skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Uh, it's a question with a well-known answer. When uranium and other heavy radioactive elements decay, they often do so via alpha decay. What's an alpha particle? Two neutrons, two protons. Eventually the alpha particle slows down and captures some electrons. What is it now? An atom of Helium-4.

If there is radioactive material buried in the earth (there is), and there are geological structures that trap it (there are), then there will be underground deposits of helium (specifically Helium-4).

Other than the fact that the same rocks trapping helium can also trap natural gas, though, there is absolutely no further relation between the two. Why would there be? Helium is also found with deposits of radon gas, where no methane is present. BFD.
To help reduce the clutter of group emails you try MooGroups. http://moogroups.com

We are in the early stages. Let me know if you have any questions.

-Steel
It would also be fun to see how the raw Tornado httpserver (http://github.com/facebook/tornado/blob/master/tornado/https...) performs without the Tornado web.py framework on top of it.
The Self-Educated Apple Genius
Audio compression does work (the explanation is crude though)
the way he says, but his inference is unconvincing.
Oi, that sure was lengthy. Summary: Some hospital in Pennsylvania tries to make money by doing unnecessary procedures on patients with good health insurance and went to great lengths to keep this lady from seeking a second opinion regarding her injury.

IMO, this is the incentive of nearly all doctors in America - the dentists I've had span the entire spectrum of opinions about my wisdom teeth. From "if we don't take them out, you can die from a gum infection" to "do they hurt? no? do you eat meat? then you should keep them, they'll makes it easier to chew".
During 1998, two global leaders came from the Americas to South Africa. Bill Clinton and Fidel Castro. In their speeches before the South African parliament Clinton described the global economy as a partnership, whereas according to Fidel Castro “the world, had become an enormous gambling house”.

As a mere observant of the events around me at the time, I considered Clinton’s response bulshiterian and Castro’s response truthy.

Fortunately for all of us Castro’s preferred economic system has proven more unstable than capitalism and totally collapsed, but unfortunately the current prevailing economic system of capitalism has also failed to evolve in the right direction.

Capitalism has still two inherent disadvantages:

(01) It is a highly unstable system

(02) It has a propensity to make the richer richer and the poorer poorer.

My solution? Code happily and wait for the storm to pass :)
It isn't the fault of email that people or not organized and use it wrong.
What other unusual languages do people use for linux kernel modules?
The D language library 'Tango' implements this:

http://dsource.org/projects/tango/docs/stable/tango.text.Reg...
This article in the New Yorker is excellent:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_...

Atul Gawande argues that the problem with healthcare in the US is overutilization.

The surgeon gave me an example. General surgeons are often asked to see patients with pain from gallstones. If there aren’t any complications—and there usually aren’t—the pain goes away on its own or with pain medication. With instruction on eating a lower-fat diet, most patients experience no further difficulties. But some have recurrent episodes, and need surgery to remove their gallbladder.

Seeing a patient who has had uncomplicated, first-time gallstone pain requires some judgment. A surgeon has to provide reassurance (people are often scared and want to go straight to surgery), some education about gallstone disease and diet, perhaps a prescription for pain; in a few weeks, the surgeon might follow up. But increasingly, I was told, McAllen surgeons simply operate. The patient wasn’t going to moderate her diet, they tell themselves. The pain was just going to come back. And by operating they happen to make an extra seven hundred dollars.
Goldman Sachs takes huge risks, gets compensated, fails, gets bailed out by the working class citizens, goes on to pay an average salary of $700,000[1]. Is that what these people are worth? Yes, if the market says so? Do the tax-payers have a say? They should, if they're the ones "insuring" them.

While I don't disagree that this is disturbing... it's not really a failure of markets so much as it's a failure of government.

I'm not one to bash on 'big business' and I understand the need to bail out the banking system to prevent cascading failures, but you have to admit things like this show a remarkable level of regulatory and legislative 'capture' on the part of certain business interests.

But back to the essay... when I read it, my overall take was that he was trying to point out that wealth is not a zero sum game. (Sometimes money can be a zero sum game, but wealth is not merely money.) I'd have to agree that too many people see everything as zero sum.

As an example, look at a hot button issue like immigration in the US. Many people see that in zero sum terms... the more immigrants that come, the more jobs they take from the natives. But that fails to see the other side of the equation. Immigrant labor is why you can buy cheap vegetables from California, it's why you can build a house cheaply and in only a couple months. Yes, this is detrimental to the former producers of those goods/services, but it's also beneficial to the consumers of those goods and services.

Anyway, I'm not advocating unrestricted immigration or even trying to make that the topic of this discussion. I was just trying to point out how a zero sum viewpoint doesn't tell the whole story.
How to Create and Implement a "Strap" for your website (part 1)
OK, first up: what is a strap? A strap is an image the looks as if it is physically “Strapped” behind the main page. A good example can be seen on http://blog.brazenbanker.com.
Several things:
1. Ok, 15w or 11w - not a big deal, the difference in energy savings less than 10%. Irrelevant worry.
2. But real issue is spectral content of light, it is not same, and frankly, I find flourescent light very unpleasant.
How to Create and Implement a "Strap" for your website (part 2)
Before we start, if you haven't completed the first part of this tutorial, you might want to do so (http://syntaxmonster.net/blog/story/16). If not, you can download the strap for use with this tutorial here.(http://syntaxmonster.net/static/uploads/implement_straps/strap.png).
Network infrastructure is sexy again Nov 2008
Those bankers on wall street destroyed the world economy and in doing so, secured way more than enough for themselves to satisfy an entire lifetime of living and several more generations to boot.

Greed is not good.

To quote MGMT, "Take only what you need from it."
There's no guarantee there's oil in either place. Remember, oil is the product of organic matter being compressed under heavy pressure for millions of years. Even if microbes or their remains are discovered on Mars or Venus, which they haven't (definitively), there's no guarantee that there was life of any considerable biomass.

So I really wouldn't get my hopes up for extraterrestrial oil at all, sad as that may be. On the other hand, minerals and metals most certainly exist outside of Earth, so...?
Fully agree - I'm much more receptive if I get a little notificiation saying 'new feature, wanna see?'.

I actually thought Microsoft's Clippy was a really good idea in principle; where they went wrong was in giving Clippy's options the appearance of a modal dialog, which people thought they needed to respond to. Also, screen resolutions were typically lower so Clippy took up an undue amount of visual real estate, to the point of being intrusive. But the context-sensitive task helper is now seen on many applications, as is some kind of anthropomorphic assistant on many web pages.
Browsers and battery life in Windows
Exactly, and not as disdainful of someone who is just trying to be friendly and do their job.
Nope, as of now each process has a separate copy, even when they are both on the same node. "The exception is large binary objects, which are handled specially by placing them outside the normal data areas and using reference counting to keep track of them. They are not copied when sent as messages between processes on the same node."
http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2006-September/...
If you're right, all it means is that no ethical doctor would remain at said hospital. Ethics only count when they go against one's own interests, otherwise they'd be pointless.

I can't believe you're making excuses for doctors who (if the story is true) tried to bully a woman against her will into having major spinal surgery that she clearly didn't need.
The article uses Perl 5.8.7 for its examples. FYI: the implementation of the regular expressions engine changed a lot for Perl 5.10.
I buy organic for three reasons:

1) Despite what Norman Borlaug said, the vegetables taste better. I don't really care why. Maybe it has nothing to do with the fertilizer used, rather that they simply don't ripen the tomatoes with ethylene (the other side of the techno-farming coin).

2) I can afford it.

3) I don't trust Monsanto and their ilk to integrate technology to better feed me. I expect them to rely on technology to improve their bottom line, very likely disadvantaging me in the process -- their goals and incentives are simply not aligned with my own.
I can't agree with him about organic food health benefits. When you eat industrially raised food (oil based fertilizer) you get a smaller spectrum of minerals, etc.

And, as my young grandson once said: "why would anyone want to eat food with bug spray on it?"

That said, it is a matter of free choice - my wife and I gladly pay slightly higher prices for locally grown organic food. If not organic, we then at least favor locally grown food.
Actually, it is rather controversial. Normally, when you add heat to a large hydrocarbon molecule, it cracks (breaks down into smaller pieces plus more heat). This is why hydrocarbons can catch fire and burn. Going the other direction -- from large molecules to even larger ones -- requires very specific heat ranges and very delicate conditions involving unusual catalysts. Add too much heat, and it cracks faster than it merges. Add too little heat, and it cracks instead of merging (if anything changes at all).

There are indeed specific conditions under which merging occurs, but in geology they are extremely rare. If abiogenic oil theory were true, it would predict abundant oil in Washington state (close, but not too close, to vulcanism) and zero oil in Texas (where there are no volcanoes). The facts are, of course, otherwise. The amount of naturally-occurring abiogenic oil is quite possibly non-zero, but clearly accounts for at most a tiny fraction of all naturally-occurring oil.

Even if abiogenic oil theory were true, we would still be experiencing peak oil. Assuming it were true, the earth would have been producing all our current global oil reserves over the course of billions of years, and our current rate of extraction would be depleting the reserves faster than abiogenic production could refill them. (Two arguments why abiogenic oil must be slow, even if it's significant: one, the annual rate of carbonate rock subduction is not sufficient to sustain the current annual rate of oil extraction, even with 100% conversion; two, the oil produced would have to go somewhere, e.g. break to the surface and feed an ecosystem of oil-digesting bacteria, if it were being produced at such a rapid rate.)
If you have the power to not clarify and walk away, they do.
April 1, 2005
Isn't this kind of like being evil to make more money? Exploiting flaws in the way people reason about price is not the same as delivering value.
Sure, but were you learning how to program? At the time I didn't know what a compiler was, let alone the nuts and bolts of installing one and getting it running. I was a self-taught 15-year-old and the only one in my hometown interested in this stuff.

Making that happen on Windows was very difficult, IMO. I remember using something called LCC-Win32?

Moving to *ix made a world of difference for me from a programming and sysadmin perspective. Everything works "out of the box" and the space is less fragmented because everyone uses gcc/g++. There are a million tutorials explaining step-by-step how to write a C/C++ program and compile it.

Installing a printer on the other hand... :)
Well, sure, no one _has_ to do anything if you take free will far enough.
One's choices are never completely at the whim of someone else's rules.
I assume you haven't been paying attention to the developments in unconventional natural gas: http://climateprogress.org/2009/06/03/climate-action-game-ch...
Wrong, there are many people who may go to that hospital by choice. It only is the act of lying and not obeying the patients wishes that are evil.

If they can't keep their accreditation then perhaps they could offer discounts to entice people to their hospital.
I haven't read that philosophical masterpiece that far. This is indeed a very innovative definition this guy has devised. So a person who causes losses to others while her or himself gaining, like a criminal for instance, is not stupid by definition?

Sadly most other common definitions are a little different:
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=stupid
The ‘scrubber’ knob of the player actually crawls along ‘between the pixels’. In other words, it’s being drawn in code and shows progression even when the allotted amount of pixels that make up the progress bar doesn’t allow moving the playhead as far as one pixel. This is something you see pretty frequently with longer videos. The playhead would just sort of ’stick’ to a spot until it could progress a pixel further to the right. Instead, it intelligently draws the knob in a way that shows progression without moving the entire thing one pixel.

Not seeing this. Checked on a long video, moved one pixel at a time. :-/
my fav is hypem.com, they offer a good UI with some nice effects.
Is Happiness Catching?
thanx :) my fault
Here's a HN post of that article on DCI:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=525949
The Art of the Handshake
You might prefer daylight-balanced tubes then. Alternatively, just hold out for LEDs which offer a wide range of color temperatures.

Protip: if you absolutely cannot live without the incandescent look, get the bulbs you want at a photography store and put a dimmer into the power line (because they're typically 200w+). You might get some sticker shock with your next electricity bill, though.
I don't see anything disdainful or rude about just saying "No." even without a "thank you." It all depends on how you say it.
> The Thomson NFA quickly gets to be millions of times faster

The O(2^n) worst case only comes from highly ambiguous patterns which are better written in other ways. So this isn't really accurate in practice.
I read it as "meatballs" and didn't even notice until I came to comment "meatballs? huh?".
A system based on lack of greed is unstable. It gets gamed by the first greedy thing to come along. Greed is written into every life form on the planet, not just humans; what evidence do you have that there even can be a non-greedy life form?

Proposing a "solution" to the worlds ills that can't possibly work in the real world is ultimately uninteresting. You are free to bemoan it, but you should be aware that your "utopia" works far less well than the system you bemoan.
Seems to me, the only people who benefit from these "days" are the greeting card companies.

Programmers day greeting card, anyone?
It doesn't have to be, but the attitude of the author is that he is standing up to someone who is trying to "dominate a transaction." With that mindset, "no" is bound to come off as rude.
"TRUTH BE TOLD, a man who has a good handshake can do any goddamned thing he wants."

Favorite part, because it's true.
I said long-term rational-self interest.

How were the bankers doing that? The bigger the fraud, the harder they fell. How is Bernie Madoff doing?

Is former Merill-Lynch CEO Thain a fraud? Not exactly. But he didn't fight a principled battle against all regulations. What I'm saying is that it's much better to be like John Allison, the former CEO of BB&T (one of the few that didn't get into subprime as a matter of principle) than it is to be like anyone else. Allison is great, and he did great, and he's free of any and all guilt! Everyone (CEOs included) that fall short of that ideal pay a price (remember, there's no such thing as a free lunch, ever, in anything) proportional to their deviation from the moral ideal (set by Objectivism).

You should not assume that Thain and other bankers are happy just because they have "a lot" of money. Nor should you assume that they have the skills to keep their money "in the family" for several generations. That implies a level of familiarity with their individual philosophies that you simply do not have! (And to be honest, I don't know either, apart from what you can tell about them from reading the paper.)
Also, when you send an email, the content is instantly dead. You can't correct it, you can't edit it, and you can't improve upon it.

Generally, when you send an email, there is some context, many times also electronic, and the mail is disconnected from that context. The content of collaboration should be close to what is being collaborated upon, and tools for work (i.e. IDEs, SCMS) should be designed to support collaborative communication.
The edit expired, but I feel embarrassed about those first two sentences so let me correct them:

The more I play around with Erlang, the more it makes absolute sense. This is concurrency done right.

This is the problem with posting to HN early in the morning. :)
Oh, I don't mean to be perpetuating the argument. I think you guys did awesome stuff. Most of my twisted work doesn't even have a web interface, some of it does, but it's fine. Some could really use some help. Tornado seems to be a great answer there.

I suppose I'm just letting you know how you can better serve my personal needs next time you invent something great. :)
As much as I think "tort reform" is a right-wing dog-whistle term, medical malpractice law has a lot to do with cases like this. Put simply, if you're insured and there's an incredibly remote chance that a test could show something, most doctors will issue it - it doesn't cost them anything, it doesn't cost you anything, and it protects them if something happens to you in the long run, at which point they can say "well, we tested for it and it was negative, so it's not our fault". From the doctor's point of view, ordering the additional test (or surgical procedure, etc.) has very little downsides and either marginal or significant upsides, depending on what ends up happening.

If you're interested in this, read up on the PSA (Prostate-Specific Antigen) test: it's the main test used to check for prostate cancer in males. You'd think that doctors would issue it to all males of a certain age annually, and up until recently most doctors did that. But there's been an interesting change of thinking in the past few years: someone noticed (and importantly, some insurance companies agreed) that the combination of an increase in the power of drugs/surgical techniques available to treat the disease and a stabilization of the relatively-high false-positive rate in the PSA test (and the dangers of what happens with a false-positive) means that unless someone has a predisposition to prostate cancer, it's often better not to test for it. The net result when the options are getting prostate cancer and taking the treatment vs. getting screened early and undergoing the invasive diagnostics needed to confirm a PSA test at that stage, it's usually a better choice just to get prostate cancer.

Note that this math goes out the window, however, if you have a family predisposition to prostate cancer. In that case, the risk of option #1 goes up (since it's predicated on the relatively low incidence rate of prostate cancer), and the dowsides of option #2 go down (since the probability of a false-positive is much lower).
Way too early to evaluate the green revolution. It may have just allowed us to temporarily overshoot the earth's carrying capacity, which wouldn't be much fun on the ride down.
But none the less interesting for that. A small, perverse part of me wants to construct an elaborate conspiracy theory around it and sell books to the gullible assuring them that this means they no longer need to pay income tax, they should vote only in Zhmerincan elections etc.
"The Federal Reserve System [...] was created in 1913 by the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, largely as a response to a series of financial panics or bank runs, particularly a severe panic in 1907."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System

So telling us that the Fed is the reason for the recent panic is ridiculous. Capitalism by itself is highly destructive. Without state interference you would have a famine in the US by now.

[edit:] See also: http://money.howstuffworks.com/fed1.htm
So that's what we have to blame for Pixar.
Art Lebedev is a really amazing studio, have a look around the rest of the site. They're the ones who develped the Optimus Maximus Keyboard http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/ . They've got serious stuff like the Samsung Sweetheart microwave http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/samsung/sweetheart/ , not-so-serious stuff like the "Fuck the Rain" umbrella http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/fuck-the-rain/ , and lots of stuff in the middle like the Mondrianum box http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/mondrianum/ .
US Navy underwater laser development "changes everything"
most people have put themselves on intellectual autopilot. Most don’t study on their own initiative, but only when they are forced to do so. Even when they study, they choose to study the obvious and conventional subjects

For them, education was about the doors they believed would open because of how they were labeled by institutions, not about making themselves truly better as thinkers

:-(
I had six daylight-balanced mini fluorescent bulbs in my living room and I had to remove three of them because they were blindingly bright. These are 8w bulbs.
We have only one planet. We already use up more resources than it has. More economic growth equals destruction on a planetary level.
I've personally taken a dislike to using two phrases with people, "fine" and "whatever". Both of them, generally, have a negative connotation to them. Especially when talking to a girlfriend/significant other, it just feels crude.
I guess you could google it, but I also got interested, so here you go:

- Caml http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/1999/02/a7fc1...

- C++ http://www.read.cs.ucla.edu/click/

- Cyclone http://cyclone.thelanguage.org/files/cyclone-drivers.pdf

- Pascal http://wiki.freepascal.org/linux/kernel/module_development

- Ada http://oopweb.com/Ada/Documents/AdaLinux/Volume/16.html

- Fortran, D (I'm just guessing, but these should be trivial)

... probably others too
Opponents of organic food never bring one of the main reasons why people buy organic - it tastes freaking awesome. While it may not be true for all products, there is a pretty clear difference between a lot of organic and non-organic products.
Preview of WebKit’s WebGL / Canvas 3D
I said captures with backreferences, not captures alone. As the link you cite mentions, "as far as the theoretical term is concerned, regular expressions with backreferences are not regular expressions. The power that backreferences add comes at great cost: in the worst case, the best known implementations require exponential search algorithms, like the one Perl uses. [...] No one knows how to implement regular expressions with backreferences efficiently, though no one can prove that it's impossible either. (Specifically, the problem is NP-complete [...])"