skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you ever want to understand the differences between men and women, read some books by women who have received testosterone to undergo sex changes to become men. They say things like "I became more interested in my career and earning money. I understood math and science better. I became more interested in technology and machines and less interested in people, etc."

It's quite fascinating stuff and makes you realise how different the sexes are.
I think we're hidden deep enough it's okay.

Let's agree to postpone this discussion for a better time and place. I've got problems with the term "evangelical law school" You do realize that almost every old college on the east coast was originally some sort of Christian institution, right? Which means there had to have been loads of folks trained at religious institutions in the past.

I started to do some research on this, but BDS is currently so bad it made the process painful. Better to wait a while.
2. Any BS gets called out with relevant evidence

There could still be more improvement in this, but the current baseline is not bad.
I'm not sure... I've never had a windows display driver crash and simply restart ('showing aero basic for a few seconds'). Seems to me that this usually results in a blue screen.

While I'm obviously not OK with X crashing and taking running apps with it (doesn't happen to me running arch+xmonad), it's still better than a bluescreen. Anything I was running in screen is fine, firefox will re-open my tabs, etc.
Why does the money from this go back to the police or people enforcing it? Giving all the revenue from tickets to say, the library or education system seems like a far better idea to me.
Have a look at the links they provide... One can get the book in a variety of formats through different stores. For instance, I got a few of these books for free via the Sony Store today.
I think you're right about X versus Aero being apples to oranges, but that's sort of the problem. In windows, it looks like the state of an application's GUI is separate from the state of the rendering system. In X, the two things are in the same process space. In windows, when the renderer crashes, GUI state isn't lost, a new renderer is started, and the user continues his day, slightly irritated. In X, the renderer crashes, and all applications crash as well. The user is somewhat more irritated. If X were split into a renderer and an application state tracker (like, I assume, windows does), then the renderer could crash all day, and the applications wouldn't ever notice.

In windows, if the application state tracker crashes, you're screwed, but that since the state tracker doesn't seem to depend on any third-party drivers, it's easier to verify its functionality and try to ensure its stability.

As for a rewrite, I'm not really sure how much of old XFree is still around. X has been modified in the past few years to no longer require configuration for its input (or, technically its video, but I still don't trust that). It supports multiple pointers, and in Linux on Intel, it doesn't even have to do initialize and exert low-level control over the video card. Things really are looking up for X, and I think your rewrite might actually be happening as we speak. It's just incremental, and with constant releases :)
If its a choice between buying the ticket now for $89 or later for several hundred, you're probably off better buying now even if you think your chances of getting selected are slim.
S-expressions are not necessary to a LISP. The original language concept was supposed to use m-expressions (somewhat more C- or Algol-like), and s-expressions were an intermediary implementation measure.

Original LISPs didn't have the macro system everyone associates with Lisp, either.

. . . and Matz didn't do a very good job of removing macro capabilities, because Ruby's still halfway to CL on that score.
After this period, radiation from the fallout is weak enough that it is safe to move about for a limited time each day

I wouldn't call that livable.
You say you have a day job, make regular open source contributions, have a girlfriend, a social life and not much free time. Sounds like you've got things figured out pretty well as it is.

I would mostly stick with the current plan if I were you. Maybe you could pick up some scientific textbooks to read during your commute or during a lunch break. But it sounds like more than that could negatively affect your work/life balance if your description is accurate.
Sputnik's perigee was only about 155 miles. Could this gun have shot a shell into orbit if they'd made it sufficiently light?
Another way to avoid a record of foolishness is to think before posting foolish comments. I think the defaults here are set to provide an incentive for that behavior.
I think anyone who reads HN who needs to be told to open windows in order to keep cool should maybe hand in their hacker badge.
It's single threaded. All my music is hosted on my NAS, which I connect to via wireless. iTunes fairly regularly freezes up for 15 seconds when I switch between playlists, or while it's attempting to add music to my library.
That was discussed in the linked post.
Thanks very much for your feedback. As a Wufoo user myself, it is a very encouraging example.
I think your last sentence "and recognize a boo-boo, it would be nice to be able to correct my mistake to avoid a permanent record of my foolishness"

How can you make a mistake in a comment? If you don't mean what you write don't post it... And don't worry about people calling you foolish (I am sure there is a famous quote for that to put it more eloquently).

Also, note that there is no post preview when you submit so being able to modify after you post fills that functionality gap.
If you read the whole thing, you'll see he calculates that too:
"99293 heavy duty nukes required to wipe out world's city dwellers, we have 10227".
Like I said health care is sometimes very expensive. Way more expensive than food. That's why people are willing to pay for health insurance, and why insurance companies don't even offer "starvation" insurance that would, say, let you get all your groceries for free with some small co-pay. There's not enough variation in food prices over a range that we care about for our risk aversion to kick in.

So you are comparing food to insurance. Maybe part of the problem here is that people keep conflating government insurance with government-run health care. They are not the same. What's happening here is that the government is seeing a product that the private market is not providing, but society has deemed desirable for everyone to have. That's a pretty clear prescription for a government option (like USPS).
Microsoft on the other hand writes an OS for any PC and any user. Any hardware combination and an almost infinite set of software installed and perhaps running simultaneously.

Strictly speaking, that's not true. Microsoft doesn't generally write an OS that is compatible with hardware; hardware manufacturers make hardware that is compatible with Microsoft. Microsoft may do what it can to make their job easier, but so does X.org.

So, while it may be true that this is a blocker for Linux in the consumer pc market, and it may be true that Linux won't ever become a major player in the desktop market, It's not the X.org or Linux developers' fault that that is the case; it's the market's, and statements like "X.org has a lot to learn fro Vista and Windows 7," are really unfair.
From his website: "Before Google, I worked on my Ph.D. in computer graphics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I have an M.S. from UNC-Chapel Hill, and B.S. degrees in both mathematics and computer science from the University of Kentucky."

The fact that he gave PR like answers doesnt mean he isnt qualified to answer technical questions, only that he is not allowed to reveal too many details of internal Google projects.
I would advise being prepared to slide along the consulting/product continuum depending on your ability to raise funding. If your startup is good, you shouldn't have to rely on consulting, unless investors are too stupid to realize it (which does happen).

The thing I notice most about your post, though, is the use of the singular. I'd get a cofounder if I were you.
I'd look at Hardware -> Drivers -> Anti-Virus -> Malware.

In that order. Then I'd start poking around for OS issues.
I think it's a good idea to study the traditional notion that nuclear war is so extremely destructive.

I love the word "traditional". As I was saying to my wife the other day, on the occasion of the passing of Les Paul, "it's amazing how many of the inventors of our ancient and venerable traditions were still walking around as of last week."

In this case, the "traditional notion" that nuclear war could destroy all of life of earth dates back only to the 1960s, was by no means universally accepted, and still is not universally accepted. Nuclear survivability has, for obvious reasons, always been of intense interest to our political leaders, and I assure you that the subject is not an "intellectual wasteland": There are reams and reams of research on it. Much of it is classified, of course.

And talk of "what will happen after the nuclear war" used to be popular -- witness all those movies and bomb shelters and plans made during the 1950s and early 1960s, when people held the then-quite-reasonable belief that nuclear war was inevitable. But then the popular notion of global nuclear annhilation took hold -- probably because, like quite a few "traditional notions", it contains a big grain of truth. Perhaps it is hard to kill the whole world in a nuclear war. But it's not so hard to kill my whole world. I can give you a target list of eight cities, all of which contain major US research universities, which (if bombed) would destroy, say, 95% of all the people I've ever known. In a full-scale nuclear exchange involving the United States, odds are that my world would be destroyed. (I, personally, am incredibly likely to die in the initial blast wave, as I live down the street from the Route 128 tech corridor, home to companies like Raytheon.)

So maybe a person who lives in the New Guinea highlands really can afford to laugh at the prospect of the post-apocalypse. (May we never know.) But those of us who live in Boston, San Franci, New York, or Washington can't. Because, for us, bombing all four of those cities would be an apocalypse.
I programmed a simulator that asked this very question a few years back just for kicks. I was wondering what types of things might help us reach low earth orbit on the cheap.

The answer is no -- any kind of ballistic shot needs some kind of tangential thrust applied at some point to achieve orbit.

You can shoot something really far with a cannon and still it hits the ground. It's possible to shoot and hit things on the other side of the earth like this, but you're going to have a huge apogee!
Believe it or not, Israel already has sufficient reason not to fire theirs first. Try a thought experiment - what would happen to Israel if they did?

The only way I can imagine Israel getting away with dropping one on Iran is if Iran continues developing nuclear technology.
The author underestimates the value of APIs to provide cloud services, and over-estimate the value of client-server architecture for driving user interface.

If anything, the iPhone demonstrates the value of native software, safely run within a jail, delivered and billed immediately, connecting to broader network-based services to provide extensive functionality.

It's short-sighted to approach the future of web applications with such hubris. The web is currently a horrendous application platform, and there's clearly value in client-side state as well as rapid, safe deployment and 'cloud' state.

The future is very likely a merger of web, desktop, and api, but not necessarily using the JavaScript+HTML+CSS or Flash that web developers have come to expect. Perhaps we'll see application architectures like 280 North's Cappuccino take hold, or perhaps not.

Either way, I seriously doubt that today's web application architecture is the final evolution of the client-server model -- we've been engaged in this client/server evolutionary dance for nearly 50 years.
Corporate R.& D. as the Ringmaster of Innovation
Sit in on some classes at a nearby university? Watch Feynman's lectures again?
You're probably quite right. I guess that, as someone who has spent most of their teenage and adult life absorbing knowledge at a very rapid rate, it's both new and slightly disconcerting to know that I simply have less time to _learn_.
I love how this post incidentally highlights the differences between science/statistics and information-centric graphic design and then shows how easily they become unified when you just touch the "scientific method" even tangentially.

We can all argue about his model now and think critically about the threat of nuclear suicide due to a simple hypothesis, curious data, and some nice visualization to communicate it quickly.
Any kind of ballistic shot? That doesn't seem right. If you can make the initial impetus arbitrarily powerful and the projectile arbitrarily light, surely at some point you cross the threshold of being able to get it into orbit.
I'm sure there is some procedure for handling citizens who have lost their passports.
Users do not run X. They run Applications.
Hence it is rational to compare Usability, Performance and Functionality of GNOME/KDE/FOSS Applications with Microsoft Applications.
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. But I don't think you can blame government for rising costs. I think it's natural for an advanced society that has already found a cheap way to provide necessities like food to start spending a larger and larger portion of its income on things like health care and education.

There are certainly things the government could do to reduce costs though, like reigning in lawsuits through tort reform. Ironically I think having the government provide insurance for a lot of people will reduce costs as well. The government has way less overhead and doesn't care about making a profit. I know that sounds counter intuitive but think about it from the standpoint of costs to the consumer.
I did read his article, and I don't agree. He's only considering his own world without recognizing that Rails needs to consider everybody else too.

As for native code, yes that would be a problem, one that hasn't been solved yet. But luckily most dependencies are pure Ruby, and only few libraries depend on native code. Nobody's suggesting vendoring everything all the way up to the kernel, but vendoring a reasonable amount of dependencies does not seem evil to me. I don't see any point in taking an extremist approach of vendoring absolutely nothing, it will piss off a lot of users.

Also, if distributors will package the apps anyway, then why not vendor libraries? Distributors will remove vendored libraries as they see fit anyway. With this in mind it would make more sense to me to vendor libraries, because people who grab the source tarballs are likely users of platforms with no decent package management.
Previously I have been quite heavily invested in the The Desktop App Will Never Die camp. Based on my experiences in the last month from selling, essentially, the same application on the desktop and on the web... I think I owe PG an apology for doubting him.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503959

There is still a space for users of desktop apps. I know many of my users love the permanence/physicality/"realness" of it. (So much so, in fact, that a third of the ones who use it online pay extra to get a backup of the desktop application on a CD.)

I just am having a hard time making the numbers work for being a developer of them.

I'm in a sort of unique position where I can split test very similar people into the desktop or online versions of my software. I get more clicks on ads for the online version. It is easier to get them to sign up for the online version than it is to download. It is easier to contact them about the online version. It is even fractionally easier to get them to pay for it (!).

I'm sort of obsessive compulsive about tracking support emails. They're running 30:2 in favor of the desktop app since I launched the online version. Sales run 50-50... and that number is starting to heavily favor the online version as I see the higher ROI it gets and promote accordingly.

I was a skeptic. Reality is making me a believer.
When I try that thought experiment, this is what happens:

1. The mother of all PR/lobbying campaigns successfully preserves US support. Especially since it would already be underway before the attack.

2. Nothing changes, except there's now a big radioactive hole somewhere.
You sir, should study to become a super-villian.
America’s doomed small newspapers
Indeed. Given that we are not immortal and have finite time, we have to make sacrifices somewhere. I have a friend who has opted to sacrifice his health, social life and romantic life for his intellectual and career ambitions. It's always an option but I don't like what I see.
Did anyone else notice that all three were Asian males?
According to this article from Wired last year, TSA changed the rules so that now you can only fly without an ID if you claim that you lost it. So essentially they're giving up any increased security advantage (real or imagined) that comes from a mandatory ID requirement, for the purpose of sending the message that challenging authority will not be allowed.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/06/tsa-nixes-flyin/
Be sure to read -DOUG-'s comment at the end of the article!
In a full-on nuclear exchange, it would be much more than major cities getting attacked. I live about 5 miles from Lincoln Labs and about 6 miles from Raytheon, so I'm screwed anyway. But, every ICBM installation, every port, and every military base would also be attacked in such a situation. I'd love to see some specific data on it, but I'd bet when you add those targets to the major cities, the vast, vast majority of the US population wouldn't fare too well.
Depending on how you're trying to exercise your mind, there are different options available:

1) I tend to use google reader to keep tabs on several authors I find interesting. I then make it a habit to find time to read a couple articles a day. So in aggregate, I've actually read quite a bit and kept my mind from falling into a routine pattern.

2) Someone else suggesting sitting in on classes. I'll also say that depending on your location, there are like-minded folks that have meetups and tech talks. These tend to be great opportunities for exchanging ideas and networking.

3) Depending on what your open source contributions are, you may be able to shift the focus to something that you arent as familiar with. There are OS projects out there that are heavy in math and physics that would provide challenges (3d game engines and libraries come to mind). I tend to do side projects with a specific goal in mind when i want to pick up a new technology.
That would be because nuclear power generation is still a bogeyman in some people's minds.

Just imagine the true "green revolution" that could be brought about with a few hundred more nuclear plants in the US alone.
Clearly this guy has never played CivIII.
Exactly. Also, why should a layperson's back of the envelope calculations be more accurate than, say, a recent peer reviewed study that actually models the effects of a nuclear war?

http://www.envsci.rutgers.edu/%7Egera/nwinter/nw6accepted.pd...

In short, the conclusion was that a nuclear war using 1/3 of the world's arsenal would devastate agricultural production for years due to average global temperature drops on the order of the last ice age occurring in /less than one year/, with temperature drops over land five times as severe (~-20 C), reduction in precipitation by over 45%, and a reduction in freeze-free growing seasons across the northern hemisphere by 50-100 days.

Large scale nuclear wars: still a bad idea.
This is a stupid debate at this point.

For most applications the line has become darn near invisible at this point. Think about it. In the abstract, what really is the difference between a desktop app running off a database and an Adobe AIR app running off a web service? A seamless install process on the web. A couple of extra APIs on the desktop perhaps. But overall they’re exactly the same.

Moreover, the only reason for any difference at all is that the platform manufacturers haven’t caught up yet. There’s no reason, for example, that an AIR app couldn’t do everything a desktop app could (access hardware devices, run in the background, etc…). Adobe just hasn’t put it all in yet.

So at this point Desktop apps are just a specialized programming environment for those rare situations (utilities, games, hardware centric programs) where web apps don’t work. Otherwise there’s not much difference. So developers should do what they've always done, evaluate their requirements and pick the tool that is best for the job.
Probably not, no. The biggest guns (see Wikipedia on Project HARP) can get a payload to 100 mi, but we can't yet combine that with the horizontal speed necessary to orbit. The problem (I gather) is the atmosphere. Sputnik was traveling along its orbit at about 18k kph, 10 times the velocity quoted for this shell, or about Mach 25 at sea level. Your muzzle velocity will have to be much higher to get it outside the atmosphere going that fast, and the shell will have to withstand ~30 seconds of shuttle-reentry-like heating and buffeting.

Possible, definitely, but not with this gun.
obviously you are right, that's why we can see Earth as a blue planet from the space - the photons bounce of the ground and leave the atmosphere without tangential thrust. But theoretically if we were the only body in space they would eventually fall back. It's needed only when you want to escape the gravity field by exceeding the escape velocity.
I was going to correct you about MIRV's being not being able to attack a geographically distributed area, but then I read this: "The bus's on-board propellant limits the distances between targets of individual warheads to perhaps a few hundred km," with the accuracy of each warhead being about "90-100m". That's simply terrifying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIRV
Obviously the author wasn't born yet when the cold war was still going on.
I have read the article and my point was different. I said .. and civilization as we know it will end. I used my elementary school maths. The current number of countries in the world are 192, since some of them have two capitals I rounded the number to 200. His statistics for London showed that 1 warhead was enough to wipe it out and London is spread out unlike Singapore or Hong Kong. As per my calculation 200 missiles are more than enough to destroy our current civilization.
The issue with a gun to get things into orbit is that you need to provide enough force right at the beginning to get into space. That would destroy most anything. So you could shoot something into orbit, but it will be a largely mangled hunk of metal by the end of it.

If I were in 1910, trying to get something into space, I'd use a hot air balloon to go a few miles, then shoot a gun. Ideally, it would be done at the equator, where the tangential speeds are higher and getting into orbit is easier.
My dad's income does have something to do with it because I didn't notice anything change for us financially despite all that he had to go through. Ergo, it couldn't have been that much. I know most doctors don't care how much you make when they bill you. Sorry that I wasn't clear.

I can object to things on a philosophical level and still use them. We become reliant on programs that should have never been created in the first place.
I want to honestly send this guy a $100. I can't count the number of times I've cried due to laughter from reading any one of these sites. The content is amazing.