skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
European countries have far more social structure than the US. People are part of groups (tribes) formed around religion, culture, nationality, language, political ideals, labour, and even football. It is the group, not the individual, that takes care of its members. Members of the group contribute and the leaders decide what happens with the contributions. This model doesn't fit individual compassion, because it would distantiate you from the group ("you (member) think we (the group) are not doing enough!?").

That being said, Christianity was in fact the binding element that provided Western-Europe with its strong social structure that still exists today. It was not so much the Bible or morale that bound them, for most it was in fact the fight against catholic oppression that led to Calvinism and other reformations. Without support or leadership from the Vatican, protestants formed scattered social groups, in which members had to protect and support each other. In doing so they found themselves reinventing the biblical message. To protect the family, social gatherings (sunday prayers), give to the poor (prevent them from stealing), take care of the weak. Again, not as individuals, but as a group.

The US on the other hand, was formed through immigration of people who had little or no social relations with each other. The result was an individualistic society where everyone took care of themselves. However, such a system is not inately human. There is no one to take care of the inevitable unfortunate. The individual compassion that is enabled by the lack of social commitments cannot begin to pay the rent for a single mother, the health care bill of a retiree, or the school books of a poor man's daughter. As economic tides reveal the pain of individualism groups are formed.

Gradually, America is shifting towards a stronger social structure. Middle-America finds refuge for its mediocre economic opportunities in evangelical Christianity, whereas the people along the coast-lines are bounded by progressive politics. The growing schism between these groups is exemplary of the social bonds getting stronger.

This also reveals the dark side of social structure. Deep hatred between different groups. A hatred that far exceeds any individual conflict, a hatred that has led to all of history's atrocities we know so well. Yet, the social bonds are unavoidable. Man is meant to live in a tribe. That is how we evolved.
Can you tell us how much you spent?
Unfortunately, yes! I've been doing that for some time now. Though I personally don't like this habit but I've come to a point where I do this for pleasure. I don't smoke heavily, 5--6 ciggs/day. But that said, I wouldn't recommend this to any one. At one point, you really want to quit but it becomes harder and harder.
Sure do. Drink, too. To be perfectly honest, I have difficulty relating to anyone who does not. It's like they're from a whole different world.

That said, I'm eagerly awaiting someone curing that whole "lung cancer" thing ...
Everything except cigarettes actually - pot, sheesha/hookah, cigars, etc.
Five reasons Apple shouldn't get into gaming
A pipe here. And pot too.
Poll: How do you get to work?
I'd also be interested in the frequency of people who work remotely part-time.
I drive.
I carpool/rideshare.
I bike.
I take public transit.
I walk.
I sit up in bed and grab my laptop.
I smoke when I drink, and I try not to drink that much because I like getting shitfaced.
As they are, the kiosks already know where they are. Each kiosk has the station name on-screen. Just FYI.
I used it for years and still regret it.
I'm a Harvard grad who can't hold a fast-food job
I'm much more partial to killing my liver than my lungs :) No smoke for me.
Warning messages have been on cigarette packs since 1966.
I hate that quote. It makes "progress" seem inevitably adversarial, when in fact, most of the things that we see as "progress" in the world are evolutionary phenomena -- adaptive by nature.
VPSLink anyone? I've had few trouble with them, though they're young enough that they do occasionally run into hiccups.
+1 for sandwiching that sentence between "Oh heavens" and "Simmer, bro".
What if Apple did buy Twitter? Ten (Un)likely Scenarios
What?! Things Shouldn't be 100% Free And Open?? You really don't get it.

Edit: it should be painfully obvious that this is sarcasm
"The lawyer who volunteers at a soup kitchen... is giving up X dollars per hour of income to provide far less than X dollars per hour of charity."

What about the lawyer who does pro bono legal work for the same soup kitchen? Or (closer to the HN crowd) the coder who puts up a website for a charity?

"it seems clear that people who primarily give time are donating for reputation"

Reputation is one possible motive, but I could imagine others: warm-fuzzy feelings, a desire to connect to one's community, a lack of funds to donate (if a second job is out of the question), and so on.

One might also choose volunteering as an alternative to other non-working activities. The soup kitchen lawyer guy wasn't exactly going to be pulling down $100/hr watching SportsCenter that Saturday.
The wireless access is only free when buying books I believe, not for general browsing.

(Someone correct me if I'm wrong)
Most mathematicians are Lewis Carroll?!
"1. The Best Ideas Are Already Taken"

I don't understand how anybody could think this. It just simply isn't true. There doesn't need to be a "void" in order for something new to be successful. It just has to be better in some way than the existing technology.

I don't think anybody on HN thinks that the best ideas are already taken. It's the people /not/ starting companies which believe this.
Er, hi champ. What have you written?
I smoked for 6 years; quit cold turkey on a whim earlier this year.

Edit: For those looking to quit, the first 3 weeks are pretty shitty, but after that not so bad. I still get the rare craving and occasional dream about smoking, but that's about it.

So far the only noticeable plus for me has been that I don't need to feel like a leper in public since for whatever reason most people are horribly offended by cigarettes these days. I was sort of hoping to develop super powers, though.
Honestly, I am wary of anything that proxies credentials, and I agree with kaiuhl in that it is even less inviting due to lack of information or screenshots of whatever tweetsip might be. cf. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000953.html
But I only smoke in the evenings and never at work and it is anywhere between 0-5.
How is this pertinent to Hacker News?
I started smoking when I was 13. Mostly because it seemed like something "forbidden" to do. My parents smoked, so it was easy to get access to cigarettes.

As I got a little older, the "cool kids" smoked, so it gave a shy kid some openings for socialization.

I quit 5 years ago, and it was easily the hardest thing I've ever done. Some mornings I still wake up and reach for my pack before I'm fully awake
Nice article. Thanks for posting it.

By the way, the "print" link is broken. Here is the correct link:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-look-of...
Bella:world's oldest dog Photo
I found this claim dubious as well. It incorrectly assumes that evolution will cull 'bad' traits and reward 'good' ones. Tell me, what is the evolutionary advantage of the appendix? Fingerprints? The number of human chromosomes?

All we know is that these traits are survivable which says nothing of any advantage or disadvantage they may confer. The author (of the article and this comment) needs to understand evolution better.
Yes but cancer education and the costs of smoking are more recent.

Now smoking is shown as a very deadly habit and many commericials (mostly from philip morris and their new requirements) on quiting and destruction caused by cigs.
It's a survey of hacker habits. It's fairly low-value compared to the sort of content that usually makes it to #1 though.
Mathematicians typically deal with abstract problems that have no direct relation to human feelings. Novelists, artists, and social scientists typically do the opposite.
Completely agree. That's the anti-competitive spirit that prevents good ideas from happening :)

I agree with the author's other 4 points, however. I'd hate to see a fourth console out there buying up exclusives, seeing another contender in the endless console wars... ugh.

... and if you thought people complained when the PS3 cost $600? :) I kid, I kid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomin...

actually quite a few spots behind.
Be egalitarian. Kill them both at once!
Obsessive chain smoker here. 1.5 packs a day. But it's the last of my vices; before that I have tried everything from Opium to Salvia.

P.S. Though I'm Arab, I can't stand sheesha, way too heavy.
Whether it's the networks' fault or not, lots of TV viewers outside the US are probably saying to themselves "Hulu? Who cares? I'll continue to download TV shows via BitTorrent".

If the TV networks are determined to go the same way as the music industry, it's their funeral.
Looks nifty, but can anyone who is color-blind comment on the "select destination" page? I feel it may be difficult to tell which stop is in which region.
8-bit fatality
How to build communities....whoever knows the answer can be a millionaire on the net.

I dont.
If the release comes from Japan, it will start in Japan, with Japanese content. Tie-ups with B&N would be a good deal for both sides. The Japanese have talked about this for years. One of the first targets would be the newspaper publishers. They have the infrastructure to pull off a wireless distribution channel from the train stations. (curiously this didn't happen with Sony).

But, I could be very wrong, and Taiwan might actually be first mover: http://www.epapercentral.com/pvi-to-mass-produce-ereaders.ht...

If they are though, funnily it would not start in Taiwan with Taiwanese content.
How would you like us to improve it so it isn't useless to you?
> The Haskell Platform is a blessed library and tool suite for Haskell, ....

Can someone explain what "blessed" means, in this context?
I'm sure everything would be different considering cloning products and ideas would be free to do which would require innovation to occur extremely quickly or products to be mostly staple goods.
It seems like content providers are trying to do something smart in providing users with an alternative to piracy by working with Hulu, but they haven't figured out a model that will work for all users.

It might be smarter for everyone involved to get those users on Hulu now despite the lack of a means of making a profit. To do anything else means more users will get used to piracy, and may get picked off by local competitors before Hulu and the content providers find ways to monitize them.

This strategy seems like winning the battle at the expense of an increased risk of losing the war.
It doesn't proxy credentials, it uses oAuth.
For plastic yes, you're right. I tend to use cash for transit fares, I don't know why. I must have some mental block about it, because I'll even leave the station to go use the ATM, then come back and make change and then put the $5 bill in and grumble about having a pocket full of quarters. Oh well, I fail.
I suspect you're right, but...something about the arrangement makes my inner archivist/historian cringe.
I think we had this question recently. Anyway, same answer: yes, a pipe. The thinking man's smoke.
Free.
Well - there's http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/

And then there's cough scribd cough
I was actually started making it a week or so before he said that. Seeing his tweet made me finish it sooner than I probably would have otherwise though.
I'm not sure I understand this one yet. Could you explain what you mean about code vs. Program?

To me, it seems the novice is correct here (supposing that those components produced are required for a good result). Is the lesson similar to that of building DSLs?
Causes cravings might be more accurate way to put it. It always gave me a buzz though (I quit 6 months ago), not just in the beginning.
I second that!

but I probably wouldn't do it anyway. I hate being around people smoking, and not just because it sometimes makes it hard for me to breath. It smells so bad.
I was working at a well respected hacker company for a brief period. Out of something like 200 people in the office I was the only smoker as far as I could tell.

Ever since I've considered it a reasonable way to judge a company. Maybe a good interview question: "So, how many of your programmers smoke?"
PHP is not a programming language. It's just an overblown template engine.
For all its flaws, PHP and Perl are the only web languages that let you build a web app in _whatever_ fashion you want.

This extreme flexibility coupled with mature libraries makes web app development ridiculously easy. For a complex application that starts at ground zero I would probably recommend Ruby or Python but really even that decision is 50-50. We've faced this crossroads 3 times in the last couple months and 2/3 we've gone with PHP over Python, and not just cos of familiarity.

For any existing app, it's probably already in PHP or something worse like ColdFusion, so migrating it to "good" PHP 5.x is usually the only logical step.

That said threading, namespaces, sickening magic and the whole haystack/needle needle/haystack game SUCK. But you can get everything done quick and everything will scale and if you need to change it you know you always can without tearing down a house of cards so ... I for one don't mind it, in fact I quite like PHP and the PHP ecosystem.
If it was just as easy, why wasn't it done?
fixed it. send me your resume and all that (sorry i always thought HN had a PM type feature just never checked)

we have people on both coasts, though we are trying to build up headcount in the new york office right now.
It’s Time to Legalize Personal-Use DVD Copying
Are there any speed/performance implications for doing:

* { margin:0; padding:0; }

Every single element rendered would be affected by this, especially if there are more rules in the global wildcard like font-family, border, color etc.
Whether I'm driving a Ferrari or an Aston Martin, I still have no idea what goes on under the hood. If you have to understand every aspect of every library you use to code you will never get anything done. Instead, learn enough to attack your core competencies and trust that the rest of it works as expected, since someone else has chosen that as their core competency.

Libraries and frameworks are all about not knowing how they work behind the scenes. That's kind of the point.
how old is hulu? frankly i am pretty impressed with how far it has come already. while they may be terminal regardless of what they do, it is encouraging that they are at least starting to bleed off some inertia and change directions.

[edited to actually address your comment]

with respect to international users, i totally understand their frustration. i don't really depend on hulu for anything since i can dvr more tv than i can watch as it is, but i would be upset too. i think it might be best to look at it in the same light as geographic roll-outs of movies, games, etc. it's a bummer, and due to mostly stupid limitations, but we can plausibly imagine a future where those limitations are no longer in place because they are inefficient.
Hands-On: Kindle DX Is a Pricey Pleasure — Despite Many Flaws
"it never takes long before I reach a point where I feel like I’m no longer programming in Ruby."

This echoes perfectly my feelings about Rails. I have tried, several times, to do something with it, but I always hit some magical wall or mythical creature that demands something from me I really don't know what it is.

If I have to define the main difference between Rails and Django is that Rails is a DSL for building websites on RDBMSs. Django is a web framework for building web sites with RDBMSs. Django stuff is Python. Rails stuff is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Ruby.
Stop Trying to Save the Planet
I wrote a long post about this here a few weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=579387

Basic ideas -- missing language features, language features that don't work, improper OO, lacking modern abstractions (where's a good ORM?). Read the whole post for details.
If I smoke a cigarette about once a month, does that count?
One day as I lit a cigarette someone said to me, "I used to smoke, and then I realized that I was the smartest person I knew who still smoked, so I quit." Later I thought about this and realized that I was the smartest person I knew who still smoked, so I quit too. Actually thinking about the smokers you know can be an eye-opening comparison.
CSS rule declarations of this kind are very, very fast; when rendering without your rules the browser is simply using a different default.css file internally, so it makes no difference (less the time taken to load the CSS file itself).

Nearly every page on Yahoo uses an expanded form of the above to reset and standardize margins, borders and padding across browsers. In fact, we give it away for anyone to use:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/
I regard string concatenation as very annoying in Java.

Actually, just about anything is annoying in Java. I guess I have been spoiled by more modern languages like... Smalltalk/80 or Lisp'56.
You can always just strip the DRM off on your computer.
Isn't it lovely when people can simply mod you down when they disagree with you instead of trying to debate?
I agree. Even if he is right in his approach, he could really do with being teamed up with someone who has a personality as strong as his and is much better at the aesthetic and fun part.

The sad thing about BOP2K is that for all the potentially clever things going on behind the scenes, you could probably re-write it with a handful of simple rules and random generators and 99% of users could not tell the difference.

My biggest concern with his approach has always been that ultimately it will just feel like you are randomly poking the world to try and make something interesting happen.The chance of an interesting narrative developing is some where in the realm of winning the lottery.

Add on top of that the chance that it will ever be in form that people actually enjoy and want.

I do applaud the man's passion, a lot of his ideas and willingness to try it though. I hope one day someone picks up his books and surprises us all by making it, or some form of it, work.
Still not wild about the DRM though -- I made the mistake of buying DRMed music that I can't listen to anymore.

The DRM that Amazon uses is pretty crappy (isn't it all), and is trivial to remove with a Python script available from various file-sharing services. But you didn't hear that from me, I know nothing about it...
It's not a long entry and his tax proposals aimed at producing desired results make for a worthwhile read.

He bolded the main takeaway:

"The beautiful thing about this country is that we like to work hard, and we like to take chances. Unfortunately, over the last 15 years, the incentives have been to take chances as a financial engineer rather than as an entrepreneur. We give far more money to people who play games with financial instruments than we give to people who come up with ideas for the next big thing. That needs to change if we want to remain a leader in this world."
there's not a lot of NEW going on in the PHP world

There was an article on slashdot yesterday about PHP6. Here's one from IBM:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-...

Not a whole lot of new, but something. I think PHP gets ignored sometimes because it is an older language, not the new and trendy thing.
heh. the last bit (where he asks for investors) was priceless. Personally, I'm also pretty leery of investors. I've turned a few down myself. Really, when you take on an investor, you are taking on another partner. you don't want to accept just anyone.
once you pick a region, there ought to be a way to go back in case you picked incorrectly
that's interesting to know! That also sounds like a big scam to me! I definitely want to read more about that process, if you have anything stored in your bookmarks!

I was thinking of artist in the traditional sense- some renaissance painter mixing pigments and material to come up with the perfect shade of red, for example.
It sort of seems like it's massively in Amazon's interest if it does, right? They want eBooks to catch on like MP3s did, and the way to do that, it turns out, is a decade of massive piracy before the publishers finally give in.
You should consider that other people have different tastes from your own. Get off your high horse.
You're talking about those "e-cigarettes" right? How do they compare to the real deal in your opinion? I've been meaning to try one, but many e-cigarette are costly.
Contextful noncog megashort timesave extra howbout?
News Flash: Paying for Coverage Is Still “Taboo”
A good list, but I just have to add one which is a killer for any good app:

PHP has terrible unicode support. Almost uniformly every app that starts out using the default PHP function set ends up failing horribly when data with non-european (or even just non-ascii) characters end up in it. There are a whole lot of kludge workarounds, but they're basically an admission of defeat rather than a real statement of support.
It only tastes unpleasant at first, then it becomes normal.

I actually have an interesting story that has to do with this. Last summer I was taking a newer smoking cessation drug named Champix. The drug works by binding with the same receptors that nicotine does, and prevents nicotine from having its effect. You take this drug while continuing to smoke, and about two weeks later, cigarettes lose their lustre. You still want the buzz, but you don't get a thing out of smoking.

Now here's the interesting bit. Without the buzz, cigarettes tasted gross again. I mean really gross. I didn't want anything to do with them. They smelled differently as well. Obviously I'm only relating a personal experience, and I can't say whether other people experience the same thing.

And to whom it may concern, I found the drug had other side effects (which may have also been related to smoking cessation), which lead to my smoking again. I lasted about two months, all in all, but throughout the entire period I was mood swinging like crazy. In the end, I found the solution worse than the problem, and decided to stop taking it.
no...what he's talking about is essentially a smoke-less pipe/bong.
That's one way. Luis von Ahn solved this problem cleverly.

His ESP game has a bunch of images, and you and a partner have to come up with the same tag for each image. Do it fast, score lots of points.

Instead of having people play realtime, he recorded each session, so that if no one's playing that particular image, you're still playing against a human, time-shifted.

Obviously this isn't an exact corollary to Chess (what would the ESP game be, a 1-move chess game?), but there are ways of denecessitating simultaneity.
I am red-green color blind. Still this works, the colors chosen are easy to differentiate. Also the large letters next to each section help.
It might be possible to add a bit more contrast in the "F" section.
The parent clearly talks about how PHP is used mostly for the presentation layer of that class of applications.
Funny. I named my cat Conan, but I had no idea he was being named after a computer as well as a talk show host and barbarian.
I would never smoke cigarettes. Its an expensive and kind of a smelly habit.

I do like the occasional hookah or cigar though. That's something you don't do every day so I think its not bad on the expenses and health fronts.
Red Bull Cola is god awful. It tastes like cough syrup. I couldn't bring myself to drink more than the first even when it was free.