skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In every case I know and I suspect in every other case the answer is "The Government". I'll run down the ones I know...

Gunkanjima, Japan: Owned by the city of Nagasaki but work is being done to turn it over to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

San Zhi (or the Pod City): It was originally commisioned by the Taiwanese government so it's always belonged to them.

Pripyat, Ukraine: Obviously owned by the U.S.S.R. before the collapse. I have no reason to believe it wasn't turned over to the newly formed nation of Ukraine along with all the other land belonging to the ancient nation of Rus'

Kadykchan, Russia: Russia evacuated the citizens which means they took control of the land.

Centralia, United States: Congress provided "buy out" packages for the Residents so it's owned by the Federal Government (with the exception of the 11 people who still own their land and live there)

Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong: Though Hong Kong is self governing for the most part it's still considered part of China and there's no private land in China so it's owned by...you guessed it...China

Oradour-sur-Glane, France: It's an official memorial site designated by the Government of France.

Kolmanskuppe, Namibia: As the article says it's owned by the De Beers group (the diamond company)

Humberstone, Chile: turned over to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Wittenoom, Australia: No idea, I'd assume it's considered Government land but there are still 8 people living there who obviously own their own land. As the article says it's been removed from all official maps so it's not even really a place anymore.

Agdam,Azerbaijan: Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union had no private land so it became owned by the nation of Azerbaijan after the collapse. It was destroyed in the Nagorno-Karabakh War which was raging pre-USSR collapse and ended post-USSR collapse so it wasn't in a position to be purchased by anyone else before it was destroyed.

Varosha, Cyprus and the Two sites in Italy: I have no idea. They were deserted by their residents so I assume they reverted back to their respective governments but both nations allow for the ownership of private land so in theory someone could still own parts of it.

Bodie State park, California: Owned by the U.S. Federal Government as a National Historic Landmark
Selecting Your Wedding Ring for your Iowa Wedding
Wedding ring is one of the most sentimental piece of jewelry that we will ever own and it is also highly symbolic. We must pay great attention while choosing such an important piece of jewelry. We will be wearing this ring all our life so we must pick something we like. When you are selecting your Iowa wedding ring, never rush through the process.
That's funny, I listen to music because I don't like background noise. (In fact, listening to music you're familiar with can help you focus since it shuts out other, irregular, distracting sounds.)
Suddenly Sudoku seems the most natural thing in the world.
Getting Mosquitoes to Poison Their Own Larvae
Reminds me of Mike Rowe's tech talk: "Maybe we have it wrong when we say 'Safety first.' Maybe it's more like... 'Safety third.'

I wonder how the Internet has affected safety culture in schools. I can do a simple search and get all kinds of crazy school stories-- and then use those to justify any rules I want, if I had happened to be a school administrator.
Fast Iterative Algorithms for the Tower of Hanoi Puzzle
Wickedfire is to HN as 4chan is to reddit. Its all black hat this, black hat that, cheating and lying to get an extra buck. Granted not everyone is, but that's the overall vibe you get from reading it
The Heroic Hacker: Legends of the Computer Age
Is this the really big convex handle? I think that might be designed for people who can kind of wrap their hands around things but can't really grasp anything very tightly.
if you ever played street basketball you would understand the context of erik's controversial posts. next time you're in ny, head over to west 4th street's basketball court in manhattan - the language is thick and the gestures are threatening, only to be followed up with chilly beer and dubbies. the net is relatively new, most people aren't aware you have to put on 3D glasses.
" Where things really went completely awry is XML Schema."

I think XML worked out OK for its intended purpose because there was a lot of experience with SGML, HTML, and ad-hoc attempts at "re-purposing" HTML. Folks could say, well, we tried this and that, and this works and that is painful. And since it was not assured to be a success, there were fewer major vendors clamoring to get their fingerprints all over it.

But after XML caught on there was interest from tool vendors to beef things up, largely with abstractions that had yet to see real-world testing, and with things that just so happened to require massive IDE support.

The worst may have been the schema stuff, but there's a lot of competition.

BTW, this page http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/ gives me 40 pages of print preview. A good chunk consists of appendices, but the main part runs more than 11 pages. I don't recall where I got that number from.

I'll just blame Tim Bray, for lack of a real excuse. :)
Real-time search is an interesting subject for me, and if nothing else, this article is interesting because it puts these start-ups side-by-side.

I have to wonder, though, about the results of real-time search techniques becoming popular. For example, Topsy weighs users differently based on retweets. What kind of new SEO strategies will this spawn? And will they be good for the web or for social media? It all makes me a bit nervous.
i stumbled across the same site awhile back and was dissapointed the whole thing (appears to be) a hoax..

from an ny times article:

About two years ago, Mr. Tatarchuk said, a Ukrainian woman
booked a tour, wore a leather biker jacket and posed for
pictures. Soon there appeared a Web site in which the
woman, using the name Elena, claimed that she had been
given an unlimited pass by her father, a nuclear physicist
and Chernobyl researcher ("Thank you, Daddy!" she wrote)
and now roamed the ruins at will on her Kawasaki Big Ninja.

source http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/15/international/europe/15che...
I love the idea. I've always been skeptical of references - if anyone asked me about any staff I've had, I'd be pretty positive. Why burn bridges and start vendettas? There's definitely a few people I wouldn't call back for, but I'd call back for any of the people that were fantastic to work with. That means either really good at their job, or average+ with an amazing attitude (which can be the right ticket for some roles).

I might halfway pause and start a bad reference with, "Well..." and let the manager guess if he's perceptive enough, but I'd never speak ill of a former staff member. Too much chance of it biting the company back - it'd be pretty damn irresponsible of me to do that. But not calling back? Yeah, I'd do that. For great people? Callback the same day I get the message, no matter how busy, at least for a 90 second chat. Maybe I'm not everybody, but I think most halfway competent managers go out of their way to take care of the great people they've worked with.
Heh... unfortunately, I've been very busy, and a thorough look into everything that's wrong with "Selfish Gene" would require more time than I have. It is well written, and that's one of the problems with the book, and Dawkins in general. That is, many people are willing to accept his views because they are well written and do not take the time (or have the background) to question their scientific validity.

For starters, very early on Dawkins acknowledges the current lack of consensus as to the exact definition of a "gene" (i.e. does it include promoter/enhancer/other regulatory sequences? should each polymorphism count as one gene? or do we group them together? and if so where, in the continuum of small differences between "genes" do we draw the line?). His proposed solution is to take as a gene any combination of genetic elements which gives rise to an expressed trait.

He then expands on this basic definition to describe how it leads to genes which are "selfish". That is, they are interested only in their own continuance, and so the traits they code for will be optimized around this goal. Unfortunately, this is dangerously close to circular logic. You see, the physical traits that appear in organisms rarely have a simple one-to-one correspondence with a particular subset of the genome. Effects such as epistasis, where the action of one gene masks the effect of another, nullify Dawkins' simplistic definition.

Or, if you would have it another way, genes which have epistatic effects would need to be included in with the original "gene" according to Dawkins' definition. Unfortunately, the network effects that give rise to higher plants and animals would eventually necessitate including the entire genome of an organism in one "Dawkins gene", making the unit of selection not the gene, as Dawkins would have it, but the individual.

As for topics which he over-complicates, the first that comes to mind is kin selection. Admittedly, I don't think his over-complication is intentional, but rather his exploration of the topic is hindered by his presumption that genes are selfish. In fact, kin selection can arise in evolving individuals without the need for the concept of a "gene" at all! Rather, any evolving individual which evolves in a mixed population will eventually acquire various kin selection traits.

As I said at the start, I'm not surprised that Dawkins' ideas are so commonly held as true. He is well written, and most of the work that would refute his claims is usually presented in language inaccessible to most laypeople.
I'd bet that there are quite a few places like this in the US. Check out Times Beach, MO: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_beach
What is wrong with growing quickly? The incremental size of an additional row like you are describing is so small that you'd need thousands of users before you even noticed the disk space usage.
"Albeit a Windows version would be far more appropriate."

And here I am, thinking that Apple has more in common with Scientology.
Don't mistake explicitness for verbosity. Soon we'll see someone posting a Perl oneliner to do the same, claiming R is also verbose. Conciseness is not a goal, clarity is. if you have to expand the operations in your mind, you may well spend more time thinking about your code then when it's written fully, perhaps factored into a properly named function.
You know how they say if you fall off the horse, you should get back on again? Running a startup can be like falling off the horse, every day, usually onto your face.
Not entirely correct. Hemagglutinin is the protein on the virus coat. It binds to sialic acid on the surface of the cells. Sialic acids can have different glycosidic linkages. In humans, the predominant linkage type is alpha-1,6. In birds the predominant linkage is alpha-1,4. Pigs have a fairly even mix of both alpha-1,4 and alpha-1,6 which explains why they make good hosts for recombination.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/FLU/FLU.html

There are literally thousands of strains that have been sequenced.
Upvoted for the mentioning of Karnaugh maps! For a subject I'm not particularly interested in (binary arithmetic and logic), I found Karnaugh maps and some of the stuff we did with them in Phy220 quite brilliant and interesting.
Well, they can't throw money out of helicopters just yet. There's no quick magic fix ("here's your $9.46 back, sorry") because they don't full apprehend the problem, nor do they have a workable filter to separate legit and fraud clicks.

Maybe you are hoping for some reassuring words + action, but I've been there and it can take awhile before a competent manager notices there is a problem to be fixed in the first place. Then they need to do a lot of analysis to make their own definition of "fraud" (a misleading term that covers a large spectrum of behavior), which may not be possible to unambiguously apply to historical data.

As my business advisor Barbie likes to say "CPC is hard! Let's go shopping!"
I recommend Squarepusher.
Well, this doesn't really get at the heart of the article (or the matter), but to be rather pedantic, the virus genome encodes much more than just 3.2KB. Keep in mind that most of what the genome accomplishes is done with proteins. In that case, you have to take codons (sets of 3 bases) and convert to one of the 20 amino acids. This effectively takes 64 bits of information and reduces it to 20...

EXCEPT that proteins are 3-dimensional entities. Their exact 3D configuration is encoded in the amino acid sequence encoded by the DNA. We still don't fully understand how this encoding works, but it is, in effect, the most awesome compression algorithm imaginable!
TWDY just got added to my "work time" playlist. Sound similar to another one of my go to bands, Explosions In The Sky: http://www.myspace.com/explosionsinthesky
On the iPhone App Store’s Prohibition of Emulators
When It Comes To Search Trends, Google Is Lagging Behind Bing
"great lie" was pj's phrase, not mine, but I took that to mean "perennial tar-pit". FB might succeed but a long string of similar social media businesses have failed to pin down the whole revenue/cost thing. It'll have to be something very different from display ads.
That's certainly disturbing too but what baffles me about the Centralia thing is the fact that it was a fire and it was right underneath their feet. I mean, Coal burns at 2800 degrees Fahrenheit and that's what was burning underneath them FOR ALMOST 20 YEARS.

I mean think about that. Coal mines usually top out at about 500 feet below the surface. So let me put that in perspective. The Sears Tower has 110 stories and stands 1450 fit. So this would be like standing on the 36th floor while a 2800 degree fire burned on the first floor and not even knowing anything about it.

It's crazy.
Walter Mebane uses Benford's Law on the second digit as a more reliable system to detect electoral fraud: http://www.umich.edu/~wmebane/pm06.pdf
Furthermore, it is interesting to note that he pointed out in 2006 that the results of the Mexican presidential election seemed fraudulent and he recommended a recount. But at that time the mainstream media seemed quite happy with the official winner, so they didn't talk about it, even when over two million Mexicans protested in Mexico City over the election results. The mainstream media decided to ignore all the statistical evidence of fraud, and just label the other candidate a a "sore loser".
how much longer must this be debated? every year we debate, we spend more and get more sick

the experiment is over, single-payer wins. the global healthcare experiment is fifty years old. single-payer wins and the nations with single-payer have better balance sheets than those that don't. they're also healthier.

whats the point of experimenting further? what else is there to learn that will be of greater value than getting people healthy now?

healthcare is not a business. you care if other people are getting good healthcare. you don't you say? well, do you go to the movies periodically? better hope that person next to you doesn't have untreated TB, or something else nasty, otherwise you're dead and your own health coverage won't help...its only a billing system, not a cure-all. when people can't get sick from sharing the air in a room, i'll admit i don't care about the healthcare other people get.

and if single payer doesn't work, then lets get rid of it for the military, because thats how their system works.

saw a reference to milton friedman and his thought on healthcare today on HN. we're so dogmatic about being conservative capitalists that we cannot admit that those nations that have embraced friedman the most tightly are also the most indebted. USA, japan, etc. time to just admit that friedman was wrong, his teachings have destroyed at least two great western economies. the further away from friedman an industrial economy is, the less indebted it tends to be. how paradoxical is that...the nations that have rejected balls-on capitalism are showing better balance sheets than those that embraced it. live and learn
My wife is Japanese and we own a house in Saitama which is a little ways outside of Tokyo. I go about 3-4 times a year.

I constantly get lost, even doing something as simple as walking the dog. It's not uncommon that I'll take photos of landmarks as I walk past as sort of a digital crumb trail to get back to where I started.

What makes it worse is that block numbers are based on age and may not be relative to adjoining blocks.

I once took her mom's dog for a walk and thought I was so lost that I made a frantic cell phone call three hours later, only to find out I was one block away.
Obesity & drug addictions are significantly more difficult to fix behavior wise than a proper diagnosis and a non-addictive drug to cure it.
Hell, if you can automate medical transcription, forget making a consumer website, sell it to hospitals and insurers. That's a whole industry unto itself.
You should get a GPS. Even without a map, it can do breadcrumbs of your path which allows you to retrace your route.
Totally agree with This Will Destroy You and Explosions in The Sky as solid coding music.

I'd also add Mogwai to that list.
I have that one and I love it. My wife, for whom I bought it, never uses it, and prefers the rickety bare-metal thing that routinely mocks me.
doctors are part of the problem and this entire process has shown them out. most people already understood that their health insurer was scum, but few know their doctor is in on it too
sad friedman-zombies downvote because they have no response
What is the advantage of this approach?
maybe you mean "intelligible web tech discussion". there are plenty of intelligent discussions occurring on the internet by intelligent people who don't know what a browser is.
CIA's Technology Arm Taps Open Source for Enterprise Search
DRAM's Inventor Honored for Contribution
Yes, and instead of creating kids that are adaptable, we're creating ones that are weak.

If someone tries to prepare for every possible contingency, kids grow up under the grand illusion that not much can go wrong, and then crumble when they're faced with the smallest unanticipated problem. (Some more along these lines in this article: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/861651.cms )

This is reminiscent of dumbing-down projects in software. :) Something brilliant is created, but over time the original developers move on and there is a push to make the thing maintainable by cheaply-employed people who are relatively mindless automatons. Most of what they do is memorize remedies for the common issues. Their effectiveness is therefore proportional to how predictable the problems are; should something unusual occur, they have no idea how to fix it and their effectiveness goes out the window. So imagine if you're a child, you grow up feeling basically capable of living your own life, only to be given the rudest of awakenings when unexpected things start revealing just how unprepared you really are.
Pretty much the only band I listen to while programming is Apocalyptica. I just like the driving-ness of their songs. For those who don't know, they're a cello metal band. Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalyptica
Improving MapReduce with HashFold
People have already started spamming rising trends using keyword stuffing tactics and hashtags. Whoever can figure out how to reduce the noise and spam will have a major competitive advantage.
Things to do before you Die: Basilica of Bom Jesus, Goa
Question for all here, if one has a strong pure math / CS background, whats a good collection of texts for building up to a solid understanding of modern theoretical physics?
I despise techno when coding it's often irregular, sometimes too loud – trance is so much more regular and works a lot better as background music. Alternatively, minimal/post-rock (Stars of the Lid, Explosions In The Sky) is regular, non-disturbing and generally nice.
This was an excellent sarcastic commentary on Crawford's book. I thought the reviewer took it apart quite nicely, and filed it in the correct category with so many other similar books with the same essential pattern. It's an over the top, generalized, justification for the author's personal decision. After all, he had to use his PhD somehow. His political and personal conflicts are blown up into societal ills so he can justify the waste of money on his education. :-)

I really have just about zero interest in motorcycles, and car repair in general, or really doing anything similar to that for a living. The whole macho, often misogynistic (which was identified by the review, BTW), motorcycle culture just completely turns me off. It's also seems to be a real attraction for the regressive anarchist/libertarian turned authoritarian type, which is a further turn off.

But the corporate culture is the same -- it may not have the same personalities or political culture, but there are distasteful elements we all know about personally (and from numerous Dilbert cartoons :-)). It, also, seems to be an attraction for the naive libertarian cum authoritarian. :-) I don't like it either, really.

But I like what I do, and I like being paid for what I do, so I put up with it because I can figure out way to do so. Perhaps Crawford found something he really likes and an environment which suits him. To generalize that into a condemnation of "non-physical" work seems like an utter long-shot. An attempt to counter the snobbiness of his UC peers with an snoobiness of his own.

My favorite part of the review is the end, where the reviewer delivers the final blow to Crawford' polemic -- what exactly is "useful" about repairing hobby motorcycles compared to certain forms of "office work"? :-)
Hey guys,
I've been playing with this concept for a little now and thought this might be a good forum for discussing the idea.

I've got a small prototype that I used to solve a few problems (most notably: http://www.facebook.com/careers/puzzles.php?puzzle_id=8).

Any criticisms are welcome. If you have any recommendations on presenting the concepts clearer, I'm open to those as well as I'm not sure if I did the explanation justice.
Whoa. Listening to the first thing I found on YouTube. They sound awesome.
Holy Craps How a Gambling Grandma Broke the Record
CSS3 Unleashed - Tips, Tricks and Techniques
I'm not trying to minimize what happened in Centralia. It does seem completely crazy.

Dirt can absorb a LOT of heat. If you had to put out a fire, and you didn't have any water, you'd throw some dirt on it, right? We are all standing on a big ball of fire, anyway.

Having worked next door to the Sears Tower for several years, I can tell you that's a lot of dirt, distributed over the entire area of the fires. The only thing that surprises me is that it took so long for the effects to be recognized.

By comparison the carcinogens in Times Beach were on the surface and therefore easily measurable.
So compared to the 777, the 787 is claimed to reduce fuel consumption by 20 percent, but it only carries 250 passengers instead of 300 - about 17 percent fewer. It seems to me that surprisingly little energy per passenger is going to be saved by replacing aluminum with plastics as the base material here. Does anybody here have an idea about the energy requirements of aluminum vs plastics in plane production? Are there significant savings zu be expected?
getsatisfaction
At and old company, we were dealing with the acquisition of a new product, and with it a new, more vocal user base that often expressed itself on USENET. The CTO went on our website, followed some links to a 3rd party website, hit a nntp:// link that opened Outlook Express on a newsgroup, then was all up in arms the next day: "What are all these negative comments doing on our website!?"

Yes, it was something like 2001, and we had a software company CTO that didn't know the difference between http and nntp and Internet Explorer and Outlook Express.

To quote Zed Shaw: Steak and Strippers, Baby!