skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's certainly considered the most likely explanation in the general public. (This is the Economist, not Paleo-Geologist Daily.)

I've always liked the Nemesis conclusion myself. Very chilling, considering we are due. :-)
Thank you that was an interesting read.

I realized that pressurization cycles stress the materials but didn't clue in that that puts a hard upper limit on the number of flights a body can make.
Probably not too bad. They'll put it on autopilot and go out the back door. It's routine for paratroopers.
I agree. I doubt I'll be able to invest the time to truly compete. But I definitely plan on creating something on the simpler end for fun. And if I can get a bot going that doesn't crash, why not submit it? And given a year until the deadline I see no drawbacks in playing with this casually.
" In both cases, you're getting the privilege to play in a very, very market."

You've omitted a word or two.
No, I don't think. From the messages you get if multiple people edit a wave too quickly, the site seems to be pretty intensive given the resources they're currently running it on. If I had to guess, I'd say they're cultivating the server resources to match the needs of who's currently using it, and throttling the number of new users so that they don't overextend themselves. It seems like they're capacity beta testing, not feature testing (right now).
You are correct that

1) Taiwan was a dictatorship at the time China made its economic transformation (I lived there at the time)

and

2) Taiwan's land reform was forced on the landlords.

But I have studied the history of the Taiwan land reform from several sources, and it wasn't based on a model copied from the Communist Party of China. As you wrote, "The possibilities for entrepreneurship change quite a bit when you go from being a tenant farmer to a small time farmer with your own land." That end result is quite a bit different from what happened in China.

Responding to pg above, the political control that the KMT had in the late 1970s is why Taiwan, even more than Hong Kong, was a model for China's loosening of control on the economy while keeping control of politics. But even in the late 1970s, while Taiwan was literally a Leninist dictatorship under the KMT, it was already a much freer place with much more rule of law than China was until much later (or has ever been in my lifetime?). And that is what inspired Democracy Wall writers as early as the 1970s, not only Taiwan's prosperity. Taiwan did make a transition into full multiparty democracy during the 1990s (and I saw several elections while I lived there around the turn of the last century), and that is a transformation the Communist Party of China still fears and resists. But maybe that will be the result of peaceful evolution of the political-economic system of China soon, on the model of most neighboring countries.
Have a co-founder from a similar background as yours, and who you've known for a while

While your message is quite tongue-in-cheek, there is some truth to it and I wanted to follow-up on this comment.

From anecdotal experience, it seems that YC favors a team of technical founders. Whereas in a blog post today on VentureHacks, the authors recommend the tech/business pair.

So which is better? Two techies, or a slick biz plus a techie?
Depends on how you mean. "Life probably exists somewhere else in the universe besides Earth" has a much more rational grounding than does "aliens have visited the earth" or "aliens have abducted people".
A graphical comparison between employees, freelancers and makers.
The post in question doesn't acknowledge that "that's how things are" and it certainly doesn't acknowledge that there are reasons why things being that way is an undesirable condition. On the contrary, the post in question joins in making sure that "that's how things are" and thus contributes to an overall environment that is detrimental to most women.
This would interest me.
The whole kerfuffle about the name being taken and everyone firing off their suggestions for a new one is the greatest example of bikeshedding I have ever seen.
Yeah, that really didn't need to be added...
Just for laughs I guess I could try genetic programming. Something that evolves would interest me the most, anyway.
Does Dropbox have any sort of versioning?
Right, which is what Emacs is there for. I don't think there is any Vim functionality (plugin or otherwise) that is not implemented in some Emacs extension.

Viper just gets you insert-mode and command-mode. It's still Emacs.
I was very surprised not to see Bill Joy on the list for VI, csh, BSD and Sun.

I was absolutely shocked not to see Richard Stallman on the list for Emacs, GCC, and the entire free software movement. Sure, lots of people read Coding Horror and 73signals, but Stallman and his Free Software Foundation started a movement. Regardless of one's opinions of the FSF ideology, it's undeniable that Stallman has influenced two generations of programmers and changed the world as a result.
What has become of the Starcraft lectures, are there transcripts yet? I suppose they would be mandatory viewing for coming up with a decent strategy...

http://academicearth.org/lectures/introduction-starcraft
Engineers don't (necessarily) have to scale with the number of users, but things like customer support (Facebook calls it "user operations") do.
Tell HN: The hidden meaning of Google Closure == Closed Source
While closure is itself open-source, the compiled output it generates with advanced optimizations enabled is obfuscated beyond recognition. A top-level function may get renamed to a single-character like "a", or simply inlined.

If you've tried reading the JS source code for Google Maps, for example, then you know what I mean. The net effect is that the JS code becomes analogous to binary files -- effectively unparsable by humans without effort that is greater than starting from scratch.

I think that the release of Google Closure is ushering with it a new era of web applications whose source code is as good as opaque to human eyes.

I don't have a blog, so I figured I'd just blurt it on here.

Thoughts?
On both this piece and the earlier one, I was kinda surprised that startup/hacker types would be so interested. I guess my mental image of the audience here is younger, fresh-out-of-college entrepreneurial types. Perhaps I am wrong, and there is a good proportion of people with mature org. experience as well?

I am also surprised by the number of people who seem to think small/startup companies are immune to these dynamics :)

(p.s. I did spend 1 year as the first employee of a startup... I found the same dynamics to apply, mutatis mutandis). Anyway, thanks for reading and keep the great conversation on!

Venkat
SPDY: Google's experimental protocol for a faster web
"s/dopamine/happy juice/ and the article has exactly the same information content."

That is the opposite of what the article states, which is that behavioral reinforcement is distinct from pleasure. The point being that habit formation is strongly driven by processes other than euphoria [1], and that those processes can be characterized and understood.

[1] Novelty is important, especially the variable timing of repetition.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=837462 - the answer to your post - sums up nicely why they are annoying: they make it so that one line of code is often not interchangeable with the next, so when you refactor or cut and paste, you have to go fiddle with line endings.
Understanding the Science of CO2’s Role in Climate Change: 1 – Introduction
What you really need is two nerds. But one should be nerdish in a direction where he does not mind book-keeping, writing blogs, ad number tracking and so on. He should still be able to program.

The other should be nerdish in a very geeky manner. If you have two linux freaks there, you'll have a company without vision. If you have two doe-eyed powerpoint pushers, you'll lack a product.
Ask HN: How to "involve the user" on a consulting type website?
Hi everyone, I could use some advice.

I'm putting together a site for an immigration law firm. Existing sites of other firms are very similar to each other. They display information on immigration that is readily available on the government's website.

I don't believe this is effective use of money. I'd like to have a site that "involves the user" in addition to making use of existing sources of information. There is no point to having another site with bare-bones text and a "Contact Us" link.

I have
a) a firm that provides a service
b) a consumer of a service
c) a process in which this service is offered. This is usually unique for each client.

The idea is that if what my firm immediately offers is useful and engages the client then they will be hooked from the get-go and ready for the next step. This also helps avoid non-committed consumers until they are ready to participate in the process.

I run into a wall here. I have no idea what this might actually look like in the real world. If you understand what I've said and have any insights then please share. Also if there are any similar examples out there then that would be awesome as well.
Mate, the guy did something sweet for his girlfriend, and she was happy and touched and affectionate with him afterwards. That's a nice thing.

> ...and it certainly doesn't acknowledge that there are reasons why things being that way is an undesirable condition.

Okay, think about this for a second: Women can go to basically any party with decent people, whenever they want, with no money and no transportation, without knowing anyone very well, and be fully confident that they can get home safe later. Men? Not so much. For a lot of reasons, women are more sought after and desirable than men, especially from ages 16-24 or so. They have more options and dating and sex is easier for them.

Yet, guys tremendously want women, so they work really hard to try to get women. Now, I believe that men should spend their time primarily working on developing their character and becoming more outstanding instead of chasing a particular girl and being less outstanding. But I digress, the way things are is that women's dating/sexual market value is orders of magnitude higher than a man's, especially when they're both younger. Acknowledging that explicitly - "Your goal should be to get your users hooking up and connecting with people" - is much more honest than the vast majority of marketing and commercials where a guy cracks a beer and then there's the bikini team dancing all around him. "Get your users laid" is a slightly crass and amusing way for saying "facilitate communication between genders to make dating, sex, romance, and courtship more rewarding and less awkward", and that's not a bad thing.

Using somewhat crass terminology - "get laid" - isn't so much sexist as just being a little crass and casual, but gets the message across a lot easier than some politically correct, "Your app should facilitate interpersonal communication and interaction, especially between people open to an intimate relationship" - which means the same thing, but doesn't call it like it really is.
7 Classic Cock Blocks and How to Defeat Them 
Cock Blocks... If you're a man who has ever tried to hit on a woman and failed, then that failure was most likely due to a cock block. I mean sure, it could also be your lack of game/face or gameface, but for the sake of argument let's say it was due to a cock block and that you're not a lost cause. This list will help you identify these classic cock blocks and will teach you how to get around them before they can block your cock once again.
http://www.broodwarai.com/index.php
Mafia War: 30 millona daily active users in Facebook. Jelous? I bet you are! They are anti-valley BS, and I respect that.
Or maybe what's sexist is thinking that women don't want to get laid too?
Gosh! I didn't realize I was being charged each and every time I pressed that stupid button accidentally. I don't even remember how many times I would have done that!
I don't see it as an issue. When something is "open source" it's always with the consent of the author and they'll still publish the source. Will this make it harder for you to peep to see what web apps are doing? Probably, but this isn't a licensing or an 'open source' issue.
I am an engineer, but I am inclined to agree with you. As an undergrad, I was the dramatics/theater secretary of my hostel (==dorm), and did enough directing/script writing to get a real sense of the medium (even though I quickly found out I had little talent on stage or backstage).

Theater/acting related metaphors and ideas are pretty central to the way I am developing the series... the next piece is shaping up to be even more theater-informed.

Overcoming Bias is a good reco -- I used to read it regularly, but (pot-kettle complaint here...:)) I couldn't keep up with the length of some of the stuff, especially by Yudkowsky. Hansen is thankfully briefer.

Venkat
Would someone please explain what this means? "her bar chart block towered over my band"

She makes more calls that the BF does? She is more popular than his (music) band? Something else?
I just put up a collection of some favorite articles about life issues / choices... the "what should I do with my life" questions. Feel free to email some others.

http://wildtenderness.heroku.com/articles
I think what he means is the chart shows the people he calls the most, and her bar was by far the biggest.
I was one of the people who ran UEStudio on Windows. When I switched to Ubuntu, I did not find the open source editors to my liking (yes, I know, heresy).

However, over the past year Komodo has stopped crashing enough to be the perfect editor for me. I don't see anything Ultraedit does that Komodo doesn't.

If they had come out on the market an year ago, I might have felt differently.
Amazon cloud heads for Asian sky
I skipped past it. I've seen ads before in videos (like http://www.helpmybusiness.com) but this was too long.
Your brain is pretty well set, like a thermostat. If he's in pain now, with his effete lifestyle and cushy job, poverty isn't going to improve his lot.

If anything, our original poster should consider psychiatric care. This kind of seething misery isn't often fixed by dickering around your professional life.
> SSL encryption will break all caching, and add latency in terms extra round-trip times.

It won't break all caching, just intermediate caches. True this does raise bandwidth usage and initial page load latency (assuming static content is not already cached on the client), but to say it breaks all caching is off.

That said, static image serving is not going to benefit from this new protocol all that much. It seems, like much of Google's other work in this area, to be focused on improving the performance of web-based applications.
Competition is good for everyone! We're more than happy to take your money. :)
He showed her that he called her more often than he called his bandmates.
If we're trying to measure how much this will hurt Intel, then we need to measure profits, not revenue. Intel's last quarter net income was $1.9 billion (source: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20091013corp...). If they performed the same next quarter, then this settlement would reduce their profits by 66%. That's not easy to absorb.
If you are a successful "maker", you will occasionally need employees to help you grow. I wonder if its wise to refer to this class of people as "servants" which has a denigrating tone to it.
My Humble Android Sales Figures
Googles crawlers are located all over the place, and especially for the latency score, they should hit the site from a few different locations, as well as different times of day.

The cache trick is the same for not-logged-in users as well as for Google. If you're showing the same page to more than one user (and you should be, for your not-logged-in users), you should cache it and show everyone that. If show Google a few hours old version (that you wouldn't want users to see) you'll be punished with the current rules.

If you're only showing content to logged-in users, Google can't see anything, anyway.
For that to happen we would have to have all the rich libraries and interops for javascript. Who could do such a thing?
Any client supporting SPDY would absolutely support the Server Name Indication extension from RFC4366
I got a lot more out of Google Analytics after I discovered events and user defined values. For an app I have, someone passing a link to a friend is an event. If that app is used embedded in Facebook rather than MySpace, I can segment based on user defined values.
I write a lot of JavaScript and I'm not even sure this is preferable. The "object wrappers" like String are considered deprecated in some circles as a matter of style, e.g. by Crockford. From this point of view, a stricter check is cleaner. And contrary to what the article implies, String(foo) is a cast to a primitive string, and doesn't create an object like 'new String' does.

So the Google function correctly returns whether String(foo) is a no-op.
Seeing as there already seem to be a lot of people involved in Starcraft AI, writing a WeeWar bot seems more rewarding to me for the time being. I don't think there are any good WeeWar bots yet. Besides, it might be used by a lot of people, for example newbies who want to train.
plinkplonk, apart from your comment being flamewarish, you're not interacting with the content of the sheats' comment. If you think Jesus is invalid, then state why -- interacting with the comment, the gospels, etc.

lostsheep, I must say that with a username like that, you are kind of asking for religious answers. :-) See Isaiah 53:6-7, one of the passages the lost sheep "meme" comes from: http://biblegateway.decenturl.com/lost-sheep -- we are the lost sheep, Jesus is also like a sheep, but he was "led like a lamb to the slaughter" and our sin was laid on him.

This is completely the wrong reason to embrace Christianity (heh), but one of the benefits is community. If you go to an active church, you're suddenly surrounded by many people who care about you, and some of them are quite knowledgeable. You also have access to a (free!) counsellor or pastor -- I guess it varies, but our pastor is very helpful with questions like this.
I'm not sure why you think there is a problem to be solved.

When you execute some code you bind an environment to that code. (This binding step is necessary if you want recursion to work.) In the case of a closure you just leave the environment bound to the function that returns. It is irrelevant how data got into the environment - as long as it is there and remains bound to that scope, the closure will work.

To be able to do this the environment needs to exist on the heap. However when you add the concurrency semantics that Go has, allocating things on the heap makes a ton of sense in general.
I assume you do not have a family...
That's just javascript minimization. Standard way of reducing page load times. It's been around way longer than Google Closure, just look at YUI Compressor.

It may stop anyone from looking at a page's source code, but I'd think most developers would put greatly reducing load times ahead of having your javascript being freely read.
Except you didn't drop out, you became European.
Or this is just a publicity stunt? You definitely tempted me to go and try your app.
I think the point is to make unemployed people feel superior.
It's more authentic than the usually mass-produced messages, I like that. But, yes, length is an issue.
There's no way the ad was more annoying than the interviewer.
Second, they coincided with one of the largest periods of vulcanicity in the past billion years. Third, one of them just happened to strike where these volcanoes were active.

Is it not plausible that impacts that massive caused the volcanic activity? Wouldn't impacts that massive be expected to catalyze that sort of reaction?
Yes actually.

Also, after getting my laptop bricked by the Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade I recovered my entire project from it.
I dont agree that Boeing or Air but never did this.
> It is designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression.

They specifically say their goal is to minimize latency to make web based applications more responsive. They aren't interested in making you able to download movies faster, what they want to do is make the web more responsive so that they can develop more apps for the web that traditional would have required a desktop client.
Upvoted for Firebug. If you've been a web developer for any length of time and you're not using this yet, start now. Prepare for the forehead slap when you learn to use the console!
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/boeingaerospace/200384...
I want to like Inkscape but I just find it too hard to use. Can you recommend any resources for learning how to use it?
Personally, Ken Thompson and Rob Pike carry more weight than Google. Also it is much easier to reason about memory and CPU usage with Go than Haskell. I think of Go as occupying a different local maxima than Haskell.
I used to work for a social network that wanted to let users get their own photos out of Facebook and into our network. We built a Facebook app that expressly served this purpose; users only enabled it after knowing what it would do and desiring that consequence.

A few weeks after we added this feature, Facebook told us if we kept doing this -- if we kept letting users import their own photos -- our API access would be terminated.

So, yeah, walled garden.
I wonder how long it'll take for some asshat to implement the equivalent of Prototype.js in Go -- forcing classicist modeling and inheritance in one of the few sanctuaries from its reign of terror.
I find that the best ambient music is often stuff you really like, but have played so much you know every note by heart. The familiarity of it, particularly if you play it loud enough that it's thoroughly immersive, is really helpful for getting into the "zone".

I find Kraftwerk is gold for this. Try "Computer Love" or "Radioactivity". There's more esoteric ambient stuff like Maeror Tri if you're curious enough to hunt around a bit. Also try Ildjarn's ambient music. (Ignore his heavy metal -- I like it, but it's certainly not for everyone.)
1 Million XBox Live Players Banned
> be fully confident that they can get home safe later.

You're leaving out the possibility of rape (date or otherwise). And I'm not sure what you're implying here about men. Men can't be confident that they will get home safe when they go to a party where they don't know anyone?

The only thing that I can guess at here is that you think that a man that goes to a party where he doesn't know anyone will get beat up. If that's the case, how is it more or less likely that a man will get beat up at a party full of strangers than a woman will get raped? If anything I think it would be more likely for a woman to get raped (gets drunk and passes out; guy goes too far while making out and she has a 'victim mindset' so she doesn't protest loud enough for others to hear/notice; etc)
But he's also contributed to a lot of open source software. Linux grew to the point of being "cool" among geeks due to the strength of its open source ecosystem. One of the things my wife admires about me is my proficiency with computers, which I got into through Linux. So indirectly his software (e.g. Xscreensaver) got me laid.

I think it's more a philosophy of "You get what you give", in more ways than one.
More Tigers Live In Texas Than Prowl In The Wild In India
Advanced Dropbox Hacks
Some people seem to find Jeff Atwood ranting about how fantastic regexes are annoying. Every time I read another article like that, though, I just find myself smiling and nodding.

Only thing that's kind of annoying is that the whole world hasn't moved to Perl regexes yet (with which I'm most familiar and think most fluently). I nearly punched the air when I learned Apache used PCRE for stuff like mod_rewrite.
The folks in comp.lang.lisp seem critical enough to me.