skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
PRC's government is known to be relatively insensitive to external pressure, but is scared shitless of its own people. China doesn't rely on foreign aids, and contrary to popular beliefs, value from export accounts for a very small percentage of its GDP. This is part of the reason China is relatively unaffected by the current downturn.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1052429...

If there's to be any changes, it has to be from within. That's why the government is so paranoid about protests and is spending loads on censorship. Recently it has been going after public interest lawyers, but these guys are much tougher to crack than angry peasants.

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_i...
Yea, joining a real company may seem to be responsible to the outside world, but starting a startup entails more responsibility than joining an already successful company. And PG here is talking about the actual responsibility which comes with starting a startup which discourages people from starting one, rather than the perceived responsibility of the society.
Sorry, I guess what I said came across wrong. I'm certainly not in favor of any boycotts, sanctions, or diplomatic freezings. Economic aid in the form of buying their products can't do anything but help. But that being said, I really don't have any elegent solutions for how to fix the current problems.

Things like this and the iPhone incident (and the pressure put on the poor man because of an innocent mistake), simply make me worried, that's all. Sure, the conditions have improved, but for the huge percentage of the world's population that is, just by chance, born into these conditions, I feel like we should be doing something more to advocate for their rights.

My grandparents were lucky enough to get out of China back in the 20s and 30s to give me the fortunate life I have now. I just wish more people had that chance.
strange site with a 960x400px picture of this guy on top of each and every page. why would i want to join that community?
I think we're talking about two difference senses of responsibility.

Well, yes. But they're closely related -- people with lots of responsibilities have to be responsible, or else bad things will happen.
Apparently doesn't fit in any modern laptop, Apple or not.
Does anyone know if this problem is NP-Complete? It sounds fairly similar to the knapsack problem, so much so that this might be as hard as said problem. However, I'm not sure if these specific conditions could be shown to be in NP.
China has progressed economically tremendously. But in terms of freedom for its citizens, it looks like it hasn't progressed much and in some cases has worsened. In fact chinese govt. now uses technology to hamper free thought and expression by its citizens.

It is still an evil empire and a draconian state. Just because some (a lot?) of its citizens lives have improved in the last decades does not mean that the govt. has become any less draconian
This makes more sense now.

Some evildoer hates 4chan, and wants to shut it down. Failing to do so by technical means, he makes it appear that 4chan is DoS-ing someone. AT&T blocks 4chan, and the hacker succeeds in DoS-ing 4chan.
Someone please tell me how a microwave or rice cooker are better than just using a normal old covered pot with a clear lid. I seem to be able to make decent rice if I just very closely follow the correct rice/water/heat/time ratios.

I figure the microwave is faster, but I don't think the rice cooker would be. I guess if you constantly eat rice, not having to pay attention is a plus?
I had a friend who did this, with a goal not of starting a business, but of reading a ton of literature and philosophy. He ended up just being tired all the time.
My guess is that this is happening because food is not a limiting factor right now, nor has it been in the last century or so. This meant that the canon of female beauty changed from plump to toned, because it was suddenly more important to reveal neoteny than to reveal resilience to famine. That's just for starters.

With cheap food for everyone, everything changes. Men become taller (Americans, arguably the group which has not suffered famines for the longest period of time, is the tallest in the world, save for small populations like Norway or the Croatians of the Dinaric Alps. IQs go up over time (Flynn effect). I can't cite a source for this, but American men are noticeably more muscular than men in other countries. America is also one of the countries with the highest rate obesity rate.

So as far as men go, you have more height, muscle mass, brain mass and fat. In fact, muscle mass, neural mass and fat are the most significant ways humans spend discretionary calories. Height is a way to accomodate greater caloric discretionary spending.

So what's happening to women is that they are spending more calories on beauty. They are becoming more attractive in all the senses that beauty can be achieved when food is not a limiting factor. Otherwise, they would already have achieved this state a long time ago.
This is a really good idea. Just taking stock of how much of our info and personal history resides online for a minute should highlight the need for simple backup solutions.

Humans make errors, hardware fails, companies go out of business or change services. Even in the redundant cloud, you can't rely on anyone but yourself for the safety of your data.
It won't fit in ANY normal laptop, and it's not intended to.

A lot of servers use 2.5" x 0.5" drives these days, both SATA and SAS. It makes tons of sense for 10k+ RPM drives, as the platters are smaller anyway and a 3.5" x 1" enclosure just wastes precious space.
"If you want to save money, buy beans in giant cans from discount stores."

We much prefer to soak dry beans, which seem to be much less expensive per unit of protein. Black eye peas have a particularly good nutritional profile, although they usually need added ingredients to have an appealing taste.
Should Copyright Be Abolished On Academic Work?
Boston Dynamics BigDog Robot
Yes, they are related, but not in a way that makes your comment true.

When your parents think you're being irresponsible by starting a startup instead of getting a job, they're thinking about the affect on your own career, not the amount of work you're undertaking to do for other people.
Another reason why ramen profitability is important: when you're working on investment, and your revenues don't meet your expenses, you slowly (or quickly) watch your bank account progress to $0. That is really distracting, and occupies your attention when you should be paying attention to your product.

My solution after experiencing something like this was to turn to consulting. Which, as pg says, is a blessing and a curse - it removes the distraction of the shortening runway, but it adds the distraction of getting paid good money for something other than your startup.
Is there a downside to ramen profitability? Probably the biggest danger is that it might turn you into a consulting firm.

I've seen this happen a few times to friends of mine, it even happened to my first startup. We had a great idea, we developed the service, but we never got around to selling it properly, after having invested so much time and effort into it, and having fixed costs that we had to pay for (office, internet, etc), we started doing custom software development for some clients and ended up doing only that in the end. I finally quit the company. The company still exists and it does pretty well, although there's only one of the original founders left, it is a software consulting company, and it will never be what we set out to do in the first place.
...and the SFLC putting out press releases like this when Microsoft was trying to do the right thing is not helping.
It sounds like the issue is not optimal packing, but rather getting the cheese into the same box as the cereal without making the cheese spoil.
There're a bunch of counterexamples to that, eg. Blogger (Evan Williams was 28), ViaWeb (Paul Graham was 31), Zenter (founders were in their early 30s), RescueTime (founders are in their 30s), Flickr (founders were about 10 years out of college), Del.icio.us (Joshua Schacter was 29), etc.

I'd say the real cutoff is whenever you have kids. Even that's not a hard cutoff (one of the Zenters had a kid right before they were accepted to YC), but it makes it a lot harder.
I hope it doesn't run backwards when it hits the end, like in PKD's Counter-Clock World.
Are you saying that, according to this mechanism, the womb tends to abort males that will be beautiful and females that will be tall?
They're closely related, but completely different.

I'm starting something. I don't care if I look responsible to others or if people think I'm a responsible person or not.

However, my biggest fear is that I get a bunch of customers and then somehow my product fails them. I would be responsible, and that would be bad.
The biggest problem with Jinja2 are the template tags.

If you don't need template tag libraries, Jinja2 is the obvious choice. If you do, however, then good luck. Django Template custom tags are easy to implement, even if you are not using the decorator helpers.

Jinja2 custom template tags are, to quote their website "non-trivial" to implement, and so poorly documented that you are stuck trying to figure out how the tags work from source.

In my CMS I have a number of tags which I make available to my users (for things like named content blocks, menus, named images, etc.). I attempted to migrate my tags to Jinja2, but finally gave up. With proper caching, Django templates are good enough.
I was one of the victims of this system. Lucky me i got the hell out of the system a few years ago. I am a software engineer in Vancouver ,Canada browsing this news now.

My files has been sitting in a cabinet of a government official build over 8 years and no one just care.

The interesting part was I had to pay the government for keeping my files. I just left 8 years ago and i thought i would not need my files anymore (not looking for a job anymore in china , at least a government job ) so i just stopped paying them.
Said guy is Zachary Quinto. ("Sylar" from Heroes and Spock from the new Star Trek film).

I haven't a clue why it's been submitted to HN - perhaps it has some awesome new community experiment somewhere?
It probably really depends on the person...I'm a natural night owl, so once I adjusted to the schedule, it wasn't a big deal. I got a ton of reading and school done during the six months I had that assignment.
IPhone vs. Android: Will Apple-Microsoft history repeat itself?
Agreed. He even puts forth that very explanation.

Hardly "a statement which contradicts itself."
Humans and compilers need each other: the VLIW SIMD case
By a nose... or is it a hair... - last day of Netflix Prize
"Another thing ramen profitability doesn't imply is Joe Kraus's idea that you should put your business model in beta when you put your product in beta. He believes it's a good form of discipline to get people to pay you from the beginning. I think that's too constraining."

This is one of the best and for many startups non-obvious parts from this essay. The business model is the business, the product is almost secondary. If you have a stellar business model and execution you can have mediocre product and still succeed.

The very best product without a viable business model could easily crash.

Especially when you're going ad supported or freemium the business model will need as many iterations and bug fixes as your product. And you need a backup plan in case things do not go the way you planned for in your most negative projections.
More that the wombs of beautiful women tend to abort males, and the wombs of tall women tend to abort females. I'm kinda curious whether this can account for male genes at all; it seems possible but pretty unlikely.

And of course, the effect is incredibly tiny, but averaged over millions of human beings can create noticeable differences in sex ratios.
I have comments, but no spam in my comments. Here’s why.
Last year Vaughan Pratt (of automata theory and Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm) asked on a hardcore theoretical physics group blog how does a light mill (device allegedly proving corpuscular nature of light, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_mill) really work. To my knowledge this question after 150 years still awaits consensus over a satisfactory anwser (while having far too plenty seemingly convincing ones).

http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2008/07/light_mills.html

A toy simulation:

http://www.gregegan.net/SCIENCE/LightMill/LightMill.html
They're also good for cooking many other things - think of it as something that cooks something until the amount of liquid remaining has simmered down to almost nothing. See also: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/11/the_pot_and_how_to_u...
Ask HN: Hypothetically reverse-engineer programming solutions from the brain?
Specifically, could we use electroencephalography or (as yet to be created) higher resolution technologies to look into the brain of a person performing a specific but complex task, and then use that information to inform the creation of programming architecture that is designed to do the same thing?
Well, it's all about needs. I just needed to run some applications and games, code a bit on visual studio to complete college assignments and run internet through a data-card whose modem(china-made) never got recognized on both fedora/OSX. However for managing servers, I never tried it so I agree with you. Your statement is a special case IMHO. Like me, most of the linux/OSX based user go for virtualisation if they need windows.
Damn, now what am I going to do with all this ramen I bought?
Hmm, yes. I was never able to do this consistently, even at my poorest. I think the reason is that it requires you to decide in advance what you're going to eat.
Yes. Absolutely continue the science -- data gathering, looking for patterns, proposing hypotheses, and testing. I'm all for all of that. Perhaps in a few hundred years we'll know enough to have something interesting. Lord knows it took Physics longer than that. Perhaps the climatologists will get lucky. Who knows? Although if I understand Wolfram's work, some chaotic processes may be simply incalculable.

I think there's a huge gap between "continue the science" and "turn over large sections of the world's economy to climatologists to make the earth their private lab" My contention is twofold: the use of the word "science" to describe the barest minimum of data collection when science is much more than that, and the mingling of scientists and politics. Flimsy science with a lot of unknowns and public policy are a really bad marriage. Sounds to me a lot like the medieval church and the early nation-states.

When Newton observed an apple falling, he didn't need a theory of gravity because he could take a million more apples and make them do the same thing. That means that even though the theory of gravity is in the same epistemological place that global warming is, we can have a lot more confidence in it. We only have one earth, and little data. Right now we have science-based conjecture, which is nothing as firm as proven theories. That means I'm not supporting huge changes in public policy. If we were talking an asteroid coming towards earth, you can better believe I'd have a much different position.
Check this link, sent to me by a friend the last time I mentioned peacocks, for some of the latest research on the subject.

http://www.adeline-loyau.net/publications/Loyau_etal_AnimBeh...
As usual, the internet has overreacted vastly to something simple.
I've always been so oddball and beyond the norm that I basically decided to embrace it, so the fear of seeming abnormal or irresponsible hasn't ever factored into it, at least for me.
"Beginning Friday, an AT&T customer was impacted by a denial-of-service attack stemming from IP addresses connected to img.4chan.org. To prevent this attack from disrupting service for the impacted AT&T customer, and to prevent the attack from spreading to impact our other customers, AT&T temporarily blocked access to the IP addresses in question for our customers."

Can we please do a DoS on the word "impacted" and its variants? Unless we're talking dentistry?

OK, rant over. :)
Agreed !!
Thanks for enlightening me.
Yeah watch out if your company doesn't have office space and you're working from home. There is this assumption that you just aren't doing anything all day so can run errands and do all sorts of crap for your friends and wife - in other words, you don't have a "real job."
Meh, when has the SFLC ever been helpful, rather than a bully. Bully for the good guys, yeah, but they're still lawyers/bullies.
FTA: "The important thing to note from a perspective of freedom is that this software, whether it is released properly under the GPL or kept proprietary in violation of the GPL, is a piece of software designed to convince people to give up free virtualization platforms like Xen and KVM, and [to] use Microsoft's virtualization technology instead," Kuhn added."

I think it helps a lot. It helps to put the contribution in perspective and it digs up a fairly plausible reason why microsoft would make some of their code available under the GPL to be placed in the linux kernel.

If they'd do the same in reverse - release code that would allow windows to be better virtualized under xen or vmware - then I would be impressed (and surprised).
> There is no reason I should be making 0.0025% on my savings but being charges 19.5% on my credit.

Technically there is a good reason.

You make so little interest on your savings because you are lending money to the bank, which means due to the banks credit rating and CIDC insurance that you are very unlikely to loose your money.

When the bank loans money to you via your credit card, they are taking a much much larger gamble. If you go bankrupt there is no CDIC insurance to protect them and give them their money back.

Hence the higher interest rate.

How big should the spread be? That's an entirely different question:)
The
Jack Kerouac took a job as a fire monitor once. It involved sitting alone in a cabin in the middle of a forest, watching for fires.

http://www.geocities.com/phoffman3/desolation/
Having gone down both the ramen-profitable and the traditional-VC roads, here are some pitfalls that deserve mention with the former. The two are not mutually exclusive, and the angel/VC road has its own well-known brambles, but anyway:

- Your biggest fear should not be flaming out spectacularly, but rather creating a zombie that neither truly lives nor dies. The downside of ramen profitability is that (by definition) it's easier to waste years rather than months on an idea that won't ultimately succeed.

- In fact, you may lose your window of opportunity to someone who figures out how to use cash to get further faster.

- Outside investment forces you to get your head out of the day-to-day firefighting every month or so to 1) think big picture 2) set long term goals 3) be accountable for your progress. The key is "outside"; otherwise it's easy to meander along and procrastinate on hard questions.

- The upside of ramen profitability is a culture of frugality. The downside is it's easy to waste time on things you could be paying others to do. For example, paying an accountant to do your company taxes might blow away the entire year's earnings -- does that mean you should learn the tax code and do it yourself? What about negotiating a contract, or even taking out the trash? (These are real examples of things we did ourselves at the ramen-profitable company.) Delegating is harder if it means losing your hard-earned badge of profitability.

Joel has a good post on this topic (Amazon vs. Ben & Jerry's): http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html
This is extremely groundbreaking work. Never before has a site combined chat, messageboard, and social networking features... with a JPEG of the irresistible Zachary Quinto.
Playing a MIDI track involves synthesizing waveforms in real time, so I'm not sure what you're saying here. There have been plenty of phones that supported monophonic or mildly polyphonic ringtones without supporting full PCM, and plenty more that supported PCM samples but have limited space, kind of like old .MOD files.
it's -> it is / it has
its -> belonging to it

No Wine Until it is Time -> it's

(But if you are contracting "until", you should have an apostrophe - 'til).
When your parents think you're being irresponsible by starting a startup instead of getting a job, they're thinking about the affect on your own career, not the amount of work you're undertaking to do for other people.

I'm not convinced that is generally true. Note that I'm talking about perceptions, not reality. I don't think many people avoid startups because they're afraid of being irresponsible -- I think they avoid startups because they're afraid of seeming irresponsible -- and I think a lot of this is based on the perception that a startup which hasn't reached profitability yet (especially if it doesn't have any paying customers yet) isn't a real company.
This was my experience as well. People always assume you are available if you don't have a conventional job. This can make time management a challenge.
Indeed, I thought this was going to be an interesting application of the knapsack problem. Instead, this quote leads me to think it's the inherent difficulties of concurrency and synchronization:

"We had to write an enormous amount of code," Mr. Ackerman said, "because any one of 10,000 products can go to any point at any time."
Informatica on EC2
Are you thinking of the superheating effect? Reasonably pure water in a smooth cup doesn't boil in a microwave. It becomes superheated, and then when moved nucleation sites form causing some of it to flash evaporate into steam and blow up out of the cup, taking lots of very hot water with it. This burns some people making tea or instant coffee.

This almost certainly would never happen in this case as the rice would provide ample nucleation sites.
> muscle mass, neural mass and fat are the most significant ways humans spend discretionary calories.

I can see the fat and the muscle, but neural mass ?

Do you have a citation for that ?
There is also R.py http://rpy.sourceforge.net/
If you ever want a safe(ish) demonstration of this, microwave an egg without cracking the shell first.

Make sure you have some sponges and soap handy.
The title changed. The previous title hinted that the Zachary Quinto community was running on Pownce.
bin packing problem is NP hard right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bin_packing_problem
Theoretically the brain çomputes, therefore 'hypothetically' it should be possible to isolate some of the functions a brain performs and reverse engineer them.

There has been some success with reverse engineering the spatial imaging happening in a monkey brain while it makes a maneuvre to reach some object. The path is clearly visible in the brain of the monkey before it gets executed.

For much interesting reading on this subject try Steven Pinker, How the mind works.
The title was originally something different, related to Pownce. It was probably submitted because Six Apart bought Pownce and this looks like Pownce.

However, it is in fact TypePad.
I often do use Remote Desktop or NoMachines, but most users aren't going to do that. If you could make setting up Remote Desktop/NX sessions trivial, you'd obliterate the use-case for web-desktops entirely.
Also, do remember that brown rice takes slightly over twice as long to cook as white rice.
"For an optimizing programmer, SIMD instructions are a resource from which most benefit must be squeezed at any reasonable cost, including tweaking the behavior of the program. For an optimizing compiler, SIMD instructions are something that can be used to implement a piece of source code, in fact the preferable way to implement it - as long as its semantics are preserved. This means that a compiler obeys rules a programmer doesn’t, making winning impossible."