skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because we're also a community of scientists. Entrepreneurship and trade can do a lot, but it cannot violate the laws of physics.

Peak oil (and gas, and coal) is physics. The laws of physics are absolute.

The lost energy from declining fossil fuel EROEI must be either replaced or the demand must be destroyed. Replacing all that energy seems very unlikely... I read about this problem a lot. Demand destruction can occur through efficiency improvements or through simply not buying, not driving, not using.

If that's not enough, demand destruction can occur through war, famine, and death. The point is that this will happen if we can't make up the gap, and no amount of wishful thinking will change it. Nature doesn't care.
Edit: looks as if Erlang does indeed have its own, separate definition for lightweight process. See the disambiguation page on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-weight_process. How very poor of whoever started misusing an existing concurrency term to refer to something else - as if discussing these matters isn't already difficult enough.

Could someone familiar with Erlang please clarify:

"To understand why this is misleading, we need to go over some background information. Erlang popularized the concept of lightweight processes (Actors) and provides a runtime that beautifully abstracts the concurrency details away from the programmer. You can spawn as many Erlang processes as you need and focus on the code that functionally declares their communication. Behind the scenes, the VM launches enough kernel threads to match your system (usually one per CPU) "

In common Unix tools like 'ps' and 'top' the term 'Lightweight Process' is used as a synonym for OS thread, eg, the LWP column in 'ps -eLf' shows the thread ID.

In this article, LWPs seem to be different from threads? Is this correct? If they're not threads, what are they?
Thanks for the feedback :)

We will keep iterating it and making it simpler and clearer. This is a first pass to explaining what Super Owl is. It is an iPhone app with a service attached to it (the editorial service) and I think it is important to say this because we are not selling an app in isolation.

Not really sure about what you mean when you say:
"audio programmes from independent DIY audio makers" sounds like sophisticated something.

Did you find this sentence confusing or do you think it sounds unnecessarily sophisticated? The intention is to give potential listeners an understanding that the content comes from independent makers as well as larger more well known broadcasters.
He folded five times.
Harvard CS50 (OpenCourseware)
I'm done buying Sony products.
I dont think that rails should worry about complaints coming from php developer.....
Instant Passive Profits Review
Instant Passive Profits Review
That's the argument given by B&M retailers, but I'm not convinced: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Sales_taxes_i...

The highest tax on there can't account for the huge markups I see in stores. The tax would be less than shipping on everything I've ordered. Ordering online is still cheaper if you add a 10% sales tax to the shipping cost.
I have a friend who once spent an entire month logging in every morning and setting his birthday to the current day. And yes, he did get many, many erroneous birthday wishes from people who didn't notice anything was up.

As for me, I don't list my birthday to anyone. I don't like receiving those post floods. (In fact, really, the only information I list is contact info, since I only use FB for keeping my contacts up to date.)
>Where are you getting the idea that the next iPhone is coming out soon? Base on rumors? [...] It's all speculation at this point.

The speculation is the idea. By definition. Some people play it "safe" and apply probabilities of either 1 or 0 depending on whether something has been officially announced or not, respectively.

Others are less binary, opting instead to base their speculation on available information and past trends. martingordon seems to be from this school, rejecting the idea that something simply cannot exist before its announcement.

He probably speculated correctly about the release date of the Verizon iPhone in the US weeks before it was officially announced because the amount and depth of available information made it incorrect to speculate any other way. The binary folks waited until they heard it from someone official.
Another point is that electronic devices don't seem to break down nearly as often as they used to. Or maybe it's just that they've become so cheap that people replace them earlier. But aside from one dodgy clock radio which I bought in a closing-down sale, I can't remember suffering from any broken electronic devices in my adult life.

PS Anyone want two free perfectly functional CRT-based televisions? Yeah, I didn't think so.
Don't Ruin Your Work With Your Presentation
LOL, what?

You're seriously telling me that they were stumped with "set?foo:0"??

And you stayed? :-)
Show HN: College2Startup helps Startups find the best hires
Primer on Graphene, a form of carbon that may replace Silicon
Broad introduction to graphene, a 1-atom-thick allotrope (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allotrope) of carbon that looks set to succeed Silicon. Multiple articles written by a journalist with a background in physics.
[Disclaimer - I work for this publication, though do not regularly cover graphene.]
Ah, I had no idea it wasn't pressurized at sea/airport level, thank you.
Some background points:

1. If a patent owner creates an actual "case or controversy," for example by making an accusation of infringement, then the target of the accusation doesn't need to sit around wondering when and where it will be sued. It can instead file its own lawsuit asking for a declaratory judgment. This is what the NY Times has done.

2. Tactically, Lodsys might file a motion to transfer the case on grounds that key witnesses and/or documents would be more conveniently available in another court, so much so that it should override the NY Times's right to choose its forum. (Choosing to sue in the home jurisdiction of Lodsys's CEO was an intriguing move.)

3. In many cases, the patent owner will try to have a "D-J" (declaratory judgment) case thrown out, on grounds that supposedly there's no actual case or controversy because there hasn't been an accusation of infringement. That seems unlikely here, because the NY Times's complaint quotes the Lodsys letter as pretty clearly accusing the Times of infringement (see paragraph 13).

4. The Eastern District of Texas is indeed favored by "NPEs" (aka trolls), but in part because a couple of the judges there are experienced in patent cases and run a tight ship. As far as patent-owner win rate, there's been at least some research suggesting that the Eastern District isn't even in the top 5. [1]

[1] See the Lemley article linked and discussed at http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/05/patent-litigation-fo...
How to Write a Killer AdWords Ad by Treating It a Mini Landing Page
There are major problems with the logic in the article. He's basically trying to argue that the average of a variable in a chaotic system over some finite period of time can't drift or change dramatically due to chaos alone. His only support for this is that it doesn't happen in the simplest possible one dimensional discrete chaotic system. What about the Lorenz attractor? If you aren't familiar with it, it basically acts like two well behaved oscillators that you switch between after some "random" amount of time. If you take a time average of a space coordinate with the Lorenz attractor you'll see chaotic swings between periods of relative stability in the two oscillators. As you make increasingly complicated chaotic systems with more and more variables you open up the possibility of having all sorts of longer term behavior that would effect what he calls "climate". He is absolutely wrong about this.

When you increase greenhouse gases and therefore inhibit heat loss, you change the dynamics — the “equations of motion” as it were — and that will change the climate. In ways that are predictable. He's wrong here as well. From bifurcation theory we know that tiny changes in the parameters of a dynamical system can have huge seemingly unpredictable effects on the behavior. Subtle differences in models can have huge impacts on where and how bifurcations occur. We have only various educated guesses that might very well be dramatically wrong.

By the way, I'm not arguing against climate change. I just think that this article is terribly wrong.
For its part, Amazon supports the Streamlined Sales Tax project, which aims to harmonize and clarify states sales tax laws across the country.

and

“The sales tax collection is very complicated. The right place to fix this is with federal legislation.”
A Whole Bunch of Amazing Stuff Pseudo Elements Can Do
This discussion seems similar to the one English departments have about whether you should still read the classics or not. Isn't the point of _higher_ education that it's "higher"? If a high school student can write a blockbuster iPhone app then maybe universities don't need to teach that.

I totally agree with the part about making the curriculum fun and show the applications of the "arcane" theories of CS but I don't think we should abandon the teaching of classic CS.
worked for me (Opera too), it opened up a tab with the size I selected. Check your settings
If you want SQLite, there's that. Not mandatory, but pretty useful. Fortunately there are the jdbc-sqlite3 and activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter gems for Jruby.
First they came for the yada yada yada...

I really wish that before deploying a tactic like this against their political enemies folks would stop and consider what the world would be like if the shoe was on the other foot and their political enemies were deploying it against them.

But a seriously large number of people seem to have an attitude that "It's okay, we can do this, we're the good guys".
But the car you bought then every two years didn't last as long, wasn't as safe, wasn't as comfortable, got worse gas mileage, didn't accelerate as well, had no power steering, etc.

But I do agree that the middle class is in trouble in America. Today to be middle class you need at least a BS degree or equivalent skills and you have to constantly re-educate, and that bar appears to be rising steadily.
> "it would be a fantastic outcome if the SEC decides to allow the general public to be a more active participant in the value creation that happens while companies are still privately held."

That sounds like a complete disaster. The general public isn't nearly sophisticated enough to make wise investments without audited public statements [1]. That's exactly why we have such regulations in the first place.

[1] And even then their capability is in question.
I havent had "real" vacation for years and feel perfectly fine without it. My recipe is to get "real" weekend almost always (if no urgency) and extended weekends for 3-4 days from time to time. I travel and enjoy simple life in these days (no work, rarely check email)
Android phones have a "car mode" with a simple, big button and voice interface that is safer to use when driving.
Perhaps the Super Owl will grow up to be as smart as this owl too :)
He wants to put his money where his mouth is. What's wrong with that?
How the Zodiac Killer enciphered the Zodiac 408 cipher
My only complaint is that on a dual monitor setup the maximum link centers the window in the middle of the two screens.

Pretty slick either way.
yay, nice, if I only knew before... :/
The law concerning use tax is un-Constitutional, that is the issue; and something that most people who do not file the use tax portion, are well aware of.

edit: what part of "No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State." is unclear?
Because price is determined by willingness to pay, not cost.
"I challenge you to come up with a proper definition, if you think the 'free market' will save us"

I will do no such thing because I have not argued that "a free market will save us". I solely wanted to note that arguing over definitions and making caricatures of commonly understood terms ("But what does it really mean to be free?") is pointless and does not add much to the discussion at hand.

I agree, however, with the comment made by gaius: historically it is more probable that a free market produces innovation than a centrally planned economy. Not, IMHO, because the abstract entity “free market” somehow magically comes up with a solution. But rather because it allows individuals to tinker and to test their results w.r.t. the actual wants and needs of other people as opposed to assuming that the best solution can be planned and designed top down.
I finished high school in England a few years back, but education here is pretty bad. The whole lowering the boundaries thing is very true, the school I went to had a 20% pass rate the year before me, last year it was at almost 90%. They're just adding new "easier" qualifications and "easier" subjects to improve the pass rates but the quality of education remains the same.

Luckily failing high school doesn't have any real bearing on life.
State sales tax is just one revenue stream a state can employ. There are several criteria for a good tax. One being it is not regressive. Another being it collects more than the burden it places on society to collect it.

Sales tax is arguably regressive, so it already has one hit against it. And in the internet age, when it is not enough to do business in your home state, sales tax is becoming a bigger burden to collect.

That said, Amazon is large enough it could collect sales tax no problem. I am just thinking in general, it may be time to look at another form of tax to fill the void for sinking sales tax revenue.
Complaints should be judged on their merits, not their source.
Adobe are adding their own "Stage3D" API (aka Molehill) to Flash. I realise that there are some situations where you want an "OpenGL-alike" like WebGL (especially if you're porting something already written in OpenGL). However, for most uses of 3D on the web, an abstraction layer with backends for WebGL and Flash would be sufficient, and would likely have wider browser support (it's also easier to get people to drive-by install or update Flash than Java).
"The likelihood that some government is going to declare Bitcoin illegal and try to crack down on it is low"

I wish this were true...
I used to have both, firebug and webdev inspector when I was into html more than I'm now, can't remember any problems with them co-existing.
The "great ideas" CMU course mentioned in one of the comments looks pretty interesting - ideal stuff for getting a taste of CS:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15251/Si...
Victimhood
Bitcoin's greatest strengths [...] that will hardly affect the average user of Bitcoin [...] avoiding a port blocking attack would be as simple as [...] The forums and main site would be up in a matter of days [...]

ad infinitum.

While the article may (or may not) mostly make valid points, there is no honesty in linking to a site that will always promote the subject and only give positive spin to the discussion.

Imagine the subject of debate was axes: are axes dangerous? If you only asked theAxeGuild.com the answer would always be no: axes are useful tools but far too unwieldy to be used as a weapon. Such a website would fail, of course, to publish the editorial: "My whole family was killed by an axe murderer".

Clearly this website is simply trying to sell you axes no matter how good or bad they might actually be.
It wasn't a rewrite. The point of TDD-assisted refactoring isn't to not change anything ever, it's to change things in a controlled way and prevent regressions. It was actually pretty interesting to watch carlhuda and the rails team take rails from 2.3 to 3.0.
Jason Calacanis runs a search spam generator (Mahalo.com) that pushes over-SEO'd content ranging in quality from mediocre to bad. (...something he has denied and outright lied about in public - http://www.seobook.com/black-hat-seo-case-study)

His opinion on web content, and web content quality, carries little to no water with me. This is like Uwe Boll saying that movie making is dead and stupid people should stop making movies.
The thing we really have to come to terms with is that the future is unpredictable. Both the "doomers" and the pollyannas fall down here. Past performance says nothing whatsoever about future performance.

Nice well-behaved Newtonian systems are amenable to prediction by mathematical regression. Messy, complex, chaotic living systems are not. Everything changes, and changes how it changes, and changes how it changes how it changes, and ...
Come on, let's be serious here for a moment.

http://www.mahalo.com/immanuel-kant/ . Half of the page is full with stupid Google AddWords (no, I don't want to purchase a credit when I'm reading about Kant, you stupid Google). The other half is filled with trivia (I don't care how many miles he walked per day), and the last 5% is passable information probably copied from wikipedia.

The reason I went to that page is that I'm finally trying to read Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason", and me being the stupid that I am of course that I don't understand anything in it. This is why when someone mentioned that they're "experts" and that they know what they're writing I tried to take advantage and become a less stupid person. I failed.
Insight into CD Baby's Customer Support - An Interview with Derek Sivers
Airbus unveils flashy grand vision for flying in 2050. But where's the cockpit?
http://bikesdirect.com/

I purchased a road bike from here and couldn't be happier. I paid $700 for one that would have cost me double that in Canada.

Everyone is correct that buying a bike from a physical store is better, but here's how I combined the two:

- Go to a local bike store and try out some bikes. Get someone there to help you and take some measurements. I found out I needed a 56cm frame thanks to this.

- Buy a bike online.

- You'll need to do some assembly on the bike. It's actually really easy. I did mine in about 30 mins and I've never done one before.

- Take it into a local bike shop and get them to fit you plus do a tune up. Some shops include this if you purchase a bike from them or just discount it. For me, I got such a good deal that it was still worth it.
Introducing Carpentry – handcrafted prototyping for Rails
Thats pretty neat since you have of the encryption done client side. Which mode of AES do you use?
If I recall correctly, mine was $120 for ~6 months.
Unlocked iPhone 4 available in the US, but it will cost you
Cool! This is something I wanted to have and had started making for myself. Mine is much less useful than asciiflow but the thing I like most about it is that it allows writing and drawing more in the way I use my notebook. It's easy to write little blocks of text that aren't aligned along the left margin.

Feature request: In text mode, assign <enter> to move the cursor down a line and to the column that text entry began.

Here's my prototype: http://norstrulde.org/tty/tty.html
The difference is that Steve Coast, the post’s author, casts himself in the role of a crusader for the newbies.

I find this all a bit odd, since as a Rails newbie[1], I found Rails 3.0.x very easy to learn with a little help from Michael Hartl's tutorial and the Rails Guides. Perhaps this is an example of the "curse of knowledge?" In other words, that since Coast found Rails 2 easier, he assumed that newbies would as well?

[1] Front-end developer with little back-end experience.
Because of the nature of my work, I use the liquid layout of Google Docs (web version, no "print" version).

Hence my astonishment when I realized you have discontinued that option from Google Docs. Very surprising.

Google Docs was created (Writely before it) as a simple text editor for the web. I can understand new users came and you may want to fit us all in your product, but erasing the liquid layout ("Web" view or version) is a complete blind move.

I'm sure that a significant percentage of users are in my same situation.

I beg Google to please reconsider their position.
I remember a blog post from 2008:

Rails will be retrofitted to make it easy to start with a “core” version of Rails (like Merb’s current core generator), that starts with all modules out, and makes it easy to select just the parts that are important for your app. Of course, Rails will still ship with the “stack” version as the default (just as Merb does since 1.0), but the goal is to make it easy to do with Rails what people do with Merb today.

http://yehudakatz.com/2008/12/23/rails-and-merb-merge/
When I say "in most situations" my implication is that for most 3D applications in the browser such low level interaction with the 3D API is not necessary. Most people building things with WebGL in the future will not be working with WebGL directly, but through an abstraction layer like three.js[1]. This could easily be extended to use Flash as an alternate renderer (say, for people running IE).

[1] https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/
The worst part of this is how irreversible it is. With a bank you might be able to get it back, with cash nobody can just siphon the actual paper money remotely, but with bitcoin you're out of luck.
Visa woes end for IBM, TCS, Accenture etc.
Yup -- that's basically it. A true newbie should find Rails 3.x easier. It's the people who have to unlearn habits that may have it rough. I found Steve's advice to learn an early version of Rails first completely backwards, in that respect.
Supporting example: http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Plasma-Capacitor-Repair-Replac...
You would think the Chromebook would be ahead of the game.
The new Samsung Series 5 Chromebook has been getting a lot of attention because of its affordability and features. Still, despite all the good things, being fully Web based does bring problems.
It’s A Facebook World … or is it?
In both awesome and xmonad mine was resized (firefox 4). Although in awesome I see the desktop over where the window used to be, in xmonad the (now inactive) part of the window stays exactly what it looked like before, but just static.
Pentagon's complete Vietnam war document released
I guess it's time to prime the pump again. More hype == more investment == $35 bitcoin.

Then in a few weeks, the early adopters start the "dump" phase of pump & dump. (ie. history repeats itself)
One problem with state machines is that they grow in complexity very quickly, and the tools that were given to most people in their CS curriculum don't help you manage this fast growth.

This certainly isn't the case in all CS programs. In my university we had a notorious class where we had to use Rational Rose RT to create a state machine representing some distributed system (usually a game like pacman, or cops and robbers), then we actually added C++ code to those states and transitions to make the system actually run.

There are of course always teams that decide to make a single state with a single transition holding all their code, but most people utilized nested states, history states, and all those "fun" things.

The course however was usually a nightmare as the version of Rational Rose RT we were using was ancient and unstable. Also, since this was supposed to simulate a real project, the requirements changed half way through the semester causing lots of swearing, lots of all-nighters, and lots of delivery lasagna.

You can still see "I HATE ROSE" and "ROSE SUCKS" etched into desks and walls in certain computer labs.
IMF Hacked by its Own Members?
From what I understand, 50% of iPhone users have not reconnected their phone to iTunes since the initial activation.
It's hard for CS to adapt given all those professors with tenure.

It's better to start a whole new field that is more applied.
Thank you for making "You just don't get it" point number 1. I like to know early on when I should bail out and stop reading something.
Good article here about what makes for a really good password with lots of analysis and stats - http://www.troyhunt.com/2011/06/brief-sony-password-analysis...