skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is pure speculation, and I have no facts to back this up, but I suspect that if humanity begins to shrink, it will become an age of robotics. I think the biggest boost to robotics will happen when the number of people available for hard/simple labor drops off.

But that's just speculation.
This may vary somewhat from one jurisdiction to another but, in practical terms, the disclosure issue does not really prove burdensome (I have substantial experience with this in Silicon Valley, having specialized in early-stage startups for many years now).

Years ago (back in the 1980s), the conventional practice concerning disclosure was to prepare a private placement memorandum (PPM) in connection with most offerings involving outside investors, even "friends." The PPM was involved and expensive, amounting to a mini-version of the registration statement companies file when they go public.

Since at least the mid-1990s, this practice has changed in Silicon Valley to the point where, very often, a "2-pager" (fairly high level executive summary) would be used to meet disclosure requirements, coupled with an invitation to the prospective investors to ask questions, etc. of company management. This revised practice has proved to be fairly easy to comply with for most companies.

Of course, this assumes you are dealing with people who are true "friends and family" - that is, people with whom you have existing relationships prior to the offering. If you do, both the legal and practical risks associated with this sort of early-stage offering are so minimal as to be in the "remote" category and the compliance costs/burdens are very small, at least in Silicon Valley (I believe this is true in most other locations as well and this has been consistently confirmed via our "blue-sky" practice, i.e., where we need to make sure that a California-based issuer meets the local securities law requirements of other states in which its investors reside).

By the way, later-stage investors usually don't like to see too many unaccredited investors in a company (working rule of thumb: best avoided if possible, no more than 10 if it can't be avoided). See also http://www.grellas.com/faq_business_startup_012.html.
The parents of the kids who sign up for $10/month weekly horoscope sms services.
British Scientist's sacking over cannabis study leads to revolt against minister
I am not implying anyone will suddenly decide to have many more children. I know wealthy, well of, educated people with 5 kids, who have gone on to fertility treatments to get another couple as they age. It's rare but it's not unknown. There ARE wealthy families in developed countries who absolutely had to, and do have, lots of kids. That's not speculation or conjecture.
Liquid N is a little difficult to come by. I need a dry ice recipe...
Usability tips for visualizing Ajax requests
The GPU client isn't quite as versatile as the CPU client (not all work units can run on the GPU or PS3 clients), but you can get about the same speed from a low-end GPU that you will with a Core i7.
There is a lot wrong with this article, but I don't have the patience to go through all of the unstated assumptions; so I will just use one point as an example:

"And everywhere, it is changing traditional family life by enabling women to work and children to be educated."

How is it that women working outside the home is better than women working inside the home? There is an unstated assumption that working outside is better; an assertion unsupported by any data.

Concerning children's education, one need only point to US literacy rates from 1850 to the present to see that the two (women working, children educated) are not connected.

As a secondary point I will point out that demographics are not mentioned in this article, apparently the author has never viewed the movie "Idiocracy" ...
Flash compiler in Flash
No. A few years ago when I moved out on my own, running these things killed my electric bill. Looking back, I feel bad for all the money I cost my parents..
actually, Intellij IDEA v.9 does just that. see:
http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/
And it has been open-sourced...
All you need to do is type your phone number in on a web form, and you get billed. I used to belive that you need to send an SMS to subscribe to a service, but that isn't necessary.
>What makes you think that this not so common (as you yourself call it) drive will become more widespread? The graph in the article suggest a very strong correlation between wealth and low fertility.

Evolution.

Right now, most people aren't that well adapted (in a Darwinian sense) to life in an affluent society. There's no reason to assume this will always be the case. The current speed of human evolution is over 100 times what it was in prehistoric times. Extreme environmental changes invariably lead to evolutionary changes.
How is it that women working outside the home is better than women working inside the home?

Depends on your definition of better. Ignoring difficult to measure benefits and focusing on easy to measure ones like economic output, it is easy to see how outside the home there's more opportunity to produce a lot more toasters, cars, etc, then inside the home. Unless you happen to live in a factory!

Concerning children's education, one need only point to US literacy rates from 1850 to the present to see that the two (women working, children educated) are not connected.

Really? And isn't comparing "work" before 1925 (arbitrarily picked) and after kind of like comparing apples and oranges?
I agree with most of your points...
but you should have done this post with your old HN account...that would make this post more worth...
Now an account with 6hrs old...Its tough to second you on this..
I would like to see your postings from your previous HN account ...
Norc isn't meant as a replacement for any queuing system, rather a replacement for Cron.

We use Norc in conjunction with SQS, and find the former is good for scheduling, management, logging, while SQS is better for lots and lots of repetitive tasks that we want processed ASAP.

Perpetually.com crawls, archives and versions any web site on demand, with any repeating schedule. One of the challenges is managing bursts of activity, so what we do is use Norc to manage the timing of archive requests, then SQS to manage farming out the actual archiving to available hosts. Since we hook SQS into Norc we can easily monitor/audit any system delay or outage.

We also use it to handle system backups, sending alerts and other system administration tasks.
The war on drugs has always been a failure: there has been no measureable decline in usage. Legalization will eliminate a dangerous black market and free our law enforcement to focus on more serious crime. Most importantly - legalization will no longer label hundreds of thousands of otherwise law abiding citizens "criminals" for enjoying a substance that humans have been using for as long as we can tell.
Twitter App Review: TweetGlide... Another Must Have Download By Mike Filsaime
I am glad you are interested in learning more about TweetGlide. Advertising can often cloud the real picture, so make sure you read this review before you download TweetGlide. There are always new products introduced to the social media world and exploring them is important. Make sure you take the time to review the information out there about other Twitter Apps.
Overall there's nothing I disagree with in what you wrote.

One thing worth point out though is that affiliate marketing is a huge force-multiplier for the company selling the product, which is why it exists in the first place.

If you have software (or whatever) you're trying to sell and you don't do an affiliate program your advertising budget is basically limited to your cash on hand.

If you run an affiliate program you can potentially get other suckers to spend their resources advertising your product on speculation; you only pay those marketers who successfully make sales, and get the other advertising for free.

A cute corollary is that you have to be tracking what they do tightly enough that you can reverse engineer the successful affiliates' strategies and self-implement them.

So affiliate marketing isn't going anywhere, but outside of the inevitable outliers the economics of it are such that the major profits will be made in scammy products, and thus the bulk of successful affiliate marketers will be marketing scams or worse.
I think it's more then speculation. Japan very anti immigrant has relied on much more robotics. The rest of the industrialized world, especially the US, prefers immigration.
My experience suggests that there are a handful of people who can read, write and speak the language fairly well, using it, when they choose, as their primary means of communication.

Most of the discussion falls into two types.

The first type is when a newbie tries to transliterate into lojban, and often says something they don't mean. This is common with anyone learning another language, it's just that in lojban one can be much more precise about what was wrong, because there's a formal grammar. Common confusions are mixing "verbs" with "nouns", neither of which have an exact matching concept in lojban, hence for some it's tough to get a grip on what's going on.

The second is debating the semantics. What does this word, explicitly created for lojban, actually mean? What's the difference between a pot and a jar? How, in English, do we decide which word to use? What is the defining characteristic of each?

These are often held up as criticisms of the language, but I think unfairly so. They provoke debates in epistomolgy, semantics and pragmatics, and touch on many of the questions that will need to be answered by the machine translation, semantic web and artifical intelligence challenges.

And what's the point in learning a language that's just a re-coding of your native language?

The other undeniable short-coming is that there is no underlying "culture." Much of the interest in learning, say, Russian, comes from the cultural insights. There is none of that in lojban.

Lojban isn't ready for generic, general purpose communication. It's still growing. If all you want is a tool, don't go there.

If you want mind-expanding concepts and debate, have a look.
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKY0orWnYfQ
The reality is that states are going to be asserting their rights against Federal ability.

This is happening in gun-related issues as well, with Montana and Ohio, at the least, considering the passage of laws that ignore the BATF if the gun is produced in and sold in the state. This gets around the interstate commerce clause used by the Feds to claim jurisdiction.
> Lojban: "spelling is phonetic and unambiguous"
> They clearly ignored that rule for the name of the language =)

I don't understand your point. The name of the language follows precisely the same rules of spelling and pronunciation. Can you expand on why you think otherwise?
Mystery of Mexican Aztec Tattoos
For the record, I found it hitting random on wikipedia and chasing citations. I didn't know a thing about the guy and as soon as I saw highly charged political imagery my mind must have flat blocked it out because I didn't even actually notice it consciously till I checked back just now.
ultimately, users are too easy to exploit. they get hit by smart advertisements from a young age. by the time they are adults they could believe anything.

Never gonna happen. The more aggressive advertisers get, the more acute people's ad-blindness becomes.

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

There is no better classifier than the human mind; people will automatically start to filter whatever that's pushed at them .. until someone finds a new virgin technique and the cycle repeats again.

We can safely go through commercial fads without involving government or religion; the greedy will risk big money and make or lose big money, the rest of mankind goes on amused and catered to.
He uses this - http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo
The answer is in the article:

While cron is great, it’s not geared toward solving this problem: Tasks are tied to a single computer, and they’re managed independently for each host and user from the command line.
And here are the rest of Wolfram's writing for reference: http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/
Can you give a slightly non-trivial lojban sentence with translation?

I'd prefer it be one you create so I can more easily ask you questions about it (as opposed to a web example).
Having a scoop of liquid N was one of "Hundred Things to do before you die" items.

The book is from NewScientist.
http://www.amazon.com/100-Things-Before-Plus-Afterwards/dp/1...
Couldn't agree more. I tried losing weight without keeping track of my daily weight, and got nowhere. Then I happened upon Jeremy Zawodny's spreadsheet (http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006851.html).

Maintaining a daily record of my calorie intake as well as my weight has really helped me keep my eating in check. It has also helped me get motivated to keep going to the gym - everytime I see that graph flat lining, I kick it up a notch.
What makes you think that this not so common (as you yourself call it) drive will become more widespread? The graph in the article suggest a very strong correlation between wealth and low fertility.

We do know of examples of high-income (and high-education) groups with high fertility, though. Mormons come to mind. There was a recent discussion about this I found interesting here: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/09/future-fertility.html
Sorry I was referring more to the cultural or mindset change that made it cool and trendy to build Web 2.0 style apps. Events like the coining of the term "AJAX", as well as things like Google Maps and Gmail really pushing the boundaries of what everyone perceived could be done with just HTML/CSS/Javascript.

My theory was that the mindset shift didn't happen in South Korea for whatever reason, meaning nobody moved away from ActiveX - but as it turns out, that reason is legislative.
Not only the black hole bit, but the time ripples propagating back from the future to prevent an abomination?

Yeesh...

I agree with you, about the scientists not finding the Higgs Boson. From everything I've seen so far of science, it hardly seems like it could be that simple. It seems as though every time we delve deeper into a field, our conception of how everything works is changed, and this hardly seems like the time for it to stop. I could be proven wrong though. Someone might prove that P=NP. That would be cool.
Obviously, the movie "Idiocracy" is a source of scholarly learning.
>>Also, is anyone else tired of every LHC article talking about Earth getting sucked into a black hole? Ludicrous, I tell you...

A simple physics experiment destroying humanity seems really stupid -- but it would be a really neat solution to Fermi's Paradox ("why aren't there any visible technological civilizations"). 1/2 :-)
1M free hours on EC2 = 2.67M free hours on 80legs!
Google's Latest Disruptor: Free Turn-By-Turn GPS Maps
Wow: http://www.release.org.uk/nicepeopletakedrugs/deck-of-cards/...
it would be so nice, if open source contribution could bring u a job in a cool software company. but I guess, that only works for the star-google combination...
Huh. I can't agree. Granted I'm new but what makes HN is the community.

For example, my startup is at a critical juncture right now and we posted a question here and on TheFunded. HN immediately responded with about 15-20 really helpful comments. TheFunded? I've gotten one spammy response so far.
It seems like depression is really a case of the pharma industry having everyone brainwashed. The vast majority of people believe that depression is a disease of biological origin, even though the academic research clearly shows that it's not a disease (it's a symptom, like AIDS) and in most cases this symptom is not the result of some underlying brain malfunction.

And yet we have all these people committing suicide because they can't get the help they need, and we have all these people who freak out whenever you say that depression isn't a disease. I don't understand it. I've literally never seen anything where the academic research was so clear and unambiguous, and yet completely rejected by virtually the entire general public.
Safe Systems from Unreliable Parts
A dog's eco-footprint equals a Hummer, study says
An iPhone app that has made 30K in 6 months
> Evolution

What biological advantage does a large family have over a small family in an affluent society?
It's an interesting one.

On the one hand, I'm not shocked that taking all the nutrients out of food makes them less good for us.

On the other hand, we don't have a mechanism nailed down, and I'm wary of the correlation here - particularly because it's telling me something I'd like to believe.

Hopefully this will lead to more research - and possibly to ways of processing food that don't remove whatever the vital nutrients are.

Not to mention that knowing what causes this might be very useful - particularly if we can make it available in pill form :->
I believe you! I believe you! I didn't for a second think that you had any other intentions other than linking to a interesting article.
You wrote:

> Wealth and the pill are still very recent, fertility will stay low in the industrialized world for quite a while, a few generations at least, but things will turn around.

Why will things turn around? Of course there are wealthy families that have many children, but why will exactly that trait become dominant?
That movie is fantastic. The entertainment value is beneficial, but the predictive warning is certainly as influential as the book The Time Machine which contained similar analogies.
Ah this is good to know, as I have a relatively high-end video card! I'll install it and see what the speed's like. Thanks.
Low End Dedicated Servers
The Ph.D. Problem
The large family will have more offspring which will result in more offspring. If this is a biologically motivated desire to have more children, there will be more children with that desire to produce more offspring, and the cycle will continue.
First of all, let me get something out of the way. There are no languages that are just re-coding of other languages.

I understand the idea behind Lojban but you've already conceded my point. Lojban is not a suitable language for communication.
How about this one: alcoholism
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/06/tfr-by-class-and-nation.php
Yeah me too! I cannot really relax reading or a watching a movie till I have done something monotonous, which usually turns out to be mopping or sweeping.
Periodic Table Table
Correlation /= causation, which the article didn't really make note of. Does the actual research suggest causation, or merely a link?
Actually, it does make note of it:

Although the researchers cannot totally rule out the possibility that people with depression may eat a less healthy diet they believe it is unlikely to be the reason for the findings because there was no association with diet and previous diagnosis of depression.
To everyone who is complaining about the account being new... I think its pretty safe to assume that the person posting this has an older account (not sure how old...) and didn't just come to this site today and say "wow, this stuff sucks."

That being said, if you think its bad that he created a dummy account to say this... well, I tend to agree with that, and yet, I think we should just this post by its content...
OpenX and Microsoft partnership on ads
How complex is "slightly non-trivial" ? Hmm. Here's a recent example:

le se viska be mi cu xamgu

Translation:

The thing(s) I (or we) see is/are/were/will be good.

Probably from context, more colloquially:

What I see is good.

Be advised: not only am I not an expert, I class as a newbie with dangerous knowledge. I have read, understood and worked with the formal machine grammar, and I have written some tools to work with parsed utterances. I have not, and probably never will, have any command of the vocabulary.

I'm happy to try to answer questions, and will defer those that are beyond me to one of the lists on which I lurk.
So it's a hybrid between a batch job processor and cron? Batch cron?
Atmosphere: Google's Cloud Computing Conference
That's excellent - dedupe makes a huge difference in most storage environments.

Shame ZFS has a slightly indeterminate future.
Site not loading?
A really interesting headline study a couple years back was with fish oil and juvenile delinquents. The kids fed fish oil had something like half the recidivism rate of the control group.

The implication here is that omega 3 fatty acid deficiencies are causing brain malfunction and criminal behavior.
He/She has probably created this account for the sole purpose of ranting anonymously. It's a somewhat common, albeit gutless, move when introducing meta discussions.
Very similar to "The Hacker's Diet" by John Walker, author of AutoCAD. He wrote a book about how he lost a bunch of weight using an engineering mindset. He also includes some very cool tools (Palm, Excel, and web-based).

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
Hrm, a title with a healthy and realistic weight loss rate. Highly suspicious.
Is it possible to start a task inside a job and have it's dependencies start up after it finishes without starting the whole job? Like, say I have a sequence of operations to one, in the middle, something screws up (like a network connection is down for some reason). Can I rerun from the step that screwed up and get the rest to follow through?
While cron is clearly pushed way past its capabilities by many people (without always realizing it), this strikes me as a reinvention of something that's been around forever: the batch system.

If the goals are improved reliability, management, fault-tolerance, etc., you'd be better off using mature software that was designed to solve this problem, and already has good community support, like Condor.
Yeah, of course. But I don't see any indications that that kind of lifestyles are on the rise -- on the contrary, they seem to be increasingly at odds with "modern society".
Same experience here. I tried it out, the novelty wore off pretty quickly. I find I'm happier with a good chair (I like Haworth's Zody and the Steelcase Leap) and getting up periodically to stretch. Sitting still for a long period of time is going to be bad, regardless of what you sit on.
Ask HN: please review my website
http://bargain-notify.me/

I've tried to handle the most common criticism: easy registration, and only when require, make sure the users know right away what it is about, etc., except for the domain name: I've found a better one yet :-)

Please let me know what you think of it.
clickable link: http://bargain-notify.me/
I think this is how they make those "dippin' dots" ice cream (which i love oh so much).

My guess would be that you would have to drizzle the (pretty watery) mixture into a pool of liquid N. I guess it would just burn off after a while and you'd have a nice treat.

Hmm... maybe I'll give it a try this weekend.
How to create Kaleidoscope images w/o using Photoshop
For reference, I've got 2 GTX295's (dual-GPU cards) in my development machine, and it'll get between 20-35K points/day depending on which work units are available.
> There are no languages that are just re-coding
> of other languages.

That's true, but it's "less true" of Italian/Spanish or Russian/Bulgarian than it is of, say, Russian/Swedish. I suspect that we are in complete agreement, and might argue only about precision of expression in our opinions.

And I didn't say lojban is unsuitable for communication. There are a few people who use it exclusively when communicating with each other. It is not yet ready for generic, general-purpose communication, just as the newest computer programming language isn't ready for mainstream use by those not interesting in the language so much as getting things done.

But again, I suspect we are/would be in "violent agreement" about most of these points. I contend that lojban is, regardless, mind-expandingly interesting.

For some.