skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
17 years later:

Plan9 is going nowhere. That commercial spin off Vita Nuovo (http://www.vitanuova.com/) is quiet. The Linux and Solaris monolithic kernels are still strong.

Minix3 doesn't really progress (http://groups.google.com/group/minix3). The L4 microkernel is commercially successful (http://www.ok-labs.com/).
Who would win in a fight: Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome?
That's a seriously great story. When I first read it, I wasn't sure whether to be afraid of Manna or to start a startup to create Manna. It seems so very real.
The amount of sheer silliness in the comments on the original blog post astounds me.

"Let's call it Meta insurance. In case a service decides to use the keyword tag someday, your site is prepared."

"I find it interesting that even though Google says they don't place any weight for rank on them, that after a site of mine went through and added them in, within weeks, they had a major jump in rank."

"Well, I say - (2D) Keywords were out a long time ago. The new 3DKeywords or 3D Keywords are coming soon. They are basically encoded keywords making them more reliable and they can be controlled."
I'm not talking about just micro- vs macro- kernel. I'm talking about general OS-level research. Just look at what MSR is doing with Singularity: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/singularity/
Does commercial success or popularity imply technically sound and superior ?
As anyone who has ever run Kconfig knows, linux is already very well modularized, and disabling unneeded logic at compile time is already easy, and most of the kernel actually resides in dynloaded modules these days.

> I'm sure the majority of that Linux kernel logic is never executed; if that code were instead placed in user-level processes, they would have no performance hit.

Such code doesn't matter. Most of it is in a dynloaded module, so it doesn't even eat ram, and even the stuff baked in the kernel hardly matters for performance -- the < 5 megabytes of ram doesn't even hurt in cellphones anymore, and the thing that hurts most is L1i cache use, where only code that is actually executed goes.

The bloat we are talking about is not the increase in the total size of the kernel, but the increase of the size of the commonly executed code paths. Linux being a microkernel would not help there, in fact it would hurt.
The only freightning thing I experienced is sleep paralysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia#Sleep_paralysis).
But this too presents no dangers, it is just a weird and uncommon feeling =)
A Quick Guide to Intel’s Chips
Wealth is stuff people want, not what people need. True, if there's shortages of something people really need people will focus on spending their wealth on those things first as there are painful price hikes in basic necessities. But if it's really true that a few numbers of limited people can, using technology, produce everything "really needed" by all of society, the remaining people are then freed to work on whatever else people might want. The fact that people don't "really need" those things doesn't stop anyone from paying for them.

By this article's logic, at the point agriculture was developed and not everyone needed to hunt for food all day, a big chunk of the population should have sat idle and impoverished.
That's extremely common and I never found that particularly frightening. After my very first lucid dream (that I can remember) I woke up and started writing it up in my dream journal, but the ink kept dissolving as I wrote, as if I was writing on fresh tippex. Took me a while to figure out that I was still dreaming. Then I woke up properly.

The dreams aren't so much nested as in sequence. You have a dream, you become lucid, you get excited, you think you're going to wake up, and so you dream about waking up and become un-lucid again.
No, sometimes Worse is Better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Personal experience: I have tried lucid dreaming, and had some moderate success at it (got two lucid dreams that I can remember). It's a lot of fun, and not all that hard. I warmly recommend it to anyone who can be bothered to keep a dream journal by their bedside.
Fat that makes you thin
>A mere 50 grams of brown fat - well within the range of what some of us already have - could dissipate around 500 calories a day.

Amazing.
On the topic, see this thread about an individual with total control over his dreams, including time dilation. His longest dream lasted for what felt like four years, which he spent "creating planets and landscapes, and then I just sat back and watched the life/universe I'd created play out in super-fast motion." It's IAmA so he could be a troll, but it seems believable to me.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9ebol/i_am_in_full_con...

As far as techniques, I would recommend giving wake-induced lucid dreaming (WILD) a try, as practiced by Richard Feynman. You basically just stay conscious as you fall asleep, watching your body fall asleep and staying aware. A very small amount of caffeine or chocolate an hour before bed can help with this.
I think you are mixing him up with Steve Pavlina. While I find some of recent entries of Pavlina borderline crazy, his old entries on personal development are really good stuff.

With Steve, for the first time I learned that I can think of him as crazy and admire some of his (early) writing at the same time.

I have my doubts about Tim Ferris though. He seems to run of hype.
Essential home office software tools?
I'm relatively happy in my current job as a web developer, but I live in a provincial city in New Zealand where the IT market is unpredictable. At the moment business is booming but we've had some dark periods during the year and I'm thinking in my spare time I should put effort into setting up some sort of basic infrastructure at home to work on projects in my spare time or if I lose my job.

At work we use Trac for project management and TortoiseSVN for version control simply because we always have. Reading HN over the past few weeks has convinced me I'm a dinosaur. Because I work alone it can be hard to get a handle on what the new standards in the industry are.

My question: what would HN suggest as indispensable home office software tools -- for any operating system -- for the modern web developer? I work mostly in PHP but am not averse to learning a little Ruby. I am mostly thinking of version control systems (git?), project and bug tracking tools (Bugzilla?), development environments (Eclipse?), and anything I should be running on a home server (I am quite good with Debian boxes).

I would like to avoid purchasing new hardware.
http://railsplayground.com specializes in RoR hosting - they offer both shared hosting, vps and dedicated servers. Extremely rapid and competent service.

I've used them for both my startup and some smaller personal projects over the last 10 months, very satisfied so far.
Google Search Appliance.
No way, for three reasons. (1) Saying "icache" and meaning anything other than "instruction cache" would be an obvious recipe for confusion, and Linus is not stupid. (2) It makes excellent sense with the obvious "instruction cache" meaning: "our icache footprint" means "the number of instruction cache lines occupied by kernel code". (3) It makes no sense with the "inode cache" meaning: how could a growth in the amount of code in the kernel possibly have anything much to do with the size or the occupancy of the inode cache?
Number portability! Bastards.
Great, as Tim usually is. I pretty much know all there is to Lucid dreaming, but I didn't know much about huperzine prior to that post.

Also, if you're really interested in lucid dreaming, there's a wonderful community filled with dream-veterans @ http://www.dreamviews.com/

Hands down, the best suggestion of what to do during a dream was, "your finger is an orgasm gun."
you're wrong on several points i don't know where to begin. sorry i don't agree with you.
I'm just waiting for the SEO 'witch doctors' to chime in about how Google is lying and all of those 'Top 10 SEO Optmizations' blog posts are right.

I've always been suspicious as to the validity of any of the SEO material I've ever come across. The only thing that people know for sure that helps search rank are other sites linking to your site. (i.e. the only 'sure-fire' SEO techniques are the Google Bomb and the Link Farm)
I think that was "for" as in purpose, not as in cost.
The too many variables problem might be more evident in the social sciences - but it is present everywhere in science, even the most 'strict' science branches - like physics. You always need to make some assumptions. Much more eloquently - this idea is laid down in: http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/nonscientists-naive-a...
The modern form of indentured servitude seems to be mostly involving illegal immigrants or guest worker type programs that tie a worker to a specific employer. I could be wrong, I'd appreciate any references for a legal immigration system along the lines I suggested that has caused problems (I may be asking in vain -- it may never have been tried).

The tax structure in the US is progressive. If we accepted unlimited immigrants we would end up with many low skilled workers coming here. Regardless of whether this is desirable (I think there's moral arguments to be made in its favor), it's politically impossible.

Placing a bar that involves a fix fee per year, if the issues related to being enslaved could be avoid, would attract exactly who we want -- those who would do so much better in a developed country that it's worth while.

I see it as if you were born in the US, you were freely given this thing, the right to live in the US, that is very valuable on a world market. Why not allow others to buy that same thing?
Fair enough. My childhood was also spent reading books, but I haven't stoppped. I read while the lights change. In queues. Making love.

Nah, not really. That's mental. Reading in your car is dangerous.
What about swaddling?
Or you could use lazy evaluation (on the producer). In this case, a simple stream is enough. Then, you call both the producer and the consumer (`return consume(produce());`)

Horrible in C, but beautiful in languages with GC and lambdas.
Compare Linux and QNX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX)

and tell me which one is bloated.
Use ===, !== etc instead of == or !=. They aren't the same
How to start a meetup group for fun and profit: part I
What I learned from running a 520+ members meetup group.
Do QNX provide the same features as linux?
I'm not sure that that is exactly Ricardos law. That applies more to trade and specialisation.

The basic laws of supply and demand (price of labour will adjust until all labour is employed) should theoretically be enough to cover it. But I don't find this to be sufficiently explanatory of what we observe in the world.

For one thing, you would expect that the price of labour be extremely volatile, especially at the bottom, in response to technologically driven change. This is not the case. The price of labour tends to be stable and rises slowly across most categories at the bottom (though it does not necessarily keep pace with the economy).

For another, in such a world one would expect the effects of minimum wage on employment levels to be easy to predict (like price restrictions on the consumption of goods and services). They are not. We can play games in the extreme margins (see what happens if you set minimum wage to $1000 p/h), but in the moderate ranges, the effects are usually pretty foggy.

In any case, citing some fundamental economic principle is not what I meant when I said explanation. I meant at least to some idea of how the mechanics of that principle apply in this case.

Labour is different to most inputs in that production of its raw materials is not really sensitive to prices or market forces,. It is, from the market's perspective, arbitrary.
Eye movement test better than MRI for diagnosing stroke
A friend of mine trained himself to be able of lucid dreaming, but stopped with it when he began to have "nested" dreams...

I experience that with normal dreams. I suspect it happens to anyone who has a vivid dreamlife. I wouldn't let this scare off any would-be lucid dreamers.
Is there anything useful you can do while lucid dreaming?

I've done it once in a fever, and it was admittedly a fantastic experience (I was a multiverse god and made lots of multiverses full of happy people in awesome landscapes having really great sex), but it would be nice to be able to get something out of it that could be shared with other people.

I'm wondering if one could use the immense processing power of the human brain in a consciously directed way; for problem-solving, or simulating a complex system, for instance. That would prove that you're not just watching pretty lights while the "this thing that's going on right now is really cool" part of your brain is stimulated.
You can add "features" to QNX to make it comparable to Linux. The only difference is, since it's a microkernel, adding a feature to QNX won't make the kernel bloated. and that is the whole point i am trying to make.
This is really interesting, does anyone have references to the stuff stated here? I'm trying to read through the stuff from his website:
http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/jp_home.html
Neat demo. Nitpick: the presenter's nervousness made it uncomfortable to watch. Between his dry-mouth clicks and swallows, long verbal gaps & unproductive chatter (..."that concludes that demo...") - i had a constant "edge-of-my-seat" anticipation of something about to go wrong.
The HTML5 Working Group needs to reassess their rationale for choosing this API. The justification remains that this API originated with IE and is already implemented in both IE and Safari. Yet, between missing features and rampant bugs, the extant implementations are nowhere near the specified behavior. While specifying the correct behavior can help vendors fix their bugs, it's unclear why any vendor should invest their time and money into an API that is this complex, that no one likes, and that is missing required functionality.

In general, I think the HTML5 Working Group needs to be more aware of how standardization of deficient solutions can hurt the web. In this case, many people were blissfully ignorant of IE's awful drag and drop implementation until HTML5 threw a spotlight on it. It seems to me that the Working Group, then, has significantly raised the chances of this horrible API becoming further ingrained, rather than merely allowing it to die in deserved obscurity.
A decade ago I picked up a copy of the La Berge book that Ferris mentions. I highly recommend it as it seems to be the canonical book on the topic since La Berge was credited with being first to medically prove in a lab that lucid dreaming even exists. It takes like 3 months of daily dedicated practice to get the knack, but once you've trained your mind to do it, it gets easier to induce with repetition. Regular lucid dreaming is an incredible experience, and I can't even begin to explain the impact it has had on my own creativity and self of self. If you haven't done it--GO DO IT!!

And I agree with what others said about using LD'ing to aid in learning. For me it is hugely useful to get unconstrained "practice" time to quickly go through steps I need to remember when awake. I call it dream kata. I mean both mental steps, like learning math proofs in my case, and steps for physical things, like learning to rock climb(falling off cliffs and flying away is seriously fun). What's weird is after routinely LD'ing such practice scenarios, when I go back to regular dreaming, I will have non-lucid dreams of doing the same kinds of practices. We dream about what we regularly do each day, so it's a way of tricking the mind to watch and mimic itself. Somehow it engages a part of the subconscious to constantly practice and learn.

While LD'ing sounds trivial, the time can add up and I think it has huge potential to give those who employ it an edge. Let's say you lucid dream for 2 hours every night for just 3 years--then you've got 2k+ hours of practice time in whatever you do. Take Gladwell's book Outliers and his account that "geniuses" in any field excel simply because they have had so much more raw practice than others. While we don't know how common lucid dreaming is amongst these "geniuses", it might be another explantion of this "practice == genius" phenomenon. The way I see it, if you can get 20% of the way to 10,000 hours just in your sleep, there's no reason to not be doing it.
In the case of UNIX, it's not merely commercial success and popularity. It is the choice of a large portion of the smartest people working in technology. If we were talking about success amongst the hoi palloi (like, say, Windows), then your point would stand...but we're not. UNIX has seen its fortunes flounder and flourish multiple times over the span of 30+ years, and yet, today, UNIX runs the most important technologies on earth (Google, Amazon, the majority of all other web applications, the best smart phones, most smart devices with anything more powerful than a simple microcontroller, and a whole lot more), because the people building them chose UNIX.

So, is UNIX technically sound and superior? In the general case, I would say, unequivocally, yes.
TI vs. Calculator Hackers
And you would be absolutely right. Thanks for the good analysis :-)
Scientists pull an about face on global warming
It seems like almost all of this can be attributed to path dependence rather than technological superiority.
Minimum wages.
I don't think system simulation is possible. The dreaming tests essentially work by prooving that you can't keep much "state".

Learning by repetition is something i heared repeatedly. I have no personal experience, but it seems to be a Matrix-style "I know Kung Fu". So you seem to have access to your memories and can reinforce them. Maybe some self-psychoanalysis is possible, since you may access your subconsciousness.
Forgot to add one thing--if you're curious what it's like to practice and learn in lucid dreams, then watch the scifi movie Dark City and look for the scenes where he's remembering being taught by the Doctor--the experience is almost exactly like that!
You can't focus your eyes when the display is so close, an "E" on the lens will look like a blur. So to get good resolution, you'll probably need a more focused light source, and you'll need voxels instead of pixels.
also:

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/javascript-best-practices...
Favorite Rating( Show the Love ) with jQuery and Ajax.
I received a mail from my reader that asked to me how to implement Show the love rating system like amypink.com. So I had designed Favorite Rating with jQuery and Ajax.. It's simple just changing little code on my old post Voting system with jQuery, Ajax and PHP..
I hate hardware.

Hardware is the thing that prevents microkernels with carefully distributed functions.

But hardware is still land where dragons are, therefore you have to do everything with it in kernel-space (it's unsafe and isn't delegatable mostly).

If hardware would soon die and we'd be programming on the turing machine, we'd get microkernel OSes in no time!
Subscribe and Win Free Mobile Phone Talktime Every Day | Tricks Machine
But adding the features means adding them to userland processes. While this technically doesn't make the kernel bloated, it still means the bloated code has to be run, and has to occupy L1i. Having them in other processes only means they will eat even more cpu, as you have to use time to sync the processes.
Tidy Service (Mac application)
Compared to Safari's recent versions, FF's recent versions have typically been more sluggish. I just downloaded Camino and will be testing that out.
Yeah, fine. But at a certain point, I can buy a replicator, print out some solar paint, and disconnect from the grid. All I need now is small amounts of raw materials to top up the inevitable losses from my recycling loop.

Your large-scale production will certainly be cheaper, but it will be possible for an individual to build, say, a fully automated chip-fab given enough raw materials. So large-scale production will be instantiated ad-hoc on a needs basis.

I'm assuming that the last bastion of human labour will be creative work, since that'll have sentimental value even when the robots get better at it.
They use Rails for the examples, but this should be suitable for most other frameworks.
An increase of the size of commonly executed code paths could mean two things. First, it could mean that a lot of special casing has accumulated due to lack of modularisation or cleanup work.

Or it could mean that these cases do in fact have to be considered on that code path every time and that any "outsourcing" to user mode processes would in fact increase the size of the code path.

If it's the former, then the argument that a micro kernel design encourages more fine grained modularisation and leads to fewer special cases is not completely spurious in my opinion.

But all of this is impossible to judge without looking at the code itself.
According to whom?

My roommate in college was half-Haitian half-Portugese and identified more as European. My near 100% African-American buddy I played cards with identified himself as fully black. A half-Carib half-French (black skin tone) girl I knew identified as French. In London, a good friend who is half-Arabic half-Indian identifies equally as Arabic and Indian. My three-quarters Chinese one-quarter Japanese friend raised in Beijing identifies as pure Chinese. I think a 1/4th African 3/4ths European blood person raised in a predominantly black community would identify as black, and raised in a non-black community would identify as European.

All my data is from people who live in international coastal cities though, so maybe it's different in various provinces and less affluent middle-of-country areas.
I think I can explain that. One thing that may be surprising about vision is that when you look at a scene, what you see comes from your memory of the scene (first iconic memory then visual short-term memory), not directly from your eyes. These memory buffers are refreshed from information received from the eyes, and most of that comes from the fovea in the middle of your field of view. That's where they placed the pixel.

(You do obviously get some information from your periphery, but not much. As an example, you are colour-blind in your periphery. The rods that detect light there cannot differentiate colours. If you see colour in your peripheral vision, that's because you remember the object being a certain colour from when you looked directly at it.)

The eye usually moves in jumps, called saccades. There are many other eye movements, but saccades are the most important for scanning a scene. While the eye is moving during a saccade, you receive no visual information. This is known as saccadic masking. That's important for making a device like this, because it gives the little chip a few milliseconds to do its business in peace.

Okay, so how do they make an "E" appear using only one pixel? My guess is that they have a small accelerometer on the chip that detects saccadic eye movements, then turns on and off the pixel depending on where the eye is pointed. As long as you can detect the start of a saccade, predict the target (acceleration is linear over short distances so at the midpoint it begins decelerating; at that time you've travelled half the distance and can predict the target), and refresh the pixel all in less than the duration of the saccade, you're set.

Because of saccadic masking, the person won't see any of this. In a series of these movements, the eye will scan the scene, detecting the edges of the "E", and from knowing where the edges are, the brain will reconstruct an image of the letter floating in space.