skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tomatoes are great fun to grow (try Sungold -- fantastic little yellow cherry tomatoes that you can't otherwise buy).

But if you're busy, have a go at chillis: no blight, no splitting, they tolerate under- and over-watering and poor soil, and there are a huge variety available (including some great-looking ornamentals). They have a much longer fruiting period so you're not overwhelmed by huge numbers of chillis at the same time.

If you put them on a sunny windowsill in winter they will survive and keep flowering and fruiting over winter (probably dont need to bother if you live somewhere like Southern California). You'll need to start using fertilizer if you do this.

You can just dry a chilli you like from the supermarket and use the seeds from that: germination rates are near 100%. Then once you're hooked, buy esoteric varieties on the internet.
My first knee jerk reaction is that this is awful and unethical, but there are similar questions with possibly different answer:

1) Is it ethical for two deaf persons to give birth to a child without screening for their genetic disease?

2) Is it ethical to create a child with disease, that guarantees his death? (Senescence)
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In the end I think it is up to the parent to decide how their children turn out, even if I disagree with that decision. When someone chooses their mate they are doing the same thing, if only in a more crude way, and certainly we've all disagreed with someones mate choice in the past. This is really no different.

If I want to have a child, and the only way I'd be willing to have one is if it completely designed, I would want my child to be tall and intelligent. Some of the variants may be seen as detrimental to some people (HEXA), but I wouldn't want society deciding on that.
The decision to use java was obviously made by a product manager that doesn't care about creating a competitive user experience. You want to compete with Dropbox then you'll have to make a native client for each of the platforms you choose to support. No silver bullet.
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It's funny how both hirers and applicants think they are the ones who set the rules. This thread is as bad as the "if you're a recruiter..." posts.
I know that it's supposed to be taken for granted that change is accelerating, but I'm not so sure. Except for smartphones, what's really changed in the last ten years? twenty years?
Evolution is just randomness that causes a rough trend in a direction. Many species have gone extinct under it's rules.

Even if it was a thing, it has your species interests at heart, not you.

There is a lot to the article and you should take heed it's the future, like it or not.

But if you want a warning sign on Modafinil as per the article the drug came out in 1998, it has been and is still is fairly easy to get, why is it not bigger than it is?

These drugs are still just rough tools, the new batch are coming soon, but Modafinil is not "Limitless"
Checkedthreads: bug-free shared memory parallelism
You were clearly a child prodigy. Good at academics and social life.
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Are you saying that Morozov should have been talking about ridiculing Libertarians instead of ridiculing tech blogs when he brought up that assertion? Perhaps that seems like a major error to you? I don't think it would to him.
Sure, my remark was actually due to the reference to Go as a language target for high performance, given the state of the current implementations.

It might get there, but lots of improvements are still required.

I really like to see the progress on Julia
Pretty much every big economy is trying to inflate away its debts. The Bank of England recently revised their inflation target upwards. Now Japan's central bank is talking about doing the same thing. As far as the US goes: I've got two words for you: quantitative easing.

Meanwhile, most consumer price indices don't include the things which increase in price the most, like fuel and food. So the inflation numbers you're seeing are already artificially low.

In this kind of environment, it seems pretty likely that gold has further to climb.

Also, most stocks these days don't give dividends, which makes them pretty much equivalent to gold from an investor's perspective. Greater fool and all that.

Investing in just one thing is dumb, of course. But not investing in commodities and gold at all seems equally dumb.
> What's wrong with teabags?

Depends on the brand, but the big UK brands (like PG) use some kind of plastic in the bags which doesn't compost.
They are excellent. Give them your coffee grounds too. Never deprive a garden of its coffee. Worms go nuts about coffee for some reason.
What if the predominant traits in our population were supra olfactory capability (smelling) that helped us recognize people instantly, or avoid poisons, or perhaps infra-vision (ability to see at night), etc...

What would it be like to be unable to recognize without the use of smell? How would we avoid some subtle poisons without smelling them? And wouldn't we be basically helpless in the dark, for 25% of the day, requiring artificial aids just to keep a car on the road? Walk down a path?

Would deliberately having a child to be like, well, us, be cruel?

I wonder if deaf parents basically are looking at it like this. They are fine with the way they are, they don't consider being deaf to be a particularly profound disability, and they want to have children that are like them; not a particularly unusual instinct.
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Hacking as an art?
Rspected HN-"Who's hiring" posters
With the same token that you (the OP of "Dear HN "Who's Hiring" responders"...likewise other posters) say HN hiring-thread is not a CraigsList , when an HN-responder puts an effort in going through their product and writing a personal note inquiring about a possible opportunity at their company, posters should take a minute to respond to the responder acknowledging that in-spite of their good/bad profile they can't hire him/her.

I am a graduating student who have applied to many startups that interested me with a personal-note and list of projects I have done with clickable-links. While about 10% of posters responded saying that they did like my profile but can't take it further because of visa, remaining 90% never responded.

While I am not the best engineer, when my detailed and clear personal application doesn't get an acknowledgement reply, I can imagine why responders are just sending one-liners. If posters want to hire, they will hire from one-liners. No point of detailed-personal application.The loss is on both of us.

I know these two advices are from me to you and you to me. All the remaining folks who have been one-liners will continue to be so.
This is sick. Depriving a child of music, birdsong, etc - just so that it can fit better into your society can't be considered ethical by any means.
Increased immune response (including heightened sensitivity to existing allergens, and potentially developing new ones), raised body temperature, general dehydration, and erratic pulse, especially if used as a sleep replacement instead of as a waking-hours enhancement.
On a side note, my profile with links to projects is https://gist.github.com/sravfeyn/13534c67812183235a2c/ . I am hunting for an engineering position at a start-up with product-innovation.
Tomatoes are, I suspect, easier to grow here in New Zealand. A fern I planted sprouted a tomato. I did nothing except water it once or twice. For about the 5th time today I gave away a bag of about 2kgs of cherry tomatoes. I don't like tomatoes much, but they do look good ripening on the vine.
From the sounds of the article, California is a bit hot and dry for them, and the UK, from what you describe, a little cool. Do you grow other veges?
Does this mean that a huge transaction for the right amount will hit the perfect low note, and cause everyone within earshot of listentobitcoin.com to simultaneously crap themselves?
If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but bitcoin is probably a good place if you are willing to take anywhere near 40% risk of ruin. Bitcoin is like 102 right now, I'd say the chances of it hitting 120 within the year is easily >60%.

Obligatory disclaimer: I have bitcoins and I think they are awesome. Also, if BFL ships and you can get one of their miners, it will likely give an easy 15% ROI (and probably be relatively liquid)
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Petroleum has more derivative products, e.g. plastics, than almost any agricultural commodity. It is telling that oil companies prefer to sell on the open markets versus locking into long-term contracts with single counter-parties. Granted, I'm sure they would be thrilled to have the government step in as a buyer-of-last-resort.
Are you seriously trying to say Bitcoin has more value than a multi-billion dollar consumer company? Lol.
A basic income : the next big idea?
Growing anything is like that. Except lawns, which drive you insane. When you manage to get the majority of a meal out your own garden it is very satisfying.
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Give it a try. A long time ago I ran a shop which sold merchandise related to only a single anime/manga series, much smaller niche than Tekken is. I recall it was still making around $1000 / month in profit (nice but ultimately other things took over). If you can engage your community such that your shop becomes the go-to place for hard-to-get Tekken products, it could be lucrative. You already have the traffic of people interested in this, so most of the work is already done.

It would be a service to your userbase and wouldn't need to be annoying. Having a "tekken shop" link in the sidebar, links from your relevant content pages to the relevant shop pages (perhaps even have those content pages BE the shop pages) and periodical more visible banner campaigns (christmas sale, limited sale of some rare item etc) to raise awareness that the shop exists should be enough.

You can start small too. You can just honestly write "we are thinking of opening a shop for Tekken items. Are these some specific items you are looking for?" and have a textbox where people can write their request. If it seems like there is demand and some products emerge that get requested, you can then go ahead and have a simple paypal cart to buy the item. You could do this in the next 30 minutes.

Don't be shy to have a high margin for products which are difficult to get elsewhere and you might just find that you successfully pulled off turning your passion into a business.
It's funny you say that about the music... (in fact, I seriously can't tell at this point if that was sarcasm) -- because the music was produced apparently by Air France, and 'airy/indie ambient' is precisely the genre one could describe Air France's music being.

(I personally love 'airy/indie ambient' music myself. :) Especially Air France's, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ADxybVy5Ls and so on)

edit: Oops, yes, apparently I confused things here (as explained below). Sorry.
Not just any multi billion dollar consumer company, a descending and overvalued one that never really contributed anything I see as particularly worthwhile at any rate.
How is that demurrage any different from inflation, though? I have to invest my cash in things just to get it to maintain the value it has now.
SEEKING FREELANCER | Designer | Switzerland or remote

I run a small web consulting agency. From time to time we are looking for some talented designers to offload some of our mockup/sketching/design work.

A typical job would involve the following: We create a detailed sitemap with all the contents and the website's structures. We put together a specification of designs/websites and design elements that the customer likes. We would then send all of that to you along with our budget, and you would create an awesome design out of that, investing as much time as possible based on the pre-defined budget. That's where we pick up again, finalize the design with the client and create the website.

If you feel that you could help us and are confortable with that project based/fixed rate workflow, please email freelance-designer@mobweb.ch along with:

- Some of your recent design work
- Your average hourly rate

Looking forward to hearing from you!
When you say new technologies, do you mean actual technological inventions or innovations, or just the latest trending web framework to spawn a fad of conferences?

Because, yes, I'm relatively comfortable not caring about technologies that will return to complete obscurity within 6-18 months.
Great. The name alone has stopped me from using it.
It would be unethical to maintain a harmful allele of a gene, assuming that the particular allele is unequivocally harmful.

But that is not always the case. The textbook example is sickle cell anemia: although it is very harmful in homozygous individuals, it confers resistance to malaria without negative side effects in heterozygous individuals, which is beneficial.

There's the possibility that a harmful gene today becomes beneficial in the indeterminate future, for a reason that we cannot predict. That is the logic behind genetic diversity in a species, which allows it to cope with new and unpredictable environments by essentially allowing alleles to compete in the "natural marketplace."

If we're going to take control of our genomes and select for ourselves which alleles are harmful or beneficial, we must at least be prepared to preserve genetic diversity, if not in living individuals, then in gene banks or genomic databases.
There's a growing number of packages written in Julia (http://docs.julialang.org/en/latest/packages/packagelist/) and using the PyCall package you can call any python package if you're missing functionality. Do have a look to see if what you need is implemented. Other than that porting existing MATLAB code is extremely easy since the syntax is similar in many cases.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the core devs.
> most people who “can draw” like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it

While I agree with this, it seems that there is a stage where drawing could be part of you easier. Just like someone can learn how to play guitar more easily when they're young vs when they're over 20.

Having said that, I also find that it is much easier to learn how to draw now than ever before. YouTube made it so much easier for people to share skills. So I could learn a certain technique with a certain tool much easier these days than in the 90's.
I hear a lot of this too, but anything more than anecdotal evidence (i.e. outside of our filter bubble) suggests that the bulk of people and Google customers are not subject to the kind of irrational hatred in your parent post.

ABC News/Wash Post poll on most favorable tech brands:
http://www.langerresearch.com/uploads/1127a22FavorabilityNo2...
I have been learning by myself for the past year, and if I may, let me share a few thoughts gathered along the way:

- This will never be “2 months, and I'll build next Facebook”. Consider that this is a field of knowledge that is exponentially evolving every year, and you will need years before you are comfortable with it. Learning code or computer science is a long term decision, and you should go for it if you really see yourself doing it as a hobby. If you are not up for it, better learn web design or something that relies less on programming;

- Following my previous point, start by learning the basics of computer science. You will not understand the abstract concepts, or know what you are doing before you have the theory basis behind it – You will get unmotivated faster. How fun is it to play a guitar without knowing music theory? There are dozens of ways to learn CS, and I personally find the CS50x class from EdX the best source to start;

- If you don't like math, well.. start liking it! Part of the enjoyment of programming is the satisfaction you get from solving problems. Read books about algorithms and/or take the online classes in Coursera or Udacity. Also make Project Euler as a daily visit, and try to solve several challenges per week;

- Again, start small, and go small every step. Make a structured plan of what you want to learn, such as "Monday I study Python, Tuesday for Algorithms, Wednesday for CS..". Take advantage of dozens of courses available in Coursera, Udacidy and EdX.

- Part of learning anything is making yourself motivated along the way. You should study at least 10h per week (I work full-time and I never study less than that) and make your successes visible, such as placing a post-it with every online course you completed in a wall;

Btw, I studied Economics for 5 years and I am 24. Even if you are older, never fall in the excuse that you are too old or it's too late. That's your "I am afraid to fail" thoughts. You don't have any pressure, no one is asking you to develop a whole new Microsoft.
Nothing throws this into a grey area as much as deafness. Deaf culture is truly profound. Entire vibrant deaf communities exist within 'normal' communities and can interact with others on an equal basis.

On the flip side, it can be seen as offensive to others when medical options become available to restore hearing. People will sometimes forgo treatment to 'stay in the clique'. This strong desire to not see deafness as a disability and an independent thriving culture is what might influence the choice to have a deaf child.

And while I'm being all stereotypical, if you ever have a Final Cut Pro question and you have a choice between asking a deaf or a hearing person, choose the deaf person....
You could start with Friedrich Hayek and the Austrian school if you're interested in a serious defense of anti-Keynesianism.

Note: I'm not saying I agree with them, just answering your question.
Like most ethics questions, I'd consider this area a matter of degrees. We probably have an easier time saying that ensuring your child's health and integrity is an ethical endeavor. Maximizing your child's stats on the other hand is probably questionable, not only because this has been associated with evil in the past, but also because we're not really all that good at judging consequences.

With this, somewhat tenuous, idea of the upper end of the ethical spectrum in mind, it's easier to see that intentionally hurting your child is bad. Again, at the most extreme end, the bottom is made up of people who commit a willful physical act to rob their child of health and happiness. This is quite common post birth, but now it's also increasingly feasible to do in the womb. I'd say removing a child's hearing is in the same league as, say, removing a child's genitals (which is also common in large parts of the world). It's a malevolent act designed to rob your child of some aspect of its humanity, and the motives are also similar ("I want my child to be the same as me!", "I think it's better that way").

Slightly towards the gray area of the spectrum, but still by far on the negative side, are in my opinion people who willingly and intentionally pass on catastrophic genes to their children. It's really not all that different, except I'd compare it more to shooting a person with a weapon at a distance, where the former examples are more like pulling a knife and butchering someone with your own hands (in some cases literally).

Now, your second question is the most interesting in my opinion. Is creating a child ethical at all because its suffering and eventual premature death seems predestined anyway? I'd argue that life - even at our current, very limited tech level - is indeed worth living and all things considered a positive thing. As badly designed as we are by nature, we're still a comparatively nice and diverse organism with amazing capabilities. And for a child born today, I hope that senescence will become a solvable problem within its lifetime.
The Hyperion series by Dan Simmons also had a great envisioning of the use of portals (multidimensional houses, the endless river) and a secret downside.
In a similar vein, there was a documentary called "Sound and Fury" on the controversy of cochlear implants in the deaf community: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/soundandfury/index.html
I'm surprised onion production is that high. Corn is in so much stuff (And as far as I could tell while there, is in all US food) while onions aren't.
Fun fact: Tomatoes love thrash and death metal.

http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/04/18/tomato-update/
http://eksith.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/tomato-experiment/

I don't know if this is only due to simply loud and/or harsh noises (I didn't check classical) or whether it's only applicable to this variety, but since I can't be attentive as I should be all the time, they worked as a wonderful babysitter.
We run Tealeaf Academy, which is an online based web dev bootcamp focusing on Ruby and Rails. Read more on our website: www.gotealeaf.com
Joe Hewitt is back!
Like once friend anywhere: Facebook's mobile problems
March 2013 DNS Speed Comparison Report
Any solutions to the problem of schools in sight? I dread the day when I'll have to send my kid off to school. Obviously I'll look at different schools, but I doubt that I'll find many interesting ones. I don't want to waste years of my kids life.
That is looking beautiful.
>Ιf you're a person who has the disorder, sufficient sleep is not going to make it go away.

IIRC, the "disorder" is mostly a psychological thing, not something concrete.

And it's uptick can also be ascribed to the willingness of more doctors to diagnose something where there was nothing before (to assist in selling some drugs, among other things).

So the two situations you describe here are not at all contradictory.
Congratulations. No wonder a neat service attracts so much attention.
we actually maintain a user directory list with basic information and new users can choose to be listed on that directory if they wish to.
Warning: Good Copy is More Valuable than Design...
Every human attribute could be redefined as "cultural" or individualistic and therefore under the scope of individual or group choice.

But to claim that the state gives up all responsibility for these choices is absurd since there is there are very real costs for those choices and their consequences.

For example, increasingly and controversially European state welfare systems are bearing the cost of IVF treatments, even for the oldest of couples and unusual parent systems (e.g. 3-parents). But there are clear trends in those societies for decreasing birth rates which cannot be entirely filled by immigration. The state has to act if it wants to continue to exist and thrive (as Japan will probably discover in 50 years time!).

In the extreme, at one end there is Gattaca. At the other end, all members of society and their children are being required to support choices that would otherwise never naturally exist, or only exist from enormous harm, but provide no objective benefit. In both cases, the long run damage to the human race or individual societies is unknown.

Perhaps the only solution is the minimum one. When it comes to procreation, allow only choices that permit any viable life and absolutely no more?

Perhaps one day, in combination with AI, there will be an internationally ratified and strongly enforced Minimum Viable Person Treaty - a sort of NPT for Sentient Life?
If by "modern economics" you mean neoclassical economics, quite the opposite is true: Those Depression-era programmes were created after laissez-faire didn't bring the US out of the Depression.
Sounds about right, using SSDs to store the user data would be ridiculous.