skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I imagine that it's useful as part of your thermoregulation if your climate is cold.

Cold muscles don't work as well, so your reaction time from "sleep to fight" would be improved I guess.

As calories have become more plentiful, the selection pressure against the waste has decreased, allowing something which is selected-for with babies to persist into adulthood.
Ask HN: What are your CraAazy Business Ideas?
Sub-reddit for those crazy business ideas you have that you'd never actually pursue IRL.<p>Upvote those you'd like to see implemented!
The problem has always been convincing clients that they’re unnecessary. Maybe this will help, but SEO is such a cargo-cult culture that I rather doubt it…
If we were still hunting for our food in the woods that wouldn't be an advantage and that may explain why in the cause of evolution, getting rid of brown fat with growing age, was a fitness criteria.
In our "developed world" however, there is such a large availability of calories, that some people get more than enough. For those, being able to burn more, would be an advantage. Unless they are planning to go on a polar expedition anytime soon :)

I agree with your general sentiment though. Whether you could burn 500 calories more or eat 500 calories less isn't much of a difference. However, a drug that makes you burn 500 more calories and allows you to enjoy more eating is probably something that you can sell to a lot of people. Telling them to get their act together and eat right isn't that easily translated into profit.
Rubber Flooring, Synthetic Turf | Gym Floors, Batting Cage Nets
Rubber Weight Room Flooring, Synthetic Turf, Artificial Turf, Batting Cages, Soccer, Baseball Equipment, Rubber, Tiles, Gym Flooring, Gym, Equipment, Astros.
Most Valuable Global Brands Recovering Faster Than S&P 500
I would like to see the same comparison with the top 100 tech startups (at least those 3 years old).
Talk with Rich Hickey: Time is the New Memory
Fantastic thanks for the link
This looks pretty dated - both the technique and the browser support. Perhaps of interest as an historical document?
I like Douglas Crockford's opinions and advice on many aspects of JavaScript:

http://javascript.crockford.com/

Conventions:

http://javascript.crockford.com/code.html

and his book "JavaScript The Good Parts" is well worth a read, even to experiences JS developers

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0596517742/wrrrldwide...
When robots are making robots that make our stuff, noone will be able to buy any of the cheap stuff, except the people that controls the goods.

Labor is the only good most people have, and it's worth is declining. The previous generation could maintain the same lifestyle, doing less work. For years the rich are getting richer and the poor get poorer, but the last years the middle class is shifting to poor as well.

The more "intangible" sorts of work are only getting paid, after the basics needs are paid, and thanks to the internet people are sharing those skills for free.
Could it just be friction?
Which variant of hungarian notation do you prefer?
The syntax is bit radical, I spent like 10 minutes online before getting why

1> 1+1

returns nothing, its because its missing a . (i.e. a dot) it should be

1> 1+1 .
2

which returns 2 as expected
oh! which school did this scientist study? he is bad at physics! If ice on poles starts melting what else does he expect? it is obvious that temperature of sea will decrease! point is water level is increasing and not that "temperature is increasing"
Would you trust your application to run in production on a Cygwin machine?
Not an economist, but I have recently been thinking about it. Probably there are lots of factors, but it seems to me that people are resourceful (if they are unemployed, they'll seek ways to survive/find employment). Also I think they'll tend to only have children when it seems economically viable to do so. As an example, consider coal miners (they've gone out of business in my country). I suspect as long as mining was a viable line of work, they continued having children and producing more coal miners. Now that it has gone away, there are lots of unemployed ex-miners for a while. But I suspect those who fail to find other sources of income won't have that many children, so eventually that "strain" of unemployment will just phase out of society. In the end, only those people with viable jobs survive.
That cleared it up for me; thanks for the information.
Path dependence in case of Google, Amazon, smartphones, websites? What kind of 'path' did they have behind them that would make them unix-dependent?
I thought that the whole point of venture capitol was that it is a Faustian bargain. You sell your soul for some short term money and thrills, the VC gets to come in and shut you down right as you are really about to make it big.

C'mon VCs, crush some dreams and make the world the uncaring place that my preconceptions demand it be.
It looks great, but is browser support sufficient? I don't care about IE5 that much, but has everybody upgraded to Firefox 3 yet?
From Mac Portable to MacBook Pro: 20 years of Apple laptops
Halo 3 ODST: Released Today 22nd September at PVR Super Size Screen Event
Isn't that what l4linux does? ( http://l4linux.org/ )
As much as I would like a monitor display in my contact lenses, somehow I think the public will find other uses for it first. Prepare to meet people in clubs soon with really shiny (and animated) eyes.
Kernighan and Mashey mentioned in "The UNIX Programming Environment" (1981): "Success or failure often depends on nontechnical factors, whose importance often goes unrecognized by those who evaluate systems on purely technical terms." And they go on to mention some of these nontechnical factors, such as having started out on the DEC PDP-11.

In Ken Thompson's Turing Award speech, he claimed: "I can't help but feel that I am receiving this honor for timing and serendipity as much as technical merit. UNIX swept into popularity with an industry-wide change from central main frames to autonomous minis. I suspect that Daniel Bobrow (1) would be here instead of me if he could not afford a PDP-10 and and had to "settle" for a PDP-11."
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

Similar fate apparently happened due to the specialization of the MIT AI Lab's ITS: "Of course, ITS wasn't portable by any stretch of the imagination. It was an operating system in the old school of development, and it died rather suddenly when DEC announced that they were discontinuing the PDP-10 and its descendants in favor of the PDP-11 and VAX systems."
http://www.crackmonkey.org/unix.html

(Personally, I only use a UNIX because it's a tool of the trade. It's free, or built into Macs. I don't enjoy it, but I use it, and found the _Unix Hater's Handbook_ refreshing.)
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/weise/uhh-download.html
See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html, particularly the section "I'm Hungary", for a comparison between two different styles of Hungarian notation.
I never thought about why people want to lose weight; I just assumed it was so that they can be healthy, but I suppose it could be entirely superficial for a sizeable crowd. Obviously, the health benefits of something like this would be minimal, but it would be great if someone just wanted to eat more junk food and not put on extra weight.
&totse users ran tests of zfs-fuse back in the day and found that it was actually noticeably slower than native ext3. From that, I'm inclined to argue the opposite: filesystems should almost definitely be in-kernel. Granted, their tests were on Linux, not on a modern microkernel.
How about, making people switch of autopilot and actually making them think leads to better behavior?

And then notice that removing road signs, traffic rules, etc. is a big change that makes people think. In a place that currently has no rules, you'd probably see better behaviour if you did introduce strict rules.
Yahoo seeking up to $500 mln for small business unit
An observation.

He says: "I realised that the 'background hum' of
work emanating from my always-connected iPhone was
a better way of describing how I now work – and live.
It means I can send an important email while I'm
fetching milk from the shop – or read RSS feeds while
waiting for a train. And I can Twitter while waiting
for my kids to get tired of the climbing frame in the
park.

"There is no more 'balance' any more – as if there
ever was – because what I am working on and interested
in swaps from second to second as I use my iPhone. The
internet is now an all-pervasive background 'hum'
which never goes away unless I am out of battery or
out of wireless signal, which is very rare."

This is someone, and journalists in general are, people who don't actually make things. In the PG sense they are not makers, they are managers, and this quoted section shows it.

When programming you can't afford this constant hum, when doing math - real math, research-type math - you can't be emailing and surfing and twittering, etc. You have to be immersed in the problem and get into flow.

Beware of following the journalists. They may show what the public might be doing in 5 years, but the people who do the work, the people who create things for others to use, won't.
I wouldn't use Fuse as your benchmark. All of plan9's filesystems are userspace (except the one that uses a dedicated machine). They can saturate 10gbe so your objections really concern Fuse and it's hosts.
And now formatted for easier reading ...

* The Age of Wonder: How the romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of Science by Richard Holmes (Harper Press)

* What the Nose Knows: The science of scent in everyday life by Avery Gilbert (Crown Publishers)

* Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (Harper Perennial)

* Decoding the Heavens: Solving the mystery of the world's first computer by Jo Marchant (William Heinemann)

* The drunkard's walk: How randomness rules our lives by Leonard Mlodinow (Penguin)

* Your Inner Fish: The amazing discovery of our 375-million-year-old ancestor by Neil Shubin (Penguin)
Ask HN: Is it OK to ask how a company is funded during an interview?
Medium-sized start-up, a few years old. Is it okay, when interviewing for a developer slot, to ask how the company is funded (whether they're bootstrapped or have raised VC)?
If only I had ____ I would succeed
It kept that from Prolog. Which is also responsible for atoms needing to begin with a lowercase letter if they're not quoted, and variables with an uppercase.
there is a getting started tutorial here: http://erlang.org/download/getting_started-5.4.pdf
Ask HN: clojure and JVM
Is there quick way to start clojure + JVM? I would like to start with simple GUI and then move to serial port manipulation. Then to connecting database. My background is electronics and I have never use java before. Any help is appreciated.
The description I read for it is "ant turd tokens". Erlang is cool and quite powerful, but realizing you put a , where you needed a . can be frustrating, especially when cutting and pasting code around.
The problem with traffic rules is that (at least here in germany) some people don't try to avoid accidents because they think it's not their fault if someone oversees a sign for example. Eleminating rules brings the responsability back to everyone..
A microkernel is in theory not bloated. The whole point is that you put a lot of the 'features' off into the separate modules, meaning that pretty much the only thing that the kernel takes care of is process sync. (Process sync happens in both monolithic and microkernel designs).

The problem is that no one has figured out how to properly stratify the design so that the process sync code is suitably general for all of the different modules, and is still efficient. (Efficiency, not bloat, is the problem with microkernels).

Linux being a microkernel is orthogonal to any bloat situation.
> If anything, a microkernel is always more bloated because of the extra code needed to do all the process sync.

there are more than two types.

We have fretted recently because the plan9 kernel is struggling to fit on a floppy disk when loaded up as an installer with most things turned on.

The whole of plan9, kernel, userspace, 386 binaries & sources for 6 architectures fit into 200Mb uncompressed (and the whole shooting match compiles in 15 minutes).

Linux is a re-implementation of an OS that was already considered dead by it's maintainers.

"Not only is UNIX dead, it's starting to smell really bad." Rob Pike circa 1991.

see also "Sometimes when you fill a vacuum, it still sucks."
Does anyone have a reference for his claim "Available estimates show that the welfare loss induced by global warming will be just $3 trillion per year by 2100."?
Is it really possible to implement the full functionality of the Linux kernel in such a way that it would be significantly smaller? Obviously, there's bloat from bad code, but would a redesign of the kernel be seriously useful, or just a waste of time? As a (possible) comparison, is NetBSD's kernel any smaller?

It'd be nice to know if Linus had anything to say to that effect - it might lead to a more productive discussion than waxing lyrical about the wonders of microkernels.
Technical question: He states that you should look at a pattern, look away, and then check to see if it changes. Supposedly it will change because your memory can only hold 7 +- 2 bits. Now if your memory is too small to keep this supposed pattern consistent, how the hell are you supposed to memorize this pattern for a consistency check? I.e. you need your memory to assert that your memory failed. Is there a separate memory he is talking about here? Even if that technique worked, couldn't the pattern stay the same just based off the chance that you get horizontal/vertical stripes twice in a row?

Sorry if I'm nitpicking, maybe my cs theory courses just ruin these things.
Reminds me of a great Alain de Botton quote: http://twitter.com/alaindebotton/status/2781110491
Try eclipse + plugin to write in clojure - it gives you interactive console to explore clojure.

Download eclipse, then install:
http://code.google.com/p/counterclockwise/wiki/Documentation
Blog prototyping with Emastic - CSS Framework using the Golden Proportion
I've had many lucid dreams, though I've never been able to hang on for very long. I'll try the spinning technique next time for sure.

If this interests you, you might also be interested in "binaural beats".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binaural_beats

The most famous use of "bb" is probably the audio series produced by The Monroe Institute.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monroe_Institute

If you can get past the "new age" stigma of TMI, they seem to be surprisingly scientific in their endeavors. They have audio series for LD and other consciousness exercises. The idea is that binaural beats can be used to alter your brainwave frequency and help you enter altered states of consciousness (hack your brain).

The first objective is "mind awake, body asleep", which is exactly what it sounds like. It involves relaxation techniques, "resonant tuning" (which is basically chanting like a monk), an affirmation of your goal (to expand your consciousness etc...) and then deeper relaxation.

I have achieved this state a few times, but never had the discipline to keep up with the exercises. The few times it happened, the initial feeling was that my body parts had all melded together and I couldn't feel where one part stopped and the other started. Then, I felt a peculiar detachment and a very intense feeling of "energizing" which I can only describe as something similar to holding a 9volt to your tongue, but all over your body. At that point I would always become too excited and "wake up".

The main reason I didn't persist with the exercises is because chanting and wearing headphones when you go to bed isn't very pleasant for the person laying next to you. The other roadblock is discipline. If you want to have LDs on purpose, you really do have to stick with the dream journal and make a conscious effort to make it happen and keep up with it.

My LDs were natural and not the result of practice, but were definitely very cool. I know what it's like to fly like Superman. :)
> either Linux is poorly designed

I take offense at the statement "Linux is designed" :)

Of course it is not optimal. Nothing else is either. How can we make it better?
That existed in 1992?
Shameless self promotion, but we're a Django specialist host: http://kutoken.com/
A $1 Million Research Bargain for Netflix, and Maybe a Model for Others
Yes. If they're a few years old, they should be used to being asked this question by prospective hires -- some developers won't join until a startup is VC-funded (and some others want a bigger stake and won't join if it's already VC-funded).
Why your gut is more ethical than your brain
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=460693

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=546444

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8bhy6/do_you_te...

http://www.myintervals.com/blog/2009/04/09/the-remote-web-de...

http://www.writebetterbits.com/2009/02/working-remotely-succ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614215

(hit search engines, searchyc.com for "telecommute" "remote worker" "distributed developer team"
Thomas Sowell told a similar tale about himself as an undergrad at Harvard. He had transferred from Howard, and was on the way to flunking out do to poor work habits. Some quotes from p.118 fo his "A Personal Odyssey" (hardcover):

"My work at Howard was a further handicap, for that experience gave me no inkling of the kind of time and effort required at Harvard, and in fact lulled me into a false sense of security. I thought I was being a conscientious student, so I was shocked one day when Nort [his roommate] suddenly said to me:

"Tom, when are you going to stop goofing off and get some work done?"

"Goofing off! I didn't know what he was talking about. But I learned the hard way when the mid-term grades came out."

This was about 1956. He pulled his shit together and graduated magna cum laude.
Why not? Thousands of applications run on Cygwin just fine. There's no reason to mistrust Cygwin more than you mistrust, say, MFC.

However in most cases you can delpoy to a more optimal platform (actual UNIX).
The Geek "Must Do Before You Die" Checklist
I'm just showing that some points that were true in 1992 aren't now.
... and as other nations -- even those we don't think of as especially prone to censorship, like Australia -- have started to apply to the internet

You make it sound like blanket Internet censorship has already begun in Australia. This is not the case. Firstly you have to understand that the "clean feed" idea that the Australian Government has been bandying about since they were elected has more to do with political manoeuvring than any desperate desire for censorship. Certain key conservative independents are enamoured with the idea and the government generally needs their support to pass controversial legislation.

The "clean feed" is wildly unpopular with Australian industry and the public. Many grass roots organisations have quickly taken up the fight against it and some of Australia's largest ISPs have even spoken out publicly[1]. The government said that industry was misinformed or some such crap, but the damage had been done.

Last reports spoke of a trial going ahead involving some Australian ISPs, using a small test sized blacklist. This blacklist was subsequently leaked and just hammered further nails into the coffin of the "clean feed" when it was discovered that the blacklist contained many sites of types that were not meant to be censored[2]. The government back-peddled, saying the blacklist was not the "official" list or some such crap, but the damage had been done.

There has not been a peep out of the government about this censorship business for months now since the leaking of the blacklist. I think and hope they've decided that the idea is far too controversial to pursue. If they do ever get back onto it, you can bet that they will encounter even more resistance than before.

The only thing that has ensured the "clean feed" is not permanently dead are the hysterical "won't somebody please think of the children!" cries coming from those who have no understanding of the technology involved and desperately wish to impose their own social standards on the rest of us. Those with vested interests choose to exploit these sentiments and only those who have not bothered to inform themselves of the real issues find them compelling.

So please don't offhandedly cite the boogy man of blanket Internet censorship in Australia to strengthen your argument. It's far from a forgone conclusion and if I had to bet, I'd say it won't come to pass.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com.au/insight/communications/soa/ISP-level...

[2] http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/03/19/1237054961100.html
Rather than bringing out the old monolithic vs microkernel chestnut, let's hear some realistic ideas on how to cut down the bloat.

Does anyone know how much redundant code is in Linux right now? Would finding, isolating, generalising and merging it be a good way to start? I know of examples of this happening, e.g. libata taking over a lot of the old 'ide' drivers; the many attempts at unifying the various WLAN subsystems and drivers.
I ask as much as I can about the financial situation of a company. At worst they can decline to talk about something. At best you get a much better idea of what's going on. In any case it probably leaves a good impression - that you understand it's a business and want to know about how it functions.
I also worry somewhat about that. I did learn to do some lucid dreaming in the past, but did stop it again after some weeks.

First I found it already harder after the first few successes to get into the lucid state. Like my mind finding more and more clever excuses telling me in dreams why I'm not dreaming despite obvious dream-like things happening. So some sub-conscious part of me obviously wasn't really wanting the lucid dreaming. Also dreams started to get more intense - which isn't always a good thing as a waking up from a cruel dream can mess up your thinking seriously for the rest of the day.

Then there is also the part that to get into lucid dreams you have to think a lot about dreams.That simply costs time, especially if your job is already about thinking (like programming).

And certainly we still don't know enough what dreams are actually for. We know it has to do with learning - but there are also theories that it has to do with forgetting unimportant things. Messing that process up might certainly have disadvantages.

Still... if I ever have enough time again to really train it I will probably give it another try. It seems like one of the very few ways we have to inspect our own mind and I'm just too curious to not want to do that.
Different account, but OP here. (I've lost my password for the original account, and evidently HN does not have a password reset function.)

For what it's worth, for the time being I've gone with a prominent ajaxy Feedback "drawer" in the lower right corner of every page: a bit of text and a form by which users can send us a message. Similar but not quite the same as the User Voice tabs.

When closed, the drawer simply says "Feedback?" in big, yellow on red letters. When open, the copy is describes the site as a "sneak preview release".

Hopefully this is prominent enough that users will see the message at one point or another, but without introducing a gateway, splash or interstitial page.
Lessons from the Adult Entertainment Industry
I think I have nothing against global warning.
I hope my money won't get spent on it.
Absolutely - the only people who won't ask such questions are first-timers who are just in love with the idea of working for a startup (for whichever reason). Ask. And don't let them snowball you with the whole, "We'll give you x shares" bit either. "x shares" is meaningless unless you know how many shares the company has outstanding.
Load Balancing on the Inside
Microsoft's Virtual World Presence Moves to ReactionGrid
What's so silly about these comments?

Edit: keywords were not an invention of the SEO industry, btw.