skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are applying extreme positions held by a minority to broad groups of people who don't hold those positions. To imply that being an environmentalist means advocating a return to hunter-gatherer lifestyle is absurd.

Honestly it's starting to sound a bit hypocritical given your original statement.
Review my photo CAPTCHA web service
No, it does not have a "Cats 'n Dogs" theme--not that there's anything wrong with that:)
A food system that kills
ABC Will Add Its Shows to Hulu (joining FOX and NBC). What does this mean for YouTube?
Short of the few countries in the world who have nukes, I would say that nobody can defend themselves from a US or NATO invasion.
Please tell me this is a parody. A programming language is a tool, not a religion.
Do they need the money in the sense that they don't have $20K in savings, or in the sense that they can't/won't borrow or raise the money in some way?
Along the same lines, I'd recommend Accelerando by Charles Strauss. (http://www.accelerando.org/) It's another well written piece of post-singularity fiction that's fascinating in the ideas and implications that it presents.

Yes, this is the second topic today I've recommended it in. No, I am not a shill, it just came up twice.
a group of MIT Scientists found that recycling is more expensive than the once-through process

Note that this recommendation is qualified in the paper: "over the next half century". After that time, they imply that uranium may be scarce/expensive enough that we will need an alternate approach.

They also estimate that the plants we build will have lifespans of 40 years and that we will need a new Yucca Mountain-size waste storage facility every 3-4 years.

It's a little troubling that our nuclear solutions to the energy problem won't last out the century, while the sites that we create for them will be polluted for thousands of years.
The contrapositive of his statement is: IF you believe in capitalist democracy THEN you cannot have universal suffrage.

Since he believes in capitalist democracy, presumably he also believes you cannot have universal suffrage.

Actually, he's more explicit than that. He doesn't believe you can have democracy at all if you're a capitalist: "I no longer believe that freedom [read: capitalism] and democracy are compatible."

So, sounds like that's exactly what he's saying.
Hence, almost no country is today truly sovereign in the traditional (pre-Hiroshima) sense of the word.
Not only that, but (and I realise this may not be the norm in the HN population) many of us work in places where people can't just get fired because it turns out they are not an A-player. I could get an F-player fired, but if I hire a B-player I am stuck with them. One of the important real-world geek herding skills is getting the most out of your B-players.

That said: he is right in that most of the hiring literature is lame if not outright stupid. I was once passed a book by upper (non-tech) management on how to interview people and it really did tout all the nonsense cliches, like the quality of the candidate's handshake. I am still boggling to this day.
Yes, I guess anarcho-capitalism is a system which fits his line of thinking.
Very very interesting :)

I actually don't use SQL for querying anything (as I said, I'm more looking for seeing how much values deviate from the mean etc), but this looks cool.

One question in relation to your project is why not simply use awk, filter data, pipe to a sqlite db and then query with "real" SQL? I'm curious to know why you choose to write a parser for SQL rather than a lint-thing for CSV..
I'm not simply talking about openly declared human-extinction advocates. The death by starvation of billions is a logical consequence of perfectly mainstream environmentalist platforms - pushing for the elimination of nuclear power, factory farming, pesticides, genetically-engineered crops, and other technologies which make our historically-unprecedented abundance of food and other necessities possible.

I simply don't care about anyone's stated goals. What I care about is the logically inevitable results of the changes they are pursuing.
They do parse natural language. In fact, that was one of the biggest problems they had to overcome, and is the main reason they currently have no plans for creating different versions for other languages.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wolframalpha_our_first_...
Why do you say "don't bother trying to write it in C++" referring to Click's lock-free hash table? His algorithms are based on compare-and-swap, which is the same operation I'd use to implement a lock-free data structure in C/C++.
by recruitment what i meant was basically whenever a resume is recieved by email,
i) a separate entry is created for that person.

ii) Other people can change status like hired, called for interview, telephonic done, rejected etc

iii) Other employees can add candidate feedback and other things so that everything remains in one place
The empirical finding here is that scientists can sometimes be persuaded to cooperate. How general that could be across how many disciplines, and whether the interesting institutional constraints you mention could be modified to increase cooperation, remains to be seen.
Thanks mate. Glad you liked it. You working on anything interesting?
Trying this now, thanks!
Chrysler Enters Chapter 11, Forms Alliance With Fiat
actually we were really facing issues after we recieved a flood of resumes. Finally ended up a quick solution myself over the weekend. Its working for now but could be better :)
Your opinion really means a lot coming from a sub-par user who does not know how to read the topic title. And is it really against the rules to submit tutorials from a site. And just because the tutorial did not help you does not mean it did not help the other countless users, but your comments are what anyone can expect from a sub-par user who's job is to hate so keep on hating sub-par.
Why is the new edition inferior?

edit:

If you want to learn what people want, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. [8] When a friend recommended this book, I couldn't believe he was serious. But he insisted it was good, so I read it, and he was right. It deals with the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself.

[8] Buy an old copy from the 1940s or 50s instead of the current edition, which has been rewritten to suit present fashions. The original edition contained a few unPC ideas, but it's always better to read an original book, bearing in mind that it's a book from a past era, than to read a new version sanitized for your protection.

http://www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html#f8n
I have some major reservations about whether a mercantilist state would have any respect for human rights.
I think that a portion of this is due to Google's unusual hierarchy model. Between the 20% time projects and the large number of small, loosely related teams, they're constantly trying new strategies (whether internally or in the market).

When a related idea makes headlines, it makes sense to release both to make google look good ("We're one step ahead of you..."), and to draw traffic to otherwise unnoticed projects.

The reason we don't see this type of behavior in other market leaders is that they don't take Google's "Throw lots at the wall and see what sticks" approach (at least not to the same extreme).

Personally I think that taking an 'innovate constantly and let the market sort it out' approach is both a shrewd use of resources (as long as you let failures die early), and a good way to keep from getting too comfortable/over-adapted to one niche. (Although it's worth noting that not many Google projects likely make money without relying on Adsense).

Tech companies (startups included) are uniquely situated to take an 'evolutionary' approach to business because you can

1) Move fast (and cheaply)

2) Quickly identify failures (good metrics) and

3) Keep a fairly flat hierarchy/network, which enables efficient communication.
I switched to OS X four months ago, and while I think it's a great step forward from Windows, it isn't quite the same as a comprehensive tiling manager. I've used xmonad, and it's a dream -- I just haven't made sufficient time to put up the headache of installing it.

Taking two windows, tiling them side-by-side and maximizing them should be effortless. It shouldn't take a fancy hardware set up nor an expensive investment, and it shouldn't be hassle to install. There's no reason UI widgets I don't need should consume precious real estate when I don't need them.

I develop on a 13" MacBook, btw.
I had a similar issue - I forgot I'd registered with an OpenID and thus when attempting to login couldn't figure out why it would fail, even when using the correct case.
>Terrorism is certainly no reason to fuck up our entire domestic energy policy.

Nor is terrorism a reason to fuck up the Constitution, but the prior Administration had no qualms doing that.
Are Commercial Databases Worth It?
You don't need to understand them, you just need to know that they exist and there are quite a few of them (us). If you do UI work, design accordingly.

For example: the larger the monitor, the more tabs I can have open on Firefox without having to cycle left and right. I like being able to see all my tabs at once and know where they are.

I also like having Terminal taking up the other monitor, and knowing that it's always there. It's the Terminal monitor. All other applications are minimized, I bring them to the front when I need them and minimize them after. It's like opening and closing the fridge.
I have a 22" widescreen monitor and usually run apps maximized.

It's a rare situation when I have to simultaneously focus on two apps.Why not dedicate screen space to what I am currently working on?
Could it be enforced, or at least encouraged, by the funding agencies?

That still leaves the problem of reputation-building; a paper where an individual is only one of 20 authors probably isn't so impressive on a CV.
Geolocation in Firefox 3.5 and Fennec
I'm the opposite. I like text to not wrap unless possible. I hate having to scroll down because someone decided to have seven words per line.
Sounds great, I'd love to do it if I'm still in town.

[p.s. My karma hits 100 and now I finally get downvotes? Sweet.]
I last read about 100 un(?)confirmed cases for the US but I still agree with this. It's a novel idea, and certainly a topical one, but does nothing to help the scaremongering dealt out by the media.
Rails on Monit
> Competing research teams involves a lot of duplicated effort.

Competing anything involves massive duplication of effort and wasted talent. One day people will realize this.

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou...

"Tournament markets... discard huge amounts of very high-quality talent, training, and skill. In the mythic version, science rewards effort and ability... In the real world, casting off large numbers of extremely capable people is simply how a tournament market works."

For as long as everyone believes that the only alternative to cutthroat competition is sclerotic dictatorship, much human effort will continue to be thrown away in this manner. I give you Be, its patents bought up by patent trolls to prevent its technologies from ever being used:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS

I give you Symbolics Genera, languishing in obscurity forever because of our society's obsession with property rights.
Microsoft's implementation of font smoothing is really terrible. The way they use subpixels leads to a weird red/green halo on some letters.

Interestingly, font smoothing in OSX doesn't suffer from this problem.
I'm sure you saw this coming but:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

"None of these things are necessary when every piece of information on your machine lives in a Lisp world image."

http://www.bobcongdon.net/blog/2004/06/boil-ocean.html
Blogspam:
Real link at http://paularmstrongdesigns.com/weblog/basejs-a-mobile-javas...
It sounds to me like they need to adopt an open source model of operation. That may not be possible with the current funding system so someone would need to figure out a better way to distribute funding.

Wouldn't it be better for them to be sharing information and results with each other? They would be able to catch mistakes sooner (ie. before publication) and build on and verify each other's work more quickly.

Imagine what it would have been like if the 'cold fusion' fiasco had ben share between more scientists sooner?
Way to take an unrepresentative part to mean the whole. Stop generalizing. That google search proves nothing except that there are a bunch of vocal idiots on the internet. It's not like that's something foreign.

Don't make up silly hypothetical "if" statements. Let us look at reality: contraceptives are supported by most religious people. To say that religion is against contraception is to look at outmoded views from again, an unrepresentative part of an entire religion. And religions which attempt to restrict sexual conduct are already viewed by many as revolting anachronisms -- so you're just using a hypothetical statement to make an incorrect generalization to support the viewpoint you hold.

You're wrong.
Yup, exactly!

http://standoutjobs.com/site/tour/candidate-dashboard/

;-)
When a VC turns you down
I came up with my own technique for developing "GUI" without any fancier tool than standard programming languages and their frameworks.

I create a launcher called "weboot" that gets parameters like directory and URL resource to start on. It launches an http server process and sends a command to the browser via command-line (but could use other means) with a generated URL (because you don't want to be stuck on an already used port). Browser goes to: http://127.0.0.1:8066/some_resource

Now you have HTML+JavaScript for the frontend and your preferred web framework and tools on the backend. It all costs just as much as you use, so don't launch Apache, just a small http server will do. ;-)

The secret comes next. The frontend needs to ping the backend every several seconds to keep it from shutting down on purpose. The reason is that after the user closes the browser or the tab, the server process has done its job and should close automatically. It all works very well on Linux. I have created a small calculator and a tetris game to test this already and I pompously called them widgets. ;-)

I also have my own ideas for creating an IRC client based on this technique as I have created several versions of IRC clients over the years and even though XChat works great for me on Linux so I don't have a real urge to do that again, it's a trivial exercise in the same way the tetris game was. When I get my bugs list under control I might give it a go again.

So, the JavaScript side loops with something like:

setInterval(function(){ new AjaxRequest('/ping'); }, 5000);

These values are all tunable. I started with a ping every 5 seconds and the server closes in 12 seconds (two pings + some extra time), but I pulled those numbers out of thin air and in 12 seconds I can even reopen a tab fast enough to avoid the server dieing in case of trouble. ;-)

I like Ruby rather than Python, and I have used GTK+ with Ruby for a while myself, but the GTK+ development in Ruby has been a little under trouble as it seems as if no one who is good enough at C and Ruby has it as a high priority on their list of things to maintain, with more and more things moving to the web and so on...

Also, even the development of GTK+ itself and Gnome in general seem to be under a little trouble as more developers seek greener pasture elsewhere and new blood is rarer to come by to replace them. Things like QT, Swing, SWT (Eclipse's UI toolkit?), and even Gtk# (Mono) are generally on another planet than low level C required by GTK+.

Good luck.
Peter Morville (Author of Oreilly's "Ambient Findability") has a great collection of search UI patterns here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/morville/collections/7215760378...
+ also:

http://standoutjobs.com/site/tour/view-candidate-profiles/
BaseJS: A JavaScript Framework For Mobile Safari
Clearly you have never met a tool which afterwards made you regard all other supposedly similar tools as stone knives and bearskins. Perhaps this day is still in store for you.

For the sake of your career as a programmer (assuming this is your trade), you'd better hope not.
So, whose PR is behind this? Time Warner and Comcast?
"Worse is Worse."

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=24807

And your last link would be applicable, save for the "ocean" actually having been "boiled" in this manner. The Lisp Machine existed. You cannot un-create it. It proves that all of the supposedly impossible or impractical pipe dreams of the Unix haters are in fact possible.
I think the optimal solution would be a world where there are many smaller countries with different forms of government to choose from and moving from one country to another is much simpler than it is now. A United States with less centralized power would achieve many of the same benefits.
maxmind also has a javascript api to give you location information:

http://j.maxmind.com/app/geoip.js
Windows 7 Freeish - Will You Upgrade Or Switch Anyway?
I've always been annoyed at Excel and always wanted to build something better. I think generally one wants something halfway between a database and a spreadsheet...

There's also SAS, which I like, but took years of brain-twisting to understand. There's always R/splus as well.

Supposedly Tableau is good, but I've never tried it.
A few months ago, I did the same course here in the US and I am sorry to report that I did not have a great experience.

For one, I was disappointed with the supposed difficulty or profundity of the course. Just like miles above, my fellow attendees, the teacher, the guru, and the friend who recommended the course to me in the first place, all described the experience in very dramatic terms (hell, heaven, profound impact, etc, etc). In reality, for 10 days, you don't do anything but sit in a dimly lit room for hours on end and concentrate on your breathing and other sensations. In between, you eat and sleep. That is all. Personally, I haven't found it especially challenging to shut up and focus for a few days. I also can't say that several days of highly-enhanced perception that followed the course had any profound long-term effect on my life. It was nice, but not more than that. (Those of you who do yoga probably know what I am talking about - those couple hours of feeling balanced, clear-headed and less "ADD" immediately following a yoga class).

Also, I felt that the course was misrepresented. What attracted me to this particular form of meditation was the promise of a 100% non-religious, 100% evidence-based practice. The website, the live teacher and the videotaped guru/founder S.N. Goenka stressed over and over the importance of personally and physically experiencing any insights. On the first day, we were told that we must simply observe any sensations that come with the breathing and not intellectualize the experience or give it any meaning other than what is. However the very next day, we were fed a whole bunch of hooey about the life of Buddha Gautama and the attendant reincarnation theory. The Buddha's tale was presented as a true story, and the reincarnation cycle was presented as the imperative to practice Vipassana mediation. The gist of it was, if you are good (i.e. you practice) you will eventually graduate to an enlightened status, but if you are bad (you don't practice, or waste your time with other meditation methods that may mean well but are silly because they focus on chanting or other false techniques) you will continue to suffer here on Earth. I really didn't appreciate the disconnect between the non-sectarian promise of the course and the reality of what the guru was telling us from his videotape each evening.

To be fair, I will add that the brainwashing is of spiritual rather than commercial nature and the course organizers do not want anything from you other than to "get" it. I would say that if you can set aside the negative aspects I mentioned above and you have 10 days to spare, it's a great way to reset your focus. Just don't buy it when they tell you that something incredible happens on the sixth day. They re-iterate over and over during the first 5 days that you must stick it out and something profound will happen on Day Six, but it's the same thing every day - meditate, eat, sleep, meditate, eat, sleep.
Google Apps gains LDAP support
Cross-tabulation in MySQL (2001)
> an unrepresentative part

The fundamentalists are the particular religious people whose beliefs and actions are most relevant to me, as a nonbeliever. The masses who "live and let live" are politically irrelevant. The crazies are fully representative of those religious people whose stances actually affect my life.

> Contraceptives are supported by most religious people

So, which church is distributing condoms to Africans? Oh, that's right, none of them.
Haha. You must be missing a ton of cool extensions. My startup time is like 10 seconds. I could certainly work hard to bring it down, but who cares? I never turn off emacs or my computer.
The nuclear power corporations have been paying for Yucca Mountain, actually. They've paid $30 billion so far and got nothing for it.

An argument for reprocessing that might have better success is to argue for energy security: any country that can store enough uranium to last for a decade is pretty safe from fluctuations in uranium costs.
There is a lot to be said of aesthetics, and I must say that Chrome looks and feels much sexier than the default Firefox theme.

But whatever, none of them are much different from each other anyway. Where is the real innovation?
I'll stick my neck out and start the "this is not hacker news!" thread. Just look at the discussion - "green activists", "religious conservatives", etc... looks more like reddit than hacker news, which is what happens when we stray from our "core competencies", to turn a phrase.
For those wondering, the use of a meditation cushion and a proper posture is to make it comfortable to sit upright (not slouch) for long periods of time. It's important and shouldn't be thought of as just sitting down.
But they still get along fine and carve out their own niche, as long as they don't step on the big boy's toes.

Facilitating drug smuggling is likely to get your seastead stomped out. But there are many activities that won't upset established regimes, while still allowing more freedom for your residents (and flags of convenience might give you even more of a deterrent). Whether a seastead could be a wealth producer through tech industry or would simply remain a drug-vacation destination remains to be seen.
How have I never stumbled across Geany? Much better than gedit, since all the useful features are built-in instead of poorly integrated 3rd-party extensions. Thanks!
In any democracy, direct or representative, the majority has the power to take from the minority. If there's something the majority wants that the minority has, they can just vote it away from them. Conversely, if there's something the minority has, but wants to keep from the majority, again, they just vote to keep it from them. It's an inherently unequal, unsustainable and unfair system. I don't see how either form of it is optimal, ever.
Disclaimer: Geolocator services are subject to your network's physical location. For example, Maxmind claims that I'm in Wichita, Kansas. Google says I'm in Indianapolis. I'm physically located in Maryland, somewhere in between DC and Baltimore.
Japan recycles their nuclear waste, should be done in the USA too. Hopefully Obama will be able to get new plants built, we're going to need them when all the cheap Chinese cars start coming in in a few years (it's already happening around my area, and they are cheap).