skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Remember that modern civilization ENABLES many people to attain high positions. So I would not consider this expectation to be totally unrealistic. There are SO many ways in which to excel and influence society in the modern world that there is room for many many many (maybe all of us) to be near the top of something or other.

One example from the work world: all decent companies have a technical and management ladder so that people who are not completely aggressive can still influence strategy (e.g., Anders Hejlsberg?).

And with food/clothing/shelter becoming less and and scarce as time passes, being at the "top" is going to matter less and less.
Is the talk available online or at least, is there alternative coverage? The Register conveys the message "Google thinks Microsoft infrastruture sucks", but they don't seem to understand the arguments (or at least, I can't understand their coverage without guessing a lot).
Great find. In general I'm a huge fan of the style, but there are some instances where it is inappropriate, such as for GetSatisfaction. It looks very unprofessional and doesn't really sell their service very well. A website that is trying to get potential business from established companies should employ a linear website that is very easy to follow, not just an unordered conglomeration of text on a blue background.
Maybe I'm being slow, but I don't see a difference in the two...
First, they are anecdotal.

There is no inherent evil in anecdotes. This is obviously fiction and was not intended to be used as evidence. If it were, then you would have a reasonable complaint. The purpose of a little story like this is (from Wikipedia): "to reveal a truth more general than the brief tale itself, or to delineate a character trait or the workings of an institution in such a light that it strikes in a flash of insight to their very essence."

Second, why are the programmers not taking control of management positions if they know so much better?

I see this asked a lot and I don't understand why. First of all, the traits (not skills, but traits) or interests needed for taking control of management positions are different (vastly different depending on the company) than the traits/interests needed to be a good developer. Second, don't forget that our fictional hero Charles eventually quit the company and presumably found a better place. Finding a place that fits you more is sometimes better than trying to change yourself to fit the management mold in a particular company.

I think Alan created the best product for the company.

Did you read the same story I did, or are you rewriting it into your own parable?

Now imagine how good Charles would be if he could learn to cooperate and participate in a group like Alan's.

That would be good I think. Let's also imagine how good Alan could be if he could learn to see past the inflated corporate policies, procedures, and checklists and focus on the crux of the problem.
Psychologist finds Wikipedians grumpy and closed-minded
Some praise for online and regular libraries
I thought this was going to be about the famous "a" he omitted from "a small step for [a] man." Maybe he had a general tendency to do that.
I don't see what you're talking about. The quality of both views looks the same to me.
It's not intended to "prove" anything. It's an anecdote, used in the simple, appropriate way that anecdotes are always used.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdote
Ofcourse linux has problems, in software installation, yes it does. But I am more irritated at the audio problems in linux, because I couldn't get my 4.1 speakers to work in linux, I mean I couldn't just plug and play it, I had to write some code for it to work, and that's asking a bit too much of the average user.
Ok, I can understand submitting Michael Jackson's death to HN, but Billy Mays? Come on.
"It hit me on the head, but I got a hard head."

Makes you wonder if the plane accident and the mysterious death hours later are related.

As a hacker, I'd like to believe in cause and effect. Finding out what caused these recent high profile deaths won't make them any less tragic, but may make the world a little less scary.
I thought the problem was that humans can't get to mars!

Because there is too much solar and cosmic radiation, and no one would survive the trip. And enough shielding to block it is too heavy to launch (from earth). Which is why we want to go to the moon first.
I just saw him on Conan last week!
Ask HN: Who/What would you have liked to have heard in college?
If you were in college (computer science/engineering) and had the opportunity to hear absolutely anybody in the world give a talk, who would that person be and what would you want to hear?

Would you listen to Ray Kurzweil giving a talk about Transhumanism or his inventions? Would you listen to Richard Stallman giving a talk about the FSF?

Or would you rather hear someone give a talk about nutrition/something non-computer sciencey?

Names and topics would be really helpful.
marketing is related, and you gotta admit the dude could sell anything
Yes, if we had Single Stage to Orbit fully reusable rockets

Certainly not essential to Zubrin's plan. There are modifications to Zubrin's plan that can be implemented with existing boosters, with on-orbit assembly limited to linking together 4 components. Seems doable to me.

However, we can't even construct a reliable artificial biosphere fully enclosed here on Earth!

Where do you get that from? For one thing, the most publicized efforts were tried by questionable people. I think a legitimate effort would account for things like curing concrete absorbing lots of oxygen. For another thing, there's a huge difference between a biosphere and air/water recycling combined with local agriculture. The point is not to get a 100% viable self-regulating biosphere. It's just to be able to use local resources. For initial colonization, it's just life support for plants. The 100% viable self-regulating biospheres will take decades to get right, but we'll have decades and lots of economic incentive once the colonization efforts are under way.

Learn to walk before you try to run. Let's work on sustained outposts on a world no more than three days' travel away first.

If the only thing to be gained from the moon is a stepping stone to Mars, then it's a waste of time. The environmental challenges are just about all different, so it's not even a good rehearsal. That's more like "Learn to swim before you run. Let's work on movement while partially buoyant, not subject to a full G, first."

I'm sure you could train babies to swim-crawl-walk. But if you want to walk, it's an unnecessary detour.
Ask HN: How would you use the web to improve the college learning experience?
Hey guys,

If any of you are going to college now or have in the past 5 years, you'll be familiar with what technology schools provide to their students: Blackboard, Moodle, etc.

And you've probably experienced frustration with how behind these platforms were compared to what exists on the web today.

So my question is this: if you were to design a app/platform for enhancing learning for a course, with tools for students and professors, and helped build community within the school, what would that look like?

I'm doing my thesis on the topic, and would really appreciate your thoughts.
Ask HN:  Does your CS/math education hurt your entrepreneurial endeavors?
I would claim that such an education can hurt you in at least three ways all of which revolve around a disconnect with typical users.

(1) Building something people want: A cs/math education values cleverness, difficulty, and novelty. Average users care about other sorts of things (e.g., utility, fun).

(2) Marketing: A CS/math education enhances your vocabulary with technical terms. After a while, you feel that these terms are just everyday language. This could result in a disaster when trying to market your product.

(3) Overestimating intelligence: Fellow university students tend to be brighter than your average users.

Do you agree?
I spent an entire day last week doing basically the same benchmarks on a new Linode account.

The results were definitely not what I expected. Both servers were able to crunch roughly the same number of requests per second. Nginx won by 20% in some situations, Apache won in a few others, but the margin was never really that significant.

However, it's important to note that there were huge differences in CPU load while running the benchmarks. Running "ab -c50 -n100000" would bring load to 30 with Apache, but only 0.7 with Nginx! Apache also used a lot more ram.

I assume there must be some other bottleneck (disk access?) keeping Nginx from utilizing more of the CPU, hence the fairly close results.
Peter Diamendes, founder of the XPrize. Just heard him a few weeks ago... he will blow anybody's mind.
Why can't the iranians just filter TOR node IP addresses?
I thought the problem was that humans can't get to mars!
Because there is too much solar and cosmic radiation,

Nonsense. If you can hop in a shelter to avoid the occasional solar storm that can kill you instantly, the remaining associated risks are like smoking.

And enough shielding to block it is too heavy to launch (from earth).

Again nonsense. Water is a very good shield medium. You'll need to carry a lot of it anyhow, and you only need to shield a small short-duration shelter for radiation storms.

So we can extract the shielding from the moon? Waste of time for exploration. So you save on launch costs for the expedition. How much is it going to cost to launch the lunar shielding extraction equipment? Yes, it's desirable to have infrastructure on the moon, eventually. But for exploring Mars, it's superfluous. It's like Lewis and Clark needing to establish Tulsa before going to the Pacific.

Read Zubrin. He's got the facts on his side.
Acer was already everywhere, just branded under another company's logo.

Acer, Asus, MSI, LG, Levono, HTC were OEMs for popular brands who decided to strike off on their own.
thanks for the feedback, we're working on this
please stop submitting or voting up stories like this. HN is not a place to read obituaries and it never leads to any kind of interesting discussion.
And what about the genius of a book ?
Feynman.
That's right, the longer they know Mono exists and let it slide, the more they risk losing an infringement suit over laches. But I don't think the existence of the ECMA standard matters.
* "Lines of code" is a meaningless metric. Please stop using it.*

I can agree that LOC is a terribly abused metric, but it is not completely without meaning. It's just really rough and better left untouched in decisions involving money.

I can imagine this story being true. Just as likely, I can imagine the opposite being true. Nothing offered, nothing learned.

I think it's just an invitation to reflect on the ways that this story comes true. People mistake needless, unhelpful processes for "tried and true methods" and software "architects" frequently over-engineer and create solutions worse than the problems.

I'm not under any illusions that you (and most people here) don't already understand this. It probably wasn't aimed at you. There are many programmers today who don't understand that this kind of story plays itself out every day to some degree. The fact that the opposite story can also happen doesn't detract from the point that is being made.
yeah, you can see him talking about being on the show http://twitter.com/realbillymays
Thanks for the feedback!

We will have weekly newsletters for sure ;)
Paul Graham, on how the industry has changed in the past 15 years ago and what to do about it.

Or I could just read his essays, but a talk would be nice too.
According to this article shared by another HN reader, they have already been awarded the money.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/01/090127212101.ht...
Doing Things Differently – Online As A Micro ISV With Integrated Marketing
It's fine, as long as you let them design the system.

The shuttle, as it is, came out of an engineer's drawing board, but not before addressing the wishes of a lot of politicians.

I am all in for Ares, as long as engineers are in control. It seems they are not.
It helps to have funding that won't be cut off in two years by a mercurial congress.
can you share which interview was this? want to tivo it.
The vagueness and hand-waving here is frustrating... but as a once-upon-a-time op-ed columnist, I understand why Herbert's pieces are intermittently weak.

Op-ed writers only have about 800 words to try to make a point or two. So the concrete suggestions and detailed citations are often thin, as a matter of the form.

And they may have to write to exactly that word budget (as here with Herbert) on schedule twice a week. He can't tell his editor, "I've only got 600 words today", or "Here's 1200 words you can run a day early." So sometimes they've got more to say than fits, and other times have to stretch half-thoughts as filler.

This one is 804 words, and seems worse than most such columns in its generalities. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if it's just an initial 'expression of concern' that gets followed up with his pet recommendations in future columns. (The same clockwork word budget that hurts the form in some ways helps in others -- no one column should be thought of as standing completely apart from the series, even though it may get forwarded that way.)

Still, blogs are rightly crushing this op-ed form. Blogs give greater flexibility of pace, size, interactivity, citation-via-linking, etc. -- meaning smarter, deeper discussion.
It depends on the person. If a prominent figure in the tech community dies, people might discuss interesting anecdotes and maybe first-hand accounts here. You can't have a hard-and-fast rule like that.

Also, it seems that people in general are a bit oversensitized right now regarding celebrity deaths. On Twitter at least Billy Mays is getting more mentions than Farrah Fawcett did.

http://twist.flaptor.com/?span=168&gram=billy+mays%2C+fa...
I didn't want to sign up.

Can you explain how this is different from Rescuetime?
A month ago I would have agreed with this statement, but after watching a couple episodes of the "Pitchmen" on the Discovery channel, I found Billy Mays and the whole process of promoting products very relevant to me as a startup founder.
handles the download, unparing, etc.

Some Usenet providers do this on the server-side and just give you an HTTP download. Watching a show consists of starting the download, and invoking VLC on that. (The download is faster than real-time, so it "streams".)

Easynews also has RSS feeds, so it would be a simple matter of programming to write an app that searches for your favorite shows and lets you immediately start watching them.
"Debugging is the cornerstone of being a programmer."

Does anyone here believe this?
The standard library?
Humans living on Mars are in a much better position to access the resources of the Solar System than humans living on Earth. With a 24 hour day-night cycle, local access to water and necessary elements, it's also a lot easier to grow food. These two facts alone are enough to position human settlement on Mars for economic, military, and political domination of the Solar System.

Basically, colonizing Mars is desirable for the same reasons that colonizing North America was. Whichever nation does it can expect the resulting civilization to break away and surpass those on Earth. But the "old country" can expect much better relations with the new superpower.

(Actually, we could build a space elevator on Mars with materials we already have. The citizens of a Mars colony could eventually access space with the same ease with which we fly overseas.)
Nope. There's definitely a hump to cross over, however: for a while you move away from "normal people" into a hypertechnologist, but eventually you understand both real life and technology well enough to mate them together effectively.

Then all you have is a great ability to use advanced CS/math techniques to satisfy your customers.
I feel foolish but : Steve Jobs of course ! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&fmt=18)

He's a great storyteller, that's why I guess his keynotes are so successful.
Some Tor nodes aren't publicly known. You get to know them by a friend or visiting a website, chat, etc., like it happens with some P2P networks.

I don't know if Iranian the government is trying to block tor nodes, but even if they were the would never be able to completely block it.
India To Put All Citizen Info In a Central Database
There's a few good talks of his scattered around the web.

Startup School 08
http://www.omnisio.com/startupschool08/paul-graham-at-startu...

or just
http://video.google.com/videosearch?&q=paul+graham+y+com...
Presumably because RescueTime does a lot of the grunt work for you by monitoring your computer with an agent, and this won't.
Colonizing other planets is one of the best ways to ensure the survival of our species. It's damn hard, but it's also very safe. The sooner we start, the sooner we are safe from the next global extinction and once we are settled, nothing short of a Gamma-ray burst frying our solar system could kill us off.

I am not willing to bet on faster-than-light travel and finding Earth-like worlds, first because FTL must be somewhere between insanely hard and plain impossible and second because we would have first to get permission from the natives.

And that arrangement, provided the ludicrously lucky situation of environment requirements being compatible, would make a lot of sense - by allowing reciprocal settlement both species would be insured against extinction.

Sound even like the start of a nice screenplay. Most probably someone already did it.
I felt that many of these designs were too busy. I didn't know where to look or pay attention.
You write "first, they are anecdotal." Fictional, in fact: "once upon a time..."

And you write "second, why are the programmers not taking control of management positions if they know so much better?" That question is outside the scope of the fictional dataset of the original post, but see "Jack and the Beancounter" in http://www.skotos.net/articles/BTH_27.shtml for a related fictional study.

And you write "but realistically, I think Alan created the best product for the company." Perhaps I am just being trolled. But at least this was a good excuse to refer to Jack and the Beancounter!
At highway speeds, it's mostly aerodynamics, so it won't buy you that much.

Check out this entry in the Tesla Motors blog: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog4/?p=70
It talks about the power required to maintain a certain speed and what's responsible for it.

The Tesla Roadster uses ~ 230Wh/mile to cruise at 55mph. What is that in equivalent mpg? Gas has 34MH/liter, which is 35800 Wh/gallon. For reference, that gives 35800/230=155 mpg.

With the given frontal area and Cd of that Mustang, it takes 140Wh/mile to overcome aerodynamic drag only. Let's assume they have a magic, loss-free power train. That leaves the tire drag, which should be about the same as the Tesla since they are both high-performance cars and probably weighs the same given the Tesla is dragging around all the batteries. The Tesla plot shows tire drag to be ~60Wh/mile, which adds up to a theoretical minimum of 200Wh/mile, which is 180mpg.

A more realistic assumption is that the Mustang power train (they only talk about engine so I assume it has a standard transmission) is no more efficient than the Tesla's, which requires a further 75Wh/mile. This brings us to 275Wh/mile, which is 130mpg.

To reach 110mpg, the engine would thus need a thermodynamic efficiency of 85%. This is more than twice the efficiency of diesel engines at ~40%.

It can't work.
Only problem is that TOR can be compromised by operating a hostile exit node. This involves running a packet sniffer on a exit node and analyzing the traffic.
"Humans living on Mars are in a much better position to access the resources of the Solar System than humans living on Earth."

Has the Earth run out of resources already? What is the rationale here: the Chinese seize the resources on Earth, so the USA goes to outer space to seize the resources of the Solar System? If this endeavor were cheap, it could be worth it. But let's face it: it won't be cheap.

I understand the allure of colonizing Mars. But I also believe in prioritizing. The US is fighting two unwinnable wars, and is in a grim financial situation. One step at a time. In a few decades the time might be right. Sending humans to Mars in the next couple of decades would be a bad investment imho.

Why not start small? We could keep sending robots to Mars. Since Mars has ice and CO2, one could introduce plants in Mars and try to start recycling all that CO2 into oxygen. That would perhaps create a tiny habitat and make things easier for the first humans to ever land on the red planet.
Don't forget the larger moons of Jupiter and Saturn: low gravity, plenty of water and carbon-rich environments. The major downside is that the vicinity of Jupiter is as cozy as the interior of a microwave oven and sunlight is not that abundant as it is down here.

As for the Martian space elevator, it would involve the demolition of Deimos and Phobos or some moving of the counterweight in order to miss their orbits.
I think this one is where things will have to go if we want efficency: http://www.aptera.com
Google maps gets it wrong ...
Do you think it's wrong for a web site to link to another web site?

Back in the late 90's, I was working for public broadcasting, and the mentality of management was that you needed permission to link to another website. They would get on the phone with the owners of the other website and ask. That is the sort of mentality you are dealing with. I suspect a disturbingly large fraction of the mainstream has this view.
This should be a map of Plymouth Sound in the UK, with the breakwater at the bottom, most likely. Make sure you have the "satellite" imagery turned on, and you'll see two overlaid images of the breakwater.

Oops ...
This clip (and the others posted by 'ChristopherJSykes') are from the BBC show "Fun to Imagine". Been a few months, but I remember the 'Magnets (and 'Why?' questions...)' segment being particularly worthwhile if you're looking for good bang-for-buck timewise.

Incidentally, the guy releasing this also directed it.

Also in case you prefer text: http://varatek.com/scott/feynman_problems.html
I'd like to believe in Zubrin's plan more than anyone (I still have a well-highlighted copy of his "Mars Direct - Humans to the Red Planet by 1999" Acta Astronautica paper amongst my many cabinets of the stuff) but that plan is built on assumption.

>However, we can't even construct a reliable artificial
>biosphere fully enclosed here on Earth!

Where do you get that from?

From the fact that no one has done it yet. Ever.

We just don't know how to live on other worlds. We are almost completely ignorant of the complexities involved in the process and have a whole bunch of unpleasant discoveries to make yet. That's not to say it _can't_ be done and that we don't know what should happen in theory, but we have never done it before. Ever. There is no experience to build upon.

If you want another flags and footprints mission to plant a candelabra of pennants on Mars and then scurry back after a few days of visiting, by all means piss away hundreds of billions of dollars and go to Mars direct for a quick visit. However, if you want to learn the actual skills required to live and work on other worlds, you should focus on building missions which demonstrate and refine the skills required to live and work on other worlds.

Doing so on our Moon and near-Earth asteroids (the nearest locations to support and safety) is the best way to do that and will give us the tools needed to move outwards permanently.