skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Or how about this one: "He’s not a savant or an obvious genius — he’s someone of mortal abilities who seems to be working immortally hard."

Fantastic. Hard work is probably the biggest difference at the margin.
I would suggest anybody interested in this sphere watch "The Constant Gadener" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387131/). Pharma companies are usually right up there with oil companies when it comes to exploiting the third world.
One scoop per cup is the golden rule. ;)
The argument that Apple has a much rosier future than RIM cannot possibly be distilled to “Apple has better marketing.” They do… but their phone also don’t make you want to tear your eyes out. (I am not under the impression that our author thinks it’s all marketing, but Business Insider sees it more or less that way.)
Java: write one, run away.
Real-time #QRcode tweets
I'm still not sure why they're surprising pople with packages instead of sending out a warning email.
wikihow
Weighting our benchmark functions using profile data (as discussed in the conclusion of the blog post) should address this problem, at least partially.
why three personal items?

Also, more info would be nice.
Agreed - and I'd be the first to admit that I personally took getting competent too far (and that in itself starts getting less social, since it's hours of practice each week with just one partner).

However, the basic initial win for the OP is to get out of the house, and have a blast learning something with a bunch of other people. The aim doesn't have to be to get good - it's a major step just to turn up. I was just trying to suggest that every beginner will be in much the same boat. IMHO, learning to dance is a much easier social activity than 'going to parties', for instance.
http://www.wikihow.com
I think he should have included "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fun fact : for years Richard Branson lived on, and conducted business from, a canal boat moored in Maida Vale in the middle of London. I'm not sure if it ever moved or was permanently moored.
My thoughts exactly. I wonder if that's something that can be taught, though, or at least encouraged/nurtured. How did we, as entrepreneurs, get to be this way?
One heading to my zip code, population ~45k, so my odds are probably better than 1:1000, particularly if signing up earlier helps your chances.
Oil will gradually rise in price until it becomes more expensive than readily-available alternatives (solar, electric, more fuel-efficient, etc.) At that point, everyone will switch to the alternatives, demand for oil will sink (leaving its price at an oscillating plateau), the sudden cost-effectiveness of technologies like solar and better batteries will result in greater investment in them, and we'll switch to a new declining cost-curve as greater R&D pays off in better energy technologies. Eventually we'll be paying less for our solar energy than we're paying for gas now, and will wonder how people in the early 21st century ever got around.

It's started happening already - the oil price spikes of 2007 were a harbinger of things to come, and they led to a widespread consumer shift from SUVs to hybrid, and the development of things like Tesla Motors.
parody of what?
Any idea what the source of Addicted-Gamer's data is?
Bah.

Just from I'm from Canada they think I'm slow, eh.
My assumption is that they will suggest to you other possessions that you might want to buy, based on the three favorites you provide.
Remember how everyone likes to note that Apple is never afraid to obsolete itself? Killing OS 9 to start completely new in OS X… Aggressively and constantly re-imagining the iPod… Replacing the iPod (effectively) with a completely new touch-based system (iOS)… beginning the revolution from PCs to iPad-style devices (they are selling as many iPads as they are computers, now).

When has Blackberry ever really dared to cannibalize itself?
I think the section at the end about the author buying his wife a Torch (and his problems with its usability) are a strong indicator of your second point.
The MDM APIs are not public (at least, not to my extensive searching).
1 to my zip - 3 to my city.
Unfortunately that city is Santa Clara, CA so I am sure I am not the only one who requested one.

Hopefully I'll find out early next week.
Do you have any data to support this? That seems somewhat right to me, but i'm reluctant to trust a random declaration like that.
Inside job is a bit sensationalistic.

That said, you can probably learn a decent amount by reading a book called "Hedgehogging.". It goes into some of the cultural aspects of finance.

Just keep in mind that "trading" is all about having a better eye for value than the other guy. In every respect. If you're bad, you'll get fleeced. And by you, I mean everyone who has placed money with you.
It's basically so you have a profile started when we launch. We're planning on users adding a whole inventory of their things via iPhone barcode scanner, ISBN, search, etc.

From that inventory, we calculate interests in other items. From aggregate user input, we suggest interesting things to do with things you have, things you might want, etc.

I'm still learning how Bayesian networks work, and we might decide on another algorithm entirely, but we'll see how it goes :)

Thanks for your suggestion. We're building an FAQ out of questions like the one you just asked! Is there anything I could explain better?
I thought about that too, but I speculate that the clean versions from Siemens wouldn't come from the factory ready to run an Iranian nuke plant -- you'd think that code would all be developed by the engineers who run the plant. All of that code would have to be recompiled from source too, as Stuxnet attaches itself to the PLC binaries.

Of course this is all wild speculation.
Isn't this what Quora is for?
Me too, may the best man win.
Sorry, I misread the OP's comment. I was wondering why restaurants with $200 bills would worry about a $1 charge. Thx for the correction.
In general society, the concept of "peak oil" is a given. People involved in oil/energy generally believe it's a myth.

I personally believe they have too much of a horse in the race to accept that oil is not limitless, but to this point they have been proven right that new sources of oil will crop up.

In asking a question like this, I think it's worth considering the possibility that "peak oil" is little more than a myth, even if us tech people don't buy into the concept.
Something I realized while watching the choreography of Dawn Dippel and Revolve dance company last night: The hallmark of good design/composition is that everything is a unified, coherent whole. If your thing is composed of multiple elements, those elements add up to a unified, coherent whole. If you decompose those to their elements and look at just one piece, that piece by itself should also be a unified, coherent whole.

You can see this in good choreography. You can hear this in well composed music. You can see this in well designed software. The thing makes sense as a whole. The pieces make sense of themselves.

Why this is so is also easy to see. It comes from the way the human mind organizes information. We "chunk" information at varying levels of detail and granularity. If your application makes sense, it needs to make sense at varying levels of detail and granularity as well.
Stimulus can't hit the broad(band) side of a barn
It is funny that for such a strong industry, the proponents for an increase in the nation's technical infrastructure are so quiet compared to the proponents for "green" tech.
So if I'm not on this list, is there still a chance that I'll receive one in a future shipment? (If there are even any future shipments)
I can't be exactly sure, but it should be querying the UPS tracking API for reference numbers. These are assigned by the shipper (can be a description, customer name, or in this case sequential SKU blocks of 2000) so knowing the pattern would get you all of them.

Jey's guess (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1996388) would be mostly correct.
Good assumption, but we're doing more with it than that. There's also an "activities as recipes of items" aspect we're working on.

We don't want to just push more crap from amazon on users. We want to help users become aware of activities they could be doing with the things they own as well.

"789 users that own a MacBook and a DSL camera are doing photography. Maybe you'd like to try it"
"Kick to restart"
"Hi, where can I buy just enough rope to hang myself"?

For some things, simple instructions are fine - the coffee example being one of them. Once you get into complex or dangerous things (home improvement, etc.) you need to impart some safety and theory before just giving instructions.

There's a reason that they make undergrads go through the "Lab Safety" course before doing work in a science lab...
It was a random sample of the batch.
Oil prices seem to be quick to spike, so I would expect it to behave more like a step function than something more continuous. It seems certain price levels have to be hit to sufficiently dampen demand. If the spike is bad enough you get recession (or depression) which kills demand, and if it isn't big enough the initial investment of alternatives is too high.

Also, if Saudi Arabia or wherever "run out of oil" I'd expect political instability to result there, but also, it not to matter as much. Before running out there, I'd expect it to matter more.

I look forward to some facets of our crazy lifestyles changing (less exurbs and McMansions) but it'll definitely crimp GDP somewhat, more or less depending on the derivative.
It's generated a ton of hype and interest. I suspect that's one of the main reasons.
None to my zip code though 8 total to Staten Island NY :(
Applications end on the 17th, don't be discouraged.
Not on the list, but I hope I get one in a later shipment.

I'd love to try it out, but judging from reviews so far I'm not so sure I'll actually be able to develop on this thing.
You can't customize the "system image", but you can certainly write an application that removes the official App Store and only allows installation from the custom "store".
It's not open, but eHow.com is pretty much a general FAQ for the web.
I actually expect it'll look like a sawtooth wave, trending upwards. Oil has very high inelasticity in both demand and supply, so small supply changes have large effects on price. Changes in demand happen over much longer timescales (i.e. people's car-buying purchase cycles), so it takes longer for prices to go down.

The OP asked for the effects of peak oil specifically though, not for actual oil prices. In the short term, oil supply is ruled by geopolitical concerns. We bomb Iraq, the price goes up. Putin decides to flood the market with cheap oil, the price goes down. Chavez starts saber-rattling, the price goes up. World enters recession, the price goes down.

The Hubbert curve is what's left when you subtract out all the random political noise. And that slopes gradually down. So if we're limiting ourselves to the effects of Peak Oil only, the trendline for price is going to move slowly, even if the price in any given month gyrates wildly.
You could be right but if that's the case I think it's a mistake. I can get why Google would want a certain type of person to test these things but the problem with an application process is it makes the whole thing a question of worthiness.

"Are you deemed worthy of a CR-48 by Google?" (This is not an official Google quote I'm just laying out the sentiment)

And the problem with that is...some people won't be. So when you look at using the package arrivals for hype you have to realize you're rubbing it in the nose of everyone who didn't get one (and the ones who did are already happy with you so they're already hyped up).

I suppose there's a third group that wasn't interested enough to even apply but I can't imagine those people being moved by a bunch of "my CR-48 arrived" stories.
Zero to my part of SoMA in SF? Highly dubious, even if this is just one batch.
I think AWStats has a a list of "bot" useragents regexs. I'd probably start there.

That said, I know my sites get many thousands of hits from rogue comment spam and email harvesting bots with forged user agents.
Umm....

My sister is an exploration geologist for one of the major oil companies. Within the industry, peak oil is very widely recognized, and the general consensus is that it will happen within the next 10 years, and probably already happened a few years ago.

The myth is that we're all going to be doomed because of peak oil, they'll be widespread societal chaos, and it'll lead to the death of Big Oil. At least over the near term (~next 40 years or so), peak oil generally means more profits for the oil companies, as they control an increasingly scarce resource. Over the long term, they are potentially screwed, but good luck finding a CEO who cares what will happen in 50 years, so their efforts to finding a solution have been rather halfhearted...
Too bad it makes my MBP lag to death.
Zip code search would be so awesome right now.
Hackers need to understand that nobody cares about their attachment to this word. The English language has moved on.
There's one going to my zipcode that just shipped. I've had a slight anticipation everytime I get home in the past few days, wondering if there is going to be a package there, and that just made it worse, but here's to hoping!
How the New York Times comment system works
I played around with the reference numbers, and it seems like Google sent out 3 batches:

AAC1XXXXXX (up to AAC1001982)

AAC2XXXXXX (up to AAC2002127)

AAC3XXXXXX (up to AAC3002115)

All of these turn up 6 pound packages sent within the past few days, with the earliest being the 9th.
This whole affair feels like a cyberpunk action thriller. It's a bit spooky that it's real.
I feel that actual "hackers" need to realize that a new name is necessary if they want to disassociate themselves from this depiction. It's like the "begs the question" people (http://begthequestion.info/) -- it's simply unfeasible to change such a commonly (if unintentionally) misused interpretation.

Edit: Feel free to downvote me, but please let me know why: I'm still new here, and I was trying to be constructive.
can more or less be trusted, but only because it's never been rooted

Actually, I'd assume that there are a few Blackberries are rooted and have rootkits on them. That's just too useful to not exploit. Someone doing industrial espionage or law enforcement has probably already done this.
I have to say, Im really waiting for that laptop to be useful. At the moment is a tiny step up in performance from my shitty non-ssd ubuntu netbook.
I am salivating maniacally since the shipping leaks.
Only one shipping for my town...
and I am the only one that It could be, or so I think...
I hope and pray that I am the one they chose.
If only I could find out the exact address and not just the Town name!
I used Kindle's 3G/EDGE network globally.
Their lock on the market is less than 100 percent.

http://tinyurl.com/22pu34p
Survivor Entrepreneurs
Yep, as a thing gets scarcer, its price goes up and people begin to re-evaluate its use. Gold is a lot scarcer than oil and we are in no danger of running out.

But I don't think the oil price spikes of 2007 were a harbinger of this. The supply of oil is relatively stable compared to demand.

Demand is affected by all kinds of things. Since prices of many other commodities spiked at the same time, the dollar had declined, gold had tripled, its far more likely that the Fed's cheap money overheated demand. And China's building boom probably had a lot to do with it too.
I received mine, but my zipcode is not on this list. Is this list for a different batch than the one mine arrived in? Mine was delivered early Friday morning (GMT-5).
Maybe they should get a different name for this; I thought it was an open source implementation of Common Lisp.
"good luck finding a CEO who cares what will happen in 50 years"

Assuming you mean that as some sort of slam against CEOs: Project that slam backwards. If a CEO in 1950 had "cared" about 2000, would that have improved his decisions? 50 years really is too far away to plan, and the gulf between 2000 and 2050 will probably make 1950 to 2000 look smallish.

I'm not a huge fan of "next quarter, the world ends" thinking, but expecting 50 Year Plans is not the solution. (Even 5 Year Plans have a certain... reputation.)
I figure there must be a lot of oil in the Pacific...
One interesting point here. This seems to use the UPS API so I assume they're using info from tracking information of people who already received one. But the question is Did Google ship all the CR-48s via UPS?

Where I work we send out gift baskets to select VIP donors to goose donations over the holidays and even we pay a service that determines the cheapest shipping carrier for the donors location. I'd imagine a company as big as Google would use a similar service (especially since they obviously didn't order in bulk as some are ground and some are overnight)
At least (AFAICT) it's just for people who signed up. Probably saves a few "suspicious package" reports.
Can’t believe no one has posted a comment like this yet, but: How on earth does this work? Where is it pulling data from?
Here is a mini doc on the 10 Principles by Coolhunting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz8m9VMYRpM
That's certainly possible, although I don't understand why they would take that approach. The PLCs themselves should be relatively standardized, and any specific software that was created in house should be in an offline backup somewhere. Clearly, they didn't follow best practices, but it shouldn't take a year to start from scratch, assuming you had the basics on file.
I think you're reading way to much into it. It's free. Nothing more, nothing less. People get excited at the thought of free stuff, especially something like a laptop. If someone is so emotionally unstable that they feel socially rejected because a complete stranger got picked for a beta test instead of them, they have bigger issues going on -- it's not because an application process exists.
Despite the prerequisite of caring about the web on this site, I wish someone had explained what the Hell any of this meant.

-I didn't know what a "Cr-48" (note the lowercase "r") was.
It's apparently the Chrome netbook Google is putting out.

And it seems they're giving away 5,000 for free to random addresses? This should be a news story, not a guessing game.
I don't mean it as a slam on CEOs. I mean it exactly as you do: that it is in no decision-maker's rational interest to project plans out to 50 years, and so anyone you can find that's made it to the CEO office simply...won't.

This occasionally means that humans make rather regrettable choices that could totally have been avoided in hindsight, but I don't see a way to fix that without them making other regrettable choices that could only be seen in hindsight. I think it's fairly obvious that there will be a problem with the oil industry in 50 years; however, I have no idea what a possible solution to that problem will be, and I doubt anyone could until a few years have gone by.
UPS' API delivers this kind of information and I assume they got the address from someone who already received one and then queried for packages from that address.
I am writing from my "other" account and I make a living in financial modeling.

While in general the article is true, as always, journalists fudge truth just a bit to sound more sensationalistic.

> But Mr. Singer wonders if his company, Robison Oil, should be getting a better deal. He uses derivatives like swaps and options to create his fixed plans. But he has no idea how much lower his prices — and his customers’ prices — could be, he says, because banks don’t disclose fees associated with the derivatives.

Sure there are fees, but most of the premium is the price of risk, the price of the insurance if you will. While banks sometimes do some proprietary pricing enhancements, the foundation methods are usually the same and can be picked from books (like the bible of derivative pricing by John C. Hull) and papers. I know for a fact that big commodity companies (e.g. oil companies) have their own financial analysts on staff to double check derivative pricing. And it is not just that this allows you to haggle with the banks - you do no want to get derivatives that are too cheap either. That may be a result of incompetence or a sign of trouble - should the derivative seller pay to you they will not have enough capital to cover their obligations. That is exactly what happened with AIG and Lehman Brothers.

Now, Robison Oil may not be that big to have financial analysts on staff, but they could use third-party pricing consultants, at least.
It's querying the UPS tracking API for reference numbers. These are assigned by the shipper (can be a description, customer name, or in this case sequential SKU blocks of 2000) so knowing the pattern would get you all of them.

I played around with the reference numbers, and it seems like Google sent out 3 batches:

AAC1XXXXXX (up to AAC1001982)

AAC2XXXXXX (up to AAC2002127)

AAC3XXXXXX (up to AAC3002115)

All of these turn up 6 pound packages sent within the past few days, with the earliest being the 9th.
I can't recommend pivotal tracker enough. It's not a full featured bug/issue tracker like JIRA, but I think that's what I love about it (I also only really use it for projects with up to about 4/5 people on them). The interface is super easy to learn, but works very well for both bugs and features. You do have to prescribe to an agile style development cycle to get the most out of it, but alternatively, you could just leave everything in the icebox.
Using the name of a capital city as shorthand for a central government is very common and accepted
I submitted this same question to HN a little less than a year ago when we started working on what would eventually become Crowdbooster. Here's a link to it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1190516

We ended up going with Unfuddle, which we still use, and it's nice to be able to close out tickets in your Git commit messages, but we don't really use the rest of the software much. Honestly, just having quick meetings and going down a list on a whiteboard has been the most effective thing.
Batman's ability to defeat stronger opponents is predicated upon his superior logical faculties, as we've already established. He's the Sherlock Holmes of Kickin' Ass. That said, he cannot hope to outmatch Spock in that regard, and, even should hand-to-hand combat be a factor, he would still lose on account of the Vulcan's clear advantages in strength and reflex.
The Biology of Sloppy Code
Applications actually end on the 21st at 11:59:59PM PST.
I interned for Eyebeam - it's an awesome place and can highly recommend it.
Is it sad that my heart jumped a little when I saw that one had shipped to my where I live. Unfortunately it has already been delivered and I definitely didn't receive one!
Commenters so far are talking about oil as a fuel.

Petroleum is spread throughout our lives. Agriculture is driven by it (fertilizers). We use it to make plastics.

Moving our economy from oil looks to be a major undertaking.

Read this book by a petroleum geologist for a sobering view: http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Oil-View-Hubberts-Peak/dp/produ.... He is most convincing about why we won't find more oil, less so about economics (because he's not an economist, presumably).
how do you know they are sending one to your town??
http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?issue=65&id=2

Ctrl-F: "Hacking boxes"