skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am not disagreeing with the author of the article, but I will say something positive about the "smartphone life style": my wife and I live in a small town in the mountains. Although we have a lot of local friends, our family is distributed in San Diego, San Francisco, and Rhode Island. I really enjoy keeping in touch with my family by emailing pictures while I am hiking, etc. in real time as I am experiencing life. I probably send at least two pictures a day. Later, on the phone, the previously sent pictures are something to talk about. Using video Skype or iChat video also helps keep in touch.

If I lived in a small town with almost all of my family and friends nearby, then I might agree more with a limited technology lifestyle, but that is not the way it is.
would be awesome pdf format for the books :)
It probably would, however it sets a terrible example and must never be allowed to happen anywhere at any cost

"distributing equally among all citizens."

good grief, what a dangerous idea!
dont forget gauss.
I want to point out a comment [1] apparently by the former chief open source evangelist, Danese Cooper [2], on the "Fork Yeah!" video contradicting Bryan Cantrill on this point. Here it is reproduced:

Lovely except it really was﻿ decided to explicitly make OpenSolaris incompatible with GPL. That was one of the design points of the CDDL. I was in that room, Bryan and you were not, but I know its fun to re-write history to suit your current politics. I pleaded with Sun to use a BSD family license or the GPL itself and they would consider neither because that would have allowed D-Trace to end up in Linux. You can claim otherwise all you want...this was the truth in 2005

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&lc=UEj5uH4rMafUnX...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danese_Cooper
I am a huge Banks fan, but I really didn't enjoy The Wasp Factory.
The most recent estimates for Iraq War casualties involve around five thousand from the Coalition Forces, around twenty five thousand Iraqi insurgents/defenders/combatants, around fifteen hundred contractors, and around seventeen thousand Iraqi Security Forces.
Country restricted. YouTube mirror http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdPpdu8OGDQ
Love the idea. The rub is figuring out which article will influence people (100s are written every day at Seeking Alpha for many views of the same issue) -- if you can predict influence then I think you've found a nice little money machine :)
> The Moscow situation is not comparable to Afghan countryside.

Precisely. If anything, it's a much more easily controlled environment for gas diffusion, and allowed almost immediate entry by the special forces to clear the area. Even then, there were significant hostage fatalities (although in a large part due to medical staff not being timely informed of the nature of the gas, or provided with the antidote)

Achieving that level of consistency of dose (enough to work, not enough to kill) in a rural village environment, via air-dropped containers, is, IMO, utterly impossible.

I'm arguing against your suggestion of 'sleeping gas bombs' only, not that the indiscriminate bombing is/was the correct choice.

In addition, R&D only determines what you will have available maybe some time in the future. If you're in combat right now, you don't have the luxury of waiting 3-5 years for promising test-bench stuff to make it to your rucksack/support units.

If all you have is high-explosives, eventually everything looks like rubble.
Getting inspired from newspaper glossary for css naming
Yesss! Thank you so much!
Debian in Space on ISS computers
Note: February 03, 2009
The are a great many laws I would prefer the current Congress not revisit.
Gordon Ramsay: The worst act of animal cruelty I've ever seen
I don't really understand why the international community does not come together to stop these sorts of things:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=388Y1VVBYd8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=ajnboDfY1OI&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SAkq6lsnoE
More generally speaking, I think the problem has to do with how we tend to view "things", how we get attached to them and how we forget why we have those things in the first place. Assuming that nearly everything man-made is a tool (be it a hammer, religion, politics, the economy or even art), most of the things we make have a purpose. I think the problem is that not everybody gets the purpose of those tools as clearly as others, sometimes to the point where the purpose no longer matters and the tool becomes an end in itself.

What I'm trying to say is that we tend to glorify the tools themselves, despite their potential flaws or inadequacies. We forget that we made those tools to make certain tasks simpler, or more enjoyable, with (hopefully) the ultimate goal of being generally happier. In my opinion, a good example of this is the monetary system, where some people hellbent on making as much money as possible end up living miserable lives.

By shifting the emotional attachment from being happy (by yourself and socially) to the thing that helps bring happiness ("diminished substitutes"), we start valuing the tool for its apparent value rather than its intrinsic one. It becomes the "chasing the dragon" philosophy of life ; we create a dependency, or even an addiction, where there doesn't need to be one in the first place. We focus so narrowly on the means that we forget the end.
Please note that while Professor Lustig's claims about the wholly toxic nature of fructose are not accepted as fact (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20047139 and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411192/ for a couple of examples), I think you're still miscategorizing his claims. Please see:

http://www.crsociety.org/index.php?/topic/291-dr-lustig-on-f...

"I think that fruit is so much better a choice than virtually anything else in the store -- particularly any processed food -- that I don't want to come down on it. But I would say, fruit is one of those things where I would say, everything in moderation."

This sort of falls into the "duh" category. Just as a sensible person wouldn't consume a ton of saturated fats in the name of eating a high protein diet, a sensible person is not going to be eating 20 bananas and five pounds of strawberries a day in the name of getting enough fruit.

As for the professor's claim that exercise isn't effective for weight loss, I think laypeople should be aware of the tendency for academics to speak in macro terms. The vast majority of people I have met who are overweight and have tried unsuccessfully to lose weight a) do not have as healthy a diet as they believe they do (far too many processed foods) and b) if they exercise and exercise consistently (a big if), do not exercise long enough and intensely enough to burn fat and become conditioned.

Anecdotal? Yes, but instead of blaming specific foods and claiming that exercise isn't effective, let's just be honest: most people won't lose weight because they can't commit to major changes in their lifestyle.
We must keep ze culture pure for ze motherland!

Really, do immigrants diminish a country's cultural heritage, or enrich it?

Freezing culture in stone sounds like a great idea for stagnation.
Not sure I buy that people who make lots of comments are better qualified to pick good content.
Try grin if you're biased in favor of Python: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/grin
Ask HN: NSA False Positives (Screwing with the NSA)
Is sending emails/sms that talk about attacks on government buildings or people in hopes the NSA will pick it up, only to follow it to a dead end, effective?

If so, we could probably screw with their data mining ops by sending lies like mentioned above to friends or relatives via email or sms.

Probably not advisable, but if enough people did this it may make for a very interesting situation.

Any thoughts on this? I can't be the first to think of this.
>And for another, we used to wait till people were sentenced / punished before claiming that they were punished. This is an article about their prosecution. Prosecutors push for the maximum sentence that they can possibly get, and have done so since the dawn of time. Whether or not they are _actually_ sentenced depends on the judge.

One: how did that work out for Aaron Swartz? I'm asking because the same BS was said in the defence of the prosecutors actions then.

Second: Citation needed, that prosecutors have "since the dawn of time" pushed for the same kind of sentences in the same kind of cases. Merely pushing for a little more doesn't qualify -- this is an extreme blow up of the actual offence here.

Third: I'm appalled by your casual dismissal of this, as "it's how it's always been". Even with the actual sentencing depending on the judge, this over-blowing of offences is a moral and legal problem that should stop. The prosecutors should push for the sentence that is appropriate to the crime, as they perceive it, not to "the maximum sentence they can possibly get". Their job is to serve justice, not to put as many people in jail as they can.

Fourth: Who said that asking for the "maximum sentence" is a harmless tactic? Who said it doesn't impact the jury's decision and the sentence that the judge will give? If the offence is something that should get 10 years in prison, and they ask for life, then maybe this will provoke a sentence of 15 years. The same tactic also can lead to innocent people plea to guilty, instead of risking a potential 5 or 10 years in prison (where they would actually take their chance for their actual lower appropriate sentence).
That probably has a lot to do with how isolated they are. From back in my days of doing IP location technology, North Korea had less than 50 public IP addresses whereas Antarctica had well over 1,000.
There is no way anyone can make several accurate observation about nutrition at our current stage of knowledge about physiology, let alone be able to "hack" it. It's like someone saying they're working on a warp drive or a teleporter. It could happen some day, but probably far in the future.

Actually, the warp-drive/teleportation problems might be easier, because we'll probably know when we get there. With nutrition, there's little evidence to suggest that a theoretically perfect nutrition would result in much improved health over sub-par nutrition. We don't even know that nutrition has a strong effect on health at all (other than eating poison, or few other truly well-known facts).
Plus U.S law enforcement having the ability (under Canadian officers guidance) to arrest Canadian citizens on Canadian soil.

I also remember the Harper government opening up sharing Canadian citizen's personal information with the U.S border.

Canada's government right now is all about bowing down to the U.S.
You know why your comment reeks of politics? Because technically it doesn't make any sense.

If you're a user of Waze now, if anything then the situation can improve for you. Now being a purely Israeli company Waze is surely more susceptible to Israel intelligence agencies tracking than as part of Google. Yes, it will likely become more susceptible to U.S. intelligence agencies now, but this is not what your comment was about.
Back in the day, many European countries had registers of known communist and socialist sympathizers. They where used to keep communists out of government and union jobs. Those in the registers had a harder time getting promoted, was fired for spurious reasons and so on. The other effect it had is that people became frightened to voice their support of communists lest they also be placed in the register and having their careers ruined.

It is not far-fetched to think that broad intelligence gathering will be used in the exact same way today. Communism may not be the big boogieman it once way, but there are still ideologies and causes that can get you branded as undesirable. For example, by being drug liberal.

I think it's naive to think that the information they are collecting will go unused. There aren't enough terrorist threats in there to act upon, so they will focus on the secondary threats which is people with the wrong opinions.
Well, this is more or less how I read the regular news. I think it helps to be a naturalized US citizen, so I can have both an outsider's and an insider's perspectives.
I've heard rumours of rights being purchased etc, however not to Consider Phlebas. I think given the nature of cgi these days, it wouldn't be that hard to pull off a big budget version of Excession. Which, as I've just noticed was written in 1996. Is it really that old?
It looks like Vagrant is designed to help out web developers more than anything else.

I develop primarily for microcontrollers, and it can be a pain to manage toolchains for different architectures. Would Vagrant help with that? Does anyone have an examples of using Vagrant like this?
While much, if not all, of what he is saying here is good and true, Sensenbrenner is more part of the problem than part of the solution, and he's likely making a big deal here just because it makes his political enemies look bad.

Among other things, he has previously blocked Congressional debate on the PATRIOT act, including cutting off the microphones of other members of Congress.
Consider a thought experiment. Suppose 2% of country A has committed a crime, and 1% of country B has. Suppose both countries have identical criminal justice systems - say they catch 80% of criminals, and have a false positive rate of 0.25%.

In that case, country A has 1.845% of their population in jail, while country B has only 1.05%.

I'm not saying this is the only cause of the US's high incarceration rate, I'm just pointing out that some stats are missing from this discussion.

(Interestingly, 30% of the people in jail in B are falsely accused, while only 15% of the people in jail in A are.)
Tell me when the NSA, or the US in general pre-NSA, has ever endangered or compromised their encryptions? There surely is enough stories of how the CIA screwed up and stories like the FBI helping Whitey Bulger to continue murdering while he was an FBI informant.
Isn't it better for their economy if the things they make is just a /little/ better than the stuff made in China? (Think "planned obsolescence".)
Life lessons in fighting the culture of bullshit
The experience of doing a PhD varies wildly - between countries, between schools, between departments, between professors, and as time passes.

Even at the same school, one person reported to me that while he was in his second year his supervisor told him he probably had enough material to pass if he wrote it all up - while another person worked long hours and reported to me that his supervisor had shouted at him for not coming in to monitor his experiments on christmas day. One person went on to a research position in the private sector and feel it set them up for a good career; another hoped to enter humanities academia, but wasn't able to find any jobs and ended up doing office admin work that barely needed an undergraduate degree.

Even for the same student, some parts of the process will be enjoyable and fascinating, other parts will be frustrating and tiresome. If you had asked me two years in I'd have told you doing a PhD is pretty great - by the end, having gone through the process of writing up, my opinion pretty inverted. I decided a career in academia wouldn't suit me at all.

If you boil the experience of doing a PhD down to the essentials of the experience, there's very little left because the experience varies so much.
I have problems even logging in on ycombinator with tor. Not to mention any site with anti-spam protection.
In his recent book AntiFragile, Taleb states that he drinks no beverages that aren't at least 1,000 years old. In particular, he admits to drinking coffee, water and wine.
> eat lots of organic vegetables, some organic fruit

"Organic" is an unscientific ideological term. It has absolutely nothing to do with the nutritional quality of food. Study after study has shown "organic" food to be nutritionally equivalent to scientifically farmed food, including quantities of pesticides found on them.

(Yes, citation needed but I don't have refs in front of me right now)
There is a penalty for trespassing, and it was printed on a sign and hung up on the fence. Teenagers with "moral streaks" that feel like committing a misdemeanor in order to make a point may do so.

If there needs to be stronger laws against trespassing, then the laws should change. Except, we know that trespassing shouldn't come with a 10+ year sentence. Allowing prosecutors to arbitrarily up the charges is a failure of justice. It allows a more "legal" way for the government to act in retaliatory ways.

If the facility hadn't been completely incompetent in their security, these people would have been stopped at the first fence and not even made the news. Instead, many people are embarrassed and at least if "convicted terrorists" go to jail over this, there is some saving of face possible.

Why were they not immediately charged with such high crimes? If this was truly a major problem, why not pin them from the start?
> date to be determined

I've never read Banks and don't know anything about him or his worlds aside from the reputation, but failing to find a better day, I'd suggest picking the release date of one of his books.
It is not an excuse if the guy is ready to throw himself and an airplane into a building for it. That means the guy is pretty sincere. The word you are looking for is motive.

The fact that you do not find their motives "reasonable" intrigues me. Is it their methods you disagree with, or their grievances?

If you think their grievances are not legitimate, does it change when you substitute "gold rush" for "oil rush" and "red skin" for "rag head"?

(By the way I'm not thrilled about getting bombed. I almost lost a friend in Boston.)
It's funny—my boss has wished me luck on interviews, and people I barely know know I'm on an anti-depressant. The fact I've made an attempt on my own life is posted publicly on HN.

As far as I know, I'm also absolutely uninteresting to any 3-letter agencies. I'm still not a fan of omnipresent surveillance of my phone's activity… or any other activity, for that matter.

What does it really take to become interesting to these guys, and how might that impact my life? Is political speech critical of, say, the collection of citizens' phone metadata enough to catch their interest? Is unknowingly associating with someone they find interesting enough? Knowingly associating?

In an ideal world, if any of these things subject me to additional scrutiny, once I turned out not to be a legitimate threat, that'd be the end of it. I wouldn't even know anyone had been watching. But does it ever go further, even when it shouldn't?

How are we supposed to know when everything's done in secret?
How to Shield Your Calls, Chats, and Internet Browsing
Sweden has a pretty easy immigration path, is fairly friendly to immigrants, most natives speak English, and has a large tech community with not enough local talent.
Tel-Aviv would be an excellent place, but it's only fairly open if you are Jewish -- otherwise, immigration policy is tight.

Stupid, I know.
Keep in mind that for a lot of quality indicators that impact daily life of the average person on the street, The United States is much more comparable to Developing countries than to Developed countries.

Indicators like murder rates, suicide rates, incarceration rates, unemployment, health, education, etc. etc.
I don't think you understand what sarcasm is. Here's a hint: it's not an appropriate reaction to death.
For me the most interesting in this case is why nobody else wasn't interested enough, 1.3B is not that much of a money for other possible acquiree candidates to withdraw.
excellent commentary on situation in Japan by (very successful) hedge fund manager Kyle Bass:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY6IEpKRA7Y
"It's not a war on drugs, don't ever think it's a war on drugs. It's a war on the blacks, it started as a war on the blacks," says Ed Burns, the co-creator of the television show The Wire. "It's now spread [to] the Hispanics and poor whites, but initially it was a war on blacks. And it was designed, basically, to take that energy that was coming out of the civil rights movement and destroy it."

http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryus2012/2012/0...
He would have very little to use. He helped create one vaccine. His royalties are not that significant (according to him). He'd have just as much to gain from scientifically valid alternatives if they existed. He could do the same as he does now (treat patients, speak, and write) with any valid disease treatment.
Which exact precise64 box are you using? Ubuntu now publishes regularly updated Vagrant images, do you have this problem with this box?

- http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/vagrant/precise/current/
I also found "The Business" a very good book, that should be good for people starting to read him.
It's based on the assumption that the human body is a complex organism made up of interacting subsystems, and that there is a distinction between testing the effect of a change on one subsystem and testing the effect of a change on the entire organism. That's a very abstract assumption, and easily applies in this case. If you can't see anything in common between the human body and a computer program, you're just not looking at an abstract enough level. You can start with "they both exist" and work your way towards the concrete from there.
Yes: http://norml.org/

Please join, support, rally with NORML for better drug laws.

The facts:
55% of federal prisoners are held for drug law violations

21% of state prisoners are held for drug law violations

via http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Marijuana#sthash.LTU05KnJ.dp...

Legalization doesn't just help people who smoke pot--it helps ALL of us, by reducing prison time and incarcerations, especially sentences due to simple marijuana possession.

EDIT: More facts via http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2109777,00....

"Drug convictions went from 15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold increase. More than half of America's federal inmates today are in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession."
Its hard to imagine Google supporting two distinct mapping apps.
What do you hope to achieve by screwing with their data mining operations?
Tianhe-2 may easily crush supercomputer speed record at 30.7 petaflops
My favorite choice is D) asleep. now I realized I should get my PhD now !
A very good point. In that vein, let me recommend Whit from the non-scfi side; the most sympathetic book about a 19 year old cult member that you can imagine (especially from an avowed atheist like Banks)
One could easily imagine a false correlative impacting your life negatively and unfairly:

If you have security clearance, the government is very interested in the private details of your life. For instancw, the assumption is people who cheat on their significant others are more likely to be a security threat for many reasons. They don't even need to prove it; just find anything from that point to call your character into question.

How would you like to have your entire life become more difficult because of a misinterpretation of correlation/causation?