skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't quite know what he's arguing against. The E that's mc^2 has always been the rest-mass energy. Hence what Doug wrote for the total energy

E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2

I'm not saying the article is wrong, but he sure could have explained more clearly what wrongheaded thing he's trying to debunk because I didn't get it. It sounded kind of like railing that E=mgh is "wrong" because it should be E=mgh+mv^2.
Why Day 4 instead of Day 3 or Day 5?

It was a choice between Day 3 and Day 4 -- both of which indicated that the effect had disappeared.

Day 4 seemed more representative. Maybe because of this line: "I mention this because it took me about an hour between deciding to brush my teeth and actually doing it." This got to me. It captured what being distracted is. It's factual and yet subtly affecting.

Another reason for Day 4: Day 3 still sounds like the beginning. It sounds tentative. Like an experiment that might end after three days. Day 4 shows real commitment. It's for real. It says the author is in this for the long haul.
Perhaps you could explain, then, why MS Windows gets in my way so much that if I have to work there it takes me at least three times as long to get most tasks finished as it takes to get the same tasks done on FreeBSD.
While the author mentions "a communist utopia," minimum income programs have often come from market-oriented economists, such as with Milton Friedman's Negative Income Tax, which he proposed as an alternative to a host of disruptive policies including the minimum wage and welfare, and the FairTax proposal, which includes monthly "prebate" checks.
It sound all very positive but I alway have in the back of my mind the possible unintended consequences of regulations and laws intended to alleviate the poor out of poverty. Such examples like mininum wages actually hurt the poor by making them incapable of getting jobs, and the side effect of job training that may result from getting jobs.

In other words, the program seem suspect based on previous experience. It seem to produce wonderful result, but I am going to pass on this one and see what will become of Namibian in ten years of time.

Alway remember to not only analyze the seen, but also the unseen. It will unmask any hidden grim consequences if any that are hidden on the face of an intervention. Such is the art of analyzing economic interventions.
My God, give this man a Nobel prize!
That is an unfounded claim. According to Nuclear War Survival Skills (a downloadable book on the construction of improvised fallout shelters), nuclear fallout remains directly lethal only for two weeks. This is the kind of fallout produced from a detonation where the fireball touches the earth. After this period, radiation from the fallout is weak enough that it is safe to move about for a limited time each day. A nuclear detonation in the air produces much less fallout, and it will be diluted over a much larger area unless there is precipation.

Any discussion beyond this is guesswork..as far as I know we have never really studied this stuff. It would be interesting if someone could point out that I'm wrong. The following article claims that the number of birth defects and cancer-related deaths from the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings are too small to be seen in the (admittedly sparse) data collected.

I think it's a good idea to study the traditional notion that nuclear war is so extremely destructive. The subject seems to be a voluntary intellectual wasteland - no one ever wants to find out how things really would work, only quote the canonical belief that any nuclear war would cause huge amounts of deaths from cancer, birth abnormalities, barren fields, genetic mutations and nuclear winter.

What such a war would do to society is an entirely different matter, but this is almost never discussed.
Wrong with iTunes: Slowness, Storage of metadata in proprietary format, Easier to detect/remove dupes.

What I want? Something as fast and responsive as the original versions of winamp, with the search, playlist, podcast and sync functionality of iTunes.
As I read it this article highlighted the biggest cause of problem in Nambia: the "rich white farmers".

(obviously that's probably not wholly accurate - but the article does not leave them in a good light!)
Another good alternative these days is a processor of reStructuredText.
Free and Commercial Stock Photography Sites
I agree -- it would be nice if X didn't take the state for most of my apps with it when it crashed (not that it crashes with any regularity).

On the other hand, the guy's complaints regarding X crashing and comparisons to Aero are apples and oranges, from what I can see (though I wasn't there to read error messages, so of course there's no way to be sure). It seems like his problem with X crashing was one of the GUI itself crashing, in its entirety, whereas Aero crashed when there was specifically a driver issue not directly related to Aero itself.

Aero is able to get around it by having a secondary "legacy" GUI system to back it up, and by having multiple drivers so a "lesser" driver can kick in. X has lesser drivers available to it, but there's no backup GUI system to back it up.

Now, imagine that the fundamental interface between the kernel and the GUI actually crashed (sorry about the hand-wavy way I phrased that -- since Unix/Linux systems and MS Windows systems do it differently, I can't get more specific). What would Unix with X do? Well, it'd fall back to the command line.

What would MS Windows with Aero do? It would fall back to whatever passes for a blue screen of death in the Windows 7 world, because MS Windows basically doesn't have an OS without the GUI. The command line interface is part of the damned GUI in MS Windows.

I'm not saying X is perfect. It does indeed need a lot of fixing. I actually think we'd be better of replacing it from scratch, if we could get everyone on board. I do not, however, think that MS Windows is the model to use. In fact, I think that on a good day, MS Windows is only nearly as good as X. In short, X and the MS Windows GUI stack both suck, but at least the way X works with the OS is marginally less stupid than the way MS Windows works with its GUI systems.
I wonder how much time is needed to launch all these missiles. They aren't all in ready state in a silo, are they?
The Baan Free Library once gave away books from the Honor Harrington series, a decision which made them at least $100 from me. I can't understand why they don't do it more often. Well, OK, I know the reasons (contractual/rights issues, mostly) but the businessman in me says screw the reasons and get it done.

There is zero marginal cost to distributing the back lists. The core customer for these products grows to like a character/author/series and then is hooked, producing a LTV upwards of a hundred dollars. Lifetime profit is lower because cough publishing sucks, but the sales generated by most of the back catalog are miniscule anyway.

They should just get the lawyers involved and start renegotiating contracts on an industrial scale. Hello, Author #147. You own 19 books with us, each covered by a separate contract. We are offering you a one-time no-negotiation deal: license us perpetual electronic reprint rights on book #1. We will use it to market your other books. We may inform you of particular promotions and details as a courtesy, but might not have the time, make sure to check our blog.

If you agree to this deal, we will establish a baseline for how many sales you had on books #2 through #19 last year. Your royalty on all sales above the baseline triples. Help us help you.

If not, firm handshake and move on to the next author. The publishers will get returns with scale more than anything else.
Ask HN: What web apps/online services do you use for your startup?
Before joining, i had no idea about the number of tasks that need to be done in an early stage company.
For eg., the company email needs to be taken care of, the different tasks have to be handled, documents collaborated upon, knowledge base wikis. My question is what apps/online services do you use?

Some of the ones we use are:
1. Google Apps for email,docs
2. Basecamp for project mgmt.
3. unfuddle for git.
4. dropbox for files.
5. Teamviewer for demos (desktop app)
Why would I do that? What does Compiz do for me? It's just whirling cubes and wavy windows.
AVGA: The AVR-based video game platform
They want one so they can assure israel won't fire theirs first.
This gibbon sure as hell appears to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9n_moGyTlw
Google Helps With Work Efficiency
About captcha entry farms
The fallout (when taken globally) is actually not that bad. In 1962 there were 150 atmospheric nuclear tests. That is 150 normal nukes were set off just to see how it works. And we are still alive. With a bit more deformed kids, cancer and so on. But civilization is still here.
I had a similar idea a year ago so I registered finget.com .
Never got to actually do any work on it.
Apple also overhauled most of the *NIX kernel and made proprietary graphical tools and closed off the supported hardware. All of which contribute to the ease of use and keep the solidity.
Should I get a Home Warranty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter

Also, I think three well placed nukes in the US could guarantee the collapse of American civilization. Always remember - if the trucks stop driving, it ain't long 'till everybody starves.
Oilfields?

Iran hasn't developed or bought a weapon yet that hasn't been used to attack Israelis.

If Iran gets a nuke and targets it somewhere else and doesn't use it, I'd be impressed. It would show a lot of restraint.

There's no doubt in my mind that Iran threatens Saudi Arabia -- I guess I just always thought of it in a more indirect way. It'd be good to see them pivot and disperse some of that revolutionary fever instead of pointing it all at the same place constantly [insert larger discussion on mideast politics here]
> 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.

Why are you using Ubuntu, then? I suspect it's more your choice of distribution and GUI environment that's at fault for your unsatisfying user experience than anything inherent to Linux or X. On FreeBSD with AHWM (instead of Ubuntu with GNOME), I don't have such issues at all. The only stuff that's slow is waiting for Firefox, OO.o, and the GIMP to open the first time I open each of them after starting the computer. On the rare occasion that I use MS Windows, by contrast, I tend to spend a lot of time waiting.

I can't stand GNOME and KDE (especially KDE 4). The sitting around and waiting for stuff to happen is far too reminiscent of MS Windows for my taste.

> I get and appreciate the network transparency of it all, but shit, VNC is often faster for me than forwarding X over SSH.

Are you using SSH compression? I mean, sure, X over SSH is slow across the Internet, even with compression, but then MS Windows Remote Desktop is no blazing-fast, realtime operation under those circumstances, either.

> displays and plumbing

I'm not sure what you mean by that.
It was disappointing for them to lead with hints that this is a "really BIG" upgrade, and then decide to only talk about things that would never justify $200.

And if they're going to make a statement like "Finally, Microsoft creates a clean, modern look that competes with Apple's finely designed Mac OS X Leopard", they need to choose screenshots that don't suggest the opposite. Start by not highlighting the bizarre new desktop backgrounds.
Did you read the Fool's trilogy? It's a continuation of the story and also very good.
To Microsoft, Basic Research Is Good Insurance
Embrace Losing
Where the heck would you look for troubleshooting a Vista machine if not the OS? Are you saying it's probably a hardware problem, or are you one of these people that thinks when an application takes down the whole system it's not a sign there's anything wrong with the OS?
Compare Google Caffeine
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=765970 for a little background on Caffeine.
This is of course, assuming the pundit in question is not an anarcho-capitalist. To an anarcho-capitalist, the question of whether the production of security should be privatized is a perfectably reasonable discourse, in which they of course perscribe the creation of private defense agencies as well other insitutional design such as polycentric law and private courts, all of which have some basis in history.
Add 高考 (the Chinese college entrance exam) to the list and everything else, including 入試 are pretty much flattened against the bottom line.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=sat%20test%2Clsat%2...
TomTom for iPhone Appears in New Zealand App Store
Firefox Browser | Customize your Web with free add-ons
Lessons Learned from the GitHub Recommender Contest
That is also what they thought in Zimbabwe.
I’ve been looking into this to see if it will have any positive/negative affects for my employer. Came across this useful tool for comparing results side-by-side: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=766281

Additional analysis by some well-known SEO’s:

http://www.seobook.com/google-caffeine

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/google-caffeine-and-seo.html

http://www.vizioninteractive.com/google-caffeine-a-comprehen...
"A right that allows majority shareholders to force minority shareholders to accept an agreement"

I don't understand. Wouldn't the majority be able to force a decision regardless of whether they have this clause or not?
Ask HN: Why does HN not allow you to modify your comments after 1 hour?
I don't know of any other sites that do this. Just wondering what the rationale is.
Radation, disruption of food production, nuclear weather effects (nuclear winter or whatever), disruption of medicine production, disruption of police protection. These will kill far more than the actual explosions.
You mean the government force all those white farmers out of the country and replaced with government fools who doesn't know how to run a farm?

That's a pretty big case of shooting your country in the foot, not to mention a pretty big dose of racism.
"Design Like NASCAR. The more buttons, widgets, stickers, and visual clutter the better. I want to see every possible login system including but not limited to Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, Google Friend Connect, and that Myspace thing. Because of their respective crappy terms of service, use the giant buttons they insist on. Also include a megabyte of “share this” icons for every obscure service in every language. People love options! Complexity is for closers." - check
I did the same exact thing (on a small, side-project scale). Early success that led to an "oh it's easy to get traction on the web" and a "no problem, I have infinite bandwidth" hubris.

Of course, I've been trying to get back to that place ever since.
I use Compiz all the time, and I have no problems with crashes. I like the effects, but there is one that is very helpful: alt+mousescroll allows me to change the transparency of the selected window. As I don't have multiple monitors, I find this very convenient when coding (or any other task where I have to refer to information in another window).

I also like "rolling the windows up" like a window shade (available on some themes. I dunno...I just do!
One Trident submarine can stay at sea for up to two years without refueling. It can produce it's own recycled water, and produces little to no waste. It is only limited by food, since it is powered by a nuclear reactor.

Each submarine is armed with 24 (nuclear) Trident II long-range ballistic missiles, each one able to hit almost anywhere in the world. Each one of these missiles can be launched from underwater at a moments notice. In mid-flight, each missile can split up into 12 individual bomblets, each of which is capable of wiping out a city.

One submarine, which is manned by less than 200 men, could destroy 288 major cities in half an hour from anywhere in the world. That's a frightening thought.
Not the NYTimes text, the text of the paper. I did read the NYTimes text, as well as the abstract of the paper.
I think the main reason is to keep the context of a discussion in a thread.

Turning your question around: Why would you want to modify a comment after one hour?

Read your comment before posting and be happy with it at that time of posting. If you come to new insights later then post another comment. There's no shame in that.
First two comments here and first one there are right: fallout.

I don't have a source, but I've been told that we at one point had enough nukes to kill everybody a few thousand times over.
If you're interested in machine intelligence, you need to spend some time with infants.

Completely agreed - what blew my mind most was how little there is when children are first born. It was only a couple of months in that my daughter realized those things constantly around her were her arms and that she could control them. There was literally a moment when she stopped just flailing around, and stared intently at one hand as she moved it left and right in front of her.
Web vs. Desktop Applications: The Neverending Debate
It is a frightening thought.

We have technology that can keep 200 men alive for over two years, including all of their needs for food, air, water, electricity and such, and yet we're still getting around by burning old plants from millions of years ago.
Well...he's made 20 bucks.
Please don't use bit.ly links.
what's up with the date of that article?
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

This really surprised me, also. Especially so, because first "human" things my daughter did was to start offering to feed us when we fed her (~7 months). It would seem social reciprocation was her first social instinct - long before speech, feeling of ownership, etc.
Here's an interesting article from someone who argues that dual-incomes have lead to lower incomes for each individual person.

http://dyske.com/?view_id=882

He also touches on other interesting points:

"When I was in junior high school in Japan, I read an essay in a textbook by a Japanese woman who was critical of American feminism. To her, the American feminists cheapened the value of the traditionally female roles by implicitly assuming that traditionally male roles were nobler human endeavors. Instead of focusing on the value of traditionally female roles, they all focused on their rights to take on traditionally male roles. In that effort, they reinforced the notion that traditionally male roles were superior."
X does window forwarding, and I love it, but it doesn't do remote session resuming. For that, you have to fall to things like VNC, which really isn't much more than streaming video. I'm fairly certain that RDP doesn't do that. Its performance on pan-pacific connections is completely acceptable, much better than clever video streaming systems like gotomeeting or webex. I've never had the chance to try VNC across the ocean, but I'm guessing it wouldn't be as nice as RDP either.

Why do you think RDP does work by screenshot forwarding? I'm pretty certain it works by forwarding win API calls over a network, but I've never dug into the rdesktop source, so I could be completely mistaken.
Maybe this aren't good examples but great ones are out there.

For example, even the littlest babies understand basic physics. Once they're old enough to focus, if you show them a video of a ball hitting a stack of blocks adn the blocks go flying, they don't care. But if you show even a few milliseconds' delay between the ball strike and the blocks flying, they get very, very interested indeed.

By the way, the studies no doubt have controls and reasons for the way that they determine the probability that babies are paying attention to red balls because of x than because of y. These types of studies have a long history in the field. But the op-ed author is not going to go into those details.
Ask HN: Staying Sharp
Here's the (relatively brief) story:

I went to university at a top 20 school in physics and mathematics, and paid my own way by working part-time doing web development. After being in a few research internship positions (CDF-FNAL and some biophysics work), I realized that, while I thoroughly enjoyed higher level physics, I had developed a passion for web application development. Consequently, when I was presented with a very enticing offer in July 2008, I decided to start working full time and do my last four classes (I only had non-science related electives remaining) over the next year or so.

As it turns out, the decision I made was a fortuitous one, due to the economic meltdown that occurred only a few months after I went from part-time work/full-time school to full-time work/part-time school. Moreover, I do enjoy my job, and the ego boost of knowing that every day my hard work is put to use by tens of thousands of people (which is, in all honesty, one of the reasons I became so passionate about web applications in the first place).

But I've started realizing that my mind isn't as sharp as it used to be. As someone who was consistently challenged and put to the test in academia, I'm finding that I don't actually have any day-to-day challenges to push me and keep my scientific mind exercised. With my day job, regular open source contributions, girlfriend and social life, I don't have too much free time either.

My question is then: How do my fellow HN'ers keep their minds sharp? Should I read more publications & papers? Should I try and do more scientifically oriented open source work? Or is this just something I'm going to have to accept and deal with?

An insatiable appetite for learning sure is a hard thing to satisfy. Any advice would be highly appreciated.
I don't think there's a problem between the two when Cramer's transactional interpretation is used for quantum mechanics. I seriously think the answer will come from something derived from his work.
This is to be expected. I think the explanation is because you have a large memory and a great understanding of the technology. The limits microsoft places on the technology to keep it simple for others to use are actually obstacles for you.

Compare hot keys and menus. Menus are slower and take several layers of navigation. Experts of any kind of software though, learn the hot keys. Novices use the menus.

There are actually a lot of things you can do with Microsoft from the command prompt or power shell. Microsoft systems are quite flexible in this way, similar to *nix. You can do scripting and batch files and all that too. It's just not as popular to hack on microsoft like that.
Google and Microsoft Battle for College E-Mail
I might want to modify it after one hour for the same reason I might want to modify it after one minute.

Perhaps I'm not checking HN regularly that day and make an offhand comment. In that case, if I come back a few hours later and recognize a boo-boo, it would be nice to be able to correct my mistake to avoid a permanent record of my foolishness.
Iceland's banks and the ugly secrets exposed in the meltdown
The Media Bundle Is Dead, Long Live The News Aggregators
interesting. Either a typo or it's meant to correspond to the print date? Perhaps it hasn't been printed yet.
I could not agree more. However, I've used Linux and the X stack for a while now, that has never happened to me. I've had applications killed that way, but never a whole X server.
Homebrew. We tried Magento but found the code to be a pile of spaghetti.
... and when you are done with the emails, here is a sure method to freak everyone at your funeral. Ask to be buried with your mobile and have your best friend ring you, just about when you down. For a bit of extra buzz he can pretend you have answered! If you really lucky - assuming a dead person can be lucky - your dead blog can get slashdot!

PS. Will not work with cremation.
It's to make sure that history does not get 'revised'

As it is there is already plenty of that going on.

I'd be fine with locking a posting or only amending it after it gets 1 comment or upvote (or downvote).