skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only deal anyone is really talking about is reduction in emissions based on 1990 (or perhaps some other date) levels. Rich countries make faster, deeper cuts and subsidize cuts in poor countries. Pretty much any variations are within that framework.

I think there is also a perceived unfairness or indignation surrounding the issues. Depending on how you present things, it's always possible to present you country as getting screwed. There are always those whos agenda (which might even be legit) it serves to tell people they are being screwed.

In every country in the world there are powerful people going around with that message.

Rich Countries:

* You are expected to make emitting carbon more expensive here then it is in other countries. That means that steel mills, factories & the like will shut down & reopened in China. Jobs will be shipped overseas(embellishment) No emissions are prevented since the factory gets reopened in India/China anyway.

* This is a plan to tax US/EU suppliers a& transfer this money to China/India.

Poor Countries:

* You are expected to pay for the problems created by those countries with over 100 years of industrialized history.

* Going by 1990 levels means dividing a world environmental resource. Since we were polluting 1/5 as much as US/EU in 1990, we get a smaller slice in the future. (related) This deal means that whoever polluted in the past is entitled to polluted in the future.

*There is a known quantity (whatever it takes to get from 380 to 450 ppm) of carbon we can emmit globally. Divide that by 6 billion.

Each one of these arguments is true in a way.
I never saw what actual per-capita emissions were on the table. Did they really want the developing nations to stay at a lower value indefinitely?
Indeed!

http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/2008/11/a-brief-conversat...
Some insightful comments on slashdot (browsing at 5): http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/12/22/1936214/Microsoft-Ord...
Cheer up. There's a good chance that many of the big tech blogs didn't see your site at all, or your text pitch wasn't all that compelling (but maybe your site is), or any of a hundred other reasons.

The sad fact of the matter is that us tech bloggers get way too much Email. No matter how many Gmail filters we set up, it's a constant struggle to find those 'diamonds in the rough' — the sites that nobody has ever heard of and have no funding. If you get ignored by everyone for multiple launches then maybe something's wrong, but don't get too dejected because of one bad press push.

Shoot me an Email next time you guys launch a cool new feature (it's in my profile). Tell me why it's cool. Tell me why you're more than a Digg for style questions. No promises about a post, but I'll check it out. Also, just from a five second glance at the site, I think you might want to look into changing up the layout/colors a bit. I'm no designer though.
...and, let's face it, the relative complexity of a skyscraper compared to a computer software program, given equal cost, is very, very low. A skyscraper costs hundreds of millions to construct. An equally costly software project would be something like the entire lifespan of the .NET Framework including the CLR, Standard Library, C#, VB.NET, Silverlight, all of the "Enterprise" features, etc.

Also, software isn't really construction. It's built by the people who design it, for the most part. Imagine a skyscraper (or car, bridge, etc) built entirely by engineers. Yikes.
This is somewhat lessened (at least to my reading of the GPL v3) by the "ASP hole," namely if you're running this on a server (as opposed to releasing a product) than you don't have to distribute. The parent comment mentions a web application which suggests that's the case for him.
As with many issues, I think it is a social problem and not a government issue. I think it is the role of parents and not the government to control what a 10 year old ingests.
Yes, I realize this. But that still only limits you from distributing a non-GPL application. You can still use it on your own applications or distribute it GPL(if you planned to) without cause. So in reality it only affects one of the 3 possible outcomes. I would also hazard to say that the vast majority of php release cases fit into the two segments still allowed though.

I respect peoples right to different on licensing choices(I'm not a huge fan of the GPL for my own stuff) but the wording of the original comment seemed a bit inflammatory in regards to the licensing which is why I questioned it.
I've got a few points and opinions to throw out here.

Firstly, after reading a lot of comments here it seems that many people are talking about how NOT to get into management and stay with the job you love (particularly in reference to programming).

Though this sentiment relates to this article I also find it somewhat disconnected in the context of Mark and Ted's opinions of their roles. A lot of commenters clearly seem like they're already in established programming roles with a degree of authority they enjoy, whereas these two guys in the article aren't. They're new to their company, and are striving to get to a place where they're satisfied (quite the opposite situation from many of the commenters).

Next, the general message I gathered from this article is that being successful in an organisation is apparently about having an awareness of your surroundings and making small yet persistent changes without getting in the way of others. Doing the opposite, which in Ted's case was shameless self-promotion, working hard, working overtime and being highly-strung with a drive to get further is not the way to succeed.

Now I find this VERY debatable, because a lot of it is subjective to the organisation's culture. What's to say that in another organisation that values aggressive proactiveness Ted would've been promoted instead, while Mark would have taken another year or two to move up? You cannot teach people how to be successful in management based on one case-study. Furthermore, each staff had no idea of their performance until the actual bonus time and hence were kept in the dark. There's something wrong here if Ted was convinced he was on the right track. Isn't this what mid-year reviews are all about?

The key messages I can see here are to have an aim, observe and adapt. Mark had an aim, which was to somehow distinguish himself from the pack. He observed his environment and he adapted. Ted had an aim too (promotion + bonus), which he clearly observed because he seemed to have worked his butt off. Having failed to get his promotion he now has to adapt (move to a new company, change his ways, whatever).

The story isn't finished yet. A year later tables could turn. Mark could get comfortable with where he is and slip, while Ted could make it very big.
I do understand the indifference -- the deadline is more or less completely arbitrary, as there are very few critical scheduling issues dependent on strictly punctual delivery, and all that is really required is reasonable timeliness. If the professors allow it, why not use the additional latitude to your advantage?

Hard deadlines are generally driven by what are ultimately financial/market concerns. I sweat the deadlines when a trade show is approaching, and I sweat the budget when we see schedule slippage on an release, but most of the time I'm happy as long as everyone is productive, progress is being made, and the budget looks OK.
What happens to concert ticket prices when Live Nation and Ticketmaster merge?
Ask HN: Why doesn't RIM have any direct competitors?
Research in Motion is one of the fastest growing companies in the world, primarily due to its dominance in the business mobile phone market. While it is certainly moving in on the consumer market (I have one myself), the reverse doesn't seem to be true. Why are no other manufacturers making dedicated business phones? It is a multi-billion dollar market, after all.
Incidentally, given incidents like 'climategate' I think we should also be a little hesitant about quoting sources like wikipedia.
I woulnd't necessarily conclude that "consumers" rather then manufacturers are "responsible." The US exports too.

OTOH, The US has been at it for much longer. They also have fewer people which should "entitle" them to less on an equitable basis.
Not if you're smart and motivated it's not.

I went to High School with a guy named Chris. He dropped out of college to do programming work, and I stayed on, eventually going to grad school.

Now he's the founder of GitHub and I'm some no-name programmer working for a financial company nobody's ever heard of.
I'd say the novelty of it is enough of an incentive for such an idea. Also, bumping two phones together carries lower psychological cost than handing someone your hard-earned cash and I would expect people to have less qualms about lending/returning/trading small sums of money this way.
I think that you have taken the recent atmosphere of "failing fast" a little too far. A "launch" really can't be considered a good metric for failure or success.

Pegging your product on one massive launch is a flawed idea - it seems to operate under the assumption that massive, immediate reach is what you need to attract users as opposed to leveraging/exploiting other mechanisms. Having product "out" at all stages in order to gain feedback and iterate helps.

In fact, it is far better that you had a "failed" launch now so that users can give you feedback as opposed to trying to remain stealth to build up to a bigger launch.

I think that Skribit's "successful" launch can be more attributed to how Paul handled the pro upgrade screw up. But the TC article isn't what will make or break the success of Skribit.
A versioning file system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versioning_file_system) is not a new idea--some old OS's, like ITS and VMS, had them. One of the biggest repeated bones of contention in the old Unix-Haters' Handbook was in fact Unix's lack of versioning.
Software is different because it's considered a creative work and therefore falls under the veil of copyright. Copyrights protect each implementation individually, and this is ample protection.

Patents generally cover a whole _invention_, not an implementation, and each implementation requires a license from the patent holder. So, in the case of the web browser, had Mosaic or Netscape patented this concept every competitor would be forced to obtain a license from the patent holder and open-source or free browsers would be impossible. Patents in the case of software therefore have a chilling effect and prevent significant competition for a long time.

Pharmaceuticals only get patented by publicly divulging their significant modes of operation; a software patent outlines only vague processes, like the i4i patent that's brought this whole thing up.

Software is also merely a high-level implementation of an algorithm. Algorithms are non-patentable and all math is discovered, not invented; this has been settled earlier, and is the reason that algorithms alone are not awarded patent protection. Software is no different.

In software, the implementation details are significant enough that patent protection is not only undesirable but in fact crippling to the industry as a whole. Take a look at some software patents; in fact, take a look at i4i's patent specifically. It's applicable to basically that edits XML documents, whether it be a word processor, an IDE, or anything else. These things are way too vague and they encroach on prior and future art in a hugely negative way.

See http://w2.eff.org/patent for a list of some rather absurd software patents granted by the USPTO; even if we ignored everything else and assumed that software patents were OK for things that deserved them, the people in charge of patents don't have anywhere near the kind of knowledge necessary to make intelligent decisions.

Those are my reasons for opposing software patents. It makes development a complete minefield, and only the big guys can afford to wade through that. I just have to hope that I don't do anything too successful until the patent laws are revoked or until I make enough money not to care.
VLMC : VideoLan(VLC) Movie Creator
thanks Jason.

I'm not really down, we are doing pretty well, all things considered. And I'll make sure to shoot you an email the next time something interesting happens(new feature or a milestone)

I know what you mean about the layout, to tell the truth we had a very nice web 2.0 look when we entered private beta, and the early users absolutely hated it. So we kept throwing redesigns at them, until they settled on the current one.

We'll probably try switching to a web 2.0 look, 5-6 months from now, to make it look a little bit more modern. And by then we should be able to get at least some decent numbers coming in.
But there are limits. Kids aren't going to understand decorators or list comprehensions. They aren't going to get the point of doc strings. They don't want to deal with packages and namespace issues in every piece of code they write.

None of this stuff existed in BASIC. As a kid in the 80's, I could read code in magazines written by professionals (of sorts) and understand every line. There's nothing like that in the modern world.
Automattic are behind it, at least it comes from their repo: http://svn.automattic.com/backpress/trunk
I currently make my living with Linux, and yet I get this nagging feeling that if programmers were licensed, I would have to have learned any number of Microsoft technologies (OLE, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, .Net) depending on when I got licensed.

I entered college in 1987. Windows 2.x had just come out (I think)---OS/2 wasn't even being designed as of yet. The Intel 386 had just come out, and major application design in PCs in assembly had just passed in favor of C or Pascal. I couldn't even have comprehended my job today (programming wise---web based applications written in PHP) back then.

Yes, there hasn't really been anything "new" in the past 20 years (except maybe for ubiquitous networking) but the details sure have changed a lot.
Breast Cancer Vaccine Looks Promising
Well, look at some software patents. The kind of scope and specificity in "a system that ranks cataloged pages..." is about par for the course.

Look at the patent that caused the injunction against Word ( http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=y8UkAAAAEBAJ ); it's rather vague and basically includes anything that uses or modifies XML to create a product for end-user consumption.

The enforcement depends on the judge and the parties to the suit, but it's got a really, really broad potential scope. It's not unique; most software patents are that way. You think that's a good thing?
EDIT:

Just like I mentioned to @ryanwaggoner, I think, given incidents like 'climategate' we should be careful of quoting sources like wikipedia.

For instance, the source data used for the wikipedia article is not carbon emissions per capita, it is data on carbon emissions per capita . . . PER USD1 GDP. That is, per capita per $1 GDP.

The authors of the wikipedia article either mistook the data to be data on per capita emissions, or really didn't understand the difference. At any rate, that is the reason for the confusion I think.

By the way, here is the source data that the wikipedia article uses:

http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Data.aspx
How fans of one language see the other languages (extended for Haskell)
awesome. I like the concept. I spent my frosh year at Boston College and still root for the Eagles. Congrats guys.
But you _know_ "IP Terrorist" will be associated with filesharers, and not trolls.
I mean, they're not a troll in the way that they're developing their product, but they're a troll in the way that their patent is for a way of editing custom XML. Really?
You've just done a lot of work, and it's Christmas vacation. Give yourself a break.

I really enjoy programming too, but that doesn't mean I want to spend every waking moment doing it (okay, I guess I do spend most waking moments doing it ;-)). When I don't feel like doing anything, I don't, and I try not to stress out about it. I occasionally fail, but it's good to remind myself that not everything has to be something productive.

Otherwise, you're heading down the road to burnout. Disinterest in your projects is a sign that your brain needs a rest...give it one.
EDIT:

It occurs to me that perhaps I should be more explicit in what I am saying. The source data used for the wikipedia article is not data on carbon emissions per capita, rather it is data on carbon emissions per capita . . . PER USD1 GDP. That is, per capita per $1 GDP.

The authors of the wikipedia article either mistook the data to be data on per capita emissions, or really didn't understand the difference. At any rate, that is the reason for the confusion I think.

By the way, here is the source data that the wikipedia article uses:

http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Data.aspx
Actaully, I wish I could find the link, but there was a study that showed in 2007 that of all the novel chemicals, most were out of university research, and not big pharma. They tend to spend an inordinate amount of money on marketing, which is ludicrous. I mean, if you need medication, the last thing you should be doing is basing it on ads. Your doctor doesn't need asked about latisse or whatever.
I think that competent programmers with relevant training could develop good compression techniques for things like audio and video. In fact, that happens somewhat often.
Others have already commented on your question, but you'll find me being against all patents in general. If they were serving their intended purpose, maybe, but they don't benefit the little guy, only the big guy.
I'm somewhat confused by this article. It describes the problem like this:

> Those dragons are such: you have two paths inside sys.path that contain similar code. Such as I do with all of the Domain51 code. Package one has foo as a module while package two contains bar. The assumption would be that Python acts like most other languages and would exhaust it's sys.path trying to find both packages, but that's not the case. It'll get to the first one, then pretend the second doesn't exist.

...but I'm certain Python can "import foo; import bar" without issue.

Poking at the sample repository the article links to, it seems the problem is something more like this:

+- some_path/
| |
| +- foo/
| |
| +- __init__.py
| +- fred.py
|
+- other_path/
|
+- foo/
|
+- __init__.py
+- barney.py

...where both some_path/ and other_path/ are in $PYTHONPATH. If you have some
Python code that does this:

from foo import fred
from foo import barney

...then the second line will raise ImportError. The first line causes a
mapping "foo" -> "some_path/foo/" to be added to the module name cache, so
on the second line it tries to import "barney" from "some_path/foo/" and
fails.

I'm not sure what pkg_resources has to do with anything, but I think Stop
Doing That is a reasonable response.
The thing people don't really want to repeat is that he has essentially created the [I want to say Vegas] of the web, where everything is great in short bursts etc but if you end up staying you realize how scummy the place really is.

This is why his site has a hard time gaining revenue even though being in the top 1000 on Alexa, no reputable business is going to advertise where porn and violence are the norm.

If you are going to gain anything from what moot has done it is that the idea of anonymity is a very powerful thing.
Why is Video Conferencing So Brutally, Craptastically Awful?
At least in the version of Sugar that I used, development on the device was essentially impossible (as there was no usable IDE), and developer documentation was not readily available.
Exactly what can Moot offer, in terms of discourse? Moot's fame was very much a matter of happenstance and ungodly luck - the whims of the internet, rather than anything innately genius about his approach or handling. It'd be like asking a kid that's, by chance, made a paper airplane with an unusually long flight time about aerodynamics.
As I said above, I'm against all IP.

And PageRank is a trade secret, not IP. There's a reason that Coke hasn't gotten a patent on their forumla, no?
It doesn't seem likely that Google GSA uses the same algo as their web search.

Not to mention that security by obscurity is most effectively breached through trial and error

Really? I'm not a security expert, but isn't brute force impractical except in the smallest of search spaces?

there's nothing stopping you from gaming Google's algorithm right now (and many spammers are doing just that)

True, but the situation would probably be even worse if the algorithm were open, wouldn't you say?

If you can't secure your code while being open about your methods, obscurity won't help in the long term.

Also true, but as other people have already commented, this is more like a matter of policy than security. And besides, some methods can be open because they're intrinsically hard to get around, (e.g. crypto algorithms: cos it's math, baby) and others because they're expensive (e.g. I don't know, hardware requiring expensive/rare materials?). However, web search algorithms are horses of another color, aren't they? I hesitate to say for certain, but it's possible that there is no search algorithm that cannot be gamed if it is known. If that is the case, then security by obscurity, while not being an ideal solution, may in fact be the only option.
“Engage Me or Enrage Me”: What Today’s Learners Demand
And Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both went to college and dropped out. So perhaps college does give some benefit, but the degree isn't necessary.
It actually takes India about 6 months to reverse engineer a drug. It's not that hard.
They're asking for an 8 GHz processor, for crying out loud. And they want it to run on one watt of power. Including the display. Optimism is one thing, but these specifications are nothing short of delusional.
what's the link for the interview with thriller?
Yahoo will kill MyBlogLog next month
Sure, but how many people dropped out of college with aspirations to do something great and then failed?

More to the point, does college really have any particular impact on such matters? If Bill Gates had finished his degree, would he have still been as successful? If Don Knuth had dropped out, would he have still been as successful?
Hey, thanks for writing this up. If I might make a suggestion: at the beginning of this post, you should explain what your site does. As someone who had never heard of it before, I was left with a choice of reading the rest of the post and hopng to find out or navigating away from it to explore the site. A short description would have helped those unfamiliar with your service and wouldn't have offended those that are.

One other thing: For a site about style, the site is not very stylish itself. I think for your site, a designer or a few CSS books (SitePoint has some good ones) would be a good investment.

Again, thanks for the writeup. Looks like it has a lot of growth potential.

Edit: maybe it didn't render properly on my iPhone on the first visit. Upon checking it again, I can see the design. It was just white text on a plain black body the first time around. Looks better now.
I don't think ebooks make a strong case for torrents mainly because of their small size and the sheer number.
Emule or IRC have been traditionally strong channels for ebook sharing.
Of course. "Real" milk. But there are also some downsides of no real regulation. Like… http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSPEK1127320080303
Interesting post and thanks for offering a different perspective to mine! In regards to new users, do you think it's because registration is only done through OpenID (which is great on a tech-heavy site like Stackoverflow) with a not-so-tech-savvy style-centric audience?

A massive-to-us 34% of new user signups that day were through Twitter, thanks to a riduculously low one-click barrier of entry.

As for contacting bloggers, we only got in touch with TC for launch day and have yet to reach out to my other blogger friends, et cetera. Gonna wait til after the holidays.

That being said - you are definitely getting some traction with the 700+ uniques/day. Grats!