skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Peak oil != running out of oil.

Peak oil means that the rate of production is set to go into permanent decline and the price of oil is set to become extremely volatile, as a cyclical wave of super-spikes to kill off demand lead to sharp recessions and a downward grind in material standards of living.

We just saw the first iteration of this trend in 2008 and 2009.
It would be wonderful for software developers (if it got traction) but there is no reason why it is helpful for software customers.

Nobody wakes up in the morning and says "You know what I need? An App Store on my machine, to help shareware developers sell more software to me!"

(P.S. It has worked wonderfully for Steam though, and wonderfully but less famously for one or two other game distribution networks like Stardock. They all give value adds for installing the "store" system -- priority distribution of games, deeply discounted games, and kinder friendlier DRM being three of the big ones.)
So this isn't a shared-nothing system? How do they handle failing nodes, and prevent data loss?
Why Google Is Buying AdMob
Actually, that seems like a pretty good argument that people should use italics or bolding for emphasis more often. They are used to modify the meaning of the phrase, as he demonstrated, just like our tone of voice. The exact mechanisms are different, of course.
In case you aren't aware of what Caffeine is: http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/google-caffeine/
This looks awesome and these launch offers are -way- cheaper than the normal prices on a per month basis. How long are these gonna last?
good engineers are never short of good offers

Actually a lot of programmers suck at networking and are terrible at job hunting.

This is a myth perpetuated by the you-get-what-you-deserve crowd who also believe that the homeless deserve to be where they are because they didn't play by the rules.
That's a very good point.

I hang out on few online electronics forums ( http://forum.sparkfun.com for example) and answer a fair amount of questions, help people with electronics problems, and provide simple designs. Occasionally I think about how much value I'm giving away (even here in the Midwest, EE consulting rates are around $100/hr) for free and how much value the site owners get from having others like me on their board.

Then I remember that it's really fun and that I enjoy helping people and seeing what creations their minds come up with. Once in a while someone pays me to design/build something, but most of the benefit I get from it is in no way financial.
On the internet very little content is really worth working to get. If it's too annoying to read it, there's always other pages available. And if it is worth working to get, I, at least, am not likely to be paying much attention to the ads around it.
Trillions - The Future of Computing
It seems to me that the problem the OP describes is not confined to governments.

If some layer or department of a large company's bureaucracy is consuming about 1.5% of its revenues (just as the Australian tax office consumes about 1.5% of Australia's GDP), then the upper management will never have much interest in driving that proportion down to 0.5%. So as the company grows, that layer or department will grow as well in spite of automation, just as the tax office has grown.
This is a serious problem but I don't think this is as easily solved by face to face, or telephone, communication as the author seems to think.

I used to have a professor that claimed interpersonal communication fails 95% of the time. I now know he was using hyperbole to make a point - but it's still very often and only going to get worse from here.

The problem is we are all AWFUL are reading tone in text communication - and it's impossible to get better at it as the author points out with his example. We can only get better at communicating our intent correctly, not at interpreting the intent. This is also true of other communication though. We are very bad at reading body language, facial expressions, and all sorts of other non verbal cues. I suspect this is why the internet habit of using smilies and 'lol's began so early in the advent of the internet. A population of people who historically had more trouble than others with an already very difficult problem found an easy way to solve it in their new medium.

I think escalation in medium works most of the time is because we have more practice delivering our intent verbally . Going forward, however, I don't see any reason that might not change as younger generations get more experience with text based communication than verbal communication.
I know, and agree. I'm saying the title is close to link bait.
Why this, as opposed to sIFR, Cufon, or other free techniques that are currently being used for font replacement? (Honest question.)
On that site I can see a sort-of flash of unstyled content as the font loads, but that doesn't seem to happen on Typekit's own pages.
No, you wouldn't. At current energy use levels Nort America contains enough coal for 200 years at the current population, and you can make liquid fuels from coal by gasification.
http://aaenvironment.com/CECE/SynthesisofHydrocarbonFuels.pd...

I can't find the reference, but I think there was a French study in the 80's that claimed at $200/barrel it'd be economical to make liquid hydrocarbons for energy using air and nuclear power.
Augh, I couldn't read the whole thing. Was it written by James Joyce? Because the whole stream-of-consciousness thing doesn't really work for technical articles.
That contradicts the science then that says business leaders are overwhelmingly extroverted.
"almost every programmer with which we spoke about XAML said that ‘if you want to do serious things, forget about designer, do it by hand’ – we said, no way!"

I've never used Delphi, but I wouldn't let layout generators build my interface for me regardless of the technology.
Hoping it's the duration of your account. I'm tempted to sign up even though I don't need it, just for the future.
I guess Microsoft clearly failed marketing to this guy. I see no evidence he has actually ever touched anything .net related. I've never experienced performance problems with .net due to the garbage collector (granted I've been working with it since 2.0+ there may have been issues in 1.0) I think he is a desktop developer, but from a web point of view it was slow due to the viewstate... MVC solves that problem.

I chose ASP.NET MVC for my startup, and the ONLY downside is the slightly higher server costs.
If you have to declare yourself a member of the A-list, you aren't.
That is really neat. Seems they didn't have the brakes set to fail-safe though. "BRAKES!"
This assumes that the place they're going to has openings for more than one person, or that the person they would take has the job requirements. Honestly, I have never seen what you describe in my 20 years in this industry.

The only times anyone has tried to "poach" me has been when a new company was starting up.
I was expecting a hit piece of sorts, but was surprised to see that the point of this article isn't Joel, but just uses an exchange Joel had on here as an example of a larger problem.

If I were the submitter, I'd correct the title to remove the "(and Joel Spolsky)" as it emphasizes the wrong part of the article and isn't present in the actual title.
It depends on how fast Typekit's server responds. I'm sure it is extra slow today. I did some unofficial benchmarks on the service while it was still in beta:

http://iloveusability.com/usability-review/typekit/

It'll be interesting to see how well their servers perform under a heavier load.
I would like to hear what Alan Kay has to say about that (or Terry Pratchett or ... ).
Yes, my point exactly :)
Curiously, the fonts on that page didn't render particularly well for me (Vista/Firefox)

http://imgur.com/uHeAq.jpg
Ask HN: How to sell a private version of my web application to clients?
Hi all,
I am building a web application with ruby on rails and some people have already asked for the ability to host the application on their own servers. They want to do this because they need to store sensitive data. I'm not particularly concerned about the fact that they could steal the source code, but rather on how to manage upgrades.

My idea was to setup git for them, so they can automatically download the current version.

I know github does something similar and I would like to know if someone has an idea about how they do it.
MVC is an important move forward for .net webdev. The event driven model made for nice presentations on dragging and dropping buttons onto the page, but in practice it was an abomination.
Geek Porn (chartbeat)
No. "Properly quoting" inputs is the worst way to mitigate SQL injection flaws.

What you need to be doing is replacing your concatenated string queries with precompiled parameterized queries, where the values in your queries are replaced with placeholder strings (like "?" and ":varname"), and the values are passed in a seperate call. Every mainstream database API supports these.
Cornucopia: digital gastronomy
I posted the original with Schneier's and Ranum's pieces (http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/magazinePrintFriendly/0...) at about the same time this was posted - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=932940
The entire Justice Department (not just the IRS) has a budget authority of about $25 billion, out of a budget with roughly $2.5 trillion in receipts and $3 trillion in outlays.

So if the government not only eliminated the IRS but eliminated the entire Department of Justice, Federal spending would go down by less than one percent. Roll on the revolution, dude!
Google Closure Critique
Autonomous Indoor Copter Drone Steers with Laser Scanner
One of the things I really like about Ubuntu is that I can download and install the right version of a wide variety of program for my machine very easily. And it lets me keep up to date without thinking about it. A lot of programs don't update automatically and those that do are doing it right when I don't want it to--when I start the program up. If there was a similar system for Windows, I would definitely consider switching back.

If developers have a good distribution system, there's greater incentive to invest more in making better software. There's a chicken-and-egg problem here since unless the platform has worthwhile programs, no one is going to install it, but Steam is one example, and Microsoft could do it themselves and that would guaranteed to be adopted, if there's no legal problems there.

Distributing free programs (How about keep my Python and Notepad++ up to date?) would be a way to bootstrap as well.

EDIT: Firefox Add-ons also looks like it's moving towards a store with donations as a preliminary trial, and remember add-ons can also be standalone applications running off of xulrunner: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=892073
Zen, or the art of YC interview
In practice "peak oil" is more a political catchphrase than anything else. Objectively, the concept is both true and obvious. Yes, finite resources are finite and if you keep using them they'll eventually run out. Not exactly rocket science, there. In practice, it mostly gets discussed because people like to worry over impending catastrophes, especially ones that can be blamed on people they don't like. It's really just not that big of a concern.

Oh, and abiogenic petroleum is pretty much crackpottery, so that doesn't help.
That's put me off a lot; I'd expect them to be using a service that is very stable to scale now they have launched.

The fact their own site is intermittent today is worrying.
I can't say I understand the example supplied. There's no way to say what the commenter said to someone's face without being insulting; he is explicitly implying that Joel is being manipulative and deceitful. It's the sort of thing you can feel free to think to yourself, but which is very rude to say.

Try this: Say this paragraph out loud, and find a tone where the primary message conveyed isn't "way to pull one over on us, asshole" (hint: there isn't one.)

You disguise a PR piece as an objective 'how to' in a national business publication, coming across as an authority, the underdog, and an all around nice guy who really cares about his customers. You're an engineer who claims to be 'weak' in the sales department, but all evidence to the contrary: nice 'sales hack'.

Even if you got rid of loaded words like "disguise" and took away the scare quotes, there's still no nice way to express that thought to someone. It's really tactless; any reasonable person would be insulted, regardless of the medium.

To generalize, I posit that a lot of "miscommunication" thanks to tone online is just a result of people feeling free (with the cover of semi-anonymity) to throw away any subtlety and confront people in a manner that they would never adopt face-to-face.

EDIT: Expanding on my last paragraph, I don't want to be overly critical of people who are very straightforward and speak their mind online, even if it seems rude; there's certainly a tradition of abrasively practical hackers. The commenter perhaps did everyone a service by opening for discussion something that other people might have left unsaid.
Is that good? Bad? Better than expected?
Couple reasons:

1) sIFR, Cufon, image-replacement, etc. each have their own problems. Hard to setup, can't select the text, tedious to maintain, requires opening Flash CS4, etc.

2) @font-face is the future, but most paid font foundries refuse to support it b/c it requires the font file to be linked to on the server. So designers can legally use free fonts with @font-face but not fonts they've purchsed.

So, Typekit is an attempt to keep the font foundries happy by hosting the font file and preventing unauthorized downloading, while keeping an eye on ease-of-use and the future of the web by doing most of the @font-face heavy-lifting.
This may be surprising to the Internet generation, but companies have crowed when they win accounts over from more established competitors for even longer than there has been search engines. Among less worthy chest thumping reasons, providing social proof helps motivate customers who are on the fence by letting your internal champions say "Hey, X just switched to Z, we look to X for leadership in our industry, let's do Z" and "Z is a safe choice, after all, X uses it. I can recommend Z to my boss and not get fired".
... a horrible car remote?
This article misses quite a few important details.

Most importantly, the first 6 digits of a Visa numer constitute a "BIN" (Bank Identification Number). I have heard that MasterCard uses variable number of digits for BIN, but I don't have proof. Some places will have lists of BINs (there's really not that many) and reject "card numbers" that don't have a correct BIN.

Secondarily, MasterCard numbers start with "51", "52", "53", "54" or "55". AmEx starts with "34" or "37", and Discover Cards start with "6011" or "650".

Generating a good "fake" CC number is a bit more complex than the first digit, and getting the Luhn checksum correct.

One of the other commentors is correct in having a huge number of checks around the format of a "credit card number". In practice, all kinds of rubbish ends up in the card number field, and every once in a while, it will pass the Luhn checksum and cause problems down stream.
Meh. I think geeks look at the repeated RPM-style gauges and start thinking how they could design the interface better.
I think that the line between "operating system" and application framework is a bit fuzzy, to say the least. I would argue that the Java VM is exactly an operating system to the code that uses it: a system of operation defined by the primitives presented by the VM. In fact, a VM and a set of APIs is all that a "real" operating systems is!

I can see why the title might irk you, but if you read the post, we're not claiming that it's another operating system to list besides Windows, Unix, OS X, and VMS, but rather that we've built an abstraction that has the same power, robustness, etc. for analytic tasks that an operating system does for simple processes.

The history of computing is one of building abstraction upon abstraction -- it's not like we built the OS and we're done.
I saw a study a few months ago on that, I think it was linked on Overcoming Bias,but I'm not sure. Apparently, most people rate themselves in the 3rd quartile; everyone under average thinks they are somewhat above, and people in the upper quartile generally over-estimate the average, thinking most are more like themselves, so only those who are actually in the third percentile are (accidentally) accurate in their self-assessments.
Revenue and Runway - Why every cent matters
It sounds less like they're being discouraged from using Python, and more like they're being encouraged to think critically about what sorts of projects Python would excel at.

Put another way, they're being encouraged to use the right tool for the job.
I checked out that esrfacts hoping it would be entertaining. That has got to be one of the lamest sites that I have ever seen, it is so lame that it has me actually using the term for the first time ever.
This is highly reminiscent of the broken window fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
whoops, embarrassing typo! It's @BHeardUSA on Twitter!
i wouldn't dispute that c# is a fine language. i wouldn't argue that object pascal is better than c#. i would, however, argue that delphi, mostly because of its incredible two-way design interface is a terrific development environment, superior than any forms designer included with visual studio. i don't know what hand anders had in the interface builder of delphi, but its better than visual studio's (better than all of the vb verions, etc).
Aside from being sourced directly from the Rackspace blog, there are NO logical/technical reasons given for the the switch.

This is a pure PR puff piece.

Why is this even on HN in the first place?!
How's the list going?
1) Emoticons and internet lingo (lol, brb, lmao, etc.) do have a place in "professional communication". They aren't just for teenagers.

This is good advice. I've fallen foul of this problem on many an occasion and now liberally (but not excessively) use emoticons to communicate theme's and feelings as needed - it really does help :)
I think that the real reason the best of the best don't display much ego, is that they are primarily focused on whatever it is they do, rather than on themselves; that is how they got to be the best in the first place.
At first I really thoguht this article was written in one language and translated to English, or written by an application. Actually, after having finished it, I'm still not sure.

As for the merits of the article - meh - it seems to mostly be based on the writer's experience with early versions of .NET and the framework has come along way. An interesting read, but perhaps not quite relevant anymore.
Good god. We don't deliberately play good cops and bad cops to push people's buttons. We wouldn't have the energy to do that all day long for 3 days. We just have a lot of questions to ask and only 10 minutes to do it in, and we have to switch context completely every 15 minutes. This means there's a lot of randomness in the questions. You get easy ones mixed randomly with ones that seem very critical, but it's not deliberate.
Patents are only granted on specific implementations, not ideas.

So, if granted, it wouldn't be a patent on any better extraction method, but only on their particular method of increasing efficiency. (say, the use of a particular additive in the slurry or what-have-you)
Another option many people seem to be unaware of is Typeface.js: http://typeface.neocracy.org/

It supports text selection, requires zero thought once it's set up, and works in every major browser. The only major downside is that you need to convert each font to typeface.js' JSON font format, which adds a bit of heft.

At the same time of course, I definitely support what Typekit is trying to do, since most font foundries won't be happy with (m)any other solutions. Too bad this discounted pricing won't last!
@font-face in action for those you haven't seen or noticed it:
http://www.alistapart.com/d/cssatten/drim.html
I would expect that what I store in any cloud server is never lost, so having two problems would EBS would be enough for me not to trust them again.
"I don't think it's possible to make an implementation like CPython as fast as an engine like V8 or SquirrelFish Extreme that was designed to be fast above all else."

Are they saying that JavaScript is already faster than Python? I've only recently started using some Python, and while it seems to be a decent language, I have not yet seen much that would make me prefer it over JavaScript. Some things are a bit smoother in Python, others are smoother in JS. Here's hoping that JavaScript will win :-)
I always thought geek porn was real porn, but on the internet.
Why would their use case seem better suited to renting a bunch of servers?

The 400% jump in video utilization upon the release of the iPhone 3gs probably represented a major inflection in their rate of storage growth, and their peak need for media processing capability. That may have been something they could have anticipated, but it would have been easy to end up dramatically over- or under-provisioned.

In addition, I'd expect that their load varies a lot. Some of it may be predictable, but short lived (like increased photo and videoposting around the holidays), so renting 2x as many servers for a week a few times a year seems like a hassle. Other spikes are going to be unpredictable and of unknown duration. Keeping too much extra capacity around for these situations can quickly eat up the savings from renting servers.

At the very least, "cloud computing" is going to be valuable for handling large peaks, even if they have some more permenant infrastructure in place. Look at electrical power generation. Utilities invest heavily in steam plants to achieve high efficincies andclow costs for meeting their base load. To meet peak demand, they fire up less efficient gas turbines. The higher operating cost is more than offset by the fact that they are so much cheaper to build and can be spun up and down quickly.
What's wrong with prototyping a service using Python and if it takes off port it to a better language for scalability?
I miss information on how it works. Does it render fonts as images? Or maybe it uses some new HTML 5 feature? Or it requires an ActiveX plugin?
This guy is still living in 2001, most of his arguments are pretty much nonsense, and I am highly skeptical of his performance claims
For me the biggest problem with .NET is the fact that it doesn't generate true binaries and the deployment problems (framework needs to be installed). The advantage of Delphi is that it compiles everything into a single exe file that just works properly everywhere on any Windows machine. But if you develop in-house software or custom software for a specific customer then these reasons probably don't matter.

I have tried writing a few applications in .net and I liked it. I think it's really great for the programmer because C# language has lots of features that I really want to see in Delphi's pascal. Still, Delphi (I'm still using the old Delphi 7) is my favourite development tool.
The biggest risk Google faces is not developing some awesome new thing. There is very little risk that they will develop some awesome new thing, but not be able to make it scale.

If discouraging developers from using Python means that one great project doesn't happen it's probably a net lose for them.
That's exactly what a bad cop would say. Let's see if Trevor chimes in with an opposing viewpoint.
Chrome currently does not support @font-face by default so this does not work on chrome for me unless i run it with a command line option to enable it.
This is a really innovative idea. I'm a big fan of cufón right now, but I'll definitely play around with this.