skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting answer, and goes to my suspicion that "this is the way we've always done it" is part of the answer. But see the comments above.

The trouble with that is that on a line printer those '.'s really don't stand out very much and if you forget one you're toast

That's not the half of it. Many years ago the US launched a satellite, part of whose control was done by a Fortran program. Well, one of the developers used a single period in a loop header where he should have had a comma. Unfortunately, in Fortran that was syntactically valid. Problem was, it was hard on the printer he used to see the difference. So the satellite and a bunch of US taxpayer money took a trip to the center of the sun. Ouch.
>Research on morality can tell you a lot about what morals people have, but it can't tell you anything about what morals people ought to have.

Yes, I recommended Haidt because the topic was whether the fundamentalists were acting according to their understanding of morality. If you're saying that research on morality doesn't yield conclusions on something like "real true morality", then I agree. But I'd add that Haidt's research helped me see inconsistencies in my morality, and in this way it's affected my view of the morality I ought to have.

I agree that repugnance can be a good heuristic for personal actions. I wish that people wouldn't impose their sense of repugnance on others, though. You know how Jews aren't allowed to mix dairy products and meat? I thought that was just an arbitrary rule until I went to Israel and talked to some Jews. They didn't just find it immoral because the Torah said so; they found the idea of a cheeseburger or a meat-topped pizza disgusting, as we might find the idea of meat ice cream disgusting. So I'm concerned that repugnance can easily get attached to arbitrary things.

More abstractly, we can view repugnance as nature's buggy hack to get us to avoid harmful things, dating from before we were as intelligent and knowledgeable as we are now. Purity-morality is just harm-morality implemented on an obsolete system. Now that we're intelligent enough to judge harm more competently than instinct (i.e. we get fewer false positives), we can and should override that judgment, when it helps us. (Trivial but real example from real life: I used to find mushrooms disgusting, just because. After Haidt got me thinking about the usefulness of repugnance, I looked up the nutritional value of mushrooms, found that mushroom-phobia was unhelpful, and decided to get over it.)

Hubris!
You're assuming that this is only about supplying electricity at as low a price as possible, which is a very narrow way to look at it. Consider instead the larger picture. This sort of project is going to require a lot of R&D which will both create jobs and lead to additional discoveries. The experience gained can used in future related projects and sold to other countries. If the project is a success then Japan will be the world leader in this sort of technology. So don't just look at the $/W look at the net effect of this investment on Japan's GDP over the next 20 years. From that point of view this is probably a lot better investment than simply buying third party solar panels.
Here are some random thoughts:

Don't have your source code repository just in the office. I would strongly suggest to use a distributed system like git or hg while also keeping a master repo on something like a 6 USD/month rackspacecloud server.

I move backups to Amazon S3. I simply export databases and repositorities, then tar, bzip and pgp them and then upload them with a timestamp in the name to Amazon S3. With the right tools on unix this is almost a online-liner. And it costs a couple of dollars to just upload and store stuff.

Laser printers are really cheap these days. Toners are expensive. But really, just print the 'formal' stuff. Letters, contracts, etc. Nobody prints source code anymore I think.

Network: go wireless if you can. Preferably 11n. Less infrastructure needed. Get a wireless router with USB to hookup the printer.

Chairs: let people choose their own. Within a certain budget. I find it highly personal. Specially if you plan to use them 10+ hours a day :-)
Man, with just a few tweaks, that would take me straight back to the good ol' BBS days. :-)

(I mean this in a good way.)
Forget Google merch...I want some "Bing Bling"
RedZone Solo explores sewers so you don’t have to
Horizontal. And I never even realized it until just now.

But I don't have OP's problem. Why? 2 words: wall space.

Everything is mounted on the wall somewhere. I'm a nut for those flipchart pads from Office Depot with the sticky strip on the top. I also have one wall completely covered with brown packing paper. I use lots of scotch tape and push pins. I rarely forget about anything; after all, it's all right in front of me all the time.

Artwork and window treatments, while astetically pleasing, are a total functional waste of valuable and limited wall space. I'd rather look at specs, notes, flow charts, and yes even source code mounted on my walls.
In other words: Never own ducks.
Good point. People sometimes use expressions with operators as arguments.

My take now is that, because comments are required for cases such as the above, they require them everywhere. What should happen is that they be optional.

Also, it just occurred to me that, while Lisp et al. don't use commas, they do use parentheses to bracket subexpressions, so they don't have a problem with the issue you just cited.
I've had similar success by appending the site version to the query string. src="/foo.js?v=2.1" This has worked for me across all major browsers and required extremely little work for setup and maintenance.
Because really, browsers are large enough and contain enough avenues for security holes already.

I'm no javascript guru, but let's please keep the number of languages embedded in browsers limited to the absolute minimum.

And let's get rid of flash while we're 'discussing' this.
Not necessarily. Consider the peacock's tail - not good for survival, but sexually selected for.

Just because something "should" evolve doesn't mean it does. Evolution is haphazard, and adaptations are usually merely good enough, not perfect.
Good idea. Start one.
Tahts exactly what I did about 6 months ago. "/path/file.js?varsion=timestamp" where timestamp is:

A) The last modified time of the file in milliseconds
B) The current time milliseconds if in debug mode

Depending on if debug mode is turned on the minified file or original is served to the client. I minify on-demand since it's so fast and files rarely change, only the first request takes the hit and it is not a big hit, maybe 1 or 2 seconds.

I serve the pages with a 1 yr expiration time for these files.

I do the same for CSS.

It works very nicely :) NEVER have to clear a browser's cache when developing and garantee that all users always have the latest code.
How am I going to change the world doing that?

By planting seeds that you have no other way of getting into your brain. You can reap the (currently unknown) harvest later.
“I don’t have money to travel.”

Fair enough if it’s true, but for many people who say this, it would be better to say, “I’ve chosen to spend money on a lot of other things, so now I don’t have money to travel.”

Shall we never forget the lovely Victorian ethic that the poor have only themselves to blame.
The question is not about "Why" but about "How". How would I get the money to travel around the world exactly?
I'm assuming it is geosynchronous, you could only blast down to your own country with it, any place else the angle to the atmosphere would be too oblique to have any chance of reaching the ground.

It's an ideal country sized energy suicide weapon though.

Sort of a satellite born seppuku.
For US citizens, Peace Corps is one way to meet both of those goals. For people from other countries, there are similar organizations in many countries, and some that accept volunteers from almost anywhere (such as VSO and UN Volunteers).

Volunteers spend a long time in their host country, and really get to see things in depth (not just the tourist view).

Volunteers also get a chance to "change the world". Usually not in a particularly grand way, but a little education and inspiration can have a lot of ripple effects.

Of course, being based overseas, and having a fair amount of vacation time, volunteers also have opportunities to visit other interesting places and countries near their host sites.

Getting a reasonable living allowance and government-sponsored benefits sweetens the deal, but of course it doesn't offer nearly as much freedom as simply quitting your job and hopping on a plane.
My dad's company writes enterprise webapps in PL/SQL. I haven't seen the actual code, but imagine it begins like this:

SELECT '<html>' ...

They're pretty successful commercially. Apparently the approach is practical because it doesn't have many layers.
It's also true that the whole story still isn't over (10 years after the official end of conflicts), but I doubt that American public hears about it anymore. It's not prime-time material anymore.

Still, nice to hear that someone is interested in more then flashy headlines.

In light of my comment bellow, I will not pursue the subject further, HN is not the place for it.
Um... could you do it? I feel I'm over my quota of "Ask HN" for today.
That is not traveling in my book, though - it is staying abroad. I have no problems with working in another country.

I certainly agree that it is worthwhile to experience another culture at least once. I am not so sure about more than once, though.
The 8 Reasons Why Startups Need Early Adopters
Other advantages: Windmills are vulnerable to disruption by anyone with a zodiac and some semtex, not to mention they have transmission issues of their own.

A space-based solution has a far higher cost to threaten; you basically need to have ASAT weaponry and that's (at least for now) somewhat out of the reach of non-state actors. Not to mention a space-solar satellite would have enough onboard power for some fairly aggressive countermeasures.

Edit: grammar
Android and Maemo are really headed in different directions. Maemo is (or at least has been) trying to keep as much of the existing linux tools and applications available as possible, while Android seems to be Google trying to rewrite the world(not that it's a bad thing, just different). The last Maemo device(Nokia N810) can run lots of applications you would not normally consider for a handheld device. I've seen everything from Emacs to FreeCiv to irb and the Closure REPL(although the N810 is rather shy of memory).

I think they real problem with these devices is that for the same price you could just buy a netbook and call it a day. The only place where I have benefited from the internet tablet form factor is while riding the T.

edit: more programs I use on a daily basis; mplayer and evince
Seeing this makes me want to learn Flex. Wonder if there's anything like this but open-source?
Not saying you are wrong, but could you give some examples? There are always zillions of options in life - to choose one, a little more than "currently unknown" would be nice?

Is traveling better than working on a startup?
By prioritising it higher than any other non-essential cost you have. I know people who have saved up for 6 month round the world trips while working in various menial low paying jobs. The question is, like for most things, is how badly do you want it.

Of course it helps if you don't have a family to support.
I don't know for sure, but there might not be an Atom-based board that has as many PCI/PCIe slots.
With an emphasis on : "how do I get money to travel if I'm not in the US visiting poor countries but I'm in a poor country and I want to travel"
For the record, NASA uses Thinkpads.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/TORU_dock...
I was afraid it was going to be another HN survey asking everyone whether they were tall or plump.
"it is almost painful that flash of all those windows being replaced."

I agree that it would be, except that the transitions are pretty smooth with the system I'm using, so there's no flash/blink effect. I haven't used xdmx.
Privacy Groups Lobby Congress to Limit Behavioral Targeting
Oh man... I love it!
How the Terry Childs case could harm password security
Lots of places (in the US) have this, but it's ineffective to prevent Awkwardness - they only cover the height of the urinal itself. To fully prevent Awkwardness, I think you need full-height walls, so you can't see your fellow visitor's face.
they just happen to use gems as a $LOAD_PATH manager

Oh come on. That's like saying "you should not make your MacOSX app require Finder just because some people just happen to use it as their file manager". Just happen? It's the default, and overwhelmingly dominant, choice! It's freaking bundled in 1.9 core!

rtomayko is a prominent and well regarded community member but he's pretty much a crank on this issue. He is the extreme odd one out who doesn't like rubygems, so it's on him to deal with it, rather than causing inconvenience for everyone else. He doesn't even give a good, or any, reason why he doesn't use gems. And as if I'm going to write -rubygems every time I run anything, give me a break.

Rubygems is the official package manager and is used without any issue by 99.9% of Rubyists. It's not 100% perfect but in general works beautifully and greatly contributes to making everything in Ruby "just work". There is no reason for people to stop using it as the default choice.
Criteria 1: Cheap (don't spend too much at this stage)

Criteria 2: Easy (your time is better spent on other things)

Criteria 3: Portable (if successful, you will move to a larger/better office. If not, you will sell this stuff to someone else. Either way, keep it portable)

I wouldn't overthink this right now. Do whatever is most efficient for you. Make sure you have an easy, touch-free, reliable way of making off-site backups of your source code (presumably the only real thing of "value" right now).

For things I have been involved in, I do my own hosting. All servers are linux. Email, web, svn, etc., all setup on linux boxes and backed up to other remote linux boxes. I have been doing iterations of that for 15 years now. It just happens, it takes me no effort. It might take you a solid month and still not work right, in which case that is the wrong approach for YOU.

Check craigslist for furniture. Start with used office furniture. As a rule of thumb, for offices I have built out, it will cost you $1,000/cubicle (used cubicle, chair, labor/install/setup). This is most likely too expensive, especially if you can get a $200 chair and a simple desk someplace else. Just make sure the furniture is workable. I worked at one place that had really nice chairs and really basic desks (tables really), no storage for books, no room to spread things out. It sucked.
I think they real problem with these devices is that for the same price you could just buy a netbook and call it a day.

Except then you'd have to carry a netbook around, and you'd still have to carry a phone. I want to carry as little as possible, but I still want to have a computer handy when I need one while out and about. My G1 filled this need just adequately, and it sounds like the N900 might be considerably better at it.
I'm more of a supine organizer, myself.

Incidentally, I followed a link to Perry's other essays, which led me here:

http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

to which I'm compelled to respond, Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!
Intel's 'Braidwood' -- Turbo memory done right?
When I'm being chased by zombies.
"7-Zip - You'll typically get between 2% and 10% better compression than ZIP."

Does anyone really care about compression rates? And what about the fact that noone you send your .7zip's to has 7zip installed?
Sorry, but not seeing the point of posting an old PG article without a new observation. Is it some kind of test to see if it will automatically get voted up?
RFCs and other documents do not mean it's needed or wanted - "Make something people want".
I'm sure it will limp on for years, after all, it's limped on for 10 years so far without real widespread adoption.
Japan also strikes me as the type of place where residential solar couldn't come close to providing enough power.

Their population is very dense, especially in urban areas.
Whoever this guy is, he really needs to pull his head out of his ass.

The author is a smart guy. Major contributor to Sinatra, developer at Heroku, etc.

You might be right about the rubygems issue, but the random bile and personal attacks make it hard to take you seriously.
I have everything vertically organized except for things I currently work on or that I need often - these lie on the surface. ( it's both about my desk and about my computer)

I also have a cabinet where I put all the papers that seem unimportant but may be needed some time in the future. Once a year I trash its contents without checking what's there.
How does this work at Wrigley Field?

(for those who don't know, it's a baseball park in Chicago; the men's restrooms have one large "trough" style urinal along the whole length of the wall)
I'm a night person, but if I force myself to get up early and go for a run then immediately after I am at my most alert, no matter it is 12 hours away from what is usually my most productive time of the day. I guess cave people didn't have a choice when it was time to run from a sabre-toothed tiger.
Poll: Caffeine Usage
Lately I've found myself back to drinking tea in the mornings after a long period of caffeine abstention. My question is: How much caffeine does the average HN'er consume daily? I'm going to try a two variable format, so bear with me -- hopefully it'll be more useful than the typical poll
Age: 0-20, 0 portions a day
Age: 0-20, 0-3 portions a day
Age: 0-20, 4-6 portions a day
Age: 0-20, 7+ portions a day
Age: 21-35, 0 portions a day
Age: 21-35, 0-3 portions a day
Age: 21-35, 4-6 portions a day
Age: 21-35, 7+ portions a day
Age: 36-50, 0 portions a day
Age: 36-50, 0-3 portions a day
Age: 36-50, 4-6 portions a day
Age: 36-50, 7+ portions a day
Age: 51+, 0 portions a day
Age: 51+, 0-3 portions a day
Age: 51+, 4-6 portions a day
Age: 51+, 7+ portions a day
I prefer using my Readability bookmarklet: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Finally, someone who sees the benefits beyond the almighty dollar. An up-vote for you!
I don't see how this Victorian ethic applies. He's not talking about the poor, but rather those who have "chosen to spend money on a lot of other things", i.e. the middle-class.
Is traveling better than working on a startup?

Great question. I don't know. I have done both, but a lot more working than travelling.

Building stuff is as much creative as it is scientific or task oriented. That creativity has to be fed somehow. For me, putting myself into a situation I'm normally unaccustomed to really gets the juices flowing. Travel is great for that.

I have done very little international travel, but I have done a lot of RVing. Although I never actually did much work while out on the road, I was never more relaxed and introspective. Often couldn't wait to get back to work to try something out.

Reading, surfing, and watching video are all good methods of feeding your brain. But nothing comes close to actually being there.
Thanks for the feedback; it was especially useful to see that so many people up-voted it!

I've removed that special banner. You're right, HN folks know to upvote if they like it, of course, and it's insulting to say otherwise.

In my defense, it's true that I'm an HM reader and it's true that I appreciate the upvotes. :-) But you're right.

Thanks!
World Cup 2010 – Marcello Lippi: “I Have Nothing Against Antonio Cassano”
Italy coach Marcello Lippi has explained his decision to snub Sampdoria ace Antonio Cassano for the upcoming World Cup qualifiers. Despite showing some stunning form in Serie A, ‘Il Talentino di Bari’ was left out of the Giro Azzurro.
Wow, that looks pretty damn awesome. I'm going to have to give it a try.
The first "Age 36-50, 7+ portions a day" should be "Age 21-35, 7+ portions a day".
That's a lot of work to shoot down one or two planes. Was he a good military leader? If you lose the battle but don't lose a single man then one might question your willingness to engage the enemy, a necessary unpleasantry of war.

His men undoubtedly most appreciated him because he kept them out of combat and alive.

And was the plane detected/shot down because of the defenders' skills or were there plane malfunctions, etc.?
One of the downsides to carrying just a small device is screen size, reading PDFs on a tiny screen is tedious. You also have to deal with the limited keyboard, luckly you can remap some of the meta keys to include []{}<> and the all mighty pipe.

For everyone else, here is a picture of the N900 running xterm http://www.flickr.com/photos/clankennedy/3868820466/
I think the caffeine is not always the main reason for drinknig tea/coffee, for me tea is mainly a sugar delivery device and I go through a lot more of it than I probably should.

This has been going since my teens so far without any bad side effects but I can't imagine it is healthy.

caffeine content of various drinks:

http://www.wilstar.com/caffeine.htm

Tea is apparently roughly halfway up there compared with the strongest coffee. I figure I go through three or four pots of tea in a day.
and quite a bit of them at that!
25 Social Media Sites for Entrepreneurs
Poll: Horizontal or Vertical Market for your Startup
For your startup, are you more interested in a horizontal (one function across many industries like word processing or collaboration) market or a vertical (multi-functional in one niche like medical claims processing, hair salon, or architecture) market?
I might be crazy, but I believe a pretty significant reason that many people have kids is so that they... can have a family?

I'm also fairly sure that most people are not expecting their kids to make them any money, or go bragging about their hefty ROI from a son who went on to be a successful lawyer.

It's nothing new that kids cost money. Sure, college is a big cost that maybe not everyone was expected to need years and years ago, but in this day and age its more and more likely that students are paying for it themselves to an extent, through either scholarships, loans, or part-time work.

For other expenses, I would think that having kids is almost like "paying it forward". YOUR parents must have spent money on you and your potential siblings throughout your life, so why is it suddenly a huge burden when you're expected to do the same for someone else?

I feel like the article made it seem like having a kid these days was a poor investment decision (which is an understatement of course), and nothing more. I'd almost feel sorry for his son, which he seems to give absolutely no credit to for being a success.
Done.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=800189
I figure I go through three or four pots of tea in a day

Holy smokes, jacquesm!

I find that I enjoy tea the most. Nothing like a good, strong cup of tea in the morning with cream and splenda (sugar substitute)

But tea is almost like a gateway drug, at least for me. Probably part of my addictive personality. Pretty soon I'm chugging Diet Mountain Dews and energy drinks.

I've always heard that tea, especially green tea, is really good for you. Glad to hear you're able to consume so much for so long without any adverse effects.
Any hacker should be perfectly safe.

But I highly doubt they'd want to work for companies that did not know the difference between 'hacker' and 'cracker'.
> require a lot of R&D which will both create jobs and lead to additional discoveries

If it's government funded/subsidized it's more likely to divert capital from more productive R&D and uses in the economy.
Well, he did say "Fair enough if it's true", fwiw.
We are all mutants
EBay sells Skype, ending ill-fated match