skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the desire to have children has a genetic component, and those with this genetic component are more likely to have offspring that survive until adulthood, then the trait will spread.

Given that plenty of heritable traits (like religiosity) are correlated with increased brood size, I'd say it's pretty likely.

Also, given that in first world countries even the offspring of poorer folks survive to adulthood, that removes any benefit of giving birth to fewer children.
Good luck figuring out from a programming test whether someone is actually going to add value (rather than just be good at solving tests). Experience delivering quality work on time is a reasonable predictor of future success.
There are many people who can converse fairly well in real-time written Lojban (although vocabulary is limited, and some parts of the language are generally not used).

Due to audio-visual isomorphism, being able to converse in written Lojban almost implies being able (theoretically) to converse in spoken Lojban. However, people are generally much less used to speaking and hearing Lojban, so spoken conversations are usually somewhat difficult (definitely far from fluent).
Jesus, you got downvoted hard. Damn shame.

Guys, it's really, really not that difficult. Apple offers you a combination hardware/software package. They design the software to work brilliantly with the hardware they design, and they work very hard to make sure your experience is the best imaginable. That's why they pair the two together. And Apple doesn't want you using their software on hardware it wasn't designed for, because they want to make sure you get their full experience. They're designers. They win international awards for their computers. They want you to get their product, not a hybrid of half of their idea with half of somebody else's cheap refuse.

If you don't use OS X, you don't miss out on that much. It's not like you need OS X to live, and Apple's depriving you of something by asking you use their computer. If you don't want a Mac, then use Linux or Windows. If you want Apple's product, buy Apple's product, not a cheap third-rate knockoff.

In return, when you buy a high-end Mac, you get a superb, pleasurable experience. For as low as, what, six hundred dollars now?, you get a beautiful piece of hardware that does what you want it to splendidly, has the best third-party ecosystem I've ever come across, and doesn't lose you cred among any fashionistas you might know, plus it runs on Unix so you can tinker away with it however you see it. It's a very nice machine and millions of man-hours were spent making it, so perhaps it's worth your saving up a little money to purchase the full package. I and many other Mac owners can testify that we are very happy with our buy and may buy another one in the distant future.

I know the line of thought is that computers are just tools to get a job done, but that's like saying all a chair has to be is a plank of wood to get your ass on. There are planks of wood, and then there are chairs that lots of thought has gone into to make you as happy as you can be. We pay more for those chairs because while we don't need it to live, it makes our lives a little better. That's how Mac OS X's been made, and I don't think it's ridiculous to ask that we honor its maker's wishes, or at the very least, not bitch when the maker puts a little effort into ensuring you do it their way.
IPhone developer gets cease and desist from Jeff Foxworthy
A simple joke app received Jeff Foxworthys attention on copyright infringement.
>> "The fact it uses a somewhat open Unix is a historical accident"

I don't think macs would be anywhere near as popular as they are today if this wasn't the case. I would not be using one now if it wasn't 'unixy'.
Do they not realize that this will cause more people to use Windows 7? What if people actually like it?
It's nice to have filtered links with a brief summary, but this is not my thing because your comments are too verbose. The issue is about 500 words/18 links, HN's http://news.ycombinator.com/best is 250/30. HN has little context, but the sweet spot for me is between the two. Here are a few relevant articles:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/headlines-bbc.html
http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/rewriting.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703b.html

Here's an example:

> Doug Crockford gave a talk on his book "JavaScript: The Good Parts". This article explains what he likes, what he doesn't, and why: Doug Crockford Talk on JavaScript (news.yc, reddit)

This implies that the content is an interpretation by someone else of Crockford, and that his talk was about his book, which it wasn't (it had the same subject). Besides that, it's verbose (in my opinion), and doesn't put the most relevant info at the front of the sentence. I would have edited it to read:

> Doug Crockford Talk on JavaScript (news.yc, reddit) - Author of "JavaScript: The Good Parts" on what's good and bad about Javascript.

or better yet:

> Doug Crockford Talk on JavaScript (news.yc, reddit) - Javascript pro/cons from author of "JavaScript: The Good Parts" (transcript).

I hope this criticism is helpful.
That was more common in the late '90s than it is now (and note that it involves knowing only a very few instructions; enough to call a function or the system call gate).

There are occasional exploits that can't be pieced together out of other people's shellcode, but there are also perhaps 10 people in the world that write those exploits.
Cairngorm: Getting Started – Part 4
On the iron lungs and the salk vaccine there is an interesting "conspiracy" theory I've seen. Incidence of polio correlates extremely well to production volumes of DDT and various insecticides. It's a startling chart. Production went way down and then so did polio.

The exact mechanisms of the polio virus have allegedly never been all that well worked out. The efficacy of the salk vaccine might be a coincidence.
Sad, because it was my little Mini9 OSX that really made it fun to hack on the go. It was also a nice cheap way to test on OSX for doing web dev at work, much easier to keep a little 9 inch netbook for browser testing!
This was not my experience as an undergrad. I needed a B average to keep my scholarship, so I made sure that was never at risk. Beyond that, I focused on learning and on learning what I was interested in. I spent vast amounts of time on math and computer classes and read as much as time permitted beyond the required materials. On the other hand, I only did the minimum to get the B when I had to fulfill requirements in humanities.
I've tried to sell t-shirts via Facebook ads, without much luck. Actually, a couple years ago when Facebook Ads were called Facebook Fliers, and there was very little competition, we sold a ton of t-shirts.

This "insider's confession" is extremely contradictory. He starts about by saying "People on Facebook won’t pay for anything".

And then he closes by saying that once the legit advertisers start to grow on Facebook, it will push the scammers out. How are legit advertisers going to be able to do that if no one on Facebook buys anything, regardless of the targeting? And then he claims the legit guys will be able to afford $10-50 CPMs. I can't imagine that will actually happen. Maybe it will, but as of now, people are on Facebook to talk and share with their friends.

If a business wants to be successful on Facebook, then it needs to be successful in the old school real world way: word-of-mouth. Make an awesome product, get people talking about it, and you'll see lots of Facebook traffic and conversions.
In '96 when I wrote the Crispin IMAP server bug, I can't remember which way it was but you either couldn't have uppercase letters, or could only have uppercase letters, in the shellcode. I thought I was kind of badass for writing that code. Of course, by '99, that was a triviality.

Just saying, it's not just NUL.
You're not addressing the other half of Scoble's point, which is not just lamenting that forums inevitably break down, but that blogs and Twitter and other such explicit lists offer a way out. I've been making this point for about eight years now, and while I (obviously) will still participate in forums such as this, I do it with the certain knowledge that it is only a matter of time before it falls apart and there is nothing I can do to prevent that, only delay it sometimes.

Meanwhile, my Google Reader remains as high quality now as it was when I first started using RSS nearly ten years ago. Not a whiff of degradation, because when a blog goes south, that blog gets evicted. If anything it's better.

It's a different type of community, and it isn't perfect in every way, but it scales radically better. A forum falls apart sometimes in the mere tens of active users, certainly by the thousands, but an RSS feed is just sitting there, serenely serving out.

(This is part of the reason I'm so against things like SideWiki, which threaten to bring forum user economics to every part of the web. Yes, to some extent you can just "not use it", but even the overflow of crap from the forumification of everything can reduce the value of a blog to you. This is also why I don't think it is necessary for a blog to have a comment section; why forcibly attach a forum to something that is superior in its own way?)
That's a nice workaround, but to me that smells like something wrong with the language itself. I can't think of a good reason to allow assignment in an if statement; other than maybe save a few characters and introduce a lot of confusion / bugs in the process. If you need to make an assignment then do it separately, don't hide it in an if statement (imho).
If you don't mind my asking...

What is someone's motivation to vote on and/or discuss a deal? Maybe I'm missing something...

On the website itself:

1) It takes two clicks before I get to the deal. When I click on a deal, I go to a site on bargin-notify that lets me discuss/vote and I need to click on the same text again to get to best buy (or whatever). I think you should have a "buy this" button or something" on both the main page and the description page.

2) I think on the main page, you want to have a way to directly get to my searches. I'd imagine most people would come to the page and want to look at their searches right away. I could be wrong, but thats how I envision using it.

Overall, I like the idea of bargain aggregation. I'm curious how your getting commission off this if your just pulling data from RSS feeds, but no need to spill your secrets to us...
Well... The absolute worst case here is a structural engineer producing something that looks like a bridge for some time, then becomes a very dynamic and contorted structure of concrete, metal, automobiles and mostly dead primates.
Zero-knowledge online password management
Yes, but these warnings can generate false positives if you actually want to do assignment in a test condition. And before everyone tells me that's bad coding style, it is at least a common idiom in certain kinds situations like this very common example from PHP (whose compiler does not warn for assignment at all):

<?php
if (false !== ($pos = strpos($haystack, $needle))) {
doSomethingWith($haystack, $pos);
}
?>

I find the constant first notation to be very friendly, btw. It's not as natural when translated into English normally, but in terms of logic, it makes sense to think of the first part of the test condition as its own little predicate:

// Generic language
bool matchesMyConstantValue(val) {
return MY_CONSTANT_VALUE == val;
}
Tool of the Day: Comindwork: Powerful Project Management
www.leeners.com

I haven't made cheese yet, but I know someone who does it all the time and he recommends them. I have done a fair amount of winemaking. It's like making bread: you just need the patience to accept that yeast works in its own timescale. Other than that, there's nothing particularly difficult about it.

Now that I have a source of raw milk (it helps to live out in the sticks, surrounded by small farms), I plan to get started cheesemaking soon.
Or put some public domain code on github :-)
Thanks for the sentence, that's certainly nontrivial enough (I was just trying to dodge 2-3-word-sentences like "jesus wept" or "i like milk", which rarely show anything interesting at the grammatical level).

Not-mocking: there's an apparent lack of number ("thing(s)", "I (or we)"). Is it closer to true that:

- the grammatical root of this apparent lack of # is shared between "thing(s)" and "i (or we)"

...or that:

- "thing(s)" is a gloss of some word that's ~ "specific things not specifically specified"

- "I (or we)" is a gloss of some word that's ~ "who I speak for" (or some other deictic term that's ~ first-person but otherwise underspecified)

...or to some other possibility? Additionally: Given that it's a designed language I'm curious about what underlying intent (whatever it is that explains why the answer is what it is, instead of being something else).

(Disclaimer: wiki's lojban articles have resolved a lot of my other questions, but before I asked you I'd only looked at lojban's wiki's articles, which are mostly unhelpful.)
Ask HN: Prion Disease Fear?
I did post this on reddit, but because I posted it in a state of panic, I ended up writing something rather embarrassing, so I'd like a second go at a different community.

Basically, for the past 4 months, I've been terrified of getting a prion disease. Too many things about them seem so brutal. How they start off as psychiatric problems, how they only affect the brain, how the death is fairly long, and how they are immune to conventional steralization all terrify me.

But there's one thing that truly stands out in fear: insomnia. Prion diseases many times cause an actual physical inability to sleep, and this drives me up the wall. How can I fall asleep, knowing that I may not due to these (1 in a million rare) brain diseases?

So far, I don't know of any other kind disease that does this, so it's fairly unique to them. I've been seeing a psychotherapist, but I still have this underlying fear. I'm thinking of killing myself, since that's looks like the only way I can rest assured that I'll die a comparatively peaceful death.

Why shouldn't I fear them? Do they scare you? Also, would a death by sleep deprivation not even be as bad as I'd imagine/is the disease not that painful for the sufferer?
You're saying that Jobs made a decision to create a Unix workstation so it's just a happy accident that he had to use Unix to make a Unix workstation?
The Rack Middleware/Metal screencast that they link to is actually really good. I hadn't delved at all into Rack or Metal before but I definitely understand their utility now...

http://railslab.newrelic.com/2009/06/05/episode-14-rack-meta...
The commit parameter is a pain in the backside when it comes to rails but I would have thought most people would know how to fix this anyway. It's a simple HTML issue, not really a Rails issue.
Startup Hiring Advice
Blowouts and budgeting for snacks is damn useful. I used to exercise on blowout days, and had them somewhat more often (every fourth day). Also made sure I went over 2000 calories - this way for a couple of days afterwards I actually feel like eating less.
Compression works inside relatively short chunks of the files, compared to huge amounts of storage. Plus if you use zip, you're only looking at similarities within individual files. I don't think the results would be useful.

Incidentally, ZFS also has an option to compress the data. You have a choice of a fast but not so wonderful algorithm, or gzip level 1 to 9. Since de dupe is at the block level, I believe you can combine the two.
I'd always assumed this was a common teaching. I saw it repeatedly in my undergrad CS days, and even saw it in some AP high school classes.
Isn't this rather elementary?
That's what an iPhone is for.

ok,ok there's a gap for a 9-10" macbook. They should make one.
I did something very very similar. I lost about 50lbs in about 2 months by very VERY closely tracking what I was eating.

I wrote a super simple little web form for myself to input what I had eaten, and how many calories were in it. There were no fancy graphs or anything like this appears to have, but it made me very aware how what was going into my body. What made it great was that it was accessible from my phone, from my friends phone, from my computer at work, etc. etc. etc.

If you care (although I suspect that anybody here could recreate this in about 10 seconds), you can check it out here: http://www.gibsonandlily.com/getskinny
What a simple and well implemented service.
LuaJIT 2.0 Beta released, making Lua the fastest interpreted language
Lean Startups aren’t Cheap Startups
The Way I Work: Jason Fried of 37Signals
Never stop learning.
Of course there are wealthy families that have many children, but why will exactly that trait become dominant?

I wish I could make this point more clear, but words fail me. From some of your discussions with others in this thread, I see they are also having difficulty communicating the basics of evolution. Pardon me, I have to abandon this discussion now.
And there's even more friction. These are all very minor things, but they add up:

* I tried to sign up and got "bad email or password". Oops, the form on the homepage is actually a login form; I had to click on the Sign Up link and enter my information again.

* After creating an account, I still can't use the program right away. Need to check for a confirmation link in my inbox.

* Now I'm signed in, but I have to "add a story" and then fill out another form with information about the story. How am I suposed to know how many chapters I'll have before I even start?

I would do a combined login/signup form on the home page, or side-by-side forms. When the user signs in, create their first story form them with a default title/description/type, and let them click to edit those fields. Some sort of inline editing (click to edit, or just input fields by default) would feel quicker and simpler than the JavaScript popups for editing.
My (bootstrapping) startup took a smallish f&f round. We took the money in the form of a convertible loan, which means that it can be converted to stock or repaid (as a normal loan would) at a certain date.

This got us the money easily, and left it more flexible for us to maneuver in the future.

Yes, it's a little less advantageous to the lender. But the f&f rounds are usually b/c your f&f want to see you succeed, not because they are actually shrewd business deals (although they certainly can be).
Link goes to the benchmark shootout, the actual announcement it here:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58814

Congrats to Mike Pall on an impressive solo achievement.
Does Multitasking Make You More Productive?
Yeah, both. There's a lot of emulators, unsurprisingly, but also some neat homebrew apps.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Homebrew_development
Shoestring marketing for start-ups
Please explain how I mis-used the term, considering the definition is: In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in, or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products and services, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.

I didn't say this incident is the result of incompetence, I am saying their developers have illustrated a lack of competence in the past. Breaking with third party fonts installed. Breaking iPhone updates that require the use of another computer to fix a broken patch. The list goes on and on.
Cheaper, cleverer desalination
Wouldn't mind an explanation on why this is down voted.
I think you would use MLComp as a baseline. You have a set of data that you can run generic algorithms on to show you what the best results are without any further considerations.

It is also useful for researchers who develop new algorithms for a specific dataset but then make it a generic algorithm. No research has the time to sit there manually testing every dataset that they can find to see what their algorithm works well on.

So for data set providers it gives them a quick look at what machine learning can offer without a lot of development.

For researchers it gives them a chance to see a surprising result, maybe their algorithm works well on a dataset they never considered.
But Google street view would have shown empty fields!
checked it out really quickly and decided that I'll definitely try out your service for my son tonight.
my imaginary friend came from Argleton. He says it's a great little town, he also mention it was hard to spot it.
My new startup: split-the-bill.com
Business Lessons From The Battlefield
Regarding the "should" part: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1323013
Calorie counting always works - when you want to lose a lot of weight and lose it quickly. For maintaining long term you can't stick with it though, so you most likely want to make lifestyle changes, including exercise.

Exercise is fundamentally hard for weight loss. It takes a lot of time exercising in order to make a difference. Eating 600 calories less is not that hard - but from a bit of googling it looks like it would take 1.5 hours of continuous aerobics (plus time for changing and shower - that's over 2h every day). I'm not terribly out of shape, but I'm pretty sure I can't do 1.5h of aerobic and still stand. Also, I'd be famished afterwards.

If you have good data for exercise, please share. Otherwise it's still anecdote vs anecdote.
How is an iPhone a 9" laptop?
!ptr is bad.

I worked with a C programmer who changed all occurrences of "ptr != 0" to "!ptr". The program stopped working. In Windows, a null pointer is not 0. The C idiom "ptr != 0" compiles correctly, but when you try to get clever with "!ptr", you were in trouble. The expression would evaluate to false on a null pointer. (At least with the version of Visual C++ we were using back then.)
Carriers and Netbooks: To Subsidize or Not to Subsidize?
When you do this with mortages you get a financial crisis!
Holy shit, the design.
I agree. I saw this tip a long time ago and tried it for a bit, but realized that I don't need it because I never put a "=" in place of a "==".
Atom is x86. So it should work with Atom. That it doesn't is a sign that they are (probably) deliberately checking.
Actually you did say this incident was a result of incompetence when quoting someone speaking on this subject and how it is not vender lock in.

Bringing up things which frankly have absolutely nothing to do with what we're currently talking about doesn't aid your argument.
Then you weren't writing that code in C.
I didn't realize that it's a "which is more wrong" contest...

At least the children are arguably less culpable given the age of majority.
Thanks a bunch for the feedback!

As I said, this is very much unpolished: just wrote it to scratch my own itch. If you end up playing around with it, I'd love to hear whether the functionality is something you'd find useful if more polished.
Hacker's Diet is a bit scary, with all the excels and formulas. The "short version" worked well for me: count all calories, and better fast then slow.
This is actually quite salient advice. There's so many blogs that just say, "OMG do it!". You need to be rational and have a plan.
If the lifestyles you're speaking of involve a significantly higher-than-average birthrate, then they're almost by definition on the rise...
A few points about exercise: Some of the point I have heard is to change the metabolism, so that while you are doing other things, you are burning more calories.

The other issue is that simply eating less will cause you to lose muscle, not necessarily fat. Lifting will let you keep the muscle.
I probably wouldn't pick up this habit simply because

1) You shouldn't be able to make an assignment (by itself) in an if and not get a compiler error in most modern languages.

2) It goes against the logical flow. You are checking if a variable is equivalent to a constant, not if the constant is equivalent to your variable. If your code is read by someone else who is unfamiliar with this practice then they may get confused by the illogical flow of everything.
Inc magazine database fail