skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As much as I'd give anything to be in deep space exploring the galaxy, the universe is a creepy looking place. You know the feeling when you're noclipping in a game? I imagine it would be weird like that.
That is true. I downloaded it the other day but in my 30 seconds of usage didn't see any reason to switch to it from Chrome. Do you have any thoughts on reasons to switch?
So, after complaining, what do I like about this passage? The hobbits have come through a long journey of increasing trauma and lately are skirting Hell, looking for a way in. They find unexpected beauty in Ithilien, part of a pattern through the whole story of havens after dangers. Here's the full paragraph:

Day was opening in the sky, and they saw that the mountains were now
much further off, receding eastward in a long curve that was lost in
the distance. Before them, as they turned west, gentle slopes ran down
into dim hazes far below. All about them were small woods of resinous
trees, fir and cedar and cypress, and other kinds unknown in the
Shire, with wide glades among them; and everywhere there was a wealth
of sweet-smelling herbs and shrubs. The long journey from Rivendell
had brought them far south of their own land, but not until now in
this more sheltered region had the hobbits felt the change of
clime. Here Spring was already busy about them: fronds pierced moss
and mould, larches were green-fingered, small flowers were opening in
the turf, birds were singing. Ithilien, the garden of Gondor now
desolate kept still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.

It does get worked up about 'pretty countryside': that last sentence practically wants to go in a poem. (The GARden of GONdor now DESolate... still a dishevelled dryad loveliness.) The 'poetry' caps the paragraph where it fits in the rhythm of the telling. I didn't notice this artifice while reading the book, except insofar as it marked it into memory to bring the scene back from "dishevelled dryad loveliness".

I can't resist sharing another bit of found poetry, found by a program of mine at http://github.com/darius/versecop -- at the climax of all the action, Sam stands on Mount Doom and sees Sauron's works fall to ruin:

... A brief vision he had Of swirling cloud, and in the midst of it Towers and battlements, tall as hills, Founded upon a mighty mountain-throne Above immeasurable pits; great courts And dungeons, eyeless prisons sheer as cliffs, And gaping gates of steel and adamant: And then all passed.

Line after line of near-perfect iambic pentameter. I don't know if Tolkien consciously hid a Miltonic line in his prose there -- I sort of doubt it -- but I am confident it was more than coincidence that put this longest iambic passage my program found at this moment of the story. Or that it's got more than its share of alliteration.

(Running the same program over the works of Jane Austen brought up only a few passages of two or three lines. Austen is great, just very different.)

Back to the first paragraph, "day was opening in the sky" -- "mountains receding eastward in a long curve" -- "Spring was already busy about them" -- "fronds pierced moss and mould" -- "Ithilien... kept still a dishelleved dryad loveliness". It's an awfully animate sort of landscape in these words, though not obtrusively so. I think that's another way the scene's brought to life.

There are nine and ninety ways to write, but I gotta say this is one of them.
Http://www.keezmovies.com/video/carmella-bing-big-big-tits-get-fucked-432091
Yeah, and the author sounded like someone who had just read the javadoc 5 minutes ago.

But I love java.util.concurrent so I voted up anyways.
Will Apple Embrace the Web? No.
How The U.S. Government Killed The Safest Car Ever Built
in space people walk by hand.
Will every application get a response, even if it's a rejection?
If you zoom in (and give it a sec) it'll load the high-res version.

Just remember, every point of light is a star. And then remember, there are as many galaxies in the universe as points of light in that picture.

Now go watch Pale Blue Dot on youtube.
Unicode Beginners Introduction for Dummies Made Simple
Good point! Yeah I agree that's a factor. Heck, even if they could contain the leak in 6 days it would be a huge improvement over 6 weeks or 5 months or whatever it will end up being now.

On the point about transportation time being a factor: in getting resources to accident site, there are many well-known ways of mitigating that. They can keep things cached on site, or use equipment from other nearby platforms that are not in accident mode, or, they can keep stuff based at a closer port, like New Orleans rather than New Jersey, for example. Plus they can fly in as much as they can, which would be a matter of hours in those cases. Lots of other things they can do, have trained teams and ships on standby, ready to deploy quickly to any of say 5-20 wells (or whatever) in their service area, if an accident occurs. The cost of keeping those people and equipment sitting idle and nearby can just become a cost of the operation, and considered to be justified as a net-win in accident scenarios. And again, we're talking about a company making billions in profits every 3 months -- they probably have enough margin to divert some of it upfront to buy better preparation and reduced accident-containment-latency.
Carbon tablet? Hasn't updated to Cocoa yet? =)
Amazing. Is Sol visible in that image?
You mean there is no floor to walk in ISS? Seriously, the tour was amazing but I kept wanting to look for the window-view of Earth.
Discreetly sneak in there and run a pipeline off to your own storage facility and open your own parasitic oil company. I propose a startup.
Definitely some books I will check out after reading this list ("Lisp in small pieces" for example).
Also enjoyed the fact that Norvig is a Talking Heads fan. I always thought of Norvig as a new wave kind of guy.
From his 'On LISP' review:

...In Graham's prose, like his code, every word counts...

Fascinating to read Peter Norvig describe ten years ago what most people tend to say about pg's essays and general writing style.
What? No built-in webcam!? :P
Wow down votes for an honest question! I don't get it?
A few minutes after the horrible video editing it turns into a great full screen narrated tour. Just grit your teeth in agony until then...
Thank you for clarifying and educating me.
I didn't realize 2b metric tons is the total of all that carriers move in a year. Eek, off by 1000. (I should get some sleep.)

BTW: I think it's curious to compare the 19,000 bpd with the 645,113 bpd that the Alaskan pipeline moved in April. http://www.alyeska-pipe.com/Default.asp I can't visualize how much we must be consuming/burning every day.
Facebook’s friendship trap
It's the first recorded online instance of the "worst * ever" meme, which ended up making its way back into The Simpsons by way of the Comic Book Guy.
Google Android Phone Codes
;World asks "Why?"
I've heard from more than one petroleum engineer that the only thing likely to work is relief wells and that all the rest of this is theatre. If that's true, it's a politically impossible truth, which would explain much of what we've seen so far.

Apparently all the same techniques (the cap, the top kill) were tried 30 years ago -- in much shallower water -- and didn't work then either. What worked was a relief well. If that precedent holds, then we're barely past the beginning of this catastrophe. I hope that's not true, but it's beginning to look that way.
Social network for Otaku
I actually had to deal with something similar at home.

Granted it was flowing water, but same principle.

Anyways what you do is use an open hose and some hose clamps on the leaking pipe, then you direct the oil hose where you want it to go. Since there is no resistance on the other end, the oil will just go through without any pressure build up. And by using a hose clamp on the leak, it doesn't go elsewhere.

Then you can point the hose whereever, maybe park an oil tanker nearby, and pipe directly into it. Then you build a platform that uses a Y valve to divert oil between multiple vessels without spilling.

Here is a diagram: http://imgur.com/4m2GY.jpg
It might have been better as a more generic "Ask HN: Who's hiring interns?" thread. But, nothing against the rules about this sort of post (not to mention that there's always the "Ask HN: Who's Hiring <redux>" threads that pop up every few weeks).

My suggestion to anyone looking for an internship is to find a company you're interested in, look on their jobs page and see if they have anything open in your area. And then send them an email (even if the listing isn't for an internship specifically). The worst that can happen is that someone replies and says "Sorry, we're not looking for an intern right now."

And hey, it worked for me; I've got a very awesome internship at Justin.tv this summer by doing the above.
He says, 'When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.'

As an engineer, that's not quite how I think (maybe everyone's different though). What I think about is all the time I spent grokking the subject so that I could see and appreciate the simple connections later.

Diversity in one's approach is really important. And that's underrated -- and powerful that he appreciates that. But perhaps equally important is using the actual design that you've developed to help you find the creative connections. There's just so much focused overlap there. So much quiet feedback that can become powerful -- with a few (somewhat metacircular) iterations, etc.
The only fate iPhones deserve
That liability cap does apply to negligence. It applies to any civil suits. However, it does not apply to criminal charges, and the DoJ has intimated that it may pursue criminal charges against someone in this.

Even if the liability cap is pierced during this particular incident, that's still orthogonal to the impact it has had on the behavior of exploration up until now.
(too late to edit, the correct link to my emacs config is http://github.com/samsonjs/config/blob/master/emacs )
As Carl Sagan would say, "billions of billions".

Also this quote from the book "Pale Blue Dot" is equally amazing: http://vimeo.com/2822787

The original "Pale Blue Dot": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M
All businesses work this way to day, but only few has such a high risk. What BP did there was practically a 50/50 game of chance, and they've lost. It seems that in the shadow of profit, the risk becomes transparent. Sometimes other risks, like 'losing market value' seem more real than the risk of bursting such well. Maybe it is because economists are in charge and their lack of technical expertise, makes the technical risk less real.
man that's a man after my own heart.

what you need now is a howto and a components kit sold in radioshack for the consumer boffins and we will soon see another sinclar / apple / Microsoft in the making.
Somebody should show this to people in #lisp. They uniformly worship Norvig and hate PG.
Except now you've globally eliminated oil.
To confirm, the sea floor is 5000ft below the surface, and the oil reservoir 18000 feet below that.

There are some good diagrams at NYT and washington post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2010/05...
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/25/us/20100525-to...

Funny that the outlet on top of the cap they tried to lower over the leak became clogged with some kind of ice/methane crystal mix.

The junk shot/top kill didn't work... as far as I can tell, the mud just sprayed out the top of the broken, bent pipe. Taking blood coagulation as an analogy, there is a complex system of aggregation to form a clot and then strengthen at a breach in an arterial wall - this isn't exactly replicated by what they used in the junk shot, apparently a mixture of mud, golf balls and car tyres.

One idea would be to try something else for a junk shot that would actually change the flow characteristics of the oil such as glue, or liquid nitrogen. Mind you, this stuff gets pumped into bottom of the blow out preventer, and the leak is at the top 30ft away. That isn't very much time to change the viscosity of the oil. You would also need a very large volume of this junk shot material... Alternatively, maybe junk shooting with a pile of rare earth magnets could do the trick, assuming the pipe is ferromagnetic.

Also there is still the sea-floor to surface pipe attached to the top of the blowout preventer, albeit bent off at an angle. You could thread something through the post breach pipe back towards the main breach and try to plug it that way.

The coolest solution I can think of is to fire a copper slug down the throat of the bastard thing with a surface mounted rail gun.
There is an older (and I think better known, and possibly more interesting) case, that of the Facteur Cheval:
- http://www.facteurcheval.com/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Cheval

He built a palace all on its own, with his own distinct style, back in the early XXth century.
Can you cite the source that leads you to believe that BP stands to make 10x more profit by running a risky drilling operation? I find it hard to believe.
Through Internet archeology. Hello, readers from the 28th century!
You have really specific ideas which makes me think you can self study. Institutional learning can be wider focussed and might not be as useful.

1) I would suggest starting the business right now. You have a day job and can bank roll it the initial stuff. Give yourself a budget and maybe a time and place to work on it? Do you have time to study on the side?

2) Next, find the type of customer that you want to work with and start seeing what you can find on the market to fit their needs. This way you can find a niche. Is it kids, adults, veterans? Is it mobility, seeing, hearing, etc?

3) Start researching the sort of things that are being created. (ex: The walking robots, robot cars, etc.) Maybe start communicating with researchers directly. You might end up finding one to study this exact thing with.

4) Try to connect a technology you can replicate with customers that you want to help and figure out what needs to be done to connect the two. You may even start just by helping people with off the shelf products and improving them.

This can be a good time to put together a business plan if you need funding to pull it off. You may also find yourself just building a series of prototypes in your spare time.

Enable a few kids to walk and money will find you.
Damn, that's pretty nice. I would use it around the house for sure. Very nice specs for the size and weight.
These days in the security field "user education" is viewed as an excuse by developers who abdicate responsibility. Phishing shows that users can't/won't be educated, so some other solution has to be found.
The Science of Genius
Excellent creative suggestion. I would gladly pay for TextMate 2, since TextMate is an essential part of my productivity every day.
'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.'

In the USA at least, copyright is offered as limited privilege meant to achieve specific goals, so the scare quotes might be better used when talking about the "rights" of content creators over the material they "own".

I mean, if you really own something, you can maintain that ownership as long as you like, and then pass it on to others to own, who can do the same, on and on, forever.

But (modulo corporate shenanigans) that's not the case with copyright.

And were it considered a natural right there would be no need to make special mention of it in the U.S. Constitution.
While his enterprise software product may have failed, what he seems to mean by "web objects" is web service APIs, which have indeed become vastly more important since this interview took place. In fact, that was probably the most prescient thing he said.
PS: Maybe buy "What is a Microcontroller" about the Basic Stamp. http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=211799... It's really simple and a nice way to get perspective on programming hardware. As a next step, build something with an Arduino.
How Not To Secure Your Network
New Kindle expected this Summer
Interactive XKCD Raptor Survival Graph
Google trends issues hot media: Israel rejects Middle East nuclear talks plan
His review of the Talking Heads CD set is dated July 27, 2001, but mentions "Sept 11." Conspiracy theorists take note.
World hottest news: Porn ban on net and mobiles mulled by South Africa
I didn't mean that it would generate one by itself, but it could disturb the air currents significantly in the area, possibly allowing one to form via some kind of feedback loop. Disclosure: I am not an atmospheric scientist.
No... I knew those things. Although from his analysis of CopyOnWriteArrayList, I'm wondering if ReentrantReadWriteLock is something he didn't know about java.util.concurrent.
Indonesia Furniture Handicraft Wholesale Marketplace | BlogClubbers
run directly towards the slowest virus, since it has a wounded leg? (sorry, couldn't resist :-)

In all seriousness, though, this is very exciting. I wonder how easily this technique could be adapted to work on other viruses, like HIV.
They attached the 'cupola' window to Node 3 a few months ago, that points down towards Earth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwEyWrEqXmg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNQ8s2jnMTc
Ask Hn:  Feedback Please - Rate my Startup  Nxting.com
Match.com meets Chat roulette meet Justin.tv?
Flojuggler
DHTML Lemmings primer
(c) Exceptions
(1) Acts of responsible party
Subsection (a) [incl the $75m cap] of this section does not apply if the incident was proximately caused by—
(A) gross negligence or willful misconduct of, or
(B) the violation of an applicable Federal safety, construction, or operating regulation by, the responsible party, an agent or employee of the responsible party, or a person acting pursuant to a contractual relationship with the responsible party (except where the sole contractual arrangement arises in connection with carriage by a common carrier by rail). [...]

sounds pretty cut and dried to me.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode33/usc_sec_33_0...
that is pretty bad. is this one a joke?
Of course not. These images are taken FROM Sol. How could it be there?
Lala is Shutting Down
Hero worship is sadly not transitive.
I created an interactive version of the graph, so you can enter values and see how long you would last: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390136
I'm not using BT at all, it's wired from the circuitry to the gamepad, and the gamepad is of course wired.
Yes, so:

1) that's something to put on your cv & bring with when applying for a job. it tells you something about the guy as an engineer.

2) if he was a founder this shows he can deliver and compete. you want to invest in people who can deliver and compete. those tablets are kind of big deal now you know.
It redirects. ;)
Is there any other information about this engine? Yogurtistan looks something like a Habbo Hotel or Second Life game.

Are they planning on releasing this engine to others? I'm asking because I'd really like to use it to make a WebGL bridge for browsers that are failing to implement it.
This was announced about a month ago I'm afraid...
I wonder, how much do you think this cost him? (Just the materials, not time spent and what-not)
HTML5 video destruction effect
I agree with the terminology being a problem. Regarding private key public key encryption, I think the public key should be called the "lock" since people use it to lock data they want to send you, while the private key should be called the "key" because you use it to "unlock"(decrypt) the data.

But this messes up when you use the same terms for other uses of public/private keys such as authentication. Still, the terms could provide a better mental model for people new to it to understand.
That's a pretty interesting job he's got. It sounds like it'd be pretty fun to be able to dive into a startup for a set period of time to help out, and then move on to another. With no risk for pay/insurance/etc.
My fear is that this won't be available to readers from the 28th century.
That's actually pretty interesting and quirky. I wonder what happened.

Could he have initially posted before Sept. 11 and then edited the post after? Or did Amazon screw something up with the dates?
My numbers were for illustration. It doesn't need to be 10x more profitable, it just needs to be any degree more profitable and the unlucky event sufficiently rare that the profit of the successful wells outweighs the costs of the failure (also keep in mind that oil companies drill many, many unsuccessful wells, so a marginal increase in the cost of drilling an exploratory well is significantly magnified).

Despite the costs of cleanup, we're not anywhere near the point where it makes sense for them to change their practices. BP made $4bn in profit last year, and current cleanup costs have yet to hit $1bn. They can get a lot, lot higher before they outweigh the profits of years of risky drilling.
That's the most detailed? Google Sky has about 2x the magnification of a random, boring spot I picked, and much higher on interesting locations. Maybe there's some small spot which goes to 8x, but otherwise I think they've been beat.

(comparison: both scale roughly 2x on each level. linked: 9 levels. Google: 10 levels before informing of no more data, many boring locations go higher. Apparently, I found one of the least interesting sections to try first.)
Update (I can no longer edit parent): the Wall Street Journal has a longer and even more damaging report on what was going on inside BP prior to the blowout:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870402620457526...

In summary: they were doing it cheaply, and in a hurry, and skipped standard safety precautions, and ignored several warning signs.
Quite seriously, the funniest thing on Twitter... Sad too
I'm really not sure.
In Czar Peter’s Footsteps
Can you explain "relief wells?"

edit: found this http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2010/05/gr...
"BP is drilling two relief wells, which will permanently intersect with the damaged well and shut down the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico by pumping concrete into it."

So a relief well is a new well that intersects with current wells and allows concrete to be flowed to the current wells. Can anybody elaborate?
Why would it be political suicide to come out and say, "This is the only viable option. Here are the pros, here are the cons. This is our best option. Now let's get to work."
You mean something like Zeus http://www.zeusedit.com
You may be right about that, but again what happens in response to the gulf situation is orthogonal to this entire thread of discussion. BP has been racking up tens of millions in fines over the years, but they've been spending those millions to make billions.

Financially, they are incented to cut corners and risk paying MMS the occasional $25k, when the drilling platform costs $500k/day.
From the article, the only really nasty things are:

[a].forEach(fn(){})
[b].forEach(fn(){})
// Parses as [a][b]

return
a+b
// Parses as return;

You would have to work pretty hard to trigger the rest.

I'm curious about the speed trade offs from removing semicolons. You shrink the source code a little, but does the parser throwing exceptions all the time bump up execution time?
As he says in the descrip of his YT demo <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7W_AuspKls>:

This is a project I have been working on in my spare time for the last few months. I wanted a Windows 7 touchscreen tablet with a large screen that could handle HD video and wasn't too thick or power hungry. The build cost for this was around $600-700.
Dude lost me with "Essentially, as long as the iPhone and iPad are able to retain mind-share, developer support and an unignorable market-share then Apple can shape the lowest common denominator for the web (even if that low is very high, like the best HTML5 / CSS3 support)"