skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You leave out another possibility: that the more accurate game theoretic analysis indicates that pre-emptive strike has a good chance to succeed, with little chance of survival or detection by the target civilization. The best option is actually (4) never ever let on that you exist in the first place. I think this is infeasible given the psychological makeup of our species, but perhaps possible for another. In this case, the galaxy is garrisoned, but the aliens know we have some time before we are star faring, so they can take the time to knock us off in a way the least likely to be detected by another species.
Out of curiosity, how does one pitch to Ron/SV Angel?
I think this will happen sooner rather than later, but man oh man is this going to ruin people's day.
3 Weeks of iPad: Some observations
Same year, across the Bay in Berkeley.

The street is Euclid Ave. which borders the central U.C. Berkeley campus to the north.

Do be sure and note (a) the same generally languid approach to street travel; (b) the role of the fine gentlewoman in breaking up a dispute before it descends to far into fisticuffs. I think that the guy walking on the tracks might be black and so I suspect there is also a racial element to these snapshots of history, but I'm not sure. I'm also not so sure that the confrontation we see in the video wasn't staged - it looks like it could have been but it's hard to tell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK9CekGF3Ho
Thanks, I found it useful. :)

A small bug I noticed: longer biographies aren't showing up in full [1]. Happens in both Chrome 5.0.375.17, Safari 4.0.5 and Firefox 3.6.2; OSX 10.6.3.

[1] http://cl.ly/YXs
Who is to say we don't fall below the alien's lower threshold of respect-worthy intelligence?
Help a Team Reach the Electric Motorcycle Grand Prix
I like one of the comments:

obviously it’s a visual tracking system.

Sure about that, are you? This sort of thing is meant to be paired with a visual tracking system, it's just a machine to move from (x,y) to (x2,y2). I've seen plenty of examples of cameras hooked to computers detecting object placement at many many many times faster than this thing can move. The capability limit hasn't been the visual tracking software, but the actual speed of the machine to go between points.
I think fewer people are aware of it these days when you can simply hit up google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=.003+light+seconds+in+miles

Though it seems they haven't gotten millilightseconds to work.
You have Charles Ponzi's history mostly wrong. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ponzi for a more accurate version.
No you're a tuba! (you've got a typo in the url)
I suspect that sufficiently advanced deep spacers who intend to remain undetected, can. I also suspect that many races will conclude that this is the best strategy for long term survival.
Why run X11 just for an xterm instead of just using Terminal?
I don't know, but remember that redis writes aren't hitting the disk synchronously.
What good is being afraid going to do?
Is SMS the new cash cow for twitter?
Greece is near bankruptcy
(I just spent 5 minutes figuring out how to mention that I currently live in Edmond and make it relevant to HN. I couldn't.)

I feel bad about not subcribing to the Edmond Sun though- they have much better articles than The Oklahoman.
Aves Engine: HTML/JavaScript Game Engine
Here's the original rumor http://rixstep.com/1/20100424,00.shtml
(thanks. typo fixed. (how the heck did that happen?!??)
Why I'm not moving to Linux just yet
Sort of interesting to see the peak oil meme spring up again and again for over a decade and always be right around the corner.

Obviously at some point the production levels will gradually decline, but people will either boost efficiency or substitute away from oil.
What current tech company (other than Apple) has this kind of potential?
These predictions come since as long ago as 30 or 40 years ago (check 'The End of Oil' on Amazon: in 2004 when this book was printed, the 'end of oil' was predicted (once again) to happen... in just few years! Did it?) The thing is every time such prediction is made, new and new oil fields are discovered, technology of oil extraction improved and these folks have to revise their forecast again. Don't be scared:) It's all printed by folks who want to speculate on oil prices.
Ha! I knew something was fishy in that econ class. :)
Thanks a lot though. This is far more sinister than I suspected.
Take a look at the data file (/usr/share/misc/units.dat) some time. It's an interesting little declarative non-Turing-complete DSL, in addition to being a handy reference manual.
Well it doesn't cost any money to join but I wouldn't say it is free. You are agreeing to forfeit a lot of personal info by participating.
Denote preconditions, postconditions, and invariants during interviews! It'll save your life when it comes to quickly finding the "off-by-one" bugs that tend to be problematic when you're reinventing strcspan or another C string manipulation function, or doing some crazy recursion.

In real life, whenever I'm writing complex C functions, I always denote my preconditions, postconditions, and invariants. I also tend to denote non-obvious pre/post conditions above the functions, to optimize for the case of source-diving (when someone's just glimpsing around and trying to get the gist).
The graph suggests strongly that in the worst case the price of oil will rise in a slow and predictable fashion, readily allowing alternatives to be introduced profitably, preventing the need for coercion.
That can't be San Francisco, the cameraman never once gets assaulted by overly-aggressive homeless people.
This has the potential to cripple the economy and society (see Mad Max). There is a great book that discusses Peak Oil and the potential crash we are facing called "The Long Emergency" for anyone interested. I really hope we attempt to hedge this looming problem proactively instead of waiting until we have gone off the edge of the cliff. This has been discussed over and over for the past 30ish years though (if not longer) and many consider it a non-problem, but it is worth planning for and diversifying away from oil, be very very bad if we got this one wrong.
Has anyone here had experience actually using Helma? How does it compare to other general-purpose code frameworks?

I had it downloaded about a year ago and made a few toy projects, but nothing serious enough to really give it a proper workout. (And I don't have a VPS to actually launch anything on...)
Define "too much," please. :P

I research things I'm interested in and passionate about. I want to know more. I'm an infosec guy by career and I can tell you that there is no way one can master all aspects of it. This should come as no surprise to entrepreneurs, developers, or geeks in general, really.

I'm currently interested in learning more about computer forensics. I have basic knowledge, but want to familiarize myself better with the methods, tools, and tricks of the trade. As usual, I also want to understand the counter of that -- anti-forensics technologies.

All the while, I surround myself with other bits of infosec news and knowledge, industry thought leaders, document what I play with, and eventually write about it to share it with others. There's no sense being a hoarder of information. Sometimes I come up with something genuinely unique. Other times, I feel like more of a curator.

I have other interests as well: bicycling, mechanical repair (think: automotive, appliance, etc) just to name a few. I'm equally as passionate about those things as well, and spend a good deal of my time learning about those things and putting them to practice.
What good is being happy going to do?

I think it is very hard to make a convincing case that fear causes us to do less. It might lead to that reaction in some people, I’m not sure whether that is true of everyone.

The kind of fear that stops you in your tracks seems rather like a overreaction – a misfiring – of your fear circuitry. You should, after all, run when you see the tiger, not stop. My guess would be that fear leads to inaction only in a minority of people.

That’s only a guess, but I’m not exactly sure why having no emotional reaction or being happy upon hearing those news (and assuming there’s some truth to them) is better.
Job Hoppers Redux: An Employee's Perspective
I remember my mom brought home an Atari 800XL. This was after Wargames was released and my brother and I used to play on it all the time. He did something where a bunch of garbage characters were printed on the screen while I was playing and said "oooo you broke into the pentagon!" I immediately thought of wargames which scared the hell out of me and unplugged the computer. Good times. :)
I totaly agree with this. Instead of wasting time building generalizing filters take the ones you feel good about on as contractors first. Get a feel for their competency and whether they fit your environment before you buy the cow!

Anything else just seems so ineficient and risky at least when it comes to programmers. Think long term.
Nice Analogy (Rock Band and Tech Startup)
Why Apple Shareholders Should Be Cautious
If evolution is constantly changing, how can a creature be caught off guard? The answer is that in a closed system, it is possible to reach a stable point that it is difficult to jump out of: in the search space of genotypes, there is a local maxima in the utility of the phenotype.

One thing I was wrong about was that the stable equilibria doesn't exist indefinitely; eventually a mutation might arise that does jump out. I was also assuming that a closed ecosystem was also closed to change in general. The latter seems more common; that equilibria is upset by an outside event that alters the utility of the phenotype - such as an open system closing, or some non-biological change in the environment (eg climate), and not by a change in the genotypes within the closed system.

It is possible that aliens are in one of these stable configurations at the time that we encounter them, which seems more likely in closed ecosystems. Closed ecosystems can be created by internal barriers being removed (which intelligent life, or at least we, seem to be doing). Of course, it's harder to eliminate change altogether (!), so that source of alteration in the utility function would remain. Yet, we certainly have motivation to eliminate environmental change that affects us adversely, so perhaps intelligent life is likely to be at equilibrium, in the long term.

If you disagree, I request that you indicate with which part. ;-)
How does the (conventional) big bang theory fit into that? At first glance it seems like valid evidence for spontaneous creation of information.
To play normally the video needs to be sped up about 40-50%.
For that spare screen you're not using...
How To Live Before You Die ~ Steve Jobs
In 1956 it was predicted to be in roughly 2000, and the DOE is currently saying that we are right at peak oil now. So if the DOE and the military are correct, this means that they were dead on from the beginning.
Combining Content and User-Based Recommendations
Hilariously he has a link to his own blog post accurately describing ponzi schemes. My guess is he was just baiting.
Ask HN: Should Apple buy Dropbox for seamless doc sharing on iPad?
I've read a lot of comments and reviews on the iPad. One of the major criticisms has been sharing documents and webpages between laptops, desktops, iPhones, and iPads. Should AAPL buy DropBox so it could offer a more seamless user experience?
My netbook (900MHz, 512 meg RAM) is blindingly fast for unix; but Eclipse was unusably slow.
Same streetcar journey, 2005.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqcz_tllnwM

I'm really glad someone did the 100 year anniversary version.

2105 will be all nanorobots or something.
Mini Altair 8800 PC
Writes are saved to an in-memory table first and are burst to disk asynchronously. But, when the burst happens, the writes to disk are sequential - this is key. No reads to the disk are done before writes (which occurs in MySQL).
Yes, it did feel slow, although I liked that you could see more of the detail at this slower pace...
People who are up to three degrees of separation can still have an influence on us. If you have a friend of a friend of a friend who has been influenced by advertising, the influence can trickle through his friends to you, and you don't even realize you were effected by advertising. The influence of advertising is pervasive and unavoidable.
Look at this graph and be afraid. It does not come from Earth First. It does not come from the Sierra Club. It was not drawn by Socialists or Nazis or Osama Bin Laden or anyone from Goldman-Sachs. If you are a Republican Tea-Partier, rest assured it does not come from a progressive Democrat. And vice versa. It was drawn by the United States Department of Energy, and the United States military's Joint Forces Command concurs with the overall picture.

I hate to break it to the authors, but just because something comes directly from the government does not necessarily make it "correct" or even "free from bias".
Exactly. Prices rise when demand outstrips supply and people respond by seeking alternatives and by doing more exploration.

We'll never truly run out of oil as long as there is a free market. It will just keep getting more expensive.

The runup in oil prices that finally turned around in 2008 had nothing to do with long term supply but was caused too much easy credit overheating the economy.
Not exactly; "The End of Cheap Oil", referenced by the article, was written in 1998 and presents the following graph.

http://dieoff.org/page143.jpg

True, the peak is predicted to have been a few years before now, but I believe production IS falling today?
You don't understand Facebook's revenue at all, which is why you think that. App developers spend hundreds of millions per year promoting games. They aren't making the big money from businesses that lose a couple grand and then find out it's unprofitable. They're making their money from Zynga.

That's sustainable. Facebook is probably going to make their own payment platform mandatory for apps, and they rake 30%. They could quite easily grow to a couple billion in revenue if nobody new ever advertised there again.

Also, local advertising does much better there than most stuff. Better than on Google in some instances.
All the videos from Startup Lessons Learned Conference
Interesting comment because I've read that one of Apple's visions with their mobile devices is to get rid of the traditional hierarchical filesystem.
you mean the same people who completely agree with whatever plan Bush or Obama have had about Iraq or Afghanistan? And here I was thinking they were totally independent.
Ask HN: Good Cloud/SaaS accounting service?
My startup's decided to be a bit more organized on the financial side of things and are looking for a good SaaS accounting solution.

I found a previous Ask HN thread about this (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=317131) but it's almost 2 years old so I thought it'd be worth asking again.

Currently considering:

http://www.xero.com/
http://www.rhinoaccounting.com/
http://www.liquidaccounts.net/
http://quickbooksonline.intuit.com/
https://www.clarityaccounting.com/

Any recommendations? We have no experience with this stuff.

Obviously cheaper is better, but we don't mind paying a bit for quality.

Thanks
So, basically we should be looking at ways to reduce our dependency on oil? If I buy a car today, I should buy one that gets really good mileage, because oil is going to be more expensive in the future?

<sarcasm>This is just total news to me. </sarcasm>
The reason people can get away with Copenhagen is that decoherence is absurdly effective in all realistic cases, causing there to very little uncertainty about whether and when a measurement happened. Insofar as we can all agree when a measurement happened, physicists operating under Copenhagen are going to be just as effective as those who understand MWI. And for most of the theoretical and especially computational aspects of quantum computers, this is the case. The only place where someone operating under the Copenhagen interpretation is going to falter is when they have to think hard and in novel ways about how to prevent decoherence.

So I really don't think interpretation is going to be correlated with advances in the computational aspects (i.e., what kind of problems are quantum computers good for once they are built, etc.) but I would predict that future insights in how to build computers which are robust against decoherence will be dominates by those who understand MWI.
I think the world was just slower then.
Economic analysis of medieval trial by battle
Palm had this potential a few years back. Netflix is one, you could have bout one of their shares instead of the monthly subscription and would have had 10 times that now. IMAX is another, so will be Facebook when and if they go public.
Looks on the surface remarkably similar. Yeah, no horses, less pedestrians (though not by all that much), public transport seems the same, about as many people on bikes and many more cars. But the basic building blocks didn’t change by much.

Everything is much tighter regulated, though, (pretty much a necessity when enough cars are involved) and as a consequence everything looks a lot less chaotic.
Unfortunately, we don't have anything like a free market in America, and we haven't had it for over a century. The correct term for what we have is a mixed economy, meaning a mix of (increasing) regulation, control and (diminishing) market forces.

Having said that, I do agree that oil will simply get more expensive, and that we won't simply run out of it.
I particularly enjoyed this quote: "[I]t's reasonable to expect to find a large number of retained legal representatives under a legal system in which people feel that their property rights are constantly threatened by rent-seeking litigiousness or in which rampant rent-seeking opportunity gives them an incentive to behave litigiously themselves. The rarity of retained champions in medieval England therefore suggests that rent seeking under trial by battle wasn't rampant."
Zeno-Length Iterations
It's not so much that MWI is all that satisfying, it's that Copenhagen is incoherent.
'Hooked for life' on math
Nash Equilibrium
The crude traders don't seem that worried. Look at light sweet http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/crude-oil/light-sweet... or Brent http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/energy/crude-oil/brent-crude... If they seriously though there was going to be a major shortage in the moderately near future (5~10 years) the December prices for 2012~2018 would be higher.
Get an introduction from someone in his network. As far as I know this is the only way you can pitch him.
Here is a direct link to some of the governmental figures.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/liquid_fuels.html
Oh really? I had not heard that, I'm going to have to google around for some articles on this, I'm interested to read up on it. Thanks for the heads up!
It was also due to people treating oil as a currency hedge instead of a fuel or raw material.
I would be a lot more supportive of this kind of thinking if it hadn't been going on for more than 40 years.

Obviously there is a finite supply of oil, and it will start to run low sooner or later. But I would question any forecaster's ability to make pinpoint accurate judgements on this, given that so many have tried over the last 40 years, and so many have gotten it wrong.

In general, I think that it is very dangerous to pivot thinking around a particular data point or graph. It ascribes a lot of importance to a set of data, that, in summary view looks very concrete and real, but might be made up of a lot of layers of uncertainty and plain old guesswork. I'm not suggesting that this graph is necessarily wrong, but you'd have to be pretty idealistic to believe any simplified piece of information about something has chaotic and complicated as all of the conventional and unconvential oil still in the ground, and able to be extracted, with timeframes and technologies thrown in. There's not even any uncertainty bars in the information.
Sigh. We have been hearing for decades that we have only a decade left.
This is par for the course on a daily basis. I work on facebook apps essentially all day, every day. One of the biggest challenges is writing an application that relies on facebook functionality that may or may not vanish or fail hourly.

+1 for building a business on a platform that you don't own, don't control, and has no TOS or SLA with you that protects your uptime.
My understanding of MWI doesn't go much beyond what I could understand of an early Wheeler paper (I thought it was from the mid-40s, but Wikipedia says MWI starts with the thesis of a student of his with the first publication in 1957 ... and I read that paper (whenever it was published) 25 years ago so it's gotten pretty fuzzy).

Well, in this universe it started in '57. In yours, it seems, it is different. Where are you from traveller ?
It is a crime threaten people with violence. When someone holds up a sign that says "Death to so-and so!", and they're in America, arrest and prosecute them. And this doesn't go just for Islamic terrorists: anyone that threatens a particular person with violence, incites or instructs people to violate the rights of another particular person or exactly delimited set of persons (such that their rights could be violated independently of government action), they have committed a crime and should be prosecuted.

The point is that you shouldn't have to wait until someone is dead to put a stop to violence, and you don't. The laws we already have do this.
Don't forget a lot of the run-up in prices was due to a fall in the USD, which the oil prices are quoted in. Countries with resource-exporting economies (like Canada) did not see anything like the percentage increase in fuel prices at the pump that the USA saw.
Unfortunately the graph doesn't take the geopolitics of the situation into account. American oil reserves are long past their peak (about 40 years ago) and we are largely dependent on foreign oil. If demand begins to outstrip supply, what's stopping the Saudis from keeping their oil to themselves? Or better yet, what's stopping them from selling it to China for a much higher price than what American oil companies can bid.
Startup Idea : Twitter Version Of Digg
One thing keeping Apple from lots of extra iPhone sales to business users is that Mr. Jobs, for some reason, has a thing against keyboards. There's no business reason for it. It's a silly, unforced error.

Not building products that fully appeal to "business users" isn't an "unforced error". It's a market segmentation decision.
I'm not contesting that we'll hit peak oil at some point. I am contesting that people have been able to predict it - lots of people have predicted a wide range of dates. Maybe some people will hit it, but that's luck (or indistinguishable from it).

I'm also contesting that we need to be afraid. So long as the change happens gradually there are lots of things we can do to use energy more efficiently or generate more of it.
Dupe (4 days ago): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282408
Exactly. If the Department of Energy were truly worried about running out of oil they would be investing in nuclear power stations and a overhaul of the power grid to prepare for the day that we all have to plug our cars into the grid.
There are a lot of statements I disagree with in this article. At the same time, it is true that if Apple were bought to the same ROI as Microsoft then the stock price would be less than half of what it is. Buying put options to cap your downside is not a bad idea, especially if the stock has already made you a few dimes.
The article places peak oil at around 2012.
An equilibrium will be reached.