skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a quote from the article:
"India's vast farming economy is on the verge of crisis. The lack of rain has hit northern areas most, but even in Mumbai, which has experienced heavy rainfall and flooding, authorities were forced to cut the water supply by 30% last week as levels in the lakes serving the city ran perilously low."

Heavy rainfall and flooding followed by severe drought. This is a standard pattern across India, not just in Mumbai. Indian villages always have had water storage ponds - in fact most Hindu temples have a pond attached to them, which serves to recharge the ground water level in the whole village.

What happened in the last 40+ years is a complete dismantling of traditional village governance, initially replaced with State-government appointed government bureaucrats (almost all of whom didn't reside in the village they were supposed to administer and rarely even visited it) and then much later, an elected village body that has few real powers, and still answers to a State-appointed bureaucrat.

It was all done with the best of intentions. But it ended up centralizing rural administration - destroying the village in order to save it. Simple tasks as desilting the water storage ponds were neglected, and eventually many of those ponds were encroached upon. This is true everywhere in India, in major cities as well as small villages.

So it is not simply just nature that is the problem here.
"Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny."
A Brand New Look and Feel for Google Finance
It'll be nice when SSDs come down in price/GB. Should help make day-to-day work seem just a tad quicker.
That essay is excellent. Thanks for posting it.
There is a 'stereotypical' China, the communist country which just like Russia is soon going to implode and there is the real China, a very large country with a set of unique challenges and a very large amount of energy to try to overcome those challenges.

Modern China is not to be compared with the country that it was 30 (or even 20) years ago, it is evolving rapidly and it has a very good shot at becoming the dominant power in the next couple of decades.

It is by no means a certainty, but while western politics are centered around special interest groups and their lobbyists China is working very hard at becoming if not top dog then at least an equal.

A friend of mine has just emigrated to China and the stories he tells me about life there and the level of economic and social change in the last 10 years alone are almost incredible. If they can keep that up they will be very powerful indeed.
Don't try to view this on an original iPhone. It crashes safari.
What features would people like to see?
Retweets?
There's a webapp based on that at http://dontbreakthechain.com/ (not mine!)
desalination plants & water trucks ?
interest set to 0% certainly is inflationary since that means real interest is negative. government doesn't control the prices of commodities directly, but if the money supply was kept static you'd get continual mild deflation.
I can't find good numbers, but it looks like SSD's are still around 0.1 millisecond's which is still 100,000 nanoseconds. And 1/1000th the access time of RAM if if they are 100 times faster than HDD's. Most people don't really notice that big of a jump from HDD to SSD's and, I don't see it being as much of an issue for a while due to the increasing ram and cache sizes.
That's similar to the argument Jared Diamond makes in his book Guns, Germs and Steel. In order to explain the obvious problem - China was clearly ahead of western Europe in terms of technology and science - he appeals to the political structure. China was politically unified around 300 AD, while western Europe was only recently politically unified (and not in the same sense as China was).

Political unification has advantages, but it also gives you less people making decisions, with fewer competitors. So decisions to not pursue technology and science were magnified and unchallenged. In western Europe, if you didn't do something, your neighbors would.

I felt this was a fair assessment. But I also though that, considering the path China is on now, western Europe being so dominant in the world might become a historical blip.
what tech is that ? I'm very interested in that!
Is there a reference implementation that you like and that is well documented.
Yes. Mine got a SQL Injection attack so the hacker was able to run scripts that changed the database. I thought I plugged the holes to prevent it but apparently, I missed one.

I also did not make a fuss about it since the hacker likely wants some attention. I was backing up my db regularly so I just restored from a backup when it happened.
part time startups are harder for people that have other commitments, like a family to feed, wife or gf, busy career. That is why most of the startups are started by young single men who don't have a family they are obiligated too, a gf or wife that needs attention that takes away time from working on your startup, or people that are higher up in the food chain at corporations, which requires time as well. Furthermore, younger people can take risks because they have more time to recover from a failure.
Geopolitically, water may be important, but it is unlikely that a fair resolution to the water issue will resolve the Kashmir issue. Starting in 1947 during partition/independence both India and Pakistan have claimed Kashmir. Now it is a very emotional issue and one that is often seen has having 'national pride' attached to it.
Now I see them too.
The west is still ahead of China in both Science and Technology, but they're moving fast and we're slowing down.

I'd say that China is moving faster because they're still catching up. Once they've caught up, I doubt they'll be moving any faster than the West.

China has it's problems, but it has one thing that the west does not have, which is the power to make very bold decisions and to realize them. No such thing as turf wars between parties or coalition building to dilute any plans.

When the way forward is very clear, as it often is when playing catch-up, this is handy. This isn't as useful once a country has caught up, and needs to figure out the way forward without somewhere else showing the way. At that point, the way forward isn't clear, and discussion and disagreement are useful for arriving at a better solution than one could get from top-down.
Afghanistan was the war we started to get rid of the Taliban and cripple Al Qaeda after they (Al Qaeda) blew up the towers.

People pretty much universally agreed (and continue to agree) that going there was a good idea.

edit: I don't mean to sound rah rah about war, it sucks that we're there and it sucks that we will be for a while. All I'm saying is it wasn't unjustified and there's no reason to sit back with the benefit of hindsight and say "We never should have gone in in the first place." Time is better spent figuring out how to fix the problem and get out. Any suggestions there?
Rainwater harvesting. As @sridharvembu pointed out, even areas with heavy rainfall suffer water scarcity.
Nokia N97 Wallpaper : Sound Tunnel
Thanks. I will get the rubber burning. " The only advice I can give is..." a very crisp advice. I am going to stick to your advice rather than borrow from it.
That's a good point. So you are essentially arguing that as they approach parity they will stagnate again.
It's possible that you've still missed something, unless you're certain that .php is the only extension which your server executes (.php5 often works, and some servers will also run files with .cgi or .py extensions, among others). Blacklists are never fun.

The solution which occurs to me is (assuming you're on Apache) setting the .htaccess file in that directory to cause all files to be downloaded, regardless of their type. I haven't tested it, but I think this is the setting you'd need to make:

ForceType application/octet-stream
Completely disagree here. I have worked at the beeb through the good and bad times (arcane scripting languages built on top of mod_perl), there has been a recent and very fast transition to using much more open industry standard technologies.

I've been working on the new platform since it was released and 99% of the time have been using pure ZF code. Not sure who makes the tech decisions where you are but I'm seeing no indication of NIH.
People pretty much universally agreed (and continue to agree) that going there was a good idea.

I don't. Most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, not Afghanistan, and the links between Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and OBL were tenuous at best and hugely overblown. As far as I can tell, our invasion seems to have affected an enormous increase in world opium production more than anything else. I don't know whom that benefits, but it sure isn't what I pay my taxes for.
I don't think that's really valid. How many recent languages expose raw memory access? The trick to building a great computer system / language is exposing the aspects that are most useful while hiding everything else.
When you have those moments where you do actually get things done, are you still focusing on the mundane tasks? That might be why the inspiration isn't lasting. Set aside a small amount of time each day to work on some creative task. Don't obsess too much over picking something really impressive or useful; start small. Stick with it, and eventually you'll find yourself more energized toward everything else.

"We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action." -Frank Tibolt
But you can set your Twitter account to "private", approve all follows, and then your tweets are only visible to people you approve. So this doesn't hold water.
Some videos show that SSDs could improve experience in terms of booting, launch, etc:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJMGAdpCLVg

It's that kind of speedup I'd like to see -- disk-heavy tasks that don't peg the CPU.
The major improvement coming from SSDs is that seek time no longer kills you. People will notice a difference going from random access on a rotational drive to random access on an SSD; sequential access, not so much.
Early facebook employees just got rich
"Of course, every web project requires lots of lines of code which can easily break at any moment" wtf?
you had me paraonoid enough there to check :)

It's ok though, the fix I applied was a little more elaborate than indicated above.

thanks anyway!
I normally use sites like DZone snippets for code snippets but I'll check out this site too if I need any. Thanks for sharing.
I also like the design of your site better.
It's not a bad idea. At the consumerish end of the market, people often buy club lighting from Guitar Center[0], which sells a large selection of generally low-end to midrange DJ and club equipment. An aggressively-priced low-end version could sell very well there.

The higher end of the market is served by specialized lighting dealers. Professional lighting equipment is very expensive, such that prices are not usually listed. A lower-end professional console goes for around $10k (based on used prices I've found for an Avolites Pearl Tiger).

LightJockey, the market leader I mentioned in my original post costs about $1300 and sits somewhere between consumer and professional. It is not available at Guitar Center, so that's a potential means of displacing it in the market. All I need to do is make a superior product, and I'm sure I can do that.

[0] A US chain store that sells and services musical instruments and related equipment.
SSDs vary a lot by write speed. Most today are slower than HDD for write throughput. (Intel's SSD drives are actually fast, but expensive.)

This will get figured out and make a big difference. But still no comparison to RAM.
You're right, none of those examples would be sufficient for a verdict. But we're not talking about verdicts here, we're talking about access to code, which occurs a long, long time before trial.

Have you ever conducted discovery before, let alone patent-litigation discovery? Discovery is about your suspicions. If you already had facts, you would not need discovery.

Judges are very lenient about discovery requests; the bar is very low -- reasonable suspicion is enough. BTW, you aren't actually required to justify your discovery requests unless the opposing party challenges them, and even then, it's their burden to show that your discovery request is unreasonable and irrelevant.

Code would be a request for production of documents (which actually refers to any physical evidence). Patents are exclusively federal jurisdiction, so the FRCP applies. In federal court, discovery is granted for anything that could lead to relevant evidence

All of the examples you mentioned are enough to get discovery, which occurs before trial. I've seen discovery granted based upon the affidavit of an employee who was fired for cause for stealing from the defendant company. I've seen discovery granted based on a *news article about a company.
Ask HN:  Would a "truth" search engine be viable commercially?
A "truth" search engine would be one that only returns web pages containing accurate information.

For example, when searching for the age of the earth, only web pages indicating an accurate age would be returned.

Would such a search engine be viable commercially?

Sometimes the truth can be unpleasant.
One interesting idea: make a png compressor that doesn't change the image at all; instead, it encodes the torrent's data in the decisions made by the DEFLATE compressor, so a stenographic image merely looks like it was encoded with a slightly suboptimal DEFLATE implementation.

Simple example: you're coding a match against a previous block and can choose one of two previous blocks to match against. If the bit of the torrent file to be encoded is "0", you use the closer of the two blocks, if it's "1" you use the farther.

All you have to do decoder-side to emulate this is to decode the whole PNG, then go "encode" it again and see what decisions were made in the original PNG file and one by one decode the bits to an output torrent file.

You'd probably need a pretty big PNG file (at least a few hundred kilobytes, if not a meg).
Segway.
I could see that web site being a lot more interesting and compelling if it gave you some sort of visual discovery for each new day. If you break the chain, you have to start back at the first one.
Not quite: there was one person in the House who voted against the authorization of force in Afghanistan.

She is my representative :-)

And people continue to universally agree that going in there was a good idea? I mean, really? I grant you that nearly everyone was for it in the weeks after 9-11. Even I said something to that effect. But, hey, I was 19 and naive. Were the same thing to happen again tomorrow, I would not be so quick to judge, for what seemed liked a good idea at the time looks a lot more questionable 8 years later. Bin Laden is free, Afghanistan's cost to us in terms of lives and treasure grows by the week, the Taliban still rule large parts of the country, and Al Qaeda is not crippled.

I am not asserting that the invasion was unjustified, but you have got to admit that it's highly debatable whether the benefits outweigh the costs in this, the eighth year of the war.
Don't mistake HN "consensus" with Ruby community consensus. I've been very loud on HN about how monkeypatching is a bad idea, but I am not a member of the Ruby community. (I got my burned-by-monkeypatching credentials from Javascript.)

I never was really in the market for Ruby since I know Python very well, but certainly Ruby's love affair with monkeypatching would be sufficient by itself to turn me away.
Taking the car analogy further: Plenty of people buy cars that will go faster than they will ever need to go.

The car designer ALLOWS you to do it, even if it's not usually safe.

The happy customer knows it's there if he needs it.
yes, I have been in the US for the last year and a half, right now in fact I even have about 6 weeks all to myself since my wife is back in India - so it gives me a lot of time to work on stuff if I can get to keep myself focused!Thanks guys lots of amazing amazing advice!

I have lived in US for a year before too, atleast in my company the work culture is much better here where people come in on time and leave on time and focus while working - so I kinda am more productive here than back home and this also gives me more free time
another suggestion, hash on the image, keep a list of the last 100 images, if an image re-appears drop it.
I got my burned-by-monkeypatching credentials from Javascript

Ouch. I cringe just thinking about it.

(In Javascript you can do some truly ugly and unnatural things mixing up what people expect and what they get.)
Opinion: Why desktop Linux may have lost its chance
Actually right after I posted that, I went and joined the office Gym.Hopefully I'll stick to it for full 30 days!It really feels good to work out and I'll probably take a print out of this HN thread and stick it on my walls so that I'll always be reminded not to slack
The business world abhors legal uncertainty.

The problem is not just the case where a company does get hit with a lawsuit if it should violate the GPL as it might nebulously apply to myriad situations.

It is the very possibility of such an event that will scare away those who might otherwise fund your company or who might otherwise acquire it.

I know. I deal with funding rounds and M&A very frequently in real-world situations. Believe me, if the GPL pops up in due diligence, general panic ensues unless it involves only some incidental use that can be worked around or it involves a very clear-cut case of how the license applies.

As an entrepreneur, you can lose and lose badly in such situations even where no lawsuit is ever filed.
I grew up in India and I half joke that I don't know how to swim because I grew up in a place where drinking water is hard to come by, forget the swim part.

At least where I grew up, water was always hard to come by. If you ever jumped into our water well, you would die at half way to the bottom from heart failure. It's probably half a mile deep :-)
your advice is truly motivating!You are spot on, I have ALMOST ALWAYS tried to pursue more than one project and almost always jump of the wagon when the boring parts hit and worse the guilty feeling of having not done the boring parts basically won't let me work on the other interesting piece too and I switch back and forth and give up eventually on both or do it with poor quality
How chaos drives the brain
Actually - I kindof liked it. I'm very argumentative - and I'm happy to play devil's advocate. The article suggests that you use cognitive dissonance - rather than telling yourself you're awesome and then feeling sucky because you don't live up to that -- tell yourself you suck and then feel better / prove yourself wrong. Interesting food for thought at least
as another poster mentioned, the trick works on usb and built-in laptop keyboards as well. Basically if you're typing on any kind of keyboard, you're vulnerable :-)

secure wireless keyboard might be more secure only because there is less power going through the devices, so the signal is potentially weaker (battery powered)
This would be really useful if you could filter by subject (search term or hash tag). It'd be a great way to see pictures of a live conference or news event as it was unfolding (to go along with http://almost.at/)
Whose truth would it return?
Do I HAVE to write this?

You argue the US government would take large risks to get egg on their face just to emphasize what is well documented anyway.

If you're not trolling, you're a conspiracy nut. Think about motivation and risk.

Everyone asks the questions: What is the cost, what can you earn, what do you risk?

Arguably, the risk of getting caught is high, the payoff trivial and getting caught would really help the wrong people. The CIA etc can just sit and watch this clusterfuck play out, without taking over twitter...

I find it amusing that you assume anyone thinking you're spouting nonsense thinks of the world in black and white. Your history explains that.
yes I am indeed an INTP and every single word of your comment applies to me, boy you almost sound like my twin brother :-)
Once you do that, Twitter basically becomes a subset of Facebook, and you if you already have a Facebook, there's no reason to switch.
As a start, it would include all well-established scientific truths such as evolution. It would also include recent history where there is little doubt about what happened.

It would not include any web pages that present the other side of the debate.

It would exclude all conspiracy theories.
Those look like artistic renderings, from before it opened - not pictures.

I don't doubt it's much more impressive in person, also.
You need pain. All this "30 days to form a new habit" stuff is bullshit - for certain personality types anyway. I went to the gym for months but it eventually tailed off.

I've found the best motivator is always pain. I was sloppy at cleaning my teeth until I had some major dental pain and a ton of expensive dental surgery. Now I'm brushing and flossing all the time - guaranteed.

I used to be sloppy at dealing with e-mails. Now I try and get on the case right away as I found the pain and shame of dealing with irate people calling me up to be worse than just doing the e-mail.

So, pain, that's my recommendation. It's also something Tony Robbins tends to go on about. Find pains associated with undesired behaviors and realize them. Find pleasures associated with desired behaviors and realize them. The rest follows automatically.
An honor to get the third comment from a new account, I guess...

Oh, I did consider who benefits.

Did you spare a thought to cost/benefit? And the risk of getting caught and how good that would be for the conservatives in Iran, that is frenetically trying to pin the uprising on USA (-: but had to settle for BBC! :-).

It's not sane. It is like a rich guy holding up a gas station.

Edit: The fourth comment, not the third (missed one, which was whited out too much from talking politics...)
Excellent point, Thank you!.I go over the task in my mind so many times that I get more and more overwhelmed and ever so often because of external pressure or deadline I am forced to complete it I realize that for what I probably wasted 2 weeks thinking about took only about 2-3 hours to get done
It's not vaporware. I saw a demo of it several months ago, and I'd bet it's feature complete by now, or close.
Thanks!Appreciate all the links!
Yeah, I agree that the costs are awful. The guys coming back aren't like they were when they left, for sure.

But how can we know the costs of not going? It's really hard to nail it down to any particular influence, but there hasn't been a domestic attack since 9/11, and it'd be foolish to say that the war in Afghanistan hasn't played a role.

Regardless, it was a hard choice, and easy to second guess. But that doesn't mean it's time to sit back and say "Yep, never should have went there in the first place." The better thing to wonder is "Where from here?"