skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with your statement is that if you're burning a lot of time and mental energy on the insignificant things, then you are wasting your time.

One has to buy nappies*, as a minimal impact example, and one has to choose the brand and type. I don't really think there is any greater thought-cost, if you will, in choosing the more ecologically sound option provided proper scientific research has been performed - amazingly it doesn't appear to have been (note major problem with UK gov study which is now widespread used as a reason not to have reusable despite them being lower impact; I'm assuming big pharma corps are invested against proper research).

Things like turning off the tap as you brush your teeth are just habitual it doesn't need thought once it has been done for a few days, ditto turning out lights. These are not major lifestyle changes and so, I'd argue, don't impact at all the possibility of promoting better resource use in the large scale situations.

Finally, ten 0.001% optimisations that compound over a zero change threshold can be extremely important - ask anyone who is in debt and bumping the bottom of their agreed overdraft, a few pence is all it takes to cycle you down instead of up.

Food optimisation: in the States, I read today, 40% of purchased food is wasted. That's got to be at least half of all food production when you allow for spoiling and other waste (I'd reckon more). A small change in lifestyle, simply choosing to care, can lead to a huge drop in this figure - there are 300 million people in the USA.

Ultimately I see that the 95% I don't have direct control over, eg building of renewable energy capture in favour of fossil fuel based systems, the 5% I do.

If I've got a cup and my boats sinking I'm still going to bail-out until someone else comes along and helps.
I did explain what I meant by death in my post:

People will continue to read printed books for a long time, just as some people still watch movies on VHS. But the printed book will be "dead" in a few short years in the sense that the bulk of the adoption curve, the pragmatic majority, will have moved on.
"I am not sure Joe Sixpack can be convinced the claims have little merit if they have flashy graphics."

So, better to assume the audience is too stupid or ignorant to think for themselves, and restrict open discussion and examination of the data and process?

That's bullshit.
Right. As I noted above, it's absolutely not acceptable for some situations, particularly those where you want lost or confused people to look you up. But I can still think of plenty of other situations, and was merely pointing out the disparity between the number of Unicode URLs I've encountered and the number I'd expect to have encountered, given all the possibilities.
It is a light hearted article with a laugh of two, and I learnt that something I take for granted (spaces between words) was only just established by the 13th century. No wonder so many people were illiterate, their texts were illegible. (Ignoring the fact that those texts were probably quite hard to get a hold of in the first place...)

It isn't canonical Hacker News, however. Everyone expects HN to trend towards Reddit, though, don't they?
Black Friday deals on games.
Leave any deals for games that you have in comments.
Here is one that I have found. http://ads.pcgamestore.com/thanksgiving_09/index.html
They have 50% to 80% off on a lot of the games.
It would be nice if they could wash their hands using the current technology, which is wildly effective. Will this new device be more socially acceptable or address whatever the reason is that they don't currently adopt the simple, well-established and lifesaving procedure of hand washing?

See: http://www.myshelf.com/haveyouheard/07/washinghands.htm
The danger of going for PhD is that after 5 years or more of studying, with all the time investment and academic achievement, you no longer have as much desire or motivation as initially. I think this partly explains many legendary founders started their start-ups very early: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg (not considered legendary yet but on his way), etc. The more you how hard it is to start a business, the less time you have left, the more unlikely you actually start one. If you think you will start a business someday, why wait any longer, start one now. Good luck!
Can you please elaborate? Just blog comments or Interesting people contacting you to collaborate because you wrote something that resonated with their philosophical tuning fork?
Hey Teralaser, how long do you realistically think it would take someone to determine if their business would be a success? 2 years? 3 years? 10 years? Also, if someone takes a multi-year break from school, how easy is it for them to just pick back up in a Ph.D. program? Is such a pause a deal breaker for most universities when considering an application to their programs?
IPhone worm creator lands software job
Proper use of English could get a virus past security
Help my startup, Ksplice (rebootless kernel updates), win $100K from Forbes
A thanksgiving tale on the pursuit of happiness...
The death of uncool
Oh no! Who will defend us from Super Elmer Fudd?
Numbers is awesome!!!

The entire iWork package is phenomenal and definitely a lot better than any alternatives on the Mac.
Columns are the words of their author, not the newspaper. They don't necessarily agree with the opinions of the paper.

On the same note, columns aren't news items or reports. They are opinion pieces. To call it "journalistic drivel"—or "journalistic" at all—is unjustified.

Columns are meant to give opinions. It's not unusual to see columns written with the intent of giving an opinion that's opposite to the one held by average readers. The opinion of the newspaper's editors is usually given in the editorial.
How a HS Dropout Became the Youngest Boss at Apple - Buccaneer scholar
Sure, but how many 60W bulbs on the ceiling are required to raise the temperature in a room 1 degree.

Look at it this way: To raise the temperature by 1 K, you need to add X Joules of heat to the room, for some value X. Those X Joules can be added by burning approximately X * 9E-7 standard cubic feet of natural gas; by running a 1200 W electric heater for X * 2.3E-7 hours; or by leaving a 60 W light bulb turned on for X * 4.6E-6 hours.
"... Do you like/agree with my answer ? ..."

Over analysis?

"... My student is a student of Chemical Engineering. Right now he has the opportunity of developing his own chemical-based business with a good economical prospects. ..."

If you are making "stuff", unless you are selling the process, the derivative of making "stuff" you will be bound to the old laws of creating a business. In some ways it reminds me more of a hardware Startup. The rules of Software startup rules don't apply. You (might) need offices, lab space or time, hiring of extra expertise, equipment and the problems of marketing and sales. All this requires cash and a degree of risk higher than a software Startup.

One question. Does has this new "stuff" got existing or potential customers? Is your "stuff" applicable to a large market commodity or a high cost niche market?
Caches are nice, but they confuse memory leak detection tools
The On Language column in the Times was written for about thirty years by a guy named William Safire. The column usually criticized some recent instance of language usage in popular culture. He was frequently peevish but managed to avoid coming across as acerbic. Safire died recently, and since then his column has been written by a series of guest authors. In this instance, the author is trying to recreate Safire's style and unfortunately fails miserably.

You see the same thing in the British automotive press. Everyone wants to write like Jeremy Clarkson, but nobody else can pull off his style without coming across as a total asshole.
Because my preferred openid provider uses client-side SSL certs to authenticate me, google doesn't. Part of the point of openid is it allows me to implement security procedures you haven't thought of without making me beg every site I use to do things the way I want.
The Landscape of Parallel Computing Research: A View from Berkeley
Robots taking jobs is not a bad thing. It's a very good thing. It's briefly painful for the person who has to find a new job, but then the product is cheaper and better for everyone else. Forever.

Jobs don't disappear. They just change. The industrial revolution made cheap many products that had previously been expensive or required armies of laborers to produce. And then it made available many more that had previously been unthinkable. A transition to a robot/information economy would have a similar effect; today's burger flipper is tomorrow's burger recipe artisan or perhaps robot maintainer/programmer, and can run a whole store by himself. And the cost and variety of gourmet food drops to about the cost of the ingredients.
Camel casing in brands can be confusing when writing.

Is it Paypal or PayPal? Microsoft or MicroSoft? Moneybookers or MoneyBookers? Macintosh or MacIntosh? Altavista or AltaVista? Wikipedia or WikiPedia? And so on, and so forth.

Some you can remember. Others may require you to look them up every time.

But well—we already have to worry about spaces and dashes, so I suppose worrying about one more thing isn't so bothersome.
McIntyre: The deleted data from the “Hide the Decline” trick
Another fake conference?
What would be the equivalent in Python to the :punct: character class operator? I don't think the re module supports those. I guess they'd have to be spelled out pretty much?
Conrad of MLS has epiphany after reading history of linux
Signal fading on radio traffic reports
How is picking the wrong OpenID provider any different than entering an incorrect email and password, because you have multiple email addresses and you couldn't remember which one you used?

Were you aware that you can associate multiple OpenIDs with one account at StackOverflow?

Do you ever use a computer that does not store your passwords for you?

Would a standard OpenID-remembering feature in your browser help change your mind?
For the section titled "LINQ? Return expressions, not results", the query returns an 'Iterator'/'Query' and not an 'Expression Tree'. They are completely different things. The underlying point is valid that it makes sense to return the query so that the caller can do perform additional filtering/grouping, if needed.

Also, it's great idea to convert query results to List instead of an array. See Eric Lippert's blog on 'Arrays Considered Harmful.' http://blogs.msdn.com/ericlippert/archive/2008/09/22/arrays-...

Section: Immutable strings? Use String.Format() and StringBuilder

For the given example, practically, there is no difference in performance for two code samples. I hate micro optimizations. Use the version which makes the code easier to read.

I take serious objection to the tip - 'Minimize the number of variables'. Code readability/maintainability is much more important so use as many variables as you need. Only after you have profiled the code and found that using 3 variables instead of 5 variables gives you performance boost (which I doubt will ever happen), remove those extra variables.
The tone you call 'preachy and disdainful' I find humorous and self-aware. Likewise the conceit of refusing to print any camel-case terms. "I could print it here to show you, but I refuse to allow my prose to be so disfigured": it's a parody of a grumpy-old-man routine. I assume he's sincere in his distaste for inner caps, but he plainly recognizes that it makes him sound like an old codger, and he's playing that up for comic effect.
Indeed, Paul Saenger, the scholar I quote in the article, writes that during the transitional period, capitals were sometimes used to mark word boundaries in run-together text. Unexpectedly, though, the last letter of a word was more often capitalized than the first.
The motivation bit is the most important part. PhD's can be very grinding and most PhD's I know seriously considered throwing in the towel at least once during it. If you don't really really want it, chances are you'll never complete it.
"But well—we already have to worry about spaces and dashes, so I suppose worrying about one more thing isn't so bothersome."

There's plenty more than that to worry about.
For me it's a price point game. I have a dreamhouse account I only paid $20 for an entire year (I think it's the same $119/year account - it was a promo). What a great deal

But the question is are you paying a false economy. No point buying my friends' 900mhz laptop for $100... yeah it's cheap but I can't do what I need performance wise with it at that spec - so it's actually expensive.

Business wise, they are a cooperative rather than a traditional company structure, and I think the lack of business drive at the top of the company doesn't help them.
What Photography Will Look Like By 2060
Where Gender Stereotypes Come From
I can't confirm your observation. I have thrown OSol on many notebooks and it found stuff out-of-the-box my Linux installs didn't. Oddly enough, the Broadcom wireless one of them uses had problems, but that's about all the problems I had (and that Broadcom was a source of grief for a long time under Linux).

It sure doesn't seem pickier than Linux or BSD.
Indent your lines with two spaces and they'll end up in a <pre> with your asterisks intact.

Why bother trying to validate the domain lexically, when you can just try resolving it?
That could be, and I certainly did a double-take when I saw this his blog is called "Steamboats are ruining everything." Still, at first blush, any winking and/or nodding was lost on me, and I usually pick up on that kind of stuff.
I disagree with the notion that asking for advice somehow shows he "doesn't have what it takes" to do either. If he's looking for someone else to tell him what to do then that's a problem, but if he's seeking information and perspective from people who have experienced what he is embarking on, that's common sense.
If we're talking computer science then I kind of have to agree that Unix and regular expressions are minor contributions if they even rank at all. There are several theoretical concepts and core algorithms which are much much more significant.

On the other hand if we're talking about computing and programming in general then they are pretty damn major, possibly on the top 10. One has to remember that CS isn't programming and programming isn't CS.
But one could wish that they were more often RATIONAL opinions. Everyone has opinions, I just wish more thought went into those that make it into print.
I'm not complaining. Just explaining how Google makes money from other people's content.
Heavy metal
Newspapers, monetization, and browser plugins
This is the kind of things that we need if we are to fix medical technology: new and cheaper machines that work better than the previous ones, coupled with mass production adopted from industry.
Really? Do you really care what non-programmers think of CamelCase? Why not ask them what they think of using braces, or indentation?

Clearly people think my question detracts from the value of HN because they're downvoting it, but to me it's worth it to investigate a place where the opinion of the "community" differs so radically from mine.

I have zero interest in finding out what people think of summation notation, or bra and ket notation, and, quite frankly, I find it inconceivable (and I do mean that, unlike Vizzini) that programmers would care what non-programmers think about CamelCase.

Still, you're being up-voted, I'm being down-voted, so obviously people really are interested in that. I'm mystified, but I'll accept it as a data point.

ADDED IN EDIT after reading the comment by benatkin to the above:

I am genuinely surprised, confused and puzzled. I'll have to re-think my model of what the HN readers think satisfies PG's outline of "On-Topic":

Anything that good hackers would find interesting ...
gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I'm going away to ponder the response, feeling somewhat bruised and punished by the "community" I thought I understood and felt at home in.
I'll probably never know what the data supports (although I'm admittedly skeptical), but I do know that discussing deleting emails and data to avoid responding to an FOI request is probably illegal, and definitely casts a cloud on everything else the participants have touched.
I think Dreamhost is fine as long as your comfortable with their limitations. Limitations like their backup server being down for over a month.

http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/2009/10/30/hanjin-backup-serv...
I bought this at Book Buyers in Mountain View a few weeks ago. Its entertaining. They had a few copies, if anyone wants one.
That article pretty much concludes that hand-washing doesn't work, not only of because of practical factors (hospital staff cannot possible stick to the regimen of hand-washing that would be required), but also because even the strictest cleaning leaves enough bacteria or viruses on the hands for transmission to happen.
This Is Why The Internet (And Twitter) Wins
Implant-Based Cancer Vaccine Is First to Eliminate Tumors in Mice
Whoosh That's the sound of my comment going over your head.

If you think the web is popular because it's a cross platform sandboxed version of Access (which is essentially what you were suggesting) then you're the idiot. There's only so many useful applications you can make by simply storing and retrieving very simple data locally.
OpenID is an awful solution for this -- you have to type a long URL, get redirected to an arbitrary page in a WebKit view (hello 17+ Mature Sex Drug Gambling Violence rating!), type at least your password on that page, and eventually get redirected back.

No, the service can't "pull your email info from it" -- OpenID provides no information about an authenticated user to the service beyond "yes, they are that identifier".
what is wrong with URI.parse in the stdlib? the articles' re goes out of url validation to get urlish things in free text, (e.g. " lokk at http://goo.com/bat, lovely" the comma would actually be part of a valid url, but the regex tries to detect this. Yet, for url validation ruby's lib is enough, I believe.
I am no expert in hiring folks for a startup, I find it hard. But I have personally hired a couple of dozen people in my startup companies (there are some overlaps between them).

The advice given is good, but if you work with software or design, make sure your work is visible. If you only work on stuff that you can't point to which is obviously yours, work one some open source projects. Build some cool Android/iPhone app in your spare time. Do something that makes it obvious that you have passion, that you like working in a small team, that you can be flexible on work on a number of different things, as these things are often key in a startup.
Thank you, that was a very interesting article but it leaves me with one question - why aren't the doctors wearing gloves that cover the area that they are expected to wash?

Compared to their hands the gloves are trivial to sterilize, cheap to purchase and can be removed in just a few seconds making it trivial to change them between each patient. Finally no medical personnel would ever dream of not changing gloves in between patients.
I won't go as far as the author but I think camel cased names are going to look pretty dated in the future.

As Ken MacLeod put it in "The Star Fraction", written in 1995 and set in the mid-twenty first century:

"The name [FreeSpace] had once seemed trendy, but now dated us painfully - 'very TwenCen', as I'd overheard someone say..."
Thanks, fixed the formatting.

(It's not my regex - I lifted it from someone who had the time to write a comprehensive test suite.)
Mommy Moments Meme
The Psychology of Randomness
Why I was tempted to discriminate against women
Uwsgi server and handler for nginx
It only wins if it supplies and continues to supply correct and timely information.

The internet is like the telephone game with millions of people and until something changes I trust my local news station many times more than the internet on breaking news stories.
Why two or three and not twenty or thirty, if we're specifying that they're healthy and educated? :) Overpopulation (in the sense of too many meat humans) is no longer particularly relevant to our future; simple copying seems likely to be more important.
+1. I have lots of sympathy for emails being taken out of context, internal jargon looking weird when shown in public. But asking someone to delete email/data is just wrong and can't be explained away. I find it sad that there hasn't been an official response to that specific email thread. I also wonder whether it might be borderline illegal.
How significant is a 45 minute delay to news that Tiger Woods was in a car crash?

Unless it's 30 minutes to the start of a tournament and betting hasn't closed yet the delay is insignificant.
My first response to the title, even before I clicked on the link was that it was probably going to be a restatement of the amateur SF writer's error of trying to dole out ideas in their stories. Ideas are plentiful, trying to not put them in stories, apparently because they believe there should be only one or a few ideas per story is one reason most amateurs have a hard time writing good science fiction.

On reading the essay, I realized Sivers had an excellent point, but it was a point about feedback. Presenting one idea at a time makes it easier for readers to give good feedback, and they are therefore more likely to provide it.

I wonder if there is any way to combine the two views? To provide more background and context, with the necessarily larger numbers of ideas being presented, while still getting useful feedback from readers.

I posted a version of this with links here and to Sivers page on my blog at http://williambswift.blogspot.com/2009/11/many-ideas-or-one-....
I'm interested because I want more than half of the people who are currently in high school to know a little bit about programming in ten years, and I wonder what might trip up some of them in an introductory programming course.
I more or less follow this rule. I'll mention iPhone or TextMate without pause, but SpongeBob SquarePants is asking a bit much and (PRODUCT)RED, which is audacious enough to require a superscript, is just plain silly.
I have a slice and also a linode instance and they are both good services. Slicehost is easier to make instances but linode offers you more configuration options. Both are great services though.