skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It wasn't rude. The super rich in America control far less wealth today in proportion to the total economy than they did in 1900, when Rockefeller by himself controlled wealth equal to 1/45th of GDP. At his peak, Carnegie was even wealthier than Rockefeller. The ten richest Americans at the time controlled wealth equal to 1/20th of all GDP.

To accomplish that feat today, someone like Gates would need to be worth nearly $350 billion. The top ten would need to be worth $800 billion.

In the 19th century, private individuals used to fund wars, because they were more powerful and wealthier than the nation states going to war. The Morgan family, JP and his father Junius, funded wars by shuttling money through their banking empire on both sides of the Atlantic. Nation states had to borrow war funds from private banks & enterprises. The thought of that today is laughable, when the US military vaporized a trillion on the latest Iraq war alone.

In the panic of 1907, JD Rockefeller pledged his wealth to stabilize the system - specifically he offered JP Morgan a guaranteed backing that he could use to assist the US Treasury in stabilizing imbalances that threatened to crash the economy. That notion would be comical today, when the Fed prints a trillion every six to eight months depending.

The idea that the rich are richer today in relation to the economy, than the early industrial days of America, is an absurd myth that isn't backed up by any data. It's pure propaganda.
Zapping asteroids and space debris with a swarm of satellites firing lasers
Gamification Sucks
Lately it is has been getting a lot harder. The problem right now is that so many things have moved so far, that there simply isn't a known pattern that will work.

Generally speaking, you now need a compiler. If not to install something other than a quite old system ruby, then to install common gems like nokogiri.

XCode seems to change significantly every release. Not long ago, you had to download it, or get it from your system CDs. Then you had to buy it from the app-store. Then you got it for free from the app-store. Then you got the installer for free from the app-store, and had to run the installer. And today I think you get the installer, which you run, and then you go through a series of menus to get to "install command line tools" (like gcc).

Once gcc is there, then you need a ruby. There's RVM and rbenv. Those need to be found, installed (by running a curl command piped through bash), and then a ruby needs to be installed. I use RVM, which is easy enough for me, and it does install bundler by default (which is good).

Once you have a modern ruby, you probably want a database other than sqlite. For that, you usually need homebrew. Again, install homebrew, and then have homebrew install postgresql/mysql.

At this point you are almost ready to install the rails gem.

Oddly, a lot of the newer complexity has less to do with Rails, and has more to do with the Ruby ecosystem getting both older and more complex at the same time.

Every time I help a new developer get started with the rails environment, I too am amazed at how much has changed since I setup my own laptop one year ago.
For more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment
government agencies do not relinquish their claims lightly. They don't consider their hardware to be "abandoned", merely "very hard to get to".

My ex-coworkers at the Museum of Flight (in Seattle, mentioned in this article) know the exact location of a WWII-era fighter aircraft that crashed in Lake Washington. They recovered and restored one aircraft from the crash site at least a decade ago, but the Navy will not let them touch the other one.
Do you mind going into some details about why the Bundler gem was mocking you? I'm a Python dev and only know rudimentary rails/ruby.
This article seems to completely miss the point that almost all of Apple's revenue comes from hardware sales: they pretty much build software to make certain that there is incentive to own their hardware; even more so, as all of their revenue is from hardware, they are in a uniquely deranged position where you are encouraged to throw away your old devices and replace them with new ones.
A 15-minute standup isn't going to hurt a good team's productivity, while it could greatly improve the productivity of a mediocre team.

It takes a lot to noticeably hurt a good team's productivity. But it's mean, just fucking mean, to punish a good, productive, communicative team with more process because you also manage crappy teams.
I was at Disney World last week, and they have this neat thing called the Carousel of Progress. It basically shows a household in the early 1900's through to present time.
The interesting thing is how little has changed since then. There have been huge changes in communication, but other than that, the family of 100 years ago had an ice box, running water, etc. There were 130,000 cars in the country.

We marvel at our advances in medicine, but the biggest advances in life expectancy, from relatively simple techniques combatting child mortality, are long behind us. Life expectancy at age 65 has increased only 4 years (from 12 to 16) in the last 100 years.

In any given field, we see technology progress rapidly than plateau. Aerospace plateaued in the 1960's, for example. Even semiconductor technology, which has progressed at a breathtaking pace over the last half century, has improved markedly slower in this decade.

I think the faith in technology to save the day is misplaced. Improvements in energy technology peaked in the 1950's with the invention of nuclear power. Indeed, we still get most of our electricity from coal power plants that aren't dramatically different than they were 100 years ago (the city of Chicago just shut down two coal plants that are 100+ years old).

I have no doubt that technology will solve these problems, eventually. But the scenario in the article isn't something that might happen hundreds of years into the future. The projection is for 2050. I won't even have retired by then. We need a revolution to happen in the next 38 years, and I don't think one is forthcoming.
Video Tutorial: Getting Started with Django Best Practices
New website maps your political stances to the 2012 presidential candidates
Pretty cool new site that shows a breakdown of which candidates you side with by issue. Definitely worth it if you have two minutes to answer honestly.
I actually think that food is the least of our problems.

Now growing animals for food is incredibly wasteful (in terms of water and other resources). Lab-grown meat isn't economically viable yet but by 2050 I imagine it may well be. Still, it'll be hard to argue with the economics of how cheap it is to grow a cow.

Fuels and metals are the big problem. The first is I believe a much bigger problem than the second. The reason is that there fuels are a means to an end: energy. When it comes to the electrical grid, you can supply that power with coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, wind power, solar power or nuclear power. It doesn't matter to the end user. It will be reflected in the price but the point is that you can make substitutions.

The bigger problem is metals as we're rapidly running out of those or, rather, the cost of extracting those will in the next century or two drastically increase. It is incredibly cheap to rip up iron out of the ground (~$10-15/tonne IIRC). Transportation and smelting to steel may increase the overall cost by an order of magnitude but that's still cheap.

Some look to space as a means to solving that problem but I have trouble fathoming a situation where extracting metals from the Moon or asteroids or whatever will be within even a few orders of magnitude of the cost of digging a big pit on Earth. Even if energy were free (in fuel terms), the cost of travelling far, retrieving the ore, refining it (probably in space) and getting it back to Earth are just fundamentally high (in comparison).

I honestly believe there needs to be at least one order of magnitude less of us than there is now and there will be one way or the other in coming centuries.
Obama hasn't mentioned global warming since his 2008 campaign.
I agree that X-Frame-Options isn't the right solution. Here's the comment I posted on the site:

--

This is a cross-site request forgery (CSRF). To prevent the attack the server needs to disregard the request. It doesn’t matter whether or not the browser disregards the response to that request. By the time the browser receives the response it is too late, the server will already have processed the request. Therefore using X-Frame-Options won’t help in this case.

The correct solution (I believe) is for the server to check for Referer or Origin headers and use those headers to determine whether or not the request is valid.

The decision about which requests to accept may be a bit fuzzy in this case because Amazon probably wants to accept most requests that originate from external sites, but perhaps not all of them (as your attack shows).

Strict CSRF prevention techniques are probably not desirable due to the fact that the recommendation system needs to be seamless to the end user. It would be inappropriate (for example) to ask the user for their password!

Some references for the interested reader:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_request_forgery

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross-Site_Request_Forgery_(...
There are self sustained mobile desalination platforms. You can see one here, made by a Greek university:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTuh2wIz32M

The platform which weighs 150 tons produces 70.000 liters of water daily and it costs around 700 thousand Euros. It’s not much but it’s a good start, I’m sure there are other advancements in this area.
"tough stuff" -- I love Bezos' technical terminology.
I love that they included the third party candidates
Panopticlick will tell you what plug-ins you have. As far as I know, it's not possible to test for what extensions you have.
Post PC era, Really?
It's the other way around. The original intent of patents is to disclose the making of a device to the public domain in exchange for an exclusive royalty and eventually, after a certain amount of time, for the device to become public domain.

Since the royalty is exclusive it means that you are the only one that is allowed to profit from the patent and here comes the defendability of patents.

However if you really want to protect something then, by all means, keep it secret. Coca-Cola and Pepsi formulas are kept secret and will not be patented, for example.
One great example of that is the Haber Process. Fritz Haber (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber - a controversial figure as you can see) figured out how to synthesize nitrogen fertilizers, which basically solved a hunger crisis that was growing in Europe at the time. As the wiki says, "The food base of half of the current world population is based on the Haber-Bosch process." I originally heard this on a Radiolab episode; they claimed, among other things, it took us from a world capacity of ~1.5bn to ~13bn, and that people needed fertilizer so bad at the time that wars were fought in South America over bat guano. Hey, now we fight over oil.

The guy also gassed Allied troops and felt pretty good about it, so, you know. He had range.
"Surface wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database."
I don't think so. ASP.net MVC has been open source for a while. They are adding ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages (aka Razor). That is pretty much all of ASP.net unless you really, really want web forms(you don't).
I suck - meant to add this last week.

The things I do ...

Joy Cardin Show
Dir WPR Mike Crane
after 27:48
Greg in Stevens Point "I get tired of the political talk in the first two segments (tl:dl - he doesn't like politics, would donate, would like the morning programs to be more like the mid-day one, with gardening, home handy tips and various other stuff) "It's just listening to college teachers with an opinion .. it never ends .. been going on for three, four, five years however long it's been."

Mike WPR Director "Bascially starting with the election two years ago now that there just seemed to be a lot more politics to talk about. that we had a significant change in governance that I think has caused a lot of people to be
curious about it maybe we'll find after this next election that things will shift a different way and there will be other things to talk about."

The second comment was rich. Greg complained about diversity - race issues. "Only one person of color."

Mike:(paraphrase) We have a Latina, too. And we're working on some other stuff.

The 'person of color' is the (imho) best guy _on_ WPR, Jonathan Overby. His 'Higher Ground' used to be a really entertaining live show with an audiance, live music. A few years ago they cut it back to Overby playing records.

I miss the way it used to be.

http://wpr.org/higherground/

Now, Crane's comments can be seen as innocuous. And, maybe, he really did mean them that way.

But it's funny that the swing to 'talk about politics' didn't happen until after Walker (R) was elected. And that he said it would swing right back if he was voted out.
The FED is Fed Up
Programmer's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (2009)
Let's quickly hit the three points they covered, and one they didn't.

1) Hot. Current models predict that 2050 will be warmer, but not much warmer. I believe the current best guess is around 2 degrees C by 2050, which it certainly noticeable, but perhaps not best summed up as "hot". (For people not following this subject, physical observations have produced lower amounts of warming than the models expected; as a result the estimate of the climates sensitivity to CO2 has been revised downward.) Don't get me wrong, this doesn't mean that global warming is not real, and a big problem. But according to the IPCC models, it's also a very very slooooow problem. We shouldn't be complacent, but it's probably counter-productive to panic.

2) Crowded. Well, not really. We're talking about an overall increase of 1/3, which sounds a lot but keep in mind that this is just about as crowded as the world is ever projected to get. Further, the linked report says this will happen mostly via the less-crowded places getting more crowded, not increased crowding in the megacities. That's not so bad, really. I LIKE big cities, personally.

3) Running out of fuel. Again, this comes with a big caveat. We're suddenly finding huge amounts of fossil fuels - mostly gas, but also oil. (Or rather, we're figuring out ways of accessing the ones we already knew about. Remember that "reserves" are fossil fuels which are known, proven, economical to extract, and - in the US - legal to get to. A small rise in oil prices or - in the US - a change in law can lead to "reserves" multiplying without a single new survey.) We're really not going to "run out of fuel" by 2050, or even get close. Fuel may be significantly more expensive because what's left is hard to dig up, or we might decide to simply not dig some of it up (in order to fight global warming), but there's more than enough for the next few decades. And yes, that includes projections of increased Chinese consumption.

4) Richer. One of the reasons 2050 looks so hot, crowded, and out of fuel is because we have 38 years for small growth rates to compound. Small temperature changes can add up - but so does growth. We generally expect productivity to increase by at least 2% per year. If that continues then by 2050 we'll all be a little over twice as rich as we are now. True, it's not certain those trends will continue until 2050, but the same could be said of the first three trends too, and productivity growth looks like at least as good a bet to me.

In short, the world of 2050 looks like it'll be almost unnoticeable warmer, small cities will be more like the Bay Area or New York, fuel will be more expensive but plentiful, and we'll all be twice as rich (and with MUCH more awesome tech).

I'll take that deal. Got a time machine? :)

Edit: Water is a much more major problem, and deserves a lot more attention than it's getting. However as other commentators have pointed out, thorium reactors should allow us to just brute force it via desalination plants. Fingers crossed...
Bearing False witness, ya moronic scumbag!

God says...
intoxicated Essence farness value accounted sight waters
character glances spoke offspring spoke converting data
dispense Let fable fear caves deepest brain kind IS look
fouls reclaiming leaden slaying pursuits dragons hand
spouts temptations daemon perils marks Professorship hugging
burial profound case accept sending capacities wife Beware
> What I want is to /eventually/ get PNaCl

Well, NaCl is in no way a step towards that. They are completely separate technologies: One is a modified gcc compiler and custom validator in the browser, the other is a modified LLVM compiler and another modified LLVM compiler in the browser. The only similarity between them is the name, and some of the SFI approaches they utilize. But their code, potential spec for standardization some day, startup times, portability etc. are entirely different.

Supporting NaCl now would not help out PNaCl in any way. (In fact, the opposite could be argued.)

> But, building JS into the world's VM because of the asteroid-like inertia behind JS is frustrating in a similar way to watching Intel bolt stuff on to a pocket calculator CPU (8086) until we get a CoreI7. It obviously /can/ work, but...

First thing, I do understand your frustration. I feel it too.

But JS isn't just there because of inertia. There is no other valid option, all the proposals have major flaws, either technical or legal. JS also has its flaws, to be sure. But since the others are not clearly better (running faster, but only on certain CPUs is not better), JS will win because it does have inertia.
Come back when it's realtime. (I only wipe myself with recent happenings.)

http://hackaday.com/2011/09/27/toilet-paper-printer-made-fro...
Energy and water consumption projections seem to just take current per capita consumption rates and raise them against projected population growth. Then they ask the question of "how will energy producers cope with these demands?" and start guessing at which technology will swoop in to save the day. But that doesn't appear to be how things work in the world.

I imagine a lot of us on HN live in a world where you can blast your AC all day and leave all your faucets running with no repercussions beyond a cheap marginal bill.

Isn't it more likely that we'll encounter the economics of scarcity and an adaptive market instead of one day turning on our faucet and nothing comes out because, dang, we've run out?

I hear stories of parts of America fighting over water access, but aren't they really just fighting over a supply that still lets people run their faucets all day?

Perhaps, as the water supply becomes more and more jeopardized, it will stop being practically free. Like every other market in the world, its price will reflect and dictate nominal availability. And the introduction of new technologies will come, like most markets, when the price of water/energy hits a tipping point. In other words, if we start running out of fossil fuels, won't that just jack up the price until alternatives become cheaper? And the higher price of energy will mean we may have to be more deliberate about saving energy, for once?
Thats an amazing idea. Would they take 5k each. If so we just need to find 10k people to contribute. Kick starter anyone?
No, your friend is not left holding the bag. He's left holding the money you paid him for the equity. You were the one in the red at first, but since the value of your stake could grow and pay you in dividends you overcame that loss. Both of you gained money - that's the point. He didn't even lose the opportunity for more money, because he needed the initial investment to even grow the company in the first place.

Here's the key point you're missing. In order for it to be zero sum, if you make a million dollars off of this company, he needs to LOSE a million dollars. Not the opportunity to make a million dollars, an actual million dollars. Clearly this does not happen. You are totally and entirely wrong here.

The market doesn't grow because new money flows in. This is mercantalism and your understanding of economics is hundreds of years old. The market grows because companies create REAL (not nominal) value that didn't exist before. I can explain this in more depth, clearly your financial friends aren't very good at their jobs (it's quite common).

The reason your oil trader friend agrees it's zero sum is because the futures market is zero sum. The stock market is not.
"The campaign is expected to last six to eight weeks..." and what happens after that? Knowing this information, Android and Apple can just plan to launch a campaign in 8 weeks when their is less money being thrown around by WP and Nokia.

Can they really get the message out in 8 weeks and then go back to their old ways?
Unhide Your Dock Faster
Great Wildlife Photography
just finished my site-check it out. I offer cheap prints of my work and am looking to break into the photography stock photo market.
Current Obsession: The Clone Wars
I help maintain the http://github.com/thoughtbot/laptop script that Giles mentioned. Happy to take feedback in Github Issues.

Some other good ones:

https://github.com/atmos/cinderella

https://github.com/pivotal/pivotal_workstation
Interesting, we were going down a similar path in Victoria, Australia with falling water supplies. They build a very expensive desalination plant. Now it has turned around with 3 or 4 wet years so we are about to have this plant come online and not needed in the foreseeable future.
But if you have a mixer, why not just buy proper microphones? A cheap mic is around $5, so buying two of those would yield vastly superior recordings for even less. This is merely a curiosity for unusual situations where standard equipment is not available.
Glad to see disdain for "agile" is finally becoming mainstream. Now, it may be that someone writing rote software should follow a process, but for anyone doing anything actually innovative, you can't get into their head and tell them what process they must follow, whether waterfall or agile. It's like telling Michelangelo the process for sculpting.

Rather than teaching people processes, they should help foster better ways of actually thinking about the code itself. E.g., learning new programming languages and frameworks gives one a variety of perspectives to think about code from.
There's one on display in Huntsville too.
[crypto] Bitcoin-mining Botnets observed in the wild? (was: Bitcoin in endgame
Definitely matches my experience.

And let me just leave this here... http://jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Decline-and-Fall-of-Agile.htm...
Yeah, I tend to think it will be viable for say mining the moon for local structures long before it would be to cart them back to earth.
Ask HN: No NFL, NBA, MLB archived videos
Why are there no sites that stream old NFL, NBA, and MLB games? I would think many sports fans would pay to see old games or games that they've missed. Are the cost of licensing the videos too high? Any insight would be appreciated.