skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The full DSLReports thread is at http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,22769947 . In a later post apeface, an AT&T employee, wrote:

"Well, I didn't see 207.126.64.182 or 207.126.64.181 in any block lists in the uverse routers , but that isn't to say they aren't blocked on the backbone someplace. We obviously aren't blocking the entire site or any particular link due to content because I can still access everything else but the links using the IP's above. If we where going to block a site, it wouldn't normally just be bits and parts, it would be all of it."

EDIT: apeface confirms AT&T has img.4chan.org blocked at the backbone.
I'd say increases in the prevalence disease would have been the biggest factor in the reduction of lifespan for 'civilised' people.
To accomplish this, you must both (a) live to be at least 100(x+7000) years old, and (b) destroy human civilization within x years.

I hope you're already working on your immortality elixir and your doomsday device.
> Question is how can those particles be made in such massive amounts and at low enough price.

I'm more worried about how we stop them once they are successfully programmed to self-replicate. I actually think that 'Gray Goo' is a far more likely scenario for the demise of mankind than it is given credit for:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
"Apple Finally has an App Machine" – aw, geez, i thought thats what my macbook was
Oops -- I should also have added that it's a 9800GTX+ EVGA video card.
Sortable Hacker News
are you trained as an artist or as a software engineer? hmm, maybe what i want to ask is, from which "side" did you get into being a software artist?
Thanks. How did you find that URL?
Not really. What you are describing might happen on a bad episode of Star Trek TNG (Q changes the gravitational constant, for example), but in reality stuff that happens on a planet orbiting a distant star are not going to be all that different than what happens here on Earth. Chemical bonds work the same way in Sunnyvale as they do in the Oort Cloud or in a galaxy billions of light years away. We know this by studying the spectra of the light coming from these places.

At the chemical level, I do not anticipate that extraterrestrial life would be very different than that found here. Water is a terrific solvent and is liquid at a wide range of temperature. Unlike methane and ammonia, its molecules are dipoles (one end is more positive and the other more negative), which makes it easy for it to form hydrogen bonds and a strong surface tension at the surface.

Carbon and Oxygen are both fairly abundant. They are formed during the carbon-cycle of aging stars (3 He -> C, 4 He -> O). I have read SF stories that tell of creatures that breathe Florine or are Silicon-based, but these are pretty far-fetched. Florine is a lot rarer than Oxygen, and though it is more electro-negative than O, because of this it is likely to stay locked up in rocks than remain in the atmosphere. Silicon has the same number of valence electrons as Carbon does, but the bonds that it forms are at a higher energy state (n=3, vs. n=2 for C). This means that it is hard for Si to form double or triple covalent bonds; this is something C can do very easily. For a more detailed discussion on this subject, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_biochemis...
Wow, thanks: another rich-information, insight-stimulating data point.

I heard an NPR story about bedbugs being on the rise a year or so ago. It didn't occur to me that bedbugs presented an entrepreneurial opportunity.
Hmm well I won't speak to the "New Age-ness" of any of this stuff as I like to stay as far away from that side of things as possible. But I believe proving to yourself that you can have at least some control over your own dreams can provide some significant benefit. When I was quite young, about 4 or 5 years old I had this recurring dream that I was being chased though our family home by a Wampa (from Star Wars, why I had seen The Empire Strikes Back at that age is another story). This dream freaked the hell out of me as you can probably imagine. I told my mother about it and she said that I could control my dreams, that I either needed to make friends with the monster or kill him and that I had the power to do either one. I'm not sure how long after that it was, but there came a night and a dream where I did in fact make friends with this huge white monster, took him downstairs by the hand and showed him my toys. Now 25 or so years later, that was the last recurring nightmare I ever had. I barely have any nightmares at all in fact. I attribute this mainly to this experience at an early age.

So for me, I guess I would call that pretty life changing, but perhaps not in the way that others might think of when they attribute the term "life changing" to lucid dreams. I feel that there is some degree of mastery one acquires over one's own mind with these kinds of exercises. A feeling that this is my mind and I control it. That's always been pretty valuable to me.
Eclipse has the JDT package which gives you access to the parser that Eclipse uses internally.
Never say "magic" again...
Funny you mention local real estate websites, that's actually been something I've been thinking of. I'm a real estate broker learning to program, and my "muse" hopeful is http://mysinglepropertywebsites.com/, which is targeted towards real estate agents. Average age of agents is 54, and they have a lot of pain points. I'm still pretty weak on programming but deep on real estate industry knowledge, if you (or anyone else) is actually interested in that area email me: mlapeter at gmail.
Is there any way to get a "raw HN feed"? I imagine there are a number of interesting hacks which could be made given real-time access to a stream of submissions and votes.
At the bottom of the page, click "past messages".
I think the best argument against a "grey goo" apocalypse is that it hasn't happened yet, despite the fact that the earth is already full of self-replicating nano-machines.
The best success I've had with lucid dreaming is doing it directly from wake, Feynman style. The cue is when you notice yourself going into sleep paralysis. It only happens to me while sleeping on my back. It feels like an incredibly intense energy going through your body. If you're not aware of what it is, it can really feel like you're going to do if you don't snap yourself out of it. You won't die, you feel this way every night while your senses are disconnecting, you just normally sleep through it. Just relax, let the energy flow through you, and float away.

It can of course be tough to fall asleep on a stimulant, but some chocolate can make it easier to stay awake as you are falling asleep. 3 or 4 squares of 70% dark chocolate works very well for me.
Thanks. You addressed something I was specifically wondering about: whether these opportunities tend to be in b2b markets that most people don't know much about. I suspect that these relatively esoteric markets do indeed tend to be the best, because the customers are easier to target and it's worth it for them to pay high-enough prices that you don't need to make too many sales.

I once talked with a woman in a Palo Alto coffeehouse who was running her one-person business right there (she was there just about every day). She sold a tiny program she had written that did something involving physical chemistry. I think she only had one or two customers that she licensed it to, but that was all she needed.
I'm ashamed to admit I didn't think about inverted flight until I read this article. Shit.

Once I realize something like this it makes me want to go back and do an integration / cleaning pass on my web of knowledge. Not sure how to do that in practice, though.
Well, you're probably right about the oxygen thing. I just meant that the chemical mechanisms behind their functioning will be completely different than ours. I mean, some Earth organisms have completely different RNA from ours. I do not expect aliens to have guanine, adenine, etc. as their storage device, but that's not to say they won't have one.
Is it cheating to pick an international policy? I'd like to see completely open borders for non-criminals across the world, with no restrictions on working, schooling, relationships, or associations. Go where you like, when you like, unrestricted, without needing permission from anyone.
I wouldn't exactly phrase it as a "decline in innovation" but post-tech boom innovation has gotten harder for numerous reasons. Off the top of my head, I can think of three culprits dragging this down in the tech industry specifically:

First, the general malaise people feel about tech IPOs after the ultra-hyped tech bubble burst. This is a real shame because this wasn't necessarily something perpetrated by the tech industry itself; it just saw dollar signs and got played by Wall Street.

Second is the decline of venture capitalists, who lost virtually all of their sex appeal with the dot-com bubble. They're now seen as "vulture capitalists", devious characters that tempt young entrepreneurs to sign away control of their start-ups for the small chance of seeing their dreams come to fruition. Is that reputation deserved? I don't know, but I've heard enough horror stories to be extremely apprehensive about taking the VC route.

Third is Sarbanes Oxley, which has made it extremely costly for small operations to go public. SOX is fine for larger organizations, it just needs some tweaks and and certain exemptions for smaller organizations.

Due to these factors it seems like the tech industry is taking smaller risks. Entrepreneurs are building companies to "flip" to Microsoft or Google rather than building the next Google or Microsoft. Sure, we're creating new businesses, but they never evolve past the 'start-up' phase; they merely get absorbed into a larger entities. You create significantly fewer jobs integrating start-ups into big organizations than you would by taking the growth route by building a medium and then large-sized business.

So with the cost of growth and failure higher now than it was in the 1990s, is it any surprise we're not bolder, and witnessing a so-called decline in innovation?
Cool. Have you ever used the Manipulate[] function in Mathematica? It blew my mind the other day. You can just wrap any expression (including plots), with something like Manipulate[expression, {k, 0, 10}], and you get the regular output with a slider for k in the range [0,10]. If expression is a plot, it'll redraw as you drag the slider.
Your brain consumes 20% of the calories you eat
Across many domains, the effect of libraries is exaggerated. Perhaps minimization isn't enough. Let's add image processing, talking to hardware over a serial port, and parsing an xhtml file. Libraries win:

image.convolve( filter )
hardware.write( c_struct )
beautifulsoup( xhtml )
im hungry cause im smart :)
I don't think you can assign the highly socially outgoing (as you described here) as "regular" people. They're outliers just as nerds are. I'd wager that most people just "get by" in varying degrees... though how you would prove or disprove my hypothesis, I have no idea :)
Couldn't resist thinking about this. Maybe it's just me and HTML forms.

1=1 will pwn you
Our site is a consumer entertainment site at the $10-20 price point. However, I would consider our particular market to be relatively unknown, especially in the larger world of internet affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing in general is probably a good approach if you have deep knowledge of some area and an idea of how to generate traffic. SEO can be quite difficult, but if you know enough about your topic--let's say you're a multi-day hiker and you're running a blog with product reviews--you should be able to generate enough actual, usable content to get some revenue flowing.
Probably the US tax code. Does it matter that it's not a consumer product?
I'm not sure accelerated evolution is the right term, but the idea makes sense. Changing conditions exert selections pressures.

Dietary changes would have been a substantial. Lactose tolerance, for example is almost certainly new.
Top Imprudent Internet Acquisitions
A lot of the comments on the wider internet are of the tone "oh I wonder what 4chan will do, AT&T have messed up this time" - but isn't that missing the point - that AT&T have censored a site? I didn't know that was the done thing, ever (in the US). I mean people are free to go to other ISPs, but it does seem a bit odd...
This is a great idea. I wonder if there's a way to do this through your own offered credit/debit card, instead of having to work with the likes of visa, large banks, or payment processors.
Jupiter -  Our Cosmic Protector?
My dad goes the senior center a few times a week with my grandmother... and he's not visiting :)
And it especially helps when your business partners are relentless insects who spread very efficiently and feast on the blood of people's sleeping children.

Which VC firm are you referring to?
Damn you, will wheaton, I can't stop loving you.
Your writing is perfectly fine for Mashable, which has a totally different audience than HN. It's like a Variety subscriber complaining about Us Weekly's coverage of the entertainment industry.
Check out Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake
in the History of the Human Race": http://www.awok.org/worst-mistake/
The reason riding a unicycle is difficult
The wheel, of course.
>> industrial parser that can parse Java source code (like anything that the jvm can run)

Do you mean a parser for Java source code or bytecode? I would guess the former, but the reference to "anything that the jvm can run" suggests you may be looking for bytecode...
Ah; this is closest to what I want; though if I can use the Sun one Sun uses for javac, it'd be even better.
I hesitate to dive into a startup for a number of reasons, one of which is that I have little knowledge of the markets. Where do people have problems? What are they?

A more difficult question: What non-obvious "problems" become manifest once a solution is evident? (Perhaps, A key to victory in this consumer culture).

Anyway, more directly on topic, here's a cash-flow muse I came up with recently: make a pasta-chute that lets you put in the pasta without burning yourself in the boiling water. Let me know if you wanna collaborate with me.
I have been trying this for a long time but from a spiritual side. I have been somewhat successful at it. I say somewhat simply because lucid dreaming is not the main goal.

One of the tricks that I like is, don't laugh, to pull a finger. In a dream, this one will stretch without any difficulty. I has never failed me but once. Once I gain lucidity, I usually jump in order to fly. And yes, it is an amazing experience. By the way, from my experience, consciousness in a dream is not binary (ie., you have it or you don't). I have observed that the degree of consciousness varies depending on several factors. Some depend on your health, mentally and physically. But other factors seem to be more important, at least for me, but these are of spiritual nature which I won't discuss here.

I believe that one of the main problems on why is so difficult to become conscious in a dream is the possibility that the mind is another entity than yourself or something like that. I remember reading something along those lines when searching for meditation. I believe that Buddhism teaches something like that but I really don't remember. I was able to experience this disconnect once in a dream. I distinctively remember looking at an event which I knew was not possible, but at the same time I had a thought that said that it was possible.

Having experienced this, I know try to learn more about it. No long ago there was an post here on HN about research regarding how cutting between scenes, in a movie for example, affects memory- I think. Sadly I don't have the link. I find this very intriguing since many of my dreams are like movies where viewpoints and scenes change without me questioning it. I must admit that I have watched a lot of TV in my life and I am constantly trying to limit the amount or stop it completely. I would throw the TV out if it was up to me but it's not.

Hopefully someday I will become an oneironaut ;)
I'd say that AOL/TW was the best internet acquisition ever, not the second worst -- given that AOL bought TW, not vice versa.
What about if we could reverse the way credit cards work, so instead of a company taking money from me I give the money to them; instead of supplying them my cc number, they supply me with their credentials and I transfer the money and then they verify the transaction has taken place.

I'm not sure about US or European banking, but in Australia we have three methods that work like this - BPay, direct deposit and cash/cheque. BPay is a company that sits in the middle and is, I gather, not financially viable for smaller companies, a direct deposit can take days to appear, and cash is not that great for online transactions.
Justin.tv Opens Its API For Free, Hopes Live Video Will Explode
EVIL MARKETING. But I love it!
ok then, how would you do it differently? :)
Instead of a selectable "by-field" comparison, can we have a "formula" box at the top that lets us write our own comparison function? I think that'd be a lot more fun for us here to play with—we might start trying to optimize it ;)
According to Yehuda Koren, BelKor et al. won the prize after all. We'll have to see tomorrow. Surely there will be some sort of press release.
Sure, why not, but he is probably nullifying a few TOSes and other service agreements. The reason we put inane disclaimers and "get off my lawn" type message in /etc/issue is to cover our asses. If anybody from his network/hosting provider sees this he will surely get his account yanked by them before the baddies.
A "HN Labs" style concept would be amazing. I know it probably goes against the HN mentality, but a gmail style label system would be so useful. "Javascript", "Press", "Databasing" etc.
Are Stocks the Bargain You Think? (Oct. 28, 2008)
You described a corporate purchasing card. Purchasing cards are designed to let you manage on-the-fly all kinds of spending parameters e.g. "no hotels in zip code 10001 Friday through Sunday." You'll pay more for these programs of course.

Here's an idea: a card with a magnetic strip on each of its 4 (or 6 or 8) edges. Now instead of carrying multiple cards you carry just one. If you use both sides of the card, you could fit 16 mag strips on an octagonal card.
Huh I can't downvote these trolls any further then -8?
Yeah I used Dapper.net to scrape the homepage and have it return an XML result set. Here's the Dap: http://www.dapper.net/dapp-howto-use.php?dappName=HNhomepage
You can have it output JSON, RSS, XML, whatever...

sean
Sounds good. I'll be happy to take a second look to go along with your new pic on the site, the old one was definitely getting stale. Props.
Yeah, but that (a) requires scraping, and (b) only gives you the vote totals. Given a raw feed far more interesting things could be done -- say, figuring out which people tend to like the same stories as you.
Creative Marketing Tactics
I was trained as an artist and got into computers / programming accidentally... now I teach artists how to code (and sometimes CS students more artistic potentials of software / programming).
Thanks for the info. I think "purchasing cards" should be for everybody, not only for large companies. And the concept could be applied for checks, money wires, debit cards, paypal, etc.

Here in my country, banks make a large profit out of fraud, albeit indirectly. They offer fraud insurance. They purchase the insurance from someone else for about USD 1/month, and sell it to you for USD 6/month. Of course most people never get to claim anything. Each time there's anything related to credit card fraud on the news, banks get more people buying their insurance (here banks are the only credit card-issuing institutions). If banks offered a cheaper/free way to reduce or eliminate fraud, they would also kill their insurance business.

About the multiple strips cards:
In Japan they're already using NFC cards with internal chips that can store several different cards information. The info is encrypted so that only certain authorized card readers may read corresponding card info. Checkout: http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa
Securitas discriminates against Firefox users
If you use Firefox you are not allowed to apply for a position on Securitas's web site. Apparently they believe open source users are not trustworthy or reliable. By trying to start the online application, Firefox users are routed to a page stating that Internet Explorer 6 must be used.

http://www.securitas.com/us/en/Career/Come-Join-Us/Start-On-line-Application/
I go back and forth between feeling this way, but I've taken the plunge and I have two of these "cash-flow muses" in progress. They've both had sales, and one is close to being profitable.

Here's a couple of other thoughts:

1. Hackers often dramatically under-estimate the knowledge that they have...something that's easy for most of us is probably near impossible for 99.9% of the population, or at least they think it is.

2. For me, I don't view this as something that I'll dedicate any more time or energy to than is necessary to free my time. The whole point of a muse is passive income to allow you to pursue whatever you're really passionate about.
The used copies of the older first edition are reasonably cheap.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0387975136/
Kenyon Commencement Speech by David Foster Wallace
If the resulting program could fit in 512 bytes of memory it might work. So much of programming on AVR's though revolves around manipulating bits to drive the various hardware interfaces, is that something Lisp would be suited for?
As a hovercraft, of course. If we'd started the history of transportation by floating instead of rolling, I think we can all agree humanity would be a much better place right now.
Why would someone want to go and write their own compiler/text editor/OS/blog/foo? For the sheer joy of hacking :)
Anyone have a list of IP blocks owned/used by AT&T?

I'd like to make a script that can be embedded on webpages that notifies users that their ISP has begun censoring their internet connections, along with instructions on how to complain to AT&T.
Funny you say that: E is working on something that is both.
About Meaning
I don't understand this one, shouldn't the higher level abstractions require less code, rather then more? If not, why use the abstraction?
You must be joking right? Without private engineering colleges there would not have been enough engineers for all these companies to operate. That is the point of the article. There were always enough people graduating/working who could form a nucleus of a company, but not enough people to grow it
1 million dollars and 1 million pesos and 1 million euros and 1 million yen are all different.
"You can solve any problem by adding another level of abstraction, except having too many levels of abstraction"
er...
it depends on what you and me define "quality" as :-). I base my claims of the following chronological series of events:
1. Sam Pitroda heads the Knowledge Commission and advises the govt to increase the number of institutions and universities in the country to increase the % of people pursuing higher education.
2. There is a mad rush and suddenly a lot of deemed universities. In Tamil Nadu, its big business.
3. step #2 implies lot more engineers. The eligibility and criteria for engineering relaxes gradually. It stood at 60 when I passed out of school(2002). Now its 45!
4. Supply exceeds demand(by a huge margin).
5. one fine day, govt wakes up. Yashpal committee submits report to govt on ensuring the quality of deemed universities.(happened last month)
6. govt yet to take action based on the report.
On a similar note, there's http://theyfightcrime.org/ I use that a lot when I feel like writing something quick and stupid and just need a plot bunny.