skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I've noticed that with my kid, too. When he learned to sit up and crawl, he would be nearly asleep, presumably in that part of sleep where your brain is wandering but you're not quite asleep yet, then suddenly, bam, flip over and get on all fours to crawl, then start standing up on the bed. Once when I let him finish the task, he even visibly woke up, looked at me with some surprise, and then started crying again because he was tired, wanted to sleep, and clearly did not want to be standing up. Probably blamed me for it, too. No intentionality, it's just the "standing program" fired at an inopportune time.

Another funny one (from an AI perspective) dates from when he was about 4 months old; we were sticking our tongues out at him and he was starting to try to copy us, and I swear, you could see his leg jerk, then his left arm, then his neck, until finally he got his tongue out, just like there was a little man in his head pushing buttons until he found the right one.

On the parent's side: We have a dog and two cats, and our child just passed a year old. My wife was just telling me that she's caught herself being surprised a few times over the past few days, as my son does things like "puts the lid back on the container". She said she realized that up to this point she'd been subconsciously applying the "pet" template to our son, since that roughly matched his capabilities for the past few months (non-word vocalizations for needs, limited manipulation skills, understands only a few words, etc.), which she didn't even realize until suddenly he started to do a few things that didn't fit the template, like put a lid back on a container, or spontaneously use a keyring to mime locking the door (to the best of his ability). Kind of an interesting conceptual problem on the adult side.
I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with intense debate, considering Automattic(the company behind WordPress owns IntenseDebate). However, disqus would probably be a prime target.

I think the issue is that if the services like Disqus goes away, you don't have the comments anymore either(I believe). With things like IntenseDebate and Backtype you still own the comments, as they are saved in your database with appropriate plugins. Also some talk about appropriate SEO, etc. but I haven't researched that.
Mercury's orbit is easily predicted from Newton's laws, but the prediction is -- just a tiny little bit -- Wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Per...

No one gets younger by traveling faster, but one of the ideas of the twin paradox is to set up a real situation where the changing perception of time by different observers adds up to a real effect that can be clearly seen to persist once the twins are back together, and are once again agreeing on their perception of time.
This subject area (and story) are littered with anecdotal data. Makes for great reading, but I'm not so sure it makes for good material for public debate.

Most interesting were the life expectancy numbers, which if I remember correctly, are skewed in the U.S. due to violent death. Taking out the chance that you're going to get shot in a liquor store holdup, the life expectancy numbers are very close, perhaps even showing an edge for the U.S. (I don't have a link closeby, sorry)

In fact, looking at life expectancy worldwide and spending, it looks like people are living to about the same age in the industrial world regardless of the type of health care program they have. This, of course, doesn't address quality-of-life issues.

If people live about the same amount everywhere, then why does the U.S. spend twice as much? And that money spent across the board. In other words, it's not that public health care has any cost effectiveness to it, Americans everywhere are spending twice as much.

If I had to guess, I'd say it comes at the end of life -- a huge amount of medical expenses go into that last six months. If you cut those expenses off and made them more managed (rationed?) I bet you'd end up with very similar figures.

At the end of the day, if you make health care into something that you go to a politician to fix, you do a lot of interesting things to a democracy. Now might be a good time to think those through, instead of just pointing out how broken things are (they are broken) I favor an immediate, simple solution without government control that tries a few simple changes instead of a complex, intricate solution that few understand and fewer could fix if it didn't work. Do simple things repeatedly and fail often. Don't engineer a paperwork version of a nuclear submarine and then expect to be sailing it around the world next week.
How about looking it also from another angle. How many missiles do you need to wipe out all the big Cities and capitals of the world. Probably only one missile per City. Given +- 200 countries and that is the end of civilization as we know it. From there onwards whoever survive will have to compete like cockroaches to continue living.
Tynt Tracer: The Spy who got into my Cut Buffer?
And the winner is ... OS X.

I use Ubuntu on a laptop when I'm at home (rarely) couch surfing. It's miserable. Slow redraws, down syndrom-ish user interfaces, the whole thing feels and acts cheap.

While the X protocol has certain awesome advantages, it's a miserable choice for desktop. I get and appreciate the network transparency of it all, but shit, VNC is often faster for me than forwarding X over SSH.

Are there alternatives? I dunno, but graphics drivers, displays and plumbing are distinct advantages for both Windows and OS X when it comes to desktop interaction.
I routinely operate with 50 open, often as many as 100. Never had an X crash in the two years been with this setup.
I've always argued we don't have new einstiens because of computers. They suck up all the smart people like a disease and make people feel fulfilled working on trivial problems. Eg writing a tetris clone using x.

I'm not sure what the answer is.
The linked blog post is just a summary of a longer and detailed Time magazine article found here:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1916286-1,0...
It's too bad they're PDFs, I'd love to get ePubs without needing to run them through Calibre and then hand-tweaking them.

Or, scratch that. Calibre is sucking on these ones.
I wondered the same thing, so I did a little extra footwork.

Berkeley Professor David Wagner conducted basically the same research as this dude: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/faa/

He came to similar findings regarding selectees: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~daw/faa/noid.html

Neither of those pages are dated, though, so it's still possible things have changed in the past three years. Even so, it's worth noting that both these sites are reporting post-9/11 information.

I'm curious and a bit adventurous, so perhaps I'll give it a shot. I bought the jetBlue pass, so I'll have plenty of opportunities. http://jetblue.com/deals/all-you-can-jet/?intcmp=HPHero1Eng_...
Yes, from a healthcare point of view it makes sense to have the two figures (violent death / others) separated out. But every country combines those numbers, I don't see why the US should get a free pass on that.

And the two do mix, when you get shot in the liquor store but you don't die suddenly healthcare is very much in play, it might even remove that potential violent death from the statistics.
Check out http://clair.ro/flow

All interesting headlines I'm sharing in my Google Reader are pulled out there. Also I'm trying to catch the current flow in tech, world, biz and lifehacking one or two times a month.

It is the base of my Personal News Agency whatever it will be in the future
pizza
with radius "z" and thickness "a" has the volume

pi*z*z*a
Just one correction: Non Nuclear Proliferation Pact has nothing to do with reduced stockpiles.
Civilization is more fragile than most people think. Destroy enough of the infrastructure, and it won't be easy to get back.

There might still be people left, but it doesn't mean they'll have a good time.

For more about existential risks (and how to mitigate them), check out the work of the Lifeboat Foundation (http://www.lifeboat.com)
Apple has made an easy to use Unix, in part by making the important decision not to use X.
I actually got "Assassin's Apprentice" for free via Kindle (which is still available: http://www.amazon.com/Assassins-Apprentice-ebook/dp/B000FBFM...). The book was great, and touched off a whirlwind reading of the whole trilogy.

Great series, but the ending was really depressing even though it was pretty clear what would happen to the main character from book one onward.
I am skeptical that you can bring someone out of poverty by giving them money. Granted, I'd rather have it given directly to poor people than having it appropriated by their friendly neighborhood corrupt official. However, it seems calculated to make us feel better about ourselves rather than improving conditions on the ground. We've spent how many billions on poverty eradication in Africa, and for that matter in the US? Where is the ROI?

For a woman with seven children, this translates into 800 Namibian dollars a month, which is considered a moderate income.

I think some economists are in for a rude surprise: poor people respond to incentive structures, too. (One of the reasons why rich countries have less children than poor countries is you have to concentrate capital on kids to get ROI on them, to phrase it in a very reductionist way. They'll need to be educated, supervised, etc. The invested kids then go on to win.

Poor people have little capital to invest and make up for by using the children as a resource. It seems like a great idea at the time, but also virtually guarantees that the kids will be poor. And the cycle repeats itself.

Despite this, economists are now suggesting paying people to have children. What could possibly go wrong with that idea.

[Incidentally, while I hate to fact check a good story, paying a woman 9,600 Namibian dollars so that she can earn an unaudited "profit" of 1,000 Namibian dollars raising chickens, when the annualized inflation rate is 10% a year, is not all that impressive. Africa needs a few more hard-hearted capitalist bastards to say "Wonderful story, that 'profit' is an accounting fiction, find something that works."]
I run Ubuntu almost exclusively now because it is the most usable operating system for me. From years of running XP I can tell you that it did not handle driver crashes well and I lost all my files when it crashed. I have used Vista and I know that I have to restart it very frequently because of driver issues. I really hope that Microsoft has made a significant technical investment in Windows 7 and I hope that they have made the kernel more robust when dealing with crashes, but I assume that was a lot of work and really expensive to develop. It is kind of ridiculous to say that Linux is crap because it doesn't have a very advanced feature from an OS that isn't even available to the general public yet. As a Linux user, I can tell you that Microsoft has a few things to learn from others as well. It is called competition and it is what makes things get better, and there is plenty of room for improvement all around.
You could take a certain quantity of ice, figure out how long it takes to melt under a fan in hot weather, then calculate the energy required to get that quantity of water into ice (heat capacity equations), and you'd have a rough figure for energy spent per unit time.

Then compare that with the energy consumption of an air-con unit.
The thing is that even though we have like 10k warheads we have a much more limited amount of missiles, so we wouldn't be able to deliver them. On the other hand if we wanted to wipe out only cities bigger than 2 000 000 it would be ok: theres only 200 of them
How do you make good decisions in a team?
I recently submitted this post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749810 but here today I'd like to ask you a practical question, unrelated to the software. I also hope the answers will be useful to all of us trying to make the right decisions.

So, how does your team make decisions? What are the useful techniques that you use? For example, I've read a lot about the RAPID concept. Does it work? What other useful concepts do you know? Do you have any personal tricks? What is your earnest experience?

Thanks to everyone who'll find a minute to share.
Everything is even better. There is no way that the numbers will be as high as the (excellent) analysis suggests:

---

* This presumes all parties collaborate to destroy mutually exclusive regions (unlikely)

* Multiple nukes will be launched at particular sites to avoid countermeasures

* Some of those countermeasures will be effective

* The main targets of nukes will be nuke launching sites, which will cut down the retaliatory nuking

* Nuke launching sites are not in populated cities (generally)
Did anyone else get the feeling that Matt Cutts sounded like some P.R. guy here? I have never heard about him, but his blog does say he's a software engineer and has at least a B.S. in computer science.

On the other hand, most of his quotes in the article are about "revampng/rewriting" the entire "infrastructure" that Google uses to support all of its "platforms". To be more detailed, it's a new version of Google File System (GFS). Other things Cutts says is give an elementary explanation of map-reduce while not being able to say whether this "overhaul" will actually affect Google's MapReduce implementation, or its BigTable one for that matter. Heck, apparently everything Google uses, from MapReduce to actual tools and services, are just categorized under "platforms".
Hmm. I just have a lot of trouble believing that you run lots and lots of machines and yet have never seen a kernel crash.
I like that idea, it combines 'act now while it's still cheap', with the idea that the site may not be as useful until it has a certain number of users, and thus it makes sense to charge less to early users.
Seconded. X has only crashed once or twice in the last 3 years of me using it.

This may be anecdotal evidence, but then again so is the article.
Nobody's looking for a free pass, just an honest view of how long people are going to live. When the numbers are skewed, the resulting debate is skewed.

Along those lines, another well-quoted stat is infant mortality rate, which also drives down life expectancy. But in the U.S., premature babies are routinely saved much earlier than elsewhere in the world. This means that lots of premature babies are more often lost too -- thereby making the infant mortality rates look like something from a third-world country.

You can't manage something unless you measure it, but you can't measure it unless you define it. I'm perfectly happy with a very high infant death-rate and a slightly lower life expectancy rate now that I understand the definitions. But a common understanding is a key component of discussion.

So now every time somebody trots out those same old tired stats we have to have the same conversation over and over again. It's like the old myth that paying money for prevention saves money in the long run -- lots of stats sound reasonable and seem to make a simple point but don't mean what people think they mean.

That's not a good situation.
According to the HTTP headers, noid.html was last modified on Fri, 20 Oct 2000 05:54:16 GMT
The one thing that makes the argument bogus is its false premise, best illustrated by this sentence: "Let's take a look at operating systems with a modern, advanced, and robust graphics stack: Windows Vista and Windows 7."

Isn't there something conspicuously missing from that list?

While Windows 7 may be better than its predecessor Vista, which itself was a step forward in graphics architecture, why conclude that X needs to learn from them in particular?

I mean: if Thom Holwerda's thesis is "X.org, start your photocopiers," he could find better inspiration.
These seem like all good questions, but an op-ed in the NY Times isn't the place to address them. There just isn't room to specify all of the tested variables and their controls and how the results support the conclusions. Of course the NY Times should be linking to the original research reports.

Still, I don't know how this op-ed could lead someone to think the research was sloppy. For me to say that I'd have to, after I read the original reports, present alternative designs that eliminated confounding variables but that didn't introduce additional ones.

Here are the papers:

1. http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~fei/XuGarcia-PNAS.pdf

2. http://web.mit.edu/eccl/papers/bonawitzandschulzseriousfun.p...

3. http://www.alisongopnik.com/Papers/Kushnir%20DevPsych.pdf

I'm sure the researchers would be pleased to answer any questions.
STARTPAGE: DAEMON-Search.com
PDF was developed as the best small API rendering system from the decades of Postscript experience that preceded it.

The API and the way you think about drawing in OS X match the concepts of PDF. There is a "display PDF" ability, but down at the nuts and bolts level it is just similar concepts.
I remembered those insane 120 minute cassettes full of ZX Spectrum games, of which the magnetic tape was extremely thin and completely hazardous in the long run.
I think it is mainly a problem of uniform data gathering. Every country has their own methodology, international organzations have theirs but don't do the whole world, just some subset.

None of the numbers are comparable because of all this, it is a big mess. The error bars would have to be drawn so wide as to make any comparison essentially meaningless.
I can haz sup0r successful startups?
Surprise, people enjoy websites that make them laugh.

lolcats and failblog require absolutely no intellectual investment at all. It's like eating a nice steak...it triggers that part of your brain that goes "this is good", but doesn't actually require you to do anything.

This does, however, bring up another point...are there any other animals that experience humor?
Mh, just wondering: What about 'creative' nuke usage?
Basically, I am thinking about not dropping a nuclear bomb on, say, Berlin, but rather using bombs to create major disasters, like tsunamis (either by setting off the bomb in an ocean, or by destroying almost collapsed landmasses, which would then drop into the water and cause monster-waves), or by abusing tectonic knowledge and nukes to create major earth-quakes? Is such thing efficient enough to be reasoned about when trying to calculate the overall killing power of all nuclear weapons?
You will find that the filesystem barrier operations don't work on LVM except in the very latest kernels. If you want integrity and performance you may not wish to use LVM.

Background: The general case is hard. The LVM folk were holding out for the general case but eventually yielded to practicality and coded the easy case (single physical device). Extra work for them, but smiles for users.
>It could also allow for *nix users to have something like RDP, which is one of the _very_ few things I actually admire about windows.

I HATE RDP. X.org was created to be net capable, you can do full desktop and window forwarding, we don't need this functionality it exists! (Especially because X.org window forwarding doesn't take screenshots)
Well, maybe we're just lucky but I don't think that is it.

We strip the kernels down to the minimum we need on machine installation and we always try to find out what caused a problem.

On top of that a buddy of mine wrote a piece of software he calls 'flame', which is used to manage 300 machines.

Sure, occasionally one of those will go down. But post-mortem analysis will invariably point to some piece of hardware that broke. Either a cpu, a memory chip or a drive hanging on by a hair. I think the trick to managing large numbers of servers and not being in reboot hell all the time is to find a recipe and to stick to it, and good quality monitoring tools to give you an early warning.

And if you are running on cheap non-ecc motherboards for servers that really is asking for it.

I like to sleep well :)

The last crash that I remember was in February this year, a faulty memory chip that had been registering complaints for a while in the mcelog (but due to a human error we missed it). We had just upgraded a machine that was already in production and we did not burn in the machine out of service. Stupid mistake...

We burn in our new machines religiously and we only use top quality hardware. Still, during the burn-in phase we have a good 10% hardware failures.

But once the machines pass burn in - and we really give them hell - they perform pretty good.

Since we're in anecdotal territory anyway, once during the burn in testing of an ethernet switch over the weekend we came back to the office on monday morning to find the test frozen.

The switch was no longer passing data in or out. A reboot would not revive it.

We opened it up to find a crack running straight down the middle of one of the chips... so much for that particular brand of router :)
Maybe the next Einstein will be a "silicon physicist". In 50 years I expect to have computer systems that can program at least as well as I can.

Of course, you should expect any prediction I make about AI to be wildly enthusiastic.
Really? I'd have thought jerusalem would have been a more likely target
It's a bit hard to comment on this article, because much of it is, in fact, true. I do have two problems with it, though:

1. Windows 7, which is indeed a great product - very polished and with a very advanced graphics stack, nevertheless has problems. I've been running it as a secondary OS for some things for a while, and it definitely exhibited problems, in particular with video playback. Media Player crashed, requiring me to reboot before I can play video again, the desktop manager crashed many times, making it impossible to do simple file operations without restarting and driver management was often very difficult and problematic. Idealizing W7 (or Vista, or OS X) does nothing to advance the state of Linux or computing in general.

2. Sure, it's absolutely fine for users to complain about low quality software, but if you want to make a difference and improve things (and presumably, if you bother to write an article about this, you do) the more effective way to do that is not to vent your anger and start a flame war, but actually deal with the real problems. Are Evolution, Totem, VLC or X.org buggy? Help identify the bugs and report them to the projects, so that they have a chance to fix them. When the fix is out, help testing it. You don't need to be a nerd or a geek or a dork or anything to do that - just a good citizen. It takes relatively little of your time, and you'll know you've actually done something to improve things, which will benefit you and the rest of the world in the future. That's not something you can do with W7 ot Vista, and that's where the power of the free software community lies.

Complaining is so easy, and can sometimes feel fun (in a very immature and destructive way), but if you're not prepared to do anything to improve the situation, don't expect it to improve itself.
I feel the same way about computer games, and I make games. I spent too much time playing games in my youth, and my co-workers spend too much time playing games now.
Two magicians, three cups and one lesson your boring product must learn
"Crash every other app"? Tell us what distribution you're using. I want to avoid it.
This tired, false Microsoft / Linux dichotomy completely misses the point. Microsoft's customers are computer users. Linux doesn't really have "customers" in any normal sense of the word, but if it did, they would be developers, and the product that Linux provides is a platform that can be molded. Whether or not the unruly horde of Linux developers will ever produce something as polished as Microsoft remains to be seen, but your argument against Linux is a bit like saying Wikipedia will never overtake Britannica because people want to _read_ an encyclopedia, they don't want to _write_ one (duh!)