skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not an alchemist? Did you forget about the Socerer's Stone? How could a non-alchemist discover that many uses for dragon's blood?

Harry's parents are mysterious figures and I would guess that their wealth (or his rather) was more inherited than from being a highly skilled witch wizard team. He did inherit the invisibility cloak.
A Lake discovered in Titan - a moon of Saturn
You don't need permission to say bullshit. Always call it when you see it. It doesn't need shelter.
Hobbyists Use Etsy to Trade Day Job for Hard Work
I respectfully disagree. Harry Potter isn't considered "good" among critics, it's not a literature masterpiece. The same is true for other arts, like cinema and music. The top sellers usually aren't considered the best.

"Wanted", as in the audience wants to consume, yes. Maybe good enough; for the mass market.

But it all depends from what angle you approach the conversation. Tastes are hard to discuss.

Your last paragraph ignores the "everything else" that constitutes a product and its surrounding business. Things like price, marketing, design, distribution deals, costs, market share potential, competitors, etc... it's not enough to simply have a good product; or even a perfect one, if such thing was possible.
Health Reform, taking the wrong risks?
In defense of MBAs, they can actually be useful IF you already have domain knowledge. The problem is when MBA graduates with no domain expertise are unleashed to manage and lead a business. It's dangerous even in small markets, for example the Stanford MBA trying to sell condom keychains (http://www.storylog.com/how-my-start-up-failed/)

I work in a multi-disciplinary engineering firm. In the past, the project managers were typically promoted from the senior engineering ranks (like a lead mechanical engineer). About 5 years ago, the company decided to create a separate discpline for project management. So graduate engineers would go straight into assisting project managers, and then becoming one themselves without ever working on a project as a discipline engineer.

Now we have to deal with project managers who've never actually worked on a project and don't understand how projects really get done. They only know how to manipulate cost and schedule spreadsheets and set unrealistic milestones.

The best project managers I've worked with have had extensive experience working on projects in their discipline, then supplemented these skills with an MBA or similar such management training.
If you are interested in more of the background, Scott provied this link to his previous posts that touch on D-wave http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?cat=20

A commentor to the most recent post points to this rebuttal http://scienceblogs.com/pontiff/2009/12/in_defense_of_d-wave...

But it all boils down to this, as Scott replies in the comments "...the elephant that’s missing from the room, namely the evidence for coherence and multi-qubit entanglement. Without that, the car never leaves the garage. So, yes, write an unbiased review of the leather seats, but don’t pass over in silence the fact that nobody’s seen the engine."

It's possible to build in hardware an engine that will efficiently compute a particular class of problem. It may even be useful. That does not make it a quantum computer.
Hmmm... you might be right. Business people, representing capital owners in a world with increasing capital concentration, exert a lot of leverage. Leverage pays well.
I never did work in class. The environment was not conducive to being able to focus. It wasn't until I was away from school, at home, where I could actually think and work through problems.
Yes, the deals are sometimes crazy exploitative. But at the same time, they sometimes dish out lines of credit to people just because they like them.

The real problem with the show is the format. The amount of money they ask for, they need to get. So the equity amount always climbs to 51%.

I think that even the deals that are agreed upon mainly fall apart later on. Great show though.
fwiw, yahoo india maps have been having this for a long time. yahoo india maps is way better than yahoo US maps (ajax instead of flash)
A couple months ago I asked Michael Carter, one of the guys who works on Orbited and js.io, about django/comet integration. He mentioned a project he's working on called hookbox (http://github.com/mcarter/hookbox/). I haven't had time to look through the code and it doesn't look like it's been updated since it was uploaded in Oct '09, but maybe someone here has played around with it.

> Hookbox is a comet server and message queue that tightly integrates with web application frameworks. The goal of Hookbox is to allow your web application (php, django, rails, etc.) to handle all of the logic pertaining to authentication, authorization, logging, message transformation, etc, while still hiding the hard parts of Comet.
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> “Fusion Garage is now working with another top tier ODM [That's an original design manufacturer] to develop a completely new board and mechanical layout that is the basis for the joojoo. To state, as the lawsuit and accompanying blog post do, that Fusion Garage’s JooJoo is based on any Pegatron IP is false.

This is not parsable into logic. Either the device they say they are just about to ship exists, or they are working with a new ODM and haven't yet developed the new guts. They can't be doing both.

Since they have said they are working with a new manufacturer, it also implies that they couldn't work with the old one (likely due to IP violations).

This is starting to smell like the Chernobyl fish market a week after the town was evacuated.
Apa Sih Asyiknya Belajar SEO?,Seperti Apa Serunya Belajar SEO - Bismillah Slamet
The Hacker Fair: A job fair for hackers
VLC for Mac Death "Greatly Exaggerated"
frankly it's not business that's sexy, making tons of money is. i used to work on wallstreet, and i can assure you the people there are smart enough, well connected enough, and greedy enough to find new ways to make fortunes again, in fact they already are. the bonus' at goldman sachs and scores of hedge funds this year will seem quite sexy again for those undergrads and mba students.
Colts Vs Jaguars News Updates
I have heard that if you notify paypal you may see a big spike, then when it gets auto-flagged, it will quickly be un flagged when they see the note on your file.
Yes - it strikes me that this is not so much navigating like someone in India, but navigating more like many (most?) people do in practice. I tend to like knowing which way is north, and using that, but I've found explaining things using compass directions often confuses people. Especially in unfamiliar surroundings it's much easier to get your bearings from significant landmarks.
How did Russian girl (Olga Khroustaleva) end up working on Indian maps?
Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More
It's not so much writers block with me as that I don't necessarily have the best sense of what my writer's want to hear. I write about very technical content, and very between explanations of advanced topics, introductions, and opinion pieces. It's useful to know what my readers want to hear.
When I say not an alchemist, I mean to the degree of Nicholas Flamel who was the only known maker of the Sorcerer's Stone. Many people know math well, but don't call themselves mathematicians. I agree some of the wealth could have been inherited (on the Potter side), but being highly clever, Harry's parents certainly had earning potential as well.
37signals would be significantly raised in my estimation if you tempered your invectives with less emotional arguments.

Of course, tempered rational arguments rarely drive significant traffic, and lackluster traffic doesn't drive sales.
I suggest reading the classic "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren

http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Touchstone-book/dp/06712...
I would expect more rigorous reporting from ars. The reason that encryption techniques protecting DVDs and games fail is that the thing doing the decrypting is the thing that the enemy possesses: the game machine or dvd player. The machine has to have the decryption key in it somewhere, thus the whole stack of cards is a sham.

This is totally the opposite. The drones need only have the capacity to encrypt their video and decrypt command/control information from the host.

Both drone and host are unique devices that could (given their incredible pricetag) easily have unique public/private key pairs for each drone and each control station. Before takeoff each could be paired by an exchange of fresh keys. The only attack is brute-force with an as yet unavailable amount of computing power.

That they failed to do something like this for so long, well, words fail me.
I'd like to know what counts as bullshit. Six Sigma and other such fads certainly seem like they ought to be included. But, what's not bullshit? A good MBA program is an amalgam of fundamental concepts in economics, sociology, mathematics (at least stats), and such. Six Sigma might be analyzed, but it's not presented as a fundamental truth or even a profound idea.

Let's take a specific example: the concept of "agency costs". An economist defines these to be the inefficiencies resulting from one's agents (those doing work for him, and those doing work for those agents, etc.) having different incentives than himself. MBA program include agency costs as one of many economic concepts discussed.

A friend with a Harvard MBA was selling his house while living in another city. He noted that the traditional real estate agent's "6/4" commission structure (6% of the first 100K and 4% thereafter) causes a rational agent to sell as many homes as possible without regard to the actual selling prices. Why bother seeking out a buyer willing to pay $20K more when you only get $800 of that? It would be easier to seek out an additional seller instead. An agent incentivized with this structure likely would not act in his best interests.

So, my friend persuaded an agent to accept a very different plan: 2% up to the price he felt he could get by putting out a FSBO sign in the front yard and 10% thereafter. With this, the agent could earn significantly more by working to find a high-paying buyer. The house ended up selling for a little more than the "FSBO sign" price, so he at least saved on commission.

Those here without MBAs might also think in this way -- much as those without CS degrees might also understand algorithmic complexity. It's not that the content of a top MBA program can't be learned through self study in the same way that good developers are sometimes self taught. But, to suggest that the fundamental content of an MBA program is "bullshit" ignores what is valuable.

Perhaps we are most aware of frat-boy MBAs' self-important yapping, but the fundamental concepts of these programs are generally sound. I have an MBA from a less-than-Harvard program and have found what I learned there to be of benefit. And, I consider myself pretty much bullshit free.
Wow. So you don't think that the abilities and attitude of business people matter to the economy, even startups? I hope that the potential and actual startups/businesses on this site don't have this attitude. If this was the prevailing attitude then to say the economy would 'suffer' would be an understatement. Whether an MBA improves or signifies ability is another matter entirely.
well, they have almost 22B dollars sitting in cash. from an investor's point of view, that is wasteful. Easy way to turn that cash into growing revenue streams is to purchase profitable companies. Though 500 mil is a bit steep to pay for yelp IMHO.
I don't know how!
This is the comment in these stories that has irked me the most.
> requiring that moving into management always come with a pay cut to make people honest

What about people that can't afford a pay cut financially?
She was obviously qualified and did a great job. How would anyone else do it?
Of course, this article is worth it just for the author's solution to his common problem of "I can't remember when the hell I read this book or what was in it" with an ingenious technique -- he puts a Post-It on the book saying "2003/04."

But if you stopped reading in a rush to put Post-It notes on all of your books before you forget about them, click back quick -- the best is yet to come! Have you ever thought, "I want to put all my books in numerical order," but the books don't have readily accessible numbers on them? Just rank them all from 1-10 and mark it on the spine! Nothing could be easier!

I'll have to give these techniques a shot. They sure sound a lot easier than actually fucking thinking about the book as I read it, which I have been naïvely wasting a great deal of my time on.
Could very easily fake that. Sure, you and I would know it was a fake, but most people would not.

You are an idiot for using paypal in the first place, as many people have already said. There are so many horror stories out there, just do a search.
Here's her resume if you are that concerned:

http://www.bluebytes.com/resume.php

At google:

Responsible for user experience research and usability of Google Geo products within the USA and internationally
MARAZUL HOTEL website - Salvador
Doesn't Yelp offer astro-turfing for $$$? I hope that this practice doesn't fall under the umbrella of "don't be evil."
It's interesting (if not terribly surprising) how most of these Etsy businesses simply don't scale. The thought of making the same thing over and over again is really quite foreign. I sometimes forget how much leverage we have as coders.
Exactly. I believe that people in third-world countries can be a lot more motivated when it comes to learning and harnessing new technologies, simply because they might have a lot more at stake.

Unlike in the past, nowadays it is relatively easy to gain access to technical knowledge. If someone has access to the web and knows enough English they are basically at the same distance from information (=1) as someone in a developed world. All it takes is a lot of time and persistence.

So there might be third-world countries but there are no third world people.
Are you kidding? If I hire a contractor to do work, and that work is done (meaning I can look at and interact with the product) then I'm not going to waste valuable time "verifying" that product against every other product on the market. Especially against other "beta" products that only a niche few (relatively speaking) have heard about. That would be a dumb use of time. Why? Because even if the contractor did rip off the code, (which should be so unthinkable as to not even be an issue,) all I have to do is say "hey, the contractor did this, not me -- I've pulled the plug and fired the contractor." End of discussion. That's exactly what Microsoft did, and now Plurk is pushing the issue too far.

Plurk did get a ton of free PR from this. For thousands or tens of thousands of people, this will be the first time they've heard of Plurk. To claim that Plurk was somehow "damaged" amidst all of this is just stupid. Yeah, they were ripped off. But nobody got rich off of it. There is no money to chase down. Plurk could net themselves way more money (or rather, any money at all) by trying to generate new profits by taking advantage of all the free PR they got. But they're throwing a hissy fit after Microsoft has done their part in fixing the issue (pulling the plug on a product that wasn't even released yet anyway). As others here have said: what a waste.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/10/yelp_reviewers_paid/

This seems like they paid people to write reviews, but I see no suggestion that they instructed paid reviewers to be biased. More content is better for everyone, as far as I can tell.

Another Register article (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/19/yelp_pitch_revisited...) seems to be at most an accusation of unethical ad sales tactics, and it includes the CEO flat-out denying that they'd ever manipulated reviews for money.
I am going to print out this thread and send it to the publisher:

"Due to copyright restrictions, certain Kindle Titles are not available everywhere. If the country or region displayed is incorrect, you may change it by clicking "Change region"."

I could circumvent that via using my US proxy or wait until I go back for Christmas, but I really wanted a book to read on the plane ride tomorrow. And you know? Screw it. I'm going to buy from one of the numerous publishers who is willing to take the money I am attempting to throw at them.
Google's don't-be-evil policy bit the dust as soon as they bought DoubleClick, as far as I'm concerned. Their new policy can be accurately summed up as "be less evil than Microsoft", which has understandably given them a lot of headroom to expand.
On your first point, I was making a (bad) joke.

On your second point:

Did they ask permission or set their TOS appropriately in the second contest?

I don't think the problem is releasing the data, the problem is not asking for users' permission first.
Sorry -- agile was the wrong weird to use. I didn't mean agile as in loose engineering standards -- I meant agile as in "ability to react quickly and decisively to unexpected events". You can't possibly plan for every contingency, as the story proved, so it's crucial that your organization can quickly and easily fix problems as they come up. This has implications for both engineering and people systems. OODA loop is a better description of what I was thinking of (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop).

So having modular, cleanly separated subsystems would matter as much for hardware as for software.
The accusation much more frequently levelled is that they extort business to pay to have negative reviews hidden:

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/yelp-and-the-business-...

It's not lying -- the good reviews that remain come from real people -- but it's certainly misleading.
Don't tell T-mobile but I use this on my g1 constantly; at airports, hotels, moving cars, in the backard. I consider it the "killer app" of a rooted g1.
Medical specialists make more money.

That's a pretty shallow explanation though, because the question is why. Assuming some level of supply and demand still applies to the medical profession, people seem to go to specialists more often than GP's even for things a GP could probably handle. But why do they do that? One possible explanation is that people don't like doctors, so they only go when something is wrong with them, at which point they spend most of their time seeing a specialist for that particular ailment and then forgetting about it.

Oh, yeah, liability. A GP can reduce their liability by referring you to someone else pretty often.

It's also possible that being a specialist carries other benefits, like prestige and status and personal interest.
Ah, everyone's favorite book to be a smartass about.

Great suggestion antpicnic. I consider this book to be the foundation of my higher education. Seriously, by not using the methods of this book, you'll always be a tier lower than your potential.
Consider some sort of email or twitter list where you can notify us of new posts and politely ask us to upvote you.
This is not the 36signals blog nor TMZ.com; Jason can say what he wants.
you'll never, ever, ever hear me say this ever again: i thought scoble made some interesting points (when he talked about facebook acquiring yelp). http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/26/facebook-is-lucky-it-missed...

but what does google have to gain? extend google maps/local? aren't they already scraping reviews and ratings? screw the "don't be evil," what's in it for them...especially at $500M?

and as a random peanut gallery jab, it kills me how "past the term sheet stage" indicates an 80% probability. isn't anything past .01% "past the term sheet stage?"
I take it you don't go to Harvey Mudd then?

There's a fairly wide variation in grade inflation between schools, which is why a lot of the top grad schools will adjust GPAs for students from schools with grade inflation, or lack thereof, compared to the average.

Companies would do well to do the same, or to simply work on a case by case basis. Sadly, most companies recruit from a fairly small set of schools, and have little knowledge of the grade inflation differences.

If GPAs were the worst of it, then it wouldn't be so bad, but usually the ignorance runs much deeper. I once saw a recruiter for IBM Research's Extreme Blue internship program complain to the audience that he was wasting his time talking to a room full of students, because he could be spending it talking to MIT kids instead -- he was addressing a room with 100+ CS majors from, among others, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, USC, UCLA, UCSD, Cal Poly SLO, and Pomona College.
hmm, at the college I went to, there were almost no female students in the automotive repair courses... Obviously it was all the star trek posters.
Yelp is sitting on a massive store of local business data. That's useful for search quality. Yelp is in the first three results for the majority of businesses in their database. That's useful for search monetization. They also have a direct sales force calling on local SMEs. That's useful for Google Apps. I could go on.
Sports teams spend hours every day watching film for a reason. You have to study the problem you're facing in order to figure out the best way to handle it. Business is simply solving one problem after another until you've got a profitable company.

You learn a ton by starting and running a business, but a formal education can give you a more encompassing framework on how to think and approach specific situations.

I'm going to an undergraduate business school right now, and I'm also a web developer and entrepreneur. Sure, some stuff is common sense, but I've also learned a lot that was under the surface that I've already found to be invaluable in my endeavors.
No it hasn't. This is 2 events in an expected background of 0.8. According to reports it's a 1.5 sigma event. Noise.

This can be dismissed until they get to 3-5 sigma.
It's become very fashionable among the intelligentsia to make these sorts of claims.

I have never liked elitist thinking, which is why I vote the way I do.

With regard to elephants in particular, I give you buffalo, as an example of an endangered herd animal which is no longer endangered, and in fact, is available for your next BBQ at the local grocery store. That's not intelligentsia, elitist theory, that's history.

As for whales, or fish, things become more tricky, if you can't put a fence around them and say "these are mine".
>The only attack is brute-force with an as yet unavailable amount of computing power.

If they were doing it today all they would need is a $30 32 GB flash card full of random data to use as a one-time pad.
You could link to the post on xkcdexplained instead of blogspam: http://xkcdexplained.com/post/285788458/abstraction
To summarise most of the comments in this thread:

"My GPA was [low/medium/high], therefore I think that most smart, well-adjusted people get [low/medium/high] GPAs."

edit: However, in the interests of contributing more than snark, I shall say the following: I think the US GPA system is screwed up, due to insufficient resolution and grade inflation.

Where I went to uni, you got a mark for each course out of one hundred. Any mark above 85 was considered very good, and only the top few percent of students in each class would get above 90. (A 100 was unheard of, or more accurately, I only heard of one once).

Anyway, this meant that a lousy mark in one class could be cancelled out by a great effort in another class -- since even the top students only averaged in the very low 90s there was always room to recover. In the US, though, at most places an "A" is too damn easy to get, meaning most of the top students will be running 4.0s, and staying at the top simply requires you to not screw up and get (gasp) a B.
Twitter Testing New "Contributors" Features
There is also Anki (http://ichi2.net/anki/), which is also cross-platform and already has an entire library of contributed flashcards.