skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There have been plenty of 'first steps toward building practical nuclear fusion power stations.'

Excuse my skepticism, but I doubt anyone will come out with a breakthrough anytime soon. Even if they do, it will still take years to figure out how to commercialize the technology safely.

No fusion reactor is going to be the answer to our energy needs in the foreseeable future.
Nice article, but Ruby wouldn't have been my language of choice for illustrating HPC concepts.
Calvin & Hobbes on the economy and businesses
I'm now starting to understand why the YC motto is "make something people want", rather than "make something useful".
Ah Colossal Cave! - my very first nontrivial program was a version of Hunt the Wumpus. Still a good beginner exercise today, I'd say.
This is the kind of pigeon-holing which prevents one from actually considering an idea on its merits.

For example, what did OP say that suggests they don't allow themselves to think broadly? It's a baseless assumption rooted in your own personal biases, and has nothing to do with the idea at hand.

Which is not to say that I'm particularly enthusiastic about sea-steading. Who's to say though, that its time won't come?
If the app contacts their web servers after it gets installed or in the course of use.
>You could make a Windows forms calculator with only a plus button, with an equals sign available with a CD Key, and people would pirate that. (I've often thought of trying it.)

Made me think of this:

http://blort.org/~kgasso/images/how-to-catch-script-kiddies....
We are slowly building a fusion reactor that will produce a steady state net energy gain Q > 5 for several hundred seconds (ITER.org). The idea that fusion is some mythical problem that we have no idea how to solve is false. The problem is it's extremely expensive to build large scale fusion reactors and nobody has fronted the money to build anything significant in the last 25 years so we don't know how well the "state of the art" has advanced.

For about 35 billion we could have a working 1GW fusion power plant within 15 years. With extremely good odds for spending less money and building something sooner. After that it's just a question of reducing costs.

PS: All of the numbers giving are vary conservative estimates.
It's also too early to call it a failed investment and mere 'experience builder' for the staff.

What if Cuil still has a couple years of runway with that $33 million, or strategic investors who appreciate the 'option value' of a Google alternative? (I don't know that they have either, but they might.)

I'm sure more traffic would be nice -- if only to help train their ranking and snippet generators. And of course everyone likes their product to get positive reviews. But even without those things yet, their tech and operations may have made progress for a long-term assault on the giant search market
SMS messages are much smaller than a single TCP packet is capable of carrying (or, if you want to roll your own re-transmit logic, a UDP datagram). They also have effectively no QoS guarantees attached, so you can queue them for transmission whenever bandwidth is unavailable (or would degrade service for more critical streams, like active voice calls).

Since the "last mile" bandwidth is effectively free, by virtue of being embedded in the control channel, there's no reason other than "consumers will pay it" that justifies the cost of SMS traffic.

The Internet is full of services that blast millions of tiny packets between networks (routing, DNS, etc.) without incurring significant per-transaction costs. There's nothing special about SMS that should drive costs up as much as they have been.
"For developers of shrinkwrapped software, Open Source only turns piracy from a problem into a benefit if you're willing to forego building consumer software and you have software that is either too complicated to use without handholding"

I've worked in the largest bank & largest telco in a country, and the largest hedge fund in the world. All three paid substantial licenses to Red Hat. In no case was that license paid for hand holding. Either my experiences over the last decade are completely unusual or the author is talking out of his ass.

"OR you can scare a large percentage of your customers into buying traditional software licenses by using the GPL instead of the BSDL."

How does the GPL scare customers in a way that the BSDL does not? This is a big claim to make without supporting arguments.

That the author doesn't seem to be bothered to spell 'Red Hat' correctly points in the same direction as the other two points. This article is trash.
Sounds like a reference to the movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Eight
What is your opinion of the Polywell? Its proponents claim it will be much cheaper than your 35 billion plant.
Repost:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=411049

But still brilliant.
Note that patriotism can also take on a worldly, cosmopolitan and peaceful interpretation, if you want it to.
Other than the explicit dependency listing, the author's list of expected comment items reads almost item-for-item like the contents of a well-formed Javadoc block, so I think it's safe to say that a large number of both student and professional programmers do write comments that thorough.

These days, though, TDD is winning a lot of converts as a more effective means of specifying the expected behavior or code. Whether you consider that a good thing probably depends on your relative opinion of executable vs. human-readable specifications.
If you were born elsewhere, and could never get to America, would you be fine with American exceptionalism?
From the article and comments on slashdot it just looks like Fairpoint is cutting access to email from the verizon website in Febuary, which makes sense because Fairport is taking over Verizon's service in that area. So this really isn't a big deal.
List of Chinese Inventions
It's often said that the Chinese were on the leading edge of scientific advantage throughout much of history, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading this extensive list.
Remember that not everyone lives in the USA. Nearly everything on hulu.com is limited to US IP addresses only, because they're still wrangling with international licensing for most of the shows on there. Online video stores like iTunes and Xbox Live have anaemic-to-nonexistent lineups outside of North America.

Bittorrent, on the other hand, doesn't much care where in the world you are.
Indeed. People who were exposed to the site when they first opened may never come back. But, like the laundromat in my neighborhood, they could have a second "Grand Opening", only this time with better algorithms in place. It seems unlikely after dropping the ball as badly as they did, that they have the smarts to carry this out successfully. But it's still a possibility.
ah, dang, i knew i saw it somewhere but i couldn't find it after a quick look. my bad
My intended claim, which I admit could benefit from more precise wording, is that lifestyle changes are not more effective than conventional treatment.
I imagine at this point that the VCs, if not the founders, would be very happy for an exit in the 85-100 million range..
Verizon apparently has some kind of portal for accessing other webmail services (why?) and after a certain date customers will have to use Fairport's portal instead. This is a complete non story.
I think that this kind of post here is good. I mean, this community may have a really positive effect on each one of us (maybe a tiny influence, but still) because of this kind of post. It gives me some examples to follow. And for that, reading HN is a good thing.
Same for caffeine... most things in moderation aren't bad (alcohol, caffeine, sex, reckless driving, and salt).
I guess if you block ads you're "pirating" Web apps. And unlike with software, the marginal cost of serving a user is nonzero.
(Solving the money problem) != (solving all my problems)

Successful startups generally solve the money problem. That's all, nothing else.

Solving the money problem doesn't solve loneliness. It doesn't keep you warm at night or fix problems with a messed up family situation, etc...

But, once you've solved the money problem, you tend to have more time on your hands to focus on other problems.
Have you ever heard people like Marty Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino talk about what makes a good movie? I'm sure you've watched any number of shows on VH1, where bands talk about what makes a good rock or pop song great. It's why Annie Dillard wrote The Writing Life. Hang around novelists or genre fiction writers, and you'll start to hear about what makes a novel great, story arcs,etc...
Nick from Lion Burger, here. We would never want to insult our customers, either. In this particular instance (the audience of Snipt), IE6 users do not represent a significant number of our customers (less than a tenth of a percent, actually).
Actually, I'm amazed at how certain games correlate with startups and business.

Has anyone ever played Natural Selection? You basically work with a team of 12 marines vs. 12 aliens. One marine is commander, and he must make sure resource towers are built and defended from aliens. On top of that, marines must defend their base and actively be out preventing the aliens from building new hives (as well as destroying existing hives).

The purpose of the game is to hold the most resource towers. But you also want to be with a really good team of marines, which means you don't have to micromanage "Player X, go build the resource tower in Location Y. NOW!" They naturally go to the locations and ask for you to drop a resource tower.

Aliens get special abilities based on how many kills they make. You find that highly specialized aliens are very destructive (so hire that dude who is REALLY good at Objective-C for doing iPhone development).

> Building and keeping resource towers == making sure you have enough funding at all times, cash flow is the name of the game

> Getting with the best team of aliens/marines == hire the best people that you can, it means zero micro-managing

> Your team could be terrible, your commander could be the best, but you'll still lose the game == even if Steve Jobs were in charge of a company with 100% bad employees, the company would fail

> Specializing when you can == you're a very difficult fire to put out, and when it comes to competing, you're unstoppable

> Keeping team morale high gets player cooperation == don't be a prick, your team doesn't like working for that type of person and won't follow orders when the time comes

> Allowing the enemy time to build up is dangerous, always be on the offense == always be pushing faster and sooner than your competitors

> One marine camper with a phase gate can take down your entire alien team == corporate espionage is a bitch, Steve Jobs isn't paranoid after all

> If you can't get your team to all jump through a phase gate and rush an alien hive at once, you're done for == team cooperation with focus is really good

I sometimes feel like I'm playing a game of natural selection while I'm working in a startup or on a project. It's weird, I know. Ok everyone downvote me now.
Discussion on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7lk4f/swym_a_be...
Yes, but let's go with another material for the briefcases. Iceland will have plenty of aluminum, I promise.
With 150K unique visitors a month, they'll be lucky to get back a 10th of that - in bankruptcy court. What I'd like to know is how this unfolds typically with VCs when they anticipate that they will not get their money back. Can they shut everything down right away and demand all remaining funds be returned on the spot or do they typically assume the loss, write it off on their books and let the company burn through its remaining cash and grind to a halt naturally? I'm assuming the latter.
> If you were born elsewhere, and could never get to America, would you be fine with American exceptionalism?

Sure. Why would I care what Americans think about themselves? Why would I care what Americans think about me?

And, on a more objective note, the argument for American exceptionalism isn't that America does so well, but that other countries do so badly.

After all, let's compare the stereotypical American with the stereotypical European and then look at the aggregate results. Some might argue that the stereotypes are wrong. Others give credit to the flying spaghetti monster. Maybe the Illuminati are to blame. And so on.
Copyright doesn't preclude independent invention, so your evil scheme is neither effective nor particularly persuasive.
Is most of your life spent doing something you are passionate about?
The people who want this will want it for about 15 minutes, then they'll want something else. It's a fad.
You don't know how many people would prioritize this game over other spending if they couldn't get it for free. Only things that you can pirate can you choose to get for free so it gets prioritized lower than it deserves.
"Green" is subjective. Iceland is attractive to industry because
- it's largely unpopulated
- it's on the ocean and near both Western Europe and the Eastern US
- stable and modern government
- energy is cheap

Also, Iceland has not only geothermal potential, but hydroelectric potential.

In short, Iceland is an potential industrial wonderland ---and all powered "green" tech, too. However, just because one isn't burning coal doesn't mean that industry is consequence free. The problem isn't environmental as I understand it, it's cultural. Icelanders pride themselves as an extremely educated, egalitarian nation. They don't want their nation polluted with the socioeconomics of heavy industry including unskilled labor, pollution, obvious social classes, foreign industrial oligarchs, and, yes, the non-Icelandic. To them, the heavy industry is tacky and crass, just like how McDonald's advertising on elementary school textbooks would be to us. Both are examples of "economical effectiveness," but neither are widely appreciated by people who would know better to choose otherwise.
Death and sex are the biggest agents of change in any living thing.
Good list.

Another good one - Ancient Roman Technology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Roman_technology
"How does the GPL scare customers in a way that the BSDL does not? This is a big claim to make without supporting arguments."

That's easy to support. The GPL wing of the free software movement is famous for being unreasonably prone to solving conflicts with litigation. They are also famous for going to extreme lengths to dig up evidence that somebody is committing a 'crime' against their licensing ideology.

The academic license community (BSD, MIT, etc) on the other hand rarely if ever enforce their licenses in any formal way. They especially don't end up in court over it!
Ask HN: How do mashups avoid copyright infringement lawsuits?
Services like Dapper, Yahoo Pipes and Feedity facilitate the creation of mashups that are essentially built off other sites' data by retrieving that data as a convenient RSS feed.

Why do we not see more intellectual property lawsuits as a result of these recent applications of screen scraping?

I was looking at the Wikipedia entry for web scraping:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping

Under the "Legal Issues" section it talks about the tort issue called "Trespass To Chattels" which covers a wide variety of computer trespass crimes, including web scraping but from what I can tell there are very few recent lawsuits with respect to web scraping. The big one was Ticketmaster vs Tickets.com but that was back in 2000:

http://www.tomwbell.com/NetLaw/Ch07/Ticketmaster.html

Sites like popurls, alltop, google news, aggregate data from other news sites. According to copyright law, this should be permissable as long as the quote is limited and not a complete republication. These sites seem to follow this guideline.

But are there other recent sites that do not, who you would expect to fall afoul of the law? How do they avoid litigation - by asking the originating site for permission to republish? By paying the content owners for the privilege to republish? Or has the commonness of the Web2.0ish way of regurgitating content made this a moot issue by now - to the point where most original content owners have given up on trying to control the ownership of their content through litigation?
What is the magnitude of this, and how many servers do you have to buy to do the deployment?

Also, while the DNS is switching there would be some major database inconsistencies between the two server stacks. How do you deal with that?
I'm not a lawyer, so don't go just by what I say, but I've looked into this a bit in the past, and I think it depends on what you are referring to.
Check out Perfect10 v. Google which covers copyright of photos (how google can republish photos for photo search) or sheffield news v. sheffield times re: inline linking/framing of content.

The result of Perfect 10 v. Google is (simplified) that as long as you are linking to the source, you're safe.

How this relates directly to Dapper and Yahoo Pipes I haven't considered before.
However, I would argue that both Dapper and Yahoo Pipes maintain direct links to the content, as they needed the links originally to index.
I'm not sure if they return the host in the results or not, but I would say that they should.

Alot of it is a case of 'better to ask forgiveness than permission'.
> If it's just as easy why doesn't it happen? From what I've seen, companies seem to only challenge patents in court.

Why do you think that what you see of the US patent system is representative of how it works? If you're relying on news, you don't have a chance.

News is almost always a conflict account, typically written by someone who doesn't understand the system. When a patent holder sues someone, that's a court case. At that point, the sued may well file a reexamination request, but they're also likely to make an in-court invalidation request. (The RIM case has some interesting twists having to do with the combination of these factors.) You'll hear about the latter but the former isn't part of the case.

FWIW, there are some fairly prominent reexamination cases that folks who follow the US patent system would be aware of. One is Amazon's one-click patent.
I wouldn't say its necessarily so, take Microsoft - its a corporation with thousands of employees that work on its products, but how many people hold Gates personally responsible for the failings of Windows?

This example is a fairly mainstream idea... it made an appearance in the South Park movie.
Dare Obasanjo is a developer and technical evangelist for Microsoft Web Services; so it's not too surprising that his understanding of the application of Open Source in the rest of the world is a bit skewed. That said he is correct in that Open Source is not conducive to big product companies like Microsoft. That you can use open source infrastructure to build a platform for big product services (Google, Red Hat, Facebook, etc.) is not really in question at this point.

As for the World of Goo guys. My take is that the gaming industry is going through a similar transition as the music industry although they do have some options that don't make sense for the music industry; like selling subscription based participation in multiplayer universes. Actually, a musical equivalent to World of Warcraft would be awesome; I just have a hard time picturing how it would work or if Myspace is already inhabiting that space sufficiently to prevent competition.

If the World of Goo guys want to maximize their take from this game they should make the physical package more attractive to gamers; throw a t-shirt with game artwork into the box, or some special trading cards or something to make the tangible possession of the game worthwhile. Either that or have the standalone version be an ad for their subscription service.

Piracy sucks for creators; it really hurts to see other people taking your hard work and using it without giving you any return. But that is the current reality and suppressing IP piracy effectively would have negative social consequences and impacts that nobody in their right mind wants; like outlawing general purpose programmable computers. But facing up to that reality is something that anybody who wants to achieve any level of success in the content industries has to do.
Have you considered that the US is a desirable place to be because of dissent and people acting upon dissatisfaction? The tiresome rhetoric encouraging people to leave because they disagree with the status quo is antithetical to the principles this country was founded upon.
I'd be interested in seeing a reference for the result on the sphere, if you have one.
Yes, but you can survive without alcohol, caffeine, sex, and reckless driving. Without salt you die, painfully and fairly soon.
One could just as easily argue that they are a victim of poor marketing. You can hype something up to a degree that you are setting yourself up for failure. Good marketing in the end is about setting expectations. The ones their marketing campaign set up would have been difficult to live up to under the best of circumstances.
We do this with our iPhone games, like Raptor Copter (hunt velicoraptors in your Chinook helicopter!). It's part of our achievements/leaderboards framework, so we kept it in, but it also lets us compare the total number of sales to total iPhone device ids in our database. Piracy isn't a big problem, and we generally don't care anyway, but the data is available.

We had the scrolling LED sign in our office rattle off sales in real-time, which was fun for awhile.

As a quick piracy note, you can also detect pirated iPhone apps this way: http://thwart-ipa-cracks.blogspot.com/2008/11/detection.html

Back to iFart--I can't imagine many people would pirate a farting $0.99 app, versus a more expensive, more popular game. Maybe 1% or less?
“Google will buy Twitter”
The PC line is that everybody is equal, and if there are measurable differences between groups then it is due to white male heterosexual upper class capitalist oppression.
Cory Doctorow is one of the most copyright reform-advocacy-minded people around, and he makes the opposite claim: [paraphrased] "the problem for independent artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity."

If A is the set of people that've heard of your product sans piracy, and B is the people that've heard of it after piracy, then the gap between B' that pirates and B had better be smaller than the gap between A and B. That's likelier for a tiny producer than a huge one.
you can get the idea for free from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_house
"... After a 40-Dunhills-a-day-habit for nearly 20 years, I stopped smoking ..."

Best advice.

"... Before I got sick, it was hard for me not to interfere in every single decision that was made here at GigaOM ... When I returned, I had to choose to let go ..."

Second bit is subtle. By letting go you decrease your stress. I like Om for his different take on technology. Here's for his recovery & better health.
Isn't Live.com actually composed of gazillion sites? I think Alexa counts all subdomains together.

On Wikipedia there are listed more than 50 subsites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live

With many of these being used directly from Microsoft desktop software, it wouldn't be so unbelievable for Live.com to be #4.
That's quite useful, thanks!
I think the social stigma argument is oversimplified. Nerds often just trade the standard status hierarchy for another, governed by more nerdly pursuits. Yet positive nerd social spaces and stereotypes for boys are much more accessible than those for girls.