skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actually it should be possible to construct a model of oil quantity as if oil was a self-replicating being. After all, we are talking about conservation of matter (and matter-energy conversion which I suppose is negligible here). In this sense, oil self-replicates as animals (that have consumed the benefits of oil) die off, and fossilize over billions of years.

That's just P(t) - C(t) + K for P = production, C = consumption, and K = amount available at t = 0.

So for oil, we have small P, large C, large K. For tuna, we have small P, large C, small K. As such, projection estimates should rest on similar assumptions, and extinction models should be as realistic as you can get.

I agree that there are no easy solutions, but the problem is there; it's the elephant in the room, in all aspects of consumption.

(this was posted as more of a thought experiment than anything else).
Why mix the business model with the license?
If you are the sole owner of the code, first release it for pay/donations whatever, then once you cross a revenue threshold, release it as open source?
Atlas Shrugged Updated for the Current Financial Crisis
I've used svn and git a little and am shopping around for something to use on a current project. I found git harder to use than svn, given that I'm not a power user. I noted that the last item on the page seems to reflect that--git is only easier to learn than perforce, according to the site.

Is that really true? I might just be dumb, but I had a harder time with git. Given that I'm in mostly single-user mode, it seems like I might be more productive with svn simply because I wouldn't have to wrestle with it as much to get going.

Can anyone recommend a "git for people who can understand and operate svn without hurting themselves?" guide? Or is the value of git significantly lessened in single-user mode?
Outgoing FCC Chairman Wants to Rid The Wireless Web Of Porn.  Good Luck With That.
I find that the the weeding your garden example has a more general analogue outside of content: managing code debt. The more mature a code base and the more hands that touch it, the more often little shortcuts, design decisions that lead to later refactoring, incomplete or incorrect documentation, etc. will show up; these are like "weeds" in your "software garden".

As with letting weeds in the content choke out the actual signal, not taking the time to do code weeding will ultimately lead to buggy, unmaintainable code. Of course another approach is to try and avoid code weeds in the first place (e.g. TDD), but at some level code weeds / debt is inevitable over time for any sufficiently mature code base.
Why I don't care:

Because it simply doesn't matter that much IMHO. A startup doesn't succeed or fail based on which RCS it uses, it may fail if it doesn't use any at all, and it may fail if people are wasting a large amount of time doing silly things (Moving directories in cvs).

If you're hacking open source projects however, then I'd say Git is most likely the way to go.
I would argue (as I do at the site there) that Git is just as easy to learn and use as Hg, in some cases easier (http://jointheconversation.org/2008/11/24/on-mercurial/). The 'Hg is easier' argument tends to be from those who initially tried Git a while ago.
I would almost think the opposite. Not because the business students will learn any more at the ivy league, but their networking would seem to be much more effective, which is what usually matters to business students anyway.
I generally like to try my best to get people to completely forget SVN when learning Git, because I feel that SVN is fundamentally a bad model, BUT - http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html may be what you're looking for. When you want to really learn Git better (and gain hugely in productivity) check out http://gitcasts.com and http://book.git-scm.com for some Git-specific learning materials.
The biggest problem people have with Git is unlearning Subversion. 'git revert' is not 'svn revert,' 'git checkout' is not 'svn checkout,' etc - if you want to learn Git, leave everything you know about Subversion at the door and go in with an open mind.
The Peepcode screencast on git was very good.
The value of git in team mode is so great that you could say it is significantly lessened in single-user mode.

However, I would still invest the time to learn git, and yes it is more complex then svn.

Like 10 fingered typing git is something you don't necessarily need, but it is a multiplier on your productivity.
Inaccurate. For example, in the section for "Any Workflow," the author contends that git is better than bzr, hg, svn, and perforce. However, this is completely false. bzr has far better support for the central repository (svn-style workflow) with its linking of repositories and hg and bzr both have excellent support for the models that Git supports. Funny that the site tries to defend against fanboyism while it itself is a poster boy for it.
I know what you mean, but like learning anything else, it takes some practice to get used to it. You've probably seem some of these links before.

http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html

http://cworth.org/hgbook-git/tour/

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/index.ht...
http://www.plsinfo.org/getanswers/databases.htm

-> http://ezproxy.plsinfo.org:2048/login?url=http://proquestcom...
Good OS Announces Cloud - Boots into Google Chrome within seconds
Honestly, I was hoping for a joke or a comic. Sigh.
Engadget gives a better overview but editorializes:

http://www.engadget.com/2008/12/01/gos-cloud-instant-on-os-c...
I think this is great. If I buy a piece of hardware, I should be allowed to use it to the fullest.

I have an iPhone and really like it as is. That said, I welcome improvements (proprietary or not) Great job!
Pithy but true.

It also implies that's not worth going into crushing debt over it.
No, I'm sure it's much more valuable to the people he knows and who he'll likely refer you too if he thinks you're good enough.

People who come to Seth will be more than happy to hire someone who has been taught to see things like he does. They're going to him because he's an unconventional thinker and they'll go to his apprentices because they hope they'll be unconventional too.
I thought this was a whole time travel question.
As the article hinted at, part of that question rests on ownership. Profits "shipped to another country" are ultimately the property of the shareholders. If all of the shareholders are American, then the profits get shipped to Japan and then returned to America in the form of dividends and share buybacks. There are legal issues, of course, regarding taxation and jurisdiction, but it does make you wonder. There are plenty of companies in Panama (et al) which the US Government would like to have enough evidence to prove are American owned...
exactly. as lbrandy rightly said, he's a genius marketer. how many of those are there in MBA schools?
care to explain? thanks :)
This would be my guess too, except that people are saying they haven't seen this extreme of an absence of acorns before. If this is an adaptation against acorn eaters, why is it so rare?

Also, squirrels don't just eat acorns. They also bury them and forget to dig them up, thus helping to produce more trees.
If you really just want a minimal source control system, Git does the trick well enough. I don't think you need anything more than 'git init' (make a fresh project), 'git commit -a' (commit all new changes except for deleted or renamed files), 'git add' (to add new files), 'git rm' (to remove files), 'git checkout' (for reverting changes), 'git log' (obvious), and 'git diff' (also hopefully obvious). Put a .gitignore file in the root of your project listing globbed filenames for everything you don't want to manage. Run 'git commit' after every sequence of 'git add' or 'git rm' invocations. That's it. You shouldn't need any more documentation than this paragraph.

Branching is a killer feature, as is clean history management, as is the index, and when you find yourself wishing more control over what happens to your source code, wishing for freedom to experiment, all these tools will be there waiting for you.
If you're coming from svn then Mercurial is much easier to learn than Git.

Also, I don't know what crack they are smoking but Perforce is easier to learn than Git for basic stuff. The biggest place that I've seen perforce get complex is where people try to enforce all sorts of bizarre (read: stupid, useless) polices.
This is true, but there is more up front investment in both time and money required to become either.
There are a lot of people who will take pains to tell you that their foreign auto was "built" in America.

There's a big difference between assembled from foreign parts and manufactured in America. Now even the Big 3 have foreign parts in their cars. But the foreign manufacturers bring over their own suppliers and a much higher percentage of their cars are not made in this country.

A high percentage of the sales price of that foreign assembled car you buy is sent to the parent overseas. When you consider that each dollar is multiplied five times thorugh the economy with an automotive purchase we have exported a large chunk of what used to be part of this country's economy.

Buy what you want but please don't kid yourself into believing you're purchasing an American manufactured car when you buy a foreign make.
Ask HN: Which Functional Language to Implement for Learning?
They say the best way to learn about things is to just go and implement it. That being said, I'm looking to implement an interpreter (or maybe a vm and compiler) for a functional language to enforce the ideas I've learned in the past few months.

In the past, I've written interpreters for a few basic languages and Scheme (not fully r4rs compliant, but close enough to learn what I wanted). Of course, I wrote these in languages that provided garbage collection, and without any type-checking. Basically as AST-walkers.

I want to establish more expertise with these topics and create something that I can actually use, maybe even extend, but to build a new language from scratch and make real design decisions isn't in my cards yet.

So, the question, does anyone know of language specifications for functional languages that aren't entirely crippled that would be interesting to implement as a learning project?

Please don't suggest scheme. I love scheme, but it's been done to death, and is the language I've studied the inner-workings of the most. Thanks.
One night 4 months ago, I found myself terrified by the reality that I due to what was happening with our clients, I needed to fork the codebase. And I was on svn. Ouch.

I had postponed this moment as long as possible using the svn-without-branches approach. But that wasnt going to help me going fwd. That night I figured I had no choice but to plunge into git asap. I was not looking forward to it AT ALL; It seemed at best a necessary cost.

Once I decided to, it took me under 3 days to mostly "get" git and be productive. (And I would not say I am the quickest learner.) Now I would never, ever, ever go back, even for tiny projects.

Key resources for me:
- gitcasts for the basics
- git channel on IRC for odd questions
- git internals from peepcode for a more solid understanding

Best of luck!
This is on the front page at the same time as the WSJ article "Any College Will Do" - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=381582 - which highlights how it doesn't really matter where you go or who you study with, it's all down to your personal drive and attitude.
Haskell is probably a good option.
The "Any Workflow" section is a little confusing. The fine print says "[Other SCMs] can do the simple flows I've described above, but they cannot do them with multiple simultaneous local branches." I don't understand this well enough to be convinced, and it's hardly good form to use examples that don't demonstrate your point.
I'm not sure how you're defining "fruitful/successful projects", but the impression I get is that there are mountains of Java business logic in the wild... It's practically the new Cobol, and it will be just as hard to kill.
Why don't you try Sche.... Oh. Never mind.
I think this hits on a big stumbling block for the product. There are a huge number of companies that don't allow the data to be removed from their workstations or servers.

If the product could be implemented as an extension for Excel, similar to Xobni in Outlook, then there is much more potential. There is really no reason for this to be an online app.
Mibbit is impressively fast.
What happens in the case of forks? If I decide to fork some open source software under this license, make a bunch of changes and start selling it under this license, what do I owe the original authors? Now how about if the changes were minimal or amounted to a complete rewrite?

I'm not really sure that I can think of a way to have a license like that which doesn't rapidly become overly complex when forks are thrown in. And if the freedom to fork is taken away, I don't think that I would consider the license to be free as in freedom.
Four very different thoughts here...

1.There is precedent for criminal convictions of pretexting as part of some larger criminal social engineering act. Personally, I think bullying is a stretch. It's a feature of the Internet, and if a person can't shrug off anonymous Internet bullying then that person has deeper psychological problems.

2.Should go back and re-examine (and possibly overturn) all criminal cases in which pretexting and/or false identities were used by the authorities? If there is precedent that this behavior is illegal, then we need to reinforce that law enforcement tactics are not above the law.

3.The shell of anonymity is only safe when it is perfect -- leaks create the opportunity for blackmail. In many situations it is more important that you are not in a position to be blackmailed, than to disclose any 'undesirable' behavior or association.

4.How could this case stand on appeal? Didn't the judge essentially interpret breach of contract into criminal law? MySpace obviously granted Ms. Drew's account -- her access to the system could not have been "unauthorized" as claimed in the wire fraud charge. Most contracts and TOS have pretty clear terms about what happens when one party breaches, so this should have been a simple case of "you broke the TOS, we closed your account, as stated in the TOS." In my opinion, the more serious crime here is that the judge decided he could usurp the legislature's power and turn random contract text into criminal law.
Kottke: Does the broken windows theory hold online?
As publicly traded companies, the management is beholden to the stock holders and are (in essence) required to act in the manner that most increases stock value. Wall Street is notoriously short sighted and will ALWAYS prefer short-term moves over long-term moves. Therefore, accepting a strike for the greater/future good would have only decreased the stock value and resulted in a massive management turnover.

BTW, while I worked in Ford Systems, my wife worked in Ford Finance. I'm pretty familiar with most of the inner workings at Ford and can tell you that your assumptions about the available options are not very accurate, although I can understand why you might think that way.

I'm not sure about your statement of profitability. Ford had a profitable Q1 this year, and it's last full profitable year was as recently as 2005 (just under 3 years ago). "Profitable" can be very open to interpretation, although they have been losing marketshare for quite a while, they have not been unprofitable for a significant amount of time when you look at the bigger picture. Not sure about GM or Chrysler.
Help Technologizer identify the single greatest year in tech history (part one: the 1970s)
I version control system determines the workflow so it has direct impact of the internals of a company.
I like the idea of playing with a lazy language, but am a bit intimidated by Haskell. Oh, sure I've written some trivial programs in it, but there's this aura surrounding it that makes me put Simon Peyton Jones, Philip Wadler and the rest of the crew on this pedestal. I kneel before them.
Ford's plant in Brazil can do this too:

http://info.detnews.com/video/index.cfm?id=1189
Case in point: Hacker News comments vs. Reddit comments vs. Digg comments.

Sure, there's a population bias. But Reddit used to have mostly intelligent comments. Not anymore.
Do you have examples of bot TOS violations going to court?
Thank you! The extension hangs under the tab and shows up when you hover over the tab. This breaks on Mac OS X and Linux plus the keyboard shortcuts don't work on these platforms. I am as surprised as you are that it doesn't work cross platform. Also thank you for posting more information about Tyba - it's much appreciated.
To be fair, there are 14 that are authored by multiple authors. Perhaps a few more females are hiding in there?
You make a good point, so I have removed the dscm tags from that one. I added this because I feel that the ability to keep full branches in the same repository that you can push and delete easily gives you far greater flexibility than bzr or hg, which you can only get the exact same functionality by having separate repositories that are clones of each other. However, since that's not what I was demonstrating in that section and it's a bit too complicated to amend easily, I've removed it and focused in that section on the advantages over svn and perforce. perhaps later...
IBM's XML Challenge (lots of prizes inside)
Google reveals Chrome extensions plan
Simple, require registration.

Ask gender.

If they answer Male, tell them to fuck off.
Bittorrent declares war on VoIP, gamers
I think there might be a security hole in that one...
I'm not sure why you would want to do this. What's better about a site that verifies that all members are women? Protection from invading anti-feminists? Safe space, like an online women's center?

A good strategy might be to make the site invite-only, and distribute invite codes to early members stressing that it is supposed to only be for women. That might actually generate a sort of buzz, if you forbid it to men.
This won't work. There is a sizable population on the net that likes to pose as female. If all you have to do to forge a female identity online is to choose female, then lots of guys will do it.

I'm thinking that having an "unverified" status is the way to do it. Users who are not yet verified can browse and do certain things, but cannot comment or moderate. Alternatively, they will be able to comment, but at a lower Karma score, or some such.
And even stronger: digg is now better than reddit. Digg is somewhat moderated, reddit isn't at all.
http://xkcd.com/125/
I disagree - I feel that the branch model in Git and its support in the distributed models gives Git an advantage over bzr and hg in overall workflow flexibility, including the centralized model. However, wmf below is correct in that I did not defend that properly, so I have amended that section.

Furthermore, I have been using Git since the pre 1.0 days several years ago - way before most people were using it, so 'fanboyism', a term that I hate, is obviously not why I use it or why I try to teach it. I feel that it is a legitimately better choice for most people than these other tools and this is my attempt to make those points as simply and as straightforward as possible. If you feel I am technically incorrect on anything, please email me and I _will_ fix it.
No.

No business should receive help from the government aside from a publically available grant. Bailouts violate the concept of a free market.
Make registration require an invite from another member. For the initial users, only invite people you know to be women, and that you trust to follow your rule of only inviting other women themselves.

It may slow your growth at first but could add to the sense of exclusivity that you appear to want. A strong community devotion to the idea of women-only membership might be a side-effect of the self-selecting invite/agree process.

Though beware: there be dragons in online conceptions of gender, and it's sure to always be a topic of controversy (PR hooks?), especially as a man creating a women's-only site.
More accurately, there would be a shmarmy Wesley Mouch advocating Fannie and Freddie, and the need to repeal the Glass Stiegel act.

The most productive people in the world have never cared about finance or banking.

The only similarity between anything YC related and the credit crisis is that some business models are purely designed to catch a bubble. If you do that you are just speculating with code rather than financial instruments.

True entrepreneurship adds value and builds businesses that you can self-fund and that people will pay for, without trying to lure in a million visitors and a few investors with some sort of undisclosed, roulette-wheel business model.
The Answer To The VC Question: "What Is A Desirable Outcome?"
Making the site invite-only is a good strategy. But it will not do enough to prevent men from getting registered. There would have to be another mechanism.

The purpose would be to have a social news site that's oriented towards women, but which does not accomplish this by actively encouraging "girly" content. I want the notion of "what's interesting to women" to be emergent, not socially engineered by the site's designers. Also, I suspect that this will make the site safer as well.

The mechanism does not have to be foolproof. The ability to flag abusive users and other moderation mechanisms will still be needed to weed out the "leaks" and female users who also happen to be abusive.
Given 6*10^20 neurons in the human race, we have 10^3 atoms in 12 grams of carbon per neuron, a little bit more than 1 neuron simulation per atom. I'm not a neuron simulation or an atomic computing expert but even a few orders of magnitude above it (e.g. 1.2 kg of carbon) would give us sufficient computing power for a neuron AFAIK.

Also 10^11 neurons fit in roughly 0.001 cubic meters (i.e. a cube of 10cm), a thousand would fit in a cubic meter, your one brain simulation server room has space to a 100,000 actual human brains. Even if the simulation hardware occupies the same space as the human brain requires we would use only 0.01 cubic kilometers for the entire human race simulation. I have to agree that this will cost more than $1k, but is much smaller than your design.
Yes the huge masses win. The mob will win because it will be the mob that decides what is actually 2) and what is 1).

Minorities lose because their (our?) behaviour may be suspicious to the masses. The judge is replaced the mob.

But that's not all. Since the mob doesn't have a clear picture of everyone's actions, someone has to do the data integration and run algorithms to compute a simple number to express how suspicious someone's behaviour is.

HR managers will no longer personally google for applicants. The whole thing will be outsourced and those affected will never know why they didn't get that job or that bride.

Something suspicious, nobody will know what. The algorithms might use heuristics and random factors so nobody can ever find out why a particular decision was taken other than that the suspicion factor was too high.
Yeah. I don't see 4chan and its ilk disappearing any time soon.

You can't have wonderful things without awful things. Things that would make one hard make the other hard as well.
Perhaps a strict Haskell 98 implementation? I really like Haskell but i'm still not convinced that laziness should be the default. It would be interesting to see what the trade-offs are.