skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Travel isn't, in my opinion, something you should 'have done', it's something you should be doing. I'm not a big fan of the take a year out, travel the world, then tick it off your list. Travel anything from a week to a month every year until you're too old/sick to get out of bed. My 86 year old grandmother recently flew across the Atlantic to visit family.

The world is not a static place. That thing you really want to see might not exist a few years from now. You can visit the same city a half dozen times and have a half dozen different experiences of the place because the world has changed it between visits. I'd rather take a few long weekends every year than save up for one big trip sometime a decade from now, but that's just me.
Travel is stressful, no doubt. But the stress of travel can be minimized with some planning. For example, use a checklist to make sure you pack your toiletries. Print out all your travel related information and keep it in a folder. Dress in such a way that streamlines your way through security.

As for the wife and dog, I'm of no help. :) It sounds as though your travel is work-related, though, so maybe there's some added stress by association.
Cellphones and Brain Tumors: 15 Reasons For Concern
I'm not saying the bomb will go nuclear when heated.

A high-powered laser won't just heat stuff up. If you can pump enough energy to small enough surface area in small enough time, the outer layer of the object being hit will be ionized. The laser will pump even more energy to this cloud of electrons and ions. For all intents and purposes, this cloud can be called an explosion.

Yes, I'm saying that when you hit a piece of garden-variety steel with a strong-enough laser, it will blow up and disintegrate into small pieces.

And even if the missile is moving very fast horizontally at the apex the movement is entirely predictable, even minutes into the future. All you need is two rangings, then you can just point the laser at where the missile is going to pass trough.
TechShop: A Xerox PARC for the rest of us
I am almost literally drooling. I've already set aside the money for this device for when it comes out.
Action versus Reaction
Flown by pilots other than Americans ? Under anything other than American chain of command ?
Yeah, but Brad Feld led Feedburner's B round. Matt McCall had to go to New World Ventures because he couldn't raise a fund at Portage.

You can do anything anywhere, but your odds of success are much, much better on the coasts. The lawyers here have fucked me, the (few) investors here have toyed with me and left me hanging, and the actual number of people who can actually deal with startup culture (no, it's not "working 40 hours for a small company", asshole) is abysmally small. Tech Cocktail and the like are swamped with recruiters and "social media experts".

There are successes, such as 37signals, PerkSpot, skinnyCorp, but almost all of them are bootstrapped. If you need money because you're doing interesting technical things, leave.

I should have started my company in the Bay Area. It's too late for me. Save yourself.
Elf is a Perl 6 implementation project using SBCL
To make my calculation clear:

21 * 10^9 dollars / 1 * 10^9 W = 21 $/W

Those are just watts at peak power, which are probably roughly 10x average power produced by panels, at least on the earth.

But perhaps I was too hasty in that the major hit against solar panel production is the earth obscuring the sun at night. On the other hand, I would expect cells in space to heat up substantially, given that they have no air to conduct away the heat.

If I could, I'd edit my comment to clarify that my comparison was not fair-- I was comparing two systems with different capacity factors as if they were the same.
"HFT Has Destoyed The Link Between Prices And Value"
The point about not requiring rubygems in a library or a gem (as ironic as that may sound) is that by doing so you're coupling your implementation to your environment. This is as bad as coupling your classes to global constants, and not something you should do. Case in point: Rails allows you to "unpack" gems to make your app more portable, and it shouldn't matter if the "foo" gem uses the unpacked version or the one installed in the gem repository on the server.
It can be done anywhere. This news isn't even related to any of their startups, so there's no reason it should shake them, unless they're easily shaken, which speaks volumes if you ask me.
$5.20 (plus shipping) for 4 pens that "write amazingly well" is too much money? Why not just buy the ones you like and stop spending time/energy on the "problem"?
Right, but the iPhone user would find it a lot more noticible. The reason botnets can exist are because they users of the infected computer don't try to fix it. With a phone, the incentive to fix the problem is much biger: it eats up 100% of your available resources every time it attacks someone.
True, but I guess my point is that I wouldn't consider it a completely distinct theory as the article suggests it its.

But its a good point, its possibly intelligence is attractive for reasons not having to do with evolution.
What's worse, there are sinks at the end of the troughs at Wrigley that shower water down, and every once in a while some drunk guy can't tell the difference....
Yep, tried it and it works. So if anyone else ran into the same problem, just select all the cases you want to move as described above, then click the context menu button and select "Edit" and you can change the properties for a bunch of cases at once. Pretty sweet indeed.

Thanks for the tip :)
moon visit would have never happened

This is my favorite example of this type of argument, because the moon visits should not have happened when they did. A handful of government employees spent a few days on the moon (at an enormous cost to other Americans) at least 40 years before there was any useful reason to get there. The evidence of this is that we haven't gone back.

As for your other examples, your claim is as absurd as saying that if it weren't for Edison we wouldn't have interior lighting or if it weren't for Bell we wouldn't have telephones.

If in 1978, we had diverted 5% of GDP for 10 years to building something like Google, we probably could have done it. But in 1988, it wouldn't have been terribly useful, and by waiting 10 years we got Google anyway at a much lower cost (and without coercively spending other people's money).
Quite. As I said, Apple, in terms of quality, is in the top three. I would rate Samsung in the top one...
In some countries depreciating a storage server takes multiple years, while paying $50 for a service does not.
Another option is getting a job (or inventing one) where you get to travel a lot. Traveling as a tourist can often feel uncomfortable and give you a wrong sense of the places you visit. Traveling in order to collaborate with people is a more complete experience, and you don't have to put life on hold to do it.
The fact is that the developers had to write the code themselves anyway. The switch to the GPL didn't cause vendors to contribute CNID fixes, it merely let those specific developers feel better by sophomorically raising the proverbial middle finger to "thieving" commercial interests while they did free work anyway.

Clearly the developers were interested enough to write the code themselves, in which case the fact that they preferred to fork under the GPL license is just as much happenstance as the interested OpenLDAP developers being happy with the existing BSD license.

It's not as if Netatalk changed the license to the GPL and then attracted a large following of GPL-only developers.
I had no idea Tumblr even had its own 'follow'; I would be much more likely to subscribe via RSS.
$5M for community news innovation, eh?...

edit: I wholeheartedly encourage every one of you with even the most half-baked idea to submit it to the open forum. There are too few organizations willing to front this kind of cash incentive to improve what is a very broken news system (and frankly this kind of innovation isn't going to be coming from within). It's old hat on hackernews, but our ideas aren't as valuable as we'd like to believe - share them, for the sake of a better informed-public.
Costolo had also been starting companies here for a decade prior to Feedburner, all the way back to Burning Door.

Strongly object to the idea that it's harder to find people to put in a 60-hour week in Chicago.
This page seems to be loading (but I haven't tried signing in): http://labs.phpanywhere.net/
Playing Monopoly Makes You A Better Entrepreneur
This looks like a really cool app, but I'd rather see it released as something you could install on your own server, like phpMyAdmin. It looks like it runs from their website and accesses yours via FTP, which I'm not really that comfortable with.
All due respect, I don't think you're getting what Robin Hanson is about. (Which is understandable if this is the only post of his you've ever read.)

The point of this post isn't to criticize Alex Grass's choices, it's to point out that our social system has a rather bizarre bias. We applaud Grass's spending money on these charities -- presumably because it's an ostensibly selfless act -- despite the fact that he actually did more social good by making the money than he did by giving it away. (Not saying I agree, just trying to clarify.)

A running theme, maybe the primary theme, in this blog is that people make deeply suboptimal choices (whether measured by social interest or self interest) because they're really more interested in sending signals than they are in achieving optimal outcomes.

The blog is worth a longer look; for me, I don't know how much I agree with Hanson's signaling-centric view of the world, but I'm impressed with how deeply he thinks about these things, and how he manages to talk about these topics without devolving into misanthropically simplified "people are dumb" conclusions.
My point about the apex is not prediction, but dwell time. You have to move the laser very fast, and very accurately to match the motion of the missile.

And anyway, you can predict the motion as soon as the motor is finished, you don't have to wait for the apex.

It's very difficult to aim the laser that well - even if you know exactly where it's going to be. Even if you were perfect in location and control, random atmospheric effects would mess it up.

The only practical way is via feedback loop, and when the angle is changing so fast it's very very hard to do.

You want a place where the angle doesn't change much, and all you need to do is adjust it based on feedback.

As far as destroying the missile - you need to pump enough energy into it to vaporise the entire thing. Normally an explosion will fracture the object near it. That cloud won't. You are moving very fast in air (even at the apex), and any ions will be blown away, plus they are only moving away from the missile, and not toward it, so they will not damage it. (They are moving away because they came from it, when they vaporized they bounced off the surface and away from the missile.)

You have to vaporise the entire thing layer by layer. And the energy in the cloud will not help you - since it's moving away from the missile it won't heat it, in fact it will insulate it (until it's blown away by the air) because all the energy of the laser will heat the cloud, and do nothing to the missile.

It's too easy to defend against a laser anyway. A small amount of water in the nose, released when it detects a laser will produce a cloud of water that will absorb all the laser's energy.
This article will get upvoted because people hate the app review process, but the logic in the article is flawed, as was Hewitt's. Whatever they may say about the "sandboxing", the iPhone is running native code on a little box that can listen to your phone calls, access your voice mail, and probably log in to your email account. When the little box goes crazy, it can disrupt the GSM network.
11 simple yet powerful PHP Template Engines
The comments are priceless.
> The only problem is that Apple is using its huge market share in portable players to keep subscription music from getting a foothold.

Or, it could also be that people just don't want to pay for subscription music. I know that I don't.
If the author had A/B tested the headline, it probably would have gotten more clicks as "Naming characters in a novel". The way it reads now, it sounds like something about using non-ASCII symbols in Adwords.
Exactly. Similarly, when you buy a book, you can't photocopy it repeatedly and sell the copies. You bought one physical copy, and the copyright prevents you from duplicating it.
There are two kinds of rights when it comes to paying royalties for music: performing rights and mechanical rights. Performing rights are most commonly owned by the composer or the publisher and mechanical rights are usually owned by the publisher and the record label. Note that the performer doesn't own any of these rights. Unfortunately, performers (or "bands") are not entitled for compensation based on record sales, unless the deal they signed with their publisher or record label specifically states that. And the deal they can struck with these entities largely depends on their posotion in the bargain; more popular bands can obviously get better conditions more easily. One way to become more popular is going on tour, of course.
My biggest beef with Steam is that there is no right of resale.

It's awesome aside from that though.
That's actually part of the point here; rather than donating to something that might produce a cure for cancer, he donated to a building, presumably one that has his name on it. Perhaps someone in the building will find the cure, but said person quite likely would have found it in another building just as well. Especially if the money had gone to research and not bricks and mortar.

If there was a massive shortage of medical research space this may have been a rational contribution, but I do not think that is the most important problem facing medical research right now.

Do consider the text of this reply carefully, please; there's a contingent statement in it. I'm not flatly asserting that donations for buildings would never be useful; rather, the point is that it is very unlikely that this donation was the optimal (or even close to optimal) use of his money in the real world we actually live in (rather than a hypothetical world where well-funded medical researchers have to give up research because they can't find anywhere to do it), if his goal was to actually advance the cause of science and help people, rather than have people tell him how wonderful his contribution is. (Indeed, it is quite likely that he had no reason to perceive a difference between those two things, and again, that difference is a recurring theme in Hanson's writings.)
Apparently the Internet knows nothing about me. That is ... rather surprising.
Yep, and I think that's stupid. Strictly speaking, they aren't profitable. Of course, GROSS profit (sales - COGS), they might be. We don't know. But consider the following scenario:

I have an apartment building, and I clear $10k per month on it in clean profit. Yum! But I've got bigger dreams, and I know that if I had ANOTHER apartment building, there'd be scaling economies in terms of management and maintenance staff as well as marketing.

But $10k a month isn't going to build/buy another building. So I take out a loan whose monthly debt service is $30k per month.

All of a sudden I'm unprofitable, right? Except that as soon as I get my 2nd building up and full (a 2+ year process, quite a long time to be "unprofitable"), I'm clearing $70k a month. Until the end of time. Short term (voluntary) pain for a long-term gain.

Evernote is doing the same thing. You don't build something like Evernote and get to profitability super quickly because of the economies of scale (much like Amazon).

But the other place where 37s is wrong is totally dismissing forecasting, which at this scale works pretty well. When dealing with signup and conversion rates like Evernote has, it's actually pretty statistically significant. You can predict where you'll be in 12 months and it's pretty easy to calculate how what your COGS is going to looking like when you're serving 10m users instead of 100k.

Just like Facebook, Evernote could reduce their investment in growth. They could trim staff and they could turn the screws a bit on their free users to up their conversion rate. But given how the scaling works out, I think they are likely making the right choice with their investment/debt. By delaying this as long as they can, they can ultimately have a higher margin business.
> There's a reason why even open leaning Google has a review process for their app store.

You're either misinformed or being somewhat disingenuous comparing the Android review process to the App Store one. The Android review process consists of pretty much instantaneously running a piece of sanity check software against the putative application, and then immediately approving or rejecting it.

Yes, Google still has the ability to reverse decisions later, but this is more or less the only part where their "review process" is on par with Apple's. Anyway, you would expect that anyone running an application store would maintain this ability, at the very least to remove abusive or somehow illegal pieces of software.

(I'm not saying that I would never disagree with Google's particular decisions regarding their ability to remove applications. I'm saying that the Android model is pretty much exactly what the article is proposing for the App Store.)
> And most bands with no record label have no record sales.

What they need to do is market themselves effectively. I've known one band that signed a record deal... but they were already popular in their particular niche. So their record deal has an expiration date on the length of time that the record label owns the copyright (10 years in this case, IIRC). Had they not already had a following, the label would have screwed them into signing over their copyright indefinitely.

You need to work on your following on a small scale, and then let word of mouth, internet marketing, etc scale up your fan-base. The 'hit it big' idea is largely a fantasy. Most bands that sign a record deal to 'make it big' end up failing and then being locked into a contract with the record label for the next X years.

To say that bands need the record labels is a fallacy. Most of the bands that the record labels sign are failures. Record labels take the 'shotgun' approach to finding the 'next big thing.' They are opportunists that prey on people's hopes and dreams of becoming the next huge band. They sweet-talk them into thinking that it's a slam-dunk as soon as they are signed.

The problem with most musicians -- or at least the 'rock' musicians -- is that a lot of them don't do it for the 'love of the music.' They do it because they want to become a large popular rock band so they can party, binge on drugs/alcohol, and get fans/groupies/etc to have lots of backstage sex with. If someone is following this path, and they get screwed by the record companies, I have little sympathy.
In 1978 google could not have been built simply because there was not yet a need for a google to be built. The need for a google came in to being by the combined existence of a large pool of accessible data called the world wide web and the frustration with the search engines of the day, notably altavista and inktomi.

Only when those conditions arose was a google possible, and in many ways inevitable.

To compare the invention of electric light and the telephone with the moonshot is to compare apples with oranges about as bad as I've ever seen it.

Compared to the amount of money wasted on various nonsense projects in their time, SDI comes to mind but there are plenty of other examples the moon saga was one of the high points in the history of humankind.

Sure the telephone and the electric light are great inventions, not a day goes by without use of them for a large portion of the people on the planet.

But they did not inspire a generation of kids to follow the path of science the way the moon episode did. We would most definitely be in a completely different world technology wise had that not happened, it probably was one of the best returns on investment in the history of man.
Not to mention that the computer and internet revolution is, for the most part, entirely contained within the past 50 years... and IMHO the advent of mass computing and the internet is likely the most important leap in human technology for the past few centuries.

Think back to how life was in the mid 80s, and tell me we have not advanced by absolute leaps and bounds.
Providing jobs as such isn't a benefit to society

Indeed, but the type of jobs generated by these types of projects are hardly pointless ditch digging.

The benefit from additional discoveries is already factored into the cost of conventional solar.

But only if the companies are Japanese. Otherwise Japan is not only helping grow another countries GDP they're also helping them gain a further technology lead. Doing everything 'in house' is probably more inefficient in the short term, but might offer more long term benefits.
Neat concept, though as other commenters have pointed out there are some security issues.

On the plus side, I can't imagine it being that hard to add syntax highlighting for additional languages.
Farewell America
Wow. That is very clever, and very, very scary.

I was unaware of that particular attack, though now that I've read about it, it makes perfect sense.

Maybe it's time to set my work machine to not keep my browsing history (like my home machine)...
I'd like to chip in my own "this is silly" perspective. You see, Japan has a history with futuristic flops:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer
Don't miss the section starting at 17:10 (LIDAR + Street View = High grade street level 3d models)
> The only problem is that Apple is using its huge market share in portable players to keep subscription music from getting a foothold. Spotify's iphone app is approved, so hopefully they can start to crack this market open.

It also doesn't help that people don't want to lose access to their music if they all of the sudden can't come up with the $15/month... I would say that people are probably more willing to give up cable/satellite tv for a month than deal with losing their music.

Problems with the subscription model:

* Need a portable music player that supports the particular DRM
scheme vs just getting an MP3 that plays on almost any
portable music player (save for Sony's players that only play
their ATRAC crap).
* Don't make a monthly payment and you lose all access to your
collection/playlists/etc.
* The service could implode. Then you've sunk $15/month * x
months and you have nothing to show for it.
* The DRM scheme could become unsupported. Microsoft has
proven this with their abandonment of PlaysForSure.
Lets not forget Fair Use:

TITLE 17 > CHAPTER 1 § 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.