skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In passing, this is an example of where libertarianism breaks down as a practical alternative.

How will you determine what these costs are? It might be simple if I have a fishing business in Louisiana, but what if I'm a bar owner who depends on the dollars of hard-drinking oil workers when they're on shore? What if I'm just depressed by the whole thing and miss work? There are millions of people living in that area, and the gulf coast economy is about 2-2.5 trillion. You simply can't handle every individual case in court, it's going to be a series of class actions. And without some kind of judicial standards for how those should be handled, the result will be arbitrary at best.

Additionally, BP will argue that oil drilling is fundamentally risky and the residents of the area liked it when the going was good. So there will be further arguments about the degree to which it is really their fault. Again, without agreed standards in place the outcome of such wrangling will be arbitrary.

Finally, whatever a court orders BP to hand over as compensation for its poor drilling practices is purely hypothetical unless there is some way of enforcing it; BP might just sink the remains the of the rig, announce the failure of its 'gulf operations subsidiary' and just turn its attentions to operations elsewhere, where they have never had an accident. Perhaps they'll just blame the whole thing on inferior oil workers in that region.

So without standards for judging claims and liability, or mechanisms for enforcement of judgments, the situation will not be properly resolved. Those standards and mechanisms are the basis of laws, and we elect governments to serve as our agents in establishing and promulgating them.
The 20th century is considered the most violent century in terms of sheer number. Death rates are a weird thing to think about in per capita terms. If you look at it that way, then an individual life is worth less now than it used to be. Whether your death is a 1 millionth or 1 billionth of the population makes no difference to your family and friends.

There still 90 years left in this century. Judging by previous ones, a lot of awesome and terrible things are going to happen. Technology amplifies man's capacity for creation and destruction. Speaking as a 25 year old, I'm optimistic that life will continue to be an interesting ride.
I would call a press conference where I would carefully explain that it was someone else's fault.
BP is working to fix it ASAP, by drilling relief wells, a fix that is known to work, and known to take a long time.

In the meantime they're attempting to keep their PR as good as possible by a) downplaying the size of the spill and b) taking mediagenic actions that are unlikely to succeed, but are useful distractions. Giving them names like "Top Hat" and "Top Kill" and "Junk Shot", and whatever they will be calling "lower marine riser package cap" in a few days.
Meetup Everywhere
Your suggestion reminds me of the example in the book Wisdom of the Crowds (or maybe it was Wikinomics or both)

"But managers did learn to type. And Goldcorp did use the internet to mine gold: in 2000, it abandoned the industry's tradition of secrecy, making thousands of pages of complex geological data available online, and offering $575,000 in prize money to those who could successfully identify where on the Red Lake property the undiscovered veins of gold might lie. Retired geologists, graduate students and military officers around the world chipped in. They recommended 110 targets, half of which Goldcorp hadn't previously identified. Four-fifths of them turned out to contain gold. Since then, the company's value has rocketed from $100m to $9bn, and disaster has been averted."(http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/sep/05/news.netric...)

TL;DR Hey BP take advantage of someone who needs some cash more than you do in order to find the solution
%s/oil//g

Done.
It all depends on the lens that people see through.
Jeff Hawkins on Artificial Intelligence
... I simply do not equate it with stealing something tangible.

Kind of like how that one guy that one time stole my web startup idea!!!
Yup, I only learned about this feature a few months ago. It also makes other apps like the standard Google Reader usable.
Because often you can ram a bunch of gunk down the hole and have it stay there. This is how they have been controlling wells and stopping gushers since the beginning.

The problem with asking non petroleum engineers this sort of question is that you get incorrect and useless answers based on very limited "intuition and common sense" and not based on actual knowlege of the discipline.
Nice article, Dan.

The key insight I found was that the whole mystical, complex concept of "software" has been distilled to something that ordinary people can understand as atomic elements, "apps."

That's a fairly profound shift in software marketing, for sure.
So there would be no motorized individual transport if not for streets built by governments? Would we all be taking the train … no, wait, I would guess that train networks are a pretty bad example in this case. So, would we all be flying instead? Riding the bike? Hiking?

Despite all it’s shortcomings, motorized individual transport still seems like a pretty sweet deal to me – I can’t really fault the government for forcing everybody and me to pay for the infrastructure, especially if – like you seem to argue – there is no other way to get that kind of infrastructure.

Somehow I don’t really think you are making a good case for your argument.
That's a bit of a stretch from the Times article. Yes, they were trying to get the well under control, that's what they were doing when it blew up. Yes, the MMS approved lower pressure tests so it would be less risky to run the tests.

I love how people act as if it were in Transocean and BP's interest for the well to explode, people to die, and the ocean to be poisoned. They didn't want this to happen. BP shareholders have already lost $52B. Transocean shareholders are down $6B.

"Politics" is not a great way to solve this and the engineers on the rig were not driven by greed. For wells this deep, it looks like the risks are higher than estimates, and a relief well needs to be prepared. Human progress requires us to try new things. We learn what works, and what doesn't. We learn to price the risk.
I remember reading about how atomic weapons detonated at the point of the leak would seal it a few weeks ago.

More information at http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0513/Why-don-t-we-just...
Coming from outside the App Store, two things always stick out at me:

1) They have totally nailed the purchasing experience. I think that probably increases sales system-wide by well in excess of a factor of ten, and it powers factor #2.

2) The use of iPhones is social in nature. Not fake social, like Facebook apps. Real social: hey, look, my cool phone can fart. Folks I know with iPhones pull them out at dinner and show me how much fun they're having slinging birds around. And darn it, I want to sling birds, too. That is why Apple loves the apps: because each one is a recurring opportunity for you to explain to your friends "Here's what you could do on your iPhone, if you were cool, but you can't do it because your phone is lame", why Apple is trying its darndest to kill cross-platform development ("Big deal, I have that game on my Droid"), and why some developers are sort of falling into accidental virality through quality of experience. (Some others, of course, are intentionally engineering the virality.)
Sorry, currently it's only a Chrome extension. Maybe I'll port it to firefox when I have time.
This is one of the more sober commentaries on the internet and power I've read in a long time.
I did. That's why I said "2 to 6".
I would drop a large inverted cone made of steel or concrete so that it's point obscured the breach. The weight of the plug would keep the oil pressure from pushing it out, while a stabilizing float attached to it's top would prevent the cone from tipping over. Like so:

| < Line up to deploying ship
O
O < Stabilizing float
|
----- < Steel/concrete plug
\ /
__\ /__ < Breach
V

Once it settled you could likely pour a block of cement around it...
Worst Usenet post ever.

(The thread is pretty good, actually. If you read a few posts up where they discuss Steamboat Itchy, you can see that people were even more clueless about copyright in 1992 than they are now.)
This makes sense when your product is interactive (i.e. software and games.) However, when your product is linear: a book, a movie, a song, a performance, a reading, a play—in short, a narrative, there's really no way to "migrate" that content to something that cannot be pirated, because, in the end, if the product doesn't require your input, then experiencing a recording of it is the same as experiencing it.

Do you expect that the future holds no reward for storytellers in any medium?
Sure! BP could just get an insurance policy from a reputable insurance provider like...AIG. What could possibly go wrong? I mean, a reputable insurance company like AIG would never, ever, ever offer policies for complex products that it did not fully understand for prices so low that it couldn't cover the risks involved. Insurance company officials would never ever ever cut lots of fundamentally unsound deals in exchange for big bonuses. And even if they did, such behavior could never blow up and eliminate a few trillion dollars of value in a massive economic collapse. That's totally absurd.

Really now, this "solution" boils down to "assume the existence of insurance companies that act radically differently from any insurance companies we have experience with"...tis much like "now, assume a can opener".
Which parts of the us govt, specifically? Questioning or banning what?
I'm not sure how much other HN'ers use Java in anger, but I really wouldn't classify the listed classes in the OP as something I wouldn't know from java.util.concurrent.

In fact some of those are things I do ask in interviews, which probably means that I would expect most Java devs to know about.
Please don't pretend like a lot of people aren't going to make a lot of money selling things that could be pirated. You can migrate wherever you want, but you are only half the equation. If the consumers don't follow, someone will replace you and make all the money you are too proud to make.

But at least piracy will be zero.

ETA: I am pretty amazed by your use of scare quotes around the words "rights" and "own". It's almost like you are mocking people who expect to be able to buy things, and then own them.
Create a time machine, go back in time, and build the oil well in such a way as to not break like it did.
Dear Alleyfield,

By any chance, do you not work in marketing? Are you part of the target audience (that is, do you still run IE6)? No? Are you, rather, a fairly sophisticated user, maybe dare I say, a geek? Yes?

Then don't judge the effectiveness of that particular marketing, it doesn't make sense to you, and that's perfectly acceptable.
Vanilla Custard Cookies Recipe
My example about putting out a person's hair fire had to do with speed, frequency and preparation for the attempt. I clearly did not say anything about relative difficulty. Stopping the oil leak under these conditions I agree is harder than putting out a person's head fire. The point was about preparation and hustle and being able to move very quickly, very early to stop the fire/leak ASAP, given the downside. In this, I personally think they've failed ridiculously.

I did not accuse any scientists/engineers who are actively trying to solve the leak now of doing anything unethical. I do not and cannot know for sure the details of exactly which person did what, when -- none of us can, and much will be hearsay. However, I thought it was clear from my post that I think it appears more of a lack of preparation before the accident, and/or a lack of will after the accident began, at a leadership level. At the level of an individual engineer, he may want to do the smart/cautious thing, but if he is overruled by executives or accountants, etc. then his intent has no effect.

I did not completely dismiss the challenges of depth and pressure. I even cited them specifically. But if you focus on the core goal we have right now, it's that there is oil flowing into water at a certain location. Just stop that flow and/or contain it to a finite controlled volume, and prevent it from spreading out into a much larger area. It doesn't matter exactly how quickly you stop/contain it, and it doesn't matter exactly the volume of the containment zone, or even whether you use 1 technique or 3, together or in sequence, just make it happen and do it quickly. And they fundamentally know how to put and operate equipment down there, and lay pipes, and draw oil up to the surface for further processing and transport. What BP needs to do is basically just a variant on that same fundamental task. Again: there is some fluid in another fluid. Bad stuff getting into some good stuff. Keep it from spreading in an uncontrolled manner. That is not fundamentally impossible, even at 5000 feet depth. Walls. Pipes. Suction. Seals. Tanks. Valves. This is all well understood technology and can be put together in a variety of ways.

Also, all your claims about how lay people (such as myself, you imply) are inherently unqualified to talk about this subject would apply equally well to you. However, in reality, I would argue that a reasonably intelligent and educated person can come up with a decent analysis and decent solution ideas, comparable to that of professionals within a field, given that the constraints that that field operates within are sufficiently knowable and understandable by said lay person. In essence, Mother Nature doesn't know or care what degree you have.

You and I may have differences in how solvable or preventable we perceive this situation to be, but frankly you keep going overboard and saying rude things. Imagine you are sitting across a table from me, speaking to my face, and adjust your words accordingly. Free speech is awesome. But with it should come the sense of responsibility to not be rude to whom you are speaking.
It is absolutely in BP's and Transocean's interests for this well to explode and people to die. That's my point.

Avoiding accidents by drilling more safely and expensively is not in the interests of BP and Transocean; it makes more sense for them to be risky, gamble 50 times on other wells, make 10x more than they would if they were doing it more safely, and use those profits to cover this one unlucky time.

Forcing them to do it safely even though this makes the well 2x, 5x or 10x less profitable is the purpose of government regulation. In the case of the US oil industry, the regulator is corrupt, completely in thrall to the industry with no accountability.

Hence, the solution is not about pricing risk -- BP have already done that, and this is the logical result. The solution is a regulatory one, which means a political decision.
Not coincidentally, the color camera's bayer filter and the pentile matrix use an awfully similar RGBG matrix arrangement.

Each "pixel" you get RAW off the camera is only R, G, or B. The "full" resolution is synthesized in "demosaicing." In other words, 2/3s of your digital camera's image is faked up. People just don't notice much because a) the error from faking it looks a lot like defocus, b) the cameras often try to cover up their suckiness with denoising algorithms, and c) most people get a JPEG out of the camera anyway... which typically encodes the chroma (color) at a lower resolution and throws out a bunch of the fine (high-frequency) details.

The real weird part is that the pentile matrix should be capable of a higher effective resolution when displaying color images from digital cameras (except from Foveon X3, 3CCD, or even more uncommon setups). It's "subpixels" are arranged the same way as the data is, which saves you from tranforming the image to and from the intermediate RGB format.
I recommend building GPG into Firefox along with FireGPG, and suddenly it gets a hell of a lot easier.

I know most people would be looking at the Thunderbird-Enigmail-GPG route, but I've found Firefox - FireGPG - GPG to be easier to use, install and more usefull. Actually the most difficult part with that setup is getting GPG to play with FireGPG, include GPG with Firefox and suddenly public key encryption is easy and available to the masses.
And if they'd been "regulated" by an insurer who promised to pay the cleanup costs of the once-a-decade spills, you can bet that these regulations would be to a higher standard.

Given that a large insurance provider called AIG promised to pay massive clean up costs and utterly failed at regulating its clients, I think your theory is incorrect. At the very least, it is incomplete.

Your theory needs to incorporate the fact that human organizations often behave irrationally, and even when motivated by appropriate incentives, they are prone to systemic reasoning errors. In addition, it needs to deal with the fact that a representative government cannot credibly refuse to promise to clean up messes of this sort, so an element of moral hazard will always remain.
> I just wish it wasn't coming from a bunch of dickheads trying to strap guns to it.

Dickheads?
Someone in the future has already done that. But they won't emerge naked from the chrono-portal, 1 year ago, until July our time this year. Also, when they emerge naked from the chrono-portal they are immediately crushed and drowned and eaten by deep sea crabs. Ouch, time travel hurts my head.
Firefox's rendering engine, Gecko (née NGLayout) was started well before Netscape went open source. Mozilla.org decided to scrap the classic rendering engine in favor of Gecko/NGLayout within a few months of going open source. Six short years after that, Firefox was ready for prime time.

http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article177.html

http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/screenshots/
Rude? You made a bunch of idiotic points, and he politely refuted them.
Was going to make the exact same point. Good name, too. I think blogging is something we do until our time can't scale with it due to the success of the blog, very few times does the blogging itself carry it's worth past some lofty modicum of success.
Fair nuff
I think the pressure from the oil coming out would push the point of the cone to the side.

Some modifications to your idea: Use a really long nose guidance rod of titanium or something that is much smaller than the pipe diameter.

Have the plug have a new pipe running through it to allow the oil to gush through, but then have a new kill valve after you seal the plug in place.
Economy gains £4bn from Scotch
What's the significance of this? (Serious question - I'm not a Usenet user and I'm not too much older than this post.)
Checking the shipping time calculator at searates.com it looks like a typical shipping time from Newark to New Orleans would be 6 days. I assume some time could be knocked off that if you were traveling at emergency speed and paying extra for whatever other obstacles arise. Call it 3-4 days from east coast ports to gulf waters. West coast ports would presumably take longer.

Transit time alone is not a factor to dismiss. It's not too hard to see how time adds up, really.
it reassures me that foxnews.com is farther down than I would have expected.

43. http://bbc.co.uk
83. http://nytimes.com
179. http://reuters.com
257. http://foxsports.com
279. http://foxnews.com
that would have been really good if they would have cut the music and eliminated the silly editing, just leaving it in one fluid shot, no overlays, none of that crap. as it was, it was so distracting I had to turn it off. blech.
Web-obsessed South Korea father jailed for baby neglect
A recording of a song, performance, or play is totally different from the real live thing.

Recorded media is just over a century old (excluding books). Creativity flourished in the past, it will continue to do so in the future. Perhaps we can revive the days of oral storytelling. The Story adapts.
Anyone care to do a scatterplot of domain name length vs rank?
Ask HN: Email list security with 3rd parties?
Wasn't sure how to word that title.

I've been working with MailChimp to handle my app's emails. I recently met someone who I otherwise like (cool guy) who offers the same service specific to my metro area. He agreed to match the price I was currently paying and I agreed to switch over. Being the paranoid person I am I immediately started thinking about security.

In my mind the danger of MailChimp selling my emails is relatively low. Even if I'm naïve about that I think the likelihood is low they would end up selling to a direct competitor of mine.

On the other hand, someone handling my emails locally would conceivably know my competitors personally. Given the value of those emails to a competitor, I was thinking the temptation to make some extra money might be too great, if not for the owner than maybe one of his staff.

Regardless, I want to move forward with them for a host of reasons. But I don't want to do so blind.

My only idea for monitoring the situation so far is to set up numerous fake emails accounts and 'poison' my list to keep an eye on it. If another local business hits those accounts I think it would be clear there was a breach.

Has anyone dealt with this? Is there another monitoring solution?

Thanks.
I was going for the 'Big Dumb Booster' version... All beef and no brain!

I'm not sure whether the point would get pushed aside, but a guide rod definitely wouldn't hurt!

I think at this point they should just seal the thing off rather than trying to run additional plumbing into it...
So why not do it?

Find a few empty supertankers (which I'm certain BP can round up if they need to), mount a bunch of large industrial pumps on top of each one, plant them strategically around the leak site, and start sucking up the oil-water mixture from the surface (and stop with the dispersant - we want the oil to stay together in this scenario). Once they're full in a week or so, bring another three or four supertankers in to take over. Meanwhile, send the full ones to a nearby port, offload the oil-water mixture, and deal with processing it to separate out the oil and the water there. We won't get all the oil; if we're lucky, maybe 75%. But whatever that percentage is, it's miles better than what we're getting now.

This is apparently what was done in the early nineties off the coast of Saudi Arabia when they had a similar problem. I'm not saying this would be cheap - supertankers and pumps don't grow on trees - but BP needs to fix this and show they're making a good efforts. Plus, you could probably recover a good deal of the oil as a part of the onshore processing and sell it like any other oil.
Don't want to be nitpicky, but its "you're", not "your". The irony is also a bit funny
Studies like these seem to point so often to things like violent TV and computers, which sounds terribly anecdotal, but I guess bland enough that people will accept the study as verifying something they already know.

I would love it if maybe sometimes you would get a study like this that concludes, "Researchers suggest that the decline in empathy is caused by excessive exposure to charitable pleas for helping whatever poor children or country are in fashion at the moment, as well as those awful animal abuse commercials that make me cry."
Skype 2.0: Make Voice Calls over 3G network
I doubt they will disappear. Blogs are perfect for anyone that wants to write online. Microblogging, or whatever, doesn't cut it. Twitter messages are too short. No, blogs won't be going anywhere. I believe they've become a permanent part of Web culture. Remember when Web sites had "guestbooks?" That functionality has essentially been replaced by comments on blogs.
What you just said there was rude. Any karma voters care to back me up with clicks? :)

Also, I don't think he refuted my points. He certainly did not do so politely. Let's agree to disagree. Just keep it civil.
You may want to follow BP's PR Twitter...
http://twitter.com/bpglobalpr ;)
Dude, I couldn't agree more.