skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the provocation! You have gotten people thinking.

Personally, from the writings and essays of Paul Graham I don't think his goal is to make money. He is a visionary with the intent of creating more value in the world for people. He, as an individual could go and do his own thing for the rest of his life and not bother with this. Hawaii here we come. However, as people look for purpose and meaning in life, when one looks back and sees that they were an integral part in creating a great deal of 'wealth' (the way he defines it)for the world that is very rewarding.

Their terms ...

Just as it is integral for them to give of their expertise and experience so too it is of equal and perhaps greater importance to be able to curb their giving. This empowers founders to dig deep within their own reservoirs of strength and character and develop their company with minimal resources, i.e. money.

Just as a parent wants to give it is perhaps more important for him not to. It is important to discipline.
Senate Rejects Judicial Power on Home Payments
Or for any losers on OS X, I highly recommend 1Password: http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password

It stores an encrypted DB accessible via a master password, and it works great with something like DropBox if you use multiple machines. It also works w/ multiple logins per site.
>> "[T]he extension of the franchise to women ... [has] rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

Seems like so many people have been pissed about this line. It seems obvious that he didn't mean "women should not have the right to vote" though... just that it makes libertarian ideals harder to achieve, because women tend to favor more government.

Hence his main argument: The US majority will probably never be libertarian, so libertarians must try to go beyond politics if they ever want to achieve their goals.
The author seems to forget that separating U235 from U238, plutonium, and a slew of various highly radioactive and hazardous materials isn't exactly something you do in your shed with a couple of beakers. Especially if you want medical-grade concentrations of exotic isotopes... Saying that plutonium can be reused as fuel is also an assumption on the reactor technology used.

Imagine even just transporting the spent fuel to another plant. You can't permanently cast it in concrete and glass if you want to recycle it.

Many isotopes for nuclear medicine are also produced in accelerators, not by recycling.
Aloha, Kolya3!

It is difficult to try and relate in words - it really is the kind of thing you just need to experience. Rather like trying to explain the taste of vanilla ice cream. My experience was something like this:

discomfort, billions of thoughts, wait, do i always have this many thoughts, oh yeah, i need to be watching my breath, etc, etc, etc, days pass along the same lines, intense light/energy, no thought, pure experience of what seems like our original state, back to thinking - OMG, can i stay here forever? reluctant return to daily life

That is a very poor substitute for what actually happened - it bears almost no semblance whatsoever to the experience.
> know of no religious conservatives or anyone else for that matter who like STDs

Then you willfully ignorant, at best:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hiv+god's+punishmen...

I stand by my argument. Whether or not they openly claim to like STDs, religious conservatives and, say, HIV are natural friends. To the extent that the fundamentalist religions actually believe in their stated goals of discouraging promiscuous and homosexual conduct, the popular fear of HIV et al helps to make sexual mores more Victorian than they otherwise would be.

If and when we exterminate all STDs (a pocket-sized instant tester costing <$100 would do just that, and may be around the corner) and develop perfect unobtrusive birth control (say, immunocontraceptives currently being tested), sexual taboos will eventually go the way of the taboo on working on Sundays. And religions which attempt to restrict sexual conduct will be viewed as revolting anachronisms.
also registered twice
If it is irrational to fear a nuclear catastrophe, then why are the nuclear companies indemnified against exactly such a catastrophe by the Price-Anderson act? The industry has repeatedly lobbied for this act, so it seems that they are also afraid.

Various reports have been produced by the NRC which attempt to "prove" that the chance of a catastrophe is low (1 in a million or what have you). The methodology of these studies is somewhat laughable: a catalogue of all possible failures is created, and a probability is estimated for each one; then the probabilities are multiplied by the consequences of the failure. So, there might be an estimate that a tornado will hit a plant every 100 years; given that a tornado hits a plant, there is a 1 in 10 chance that the containment will fail; and so on. Anyone who has worked in software knows that it is absurd to try to catalogue all failure modes of a complex system.

Additionally, these reports have been marred by corruption. The Reactor Safety Study, produced in 1975, was eventually repudiated by the NRC in 1979. It was enormously misleading, summarizing the risks of nuclear power in terms of "early fatalities," whereas the cumulative fatalities from radiation exposure are far more serious. It is based on these sorts of flawed, self-serving studies that the nuclear industry brags about how "safe" its practices are.

Overall, I find the tone of the nuclear debate very disappointing. Nuclear supporters seem to pretend that anti-nuclear activists are just irrational, with no arguments worth worrying about. There is not even an acknowledgment that there are still hard problems to solve with nuclear, or that mistakes were made in the past.
Your Submarine essay on PR has been especially valuable advice. I hope it makes any folio/book.

It helped my tech-startup to gain the courage to spend a realistic amount on such a vital area.
Why the iPhone is revolutionary: 'Leaf Trombone' edition
I'd like a way to easily bind/remember "Which click pass site did I use?" for my account. I don't get logged out often, but when I do I usually try 2 or 3 different sites (eg. Google, Facebook, etc) before finding the one that links to my HN account.

And I'd be fine with "nod" -> "Facebook" (e.g.) mapping being public.
http://standoutjobs.com for recruitment (disclaimer: I'm a cofounder :-P )
Amusingly, every American school I've ever been inside was built of cinderblock - a type of brick made from the fairly radioactive ashes from the exhaust of coal power plants. Don't take my word for it, ask a kid to take a Geiger counter to school one day. (I wonder if that is an expellable offense in our times?)
Haha, that is because you can't maximize on OS X (bloody dock is in the way). SCNR ;-)
Is that a custom stylesheet on the standard django.contrib.admin or is it just the look of django-filebrowser?
Although I agree that modern nuclear reactors are extremely safe, I'd hardly say that the problem is 'solved'. They still don't use the fuel efficiently comparatively to what could be done with eg. breeder reactors, and the solution to the waste problem is still 'bury them'. Separating the nuclear waste by isotopes is a very complex and costly process, and even once it's done it doesn't necessarily follow that what is obtained can be used as fuel or for medicine. It depends on the reactor you use, or the kind of medical imaging you need to do.

Research is still ongoing in nuclear (fission) technology.
I think Obama stopped using Twitter before the "recommended people" shock happened that multiplied some people's follower counts by 100.
This points to a release that came out a month ago. I suspect this is some sort of spam.
The field of cognitive science (lingistics + philosophy + computer science + neuroscience + biology etc.) has actually discovered the underpinnings more or less. Consciousness is based on our bodily interaction with the world. Thought uses experiential metaphors from basic physical interactions with the world such as light/dark, up/down, etc. Read "Philosophy in the Flesh" by George Lakoff.

AI will never come from digital machines.
Now Hiring If You're Young (1998)
You can download a PDF of the full paper that is referenced here:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1354849

Click "Download" at the top and then click the SSRN link. Doesn't require registration.
Coal power plants steadily spew radioactive ash into the atmosphere. This is an empirically verifiable fact. And I have yet to see an anti-nuke activist give a rat's ass about dead coal miners - of whom there is a never-ending, steady flow.

You lose.
Meditation is pretty interesting stuff. For those put off by the spiritual or new age aspects of meditation, try The Relaxation Response.

http://www.relaxationresponse.org/steps/

http://www.relaxationresponse.org/howto.htm

It's trancendental meditation boiled down to the basics and demystified by a Harvard MD.
someone doing a few failed logins before successfully logging in won't look all that different than someone doing a few failed logins and then giving up, which is what most humans would do (as opposed to scripts).

people naturally tend to have a small number of cross products of usernames and passwords...once it gets too large we start forgetting parts of it.

a couple times in the past year i've forgotten my password for hn. after the first time it happened i wrote it down so i wouldn't lose my precious karma.
I have been playing with Resolver One http://www.resolversystems.com/ It is a Python Powered Spreadsheet.
CS123: Introduction to Computer Graphics
http://volokh.com/posts/chain_1240849478.shtml is a better link. The content is really in those 3 links at the bottom.
His basic point as I understand it is that there never really was the good old days of the patent system and that it has been broken since long before computers. People have always had to pool patents to make progress.
You can have my Excel when you pry it from my cold dead hands.

But seriously, like with any programming language, once you get used to the syntax it becomes intuitive. The advantage I see for using spreadsheets is that they are portable. You can send someone an Excel spreadsheet and they can look at it, play with it a little, and send it back.

R or Mathematica can do the calculations (and are more powerful than spreadsheets), but you lose the portability.

For simple stuff that I don't need to share I often use interactive Ruby from the Terminal too.
or just write it down...i mean, if someone gets access to your harddrive, stealing your hn account is probably the least of your worries.
Come on guys, don't get personal. You're both right; nuclear power is the best technology, but the nuclear industry is corrupt in something like the way the defense industry is.
And it's definitely not worse than coal, which is our primary source of electricity in the United States. Merely mining it kills three to four dozen people in the US directly every year, on average, since the 90s (and it was dramatically higher in the past). I don't think I need to mention to HN that the production of nuclear power has killed zero people in that period. The waste produced by the burning of coal dwarfs the waste that is generated per kWh...it's literally several orders of magnitude larger. And the shortened lives of people breathing coal pollution certainly adds up to dramatically larger impact than that of nuclear waste.

Yes, coal pollution is "safer" the nuclear waste in equal amounts, but neither is clean, and nuclear waste (low-grade or otherwise) can be contained safely, while coal simply produces too much to store or convert to non-dangerous forms.

I talked to a Greenpeace activist a few weeks ago to try to understand how Greenpeace can still be anti-nuclear energy with all that we know about the costs of the alternatives. Obviously, an on-the-street activist isn't necessarily representative of all of Greenpeace, but she did have a pamphlet about nuclear energy that she was very familiar with. In short, there is no recognition in their materials that nuclear power and nuclear weapons are dramatically different (and so, "no nukes!" applied equally to weapons and energy in her mind, and she simply couldn't imagine that one could exist without the other). There was also a deep-seated denial about coal and the realistic options for moving off of coal. Her response was, "We shouldn't compromise on clean energy, it's too important. We need clean sources of energy, like solar and wind, to replace coal and nuclear power." Obviously, there's no reasoning with this sort of mentality.
> please could you clear up what is meant by "Lisp All The Way Down."

"Lisp All The Way Down" is when you can select any part of the system - and the full source (written in the same basic concepts as the rest of the system, including the program you are writing) of the element will pop up. Any changes you make will take effect immediately and in real time. We had this in 1985. Why can't we have it now?

> it doesn't make Clojure evil, just different

The language is being promoted as the long-awaited, Messiah-like successor to Common Lisp. That is the main source of my annoyance.
Nice article, but:

> Mercury was once seen as a cold, dead little world, ....

"Cold"???
He didn't say the "US majority," though, he said "women."

So, what place do women have in his ideal, libertarian state?

I think that's a relevant question.

For example, presuming women are disinclined to vote for libertarians, how do you reconcile the "democracy" in "capitalist democracy" and "universal suffrage?" Is he saying if we have universal suffrage then we have to pick one: capitalism or democracy?

That seems to be the implication of his statement.
Pretty nice idea. Just a couple thoughts..

1. Definitely would like to search on content keywords, not just title of manual.
2. One of your top priorities should be getting this to the top of Google search for 'manual'. Right now it looks like your competition is a bunch of tech-centric manuals (iPhone, MySQL, etc.). I have to think these are beatable entries (though it won't be easy).
It's kind of a shame that the code that was meant to stop flamewars stymies interesting conversations like this one.
It's important to look at nuclear waste in the context of alternative energy generation processes. The solution to waste from coal plants is "pump that shit in the air and water", which is far worse than nuclear.
plain text with tabulated data and Awk
awk? I have been messing with this project: http://aql.googlecode.com so that I can quickly do sql-like things with flat files/output where ever it suits me. I need to check in latest code but it is coming along nicely! I believe it fits your description as I built it with the intention of it becoming part of my "unix eco system" in that I can pipe to it etc.
I at least know someone who worked (tangentially) on the statistics thing, and it was in the pipeline for a long time. Similarly for things like searchwiki or longer snippets (I've heard of small UI changes sitting around for years).

I think whats really happening is that when competitors do things its often a validation for the team that is doing it at Google. Further, I think some of this is kind of silly because this is Google we're talking about: the guys who sat on GrandCentral for well over a year in radio silence to... err... migrate it somewhere? Google development methodology is "do it once, do it right", and by God they're going to work on it until its right. This isn't some market analyst telling the engineer to turn up the "copy Cuil" knob or anything.
What about Chile? We have a real democracy, when we bailed out the banks in 1982 the bank boards got thrown out on the street and the taxpayers got all the shares and made a profit, and there is still rule of law. Entrepreneurs effectively pay no taxes. We have a democracy and have our shit together.
> This is what Thanissaro Bhikkhu, a renowned Buddhist meditation teacher, calls "getting the body into position."

"In order to do a sit-up, lie flat on your back with your knees at a 45 degree angle. This is what Jane Fonda calls 'getting the body into position.'"

No kidding? What else would you call it?
That's not really the answer I was looking for, I realized it was the submitter's own site.

I'm wondering how all these sub-par sites are making the front page. I'm just waiting for one of those links to google's homepage that the spammers use makes it to the front page.
I think you're reading more into my argument than is there. For example, I did not say and do not believe that nuclear is worse than the alternatives - it's certainly better than coal in almost every way. I just don't like it when people pretend that there are no reasonable criticisms of nuclear power.
Password retrieval has been a standard feature for any website for many years. It's easy to do for users who have an email in their profile, and it gives the rest a good reason to enter it. When I created my account I added my email because I assumed that the feature existed. Good thing I haven't forgotten my password.
I work on a website and I use two 24" monitors. Firefox maximized on one (Firebug takes up tons of room you know!), and screen (with emacs/terminals/etc) on the other.

I think this is more a personal preference thing than anything else. (And I use my laptop for music and IM, but its usually displaying the Vista enter password screen anyway.)
Cheap Flyers Printing
Advice for recent MBA Grads
Would you mind elaborating on what else you're looking for other than what Harvest offers?
The ones I find myself using the most are:

[Appstore]

Tweetie

Stanza

Last.fm / Pandora

[Installed via jailbreak]

Cycorder

SBSettings
I can't speak for him, but my guess is that his ideal libertarian state would be non-democratic, opt-in only, or both.

Don't ask me how he plans to achieve it...
It's a custom stylesheet.
The only reason it's more expensive is because the disposal of nuclear waste is artificially cheap.

If corporations had to pay for the cost of building phenomenally expensive disposal sites such as Yucca Mountain, recycling would suddenly become vastly more economical.

Another issue is the very low price of uranium; reprocessing solutions weren't considered in the past because uranium was so incredibly cheap that it made no sense to attempt to reprocess spent fuel. One of the primary reasons recycling has become an issue again is that the price of uranium has risen enormously in recent years.
> Unix and C are brilliant pieces of work

I beg to differ:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/handbook.html

> pipes, scripting C programs, etc.

None of these things are necessary when every piece of information on your machine lives in a Lisp world image. As it should. And would, if the machines we are now using were the descendants of real computers, rather than of early-1980s children's toys.
I think the quote you're looking for is this:

"You can't reason a man out of a position he did not arrive at through reason."
for a scientist, he doesn't make a very scientific argument:

>His experiment in cooperation with four other laboratories, he said, yielded “a very compelling body of data validated by many labs,” and has inspired the researchers to go on freely sharing with one another.”<

Would competition have produced a _more compelling body of data? Very likely if you ask me.
SciPy: http://www.scipy.org/

R: http://www.r-project.org/
I TA'd this class once upon a time. The slides are great.
RescueTime on CNBC this morning
> The impedance mismatch between Scheme and the JVM is a lot less than what the writer thinks

Tail call optimization? Scheme is a cruel parody of itself without it.
I thought this was a joke, but I think the author is serious.
I was looking to embed a Lucene based search for offline text search of a CD of static HTML/PDFs. I wanted it to be able to run the same search as our server ran. Applets were the best option there.

But, you are right in that they're pointless as UI elements.
It's not that there's "no need to change the patent system", it's more that it's been this way for a long time.
The implication that scientists compete due to their egos is not totally accurate. Yes, some do have egos, but like the programming world many are just geeky types who want to find out the answers and are happy to co-operate if that helps.

What forces them to compete is the money. When your entire research program is based on your having to convince your funding agency to give the bucks to you and not to the other guy, you create competition and moreover you are rewarding the people who are the most competitive.

I agree with the point of the article that sometimes better science would get done with more openness and co-operation (I have seen numerous examples of that in my field), but absent an infinite supply of money I don't see how it can be done. I'd love to know though!
Federal Felony To Use Blogs, the Web, Etc. To Cause Substantial Emotional Distress
Yes. A friend pointed it out to me just now :)

Still, it really doesn't seem to make much difference (or maybe, I'm not using Excel (actually OpenOffice) right).

Haven't tried Mathematica yet; though it has sounded interesting for a long time.
From the article: "Can you imagine Walmart making wholesale changes to its stores because mom and pop's store on the corner implemented some neat features for its customers?"

Yes, if Wal-Mart had the magical power to allow 1% of its visitors to walk through the door to a completely different store, they would have the power to experiment with a lot of things that would arguably make the shopping experience better.

I have no doubt the Google A/B tests a lot of this stuff before rolling it out.
Rehabilitating the professional rock star
http://news.ycombinator.com/resetpw
Would competition have produced a _more compelling body of data?

Possibly not, depending on how the experimental stratification was allocated among the labs. The press release about the research

http://newsroom.ucr.edu/news_item.html?action=page&id=20...

linked to from the submitted article doesn't make clear the nature of the collaboration among the various laboratories, but makes the claim that the previous competitive atmosphere among labs led to results that could not be replicated. Apparently the currently announced results have already been replicated.
I went to a talk once where the presenter made the case (very well) that there was just one single patent that enabled Singer to sew up, so to speak, the market.

Even more elegant, it came down to just one claim.

The claim was for a sewing device in which the thread went through a hole that was positioned near the sharp tip of the needle (unlike on a hand sewing needle, where the hole is on the other end). Simple, and very hard to get around.
I doubt it. Competing research teams involves a lot of duplicated effort. Novelty is usually required for work to be published, and if you're scooped, there's two options: drop the project, or find some way to differentiate yourself from prior work. In theory, the difference you come up with should make your publication still a worthwhile addition, but in practice, I don't think it usually is.
Ask HN: Where can I find the uncensored "How to Win Friends and Influence People"?
PG brings this book up in one of his essays, and notes that the edition available today is the Bowdlerized one. Where might I get a hold of the real thing?
Ordained-Becoming: Technological Determinism
When you had moderators (AKA editors) who deleted the stupid stuff.
Academia tries to give you some freedom as if you were managing your own company. But unlike a standard company, you seek funding by submitting proposals to your competition (!).

And unlike a standard company, you have grad students instead of employees who may do what you want and then again may just ignore you.

To top it off, you have to teach as well.

Given all this, do you really think scientists would be open to have whatever remaining freedom they have taken away through greater collaboration?