skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Statements based on speculation are not automatically wrong and so if you wish to _show_ they are wrong then you need to prove it. Your first sentence is specious at best and not really that as even a priori it strikes me as poor logic.

Did you mean no more likely [...] than heterosexual men?

The best stats I can get are from "The Demographics of Same-Sex 'Marriages' in Norway and Sweden" however they don't relate particularly to the Midlands of England in the 1950s. They show that indeed about 34% of homosexual male registered relationships in their study have a 10+year age gap (vs. 9% for heterosexual marriage) but account for this by the greater age of those entering registered homosexual relationships.

So yes "older men with younger" is apparently a more common homosexual pattern [in modern Sweden amongst officially recognised partnerships] but that's not really relevant as we're not considering a population but a specific case - stats don't show anything certain about individual members of a population. So this apparent Ephebophilia may have been a more specific fixation (which was my speculation) - Turing's crush died tragically at 18, the lad he was arrested for having a tryst with was 19.

Like I said, it's speculation. There doesn't appear to be anything ruling it out.

Two side points:

"Normalcy", yes statistics indicate "normalcy", the age gap is unusual. Deviations from normalcy often have interesting phenomena behind them - I had a BBQ this evening, that's unusual, the reason why we chose to sit outside and eat, cooking over charcoal, indicates something about my character.

I don't understand your reference to "torturing young men" what are you getting at there?
Fantastic article, but it was on the front page about a month ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760477
" It doesn't have pattern matching for selective receive, IIRC"

So http://metalua.luaforge.net/ has an implementation of pattern matching as one of it's shipped examples. Do you know if ConcurrentLua could be used with pattern matching. or is it designed such that, as it stands, pm would be useless.
I don't actually buy the line of Peak Oil appearing suddenly and leading to the end of civilization as we know it. I've heard the 'economic frontier' argument before too.

But I don't think anyone thinks there's infinite amount of oil in the ground, so a peak of some sort, at some time is predicted by everyone serious, including the US Department of Energy.

Now, the Hulbert curve only has it's shape because decaying deposits are replaced by less expensive deposits elsewhere. So if there actually is a decline in total deposits, it's logical to expect the decline to no longer be exponential but more gradual. Indeed, a lot of the increased US production is coming from the increased price but it's still limited by the total amount in the ground at any price.

By the way, Moore's law has broken down for processor speeds. It hasn't broken for the other components but without increased speed, more transistors aren't necessarily instantly usable. This, again, won't lead to instant Armageddon but it's problem, Intel can see it's a problem and is working on improved parallel processing - but we know there are serious limits to this. Ironically, huge but not necessarily faster processor are what's needed to do massive simulations of the human brain. But these won't necessarily sell another round of Windows upgrades (at least not tell the simulations work convincingly...)

Anyway, let's not make hysterical doom-sayers lead us to act like there will be no problems in the future.
I was primarily talking about labels, not qualifications, but I do feel they are connected.

There are plenty of people who call themselves "tree doctors" yet medical doctors have no problem with that (and certainly don't go all tribal and True Scotsman about it). Perhaps the difference is that in the public eye, the term doctor is synonymous with the qualification, whilst "engineer" has yet to reach that status?
The increase price of oil is indeed very driven also by massively inflationary US policy.
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.

I find the belief that mega-agricultural conglomerates are at all interested in our long term well-being to be the height of technological arrogance. The market incentives are just not aligned with our interests.

It's not that genetic engineering can't be safely and responsibly leveled, but simply that given the track record of the foods provided by these organizations, I don't see why they will behave particularly responsibility towards our interests in the future.

It's also disturbing that you're attempting to turn the debate into one of classism or racism:

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".

Why is my desire to know exactly what I'm purchasing in any way remotely related to how I feel about people who "aren't just like me" or living in a third world economy?
My dad is very interested in this peak oil movement. While they do have some good points (it's harder to extract the second half of oil from a well, doing the math on the energy it takes to extract a barrel of oil, etc..) they are missing some very important points.

1. Oil is not the only energy source. Sure, it is by far the best and most convenient source for transportation, but outside of transportation, almost all our power needs could be met by electricity. One can obtain electricity from many sources; Nuclear fission being the source I am most excited/hopeful about. Countries like France and Japan already meet almost all of their power needs with fission.

Also, many of the processes for extracting oil that are impractical if you use oil as the energy source to do the extraction, such as oil sands, become practical if you can use energy created by fission or coal or some other cheaper, more plentiful source.

2. oil demand is not inelastic. The automotive market of the last few years should make that clear. Sure, we'd all like giant luxury vehicles, but this is constrained by economics. Not only can we move from 12MPG SUVs to 50MPG compact hybrids, we can drive a lot less. Sure, I am going to drive to work every day; until it starts costing me more than I'm making, at which point I will obviously stop doing so. Oil demand is extremely elastic. I bet that when gas hits the equivalent of $10/gallon (meaning, in today's dollars) you will see the bottom 40-50% of the us population no longer driving.

Sure, I'm not going to be turning my servers off anytime soon, but that's mostly fission and coal, with some natural gas thrown in because California is weird and rich.
Video Games You Can Count On
The problem with that philosophy is there are thousands of "blockbuster" treatments, everything from a simple filling, to a Tylenol would be miraculous if you steeped back a few hundred years.

Finding the right balance between cost and heath is hard, but blaming everything but the blockbusters is the wrong place to start. Two years ago my father went from fine to dead in one week in part because the doctor failed to ask for a single test. He had health inshurance, went to a doctor who liked to avoid extra tests and died. A hundred years ago, dieing at 62, could have been seen as living a long life, but today a simple test and a quick surgery and he could have lived another 20 years in good heath.

PS: If you really want to look for waste in heath care figure out where the money goes. Starting with the payments to your heath insurgence company and how little get's back to actual treatments.
This is like saying, use a micro-framework instead of Struts, .NET, Zend or Rails because of the size of the files.

This is a no-brainer. File size doesn't matter.
Perl 5.10 and up has a pluggable regex engine interface.
As someone who went to a state school for undergrad, worked for a few years, and is currently at MIT for a PhD: Yes. MIT is a magical place like none other.

It's hard to put it more concisely.. The whole school just has an aura of "what the hell, let's try it" and a the professors and financial backing to make it happen.
It's about 10 miles from where I grew up. No one talked about it much. I can't believe I never explored the abandoned superconducting supercollider.
Top notch marketing/PR? ;-)
I can't find information about the balloon. What kind of balloon did they use and where can I buy one?
Where Borlaug and organic farming have differences is modeling sustainability.

As a scientist, I think (based on very little knowledge of him) , Borlaug was interested in sustainability and open to criticism.

The problem of sustainability can be addressed by various forms of science - Borlaug probably doesn't deserve to be a lightening rod. The politicization of agriculture (and the sustainability debate) is industrial farming techniques are sometimes (obviously) in conflict with ecologically "holistic" practices - that is, the model of the systems are different, and both models get things wrong.

My two cents:
Profit clouds science as much as fear or ignorance.
NY Times serving up malware today
I guess folks who depend on advertising, and ad networks, need to be a bit more careful about who they sell ads to.
This seems like a situation where knowing a certain phrase might help. I don't know what that phrase might, but a lawyer or someone else familiar with the medical industry might.

Something like "I will not authorize you to perform this procedure and have notified my physician and lawyer of this, if you perform anything that I have not authorized will result in an expensive lawsuit" or something.

Anyone know what the right terms to use are? It seems in other situations there are magic words that can be used to produce immediate results.
Check the definition of "organic." There is no requirement regarding food additives, save that the additives themselves must also be organic. Nothing is stopping the organic farmers from introducing these additives any more than it compelling the conventional farmers to do so. Whether they do or don't is entirely a matter of goodwill.
So I'm not exactly target market (I paid, yes paid, to upgrade to XP Pro), but I think the new version looks like a much more stylish minimalism that should serve you well.

And any service that lists its prices in picodollars has made me a fan for life.
I can believe American Health care killed your father. The people who have insurance, are afraid to go to the emergency room with chest pain, afraid the pain is gas and they can't afford the high out of pocket costs they have to pay.
Ask HN: Remedy for sagging inspiration?
When you're working on something and just start to feel, what's the point? Is this going anywhere? Will anyone care? Should I just give up?

What do you do to stay inspired?

Do you read something?

Do you have some kind of ritual to get you back on track?

Any inspiration secrets?

I'm having a pretty low day today and could use some hopeful advice.
I believe Mobile Linux is still in use with their MP3-phone hybrids. It uses a customized kernel and a very thin shell; its focus is completely different from that of smartphone OSes.
As a BSD user, I think it would be great if you spoke a bit on your site about your bona fides in that community.

And that you maintain a FreeBSD (only?) port.
I usually tell people, you are not a mathematician, a crazy scientist or lonely sys admin, you are a web developer, go with PHP.
I disagree. I think you are confusing two issues: 'certified organic' and 'local artisan'. I'm in a business right now where I buy a LOT of locally grown fruits and vegetables --- often 1000 lbs a week. I'm in the Bay Area, and I buy at the farmers' markets direct from the growers.

Probably 2/3 of what we buy is certified organic, 1/3 'conventional'. Everything is local, and I'm pretty sure that everything we buy is better than anything flown in to the organic section at Whole Foods. And I'm definitely sure that the certified organic produce is not uniformly better than the non-certified. The differences farm-to-farm, variety-to-variety, and season-to-season are certainly stronger effects.

Perhaps you point instead is that there is a difference between a mass produced tomato flown in from afar and ripened in a chamber and a home-grown tomato picked at the peak of ripeness? And that the tomatoes on the vine at $3.99/lb are often a better facsimile of the latter than the pinkish tennis ball at 99 cents/lb? In which case I'd agree with you. But I'd hesitate to say that this is because it is 'organic'.
Infocom Games Online
fucking horrible list. Doesn't even mention Halo 3: ODST. Yah halo, that game that did 300 mil in a day, remember that?
Mew is a mail reader for Emacs
Because every approach to regex (not "regular expressions", mathematical pedants can come back when they admit that programming has moved on to something different) has advantages and drawbacks. The one presented in this article has advantages in particular highly-contrived situations. The approaches used by popular libraries and languages have advantages in more common real-world situations.
Ask HN: Self-Study or Take a Class in Programming?
I'm a college student pursuing liberal arts studies (econ/political science). I know the basics of CSS and HTML but I want to eventually be able to work on web applications. I've read a lot here about various different learning methods with past Ask HN posts and I'm curious if any of you have opinions on what's better for a new programmer, the classroom environment or self-studying.

The introductory courses at my university are taught with Java. As my academic aims lie outside of CS (and may change depending on my future programming experience), I thought it might be advantageous to learn programming extracurricularly through OpenCourseWare. Have any of you had experience with both? What did you find to be better? If you had the opportunity to take a classroom course, would you?

Thanks to all of you.
Techcrunch did not start hitting the HN front page 10-20 times a day until the last 12 months or so, and Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22techcrunch+50%22) seems to indicate that I'm not the only one who hasn't heard of their conference until this month. In summary: the excitement does not seem to be based on reputation.

I get that the companies that are going want us to think it's important, but why would a startup that's not going hype it up?
Wait for the platform to change? It already did. It's now FOSS and it's called LAMP. You ignorant basterd ;)
Whatever happened to public wi-fi?
bravo!

much better front page. not a tar snap user, but have followed the tarsnap story, and I think this is a good move.
Python is great for small apps or server scripts. For building large-scale enterprise apps, it's a NO-NO. The code can become unmaintainable. I can't say the same for Java, Ruby and PHP apps though.
Over 100 Million Americans Have Smoked Marijuana -- And It's Still Illegal?
Eval-string or eval?
Is virtual world boom our industrial revolution?
Organic vegetables aren't chemically ripened

ALL vegetables without exception ripen because of chemical reactions. I presume you mean that the chemicals that cause ripening in some vegetables weren't put in the vegetables by human agency, but that may not make a difference if they are the same chemicals in either case.

Organic snacks use sugar or cane juice, most non-organic snacks use corn syrup

What is the evidence that this difference has any significance for human health or any other important issue?
List of Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts & Keystrokes
DEADBEEF for the CAFEBABE
ah, the classics.
Four things Star Trek can teach us about Simulation Design
As a BSD user, I think it would be great if you spoke a bit on your site about your bona fides in that community.

On the About page I talk about being a FreeBSD committer, security team member, and Security Officer, and about some of the code I've written in FreeBSD -- is this insufficient?

And that you maintain a FreeBSD (only?) port.

There's also a slackbuild (Slackware), an AUR (Arch Linux), and the tarsnap source code contains debian packaging bits -- so FreeBSD isn't unique in having packaging metadata available for tarsnap.

I plan on providing pre-built packages in the future too -- those will go onto the download page once they exist.
We need to start having a rational discussion about this; I'm surprised, given the level-headedness by which we approach other topics, that we are so unabashedly biased on this one.

Hurrah. I applaud anyone on HN who urges participants to look at evidence and to examine their preconceptions as we discuss issues thoughtfully.
The programmability of a shell just isn't interesting to me. Whenever I start hacking a shell script, it either starts out as just two or three lines or it evolves to the point where I feel like I need a "real" language. At that point, I'll end up hacking it in perl or python.

In the meantime, I'm happy enough with bash.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. WebGL is an immediate mode API and O3D is a retained one.
Everyone has low days. When I do, I just power down and do something else.

I can't imagine letting a low day discourage me. My work is way too important for that.

If you ever think "What's the point," "Is this going anywhere?" "Will anyone care?" or "Should I just give up?", that tells me that you're not sure about how important your project is. Get sure. Is it too important to let a few speed bumps discourage you? Decide. If it's that important, then get back to work. If not, do something else. There's no in between.
Come on. The sky is black, the ground is blue...

And its farther from the ground than I ever was.

Let them brag. If more people build simple affordable stuff that go higher than common aircraft and give them a taste of what space is, I am fine with it. It's a step in the right direction.
Related comments here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=811113
I would much rather buy locally-grown, non-organic produce than organic produce grown in an industrial operation a thousand miles away.

Why? Outside of the arguments of freshness, which could be dealt with by a more efficient distribution mechanism, I don't see any net benefit.

I'll admit that the argument toward supporting local farmers carries little weight with me. Outside of the freshness argument, it strikes me as little more than small-town sentimentalism. There are a number of other industries where we did far better when we dispatched that argument; I'm not yet convinced that food production is any different. I can imagine all sorts of economies of scale that could be exploited, but we have to let the economy scale first.
This one?

http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0303-MAR_20DOLLARS
ALL vegetables without exception ripen because of chemical reactions. I presume you mean that the chemicals that cause ripening in some vegetables weren't put in the vegetables by human agency, but that may not make a difference if they are the same chemicals in either case.

Your point is uselessly pedantic. Most conventional tomatoes are picked from the vine early and are then ripened through the application of ethylene. This produces a less flavorful tomato.

And yes, I'm also aware that arsenic is "all natural".

What is the evidence that this difference has any significance for human health or any other important issue?

Sugar is less sweet, and foods made with it tend to have a more balanced taste. This is something I consider to be an important issue when it comes to food.

My opinion is of course subjective, though popular. The fact is that corn syrup was never added for the flavor. It was substituted for sugar because it's cheaper than sugar.
It seem that financial backing wasn't needed for this project. Isn't the cheap cost the surprising factor here?
On a side note, I am currently reading "Metamagical Themas" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas), written by Douglas Hofstadter, who also wrote the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid".

"Metamagical Themas" is a very good read about a ton of different subjects, from self-referential sentences to Lisp.
Does Your Diet Affect How You Consume Information?
Whether they do or don't is entirely a matter of goodwill.

Not good will, but rather responding to market demand. The 'organic' buyers are more likely to read the ingredients list.
Inside of a Dog - What Dogs See, Smell, and Know
Good points but you could still engineer the plants to: grow in saline conditions (I think that is being pursued), over wider range, to resist drought or flood better, defeat pests and blights (rust was mentioned in the article), and come back from being downed by weather. The goal being to more frequently achieve maximal yield by increasing the range and durability of the crop.

The last bit would be to eliminate the need to sow the crop by having wheat be a perennial. That would greatly reduce the energy input to the crop.

Plenty more to do.
If no fossils are needed, where does the carbon come from?

Carbon is a chemical element, chemical elements just don't appear magically to random places. Carbon is too light to exist in the bedrock by pure geological reasons, some sedimentation is needed.
Neither of you have referenced supporting papers or research. Which one of you is correct?
Netflix prize tribute: Recommendation algorithm in Python
re: Haber: increasing the limit is both a good and bad thing. maybe it provides more people to tackle the problem of the limit, and maybe it makes the problem of the limit even more tragic.
Problem is, just because people have cried wolf twice doesn't mean that the third time the wolf won't be at the door. And the long-term absolute price of oil is steadily rising: there's a boom, which you note, then a bust, which usually leaves oil at a higher "steady" price than before the boom.
Are Impossibility Proofs Possible?
The Hugh Hefner syndrome – how a good-looking partner makes you more attractive
Looks good here. Looks like a snap to use (NPI).
"It seems restricting access to content is not the best bet. There is someone else out there who will provide the information more conveniently."

Few people do what you do. Creating an account and logging in once is not very difficult, so it's not much of a "restriction" on the content. I'd bet they make far more money using registration data than they lose from people like you seeking other sources.
is this insufficient?

Nope. It sounds like exactly that for which I was looking. I couldn't (or rather, didn't) find it because I thought the indented bits under the Tarsnap label were telling me which things were included on the page I was on. I know, for example, that I saw News there.. and also News included just above the fold of the page I was on.

In fact, I suppose realized later that they were sub-menu items. When I went to the Design page and clicked on the Security link, I recognized that the menu on the left changed. I'm pretty sure it would not have occurred to me to click on them directly, however.

I spent maybe 90 seconds trying to find info about your work and the company, unsuccessfully. I don't know if this is, in any way, useful feedback. I mostly seem to be pointing out my inadequacies as a user, not providing any solutions to my so-called problems.

FreeBSD isn't unique in having packaging metadata

I looked on the Download page and expected to be told (especially around the time you mention that BSD systems usually have the OpenSSL header files already installed) that I could also find it in sysutils/tarsnap.

I hope my comment proves more helpful than it appears from my end.
It's definitely an improvement, but still looks unprofessional. Good enough for now if you want to keep working on the code.