skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For an article about biofuels, you can check out "Growing energy" and "Bringing biofuels to the pump" by the Natural Resources Defense Council, http://www.nrdc.org/air/energy/biofuels/contents.asp
according to the article, building a data center in russia seems to make sense when optimizing for 1) flops per dollar of watt-hour 2) high absolute value of flops. for example, google may be interested in shifting their compute/flops intensive tasks (e.g. building search index) to the servers in russia and then replicating the index globally.
Sure, but it's hard to say if adding or omitting a feature is going to be a net win for a growing user base. All things being equal, I'd rather a somewhat smaller user base for a language that is more easily internalized than a larger user base where you really do need the extra help to understand all the quirks of a language.

Were that language design so simple ...
Aside from my ability or non-ability to speak Russian, I'm curious as to how my nick would imply that I "live in a [sic] informational isolation and has no access to news..."

I'm also looking forward to a book that Amazon touts "In Bad Money, Phillips describes the consequences of our misguided economic policies, our mounting debt, our collapsing housing market, our threatened oil, and the end of American domination of world markets. America’s current challenges (and failures) run striking parallels to the decline of previous leading world economic powers—especially the Dutch and British. Global overreach, worn-out politics, excessive debt, and exhausted energy regimes are all chilling signals that the United States is crumbling as the world superpower."

Gee. Must be quite the fun guy to run into at parties.

I'm not going to get into Russian corruption and associated risk involved with investing there. I'll let the world markets make those calls. I stand by my original comment until persuaded otherwise, and statistical analysis of my nick ain't cutting the mustard, gentlemen.
The Database Programmer: Different Foreign Keys for Different Tables
> That's probably one reason people so often do this to me.

You're probably the only author that gets them to read at all.
I actually felt like Union Square didn't quite fit my criticism as it is more agile and angel-like. I should have said "those VCs that don't adapt are screwed."
Also, I don't get this thing Americans seem to have for private offices.

I think it's related to that thing they have for productivity.
> How many times do you think Jobs rehearsed that opening line before he dialed (or had Katie Cotton dial for him)? I’d say he practiced it one hundred times.

I'd say he didn't practice it at all. I don't think SJ is the kind of guy who has to practice a line like that--that's who he is.
That's only until black bears break in and steal all your vodka supply, therefore neutralizing your sysadmins.

Dude, seriously. Russia is not Somalia or wild west.
>Aside from my ability or non-ability to speak Russian

No one was questioning your ability to speak Russian. The issue in question was your awareness of the reality as it exists outside of the lens of the corporate media.

>I stand by my original comment until persuaded otherwise

That's your prerogative but as we've pointed out you are wrong and appear to be biased.
25 Internet Startups That Bombed Miserably
"There's nothing more deadly to your career than having a reputation of being so concerned with process that you don't accomplish anything."

At a government contractor this boosts your career more than anything else can.
I guess just for consistency's sake. And so people like me can see what happens when you take off the subdomain :)
I don't know anything about economic viability of nuclear power, so I won't comment. I understand that wind and solar both receive substantial subsidies in the U.S. as well. There is also a possibility that were nuclear power as trendy as wind and solar, it would receive more development unhindered by politics, potentially leading to lower costs. This is of course pure speculation.

As for the environmental impact and total carbon footprint, that of wind farms is not small either. Vast areas of otherwise-usable land concreted, carbon expended on building, maintaining and dismantling wind mills, backup power required to buffer against weather conditions, and the like. I haven't seen any comparison of various energy forms with all the costs included, but would certainly like to take a look at one.

[edit:

A quick search led me to this: http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/pnucpwr.asp

It seems that while existing nuclear power plants (constructed over 3 decades ago) provide marginally cheaper electricity than fossil fuel based powerplants, new nuclear powerplants are indeed not viable economically, at least as compared to fossil fuels. The report suggests that including a carbon emission tax of $100/tC will bridge that gap.]

[another edit:

A paper (http://gabe.web.psi.ch/pdfs/Annex_IV_Dones_et_al_2003.pdf) claiming that total carbon footprint of nuclear power, from mining to waste disposal, is in the range of 6-12g CO2-equivalent per kWh, mostly attributable to mining, compared to 500g/kWh for natural gas and >1000g/kWh for coal.

Hydro weighs in at anywhere from 3 to 3000g CO2-equiv per kWh depending on region (alpine hydro stations are clean, flooding tropical forests is not) with weighted average somewhere in the 300g range, wind is at 14-21g/kWh depending on weather conditions, and finally solar at 79g/kWh with potential to fall to 30-40g with future technologies.

The concluding graph shows only [European] hydro beating nuclear in terms of total carbon footprint.

Lots of other interesting reports on that site (http://gabe.web.psi.ch/research/lca/), most offering similar results. One 2007 paper also considers land use, ecotoxicity, and radiation emissions, allowing certain types of wind generators to approach nuclear in terms of total environmental impact. Solar is still way off due to high levels of inorganics and toxic non-greenhouse air pollutants.
]
I'd reserve my judgement on whether or not we're in recession until the next administration comes in and opens up books. I wouldn't trust ANY financial numbers that are coming out of this administration. All this reckless running of the printing presses has probably increased the inflation so much that all the GDP has been wiped out. Until you see M3 money supply, don't trust anything Bernanke says.

Personally, I think we've been in a recession for half a year at least. Just look at spending patterns... they're all down.
If I were you I wouldn't be so quick to jump to conclusions. There's a lot of randomness in what gets noticed and voted onto the front page, especially on sundays. And we all submit things and wonder why no one votes them up.
The clouds are coming
InGameNow Opens API: Attention Techie Sports Fans
Well if you don't want to get into details that's a fine position to take. However if you always follow the crowd and never get into details yourself you will never win anything. There are nuances to Russian situation and if you figure them out while others don't you may have an advantage in certain areas. So here come nuances:

Energy industry is insanely profitable and was devoured by Putin's government. Telecom industry is also insanely profitable and was left alone. Why so?

For one, energy was originally privatized with violations (aka stolen) from the government in the 90s, whereas telecoms have mostly grown by themselves. Putin has actually offered oligarchs truce - they keep the money but return the companies back. Some agreed and live very well (Abramovich), others disagreed and are now in exile (Berezovski) or jail (Khodorkovski). Putin can be blamed for nailing them on taxes instead of original theft, but hardly anyone blames US for doing the same to Al Capone, right?

Second difference lies in nature of energy industry itself. Energy is a weapon as Putin has demonstrated us in his treatment of neighboring states. Telecom is not. So, don't hoard Putin's favorite weapon.

Then there are advantages to building DCs in Russia:

1) Energy is cheap there. At some point they actually brought aluminum ore from Africa to process in Russia and shipped it back, because energy was so cheap. Why is it cheap? Because of subsidies. EU is (was?) going nuts over it, but I don't think Putin budged. Energy subsidies are kind of important in cold climates.

2) Talent is plentiful.

3) Europe, China and Japan are close by

4) Real estate is cheap in the areas where you would typically build a DC compared to Europe or Japan.
I use USAA and it's by far the best online bank in terms of the website features, customer service, and account features.
Good things sparkly, aquamarine necklaces have become a unisex fashion accessories in this country, so that both men and women can enjoy this advance in technology.
"that will drive tectonic shifts in the technology landscape"

and i was just getting used to the whole paradigm shift buzzword..
No references and I may be going down the wrong path here, but wasn't there some relatively recent activity with respect to the quantization of space, with the Planck length being the minimal quantum?:
http://www.scienceandresearchdevelopmentinstitute.com/planck...
Poll: to js or not to js?
Actually the question is not whether I should use javascript, but whether I should actually spend the time and effort making the application work without it. I want to be considerate of the blind, but on the otherhand I'm not sure if I'm putting too much effort into that. Maybe I should build the ajax version first, launch, and then start building a verion that works without. I use noscript but have a liberal allow at first loss of functionality policy.

note: I really think the non-js version of my site is going to be cludgy

so how important is having a non-js version to you?
somewhat important
only if you have time
Depends what you're making. Some sites just plain don't make sense without JavaScript, eg. Meebo. But if you're not one of them, you'll have a much better site all-around by using progressive enhancement. Build the site without JavaScript first, and then gradually layer JavaScript on top to improve usability problems caused by its lack.
Spoken like a man with a drastically better grasp of group theory than my own. :)
Have links to Poll and Search on the front page, they were painful to find.
Horrible examples... MySQL, WebEx, Zimbra had very healthy cash flows before they were acquired. They didn't have to be acquired for them to be very successful. Just look at Zimbra's revenues before they were acquired: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9780434-7.html You need different examples ;).
Lisi replies to the article too...
It's not about simplicity, but rather about productivity. In a way this could be considered in a similar manner asOccam's Razor, i.e. if you want provide x amount of productivity, the simplest way to do so is usually the best.

Too often, software developers/teams thing productivity = functionality which is usually not the case, at least in my experience.
Advanced Web Application Security
Understanding The Hardware
You can have a theory of everything that is incomplete. There are no problems with that. And that's what people is looking for... ToE doesn't mean "a complete theory of physics", in the logical meaning of complete.
Google says there are now 10^12 unique URLs. I am proud to announce the 2nd trillion.
This sounds painful. 256M of RAM. No access to the graphics card you bought. No access to video output unless your monitor supports Digital Restrictions Management. No access to certain parts of the disk. (Perhaps the most pointless security measure ever. You can just remove the disk and put it in another machine and forget about the restrictions.)

I'm sure the hardware is cool... but with such a restricted device, who cares? Wake me up when I don't have to beg a computer program for permission to use my own property.
I thought the same thing... telling someone off doesn't take a lot of practice.
Hasn't this been repeated word-for-word from MacAskill's blog post at http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/06/03/skynet-lives-aka-ec2... ?
Of course, it may certainly be sudden onset apophenia, but this in conjunction with some of the responses to Jessica's recent blog entry on female founders, along with a number of other threads that have popped up here... my forlorn submission may have nothing to do with anything, but the pattern is there.

Women are viewed as genetically inferior at this hacker stuff, and the prevailing theory is that it might have something to do with a giraffe hunt at the dawn of time, or biological clocks, or the belief that since young women can get laid, they don't have to work as hard at life.
Out-of-print math books
Sounds like the best plan, definitely.

One thing you should try is WSGI after you're done with the blog. WSGI is a Python-level specification for how to interoperate with a Web server.

It's a layer above FastCGI (if you know what that is) and takes care of all the OS-level things such as network programming (but that is very good to know about).

One thing you'd really want to learn right now is HTTP. It is essential to Web development or design.
If at Harvard, the first and single assignment you submitted for peer review in a class didn't go over well, did you walk up to the professor and classmates and accuse them of sexism? Because that is what you're doing now.

Secondly, the writer, editor, and most-quoted person in the article are all women. Their article contains text that says that 20 year old males have lots of happiness to look forward to--the prime audience of this site. Therefore, I doubt the story was voted up because of what you perceive is a negative write up about women; more likely it was because the submission title mentioned that men get happier as they age.

I've also seen inappropriate comments. If there is a comment you disagree with, you should reply to them specifically.
I don't know how much energy he spent implementing Arc, but the energy he spent before Arc's release writing critically of existing dialects was at least as much as you might see "language snobs" expend. My point is, you can't deduce from someone's highly critical attitude that they won't produce useful code.
no. But as the old saying: "Show me, don't tell me".

In the name of progress, I suggest to people stop screaming "it is so unfair, women are just as good at [insert capability here] as men are.", how about actually encoraing them to build the next google/facebook/lisp/reddit/wikipedia ... whatever we think is hacker worthy.

Then they will definetly get the respect they deserve. Until then, sorry, saying women are just as good hacker as men, and they are just left behind by the "establishment" it is all talk, and talk is cheap.
I voted this comment up, not because I necessarily agree with it, but because feedback about the way something strikes you, even when you can't put your finger on it, is very valuable. I'd like to see more of this feedback on Hacker News, along with more stories about what people here are actually doing.
This is the link to the actual study: http://www.genet.ac.uk/workpapers/GeNet2008p32.pdf

Note that the study title is "Aspirations, Attainments and Satisfaction", not the nebulous and broadly defined "Happiness" as reported in the article. This is significant because the study specifically analyses self-reported survey responses for, as the title suggests, aspirations, attainments and satisfaction. And they are quite particular about the factors that are taken into account in their analysis, for example: happy marriage status, "big ticket" consumer durables, number of kids, etc

It would be hard to argue that aspiring for a 7L washing machine (and subsequently attaining it) constitutes the same happiness as a happy marriage, which is what this study asserts (from my cursory read of the paper, they don't normalise or put weights on the factors).

Overall the study is dubious, sophomoric at best. I had quite a few of criticisms of the methodology while reading through the paper. If they're not going to be rigorous about it, they should just not bother doing these kinds of studies, presumably only to confirm their own pre-conceived biases. The biases are obviously mainstream too, as is evidenced by all the pop psychology comments here.
Ask HN: good electronics hacking course in the Bay Area?
When I lived in Boston, I wanted to take this series of courses, but never had the time:
http://www.extension.harvard.edu/2008-09/courses/10228.jsp .

It is a lab electronics course based on "The Art of Electronics" by Horowitz and Hill. If you take it both semesters it goes from basic electronics all the way to chip design. At the moment I am stumbling along with my copy of Horowitz and Hill and TechShop help.

Does anyone know if there is a course similar to the one I listed above offered anywhere in the Bay Area?
The moment we are born, all of us, we are labeled, bagged, tagged, and forced into roles by our families, our communities, our schools, and our peers, and all of those people are also categorized at birth, and taught to believe the same things. This is powerful stuff, and to discount it entirely is foolish.

That said, you are correct. Talk (type?) is cheap. I'll now bow out of this conversation in favor of doing something more productive, like the dishes.
wow. Amazing analysis on the situation, very interesting comparison of the situation to the prisoners dilemma game. Excellent read!
I can't wait for persistent storage to go live, I think that'll completely change the way EC2 are used.
I think this kinds of article resonates with the hacker community, which tend to be in the geekier side, and male, and younger.

Most guys in their 20s have had some kind of trouble with dating at some point, the people that spend an inordinary amount of time in front of the computer, and interested in "un-exiting stuff", such as science, physics, mathematics, will have even harder time to find good mates.

I am in my 20s too, and have all my stuff together, and I manage to find dates, but it is really hard to actually find a good relationship. Why? Women in their 20s get an disproprotionate amount of attention, and have a larger set of choices. And dealing with women in their 20s is even harder (unless you are willing to play games). Too be fair, both guys and girls in their early 20s seem not to know what they want.

So, there is actually some kind of personal satisfaction (or schafenfreude) when you learn that eventually there is some kind of fairness to life, and their is a payback for all the partying and careless dating, and that things will get better if you are a guy.

And since most of comunnity in here are guys, things like this will get upvoted.
Mine didn't even get to the "incorporated" stage.
I'm building a web app and have my business model already figured out. I have a free and a paid version of my product and see being in this game for 5+ years, or longer if it is successful.
I guess this goes to show how this metric is useless on it's own but if you compare with other previous years then you can understand how far the web as evolved.
yes, and my mom wanted me to be a dentist. Guess what, I still did what I wanted to (an engineer). And moved in another continent to do it (from Europe to USA).

You saying that like male kids don't ever get pressured to do things they don't really want to do.
And as countless studies have shown, in a society where women have more choice, they tend to shun computer science related studies, and go for other things they like.
"That's probably one reason people so often do this to me."

It seems like a lot of the time when people do this to you it's because they've skipped over one of the qualifiers to your argument, especially when the qualifier comes a couple paragraphs before the actual anecdote or metaphor.
smanek - note that almost the entire article was about using Hydrogen as a battery - the author pretty much quickly proved, and did not feel the need to belabor the point, that hydrogen is incapable of being used as an energy source. He also went on to show that it's pretty unlikely to ever be used as a battery either.

I'd love to see the article that refutes this article though...
Because a system in which companies are intentionally built to be sold for a lot more money than they could ever earn is not sustainable.

Moreover, it's not aesthetic. For a while our model was 14th century Florence, now we're 20th century Hollywood, complete with our own starlets and gossip columnists but without an audience willing to buy show tickets.
FCC to Rule Comcast  Can't Block Web Videos
I don't think there's anything greatly wrong with the "build to flip" methodology - the right people to run a company long term are not necessarily the right ones to come up with brazen new ideas and start from scratch.

Not to say that I'm really fond of VC style funding however. I have seen VC's destroy perfectly good companies that could have otherwise sustain themselves by insisting they go for broke with huge growth rather than just concentrating on a profitable niche with moderate growth.
Apple is starting to sound like bose. Bose used to be a tech company, but then the marketers got a hold of it (they spend more on marketing then on engineering). Bose has an obsession about not giving customers configurable choices - for example none of their machines have bass/treble controls. Apple does exactly the same thing.
Daniel, the stories regarding Russian corruption are greatly exaggerated in US media [which, of course, doesn't mean there isn't any]. The book by Phillips explains why: this isn't about anti-Russian/anti-American politics, there are real and valid business reasons behind this.

Also, do not dismiss Phillips as "one of those" authors. Far from it.

Following your logic we shouldn't be building factories in China (because they're commies) and we shouldn't be investing in Iraq (because they're crazy Muslims).

American economy, and the super-power status that comes with it, had been built on two things: exploration of oil as a new energy medium and devastating world wars in Europe that crippled competitors, namely UK. But we aren't #1 oil producer anymore, soon we won't be #2 as well, meanwhile the world oil production has stopped growing 2 years ago, thus we need something else.

We've tried at least one "new thing", look at our attempt to become the center of world's finance, but failed. Why not become the global dominating power at computation and information processing? Why not take advantage of American universities, cheap Russian electricity, whatever it takes, to find something, besides oil and finance, to power US economy for years to come?
Pascal gets closures before Java
everbank is mostly ok, you can even link up accounts from other banks.
"While Friendster is reemerging as a dominant force overseas in the field of social networking, time wasn’t long ago when the once-mighty company was on its last legs. A New York Times article wonders “what happened to Friendster?” and chastises it for passing up “a billion dollar opportunity” during the height of its success. Many have privately speculated that there was no one thing Friendster did wrong. Rather, they believe, people just use whatever site their friends use, which, eventually, became MySpace and Facebook instead. Regardless, Friendster boasts one of the more high-profile “fall from grace” stories in recent years."

That's kind of wrong. All my friends in the east coast were in friendster first, but the site became so slow and painful to navigate or do anything that even something like myspace was such a refresh.

The other blunder that Friendster did at the time, was to allow people see who visited your profile. I bet their pageviews dropped overnight.

I think this is a classical case of bad execution ruining a startup.
Probably because energy used for cooling is only a fraction of total energy used, so other considerations take precedence.
http://ianab.com/trillion/1099377140735.html
How RMS browses the web