skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> My opinion of him isn't too high. He likes to brandy himself about as some sort of hacker hero, but in truth, he's not really contributed much to OSS.

OSS ESR has been involved in or founded:

Fetchmail,
GPSd,
CML2,
The Cathedral and the Bazaar,
The Jargon File,
Terminfo/Termcap,
VC Mode/GUB in Emacs (ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS),
Contribs to Gnuplot, Gnome, Python, Groff and Nethack,
GNU Toolkit SED,
Hexdump,
gif2png,
Bogofilter,
Countless Howtos at the LDP

With the exception of the above, you're right he's not contributed much to OSS. I'm not saying ESR's not a polarising person (I've met both ESR and RMS, both can be black and white people) but he has contributed a lot to OSS.
Code Archeology
Californication Slip Of The Tongue
Heres another series that will be returning to our screen in a few weeks. The sophomore season of Californication might only premiere by the end of September but I got the occasion to watch the season premiere already, and despite my dislike of the first season I sure wasnt going to pass on the occasion.
Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia
CLICK HERE FOR MORE DETAILS
Props for not calling it a startup! I def. think this is something avid sports fans, and particularly gamblers, could probably use, but I would echo the concern that it is confusing visually.
Spend every waking minute making my wonderful wife, who puts up with my stupid hours, travelling away from home, stress, lack of organisation and everything else that would turn mere mortals away ludicrously, deliriously, cartwheel-turning happy.
You forgot the efficiency of the electric motor itself and everything between it and the battery pack (converter, etc.)
He's not clinically insane; it's just that he "doesn't have people skills"...
Here's why I love ramaze: multi-app, multi-db app, ~50 lines, one file, zero proprietary plugins, rake tasks, generators, etc. No bending of the framework whatsoever. Use require, use modules, pure ruby, pure joy. :)

require 'rubygems'
require 'ramaze'
require 'sequel'

# Models
module AppOne
DB = Sequel.sqlite('app_one.db')

class Post < Sequel::Model(DB[:posts])
set_schema do
primary_key :id
varchar :title
text :body
end
end
end

module AppTwo
DB = Sequel.sqlite('app_two.db')

class Post < Sequel::Model(DB[:posts])
set_schema do
primary_key :id
varchar :title
text :body
end
end
end

AppOne::Post.create_table!
AppTwo::Post.create_table!
AppOne::Post.create(:title => "app one title", :body => "app one body")
AppTwo::Post.create(:title => "app two title", :body => "app two body")

# Controllers
module AppOne
class MainController < Ramaze::Controller
map "/app_one"
def index
@post = Post[1]
"#{@post.title}<br/>#{@post.body}"
end
end
end

module AppTwo
class MainController < Ramaze::Controller
map "/app_two"
def index
@post = Post[1]
"#{@post.title}<br/>#{@post.body}"
end
end
end

Ramaze.start :adapter => :mongrel

Run, go to /app_one and /app_two respectively. Enjoy.

Here's some of what ramaze is missing:

* Some conventions (simple modules, no "plugins" please) and a space (website) to share code, such as rake tasks for sequel migrations, authentication boilerplate, etc. Ramaze needs an ecosystem of modules to allow developers to benefit from each other. I'm not a fan of cargo-culting, but rails/merb plugins do speed up development.

* Marketing/evangelism. (I'm trying).

* A more nicely integrated restful router with urls a la rails/merb conventions. While "technically" somewhat silly, all the cool kids want something like it.
Central Virginia Classifieds Blackstone Farmville
While surfing the net I found a new classified site in South Central Virginia: Southernvaclassifieds.com. They have categories for everything. They focus on small Virginia towns like Blackstone, Victoria and Farmville.
Am I on trial? What's the question?

Let me be more careful.

There are two methods to throttle nuclear plants: by control rods, moderating neutron flux, and by temperature, moderating coolant flow (in, say, a pebble bed reactor). Either of these work well for generating heat, though coolant flow is simpler technically. Beyond this the plant is a steam turbine, which would have the same maintenance problems as any other steam turbine designed for the load. It's not as fast as gas, but the fuel is cheaper. But as DabAsteroid pointed out, Nuclear Plant are typically base loaded, in the US at least, so that's not terribly relevant.

I don't understand enough of the specifics of the particular designs Dab alludes to to comment on reactor poison buildup. I know that in pebble bed reactors throttling was intended by design.

I think that within the US market (which was, erroneously on my behalf, what I assumed the conversation was about), the point of new power plants not being yet created still holds: whatever load balancing one would need is an investment already made. (though this is mostly irrelevant to the point of discussion where nuclear plants don't supply peak demand). Of the proposals for which nuclear plants would supply peak power, the question is still out there: how will they balance the load? There are many possibilities, but they're mostly guesses. There is, increasingly, a diverse market for load balancing technology, and companies, struggling with technology and sales and tradition and economy, to try fill that need.
Pandora: Congressional Emergency
Cool, but... this is one of the "problems" with Smalltalk and Lisp, in terms of the mentality. Instead of focusing on what 99% of developers need, they work on doing turtles all the way down, and go into business competing with Linux, Windows, et al.

Now, from a pure tech point of view, what they're doing is cool, interesting, and worthy of praise. Just that they shouldn't complain if they wonder why they're not as popular as Ruby, Python and friends.
I was thinking of an old yellow, similar to the shade of a faded newspaper's color rather then a shade of grey.

After messing around with the arrow in photoshop a bit, #d1ce9c was the color that I came up with: http://thisismyinter.net/mockups/newmogul.png & http://thisismyinter.net/mockups/grayarrow.png - But it's nearing 4am here, so it could turn out to be a hideous shade of yellow and I wouldn't realize it until tomorrow morning.
Quite apart from the argument you are proposing there - what does that have to do with skin color? Everybody that lives at the equator in all parts of the world have dark skin, it has nothing to do with if a person comes from Africa or not.

And it's not "fairly well established". Not in any way that one would deem scientific. It's fairly well established in the minds of bigots and in the minds of people who are looking to justify their denial of rights to certain groups of people, but it's not established in any meaningful way.

For example, take a look at the body of evidence showing that the earth is round. Now, using the same SCIENTIFIC criteria, show me the evidence that people of African descent are less intelligent than people of european descent - you'll find that the 'studies' that were done are very fuzzy, very open to intepretation, use very skewed sample size, and are not pure at all.

What you are really trying to say is that In tests conducted in the 70s with tiny groups of African-American people of mixed race, who came from long disadvantaged communities, there was a difference in problem solving ability according to a certain metric, compared to affluent children from educated homes.

The evidence is weak and very unscientific. If you REALLY want to prove that the IQ is lower, then I demand sample groups approaching 2000, I demand that the tests be taken in Africa, and written in an African language, I demand that the socio-economic backgrounds of the participants be the same or similar, and I demand that all questions related to verbal ability be removed from IQ tests.

IQ has not been measures properly, and having lived in several continents, nothing I have seen indicates to me that there is any significant difference in IQ between people living on different continents, once you factor in their family background.

But people like you once found a study that fitted in with your narrow perception, and you hang on to it like it was the holy grail. It's flawed, and it's an argument similar to creationism.
usually when I submit large amounts of text on an unstable site/device I copy it first to save the text to memory :-p
You know, back in the day, Oracle did exactly the same thing themselves - they released their product on IBM mainframes because no-one would take them seriously otherwise. They even had to leverage a consulting contract with the CIA to claim to be "government contractors" to convince IBM to sell them ones.

By no means did they invent this strategy, nor are they the only ones to use it, they're not even the only database vendor. MySQL relies equally on "magic". Selling on your technological merits doesn't work. Look at Sybase and Informix.
Utility scale flywheel systems are being added to new powerplants

Can you name one?

Beacon Power

Has Beacon Power ever made a single sale in its 11-year existence? I see it is trading at $1.25 (up from 84 cents, within the last year). The NASDAQ keeps threatening to delist it.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22beacon+power%22+delisted
This is good stuff. I certainly hope frameworks like ramaze stick around and gain their own niche market share.

For http://shellshadow.com I had to make careful decisions about being able to eventually hire others to do the web app dev, which meant making sure my framework picks wouldn't be too obscure. I had to get away from Rails. In fact, if other frameworks like Merb, Ramaze, datamapper, and Sequel didn't show up, I would have had to dump ruby.

I like Sequel http://sequel.rubyforge.org/ quite a lot. It blazes new territory for an ORM. It was a tough call to go with datamapper.

In short, Merb showed promise and I bet on the strength of its backers in addition to what I saw as solid software engineering.
Author nun finds new outlet in cellphone fiction
Doesn't matter. JPM backs it now.
The same things I'm doing now.
I hate wishful dreaming!
nothing I have seen indicates to me that there is any significant difference in IQ between people living on different continents, once you factor in their family background.

What if family background is ignored?

.

I demand that all questions related to verbal ability be removed from IQ tests.

How's this?:

http://www.amazon.com/Clocking-Mind-Chronometry-Individual-D...

it appears that the variance [IQ subtests] share can be reliably and accurately indexed by reaction time on a task where subjects must merely press a lighted button. The correlations between such simple tasks and g is around .62, which is higher than the correlation between many subscales of IQ tests and the g factor to which they contribute.

.

IQ has not been measures properly

Is that what you gleaned from studying those two books (both listed as ISI Citation Classics)?

http://www.google.com/search?q=citation+classic+arthur+jense...
Other research, which I can't dig up at the moment, tells us that wealthier people are happier. So other things being equal, having more money than you can possibly spend should take a few worries off. Not sure this required a research grant to figure out, but ok.

So, I guess the only real add this post provides is that some wealthy people are happier and also some of them are smart and interesting. ok. I've met Steve Jurvetson before and also found him to be smart and interesting. I just didn't blog about it ;).
Download Friday Night Lights Episode
Imagine how easier and cheaper it would be if you could Download Friday Night Lights Episodes. The reality is that you can actually download all Friday Night Lights Episodes from the Internet at very High Speed; the only problem is finding a reliable and affordable service
On making sales, the short answer is yes: they announced a sale as far back as 2001, uncovered from shallow googling. This was for a telecom utility though, not a powerplant scale utility.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5265/is_200102/ai_

[edit: in H1 2007 they produced sales of $842,034, with $30,244 gross profit, minus substantial operating expenses of $6,443,344. Such magnitudes may or maybe not be expected in a startup company]

On adding to powerplants, the intent with the beacon power demonstration plant is to actually commercially deploy the system and make revenues from regulation services. Technically this is not adding to an existing powerplant, though it is adding to the power grid. Eventually the aim to to add to existing power plants where possible, as this avoids transmission losses.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=123367&p=iro...

I'm not intimately familiar with the state of the two large utility scale demonstrations. The public information, posted in their stockholders 'results' release, is that they're building a 5 MW plant, have tested a 1 MW system, siting another (10 MW), and ramping up to production; following approval in open bid regulation market.

Beacon expects to have frequency regulation facilities in two locations before the end of 2008 with a total of five megawatts of capacity. To that end, the Company has initiated the process of establishing up to five megawatts of frequency regulation capacity on its Tyngsboro site, and is actively pursuing potential locations in the PJM Interconnection in addition to a site in Stephentown, New York. On July 17, 2008, the Company received a land-use permit it had requested from the town of Stephentown, New York, and subsequently exercised its option to purchase the land. Pending approval of an active interconnection request to NYISO and any other implementation requirements of the NYISO, a possible location for Beacon's first 20 megawatt frequency regulation plant will be in Stephentown.

http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=123367&p=iro...

There's also Pentadyne, which manufactures smaller scale UPS systems, used, for example, in process plants. The economics are much the same though, since it competes against batteries. If anything, economies of scale should tweak toward the utility scale implementation.
Www.isearch.mobi
What do you guys think of this engine? (www.isearch.mobi)
1. Buy a warehouse, convert it into living / productivity space, a large room for any one "type" of productive activity (read: making stuff).

2. Contact everyone I know who is passionate about whatever it is they do, and inform them that they can live here, as long as they're productive and clean up after themselves, etc. Focus on people I know who are into green technology, and people that are just generally awesome.

3. Spend the rest of my life learning, implementing, and creating awesome stuff with other people doing the same. I personally would be making music, implementing an mmo where the npcs learned from their surroundings and the actions of past npcs, and were controllable by a human at the individual and group level, learning and working with electronics - making effects pedals and similar, and researching and implementing ways to use technology to improve the average humans existence without totally raping nature.

3.1 Try to set up more places like that.

EDIT: I wrote out a bit of an extrapolation on this idea, you can see it here: http://kaens.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-i-would-do-if-i-had-1... if you're interested.
Automated driving doesn't seem like it would be very hard if you had the ability to do whatever you wanted to the roads / cars on the road. Of course we're not in a situation anywhere near that ideal.

I share the opinion that a lot of things that should be automated are not. For instance - fast food. If fast food places are going to exist, I do not think that they should be part of what some people have to do to keep a roof over their (and their kids) heads, and food in their stomachs. They are repetitive, soul-sucking jobs that don't require a human.

The reasons for why our society is how it is are complex. I'd say that the reasons that we still have people working fast food jobs for a living are mainly the economic and power structures that we have in place right now.

I mean, on the idealistic side of things, if everyone suddenly realized just how silly our organizational / economics / power structures are, and what we can currently accomplish with technology - and what we'd be able to accomplish if we were devoting most of our resources to making the world a better place for humans (and hopefully all its other residents) and not on economic pissing matches.

We could colonize space - probably within my lifetime - if we wanted to, etc.
What I glean from this discussion is that people who are obsessed with proving another people inferior in some regard are not people I want to associate with. Particularly when I belong to the subgroup they want to prove as being inferior.

I mean what's your point? What do you hope to gain by telling me that people like me are less intelligent than people like you? And how do you think it makes me feel to read that?
Of the proposals for which nuclear plants would supply peak power, the question is still out there: how will they balance the load?

There are the various forms of CAES.

http://topics.energycentral.com/centers/gentech/view/detail....

There are also resistive shunts that can be used in conjunction with an entire national 100%-nuclear fleet running at full throttle full-time. The resistive shunts would be used to simply dump any excess power. We use resistive shunts for this, today (which is how we get rid of wind and solar power that grid utilities are required to "buy" from the public), but in the proposed scenario, they would be used even more. To encourage demand during times of excess supply, a real-time free-market could help.

I envision that demand fluctuations would be smaller in the future, because of larger overall demand dwarfing weather/seasonal/earthspin-related (paganistic) heating and cooling fluctuations, and because of a global move toward a continuous day (after all, many of us are up in the "middle of the night", here, making our "day" when we feel like it).

Nuclear powerplants can also make natural-gas, hydrogen, diesel, gasoline (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22nuclear+gasoline%22+graham...), octane, ethanol, methanol, deoxidized boron (http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.html), etc., that can, in turn, be used as fuels for load-following and peaking power.
Give me $100K/yr and I will make one hell of an effort to change society in a positive way. To be blunt - fuck having a better car or larger house for myself, fuck spending $100K/yr on me.
The idea of eliminating the OS isn't about "competing" with Linux or another OS. The idea is that in some cases you simply don't need a full traditional OS.

Ruby and Python have there place. They started as scripting languages and matured from there. If you haven't done serious work in Smalltalk you don't have the understanding to compare. Smalltalk did certainly provide 99% of what most developers needed. The reason Ruby has taken market share and Smalltalk's market share seems smaller has little to do with comparing choices between the two.

Smalltalk's ascent was throttled because of the promise of Java. Ruby has risen in large part due to the fact that Java has not lived up to its promise in certain aspects. Could Smalltalk have made a stronger comeback instead of Ruby coming on strong? Maybe...but that a complex discussion.

To those that were inside the Smalltalk community when Java came on the scene, they know that Smalltalk died essentially because Sun had no revenue model against Java and could give it away for free. All three Smalltalk vendors at the time sold per seat licenses for the technology. Their business models did not allow them to rapidly change and give it away for free. This is the core of the reason along with the fact that Sun had lots of money to throw around to convince people they knew what they were doing.
Wild swings meaning the enormous gulf between the estimates of accessible oil typically cited and the estimates of oil resources you cite.

Are you talking about smog? CO2?

CO2 most importantly, but smog plays a major role.

Why would they stop? We've reached a few inflection points. Americans drive less this year than they did the last.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/business/19gas.html?ref=bu...

One might gather that price will similarly effect heating costs and flight usage. Fuel economy is one of the foremost items on the minds of Americans now, according to Gallup (#2 in national issues, apparently).

http://www.gallup.com/poll/108067/Fuel-Prices-Now-Clearly-Am...

Countries might increasingly wish to reduce their economic dependency on the oil market, as it becomes cheaper and cheaper to do so. There has been much support for an ethanol economy in the US; for example the bipartisan bill to introduce biofuel installations in gas stations.

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/08/bill-in-congres.html

Already Brazil has an ethanol economy, provoked by the 1973 oil crisis. Nations with similar agricultural capability and high oil dependency have the same incentives to guard
against future market downturns.

Finally, there's the global warming problem. I assume you don't believe CO2 has a major role. But from a pure economic standpoint, it is likely the governments and the populace will increasingly believe it has a major role and will probably do something about it, either collectively or individually. This will probably influence demand to drop, though it may not do so suddenly. Anticipating this, oil companies have a riskier bet to make in large capital investments in heavy oil extraction. Increasingly, such companies will try to diversify into the broader energy business, as many are already making efforts to do.
It's certainly a complex discussion without one answer, but my point is this:

> The idea is that in some cases you simply don't need a full traditional OS.

The number of those cases is quite limited compared to the number of cases where developers are perfectly content to develop on top of an OS. Therefore, investing effort in the limited case rather than in the common case is effort most likely not wisely spent.
Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia S04 An early look
Much like the last two seasons, Its Always Sunnys fourth chapter will start off with double episodes for the first few weeks before it switches back to one new/one repeat for the remainder of the season.
Terminator The Sarah Connor Chronicles 2 04
Recently it has been reported that the show is struggling to lift its rating and to anticipate that, the writers have brought in a new character to be the love interest of Derek. Rumor has it, Stephanie Jacobsen who played in “Battlestar Galactica: Razor” as Kendra Shaw has been cast.
8 blunders of Google
Medical Labels
Thanks, Dani. I'll read your links. You're right, I should have done more googling.
Maybe it's true, maybe not, but the one thing I remember (though not the reference) is reading that a study had found no statistical correlation between executive pay and the performance of the company. So my impression was that at least at the highest levels of compensation, executive pay is being set by other mechanisms, ie everyone bidding for the same people.

Btw, blogging about worrying about whether you are as smart as famously smart people seems self-absorbed and insecure to me... What do I get out of reading that?
Funny, I remember hearing that research showed exactly the opposite, ie people in remote villages in New Guinea rated their happiness substantially the same as those in developed countries. But like you, I don't have the sources either. ;-)

You might be right, though, that relative wealth influences happiness. In other words, you don't want to be the poorest person in your community, even if objectively you are wealthier than those in other communitites.
Sadly they also kicked interesting features. I thought being able to see someone's "tweets with friends" was one of the most interesting features, as it provided a quick way to create aggregate feeds (for example for a conference, see all tweets of everyone attending the conference).