skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is something seriously wrong with our society. I think it is a much deeper problem than what we are acknowledging with the decline of newspapers, education, politics, and currency.

It is our vision of the future. Our vision of the future is wrong. At one point, we believed if you worked hard and produced something of value that you would be rewarded. This was true in a world where life could be substantially improved.

However, in our world -- the western world, life is sufficiently good. There are no consumer pains to speak of. We are sedated by television. We are fed by grocery stores. We are medicated with little pills, to cure our ills, our wills, and operate our mills.

Our problem is: We have no purpose.

We have no purpose on earth. We have no problems to solve. We have no problems we care about. We have no problems. Life is too good. There is no struggle. There is no ill.

There is only desire left. Desire for power. Desire for monetary gain. Desire for resource control. Those who do not desire this power, this control, this money are being squashed by an increasingly relative few who do.

And there is ever less and less for them to take. Ever less and less for them to control and gain and everyone is just kind of fed up with it.
Hands-on: Debugging an Android Application
Peak oil is tied to the rate of extraction in addition to EROEI.

The world demands something like 85 million barrels of oil per day. There could be a trillion barrels in the ground, but if the oil industry can't get it to market fast enough, the price will become volatile.

Similarly, there could be a trillion barrels in the ground, but if it takes more than a barrel of oil equivalent to extract a barrel of oil, it's useless as an energy source (but obviously not as a feedstock for oil-based goods production).

What happens after an oil source passes its peak is that a) the rate of extraction starts to go down, and b) the EROEI starts to go down.

EROEI is proportional to the cost but they're not equivalent. As we saw over 2008, the cost is also a function of the balance between supply and demand. When demand tries to grow against a flat supply, the price goes up. If the price goes up high enough, the economy starts to go into jeopardy.

That's why the rate of extraction matters, and it's not a subject the peak oil deniers really address, except to wave their hands and claim that 'new technology' will deal with it.

So far, the experience with 'new technology' has not supported this optimism. Most new technologies either a) accelerate depletion of conventional sources without increasing total recoverable reserves; or b) enable access to non-conventional sources at a very low rate of extraction and a very low EROEI.

Peak oil theorists have been warning us about exactly the kind of oil price volatility (long run-up followed by an economic crash and a collapse in the oil price) that we're observing today. As long as our economy still runs on an ever-increasing rate of oil production, we will continue to suffer from volatility.

Remember, the market has two methods of bringing supply and demand into balance: it can spur the creation of new supply (through the price incentive to increase production), and it can spur the destruction of demand by pricing some consumers out of the market.

Given the geological constraints facing the feasible rate of oil production, we can expect that most of the balance will come from destruction on the demand side.
Traffic Hacks: How One Driver Can Vastly Improve Traffic
Meth has nothing to do with most of your points. It's not the same as Marijuana. Meth related arrests are not causing overcrowding in jails.

On philosophical grounds, I still believe that if you want to fuck up yourself in meth, it is YOUR problem (after all, it's YOUR body.)

As I've said before, if you can point to me a person that wont affect anyone else through meth use, I'd be ok with them doing meth. This however, it not possible because of the potency and addictive properties of the drug. There are very few (if any) jobs that a true meth addict can do competently. They suffer from paranoia, blurred vision, insomnia, etc. It's not just your problem, it's the problem of everyone that depends on you.

You (we) have to understand that almost every single society that grew on this planet used drugs somehow -- The prohibitionist approach to stop (some) drug use would look childish and hilarious - if it were not disastrous.

As I said before, I never claimed that current methods were effective. All I have claimed is that meth should be illegal. And of course, we should always be researching new ways in which we can enforce our laws more effectively.
Apparently, Google has decided that its formal complaint system is "the Internet". We should all abide by Google's wishes and, as long as no internal complaint system appears, use the Internet as our complaint system, calling public attention to such problems so that Google will notice and do something about it.

If that happens enough, and each such complaint contains some reference to the fact that it only appeared on the Internet where Google can see it because Google doesn't provide a more satisfactory, direct line of communication, I suspect Google will eventually rectify that little oversight.
"Documentary" is being kind to the dreck the holocaust revisionists spew on sites like that. No thank you, I'm very well aware of their idiotic arguments.
It is a clean design, and that's good, but there's a really long list of things that are wrong with it. Things they could fix while retaining a clean, stripped-down experience. In light of that, I'm confused about why people ascribe so much of the site's success to its design. A better design doesn't have to (and shouldn't) mean a heavier one.

It doesn't seem to have hampered craigslist, though, and that's why my best guess puts it in the "nonfactor" category.
Personally I feel that hard work and determination are probably two of the most important things needed to really be successful. With that said...

Sometimes you have to scratch the itch in order to focus. It might cost you a day or two, but if it helps you get back on track it is probably worth it rather than weeks of being unfocused. If you find the new thing you're working on so much more compelling, you might be better off sticking with it, especially if you're more likely to stay with it.

You might be interested in using a stage gate method for helping to determine whether or not to keep with the current project: http://lostgarden.com/2007/02/rockets-cars-and-gardens-visua...

I think it is especially hard to let go of failing projects and being able to put things on the shelf will save you years of lost time. Is the rough patch an indicator that maybe the idea isn't as good as you first thought or just hard work, or?
This is a weird list. I strongly agree with some of them: Programming in Pictures deserves its number one place, and Natural Language (i.e. programming in English) is bad too (although "Business people are never going to be able to program" is very wrong if you consider spreadsheets). On the other hand, including metaprogramming and abstraction is just wack. I guess he means to criticize the excessive use of these things (or of abstraction, at least).
I think Google passed the point of no return shortly after it went public -- because public corporations are, almost by definition, prone to "evil".
The Startup Library - 613 page downloadable PDF
The Startup Library (613 page downloadable PDF of a pantheon of great startup blog posts and essays)
Freaky news about your brain may change your mind
I have never seen dcurtis and edw415 in the same room together.

Ever.
Yep - and set up / setup.
By far the best chain to eat at (save for in-n-out, but I'm on the east coast) by far. It's actually fresh food, not terribly expensive and generally really tasty. There is also a "secret menu", where they will make whatever you want, as long as the materials are on hand(ex. quesadillas)
How are H1N1 flu projections calculated?
Stunning Architectural Models [Pictures]
I thought this might be the case. I figure that working intelligence, artificial or not, must take in a whole pile of data and throw out almost all of it, making it's decision based on a few bits.

Thing is, the throwing out part is very elaborate and takes a lot of work.
Okay, I've been conned out of money by game developers forever, since pong kept taking my quarters and since Maxis and EA released a quadrillion expansions for every game they produce.

Seriously, how is this any different, they just use a different tactic. Except that a guy is allegedly being sued, despite it being a claim on some unknown forum by a guy who I can't even find the blog of. IMO it's all made up because this moron has taken a hating to a game instead of ignoring it and letting it go the way of a million other webgames.
Yep I'd probably eat there daily given the opportunity. My two year old daughter loves their food and has since she was maybe 13 months old. She likes to sit by the line and greet people.

If they ever stopped making their hot salsa I'm not sure what I would do...
Feels kind of scary that retaliators could make so much damage so quickly.

Yeah! Have you got any idea about what exactly happened? It's kind of crazy if only one person can make that happen.
> New solar cells can sometimes take greater than the life of the product to recoup the energy spent on creating them. If you live in, say, Massachusetts [...] you'll probably never net an energy savings.

"False. The energy yield ratio (the ratio of energy delivered by a system
over its lifetime, to the energy required to make it) of a roof-mounted,
grid-connected solar system in Central Northern Europe is 4, for a system
with a lifetime of 20 years (Richards and Watt, 2007); and more than 7 in a sunnier spot such as Australia. (An energy yield ratio bigger than one
means that a system is A Good Thing, energy-wise.) Wind turbines with a
lifetime of 20 years have an energy yield ratio of 80."

source:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c6/page_41....

(I assumed that the sun in Central Northern Europe shines with an intensity similar to the intensity in Massachusetts.)
There are huge logistical constraints on the demand side too. Think of all the cars on the road, all the gas stations, etc.
If everybody did that, the Internet would consist of nothing but apologies...
I'd point you to two posts, the first is about a role I call "Everything But Code"
http://jonsteinberg.com/post/67043520/everything-but-code

The second is an extension of the idea, which I call Hackable Business Development.
http://jonsteinberg.com/post/170568831/hackable-business-dev...

You can also handle a lot of the product management and the interfacing and deals that can be built upon your API and those of prospective partners
Gian,

If you want to argue that functional programming is better than object-oriented programming, you should take an object-oriented program, show how you would rewrite it as a functional program, show us why the result is better, and then show how the defects in the OO program are unavoidable within OO.

Some aspects of "goodness" for programs are:

* Brevity.

* Whether the program does something useful or at least entertaining.

* Local modifiability: that some modification of the program requires only local knowledge and local changes, rather than global knowledge and global changes. The more local, the better. This is conditional, though: requiring a ten-line change to a ten-line program is still better than requiring a twenty-line change to an eighty-line program. Demonstrating this requires that you show what is needed to make some particular change to both versions.

* Speed.

* Memory usage.

* Readability.

If you can show that your rewrite is better at least one of these axes and no worse on any of them, and that the difference is a result of OO vs. functional, then you will have shown that OO is worse than functional style for that program. This shouldn't be hard; I think symbolic differentiation is the usual example program for this. If it's better on some but worse on others, then you've shown that for that program, the choice is a situationally-dependent tradeoff.

If you can show that this is true for a wide range of programs, then you will have shown that OO is worse than functional in general.

However, you haven't shown it even for one program. Instead you have some vague bullshit example from some terrible textbook, some vague bullshit example from a sci-fi movie, some theoretical objections stated in the form of a series of mutually contradictory statements, a statement that you aren't actually an idiot (in case we might think that from reading the rest of your article, I guess?), a bunch of apparently false statements about Standard ML, and a bunch of evidence that you're pretty much missing the point on OOP.

Edit: Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote an excellent takedown of what Gian is missing a few years ago: http://plasmasturm.org/log/340/

I still haven't seen the non-shitty OO tutorial he was wishing for.
Yet more howtoforge spam...

joschi is a bot, see http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=joschi (and not a single comment to go with them...)
Accessing post-Javascript DOM (server-side) with Aptana Jaxer
Yeah, that's actually a pretty odd way of doing things. In perl with moose (or just perl6) you just type 'class Foo Bar' in your file and you're good to go.
Because people don't value who makes art, they value who sells art.
While I have not conducted any format experiments in the efficacy of the advocated driving method, I can report that it's far more relaxing than tailgating. Give it a try!
Tech Podcasts and shows
I have grown to love NPR's all tech considered podcast.http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97097438.

I am trying to build a regular feed of interesting pod casts and tech shows(with a tech flavor) .Some of them that come to my mind.
1. BBC's click http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/default.stm
2. Tech Podcast from PRI:http://www.theworld.org/technology-podcast/

Feel free to add to the list !
Any news on replication?
Why are rich people so uncreative?
What was the cargo ship, Arctic Sea, transporting, and why was it hijacked?
The article is totally fine for HN. However, I don't think it's "hacking" a test if I study for it, so why "Hacking a Google Interview"? Is "hack" the new "pwn" or something?
Beijing loves IKEA -- but not for shopping
Since when is the fact people walk in circles when they don't have a reference point "new research"? I learned that in the Army in '94, and I learned it in the Boy Scouts in the '80s.

Maybe the research is new, but all it does is corroborate what real-world evidence already told us decades ago. The author of the article seems to be sensationalizing the matter, or maybe just such a poor reporter that she didn't bother to find out what's new about the research.
Sure, that's absolutely true; am there, doing that, hoping for the T-shirt.

All these things get set up as dichotomies when they aren't. All I'm really meaning is that "oh, they've got funded" feels like a pretty limiting way of deciding whether you think a startup will be be a winner or not, compared to meeting with your potential colleagues and kicking the tyres yourself - and the premium you get for guessing right if you throw in with the pre-Series-A team is actually pretty big.
"I'm tired of loved ones—you know who you are—who claim they are too busy to pick up the phone, or even write a decent email, yet spend hours on social-media sites"

Yes, because getting on the phone with you for hours on end telling you all about my vacation is the same thing as spending 3 minutes uploading my photos to Facebook. Has it occurred to the author that maybe said friends aren't close enough to be spending time on the phone like this?

I call shenanigans on this entire article. It seems to suggest that Facebook as weakened friendships. No, I still talk to my closest friends just as often - on the phone, online, in person, wherever. The difference is now you can keep track of your "outer circle" much more easily than before. This is not a bad thing.
I've actually done this on my way to/from work, and it makes a legitimate improvement in my commute.
Obligatory reference: http://www.aperfectmess.com/ a book about the cost of neatness.
And this debate covers a lot of areas. Anyone that trusts science must recognize the power of emergent patterns, and how they rule the world. This, the internets, is one of the most interesting examples of it because it was just born some years ago, world geography and big cities are as interesting but much more afflicting examples.
Will there be a science of disorder? In the case of enterprise architecture and Craiglist, what are the principles? Are they embodied in Craig Newmark?
Or there will never be a science of disorder, and rest of us will be left with the social sciences which try to explain how we value neatness and hoping more enlinghtned people like Craig Newmark will rule the world?

There is a breach in the Master & Commander pattern of today enterprises waiting to be opened.
Scenes from the Violent Twilight of Oil
The entire thing has been positioned as a bid for attention and funding from the start. How is it anything but selfish, wasteful and boring?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=759730

Concept wise, I'm also drawing a blank, I need a hot geek girl/onair personality to come along. I can Ustream all the airports but no one will sponsor/pay for it--certainly not JetBlue since they know 1000 people will consider it, a dozen will go through with it, and all the social media marketing will be valued at zero. At best you can tape yourself going to all the airports and talk about them (review the architecture, shops, food, services, etc.) but that's boring after awhile. Time-lapsing and condensing the footage into a 5 minutes Where In the World is Matt video, maybe, but that's marginally novel and I think will only be a moderate (YouTube: 500k? Vimeo: 100k?) viral hit. How do I monetize on viral videos?

Flagged for drama. I'm disappointed that we've given them even more attention.
Some Japanese scientists did a study to show how traffic jams can appear of of nowhere. They told 22 drivers to drive in a circular path at 30 km/h. A traffic jam appeared, and moved backward. The video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Suugn-p5C1M
How One Driver Can Vastly Improve Traffic

Yes, but that one driver is never the guy in front of you.
WAL-log shipping was released with Postgres 8.4, so there is now native replication very similar to binary-log shipping. I don't know for sure if it's 100% as good, and what the drawbacks may be to replication through this system, but AFAIK, it's supposed to be pretty much the same thing.
I don't think that the idea that once computers reach a certain level, they can be used to build more powerful computers should be discounted. If you define "the singularity" in this fashion, you don't need any concept of consciousness but you have to admit that there will be issues.

Similarly, once there are robots that, say, guided by a few people, can take on many, many people in a conventional or irregular army, on a real battle field, then you'll have a situation which will influence real social and political decisions. You could call that "the singularity" too.

And since these and other issues are approach, I Kurzweil does us a service point it out even if many of his formulations are indeed crude and simplistic.
Also, you can arrange to meet them more easily.
Hmm,

Could you give some references on this?
Connecticut man consults Apple Genius and gets arrested
I agree; of all the things to do with a resource that is in any way scarce, burning stupendous, gargantuan quantities of it wholesale probably isn't the wisest. The problem is that the physical energy return on that process is better than anything else for the moment.
Interesting, my instinct has always been to try to "punish" the cheaters by preventing them from merging in, thinking that this would discourage this behavior. But I can't really stop this, and the article provides a good explanation for why you might as well just let people merge in front of you.
Want Fast Internet? Don’t Live In the Sticks
I find that a lot of my programming problems break down to a few of the same categories:

State manipulation
Data introspection
Data formats
Concurrent operations

Basically, things are hunky-dory so long as I have a simple data structure that every part of my program can use in the exact same way without destroying performance or entangling its operations with the rest of the program's state. It almost never quite works out like that for a non-trivial program. Hence I end up writing more complex data structures that can generate appropriate views and manipulations of data, state machines to formalize the order of operations and the resource management, and DSLs to generate functionality from data rather than repetitive code.

I think a big improvement would result just from building a convenient state machine syntax into the language.
I like Joel's essays as much as anyone, but how is this not pure advertising?
Speech evolved comparatively late. I'd be willing to bet a motorcycle driver processes data a lot faster.
Anyone have experience in Disqus vs JS-Kit? I'm actually considering using one (or at least making it easy for customers to use) in a couple products.
Indeed, the very fundamental underpinnings of the overwhelming preponderance of the US economy, as well as that of other First World countries. Just about everything requires oil, and just about any growth requires more oil.
Also what if you leave Maps open on your phone while you walk around the city? I would imagine that would skew the data as well.

It sounded to me like they only show the data if there enough reportings to give them confidence. So, even if someone did leave it on while walking around they would be an outlier in the data and more than likely ignored by Google until they started to fit in again. Also, if you're walking around I'd imagine you're unlikely to be on the road, more likely on a sidewalk which should show up in the data as not quite on the road and therefore less likely to be accurate. I suppose there is also the case of a lot of people walking around on the street, but I'd imagine that traffic isn't moving very fast if there are a lot of people doing that anyway.

I for one would love to get my hands on some of this data. My first thought when I saw this was a road-based version of FlightCaster but it could have all sorts of applications. I predict that Google Maps will get a lot better at routing you around congested areas in the future.
AnonTalk is even simpler. But it's also filled with pedophiles and its admin is a spammer and a dick.

The concept is great. But the execution? Ugh.
I wish I shared your sunny optimism.
Ugh:

The job of all artists is now self-promotion. In an age in which the old cultural gatekeepers are being swept away, the most pressing challenge of creative artists is to build their own brands. And it’s the Internet which provides creative talent with easy-to-use and cheap tools for their self-promotion.

In a sense this is true, but you could replace every instance of "self-promotion" with "creation" and you'd have a conclusion that is just as correct without all the craven cynicism. If you want you can interpret every tweet, webcomic update, or flickr photo as a marketing effort. Or you can choose to see the internet as a canvas and these as the brushstrokes.
Adobe Acrobat.com