skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
his name "appears to be included in the government's records of terrorist suspects, according to a preliminary review."

Along with how many other people? Hundreds of thousands?
As noted here previously: http://www.tinaja.com/patnt01.asp

He says that $14 million or so is the break even point for patents.
Bugs Inside: What Happens When the Microbes That Keep Us Healthy Disappear?
It took me a bit to get "bit meme" instead of "bite me -dot- me"

In all brutal honestly, I won't use it (as HN already provides me the list of links I want to see), and I can't imagine that other people are really clamoring for yet another way to find cool links, what with digg, reddit, facebook, twitter, and all the others.

Still, as a fun project or a way to play with the bitly API, then I'd say it is a job well done :)
> $200 in NPV in five years (maybe $300 of nominal dollars),

I doubt that $300 in five years is worth $200 to a startup today - that's a very low interest rate.

> you still wouldn't be able to spin up fast enough and would take a massive infusion of capital to scale.

I was unclear about the reason for using NPV.

There are three numbers. One is the LTV of the customer. The second is the amount of money per customer that you need now. The third is the interest that someone will charge you in return for the LTV of that customer. The LTV and the interest rate tell you how much money that customer is actually worth now to you; it's the realizable NPV. If it's greater than the CAC, great. If it's less, you're hosed.

For most startups, the interest rate is pretty high, so a $200 LTV five years out isn't going to get you very much money. For example, I doubt that many start ups can get $200 today for $300 in five years.
More the point, economics is just short of comprehensible to the vast majority of non-economists. Which is why the ability to know that you DON'T know shit, is so important. But few people have that kind of self awareness.

A long time ago the HN audience consisted mostly of people who knew at least that much. That's no longer the case.

http://mattmaroon.com/2009/05/01/hacker-news-disease/
Understood -- I'm saying there are growing factions in both parties that will make these old allegiances obsolete.
> Does your history include the Clinton Administration, which ran a surplus?

Yes, it does.

Clinton benefitted from the end of the cold war and a repub congress. They couldn't figure out how to spend the "savings" fast enough. (A Repub president with a dem congress might have had the same problem.)

What "war" do you see ending that will produce comparable savings? (Obama is winding down Iraq on Bush's schedule.)
Prohibiting media players and computers turns selling on-board movies into a great way to make money.
Latest DVB-S/S2 transponders 12-26-2009
> That's some quality snark there, but as the Fed does in fact routinely increase interest rates, I think your comment is basically content-free.

The question is not whether the Fed increases interest rates, it's how close the budget is to balanced.
Underwear Bomb: The New, Stained, Patted Down Crotch of Terror
Media outlets would label that as "boring." It's a sad state of affairs, but sensationalism sells.
I was with you until you said: "the best way to fight the war on terror is to give people in Afghanistan, Saudui Arabia, etc. a decent life."

Take this very terrorist, for instance.

- engineering student

- son of a "prominent" banker (a retired board member of his bank)

- family "mansion" in Central London

source: http://allafrica.com/stories/200912260001.html

Osama Bin Laden grew up extremely wealthy, Al-Zawahiri was a surgeon, etc. You think these are outliers? I could make a suggestion myself as to how I'd like to see this fought but, this being Hacker News, I'd settle for an examination of the statistics to determine cause-and-effect.
I'm hoping it's real but we should keep in mind the source is physorg.com
That's a pretty good observation. Wouldn't have thought of that.
However, in my experience you would be better off designing for this issue from the outset and avoiding the use of these libraries if you care about your layouts looking good in IE6.

Strongly disagree. "Designing from the outset to avoid these libraries" means avoiding alpha-channel transparency altogether. That's a ridiculous design limitation just to satisfy IE6 users who also have JS turned off.

> "Fixed" <IMG/> elements must take on visibility:hidden;, and thus become unclickable. I see no workaround other than using clear pixel GIF replacements, and that is code that I am not going to write.

There go your buttons.

This is easily worked around by using <a>'s or <button>'s with background images.
He's in the fortunate position of being able to increase his job-market value, while actually working. If you really want to change your job, you might have to quit and start again from scratch - whether you are nervous or not.
Indeed, it's very practical to open the spigot slowly as a way around the two ways of thinking, penny-pinching vs labor/resource abstraction.

I would quibble about turning off the switch. It's fine to hand that function to someone else (CFO-type), but when I've had nice budgets (e.g. 5mil) it's been necessary and efficient to ignore the spending noise to some extent and focus on the big picture. But that might be a personal fault.
CUDA and OpenCL run time comparison using Vector Addition
7 pages of 30 items.
It also struck me as rather smug and arrogant: "You can't quit your job, but I have a PhD from MIT, so I can." Geez buddy.
This seems quite similar to the question "Is open source software viable?"
Totally agree...

Nervousness is not your fully-informed-and-purely-reason-based subconscious trying to convince your irrational conscious mind of the underlying facts. That's about the most backwards way I can imagine it.
Good point - I was actually thinking about deleting the second paragraph before hitting submit. Maybe I should have.

Poverty does seem to be a large part of the problem though. It appears that the reason Al Qaeda can gather a following is because they give people hope and a common enemy in a desolate and very poor world. If the US had sent televisions, jobs and a McDonalds on every corner to Afghanistan instead of bombs the result might have been different.
The problem is that if we tell ourselves to wait until timing is right, we will make sure timing is never right.

It all comes down to the fact we are just scared of giving up the illusion of security or what is "convenient" even if that convenience is what is keeping us from achieving our goals, from what is truly important to us.

We will make sure we do anything possible to postpone the moment when we can say are I'm "ready".

Even if being ready just comes down to having enough money saved so we don't have to eat spaghetti or tuna while we work on our dreams, the story always goes something like this:

You want to have enough $ saved so you don't have to worry for 6 months and be able to just focus on yourself, on whatever you really want to do.

Once you have that $ saved you might tell to yourself, well, but things never work out the way we plan them so I think it would be better if I have enough saved for a year. I just need to keep doing what I would love to quit for a couple more months, and that's it, I will be ready then. Since that reasoning actually makes sense to you you end up postponing it for a bit longer.

A few months later you find yourself either worried about things like the economy, or maybe you think you need more money, or anything else you can come up with to justify postponing your dream and you keep doing it over and over.

The time is never right. You just have figure out what the worse case scenario would be, what could happen if everything you though you knew was absolutely wrong and what options you have to go back where you started in the event you fail. The chances are once you are aware of it, it won't be that bad as you though and hopefully you won''t longer be scared and will quit what you need to quit to invest your time on yourself.
They also mentioned how corporations sold very few bonds in the first two quarters of 2009, so I am imagining that the US Gov is not the only player that needs to sell a lot of bonds next year.
Best advice I've heard is to make small changes that get you closer to your desired job, while utilizing your existing skillset, like asking for additional duties at your current employer. This way, you avoid the start-from-scratch phase you describe.
The only useful thing in the article is the message that "if you can get a job at an incubator before starting a company then do so". Ie, if you can simulate the experience of starting a company then do so.

Everything else is nonsense.

* Whenever your going to do something outside of your previous experience, your going to be nervous.

* Being nervous doesnt mean you give up. What if Laird had complained that he was too nervous to surf Teahupoo?

* Sometimes your not going to be able to simulate what you want to do. So make sure you have an safety net if things dont go according to plan.

IMHO In the end the regret of never having tried is far worse than any other consequence.
550,000 according to the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/us/27terror.html?hp
Full Disclojure - Tutorial on Clojure language [screencast]
Elected officials that were 'always on the record' would be constantly 'playing to the camera' to try and 'look good' or make the other guy 'look bad.'
"It sounds like a terrible business idea. By definition your target market is constantly turning over -- mothers these days have one or two kids, maybe three at the outside, and those kids don't stay young for long. You build a clientele, and then that clientele graduates and you need a whole new clientele."

I wonder if the outcome would be different if she targeted elderly.

It seems like a better market both thanks to demographics and IMHO also as value provided to the customers (and society in general) would be higher.
How to commit brand suicide
This strikes me as a ham-fisted effort to politicize this incident. In other words, a crock.
I bet you have an interesting number theoretic explanation for your userid :-)
My point is that if I wanted to start my own company (which I don’t), I wouldn’t feel nervous. The reason is clear: By earning a PhD in computer science at MIT I developed a skill that’s rare and valuable to this particular economic segment.

So this guy thinks that getting emails from recruiters means that he has what it takes to be an entrepreneur? He thinks that a degree you get from a University teaches you something about running a business. Oh, and by the way, he would be fabulously successful at it if he wanted to. Yeah, I could dunk over Shaq too, it's just that I don't have any interest in playing basketball.

Being an entrepreneur has so little to do with skills (you can always learn those). It's about decision-making, ability to learn and pivot, and guts. Frankly, I find this guys ivory-tower preaching to be grating. He doesn't know jack about entrepreneurship and yet he's willing to take a dump all over someone who happened to be starting their first business in a market segment that was hit terribly hard by the recession.
Clinton benefited from the end of the Cold War and having a Republican Congress, but he benefited a lot more from the surge in government tax receipts caused by the contemporaneous economic boom. In constant 2000 dollars, in 1992, the US took in 1.2 trillion. In 2000, we took in 2 trillion. You presumably didn't remember the 150 billion added in yearly expenditures over the same interval because it got swallowed by the boom-fueled taxes.

Then, the boom ended, as boons are wont to do...
When I got to college, they didn't teach programming in a sane way.

They still don't!

Most professors retreat into lecture mode due to large classes, inabilty to teach, and wide variance in student quality. When students are motivated it is mostly towards things outside CS (games, IT, etc.). Industry has a pernicious influence and when their initiatives fail they assume it's because the academics didn't follow the PHB's plans far enough.

Even if you're on top of all that, it's still incredibly difficult. I taught CS courses a few times, and the hardest part by far was pacing -- simultaneously pulling the lost students along and pushing the advanced students towards stuff they can sink their teeth into.
Amazon strategically places its warehouses just outside of the most populated states. Imposing sales tax would be mean they immediately lose a ~10% pricing margin on sales to states like California. That's quite a big impact.

If you look carefully at the way prices are set on some of Amazon's items, they actually set the price at just below the list price + sales tax for some populated state, such as California. So at first glance the price will seem to be higher than a competitor's, but it's actually cheaper since the competitor (i.e. a b&m retailer like Wal-Mart) has to charge sales tax.
I'm glad you had a good, reasonable experience. On Wednesday, I was told by a TSO that I couldn't bring my baby on board. She was making a joke, because she wanted to assert that the baby was cute, but telling someone they can't bring their baby on a plane at the security checkpoint is about as serious a joke to parents as joking about carrying a bomb is to TSOs.
So much mashable!
Note that if you correctly parse xenijardin's tweet (and her boingboing post here: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/26/yo-dawg-i-heard-you.htm...), then it becomes clear that you're not allowed to use electronics during the last hour of a flight, not the entire flight. Let's play telephone...
MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD, 6+ peer-reviewed papers, finishes by 5:30pm
Thanks for this... Interesting article but not the easiest read.
And this excerpt seems relevant:

"A senior Obama administration official said Mr. Abdulmutallab had come to the attention of American officials at least several weeks ago, but the initial information was not specific enough to raise alarms that he could potentially carry out a terrorist attack.

"The investigative file was opened after Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father warned officials at the United States Embassy in Nigeria of his son’s increasingly extremist religious views, the official said.

""The information was passed into the system, but the expression of radical extremist views were very nonspecific", said the senior administration official, who has been briefed on the inquiry but spoke on condition of anonymity because it is continuing. "We were evaluating him, but the information we had was not a lot to go on.""

Do we really want to prevent anyone who expresses extremist religious views from boarding an airplane?
Businesses that fly people internationally will freak out, as many have said - although I would think that it would be because of people having to check their laptops, as opposed to their inability to be productive while flying.

When I used to fly for business with a laptop, the company assumed I wouldn't get much work done on the flight - but one of the cardinal rules was that your laptop was never out of your physical sight when traveling. We encrypted everything, but you always had to bring it carry-on, stash it under your seat, and carry it with you when you went to the washroom.

I'd also be pretty cheesed off if I was an airline - making all these investments in on-board Internet, and now having it banned.

As for the others, I think I could get used to them - I rarely use my iPod when flying anyways (stick with sleeping or in-seat TV), could pack my bag slightly better if needed to eliminate the "personal article" we're now allowed to carry on, and time my bathroom breaks better (the no-standing rule was in force flying into Reagan for a while post-9/11).

More broadly, however, it pisses me off on the grounds that it assumes everyone is a criminal, and would do almost nothing in terms of actual airline security.
Indeed, but I took it to read that the market would be valuing bonds on the basis of permanent deficits. If they're expecting a combination of reasonable growth and a stabilizing of the debt load then rather than treating the recent increases as a trend, then I don't think we'll see bond spreads widen very dramatically. ZeroHedge seems to be assuming a kind of late bull market complacency that's blinding everyone everyone else to what the federal government is at, whereas in reality the Fed and the treasury are under close scrutiny worldwide.
Really? If I got an arbitrary call on my birthday from some business contact whom I hardly knew, I'd be wondering what was wrong with that person. Relationships aren't a bag of tricks.
There's a corollary in here: if you're early in your career, optimize for skill-building as much as possible. It doesn't matter whether you're building skills at someone else's company or at your own (though the former pays better), but it does matter that you're building them.

I quit my day job a couple years ago to found a startup with a friend. The startup flamed out miserably, and in hindsight I was woefully unprepared. But the skills I learned at my startup set me up for my next job, where there are many more opportunities to learn further skills. Hopefully by my next attempt, I'll have enough "rare and desirable" skills to make it succeed.

Come to think of it, this may make a good litmus test for when to leave your job. Quit when the opportunities available for skill building are less than what you'd learn from a failed startup.
Which is not a punishment for all of us out of the US.
New wheel for your bicycle: The Copenhagen wheel
Elegant design, controlled via phone, on which your performance data and environmental conditions (pollution) are stored, and more...
...namely terror carried out in the Western world.

You're making two mistakes: One is confusing goals with what is used to achieve goals. For Al Qaeda, terror is only a means to an end. The end is more along the lines of restoring a worldwide Islamic state under Sharia law and a particular brand of Islam. Latter bit, particular brand of Islam, is pretty important (it partially explains why bin Laden had his Saudi citizenship revoked, despite Saudi Arabia being under Sharia law already)

The other mistake is that you're assuming that all the organizations under Al Qaeda (think of them as an umbrella corporation, really) or people within Al Qaeda want to fight against western nations. Abdullah Azzam (one of the initial founders of Al Qaeda) wanted to move into Israel after Al Qaeda's small part in pushing the Soviets out of Afghanistan, not the West (like al-Zawahiri wanted) or Saudi Arabia (like bin Laden wanted). And bin Laden - and Al Qaeda - have some pretty strong ties in Africa as well (see Sudan, Somalia and Yemen, for example).
The key facts:

In the current study, only three vowel sounds were tested.
The test subject's average hit rate increased from 45% to 70% across sessions, reaching a high of 89% in the last session.
Hard to argue with the data. The norm is deficits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_annual_federal_deficits...
Unfortunately you already have.

At least two of my friends are barred from entering the United States for life simply because they were members of a Marxist organisation in their teens, and are now labelled as terrorists. I come from a fairly left-leaning country (Denmark) where Marxism isn't all that unusual. We call it free speech.
There is some work been done by Durham Uni to detect liquid explosives:

http://www.governmentbusiness.co.uk/content/view/2072/1/

http://www.kromek.com/products_liquiddetectionscanner.asp?Id...
The Miele vacuum cleaner I got a couple of years ago has a spring-loaded retract.
Remember that European cords only need to carry half the current due to the higher voltage.
ThinkBoxWorld searches for next star technology
ThinkBoxWorld - a global network searching for the next business star in social media, web 2.0, internet, communication, clean tech, innovative technology and design. Turning innovations into business worldwide.
Propagating runtime configuration values through the Haskell type system
That's probably not legal in the US. Fixed installations must not use flexing wires.

Flexing wires must be detachable from the fixed installation.
I'm actually a skeptic on the generic x10 programmer-productive claim

Why? There have been many studies of this and their findings are consistent. IIRC the numbers range from 5-to-1 to 100-to-1 with the median in the order-of-magnitude range.

Pages 14-15 of Robert Glass' Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering cover this topic.

http://books.google.com/books?id=3Ntz-UJzZN0C&printsec=f...
I see it as nothing more than an expression of the transitory and meaningless nature of most online relationships. Facebook is simply afraid of losing user base because the automated tools make it so easy to leave.

In Facebook's defense I must say that any web service or startup would probably complain if another service made it easy for users to destroy their account, especially if the content associated with the account was an indexable source of traffic, and destroying the account (unfriending) would possibly hurt other users.
Netflix is public, so its not necessarily their choice. Resisting a buyout (even a hostile takeover) rarely goes well (e.g., Yahoo).
Petition to Valve: Release Counter-Strike 2
Your first point - I agree of course, sorry if it wasn't implied.

Your second point - That's exactly the point I'm making. Al Qaeda isn't led by one person who dictates what to do and what not to do. It's more of an ideology, and not all it's members choose to fight the same enemy in the same way. That's exactly why it's so hard to fight - you're trying to kill people's ideas which is not something you can do with bombs.
Hello idealmonk, I think there is a new version of the Python bindings with a lot of bugs fixed. Not 100% sure your issue is fixed as I mostly use the Ruby bindings at work, but here is the link: http://github.com/andymccurdy/redis-py/
Lets see if we can get enough members in this Facebook group so that Valve Corporation can be shown that there is demand for a new and updated version of Counter-Strike: Source in the year 2010.
Absolutely. The part where he says he doesn't feel nervous about doing a startup because he has a PhD from MIT. I almost threw up.

I don't know any start-up founder that cites his degree as a key motivation for doing a start-up.

All this is really sad because I think someone can write a solid post about the possible downsides of quitting your boring job and what precautions to take. This guy is trying to do that - but in all the wrong ways.
I agree with the other commenters: the author rather trivially assumes his conclusion by taking for granted that the market is rational. It isn't. One can argue about why. I tend to believe it's because we're still early in the history of the software: the closest analogy we have is the Industrial Revolution, and Ford and Taylor don't appear until well over a century into that.

The other side of the coin, of course, is that an irrational market represents major opportunity for anyone who figures out how to exploit it. So we all should stop complaining and start exploiting. Hopefully the hacker renaissance and startup wave of the last few years are the start of such a process, but it's too early to know for sure.
In the past, Netflix had a poison pill policy to prevent a hostile takeover:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5057/is_200403/ai_n1...
They Killed My Lawyer
Since a lot of people think PCL is a good choice, what do you think the new book Lisp Outside the Box form Nick Levine, It's a practical introduction too.
Seeing Customers as Partners in Innovation
Yeah, this article is probably much more accurate than what you see on the corporate news media. Fortunately for our 'masters', there are always news stories about terrorism, etc. that they can use to keep public consciousness off of higher importance things like the economy. I got out of the stock market 2 years ago, started easing back in about 9 months ago, and now I want to get back out.