skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't have any solid numbers on Apple's margins, but I'm not sure I agree with your break-even assessment.

taptaptap recently announced that they clear $1M/month via AppStore sales (and they don't currently have any apps on the 100 Top Grossing list). From a per-customer perspective, I don't think Apple spends their $450,000 take supporting taptaptap. This will pan out differently with less profitable customers, but I imagine that the lower-end customers are effectively subsidized by the giants like EA (13/TG100), Gameloft (5/TG100), et al.

I'd absolutely love to see Apple's fixed and variable costs for developers at different sales levels, but I'm not holding my breath.
I have found that uber-productivity is domain specific. I might be uber-productive in a particular domain (Java programming), however put me in an environment that does Groovy programming and I will stink as much as the next newbie. However good programmers develop techniques for meta-uber-productivity. They know what it takes to get uber-productive in another domain in a short time and what works for them.
My way to try and me more productive in any environment is to get my hands dirty, start soon and make changes often. Practice makes perfect.
As an individual you can be uber productive, just practice more of what you want to be productive at. Want to be productive at running a business, start your own and practice it. Want to be uber productive at programming, write code lots of it, and so on and so forth.
Track Santa and his sleigh with NORAD
CCZE: the robust, modular log colorizer
Google doesn't, so I'm not sure that they can hold it against others.
I don't think we should be agreeing to these as "special cases" at all. Things are already too convenient for the state.

The government is arguably propagating these special cases at an alarming rate. At least one version of the "health reform bill" is reputed to make not having private health insurance a crime, as Massachusetts does at present. Sure, those who can document their poverty are supposed given help in these matters but this leaves a disturbingly large area where criminal codes are going enforce private debts.
What are people out there using Ioke for? I respect Ola a great deal; just wondered if anyone found an interesting use for this interesting language.
If the worst they've got to worry about is another Android phone, I'd say they're doing pretty well.
Wow, huge congratulations guys! Can't wait to hear about your traffic numbers from this.
Interesting. Sounds like a solution looking for a problem to solve. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
Thanks for the suggestion. I was actually thinking about something that could make use of concurrent programming, so maybe some kind of game that utilizes this isn't a bad idea.
If this sort of thing is fascinating to you, and you consume caffeine, you absolutely must spend the short time to learn about antagonistic and reinforcing caffeine usage. I've read a few papers on it, but I'm not finding any of the best ones by googling. This link has a short overview though:

http://arvindn.livejournal.com/57651.html

> What is common to these tasks is that progress happens in spurts, due to the fact that they involve frequent cognitive bottlenecks. A cognitive bottleneck can only be overcome when attention level exceeds a task dependent, typically very high threshold. Clearly, then, antagonistic caffeine consumption results in worse-than-normal productivity, because it flattens the attention level curve and decreases the fraction of time spent at peak attention level. Instead, reinforcing consumption helps maximize productivity (the red line). According to this strategy, the best time to drink coffee is when you are already very alert.

Basically, caffeine gives you a boost, then withdrawal. If you're doing creative work, time your caffeine consumption to your high energy periods, then rest during the withdrawal. If you're doing rote, repetitious work, take caffeine during your low periods to smooth your energy out.

This is incredible for your productivity, especially if you're doing creative work that you can't brute force yourself to finish. Highly recommended, almost should be mandatory for any anyone who consumes caffeine and does creative work.
Exactly. And that's often how fraud gets found. You are trying to build on someones research and some of the assumptions aren't working or you can't baseline the work. That usually leads to trying to reproduce the original work and voila ... fraud at the worst (I'd say most of the time it's just sloppy work)
Note that WakeMate (YC 09) is making use of this.... sorta. :D
Anniversary of the Rails/Merb Merger: So How'd It Go?
Except that those trillion pages have little incoming links ~ so they have no "juice" or "pageRank" to pass. Target has 267k incoming links then redistributes that via internal links / a while ago people started "link sculpting" using 'no-follow' in the link <ahref> to take all the homepage link juice and pass it to what they perceived as their better converting pages.. but google has since come out and said that wasn't a good thing to do...
It's going good so far! Can't wait to see what the next year holds.
My understanding is you can hire botnets. It would be far cheaper than Mechanical Turk for something like a DDOS.
An additional two clicks would have led you to the last post he made 124 days ago.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=777870

>My email is mhuebert (at) gmail (dot) ca
>(I also have an informal bio up here: http://www.huebert.ca/bio.html)
It is not just a matter of trusting the source, such as pg. A full URL also helps me decide whether to spend the time to visit and load the new page. User experience.

I'd vote to ban shortened URLs from HN posts and comments (edit: when full URLs are available).
Are there any interesting companies out there pushing Augmented Reality?
Are there any interesting companies out there doing new work with Augmented Reality? I have a personal interest (as I work on an open source library to support it) but I'm also looking to relocate to the Manhattan area and would like to make a career move in this direction. Apologies, as this is more of a personal appeal, but it would be interesting to see what's going on out there in this new field...
While you have an interesting point, it is an invalid analogy:

After the fall of the Roman Empire that part of the world involuntarily fell into a dark age, that is very different from intentionally eschewing technology. And those societies did rediscover most of the lost knowledge and began progressing again.

Presumably a society with advanced technology that did something as drastic as getting rid of all of it would have left behind reasons so that their ancestors would also avoid it, or at least be able to make an informed choice. It would not be hard to ensure that endured (barring a major catastrophe) for many generations.

It could have taken the form of oral histories which can be preserved (at least in general intent, even if details change) for very long stretches, or maintaining writing even if it was restricted to their spiritual leader caste, or even one remaining piece of technology in the form of an extremely durable recording that speaks to them on set anniversaries.

Giving up technology is very different to losing it as a society collapses into a dark age from a combination of corruption, war, and other factors.

Also, the Roman Empire did not have anything to function as an ancestral memory. While it has been mentioned several times before that the limits of the Soul Trees function as an ancestral memory were left vague, it seems likely that something as fundamental as deliberately eschewing technology would show up at least as echoes of an aversion to technology.
This looks like an opportunity for WakeMate (YC S09) guys.

Wouldn't it make sense for them to sell their current product as a general purpose/programmable chronoconsultant device? What kind of sensors does the device have? Can it be used to solve other health problems?
Nutrition -- It's a matter of fact
The Economist, because I find their content fascinating, editorial integrity to be second to no other mainstream magazine. They even admitted their mistake for backing Bush over Gore. Plus it's fun to read all of those stodgy old Economists' write-in letters. Better than daytime television!
I worked at a startup that did this. It was a cool idea, but there weren't enough users who cared.
Setting up a Tomcat JSP Development Environment on Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Doe sql injection count?
I have used it since high school (stopped when I moved to the US since it's somewhat difficult to find in this country, I don't miss it at all, I usually go with coffee). Basically it helped me go thought college and my first years as a software developer. I don't think it's that powerful as other *cetams or sulbutiamine (or not that effective).

Ask me anything if interested.
Shortened urls are already banned from HN posts, mainly because spammers started to use them.
I took it for several months with acetyl-choline, didn't notice anything. Conventional cognitive enhancers are much more effective in the median case.
PySide released: LGPL'ed binding to Qt, 'cause Riverback won't LGPL its PyQt
New tips about the upcoming Apple Tablet
More clues from the NYT that Apple might deliver the upcoming tablet in 2010.
A Blippy-Branded Credit Card, Please
An opinion piece with references? Impressive.
I think the intent of the title is that "real" CMSes shouldn't be so easily beaten by WordPress.
I disagree with your assertion, due to the consequence of a similar series of faked results first reported on earlier this week.

Essentially, people wasted 2 months of distributed computing time trying to use the data from a fake crystal structure. Unsurprisingly, these were unsuccessful. Hundreds of thousands of compute hours were wasted and people were diverted from making real discoveries because the structure was already 'solved'. This is a huge setback, in my opinion.
nice that was my frosh year too, go eagles
Prominent? Based on what? I've never heard of Jinggangshan University before. It's not even top 5 in Jiangxi province, where there ain't many universities.
One of the reasons that advanced lsof usage isn't that common is that the Linux man page for it so dense, and a bunch of details you don't need to get started using it are in the first few pages. I've tried a number of times to get all the way through it and have never finished. Thankfully there are some examples at the end.
A search box can be so... uninspiring.

Here's a site that I just stumbled across. I want to try almost every single drink on this page.

http://www.liqurious.com/

You gave me a search box. I had to pause and think. I typed in "sake", because I tried a root beer and sake drink once that was surprisingly delicious. No results. Ok, so you're building your database, but what should I have typed in there? Why not just show me the best/newest/most-interesting drinks in the db?
When I was in university, I had a friend who had faked her thesis to get a Master's degree from a university in Beijing. She admitted to me that she had simply found an obscure English journal paper and translated it into Chinese.

I wouldn't be surprised if this incident happened in the same atmosphere that existed at her school: new grad students who have grown accustomed to cheating on their way through undergrad, and professors who don't check their students' work.
They are losing the home they live in, which in practical terms is as bad or worse.

Average people don't care about call options or rates of return, they care that they have a roof over their head.
It's kind of harsh to say "in exchange for nothing." Monetary policy for all its controversy is still a tool, that at times averts depressions...
>> Eventually, the currency becomes worthless - historically, every fiat currency ever created as eventually lost 100% of its value. It's less a question of "if" and more a question of "when".

This is trivially true (all civilizations end, the sun burns out, nothing is permanent) but the relevant timeframe is usually one's lifetime, and the stability of the currency over that timeframe is more important.

>> you're paying compound annual interest to the central bank in exchange for nothing

You're paying that "interest" in exchange for a more stable currency, a supply of liquidity that allows for progress/growth . If the central bank is doing its job reasonably well, that is. You may also be paying for the "feature" of money that allows you to transfer value to your future self with relatively little risk.
No one's figured out a grand unified theory of Physics either but they still have a lot more useful conclusions and solid research than we do on ability.
Academics from mathematical fields tend to use LaTeX. One way to compile a PDF is with pdflatex, which can import .png, .jpg, and .pdf images. This means you’d need to be able to get your vector images into .pdf format conveniently. This tends to be easy on traditional Unixy systems. I believe on osx too(?).

Many theses and textbooks are typeset with LaTeX. I used it for my PhD thesis. Advantages include: a plain text source file, which can be edited in your favorite editor; easy cross-referencing that automatically updates; high-quality typesetting. Some things that are very easy in Word are harder to do in LaTeX: for example, it can be tricky to select fonts or customize other aspects of a standard style file.
I think LaTeX, http://www.latex-project.org/, would be a good choice, been using it for a bunch of papers for computer science. It is pretty easy to get started with a simple template.

I can recommend MiKTeX as an editor for windows
I guess I should have read the fine print. I ordered the $300 device after they sent an email a couple months ago.

It supposedly has shipped and will arrive any moment - I didn't realize it would be cripple-ware
The percentage of the global economy that stores value in a particular currency will change based on the long-term expected inflation of that currency. Large companies hedge currencies all the time.

If you live in zimbabwe, whenever you receive currency, you immediately try to exchange it for something else, either another currency or goods. If you can choose to accept payment in a different currency (ie: by leaving the country), you do.

You can't opt-out of your currency inflating, but you can often choose how much to hold of it. How much currency do you actually have? I bet most of your net-worth is in non-currency. If you own stock and that currency inflates, the amount of dollars you can get for that stock goes up - you don't hold currency. Even savings rates tend to track inflation, if you are a bank and know that the money loaned to you will be worth less in the future, you can offer to pay more interest for the opportunity to use the money now.

It isn't as if the fed can extract interest on all economic value, just all dollars, which is a relatively small fraction of stored economic value.
Monitoring Apache with Bluepill
I should've been more specific: How do your iPhone, on which you shot your enemy, send a message to the target's iPhone so that it can vibrate?
How Trident's Twitter Experiment In USA Today Can Be Repeated Online
So it appears multi-touch is disabled on this device also? IIRC Google stated that Verizon wanted multi-touch disabled on the Droid but here's Google's first party blessed handset and it's also lacking multi-touch. Something's not adding up. We're past the point of oversight or third party objections.
I've done performance based pay for programmers both at the individual and group level. It adds a lot of non-obvious problems. I don't believe it improves happiness, retention, or productivity in the long run†.

Most companies theoretically already do performance based pay, but just at two levels:

Level 1 pay: $salary
Level 2 pay: $severance

There's usually a lot of room for improvement. If they can't get it right for 2 levels, they shouldn't look to fix it by adding more.

If you've got a big productivity range and a small pay range, you don't have to address it by expanding the pay range. You can focus the productivity range instead, and get lots of side benefits. Let the people who aren't performing well find another job.

Remember there's more to comp than just wages and bonuses too. Sometimes other things can address perceived needs.

___

† I'm assuming most good employees will be around 2 years or more. If you don't expect that, that changes everything.
Right. Having extra pages, versus extra content, is not specifically beneficial. If that were the case, other sites would fill themselves with specious stuff like empty search results pages.
Emm, I think most English nouns are made plural by adding -s/-es", so I can at least try the regular approach if I'm not sure. German nouns have a lot different forms for plural :|
Reading the other comments and responding, much of TeX (I don't know LaTeX - my Ph.D. was written in plain TeX) and HTML are interconvertable, depending on what you're doing. It depends a lot on the kind of book you're writing, whether you need equations, fancy layout, etc. If it were, say, a novel, I'd still go for the wiki. Then put tags for the linear arc through the narrative, and side pages for notes to yourself.

On the other hand, if it's a technical work then you might need something more high-powered. My book was quite technical, but I still used a wiki and embedded images from MimeTex for the equations. Exporting to HTML and using htmldoc worked a treat.

I'm technical, I did a lot of support work, I didn't use a tool "out of the box," but I could tweak it to do some unusual stuff.

YMWV. How much customisation are you willing to do?
In the real world the amount someone is willing to pay for your work is greatly influenced by how it is marketed and sold.

Yes. An Indian programmer could earn (say) $15k at home, 40k if she goes to Japan, and 80k in Silicon Valley. All doing the "same" job.
The converse relationship also exists.

Hacker News is my first resource when I wake up in the morning, I check it before my emails. Shortly thereafter, I also check /r/programming on reddit. Sometimes, I see content pop up on reddit after it appears on Hacker News. It is not a one way road, as you suggest.

It might be interesting to write a script to watch both sites and pull data, determining where content appears first - possibly using modified code from the OP. If I get some time, I might do just this tonight. Somewhat useless, but the information might determine what is a better real time resource for topics relevant to my interests.
You can't be accurate when you need to hit multiple different targets with one shot. It's exceptionally difficult to get people to agree on what's valuable, and how valuable it is.. and the problem gets worse with scale.
Suppose there are three stages of the product lifecycle:

1. Before minimal product

2. After minimal product but before product/market fit

3. After product/market fit

It seems that the common consensus among gururs of lean startup is to charge on stage 3. Based on nothing but my personal opinion I prefer to charge at stage two. The price at this point is the filter you apply to your feedback channel - they higher the price the less feedback you will get, but the more meaningful each individual piece is. If you're just starting out and your feedback pipeline is empty the right price might very well be zero, but once you have feedback the price should go up. My reasoning is that talk is cheap and only people who pay are really serious. Also setting the price helps you discover your audience - they may not even be looking at free stuff.
I have a public www folder too if I only want to open up part of the whole repo. But since there is usually no sensitive data in a public-facing repo anyway, I don't care if people can access .git or not. They may clone it if they want! :D
What about someone who works 10-12 hours and accomplishes the most tasks? I think you have to understand the corporate mindset without abandoning your black-belt coder-fu. Yes, you have to emphasize how difficult what you did was. You have to point out what you've accomplished. And tie yourself in directly with producing specific pieces of revenue wherever possible.

But this will all be helped if you can program well. And if you want to play office politics, it'll be useful to have the ability to accomplish someone else's job in half the time, if you really can.
To be more precise: inflation is a margin of safety against deflation.

Imagine a medieval world where the money supply is fixed. New money is never created, it can only be transferred back and forth. Now imagine somebody invents and rents out a steam engine. The world is now richer by this new technology. Your money's purchasing power just went up, since it can buy something useful that it couldn't before. Since the total amount of money is fixed, other unrelated goods will go down in price. If this becomes a common occurrence people will hoard money rather than buy stuff. This conservatism reduces investment in new ventures, and the overall growth of the economy suffers.

In an ideal world we'd be able to measure just how much the economy grew by and add just that much money into the economy. But we don't know how to do that without avoiding a command economy. And perhaps the question is ill-posed anyway.

Inflation is hard to control, and it can be 'captured' by special interests, leading to tragedy of the commons. We're still looking for a better way to avoid deflation.
We disagree on how huge of a setback it is, "how significant this is in the scheme of things" as the original question put it.

A setback, yes. Huge for those who wasted their time? Maybe.

But compare it to, say, Lysenkoism. That was a huge setback for Soviet biology.
Tell HN: Happy Holidays
Happy holidays and happy hackerdays with your days off (for the non-self employed)
That's essentially what I said.
You can't lose something you never had to begin with.

Lets follow your logic. My lease runs out on Jan 31. Am I "losing my home"? If I'm not, what distinguishes my repo agreement/lease from other peoples call option/mortgage?
Selling Out Gracefully, getting more out of iPhone apps
Is there any place where pastryKit can still be downloaded?
the most likely answer would be to use GameKit, which communicates via bluetooth and can be used to discover other phones that are nearby. no wifi connection needed.
I already grabbed a copy:

http://nxfx.com/demo/pastryKit.zip

Now looking for some documentation...
Will Canada ever have its own Silicon Valley?
Too bad I was only able to find the minified version.
Actually, I really enjoyed studying complexity theory. It just took far more effort than anything I've ever done before - it's really mind bending, and that's why I loved it. I just know that to get to the real meat, I'd have to work very hard for five years or so to develop the intuition and to get up to speed, and even then I'm not sure if I'd be able to cut it to do real first-rate work (a cop-out, I know).

I agree with you that people, especially laymen, tend to overrate talent - it's a good defense strategy that helps people avoid doing difficult things. But I disagree with you that there is no natural talent or inclination towards certain subjects in general. When it comes to hard math, I know people that just pick it much quicker and easier than I do, and it has been the case since I was very young (long story short, for a few years I went to school for gifted children, and some kids were just better than me no matter how hard I worked). I'm also convinced that some fields require more natural talent than others.
You are reading too much into this. This is the way Apple handles everything. They keep everything secret, so of course they are going to kill a leak like this. Now, you may be right separately from this (I still would say your are not), but the logic that lead you to this conclusion is certainly incorrect.
I know I'm nit-picking, but a rotating planet is not strictly an inertial reference frame. That's why the winds and the oceans circulate on Earth.