skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't have to believe that GMO companies are do-gooders ...

They're not. They're corporations.

As a corporation, their primary incentive is, correctly and necessarily, profit -- not people. If that coincides with "do-good", then they do good. If it doesn't, then they don't.

There's plenty of historical precedent here -- take, for instance, the research into genetic use restriction technology as to require re-purchase of seed stock or a chemical activator every year. The work was shelved due to widespread outcry from farmers and consumers, which directly leads to my next point.

... Because only people rich like you will be able to choose the non-GMO variety, because you are undermining the development of safe GMO foods with that label, and because without GMO foods large numbers of poor people will starve.

So if I want to know what's in my food and how it was produced, I'm a rich American undermining the good of the mankind and causing the starvation of poor people everywhere? That's certainly a bold argument.

Instead, why doesn't the blame lie with GMO organizations that engaged (and continue to engage) in behavior that does not appear to be in our direct interests?
I'm a bit torn due due to the U.S.'s need for a better energy policy and development, but I have to agree with your concern regarding noise pollution. It is absurd, what some people think is their right to inflict on their neighbors, and upon every block they pass down with their subwoofer or straight pipes.

Perhaps these concerns with regard to residential windmills are yet another aspect/reflection of the poor outcome of having a lack of an effective public energy policy and initiative. Communities and governments refuse to address the problem in a coordinated fashion. Everyone ends up "doing their own thing" and, all too often, the neighbors be damned.

Noise pollution has remained a hidden environmental degradation and health risk. Hidden in plain sight.
Apropos of nothing the age of consent in the UK for homosexuals was 21 until 1994 I think - your first clause is a little weird perhaps you mean "men of majority, adults".

Turing chose chemical castration in preference to prison (I think the term would have been 2 years). Given his knowledge of biology and chemistry and that people on-line have told me he was open about his homosexual preference (which is doubtful given his fiancée didn't know until after they were engaged despite working with him and knowing him intimately outside of work), anyway given those two points why didn't he choose prison?

He was convicted of a crime because he admitted to performing acts which were illegal - (at least after and probably before 1954 IIRC) it was also illegal to bugger anyone (or animal!) and an admission of that would have presumably led him to the same sentence (according to the statute), loss of clearance and job the only difference being he wouldn't of been offered hormone therapy ("organo-therapy")as an alternative.

Unrelated but I also only just found out that he is Alan M Turing OBE FRS having been honoured by the Queen for his war efforts and made a Fellow for his maths accomplishments. The recent news made me think he'd been blanked.
I don't think it does -- the receive function only takes a timeout[1]. If it did pattern matching, it'd probably take a table of potential patterns, or a table array of pattern->functions, or somesuch.

After wondering before, I just checked the source. In message.lua, receive just takes an optional timeout. It'd be easy to have it take an optional function argument that tests each message in turn (since it's just a list of messages, modified in place), and returns a true if that message should currently be used. I'll test and submit a patch for it later. Not as flexible as pattern matching, but PM would be better off in the base language. As for integrating Metalua's PM with selective receive, I'm not sure.

[1]: http://concurrentlua.luaforge.net/reference.html
How many people still use perl in web scripting?
I dug out my old spidering hacks book and am starting to build a backend of a mashup in perl and was wondering how many hackers are using it.
See my last sentence above. The connection of organic and not-messed-about is indirect - the same buyers demand both characteristics. Adam Smith gave a good explanation of such "goodwill".
This article is less interesting than the original, mostly because most of the stuff he gets isn't all that outrageous or interesting. Of course the hotel staff will bring you random objects for $20, and a stripper doesn't care if you want to talk about your dog. It's only interesting on those odd occasions where you get something which is worth, in some sense, more than $20.

The final paragraph, though, about the power of calling service staff by their names, is is interesting. Maybe I should try that. Anyone got any experience with habitually learning and using names (or just reading off their nametags)?
I suspect that the doctors at this hospital would be well under the quota you speak of. Remember, the author suggested the hospital might lose it's accredition for this type of surgery since they didn't do enough of them.
The problem was never the application, but the file format.

The trick is to make sure everyone uses ODF, at which point I don't really care how they edit it (much like I don't care what text editor people use to change basic text files). If someone prefers Microsoft Office, they should still be able to use it.
Only in the sense that Python is written in C. Tornado has a C module to expose the epoll system call on older versions of Python, but it's not needed at all with Python 2.6.
Palo Alto Hacker House - Now Seeking Replacements
As a YC co-founder, I was interested in the Hacker House because other people shared an interest in start-ups, programming, design, and technology. I personally had a great experience in the house--the place was empty during the day, so it wasn't too distracting. I would certainly recommend living here if you're trying to live lean, we'd love to keep the Hacker House going.
If anyone ever wonders why it's important not to "standardize" on any one program, innovations like these are a good example.

Continued kudos to the little guys (Opera, Mozilla, Apple) for actually doing something useful with the browser. And Microsoft, I'm tired of hearing the word "innovation" from you.
That comparison is like saying that when someone gets diagnosed with diabetes, they should preemptively amputate their feet so as to avoid trouble with them later.
I do like "online backups for the truly paranoid" I think it gets the concept out nicely, but I remember the first time I looked at tarsnap being slightly confused about the mechanism. I don't feel like I'm much help because I can't tell what clicked when I suddenly felt comfortable with the idea.

The security part doesn't need to be anything more than a nod toward that core. Maybe something along the lines of:

Bomb-proof backup in two commands:
<generate a key as simply as possible>
<backup some files>

Nothing terribly fancy but putting a glimpse of the exact product right on the front page seems good. A user can digest that there's (a) encryption (b) online backups (c) a nice pricing scheme in all of about 30 seconds.
Looks much better. I would suggest some simple tweaks to make the box borders drop into the background slightly and stop competing with the text so much:

change the current css to something like this:

tarsnap.css line 107:

div.box h3 {
border-color: #DDDDDD;

tarsnap.css line 91:

div.box {
...
border: 1px solid #CCCCCC;

Maybe also change the 'Start using tarsnap now!' box header from pastel red (for stop) to pastel green (for go):

change tarsnap.css line 121:

div.box h3.cta {
...
background: #A5F5A5 none repeat scroll 0 0;

I would also think about giving that boxes content div a background-color: #D5F4D5 or something, to make the call to action a tiny little bit stronger.
Get unlimited calling and possible text with google voice app
(Most of the following consists of niggles. This will give the impression that I think worse of the site than I actually do. Sorry.)

The message sent by the design has changed from "Absolutely no effort has gone into designing this; I have other priorities" (see also, e.g., Craigslist, Drudge Report, useit.com) to "I thought this could do with a bit of thought about design, so I sat down for half an hour and hacked together a style sheet". This may or may not be an improvement.

Purely superficial visual-stylistic remarks (important note: I am not a graphic designer or anything; and I've looked at your pages using exactly one web browser on exactly one machine):

I think there are too many rules (mostly box borders), which are too prominent and too close to one another and to the text. And, generally, not enough whitespace.

I tried moving the boxes about 1em further apart, putting the text within the boxes a uniform 1em from the edges, and changing the borders from #000 to #999 (and #ccc for the rule between the box header and the main content) and I think it was a definite improvement. They still look, well, awfully boxy, but changing that would mean a pile more work.

The hover highlighting for your navigation sidebar would be greatly improved, I think, by changing the background (e.g., to the same as for a.current -- that "doesn't work" for the link representing the current page, but that may be a feature rather than a bug) instead of adding a border.

The majority of commercial websites seem to use sans-serif faces for most of their text. I like serifs :-), but there is something to the argument that they don't work well on the crappy low-resolution monitors we all have to put up with and you might find that, say, adding font-family: sans-serif and (something like) line-height: 140% to div.box gives a more "professional" look. You may or may not care about this. For some reason, I find that reducing the contrast just a bit (color: #333; you wouldn't want this for the headings) also has this effect. This may all just be because any change away from default settings produces the impression that more effort has gone into the design, or something.

Marginally less superficial comments:

On the About page, you should probably make "portsnap" and "FreeBSD Update" into links.

In addition to not being a graphic designer, I am also not a lawyer; but I wonder whether your legal page needs to say explicitly that the "Why?"s aren't part of the legal agreement.

Too many parentheses on the "Utility" page.

On the why-picodollars page, you probably mean 2^-40, not 2^(-30).

On the why-10^9 page, you claim that nothing other than RAM is addressed in hardware. This is, of course, not true. You might consider replacing "RAM" with "memory", or something.

On the scrypt page, PBKDF2 and bcrypt should be links.

It's a pity that the Why? links bounce the user to a new page. (Especially on the accounts page, which has forms on it.) You might consider some AJAXy nonsense to avoid this, but it's probably about ten times more trouble than it's worth.
Congrats Justin Lee! I was in your CS class senior year of Bellaire. ;-)
"At the present time, tarsnap does not support Windows... and does not have a graphical user interface." ... "[Tarsnap] attained profitability in February 2009."

This is really inspiring. Congratulations. Goes to show that if you make something genuinely useful, even non-paying computer users take out their wallets.

Now for a few comments on the look of the site (which I think is pretty good overall, considering your current target audience).

I suggest turning off the full justification in the text boxes. Ragged right lends itself to much cleaner inter-word spacing.

Try to make the text boxes have the same margins on all four sides. With large top-bottom and small left-right margins, they look unbalanced.

I personally would prefer a menu strip along the top of the page to the menu bar you have. Several reasons for this. One, there's a lot of wasted space below the menu box. Two, I am not a fan of the indented submenus. If you make a menu strip along the top with a secondary strip for the submenus, I think it would make the entire site look more balanced. You should even consider tweaking your content to eliminate the submenu altogether, although that may be easier said than done. If you can pull it off, though, perhaps by putting some pages together with others, you will make it easier to grasp the contents of the site at a glance.

Finally, what is the proper capitalization? Is it "tarsnap" or "Tarsnap"? Make up your mind and be consistent. If you settle on "tarsnap", do not hesitate to use the lowercase form as the first word of a sentence. It's a small thing, but I think it clarifies the branding.
Are you just burnt out? When you're low on inspiration, taking a day to do everything but work can do wonders. Get out the house, see some friends.
had a fun time living in the hacker house this summer, the house was pretty quiet during the day since most people worked at funded start-ups with offices. that allowed us to concentrate during the day, and throughout much of the night.
Are you always this angry and pointless in your blog?
Discover Windows Vista for editing and sharing photos
It's nice to see people still remember BeOS.

I never had a chance to use it, but it looked like there was something special about it. Did anyone here own a BeOS system?
Whether or not you like that philosophy in general, and despite your father's tragedy, it is extremely appropriate for spinal surgery. Spinal surgery costs a lot of money, frequently goes very badly, and even "successes" tend to be temporary and are followed in a few years by being worse off.

This is why in the mid-90s the Agency for Health Care Policy Research (AHCPR) looked at the subject and concluded that back surgery was inadvisable if any other options were available. Unfortunately for the AHCPR back surgeons are a fairly well off group, got the AMA on their side, and the result was that Congress nearly destroyed the AHCPR. The remnants have learned not to issue politically controversial opinions, no matter how well-founded in fact they may be. Thus a well-meaning attempt to actually evaluate expensive medical treatments for effectiveness ended.

Incidentally experts claim that the vast majority of the gains in life expectancy over the last 150 years have been due to improvements in public health, not medicine. Each of vaccination, sanitation and clean water supplies has done more to contribute to longevity than any medical advance you care to name, including antibiotics. Yet people are unaware of the contribution of public health. I find this odd.
Enjin.com brings platform out of Beta - A social website creator for gamers
Enjin.com is an online platform for gamers, providing a free to use online Content Management System for website creation, member management, social networking, and gaming profiles. Since beta release in March 2009, over ten thousand websites have been created supporting over 30,000 users.
What concerns are those?
His examples tend to focus on sources of data. Arguably, a desktop program doesn't have to care where its data comes from, and it doesn't even directly need web features to be smart.

For instance, what is the difference, really, between using address book data that's entered entirely manually by the user, and data that may have been partially synchronized from somewhere on the web? As long as it ends up in the format the program expects, it can appear "smart". The program itself doesn't need a sync feature, as long as something can sync that understands its formats.

So the issue, to me, is that programs just need more open data formats, and there need to be more handy services (like sync programs) that deal with those formats.
Not having to deal with Apache is its own reward :)

Seriously, having a self-contained server is often nice, and the async support would be useful if you need to do long-polling or make http requests to other sites (e.g. making an API call to Facebook or Twitter).
Stuff like this makes me want to make the jump (from vim). There are _cats_ on the front page.
Think of the super-powers you missed out on ....
I find that Fish is better for interactive use. It has as-you-type syntax highlighting and indentation, and the tab completion tends to be better.
If they could pay their workers nothing and get new ones when they were too sick to work; if they could do more clear cutting of endangered forest to reduce costs; if they could manipulate the markets more to make the poor give more to the rich ... they'd be even better capitalists ...
Scheme: The Swine before Perl
This is an older article. It seams to list a few ways that Fish attempts to improve on older shells, but appears to be a little out of date.

Fish has a nice design document that gtive a better understanding of what it is about:
http://fishshell.org/user_doc/design.html

Fish's real advantages isn't so much it's list of features, but the fact that they come pre-configured. That, and the fact that Fish sacrafices backwards compatiblity with other shells to make a cleaner command language and a more manageable environment. I like being able to configure an environment variable without tinkering with my .bashrc or .profile. Granted, I can't easily reasonably install it on the solaris machines at work, but it doesn't make my home computing environment much nicer.
I posted a couple of hacks for fish here:
http://christopherolah.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/a-couple-fis...
Sure. I was making a statement about MIT, not this project.
DailyBooth (YC S09) ready to hire an exceptional engineer
DailyBooth is a rapidly growing social network based in the bay area. We're about ready to make our first hire so we're looking for an exceptionally talented engineer to join the team.

If interested, please email jobs@dailybooth.com with your resume attached and any important details you'd like to include in the body of the email.

--

Qualifications:

* Thorough knowledge of PHP and MySQL.

* Understands how to write scalable code.

* Can quickly learn new languages when required.

* Understands and interacts with social media.

* Can work well in a team environment.

* Above all, an all around excellent engineer.

--

Advantages:

* Has previously worked as an engineer responsible for scaling.

* Can act as the system admin when needed.
Good thing they put up everything behind a registration wall.
Sadly, as with kids and sweets, IMO the market doesn't demand what is best for it (and everyone else).

Otherwise Wal-Mart products would be as cheap as they could be whilst still being made to last and be repaired and low impact, low energy, etc. - all products would be traded in a way that workers were not paid immorally low wages. McDonalds would sell food that is good enough to keep you healthy rather than being carefully chemically balanced to be good enough to bring you back next time (high sugar, high salt, high fat, strong marketing). Exxon would be investing not only in ways to let you give them money more quickly but hugely into increasing fuel efficiency and alternative transport systems that would use renewable resources.
The screenshots don't make it look all that special ... looks sort of like old Windows. The logo is really cool, though.

Hopefully I'm wrong, and somebody can enlighten me?
"(02) It has a propensity to make the richer richer and the poorer poorer."

The poor in the first world are richer than the rich were for most of history. The poor in the third world are no poorer than in the past.

So no.
Ah, Petrov very well may win.

As for Haber, his comparable achievements in the science of waging war and of providing the technology to enable to German war machine makes his achievements more morally ambiguous. Also, someone else would have invented his process. Borlaug's achievements were as social as scientific, he got out in the fields and got the farmers to grow the new higher yielding crops.
IPhone usage on Flickr falls dramatically
I actually worked at Be Inc for the last seven months of its existence.

BeOS had a lot of good stuff going for it. A database-like file system, media frameworks, pervasive multithreading, a way-ahead-of-its-time file typing system, and so on. But the main reason I chose it over linux was that it was a lot easier to set up and maintain.

It's gone a bit too far underground for me to keep following it, however. After I got laid off from Be, I switched to Mac OS X 10.1, which had recently been released.
Every rule system ever designed has the potential to be misinterpreted, misused, and create incentives that were never intended.

Rule systems and rule makers can't be held responsible for idiotic/selfish/malicious behavior by individuals. Yes rules and systems can be refined to improve them but ultimately it will always be up to the individual to exercise judgement and moral character. So I'm afraid I have to disagree with you. If you blame the system for being misused you miss the point.
Who defines "need," given that you don't mean "subsistence survival?"
Code Splitting for Fast Javascript Application Startup
Is there a mechanism for doing this in Django yet? As of right now it seems as though this is just a new handler to use the server.

Providing a way for Django to do the long polling, streaming, comet type aspect of it would be the next step, which I'm not sure Django can handle out of the box without a lot of changes. I hope someone makes it though.
Is this another sign that newspapers are getting even more desperate for advertising revenue?
It remains to be seen whether Twitter will actually succeed.
Pitance: Template and Snippet Infrastructure
Why timing before coding is a good idea
The VM image works like a charm with VirtualBox. I just had to change the emulated network adapter to Intel PRO to make networking work.

Boot and shutdown are really really fast.
'Instead, why doesn't the blame lie with GMO organizations that engaged (and continue to engage) in behavior that does not appear to be in our direct interests?'

Because GMO research is absolutely vital to continuing to feed our species. Monsanto may be a terrible company - but this is mostly related to patents. Patents bad. Feeding people good.

GMO for the people.
I'm a victim because I prefer to be able to open my windows or sit outside?

I'm a victim because I can't sleep through the sound of landscapers early in the morning, even with the widows closed?
"more needs are being met and more suffering is being averted"
If by suffering you mean the feeling of inferiority someone gets when they don't have leather seats in their caddy and a 12v 2litre engine, don't have the latest iPhone, can't cross the world in 20 hours.

Capitalism magnifies inequality as those with money get richer and those without toil to that end.
Really cool blog. I'll add it to the other good ones I typically read: flowingdata.com and datawrangling.com.

I wonder why he chose to use PMF. There are seemingly less complicated algorithms (PCA/SVD/LSA) that appear to do the same type of thing.

It also looks like PMF uses expectation maximization, which is quite common but not necessarily scalable (although I could be wrong). This would probably take quite a bit of time to run on the whole dataset and unfortunately he doesn't give any specs!
Or if you're a person in the third world (and assuming everything else about your statement is true, which I have doubts on) - we're still poor and the rich in the developed world are richer.

So yes.
Google Chrome Extensions: Developer Documentation
Too many differences to list, I would recommend you try it for a while and see :)
The sloth.
Bribing service employees to steal from the store for you (figuratively) seems like a good ROI:

http://www.thetwentydollartrick.com/

I'm not much for the false feeling of status resulting from bribery, though.
I highly recommend that you try it on real hardware if you're going to try it at all. It's much, much snappier, even on a Pentium II or III, on a real machine than in a VM.
Changing Equity Structures for Early Startup Employees