skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wikipedia is not the best source. Not necessarily the worst either but still.

The phrase "Peak Oil" has become much more than a statement that at some point in time the human production of oil will. For example, one of the primary boosters of the phrase was the website "Dieoff.org" which anticipates the death of most people on the planet. And you've demonstrated this yourself by jumping to the Hubbert curve...

The thing about a Hubbert curve is that it is base on regional data. Production in various regions has, rather roughly, indeed expand exponentially and then gone down exponentially. But where this behavior has been roughly seen, the exponential decline has happened because the particular sources have been replaced by cheaper sources elsewhere. Since this cannot happen on a world scale, there is every reason to expect world-scale production on existing fields to go down gradually rather than exponentially. Further, as the GP notes, more oil is being discovered even into the declining range.

This relatively slow decline will provide some impetus for alternative energy sources - it already has to an extent.

The world has quite a few problems but approach that our "Peak Oil" friends use for framing these problems is not useful.
Crockford sums it up as (paraphrasing): We take time to perform all actions diligently and with the utmost regard towards security and privacy -- unless you pay us.

And, with all good standards, you get multiple choices for a solution. Crockford prefers his adsafe over Google's caja.

http://www.adsafe.org/
http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/
That's rubbish. Economic growth is not simply more of the same. The next 20% will not be like the last. The 20% before that was also different.

If we can get twice as far on a litre of petrol with no other costs (worse car, etc.) that is economic growth.
So you are saying that removal of wisdom teeth gives you a disability similar to removal of feet?
I use fish on all my machines at this point. It's nice to have really smart auto-completion. I know bash can do some of this if you configure it correctly but I'm all about reasonable defaults. I can't be bothered with lots of configuration changes on every machine I touch.

One word of warning, and this probably applies to any shell, you should keep one of your sudoers on bash or sh. I've had a few occasions where something broke fish so when I logged into the machine via ssh I would see a few error messages and the session would terminate when the shell died locking me out of the system. I never figured out what broke fish in the first place but it's taught me the value of having a fallback user/shell for emergencies.
No, they burn really bright for about 1-2 seconds and blow out. Voice of experience.
One study such as this does not offer conclusive evidence. If you actually read all the way through the article you linked to you would see that there are numerous problems with the headline interpretations. One example

'The appendix of the FSA report shows that some nutrients, such as beta-carotene, are as much as 53% higher in organic food, but such differences are not reflected in its conclusions.'

I suggest that if you are going to attempt to wield the sword of 'scientific proof' you should at least have some understanding of how it works. 'scientifically false' is a very strong statement. When used without proper evidence it does just as great an injury to science as a combined crystal healer / homoeopathy convention.
Which will hardly be able to cope with the looming scarcity of resources, considering the numbers of population growth rate.
> I can't be bothered with lots of configuration changes on every machine I touch.

Every machine you touch may not have the option of fish. Having a reasonable .bashrc (and even .cshrc -- I've been on machines where bash was broken) is key to doing any sysadmin/dev work on linux/unix boxes.
AFAIK, Twitter is doing exactly the same thing with Rails that Yahoo is doing with PHP. They ditch the ORM and use it as a thin presentation layer over RPC calls.

I don't know too many intimate details of Rails, but ORM is most certainly not at the heart of Django. It's quite common to drop the model layer entirely and run it on top of either RPCs or a different backing data store (see AppEngine, for example, and every Django app I've written at Google).

ORMs have well-known performance problems - a couple startups ago, I was doing webapps in Java, and we found that relying on Hibernate gave us an instant 5x slowdown over raw JDBC calls, and far more than that relative to our proprietary database.
SVD doesn't work when you have a sparse matrix as input. You could use some sort of imputation method (like EM) to fill in all of the missing values then run SVD, but this would be extremely inefficient, since only a tiny fraction of the user x movies matrix of ratings is observed. It also probably wouldn't work very well, because your true signal from the data would be overwhelmed by all of the missing values that you'd somewhat arbitrarily filled in.

PMF is a generalization of SVD that is able to work directly on the sparse structure of the input. It does gradient descent -- modifying the low dimension latent vectors directly to minimize error, and never does any imputation of missing values. This makes it very efficient, and it can easily handle millions of ratings. See http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~amnih/papers/pmf.pdf for an application of PMF to the very large Netflix problem.
I have worked in Japan for a few years and am pretty good at sugar-coating things when required, but you presumably want my honest feedback, so here it is: your "minimalism" is more about what you want than what your customers want, and it is the most expensive fashion statement you have ever made in your life.

If you A/B test that against any improved design, for example one which replaces the subtle "get started with Tarsnap" link with an attractive 200x60 button, the graphical alternative will annihilate the performance of your minimalist alternative.

If you don't have the time, skill, or desire to do this, there is an Internet full of starving web designers out there. I got my current website design from a nice young lady in India for $150. With the degree of improvement you'll see, that would probably pay itself back within a few days to a week.
Screams "one-person shop".

Still simply does not explain to a typical user why they're any better off with you than with Mozy. In fact, even for technical users, Mozy's security page might sound better than yours.

Lose "does not support Windows". Nobody in your target market cares, but it sends a "this is half-baked" message --- which is obviously not justified.
It's great. Launch it now and fix it up later. ;)

Seriously: I was attempting to evangelize tarsnap to my company the other day (despite the fact that I have yet to actually use the service...) and was hindered by the fact that there was just nothing to link to. This is exactly what I needed last week.

Let your first priority be: Launch this right now. A good second priority would probably be to listen to patio11 and tptacek, but I encourage you not to let this distract you from the first priority.
Is City-Wide Wi-Fi a Dead Idea?
We are analog beings trapped in a digital world, we did it to ourselves.
This is very true. My wife particularly hates "fine" and "sure".
Then for gods sake ditch Times New Roman. You'd be 10x Googlier if you'd just switch from font-family: serif to font-family: Arial.
Uh,

In the US, a large number of people use the emergency room as a doctor's office because they have no other choice.

So, Canada: problematic. US: fail

But if Canada keeps using US logic, it might wind-up in our boat. Good luck to you...
Woops, submitted it with an anchor. Scroll up, the introduction is worth reading.
Cool. Thanks for sharing that information. I love Hacker News.
This is the best advice I've ever seen you get on HN, Colin.
And what animates the software developer? I disagree that a computer is an inanimate object (unless you pull the power plug).
Giveawayoftheday: AnyBizSoft PDF to HTML Converter on September 15, 2009
Giveawayoftheday: You can get AnyBizSoft PDF to HTML Converter for free on September 15, 2009
If you want GMO to succeed in the marketplace, then try convincing them to start serving the market, rather than trying to apply regulation to prevent the market from making informed decisions.

"GMO for the people" is just sloganeering.
For what it's worth, here is a (bleeding edge) way to run Django with Twisted: http://clemesha.org/blog/2009/apr/23/Django-on-Twisted-using.... Full working example code is linked from the article.

With this you get the benefit of being self-contained and you get Django with all it's joys plus Twisted for your long-polling, etc.
I mean users like the author of that blog who think just because he can think of a feature it is easy to implement. I mean users who create a meeting at 2am instead of 2pm and get mad at the software for not warning them of their mistake. I mean dumb like people who create 10,000 contacts and get mad at the software for not automatically deleting the ones they don't care about anymore.

What he is suggesting is just absurd. If it actually did do what he wanted, he'd get pissed off like the guy the other day who got mad because apple's time machine automatically deleted some year old backups of his system to make room for the latest backup.
A friend of mine who works for Qualcomm in san diego says this happened to him as well. He went to the dentist to have all 4 wisdom teeth removed. They asked him to schedule it over 4 separate days rather than doing it all at once, just so that they could charge the maximum allowable amount per day to the insurance company -- they actually explained that to him!
Landscapers have been a problem for me absolutely everywhere I've lived. I have two choices, rid the world of early morning landscapers or sound proof the house, starting with better windows.
I've studied the history of the oil business, but my findings are totally different from yours.

Look at the price history-- there is no 25 or 30 year cycle of crude oil crashes beyond the gap from 1979 to the mid-2000's. We can all confirm this for ourselves here:
http://www.inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Oil/Inf...

and here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_Prices_1861_2007.svg

You can see that the price stayed within a factor of 2 of its average price (around $20 in 2009 currency) for roughly 100 years. Furthermore, before World War I, coal was our primary energy source-- less than 20% of our global energy usage came from oil before 1920. To say that the oil industry has had the same drivers as it's changed from being just a source of kerosene to the primary world energy source is inaccurate.

Incidentally I do agree that "presupposing a [sic] impeding [sic] permanent shortfall in global hydrocarbon supplies" is likely to be a poor idea, but not for the reasons you state. I think it's a bad idea because the actual history of oil has been so unpredictable, so acyclic.
It may actually be faster, but I am still getting the load test environment set up. I will post the load tests here or on my blog when I run tests.

Mainly, I wanted to make sure Tornado integrates with existing frameworks so that more people can play with it, and the separable parts are useful to people who don't want to use the whole Tornado stack.
I do this as a matter of course. I don't do it to achieve any goal beyond recognizing the humanity of those who are serving me. That being said, it does seem to result in more attentive and personal service.
FYI, the instructions referenced in this message with Django/Tornado getting started code is at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users/browse_thread/th...
Scvngr Has Massive Text Game Turn Out In Denver
http://www.kaymont.com/pages/sounding-balloons.cfm
Still alive in Philly (Wireless Philadelphia)
My take on Tornado and "modern" web servers
The Best Way To Improve Your Creativity
Soundproofing is very expensive and might be impossible depending on the noise, the construction of the house and whether or not you own or rent. If possible it's almost always preferable to simply not have the noise in the first place.

An apartment where I lived in Manhattan had unbearable noise. The bill for installing soundproof windows would have been $1800 and wouldn't block any of the low frequency noise from a nearby bar, so I moved to a quiet street in Brooklyn...
Running this (for me) has a lot, a lot of advantages over using apache. Not the least of which is it's microscopic compared to Apache. I'll be very interested in this; and might take the django bit for a spin this week. Thank you.
I find that not treating them like service staff works wonders. I think that's part of the $20 and name tricks, it relaxes you into a state of sublime confidence. You begin talking to people as if you know them. This faux-familiarity makes them start treating you like they actually do know and like you. And no one wants to deny a favor to a friend.
There's also lua lanes, haven't used it yet though.
http://luaforge.net/projects/lanes/
"The findings, partly published today in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, contradict previous work that has found organically grown food to be nutritionally superior."

It doesn't seem as cut and dry as you've made it out to be above, but I'm no expert.
http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=1031&#...

It was meant to filter out some text added by cell phones to replies.
Seeing as I can buy organic produce in large grocery stores for a relatively low price above the baseline, it is, by definition, not a boutique product.

You're clearly using boutique as a backhanded pejorative for the production model. The argumentative slight-of-hand is ridiculous.

Have you ever grown a traditional garden, vs. an organic one? Try it on any kind of scale over 100 square feet, then tell me about the work involved, and tell me whether 'boutique' fits organic or not :D

What were your experiences in attempting this, and where did you find the organic approach led to significant inefficiencies in production? How does your experience compare with that of successful larger organic operations?
YouTube - Beyoncé - Sweet Dreams
Have you tried ipython? http://ipython.scipy.org/moin/ Pretty close...
And Mountain View, CA (GoogleWifi).
Python Thread Synchronization Primitives : Not Entirely What You Think
I dont want to pay 3 companies (home, iphone and roaming wifi) for my internet needs. Whether it is a dead idea or not, these companies need to work together to provide me 1 package to access HSI anywhere and everywhere.
On the contrary, I think the command line was reborn in 1999 in the form of Google. It should be relatively straightforward to work out how Google succeeded where terminals failed at being effective interfaces for normal people.
At least it was accidental, and not intentional... If that counts.
It's nice to have some insight on BeOS, but now that you use OS X, how does it stack up against the ahead-of-its-time BeOS features, now that OS X has manage to implement a lot of them? what's missing? do you like Apple's implementations?
Right, the only standard shell is sh.
Hmm,

You don't specify what missed test killed your father.

There are, however, many symptoms where, given the uncertainty of all technology today, giving an operation or a drug prescription to might save X lives whereas NOT taking action would save Y lives, where X and Y are very uncertain.

The harder thing, though, the lives that are lost through giving the operation or the drug tend to be even harder to measure - people die through being prescribed 4,5,6...X drugs up to the point that interaction fry them without any one drug being "to blame". People die from complications of many surgeries, yet if the surgery is possibly necessary, people don't think to blame the decision to operate (the New Yorker figure that surgical accidents kill more than auto accidents is remarkable - auto accidents were once the 4th leading cause of death in the US). And there is a hidden if you test everyone for everything. False positives can kill people - false positives do kill many people today.

And as the New Yorker article mentions, physician incentives to make tests (or in other circumstances, to avoid them) can make a big difference.
I've always expected city-wide WiFi to fail if it were provided by the government. I've never really understood what the advantage for the government was, unless the assumption was that it would add to the network infrastructure of the city for city use, which is silly, as they wouldn't be able to use it for private communications.

As a tax-payer, I can't imagine wanting to pay for something like that either, at least not above what I already pay my wireless carrier. I agree that it would be a nicety, but given the underfunding of most schools / bridge / roads / etc., I can't honestly imagine wanting some of my tax dollars to go toward WiFi, of all things.
I usually try things out in perl first, given the abundance of its modules, but I usually rewrite it on the same day in something else.
This is true, every word. I can absolutely vouch for what this says.

It's quite startling the first few times you try it. Then it gets fun. It's easy to push it too far.
This is really good stuff. Interesting topic. Good writing. I like it.
I work in computer repair as a sole proprietorship, and if I charge too much I won't get repeat business. But you can't always judge if someone will refer more customers to you or give you repeat business.
So the poor haven't gotten poorer after all?

If you want, pick a standard of absolute wealth and try to argue that the rest of my statement isn't true.
Top Health Benefits of Kale
Minor suggestions mentioned elsewhere, let me reinforce them:

- put this up right away and iterate from there.

- no-one reads text. The best line you've got is "online backups for the truly paranoid". Put a graphic button somewhere so people can reflexively click on it and get taken to a payment page.

- please don't tell us what it DOESN'T do on the front page (i.e. Windows support). My website doesn't make ice cream, but it is irrelevant. Also, you don't want negative sentiment anywhere near your payment process.

- Improve the start area.
- 1. Download and Install (5 mins....)
- 2. Deposit $5 or more
- It's that easy!!!!
10. http://yonderful.com/9-worrying-signs-of-twitter-obsession
We're getting ready to launch a site now with Ubuntu Server 9.04, Apache2, mod_perl, and perl 5.10. We considered RoR, PHP, and a couple of Python frameworks, any one of which would have been reasonable, but I'm reasonably satisfied with this choice. I like the way you can access almost all of the Apache internals with mod_perl. RubyForge is gaining on CPAN but it's still got a ways to go, at least for variety.
I never understood why people were so excited about city-wide Wi-FI networks when we already knew 4G networks were coming. Maybe there are reasons to prefer the former over the latter, but I never heard anyone who was advocating for city-wide Wi-Fi even mention 4G.
It seems to have good results for me. People remember my usual order and are more friendly. It seems to work best if you're subtle about reading their name tag so by the time they look at you and interact with you, you can just use their name very naturally. If you're a regular customer and you remember their names, that works even better.

I won't say I've ever gotten anything out of it (I get free extra cheese on my pizza sometimes?) but it's a far more rewarding way to interact with people.
Glad to see you replacing the site. I'm a satisfied tarsnap user but unless you greatly improve the site you won't get others except very early adopters like me.

That said, the new site is missing the mark. There is plenty of good advice here on how to improve the content. You best bet is to copy some ideas from your competitor's content. Even if you do that, it will still look like you did the web page and look ugly. There my be no way around you shelling out a few hundred bucks on a web designer. Every time I have tried to make my web sites look better, it was painful and I simply wished I had paid a designer to do it for me.
A take on Tornado and "modern" web servers
I need a reason to recommend this, Colin. If you give me one --- and it's not "paranoia" --- I will start recommending it.

(I already have, to people like H.D. Moore on Twitter. The HD's of the world is a really small target market).
Yeah, you can tell from the article that they want to do it right, even if that means waiting a little bit longer. I respect that.
City-wide WiFi is usually pitched as making sense in a city in which there are many underprivileged who may not be able to get their own wireless service. But then again, if someone can buy a laptop to use wireless then why can't they pay for wireless service? I guess it would be a nice thing to have if the city budget has that much extra to spare.

In the meantime you can always skim wireless from numerous unsecured hotspots. In any major city there is going to be free wireless everywhere from both businesses and homes.
It's not about peak oil.

It's about peak cheap oil.
With that in mind, please write your blog in a font and colors that can be read by analog machines and does not require the accuracy of a digital one. Interesting, yes, but it took me disabling the color scheme and zooming in to even be able to read it.
that's a good question, and something i hadn't thought about in a long time.

macosx has mostly surpassed beos. in my opinion it's more pleasant to use today than beos was in its prime. having said that, there are some things about beos that will likely never be recreated.

that database-like file system, for instance. that wasn't just a bullet point feature. the big thing that got me hired at be was that i wrote a usenet newsreader for their operating system. i made heavy use of bfs indexes. my program could search through hundreds of thousands of message files in a microsecond to find the one i wanted. there still isn't such a thing on the mac today, or any other os. when i ported my newsreader to the mac, i had to think up workarounds for all the places where i could no longer use bfs indexes. at least a couple of weeks' work for a substandard implementation, compared to the beos way.

another one is multi-threading. for beos programming, it wasn't just a suggestion, it was mandatory. every beos window runs in its own thread, whether you like it or not. so if you came to beos kind of ambivalent about multi-threading, it sucks to be you, because you were forced to learn it. i'd say that's the biggest long-term boost to my career i got from beos: i'm better at multi-threading than any other programmer i've ever worked with.

the macosx threading model is anemic by comparison. you run the user interface in the main thread, and if you want secondary threads, you launch them yourself. since it's not used much, nobody learns how. and now they've introduced this grand central thing, in an effort to make multi-threading easier. having learned how to do it the "hard" way, grand central doesn't look like much of an improvement to me. yes, multi-threading is hard, but not that hard. it just requires more discipline than many programmers possess.

another really great thing about beos was the absence of legacy. i had earlier spent a lot of time programming for windows, and my god what a mess that is. there are things in the windows api that are weird and stunted due to decisions made in 1980. i didn't realize what a giant burden that was until i was free of it.

to its credit, macosx seems largely free of this. apple has added a ton of stuff to cocoa over the nine years i've been using it, but it still seems fresh and approachable. i think a large part of that is that apple is not afraid to toss stuff out when it gets stale and dated. microsoft, on the other hand, values backward compatibility above all else, so their apis stink to high heaven.