skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Where I spent most of my childhood, there were no roads for a few miles, no garbage collection, no fire department, and while the area was nominally in the jurisdiction of the Alaska State Troopers, it would have taken at least an hour for an officer to respond. Of course, a total lack of infrastructure would be less than comfortable in a modern city, it's entirely possible to live comfortably without such conveniences.

As for health insurance, the claim that it is necessary is absurd. One could make a much more reasonable claim than health care is necessary, but the question of the specific mechanism by which it is paid for is orthogonal to whether it should be considered a necessity in a modern society.
Okay, but that suggests wave function collapse is erroneous whereas many-worlds is more likely. Based on that alone you can see why I'd consider many-worlds silly. Also, I'd say anyone entertaining it as plausible or even likely is probably reasoning from a purely mathematical vantage point, which is simply not accurate enough to draw such conclusions from. I can't see how else they'd arrive at its feasibility. I don't believe Shrodinger or Einstein would ever propose it.

Wave function collapse wouldn't be so much erroneous as an illusion; it would still describe the way in which other quantum states would decohere and become inaccessible from the perspective of an observer. Remember, these interpretations are equally supported by experiment at this point. Far from being silly, that's exactly why many physicists consider many-worlds to be more likely--wave function collapse seems to be an unnecessary addition that complicates the theory for no benefit (see also: Occam's Razor).

Furthermore, reasoning from a purely mathematical perspective is generally better, in this case. Our intuitions about reality are so shaped by the size and energy levels we experience that thinking about quantum mechanical or relativistic phenomena in terms of "physical reality" instead of mathematical structure is likely to lead to misunderstandings and mistakes. Some physicists would argue, actually, that wave function collapse is exactly that sort of mistake.

There are a few well-known physicists in favor of many-worlds--Hawking and Feynman, for instance, the latter of whom won a Nobel Prize for his work relating to quantum mechanics. As for Einstein, you may recall his unhappiness at quantum mechanics being nonlocal ("spooky action at a distance") and nondeterministic ("god playing dice with the universe")--whereas the many-worlds interpretation restores both locality and determinism.

In the end, I'm no expert, and can't really make any statements about what is or isn't likely, but calling many-worlds "silly" is almost certainly incorrect. It's no sillier than quantum mechanics as a whole.

Hmm, here I won't argue directly against that statement, but instead offer this: If a tree falls in the forest when no one is around does it make a sound? I'm pretty sure you know the answer is 'No', and that's more of where my conscious observation of reality statement came from.

That question depends on the definition of "sound", actually. Does it mean "longitudinal pressure waves in a physical medium" or does it mean "the subjective experience a human has when perceiving pressure waves in air at certain frequencies"? The answer to the question is completely obvious, and different, in both cases.
While I agree with the fact that there are many US military bases around the world and they contribute to the equilibrium, your statement sounds a bit like slaves won't fight between them because they serve only one master.
Through this article I learned of Israel Gelfand, who died October 5, 2009. RIP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Gelfand
The irony rings clear even today.
Typically. Occasionally you hear about one running Linux.
javascript:(function(){readStyle='style-ebook';readSize='size-medium';readMargin='margin-wide';_readability_script=document.createElement('SCRIPT');_readability_script.type='text/javascript';_readability_script.src='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/js/readability.js?x='+(Math.random());document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_script);_readability_css=document.createElement('LINK');_readability_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability.css';_readability_css.type='text/css';_readability_css.media='screen';document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_css);_readability_print_css=document.createElement('LINK');_readability_print_css.rel='stylesheet';_readability_print_css.href='http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/css/readability-print.css';_readability_print_css.media='print';_readability_print_css.type='text/css';document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(_readability_print_css);})();

That is the readability bookmarklet.
It's not helpful for the homepage itself but it gives that "Home"-Button a purpose. This is my workaround because Firefox doesn't support Bookmark-Buttons on the button bar.
I can now just hit the "Home" Button on any page and readability will work its magic.
The cited works are interesting. If your interested in this sort of thing (who on HN isn't?) check out The Pragmatic guys book: http://pragprog.com/titles/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-lear...
Internet rules and laws: the top 10, from Godwin to Poe
If you haven't seen ClickToFlash yet, it can transparently replace the YouTube flash player with an HTML5 <video> element in Safari:

http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/
Ok, so with a 2048x2048 image it works alright. Still quite slow though.

But I am rather sure it is tailored for click heatmapping.
I love Paul Carr.
It sounds so simple, just a three step process:

Spaceport, Spaceship, Space Hotel.

At least they make it sound simple on the site. Personally I don't know how they plan to get it completed before 2012. It looks to me like a great dream but not particularly feasible, though I must say that the maglev launch system looks fascinating.
It looks really nice. I'm giving it a try right now and it doesn't seem to be downloading the video though. I'm using the latest version of Safari on Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

I tried Firefox too and still no download. Activity Monitor shows no network activity that would be indicative of it downloading. I tried pressing play to get it started, still nothing.

The video that I was attempting to watch:

http://neosmart.net/YouTube5/index.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww....
Hi jsean,

Thanks for your feedback. iPUB also has a feature where in you can attach notes at each paragraph of the book. Also share these notes with other readers of the book. Would you think this feature is useful for you?
стартовая страница
They used it correctly.

From wiki: "Zero-day attacks occur when a vulnerability window exists between the time a threat is released and the time security vendors release patches."

A flaw exists. No released patches yet.
Ask HN: What do founders spend their time on, after their product launch?
Seems like all the startup stories you hear, more or less play out like Cinderella, you hear about every minute detail about preparing for launch etc, then you launch, and pretty much end up with "...and they lived happily ever after". Maybe a year down the line you hear about a new version, and a few years later you might hear about the acquisition.

So what do the founders spend their time on after they launch?(3+ months after launch). You know things besides coding new features.
I didn't realize Israel Gelfand had just died. He is by far my favorite author of mathematics textbooks. (I even use his photograph as my avatar on the first website where I used the screenname tokenadult.) His book Algebra

http://www.amazon.com/Algebra-Israel-M-Gelfand/dp/0817636773

is an inspirational example of how to make a textbook both humorous and challenging, and is the start of a great series of textbooks on secondary school mathematics from the viewpoint of advanced mathematics. I use that textbook in the supplementary math classes I teach, and the students LOVE the problems. His MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his work in mathematics education (which I just learned about from the Wikipedia article you kindly shared) was very well deserved.
A Mom's Life and Loves
Why is this even on HN , i would have thought HN is simply not the right audience for that particular piece.
Seems YouTube's changing the token :S

I'm looking into it.

EDIT: Found the problem. Need a couple of minutes though.

EDIT2: Should be working now. Local testing hadn't shown the IP restrictions in the YouTube link token, fixed now. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Nathan.
It's interesting to see people who supported Obama, or even paid attention to the '08 election at all, acting surprised about the health insurance mandate. Obama was pummeled over the concept during the race, most notably by Clinton during the primary. This was a long time coming.

As for the concept of a mandate, it's simply the flip side of guaranteed issue. Without a mandate, guaranteed issue screws insurers: it creates --- as a matter of law --- an incentive for people not to get insurance until they get sick. Adverse selection is the enemy of insurance.

It seems to me that you can't argue about whether an insurance mandate is confiscatory or overreaching without at the same time arguing about whether people with preexisting or chronic conditions (or some statistical disposition to same) should be excluded from the health care system. And yet: all I see here is arguments about whether politicians should run the health care system.

Finally, I'll just note that the dollar amounts being discussed for the fine accompanying the mandate are a fraction of what someone would pay for actual health insurance, and probably lower that one would pay even for low-deductable coverage. I think lots of people don't realize that, because right now, the cost of coverage is very stealthily deducted from their income at the fiat of HR directors and the health insurance reps that instruct them.
I don't think the investors will consider the joke particularly funny...

This involves launching and maintaining a space station and the development of a reusable orbital craft not unlike the space shuttle. That's not easy.
Ricardo, can you point me to the security flaws you've discovered and documented? I looked you up on LinkedIn, and you have a long resume in software development --- but no apparent experience whatsoever in software security.

Your claims about QA and security are so wildly outside my own experience and the general understanding of my field that I'm wondering where you get the confidence to make them so forcefully. I've never met a QA team anywhere that could reasonably be left responsible for testing software security.
The more likely 'law' is that you are feeling nervous because you know there are several points of failure in your demo that you haven't taken care of.
Entirely social. Commercial jets are already equipped with software that can take off, navigate, fly, and land the jet. Generally more efficiently than a pilot can. The job really is an easy one for software.

Unless something like this happens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 . Then there's absolutely no replacement for a human being or three in the cockpit, and the public and the FAA know it. A pilot's salary or two is not too much to pay to protect the lives of several hundred people once in a while, even if it's otherwise unnecessary.

The military believes it, too, and the jets they fly have a higher likelihood of encountering life or death situations such as having pieces shot off and needing to get home. While there may not be pilots in the jets in the next generation, they'll be flying them for a while yet, and commanding them for a long time. The battlefield is too difficult, complex, and important for anything else. Once someone gives the order to drop a bomb, they'll trust software to execute the order efficiently and correctly. But it's going to be a human being giving the order for a long time. Possibly forever.

There are some jobs that won't be done by software until it can pass a Turing test. Software may be able to do the job in the vast majority of cases, and in some societies that may be good enough. Socially speaking, in this society, it isn't.
"Two weeks ago, I wrote here about how the ‘real time web’ is turning all of us into inhuman egotists. "

Amen, it doesn't matter if you are a top-level celebrity or happen to be at the location of a major incident , i don't want to know your opinion of anything and no anyone with camera and a twitter account doesn't a journalist make.
I don't think a bookie will want to pay much for it. If you want to wage for it, however, the odds are, pun intended, astronomical.
What a fabulously badly written, sensationalistic article. The TLS problem published last week affects virtually none of the applications that use HTTPS on the web today: they're currently only relevant to applications in which the client is required to carry a certificate to authenticate themselves.
Better question: why are we so focused on weight loss instead of health and fitness?
Depends on the business, and what you're doing - but it's more or less:

- Support

- Sales - any number of sales-related things like optimising the sales pipeline or even managing sales staff if you're B2B

- Marketing and PR

- Business - things like dealing with raising money, finance, accounting, trying to negotiate the lawyers fees down, fixing up the license agreement you originally wrote...

- Finding Staff - if you're doing well, you might need to hire. It takes a lot of time up, and it's a huge decision each time.

- Managing staff - this takes a LOT longer than you think it would, i'd say between 40-80% of your time gets taken up by managing staff when you get to 3 staff.

- Product development if you're lucky
I went through this book a few years back (Breakthrough Rapid reading by Peter Kump). I bought it for no other reason than it comes up first in Amazon when you search for "speed reading":
http://www.amazon.com/Breakthrough-Rapid-Reading-Peter-Kump/...

My conclusion is that yes, speed reading works and it's real. The book takes you through various 15 min exercises, one per day for 30 days. At times these exercises are a real pain and I really hated doing it. Sometimes it feels like you are making no progress and not comprehending anything if the exercise makes you go faster than normal.

But at the end (and throughout) you can do a self test to see your improvement. The test also covers comprehension so you can verify you aren't just skimming. The improvement was dramatic. I ended up reading twice as fast by the end with no loss in comprehension.

I still use a lot of the techniques today to reinforce it, although if I'm reading for pleasure I don't usually use the techniques (but still read faster).

One downside to it that I've noticed is that I'm much worse at catching typos in things I write now. Since my eye is not focusing on each word when I read I have to really force myself to slow down if I'm reading to proof something instead of comprehension.

Here is something I wrote on it a while back:
http://www.startbreakingfree.com/77/business-education-part-...

Some of the claims about reading a book a day are marketing hype. So don't expect miracles. But in general yes I'm convinced it works. I definitely read faster now, and it's probably worth the investment of a month to learn it to get the return in productivity.
Here's why they didn't lose weight:

The cycling was deliberately performed at a relatively easy intensity (about 55 percent of each person’s predetermined aerobic capacity).

Body recomposition isn't a game of calories; it's a game of hormones. It's well documented that high intensity effort is required to increase levels of human growth hormone, which leads to fat loss ("afterburn", as the article calls it).

This is easily found in existing medical research. Quick Google turns up this, but there are many others: http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/75/1/157

GH did not increase significantly from preexercise baseline during low intensity exercise

[...]

A minimum duration of 10 min, high intensity exercise consistently increased circulating GH in adult males.

So HGH is released relative to a workout's intensity, not its duration. You'd be better off with 20 minutes of high intensity workout versus 3 hours putzing around on a stationary bike.

A hormone-centric mindset will get better results with diet, too. Your hormonal response to some piece of food is much more important than its caloric count. This may be slightly conspiratorial, but I think the food industry fights against this viewpoint. They want you to think you can still lose weight if you eat their shitty 100-calorie snack packs full of crappy corn syrup and whatever because, hey, it's 100 calories, right? Woe betide the food industry if people actually start caring what they're eating instead of just how much...
Couldn't you just allow cross-state insurance pools, insurance portability, require direct payment and encourage the states to have their own pooling solutions, much like some states currently do with automotive insurance?

I don't think it's an either-or question -- pooling/mandate or not -- at the national level. Sure, I think lots of folks would like it to be that way, but it doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to have a centralized answer for it to have a solution. Co-ops, for instance, have been left on the floor so far.
It's not that far off from other products offered by Logitech
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/mice_pointers/mice/devices...

here's a 15 button mouse built for World of Warcraft http://campaign.steelseries.com/us/
And yet this is the sort of advice I'd give to anyone talking to any investor: learn what that investor cares about, judging from what they've said and the companies they've funded. In fact giving founders this sort of information about later stage investors is a not insignificant part of what YC does.
Yes, and after that, we'll have to start teaching ourselves multiplication again, so we can develop a manned plane that can break the stalemate that software will get into:)
Contacting google ...
Yes, the news does, in fact, look different when not subjected to $50k of pre-planning and post-production per clip. If you find this surprising or dismaying, the problem lies in you, not in the news.
How come JIT compilers seem to have a problem with compiling try/catch blocks? Also, why does caching the window object increase performance by significant margins in some of the browsers?
I'm not having any luck loading your page, so maybe it's explained there, but how do you get to the .mp4 version of a file? pwnyoutube often works, but it's also often down. I'd love to just be able to download the video and watch it locally, if the .mp4 link allows that.
The news looks significantly different when it's not subject to basic fact checking and the people reporting don't even pretend to adhere to journalistic ethics.
Speaking personally I find that my reading speed varies greatly depending on what kind of material I have been reading lately. If I've been reading light material that I don't have to pay attention to details on (sci-fi/fantasy is a good example), then my overall reading speed on other kinds of material increases. If I've been reading serious material like a math textbook, then I slow down.

Speaking from experience when I read quickly it feels like I'm "pipelining" stuff. Normal people read a bit, process, integrate, then read some more. I am able to read, process, and integrate in parallel at different speeds. I'll get to the end of my reading, and internally I am not done the material. This lets me read much more quickly.

As an illustration let me describe the one time I measured my speed on a long piece of work. I have a habit of reading in the bath, and one day in high school I began reading Clan of the Cave Bear at the beginning of a bath. I got sucked in, read the whole book, then finished the bath. My mother wondered where I had been all day. I told her the story. She didn't believe that I could have done it. She asked for a summary of what happened. I couldn't give it and explained that it usually took a day or so for me to properly digest a book like that after I read it. She really didn't believe me.

So as proof I gave her the book, told her to open to a random passage and start reading. After a couple of paragraphs I proceeded to tell her what was going on at that point in the book, had her hand me the book then quickly found the paragraph. After repeating several times she was convinced that I read the book.

She then took a count of pages, a count of lines on pages and a count of words/line for several lines then estimated how many words the book was. We calculated how long the bath was and it turned out that I had read the book at over 900 words per minute.

Oh, and the next day? My brain had finished integrating everything and I was able to give her a plot summary for the book.
Sorry, but I think this is complete bullshit. If millions of people talk about stuff publicly, some are bound to produce nonsense or bad stuff. Getting worked up about that is equivalent to reporting about the proverbial falling sack of rice in China.

As for the army case, I suppose that person acted against the rules of the military (just guessing) and will probably be dealt with accordingly.

As for the dying kid: a professional journalist would have done the same thing, unfortunately. (I did not watch the video, though).

As for cell phones in hospitals: I tend to think that is an urban myth. That expensive machinery is so fragile that it can be shot down by some microwaves from a mobile phone? Very unlikely - more likely there are other reasons for banning phones, perhaps psychological ones.

As with "professional media", some people will manage to get a reputation for fact checking and whatnot, and smart people will stick to those sources for their news. There are also "professional" magazines about UFOs and stuff.
I enjoyed the This American Life clip, even though I've watched it before. However, I feel it somewhat undermines his thesis that in my school, if there was a fight in the playground it would not be unusual for the bystanders to spit on the pair scuffling on the ground. People can be dicks, with or without video technology being involved.
There will be war for as long as there are debates on the internet: until everyone agrees about everything important enough to fight over.

World peace could arise as the result of some extremely democratic/libertarian/scientific worldwide monoculture that agreed on everything but what they were willing to settle with words. I think that an unlikely end to the story, though. The easiest road to world peace is for someone to win. And that's not a happy ending in my book. I'll take war over that. It's nasty, but nowhere near as bad as tyranny.

Put another way, there will be war as long as there is crime. I hope that's forever. Living in a society that had actually done what it takes to eliminate crime completely would not be worth it to me. I feel the same way about a world without war.
Starting Findory: The end
In my 5 years as a UNIX Sysadmin I've set up SSL/TLS hundreds of times to protect web, email, and database communications, and not once have I ever been compelled to use client side certificates for authentication.
True, but some sort of heuristic is necessary. Without a heuristic for guessing what would be important ahead of time, we wouldn't have paging on computers, and then where would we be? If the heuristic is right more often than not, at least it's useful.