skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Correction: The "experts" have tried in vain for 5 weeks to stop this, and have thus far failed.

Even the most cynical of minds cannot possibly conjure up the conspiracy theory that everyone is just sitting around doing nothing. It is in BP's own best interests to fix this ASAP - the magnitude of fallout this creates for them increases as the problem drags on.

One of the less impressive aspects of our new information culture is that every Joe Schmoe now thinks he is an expert materials engineer, rocket scientist, political expert, economist, sociologist, historian, physicist, chemist, biologist, medical professional, and general.

As a trained mechanical engineer turned software guy, I find it ironic that we softies bitch about laymen's assumptions about our field, and we are aggravated constantly by other people who assume that everything just takes "a couple of days" to build... yet we are so quickly to leap to the same conclusion when it concerns a field that is not our own.
I like the idea of crowdsourcing it, but can't help feeling that a sufficiently original idea wouldn't be recognized as feasible.
what is the iPhone app store doing that Palm didn't do before?

Moving units.

It's annoyingly difficult to pull definitive PDA sales numbers for all time, but this article:

http://digital-lifestyles.info/2005/08/03/pda-sales-set-for-...

says that annual PDA sales peaked at 13.2 million in 2001, then slid for several years, then picked up again. That's all things called a "PDA", which obviously includes a bunch of Blackberries, Windows CE gadgets, etc. Palm had only 17% market share in 2005. So assume that Palm was moving about 20% of those 13.2M units in 2001. That's 2.64 million. Round it up to 3 million units per year. [1]

Apple moved 8.75 million iPhones and nearly 11 million iPods (many of which were iPod Touch units) last quarter:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/20/once-again-apple-has-its-be...

Which is to say: Apple is selling iPhone OS hardware at a rate at least 11 times larger, and probably more than 20 times larger, than Palm ever sold PDAs.

(And this is just counting Apple products. The OP's point about App Stores applies to Android as well. iPhone plus Android equals Palm times, say, fifty.)

This is the OP's point: Palm may have pioneered the market and sold a bunch of software, but Apple, and its Android-based follow-on products, have grown the market by orders of magnitude.

---

[1] On the one hand, the fact that my lame Google-searched sales stats stop in 2005 is a problem. Palm sold stuff after 2005. On the other hand, my impression was that Palm was also becoming a phone company around that time. Anyone with better data is welcome to show it.
[summary] Usability study of PGP 5.0. Out of 12 people who didn't know about private/public key systems initially, but were experienced with email:

Roughly between 1/4 and 1/2 of them (worse in a couple cases) succeeded at a given task (send a key, encrypt an email, etc). Others failed completely, or took a long time to achieve it (~30 minutes in several tasks for a couple people), and some couldn't manage the essentials - even with feedback - by the end of the 90 minute trial.

Reasons given for the failures were primarily focused around workflow / UI design.

---

Strikes me as accurate, probably better than many alternatives at the time, which is somewhat frightening. And, given my experiences getting signing / encrypting working in Mail.app, it's hardly improved in the past decade. Thunderbird makes it simpler, but not by much, and I don't recall being able to use multiple keys easily.
"Going out of business" is a product of regulation that artificially separates the assets and liabilities of a corporation from its owners. I expect that the hardcore libertarian argument would be to make bankruptcy conditional on the corporation having insurance sufficient to cover any possible liability - failing that, the shareholders are held fully responsible for their share of the corporation's liability.

I'm no Libertarian, but I think it's unfair to characterise their position as being a kind of corporate anarchism.
A lot of students don't want to move away from the city they went to college in. Does the proximity of MIT also affect this and the low number of technology companies affect this?
Wolfram is frightening in its completeness... I should really look into their setup some time.

Anyone have any suggestions for starting it? From what I've gathered, it's a bit different than other math texts / different conceptual basis.
A novel idea, but would the underwater shock also trigger tidal waves for potentially more damage?
And movies taught it's probably the best way to deal with aliens:

"I say we take off, and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
- Ripley
I enjoyed Lord of the Ring far more as an adult than when I originally read it as a teenager.
how are you planning to compete against established players in this market. Seems like this problem has already been solved.
The Mullover
A few Irish tunes have a somewhat self-similar structure. There are two parts, which are a call/response to each other, and each of the two parts themselves have a call/response structure. Sometimes it goes another level, but then we start getting down to the granular limit of a distinct melodic idea.
Here's my guess: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_nepotism
International Space Station Tour
Drill new wells next to it, into the same source, to remove the oil and pressure in a controlled way.
I agree. BP is not an American company but I think it would be entirely appropriate to rescind their US licenses and freeze any assets possible. On the basis of similar episodes elsewhere it could take several months to bring the spill under control. Economically speaking, this may become as expensive to the US as 9/11.
Kinda nice... makes it easier to find the popular items after they've fallen off the top of HN, and faster to skim (which I should do more of anyway, I waste too much time here).

The hotness calculation seems to be pretty basic, just grabbing the points / comments numbers on the page and comparing them to each other. Which is actually exactly what I want, I'm not really interested in something which tells me exactly what HN's sorting equation tells me, and more complex == harder to understand the results.

Found a bug, btw: upvoting gives me NaN instead of a number for points.
I agree; I think the freemium model works well. I have a client-side application that I have in a freemium model. The Free version provides just the basic core functionality. The Pro version adds all kinds of other extras that aren't necessary but add value. I think it's a great way to get market penetration with free word of mouth advertising.
Lessons From the Forgotten 'Flash Crash' of 1962
An iPhone Lover’s Take On The HTC EVO 4G
How did you find this? Google's Usenet search has been horribly broken for years. It's criminal how they've let their Usenet archives rot away.
Not necessarily, if you are living off savings then you have a limited amount of time to either put something out that could become cash flow positive or secure funding.

It would be hard to quantify missed investment opportunities because of timing though because many companies that could have been won't happen because of the missed opportunity, you could only really quantify people who have stated they took alternate investment or joined another seed fund because of timing.
It annoys me that every 40 year old thinks that the world is getting worse. I used to think it was just the less intelligent people who's minds couldn't keep up with the rate of change. But to hear Jobs say it was disheartening. Death rates from war are the lowest per capita that they have perhaps ever been. People continue to live longer lives. I think that the world allows more upward mobility now than perhaps any time I can think of. Billions of people in India and China are moving towards first world status. Unreadable amounts of information is available at a moments notice. People at the poverty line have things that the richest map 100 years ago couldn't even dream of. When was this heyday where every person was an educated scholar and only the intelligent became leaders. Every complaint like this I hear, I can find 10 examples from history where things were worse. I just don't get it. Maybe I'll understand when I'm 40. I hope I can keep my optimism.
Skype for iPhone Now Supports 3G Calling
Q: Piracy is immoral, and illegal. We need to spread awareness, then people will stop doing it.

A: Sure... that's how religion was able to successfully put a halt to masturbation, pre-marital and extra-marital sex. And why the US successfully won the war on drugs.

Illegal doesn't matter. People do what they want to do. Immoral is subjective. And teaching people to behave in a way contrary to human nature DOES NOT WORK.

I've been trying to explain this to some people I know. I hope this helps. :)
Yes, preventing BP from doing business in the USA would be a corporate death penalty.
The naming of Reddit: reDDit like diGG seemed the most obvious reason to suspect it was inspired by Digg.

Since they say they didn't consciously copy Digg I take them at their word. I doubt they'd lie about it. I wouldn't be surprised if they're misremembering though. People are always teaching me things I taught them a week earlier. Memory is faulty and that was probably an especially stressful time for them.
Sometimes a slight exaggeration makes for a better headline :)
nice handle :)
A Breakthrough Cure for Ebola
Are you sure that you aren't thinking about Regular Expressions?
SSL won't hide anything from anyone who really wants to see it, as they can set up an SSL proxy using a certificate that is trusted by your browser. The address bar will turn blue, and the certificate info will say something like, "issued to www.gmail.com, issued by [IT-obsessed corporation name here]".
How to deal with piracy as a publisher.
That's basically what the "relief well" plan is, but it's taking a couple of months to get there.

I think the trick is that it needs to be intercepted deep enough into bedrock to not risk having the whole BOP crater.
Gunicorn, Django and WSGI
1) Put a big ass cap on the top of it 2) Try to choke it off by pumping in a ton of junk. 3) Blow it up.

Those are truly ideas I had instantly. What's terrifying is that my ideas bare any resemblance to the supposed experts's.
I know I'll get down voted for this but, I wouldn't expect any beer with a spanish name to be good.
Very true :)
But we are trying to going to target very specific market of low-end users who are in need of cheap online survey solution with easy to use interface. Also we tried to make pricing as simple as it can be. For example, we don't have any additional charges for response overage or any other advanced functionality which can cost you a lot with other solutions.

We want to make the application more specific to user needs instead of adding everything like other online survey solutions so my idea is to make - you get what you need at a simplest price.
What if it creates lots of little holes all around the area and the oil continues to leak. Now you have a bigger problem on your hands -- stopping lots of leaks a mile below the surface instead of just one.
$42.9 million slot jackpot should have been $20
Likewise. I pretty quickly thought of the "suck the oil plumes into a tube, draw up to surface" solution (at least as a stopgap) so was shocked that it took BP about 3-4 weeks before they put such a system in place. Weeks! Felt like that should have been on site and implemented within hours or least the first day or two after the leak began.
Two problems here.

1. they do carry insurance. Their fuel assets are insured by Jupiter Insurance ltd. ( a wholly owned subsidiary of...BP itself. According to their annual report, they consider external insurance a poor economy and carry as little as possible - basically $1 billion per incident, figuring that any overages can be paid for out of revenues. Awesome.

http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/STAGING/gl...

2. OK, so make them carry more insurance...but then you're back to the dead hand of government regulation or whatever you want to call it. And with the best will in the world, sometimes events take place which are beyond our ability to predict. I imagine the government's recent cautious endorsement of more offshore drilling was based on a careful look at the number of rig disasters in recent years, and the assumption that the industry was sufficiently mature to appreciate the importance of risk management. It's kind of ironic that this occurred right after Obama upset the 'ban all drilling' crowd.
I assume that's just his name and middle initials?
Firstly latest estimates are between 12k and 19k barrels x day (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/us/30spill.html?pagewanted...). That's 350 - 554 gpm. If a super oil tanker can hold 2m barrels you'd fill one up with greasy, slushy water in between 105 - 166 days (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_tanker).
The Government Wants To Save Newspapers And Media Moguls
I've created a quick graph [1] of the survival time running in a single fixed direction. While this doesn't take acceleration into account, the results agree with the article and common sense. No matter which direction you run, one of the 25 m/s raptors will catch you, so your best bet is to run directly toward the weakened one. The code's available here: http://gist.github.com/418783

[1] http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=s&chd=t:0.0,1.111...
Negra Modelo?
Actually, I've heard many libertarians argue for precisely a kind of corporate anarchism. That is, at the end of the day, exactly what deregulation really is: removing government from having power over the actions of corporations. Taken to the logical extreme that people such as Rand Paul seem to honestly want, then that implies that a government cannot enforce the conditions of bankruptcy, nor the liability of owners.
A New Subway Map for New York (Interactive)
Textmate has incremental search. Type Ctrl+S and start typing what you want to search for.
NYTimes graphic team, you never cease to amaze
It makes sense as an analogy but it's not valid evidence supporting the argument.

The argument is that usability matters more than capability and that's why the iPad will ultimately win the mainstream. In mainstream use, computers simply have more diverse capability than cars.

(note that this is NOT the case with mobile phones-- while mobile phones have diverse capability and people use them for lots of different things, if all you could do was make calls, send text, email, use GPS and do basic web browsing people would still buy them)
Toña.
As a past creator of downloadable software, I don't fear file sharing... because I am no longer producing downloadable software. I'm producing web applications, one of whose many benefits is that they make piracy obsolete.

Enjoy your BitTorrent and whinging about how DRM infringes on your "rights" to enjoy the content you "own", as you gradually realize that content producers are migrating from the forms of content you can conveniently steal to the forms of content that you can't.

I have rather limited sympathy.
The idea of a purely voting/community driven site as a Slashdot spinoff was also implemented, at Kuro5hin. It turned out a bit differently, though, as it mostly ended up becoming something of a site for freelance tech writers to publish long-form pieces in the era before everyone had blogs they could do it on. So, ended up diverging from the blurbs that Slashdot does, or the pure links that digg/reddit type sites do. They did keep a section for just a link and a blurb, but it was pejoratively entitled "mindless link propagation" (MLP) and not really a main focus of the site.

(These days it's something of a dive bar, with only old regulars left and a lot of miscellaneous discussion.)
Perhaps relevant is Maciej Cegłowski's 2005 piece on the uselessness of the Shuttle and the ISS.

Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression
of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to
near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with
little concern for their personal safety, and requiring
extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with
an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this
primitive space plane must have been a sacred artifact,
used in religious rituals to deliver sacrifice to a sky
god.

http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm
> In order to get there, we have had to follow, in remorseless day by day detail the Hobbits' walking holiday from the Shire to Rivendell, the highlight of which is the monumentally irritating Tom Bombadil, who communicates entirely in jingles

Strangely, I loved the detailed walk through the forests. It made me feel like I was actually undergoing the walk. The entire book made me feel I made the journey!

I read LOTR first time at around 39 and loved it. It's time now for a re-read at 45. However, I've tried reading Silmarilion several times but never been able to complete it.
Samsung develops USB-powered desktop PC monitor
Agree with #1. but on #2, that $75m liability cap is a crock - it only applies in cases where there has no been gross negligence or willful misconduct. If it can be shown that BP lied to the MMS or created the situation by failure to comply with regulations (even if they started complying once they realized they had trouble), then the limit doesn't apply.

See http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode33/usc_sec_33_0... subsection c.
I'd use a regular expression. I solve all my problems with regex.
Splitting the hairs pretty thin at that point.
I think the marketing department did just fine. Browsers do indeed have a shelf life. The blame rests with those who created the situation, not those who pointed it out.
You're making the assumption that the two things are mutually exclusive. Not all functional behaviors require overt mental processing.
Cool. Is there a firefox version?
Excellent interview. More than any other figure in music, this guy has managed to not only stay relevant over the years, but really continue to create innovative music. I'm about to begin reading the recently released book Another Green World which I'm pretty excited about.
Don't quote that barrels per day figure too readily, the barrels per day from the BP spill figure is based on.. BP's estimate. I'd double the estimate just on general principles.
I would immediately seek out, using all methods possible, anyone who could reasonably be considered an expert on such issues (to my own satisfaction), and find out their opinion.

Then I'd find out what my budget was, and who else I had to deal with afterwards.

Etc...
Man builds his own carbon-fibre, Windows based tablet PC
Fun fact: it was between "reddit" and "reditt" while I was a senior at UVA sitting in Alderman library. I asked my friend (and library buddy) Melissa for which one made more sense for the way "read it" oughta be misspelled. She picked reddit.

We ended up considering a number of other names once we got to YC (PG wasn't a fan of reddit) but I persisted and I think Steve just realized he had better things to do.

I've got the email I sent to Steve about digg (subject line: READ THIS on 7/11/05 at 11:48pm (we launched reddit on 6/23/05).

I'm not lying or misremembering, which is what motivated me to respond.

http://alexisohanian.com/are-we-still-talking-about-this-res...
Phew. Accepted. Lets continue having fun and a sense of acceptance on HN. Its (part of) what makes it better then other sites.
Forget about the $75m cap - it doesn't apply in cases of negligence or misconduct. That was only newsworthy when BP's 'oh no, what a terrible surprise' posture seemed credible.
Damn, it’s really busy up there with the shuttle docked.

I wonder how long the most-people-concurrently-in-space-record (13) will stand after the shuttles retire. It could be a long time …
Agreed. I bet for a mere $20 million (ok, maybe $100 million, who knows) they could setup an operation to create a man-made "controlled" leak on the ocean floor at 5000 feet depth. And then they try out various methods of stopping that leak. Take notes. Fine-tune. Then they stop the test. Document everything, train people, put resources in place to be able to implement the same solution when a real leak occurs.
I'm not in the UK, but I think they just scan for the intermediate frequency used by TV receivers. The receiver combines the TV signal with another signal that's something like 10 or 16 MHz away from the broadcast frequency, in a way that results in the TV signal being shifted down to ~10-16MHz, where it is easier to decode. Some of that additional signal leaks back through the antenna, or is otherwise emitted by the equipment. For example, to see if you're watching a station at 87MHz, they'd scan for emissions at 77 or 97MHz. No window spying necessary.

Corrections by those better versed than I in RF electronics and antenna theory are welcome.
You can try my project that extracts the article text for easy viewing on mobile phones: http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.wired.com%2f...

FYI, this is used by http://toadjaw.com/hn
Or you could move into Brix or Joule, walk downstairs to Vivace and pick up the commuter bus on Broadway... ;-)
Good point. However, I think it should not have been the first time they had to stop a physical leak. They could have carried out experiments, at the same depth, with the same set of equipment. Except not under emergency conditions.
Is anyone else incredibly jealous?
Thanks for that. I'm at GMT +7 and was wondering. I see peak/low periods based on the rate of change on the home page but haven't put it all together in my head.
Google Go language has almost the misfeature.
Look to be quite a few hacks in there — tubes and tubes and tubes. Though I suppose with all the modules, it's one big hack.
From the website (http://www.guedelon.fr/) it looks half-finished and not too visually impressive, although interesting nonetheless. Could you explain what makes it surpass all other human monuments?
Wow you are getting rude. Chill out.
Genetics: The number crunchers who are saving lives
Wow, who cares?!?
Seeing the inside of the shuttle flight deck gives me very very vivid reminders of crashing my shuttle/team during a sim at the old Space Camp in Mountain View; I was part of the first class to go through in '96.
normal every day people bought millions of dollars in apps every year

I would contend that few "normal every day" people bought Palm products. The iPhone has had far more mainstream success (as the numbers from mechanical_fish attest). That's a big difference, both in the type and number of people now buying independent apps.
The Most Detailed Image of Our Galaxy Ever Taken