skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you've got a (mostly) symmetrical action, like bipedal walking, there almost certainly is some way to recapture "returned power" from footfalls to reuse for the next step. It'd be a little different from just balancing reciprocating pumps against each other, since you'd need to "time slip" the recaptured energy - but a flywheel might make that possible without incurring too much loss to make it worthwhile.

For multi-legged robots, a bit of smart geometry can pretty much do this already - see these things: http://www.strandbeest.com/

I suspect using some computer-adjustable versions of the "multipliers" from the article would allow you to build something like a strandbeest which you could steer while only losing a little of the efficiency.
Both amusing and terrifying :)
Pretty cool, also wrote one yesterday, using Flask and Cassandra
I want one of these hooked up to my house - all outbound water should be run through it and i would like to be returning/recycling the water I receive.

At 8K in its current form, that's worth every penny.

They should get the cost to 4K and charge everyone in the developed world 8K for it - get one give one fashion.
You are right that crimes are up*, and theft seems to be one category that has increased[2]. Don't know whether it's because of economic differences though.

That sick people aren't supported by the government and that cancer patients are being forced to look for work is a bit of an exaggeration.

Also, I'd say the main point of the article isn't that Sweden is heaven. Rather, it's trying to highlight some things that has worked well in Sweden (and other Nordic countries), but the article also points out quite a few bad things.

Sweden has many challenges ahead, and some things are worse nowadays compared to 20-30 years ago. Increased crime is certainly one of them. But, there are also things that have improved considerably, our debt is lower now than it used to be, we can still afford a public -- which I'm dearly happy for.

I'd say the article is fairly balanced, but I'd prefer a more critical view on the privatisation of the public sector. Some things have turned out well, but many haven't. There is a Swedish expression for naive, 'blue eyed' -- that word sums up many of our recent privatisations.

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Anm%C3%A4...
[2]: http://www.brottsrummet.se/sv/brott-och-statistik
Prepping Up the Temporary House Without Spending a Lot of Money
> Sounds good in theory but I don't think the average doctor, let alone the average patient, is capable of independently weighing the pros and cons of every novel treatment

Why not? Who else can be more qualified to weigh the pros and cons of a novel treatment than the patient himself? What we're talking about here is the act of applying one's own value system to the likely distribution of results associated with that treatment. If the patient is properly informed of the latter data, then the remaining variable is the set of personal risk-reward value judgments that only the patient himself has access to. If the patient is not properly informed of the relevant data, well, then, why isn't he?

If the patient himself isn't capable of weighing the options, and neither is the doctor, that means that even more remote people who aren't familiar with the particulars of the case at hand, are going to be less likely, not more likely, to make a good decision. You're going in the wrong direction here.

> And then you have desperately people who might normally be more skeptical but will believe just about anything if they or a loved one fall ill.

Right. This is part of the point that I'm making; people who are "desparate" because they're literally in life-or-death situations will tend to have a much more idiosyncratic and organic hierarchy of risk-reward tradeoffs that isn't likely to be captured by generalized presumptions. You're trying to cast "desperation" as a impediment to informed decision-making, when in reality, "desparation" displays the underlying priorities of the patient in much clearer relief than comparative indifference ever could. People are desperate precisely because of the drastic implications of the situation, which means that it's much more important for the patient to make a choice compatible with his underlying value system than it would be in other, less impactful situations.

It's not a question of people being willing to "believe just about anything" to alleviate a horrific illness; it's their willingness to try even remote options, because even a tiny chance is better than none that you're not giving due consideration to.

> I'll take the imperfect regulation over the "free market" any day.

It's not about a "free market" as much as it's about your individual freedom to determine the disposition of your own life and health

Of course, if you'd rather trust one group of third parties over both another group of third parties and your own judgment, that's your prerogative. If the FDA were merely a certification group, you'd still have the option of relying only on that FDA certification as your sole decision criterion, and not considering the matter any more deeply than that. But you've got absolutely no right to demand that others outsource their own value judgments to your preferred third parties.
Yes you're right that ECC is vulnerable to Shor. I answered a different question then the one that was asked.
Some other fairly recent examples:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#Incur...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip_smuggling_tunnels
I don't find title changes nearly as annoying as people complaining about the title changes.
The question must be asked: how you improve your work with that information?

how you make your current work require less effort, or have higher reward?
Yes they are. He said a researcher shared that information with police officers, not that they did anything but say "thanks a lot, this will help". I'm willing to bet no officer on the drug enforcement team even read the paper.

No law local enforcement agency will known how to even begin step 2, and none will waste the time and resources for step 3.
Don't Dequeue WordPress' jQuery
I would go as far as to say that title changing by admin is lying to the users. Submitter decided on title, submitted with that title, and suddenly, 20 minutes later, the title is changed while submitter name stays the same. That created false impression that submitter said something what he didn't said.

Why stop at title, why not change comments also, if admins think they are not good enough for HN standards?

If title in bad, the article will be downvoted, or not upvoted enough. That's all regulation that is needed.

If you have to change the title, at least state clearly that the title is not written by the submitter, and leave original title available somewhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Hydaspes
Agreed that this is a great book to introduce Stoicism. This, and Seneca's works which I've read since, have been life changing for me - I think it should be required reading for all entrepreneurs, if not everybody.
His hometown is close to were I live. I've visited his father's, Philipos, tomb at Vergina. Massive structure, loads of gold, really impressive. Sometime they have to find Alexander's tomb too... it still remains an unexplored mystery.
I should do better than this, but my flight to SF takes off in just over an hour, so for now: the first paper this article linked to (I wrote it with Tim Newsham) is a study in how you can compare implementation details between two TCP/IP stacks and use them to sneak traffic past a middlebox that assumes one interpretation or the other. The example that comes to mind is putting data in a TCP SYN segment.
It was intended that copyright would exist for a limited amount of time to allow people to get some profit in return for their creative endeavors. With the Mickey Mouse Protection Act of 1998 corporations can hold onto copyright for 95 years since publication or 120 years since production.
I'm not arguing from principle as much as I'm pointing out that the utility value is itself subjective with respect to each individual; I'm criticizing the socio-political doctrine of utilitarianism which pursues the "greatest good for the greatest number" in accordance with a single, generalized definition of "good" applied to all, irrespective of the divergent preferences of each.

Treating individuals' health as something to be optimized with respect to a putative macro-level abstraction of society as opposed to treating individuals' health as something to be optimized with respect to each individual's particular happiness is the problem here.

The post I replied to was also an implicit argument from principle, in treating the net-lives-saved measurement, with respect to the aggregate population, as the overriding decision criterion. It's just that this is a bad principle in that it gives "saving" the life of someone living in misery due to an uncurable but not terminal disease the same moral weight as curing someone of a terminal disease, and gives the potential death of someone consciously willing to risk death in an attempt to alleviate suffering the same moral weight as the potential death of someone denied access to a treatment they were willing to try and which might have saved their lives.
It sounds like an attempt to hit as many buzzwords as possible.
HBO asked Google to censor links to HBO.com
London & San Francisco Startup Scenes
You use an extreme example as a red herring. There are very few aggressive napalm-obsessive maniacs (outside the military agencies), but there are tons of regular folks who do no harm to anybody, but are constantly threatened by quirks in the laws. Do you know for 100% sure that you have paid all your taxes and filled all the forms correctly and never misspelled or accidentally lied in some gov. paper? So that if someone would want your ass, they would never find anything in your history against you? With such amount of laws, regulations, police abuse and complex expensive judicial system, you can never feel safe. So please don't think that some abstract triple-arsonist is your biggest threat. Your biggest threat is IRS. When your govt wants to kill some arabs, they will force you to pay for that and you cannot unsubscribe. And then you, not the govt will receive terrorist bombings in response.

And while I don't think that taking drugs is a good idea, I don't think paying for fighting them should be compulsory on the part of general population outgunned by the police and brainwashed in public schools.
Why would a triple arsonist be walking around free?

If someone sets fire to 3 buildings I expect them to be in prison.
Falsifiable does not mean not true. And even if one does not wish to apply the term "true" to theories, this does not imply that scientists do not seek truth. They most certainly seek theories that make true predictions, and in this manner they are seeking truth. (And finding it very successfully, I might add.)

It is you who apparently have no solid education, nor much exposure to actual scientists.

If you want to become educated, perhaps you should read this book, written by a scientist and endorsed by Dawkins, another scientist. It's called "Why Evolution is True":

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/a-nod-fro...

Or if you want a quicker education, watch this three minute video, where Richard Dawkins says these sage words: "What science is about is finding what is true in the real world":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TOsfBSuqdk

I'm sure that you're a smart guy, but you are also a condescending ignoramus.
except when in PHP you occasionally have a feature that itself is a security hole by definition, aka. register_globals
Right around a year (I got into the first beta slot). They are part of bandwidth.com, who does the backend voip infrastructure for lots of other big companies.
Yeah, I guess I shouldn't expect a huge response to this one :P
And the M. Night Shyamalan film adapataion: YOU_WERE_DEAD_ALL_ALONG
Absolutely, that's exactly what I was thinking as well. My guess would be in most cases it would have very little to do with the actual merits of one platform over another and more to do with the trend being set by someone or something in that clump.
Loads to a blank white page with JavaScript disabled. Utter failure.
Buddhism and Stoicism have a lot in common, particularly Zen Buddhism. As a complement to the skull on your desk, I recommend Basho:

http://www.poemhunter.com/matsuo-basho/poems/
Stoicism resembles Buddhism in its focus on practical psychology and mastery of the mind through reason. The Stoics do not deny the reality of the physical world and the ego, but they teach that unhappiness comes from attachment to undependable things, things outside one's own control. The Stoic road to happiness comes from training one's mind, through the application of reason, to care about nothing except one's own ethical actions, and the ultimate measure of a philosopher consists in successful application of this training, not in knowledge or argumentation.

There are glaring differences between Stoicism and Buddhism, of course. The Stoic definition of ethical behavior is not rooted in compassion like Buddhism is, for example, and the Stoics did not create a practice of mental training anywhere near as well-elaborated as Buddhist meditation.
The manuscripts are already being digitised by the Timbouctou Manuscripts Project (the source of this article), hosted at the University of Cape Town and funded by the Ford Foundation. Those already digitised are available in their database [0], sometimes with accompanying translations.

This is part of South Africa's assistance to Mali, dating from 2001, to preserve and study the manuscripts by funding and building the new Ahmed Baba Institute building (the one damaged by rebels) with the equipment to prevent further degradation of the manuscripts and digitise them, giving Malian conservationists further training at the National Archives in Pretoria and setting up research projects.

Aside from something as drastic as the possibility of another civil war, the manuscripts are the safest they've been in years.

[0]http://www.tombouctoumanuscripts.org/db/
I didn't see a clear thesis to the article, nor do I see how this would be a counterexample to any possible thesis of the article.

The article appeared to be primarily an expository piece on the history of heeled shoes. The thesis, if there was one, seems to be that the rise and fall of heels was driven by the whims of fashion, and that just as associations with attractiveness drove its rise again among women, associations with social status or any of the other drivers of fashion could easily drive its rise again among men. If anything, your example seems to further validate that thesis: local fashions did, in fact, get men to start wearing heels again in places.
Yep. I've mostly go the other problem though. Here in Sydney Australia, it's reasonably rare for us to need to heat the house - especially right now, in the middle of our summer. Even in the middle of a Sydney winter it's uncommon for us to actively heat the house - we've only got one "space heater" in the house, a little 1000W fan heater that mostly gets used to dry rained-on motorcycle jackets/boots/gloves. Very rarey (perhaps 2 or 3 days per year) we run the aircon in reverse-cycle heating mode.

I guess that your comment probably reveals another reason why this idea isn't currently economically feasible - the "richest market" where the pre-conditions for it to work (households with significant amounts of "waste heat generating electronics" running permanently or close to), is surely the USA and the 2nd richest market is probably western Europe. Both regions where for a large part of their population, the climate is cold enough for significant parts of the year for your simple solution to be "good enough". A market the size of Australia (~20million people) probably isn't anything like big enough to get the economy of scale to work.

Now my tree-hugger side is even more melancholy...
Show HN: QueueDo (Side Project in Sinatra, jQuery, LocalStorage)
This poll's options yield unproductive results.

Like most people, I believe misleading or content-less titles are bad. As such I'm in favor of keeping descriptive titles and editing bad ones - same as almost everybody else. There is no programmatic approach to this, and I doubt we can come up with rules that improve the process. In the end it's always going to be a human being making a judgement call.

One thing we reasonably could talk about, however, is whether the current bias towards keeping/restoring the external title is healthy. If we can agree that it's mostly detrimental, it would make a convincing appeal to emphasize more moderatorial restraint.
Walking or running definitely helps to take your mind off of things long enough for it to realign itself on track. Semi related, but it also peaked my curiosity for nature and I started taking more note of different species I would see while walking or running, such as birds, insects and mammals.

Now, I end up walking partially because I'm always looking forward to what surprise I might see while doing it. Granted, not everyone has access to parks or land farther outside of a city, but when you do, there's lots of small details one misses out on if not looking for them (either up in the trees or near the ground). I still walk and run to refresh my brain, but it also spurred my interest in learning something new at the same time. As a side effect, I end up googling all those random things I run across, so beware of that if one wants to avoid time killers.
> EDIT2: Huh, it looks like I was overthinking the level-advancing. There is no code for the problem I thought I was solving; I must have imagined it.

Isn't this what `tput cols` is for? You advance to the next level when you reach the right edge of your current window, however wide your window is.
Two off the top of my head:

* A classic would be IE's abuse of TCP RST:
http://www.stroppykitten.com/cms/index.php?option=com_conten...

* A decent chunk of email server code (SMTP & IMAP implementations in particular) is there to handle erroneous client behaviours. The worst cases are those where the workaround leads to misbehaviours (or less optimal behaviours) for conforming clients. If I remember correctly, the popular Outlook series of clients is a notorious source of such warts. A number of SMTP sender libraries will skip over significant parts of the protocol state machine; configuring a mail server to handle that degenerate case can weaken its anti-spam provisions.
Marcus Aurelius was a great man. A true philosopher king. A very mature man and a true stoic. I have three copies of Marcus Aurelius translation with me. Gregory Hay's translation is the best. Do check out Epictetus' discourses and also Arthur Schopenhauer's works. If you are feeling down, a few hours spent with Meditations will make you feel much better.

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."
--Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Responsibility? The onus is on the banks to lend responsibly. They made outrageously risky loans and were liable for when the borrowers could not pay them back.

Bailing out the banks by putting whole populations into long term debt "doesn't really teach responsibility".
// Add the route
server.addRoute({
method: 'GET',
path: '/hello',
config: hello
});

I'm sorry but how is that different than

app.get('/hello', require('simplemath'));

where simplemath is

module.exports = function(req, res) { ... }
A god implies that something is created(c). That god could be good or bad based on c's standards, but the god would still be the definer of the rules if it wished to do so. How would c even know if it is accepted or rejected based on goodness? And if it is so, how would c know that it lives a good life? By whose standards?
[Update spelling]
How can you be radical if you feel "a bit biased"? I am radical voluntaryist myself because it's the only way to figure out what is right or wrong, what works and what doesn't. Whenever you have coercion, you cannot have study of human choices (that is, economics and ethics). It is as simple as that. If one wants to be coercive and violent - it's their choice, but it is illogical to claim that it's for someone's good. Because the only way to know anything about good is when you put your guns down and apply reason.

Am I being a bit biased with this idea? Can anybody study human choices by not giving them choices?
The Superbowl, a Nerds-Eye View.
Windows software is a similar case - a program works on one version of Windows due to accidental dependencies on Windows implementation details (e.g. memory management), and then fails on the next version of Windows when the underlying implementation changes. Raymond Chen has written about the huge difficulty for Windows to maintain backwards compatibility with "broken" programs. New versions of Windows provide special-case handling for old applications so they will still run. See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html and scroll way down to "The Two Forces at Microsoft" for a long discussion of this, and how Apple is much stricter.
The quote on Metafilter (August 2010) precedes The Filter Bubble (May 2011).
Discussion from 5 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5134023
> The appeal to progress is just as much a fallacy as the appeal to tradition.

And what if the spirit of man is shaped by his technology and culture?

> Atheism is a closed-minded agnosticism.

Ouch. There are no compelling reasons to believe in a god or gods. Atheism is the rational response to this state of affairs. Agnosticism is for the weak.
I thought you had to do some magic involving walking left for a little while before reaching the right edge. I'm sure a few times I reached the right edge only to be told I was dead.
Too big to fail = too big to be bailed out.
Michael Mobbs has been at it for a while.. http://sustainablehouse.com.au

Check out "The Plan" for the larger scale objectives.
That is interesting. If you want more information on them, including photos and twitter info, you can see it on http://www.hnwho.com
You don't have to run Android on battery.
Postel wrote it in 1980. (First found in RFC760[1])

Since then we've had computer viruses, worms, and other malware; we've had hackers, crackers, spies, criminals, and semi-competent people flooding the Internet; we have people not just making accidental requests but fuzzing and fusking to try to break things or bypass controls.

It's a great principle for the human stuff, but it feels really outdated for technical stuff.

[1] (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc760.txt)
nm. I didn't see the example was returning two properties. Still, that is relatively easy to do. I have a middleware that does that and it's very short not yet another framework.
Most annoying is we have technology to show information better.

We could show our original titles next to officiated, moderated, adworded language.

We could give first words and ad words equal life.

Do we have any more senseful, mindful technology that might represent title variations as diverse as real life?

Is our loved accessibility only for special interests? Why can't technology show common ground, without hiring and firing info like we are out of space, in a world we can use real psychotechnology to truly fit more people, more info, and more views.

Likewise Quora represents as community-powered self-moderation but deletes and censors by closed, secret committee vs. first giving real representation to what users really said... like I ask http://www.quora.com/Editing-Questions-on-Quora/Could-showin... and elsewhere.

If it is annoying admins to show more/less words based on eachothers diverse contexts, maybe let people who want to see moderated words see it so. Too, let us all otherwise real life readers see what people really submitted as their first words, first.