skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tesla is a cool project/company, but car companies have never historically been good investments. Massive competition from many established companies, $200M+ tooling costs to roll out a new car, low profit margins, high marketing costs, etc... Not the recipe for striking it rich long term, but he will surely make a handsome sum if he sells at the IPO.

But SpaceX, with their $1.6B contract from NASA and options for $3.6B, their successful maiden flight two weeks ago of their Falcon 9 rocket - http://www.spacex.com/F9-001.php, their newly inked $492M contract with private satellite company Iridium http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20100616 ... and they are just getting started. This could/probably will lay mega-fortune to Musk.

I too would leverage myself to the moon to keep that equity.
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I only said he didn't know "some of the basics". Also, this is neither a personal attack on irrelevant facets of him, nor is it just about TCO.

Python has done very well in its history and I personally like it. However, Guido made his final decision literally days after learning the distinction. This means before that any decisions he made in this area were based on shaky information. Furthermore, he was initially informed by comments on his blog, not his own research. I'm worried what this means for future decisions in Python if Guido doesn't research something on his own before making decisions on it. I understand that he's busy, but working of Python is part of that and surely research should be included :).
Carnegie Mellon does the same thing.
I agree, the web is a much more rich programming environment than BASIC ever was or will be. It's high level, quick to pick up, rewarding, and can be as simple or complex as you want to make it.

I reckon the code blogs have replaced the books and magazines, and I GUESS if you don't want to download a file or cut and paste you can type it in!
as if there aren't enough distractions on the road already.
If I really want/have to I can relatively easy change university. However, changing country is not that simple.

Every large corporation I've worked for had similar rules and regulations and I left each and every one of them because of it.
an unreasonable amount of wealth given she didn't create it in the first place.

You're making a lot of really, really vile and baseless accusations in your post.

A great personal relationship can help somebody soar to higher professional heights, and a lousy one can do the opposite. Given that you're not Elon or the wife, you're in no position to comment on the value of her efforts, conversations and actions. You really don't know what she brought to the table.

Just because she didn't have a CxO title doesn't mean she didn't help create value.

simply for marrying well.

A wife is not just a decoration. A great wife can help you be a better person in a multitude of ways, and can help breed success. The idea that the only thing she did was marry him... it's vile and repulsive.

You have no idea what you're on about.

I hope you find somebody who helps you breed success someday. It's clear that as it stands, you've never had a truly worthwhile personal relationship.
A Linux workstation is a programming utopia so far beyond what I imagined when I was a teen.

I loved BASIC on the C64 too, but later on, I was looking at spending $350 to buy a C compiler for my Amiga back in 1991. I learned what I could of AmigaShell, ARexx, and AmigaVision, but it was a bit limited. These days, you can be writing C, C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, PHP, Flash/ActionScript and so on for free.

In Linux or MacOS, most of these are preinstalled. As far as I know, Windows comes with no programming tools installed, other than a browser, and that is indeed a major oversight.
Any particular topics you'd like to see?
make a thing of $1 of profit that 1 million people want

make a $1 million of profit selling a thing that 1 person wants
Man this is such an ugly situation to otherwise successful and (seemingly) nice people. Almost scares you to never get married or have children. Actually not only this case, whenever I see high profile divorce cases, I get baffled at divorced couple fighting over millions of dollars, when they are already millions of dollars rich and will maintain a comfortable life for the rest of their life with their current wealth.

I guess I make the assumption that rich people are rational, or maybe they are rich because they are not (always) rational when it comes to money?

I like to think that Elon Musk is not in it for the money, and it seems like so from his actions. He seem to take money from one success story so that he can invest in his dream goals of making the world a better place. Money is just a by product of his actions.

On the other hand, reading some of his wife blog post gives me the impression that she seems like an OK person and not generally spiteful or vindictive.

Utterly confused and scared of getting married.
Look into SOMA warehouse spaces. They can be hard to get into but are the best options for sub $700/room rents.
Just upgraded my wife's 3G, and it feels great, but then I'm used to my original day 1 iPhone, so not really sure, but ios 4 on the 3G feels plenty fast to me.
Well hopefully I didn't do anything wrong that's too embarassing: http://github.com/jjg/DashApp
This doesn't make sense to me. It's not the behavior of the credit card company that's a problem here. It's the behavior of the merchant. He's quoting the same price to people who pay with cash and people who pay with credit, even though he makes more money on the people who pay with cash.

Why is he doing that? He should be offering them a discount or something. Heck, why is he absorbing the transaction fees and folding them into prices in the first place? Doesn't that just make his prices look bad? Shouldn't he pass the fees on transparently?

That's all that would be needed for competition. Not regulation. The people doing the paying just need to see the price.
Checking into Internet rehab - and sneaking out
FYI the Node.js IRC channel is logged.

http://nodejs.debuggable.com/2010-06-21.txt
Your post doesn't have anything to do with my claim, which is that despite it being a certified Unix, it doesn't change the fact that many FOSS apps are difficult to get up and running. Same thing with HP-UX or AIX.
First, thank you for your thoughtful and detailed reply.

> Note that I'm saying nothing about whether or not patients can choose physicians intelligently

I don't think I communicated very well... I was referring almost exclusively to this. Even this might be too specific... picking a good "provider" (e.g., a "brand", one level above a physician) might be the best an individual could do (since evaluating an individual physician might be too difficult).

It's all academic, really. Since the government pays for medical services directly (via Medicare and Medicaid) it's a given that the government has to pay for a huge organization to vet the individuals and groups its reimbursing. This means there's not as much of a "hole" for the private market to fill...
Sort of off-topic: I changed my Rxvt font in .Xresources from Envy Code R to Inconsolata to try it out, and the colors in my terminal got darker. Changing the font back to Envy Code R makes them bright again. (I use a dark background and normally the bright flavors of green, cyan, blue, etc.).

Why would changing the font affect the brightness of the colors in the terminal?
Safari really couldn't exist in the app store, considering that many third-party apps have links that open a page in Safari and thus it needs to be always installed. I take it this is sarcasm?
Colocated? If not, what is the provider? $80 a month for that seems quite cheap.
"Long-running" does not always imply "I/O".
Programmer Puzzlers
Who cares that you boot up to BASIC. Kids can now make a website and share it with THE PLANET.

However, if anything is hurting the desire to code it is not modern OS but the move of the gaming industry toward consoles. With PC games kids can get in to games they love and with actual code extend them and again, share them with the planet. They won't be doing this if they're spending their day playing XBOX games instead of PC games.
I share your confusion, but I think someone should have a rough idea of how an elevator works even after a few uses.

That said..

I would have expected such a person to have ridden elevators hundreds of times.

If she didn't travel much internationally, it's very easy to avoid or not come across elevators in the United Kingdom especially outside of London. I use an elevator perhaps a couple of times a month, nearly always in multistory car parks (which women, in particular, are often not keen to use in the UK, thanks to scare stories back in the 80s).
Hard to believe that you and your wife consume in a year what I would consume in 7 years if I stuck to my current standard of living :)
Ask HN: HN redesign?
I dont like the way HN is designed. It's very hard to see the stories, I usually skip a few threads or so per page, it's very hard to focus on each. The upvote/downvote are too close and sometimes I'll accidental downvote a comment/thread while trying to upvote it! =/

Your thoughts on HN's design? I was playing with HN's design in Photoshop and I think there are a number of ways it could be improved. Am I the only one bitching about the design?
I don't think the answer is to make a Mars mission more political, but to put it more in the hands of entrepreneurs like Elon Musk.

If you make it largely a private exercise, you could have more countries involved while avoiding some or most of the political overhead (eg Chinese engineers as opposed to the Chinese national space program).

Also, if the cost (and the perceived cost) could be lowered, I don't think there would be much popular resistance.

I agree with Buzz that we should germinate Mars as a genetic failsafe. I'm sure there are many possible planet-killing events whose effects would pass in time (giant asteroid for one) allowing the Earth to be repopulated.
Linking Node.js
It's questionable whether she had no role in creating the money he made while they were married; marriage is usually a bit of a partnership, with a lot of mutual support. You can allege that he would've been just as successful if he hadn't been married during that period, but that's a hard counterfactual to prove, and depends essentially on arguing that his marriage, having kids, etc. provided no support at all that in any way contributed to his success during that period. And if you're going to indulge in those kinds of counterfactuals, then maybe he doesn't deserve his money either, because hey, maybe if he wasn't at PayPal, someone else would've done just a good a job, so he only got his money by essentially having the luck to be "married" to PayPal?

That's one reason that legally, money made while married is assumed to be evenly split, absent a separate agreement. I don't have any particular insight into his situation, but if, say, my parents had gotten divorced when I was a kid, I would've considered it fair if they split the money evenly, even though my dad officially made all of it.

Plus, if you put it the other way, he's keeping 90-95% of their shared wealth, over a billion dollars, and yet is unhappy with that, because he wants more? It doesn't sound like it has anything to do with control over his companies, either; the amount of stock she's asking for wouldn't affect controlling stakes at all. Seems like it's purely the money: either it's just greed (he has a ton, but wants even more), or some variety of spite (he doesn't care about the money, but doesn't want his ex-wife to get it).
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When working in hotels, I use to request an elevator going down with passengers, jump inside, perform a manual reset and force everyone to ride up with me.

Ah, this is a system I can get behind! I get to go where I like and screw everyone else - the perfect interface. (I'm not even being sarcastic, I have an evil streak like that ;-))
I appreciate your elaboration... it really has me stumped. I understand the extreme difficulty of objective evaluations of individual performance in highly technical professional fields. But to the extent this problem is intractable, I'm not sure how adding government makes it tractable. Maybe I'm coming at it from the wrong angle?
I recommend doing something manual, e.g. carpentry or paving. I find it's a great contrast to working in front of a computer. Actually building something tangible is a good feeling. For example, I plan on rebuilding a bicycle wheel this weekend - very relaxing.
I can't help but think that it is advantageous for a general population to have government regulate currencies, be they physical objects, promissory notes, or digital representations.

If you follow the history of currency from a piece of gold of unknown purity, to gold coins produced by governments, to the establishment of central banks, to outlawing privately issued banknotes, to fiat currencies...

...you'll notice that all of these are created to keep up with the demands of a technologically driven advancement in the state of economic affairs.

If I showed up to your store with a lump of gold for trade, we would have to go find someone we both trusted to figure out how pure it was. That takes time and money. That inhibits commerce from taking place.

Having the government get involved and eventually come to manage the digital exchange of currency would be no different than these analogous historical transitions.

It doesn't make sense to completely rely on private companies for a type of economic transaction that has already become the dominant way that value is exchanged. Especially when those private companies require the full backing of nation-states and their currencies to even have any sort of business model to begin with. Why else would Visa and MasterCard have not yet created their own currencies?

You can't have a free market if you don't have a viable marketplace to begin with.
Secure your PC or lose the net
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The credit-card company's agreements bar merchants from offering those sort of discounts:

http://www.datawedge.com/news/newsletters/june07.htm

This is why government action seems reasonable in this case. You can make the argument that we shouldn't have ended up with an effective duopoly, that regulation should be lighter to allow more competition that would drive out this sort of 'rent-seeking' behavior, and I'd be sympathetic. Unfortunately I don't think that sort of wider overhaul is politically possible, and even patching up the existing regulations with yet more seems better than doing nothing.
Only once for an app if you said Yes, until you turn it off.
I moved out here for college with virtually nothing. If you're worried about the price of rent, you could consider living outside of the city.

signature:http://watch-life-unexpected-episodes-online.download-tvshow...
The Flash Web Server
That's not what the article said.
I agree that the design of HN should be improved. I think since a long time. But why didn't I created this Ask-HN-Thread? Well, I think when I make such a request, I should have some screenshots attached of my "playing in photoshop", or that I should use the RSS Stream to code a realtime example myself, or at least I should look around for pages that have a solution that I like. You know? Something to see, because design is for the eyes.

But I can also tell you that I am just too lazy for that. Why? It works. Yes, HN doesn't have the best look it could have, but it has a design that works. To move my own ass, I need something worse.
I think a much more profitable goal would be to begin identifying and harvesting of valuable asteroids in our solar system.
I couldn't help noticing that ThinkGeek's address is just a few doors down from NRA headquarters. ("Waples Mill Rd" is a strange enough name to stick in my mind.) Must be an amusing area.
Very much so. Glad to be heading back home (from Australia) in 2 weeks.

Porn is a very serious issue out here. In addition, I cannot stand paying for bandwith (switching from "unlimited" internet to pay for what you use has been an issue).
A counter-quote:

"A little learning is not a dangerous thing to one who does
not mistake it for a great deal." -- William A White
Wow. I never thought about it. The UI is wrong. You need to tell the elevator where you want to go. The elevator needs to tell you when to get on and off and maybe how long you have to wait. That is all.

The list of floors should be on the outside. Selecting the floor should act as the call. A display beside the button should count down until the elevator going to that floor arrives. (And in multi-person, multi-elevator situations, perhaps a color or number should tell you which door it will be).

The existing UI expects you to understand the elevator algorithm in order to operate it. That's wrong. It's unnecessary mental work for the users and locks you into one algorithm. What if you want to optimally handle this case?

7:
6:
5: Guy going to floor 4
4:
3:
2: Guy going to floor 7
1: Elevator
Here is a recent HN discussion of the same article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1448424
There are optimizations in most modern group dispatch systems to attempt optimal traffic routing and predictive placement of idle elevators. The fancy stuff OTIS has played with gets into AI, but the simple algorithms work nearly as well.

It's the unpredictability of the system (people holding doors, elevators going out of service, faulty mechanical switches, etc) that makes the algorithm design fun.

Feel free to ask me anything. I used to design elevator group dispatch systems as a side job in college.
> it is an immoral nihilistic society of "uncultured" pleasure seeking barbarians (rich too ;-)) .

You're saying its not? Well, the barbarian part is hyperbole but the rest rings true.
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The one in Oxford was brilliant to ride. To the hacker mind it's a great optimization.

And yes, I did ignore the warning signs and make the trip around the bottom.
My understanding is that credit card companies often have terms that forbid the companies that use the from charging differently for customers using cards than customers using cash.
Let me start off with saying nobody gets a "crore" in dowry using a US Visa stamp, Almost all software engineers can get a stamp if they want them.

Almost all major software companies (Microsoft, Google, Oracle, VMware, ..) have big development centers in India where many people have been spending there careers coding. The problem lies with people who get into outsourcing companies thinking what they are doing is "software development", while most of it is really manual testing or basic support work.

Way to sensationalize a blog post!
> In fact, the reading experience on the iPad is so superior to that of the Kindle I often find myself staying up later than usual reading a book.

Been there, done that w/ my Kindle.

Computers => ~2am sleep time

Kindle + good book => ~8am sleep time

^ perhaps you can detect why I have limited my reading recently
"There is software available, which could be on end-user machines, that would allow my ISP, as I log in, to check that I have my firewall turned on, that I have an antivirus that [it] approves or recommends installed on my computer, and that my operating system and browser are patched. And if those things aren't met, then [my ISP would not] give me [access],"

How are you supposed to patch your machine without an internet connection?

The only percieved plus I can see in this is that it will destroy IE6 once and for all!
"In emergencies, the plates could be used to broadcast Amber Alerts"

Classic...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_children_%28reasoning%2...
Oh god facepalm
Serious question: shouldn't the owner of the vehicle be allowed to receive a share of the profits?

At the end of the day, the liability associated with these "ads" falls on whom: the state or vehicle's owner?

Mind you, I think this is the most retarded idea ever.
Gruber writes that it'll be "un-iPhone-like" to hide unwanted system apps from the home screen through the Settings app.

You can show/hide the bundled Nike + iPod app through Settings app. And it's not even new in iOS 4. "Un-iPhone-like" indeed.
> extremely unusual for a person to not follow an extremely rigid career track

This is due to a herd mentality and blinkered vision. Not the caste system.
If we can harvest asteroids we can also weaponize them

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/10/nuclear-weapon-issues-are-i...
David Foster Wallace's commencement address. Kenyon College (2005)
Reading the title, I thought they might be doing something smart, perhaps using RFID tags or something similar to cut down on plate manufacturing costs and to make the registration renewal process more streamlined.

Nope, it turns out they're just trying to commoditize plate real estate. For a state that makes it a illegal to have a cell phone against your ear while driving, I don't see this passing. Then again, they are $19 billion in debt.
Banning the word 'difficult'
There are actually two different questions about competence:

Competence compared to some objective standard, basically "Can I do that?", which I think often can be answered realistically (at least where "that" is specific enough).

Competence compared to others, or how do my abilities rank compared to others, which may not really be answerable, except very generally and vaguely.

The big problem comes in trying to generalize from specific competencies to "general competence".
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis
what about a web app/DKIM breaker for this:
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/06/facebooks-dkim-rsa-key-should-be...
we can add EC2 instances as needed :)
I'd love it if the first man on Mars was accomplished by a private venture. Either commercial or contest-driven.
I don't have a better response than saying BullSH!T.

Ask your friend to peek out and look at the city dwellers, there's no set age for one to get married though parents are heavily involved in the process, there's social pressure and most people get married in their 20's.

Ofcourse these are the norms, within the handful of people I know the exception rate would be 20-30% which is high enough not to take all the social structure/expectation stuff too seriously
Python. Sure, it's not meant to be a "learning language", however, one can simply ignore the "hard" stuff (e.g. classes, separate modules), and focus on the easy stuff (e.g. the fact that it is executable pseudocode)
Um, this is exactly the right place.
Expecting a dowry is indicative of an atavistic belief system. Doesn't usually go well with an ability to work or perform in a modern environment.
I think it's a silly/unnecessary joke also.

But overreacting to it is even worse. What if this guy's career or at least his public perception gets derailed by a dirt-seeking public in some stupid scandal. What a tragic, horrible loss that would be to the rest of us.

This man needs to be given a clear road ahead to keep innovating. We need more of people like him, people who not only have lofty, humane goals but have the will to make them a reality.

If this guy wants to swim in pools of LSD on the weekends who cares? It's no one's business but his own.

What about Feynman and pot? My Mom has never smoked pot, she didn't come up with quantum electrodynamics either.
Ah, but if you had all those buttons, which would you push? Where you are, or where you're going? The same logic which causes some people to push down to go up would cause some people to push the floor they're on, because they want the elevator to come to them.

I, personally, would love to have that sort of display. But the added cost of the buttons & lights & damages / abuses probably wouldn't be worth it. (anyone, anywhere, can cause the elevator to visit every floor. It's almost as bad as putting control of the elevator onto a public website)