skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know I did. And if I should turn 'terrorist' I'd probably make a half decent one, as would anybody else with some understanding of technology.

This is (if you'll excuse the aside) one of my favourite hypothetical exercises.

The conclusion I usually draw is mostly that technical knowledge is a lot less important than technical competence. And also that the main "failure" of terrorist attacks (or planned attacks) are due to a lack of this competence higher up the chain.

Whereas the actual bombers or bomb makers (to take a primitive example) might be highly educated they are usually recruited (or as you say sent after recruitment to receive training) to achieve a plan. The planners are almost certainly a lot less technically skilled - they make crazy mistakes or bad choices and it all goes bad for them.

When you consider how GOOD a terrorist you yourself could be (in a coldly logical way) and then think that the vast majority of visitors here are as good or better then I think it puts things in a lot of perspective compared to the fear these people are supposed to instil. The people that do turn to it are, really, no match to our collective might.
No, I think you need to know people a bit better than that. F'rinstance I know that the guy swearing like a sailor because of some minor thing is a sailor and has dealt with the shit hitting the fan in a hurricane out where there's no possibility of rescue; if he wants to blow of a little steam, let him. Hell, it's even funny, it lightens the mood of the rest of the group!
There's more to tail-call optimization than simply imitating iteration using recursion.
Ok, thanks for that correction. It seemed to make some kind of sense. My 'wishful thinking' is probably that educated people make better decisions in life, pity to see that isn't the case.

And I fully agree on the PR factor, it's a pretty smart move. Educate instead of arm. It makes perfect sense too.
Very simple:

1. do it in a free or cheap location
2. ask a law firm to buy breakfast
3. use open source software/posterous to host the website
4. don't be a greedy f@#$%k and take $6k from startups desperate to raise capital.

best jcal :-p
Among the problems I see with most of these services is that they don't provide anything meaningful to socialize about that is unique to mobile and location based data. For general social banter, facebook seems to have won the turf. To your point, if you're no longer in the hooking up or carousing with friends demo, these apps have seemingly nothing for you.

All that said, I think there's tremendous value potential for overlapping virtual and physical communities. I just think all of these players have been too early and lacking imagination to strike a hit. Now that location aware devices are nearly ubiquitous, the next steps are commodifying and standardizing location data, APIs, etc. It seems inevitable. If there's anything that's going to yank me from consulting/contracting back into full-time startup hackery, it'll be something along these lines.
About 5 years ago, visiting some friends in Colorado living somewhere high up in the rockies the talk turned to terrorism.

So I posed a question to these guys, all of them are pretty smart.

Given a 50 dollar budget, how much damage could you do to society.

Let me phrase the outcome of the rest of the talk like this: We, collectively should be really happy that the terrorists are unable to think as clearly as this group of middle-aged mostly hippies, vets and engineers.

Sabotage is so much easier than construction.

Flying planes into buildings is destruction on a massive scale, but if you sat and did some cold hearted calculations on how to make sure you kill a large number of people with low tech means you could do a whole lot 'better' than that. It wont' get your cause 10 years worth of television coverage though.

The 'love affair' between terrorism and media is for the most part what keeps this whole thing going.
What else is it used for?
My Father teaches astronomy classes to school kids from 4 to 18.

This is apparently a surprisingly common question; especially for older kids (before they do any real work on density in class)
Strange Loop 2009 Keynote: Minimalism in Computing (Slides)
Who called it the "Muslim tech fund"? Not, it appears, Obama. They're overtly targeting Muslim-majority countries, but there are people of many different faiths in those countries.

This news article also begs a question. The fund targets the Mid-East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Given that Europe, Russia, Japan, and Australia don't particularly need foreign aid from us, what does that leave aside from the "Muslim nations"? South America and Southern Africa. I think we may sometimes lose sight of how broadly influential Islam is in the rest of the world.
Au contraire, it is excellent money management. The PR value of this is easily orders of magnitudes larger than the money spent.

A country that is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy should not start wars it can't afford, that is a prime example of poor money management.
agreed, needs a minimize button.

I used click user > ignore but it seemed to need reloading to work.

Cant blame justin.tv for the bad audio, of course.
Probably referring to this article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227127.200-can-unive...

It's behind a paywall, but the gist is, the engineering mentality of "there is a right answer" correlates to a certain extent with the religious mentality of "there is a right belief".

A lot of piecemeal evidence suggests that characteristics such as greater intolerance of ambiguity, a belief that society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of democratic politics which involves compromise, are more common among engineers

Note that technical ability is nothing to do with it; no terrorist organization worth its salt sends skilled bombmakers on suicide missions, they're too valuable.

Why engineers? Everybody's first reaction is that they are recruited for their technical proficiency in bomb-making and communications technology, but there is no evidence for this. A tiny elite tends to do the technical work in these groups, and jihadist recruitment manuals focus on a personality profile rather than technical skills.
Foreign aid dollars are a negligible portion of our overall budget.
Sure, but by the time those kids arrive at HN they're supposed to know better no ?

Gas giant always was a mis-nomer though, I'm sure that's part of the problem.
I got that at one point with the stream during the 37signals talk - rhythmic cutout, so assume its a network issue, on top of bad mic...

Talks hosted anywhere else?
Confessions of a Long-Distance sailor
Funny, I doubled my money on the stock in the last 6 months... I think they're doing great!

Yes it was a fad, and yes they didn't stick to fundamentals with their product line, but there are enough fat people, diabetics, and children in the world to sustain the company for the long haul.
Yep done the same thing with a couple of my mates too. We went for a financial/digital attack as the easiest vector.

We actually agreed, in the end, it was lucky these groups have an obsession with causing deaths. Callous as it sounds, killing people in large enough numbers is bloody difficult.

> The 'love affair' between terrorism and media is for the most part what keeps this whole thing going.

Agreed! Ironic really that it's partly that which they crave!
While I like the idea of trying to inspire the (radical?) muslim countries in the middle east to develop out of the oil market, I don't think our $150M--or even $1.5B--will change anything.

The leaders in the middle east need to make these investments with their endless piles of cash.... and historically they haven't (Dubai for finance being a notable exception).

The truth is we should be disengaging from these countries on a business level by putting massive investment into solar, wind and nuclear. The investments in our recent wars in the region could have easily made us energy independent by now..... if Bush or Obama were true leaders they would have focused our resources on the goal of energy independence.
Good PR won't save you from bankruptcy!
"Coffee isn't a drug _or something_". lol.

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

First picture caption: "Coffee is the most widely used psychotropic beverage in the world. In 1999 the average consumption of coffee was 3.5 cups per day per U.S. citizen."

Caffeine is a CNS stimulant\adenosine receptor antagonist. It increases wakefulness\helps focused thought but impairs memory. It's a stimulant drug, not a very good stimulant drug, but the most commonly used one with a large social presence.

Vastly superior safe legal stimulants imo:
Rhodilia Rosea, L-Tyrosine, Cocoa, Galantamine, Spirulina

Others legal ones I know a lot of people swear by:
Piracetam. (and relatives such as Oxiracetam, Aniracetam) Becoming decently common among college students.

Adderall is also EVERYWHERE you look in competitive colleges, but long term amphetamine use is a very bad idea in terms of burnout unless you are super human like Paul Erdos, and its a controlled substance.
Will I / Can I find all the presentations somewhere? (not live)
There's a certain amount of overhead and risk in that. What if I "friend" someone from work and forget to file them in the right group on Facebook? Whereas I know that there are things I would simply never ever say in my LinkedIn status, let alone post those photos...

One profile to rule them all sounds great, but read ths http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
Hmmm.... interesting idea. :-P
It may actually. By doing some good PR now you will be able to save yourself a multiple of that at some point in the future.

The US needs allies, what better way to get them than through good PR. Wars don't work nearly as well and cost a whole lot more. They also make you more enemies, and the allies that you had may look at you in a new light.
Security Software Downloads
I recognize that you're making a point about which of the two came first.

Nevertheless this one, while dragging, makes discrete jumps that correspond to change events in the document. This makes it more like the widget in Wave. The one in Etherpad continuously follows the horizontal movement of the mouse, and jumps to the nearest discrete change point on mouse up.

I like the movement in Etherpad better, though. I might like it better if both were combined so that the real slider made continuous horizontal movements, and a shadow-pointer made discrete jumps while dragging.
> The leaders in the middle east need to make these investments with their endless piles of cash.... and historically they haven't (Dubai for finance being a notable exception).

Dubai's lustre is fading though - have you been reading the articles on how they've been hit by the last 2 years, may yet default on the national debt & have been bailed out but are frantically searching for further capital?

I always was a little skeptical of their absurd building projects, but I assumed there must be enough real value there to keep things afloat; I may yet be proven wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation-passing_style
I chatted with head Gemcutter Nick Quaranto (qrush) on IRC a week or so ago about this and it appears to be a bot or what-have-you that is mirroring all of the Win32 binary gems for FXRuby--even versions that are years old! So no, these stats are not representative of reality.

Assuming gemcutter.org does become the preferred source for all gem downloads, it's safe to assume that downloads of Rails (and other known popular gems) will surpass this in due time. In the meantime I've given Nick my blessing to "filter" those download statistics as he sees fit to make them more realistic.
Excellent points, but there will be an ROI on that money. America has a big image problem abroad, Obama is a big difference from Bush but it will need more than a 'pretty face' to change attitudes.

And the fact that this gesture gets broad play in the targeted countries means it is already paying off.

For the price of less than one day of war in Iraq (255 M or so ?) it seems to be pretty cheap.

The independence of oil for energy can't come soon enough.
Why Microsoft is a Ripoff
Playdar is consuming most of my spare time at the mo :)
We're pretty active on the IRC channel (linked from the site) so join and say hello if you're interested in investigating/using/contributing.

I'll be at the boston music hackday in november talking about Playdar too.
Actually, the computers used for mission-critical systems are very old. Generally to keep the electronics big enough that an alpha particle hitting the box does not give off enough energy to flip a bit and corrupt the program.
I went sailing for the 2nd time today. It was only circles around a lake but I learned how to harness the awesome power of the outdoors. It is an awesome experience. Recommended for all.
I'm a bit late to the discussion on HN, but I responded in comments to the article stating that I removed the ping/pong code before running sloccount for the lan plugin.

Even so, the c++ style means there will have been a slight linecount inflation.
I like "post-relational", but NoSQL is catchy, and has stuck. At least we have a shared vocabulary now.
I would love to try this, but the binaries are outdated and I do not care enough to download a recent version of Erlang, or the other libraries it requires. If anyone feels like building it for Intel, I would love to hear about it.
Based on intuition, I think of the universe as a giant cellular automaton. Each state of the universe is a slice of time, which lasts a Planck length of time. Each slice is static, but the loaf of time-bread is dynamic as a hole. The brain is interesting in that it is capable of storing information from previous slices.

The brain, seeing at 13 fps according to TFA, relies on itself to interpolate the things that happen in between frames as well as combining the separate streams into what you perceive as vision.

I think the most interesting point the article made was that your brain operates a different frequencies. While this is not shocking, it does go to show that we can explain the functionality of our brains as a complicated computer system, and our bodies as a mechanical robot that happens to be squishy.

Now that we view ourselves as machines, perhaps we can apply more engineering practices for bodily upgrades. Anyone else want to be a cyborg as bad as I do?
The DVR vs Internet Video
The SSRI-class antidepressants' efficacy also appears to be somewhat linked to genetic factors (despite their all being, in theory, quite similar in action). Zoloft seems to be the only thing besides benzodiapenes that will keep my panic disorder in remission; I chose this drug because a blood relative was already using it successfully to treat much more severe problems.

So I can't speak to its effectiveness as an antidepressant, but they can work quite well on anxiety in many cases. I am also taking fish oil supplements to see if that helps improve things further, but I can say that low-dose fish oil for a couple of months on its own wasn't enough for me. From a nootropic standpoint, it might have some benefits regardless.
I see a lot of comments about the video being choppy. I did not have this problem on my end. The video was fine for me in the Austin area. I have a ton of bandwidth in with bursting and had no choppy video whatsoever. The choppy video might be a bandwidth problem caused by your ISP overloading the node with other residential customers. I know from experience that some do this, and on Saturdays it can really slow things down.

I did notice the audio cut out but it was coming in as static so it might have been physical mic problem onsite vs. the actual audio delivery from the server to the client.

By the way YCombinator--GREAT JOB with this live broadcast, I loved it, it was GREAT!

Launch early and iterate!
I'm kind of against a pharmaceutical regimen for most people. I understand that there are SOME things that people cannot fix themselves, but a lot of the cases, I don't believe drugs are necessary. Let's face it. People take pills because it's easier than eating a healthy diet to make your blood pressure go down.

Depression, in my opinion, is something most people can overcome. Rather than looking within and learning about themselves, most people would rather just pop a feel-good pill every morning.

And the drugs themselves. They're essentially a bunch of random chemicals that big pharma shoves down the throats of test subjects and looks for good things that could happen. I would rather deal with my mild depression than take pills that could make me nauseous, give headaches, make me bleed from strange places or even kill me. Most people don't weigh the costs and benefits of taking prescription drugs... because it's easier.
Original article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10...

Actually a pretty reasonable write-up of open source advantages.
I was going to post this because it is the specific reason I never bought Crocs. Also, I liked telling people how ugly their Crocs were, and his page helped.
I am in Dallas with 50mbps fios and I did notice many more problems with the archive version of the first talks. They improved the feed later in the day.
IMO, twitter itself is a fad, but only because it's somewhat revolutionary. It's becoming a collectively conscious entity, much like the entire internet. Twitter is around because people want to know what others are thinking as soon as they are thinking it.

Twitter will die when we come up with a more efficient form of telepathy.
There is an experimental OS X package, you'd need to ask on IRC for it atm (mxcl is crafting it).
Windows packages will be next.
Ask HN: How do you rent apartments in SF when self-employed?
I just looked at a 1500/mo apartment that requires 250k net worth if you don't have an income.

I have savings, but not that kind of savings..
I actually think SQL the language assumes row oriented storage. I honestly can't think of a single SQL database that isn't row oriented. While theoretically you could, in practice no one has.

I can't say for certain but this might be related to the reliance on sql for the query language.
I think the Vibram Five Fingers helped the downfall too. I bought a pair of the KSOs and there's been two days I haven't worn them since I got them. People that buy crocs want to have neat shoes that are a little eccentric. They stop being eccentric when everyone has them. Vibrams are now more eccentric than crocs, so the fad is fading. This isn't to say that crocs won't continue to have regular customers though.
The current Scientific American has an article you may find interesting on the biology behind certain kinds of chronic pain. In particular there is a certain kind of cells called glia whose job is to heal hurt neurons. They consider active pain neurons to be hurt, try to "heal" them, and increase the sensitivity, leading to a nasty feedback loop as anything will cause pain.

There are treatments being developed for this kind of pain. But one of the more effective existing ones is marijuana. Marijuana dials down the glia, which breaks the feedback loop. If you live in a state that allows medical marijuana, you may wish to look into this.
I'm a member of a sailing co-op here in Minneapolis, great people and everyone is your teacher. We just pulled the boats off the water a few weeks back (and were already sweeping snow off the boats, dontchaknow). Just tested for skipper status before the season closed out.

Don't know if it's everyone's cup of tea, but definitely worth trying. If there are any HN'ers in Minneapolis/St Paul, happy to take people out for a try next Spring ;)
Drupals founder, Dries Buytaert got some reflections on this too. http://buytaert.net/whitehouse-gov-using-drupal
Ask HN: Where'd NM go?
I've tried it now and then for a couple weeks now, but the link never works. Anyone know what's going on?
I don't think we needed Windows 7 to let us know Microsoft was a ripoff. Perhaps that's just me though. I'll take FOSS over Microsoft any day, but I also don't mind getting into the nitty gritty to make my *nix distro the way I want. I'm convinced that people only buy Microsoft products because they are unaware of FOSS. To them, the only other alternative is to buy a Mac (which is a step in the right direction, but imo, Apple reeks of Microsoft cologne these days)

[edit: my apologies for using 'M$'. no hate intended]
When are people going to realize that you can't (shouldn't be able to) sue people like Google. The internet is a virtual reality. Hosting servers are the physical space of this reality. The files were put there by people, not by Google or YouTube. I know it's an old argument, but certainly still prevalent: Would you sue the manufacturers of inkjet printers because people are counterfeiting currency? It's quite ridiculous what Germany is doing. If you don't like it, block YouTube. See how your citizens react and tell me if it was a good idea.
Comparing Windows to OS X on a price basis is downright silly. The cost of OS X's development is 100% subsidized by hardware sales. Is Windows 7 a ripoff? Yes, but only because of the differences between the low-end and high-end versions. Talk of upgrades and all that misses the point completely.
Notable deaths in IT during 2009
Success Lessons From The Man Who Was Lost In the Jungle
If anyone is in either the Bay Area or in New York, there are two community sailing co-ops that I highly recommend. I was in each city my past two summers and joined both and had a great time sailing.

In Berkeley, there's the Cal Sailing Club http://www.cal-sailing.org/ with sailboats and windsurf boards. All for $60 for three months plus a few hours of contributed work to the club. They have cookouts and open houses and free sailing lessons from members. Really a great group of people.

In New York, look into the Sebago Canoe Club out in Brooklyn on Jamaica Bay. http://www.sebagocanoeclub.org/ They're something like $200 a year plus a few hours of contributed work. Everyone there is super friendly and have kayaking and canoeing as well and free lessons.

Definitely the cheapest way to learn how to sail if you've never done it before, as most yacht or sailing clubs are much much more expensive and/or require you to own your own boat.
1) M$ on HN? Really? Come on, make your point without the silly name.

2) I buy MS products because I prefer them in many cases. I'm buying Windows 7 because it works great, and I want to move from Win2k8. I use free operating systems every day (and work on my own), but for day-to-day tasks on my local machines, I prefer Windows.
Maybe it's a moot point by now, but before facebook was around, there was i2hub and connectU. The rumor was that Mark was a dev for the i2hub/connectu team and he took the idea and made facebook. Because of the RIAA assault of i2hub, connectU died with it, leaving Facebook to take all the fame and glory. I also vaguely remember that this was settled quietly out of court. Regardless, I think it's pretty shady. Maybe it was all just a rumor though.
Hack sudden attack NA - Página 2 - Web Cheats
This is really fluff. There is no "why" here, he just lists the prices and then says that's a rip-off.
I've had this question since a child: if you have a strobe light, which flickers at the same frequency that your eyes capture information, will you see the light as on or off?

As usual, it's good to see that my questions weren't crazy (slash, stupid) like people thought.

@human_v2

Are you into transhumanism and AI research?
For those who don't follow proggit, here is the context:

Programming thought experiment: stuck in a room with a PC without an OS

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9x15g/programmi...

I am a little difficult to describe ...

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9xgnd/iama_little_diff...

(redditor lutusp is Paul Lutus, author of the linked book, former NASA engineer who worked on Viking Mars mission / Space Shuttle and creator of the Apple Writer, hacker extraordinaire)

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer
Startup School: Tony Hsieh On Delivering Happiness