skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So oil dropped almost by half since the article was written. I'm all for development of new energy sources, but just because my family's person-car ration is close to 1 doesn't mean the world will end if gas becomes expensive again.

I think I remember reading another article by this author where he somehow implied that Soviet Union's population was better prepared for financial collapse (due to resourcefulness or whatever). Having lived through that mess myself I disagree. That country had screwed up economy and when fit hit the shan everyone was out for himself and the country was pretty much torn apart and sold by pieces down to tools at factories and telephone wire.

Russia was back in stone age until oil prices picked up. Now they seem to be repeating the same mistake, according to the author, where their economy struggling once that very oil is so cheap.
And you believe the answer is MS?

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-01-2001/jw-0124-iw-mss...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_laws...

There are countless other examples including the original versions of JScript and the burden that is IE6. This is not meant to be a defense of Apple. I was simply interested in why you believed that MS is somehow less "toxic" than Apple.
There is no substitute for direct experience, but I find that a good book can give me a perspective or a paradigm to approach a situation that it may have taken me months or years to realize on my own.

I remember reading "Crossing the Chasm" for the first time and experiencing the feeling that the Chasm model organized a number of scattered perceptions and events from my prior decade of work experience and made sense of them.

Not every book is that good, but some are and if in a few hours of reading I can shave a year of experimenting and sense-making off of future efforts it's a good investment. I try to balance engagement with reflection, but good books combined with direct experience have enabled me to get better faster than I would have without reading them.
He can't back up any of his assumptions (e.g. that oil is going to crash in the timeframe required for a "collapse"), but the last year or so of activity should suggest that something like this will probably happen on a smaller scale. As such it makes for a useful thought exercise.
Of course I can perform a MITM attack on a wireless network. You might try thinking about the communication layers above PHY. Almost any of them will do.
Newsweek's 1997 Christmas gadget shopping list
At 10k/day it'll take them > 40 years to get half the population of the US on board. Or if you prefer, 40 years to get the same number of users as facebook worldwide.

Not that 10k a day is bad(!), but truly mainstream is something else altogether.
This is a very insightful article, and I'm impressed with how much work the author put into getting something onto the front page of digg. If I were looking for somebody to do effective online PR, I'd be looking for somebody like this.

I think it's somewhat sad that digg is so huge now that it takes so much effort to get people to pay attention to an interesting link, and I'd be interesting in seeing if there were any way to counteract the user fragmentation that occurs as a social news site gets popular. Reddit-like categories seem to be one solution, but it seems more like a band-aid than a total solution.
I agree that many business books have a good ten to twenty page article trapped inside, with the book length writing required as packaging for sale. Some books, e.g. Innovator's Dilemma, offer a detailed review of examples that help to reinforce the basic concepts (as distinct from a collection of personal anecdotes and reminiscences).
The article you are referring to is http://www.energybulletin.net/node/23259

But generally speaking I don't think it's possible to agree or disagree with a country's preparedness for an economic collapse unless the said collapse actually occurs, otherwise it's just mere speculation.
GPL 2 or 3? The Cilk++ page says if it is "used by others" and not open source you need to pony up. This is perfectly acceptable by GPL2.
Qualcomm breaks in Netbook market with Gobi/Seadragon
He didn't hide the affiliation, he said so up front. Under each category is a mini-review of each book. That makes the site more useful than just a list of books.
A user has to earn the right to use that particular function

Not to detract from the discussion, but this isn't an actual feature on YC. AFAIK, nobody can down-vote (although editors can [dead]).
Micro-Giving: A New Era in Fundraising
>"I hope this article can help those normal diggers understand just how it is the power users got that way, and why digg is not a democracy"

Actually, it sounds like Digg is exactly a democracy to me. You have as much chance making the front page of Digg (or a popular subreddit) as you do getting your preferred policies enacted by the government - essentially zero. Having your voice heard in a crowd of millions is hard. Those that succeed usually hack the system.

The position that there is no conflict between competing interests in a democracy because "everybody has a voice" is BS (not that I would expect such arguments from this crowd). You can ask my sister who was outvoted for 18 years by my brother and I, the Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, or the Republicans in DC about how great a job democracy does of balancing competing interests.
I love emacs, but it is anything but inuitive. None of its features are discoverable and to learn how to use it you have to read a bunch of info pages.
You have to reach a certain karma score to be able to downvote individual comments. I can't remember what the score is, but its fairly low.
Even the best democratic governments of the world imprison individuals who they consider to be a "public disturbance" etc. And the definition of "public disturbance" usually has a pretty wide scope.
Broadband Stimulus Plan: How About Some Data First?
thank you. Can people please stop up-voting zed posts. I don't know the guy and am not offended by his obvious attempts at sensationalist blogging, but I have yet to read a post of his in the last year that had any meaningful hacker content.
Guide to Encrypted Dynamic Covert Channels
I would be pleased to see detailed tech insight from zed or anyone else. Using the word "fuck" over and over does not qualify in and of itself.
Apple has gotten a lot better since the days they pulled crap like abandoning APIs as soon as anyone started developing on them. Remember OpenDoc? And if you think IB is stagnant, remember MPW?
I think authors would benefit from Elements, though like all strategies, should not be taken as ideology. Apply where necessary. Even Hemmingway did not stick to strictly minimalism.

We can also go off on a tangent, and talk about how Strunk & White was published right at the end of the Victorian era, when WWI essentially wiped out the Romanticism ideals of that era. Something similar happened in America after the American Civial War. Mark Twain's writing became darker, gritter -- clearer -- when compared to his earlier works. Post-Civil War, no one wanted to trumpet the glories of war. It took the Europeans another seventy years to catch up. (My little excursion falls apart because both Strunk and White were Americans).

I could compare this to martial arts training. Newbies are aweful to look at. They have so much wasted motion. Economy of movement suggests mastery of the art form. Masters condense sophistication into simple movements, fully aware of their potential. They do not merely have simple movements.

My main point though, is that there are other skills in writing novels not found in Strunk & White. Good expressive technique does not make a good story. I may agree that Elements is worth using. I don't agree it is the only guide you should study.
> packaging for sale.

... and for future consulting work, in some cases:-)

Yeah, with the good ones, it's not like the rest of it is just "garbage", and I enjoy reading them, but I think for people who just want to know what the 'big idea' is, you don't need the extras.
She lives in something that still approximates a third world country. "Saved for life", by guaranteeing herself a solid future, would be a more apt description.

It's not likely she was missing ballet practice and play dates in suburban parks to accomplish this.
Well, you don't really know that, do you? Perhaps another monopolist would have come along. Perhaps he would have been in the style of Steve Jobs, who is not at all known for philanthropy.

Leave your biases at the door, please.
I was puzzled by his claim that pooswa is french for pussy. It sounds more like good evening with a very strong german accent.

I guess the slang meaning implies that you're a pussy when you say good evening in french, and what I took for a german accent is in fact american.

By the way, I don't think this is hacker news. I hope this comment doesn't help the post stay on the front page. I don't know how hacker news works. I voted up the comment that says 'not hacker news'. I hope this doesn't increase the score of the topic.
I may have been a little mean in my other comment - but you're on the right track to having a real startup. I've had probably 5 serious projects that eventually got abandoned because a) no business model, b) no users, and c) stupid idea. But the knowledge I gained by creating these projects? Priceless.

It's better to fail & learn on crappy projects so when you find a great idea you can just knock it out of the park.
The Great Clash of '09: A looming battle over re-regulation
That's my point though. Even extremely smart people can stumble on a dense abstract. It is the nature of language- just because I know what I mean does not mean that you do. Even if you write something that can only be interpreted correctly in one way, there is still room for misinterpretation or total lack of understanding.

I was really trying to say that if a paper with no meaning made it through screening (no matter how light) then maybe the papers are too dense.

In response to 1), I have always found that scientific papers provide more verbose explanations for even simple concepts. I have reread entire paragraphs three times only to discover that I already have a firm grasp of the concept being discussed and can explain it in a single sentence. But it probably just depends on the author and the verbosity could be explained by your 2): removing all uncertainty by explaining exactly what you mean.
no, merb did the community good in the long run. ezra and team wrote good code instead of complaining. Demonstrating how a community can work well without ego was what merb brought to the game in a way that Zed had nothing to do with.

There are many great hackers in the world. Some have written code that turned out to be critical to our everyday hacking lives. Zed seems to think that because he wrote one piece of software that has been used a lot (its really just a small blip on the "used a lot" scale) that he has the right to constantly remind everyone of this. Seriously, do the authors of VIM, openssh, firebug, etc... constantly remind us that we owe a debt to them by listening to their rants?

The bottom line is if Zed had not have written mongrel, someone else would. No hacker is irreplaceable.
Um.. most of Emacs' features are discoverable:

M-x describe-bindings - List of all keybindings for the current mode

M-x describe-mode - Information about the current major mode

M-x apropos - Search for info on subject

Emacs is the self describing editor!
What does a "reboot" mean? It sounds scary to me. When they rebooted France, blood ran in the streets.

More than likely, though, he means we need a prettier President to waste larger checks. That is certainly in the pipeline.
This reads like a cliffs notes version of javascript material. Reasonably good summary, but fairly shallow. The blogs list in particular is sparse.
Here's something related that I definitely would pay for: a subscription-based service that provides reliable proxy servers in a wide variety of countries. There was a thread recently about this sort of thing-- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=405946.

Basically, I want to be able to browse the web, reliably, as if I were physically located in anywhere.
It's somewhat distressing to see that the parent comment has 8 karma points. It suggests that there is a lot of groupthink going on here. What was the purpose of the parent comment, other than to be a "kick in the groin"? Are you seriously suggesting that Zed isn't in the top 1% of humanity in intelligence? And before you point out how many millions of people are still smarter than that, consider how many people are dumber than that. 99% of humanity is a lot of people!

So I don't see why Zed should be called dumb, and I don't see why the parent comment was upvoted. Actually, I think it's perfectly obvious why it was upvoted -- I'm just hoping Hacker News doesn't turn into that.
http://99translations.com/
Agreed, if there was some sort of external support, server-side JS would be amazing considering the speed war that's going on with the different implementations. I messed around with WebKit's SquirrelFish which was nice and fast for the bare bones of the language, but many important functions are in window.* which isn't available on the compilable terminal app.
sorry, I'm not clear- do you mean you distribute it under GPL2, or that GPL2 allows use without releasing the resulting work?
You know what, Friedman? It's a lot harder to manage a continent-spanning country of 300 million people than a tiny, rich city-state. That's where the wisdom of decentralization comes in, but we completely abandoned that in the 1930s. Can you imagine the bureaucracy to manage a country of 300 million people as well as Hong Kong? Neither can I. It probably doesn't exist.

The One's election to office and his promise to shovel out $1 trillion in green pork doesn't change a whole lot. Friedman says:

>"Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely."

There is not a single example from American history to give me hope of this.
Different strokes for different folks. What's the point of anything, for that matter? ( - "Ask HN" question, perhaps)
I wouldn't be surprised at all if she turns out to be a Lisp hacker who uses Emacs. Becoming MCP didn't close this avenue for her.
>"The challenge in this case would be to deliver educational software on very low-end cellphones that cost $10 to $25.

Challenge of course presents opportunities. The challenge is to understand the nature of addictive games, and the opportunity is to create educational games using that knowledge. "

There are no addictive games for low end cell phones.
One of my favorite authors, Glenn Morris, wrote, "You have to go through the door that is concealed to learn anything. That which conceals the door is something we don't want to look at."

Any of you remember the series of articles right after collapse back in early autumn of this year? There were numerous articles posted around here about fear -- whether to perservere with startups, or to cut your losses and wait until you're back on the upswing. Those were the times when all of these monsters come out of the woodwork. I had a lot of fun being able to see the manifestations of widespread panic ... even as my stomach was trying to eat its way out of my body.

If you can master this part of yourself, it is trivially easy to see what drives other people. It is more than social engineering. It is a hack relatively few people know about yet can give you great gifts. It is like a secret handshake when you recognize someone who has waded into the depths of his own psyche, and came back out for the better.

If you guys try these practices -- and it isn't limited to Buddhist meditation, either -- and get decent grip on yourself, I highly recommend going back and watching Batman Begins. Certain things takes on a different significance once you stop running away from your own fears.
Yay, another reason to roll out the Tom Friedman smackdown to end all Tom Friedman smackdowns (as well as possibly the best book review of the last 10 years):

http://www.nypress.com/article-11419-flathead.html
A psychologist, asked whether he would prefer to counsel rich people or poor people, responded: "Rich people - because they don't think money can solve all of their problems."
Nice disclaimer: "Beware: 40TB of EBS storage will cost $4,000 per month plus usage charges."

I'd rather see it tried with ZFS and RAID-Z.
Unfortunately Rhino is at least an order of magnitude slower than all the modern JavaScript engines (SquirrelFish Extreme, V8, TraceMonkey). I agree the JVM integration is very useful, I just wish there were a way to get the best of both worlds.
Tim Brown: The powerful link between creativity and play
Not Hacker News. This is low-quality fearmongering, more appropriate to Reddit or even Digg.
Nokia 1680 classic 
Nokia 1680 Classic is one the most fascinating forthcoming mobile handsets of Nokia, which will definitely be going to hit the youth market of mobile phones with its magnificent features.
Owning a mac is still a cultural statement, like an Obama bumper sticker or worrying loudly about Global Warming in public. I even know poor humanities graduate students to pony up the extra $300 for a mac, because that's what they are supposed to own. Macs are common possessions of workers of DC non-profits, despite their meager salaries. It's a token that proclaims yourself to be part of the well-educated, hip, cool culture.

Owning a PC? That would be as much of a faux pas as owning a large vehicle, working a blue collar job, living in the suburbs, or voting republican. You certainly won't improve your chances of getting invited to the cool parties by doing that.

I do admire Apple for consciously making itself into a subcultural icon. Few brands are as successful as Apple. And as they have hooked themselves up to a subculture that is ascendant, it is a good strategic move.

Edit: It is possible that in the future that Apple will make the jump like Starbucks did to be a universal brand and not just a brand of the hip subculture. I consider Starbucks to be one of the greatest marketing successes of all time; at first a cool urban delicacy, later reaching the other half: the suburbs, the parents that may send their kids to the military but never to grad school, the PC owners, the small business owner (think "Joe the Plumber", not Steve Jobs), people who never worry about "materialism" or "consumerism", the Republicans. Sarah Palin and Bono, investment bankers and environmentalists have their favorite latte. Of course, the cool hip culture tends to lead the rest, so that's a good strategic place to start.

I don't see any signs that Apple has made this jump yet. I certainly don't think my blue collar dad even considered a Mac when he bought a laptop, even though I am certain that he would have had an easier time learning its user interface.
It's not a search. I know a guy, for instance, who was married and set up an eHarmony account only to discover he was a match with his wife's best friend. And much more common I'm sure is the cheater's spouse seeing something in their email.
So you're saying fart sounds won't be in any future OS update?
I don't have one, but news.ycer and my ex-coworker KirinDave has one called Fuzed.

Yeah, FUzed,

http://github.com/KirinDave/fuzed/tree/master
Unrevealing article.

The truth of the matter is rather more mundane. It's all about farts apparently - $10,000/day worth of farts . . .

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/12/iphone-fart-app.html

This is no doubt a consequence of the overly cheap pricing of iphone apps. For 99 cents, the consumer has low expectations of the purchase and the developer does not have a significant incentive to invest time in a more substantial product. That's not to say that there aren't some great apps. But developers are also churning out bucketloads of dreck.
Well, maybe. But my site http://absurdlycool.com didn't go anywhere for a year until I got it on the Digg frontpage (got all my friends to Digg it back when that worked) and then it took off and has stayed at 5k unique per day ever since. The value of that Digg frontpage to me has been many thousands of dollars in revenue at this point, and that PR resulted in a subsequent write up on TechCrunch, LifeHacker, etc.
They have strong market share. GM is still #1 here and in the world overall (though just barely). Market share isn't their problem, it's that they have to sell at a loss to maintain it.

The reason Toyota has all but caught up isn't that they're particularly innovative, it's that the Camry can have $2,000 worth of better build quality than the Taurus or Malibu. Same with Corolla vs. Focus.

Japan gets to choose to either build the same cars and sell them cheaper, or build better cars and sell them for the same price. It's hard to win market share in that scenario.
Facebook Bans Project Playlist
I thought `Symbol#to_proc` is a Rails' extension.
Some of those people, including poor people, pony up an extra $300 because they consider the value of the mac to be, say, $1000 higher. If you spend 1000 hours a year using a computer, and a mac is 50 cents an hour nicer to use, that's $500 per year.

Whatever you think of the mac experience, some people do find it significantly nicer, so for them it's worth buying.

Also, Macs don't necessarily always cost more.
That's a superb analogy :) Zed's a great hacker, but he seems to thrive on bitchy rants. He also seems to relish personal grudges, etc. I think it's entertaining and usually read his rants with a smile, though this seems to be his most immature yet.
> Perhaps another monopolist would have come along.

There were certainly plenty of people who would have liked to dominated software the way Gates did. So, I agree, one of them might have succeeded. And if they did, the outcome would have been about that same as it was with Gates' dominance. In other words, we'd probably have been no worse off.

Could the alternative monopolist have been Steve Jobs? It's possible, though I think it's unlikely. Jobs' products have tended to be quirky (e.g. the original Mac had no expansion slot), with an NIH-flavour (e.g. Apple are about the only people who use Objective C), more expensive than the competition, and often locked-down (e.g. the iPhone will only run apps approved by Apple); all attributes that make mass adoption less likely. And Apple itself has often have the flavour of a religious cult about it.

This is not to denigrate Jobs: he's clearly a brilliant man, and Apple have clearly made some brilliant products. As opposed to Microsoft's products which tend towards the mediocre: they always work (sort-of) but are rarely inspiring.

So if there was an alternate monopolist, and it was Jobs, I think software technology would have progressed faster than it actually did.

Maybe Jobs isn't known for philanthopy, but that's irrelevant, since the original assertion was "the magnitude of the impact Billy has had in their life", and my life (and most HN readers' lives) has been changed more by technological advances in computing than by Gates' philanthopy.