skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think my point was irrelevant. I think the author was arguing one can be as good as a specialist in many areas.

If the author was merely arguing that one can be good at many things, then he/she was burning down a strawman, because no one who says "Jack of all trades, Master of none" is saying that a Jack is no good.

Anyway I deleted my post because I felt it was detracting from the discussion above.
Agreed. I've never made so much while still feeling so poor as when I lived in the Bay Area.

And honestly I can't think of a city I've lived in that you could comfortably live with 3 kids for $2000/mo on rent/mortgage alone. You wouldn't be living in CA, NY or DC thats for sure.
Ask HN: Clojure in Erlang
Would it be possible to simulate STM in erlang using a message passing system? If yes, how do you feel about Clojure in Erlang? (i.e. transparent, distributed computing)
Well we have wikipedia now. I think that's a huge leap forward.
Any increases in privacy, civil rights, human rights, intolerance?

These are ancient problems... don't expect a quick fix, especially via technology.

http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_an...
Betting that it will go up because I firmly believe that China is doing what it can to move forward and become a real world power. If the last two decades are any indication they seem to be doing so quite well. They are trying to implement as many lessons they learned from picking Hong Kong apart as they can without losing control, I'm not sure that they will manage in that goal, and it frightens me to think of what it would be like if China ever fell apart.

So, will you bet that it will go down? Name your price.

I've never formally analyzed my investment performance, but to date I've made roughly 20% of my total income over the past 15 years on investments, both in stocks and in start-ups. I've lost about half of that due to failed investments.

If I would be more risk averse and less inclined to give people chances then I probably would have done a lot better than that but that's my nature.

edit: re: > are there invest-able vehicles that we have access to that are going to do well if China does well AND if it does badly?

That depends mostly on what effect Chinas doing will or badly will have on the world currency market. There is a lot of money to be made in a falling market but the timing is very difficult, much more so than in a rising market.

In a rising market you may limit your profit if you mistime, in a falling market you can easily lose your shirt.
I can imagine a fairly clean mapping between languages. If the result of compilation was JavaScript code, to be passed on to the browser using eval(), the code would perform quite well.

So, assuming that I'm correct, what you would be left with is the one-time cost of parsing. And how costly is parsing generally? (I am keeping in mind that Ruby may not be general)
On a related note, I was without internet for a bit and decided to write a Processing-esque library for .NET (specifically, it's Boo). I haven't touched it in a while, but someone may be interested in doing something with it: http://trac2.assembla.com/livingcanvas/browser/trunk
Just for fun, I clicked on the link and looked for SICP. Amazon gave me a price of $115.44. If you look at the bottom, you'll see a link for the same book, only Amazon is selling it for $69.34!

What is the difference between the two? The links are:

$115.44 : http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Prog...

$69.34 : http://www.amazon.com/Structure-Interpretation-Computer-Prog...

Aside from price, the only difference that I can make out is that the cover for the more expensive version is a lighter shade of blue. What it looks like is that Amazon is charging a lot more if you buy SICP as a textbook rather than as a regular book.
Its COLD in July.
http://scie.nti.st/2007/11/14/hosting-git-repositories-the-e... is what you're going to want to do... but I'd just use Github.

EDIT: Though, to be fair, we don't use Bitbucket (we're a Mercurial shop) for our private repos. Part of that though is the need for sexy commit emails.
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool
for love,
for your dream,
for the adventure of being alive...

-Oriah Mountain Dreamer, "The Invitation"
Slightly Skeptical View on Extreme Programming
Should our cognitive biases have moral weight? (
That's a fair point. I did not mean to imply that Drucker's work has no relevance for startups. For one, I've been profoundly influenced by his writing.

Rather, I'm trying to work towards a new theory of entrepreneurship that can help us figure out _which_ practices from general management are transferable and which fail. Most MBA's and general managers that I've seen enter startups seem to assume either "all of them" or "none of them." Both answers are incorrect.
How to insert text into PDF?
Here is the tip that tells you how to insert text into PDF file. Of course, if you read carefully, you can also learn how to change the text, images and graphics, etc. in PDF files.
Irving Fisher's unfortunate prediction from 1929 is a bit overquoted these days, but there you go:

"Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."

My point is, economies have cycles and China won't be able to avoid its fate either. I don't know if it's going to happen tomorrow or in 20 years but I'm sure as hell that it is going to happen. The important question is not whether it
is going to happen but if they're going to be able to recover from it eventually and honestly, I'm not sure if their opaque economic/political/social system will help them. In my view one of the reasons behind the West's wealth is that it always managed to recover eventually after economic / social meltdowns, one way or other.

I'm no economist though, these are only my deductions based on my understanding of human history.
Exponential doesn't mean "growing really fast".

Exponential means "growth by a fixed percentage per year".

The economy grows exponentially at around 2-3% per year.

What evidence do you have that things are improving linearly rather than exponentially?
Getting 60 thousand pageviews with 2 carefully constructed posts
Ford cars to read your Twitter feed
As a rule, if you're going to make someone feel ignorant, do so in a way that's relevant to the job.

Agreed, but...

That rule would imply cutting the link to Chesterton (if they get the reference, they'll appreciate it) and possibly the Hofstader's Law reference, too.

I wonder why do you assume people who know Chesterton would appreciate the reference. Just saying that you like Chesterton might suggest religious and philosophical beliefs that aren't necessarily appreciated by your average young liberal geek. I'm not saying people will dismiss OP right away just because of this, but unconscious discrimination does happen.

On the other hand, Hofstadter is both well known and generally liked among geeks.
That's a solid link. Thanks! I will probably go down this path as I am not too keen on giving my code to an outside party without guarantees of privacy. That and I have a server that I can use for no additional cost.
That's really not the point.

If you create a system that can execute those who (arguably) deserve to die, you've also created a system that can, and will be used to execute innocent people.

So, how many innocent people is it alright to execute for the (presumed) satisfaction of executing a few monsters?
Entrepreneurship is not a synonym for management science. Asking if it is equivalent or a member of the set of "management sciences" does not "beg the question."

If by "the validity of category Y is not established" you mean that the validity of management science is not established I think you are ignoring a body of work dating to the 1940's in applying mathematics to decision making.

Disciplines like industrial engineering or operations research are normally considered members of the set of management science. They substitute decision making based on models and simulation for naive methods based on intuition and rules of thumb. Examples would include inventory control theory, queueing theory, game theory, decision analysis,...

See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_science and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research
Different editions and publishers, McGraw-Hill vs The MIT Press.
Prohibition: A Cautionary Tale
Webkit + V8 = Chrome.
I was recently hired for an IT position that required a Secret clearance. I had read a great deal about obtaining the clearance and had help from my prospective employer that made the process much easier. The best advice (as an earlier poster noted) is to tell the complete truth. Leave nothing out, no matter how embarrassing, because the people doing the background checks and interviews will check out everything. Also, make sure that you check your credit report and be aware of any criminal records that may be hanging around from your past. Secret level checks go back seven to ten years, and top secret will be at least ten. The security officer at your firm should be able to answer any and all questions you have. I was told that interim approval would take 2 to 14 days and full approval could take up to 6 months. With no criminal record or associations with foreign nationals, and a fair credit score my full approval happened within a month. It can seem daunting, but the end result is worth the effort. I hope this helps.
I'm confused. What does this let you do? Is the idea to find other text/passwords that MD5-hash to the same hash as something else?

And how long should that take at 200M/sec?
Still, betting against China will not be easy. Because foreigners are restricted from investing in stocks listed inside China, Mr. Chanos has said he is searching for other ways to make his bets, including focusing on construction- and infrastructure-related companies that sell cement, coal, steel and iron ore.

This seems completely wrong. Here's a large-volume and presumably shortable ETF with Chinese holdings:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=FXI

If I remember, I'll try to put a short order on it in the morning to see if I'm right. Not sure how the Times and Chanos could say something so incorrect tho'.
I gather it's more a domain question, e.g. the NSA does this ... in part because compromises there can be very deadly very quickly. That's the only organization for which I've heard they're common, but by the very nature of all this I wouldn't know of others that my friends weren't in.
they are by two different publishers (one is mcgraw-hill, the other by mit press).

IIRC, there were shortened versions of the books published as well---as some schools didn't cover all the material (cal didn't cover chapter 5), but both of these match the pagecount of my full 5 chapter copy. I think that it's just a difference of publisher.
This is silly.

Suppose you were wrongly imprisoned for 20 years, but later freed. You could reasonably argue that you would rather have been killed (but would you?). You cannot reasonably argue that I, or your friend, or your mother would prefer to be executed rather than to live in prison for 20 years.

Second, what does the extra scrutiny matter if we still execute innocent people? If there were no capital punishment, we by definition would not execute any innocent people.

Your no-right-to-life argument is predicated on your own stated, but not proven, value judgement, but it's murderous to force this on others.
The last days of the polymath [someone who knows a lot about a lot]
They often go together, as you illustrate well with your comment, I agree that rote memorisation can be a bedrock foundation for any specialty, however it is not necessarily the only foundation. And the thread of my argument here is that it is not as good a foundation as a complete understanding of many topics in an interwoven fashion.

An attempt at an analogy; I assume you're familiar with jQuery as that's your nickname so I'll use that. One could memorise every single API method and syntactical quirk of the framework and be rightfully considered a specialist, but this does not innately suggest that they understand the absolute multitude of concepts that are likely to be bought together in a project making use of this specialty, or how the fabric of a jQuery object might be incorporated into a larger project using a full polyglot of development languages and spanning JRuby, Java, Groovy, Scheme, Scala etc. Knowing the underlying concepts that unite them gives a person the ability to solve problems in any one specific area potentially better than someone who had simply memorised all the API documentation for the jQuery framework.

Going through the rote memorisation of all these disparate things you're likely to eventually notice the patterns and ideas that they share, but in my opinion this is a backward way of doing things. Starting with patterns and ideas and fleshing out the specifics with reference documentation on a case by case basis has always been my preferred approach, it's much easier to find a base pattern and go through it's iterations than it is to simply memorise all the potential iterations of a given pattern. How easy is it to memorise a table of results on several thousand experiments demonstrating F=ma compared to simply applying F=ma several thousand times?

Even more so with something that moves as fast as development; when the framework changes and your memorised documentation needs to be updated, it is much easier to understand the change from the perspective of cause and effect rather than just "here's how it was including all edge cases and implications, and here's how it is now, including all edge cases and implications."
Appeared before at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=844229, but apropos to the generalist-vs-specialist discussion.
They are in trouble because they are in so many things that doing something good in one niche will cannibalize sales in another niche.

Make a killer web office suite? Kills off sales of Office and Windows. Make a great webmail site? Kills off Exchange and Windows Server sales.
I agree with you completely. Unfortunately we are in a country where getting such kind of people is next to impossible. Engineers here are bred to work for services companies.
This is pretty wishy-washy. I think there's a convincing case to be made that all else being equal society would be better off without certain people.

The problem is that the human system that can rid us of those people will necessarily be flawed, and as other have pointed out, you can't un-kill innocents.
Villa Mariposa website - Boracay
I expected to see onion.com on the byline, not nytimes.com
Predicting the long term future of the markets is like being a dowser, there is always water, you just have to dig a little deeper.

If you are wrong, wait a little longer and voila, now you are right.

Anybody can predict the long term fall of any economic system, but the only interesting question when it comes to stuff like this is what it is going to do on the next trading day and there are companies that have spent small fortunes and that are not much closer to answering that than they were when they started out.

'The Oracle' or 'The Golden Hand' is the goal of every investor, and if anybody ever would figure out how to do that and play the market long enough they would find that market changing to the point that it no longer worked.

China does not have much experience in this field so far, the people in power are scared to death (sometimes literally) of what would happen if the general population managed to get enough power to rise up against them.

How China will respond to their (inevitable, in the longer term) economic crashes remains to be seen.

So far the accent seems to be (even in relatively good times) on the control of the flow of information, which according to a German theorist in world war II was the means to controlling the people. It proved to be mostly right.

But in this day and age it is not so simple to control the flow of information. If China would be covered by a mesh wireless network then no single firewall is going to stop people from communicating.

In the former eastblock this was done slowly by Samizdat press, today that would probably be encrypted communications on wifi.

What will happen once those final barriers dissolve is anybodies guess, but that could be quite a while off.

Technically speaking the means have been in place since '95 or so, from what we can see that has not caused major upheavals. (the same goes for Iran, last year, in spite of a strong effort at it)

So I'm thinking that the same rules that apply to our society apply to the Chinese one, as long as the economy isn't doing too bad the people in power will be given more time, if there ever would be a major famine due to crop failure or some other 'act of God' then you can expect all kinds of trouble.
did you use russell and norvig? 2e is $10, but the new 3e is worth $47.15.
Not quite related, but I highly recommend reading http://courses.csail.mit.edu/iap/interview/materials.php
It's very important to look at these kinds of issues from a systems perspective. Complex systems have unintended effects. You're not allowed to say "the code will just work after I hit compile". :)

For instance, how sure are you that the government is spending your tax money wisely? How sure are you that a company you invest in isn't engaging in some form of corruption.

When you raise the stakes to killing another human, and in peace-time, at that, you'd better be sure that mistakes are not just unlikely, but impossible. Of course, that's ... impossible.
I really like 'behind the scenes' stories like this from big sites like Reddit, Facebook, Heroku etc. I work on a smaller scale of a few EC2 at a time, but I really enjoy the scaling info.
The origination of revenue concept, residency, etc. in tax law is continuously being tested, both by governments and by companies, in a tug of war.

Consider this case of affiliate advertising (which, although different in specifics from the French case, has the same tone and a similar legal path):

http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/24/california’s-proposed-“ama...

In particular, this bit:
"Here’s how it would work: If you have a web-based business in California and collect revenue by showing out-of-state companies’ ads on your site, Bill AB178 will claim that both you and the businesses you advertise on your site have residence in California, and are therefore required to pay California sales tax. For example, say your Santa Monica-based web site shows banner ads for Amazon.com. With Bill AB178 in place, Amazon.com would be classified as a California-based business based on the fact that your business draws affiliate advertising sales revenue. Amazon would then be required to collect sales tax on all sales into California. The idea behind the bill is that California could force out-of-state retailers to collect and pay California sales taxes."

You can also read more about it here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=4...
I think the use of "management science" in the title is problematic as management science is normally defined operations research or industrial engineering. Many of the techniques that you espouse, such as A/B testing, are examples of "management science."

I think what you are taking aim at that's "non-transferrable general management" is the bureaucracy of large organizations. Part of it goes back to the "startup dollhouse fantasy" which is a term you coined that I really like. But I think what you are ridiculing with it is the imposition of formal control structures on teams that are small enough that social process and peer pressure is an adequate substitute.

In "Corporation Man" Anthony Jay talks about 'hunting groups' or 'ten groups' having different rules from 'the camp' or the full tribe. Startups are like hunting groups, but every corporation has many "hunting groups." If you take a manager of a hunting group and put them in charge of a startup they will be right at home. General managers run the camp or the tribe and are less suitable for the special needs of the hunt.
Well, exponential could mean "growing really fast" since that's a vague concept that doesn't really mean anything.

I will concede though that I'm referring to growth at a fast pace, since that is the topic of the OP. No doubt some of the items I listed could be improving at a very low magnitude exponential rate and it is a more complicated task to provide evidence that this isn't the case.
Comparing Github and Bitbucket
Why I need a break
Social Media Outsourcing | Social Media Research Services | Infinit-O
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Are wireheads happy?
Depends on where the sale is made (and in this case it would be hard to argue the sale is being made in Ireland, no?), and how residency is determined.

The origination of revenue concept, residency, etc. in tax law is continuously being tested, both by governments and by companies, in a tug of war.

Consider this case of affiliate advertising (which, although different in specifics from the French case, has the same tone and a similar legal path):

http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/24/california’s-proposed-“ama...

In particular, this bit:
"Here’s how it would work: If you have a web-based business in California and collect revenue by showing out-of-state companies’ ads on your site, Bill AB178 will claim that both you and the businesses you advertise on your site have residence in California, and are therefore required to pay California sales tax. For example, say your Santa Monica-based web site shows banner ads for Amazon.com. With Bill AB178 in place, Amazon.com would be classified as a California-based business based on the fact that your business draws affiliate advertising sales revenue. Amazon would then be required to collect sales tax on all sales into California. The idea behind the bill is that California could force out-of-state retailers to collect and pay California sales taxes."

You can also read more about it here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=4...
It would take me a long time to dig up the number of language and dialects I have used, and yet I don't really know half of them. I have several times helped someone solve a problem in a language I did not know by looking at the code and saying ok it's X. And this is not just decedents of C. I have solved a problem someone with 30 years of embedded coding solve a problem he was having in an assembly language I can't even remember the name of.

I might not be a true Master, but I can tell learning the inner workings of an API that's only lasts for 10 years is not the way to get there. ASM, C, LISP, and SQL are far more important than Rails.

PS: I am all for Memorizing constants but API's are a dime a dozen. One of the few masters I have seen rewrote a system ~90% from scratch in 3 weeks in a language he had never seen that a well respected team was unable to finish in a year.

Edit: Focus on the things that let you do a month long task in a a few days not a hour long task in minutes because the little short cuts are easily found when you need them but the big stuff is far harder to stumble upon when you need it.
It seems obvious in hindsight, but ACK stands for "acknowledged."