skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is the possibility that reaching singularity means something different than those folks think. For example, it could be that the singularity is real, however one of the consequences of ever increasing technological improvements is that more people have more power than ever before, and social structures and protections (e.g. law enforcement) are not able to keep up. Such a thing can result in the death of all of us at some point shortly before singularity, via accident or madman or similar.

Another possibility (assuming singularity) is that the after effects are far, far, different than anyone predicted, and it happens pretty frequently around the universe. This could easily explain why we haven't heard from super advanced species elsewhere in the universe.

Singularity effects could have reached us as many points in the past, perhaps starting our own quest towards singularity.

Or, as you say, it could just be that singularity won't happen. (I am inclined to agree with this myself, the above disagreement is just an exercise to keep my mind open.)
See, the "...Or Does It" clause refers to the theory that the internet is actually the collective subconscious (certain fringe weirdos propose it is in fact the entire abstract), and we just now have found a (somewhat) tangible way to access it, however primitive and incomplete.
Yes. You're doing it right.

Run-time works fine if you're loading all your JS and CSS from the same machine as your markup. But that's not an approach that scales quite as well.
US military personnel needn't obey all orders, only lawful orders. Zoltan wasn't just obeying orders, he was working overtime to support human slaughter

Seriously? You've basically vilified every soldier that has ever served in the history of any army ever.
If we'd follow that to its conclusion space shuttles wouldn't fly, the moon visit would have never happened, the computer you are writing on would not be connected to the internet, highways wouldn't exist and so on.

Plenty of infrastructure projects have started either as military or pure research projects. Eventually we all benefit, even the countries where the spending did not take place.
I'm 20 and I drink totally way too much coffee.
The nested set model is a well-known workaround for storing tree-like structures in a relational database.
What about Luftwaffe pilots celebrating when they shot down a B-17? Not committing war crimes themselves, but protecting a criminal regime.
Lost Charity
Virtual private servers, yes. I use Xen.

And I agree, giving the user 2 block devices and expecting them to mirror is a very bad idea. I know this from experience. in an earlier setup, I'd give each user two block devices, one from each disk in the box. the idea being the user would mirror or not as appropriate. well, you loose a customers data, you loose the customer. Lesson learned.

But this is where my virtual setup gives me an edge. On every Xen server, I have a control guest or driver domain, the dom0. all disk and net I/O goes through the dom0 anyhow, so there wouldn't be much more overhead to me doing the mirroring on the Dom0, and passing the md through to the DomU (what the user controls.) I'm not adding another point of failure, either; if the dom0 chokes, all guests on the system will crash regardless.
this seems like it would take far more time than just purchasing a copy of omnigraffle and saving a file.
NATO operates AWACS as Joint participants. It's the exact same aircraft.
The UK also operates the exact same aircraft.
I'm going to build http://kirigin.com into a proper blog. This is a kinda half ass experiment because Tumblr is so limited.

For example, I could have "sign in" for accounts, using twitter or facebook connect. Then the "tweet this" link could be push-button, not the links to http://twitter.com/home?status=some_manual_posting_bs

RSS subscriptions that can also power email newsletters are certainly in the mix.

What text would you suggest? Obviously the title of the blog is pretty bad for the intent here.
Microsoft Discontinues All Current Zunes
Ask HN: What's the best way to distribute closed beta invites?
I'm about ready to launch a mobile/social webapp and wanted to get people involved in a closed beta. I was wondering if people could recommend good places to give away beta invites as well as any tips people had for handling them. Thanks...
In the end, only the popular bands make money anyway. Even if you sign with a major label, if nobody likes your music, they aren't buying your album, or your concert tickets.

My point was that a band will make more money on tour because the record label takes a huge chunk of the albums sale.

The real money is in producing music. :-P
This article provides no information about shooting stealth aircraft out of the sky with surplus Soviet weapons.

I claim false advertising and would like my 30 seconds back.
Doesn't really sound like fun. What exactly am I supposed to do at theses places? Yay, I'm sitting alone in my hotel room in Shanghai, now what? Walk around mindlessly and take a look at the surroundings? Gets boring fast I guess. Go into a bar and try to talk to strangers in english? Hmmm.. don't know, maybe I am too uncreative for that.
Reading this, I kept stumbling over typos and awkward sentence constructions. The content was interesting, but I feel like the writing was much worse than your average Wikipedia article. I wonder why.
it would be nice, in theory, if we had an all encompassing data model of some kind that would be able to FF & RW the whole of everything. things like ZFS and message oriented middleware show the power of such things, but perhaps this is something for the far distant future
XML namespaces are terrifying. Please don't make me do that just to make websites.
GitHub Contest Recap
You guys (Aussies) don't use the Sparrow (instead of the AMRAAM)? Canadian CF-18's used them before they got the upgrade.
In my humble opinion, there are so many proprietary and / or nonstandard extensions to SQL that it's turned into a right mess. I think that the language itself is a bit kludgey and it'd be much easier if it'd just correspond to relational algebra directly. (Eg if you do a select * from foo where x = y, you're actually doing two operations, a select and a filter, and the natural language like syntax of the language makes it very ambiguous and confusing when you're dealing with complicated structures like nested joins and such)
When a gun is pointed at me by a man with very good aim.
Pyschopaths don't love anybody. it's not a synonym for bad/evil person, it's a constellation of correlated traits, but at a very rough approximation-

A psychopath is someone who sees others as means not ends. Their existence is irrelevant except insofar as they serve his wants or needs, or prevents them being satisfied. A borderline psychopath, one of the people who was born that way inclined rather than straight born that way, and who was triggered by environment will probably be no more attached to any human being ever than you would be a to a pet.
Of course this is just a silly hack so I can't be too hard on style here, but it would have been worth it to make a table for the input/output. An argument list of 81 values is painful to see.
More portable in that you do not hardcode the path. Ruby, Python, and similar are generally not in the same location across systems.

Unfortunately on Ubuntu (and probably other Linux variants) you can’t pass arguments to the interpreter, e.g. the following gives an error on Ubuntu (works on OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, and OS X):

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -wKU
puts "æblegrød"
Definitely horizontal. Sometimes I feel like the only one who can't use the fruit and vegetable bins in the fridge because I immediately forget about anything I've put in there, and it rots.

However, like other commenters, I wonder if it's less an issue of horizontal versus vertical, and more a matter of "out of sight, out of mind". If I can't physically see something, I have a very hard time remembering it's there. Thus, storage systems like drawers, filing cabinets, and to some extent cupboards are pretty ineffective for me. Shelves and table tops are much better, and see-through closed storage devices are somewhere in between.
Sure, but how many bands that aren't on (and have never been on) a record label have over a million album sales? Are there any? The simple fact is that without record labels, most artists would be even more broke than they already are. It is possible that another model for music marketing and distribution could be created, but right now, it doesn't exist. Artists need record labels; record labels need record sales; therefore, artists need record sales.
In-Game Violence Helps Users Recall Advertisements
My dad was a largely self-taught mechanical and manufacturing engineer. My mom failed high school algebra and had trouble with Microsoft Word when she first encountered it.

They've been married for forty years now.

My mother isn't vacuous, but she has appreciably little technical understanding. As it turns out there's quite a bit of complex decision making that goes into mate selection, competency in or appreciation of your technical field of choice being one small criterion of a myriad influencing such decision making.
Yea. If there is one definitive cause, I would vote for the internet, or even more broadly, the information revolution. The newspaper model was profitable because of scarcity. Before, say, 1995, the primary information channel was the newspaper. Need to sell used car? Newspaper classifieds. Need to sell a widget to everyone in town? Newspaper display ad. Need to buy a car? newspaper. Need to find out when a city council meeting is? newspaper.

Problem is, information isn't scarce anymore. We can do all that and much much more online. Businesses can publish their own information and sell their widgets around the world online, consumers can buy and sell on craigslist, advertisers can advertise cheaply and effectively on AdWords and many other sites... add it all together and the monopoly newspapers held on a relevant and unique information pipeline is gone. They're simply hanging on by the thread of the luddites who haven't jumped to the information era. Yet.

As for the next five years I think major newspaper companies will be sold off and split up. Watch for more individual newspapers for sale. Smaller papers might make the transition, particularly smaller independent papers. They've likely maintained local ties, have a good reputation in the community and are able to react to change quickly. The deciding factor for them will be whether or not they react and how. Unfortunately, many of the luddites I mentioned earlier seem to be running these organziations.

Otherwise, I think in a year, maybe two, there will be a LOT of heavy competition from very serious local-news web sites. They'll be lean, quick, aggressive and employ some of the reporters currently getting laid off in droves right now. The smart ones will use technology as a tool and competitive edge instead of tripping over it and outsourcing their development. Industry-wide, it'll look more like the 1920s publishing landscape than the 1980s.
s/Ament/Arment/g
How to download ANY file size via BlackBerry Browser
Apple rejects µTorrent controller iPhone app
On days with clouds it won't matter at all. And on days without clouds it will be a tiny cloud at that distance, one that moves relative to the sun/earth line of sight because it would have to be geostationary, so it will rotate with the earth.

Which means the time of 'transit' would be the time the image of the sun takes to move a single solar diameter across the sky, and only for those people who are in the line-of-sight, so it would be a different group of people almost every time this happens, at most twice every year.

No such 'guy' would exist.
Statistics. I think statistics will be in high demand over the next few decades as we all try to make sense of the mountains of data that have become available.

Just think of all the things we aren't tracking right now. There aren't a lot of people who are well equipped to analyze that sort of volume of data.
Just get your hands on one of these.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SA-7

1. Turn on
2. Point
3. Shoot
4. Run away.
I wound up ditching Django templates for Jinja 2 in my app engine sites. No regrets. There was just enough irritation with Django templating issues (e.g., the if implementation, filter arguments) that I swapped in Jinja. This article has been posted before but I figure it's pertinent to the OP:

http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2008/9/16/why-jinja-is-not-django-an...
There was a Perl script for doing this called OzyManDNS which worked well.

Seems like the Author's site is down, though. Does someone have a mirror?
Google too scared of telcos to buy Skype: Implications for Google Voice
You've got to live anyway. Might as well pay attention while you're doing it.
There are less than two dozen names. I expected the list to be longer, given the breadth of human creativity and propensity for risk taking.
There's not much chance of being a tech millionaire, either. Much more likely that you end up poorer than the plumber.

But hey, I'm still working on my startup, so I guess that just means I'm dumb.
But as the industry matures, it's becoming apparent that that model doesn't hold up quite as well. 1 success is rapidly copied by every other major website and YC type startups, there's major marketing spend to stay on the front of techcrunch, techmeme, digg, etc. Software requires more maintenance, hardware becomes a bigger cost, employees extract more from their employers or leave just when they're most productive, etc. So where it might have been 1 success will make up for 10 failures, it's rapidly becoming the case that 1 success will make only make up for 5 (or 1) failures.
Nothing but pure speculation. You don't think it's possible that Google decided Skype wasn't a great investment?
Nokia Keynote - Next Generation Maps [Vid]
This is the wrong approach. Javascript is rapidly becoming the "bytecode" of browsers. Look at established projects like Haxe and GWT which take higher level languages and compile them down to low-level javascript. Pyjamas is even a python port of Gwt, not sure how well tested.

This approach solves many problems. Browser developers only have to support one language (javascript), and already projects like the V8 engine are making that fast and standardized. Developers can use the language of their choice.

It's what Java should have been in the first place. It's a pity that this is all built on an oddball language like javascript, but perhaps that's the only way this could have happened because there's no legacy javascript outside the browser.
The phrenologists in the 1800s just lacked the correct instruments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
One problem with traveling he fails to address is the interruption to your career. What if leaving your job for a while means you miss
promotion opportunities? What if by the time you get back
someone else has picked up on your startup idea?
Yes it truly is! On par with the whole GNU movement maybe even better.

I found some amazing quotes (linked to from the article):

It is cited that the Burmese king Nanda Bayin, in 1599 "laughed to death when informed by a visiting Italian merchant that Venice was a free state without a king

London Beer Flood, 9 people were killed when 323,000 imperial gallons (1 468 000 L) of beer in the Meux and Company Brewery burst out of their vats and gushed into the streets.

incent Smith II, an employee at the Cocoa Services Inc. chocolate factory in Camden, New Jersey, was loading chunks of raw chocolate when he slipped and fell into a large melting tank filled with 120oF (50oC) chocolate, and was knocked out by one of the mixing paddles. Smith was trapped in the melting tank for 10 minutes before rescuers were able to extract him. He was declared dead a short time later.

Hmmm beer, laughter or chocolate?
Exactly right. You don't have a license to the CD.

If a work has been given a copyright, the government has granted the holder a temporary, limited monopoly on reproduction of that work. When you buy a CD, you will almost always see, stamped somewhere on it, (c) Copyright $year, $holder, All Rights Reserved. This is not strictly necessary, but they just want to make it clear: No Rights Granted.

The copyright holder has all the rights to the work, and you are granted none beyond "fair use" rights (quoting small portions for critique, backup, resale, etc) defined in copyright law. You specifically don't have a license.
While I agree with you that a blanket 70 limit on motorways is an anachronism, many of the arguments put by groups like the ABD, and opposing groups like Brake for that matter, are excellent examples of lying with selective statistics and outright conjecture.

For example, the latest official statistics[1] in fact say that "On motorways in 2008, 49 per cent of cars exceeded the 70 mph speed limit. In addition, 15 per cent of cars were recorded as travelling at 80 mph or faster."

While nearly 7 in 10 drivers exceeded 30mph limits ten years earlier, just under half do so now. These roads and motorways are by far the most common road types for speeding.

In other words, your "the majority speed" claim and your claim of the 85% level are both some way off.

[1] http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/statistics/datatablespublications/...
The plane would be in the beam path for only a short time: 900 Km/hour is 250 meters / second, if the beam were to be sent down very tightly the effect would be stronger but the duration would be correspondingly shorter.

A 100 meter diameter beam would take 0.4 seconds to cross, the energy density would be 12.75 W / square centimeter.

The kind of effect would also be quite dependant on the wavelength used, longer wavelengths would be harder to 'tight beam' than shorter ones.

A typical microwave oven 'beams' 1KW or so across an area about 15 cm radius, that's roughly 1.3 W / square centimeter.

How tight the beam is really is the crucial question to answer here, 35000 km up the beam will be very tight right under the point of emission, near the surface of the planet (an airliner flying 10 Km up) it would be much more dispersed.
I've been reading about that too:

http://www.celko.com/puzzles.htm (first part)
vs
http://sqlblog.com/blogs/hugo_kornelis/archive/2007/10/04/ho... (Celko replies in the comments)
"Most bands with no record sales have no ticket sales either. And most bands with no record label have no record sales."

Go netaudio instead. You get publicity be giving away music and then you get gigs due to people knowing you and listening to your music.
InviteShare
The n800 is great for reading most pdf's. The resolution is more than sufficient, and it has zoom buttons just above the screen.

The only exception are the occasional pdf's which have a smaller than normal amount of whitespace on the sides. PDFs generated from scanned images were also unpleasant (due mainly to the weak processor/memory of the n800).

I'm really looking forward to the n900. I'll probably switch to T-Mobile to get it.
I am proposing finding a non-compromising way to make just enough revenue to keep it going sustainably while remaining neutral.

Monetization, non-compromosing and neutral have trouble playing nice with each other.
Hah, my schedule is just outside the bounds of the BBC poll. I must be a freak. My ideal day is 12 PM to 4 AM.
Sudoku Solver in Apt (note: this is pretty old you've probably all seen it I just felt it's cool and relevant)

http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/package-manag...
Trevor Blackwell (YC and Anybots) Contributes to Hollywood Movie Surrogates
Last time Macheist ran a bundle sale, they had a special offer where, if you allowed Macheist to tweet on your behalf, you'd get some additional free software along with your purchase.

This, of course, resulted in a massive Macheist tweetfest in which my timeline was saturated for hours by identical Macheist tweets. I was really put off by it, and I'll say in no uncertain terms that their tweet advertising kept me from purchasing the bundle myself. I even called them out on it via twitter.

While their tweet ads are an ingenious (if annoying) marketing tool, and we're probably still in the early days of Twitter ads, I sure hope they don't get out of control.
Naming characters with Google AdWords
At Home - Make Money Business Opportunities
"I'm not proposing a for-profit company, but I am proposing finding a non-compromising way to make just enough revenue to keep it going sustainably while remaining neutral."

If you're proposing, let's hear the proposal...
I think you're probably wrong. Plumbing scales like any services business: you stop being able to manage your inbounds, so you hire another plumber who makes less than you. Repeat N times. At some point, you're making enough off the top of all the plumbing work to stop doing plumbing; now you're a full-time business manager. You brand, promote, and scale --- by franchising, hiring more managers, partnering, or securing large contracts. Somewhere in the middle back there, you became a millionaire.

What is also probably true is that it is very hard to go out of business as a freelance plumber. It is very easy to go bust as a tech entrepreneur. The flip side of that: on a steady income, the plumber gets more opportunities to grow her business than the tech entrepreneur --- she can stay in business, turning different knobs, indefinitely. You hope that the tech entrepreneur's individual opportunities are much more valuable, but that depends, doesn't it?

There's also the classic factoid that most millionaires got there not by striking gold, but by managing their money well.

Be careful about Geek Exceptionalism. It will burn you. People excelled in business long before there was an Internet.
too true.
"Twingly Channels looks like it could beat them all"
My opinion is that building horizontal lets you enter different verticals more quickly (and exit them as well). Or perhaps get your toes wet in many verticals to see what's nice and warm before you jump in.
Outsourcing from India to Singapore
While the Indian companies syphon jobs from US/EU; these guys (COMA) managed to get some work from a prominent figure! The act of Karma?
That depends on whether your parents are perceived as VC's providing seed capital.
There is not much chance of being a millionaire software developer any time soon either, especially not after a couple of years' work.

The fact that a handful (almost literally) of businesses have achieved this, and quite a few more make a modest profit in a reasonable time, does not by any stretch mean that these "successes" are going to do the same thing. The whole point of the complaint here is that most of those "successes" won't actually be successful, ever. It's just that in this business, the one that does make it will make it big. But the others will still fail.
For a moment, ignore the commercial viability of this. Of course, in a free global market, this isn't viable. Think about this strategically.

Japan has roughly 40M barrels of proven oil reserved. They consume 5M barrels of oil a DAY. Without imports, assuming they could even get at all of their oil, they would run out in 8 days. They are the world's 3rd largest consumer of oil, and the world's second largest importer.

Half of their energy consumption is oil, another 15% natural gas (which comes from extracting oil). Coal and Nuclear make up the majority of the rest. Japan's mining is well beyond peak-coal. The vast majority of their oil comes from the middle east. Japan is an island, they are entirely dependent on energy imports. This means that if their trade routes were cut off they'd be hosed. Since the US dominates the world's oceans, that means that Japan has to keep the US happy. Sucks strategically and politically.

Space based power is useful strategically. You can beam it to an island. It is very difficult to cut off, regardless of the size of your foes' navy. You can beam it directly to a fleet in the middle of the pacific. You could use it as a weapon.
Super freak... SuperSpeed USB 3.0 at 5 Gbps, Sync-N-Go, Optimized Power