skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's entirely correct.

It's impossible for any complex system to produce the results you want every time. Any system that made it impossible for a terrorist to fly would be intolerable for the ordinary traveller.
Heads you win, tails... you win. You can beat the toss of a coin & here's how
Brooks uses a sensational title and focuses in on a narrow enough slice of this issue to hit his mark. However, the man who insults "little Johnny" American uses the same dumbed down tactics in his own article.

I hope that there is room between a complete lack of faith in government and an adolecent expectation that government solve all our problems. If the media situation were healthy, I'd expect to see articles charting the recent political movements and citizen trends in America.

* Which movements are gaining mainstream traction quickly and are they shedding their more radical fringes to do it?

* Are politics or economics driving these trends? To what extent?

* When "Change We Can Believe In", TARP and Tea Parties collide, what happens?

* Are trends like increased deposits in local banks, increased handgun ownership, strong rural land prices and upticks in silver/gold signs of individuals taking responsibility, hedging until the government gets it together or a vote of no confidence in the government and by extension, all of us?

Articles like this are written because they are effective within our system. So long as the incentive exists, so will the articles.

You've all heard that "we get the government and media that we deserve". Corny, but I don't deserve DropBox or etherpad or any of the other wonderful tools coming off YC. The structure of this place allows me to use tools above my computer literacy pay grade. I wonder if that could ever apply to government or media and the systems behind them? Unlike app development, government iteration is slow, painful and messy. This makes us stick to what works well enough and that's the fundamental issue.
Yes, I've done this in the past (~10 years ago, but not much has changed).

I imported from China, Brazil, the UK and NZ. Exported/sold to almost every country.

For basic consumer goods, the majority of the time you just have to declare the export/customs paperwork properly, and make it clear that any VAT, import duties, taxes, etc. are the responsibility of the buyer. Just be sure to fill out the paperwork accurately (people will often ask you to under-value items, declare them as a samples, warranty replacements, and so on).

You'll likely want to incorporate an official business entity in your state. Specifics about taxes and regulations vary by state, but generally speaking you can run something like this out of your garage/basement until it gets large enough to warrant consideration of a more formal location.

My best advice is probably to find a decent local attorney and have him/her help you with all the initial incorporation paperwork. This shouldn't cost more than a couple of hundred dollars. You will also likely have other legal questions from time to time with this kind of operation, and it's helpful to have a relationship with someone who can give you good legal guidance and help you deal with any regulatory issues and so on.

For shipping, get a UPS account. They have a nice API and you can get real-time shipping quotes easily. Tack on $5-$10 for each order to cover packaging costs.

Stocking inventory depends on anticipated volumes. I started by placing small orders for items, and when adding new products would do some hyping and offer "pre-ordering" to get a feel for demand before stocking up. You will learn to get the feel of it, and because there are 1,000,000 different niches, I can't suggest anything more detailed. Also, if you can get products locally, even at much higher prices, it can be helpful to first source locally, even if you don't make much profit, to get a feel for demand, and then order direct.
thanks for that, will move up the revisions! You are right on that, I just started writing and I've never been a good one so this is one good way to start off. I thank you for the honest opinion
Where's JooJoo?
I'm actually storing out the data as text files containing json in the file system, one per fan page. I normally use Mongo, Redis, Tokyo or MySQL for this sort of thing, but since I'd already done all of the processing that they normally help me with as operations on disk files, I thought I'd try sticking with the low-tech theme.
LinkedIn Wants Users to Connect More
Cheers! That's exactly the sort of reference I was hoping for.
C++ compiles much slower than many other popular compiled languages, and the more of its "fancy" features you use the slower it compiles.

C & Java for example both compile much faster than c++.
Thomas Paine made a great observation during the American Revolution. When the time came to form a government, some folks wanted a complicated system like the Europeans had. Paine violently disagreed.

When you have a complex system, he said, there's nobody to blame any more. If a King masses troops, invades your houses, or taxes you onerously you know whom to blame. If a deomcratic legislature votes to fund a war, conscript your children, or change how people vote, you know whom to blame.

But if, as in this incident, an elected legislature sets up a complex, mostly autonomous mangle of agencies managing an also complex underlying system and something goes wrong? Nobody to blame any more. And that's not because of some political "trick" -- that's just the way complex political systems work.

As we create more and more complex political Big Design Up Front, Architecture Astronaut solutions to already complicated underlying systems, we tend more this condition more and more. That's what's different about now and 50 years ago, although David refused to connect the dots. People are no more or less "mature" now than they were in 1950, 1900, or 1850. This "blame the user" mentality of governance or company creation is only going to take you so far.

David is telling me nothing that I haven't known for 20 years, and nothing that western civilization hasn't known for 300. Welcome to 1750, Brooks.
Quote from the bottom of PDXCell.com:

You can also hire me to teach you how to build your self-confidence as a standup guy or give a talk to your organization on the subject. The image comparison below indicates that I have something to offer in this area
Pothead Level 80 Shaman's everywhere should be quaking in fear.
I keep coming across quotes like "The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians". That's complete BS! The perpetrator had his chemicals mixed and ignited by the time any of the people around him got wind of what he was doing. His "bomb" had already gone off and set his balls on fire. The civilian reaction consisted in nothing more than subduing a failed would-be terrorist who was flailing around in pain from his burning leg.

What stopped this terrorist was his own incompetence, combined with that of the people who set up his equipment. Without these two factors, the "spirited civilians" sitting around him would be hurtling, screaming, through a hole in the plane's broken fuselage.

Well-meaning but uninformed people are calling out for more inter-passenger watchfulness. There are a number of remedies that can be expected to help significantly, but recruiting passengers and cabin crew as intelligence personnel is IMHO way down on the list.
Check out nailgun if you're interested in using the JVM as a command-line tool without a cold-start.

http://martiansoftware.com/nailgun/index.html
The fruit of Darwinism: 100M deaths in the 20th Century
Ask HN: Hacker CEOs, what do you use for number crunching?
I figured there are a lot of hackers-turned-ceos here on HN.

My question is: How do you go about number crunching? Like all SAAS companies we look especially at cost per acquisition, churn, lifetime customer value, committed reoccurring revenue and so forth.

Our full dataset is still only about 100GB so it's easily manageable in a SQL db. However, the times where I can get the information I need with single SQL queries are long gone. My instinct is to write a little rails app that aggregates all the key data together and present it nicely with some AmCharts. However, the scope of this project is giving me pause. This can easily become a project that I'd sink a lot of time into and instead I should spend time working on my business.

Are there any good off the shelf tools for such tasks? Frameworks that help? What do you do for reporting?
Check the actual link: that's exactly what the email linked to says. (And the title here is simply the title of the email.)

I'm assuming that (1) the poster is warning others about this or (2) he finds it amusing that the response to "The year is wrong" is (roughly) "No, that's how the standard defines year. The output is right relative to that standard. Dates and times suck." (the last sentence is implied) or (3) both.
Can Microfinance Make It in America?
I don't use it to exclusively mean CLR-hosted, and to be frank, I think the meaning is pretty clear outside of MS contexts. I believe "GCed" focuses too much on the memory allocation strategy; which while important for many of the practical advantages of managed languages, I think it ends up lopsided.

Finally, more people using a word in an alternative way is the path to controlling its meaning, rather than avoiding the word altogether, cf "queer" and the like.
I have to second The Road. Any book that I finish in a single sitting has a special quality. I would say it is my favorite book of the past 5 years and in my top 10 of all time.
Is it just me or is Performance Tuning distinctly missing from this list?
Do not do this if you are epileptic.
This is excellent. The best predictions you will read.

And it is a HN-influenced commentary on the habit of predictions themselves. Would that they all be consciously humorous rather than inadvertently humorous.
From http://pdxcell.com/

"The image comparison below indicates that I have something to offer in this area." What???

I think this guy needs some serious therapy. It's not healthy to be that deluded and angry about things.

You can either spend all your time and energy moaning and whining like this about how you had some idea once and someone stole it and executed it, which is obviously trivial if you're well connected (BS). OR you can spend your energy executing, and making things work.
A social site bending over backwards to be perfectly devoid of fun. Is it any wonder the users don't interact more?
Kingfisher Calendar 2010: Sexy Kingfisher Models Photos
It's wrong in the sense that not the obvious result users expect. But it's 100% technically right.

It's always tough to deal with this kind of situation. Do you document it all over the place and hope users read it? Do you parse the command when it's first created and warn the user that %g is different than %Y? Do you just ignore the issue and deal with the small number of emails at the beginning of every year?

I think a combination of docs + automated checks is best depending on the circumstances.
Stay Productive - A guide to indirect productivity
So what happens when I go out and buy a sports car, but don't tell anybody about it and generally try to draw as little attention to it as possible? Or put another way, what would the explanation be if I buy some high status item, but then actively work to downplay it?
500 Most Famous Logo Design Tutorials And Inspirations
If LinkedIn want greater engagement, they need to start offering professional functionality that is useful on a day to day basis. LinkedIn Answers is okay, but they would do very well to partner with StackOverflow (or do their own take on the StackExchange platform) for example.

Offering tools like TripIt is a good start. They should try and expand their applications to things like expense tracking, etc, while also doing a better job of making the applications visible and useful.
It's an exaggeration to call China Daily a propaganda vessel. Yes, I'm serious. Also, the present leadership of China has no real desire to denounce capitalism.

Other than that, your criticisms are valid.
Make no mistake - this is indeed quite deep. To be able to assimilate it well you will need at least knowledge of Analysis, Measure Theory, and good mathematical maturity.

I was able to read only part 1: Foundations, and these are my impressions. Definitely goes into my Bookmarks, so that I can read the rest...

Edit: The title was changed from "Probability Theory 101 (by Fields medallist Terry Tao)".
Posterous API: A wishlist
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin

Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt.

The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson.
Fred Wilson's Investment Themes for 2010
The Intoxication of "Greatness"
I've used them to try to pick locks. They don't work too well, as they're made of cheap metal instead of the spring steel used to make real lock picks. They could probably work on a filing cabinet or a kwikset door knob, but they're mostly just for looks.
CODEPINK : Women Say No To War
OnLive 48 Mins Video Demonstration
It seems that you want to force others to not have the option of entering into certain contracts, because you find them distasteful.

[citation needed]

Really, have I ever asked for legislation? I don't think I did. Please point this out in the thread. My actual position is that DRM and SaaS are two different things, because the former restricts what you can do on machines that you possess. You reply by pointing out that you can simply choose not to participate. However, my fear is that DRM on home computers and laptops will become as widespread as DRM in DVD players. And yes, this battle should be fought in the marketplace. This seems to be working so far, somewhat. Or is it?

That's an interesting point. If I wanted to buy a new laptop or desktop completely free of DRM, how easy or hard is it for me to do so? Well, leave out any machines that come with Windows or OS X installed. Those contain DRM. Leave out machines with HDMI -- this also contains DRM. I think I'd have to build my own machine or custom order one.

I think we're in danger of becoming a world where non-DRM hardware is hard to attain. There is far less danger of restrictive SaaS. If we don't like one provider, we simply move to a different one. The market for SaaS is still a bit more "free."
Oh, guess I just wasn't paying attention then... got a nasty cold.
Can someone please explain what ISO years are and when the correct time to use them is?
He's making a fundamental flaw, he's investing on the basis that Google and Apple make good products and that information isn't already reflected in the current price of AAPL or GOOG. Which obviously isn't true, everyone knows Apple and Google make good products.

Furthermore you can't assume that a good product means that a company will do well. Plenty of companies launch "better" products that fail, and the technology sector has no lack of examples Betamax, Amiga, BeOS, etc.
Yeah. It's too bad this article is 3 years old, and while the tech has gotten better since then, we're still not just printing livers instead of looking for organ donors.
This is horribly bad. He bought some apple stock, it happened to go up, and he beat the market. I once bought myself black at a roulette table, it happened to be the next color, and I beat the house. Should I write a page about the fundamentals of gambling that I read about and ultimately ignored for the fact that people like black better than red.
No. I prefer to keep things simple, always make sure the source builds, and just develop linearly where possible. I think it makes for cleaner workflow.
Does the brain like ebooks?
Bir Tawil would be a nice place for a data haven, were it not landlocked.
This reminds me of:

Does the set that contain all sets contain itself?
Nobody's insulted anyone here.
Is anybody aware of some effective examples of applying game mechanics to apps? (besides those mentioned in the video)

The best example I know is stackoverflow.com, which uses votes, badges, reputation etc.
That is what the study said. It holds constant across languages and tools.

Now, if I could find a link for you, that'd be awesome. My google-fu is weak today.
NaturaPause -- The Natural Hormone Solution For Men And Women
Moon Hole Might be Suitable for Colony
The prices of GOOG and AAPL already reflect their brilliance in whatever they are doing, true, but best thing about them is they will innovate more. Apple is not just iPod, it's everything they have done since the 80s and will probably do in the near future. And that in a way explains why sometimes seemingly "good" products like those you mentioned fail: because a given company can't keep up and innovate constantly.

Of course there are companies that fall under "constantly innovating" category and yet some of the things they come up with fail. It's hard to tell, or if it was easy, there wouldn't be good or bad investors, but only good ones. That's the whole point of investment: you place your bets using your knowledge and intuition. It's a game in the end.
Yes. I think this exceeds the capacity of the blog medium.
This is the first sentence I read in the page and thought the all site was a joke.

The funny thing about all that is that the guy put a lot of efforts into that and had the time to think, at least, twice.
Best free Alternative to Norton Ghost for imaging your machines
Most sane projects I've experienced do "builds" even with scripting languages. It's every bit as much of an annoyance to have a bunch of needlessly slow tests as it is to deal with slow compile times.
Agreed. The movement of stock prices is often not directly or at all related to the quality and demand for a companies products.

Often I think we individual investors are getting talked into stocks by analysts for big investment firms, to their benefit, not ours. They sell us the stock itself as a product, independent of the company that the stock represents.
They're chemical etched thin sheet steel, probably already as heavy and expensive as you want to hand out as biz cards. The originals were tested at least once. I like their design a bit better:

http://www.jenimattson.com/index.php?id=melvin#identity
If people go into nursing because the perception is that it pays so well, these viewpoints are not contradictory.
How Little Exercise Can You Get Away With?
when would you actually want to use an ISO year though? just to claim ISO compliance?
> but best thing about them is they will innovate more.

The price of the stock already reflects this as well (at least to the extent people in the market guess that it is true). When you buy the stock on the basis that the company will innovate more, what you're really betting is that it will innovate not just more, but more than other people thing it will.
The Existential Crisis of Magazines Online
This looks promising. I myself am still trying to transition to writing an app using Python / Django / MongoDB but haven't got to it yet. Very promising database though, and to see the community come up with tools so quickly is a good sign.

On another note, I love Sinatra for it's minimalism. Barrier to entry was really low with that.
I was countering the headline, which wasn't correct. Java isn't slower than C in general. It may be in specific cases, for specific programmers, etc but that's not what the headline stated.

The title takes one specific application in a particular niche, used in a certain way which a particular programmer can't get to run fast enough, and concludes that Java isn't fast enough. Faulty logic.

The argument about JGit vs C-git for me isn't something I feel you can learn anything from.
I wonder if the ever increasing average age of marriage (at least in the US) leads to more consumption. Imagine that most people get married right after high school graduation. Men certainly would have consumed within their means to attract women, but they would have been limited to what their parents gave them and what they could earn in after-school jobs. Would they still consume so much? Perhaps the "promiscuous" men would continue spending so they could attract additional mates?
Reminds me of a point made in a similar article: why are people so surprised high profile figures like Bill Clinton risk so much to have affairs, when from an evolutionary standpoint they got there in order to have affairs.

As for downplaying a sports car, it's not very likely you'll do that. Possible, of course, but just not very likely.
The advantage of having lots of small branches is that you isolate work. You never have the problem of wanting to fix a bug or add some small feature, but having the code all in a mess halfway through a major reorganization.

Also it's a lot easier to try something experimental on a branch. If it works, merge it in. If it fails, abandon the branch.

Git makes branching and merging fast enough that using them as the default workflow makes sense.
As far as I understand though, France would consider us to be absolutely piss-poor at cheese.
>The truely big estates aren't subject to estate tax and never will be.

Huh? Do you mean that very wealthy people are able to pay for tax shelter strategies but those with, say, only a few million will end up getting taxed?
I could not find a place where I could provide feedback with respect to your rss feedback. It returns text/html rather than text/xml which results in chrome misbehaving (adding all elements to <head> tag)

Govind
Doesn't "Hacker News" imply links that are only new? How about an "old" flag that buries the submission and bans the user from adding new submissions for a few days?
s/cheese/food/
Perfect principles are for bargaining
I actually believe they're accessible in Java as well through JNI and JNA. But I'm hardly a Java expert.
I have no idea which "point" you are referring to, please write more clearly.
I view LinkedIn solely as an online resume site. I believe a better route for LinkedIn would be to compete with Monster.com or CareerBuilder and build a social networking job site. With all the "resumes" currently stored on LinkedIn it is probably one of, if not the largest, holders of personal job/work experience in the world.

A business idea would be to create a mashup of sorts pulling information from users profiles and matching them with potential career opportunities on a job board site. LinkedIn could then charge a premium for providing the user and/or the company with a list of potential job opportunities and/or potential candidates. Taking it one step further would be to incorporate some form of background check/education verification into the platform for the companies. A user could select whether they are open to receive job postings or be included in job searches by companies. They could also select which types of companies they want to be included in. I am sure that LinkedIn could develop some sort of algorithm to provide benefit to the job seeking users while at the same time reducing potential spam in the users inbox.

Taking the idea one step further would be to charge a fee for resume assistance in helping users build their profiles to highlight current and past experiences. Many times I know (myself included) that users just list the company name/job title and do not include what they did at the company.
>> That's the whole point of investment: you place your bets using your knowledge and intuition. It's a game in the end.

That sounds like a better definition of gambling than investing.

To me, the whole point of investing is so that money I don't need at the moment will be worth more when I do need it. That's why I buy low-cost passive index funds and don't try to out analyze the analysts. By buying an index fund, I get the advantages of all of the best analysts out there - I'm effectively crowd-sourcing my investment strategy.