skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In studies of Balkan epic poetry and Irish oral tradition, these are sometimes called stereotypes. (Not to be confused with the modern PC term.) One function is as a sort of compression/mnemonic. Keep in mind that these orations could go on for four entire evenings. Stereotypes let longer passages fit into fewer mental entities.
I don't get it. Does it implements a software 3D engine, or emulate OpenGL API, or call HW OpenGL directly in Flash?
On the other hand, how do they know that such an explosion wouldn't just make the leak bigger?
That's a total of 1-4Tb. New cost for 4Tb is $220 using two of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148...

10 drives will need a hefty controller, and some mounting system, and they will be hot, noisy and power hungry.

Instead of finding 10 disks and asking how you can cram them into your life, ask what you want in your life and go and get the things that needs. If the disks aren't in there, get rid of them.
they can't not hire you if you hire yourself
I'm guessing you weren't there the first few years.
You mean like using the word "picked" instead of "piqued?"
The idea is that assigning a tangible cost to fucking up will cause people to try hard to avoid it.

For example, if everyone in the BP executive chain were personally responsible, and would go to jail/get beaten up/etc. as a consequence of an oil spill, then this might not have happened.
Yes, but this assumes that using nuclear explosions will improve the situation rather than make it worse.
+1 for the last sentence
I can only conclude that you do surgery on yourself because you aren't willing to trust the experts.
I thought the BOP was 30,000 feet down or is that the length of the bore hole? I've been fairly ignorant as to paying in depth attention to the whole debacle.
I found the critique misleading. It doesn't make sense to disparage Tolkien's Middle Earth writing without taking his background into account. He was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon legends and literature written in Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Old English.

I just found the critique to be ignorant.
Not sure about the hurricane. Hurricanes have orders of magnitude more energy than atomic bombs. It would have to be helluva fire.
If you could inject oxygen into the stream you could burn it off at the same time.
Well, "the experts" are informed by the physics, mechanical engineering and chemistry that's been learned over the years WRT to oil drilling and these problems. As some of the other threads have illustrated, you certainly can't ignore the basic physics required, which I'm sure many if not most of us never learned or have long forget (or we're just very rusty at solving these sorts of problems).

If you can't at minimum do the physics required you can't play this game.
They already tried something similar in concept (the dome), but the gases froze and clogged it all up. I'm sure the same thing would happen with canopies.
Usually corporatists, not libertarians.
Regulations are generally the after-the-fact reaction to irresponsible, negligent, or ignorant behavior.

The problem is, the folks who think that more regulation is the answer seem to think that the government regulators are benevolent gods who themselves never make mistakes, are not subject to greed, corruption, political influence, negligence, incompetence, etc.
Interesting, but unusable on my Macbook at around 1 FPS. I'm hoping WebGL + V8 Javascript is successful in bringing 3d innovation to the web.
I just read The Silmarillion as a long extended appendix of LotR.
Hmm, since it has leaked so much oil already... I wonder what would be the effects of just letting the well empty out. Make the hole really big so that pressure is reduced, then the oil just floats to the top where you can collect it all. Maybe a giant floating ring to contain the oil in the surface.

No idea how to deal with the `plumes`, though. <silly> Add detergent? </silly>
Dos Equis Dude Be Damned: Saul Colt Is The Most Interesting Man In The World
they tried all these retarded ideas back in the 70s with the Ixtoc oil spill http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill

the only thing that worked was drilling the relief well

I bet the reason they are doing these retarded ideas while they drill the relief well is to make people think that something is being done
What you don't get is that art is a social hack.

A long long time ago art, craft, science and even what then passed for engineering and manufacturing, were all pretty much the same thing.

Over time we started to separate things, first science split off, but eventually we even split craft from art.

And what's left in art is not some sensible definition like what can educate the illiterate, enlighten the literate, and entertain the enlightened.

It's not even some fuzzy definition like what ever is a comment on the human condition. The stand for an art piece could totally be that, until the artist tells you it's just the stand the art is still coming. Even some artists who make amusing and animated art have been accused of not making art at all but some kind of crafty floss for the eyes bullshit that so totally not art.

(Please be aware that when I wrote the above I had sculptures in mind, not video games.)

Art, and I don't just mean the products of art, but the all encompassing culture, critics, buyers, sellers, "artists", groupies, the whole thing: it is all a social hack.

If you totally buy into and can't use your own taste to tell something good from something else, we'll then you've been totally 0wn3d.

If you just like music and some other artsy type things, but don't get "it". Well then you're doing much better then people who overpay for crap they don't understand, but you still don't get it.

If you get recognition and/or fame, money, what ever, but you get for something which requires a lot of work/effort/time/talent, what ever, then you're really good at that thing! But you're not necessary also really good at art. Even if the thing is something everyone agrees is super artsy, like painting.

If you're getting paid, especially if it's a lot, for anything that doesn't require much of anything, this includes work/time/loss of dignity/etc, if you can get paid a lot from "art" for not doing much, well then you get it and are winning at this particular game.
Fring - 2 way video calling
The idea is build a 1 mile long column of dense liquid. Just the pressure of 1 mile of heavy liquid was hopefully enough to balance out the pressure of the oil.

It turned out not to be, but that was the hope.
I previously read that this is how Russia successfully handled the problem in the past with an 80% success rate (4/5).
They tried that. The cone floated away.

The oil is much lighter than water. Plus it has methane which is even lighter than that.
It didn't clog up. It floated away.
I tend to agree that the recent focus on web technology has retarded the pace of actual innovation in the last decade. The smart people who should be building the jetpacks and curing cancer are making pets.com, or, no offense, founding YC startups to make a webapp to market your new webapp to other people's webapps on the web.

Cf. Warren Ellis: "a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future."
http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/05/start/...
If I were BP, I would post online detailed specs of the physics and equipment in play, in tandem with a massive cash prize for an original idea leading to the successful plugging of the leak.
One function is as a sort of compression/mnemonic.

Bingo. I think this is very important insight from CS to this kind of literature. You might enjoy Robert Bringhurst’s discussion of Haida myths, where he calls them fractal in a way that doesn’t set my teeth on edge (the way most non-rigorous uses of that word do).

This is the kind of thing that makes me sad about the two cultures problem. The few scholarly discussions of oral literature that I’ve read seem to be groping for this kind of concept, while a lot of hackers I know are dismissive of the idea that there’s anything of real interest in fields like anthropology. Everyone loses if we can’t find ways to say things like “self-similar structures compress well” across fields.

Edit to self-link: I tried to make this kind of idea engaging to some of my friends at http://basecase.org/env/time-and-myth . The book where Bringhurst talks about this: http://books.google.com/books?id=QhMkb1HOjz4C .
I am french and visited the Guedelon castle a few years ago.

Before visiting the castle, I had done a full year trip around the world to see all the greatest human made monuments (Angkor wat in Cambodia was my favourite).

I was stomached when I realized the Guedelon castle surpasses all that I had seen so far.

Highly recommended for anybody visiting France.
I will take you up on the Reddit t-shirt offer
> and hope the water pressure will seal it

No. The hope was that the weight of a column of heavy mud a mile long would be enough to counteract the pressure.
I'll clarify a bit - yes, there is a lot of crap too, but reading the comments is just as big a deal for me as the submissions themselves.
I should also note that the idea of blocking the hole with gravel isn't exactly a bad one. You're right to point out that if you use big pebbles for your gravel the oil will just squeeze through the abundant empty spaces. So... use finer gravel!

The pressure will try to push the gravel out. So maybe make it really sticky gravel, so that it glues itself together.

Now there are three things to say about this plan:

(a) we call this sticky, very fine gravel concrete and we use it all the time;

(b) a fun educational point: Even with really fine gravel, oil can still diffuse through it. Oil diffuses through "solid" rock all the time. The oil underground is actually trapped inside rock. The rock that holds the oil is relatively porous; the oil is kept underground because above that rock is a layer of denser rock that oil can't diffuse through very well.

(c) In case it isn't obvious yet: The reason your idea still doesn't work very well is that the first cupful of wet concrete you pour onto the hole will promptly get flushed away by the pressure of the leaking oil. ;) As will every successive cupful of wet concrete. Unfortunately, a giant slab of solid concrete must necessarily start out life as a thin layer of wet concrete, so the only way to put a concrete seal over a hole that is actively leaking is to cast it someplace else and then drop it on the hole.
Yep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_diving#Extreme_depth...

Worse, it sounds like the state of the art for atmospheric diving suits will only get you half-way there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_diving_suit
Use JSLint: http://www.jslint.com
I didn't want to side track to discussion into an argument over whether laymen can think critically about complex issues or not but this is kind of a ridicules accusation.

There is a great difference between not trusting experts (what you are accusing me of) and having ideas of my own and asking others for their opinions of my ideas.

I don't do surgery on myself but if I had a deadly uncured disease I would question the doctor as to why various treatments won't work to cure me. In all likelihood he would answers for all of my questions (which in itself would put my mind at ease a little), but it is possible that he wouldn't have all the answers (leading me to want a second opinion).
I'd like to know the same thing. Is is appropriate to offer bloggers free license keys or codes in hope of a review?

I tried emailing the editors of a lot of online tech websites about my app and had very little success. I'd love to know how other people have been able to market their apps through blogs/etc.
I understand that, and apologize for my loose terminology. There are two reasons I suggest employing a larger size.

The first is to do with flow, as you mention. While all of a large cap needs to be able to withstand high pressure, that is not in itself an especially tricky engineer problem. But size doesn't hurt; in my experience it's rather easier to stop up a large pipe than a small one with the same pressure, simply because it's a less delicate maneuver. In the case of a domestic plumbing crisis, it's nice to be able to exert your arm rather than just your fingers.

The other reason is simply to do with bulk. The larger the cylinder, the greater it weight when finally sealed, the more room you have to anchor it, and the farther from the (presumably fragile) ground in the immediate vicinity of the gusher the circumference will be, if one is trying to bore into the ground with restraining pegs.

The surgical approach has not been very successful so far. Given the urgent nature of the problem, I feel it's worth trying the crude but frequently effective approach of large mass + gravity.
that would be as crazy as trying to fix your own blown out oil well
if mating the pipe with something is too hard, what if the flange were strung with some kevlar cords which loop over the broken opening. keep doing the junk shot but with bigger junk that'll get stuck at the what is now a kevlar net attached to the end of the pipe.
Well, I think the rewrite occurred after the codebase was open-sourced.
What’s the third one? The iPad? That’s fragmentation you want – iPhone apps make no sense on that device.

Other than that, doubling the horizontal and vertical number of pixels (four times the pixels) is actually quite clever and will probably not lead to any fragmentation. Since the display’s size won’t change in any significant way, old iPhone apps will just look the same on the new device (every pixel will just be displayed four times, no need for ugly interpolation) – everything that’s a vector and not pixels will just look better without any effort on the developers’ part. The old iPhones presumably won’t have any problem with apps that come with higher resolution bitmaps.

Since the screen size doesn’t change it also doesn’t make any sense to add any additional elements which would then be too small for older devices – the size of our fingers and the resolution of our eyes is the limiting factor here, not the resolution of the screen.

All of this also means that a increase in resolution is no more a big leap forward (i.e. it allows you to display more stuff), it “merely” makes text, videos and photos look much nicer. It’s quite cool that we finally reached that point.
Ask HN: Web app pricing... to charge or not to charge
I'm avoiding the temptation of delaying my web app's release due to lack of features and polish. As I've read on HN over the past 6 months: Release early! then iterate... (I've drank the kool-aid) I will be releasing my application sometime in June. (yikes)

My next concern regards whether or not to charge users to use my application. I've read articles and have had debates over the past few months. Now I'd like to pose this question to the HN population:

Assuming the founders' costs are are trivial (excluding time), what are the scenarios/reasons to charge users to use a product vs. providing free access to all users?
Oh, it's indeed ironic. If it weren't for the misrepresentation, I'd have ignored it, but that kind of thing is particularly irksome - especially as I'm looking at the evidence in my inbox. In that instance, it was worth it to get the facts straight. Call me whatever you want, but don't make stuff up.
Australian net filter goes ahead
I'm going to wade in here: the point the parent was making is that the analogy is bad on purpose. It's not supposed to make sense. They don't want to say IE6 is like 9yo milk except in that old-age means things have deteriorated. They want it to appear that IE6 was an excellent browser but that it has somehow decayed.

Clearly they couldn't think of anything really good to say about IE8 except that it's not [that] old.

Perhaps they should have compared IE6 to MS Windows ME or something else from that time that was really really bad.

Maybe "you've ditched Billy Bass, you've moved on from The Sims, you're not wearing those capri pants anymore; no more monotonic ring-tones, ugg boots are out; you've served your time as Apprentice and made and lost your million on the 'net; you're not going to stand for no more snakes on no more planes; so, isn't it time you upgraded your broswer for what's left of this new millenium? - IE8 get it in FTW".

Bit formulaic, but that's my pitch - did I win?
The corporate death penalty exists and it is a shame that it is never practiced.

See the case of multiple time convicted felon and statistical mass murderer Pfizer, where the law mandated a corporate death penalty, but the government hacked around that requirement.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/02/pfizer.bextra/index.htm...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer
or seems like there should be a safety robot that grabs the end of a broken pipe, attaches a flange, then knits (like how they make socks) a pipe on the way back to the surface
>the folks who think that more regulation is the answer seem to think that the government regulators are benevolent gods who themselves never make mistakes, are not subject to greed, corruption, political influence, negligence, incompetence, etc.

Give me a break. When you've finished tearing that straw man to pieces, maybe you can seek out what real people who support effective regulation are saying about it.
One day I want Sir Tim Berners-Lee to hop into one of those threads and tell everyone to GTFO.

But really, we're all standing on the shoulders of giants. It's cliche for a good reason (though the English teacher in my brain is yelling at me for using one).
IIRC, from memory, the well head is at circa 5200 feet and the borehole extends from there circa 18,200 feet further, to a short distance below the intended production zone. (I may be mis-remembering.)
But if I, as a developer of a mashup, wanted to use this new music recommendation site and Embedly didn't offer it because that site didn't want to pay up, I could just circumvent Embedly and go against the site's API directly at little cost.
I've sent enough chain emails to my friends, letters to MP's, rants on forums... I feel like giving up trying to stop this `net filter` imposed on us.
There are some issues with Textmate. One of the most glaring and commonly cited is the absence of split windows.

What's really unfortunate is that the handful of features that the majority of people are really itching for don't require the kind of Big Rewrite/second-system effect that's currently going on. It's frustrating.
A rhombic triacontahedron can be formed out of "bricks" which are truncated versions of projections from the polyhedral faces to the center. Make these out of cement, and build a half dome around the well head. The pressure of the water should hold the bricks together with more force than the pressure of the well.
Georgia Tech’s ATDC: 30 Years Of Supporting Startups
IEEE 2010 Medal of Honor: Viterbi
There are two inlets (link to pic below). Pump a slurry of mineral oil, aluminum pellets, and elemental sodium on one side. On the other pump sea water. The chemical reaction looks like: 2Na + 2H2O -> H2 + 2NaOH, and a whole lot of heat that might melt the aluminum just long enough to form blobs. There's no O2 left over so combustion won't happen, right? -OR- maybe a two part foam, with composite reinforcement would work.

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_u...
Well this was why I didn't suggest pouring concrete into it...I was assuming that the cap would be cast at the same time as the cylinder :)

The only point of the gravel (rather than sand) is to disperse the flow sufficiently that maneuvering is easier - same way you could wade across a stream but would be knocked over by the same volume of water aimed at your from a firehouse.
What happens when the firm that destroys the coast simply goes out of business afterwards? All the profits they made before the recklessness came to roost has been funneled to shareholders around the world.
That's a really superficial critique of Wikipedia, and it doesn't appear to be supported by the facts.

The fact is, if you go use the "edit" button right now and make a good-faith improvement, your edit is overwhelmingly likely to stand.

The "oligarchy" you refer to consists of many hundreds of people, freely nominated from among all the site's users, elected by the votes of every Wikipedia user. If you've made just a few edits, you can OK or neg new members of the "oligarchy".

What you're of course ignoring is the fact that Wikipedia's overwhelming success at their original mission has resulted in a ridiculously valuable position in everyone's search results and a huge influx of random users. I'm not a fan of the bureaucracy at all, but I at least respect the abuse, misuse, and obnoxiousness they're up against.

It's amazing to me that they're as good as they are. They certainly aren't some weird mindfuck or exploitation scheme, as you seem to be implying.
Westbound And Down: Why Things Are Looking Up For Paul Stamatiou
Recently I needed a good diagram program for my assignment to use on my non-windows box. I found this web app: http://www.gliffy.com/ They had free and paid accounts. If it didn't have free accounts, I wouldn't have been impressed by how well it worked, and I wouldn't have told all my friends and my parents about it. Hmm but I'm not a founder so this is just from a particular free product consumer's point of view.
Wonders whether he's changed the stupid it the unions fault/vouchers will fix things stance. Although to give him credit it was 1996, those sort of ideas were being sprouted all over back then
Student Term Paper Requires a Strong Idea
Generating a strong thesis statement is one of the most important elements of writing a student term paper. Citing sources properly is another important element of term paper writing. Therefore, being thorough with your work will enable you to submit a thesis paper that provides a good argument which is backed by strong evidence.
Opera pokes fun at Chrome speed-test video
For the time being, just try to put pipes into the plume and pump it into tanker ships. Even getting 10% will help.
The whole article makes me yearn for the Python "there's just one way to do it" philosophy. It's one thing to have a special-case syntax for brevity or readability; it's another thing to have several equivalent all-purpose syntaxes. I get that Ruby 1.9 is transitional; hopefully the old syntaxes will be banished in Ruby 2.
Vivek Wadhwa's Note To The South: Invest In Failure First
I would think that some sort of suction could draw up enough mixture to minimize the problem. For example, 5,000 barrels a day is 145 gallons per minute. ($3500 = 10hp 145gpm pump)

I would think that they could hook a giant pump onto one or more pipes and collect it somehow. At 145gpm, it would take 7000 years to fill up one of the super tankers.

Likewise, I wonder if they could put a heater on the top hat pipe. Maybe the oil is thick at that temp/pressure. Or maybe there are ice crystals, but it seems like they could solve that somehow. We have wires up North to thaw frozen pipes. Shop vacs have larger diameter hoses to not get clogged so easily. Maybe they could bundle lots of smaller pipes together.

Ironically, I accidentally poured a few cups of oil into my truck's coolant reservoir. I thought it would all float to the surface, but lots of it just stayed at the bottom. Blowing bubbles into the tank made it float up sort of like the bubble "pumps" in a fish aquarium.

At this point, they should just create a contest and let school kids come up with ideas.
Skype Over 3G Finally Lands
That argument applies to any transaction that transfers money. The point is to give BP the proper incentives. There is some point at which the reward for drilling (cheap energy) is worth the risk of a disaster. By ensuring that they'll get sued for the monetary cost of the disaster, you can get the socially optimal level of drilling.

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.