skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Check out Viva-Lite -lamps. They produce "Full spectrum light", which is quite frankly just awesome.

I'm not affiliated with Viva-Lite, just a happy user. Having 26W model here, it's maybe bit cold (5500 K), but still reproduces colors accurately.

edit: At least my lamp has quite long warm-up time. I haven't actually measured it, but I think its far longer than 10 minutes used in the article. Thats a major downside in ESL.

edit2: I actually forgot to add the link: http://www.viva-lite.com/
Another reason I am glad I block ads.
Amen. There's nothing wrong with buying organic. Not respecting the differences between the first and third worlds is what is irritating in the food debate. Maybe people don't want genetically modified food domestically - but these innovations are critical to continuing to feed the planet. When you vilify them, when you start labeling foods as modified to create two classes of food, you're screaming loud and clear, "I don't give a shit about people that aren't just like me, and I don't respect the differences between first and third world realities." Personally - I want to be eating the same wheat as the guy pushing rickshaws in Old Dheli. I want genetic modifications rigorously tested so as to be safe for us all.

Acting like first-world boutique farming represents a viable model for the entire world - despite all the evidence - just because new age idealism says it should be, is the height of western arrogance.
It's a bit of a stretch to call 20 miles up "space".
The only reason I ever buy "organic" is when I think the regular product is cheating me by adding in a lot of stuff I wouldn't consider an improvement, like water in meat, corn starch in sauce, etc. Ironically these are often things with organic equivalents - but the organic brands are selling to a demographic who read the ingredient labels.
It's not a lack of agricultural wealth that should limit our meat intake. It's a lack of fossil fuel wealth. Raising cattle uses an enormous amount of fossil fuel. And even organically speaking, the only reason we have such cheap meat is a massive amount of subsidized corn. That's not good for the soil, it's not good for the environment, and it's certainly not good for the cows.
Yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_space#Boundary
The Future of Social Networking: Fixing low SNR
Some of what Seth was talking about was just bad programming. AM/PM default was just bad or lazy programming. Some of what he's talking about could be taken care of using Bayesian filters or something at that level. (AM/PM default could be taken care of this way too) Make things mildly adaptive and unobtrusive, and us?

As for addresses, something like Facebook or LinkedIn could be tremendously useful. Instead of storing bits in a database, you could basically subscribe to another's address info. In fact, accounts to these websites amount to subscribing to other's personal or professional info, and letting them subscribe to yours.
Not quite making excuses, just pointing out that the system that necessitates 'evil' behavior is also to blame...
Is it possible to take advantage of this with any existing Ruby framework?
AFAIK Canada gets around this problem by capping the number of billable patients a doctor can see per day (adjusted by specialty of course). Any patients in excess of the cap is only paid by the government at a steeply discounted rate.

This discourages doctors from overworking themselves and offering shoddy care (instead choosing to move patients through like a cattle farm), and also discourages the sort of unnecessary treatment this article talks about.
Don't downmod this, it has a valid point. It's by far better if the rules of the game don't give incentives to being evil. If they do it's as good as guaranteed that sometime somewhere you will get this kind of incident. Whether you choose to also blame the individuals involved is up to you, but it's the rule-makers who created this.
New infor
I wonder if this technolgy will provide an alternative to communicating with satelites in space. I think using this underwater laser system is great because it provide security from signals being intercepted.
I'm sure there is room for incremental improvement, but we've certainly reached the point of diminishing returns.

I briefly searched and can't find sources, but I believe the wheat of 1900 used around 12% of its energy to make food and the rest to sustain its own structure. Now it's something like 90% of the energy the wheat receives goes towards making food.
> So use two and you get over twice as much light

Over 15% more, 2x58 = 116 not >200.

Or get a 22W CFL. The issue here is the false claims of equivalence between 60W incandescent and 11W CFL.
A part of the problem is the top-down mandated idea of what is "correct." If these things can be adaptive in a non-intrusive way, then it can all be like "teh" and "MIstake." I would love to stop telling new word processors to stop correcting Smalltalk. I wonder if there's any way to keep information like that around with you? I can try to do 100% of my word processing on Google docs, but, am I ever going to get there?

Preferences like this need to be tended by operating systems. If I tell one text editor widget about "Smalltalk," there's no reason why all of them across the system shouldn't know about it.
I have heard rumors that aptitude would have smarter dependency resolver than apt-get. It would be interesting to hear how it would fare in comparison.
This is a fascinating read. It's long but worth it.
The 20 Dollar Millionaire
I would recommend against holding your breath.
More garbage science.

You can not measure lux when you are so close to the bulb, and lux is not the correct measurement for light bulbs anyway, lumens is.

Lumens: total light produced by bulb in all directions.

Lux: amount of light hitting a sensor, adjusted proportionally based on size (area) of sensor. (It's actually light per area.)

If you put the sensor close to the bulb most of the light from the bulb will bypass the sensor.

An incandescent is basically a point source of light, so putting the sensor close works fine.

Florescent is not, the light output comes from a large area. For the real world, unless you need a spotlight, this makes no difference, since you are illuminating an entire room. But if you try to measure with a small sensor you will underestimate the light output.
You could actually, if the sockets are the same. The light will be twice as bright, and the bulb will last probably 1/4 of the normal lifespan. The energy efficiency will be higher.

The hotter the filament, the shorter the life, but the better the energy efficiency (also slightly less reddish light). Light bulbs have a filament length tuned typically to 2000 hours.

TV studio lights are often tuned to last just 50 hours, but they are way more energy efficient. But not necessarily dollar efficient.
We do this for the Twiddla sandboxes.

The key is that you have to be prepared for everything to evaporate if the server cycles its memory for whatever reason. In this specific case, we toss everything out of the sandboxes every 5 minutes & reset them anyway, so it's no great tragedy if they clean up after themselves from time to time.

For something with a ton of low-priority edits (like HN or Reddit where nobody sues you if their vote goes away), you could certainly get away with caching updates and only saving them out every once in a while.
Integrating Django with Tornado's web server
Last spring: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/5005... ...which made news at the time because of the extreme low cost, off-the-shelf hardware and so on.

Yeh stressed the groundbreaking nature of their work. “The fact that we were able to accomplish space photography on such a low budget and with minimal electronic modifications proves that it’s really possible for anyone—anyone at all—to do. Imagine how many students might be inspired if their high school science teacher took the time to give his students an out-of-this-world experience.”

...or indeed, vice versa. I can't help noticing that the reports of European high schoolers correlate strongly with the time that Mr Lee stopped posting on his short-lived cancer-reporting blog, correlatingcancer.com, which is the host for 1337arts.com.

Well, at least Mssrs Lee & Yeh have a superior understanding of marketing and self-promotion.
Peak oil doesn't mean that all oil will suddenly be gone. It just means that constantly increasing demand cannot be satsfied forever. For well over a century, the rate of oil production and consumption has increased very quickly. It's physically impossible for this development to continue indefinitely, and no amount of hand-waving can change that.

New discoveries don't change that - you'd need more new discoveries each year than the year before (which is the opposite of what is actually happening). Oil sands don't change that - they don't just require more capital, but also more energy to use - and energy is exactly what you're trying to produce after all. Eventually we'll have to expend the equivalent 1 barrel of oil to mine and refine 2 barrels worth of oil sands.

Peak oil doesn't mean no more oil tomorrow. Oil production may well continue for a century or more - it will just keep decreasing, not increasing. When this starts happening is a matter of debates, research and numbers. There are strong indications that we are seeing it happen right now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_world_2004.png
(look at the source - these are not made-up numbers)
Rational appraisal of risks, especially about your own healthcare and as a non-expert, is difficult.
Compiled into a runnable piece of software, it would have a large overhead of GUI code. It would be slow to launch and it would use up a lot of memory. This would simply not be worth the effort, and so "wc" would never be written as an independent program at all. Instead users would have to wait for a word count feature to appear in a commercial software package.

Stuff like this is all through the Symbolics Lisp machine OS. Any object that could print itself out to a stream of text automagically got a hot-link back to an "inspector" of itself in any text window it printed itself out to. Not any GUI programming was necessary, but text utilities were part of that GUI navigation. (The magic of "around" inheritance in MOP.)

We have low expectations of OS today, which were formed in the days of green screen machines that were many orders of magnitude slower, had many orders of magnitude less memory, and where you had to count every byte. We have low expectations of GUIs, formed by GUIs designed when machines struggled to run them.
Ah,is that really a question? My comment on my blog that my health insurance decided it was best to leave me on the ledge to die of exposure was-need I say-tongue in cheek.You must be under the impression the insurance companies are in possession of that awesome perfect blame calculator - parsing an infinite number of scenarios to detemine blame for accidents and disease, then confirm or deny coverage based on their magic box. That is your insurance company, not mine. Please reply quickly, unless you are tied up arguing with them about whether they should cover your AIDS since everyone knows sharing needles is unsafe.
They aren't the first to do something like this.

Here's a very similar project made in 2007:

http://www.natrium42.com/halo/flight2/
JQuery Conference 2009, slides
True, but clearly that some have too little and others, relatively, too much- i think that was a major issue in my situation.
One extra point: Don't Add Caching Yet.

1. wait until something presents itself as a bottleneck

2. optimize it until it's not a bottleneck anymore

3. wait until it presents itself as a bottleneck again anyway.

...Then add caching.

You'll never find the low-hanging yet dog-slow fruit if you put your aggressive caching scheme in place right off the bat. If you have a bunch of poorly optimized code running with a ton of caching to hide it from you and you suddenly have enough traffic to cause scaling pain, that's a big problem.

Speed it up. Then cache it.
I agree, and I said, No! Less was way more, for me.
The Wall Street Journal 2009 Technology Innovation Awards
Your CDs/farmers market food may have trvelled fewer miles, but it travelled in a far less efficient manner. So calked "food miles" are also around 4-5% of the energy cost in the food. Time from harvest to table and varitals selected may differ between your veggie selection and your neighbors, but odds are that their food used less energy to get to their table than yours did.
Sure, and it could have also prevented any positive achievement you might like to name.
There's another version where he takes his stack of 20s to Manhattan. Both are amazingly well written and quite intriguing.
Actually, any fair person who read that article and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenic_petroleum_origin would have to come away thinking that the man was drifting quite deeply into crank territory, other scientific merits nonewithstanding. It's a continuum after all, and not uncommon for scientists to become obsessed with an idea.
There's nothing wrong with you buying first-world, boutique food. Buy hydroponic vegetables if you want. You are not the problem: there aren't that many of you.

The problem is that new age extremism has vilified Borlaug ...

Isn't calling organic food "first-world, boutique food" and many of its proponents "new age extrem[ists]" bit of hyperbolic vilification in of itself?

Commercial farming practices brought both good and bad, and you illustrate both extremes by railing so strongly against the one of them in multiple posts.
Given the correlation between gold and oil ( http://goldnews.bullionvault.com/files/OilGold2.png ), two commodities that have nothing in common, I think that the rise and crash of crude prices has a lot more to do with fluctuations in the dollar, rather than the underlying economics of oil.
...and let me just say I'm still looking.
Sound Effects Library
i think the cost is the surprising factor about this story. taken from the site you posted:

Q:How much did it cost?
A:The system that is presented is a little over-engineered for historical reasons as well as for future expansion and test purposes. It's possible to build a system for $500 with just a cellphone link and a microcontroller, but make sure that coverage is good where you intend to launch and use a good cellphone antenna.
direct link to the ingredients:

http://space.1337arts.com/hardware
Indeed. I'm not sure I've ever noticed organic produce tasting better, overall. It certainly does look worse, which may be influencing how I feel about it.

As my own main food preparer, though, the main issue I have with organic is that it's less convenient. It takes me about the same time to chop up an onion or tomato no matter if it has a four inch diameter (non-organic, from Walmart) or a two inch diameter (from the organic bin at Shoppers Food or where ever), but I have to use a lot more of the organic ones to get the same amount of veggie. Also, organic veggies are far more often misshapen or have bad spots that have to be cut out, which I assume is because tomatoes that aren't being speed-ripen have more time for spots to go bad.

All in all, I'll keep buying food that looks good over food that might taste a little better (assuming I'm just unobservant).
My dad's a doctor in a rural environment, and I had a bad back injury including ruptured discs and cracked vertebrae when I was in high school. I can offer some insight on the psychology of the doctors and even a little bit of information on this particular injury.

A rural surgeon is going to be professionally offended if their patient calls up an egghead at Harvard from their pre-op hospital bed and then tells him she doesn't trust his judgement and instead wants to be medivac airlifted back to Boston. It's like when you watch a detective show when the FBI takes over and the local cops are all bent out of shape. The hospital staff may have been thinking about health insurance and losing their accreditation but I doubt it was a sinister plot to meet their spinal surgery quotas. It was probably more along these lines: "a crazy lady from Boston just broke her back jumping off a bridge with some 13 year olds. Now she's telling us to schedule a chopper to Boston because she's Facebook buddies with some prick neurology prof at Harvard. Quick, give her some morphine and get her under the knife before her spinal column collapses and she's paralyzed and we get slapped with a half billion dollar malpractice suit... "

Note that I'm not defending that sort of attitude. That's just what I think they would be thinking, rather than some nefarious conspiracy to maximize insurance profits, which is what the article and most commenters on this post seem to be suggesting.

The other thing is that I don't think the doctors were necessarily wrong in their diagnosis. The higher you go up in the spine, there's a lot more danger of paralysis or other severe spinal cord problem. If you're over 30 and shatter your T12, there's a 50% chance you're going to end up with a serious neurological problem. The odds for recovery are far better the sooner you have surgery, if the surgery is necessary.

Timing of surgery is also an important issue in the treatment of thoracic spine fractures. ... Some studies suggest that patients with thoracic spine fractures treated within 72 hours, irrespective of concomitant injuries, do much better physiologically postoperatively than those in whom stabilization is delayed.

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1267029-treatment

Lastly, I don't think a patient requested 370 mile helicopter flight for a treatment which could be performed locally could possibly be covered under any insurance plan, no matter how good the coverage is.
It is most likely Taiwanese-based since the newsgroup language is Chinese (simplified), with several references to .tw domains in commands.

Taiwan teaches traditional chinese, only mainland China uses simplified. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernacular_Chinese

Tried to register and comment on the guy's blog, but the function doesn't respond. So, perhaps there's a far more sinister plot behind this =P
"Inevitably, this overallocation of capital leads to: (1) vast new discoveries of hydrocarbons, and (2) the invention of new technologies to economically develop those reserves."

Scientific much? It seems a very broad generalization that there will always be a way out, just because it was the case before.
Dear Daily Telegraph,

When an energy saving light-bulb is on, can you see?

Good, now be quiet.
I wish they would hold their breaths..
In fact Thompson invented JIT compiling with this in 1968.
is it evil to try to charge as much as you can? I would argue no. Certainly, in the case where my product is limited, such as when I'm selling my time, I put effort into that. Is it evil to spend time trying to charge more for the same product rather than spending that time making a product that is worth more? maybe. It's certainly not admirable.

I explained in a previous comment that I think not differentiating, and instead competing on price and value can be a good strategy, especially when industry margins are high.
Job Posting - Head Navitas' Online 'Start-up'
I thought I would share this with the community - http://www.advance.org/en/jobs/v/374. The business I work with - Shirlaws Coaching - is linked to a global IP production company called Navitas.

This week Navitas launched its first online products - a suite of business and communication indicators. The opportunity exists for somebody to take the online arm beyond product development and personally drive "the creation of an online community for the mid tier [business] marketplace".

It's not my gig - I'm still building my track record - but I hope to work closely with the person in this role over the coming years. As such, happy to answer any questions or pass feedback along - jaldridge@shirlawscoaching.com.
Did we just turn down TechCrunch 50?
Why do you think these things are peculiar to MIT?
While we're on the subject of benchmarking, has anyone run in to a problem on OS X (Leopard) where you seem to run out of ports, and the benchmark stalls at almost exactly 16,384 (2^16) requests?

The benchmark eventually resumes 10-30 seconds later. It seems OS X can't free up closed ports fast enough.

I've tried this with numerous HTTP servers (including Apache) and both ApacheBench and Siege, so it seems like it's an OS problem.
Oil is not the only source of energy. Granted, it is one of the most convenient, but one could use energy from a fission plant to extract oil sands, etc...

If you don't care about the environment, there are even easier solutions; processes for making gas out of coal have been around since before world war 2.
> Raising cattle uses an enormous amount of fossil fuel.

s/Raising cattle/Raising cattle on corn/
Because of this: "Justin Lee and Oliver Yeh". At a state school, it can be quite difficult to find another person willing to help you build your dreams.
True. But consider also that this has been made two years ago, with 2007 technology.

Edit: Take the camera for instance. The MIT students used a Canon PowerShot A470 (they bought it used from ebay) which costs $120 new and is 7 mega pixels. This guy used a similar camera (Canon PowerShot A70) which was only 3.1 mega pixels and costed $350 when it came out.
Wired's ad-centric, three paragraph article on nine pages leaves much to be desired.

Anywho, anyone want to go halvsies on this?
Sure they are. Any progressive, liberal, green, whatever, person who corners you in a coffee shop and laments how evil farmers are for not doing organic farming. That guy, you know him. He better think it's going to feed the world. I'd rather believe he's stupid than believe he's genocidal.
Gotta admit, it takes guts to turndown an opportunity like that (even if it wasn't a certainty). It's the fine line between 'release early, release often' and 'you only get one chance to make a first impression'.
Want to Sell More E-Tail? List Your Competitors’ Prices, Study Says
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760477
> Instead of storing bits in a database, you could basically subscribe to another's address info.

I believe this is what Plaxo does, no?
Please review the new tarsnap website
I'm decided that the current tarsnap website (http://www.tarsnap.com/) is overly minimalist (this shouldn't come as a great surprise to anyone who has seen it!) so I'm replacing it with a new site which is both more informative and somewhat less ugly.

Before I "go live" with the new website, I'd like to hear if anyone has any constructive feedback; in particular, I'd like to know if there are any informational gaps (either because I haven't put something important onto the site, or if some information I've put onto the site needs to be more easily found) or if the site doesn't render sanely in some web browser(s).

The new site is currently at http://newwww.tarsnap.com/ and if there are no major problems I'll be moving it to www.tarsnap.com later this week.