skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the issue that this and a few other comments have is that by "self-liquidation strategy" the author doesn't literally mean sell every company asset as quickly as possible. It means recognize that the market for petroleum is going to decline and mostly go away before the OPEC states have all depleted their reserves. Therefore, BP et al should not invest in finding more reserves, and instead just focus on extracting all the money they can from what they have.

Note I'm not taking a stance on whether or not the author is right, but I think that if he is, there are enough players to prevent price gouging, and if anything we'd see prices fall due to no one wanting to be left with stranded assets.
We will still need oil for things like polymers (e.g. plastics), drugs, and thousands of other applications.
The author should have done some basic fact checking.

From the article:

> "more sophisticated than nineteenth-century “nodding donkeys.”"

That type of fields are getting rare. EOR [1] techniques are being applied everywhere. Although, AFAIK, some countries, such as Venezuela are somewhat backwards in their application of EOR. They wanted to nationalize oil fields and not invest in them, and look what happened.

> new technologies such as hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”)

Fracking [2] is now 40 years old "new" technology. The only reason it became popular in last 10 years was high oil prices.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_oil_recovery

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing
Best of luck mate! I was a McNair scholar in college, even though I am caucasian I still faced my share of challenges and lack of what privelage can bring. To me, that privilege is largely in the sense of self-worth and knowledge about little things such as applying for Pell grants. Financial aid can be enough to allow one to live on in cheaper school areas. A college education for many is less important, but coming from a background such as yours can help establish credibility quickly and provide a broader sense of life. I'd recommend considering it, and especially fill out the FAFSA to see what help you could get (https://fafsa.ed.gov).

College is still expensive and particularly so in a big city like Seattle. I live in Boise and would highly recommend moving to a more inexpensive city such as Portland or Boise. Rent in Boise, for example, is often only $400 for your own. The job market is also often better in these smaller towns. However, family ties often bind us to a place, so there may be smaller outlying towns around Seattle which have community colleges and such while still being cheaper.

If you decide college still isn't for you, I'd heartily recommend doing what many of the other posts say: start hacking! Committing to open source projects is a great way to build a portfolio. Another good approach is to start offering to build websites for friends, family, colleagues, and well anybody. You probably know people or acquaintances who have small businesses (construction, stores, ...) that would like to have a website or inventory system but don't realize that it's both relatively cheap to get a website. Listen and offer to do cheap help setting up websites on WordPress, etc. A side benefit is it can help your own community in a positive way. For example, help make a website for "Aunt Matilda's lawn and gardening services".

I would also recommend reading classic authors who overcame difficult situations and valued practical skills [Up From Slavery - Booker T. Washington](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2376).
Unless you scale it up (diesel electric locomotive) you loose too much energy going from gen-set to motor. It makes more sense to just send the mechanical energy from the engine straight to the wheels. Generating power requires a close to static engine speed and optimizing for that is very much in conflict for optimizing the typical emissions/fuel economy/power/reliability/price criteria by which cars are assessed.

It would also almost certainly be diesel.
Ask HN: What is the best book for learning Swift?
I am an experienced programmer looking to get into iOS programming with Swift. I have experience in C#, Java, Perl and Python and used UNIX as a professional for more than 15 years. What's the best source to get started as an experienced professional?
What to Include in the Projects Section of Your Data Science Resume
I agree with you that this article makes too many sweeping generalizations but nevertheless it struck a chord with me. I am a Gujarati programmer and have never fit in with any of my family or community members in the realm of career or goals. I have no problems with nurturing personal relationships with other Gujaratis but I just can't connect with them on any STEM topics (except medicine). I closely know probably 100+ Gujaratis but I can't think of even one person with whom I can discuss non-arithmetic math or non-business-related software. On the other hand, I can easily think of a dozen who would love to discuss derivatives (stock market not calculus), marginal utility, or EHR/EMRs.

Growing up in India, I was told that owning your business was the only path to success. In 1990, my dad borrowed a ZX Spectrum from a friend so I could play video games and he was genuinely confused when he found out that I spent all day typing (I was learning BASIC) instead of beating his hi-score in Jetpac. Thankfully, as I learned programming, I got a tremendous amount of support from his Gujarati friends, all of whom wanted me to write DBase III+ / FoxPro software for their businesses. But whenever I came up with non-business ideas, my people just didn't get it. I don't think anyone outright discouraged me when I wanted to write software for fun but they just didn't understand why I would write freeware when I could easily sell it. Half of my years between 15-20 were spent being lectured by successful businessmen on why/how I should market my music player or transliteration software.

This article resonated with me because I finally get just how ingrained business is to my culture. I always knew I was the odd one out and came to terms with that a decade ago but now I realize how others in my community must think of me. Time and again I have chosen to not make money even after I made a finished product. For me, once the product is built, I completely lose interest and want to make something else. For them, I already did the hard part of making the product and am bailing out at the fun part of making money from it.

To any Gujaratis reading this who love hacking for the sake of hacking, I'd say there are dozens of us! Let's keep talking business with family and friends of family during the day and quietly watch Numberphile after everyone is asleep.
Guy looking at device falls off cliff on Christmas Day
> If everybody owns something, then nobody owns it. We should probably rethink our notion of what "the commons" means, vis-a-vis property rights.

Good point. Of course, that rethink might go in either way, moving more things from public to private or from private to public. It's a good idea to periodically review what we consider public property and try to make it more consistent with the idea of privatizing externalities.
An airplane is far more efficient than a helicopter (drone). Also, I can't imagine that a drone flying the last mile is going to be less energy efficient than driving that big heavy delivery truck.
Buy the one with smaller form factor. the device bends with very nominal pressure and if you are someone as me who works mostly on one device and need to move around a lot with it - unplugging and replugging the key is very cumbersome. You can leave the nano one in port and forget it until you need it in another device. My two cents from using a neo to store production ssh keys.
Reminds me a lot of Philipp Oppermann's Writing an OS in Rust (http://os.phil-opp.com/)
Even granting the questionable base assumption that the sector fully implodes: Cheap(er) energy across all industries versus one industry segment collapsing is a win for the industrialists.
Did you try it? I think it makes it way easier if you need to integrate more than one API. But open for your opinions or suggestions how to improve it. The solution has just been launched, so yes there are not many tutorials out there.

Use case is if you need to integrate more than one API in your app.
I like it (for otherwise generic names); it quickly shows which language the library is for, reduces name collisions, and makes Googling easier.
I think he meant larger in the sense that 24 bits is larger than 8 bits
I agree with that but my point still stands.
"police revenue": that's terrifying. How is turning law enforcement into a legally protected extortion gang a good idea?
That would be refreshing to hear if you didn't know the next conclusion to be drawn would be, "Therefore, we need to double down and increase funding."
That's fair, but I feel like most languages have searchable package repositories, and I'd be searching in one of those, eliminating the need for such naming.
Also, if you're interested in this topic I recommend this TED talk from Yale professor Rodrigo Canales: "The deadly genius of drug cartels" https://www.ted.com/talks/rodrigo_canales_the_deadly_genius_...
Meet the digital dissenters: They’re fighting for a better Internet
Not only it helps with light pollution, but it saves energy that would go into space!
Well, I think if you went to the streets and asked a selection of people for their opinions on most topics, the majority would be aware that there was even an issue.

I think that's generally the case.
In Mathematics, Mistakes Aren’t What They Used to Be
For me Firefox seems to be doing some weird thing with the live video where you'll watch it and it will get stuck due to congestion or whatever, and then refreshing the page appears to restart the video from the beginning until the point where it broke. Very odd.
It's not a mistake, it's a feature! 100% Arduino compatibility can make things much more approachable for casual enthusiasts.

I've seen some non-programmer _artists_ get Arduino stuff working---barely---which is awesome! If they'd had to start by figuring out how to get a cross-compiler working (especially on Windows), they'd probably have given up.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/
2015 is the year that Tumblr became the front page of the Internet
I like that I can play SuperTux on my Windows machine. (:
Where did you get the PGP card? Did you donate to become a fellow?

I've been thinking about it, but it's a bit confusing figuring out what cards are compatible and donating to the foundation is nice but a bit expensive.
I know that this is intended to be a puff peace about the perceived entrepreneurial spirit of the Guajarati community as a whole but I would have appreciated more if the author took the time and effort to shed some light on the usual failure stories that some members of this community endured and didn't make it abroad.

The author made it sound like every and each Gujarati person is destined to entrepreneurial success and failing and losing are unexpected outcomes in their cases.

Nothing against Gujaratis or Indians in general. I really like entrepreneurial and trailblazing people provided they earned their wealth through legitimate means not questionable or unethical ones but I preferred to read a more impartial analysis or critique of this anthropological topic than this nauseating self-congratulatory Economist article.
That's nice. It was kind of embarrassing for a luxury sedan to have comparable performance numbers to a 90s F-series with a 300 and 4.10s (which also has torque pretty much all the time).

Those vehicles are so dissimilar it's kinda funny how close they score on the consumer (0-60, top speed) straight line performance metrics. Numbers obviously don't tell the full story but it's amusing since 0-60 and top speed are the two numbers that people that don't know cars generally care a lot about.
I was independent the day I graduated high school. The issue is the fights and arguments about not going to college after high school and knowing that I wouldn't get help in life if I made that choice. It is ironic that later they tried very hard to persuade me not to give up the career they had previously opposed.

What is wrong with waiting until I was 26 to start college? I was not ready for college right out of high school.
All the GC implementations I've seen in Rust use unsafe code, and I really wanted to avoid it. I struggled a bit with some of the RefCell stuff, but the folks on #rust were really helpful. I'm still not sure that a practical GC can be implemented without unsafe, given that RefCells can't be recursively borrowed (so as soon as you have mutable recursive data structures, you have to find some way to work around the RefCell limitation that the contents can only be mutably borrowed once). I wonder if it wouldn't be nice to have something similar to a RefCell that allows multiple mutable borrows, which I think would be safe (only) if the application is single-threaded. Or perhaps a variant that mutably borrows only non-RefCell bits of the contents, leaving the nested RefCell free to be mutably borrowed.

Thanks for your feedback :) I'd had it sitting there for a while with no idea if it was any good or not.
As a human being that needs inexpensive, reliable energy to live a good life, I hope they don't do this!
It is largely because the package namespace is polluted, so the name you want is never available.
This is just blogspam. It's primarily a link to the NY Times article that was widely discussed on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10783711) plus a link to the HN discussion and to other articles already discussed on HN.
> But async IO was seriously complicated. I mean, complicated in a way that made you think, which is not usually a bad thing, but eventually you just want to get stuff done. [1]

Couldn't agree more, very interesting solution you've come up with!

[1] http://pogoscript.org/2012/12/05/async.html
When I read most papers, it will be to do what you say. There are many papers which really aren't worth spending more than 20 minutes perusing since they just rehash or tweak something which was done previously. Unfortunately with the publish-or-perish mentality predominant in most of academia, I'd say this is getting far worse and likely to increase. Sometimes I wish there were a "goodreads" or "netflix" for scientists.

Now, a good paper I will read and grok the main importance in a few hours to the point I can implement the basics. But, a classic paper will be like a well-thumbed classic and might take years to fully grasp.
A good way to handle incoming notifications in Android
Stop Patent Trolls: Support the Innovation Act of 2015
I picked up two of the github keys. Never did get them working under OS X. Plug them in and nothing, not recognized by any of their tools, no new keyboard recognized prompt, nothing. Anyone else have trouble with them on OS X?
The increased rate of innovation (measured in months rather years) that is customary in SV has the perverse effect of hurting resale value. Think of how quickly an iPhone depreciates. This is good for bargain hunters but increases the cost of ownership for original owners.
From their policies page:

> by uploading or posting content to the Platform and providing access to your system’s source code repository, you hereby grant to Snyk, limited to the extent it is necessary in order to enable your use of the Platform, a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty free and transferable licence (with right to sub-license) to, including without limitation, use, display and transmit the content and source code

.. No thanks.
77% of all Mexicans list cartel violence as the most important problem facing the country.

Crowds of people in Culiacan may consider Guzman a hero, just like crowds of people in Medellin mythologized Pablo Escobar. The Sinaloa cartel kicks back money to the whole state, and Guzman is a hometown hero.

With Guzman at the helm, the Sinaloan cartel was also less violent to civilians than its competitors, particularly the Zetas.

The government of Mexico is among the most corrupt and least trusted in the world, and is itself implicated in the mass slaughter of groups of civilians.

It does not follow that Mexico as a whole, or even the state of Sinaloa as a whole, sees the Sinaloan cartel as a force for good. They are clearly not that.
Thank you, that's a critical bit of context.
I think it is premature to judge his performance as of yet. If he makes both companies succeed, it will be worth a post-mortem to figure out what worked. If not, then there really isn't going to be much of interest to talk about.

I'd suggest everyone revisit this in a year.
I am starting to see ads against this bill from patent trolls. It's on the Congressional calendar right now. It has 27 cosponsors. Hopefully it will pass! The EFF link has a box where you can e-mail your congressional representative, if you live in the USA of course.
> "Like the Jews, Chinese, English, Scots and Lebanese, they have come to form an impressive global commercial network."

English people as merchants or commercial folks on an individual level, I haven't heard of that. Maybe from Europe the Italians or Greeks to some extent, that's true but English people, I don't think that his/her observation is correct.
With proper monetary policy, there is no reason to expect it would cause a recession in America. The reason people in the business press are concerned about it is because deflation is associated with recessions. But usually recessions are caused by demand-driven deflation (people demanding less goods, which leads to the prices of goods decreasing), while this is a supply-side deflation (suppliers providing more goods, which leads to prices decreasing). As you can imagine, when people demand less, fewer goods are created, which is a recession, but if people are given more for the same price, MORE goods are created, which is not a recession.

Scenarios where a fall in the price of oil triggers a recession are possible. For example, with bad monetary policy from the Fed you can always get a recession if they do the wrong thing, and drastic changes in oil prices could make that more likely by leading us into a more volatile environment, where past trends could be broken. More likely is that it could lead to deflation in the Eurozone, and since the European Central Bank isn't very good at monetary policy, it could lead to a further Eurozone recession because of sticky wages. If that recession were bad enough it could cause failure of the economies of one or more European countries and trigger global recession.

It's also possible that one or more oil-exporting nations could default on their sovereign debt (Russia, Venezuela), which could cause a panic-driven global recession.
Doug McIlroy on what this is and why it is remarkable (thanks to knome for this explanation):

http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Distributions/research/Mc...

This is amazingly cool and clearly deserves more attention, so we've changed the title and re-upped the submission to give more people a chance to see it.

(Submitted title was 'DMR Unix “Edition Zero” Manual Unearthed (restoration in progress)'.)
If I were to stereotype smokers I wouldn't call the a group of luxury item buyers. I know tobacco isn't a necessity but the anacedata point from me would be that poverty and tobacco use are closely correlated.
Actually, this demo would be stopped if the stack protector was on. The demo relies upon overwriting the return pointer that controls where the function jumps to upon returning.

The stack protector acts as a guard against overwriting that value without knowing a key that is stored elsewhere in memory. You'd need some memory disclosure issue to get the key or brute force the key.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8x_yL12dJjI "Bill Scannell: Inside Field Station Berlin Teufelsberg" is along the same lines from last year, and a very interesting insight into daily life at the NSA/DIA during those times.
I was just trying to figure out what problem developers had that you were trying to solve.

From your web site, it appears that your thesis is that (some) developers have a problem using multiple API's from multiple providers, and you are offering an integrated approach to make their lives easier.
Strange that an article with this title that talks so much about Amazon's drone efforts doesn't examine Amazon's relationship with the delivery industry. Amazon desperately wants to economically remove the time lag between buying something from Amazon and buying from the nearest Wal-Mart. Drones have the potential of significantly improving delivery times and costs in the long run, but the delivery industry has little incentive to innovate in this area since they already command high margins on small package deliveries.

For Amazon, it's not necessarily about how well they can execute on their drone delivery program. I imagine that Amazon will actually make a go of turning drone fulfillment into a business, a la AWS, though the effort is still worthwhile for them even if that never happens. With this drone program, they are able to provide a large scale proof of concept, working through legal barriers that are relatively trivial for a company with Amazon's resources, but insurmountable for hypothetical drone logistics startups that might want to put pressure on UPS et al. But once the grunt work is done, the barriers to competing in the logistics industry through drone fleets will be substantially diminished.

This is the big upside for Amazon here: paving the way for increased competition in the delivery industry (whether it ends up primarily being driven by Amazon, incumbent companies, or startups) which will have the likely impact of improving it's unit costs while having the potential of eventually bringing it into parity with regards to the largest remaining advantage that Wal-Mart retains, same-day delivery.

The unit costs and limitations aren't particularly relevant to much at this point in time. Those will significantly improve as competition increases, as is typical in maturing technology industries.
hood.ie looks like a much better backend for these scenarios
About 7/8 of petroleum becomes fuel of one sort or another. The other products wouldn't keep the oil business alive, except in a vastly reduced form.
That idea is alive and well. Just look at the BMW i3:

http://m.bmwusa.com/#overview_styleid91_16IB
I tried the pro model but went back to the FST-01 as it was too slow for RSA 4096 and doesn't support curve25519 for sign/auth.

But, yes, it does work with gpg-agent with ssh support.
Popper's Philosophy of Science: Looking Ahead (2007) [pdf]
> Here's a crazy thought experiment. Instead of copying some music track, how about copying a dollar bill? What happens to the dollar bill?

We don't need all the baggage of monetary policy here. Let's get to the heart of what you're after: How about copying a gift certificate?

The only point you're making is that it's possible for a forged copy to be the instrument of a fraud. When you redeem the forged gift certificate you're effectively stealing inventory from the store.

So you're really just making the spurious claim that copying is stealing, using a detour through currency forgery to disguise the nature of your claim.

> So in a sense, the same way copying music helps the music industry, copying dollars helps the economy!

Do you understand why the government prints money during a recession?
You can make plastics out of natural gas , and there's a shift to that happening. Also for some plastics some companies are starting to use biotech. And as for drugs, there are alternative routes to oil , at least at the research level - but it's a far easier problem, since it's less cost sensitive(per volume).