skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depending on the rate of globalization and how sustainable our use of natural resources are by then, we may indeed be facing a population decline by the time life extension comes out. This seems incredible, but rich countries have much lower birthrates than poor countries. So if globalization turns poor countries into rich countries, it will solve the overpopulation problem and move the world below replacement rate.

The economic benefit to life extension is that you can work longer. If life extension works the way we think it will (by reducing the aging process), then it will also extend physical youth, giving us more productive years without the loss of productivity over time that comes with age (but with the gain in productivity over time that comes with experience and wisdom!)

Finally, it won't mean immortality, because it'll only fix old age. People will still die from suicide, homicide, and accident. Since there is a non-zero probability of these things happening to someone, the life expectancy will be more of an expected value than an expiration date, with some people dying at 1, some at 100, and some at 1000. It'll still be possible for people to have kids.

This will probably lead people to adopt an extremely risk-averse culture, and things like casual sex and automobiles will be the first to go. (The risk of dying in childbirth may be high enough to reduce birth rate in such a culture.) That, combined with a slower rate of generational replacement, will cause a very conservative culture in total.
Some bugs are worse than others - and some bugs are more avoidable than others. This one falls under the category of "who was asleep at the wheel?".

Really? Outsmarting the OS's built-in PRNG by scanning the HDD of all things?
While Sacks Plays Poker, Yammer Burns
And Ctrl + (Repeat until satisfied)
The thing that amuses me about anarcho-capitalism is that the state seems vitally necessary for capitalism to work.

Whoa horsey. You can drive a Mack truck through that over-generalization.

Some kind of collective enforcement of property rights and contract law might be required, but that's so far from a modern state it's not funny.

It's one thing for a European to shake down some rubes who didn't know enough be cautious and weren't part of his peer group. But we have lots of examples of property and contracts being respected where very, very little government exists. Venice merchants and the silk road, the western United States during the period between 1776 and 1787, Roman traders operating deep inside "primitive" lands, modern mafia bosses and their business deals, Ebay shoppers and reputation-supported transactions. I can go on -- at length.

There's such a little need for government that social mores seem to do just fine in most cases. If there is some role for government at all (and I think there is), it's nowhere near the intrusive monstrosity we have today. Just because the door is open a crack doesn't mean that a herd of elephants can run through. I think that anarcho-capitalism won't work, don't get me wrong. But the degree of community control required for business to flourish is very, very minimal. At least as far as I can see.

It's certainly not a big enough flaw to give up on libertarianism, at least with the little "l"
Nice interview, nutpuncher!
"So the opposite of "Brainy and Sexy" is a Conservative Christian?"

Belief in a perfectly good being that tortures people forever if they don't believe in it: not brainy.

As for sexy, well, I dunno.

[ETA: Hmm, started a horribly off-topic side-thread. Sorry.]
Isn't 2. what make it evil though?
Depends on when he sold stock options, how many stock options he had, the details surrounding him leaving and coming back as CEO, and about a million other possible variables.
Musician fed up with United strikes back with youtube 'United Breaks Guitar'
Because that would break the internet. Third and lower level domains as they are known are resolved at the hosting server not in the DNS system.
Steps for Successful Social Media Damage Control
This is stupid.

The $5 fee, whether it's small or not, still requires people to pull out their wallets. A lot of people simply don't want to get out their wallet and go through the sign up process, so they won't.

A lot of their news is available everywhere else. Why would I need the NYT.com website to read about Obama winning when MSNBC.com had it for free? So the question should be "Are our op-ed's and in depth reporting worth $5/mo?" And if the in depth reporting is big (e.g. CIA eavesdropping scandal) it will be covered elsewhere shortly after it breaks.

So the number of page views they lose to $5 kills their advertising dollars. Is that $5 really going to make up how much they're losing? Not according to this post: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/04/paying-for-online-news-sorr...
Sprint outsources operations to Ericsson in deal worth up to $5 billion
Here's a quick(ish) summary:

* He was able to raise about $1 MM in 8 days because he built up good relations with investors over the years.

* He didn't get as good a deal as he could have from his investors because: as a first time entrepreneur he didn't have enough leverage + he needed to move fast + he didn't want to lose the deal.

* His board pushed him to sacrifice revenue for growth.

* Lack of revenue forced him to seek another round of funding.

* When, at the last minute, a VC dropped his deal, all the others walked away too.

* When he sold his company, his investors made a small profit, but he was "flushed out" because of the deal he made when he got his funding.

Bottom line: He protected his investors. His investors protected themselves. No one went out of their way to protect him, the entrepreneur. Still, none of this soured him on entrepreneurship.
/usr/bin/xmllint --format in.xml > out.xml

or

import pprint
pprint.pprint(...)
Ask HN: SEO Question -- What's up with Google?
I have a question I think others might be interested in -- anybody who is self-promoting their websites.

I've been developing a few microsites. The idea is to put together 5 or 10 pages on small topics to provide as much help to the reader as possible on that topic. You find a small topic, promote the site over many months, and slowly make a little bit of money.

So I have this site, NeuropathyInFeet.us It took about a week for my wife and I to make. I asked some friends to promote it on their blogs, but as far as I know none of them have linked to the site yet.

After I submitted the site to Google I started getting hits. One of the pages, TreatingNeuropathyInFeet.html, started getting a few hits per day, growing to about 30-40 earlier this week. Looks like it was a long tail combination of keywords that didn't have a lot of competition. When I checked Google results, I found this combination of terms ranked me in the top 4 results or so. Very cool, right? The plan was already starting to work. Yay!

But when Tuesday rolled around -- nothing. No traffic at all. So I check Google rankings, and guess what? I'm gone. Or at least I'm not in the first dozen pages or so.

Hey if I did something wrong I want to fix it and not do it again, but heck if I can figure out what I did. So how do I go about contacting Google and figuring out what happened to my site? I mean I run a clean business. I have no desire to scam or cheat anybody out of anything. I only want to provide good content in return for traffic.

Is you have a site that is getting traffic and suddenly it stops, what do you do to figure out what happened? Is there some kind of test you run? Some email contacts or forms to complete with the search providers? I can understand if some new site came along and knocked us off the first page or something, but damn, we're just _gone_. That smells like something we screwed up on our end.

Is it possible that a competitor could have submitted my site to some kind of spam engine that would then make Google kill the site? If so, what the f*ck kind of recourse does a person have in that case? That's pretty dirty pool.

I know a lot of HN'ers have their own sites that they promote, and I know this problem is vexing me, so hopefully this applies to more folks than just me and some of you out there can help figure out what went wrong.
The Gelfand Principle in programming
Why? The EV-DO modem is plenty fast and requires no user intervention whatsoever. WiFi in this case would simply add more user configuration with negligible benefits (you're downloading BOOKS, not YouTube videos).

And why would GSM/CDMA matter at all? It's not as if you're paying for the service...
Wasn't it just a couple years ago that people here were saying California provided the model for the rest of the country, and that more people should adopt the Silicon Valley startup system?

I think the real issue is differing cultural attitudes toward risk. Californians embrace it, which probably results from the selection bias of having a state where the largest population centers are all centered on an active fault-line. Texans do their best to avoid it.

When times are good, people who take risks flourish, because most risks turn out well. But when times are bad, they get hurt much worse than people who play it safe. That's almost by definition: "good times" are those when most risks pan out, while "bad times" are those when most risks fail miserably. It's not surprising that California is doing worse than Texas now - they took on far more risk during the boom years.

People have short memories. I remember that at the first Startup School, one venture capitalist summed up the history of business in four words: "Boom. Bust. Boom. Bust." I think that was probably the truest thing said at the whole event.
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Zittrain: The Dark Side of Google's Cloud
"Belief in a perfectly good being that tortures people forever if they don't believe in it: not brainy."

Playing devil's advocate here (or perhaps the better term is God's advocate), if I understand you correctly you are saying that all beings of higher intelligence and wisdom should conform to your definition of goodness.

Does that seem very brainy? Would you like your dog creating a sense of what is right or wrong and then holding you to account for it? How about an ant? When I take my 3-year old for shots, he definitely views the entire process as decidedly immoral. But he's not seeing it from my viewpoint now, is he?

I believe the notion is that goodness as God understands it is beyond my ability to understand it. The greater good when dealing with a universe is so far beyond a petty 100-year lifespan (or a 10K year civilization) that comparisons are kind of silly. We wouldn't even understand the moral questions, much less the answers

I'm not saying I buy into it, I'm simply pointing out that you're taking a cheap shot at religion.

I believe the best response to this is: all I've got is this brain and I have to use it to make judgments. That's cool, but all it really means is the point is undecidable.
Is the net worth of someone like that really a valid concept?--since if they announced that they were to sell all of their stock, the price would plummet (since it would imply to investors they no longer trust the stock as an investment).

It's worse than illiquid; the mere act of trying to sell such a horde would destroy its value.
(take this with a grain of salt...I'm one of the "earners")

You can't invent yourself out of a system of entitlements that has long since divorced itself from reality.

You have a (comparatively) small group of people making a large portion of the income with a much larger group of people making little to no income and demanding more and more help from the earners to support their philanthropic causes.

What makes it hard to swallow is that we see loads of money being thrown at things like education and helping the homeless but we see no improvement.

I'm all for helping educate people, and lending a hand to the less fortunate, but I expect a return on my investment. When you take this much from me and my return is children who can't read turning into violent criminals and the wonderful view of a homeless man crapping in a doorway on the way to work...I want a refund.
Of course Safari loads faster than Firefox on OS X, as IE loads faster in Windows. Their libraries are preloaded by OS ...

Native apps for each platform may give performance boost, but maintaining a consistent UI will be a lot harder
Google Webmaster Central: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

I've heard of similar problems happening to other webmasters, but I don't really know what's going on, nor do I work in a position where I could find out easily.
Salts. The "Hitler" of computer security discussions.
So, if only I had vastly more insight and wisdom, I might approve of torturing ordinary people forever? I find this extremely unlikely. If you're so agnostic about morality that you won't condemn the torture of ordinary people for eternity, I don't see how you can condemn or condone anything, ever.

I don't consider this a cheap shot. This is the profoundly rotten core at the heart of traditional Christianity (and, indeed, Islam).
How to scan a cat and other subjects
Hey, know what's exactly the same functionality as http://slate.illinois for 1/4000 the cost? http://slateillinois.com
Does Social Networking Breed Social Division?
It had its own thread a while back
Nah, that'd be one-time pads.
I know someone is reading my blog posts when they use that phrase...awesome!
the founders took money off the table (the ones who left right after the funding round at least) so they're fine
With ad revenue up 35%, Gawker Media returns to pageview bonuses
The sad thing is how many people get supper upset when somebody posts this somewhere, as if it was such an incredibly offensive joke, and as if you were spreading some really evil lies.

If somebody does take this interview seriously, it says more about them and about C++ than about the nature of the interview or whoever posted it.

And just because something is a hoax (and a rather obvious one at that) doesn't mean that it can't be filled with deep truths.
But, can Jay Leno's 3D Printer Make Jay Leno's 3D Printer?
The LD50 is apparently 12mg -- 80-240 times a typical dose.

Still, not bad, considering water is lethal at a smaller multiple of the typical dose :)

http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/lsd/lsd_dose.shtml
Embedded systems. Distributed computing. Real-time systems programming. Software reverse engineering. Compiler construction. Digital signal processing. Machine learning. Natural language processing. Operations research. Numeric computing.

Give each a decade and you will be in hacking bliss for the rest of your life.
Can you sell me a copy last year?
wow, I'd not seen a movie of this before. Now I really see how revolutionary the technology is!
"all it really means is the point is undecidable"

Undecidable? You're kidding right? It's "decidable" all right, by any rational person, just like whether or not the tooth fairy exists is "decidable".

Look, here's religion in a nutshell. Religion:

1. Makes a great many claims about events known to be physically impossible
2. Offers no evidence whatsoever for those claims
3. Is therefore total nonsense until (2) is convincingly rectified
4. Therefore anyone believing it is either brainwashed or stupid or both

It's as simple as that, really.
Put another way, if you see sigma in an APL program, you can understand what that is without knowing its context. Single characters in J do not have this property; < is different from <. is different from <: (and sometimes surprisingly different; =. defines a local and =: defines a global), and in a lot of fonts it's not hard to mistake one for the other.

J, to me, took the worst features of APL (the profusion of symbols that only loosely resemble anything else you've ever seen) and makes it even worse, because at least the APL symbols were (usually) visually distinct! From the J examples page are gems like this

var =: ~.@(] , |:&.> , |.&.> , |."1&.>)^:3

which in the proportional font they use makes for a real entertaining time telling , from ,. from ..
Algorithms in C is a classic, Algorithms in Foo is, sadly, not. Sedgewick's text, much like Appel's compiler text, is a one-language book with a bad gettext translation for other programming languages.

Read Sedgewick in C and Appel in ML. Skip the C++, Java, and C# versions of both books, they usually pop up in bookstores at the end of summer.
I love the door hack. I would probably disable the knock though because your neighbor could overhear the secret knock and steal all your 2600 magazines or perform one of the fabled MIT pranks.
Just the other day I saw a post to a nyt article saying that slightly overweight people were more likely to live longer too. So how do you eat a low calorie diet AND stay slightly overweight? Eat salads and never move??
You're overthinking it. Silicon Valley provides good models for building businesses. The state and local governments are masters of burning money and getting nothing from it.

As a taxpayer in California, I cannot track where most of my money goes. I can't ask my representative or either senator where it goes and get a straight answer. (Disclaimer: I still like Boxer.)

It's a little unfair to compare states, though. Texas, for instance, has lots of natural gas resources, oil production and refinement (especially along the gulf coast) among other things.

Take a look at these:

http://img.skitch.com/20090710-x3sceq4i2pq4hwaemawtd5afrd.re...

http://img.skitch.com/20090710-nsuaeu7ch7ayhci6fp5yemeb5x.re...

A lot of California land is reserved by the federal government. I think it's somewhere around 45%. In Texas, very little is reserved.
Makes me proud to be Canadian. Don't fuck with our beer, our hockey sticks, and our guitars, eh?

(But please just generally don't fuck with us at all, because we don't have much of an army up here.)
It gets worse security-wise -- their recommended fix is to delete all your caches, removing the entropy seed from their RNG: https://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?comme...

And if clearing the caches doesn't affect entropy quality, it's even stupider -- why bother to read them in the first place?
The thing that is bothering me about the Fake Steve Jobs piece is that Google aren't creating a new operating system. It's Linux, tuned for the tablet environment. If anyone knows about tuning Linux, it's the Google engineers, they tune Linux for millions of machines.
> I just don't see how regular joes would be allowed to have this

I don't think it is a question of 'allowed'. Governments have tried to stop people taking certain harmful drugs without much success. So how do you think they will be able to stop people from from taking drugs that keep them alive?
Even if a nation could ban it effectively other nations would allow it for a fee. How many intelligent people would stay in a nation that tried to enforce their death?

Initially the cost of any really effective life-extension technology is likely to be high. But the costs should rapidly fall like most other technologies. The ongoing costs of living for the 'immortals' would of course have to be self funded.
Look -- I'm not a religious person. But I'm willing to play along, because I understand the arguments. So let's continue for purposes of instruction.

Religion is based around the limitations of human knowledge. The idea is that the Great Spirit, Great Father, or whatever is older and wiser than us (but yet strangely human!) so he understands things we do not. Just as when we were a child we did not understand things, now the Big Dude With The Beard knows things far beyond our kin.

Like a child, you can stamp your feet and complain about his/her/it lack of suitable morality for you all you want, but it really just plays into the entire metaphor, doesn't it?

I can tell you that more liberal Christans view sin as being apart from God, and hell as being simply apart from God forever. Taken this way, it simply means that if you're doing okay with the plan (whatever the plan is) you get to hang out with the big guy. If not, you don't. And that's awful! You really want to hang out with the big guy.

It's the fundamentalists who get into this "lake of fire" bit and such. I imagine "not hanging with the Big Kahuna" doesn't bring in the converts as much as "tearing your eyes out with pain" but I was never much into marketing and sales.

As for me, and you seem to be interested in my morals, I'm perfectly happy not being able to make moral decisions for God. As long as he returns the favor. (grin) I don't think that torturing folks for eternity is moral for me to do, but I try to confine my judgments of morality to myself. I also think that you're arguing with what some bunch of folks "think" some other (probably imaginary) being will do, and that seems really, really silly to me. Better to determine what you think about the idea of God in general -- any kind of God -- before you go lumping the whole kit and kaboodle together and passing your own judgment on it.
Use heroku. It's the best for RoR sites.
How To Compress CSS/JavaScript Files With PHP
A quick way to speed up your site is to simply limit how much the user has to download. This tutorial will show you how to automatically gzip (compress) your files with PHP.
It gets worse: sometimes they won't use platform libraries because it conflicts with the ideology they're trying to force on the web.

"Of course we won't use DirectShow / QT / GStreamer as an alternate backend for <video> -- that would make it actually useful in the real world, and our Theora evangelism comes first!"
It's not about the money or may be it's just me I want see my products succeed not just work. If the founders left right after the funding round that just doesn't seem right to me, it isn't fair to the VC's either. I guess we'll never know what exactly transpired unless one of the founders speak up.
>"At a Midwestern manufacturing company, for example, an incentive system that had been in place for years was removed at the request of the welders' union. Now, if a financial incentive motivates people, its absence should drive down production. And that is exactly what happened -- at first. But after the initial slump, the welders' production rose and eventually reached a level as high as or higher than before. "

This example in particular cannot be used to support the author's hypothesis. Someone arguing the contrary point of view could opine that the removal of the incentive structure did cause a dip in productivity but the plant was in middle of a long-term rising productivity trend. There is simply not enough data to confirm or deny this.

Poor math skills and a lack of even-handed skepticism abound in opinion writing.
Definitely... I have Verdana as my default font and I Ctrl+ and Ctrl- my way all over the web.
So if I told you I was the tooth fairy, would that mean that you were wrong all this time? What if I confided in you that I was God?

I get it. You would subject me to scientific tests and logic to "prove" whether or not I fit into some label that has about as many meanings as there are people who believe in the tooth fairy. Yes, that makes a lot of sense. Since we know exactly what God is we can use the scientific method to disprove a negative.

Of course.

You're purposely cherry-picking your definition of God. That's at the heart of your fallacy -- some belief that there is this one definition of God that somehow you can come to terms with. There isn't. You've got a great argument about the self-inconsistencies of Christianity inside it's own system. That's the best one. Stick to that. Trying to come up with one straw man (or straw God) to discredit or disprove just makes you look intellectually dishonest. In my opinion, of course.