skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
some low-hours guys there taking care of the equipment

Come on, this is Berkeley we're talking about. These are municipal employees who, in return for their clockpunching, are likely going to have gold-plated pensions in 30 years, paid for by citizens of Berkeley and California who never needed a rotor tiller in their entire life.

I might sound like a crazy Republican for saying that. OK, let's go to the City of Berkeley website and pick a low-status occupation. Hmm, I like Parking Meter Maintenance Worker, that sounds roughly comparable.

http://agency.governmentjobs.com/berkeley/default.cfm?action...

Salary: $49,464.00 - $52,464.00 Annually (Patrick notes: where did I go wrong!)

Pension: "City employees are included in the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS). Retirement formula is 2.7% at age 55. The City pays both the employer and employee’s share (8%) of the retirement contribution."

Now, you use that retirement formula to look up their salary at retirement based on years of service. Here's the chart:

http://www.calpers.ca.gov/eip-docs/member/retirement/service...

If after thirty years of doing the important work of keeping parking meters operating you desire to rest your laurels and retire from civic service, you can then draw 81% of your salary in your last year (including any overtime pay worked) FOR LIFE.

[Edited to add:

DOH! I erred in my supposition that Tool Lending Specialists make about as much as Parking Meter Maintenance Workers! My apologies, Tool Lending Specialists! I should have noted that your salary goes up to SIXTY THOUSAND DOLLARS A YEAR.

http://agency.governmentjobs.com/berkeley/default.cfm?action...

]
So, I'm actually both a geek and a Paleo eater. And I did create a site called www.paleoplan.com because after eating this way for a while, I was amazed at how healthy I felt.

Could this be a fad diet? of course... to some people. Could this be a bunch of bullshit? sure. However, after 30 days of completely eliminating wheat, dairy, complex sugars, and starches, I was blown away by how good I felt. I'm still surprised at how I feel, and at my energy levels and general weight loss. So, as I said, I started a site (because that's what geeks do) and now this is how I eat. There's lots of people who follow Paleo eating for a variety of reasons. Some are purely performance driven, and have found Paleo to be a great diet plan to help their athletic performance. Some people are celiacs and have wheat allergies and/or lactose intollerant, so eating Paleo is a natural decision. I've also met people who are just interested in eating whole foods, versus processed foods, and have found this diet makes them feel better.

I have to leave it to people like Scott Hagnas, Robb Wolf, and Loren Cordain for the science of it, but for me, I feel great, look great, and am just in a better mood all the time after giving up a few things. Call it hocus pokus, call it a fad diet, I don't care, it works for me and I plan to stick with it. The actual article is what you'd expect; media grabbing on to the "story." It's not exactly a true representation of the people I know following this diet.
A cooperative is a group of people united voluntarily. A city is not voluntary (yeah, you can move. but it's not always possible or convenient until we have seasteading).
Are you sure? People already use "google" instead of "search", they might start using it also instead of "computer" in next few years... You never know! Especially when Chrome OS is just around the corner...
Interesting.. I went from eating 2 meals a day to 5-6 for weightlifting. I eat a lot healthier (rarely go out), and have a high protein diet.

I've gotten sick twice, but my immune system took care of that rather fast. I barely experienced any symptoms and made recoveries within a day or two, something that never happened before

Eating 2 meals a day was bad for me because I'd feel a lot groggier eating over a 1000 calories/meal to meet daily requirements
To be fair, some ("I still am really bad at writing parsers.") seem to be more signs of humility than confessions of incompetence.
quite ambitious, especially because $10 quadrillion is about 185 times the total amount of money in circulation throughout the world (according to the World Bank).

Source: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/DATASTATISTICS/0,,c...
Very good point. I've noticed all these things and really like them. I like how Google has kicked it into high gear and I hope that independent developers do too. I think we need a better UI framework or just app framework in general for building Android apps... I'm not satisfied with the way things work right now.
It wasn't H&Ms standard practice in the first place, and they stopped the store that was doing it. Their standard practice was to donate the unsold clothes to charity.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/hm-says-it-will...
Totally the city's fault, from the page:

Early in 1992, a contractor working for the city, near the Kinzie Street bridge, drove a wooden pile next to the wall of a drift under the river. The pressure from the pile began to cause a leak in the wall. The leak was small at first. A cable television employee spotted the leak and even captured it on video tape. The cable televison company then brought the problem to the attention of the city. Unfortunately, the city allowed the leak to continue for several months without repair. Eventually, the drift wall gave way, and the river poured into the tunnels. The water completely flooded the system, including many basements that were still connected to it. The Loop was shut down for days, and the flood caused millions of dollars in damage. The torrent of flood water, silt, and debris probably destroyed most of the remaining Chicago Tunnel Company freight cars and artifacts. If the city acted quickly and if the water tight doors had been left in place and maintained, the flood may have been prevented.
rglovejoy asks: "What happens when someone gets injured or killed because he or she was improperly using a tool from the tool lending library? What if the low-hours guys you mentioned were cutting corners on the tools' upkeep? Or is this really an issue?"

It's not really an issue because the guys that work there are highly competent. Informally, you can ask them for advice about hard projects. Maintaining the tools, they do a fine job. Liability to the city, I don't recall whether I had to sign a disclaimer or not when I first went there. I don't think so but I could be mis-remembering. At any rate, they are quite conservative and careful in their tool management.

Also, regarding: "Why can't a group of citizens form a cooperative to do this, instead of involving the city government?"

Well, we certainly could. Actually, we do! You should see our neighborhood-based disaster-prep system. It has miles to go before I feel like I can laugh at the next big earthquake but it is quite impressive. We've sheds and caches all over the place. And in many neighborhoods, there are less formal tool sharing arrangements. The Tool Lending Library fills a nice niche within that arrangement and is, as another commenter pointed out, a "citizen coop" in the sense of being "voter approved".

Honestly, there is plenty to kvetch about about Berkeley and East Bay politics but the tool lending library is just not on that list.
You said iSuppli was being dishonest. They weren't. They're not exaggerating either.

iSuppli isn't responsible if daringfireball (or anybody else) mangles their actual statements.

I'll stand my statement that you are dishonest, and at your suggestion I'll add an addendum that you're exaggerating the scope of iSuppli's responsibility.
"I would suggest not grouping software by distinctions which do not matter for your users."

Yet naturally there seem to be these distinctions drawn; Useful in both understanding markets and producing usable products. A personal example: I use MS Office, Adobe Master Collection, Intuit Quickbooks; all natural collections of single feature software.

"Your users do not have a point at which their demand for software is saturated, any more than they have a point at which their demand for products is saturated."

It seems natural that there would be a saturation point, because a consumer is limited by both time and money.

“"Hold on, wait a minute -- do I need a widget for this, or a suite?" “

Personally, if I found that the lion’s share of a software suite was valuable I would purchase that vs. the individual products with the same feature set.
PushButton Tutorial Series - Weapons
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crunchies
He's always been pretty open about his "just get the job done" approach. That's exactly what PHP is too. Not beautiful, well designed etc., but gets the job done in most cases.

This is a mail he showed at a talk - http://lerdorf.com/fanmail.txt

I'm sure he enjoys it when people get worked up about PHP :)
The Haber-Bosch process creates ammonia (a solution that can then be oxidized to create nitrates and nitrites) by passing nitrogen from the air and hydrogen, currently stripped from hydrocarbons, over an iron catalyst. If a "hydrogen economy" were to actually appear this same H2 would be used to produce ammonia (and you could actually cut out several steps in the current process that are necessary to eliminate any trace of carbon monoxide during the conversion of methane into H2, CO2, and water.) If alternative energy can be used to create hydrogen in a cost-effective manner then you are golden as far as fertilizer is concerned.
Seems I've been marked down without a reason. Is there a way to delete comments on HN? I have no objections to removing this. I can't seem to find a "delete" link anywhere.
From one proprietary system to another.

I wish HTML5 included a decent way to do the things that Flash excels at, like vector animation.
And also, by the year 1985 we will all have flying cars.
Six years back or so natural gas was worth a lot - then all of the sudden there were huge discoveries offshore while at the same time technology improved such that onshore shale formations previously not economical became cheap and prolific. Now natural gas is cheap, cheap, cheap and no one goes around saying we're running out.

Oil is no different. Oil isn't endless, and we are nowhere near reaching peak oil (maybe we have in conventional oil, but even that's debatable). It's really just a matter of how economic it is to produce even the known resources and how well they are managed. Many countries (the bigger oil producing ones) tend to damage access to the resources by producing too fast (due to the discount factor to time/money). There's opportunity to get that back in the future with new technology and time.

To give an example comparing the natural gas situation to oil, Canada is making huge strides in reducing the cost of producing heavy oil, it used to be $50+ per barrel and is now down to $19-33 per barrel. With oil prices at $80 per barrel you can see the profit margin is large enough to make money.

Most oil companies take the majority of profit from oil and re-invest into buying more properties, investing most of it into discovering new resources. They wouldn't be doing that if they thought there was none left to find. Check out the top producers of oil and look at their investments vs. their profits and you'll see.

As a side note... I don't see why much of the oil demand can not be off loaded to natural gas should the gov't + manufacturing companies choose to invest that way. Vehicles can run, houses can be heated, and plants can all operate on natural gas.... Natural gas has proven to be more environmentally cleaner than coal, they even produce less environmental damages than the facilities used to produce electric and corn oil alternatives. So I really don't get all the hype. It's all just market fixing/speculation for the most part and lack of quality information.
This makes me love PHP more. If that was possible.

He just gets it. If you want to spend your days drawing UML, writing documentation and unit tests. That is dandy, but you're in PHPLand now. This is our land, and we dont care about no freakin' memory leaks.
Adobe's support for Flash on OSX & Linux has always been pretty bad. I suppose that was one of those rational decisions everyone keeps talking about. Don't spend 50% of your effort on optimising the experience of 10% of your audience.

But.. You never know what's down the road.

Now that Linux & OSX run the interesting phones, people from the Linux & OSX worlds have a 'Flash Sucks, let's find another way to do it" mentality.
As they alluded to at the end of the post, this year is also apparently going to be the year that the App Store gets flooded with crappy http://www.addictinggames.com/ type games. (Not to be disrespectful to the flash developers that would actually create quality apps, but you know that the other stuff is coming.)
a million (10^6) times a million (10^6) is a trillion (10^12) $1,000,000,000,000 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million )

$10 quadrillion is $10,000,000,000,000,000 (10^16) in the U.S. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_large_numbers ) but in parts of the world 10 quadrillion would be 10^25

Because she is based in the US I assume she is using the American meaning of million and trillion.
Yes, it was totally the city's fault that the Chicago Tunnel Company built and abandoned a collection of illegally dug tunnels under the city.

It is also totally the city's fault that the previous participants in the Chicago Tunnel Company's experiment didn't protect themselves against a flood in that infrastructure.

It is totally the city's fault that despite the tunnels not being a public responsibility, they had started a bidding process to get the leak fixed, though it wasn't completed before the flood.

Yeah... totally the city's fault.

Reader's note: There are elements of sarcasm in my post.
Just set one up yourself, you can get a rackspace cloud 256MB instance for 12 bucks a month, that should handle you for a while. You can always upgrade if you need to scale.
"...while Flash apps won’t run on the iPhone, any Flash app can easily be converted into an iPhone app."

The title is misleading...
I guess you are an outlier then. Most people will type in full questions and expect Google and answer them automatically
That email is confusing. "From: damien taylor" in 2003 yet signed "Walter Bagdasarian", which unusual-seeming name belongs to a guy who was convicted in 2009 of threatening Obama. Odd.
"Advertising aims to increase the desire to consume."

That statement is false (or more correctly, not necessarily true). Take toilet paper for example, you see a lot of marketing for toilet paper, but I seriously doubt the total market size for toilet paper is really being increased dramatically via marketing.

No, the advertising isn't meant to make people wipe their asses more, it's to steal market share from competitors. Consumption in this case has not risen, only redirected to another producer.

So no, not all advertising aims to increase the desire to consume in general, it simply increases the desire to consume a particular product, very possibly at the expense of other consumption.

Furthermore, there is substitutability of goods - if Bob's Toilet Paper works as well as Joe's Toilet Paper, and costs 30% less, consumers are reducing overall consumption (by dollar value) thanks to Bob's shrewd marketing. Not all advertising results in a net loss for the consumer.

It is patently false to claim that all marketing acts explicitly against the interest of those it advertises to.
Mainly because people so commonly dismiss a study by stating that 'correlation doesn't imply causation,' while going about their lives with their own ideas and biases based on anecdotal evidence just the same. It's the tool of a common course of visible hypocrisy. Maybe it's just a personal thing.
There are a lot of crappy apple apps out there too. Imagine a flash game like this: http://www.rocksolidarcade.com/games/robokill2/ coming to iphone.
She gives away her time to critique entrepreneurs presentations (See http://www.sramanamitra.com/entrepreneurship-strategy-roundt... ) in roundtables that are free to call in and available afterward on her site. She has written four books on bootstrapping and researched a number of success stories. They are as useful in their way as "Founders at Work" or "Four Steps to the Epiphany."

I am not affiliated with her but admire both what she and Eric Ries are trying to do to provide practical guidance to entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping.
Ask HN: Who is the best Freelance Rails Developer you know? 
Who does the best, most phenomenal web development work you know?
I expect to both succeed and fail. I try to learn as much from both as I possibly can.
No, it isn't. The new creative suite lets flash developers program actionscript and use the flash APIs to develop their applications. The fact that it is converted to arm as opposed to running on the adobe virtual machine is immaterial to the developers and development process.
Most of the CTC's business was in hauling coal in and hauling ash back out of the Loop, back when all the buildings were heated using coal.

Marshall Fields contracted them for deliveries for a while, and they experimented with some other things, but that was the core of their business.

They were also devastated by the building of the subway tunnels through the loop, which cut many of the CTC tunnels.

So while they're a cool aspect of Chicago's history, it's not hard to see why they failed. They were an artifact of the coal heating era -- and not a very robust one at that.

As an aside, a tunnel project also was a plot device in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. It's a long time since I read it, but if I recall correctly, the tunnels were being built to break a trolley worker's strike.
Rasmus Lerdorf created the most popular language for building web apps. Websites that changed the world were built with this language, and most newcomers seem to choose it as well. It managed to get a substantial share of a market that companies like Microsoft or Sun put huge resources into.

On top of all that, he actually remains a pretty cool and down to earth guy, as far as I can tell from reading his online stuff and hearing him speak a few times, which makes the snarky comments here seem even more juvenile.
Interesting! When I was eating 5-6 meals a day it was perfectly healthy - all home-cooked, organic, with good (free-range, grass fed) meat. I was exhausted all the time, and hungry every few hours, and was thinking about food all the time.

I speculate that maybe I eat less now than the daily requirements on occasion. I have a large amount of fuel stored, which seems to be easily accessible these days (to judge from the rate at which it is being consumed, anyhow).

Perhaps when my weight has normalized I'll get hungry more often.
Unfortunately I don't see MySQL 5.x as being supported.
Suggested subhed: 'Foolish Californians fail to recognize obvious superiority of writer's free-market views, invite him to dine with lesbians.'
10 min "Flying Tour" of ACL2 Theorem Prover
you should unit test your php
What about the Amazon? They've remained untouched for a while.
City Hall was one of the flooded buildings. They had an "unprotected" connection to the "illegal" tunnels.
If you like this, you'll love Hidden Chicago 2. They have a nice segment about it, and lots more. I'm not sure what you can find online, but a quick Google turned up:

http://video.wttw.com/feature/102/

and

http://www.wttw.com/main.taf?p=1,60
From what I've read they don't avoid vegetables aside from nightshades.
Not sure why you're trying so deliberately to be antagonistic. You state conservationists argue resources are "mispriced due to uncaptured externalities, and that this leads to overuse" (or misuse). How do you suppose these conservationists aim to correct these "externalities"?

Obviously they attempt to do more than point out an item is mispriced. Otherwise, their best course of action would be to buy resource XYZ as it's pure arbitrage in which case it is a bet against our ability to innovate and adapt.

edit: I notice you've modified a significant portion of your response and added a disclosure. I tend to agree that the grid will get smarter and we will become more energy agnostic. That merely goes back to proving the point that the markets themselves create the incentives for resources allocation - ie innovate and adapt and for this reason it has been historically foolish to bet that we will run out of a given resource.
I like it when language designers are "cool". My favorite language is Python, but I like Larry Wall's quirky personality better than Guido's, and Rasmus' is great. ;)
One sentiment people in Berkeley would seem to share, however, is that they'd rather be naive about helping people than naive about being critical.
My master's thesis advisor (http://www.cs.ttu.edu/~rushton/) is interested in formal verification. This is the most practical and informative introduction to formal verification that I've seen yet. All the talks about formal verification using Mizar/PVS/ACL2/etc. that I've attended have been over my head and utterly impractical. The Coq documentation, even though at first glance is still over my head, is much more approachable than the Mizar documentation I've seen. Thanks for the link!
Remote Computer Repair
Experience the Best Remote Computer Support with Ask Pc Experts on
0800-845-6515.
What Can You Learn from the 4-Hour Workweek?
Yes, it should. HN won't let me do that any longer though.
Can you change the title to accurately reflect the content please? Stripping NSFW from the original makes sense but the complete rewrite does not.
Regular blood donations? Yep, that's crazy.

I'm up above nine gallons donated, lifetime, and I'm ready to give more as the occasion allows. I'm much above the age of thirty, considerably above the model age of most readers of HN.

https://www.givelife.org/
I expected the link to be to a different tunnel which failed to revolutionise delivery:

http://www.idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burri...
Cherish Smart but Lazy People
You mean like the canvas tag? Or do you see something wrong with the canvas tag?
You're trying to say that your fellow citizens who have a job should get less than a living wage?

What would would you do with the extra few bucks that comes back if their salaries fall? Buy another chocolate bar or something? Fuck me. You're arguing against helping another human being out by giving them a good salary. You want to give them a shitty salary and them have them "leech" off of you through welfare or other shit?
Having worked at a major research facility as a research scientist I can say that providing incentives to researchers is usually not the problem.

At least where I worked, we worked on limited government contracts that were intended to scratch a particular itch (or explore where that itch might be). "Innovation" only really ever happened when the client asked the right question, and we managed to find a novel answer. Sometimes the contracts were for just a few months, sometimes for decades depending.

There was almost no room for self-guided exploration or innovation in the sense that I think this article is talking about. Nobody ever got a contract for a few million $$$ and a couple of years to just "go forth and do what you do and innovate".

On the front side of actually doing the work, we spent inordinate time and effort hunting for grant money and contracts and trying to secure those as well. But again, once we got the work, the strings attached were usually so restrictive that most of the work ended up being more or less mechanical except for a couple particularly sticky problem areas (which of course is why our services were employed).
Trying to capture both themes without being too complex; it's an interesting post that's hard to summarize in 85 characters.