skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This argument was originally due to Malthus, and was used by the English to justify not helping the Irish during the Irish Potato Famine. Shortly thereafter improvements in agriculture made it clear that Europe could sustain much, much larger populations.

The specter of mass famine from population growth was popular in the 60s. Predictions then focused on India. But improvements in agriculture resulted in calories/capita improving 23% from 1960 to 2000 despite a doubling in population.

Given historical precedent and ongoing improvements in agriculture (many of which have not taken hold in Africa yet), is it morally sound to repeat the failed argument today? Besides which, the biggest cause of famine today is political strife, not carrying capacity. To pick a random example, Ethiopia was a net exporter of food during the famous famines there in the 1980s. The famines occurred in a region called Eritrea that was undergoing a civil war, and were supported by the government as a way of weakening the resistance.

And finally around the world we are finding that population growth is faster among poor people than rich. So helping people attain a decent standard of living seems to be a more effective method of population control than encouraging them to starve themselves to death.
But, then if you wanna just see the score, you'll vote up/down without reading the comment, which sort of goes against the entire idea to begin with.
I don't think being ridiculed even more than usual is what they were aiming for.
Securing an HTTPS server
1% is very high for a lot of things.

I've seen links go out on twitter where the click through rate is around 1%. If you get 1% click on an ad on a webpage that's good.

Then if you are talking about actually selling something your really talking about 1% of that 1% i.e. 0.01%

The guy in the article made got to 0.04%
Interesting point, but the article kind of misses the piece where it explains to us how to craft the other kinds of advertising so that they result in brand recognition.

Also, I'm sure there are all sorts of circumstances that would impact this - when is it good to aim for brand recognition? How big do you need to be? How homogeneous does your market need to be? Is it always better to go for brand recognition, or are there situations where direct marketing is more effective? Etc etc...

I'd love some follow-up articles answering these questions.
Web Application Security At the Edge is More Efficient Than In the Application
If somebody from HN stops at Brno, Czech Republic, drop me email and I can show you the city, have some drinks and so on.
... which will make it almost impossible to do anything other than to get a job

I'm not sure what you mean here. Are you saying that after declaring bankruptcy it's difficult to convince someone to loan you money to start a business?

Getting a job is the normal state of affairs for most adults, so I don't see what's particularly exceptional about it.
Just come back from Venice few weeks ago, really great city to see.
Readable another way of improving readability on the Web
Count me in :-)
If any HNers ever need a stop over in 'Limburg', the Netherlands, they're free to stay on my couch.

(until last week it was a hammock, now we have a couch ;) )
Love to see the warning label if they ever make this a 'real' pharmaceutical... "Overdose may result in bright colors, swirling patterns and racing thoughts. In some cases, you may forget your name or become convinced that you're dying or already dead. Avoid use of heavy machinery."
In some places it can be difficult to even get banking.

Borrowing money is not the issue.

Employers are not above doing credit checks and banks might simply refuse to deal with you.

That can make the road to recovery a very difficult one.

Sure, most of the people out there have jobs, but since there is no better way to learn than to fail if you're going to try again some day it might help that you're able to get a half decent job so you can save some $.

Assuming the bankruptcy is a real one and not one of those where banks and credit card companies get to garnish your wages for the rest of your life.
Steve Ballmer On “Moving The Needle”
Donate to HN: XKCD meeting personal experience giving birth to an idea ...
Porto, Portugal. We have Port!
This is in the UK - social circumstances and conventions regarding walking vs driving are different from those in the USA (and others) so please bear that in mind as you read ...

========

I was driving to work this morning, and noticed a young lady walking along, obviously going somewhere. There didn't seem anywhere obvious to be going that was really close - I figured she had about a five minute walk ahead of her, at least.

And it was blatting down.

She was getting quite wet, and I thought - if that were me, I'd like to be offered a ride.

But I couldn't stop and offer one, because no doubt I'd get a look that asked what rock I'd crawled out from under, and what kind of a pervert I really was, and did I really think she was stupid enough to get into a car with someone she didn't know, even if she was getting half-drowned and would prefer to ride.

But I figured she didn't know me, so even if she thought I was demented, and even if she refused point blank, nothing would be lost. So I stopped and offered a ride to a perfect stranger who was getting very wet. Those who know me will know that it's the sort of thing I would do.

What I didn't realise was quite how much vitriol could be inserted into what might otherwise be a polite declining of a simple offer to help.

I won't do that again.

Shame, really.

========

So here's the idea. A web site where people can register, then if they accept or offer a ride they can send a photo of the other person. Then when the ride is complete, send a "transaction closed" message.

Then both parties have a stake in making sure the ride ends safely and happily. If someone were registered with the site I'd offer them a ride. I can think of ways to make the security issues work, and suddenly hitch-hiking might come back into vogue, even if only among geeks.

Hmm. Business opportunity?
Maybe I'm guilty of overestimating them, but I always find it hard to believe that people who would go through the trouble of faking these sort of things can be so monumentally stupid. These people work with polling and statistics, they must know about all of these tests. It cannot be that hard to use the knowledge to write a randomizer which produces reasonable results...maybe that's a good idea for a startup.
Water Molecules on Moon Traced
True: It is too bad there was no analysis done. Presenting the letter and bolding parts of it makes it more readable and highlights key points. However, those points make much less sense and have much less power if all you read is the bolded portions. Good commentary on what King was doing and why would have been more valuable.

I haven't managed to get through the whole thing yet, but a few things I have noticed:

1) King states that he rarely responded to his critics, but did sometimes. On the one hand, it's a bad idea to spend too much time arguing with people about your work. It takes precious time and energy away from the work and it sends the wrong message about your mission. A good way to "lose" such a battle is let your detractors distract you overly much with such tactics. On the other hand, never responding to criticism leaves your critics with too much power to shape public opinion. Don't get mired in arguing with these people whose minds you are unlikely to change. But don't let them have the only say in shaping public opinion. When responding to them, be cognizant that you are really speaking to a larger audience and this larger audience is the one you most want to reach. You have little hope and little need of really winning over your critics. It is sufficient to neutralize them in the battle for mindshare.

2) King preached non-violence and taught his people to not retaliate.

If you genuinely want justice, you cannot retaliate. Retaliation proves to people that you don't genuinely value justice. It proves that you would do as much injustice to those currently in power as they are doing to you if only you had the power to do so. Standing by your principles is far more powerful.

3) While not retaliating, King does not hesitate to call people on their BS.

This is a distinction many people seem to have difficulty making. It is a powerful distinction that helps give teeth (so to speak) to a non-violent position. Non-violence does not mean being a wuss. Respecting people does not mean kissing arse.

4) Avoid hyperbole and stick to the facts.

The facts are usually plenty ugly on their own and typically do not require hyperbole to get strong reaction. Hyperbole is a good way to give your critics a means to dismiss you as a hysterical nutcase.
My ears are bleeding!
banks might simply refuse to deal with you.

How odd -- I've never heard of that happening in Canada. Sure, banks will run credit checks before allowing an overdraft; but the only problems I've ever heard about with people being entirely unable to get bank accounts have been homeless people without any ID.
Never underestimate how often people will find reasons to be offended:

Drive down a road... See a billboard that you don't agree with... Offended!

The "fk Jesus" group on Facebook... Offended!

I usually only tend to get offended when someone is trying to offend me directly. But other people are not so liberal with their egos.
Nice pics, nice site, but, as an old computer collector, I must say: excellent domain.
To recap:

You wrote the same old point -- the expressibility and some old ugliness make it a bit steeper learning curve for Perl. A troll favorite. You wrote that Perl was one of your two most experienced languages -- but obviously, you're a beginner not doing many hours development/month.

Everyone pointed out the standard answers -- this is a small cost in the beginning, learning libraries dwarf this, Perl is easy to use for people knowing C/sh/etc, there are plus/minus with expressibility, etc.

Then your second code example is on the wrong side of obfuscation with modifying an array while appending to it -- inside two tight loops!.

(Sure, this was some performance test and it was the language's worst case, or something, so it had been rewritten in an attempt to get better speed, but... still, I've seen saner things in obfuscation code.)

When this is pointed out, you just claim that it is an accident that you happened to pick this hairy recursive-to-iterative example...

I would have given you the benefit of the doubt, if this hadn't been a typical troll subject... But, no.
Coincidentally my experience is also in Canada (not my own experience, but a close friend there, an older person).

This was about 6 years ago. I was quite shocked to learn that you could be refused banking at all, for any other reason than for instance being a criminal or something like that.
Actually, it says it runs Linux wonderfully.
That is the exact logic ad salespeople use to make you buy ads from them. Advertise continuously or else no one will remember you when they need your services.

Unfortunately, this leads to crap ads being made and entrepreneurs spending a lot more money than they should on advertising - because they have no way to know which of the brand recognition ads worked.

Yes brand recognition ads are good. But first go for guys that have a need for your product right now. Then aim for the guys who may have a need in the future.

Tips to not waste money on advertising:

1.

It'll require very little advertising on your part if your competitors are not advertising. All industries are not equal.

2.

Impact * Repetition = Long term memory. So make your ads impactful - and you will have to spend less money on repeating the ads. This is tricky - because many ads use gimmicks in order to try and create a stronger impact. But when these gimmick ads are repeated, they put people off. So this has to be done wisely.

Vodafone zoozoo ads managed to do this very well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGqndA5F3i8
(the sidebar has a lot more ads)

3.

Smart experienced advertisers like Roy H. Williams have observed that a repetition of 3 in 7 nights is optimum for long term memory branding.

This is excellent excellent reading:
http://www.mondaymorningmemo.com/?ShowMe=ThisMemo&MemoID...
Thanks for putting this right.
So if you have money to throw around you'd rather throw it at lobbying for free trade in the rich world, so that e.g. African agriculture can compete better.
If you plan to go in Sicily, feel free to ask me what to visit and the best places to eat. antirez / gmail / com
I love Charlie Brooker.

I've got an Iphone and a Macbook pro and I do exactly the things he says. Brilliant.
How A Non-Digital Electronic Subway Security System Works (Translated)
Pidgin store passwords in clear text
Squeezed Books Summary
Business Knowledge - Extracted, Compressed, Discussed
Great Visualizations - The Great Circle, Precision & Mayans
Email: The Variable Reinforcement Machine
Introducing WhoseKidAreYou (Cool- Subtype Evil)
I hope the translation is understandable; it looked ok at a quick glance. Google isn't as good with Swedish as some other languages, unfortunately. Cool article, though.
ReadWriteWeb claims a sale price of $15-22m. Can anyone confirm/deny this? ( http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/nokia_buys_dopplr_the_o... )

On a tangent, why does everyone drop the 'e' in '*er' these days? Flickr, dopplr, and -many moons ago- twittr.
+1 for paris. ovidiu dot ciule at gmail dot com
Benefit From Social Media?
You will strengthen the credibility of your business among the network and also ensures the possibility to get constructive criticism about your business that will make your business on the road to be flawless.
Interesting. However, I would note what they do:

"Through storytelling and technology, we helps brands engage the connected culture"

And that they are 'sponsored' by Microsoft. I can't find anything on the site explicitly distancing the blog from the company's main marketing function.

Or maybe I'm being too cynical.
I think it might be hard to monetize it, because as soon as they add any friction then perhaps competitive services will start up with the same API.

If someone else provided a twitter service, with the same API, then twitter clients (including web clients) could easily be updated to subscribe to both. Or any number of twitter services. Decentralized twitter. Is there any reason why tweets need to go through a central hub?
I'm interested in any meeting down here in Paris.
Gotta find a suitable place though. joss82 at gmail dot com
So, if you don't like the counter, just don't download it.

You cannot count on people behaving this way, least of all when it comes to politics.

There must be a way to stop this rejection-crazyness.

Broad rejection under the banner of "politically charged" is probably the most sane solution for Apple. The more they permit, the greater the backlash over any particular rejection, and the more their permission would be construed as endorsement.

For instance, suppose a pro-life and pro-choice application are both approved for the store, but one (it doesn't matter which) is only approved with a higher age limitation than the other due to content. Even if Apple's rating approval were completely consistent with other applications, the discrepancy between these two is practically guaranteed to cause a shitstorm. Multiply that by every other axis of approval or rejection and every other political issue in every country Apple runs a store.
My Idealistic Opinion on : iStock Selling Logos
Why did you clicked on the link? I clicked on the link to get an answer the question that was the result of this article. :-(
But anyway, it is good to be reminded, that not working too directly is the key point.
If any HNers ever come to Hyderabad India , drop an e-mail rama.vadakattu at gmail dot com
It's great to hear these two talk informally about their respective projects. As well as hearing about the similarities and differences between Erlang and Haskell, it's nice to get a little insight into how their creators think and approach the same problems.
These people work with polling and statistics

Well, current evidence seems to suggest that maybe they don't, actually, work with polling and statistics...
All this is of course totally off topic, but...

First, you have a point that to get out from under Malthus' strangulation, we have to get people's living standard up (and move them to cities, which really lowers the number of children).

I was in an argument on this subject a little bit ago. I went to Wikipedia and checked it up. From memory...

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

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

BTW, check Hans Rosling on TED.com, really informative.

About a billion in the world is hungry (mal-/undernourished).

About 37% were in India and China. Both will fix this inside a generation or two (and both will have good economies soon; btw, should USA borrow more money from China to pay for China's farmer's food...?)

Bangladesh had about 5% of the world's hungry -- but that is the acknowledged most corrupt country in the world, where the politicians lives on stealing aid money. To help the farmers you'd have to do a military invasion! (Which would kill lots of people.)

Of the remaining 60%, most hungry where (a) in countries with conflicts (Congo, Pakistan, Sudan, etc) or (b) dictatorships/corrupted countries (Arab world, North Korea and Zimbabwe). In both cases, you'd more or less have to topple the regime to save lives by feeding the hungry... Uh, no.

Then we have countries which will solve their own problems soon (e.g. Brazil).

But e.g. Ethiopia and Tanzania might be able to use even more aid. That is (a) a small minority of the world's hungry and (b) the only one I really know a bit about is Tanzania -- it seemed to be a milder variant of Bangladesh...

The good thing to do is to work for good governance. That might even be the only thing which will really improve the situation.

Edit: Syntax and more syntax, sigh.
The education is of a different level and people get a more practical view on the advanced topics.

It isn't as respected because of historical isues but also because of the differing levels that the education through the differing paths (wants to) achieve(s). But I think you shouldn't compare Apples with Pears. I think the purpose of the two paths is different as explained in my last comment above.

Officials in Switzerland and especially the OECD often claim that Switzerland has a too low rate of University Graduates but I don't necessarily think so, it is another angle from which the question on how to redesign education can be approached.

One thing you're definitely right is that there are quite a few string foirces out there that like the status quo.
The trend is pretty scary -- if any given normal activity could conceivably be made into a "crime," then you end up with a sort of underclass of people trying to keep prosecutors and police happy because they know that no matter what they do they could be hauled into court at any moment. That's wrong.
Schneier on Security: Ass Bomber
I'm happy with my X200s. I got it with the big battery, but that lasted so long, I changed to the smallest battery. Now it's incredibly light and has a quite reasonable battery life.

The keyboard is great. The screen is fine - much better than my previous X40.

It seems like an over-generalization to say that the new Thinkpads are worse than the old ones,
Their migration seems to have gone quite smoothly. And the whole site feels much faster to me.

Congratulations for that.

And thanks for sharing this information about your architecture, this was a very interesting read.
The comment was about development, not just "early development"; and it was about development and marketing, not just development.

The value of an operating system derives primarily from the applications that run on it, and this is very much affected by the business case, which includes ongoing development and marketing. Unix had that.

Even for the early development, I wonder if Thompson and Richie (and the rest of the team) would have been employed to create software in general in the first place, if their employer would not have some form of ownership in it... Doesn't sound like how a monopolist thinks to me.

This is not to deride linux (which is great; I'm using it now), but to note the role that copyright plays in securing investment in a platform. Attracting users to a platform requires a lot of investment; it's much, much more than just building the platform technology.

I think a much better example to support your case is Python (also Perl/Ruby/PHP/emacs). Very successful; a platform; and not a replication of a commercial platform. In contrast, many successful open source projects follow commercial projects. Why is this? There's pre-existing demand for it; and having a technical guide and an existing user-base makes it comparatively straightforward and reduces the risk (i.e. compared with starting something entirely new).

I speak as someone who has replicated an existing product; and is now creating something entirely new. I find the latter tremendously more demanding. There's no pre-existng technical guide, and there's pre-existing demand for this particular approach.
Believe it. EY is fucking expensive because they've made people believe it should be.
Don't subscribe, so can't read the whole article, but the opening paragraphs are consistent with what I see here (Boston) -- technology/biotech is experiencing moderate growth, but other areas (retail, construction, finance) show only low or moderate levels of new company formation. Just anecdotal observations on my part, but definitely seems slow -- especially in areas like retail and construction which experience cyclical bankruptcy/restart patterns.
Intent of what law? How does the law even come into this?
Overall I like the app, and not being a native speaker there's quite a few words it could help me learn even with its current vocab.

Found a minor issue, though: the links in the upper right are clickable, even when they aren't visible.
in india and china? no. in africa? yes. sending resources to places in contention is an easy way to cause further destabilization. see: cia in south america in the 60's.

if india and china's government's collapsed I would want to immediately cease aid to them as well.

an aside: this line of reasoning is my problem with libertarianism too. if historically under precondition X A caused B, it is quite silly to talk about A and B in a vacuum. see: nick szabo ranting about tort law :)
I keep vaguely hearing horror stories but all the people I can actually pin down as owning lenovo thinkpads are having a great time with them - me included.

I suspect what we actually have here is a case of the usual random set of poor experiences with any given product being much more conversationally trafficked because people assume that "this is my first troublesome thinkpad" must be because of the Lenovo switch rather than just being an unfortunate coincidence.
Are you asking yourself if you can still get your ex back?
Are you tryng to get your ex back ? One of the hardest things after a breakup is coming to grips with what has happened in the past and the situations which had eventually lead to the breakup. Oftentimes it is hard to fathom how a very wonderful relationship could have turn out this way.

Accepting the past and being able to grasp the meaning of things will surely take patience and time. Acceptance is very important so that you will able to look back without being bitter about it and your conscience will not be heavily weighed down and you will have focus when you pursue the love of your life and get him/her back.
Star Tech Execs You've Never Heard Of
I don't know what would make it more clear without being too loud. I just know that at the moment, I have a hard time separating articles from each other.
(Excluding sama, of course)
quad core, or not quad core - that is the question:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...
Paris? Count me in! hn (a} stereo , lu.