skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regarding the IANAL aspect you can see here http://tinyurl.com/2bd45en where the #1 act in the world understand the stakes and where the true money is made.

Oh, I don't doubt that many artists would welcome your service if it leads to a broader, more international audience. Yet I somehow doubt that the labels and their lawyers are necessarily going to be of the same opinion.

Anyway, if I may digress, if you happen to be offering the reverse service at some point, I'd like to watch German RTL Formula One coverage from the US. RTL even offers an iPhone app for that, but they check the user's location and block viewers not residing in Germany... :-(

These arbitrary "market segmentations" are really annoying and not the least in the interest in the viewer (who, sadly, is not the customer...). Good luck toppling them, I'll root for you.
A programmer's code of ethics
The remark about most people being afraid of computers is dead on. Lots of people, even people growing up around computers see them as big baroque systems of buttons and menus that they don't really understand. My mom uses an iMac, and for the most part, I don't think she realizes that there are other programs you might want to put on it aside from MS Office. With her iPhone, she has not only found and installed apps, but she actually _uses_ them. I it's think that one of the biggest successes of it all has been what Dan describes: regular people understanding what software is, and how it can make their lives better.
I think one could argue both sides effectively, depending on your definition of 'change the world'. There is still a huge unequal distribution of wealth, war still wages, people go hungry, and education still isn't what it should be. The internet has affected these things in a limited way, but it has not radically altered them. Not that the effect of the web hasn't been massive in other ways, but I think this is the scale he was talking about.
I'm in the same boat.

Resume: http://www.brandonpaton.com/about/
> I read somewhere that it's not this way in Canada, and that BP had been lobbying them to let them drill without a relief well.

That's from Reddit, and it looks like it wasn't exactly correct: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/c8t30/in_canada_it...
I was under the impression that they did drop that requirement.

(Also, FYI, if you do buy a computer and it came with an illegal copy of Windows, you should contact Microsoft to trade it in for a legit copy. It's usually free to do so provided you rat on the sketchy vendor)
I really like IE Tester, but it crashes every 10 minutes or so.
I sat here for about five minutes thinking about this, and this really is beyond me.

But I do have this picture in my head of throwing a bunch of gigantic parachute things into the water. Perhaps with tubes in their centers that lead to the surface. Or, throw so many parachutes down that it creates a canopy that directs where the oil goes. Or put some kind of super heating devices on these things and I don't really know what that would do....

Or they can build a huge cone from the surface downward.

Like you said, I'm no expert.
Mozilla - his example in the essay - eventually got re-written as the most popular browser in use today

It worked out ok for end users, but didn't lead to such a great outcome for Netscape.
This reminds me of something I read a long time ago that I think is worth bringing back up:

http://glyf.livejournal.com/46589.html
#1 On the whole these wells are net positive.

#2 It's the government capping BP's liability.

Not a libertarian, but please.
I'm not a libertarian, but I imagine a libertarian plan might include the privatization of parts of the ocean and shoreline. When an spill like this happens, BP can then be sued for violating the rights of the owners of the clean ocean surrounding the rig, and the damage they've done to the shoreline. As long as the shoreline is public property, they can get away with convincing senators and bureaucrats that they'll spend $x on cleanup, donate $y to their campaigns, and that's that. If the cleanliness of the ocean/shoreline were privatized (those private rights enforced by courts), the threat of a lawsuit would lead to both more responsible pre-accident risk assessment on behalf of BP and a more responsible cleanup strategy.
The protection of rights overrides the spectre of regulation. It is illegal for one citizen to kill another or even endanger another. Similarly, it should be illegal for corporations to endanger thousands and wreck ecological destruction on a wide scale.
Taking TechCrunch and its pseudo journalists seriously is liking taking trolls seriously, MA is the biggest troll if there ever was one in blogosphere. He is good at creating drama, don't fuel his ego or take seriously whatever comes out of his blog.

His business model is to dramatize actual events to rile people up so that he can get pageviews.

Ignore trolls.
That quote is a misquote; the prose felt 'off' to me, and yep, grepping for 'dryad' brings up:

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.

Comma, Spring, colon, Ithilien, 'a'. I think the essay's author has a bit of a tin ear, from this. Tolkien had great prose style, particularly fine at description, as here -- here's a UChicago writing instructor in agreement, listing him among other "superlative writers of description": http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/courses/index.htm

[I've only glanced through the OP; this misquote just caught my attention.]
Setting off a massive explosion with the well at the center. Massive enough to move sufficient amount of material towards the well to essentially clamp it shut.

Of course, the oil would probably start leaking through the sand/rubble after a few days.

This could be trivially solved by applying nuclear explosives to weld everything shut, with the added benefit that local fishermen could stop to worry whether they'll have a job again soon. </sarcasm>
I would imagine just "putting a cylinder" over the leak would not contain it. To begin with, the floor of the ocean isn't a solid surface, there's a lot of mud which means the opening to the hole isn't "clean cut" - any kind of "well" uses an inner sleeve so that you can connect a pipe to the "hole". That's usually where the blowout preventers would go, I imagine, would be in the sleeve inside the hole. So, the opening to the well is probably pretty muddy and unstable.

When that well blew out it popped off the connecting pipe and began releasing thousands of barrels of oil at very high pressures. Even if the "hole" were clean cut and they could easily mount a fitting to it, the pressure alone would make it extremely difficult (try turning the garden faucet on high and then connecting a hose to it, possible, but rather difficult).

This is why blowout preventers exist, if a blowout happens the well is sealed from inside itself (as I understand it). I think it is ridiculous that mandatory blowout preventers never made it into law. Bright side of it is this incident will (or should) inspire reform.

I think everything they are doing is about as much as you can do at that depth with such high pressure.
That's kinda my point. The App Store isn't that great. It's the surrounding platform that makes it work.

I think, with some improvements, Apple could be moving way more apps with the App Store.
Totally off-topic, but I'm posting this here, since it's where most of my other posts were: I was being hugely inappropriate and venting my frustrations in an entirely idiotic manner. I apologize (sincerely) to everyone, and their good taste, that I offended.
Very impressive, I'm always impressed by people pushing the limits of what can be done. However, I did find that the extra CPU required to make this work is a little bit of a concern. Nonetheless, very well done!
Doesn't this preclude the manufacture of automobiles?
> I really am not sure how it's really any different than the iPhone experience...

A few opinions:

* The iPhone UI looks so much better than the Android one. Yes, users care about such details. It's all part of their overall experience.

* The responsiveness of the iPhone is unparalleled. This has an impact on the experience users have when they run apps.

* iPhone users can generally count on a certain level of quality from approved apps. Android users don't have the same luxury. As a result, Android users may feel less inclined to explore and install new commercial apps (if the risk of wasting money is greater). This issue may be partially resolved by their refund policy, but still, no one likes having to deal with refunds.

* The online Android Market only lists a few apps. Sure, you can browse all of them from your handset, but it's an annoying limitation. I can't even see the price of these top applications showcased online.

* People from many countries cannot purchase applications from the Android Market. Only developers from a handful of countries can publish applications on the Android Market. As a Canadian developer, I'm not able to. So much for the open device (yeah, I could sell them outside of the Android Market but that's a pretty huge disadvantage).
That isn't a bad idea at all. Since connecting a pipe is largely impossible because of the high pressure, maybe anchoring a larger flexible canopy over the well site to contain sub-sea plumes and funnel it to a couple of outputs would work...

It would be difficult to control the "canvas" underwater though because of current and other unknown variables.
Apple pulls ‘iSlam Muhammad’ app from App Store (with video)
but as it's inside a cylinder, the filler is just going to get pushed against the side of the cylinder

You lost me there. The cylinder is open at the top, right?

Ever try to push your finger into a garden hose?

I have no idea with how much pressure the oil is coming out there, but it's probably more than enough to push any gravel out of the way before it makes it into the cylinder.
It's a smart idea; but I think the failure point there is the pressure. My mech engineering is shaky but I suspect getting a turn to expand under that pressure is hard. Also the hinges sound like a possible weak point.
This is a good suggestion, thank you! Maybe the local chamber of commerce too...
If there is one thing that playing video games over the couple of decades has taught me it's that there is NOTHING that a well placed nuke cannot fix.

That is all.
It depends, he could have inadvertently got a lot of sales because of the promise, even though you can tell that wasn't the intention.
Lessons from the 'Flash Crash' of 1962
Acgourley,

I was trying something related to joysticks last week. I read about the HID protocol and some threads on their implementation. How do you make your custom-made device recogniziable as a Bluetooth HID device? Since you are working on something similar, any examples/docs on this please?

I've done the basic circuit for the buttons. Just been googling hard for bluetooth HID implementation examples or at the very least some decent doc about it.

P.S: Your idea is cool. Congrats! :) Why don't you also develop a game that uses the exercise bike as input? a racing game? :)
I guess it depends, if you use it all the time for work, then $50 is like an hour worth of work for years of benefit. I'm guessing there are particular promised 2.0 features you are after?
I think the problem is that they originally did do something like that (the pipe itself), but the pipe is thin and the oil flow was well contained. Under these conditions, the cylinder has to be much wider and therefore much heavier. Additionally, there will be turbulent flow that will mess with the stability of the conduit.

Maybe if there was a gradually thinning cone, you could get it back to laminar flow partway up.
Isn't tort reform and an ending to "frivolous" lawsuits one of the clarion calls of those same libertarians?
Well you could calculate the total damage of a spill and personally charge everybody from middle managed up for it. If that's not enough, go after the share holders, even grandma Millie.

But we can't do that, the whole point of LLPs and Incs. is to limit the investor's liability.

This is partly why we have agency risk.

This is why while I consider myself a libertarian, I still think we need competent and aggressive regulators in all the places where the market is not self-corrective.

But I'm not sure how we could avoid regulatory capture for ever.
This is a serious question that I've been wondering. You seem like you might know. The drill goes very deep below the sea floor into the earth to find the pocket of oil, right? Why can't they just collapse the hole they dug using explosives on the sea floor and allow it to close in on itself? Surely it is fragile if it's so deep/hard to drill..
HP Envy 14 Review
There is always the Russian solution - a nuclear bomb (I think they actually did this, and I think it was successful - hate to see what happened to the surrounding wildlife though)
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0504/russian-paper-suggests-nucl...
the pressure will be distributed across the diameter of the cylinder

Okay, I was skeptical about this thread when I first saw it, but now I see the awesome potential for teaching physics here.

You can't "diffuse the pressure". At every point along the wall of a sealed vessel, the pressure is constant. So if, e.g., the pressure of the hole when sealed would be 100 PSI, then to stop it every square inch of the seal needs to withstand that 100 PSI.

If the top of your concrete cylinder has, say, 100 times the area of the hole, then the flow of oil may end up evenly distributed over that area. But if you then try to seal the top you must now provide the same strength of seal -- it must withstand the same pressure -- over a much larger area, which is probably harder to accomplish.

This seems counterintuitive, just as the lever is counterintuitive. But we use this principle all the time to lift things like elevators and cars. You push on a tiny-diameter cylinder with your arms (or with a little electric motor), and it pumps fluid into a much larger-diameter cylinder under the car, and the car rises. Of course, you have to pump up and down dozens or hundreds of times to lift the car one inch.
Churn rate
Extending on the cylinder idea, how about a cone?

My naive thinking would be a cone with a large diameter and a relatively small hole at the top. Plug a hose (or rather a pipe) into that hole and suck off the oil into tankers faster than it would push out on the sides at the bottom of the cone.

This could surely not catch all of the stream, but perhaps a worthwhile percentage?
Russian paper suggests ‘nuclear explosion’ could cap gulf oil geyser
Not sure if anyone else saw this clip on the Rachel Maddow show, but it was interesting. Seems like the last time something this massive happened (in much shallower water), the same techniques were tried (and failed) and finally, relief wells were the solution - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHmhxpQEGPo
Defer to the experts.
The Hard Sell on Salt
As far as I know nuclear devices tend to create massive holes rather than welding. Perhaps it would be better to use our nuclear capacity for energy generation and our petroleum for explosives, rather than vice versa.

At least if they use the nuke method no one will care about the oil spill anymore whether it works or not.
This reminds me of some unintentional errors. Neil Gaiman recently noticed something on Wikipedia that he had made up in a novel being treated like fact.

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2010/05/one-book-one-twitter-o...
Too bad that drilling takes months.
No, but it does require the manufacturers to build in safety features.
When people have a problem they think "I know I'll use nuclear weapons", now they have two problems.
Seems like the hard part would be avoiding GC pauses. This is true in many other environments as well, of course. But in this case, it could be really hard to implement right; browsers have different JS implementations that perform differently. And using GWT as an abstraction in this case could make it harder to diagnose those problems.

Probably it would work if you generated absolutely NO garbage in your game's run loop. I don't know if that's easy or hard in Java, as I've never tried it.
I've thought about this quite a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that calling games art is like calling reality art.

The specific thing that distinguishes video games are game mechanics. And, self contained, game mechanics are basically the physics of the game's universe.

Are well implemented game mechanics art? No. Game mechanics need to be transparent, unless the game is trying to make a statement on game mechanics or something (Braid?).

Video games are a nexus of things that are art, but it just doesn't seem technically okay to call the game itself art.

The best thing video games have going for them is that they can be good for the imagination. The very best video games are exploratory (Myst, Shadow of the Colossus), where interaction is not inconsequential, and they use the medium to its fullest potential. However, this inspires a sort of vacant awe that really doesn't teach you more than "there are a lot of possibilities out there."

Video games are basically just low-density information relays. They're like those "Baby Einstein" videos for older people. Soothing to the brain, but strengthen the wrong facilities.

Like anything else, moderation is key. You need a healthy diet of books, music, movies, food, with a pinch of video games to top it off, to relax the mind from all that high density information.

(Note: I am an old school gamer. These new games really do confound me, and the only game I've purchased in years was the recent Rocket Knight.)
Why?

How many times has this attitude been proven pointless and ineffective? As I understand it one of the great things about "startup cultures" is the utilization of the outsider's prospective. Why can't that mentality be applied to this problem?
It seems that the citizenry of the United States, the carmakers, and the government have come to an agreement on the regulation of automobiles. In addition to safety regulation compliance before sale is allowed, most states have emissions standards and complex road laws.

Yes, automobiles have many negative externalities but they are distributed and stochastic. Arguably, it is actually the petrol that is directly responsible for these externalities as simply owning a car endangers no one and only has a sunk environmental cost.

In the case of automobiles, we have, as a society, agreed that this is a good trade-off. In the case of industrial accidents, we have, as a society, agreed that the scale of the potential failure should be matched with commensurate concern for safety.

BP clearly has difficulty controlling their risk and they should be held liable for that just as you or I would be held liable for causing an auto accident.
BitBucket is the Best Thing Ever too!
I'm sure they did run computer simulations. However, this is the first time they've had to physically stop the leak.
up voted you because the opportunity to learn more about this situation was one of the main reasons I asked this question
Making Abstract Data Types Abstract
I've been wondering that too, and the best answer I have is to look at the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixtoc_I_oil_spill

It spilled for 10 months! At that spill was 2 to 6 times worse in terms of barrels per day.

The only difference was that it took 2 months to reach the US coast, so we were a bit more prepared for it.

I have not yet read about the long term effects. But my quick skimming did not come up with anything major. (Just short term effects.)

And no, it won't run out anytime soon.
Suing is all fine and dandy. But no amount of money is going to fix the ocean.
fair to the engineers? If you want to drill at 5000 feet, then they should know exactly how to stop a leak at 5000 feet.

The statements from BP about this kill me. "we expect top kill to work with a 60% success rate... of course we have never done anything like this in 5000 feet so we're working in the dark". Wow. Confidence inspiring.
I would weld a flange around the outside of the pipe a bit below where it's broken. This shouldn't be a problem since there's no oil under pressure coming out there.

Then I would make a contraption consisting of three parts:

1) similar flange to the one on the ocean floor that can be bolted on to the one welded on the pipe

2) a cylinder welded on top of the flange

3) some sort of closing mechanism on top of the cylinder.

Get divers (or ROV's) down to attach the contraption to the pipe by bolting the two flanges together. This should be possible since the oil will just rise out of the cylinder, so the pressure of the oil shouldn't be a problem. When the contraption is secured activate the closing mechanism.

The only requirement here is that you can weld something onto the pipe below where the leak is. I don't know whether that's possible at that depth though.
They all copied slashdot and the idea of a purely voting/community driven site was discussed frequently on slashdot for years before digg or reddit. So there :)
I live near the Group Health on 15th and John, so when I would take the bus I'd take the 43 to Montlake and transfer to the 545. It usually took less time to just drive, even though it was far more stressful than taking the bus.

I left MS about a month after the commuter bus program started, and I thought it was awesome, but it still didn't compare to hopping on the 10 and getting off in Pioneer Square.
It's "only" ~5,000ft of water.
Yes, yes you are still talking about this. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just pointing out the irony that you're trying to put an end to the conversation by continuing it. Michael does these kinds of things because they get attention. Perhaps the best thing to do is just ignore him rather than giving him more attention?

(For what it's worth, I agree with you and my blog post would have been a lot meaner. :-) )
I wouldn't rule out controlled nuclear explosions until I found out whether the HUGE amount of oil leaking out every minute is more or less harmful to the environment than the would-be radiation.
Ask HN: Is there an ad network for video podcasts?
I am looking for high quality ad content (similar to the likes of Federated Media + The Deck), but pre-roll and post-roll ads.

Does something like that exist? If so, please point me in that direction.

If not, would anyone else be interested in this? Either as a video podcaster, or an advertiser?
It would pretty much have to be ROVs (or manned sub, I suppose). 5,000ft is _way_ deeper than you can SCUBA dive.
Ask HN: Strategy for distributing promotion codes
I spent a good chunk of today implementing promotion codes for my freemium web app and now that I've got it in place, I'm not sure what my distribution strategy should be.

A valid promotion code will remove any restrictions for a user, the same as paying for an account upgrade would do. My plan is to create promotion codes tailored to specific bloggers and email them with a short pitch and the promotion code, which they can distribute to their audience if they choose write about it. I'm not sure how many free account upgrades I should specify per promotion though. Too few, and I worry it'll be ineffective; too many, and I fear that no one will need to pay to upgrade, which is the ultimate goal.

Any suggestions?

PS. To show my thanks to HackerNews for its guidance, and to celebrate the introduction of promotion codes, I invite you to sign up for my web app, Preceden, a tool for making timelines, at http://www.preceden.com and upgrade for free with a promotion code of THANKSHN, which will let 5 people upgrade for free (maybe I should have made it 10...)
Why cap it? Better to put a turbine down there and start generating electricity from the all natural hydro-petro-electric source!