skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"[...] the Three Strikes ballot initiative ... obliges [the Governor] to incarcerate large numbers of nonviolent offenders indefinitely."

This is a statement of fact, with no assertion made as to 'goodness' or 'badness' of that fact. Indeed I would argue that there is no uncontestable 'objective' basis on which to base such a appraisal. Given the facts present in the article.

What I have been saying is that there is an uncontestable 'objective' basis for judging the fiscal consequences of these policies. Further, that I am unsure as to whether or not precluding your leaders from considering those fiscal consequences is bad policy. I am thinking that it is bad policy. Please note that this is not about Three Strikes, it is about the wisdom of not letting your leaders judge the merits of Three Strikes before it is implemented. And, more generally, not letting your leaders judge the merits of ballot initiatives before they are implemented.
Next time you watch a DVD you bought, not rented, pay attention to the intro screen text. You will usually see a clear statement that the movie is licensed for home/personal use only. Some claim such a license statement cannot be enforced by U.S. copyright law, but there it is. Without regard to whether it is or is not a legitimate position for the copyright holder to take, you can be certain that Warner and others would not sell large amounts of DVDs to Netflix without Netflix agreeing to these conditions.
I love Wikipedia, but surely you've noticed the [citation needed] tag on this assertion. I strongly dispute the assertions of the Wikipedia editor about what this case meant.

Here are before-and-after articles about the lawsuit from Video Business, the trade publication for the video rental industry:

http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6398859.html

http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6461951.html?q=nebg

NEBG, a retailers' association, sought to prevent Genius group, a distributor, from including an 800 pritned on the front of discs along with the message 'for sale only, call if you suspect piracy', arguaing that including this on DVDs would damage their members' businesses by implying criminal activity on their part. The case was dismissed since the labeling never took place, and so no harm had actually occurred. they were particularly annoyed because an exclusive rental distribution agreement existed between the distributor and Blockbuster, such that NEBG members had no way to obtain rental copies to offer to their customers.

They assert it is legal for them to do so under the first sale doctrine, but this has never actually been tested in court, so it would be more accurate to say it has not so far been forbidden. It is not established case law, and in this sense the Wikipedia article is incorrect.

If the studeios and distributors establish a 28 day sale window with Netflix's agreement, and if they make rental copies freely available to wholesale buyers, then there may well be a test case brought against anyone who sell consumer copies for rental, brought by both the distributors and very possibly Netflix themselves.

IANAL, but I am an industry professional, so that's my humble opinion.
I don't think his first example is good because it isn't just about a "loss" it's about feeling wronged. By the reasoning he gives we should just let criminals and murderers free because it costs more to jail them and give them a fair trial than it does to just let them be free and commit the occasional crime.

The argument would be more persuasive if the example used had to do with something where it was a pure gain / loss as opposed to having a right / wrong component to it. I think the dating example was better, though that wasn't used as his central argument.
Yes, it is even possible to add your own data sets, Codility will tell you what you code returns for them. I guess we should make it more apparent in the interface.
Let me save you the trouble. This guy is a crackpot who doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Though if you've ever been persuaded by an article extolling the virtues of homeopathy, you might be of the right mindset to enjoy this article.
Interesting to compare this with what is currently happening with the Gulf Stream (and atmospheric circulation) and the weather in Greenland, northern Europe, and North America.

See:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/1/6/822520/-Freak-Current...

and

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/01/englands-green-and-ple...
What the hell does this crap have to do with anything?
Hm, would something more smooth (analog?) be better?
Not exactly, although that's what they['d like to be doing - only the distributors are currently refusing to sell to them if they do that, unless they agree to raise the price of new releases.

http://www.videobusiness.com/article/CA6676220.html
In fact, LiveJournal got so popular in Russia that a Russian company bought it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUP_Fabrik
Please see my reply to your similar post below, where I explain in detail why I dispute the accuracy of this particular wiki article.
I still really like the "cards" metaphor that Palm WebOS uses (well, I like the idea of it -- I've only played with it in a shop, not lived with it full time, but I do live with android and I still want to be able to do it)
This reminds me that it would be nice if someone wrote a module that produced type constraints like:

File[Exists]
File[Readable, Executable]
Dir[Empty]

as an extension to MooseX::Types::Path::Class.
Ironically, that would work quite well. So would $10,000 scholarships funded with a $10,000 lump sum tax on UC and UC State students
Yep, we've seen it... :-) Thanks for pointing this out!
Or you might be offered a raise.
I think this idea is premised on the notion that there may be an inverse relationship between education and crime.

http://www.jstor.org/pss/27529879
Will Moody's add a "patriotism test" for rating government bonds?
True, it was a terrible example. The guy in the story obviously didn't care about the $11 and change, as much as he cared about seeing justice done. His impulse has value to society that far exceeds $11.

Edit, re: By the reasoning he gives we should just let criminals and murderers free because it costs more to jail them and give them a fair trial than it does to just let them be free and commit the occasional crime.

In some cases that does in fact make sense... 9/11 comes to mind. The price of living in a free society isn't $2 trillion plus incalculable collateral harm, it's losing a building and a couple of planes every once in awhile.
B-Schools Confront the High Cost of Change
The 15 Most Hated Companies In America
M&A Bankers Are Worth the Money
Wow, I must have been completely asleep when that happened.

Interesting how the rest of the world can be 'done' with something and yet it has strong appeal to a single regional demographic.
The actual studies by Kahneman and Tversky mentioned at the start are more interesting and solid than this handful of anecdotes. If you're not familiar with them, they might well be one of the most important things you've ever Googled for.

The results: people weigh losses and gains with "1) a value function that is concave for gains, convex for losses, and steeper for losses than for gains, and 2) a nonlinear transformation of the probability scale, which overweights small probabilities and underweights moderate and high probabilities." This does little to convey the soul-crushing horror you will feel when you see these preferences demonstrated experimentally.
This is more of a insult to the top chef guy than any valuable lesson for aspiring entrepreneurs.
Engine 371 (Model Trains as a metaphor for development)
Hah, I've clearly asked the wrong Android user if it had text-to-speech. Thanks for clarifying.
This vaguely reminds me of that (was it Internet Explorer?) plugin/extension that tried to detect phishing sites by prefetching all the links on a page. There was a big uproar with admins and there was an apache rewrite rule floating around to detect the user-agent and block these requests.

I can't remember the name of this, though, so I'm having trouble searching for it. Maybe 2006 or 2007 was the time?
I work for netflix.

I also know that redbox is buying retail dvds (http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-redbox4-2009dec04,0...)

netflix used retail dvds for years. AFAIK netflix stil does for certain low volume titles.
This is pretty awesome.

In this screenshot he instantiates a WebKit instance in his Android/JRuby app:

http://img.skitch.com/20100108-1nr5rj4y7dpw4spfr9sf5w3ui3.jp...

Does anyone know if this would make it possible for a JRuby program to launch a javascript program (running in the WebKit instance of course)?
One of my favourite theories on prison reform: a huge problem with prisons is the formation of gangs and other social structures within the prison walls; not only do these promote the emergence of a criminal culture within the prison, they also make the prisoners harder to guard.

This could be solved by keeping everybody in solitary confinement, but that's overly cruel. Instead, I'd propose splitting the prison into a whole bunch of separate units, each consisting of maybe a dozen prisoners, who would share facilities and never interact with prisoners outside their own unit. Every month, the units would be broken down and prisoners reassigned to different units, preferably arranged so that no prisoner would encounter the same fellow prisoner twice in one sentence. This way we could give prisoners enough social interaction to stop 'em going crazy while preventing them from ever constructing any more than the most rudimentary social structures.

Any downsides I'm not considering? I'm assuming that the whole thing could be accomplished without occupying any more space than the existing prison system, and hopefully with fewer guards.
I think this is an awesome idea. It's like a bigger favicon that's actually useful.
public screening rights are not covered in first sale doctrine.
It would be great to have a history export feature. By the way, I must admit I sometimes upvote only to save the thread and read it later. A distinct Save feature could result in more strict upvoting...
More importantly, Google might consider this cloaking, and come round your house in the middle of the night with a baseball bat.

No, they won't. Google's definition of cloaking is serving different results to Googlebot versus end-users.

For one thing, neither nor GoogleBot nor the remote quality raters will be sending Safari-specific headers for discovery/evaluation tasks, so they won't see the preview at all. For another, this falls into the (sort of) nebulous category of "cloaking designed to enhance the user experience", which is almost always kosher.

Similar examples: you can auto-detect someone's region/language/browser/etc and customize the page to fit their needs, and Google is pretty much OK with that as long as you treat Googlebot the same way.
You might be right. Loss aversion is closely related to the sunk cost fallacy. That's why I wrote this last week:

http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/sunk-cost-fallacy/

And I have a post coming up that ties it together. Look for that next week sometime.
In gaming, lock-in is an inherent problem. You always need to optimize for specific platforms and hardware to stay competitive, so you might as well optimize for specific APIs as well. Most "ports" of games also include significant renderer rewrites. And with every non-desktop platform, you are really targeting OpenGL ES, not full OpenGL. ES is more of an API starter-kit, so it varies significantly between platforms.
I'm not religiously in favor of "tests first, always" (who actually is?), but I find that when you emphasize testing, you spend less time debugging, more time coding, and the end result is generally better engineered.

After over a decade of writing software, I'm willing to accept this up-front cost in favor of long-term (and often short-term) gain. Sure, I can quickly hack out code when I'm not writing tests, but long term experience with both methodologies has demonstrated to me that it's not worth it.
Your Attraction Marketing Blueprint Revealed
The constant name is perfect and intuitive

I might have gone with DELAY_BETWEEN_DETECTION_AND_PICTURE, because it describes what the constant is used for and does not describe it as a "rate", which suggests some sort of x / t measurement where t is a unit of time.
The tyranny of software updates
That's actually really useful info. If someone visits your site enough to be in their top sites, it's probably a sign that they like it a lot.
Disclosure: I'm an M.D. (Which may impact my objectivity about why skipping out on seeing a doctor is a bad idea.)

Without an exhaustive review of the implications of Bayes' Theorem, suffice it to say that this isn't necessarily a good idea. The short version is: if you are unlikely to have a medical condition, a positive result may well be a false positive.

Much like a full-body MRI with no medical indication, there is a risk of a false positive leading to more expensive, unnecessary, and possibly dangerous procedures to chase down a condition that doesn't exist.

Going "directly to the lab" is, for many people, predicated on an overly simplistic and idealistic understanding of how lab tests work. The context of the result (health history, family history, physical exam, etc.) is important for accurate interpretation.

Finally, some tests border on the fraudulent. I'm a psychiatrist, and increasingly tests to make a psychiatric diagnosis based on a genetic screening are being marketed directly to patients. These tests are not generally accepted in the medical community as being accurate. In fact, some them are very likely to be totally misleading.

Caveat emptor.
anigbrowl - you seem to be suggesting that the entire _foundation_ of Redbox is fraught with legal risk. Universal's response to Redbox was to pressure their wholesalers to stop selling to Redbox. If your central thesis is correct, why didn't Universal just go after RedBox?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/18774817/Red-Box-Ruling-081709
Just applied. At the least it was a good exercise in getting all of the business plan ideas into a very concentrated form.
Something From Nothing - Automating Shopify and Income
Someone should commit an equivalent patch to Subversion and have it auto-email their developer mailing list.
* Subversion's developer mailing list, that is:)
Yes, but it wouldn't have made me laugh...
This clustering is not really news--it's been noticed for years. One possible explanation is "assortative mating".

The theory is that geeks marrying other geeks raises the likelihood of having hyper-geeks as offspring, and today it's much easier/more likely for geeks to meet and breed with one another than it was in the past.
Are the folks in prison really the same folks who would otherwise be attending the University of California? I think they're generally pretty different demographics.

Better K-6 education could probably decrease crime, if we can turn the illiterate, shiftless dullards who make up the lower rungs of society into literate and hardworking (if still dull) citizens. But this requires more a new educational strategy rather than just more money, and I don't know if anyone has thought of a good one yet.
Do you have a particular link? Googling returns a lot of different things.
I'm going with clock thrown overboard on a vacation cruise or one of many complex geared machines used aboard ships throughout time for navigation. In any case, just happened to fall off a ship and land on the one below, about 50 to 100 years prior to excavation.
I find things like this extremely interesting. Oh the hope for a lost civilization and or technology that stumps modern society...
Additionally - I am not certain about the mentioned scientists' exact definition of loss - you might argue that since the damage was already done (Joe had already been charged), the 11 dollars was a gain rather than an adverted loss.
While I have tried it, my experience with TDD is quite limited.

With that said, you seem to be missing an option:

4. I have evaluated TDD, and I see its value in many cases. But I also see cases where it is not appropriate or at least suboptimal. I therefore consider on a project by project basis whether I should use it.

My experience in TDD is nowhere near enough to be comfortable making statement 4 myself, but I have heard it made and I think even most people that disagree with it would see it as a reasonable position to hold.
The eficiency of hash tables (insertions, in particular), is actually slightly worse than he indicates. They are not amortized O(1) for all data, but only for typical data (or on average over all possible data sets). To see this, suppose that every item inserted happens to go into the same bucket. The amortized time complexity is linear.

On the other hand, insertion is not O(1) even for average data; there is always the periodic table resizing. So: amortized O(1) for average data, not O(1) for average data.

The upshot of all this is that hash tables are still pretty good, but insertion is only constant time in a "double average" sense: on average over a large number of consecutive operations (amortization) and over all possible data sets.

A note to those who say, "Why not just use a different hash function?": This can greatly decrease the probability of poor hash-table performance. But it does not change the worst case, unless we allow for an arbitrarily large number of hash functions, and one of them is guaranteed to be a good one. I've never seen this done (actually, I'm not sure anyone knows how to do it within reasonable efficiency constraints).

And a note to those who say, "But in the real world it doesn't matter": No, sometimes it matters, and sometimes it doesn't. (Don't use Python to program a pacemaker ....)
World Wide Mush: How the Internet has gone off course
Try the paper(s) named (Cumulative) Prospect Theory.
Why?..

..please don't.
Yes. This is an important part of the project that we hope everyone will benefit from.
This "sixth sense" exists to some extent, but it's a little dangerous to believe in it because a lot people will pretend to have it, meaning that you'll need a sixth sense about sixth senses in order to actually rely on it without getting duped.

If a function is critical to your company, then you or a cofounder need to understand it a lot better than the guy who asked about "lines of code".
You're sure you're not thinking of Google's Web Accelerator? It wasn't made to prevent phishing, but to speed up browsing, but it caused the problems you describe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator
Please don't miss the excellent two videos at Scientific American:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/video.cfm?lineup=140616529...
I find amazing some of the technical details shown there.
Sure, but for something simple like an STD screen or cholesterol surely these results are unambiguous?

The article says these tests can be "at a cost that is as much as 80 percent less than going through a doctor", what can explain that kind of discrepancy besides rampant corruption in the "official" medical lab work market?
Just that many prisoners already know each other from their own neighborhoods. The groundwork of the social structure is already in place.
The problem is not guarding prisoners, the problem with prison reform is that it doesn't reform anything. The question is what do we want prisoners to do once they're out? There is always a political push for longer sentences but it's economically infeasible. So if we're then asking what we can do to make these people productive members of society again, then that takes money.
I think this may be it: http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~camerer/Ec101/ProspectTheory.pdf
To provide a counterpoint, I've seen a number of situations where doctors simply refused to investigate properly, instead assuming that symptoms were the result of the most common disorder capable of causing them.

I'm firmly on the side of patients having access to whatever sort of tests they want without the aid of a doctor. Should they draw the wrong conclusions from those tests, well, you already said it: caveat emptor. I am not, however opposed to some restrictions on what labs can claim about their tests.
I found the article mostly related to the sunk cost fallacy.

Two of the the examples ($11 and the work overtime) are sunk cost fallacy since people don't know beforehand how long it's going to take and what the total gain/loss is going to be (how does one know beforehand that all the overtime will become a 10% wage increase?)

I would discuss some more but it makes no sense to dissect so little material that seemed to be more confusing than enlightening to me.

Of course, all this comment could be replaced by a downvote which doesn't exist here.
What programming languages do mathematicians use?
Cholesterol: Probably.
STD: Depends on which one.

Cost: I don't know why the difference is so large; that seems like a serious problem. For what it's worth, I don't make a single extra penny on lab tests. As far as I know, most doctors don't (except maybe the pathologist who runs the lab). We just order what's indicated.
This is a brilliant point!

I added your idea to an edit I made on the Monolith wikipedia page, which now describes three variations of the Monolith protocol: Pseudorandom Basis Files, Lawsuit Denial of Service, and Plausible Deniability.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_(computer_program)

Thanks!
Published paper in Nature is at: http://www.antikythera-mechanism.gr/system/files/Antikythera...
Our ancestors were certainly not stupid ;-)

Gears were already used in India as early as 2600 BC, Aristotle described gears in his lifetime - about 400 BC, and Archimedes' worm wheel dates from about 200 BC. In 40 BC Vitruvius described a grain mill powered by a water wheel and gear transmission, and in 28 BC someone equipped a carriage with an odometer.

Brian Dunning devoted an episode of Skeptoid to the Antikythera Mechanism: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4184
Thanks for the link!

I wrote a new section called "Possible Extensions" under that article, including a subsection for the "Plausible Deniability" angle that cookingrobot came up with!
The cost of two office visits (an initial consultation in which the test is ordered and a second to receive the results) might be enough to account for the difference. The company mentioned in the article appears to charge $49 for a variety of tests.
Eschew government customers

The long drawn out purchasing cycles and arcane requirements will suck time and attention that most startups can't spare.
Oh, I remember reading about his find in an old (1970s or 1960s) issue of Russian pop sci journal Наука и Жизнь (Science and Life; apologies if the unicode did not work).

I think one lesson here is that when the society does not value technology, technology suffers. It does not evolve on its own but needs encouragement and support. Just having smart people is not enough.

I sometimes wonder what our life would have been had our ancestors started focusing on science and technology earlier, like if the scientific revolution had occurred several centuries before it did. We could have been much, much farther advanced -- or we could be living in a new stone age, I do not know.
Awesome information. I really appreciate it. That actually helps a lot. I'll get working on the karma leader boards. The plumbing is all done, I just need to wire it up to the front page. I don't know why I haven't done it before.

And, good call on the marketplace of ideas angle. That's brilliant. I was looking at some of Reddit's early tag lines, and I think I'm going to borrow/steal that idea. :)

re: the PG connection. That article is how I found you guys, and I've been reading reddit ever since. I had a hunch that PG's readership was huge in getting Reddit off the ground. And, You're absolutely right in emailing media people in the economics world and asking them their opinions on the site. I need to get cracking on that.

Thanks again.