faster than people who don't (1 child). 5^n faster, where n is is the number of generations that has passed. This is a huge evolutionary pressure. If "having many children" has any genetic basis at all, the phenomenom of small families is likely to die out in the short term... at the evolutionary time scale, anyway. Centuries, maybe.

The cause of reduced birth rates is the availability of contraception, of course. It used to be that even if a man didn't like to have children, he couldn't help it as long as he wanted to have sex. Now that this is no longer true, it's quite likely that the average man will be increasingly fond of children, or increasingly averse to contraception. Evolution, much like progress, won't be stopped.
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IBM has services and they're better at them. I think it could be a good pairing. Allow Sun to focus on things they're good at with the strength of a solid services company behind them.
How about Picasa for image hosting.. I upload files for my blog at freewebs (though download from this site is slow).. i haven't used googlepages yet.. i am still a beginner.. let me know your views..
I was there for Zuck's talk in 2006. It was pretty terrible. He came off sounding like an arrogant jerk.

What you are saying is true. But it is unrelated to what is being said. What we're saying is, Zuck needs to drink less of his own kool-aid and start caring about people other than himself. I admire his commitment, but it's a shame that he doesn't recognize, or isn't thankful for, the large amount of luck that played a role in Facebook's success. If he had attacked the problem of "MySpace, but better" at a different school, or in a different way, or any number of things, then Facebook wouldn't be what it is today.

If he's acting like Jobs, he's premature. At least Jobs' company was very profitable in the early days. Also, I just left a company run by a Jobs/Zuckerberg type; good sense of design, but very controlling, and needlessly so. I don't envy Facebook employees. There is more to life than working for the arrogant.
What business are you in?
User Stories - Tell it like it is
Since when is it good form to use a quote as the title? The article is entitled "Collapse and its Discontents".
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i would wager that google is not buying the service , rather the community. many twitter clones exist but the community is with the original - and that is what is valuable, the data they produce.
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OK, I used to refrain from commenting on that guy on few occasions, but allow me to chime in now.

He is not a "USSR survivor", he moved to the States in the age of 12 in 1980s, before shit really hit the fan. Wikipedia says he's been "on extended trips to Russia" in early 1990's. I reckon this sort of safari in late teen age is all of his acutal post-USSR experience and is the basis for all of his reasoning.

To many of his audience, his prose and predictions come off as something cool, sort of like Fallout, Escape from New York or a Gibson novel come live. Well, as someone who actually lived there at the time, I can assure you it wasn't nearly as cool or exciting. You couldn't "hire a couple of soldiers with AKs to follow you around", there were no barrels burning as improptu street lights, and one couldn't get a slice of Pu239 at a grocery market. There was, on the other hand, massive amount of financial and humanitarian aid coming from the USA and Western Europe, and a huge improvement in standards of living (it was that low to begin with).

I would say his factual parts are not entirely factual, he wasn't enough of insider to convey how it was for insider there, his vision is skewed and he has a fair anti-US bias. When I read him I visualize that excited, giggly expat teenager on a trip to former homeland, that's who he still is.
"The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman."

(from fortune)
Where is reflection?
As others have stated the status quo requires us to maintain current oil production not only to power farm machinery but also for fertiliser production, packaging etc and food transportation. We here in England are now net importers of oil, gas, coal, food and we have an ever increasing trade deficit. Hardly reassuring. Oh and oil production is set to continue declining..

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5177

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5241
Ouch. I believe you misunderstood him (and took a quote out of context). He's saying if we all reduce our resource consumption, then everything would be fine, but such a reduction is not possible because then* we wouldn't be able to support everyone, which is true. He's not saying we can't support everyone now. He's talking about a hypothetical situation.

As for the article, I find it distasteful. Generalized, sweeping statements without hard evidence to back most of them. And here we are two years later (which is mighty close to a "few years" later, which he referred to in the article) and none of the predictions are even close to becoming huge problems. (The current economic problems are not related to his predictions.)
I have used those Digi modems and they are not bad, $21 for each node gets you wireless serial cable or wireless GPIO.

These are much better, for $35 you get a wirelessly connected little computer that let you download and run Python scripts.
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Why? There is nothing to suggest people will become increasingly adverse to contraception; they already are. And you can't evolve out (or legislate away) abortion. I don't understand your points.
Gruber's response to Apple announcing the original iPhone "SDK" ("Just make web apps for it… With AJAX and stuff.")?

"Shit sandwich."

So, yeah, Gruber knows when to call a spade a spade.
Seems like a silly question. Anyone who limits themselves to one single most influential book isn't going to go very far in programming, so why bother even arguing over whether SICP is better than Information Rules or Visual Basic for Dummies.
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IPods, First Sale, President Obama, and the Queen of England
Ask HN: Good network library for games in Python
Sure, except the author keeps on trying to sound like he has spotted a flaw that the top US brass haven't even thought of yet: "Ships have no defence against ballistic missiles!"

Except of course, AEGIS has been under development for years, and is now actually deployed in the field. What's the full name for AEGIS? Oh, that's right, Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System. It's deployed on what platform? Cruisers... In other words, the author's central point is a load of bollocks, ships do indeed now have a defence against ballistic missiles.

Getting back to the main topic, well done to the Chinese if they have indeed managed to implement a high-velocity, low-trajectory heavy missile capable of taking out a carrier. Now the arms race begins. Can the US make an incremental improvement to AEGIS to defend against this new threat?

This ties in nicely to yesterday's discussion on HN, kicked off by Gruber's comments on complexity. If the US military had to design a defence system against ballistic missiles from scratch today, there is every reason to think that they'd stuff it up. But instead, they have gradually built up the missile-intercept capability, starting with the relatively simple Nike-Zeus, moving up to systems such as Patriot, and then building on that success to create AEGIS and Ground-based Midcourse Defense systems. Each step is simply an evolution on what has come before, and a defence against this new attack will also just be an evolution on what has come before...
except the Sun SPOT dev. kit is $750 and I don't see where you can buy individual Sun SPOTs
I thought this would be about Bayesian vs. Frequentist, but it really isn't.

The sort of statistical problems he is talking about are basically predictive: what is the distribution of variable y if we know the values of variables x_i? How high can we expect ozone levels to be, given the previous weeks meteorological data?

His claim is that statistics is dominated by people who begin with a data model already decided upon. These models tend to be simplistic, but can be tuned to fit any data set by including enough parameters. His suggested replacement seems to involve decision trees and neural nets, what he calls "algorithmic modeling" (on the other hand, he doesn't seem to like MCMC, which is usually based on a data model, albeit a more sophisticated one.) This is not exactly a frequentist position, since it assumes that data can be modeled by an NN.

Anyways, the article is from 2001, and I don't think statistics people have abandoned data models because such models are quite in vogue among AI people.
I think the answer lies in "choice and themes". When you select a book for the kitchen shelf you have selected an author whose recipes you trust or you have selected a particular niche. Hunting for a recipe in your bookshelf is relatively "safe" and the limited choice an advantage when you come to actually making a selection (albeit on available ingredients or the style or mood of a meal).

Compared to the relative intimacy of a recipe book a computer based search (or worse, probably, an Internet search) seems sterile in comparison.

The answer might be somewhere in web 2.0 land though. Would you trust the recommendations of friends more than those on your bookshelf? Could the software learn what you like and come up with better selections in future? Solving this problem might require an understanding of just what it is in any given dish that characterises it and thus appeals or not to any given consumer. Analysing those characteristics could provide an excellent basis for a recommendations engine.
I can understand how the DiggBar is going to benefit Digg but as a casual Digg user this doesn't sit well with me. And you can disable it... but you need to be logged in to Digg to have that work.

This could be the final straw for me as a Digger.
Here is another great resource for how to "think" in terms of mapreduce (joins, keyswaps etc): http://www.cloudera.com/hadoop-training-basic
Jaiku was also bought, not developed in-house.
Well one very web 1.0 solution would be a big online cookbook with good recipes & articles & such. I'd settle for that.
Sorry just read your reply, try jonathan at jaikoo.com
Such exist ( as a search for just "Recipes" in Google shows) but as I thought your question, that is the foundation of this thread, pointed out - they do not seem to represent a "solution" to the computer in the kitchen.
The best bit is that people tend to also optimize for maximum distance apart as well as a good position
It's true, Palms have a solid 8 or 9 years of being The "It" Product that every kid wants and every adult can't help but buy! So many cool people own multiple Palms and have pledged to buy every new Palm that comes out... plus those rocker ads are really snazzy, brilliant on Palm's part, their name is practically synonymous with "cool."

Or not.

I wish people would pause, think, and learn from the fact that every "X Killer" fails to kill X, at least where X is a well-branded, well-positioned product with a history and a devoted customer base.

Palm, as a company, is just one big fat mistake after another.
Happy 15th Birthday to Tcl and the Tk Toolkit
Cornell Chronicle: Computer derives natural laws
Cool! That's me on the cover: http://www.informit.com/store/LargeCover.aspx?isbn=032160175... :-)

(BTW, they're talking about the book by J.O, Tcl is older than 15 years, probably closer to 20).
352753012329452
The same could be said of crack dealers, you know. And hitmen. Just beacuse it's a voluntary service doesn't make it good, honourable, etc., etc.
Well, 'good' is important. I also need to know that it's good.
It's silly to rely on anecdotes like this. For example, the AK-47 is as old today as the sailing ships you mention at the time of the first aircraft carriers, but some American combat units are willing to ditch their M4s for it. The odds it will be improved much in the near future are pretty slim.

I think the flaw in your argument is the word "obsolete" -- it connotes "replaced" or "no longer in use." What else, besides the carrier battle group, do you use to project power?
Where's your proof that it makes the poor better off?

There's lots of research, on the other hand, that because the interest rates are so high, people fall very easily into an endless cycle of debt, using Pay Day Loan B to pay off Pay Day Loan A.
What a sad commentary on the state of our "intellectual property" laws. The USA needs to make some major IP reforms if it doesn't want to get trounced in the tech sector.
Do you have a blog about your projects?
Sun and SGI lost out long before that. It's not like people just stopped buying Sun workstations a couple years ago; they were already out of style a decade ago. While I was in college, in the late 90s, I saw all of the workstations that were Sun's when I came in be replaced by PCs running Linux. This was before OS X 1.0 even was available, and it was a few more years even before Mac users started warming to OS X.

Sun might have been doing some interesting things, but they've pretty much had a decade of investing into technologies they don't have a way to monetize, both in software and hardware. I'm just glad that it's IBM buying them since I think of the potential acquirers, that IBM would be the closest fit to keep some of their character intact.
We are getting there - you want some sort of peer review.

However, will you just go with a majority or would you prefer the positive reviews of a selected group? Tastes vary! Much as I love my visits to the USA I think US food is far too sweet so I would probably avoid the guidance of west Coast hackers. I also know that food styles vary - I live in France and here food tends to be simply prepared (well in the countryside anyway) and dishes concentrate on a simple combination of flavours - perhaps with more dishes served in succession during a meal than would be normal elsewhere. Thus a recipe suitable for my neighbours might fail if presented to some visitors from the UK.

So - back to my original response I think...
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"If you only share a few hours per day, or not at all, the cycle times will be in terms of months instead of weeks."

Interesting theory but I find that just the opposite is true in my Asian outsourcing business ...

I communicate with clients in the USA early in the morning and/or late in the evening. While these guys are sleeping in the USA my team writes code. The clients seem to enjoy waking up the next morning and seeing the results of the work we did while they were sleeping ... :)
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Not for customers it isn't. You only need consultants if you're churning rather than upgrading your kit...
somewhere around 95% of the 37s fanboys comments I have read in between the last 3 threads are seemingly oblivious to what get satisfaction actually provides

1. there are the small companies who would like and out of the box solution for their support to save them time / money

2. there are the large companies that have terribly supported products and the community generally has to replace them, their official support channels are usually private (so they only help 1 person), or very heavily moderated to the point where they are just a pr exercise and of very little use. (remember creative?)

the idea that companies can ban users from provided the support that they should rightly be doing themselves is just plain ridiculous
meh From the title I was hoping this was a doomsday prediction about the LHC finding a new untra-stable form of matter or perhaps causing the universe to decay to a lower energy state :)

Of course, I doubt we would even have time to know it was happening to us in that case.
What killed SGI was high-end applications (mechanical engineering, 3D graphics, oil & gas exploration, computational chemistry) being ported to NT and the Windows games industry underwriting the development of graphics cards powerful enough to rival workstations at a fraction of the price. Neither Linux nor OSX were significant factors in the downfall of SGI.
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A successful investment strategy has been to short wherever industry the majority of Harvard MBA's want to apply to join.

It is the grand "end of an era" signal.
Ok, spelling/grammar nazi time. The accent over cache would be only slightly pretentious if you didn't have it pointing the wrong way (caché is the slightly archaic spelling you're struggling to remember). But the fact that the word you're looking for is "cachet" makes it a double fail.
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As if the engineers at google were too stupid to implement real time search of a limited source set... :-)

If you search something that's not very common on twitter, the search will take forever (> 10 seconds to return results).
So why are there starving children in Africa? It's almost always because of distribution problems throughout war-torn regions with poor infrastructure.

Not even problems, those could easily be fixed. We in the West know a lot about logistics. The underlying cause is that people like Mugabe find it politically useful that their opponents starve. The "fix" for that is regime change, something we used to be able to do (Germany, Japan) but those skills are long since lost.
>> First, the idea of the virtue of selfishness is that we should question the "virtue of self-sacrifice". Really what she means is "the virtue of self-actualization".

Good point. Rand called one of her books _The Virtue of Selfishness_, apparently either as a marketing idea or just to get a rise out of people (she seemed to enjoy controversy). "Self-actualization" is more new-agey, and she would probably have disliked it, but it's clear from her writing that that's exactly what she meant.
Nice to see a new Tcl book on the bookshelves
That's a good point, but I don't think it's the whole story, and is probably more true for SGI than Sun.

I think part of my bias in how I see things was I really only caught the tail end of Sun's heyday in the early days of web serving when a lot was being served up by Sun machines running Netscape's web server. In universities there was also a shift from Solaris to Linux, but by the time I was away from working student jobs (did admin and web app devel for the college starting in '97) those spaces were Linux dominated.
I am from Finland and Xylitol has been hugely popular for as long as I can remember, mostly as chewing gum. How popular are Xylitol products in other countries?
Erlang Doesn’t Fit The JVM
Hard to get in the UK. Some chewing gums have xylitol but don't say how much and they still have other stuff like sorbitol and maltitol. I'm not sure why it's commercially unpopular - expensive, perhaps?
I think he's talking about the ~100 generation time-scale; i.e., Darwinian evolution rather than Lamarckian evolution. If anybody has a "desire to have a large family gene", then that gene will come to dominate the human gene pool in a few hundred generations, because people with it will produce, on average, many times as many children as people without it. The two biggest assumptions here are:

1. This gene exists (and is the main factor in determining how many children people have.)

2. Other genes won't become more important.

I would bet on both of these assumptions being false, but it's certainly possible that they hold.
Actually, I wouldn't worry too much about differing tastes. I think that there is some sort of semi-objectivity to food. A good recipe is a good recipe.

Accounting for tastes could be taken care of reasonably well in well named recipes: 'country style ratatouille' Thai style ratatouille, a new twist on an old favorite.'

But anyway, I think there's more to it then just recipes. I want to make pate. Could be trout, could be pork, could be goose. Where do I start. What kind of pate do i want. A really good solution would let you find new foods.
some Web browsers and operating systems automatically smooth out HTML text a bit, but as a general rule, HTML text has no anti-aliasing.

Errr what?
What if he would say it in person? 'just saying! But, if he would, then he can say it here and did.
Interesting. SBCL immediately kills my slice.
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Ah - I see. You are looking for a recommendation for an on line (presumably) recipe resource. Not quite the sort of thread for HN.
Investigating the people behind those sketchy flat-stomach ads.
Yahoo! couldn't resist fucking with Flickr, though. Or delicious. Think about the damn tying it to freakin Yahoo! accounts, which look like they're out of the stone age, and the "you have to log in every 2 weeks to save a bookmark" feature they added to delicious, etc., etc. etc.

If people fuck with Twitter like that, it'll be gone. Service instability is one thing. Adding so much friction is another.
None to my knowledge has said "wow, I really got blindsided by this thing - maybe I should STFU". This strikes me as somewhat distasteful.

Nicely said! I'm betting however that the people who would know enough to say such a thing now, knew enough to keep their yaps more or less shut back then too. Most of the people smart enough to warn us, knew they were uncertain enough that they probably shouldn't.
As part of my college job I had to administer a small Blackboard installation. For one, it did not allow upgrading the Windows server it ran on before the Blackboard code had been adapted for each new Microsoft patch. It was a pain.
Sun should have built affordable Mac mini-like SPARC T1 or T2 desktops to foster multi-threaded application development they were uniquely well positioned to take advantage of. Almost nobody will buy a rackmount server just to explore some new idea, but a lot of dedicated nerds would buy a Windows-proof desktop running Solaris if only because it's really cool.

And no. Macs are not the new Unix desktop of choice. The portion of Mac users that are aware of its Unix heart is pretty meaningless. Most Mac users buy Mac because it's pretty and just about every other Mac user buys them because they work well.
I used to this same commute myself for 2 years, fortunately London Transport are upgrading to open plan carriages and fewer seats, see the video at the bottom of the page: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/projectsandschemes/10127.asp...

Maybe the writer should start planning for the new layouts?