skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well to a non-oil expert, they seem to have some merit. To me, the execution seems flawed.
I think of del.icio.us as the direct ancestor. Digg came out when joshu's baby was the new hotness and everybody and their dog were trying to clone it.
Split windows.
I'd send in Juan Sheet to sort it out: http://youtu.be/Xknub_pILt8 .. he says "this spill is no match for me."
I think you wanted to be sarcastic, but I can't understand why. That's probably the reason you have been downvoted.

Anyway. Modern browsers with canvas, svg, webgl etc. are trying to develop what I think is essentially poor man's virtual machine. It's basically concept that Java Applets and Flash pioneered long ago. Except they didn't get implementation exactly right. This whole “Flash sux. HTML5 rox” hype is very short-sighted. Current implementations (except video) are slower than Flash (esp. on Windows) if even existent. And what do you think will happen in few years? If we're lucky we might have fast and reliable implementation of a decade old idea. The fact is that innovation doesn't come from standard bodies. In few years, we'll face this same exact situation, when attempting to use some new technology in our webapps, might it be 3D screens or thought-controlling or speech recognition, yet again to face lack of API or its 3 different implementations.

So what new does HTML5 bring to the table? Just recycling the same old idea, hoping to get it right this time.

I hope we'll have a decent and fast open implementation of Flash, or maybe Silverlight will get better traction, so that we'll be ready when everybody realize that this was just silly.
Don't fall into the trap, as this Santiago has, of arguing that games are art because they have become really good.

First, your opponent can counter with "I don't find them very good", and the productive part of the discussion is over, especially if you are arguing with Ebert.

Better yet, they can argue that subjective quality is irrelevant to the definition (the point you should be making). If bad art is nonetheless art then good non-art is nonetheless non-art.

As another commenter pointed out, the whole discussion is a tactic of misdirection. It doesn't matter what's art, it matters what's good, and this quibbling over semantics is a diversion from that asymptotically complex matter, which old farts like Ebert would rather not face.

Ebert argues that games are not art because they have failed to motivate him to ever experience one for himself. If you need more than that fact to win the argument, you are probably over thinking it.
All the stuff about private and public keys was a bit of a haze to me until I invested a few hours in reading up on cryptography and specifically the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange. I postulate that the problem here is (was?) one of terminology and/or education, rather than interface design.

Incidentally I thought the article was going to be about why amateurs can't/shouldn't write encryption algorithms (having inquired about this myself on Stack Overflow and been royally shouted down).
I don't buy it. I guess your implicit argument is that normal encyclopedias are better than Wikipedia, but overestimate the extent to which that is true, so errors are good news because they remind that errors exist.

That seems kind of weak. If I eat at a local greasy-spoon and get sick, I'm not going to say "This is just a reminder that I know eating here makes me sick, whereas I would be taken by surprise if I got sick at a nicer restaurant."
Free Guide's report Credit repair safe and effective methods
From what I've read, that option isn't viable in the gulf, due to the composition of the ocean floor there. It would be more likely to open new breaches into the same bore hole than seal the leak.
'sombre trees like dark clouds on the hillside'

Is amazingly evocative. I can see that clearly in my mind. It's perhaps no coincidence why so many people, after seeing the movies remarked at how similar the movies were to what they had imagined when reading the books -- the imagery was just that good.
Dude, that's exactly my point. I'm saying the anti-flash hysteria is foolish.
I especially liked the point about pith. From what I have seen the mark of a good writer is the ability to say a lot with just a few words. It is all to easy to ramble on and on, without getting the point across.
Does anyone else remember kuro5hin? If my memory is correct it pre-dated Digg by several years but of course didn't have the same level of success. Digg deserves a lot of credit for making the idea work on a big scale.
It does but you have to use two fingers.
Why would a libertarian viewpoint defend this? Are you suggesting that this is happening because it's an unregulated industry?
Also, what is the success criterion for number and severity of accidents before whatever approach to regulation has been taken can be judged a success? If any time an accident happens it requires throwing away the whole system that might be too high of a standard to work with.
What do you mean by walled gardens? Is not blogging still open, with anyone being able to start a blog, and in most cases anyone read it as well?
My experience with Android is purely in the form of my HTC incredible. I get that we're talking about pretty subjective things here:)

* UI appearance: I think the new HTC sense looks and feels on par with my iPhone 3GS. It's attractive and intuitive. My wife actually finds it be far superior for her tastes.

* Responsiveness: This is less subjective. Android running on the snapdragon is VERY responsive, certainly on par with the iPhone. I have played with a buddies original Droid. It definitely has some general lag to it. The difference between my phone and his is night and day.

* Quality of apps: Seriously?:) The app store is filled with 180,000 apps. 179,000 of them are complete crap. I've owned an iPhone since day 1... fart apps, picture of the day apps. I bought a fitness tracker a couple of months ago that crashed constantly and barely worked. Apple is not hand auditing applications. It's random at best. The auditing process is a content-control not quality-control. Among the apps that I actually use, I find the quality to be quite high on Android as well. There are bad apps and there are very good ones (weatherbug on Android is actually much nicer in my opinion).

* Android market: I guess I've never considered this. I've actually never even looked at apps using desktop iTunes. 100% of my app purchases have been on-device. I think this really comes down to the philosophy of the platforms. Google is building a self-contained pone-in-the-cloud. Apple still sees the iPhone as a bit more of a computer satellite (like Palm, but far less tethered I imagine).

* Countries: Ya.. that's definitely lame. I assume it's going to change soon. I would hope at least. You definitely have a fair gripe here (and I'm sure it colors some of your opinions a bit?;> )
I think Hacker News has the right idea - show responses in their own threads, use upvoting to push the best stuff to the top, use downvoting to keep everything civil (very important), and give people a chance to edit their comment if they see it getting immediate negative feedback.
Since I work from home and make my own schedule, I don't really need an alarm clock, which is great. I go to bed by 2am everyday and usually wake up before 9am.

I wake up and go straight to the kitchen to drink a glass of water. I go back to the room, make up the bed, tidy up my work desk (Clear Desk, Clear Mind -- this is absolutely essential for me), check e-mail, have breakfast (always something simple and light) and then I either go for a 30-minute walk or a 30-minute gym session. When I get back, usually around 10:30am, I'm usually ready to work. I try to get through the top of my todo list by mid-afternoon. Losing focus is very easy. In really important days (e.g., "I either deliver this or I lose the job"), I take Modafinil with my breakfast, which really gives me premium performance. But Modafinil only works for me if I take it only on occasion (4-6 times a month). I've been searching for the perfect morning routine and I've been doing this one since february. It really helped me boost my life in several ways. I manage to work and deliver shit in time (well, almost), I manage to make and try new things, and I've lost 24 pounds since I started going to the gym.
See, the only reason I noticed it was because of this “4-5 short years.” It's just Poe's law applied.
I would also ask others like the government to come in and try things. It appears at the moment it's like try something, oh didn't work, wait a week setting up for the next idea, try that, oh didn't work. Lots of wasted time it seems from an outside observer.
The relief well they're drilling should resolve the issue sometime in August. Everything else they're trying in the meantime are just stop gap measures to mitigate the flow until the relief well is finished.
At least he learned how to surf.
That reminds me, on Demo Day (Aug '05) del.icio.us was the site we kept hearing over and over. Explaining how we were different from them was pretty straightforward [Del.icio.us is king of social bookmarking, a way to keep make your bookmarks always accessible, the by-product is you can see what people are saving for later. Ppl use reddit to find & share new & interesting links about anything popular at the moment, not reference material to save for later.].

But our spartan designs did look similar, which I suspect is what made the connection.
Your outbound mailserver retries later and the message is delivered?
Need your comments on overall startup idea..worth it?
Well, nothing new here but still a different way of looking at same service & that too cheap:)

So I want to see what a user thinks of my startup...
You can view it here: http://www.UserOverview.com

Don't comment on contents, they will be replaced with totally new and better English. :)
If you have can recommend any content writer for this, that would be great..

But first and foremost important thing for me is to find how easy & useful is the website & service.

Looking forward to your valuable comments.

Thanks,
Vipul
I'd like to make it clear that I believe piracy is stealing.
Cluster-aware redundant server storage
I have no idea how the broken pipe looks like, but cover it with an inverted funnel connected to the remaining pipe to the surface. This way at least some of the oil will be recovered.
Thanks! You just found me a bug, I am going to fix it :)
No, it won't. The execs will make their money, spend it or squirrel it away, and be gone when the damage is done.

Even if you did something as extreme as threaten jail time, the chance to make millions still outweighs the chance of any punishment.

Thats all it is at that point, its gambling. Either you make a ton of money, or you loose. The only problem is, when you loose, you make a whole shitload of other people and the environment loose in the process.
Brian Eno: What is art?
Yeah, in retrospect I should have just kept my mouth shut. By the way the virtual machine analogy is really cool - I hadn't thought of it that way before.
Back when I was learning piano under a jazz pianist (who also was part of a electronic duo, signed to a label, that were becoming increasingly popular), he told me that when he released his albums they were not making a lot of money on them. His label told them it was because of "file sharing", yet as a musician, he made most of his money by performing live at venues and doing tours.

I said that "if more people are listening to your music, more people know about you, and more people will come to you gigs, right?", but he fully believed what his label was telling him.

The label were responsible for the bands website, and if you were a fan, you could not even go to this site and see where they were performing next.

I know this doesn't translate directly to ebook story, but I think it points out that perfectly rational people can be hoodwinked by this kind of thinking. A clever marketer would see this as an opportunity.
The celebration of Tolkien has much to do with the way he summarized the rich traditional mythology of the English language and then wove a beautiful story into that fabric.
This might be a naive question, but why are they still estimating how much oil is leaking? If they have pumped x amount of heavy mud in which temporarily capped the leak but was subsequently blown out because of the pressure of the escaping oil, couldn't they determine the exact pressure that the oil is coming out, and if they know the size of the opening, a flow rate?
Anything in particular you were thinking of? I'm not sure I quite get the feedback.
Multi Level Marketing: a great way to piss off your friends and leave you poor
Indeed, if split windows, full screen, and a few nitpicks over how the project window is refreshed, etc were addressed, a lot of people would be content to wait until judgement day for TM2.
Dos Equis sucks. It's like they took a bad beer and poured run off water in it and bottled it.
The official API is to scrape the HTML
Last time I looked at E for linux, it was incredibly tricky to build, if it would even build at all, and was really buggy afterwards. I've moved on, but I think it's still in a similar spot.
Your argument reminds me of the security industry's maxim that "No security is better than bad security." If you think you are protected (from threats or from bad information) when you actually aren't, you'll exercise much less caution and be more likely to get swindled. Contrariwise, if you are aware of the weakness, you'll be more careful and thus compensate for it.
The libertarian belief is that BP is responsible for all costs incurred by its neighbors because of its actions. Your use of the word 'defense' here just shows ignorance.
hmmm... so I'll suggest something that doesn't trap everything. Overlapping partial domes if you will; the objective really is to get as much of that oil out as possible.
I think he's free to do what he wants. He doesn't owe anybody anything. It's an open market, too, so if anyone cares to step in and make the next best thing nobody is stopping them.

I'd go as far to say that he has every right to charge for TM2 when it comes out, even if he promised it would be a free upgrade.

EDIT: even though I've stopped using it, I use vim now :)
Design wise:

The https://www.styxvpn.com/aboutus.php page could use some better line height in the small paragraph blurbs (something like line-height: 1.5; or so).

Usability wise:
It would look more professional to have your email address for support formatted like a normal email. Javascript or even an image would do that for you. Not sure how unexperienced users would understand "support [at] styxvpn [dot] com”

Ps:
Would there be a way for users – mac users in particular – to use the service with the built in VPN software?

Any free accounts still floating around? :)
Peter Norvig's book reviews on Amazon
>You can't "diffuse the pressure".

I must be missing something, the parent is talking about wrapping the 21" (inch) diameter pipe in a 25' (foot) outer pipe, this is effectively 200 times the area. The force applied currently by the oil coming up is going to provide 1/200th of the pressure when applied over the end of the pipe.

It's like blowing out through a straw - you can feel the pressure easily. Versus blowing out through a dustbin with a hole in the bottom.

Mind you it's 4:30am ... perhaps I should go to bed and think about this another time.
I clearly didn't explain this idea very well. OK, let's imagine we have a mains pipe of 3 inches in diameter sticking out of the ground on a building site gushing water which we can't shut off, but fortunately it's at least fixed in place. That's our high pressure source of unwanted liquid, analogous to the oil gusher.

As you say, sticking something into it or even over the end of it to create a seal is not very practical. But suppose we took an oil barrel, which is about 2 feet in diameter, and drilled a hole in the bottom big enough to fit over the pipe. Getting in place would be a bit of a hassle but once you got the hole lined up with the pipe it wouldn't be too bad, right? OK water is still gushing but now it appears to be gushing in a narrow jet from the center of the barrel resting on the ground. It's still coming out of the same 3 inch pipe, rather than the whole mouth of the barrel.

We anchor the barrel with steel cables or whatever we can. Maybe we seal around the bottom of the barrel with concrete, so it's well and truly fixed in place. Water is gushing out the whole time, but money's no object here. When we are sure the barrel is sturdily anchored, we start shoveling gravel or lead weights it as fast as we can. As it fill instead of gushing in a narrow jet, the water will start (quickly) filling up the barrel - it's the same amount of liquid at the same pressure, but in order to get through the much heavier lumps of rock it's now flowing through a much wider pipe, at a rate proportional to the circumference of the original pipe/the circumference of the barrel.

If we work fast, we can get some kind of plug - perhaps on with an open valve on it - into the end of the barrel before it fills. OK, so then the liquid comes gushing through the open valve. But that means there is not too much pressure around the edges of the barrel, so we seal them with more concrete (I am of course assuming that the walls of the barrel can handle whatever pressure of water is coming out of the original pipe).

Come to think of it, we might as well just drop the barrel with the open valve on top of the thing. The valve prevents pressure buildup inside the barrel while we work on making a seal between the bottom edge and the ground. It just seems a bit easier to me to use filler material to step down the flow from a narrow jet to a wider tube.

Now we still have a gusher, but instead of coming out of a small hole in the ground it's coming out of a big faucet which we have built around the flow without making too much effort to halt it. At which point we close the valve at the top and hope the seal between the ground and the barrel is stronger than the pressure of the oil.
Not a problem, just require firms that have the potential to inflict substantial costs on the rest of society to carry insurance against such a catastrophe. The pricing mechanism on the insurance will act as an incentive to minimize the real risk to society.
It implements OpenGL API. That means that you can develop for that particular API that you probably know from elsewhere. Current implementation seams to be done in software, but it may well be hardware accelerated when/if Flash will get such a capability and then you could benefit from it and any other optimizations without having to modify your program in any way.
Something like 1 billion! oil wells have been drilled. And about 100,000 offshore oil wells. Many many accidents have there been?

It's actually a pretty good safety record.
It's the government's own highway infrastructure that causes the problem. The problem there is that government, vis a vis its role as provider of infrastructure, has enabled, incentivized, and encouraged the use of large numbers of automobiles--not that the private automobile industry is at fault.
The "experts" have let this go unstopped for 5 weeks now.
Wasn't even close to correct.

If you read it on reddit you know it's not true. This is a general rule.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firestorm
But that's regulation... Lots of it actually because the insurance companies need regulated too (lest they default when a huge oil spill occurs).
It depends on how much 'tilt' there is to the category of the industry you're playing in. If there are strong viral and network effects, don't charge (for now and a long time).
You asked what I would do, so I answered. :)

More seriously, the biggest barrier to laypeople coming up with practical solutions to this is that all of the forces involved are orders of magnitude outside of our experience. None of us has any intuitive concept of what things are like 5000 feet below the surface of the water. None of us has any idea what oil is like in that volume, let alone at that pressure and temperature.

I'd be more charitable about common sense solutions to the cleanup, since that seems like the type of thing we can have an intuition about. The bottom of the ocean however is an entirely alien environment, with (for all intents and purposes) different physics.

The only people with an intuition for this are the ones working on the solution professionally.
The tactic of suctioning oil/water into a pipe/tube has the benefit of not falling prey to many of the other problems (inability to form a seal, temperate/freezing, needing fine-grained on-site human activity, etc.). Bring the oil/water mix up to the surface, maybe filter it, dump it in a ship/tank on the surface. Downside is it may be impossible to suck up 100% of the leaking oil, but even getting 80% would be a huge improvement, and reduce further damage to the sea. I believe they started doing it, then at least temporarily stopped it to prepare for the top kill attempt.
A Libertarian would probably point out that regulation played a significant role in this mess. The $75m liability cap gave BP incentive to continually act as recklessly as they did over the years. $75m is a joke compared to getting a new, high-production well up and running months or years earlier than if they were more cautious.

Obviously, it wasn't a good gamble this time, but it should be no surprise they've acted as our rules and regulations incented them to.
I think BP should have dealt with the oil flowing up to the surface first. They should bring in the massive tankers with big vacuums to suck the oil up. This will buy them more time to fix the leaks below.
Giant vacuum cleaner FTW.
kuro5hin definitely shared the voting element, but other than that it was pretty different than the reddit or digg. It was more like a social blog, you didn't post links, you actually posted full essays and people voted and commented on them.
I still remember that some years ago I did not knew what exactly was a "secure channel" that some texts talked about when I was learning about PKIs. The terminology is really confusing if people do not get the concepts.
Is it easier to find programming talent in Boston than Palo Alto and New York?
This paper is very popular / influential in the area of usable security. It's interesting to note that though it's possible to securely exchange e-mail, most people don't. I took a course offered by Prof. Tygar (co-author of the paper) last year and we evaluated how easy it is to send encrypted mail using Thunderbird+Enigmail+GnuPG. While the usability of the software has improved in the 10 years since the paper was written, it is nowhere near the level required to make this a mainstream technology. Maybe it is inherent to the process itself. I don't see how you can simplify key exchange to make it very easy for the average user. I guess the price you pay for security is to go through the pain of figuring out how it works. Of course, most people will not / cannot do that even if it is in their best interest.

I'd loved to hear the thoughts of the security gurus on HN about this...
The pipe is leaking both oil and gas. The ratio of the two is unknown and therefore makes calculating the oil flow difficult.
This article takes the cake for hyperbolic headlines
I thought of that too and liked the fact that it was so simple to implement compared to the other options, even if it would be hard to get 100% containment. It also has the benefit that it is physically similar to what they have to do with the oil under all-is-working-fine conditions. Therefore, it is similar to something they already have lots of experience doing successfully.

And btw if you are Empire/D Walter Bright I'm a big fan of your work. :)
The OP discussion text is not in the same view as the comments. Otherwise, I love iCombinator!