skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The United States remains the #1 exporter in the world in terms of aggregate value of goods exported. We still do make plenty of things in the United States.

The manufacturing that gets exported is the stuff that requires low- to medium-skilled workers. All the high-skilled manufacturing stays in the developed countries (i.e. U.S., Germany, Japan, etc.).
We've already got Reddit. My vote is for this site not to turn into another one.
> 2. Probability of a transaction resulting in value v is uniform from [0,99].

Totally false:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

Benford's law, also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific, non-uniform way.
Yes it was. I was looking into that last week, but forgot about it. Update: Added it in as a bonus case. Credit gave to coglethorpe for the reminder. Gracias!
No, because he is not using the word 'liberal' to denote a Liberal, but rather to denote someone that doesn't let (social) conventions get in the way of what he deems possible and worthy of following through. That sounds like the hacker spirit to me.
"What if Hitler intercepts your email and reads it?" Encryption explained
Also, a more correct ASN.1 parser (at the CA, or in the client) could have saved them. The CN field is a PrintableString type which has a limited character set specified. NUL is not an allowed character in a PrintableString.
It sounds interesting, but how can they tell if he's tripping out or not if he already has issues expressing himself normally? I guess if he's functioning at a higher level than usual, he's probably OK, but it still seems kind of iffy to me. Maybe it's just the stigma surrounding cannabis that's coloring my perception on this.

I wonder if a medical study for something like this would be feasible. I also wonder if there could be negative long term or developmental effects from a treatment like this.
Irresponsible parents would give their children illegal drugs as an attempt to "cure" an ailment, I suppose. I still don't see how that has to do with hacking or startups.
While excellent advice, that's not the issue that the article is talking about. You can be the most silent, rights knowledgeable person and still get screwed by Federal law.

I'm currently reading a book titled "Three Felonies a Day" which details how the federal criminal system is broken. The book itself unfortunately is a series of anecdotes, rather than a deeper analysis of how we got to this situation. If you can find it at the library, I recommend skimming a few of the stories to get a feel for what's going on.

I'm obviously not a lawyer, but as far as I understand, federal law does not require a "guilty mind" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea), at least not to the same degree that traditional state law requires. In addition, many federal crimes are written very vaguely, sometimes to good effect (handling unforeseen criminal acts, obviously wrong, but not specifically banned by law), but more often to ill effect (yeah, that's fraud!).

Then, finally, there is the issue of the approach federal prosecutors take in pursuing cases, in which the push for convictions is more important than the push for justice. This results in approaches to cases such as "ladder climbing", where you indict the lower rungs of an organization (mayor's aids for example) with the threat of years of jail, and have them plea bargain out to almost nothing in exchange to testify against the person above them. Often, the choice for the person being accused is so obviously one sided that they'll creatively spin their testimony so that innocent behavior suddenly because "fraud" or "obstruction of justice" or similarly vague crimes.

One more sneaky thing that federal prosecutors do is that certain things are crimes, even where not obvious. For instance, lying under oath is obviously a crime (perjury). Lying to a federal officer while not under oath is also a crime (a felony no less).

So basically, federal prosecutors can pin very serious crimes on almost anybody they wish, as this article pointed out with import/export restrictions about flowers.
Clearly without a study it would be impossible to determine whether the upfront complexity of designing and installing specialized credit card equipment would be more or less than the comparatively small complexity of counting out coins.

Walmart, for instance, now uses a system that dispenses the coin change automatically so that the person at the cash register doesn't even have to do it themselves.
Wow. A $1 billion email? Reminds me of Bill Gates' emails about crushing Netscape [2nd paragraph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft#Tria...]. I guess those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it...
> Case in point: trying to configure two screens on Linux is anything between painful to downright impossible. In 2009!

I used various flavors of linux all through college and I gave Ubuntu a fair shake for the past two years on my laptop, but this is the main reason why I'm using Vista today. That and shutting down took minutes. I don't have time to dick around with text files fixing this just to have it break again on the next upgrade.
The ability to perceive pleasure/pain is not enough. An amoeba will move away from a negative stimulus, so sentience is completely unimportant. What can be said is that cows are not sapient/conscious. The reason we do not view young children similarly for the same lacking sapience is that we know they will very likely gain this attribute as they grow older; cows will never do so.
Here is a nice reddit thread for you:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8jwno/why_i_am_g...
An Edge Essay (I think I read it after seeing it on HN, but I can't remember) had some interesting views on Autism and Schizophrenia: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/badcock08/badcock08_index.ht...

Do any Biohackers on here know of any sex based differences in the effects of THC? (I know sex hormones are strongly affected).
At least it isn't as bad as reddit where it's nearly everyday that an article about drugs gets upvoted. It could be worse, and at least this article is an interesting read namely due to the fact that they're not claiming it's a miracle or a cure, it just helps.
Plasma Rocket Can Get Humans To Mars Just Under 40 Days
Icey, you've been here for over 900 days, and you're arguing with the second sentence of the first graf of the site guidelines:

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Come on.
I wonder if a medical study for something like this would be feasible.

Finding enough parents willing to let their autistic kids participate would be challenge enough. But on top of that they would all have to live in California, where you can get the legal pot license, and the study would have to performed without causing a big uproar in the community.

Sounds like it would be quite challenging, but not necessarily infeasible.
a very liberal definition of the word 'hack'.
> Can somebody suppress my rights (to share, to sing, etc.), in the form of terms?

You're making some fundamental logical errors here.

Your first premise is that you have these rights. But where's your rationale for that?

The simple truth is that you only have these rights if the objects under consideration are yours. But you have no right to share my books. You have no right to share my house. You have no right to share my property. And you have no right to sing my song.

Unless I give you my permission to do so, of course.

So, your first premise is wrong.

Your second premise is that it's suppression if you were not given all possible permissions. But you agreed to the terms with a free will. No one forced you to do that. No one pointed a gun to your head telling you what to do. In fact, you are free to do the same work I have done to author the work, in the first place.

So, your second premise is also wrong.

I don't know what your conclusion is but it's probably wrong, too, because your premises are.
It's on Slate, not some hemp advocacy site, and it was interesting. Hence, submitted. I don't think I have an odd fascination with drugs (I actually think expirimenting with cannabis on a disabled school-age boy is ethically repugnant).

Here I might add, for no particular reason except human interest, that I have never in my life consumed marijuana.
But this is change in a larger transaction, not the first digit.

Past the first digit, Benford's Law still applies, but the effect becomes extremely tiny as one adds more digits to the front.
Obama economic advisor Austan Goolsbee once recommended eliminating the 1-cent penny -- by having the government declare pennies by fiat to be the new 5-cent nickel:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/business/01scenes.html

It's quite a neat idea, getting rid of the current seignorage loss and inefficiency of 1-cent pennies, without incurring the wrath of the penny materials lobby -- or even worse, voters with giant penny jars.

Given the reasoning here, perhaps pennies should become 3-cent pieces.

Rebasing small coins to be worth more isn't quite dropping cash from helicopters, but it should still have a mildly stimulative and redistributive effect. Something for everyone!
if we're talking about X the standard and not Xorg the implementation, shouldn't the former be the grand unifying vision?
This does not apply here since we are looking at the last digits, and not the first, so different rules apply. The bigger your price is, the more uniform the cents will be (aside from psychological factors like: 00, 95, 99 being very common)
Considering how much trouble people have navigating even the simplest computer interfaces, sometimes I wonder how anyone could possibly understand all of the laws that impact their daily lives.
I can't ask a question regarding why this is hacker news? Because I really don't see how it is.

I didn't say it's not hacker news. I said I don't see what it's got to do with a site ostensibly titled "Hacker News". I think that's a fair question, isn't it?
> If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)

Come back in 300 days, you might have a valid point by then!
A rat will nurture their young far more than a chicken, is much smarter, and will display more personality than a chicken ever will. OTOH, if one shows up in your kitchen I am sure you will be on the phone to the exterminator in minutes. Just because a chicken or cow is cute does not make it "special" and anthropomorphizing the activities of that animal is a pretty weak argument.
Am I missing something here, is it the only upside that the kid is less aggressive on Marijuana? The kid sounds stoned. Even the parents admit "his autism has become more distinct".

I feel for the parents - autism is a very difficult issue to deal with but this seems to be helping their problem more then their sons.
There's nothing odd about being fascinated by drugs and/or altered states of consciousness. The fact that our laws, culture, art, and religions are seemingly inseparable from their influence is intellectually interesting, to say the least.

I'm not saying that everyone should do drugs, certainly not, but if you don't at least take the time to learn about this stuff then you're cheating yourself out of a big piece of the human experience.
Benford's law is about the first digit of the number, it has nothing to do with the current problem. The pennies are the two last digits.

However, IMO the assumption you quoted is indeed false but due to other reason:

In real life, prices are not uniformly distributed because usually they are rounded to multiple of 5 cents or commonly they are .99 or .89 or s.th. like that.

I am wondering what happens if we put non-uniform prior on the probability of the pennies.

Another flaw in this research is forgeting that we often are getting change back. So maybe problem is to find combination not only to give exactly money, but giving and receiving change back. For example:

Using 1,5,10,20,50 you can make exact 4c only by 1,1,1,1, (4 coins). But getting change you can do 5, -1 (2 coins).
The State of OpenCL & the First End-User OpenCL Drivers
Dropping hard currency raises the bar to entry and kills a lot of low end business. No more street vendors, cash only local business, friendly card games or bets, informal services, or convenient tips. It would also give the plastic channel immense power over businesses. You might not use cash very often, but dropping it altogether would not be a good idea.
I suggest it may also have, possibly, more reason to do with the autism, which is an interesting topic of mind which has a lot of interest at Hacker News. Also, there are lots of cases of autism in and around silicon valley which raises consciousness of the topic in the minds of many hackers.
Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Others Also Hit by Phishing Attack
From what I have read autism is a condition in which inputs cause the child to feel strong emotions that are not necessarily rational. I don't see that cannabis would cause the child to think in a rational manner unless it was to cause him/her to focus on things more.
Hi Grand -- this is michael. Yes this was to respond to some of the perceptions out there that virtualization = slow. It's really not (at least now, it isnt' - as long as you know what you're doing, some of the tech docs to get the new hardware virtualization features working seem a bit daunting). And on the other hand, there's no alternative to having enough hardware capacity to meet your requirements. Virtualization can't make i/o capacity appear from thin air.
An interesting ICFP video (http://www.vimeo.com/6615365) I watched yesterday* about proofs, code, and teaching introductory classes seems relevant.

*linked from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=862686
Ironically, I first misread your argument (1) as an argument IN FAVOR of to-do lists, because to-do lists have at least the merit that they preserve the (important, not urgent) items for the next review opportunity.

The phenomenon you describe, unimportant short term tasks crowding out important long term tasks, is not so much caused by KEEPING to do lists, but by not properly MANAGING them. I don't see how one would become better at managing priorities by NOT having a reasonably accurate overall picture of what the tasks at hand are.

[Disclaimer: As is probably evident from my argument, I'm a somewhat recent convert to the "Getting Things Done" methodology]
Do that many HN readers use the Google homepage anymore? My searches are all entirely through my browser search field.

It seems like a cool feature for "power users" but I'd think that most people that still use the homepage would be newer users.
I think the only other upsides mentioned in the article is that he has stopped eating his clothing, that he focuses on eating real food now, and that he washed his own dish after eating.

Basically, it would appear that the upside is that his lessened aggressive behavior is allowing him to engage in more constructive behavior.

But you are right. We have to wonder if the marijuana usage is doing more for the child or more for the parents.
We vehemently agree -- I hate the Semantic Web bullshit just as much as you do (do re-read my comment).

What I like is using those triple-store databases for organizing the results of old-fashioned non-semantic crawling. Its graph model fits the problem perfectly, but unfortunately it's dead forever because of the original obfuscatory XML format (don't use crappy trees to represent graphs!) and the W3C's endless shenanigans.
No, I don't think I'll be visiting Reddit today, but thanks for letting me know it's being talked about in the fever swamps too.
Striking It Rich: Is There An App For That?
I believe because of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3vv0_RNTM8

[froggy's comment here]
Actually, there has always been vigorous interaction between OS and chip designers. See VM evolution, performance counters, matrix/vector operations.

I think read-barrier support, as a proven technique (see the same video for transactional memory as a functional bust) is on the cusp of acceptance.
On the subject of coin usability, I'd say one requirement is that any coin denomination should divide cleanly into 100. Surprising that they left that out.
Medical studies don't need to be declared to the public, all they'd need to do is contact the doctors who already prescribe medical marijuana and ask them if they have any patients willing to participate.

If you're contacting practitioners who already prescribe MM they're unlikely to speak out against the study, besides you could force non-disclosure agreements on participants. It's kind of morally-grey, but if there's big enough concern about getting shut down then you'll get enough people willing to sign an NDA in the chance they might be able to help their child.

This wouldn't be the sort of study you stick an ad for in the sunday paper.
Why do you suppose they used cartoonish icons for the browsers like firefox and opera? Is it just to make it look more friendly to a naive user?

I assume it has nothing to do with any sort of trademark issues but I've wondered what the limitations are for using those icons on a website (for instance, a "Best Viewed By These Browsers" box).
Weird, for me it just says "You are using Google Chrome 3" with no release date. In IE and Safari it tells me the release date.
I read it:

It's probably better than the other shit that doctors would put him on.

That's why I use HN not Reddit.
Investing In Happiness
That's exactly why games with such content should be allowed.
i've seen many people have this approach and misuse to-do lists. plenty of people will whizz through the peripheries first so they feel a sense of accomplishment and then wonder why they're up until 3am working on the big things.
I am not following. Are you saying that it doesn't matter how I display time, because in essence there is very little use for my site?

I am not sure how wide the appeal is of my site, but it solves one question my wife and I always ask one another. "What's on tonight?".

So yes I agree prime time is huge, and its what most of the TV world revolves around, but even in prime time you make decisions about what you want to watch.
It's right there in the paragraph that I quoted for you. I'm sorry the story didn't gratify your intellectual curiousity. It did mine. Autism is also a hotbutton issue among hackers.
10 important principles of agile project time management
Of course no one bothered him, he didn't appear to be doing anything wrong.

That's the secret behind most social engineering.
Wrong. Copyright is about "works", not "ideas".

My copyright of a work doesn't restrict your ability to copy the idea. In fact, this is what many Open Source projects do: they copy the idea or a proprietary software, but not the software (ie. the work) itself.
From the sounds of it, one of the biggest improvements for the son was the elimination of his habit of eating nonfood items, which seemed to occur on a near daily basis. So I am sure avoiding all of that pain was a big plus for him.
"But on top of that they would all have to live in California, where you can get the legal pot license, and the study would have to performed without causing a big uproar in the community."

IIRC it doesn't matter what state the research is done in once the study gets approval from the federal government, which is needed anyway. That's why they're allowed to do psilocybin research at Johns Hopkins. (Which they still need about 70 more volunteers for; if anyone wants to participate, check out csp.org.)
X supports multiple displays already. The problem mostly lies in getting those drivers to tell X how to deal with the windows.

Over the last few years, setting up multiple monitors with nVidia cards has been as simple as:

- Install the nVidia driver.

- Run the nVidia config.

- Double-click the grayed-out monitor to enable it.

- Save settings

- Restart X.
"What can be said is that cows are not sapient/conscious."

The ability to perceive pleasure and pain is absolutely enough to not be tortured and slaughtered. You have done nothing to prove (or even argue) that it shouldn't be, yet the burden is on you before you can justify torture and slaughter, which you have to admit is at least potentially morally catastrophic.

The claim that cows are not conscious is patently ridiculous. Not only have you avoided defining what it is to be conscious, but the scientific evidence is also mounting against your position.

For you to compare the complex sentience/nervous systems of farm animals to the single-celled existence of amoebas is, quite frankly, insane. Again, you have done nothing to support your claim.

The reason you choose to believe this about cows and other animals -- despite mounting scientific evidence to the contrary -- and not about children is that you find it convenient to do so in our current cultural/legal framework. And that's a truly stupid reason.

No one should take your remarks here seriously.
Others have pointed out that C++ is a necessity for at least the high-end games that push the hardware. High-level languages are used for scripting and logic (especially Lua). Deploy-measure-iterate is often used in the after-market for those games where it is appropriate, and in-house before release.

However I've never heard of TDD being used. Also C++ tends to be used as the proverbial hammer (e.g. for scanning debug output, build scripts). C# is quickly taking over for tools but it's also taking over as the new improved hammer.
10-cent coin. Dollar coin. Banknotes for $5+. Done.
Thanks, I was confusing liberal with Liberal. :/

Having said that I'd still prefer hacker news had a sort of programming/startup/tech focus. Articles like this are always on Reddit for those who want to see them.
AT&T to allow 3G Skype calls
Technical glitch mars MySpace demo of Embedded Live Video Chat
X the standard and Xorg the implementation have been one and the same thing for a while.

But X is just a component for the system, and what is lacking is a vision for the system as a whole. Actually, unifying visions have emerged for many facets of the system (as proven by the success on the server and embedded space), just not for the desktop.
As recently as this year, SCOTUS has made rulings that set new legal precedent for murder (Google "Tonya Harden"). I don't even have to argue that it's specious to compare murder to environmental destruction or occupational safety to rebut that argument.
As far as I remember from an undergraduate degree in psychology, autistic parents are some of the most willing to try experimental approaches. Autism is incredibly difficult for everyone involved and parents are often desperate to find something that works.

As far as having to happen in a state w/ medical marijuana, I also don't think that's necessarily true. Human research on controlled substances is pretty common, but requires the researcher to get past a lot of DEA & institutional HSRC paperwork. That's how the research that supports medical marijuana was performed in the first place.

Amazingly, a google scholar search for marijuana (or thc) and autism turns up nothing relevant. Really? It's amazing how little we know.
“Do you know what this country needs today? A seven-cent nickel. Yessiree, we've been using the five-cent nickel in this country since 1492. Now, why not give the seven-cent nickel a chance? If that works out, next year we could have an eight-cent nickel. Think what that would mean. You could go to a newsstand, buy a three-cent newspaper and get the same nickel back again. One nickel carefully used would last a family a lifetime!”

- Groucho Marx, “Animal Crackers.”