skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Dumping the remaining energy as heat in a climate-change world. Great!

Obviously, the contribution to global temperature increases due to the literal heat dissipation of engines is extremely, extremely negligible. Petroleum can cause changes to global temperatures through the release of carbon, which changes the Earth's insulation, but no through actual heat.
icanlocalize.com is who I use. I pay for the additional review afterwards so I get everything double checked. Seems to work ok, and is inexpensive.
All fiction (not just SF) is about predicting reactions of a set of characters to set of circumstances. There are really only two kinds of drama: ordinary things happen to extraordinary people, or extraordinary things happen to ordinary people. (And for extra comic-book style bombast, I guess you could include extraordinary things and people.)

The way Philip K Dick put it, in SF the ideas (or circumstances) are the main character(s), rather than the people.
This seems straightforward and true, but in specific cases you should look deeper. A surprising number of software developers work unpaid overtime, and give their time to their employers for free. As well, the amount of producitivity that computers enable an individual to produce, when compared to how much the individual is paid for that, reduces time to being almost free.

If you only have to pay someone $20/hr, but every 400 hours or so they pop out some tiny bit of work that ends up being worth $500k in savings, you've only paid $8k for $500k profit. The 'cost' in terms of developer time is so stupendously cheap that worrying about wasting it is really a waste of effort.

Now, if developers realized the amount of money they save/made their company and they expected to be paid on the basis of THAT value, instead of simply settling for 'market rate' wages (which never take into account the actual value the position creates at any point), then it would make sense to worry about such things. But, developers, like most employees, are kept very ignorant of their impact to the company. Those who actually get to see their fiscal impact and who can't be lied to (top level managers, sales people) don't make market rate wages. It is their time you should be worrying about.
I always assumed this was because in the Star Trek universe people were freed from a lot of the drudgery by the systems, and used the time to go do the interesting things that they wanted to do.

I suppose it's because I see reddit and facebook as a weird form of escapism from reality. I know that when I don't have any pressing issues I'm much more likely to sit down and read. reddit/hn is for when I need a quick "don't think about work" break, never for when I have the whole weekend stretching out in front of me.

The utopian dream of Star Trek is a never-ending weekend where _you_ get to decide what's important without being overly concerned that you'll starve to death on Monday.
Heh. "The enemy's gate is, um, that way."
http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2010/12/understanding-tod...
Someone in the "troll community" gave the BBC reporter a USB stick on it with his identity and lots of samples of hir activity.
When I read this book, I was a busser at a hotel restaurant. Some customer I was talking to had recommended it to me. He made me promise him I'd read it (seems kinda lame in retrospect).

I ignored a lot of it (like the risky real estate stuff), but what I took away from it was that you can't get rich working for someone else because you can only work so many hours in a day; you need to start your own business or invest to make lots of money. That seems like common sense now, but it wasn't for me at the time.

I'm not exaggerating when I say this-- I saved up and bought a Mac, bought books on HTML/CSS, PHP, Ruby, MySQL, Photoshop, Illustrator, design, etc., bootstrapped a SAAS company, and now I make a solid living off of it. This took me about 5 years because I started from scratch, but I can say I'm definitely a lot happier with my lifestyle now, than I was before I read the book, as cheesy as it was. Just my two cents.
As a real world example to back you up:

One of my projects was shut down by Craigslist (NotifyWire.com). I took down the site and posted the details explaining why NotifyWire was going off-line.

Six months later, while attempting to refinance my house, I was told to take my name off the mortgage application because my corporation was under legal threat by Craigslist and thus was a liability that the underwriters might cite as a reason to decline the application.

That was an eye opener for me.
I agree with you other than in this part:
> How long before an internet and phone background check is standard in the background checks organizations do before offering jobs?

this is a typical scenario of unaware teen: he signs up for facebook, put bunch of pictures, then get in some sort of trouble due to that (stalker, troubles at work/home/school etc). That is like a cold shower. Most teens learns from first, second, third mistake. Then they stop posting photos OR at least think twice before clicking upload.

Not only it would be incredible abuse on FB part to share your history in a way that your data could be as valuable as credit card history, I am sure people would stop using Facebook had known their _private_ facebook life stopped them from getting a credit card or some other benefits.
That would certainly be better experimental design, since you would be controlling for other factors. On the other hand, precisely measuring the improvement in conversion isn't particularly important in this case; it's already clear that faster is better, so you're not gaining much actionable information from the measurement, whereas you would be giving half of your users a worse experience. In a situation where you were uncertain about which of two methods is better, it would definitely be better to run them in parallel like you've suggested so that you had a fair comparison.
OK, I get it. It's for people who never have looked up "investment" in a good dictionary.

But that doesn't make it a good book. I mean, you can get that and more off a single page: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/personal-finance-for-d...

Or this one: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/making-millions-for-du...
Agreed. The UI is very hard to understand, especially, and the name makes no sense.
He sounds prejudiced to me :-p
The public payroll information for my state is available through the website http://seethroughny.net/. For 2010 there were over 116,000 public employees who made $100k.
Thanks for the feedback. It does support environments - if you check the source code it refers to environments as 'scope'. It is not possible to properly implement lambda without implementing environments.
US pump prices are low because you don't tax it like other countries, that's not a subsidy.

Environmental cost? I'll grant you that accidents involving rigs and shipping are spectacular and locally devastating when they happen, but what about the pros of a cheap and relatively easy fuel, it has saved millions of lives.

To give some balance what about farming? Farming has devastated the environment on a global scale. It's subsidised to the teeth too...

"Profit generating mess" is hyperbole, but you can have it since I went for whataboutery.
>>>Temple Jump, however, was a scam intended to trick customers into thinking the app is related to Temple Run. It had a similar icon, vague description, and a single screenshot that did not show any gameplay.

Zynga does clone games (like nearly every studio does). However, their games are clearly distinct and not intended to trick customers of a competing product.
Petroleum is really frickin' energy-dense (leaving aside the fact that unless you're heating something only a small fraction can be turned into useful work).

A mid-range home EV charger peaks out at about 20kW.

By contrast, the energy flux of a gas pump is around 20MW.
Microsoft’s attack on Linux: The hardware way
> If you can't say something nice...just don't comment.

That's great advice, both online and face-to-face. Well, probably "useful" rather than "nice", and say it respectfully; e.g. when debating an idea, arguing your position may not be seen as nice...

It is all so true that what you say can come back to haunt you. It is the responsibility that comes with the freedom (of speech, in this case). You cannot have one without the other, but while it is important to understand and accept the responsibility, you shouldn't let it frighten you into giving away your freedom.
Bing videos broken
I agree... that should make for a very interesting read.
It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure all of his books point out that 9/10 attempts result in failure; the trick being to see the failure early enough to recover and move onto the next attempt before it is too late.
> I'm a big fan of taking canon "seriously" and trying to work out how it could actually be working.

It's our Alamo :)

> Even such old chestnuts like "Why did the Enterprise actually carry families?" are old chestnuts precisely because it really, honestly doesn't make sense. Starships are blowing up all the time in Star Trek, usually not even due to hostile action (or at least, conventional hostile military action).

Time to pick some nits. Sure, we see ships blow up all the time, but we also see shootings, explosions and robberies on the news every night, but I've only dealt with a break-in at my apartment once, and I've never been shot at in the street, and the only explosions I see are on the fourth of july. Statistically, I'd wager that people are just as safe on a Galaxy-class vessel as they are in San Francisco. (Although, the Enterprise was on a mission of exploration, where you never know where you might end up - it's about as dumb as, say, packing all of your stuff into a wooden box on wheels and heading west... hm.)

But you're right. It's all terribly inconsistent. I'd wager that Futurama is probably easier to rationalize, because at least they portray a lot of the people as human, making dumb mistakes and irrational decisions. "Why is this so?" "Because Fry is an idiot." "Oh, okay." The only difference, really, is in rationalizing the technology, but how different is a self-sealing stembolt from the smelloscope?
Iphones run on oil too (and coal, gas, nuclear energy, and various renewable fuels). It's just that giant synchronous generators are more efficient than a million internal combustion engines, so they burn the oil at a central location and pipe it to you over wires in the form of electricity.

It's like asking "how much gas does it take to run the LCD screen on my car stereo?", comparing it to how much electricity a mansion uses and concluding that gas is the old fuddy duddy stick in the mud holding back progress.
Enabling Google Apps Security for Small Businesses – Review of DomainWatch
Ah, my mistake. I Googled for it but misread the results.
Thanks for the feedback guys! I intend to do more interpreter/compiler projects so perhaps you will end up considering one of my future projects sufficiently interesting or exotic :)
> Evidently the free market is awesome except when it results in cheap products that threaten an established industry.

China actively and heavily subsidizes its solar industry. That is hardly the result of a free market.
"Psychiatrists still have no idea how to distinguish a person with mild Asperger's from a person who is simply introverted."

Most psychiatrists still have no idea how to distinguish, but those few who actually study autism are very much able to tell the difference. Asperger's syndrome doesn't just affect how one interacts socially, although that is the most visible manifestation.
Anyone familiar with this able to give a quick overview of the legality of this? I've looked into this before and it sounded to me like doing this too much (e.g. all your meals?) is dishonest and/or illegal.
> Quarks Bar? Those aren't business meetings.

It's even full of people gambling, and the gambling tables are run by busty women in cleavagey outfits. And in the first few seasons, it's pretty obvious that the holosuites are for porn.
"Let's face it, regular expressions aren't for everyone."

Wait, since when aren't they? I would have thought basic regex skills were a baseline shibboleth of a programmer. I even know several non-technical people that are proficient.
Thinking like this is what prevents real innovation. All of these statements seem to be common sense, but they're all individually false when you dig below the surface.

There are huge variations in how much vehicles consume on a per-passenger basis. And there's no reason that alternative energy / electric must approach the energy density of petroleum - that assumption only holds if you're assuming that a vehicle must carry all of its power with it (and many existing ones don't.) Looks at catenary-powered buses commonly in use in many metro areas - low energy consumption per passenger, off-vehicle power source. I'm not saying they're a solution, but just that you can't get to a good new solution by assuming it has to look like the current dominant option.
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Power-One (PWER): The Real Winner of Facebook’s IPO
I just used middleman http://middlemanapp.com/ for this exact purpose. A lot of sites don't really need a database, and they don't need to be incredibly dynamic. Most Who, What, When, Where, Why questions can be answered statically.
I suppose this depends on where you live, but going above 60mph is normal usage for me. In fact, a minimum speed limit of 45mph on freeways is fairly common (unless you can't due to traffic, of course).
It's frustrating to users who download it expecting to get a game.
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I have read it, and I do think there are defects in the processes. But what to you do about it? I'm sure there are many more unknown vulnerabilities in the orbiter that were never found out, but you keep trying and fixing.
> Freedom of speech wasn't really meant to protect garbage like that.

whether its a garbage or not, that your personal opinion. even if it would be opinion of 99% of population, you would still find people liking his writing.

I am not sure where the problem is: whether it is him writing this stuff, or others unable to ignore his writing. I don't mind trolls; they are sort of a challenge. If someone is smart enough to get intelligent individual involved in the garbage conversation, then its that individual fault. internet is a product of humanbeings and like in real life, there will always be statistical noise, an asshole in the neighborhood, one stupid dude out of 100s your working with, etc.

Checking with Wiki, troll is someone fed off someones responses to his comment. I bet if you ignore this guy long enough, he would stop trolling.
> these books do not offer any recipes for wealth creation

Oh but they do: for the authors.

The problem with them is that there is little of substance and lots of feel-good hand waving. The good bits could usually be summed up on a page. Compare and contrast, with, say "Founders at Work" where each story is different, unique and interesting in its own way.
Warfare deserves its own comment.

You can fucking reproduce historical figures with incredible fidelity, but you can't have a swarm of tiny battleships piloted by equivalent AI? Instead, you send your best people in a small warship right into the enemy lines, where they can be picked off at leisure?

Why aren't you people just firing a solid wall of torpedoes at the enemy? Why aren't you flinging black holes around like birdshot? Considering how many ships are lost per battle, why aren't you just launching cloaked warp cores at the enemy and decloaking & detonating when they're in their midst?

Did they completely forget about the self-replicating mines? Ignoring where they get the energy, why not fire a wall of those at the enemy? Right before the first wave hits, it should replicate another wall right behind them, and so on and so forth.
Honestly, the case mentioned in the article is a direct scam in which the user is tricked into buying something thinking it is related to the original game. This is IMHO much worse than the zynga "ripoffs".

That being said, I am also not fond of resourceful studios cloning other successful games.
Fuel economy can only improve by a factor of order unity (typically, less than 2) by changing speeds. And as I said, vehicle size is also incapable of reaching the orders of magnitude needed.
Platforms, Languages, and App Services : Economies and Communities of Scale
They're called bicycles, motorcycles, buses, and trains. The first two give up protection from the elements, the second two give up independence. Keeping both the constraints nets you a single-person car-like device with say a 30hp motor - somewhat more efficient, but not enough to drive adoption.
Gasoline (and energy in general) just isn't expensive enough for any of the alternatives to be taken seriously (infrastructure-wise) anywhere but dense urban areas.
If you're an iOS user, HTML5 is a magical place where you can do anything – outside of iOS, it's hit or miss. And if it's hit or miss, it might as well be Flash.

Remember that a client's perspective is often neat, cool and fun rather than works on all devices the exact same.

Flash will die when HTML5 signs the cheques that it's collective evangelicals cash.
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Wrong. I'd defend his right to say it if he weren't anonymous. In the US you do not have a right to anonymous speech. In most countries you don't have this right. You can mostly say whatever you want in public because the people around you will know who you are and can respond.
I've been looking forward to this excitedly for some time now. But now, maybe, I'm not so sure.
I think the evolution was driven by the desire to have non-technical people be able to maintain websites. The easiest way to do this is a web app, and once you have a web app, making the entire site dynamic is (a) easy (b) opens the door to tons of shiny possibilities.

Obviously, there were significant efforts in the maintainable static site space, such as FrontPage and Dreamweaver, but I think those ultimately lost out to the flashiness of dynamic websites.
wow thats actually crazy! designing a simple bootstrap website that "failed" and later on Craiglist reported it somewhere that your future may depend on?? can you share some more details?
Just wanted to make a quick reply to this:

>When I think of the most talented and driven people I know (and surely it takes driven and talented people to make it in Starfleet), I think of people who work long hours, spend much of their spare time cultivating their talents, and generally don't waste much time.

I totally agree. Not only is it specifically discussed that man has begun to evolve in a way that they can better themselves, through cooperation and self discovery, but it's also a mindset I see quite often. People who work tirelessly, and do incredible work, and then enjoy the small hobbies they have? Sounds like a lot of people I know, though not nearly in as large a quantity that one might find in a star trekesque future.
I think you're right that jit_merge_point affects performance. My point was that this isn't an optimization of the JIT compilation, so much as it is a requirement for a JIT compiler to be able to operate. The compiler has to know what defines an execution frame. Once you've done that, there are definitely other optimizations that go in to reducing the opacity of your interpreter to the JIT compiler.

So, you're probably right that a fair amount of optimization can come from doing a good job of defining what identifies an execution frame. I'm curious though, if these are the sorts of "low hanging fruit" the author was referring to, or if they're included in the straightforward port of the original C interpreter.

From the section on "Optimizing an RPython JIT" it seems that the he's doing a lot more than just defining his execution frame.

> The first tactic is to remove as many instances of arbitrarily resizable lists as possible. The JIT can never be sure when appending an item to such a list might require a resize, and is thus forced to add (opaque) calls to internal list operations to deal with this possibility.
Well if we're going to consult the contrived statistics department, why not go for broke?

If you want to get really thorough about extracting all of the energy in a gallon of gasoline, you could power a US household for 7.5 million years.
> Even such old chestnuts like "Why did the Enterprise actually carry families?" are old chestnuts precisely because it really, honestly doesn't make sense. Starships are blowing up all the time in Star Trek, usually not even due to hostile action (or at least, conventional hostile military action).

The TOS Enterprise didn't carry families because it worked in a frontier with considerably more outright dangers. I think in early TNG, it's implied that the Enterprise has what it thinks to be a much safer job, what with all the diplomatic missions and always being in closer contact with Starfleet. There's an entire episode where Q introduces them to the Borg just to remind them the galaxy is still dangerous.

Given how often Earth itself seems to be attacked, maybe they just realized there's no safe place in the galaxy so the families might as well be around to keep up the morale of the troops.
I miss junior high school.
You're right: 37signals don't have to do this test properly. Their prerogative. However, until they do, the 5% figure and implied causation are meaningless.

We don't know if their SD is in the same ballpark. Thousands of possible confounds. Plus, there's no solid a priori reason why shaving off latency should improve their conversion rates drastically -- Basecamp doesn't rest on a large number of small, potentially impulsive transactions like Amazon does. Without more data (or at least an explanation), this doesn't tell us anything.
It'll be exciting to find out what life forms are hiding down there, but by cracking the seal, we've already changed that ecosystem. Pumping hundreds of litres of kerosene into the ice was probably not the best way to introduce ourselves.
Telepathy? I think not
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I think people forget that reality TV and the like are edited and spliced to appeal to the audience. Anything you see on TV is weighted to determine if its entertaining or not... should a show/news cast adopt the OP's recommendation you can safely assume that each "lead" they track down that ends up at a kid would be simply swept away because it doesn't make for good TV.
What advantages does this hold over doing the same thing with Gremlin? Other than being slightly prettier syntactically. [0]

[0] https://github.com/tinkerpop/gremlin/wiki
One that always got me is: why does no one think of using the transporter as a weapon? Once the enemy's shields are down, you can just beam the entire enemy crew into space and have a relatively undamaged enemy ship to capture.
It would be a fair trade, but your whataboutery didn't include the true subsidies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies) as well as the much larger environmental cost: CO2 production from burning fossil fuels. It's going to cost a lot to clean that up, and I sincerely doubt that ExxonMobil or their brethren are going to foot that bill.
Ironically this is one of the first books I read that spurred my interest into Personal Finance. Ha.
This also happens when you don't have a decade of experience.

I had a whiteboard interview (which are never fun) but did reasonably well. The owner sent me home with homework:

Implement a fully Ajaxified Frontpage 2003 clone web app.

I would regularly see this company posting ads on boards for all sorts of positions. When I showed up it was a dev house of 4 people including the owner and his wife as receptionist. Sometimes people aren't hiring, they're just looking for free work.
Developing for The Web With Clojure and Noir