skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that behavioral economics greatly informs "game mechanics" but I don't think the levers it relies on are all irrational. My utility (pride, sense of accomplishment etc.) from answering questions on stackoverflow.com might far exceed the utility from the maximum monetary gain I could achieve from an alternative use of my time, thus making me spending time on answering stackoverflow.com questions perfectly rational.
I've changed it so that any click on the message will make it go away.
I still don't grasp why a programmer should invest, but the subject is interesting.

A programmer could have a better understanding of the computer/tech industry, especially if you see a programmer as a well connected professional. A professional, who knows a lot details about a bunch of different tech companies, who knows the people, the shakers and the movers. But this characteristic is not only related to programmers but to other professionals in the industrie as well. Of course this could lead to a bias, namely that you overestimate yourself and will bet to much on specific companies, what you didn't do when you weren't a professional.

A remark must be made. Because the tech sector is so innovative. And still be a dominant factor for productivity growth. The trend on this kind stocks will always be upwards. And there will always be new companies, with a potential of amazing growth and idem dito stock prices. Maybe stockpicking in the the tech fields just gives you better odds.

Overall, I think that programmers have an advantage, because most of the time they are early adaptors. They will use products, before these are well known to the public ( and stock analysts) Personally, they're just spending more time on their computer and will always use the products which will increase their productivity, which of course are probably produced by the most succesfull companies. But also, professionally, a lot of professionals are at frontier of their field.

Maybe, Non-progammers should observe what all the tech savvy people use to increase their productivity or what kind of gadgets they buy. Or which start-ups are popular by the programmers. And make the decision whether this is business savvy or not.

At the end, you should check WHAT you're actually programming, and what you boss want you to do.
LinkedIn should let users post an online "portfolio" of their work. This would be hugely useful for designers, but could be extrapolated to a general solution for everyone. Programmers could link to Github repos and/or production projects. I'd love to show the photos and news coverage of the solar car I built and raced back at University...

This could be relatively straightforward to do and could be hugely valuable for both job-seekers AND employers looking for candidates.
Greg Mankiw wrote years ago on his blog a good list of introductory high level econ books:

A student emails me asking for a summer reading list. Here are ten very different books I like that are fun enough that you would not be embarrassed (well, not too embarrassed) reading them at the beach:

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers

Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity

Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist

P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich

Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics

John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar

William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates

I'd also recommend a good textbook, if you're a little more serious.
Super simple, yet functional to the purpose. Nice.
It's called countersignaling. Basically, you want to be seen as a wealthy person, so you buy the sports car. But if you were truly wealthy, you wouldn't brag about having a sports car because you wouldn't even consider it exceptional.

For a much better and full explanation, read http://zhongwe2.serverpros.com/cs/cs-final-rje.pdf
Kino.to Stream Seite - Serien und Moviestream www.kino.to
Yeah. I can't believe anybody would really use the "f" word in a forum like this (or ideally anywhere, but especially in an otherwise civil, focused forum like this). Probably (hopefully?) a fake account.
Profoundly dishonest: if there's one thing "ClimateGate" has made clear to all it is that there is no "consensus" and there are serious scientists all through the spectrum less alarmist than the CRU crew.
You might want to try David Romer's Advanced Macroeconomics (a higher level undergrad text) or Acemoglu's Introduction to Modern Economic Growth (lower level grad text).

From http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Economics/14-452Spring-2007/Syllab... :

Macroeconomics is a rapidly changing field. To get a sense of the geography, you might find it useful to read two surveys (which are already on the verge of obsolescence...):

Blanchard, O. "What Do We Know About Macroeconomics that Fisher and Wicksell Did Not?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 115, no. 4 (November 2000): 1375-1410.

Woodford, M. "Revolution and Evolution in Twentieth-Century Macroeconomics." June 1999. Paper presented at Frontiers of the Mind in the Twenty-First Century, U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, June 1999.

For two more recent and more polemical, pieces, you may also want to read:

Chari, V. V. "Modern Macroeconomics in Practice: How Theory is Shaping Policy." Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 4 (2006): 3-28.

Mankiw, N. G. "The Macroeconomist as Scientist and Engineer." Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 4 (2006): 29-46.
SandForce SSD controller beats Intel X-25M by compressing data before storing
Which is why we consider the main trait of Frenchmen to be arrogance ;)
The usual caveat applies: no support in IE for the next ten years. I would love to have that date picker universally supported now.
Mitnick's cards have been around for several years... I got one from him at a conference in KC (where he also autographed The Art of Deception and The Art of Intrusion for me). It was quite a while ago. Many others (including melvin and TOOOL) have also put together similar snap-apart credit-card lock picks. The problems are that they're too short to really get a good feel with, and they're made of crap metal that doesn't lend itself well to picking real locks.

When I'm picking locks, the pick is a long lever, and my fingertips function as the fulcrum. The other end of that lever rests neatly in the web of my thumb and forefinger, which is at least two inches away from said fulcrum. It is back there where I feel what's going on deep inside the lock, sight unseen. The length of the lever (lock pick) amplifies anything felt by the end of the pick. You just can't get that kind of feedback with lock picks that fit within the dimensions of a business card.
What I find kind of funny is how roles and identities are mixed up in texts like this to make everything appear wonderfully clear when it is not.

He says: "In this case, too-big-to-fail financial institutions had perverse incentives: if they gambled and succeeded, they walked off with the profits; if they lost, the taxpayer would pay"

So we have the banks and the tax-payers he says. Are these disjoint sets? No, these are roles and there are individuals, lots of individuals, who are both owners of banks _and_ tax-payers. The more taxes someone pays the more likely they are owners of banks as well.

The perverse incentives were provided by these owners, demanding low risk and returns way above anything that could possibly be sustainable.

He goes on to say "It certainly did not serve homeowners who are losing their homes, workers who have lost their jobs, retirees who have seen their retirement funds vanish, or taxpayers who paid hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks."

Homeowners are sadly losing their homes. Homes they wouldn't have been able to afford if it hadn't been for the reckless lending of banks. And those risky sup-prime loans, who bought them? Pension funds bought them (among others). Pension funds who demanded outsized profits for the benefit of exactly those people who now lost their retirement funds.

If the banks had walked away with all the profits or were saved when they made mistakes then people would not have lost their retirement funds, because the banks' profits _are_ their retirement funds.

Workers sadly lost their jobs. Jobs in the financial industry were lost. Construction workers lost their jobs building sup-prime homes. Many other people lost their jobs that used to be funded by people (themselves) borrowing like there's no tomorrow trusting in their homes gaining value and their retirement funds growing fat from fat bank profits.

Now, is this a zero-sum game? Have only people lost who had gained from the same system before? No, of course not, there were indeed people who did not benefit much and are now suffering hardship. And there are rich people who benefited and did not lose much.

But what Stiglitz does not say is that these people are few. Most people, particularly those who are tax-payers, are on both sides of the game in various different roles.
Could you also make the message box close when pressing ESC?
True, but why not make the experience better for browsers that support these standards and have a decent, albeit not identical, fallback for IE?
Full Disclojure on Vimeo
Blogscope
There is an intermediate state where you make it "just work" but design it so that it's easy to speed up the algorithms later. Premature optimization makes you waste time on dumb stuff, but leaving yourself a way out is a lot less costly than optimizing everything and lets you avoid the problem you mentioned.
Wow, did you ever hit the nail on the head. I've been saying this for a long time (edit: e.g. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96186, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173949), wondering why I'd never run across anybody making what seems an obvious point. At last I have!

The important decisions around performance have to do with design, not optimization. Knuth's original principle was quite explicit: forget about most small efficiencies. But people commonly use it to justify not thinking about large ones. "Don't micro-optimize prematurely" somehow got changed into "don't think about performance until the end of the project".
Entering something other than a number in the "times" field results in the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/base/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/__init__.py", line 509, in __call__
handler.post(groups)
File "/base/data/home/apps/resolution-tracker/1.338888254051474539/resolution.py", line 69, in post
r.threshold = int(self.request.get('threshold', 1))
ValueError: invalid literal for int() with base 10: ''
I think that K&R works better as a tutorial, as an introduction to C programming. Once you're generally comfortable with C, Steele's book is a much better reference.
Blogscope is a very cool analysis and visualization tool for blogosphere that I just stumbled across.

It looks like it's the Univ of Toronto guys from the Nextflix prize. Probably using Probabilistic Matrix Factorization under the hood.
"The author is an Economics Nobel laureate and university professor at Columbia University."

Are you implying the author is being used as tool of the China government? Or that this isn't his original text and the "Propaganda Vessel" twisted his words?

As for the China Daily and Shanghai Daily, I've read them regularly for close to 10 years and find the reporting to be mostly professional and many times more informative than U.S. mainstream reporting.
But makes sense that women would want to say "look! I'll make a good mommy! I am nice and selfless!"

I was hanging out with this girl when this random guy approaches us in the parking lot asking for gas money, saying how he's forgotten his wallet at home. I am super wary of his story and am about to walk off. The girl with me doesn't. She wants to go in the ATM and get him some money. I let her do that and like you said, knowing the girl would go out of the way to help some random guy added brownie points for her in my book.

Of course, if I was being totally rational I may have considered the move dumb on her part. But my gut reaction was "cool chick!".
A few books I've found extremely helpful for thinking about these things.

Jane Jacobs on cities as the economic entities that really matter: The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Economy of Cities, and Cities and the Wealth of Nations.

Peter Drucker: Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

and the classic textbook:

Paul Samuelson: Economics
Competing with CareerBuilder and Monster is a waste of time. Both of these sites will eventually become irrelevant -- searching for a job by typing in a few keywords is unnatural. People hear about jobs thru friends, professional acquaintances, work product (GitHub, StackOverflow, etc), and local businesses (signs) and as LinkedIn becomes more prevalent they will grab more then their fair share of this market without trying very hard.

The far bigger opportunity for LinkedIn is to aggregate business leads. Are you looking to outfit your company with new laptops this year, looking for a block of hotel rooms for a conference, looking for an event management company, looking to upgrade accounting systems. Each of these leads is worth hundreds of dollars and helping businesses find good vendors is not easy (consultants make billions of dollars/yr making vendor recommendations).
The existence of the recruiting industry belies that claim. The job market is incredibly inefficient: I would bet that no professional in a big city could name more than 10% of the people who would be willing to employ him at that moment.

Most of the jobs I see and hear about are of no interest to me; I can search careerbuilder (or LinkedIn) and instantly find some jobs that are relevant.
It's so frustrating when people don't understand that the market has already priced everything into the price of a stock. When someone buys a stock that person thinks he/she knows more about the price of the stock than the rest of the market.
There is plenty of academic research that shows stock picking doesn't work and shows that actively managed mutual funds do as well as passively managed funds. No fund manager can create a positive alpha over the long run.

I cringed when I read the title...
Poll: Excel or Numbers
Microsoft Excel vs iWork Numbers
Not taking Fred seriously until we hear an explanation from him of how much he knew about Zynga's shady offers business. He has been disturbingly quiet about this.
What type of work do you do that you never have urgent bug fixes and/or never have features that take more than a day to complete?

Sure it's optimal to work linearly, but in the real world things come up. Now if you are looking for a reason to tell stakeholders to suck it up and wait, then poor branching support may help you, but that's a technical solution to a managerial problem. If you're interested in having the most flexibility to solve real world problems, then git's power is indispensable. Hell, you can work linearly all the time, and retroactively convert anything into a branch. Even if you don't need branches. Even if you are the sole developer.

Sorry if that's a little harsh, but statements like "My point is, if you want lightening fast rev control for some reason, probably better to not use distributed." smack of willful ignorance. Go use git for a while and then come back and try to say that with a straight face.
This should be a bit better now; it kicks you back to the original page with a generic error message.
I was looking at this the other day and am concerned that it hasn't been updated since February, 2005. That's practically ancient in terms of software.
It sounds like you quit. May I ask why?

I got to the point that I had a nice brick and mortar store, a good clip of web sales, and a couple of employees. I was working full time and doing this as a side operation. Another company kept making me job offers until the offer reached the point where it was worthwhile. However, I had to relocate and do a bit of travel, so it was going to be too difficult to maintain the other operation so I spun it down.

90% of my sales were in the US, so all the inventory was in the US (it got to the point that I had about $500,000-$900,000K in inventory on hand (home automation, home audio, home theater stuff)).

I paid taxes/duties/etc on anything I imported and on anything exported made sure that fell to the buyer.

The majority of the stuff came from US manufacturers or distributors and was re-sold in the US to dealers or end-users.
> What percentage of students after having passed a probability course can define a random variable?

In a typical probability theory course, all of them, hopefully. I found random variables to be a crucial part of my probability theory class, being used in almost all (if not all) topics after the first month.

There are certainly other approaches to learning probability theory (though perhaps not what you were thinking.) I understand that E.T. Jaynes' book on probability theory, which I have not yet read, does not go the route of random variables.
Quoted author Maryanne Wolf seems to be saying something that is at least partly contrary to what is said in the new book Reading in the Brain

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent...

by Stanislas Dehaene. He is very up to date on the best research on reading acquisition in children and adult reading performance in countries around the world with different writing systems, and he has some very interesting suggestions in his book about how an electronic device for screen reading could actually SPEED UP human reading with optimal, brain-research-informed design, by presenting the words of the text in rapid succession (up to the word size limit enforced by eye fixation and focusing ability).

Stanislas Dehaene has great comments in his book about the right way to teach reading to children and, as one reviewer notes, "Reading in the Brain isn't just about reading. It comes nearer than anything I have encountered to explaining how humans think, and does so with a simple elegance that can be grasped by scientists and nonscientists alike."
"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." - Balzac
I now will need to do even further work to see if I am working with a browser that supports the input type, and then provide a fallback if not. Since there is no way all my users will have an HTML5 capable browser (I'm looking at you IE), I will always need the fallback; so why not just use the fallback always for more consistency and simpler code? On the server side I have to validate all the input anyway, regardless of what the client side control is promising to do for me.

With the date input type, don't my non HTML5 using visitors have to enter a string that will match what an HTML5 browser would send me? Otherwise I'll have to deal with two different date formats. I hope HTML5's spec decided on a clean, simple date format that is easy to type.
Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention
The more I code, the more reasons I find to simply use parentheses everywhere. Why bother even thinking about
1 + 2 * 4
when you could write
1 + (2 * 4)

Ok, if you've got a lot of operators in one line, it can get difficult, but you're probably running into trouble reading it even without parenthesization. It seems like one of the huge wins of Lisp that you don't have to worry about this problem.
If that set is well-defined, it obviously contains itself. Under ZFC, no set can contain itself, so that set is not well-defined.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_regularity

But there may well be set theories where it is well-defined, hence does contain itself.
In California, carrying a lockpick set (or anything whose primary purpose might be for picking locks) can get you in trouble if you're not a locksmith -- possibly a lot of trouble, depending on the officer's mood.

I had read some conflicting information on this, so I checked with a local locksmith that I trust. He said that intention doesn't matter, merely carrying it is against the law.

I don't think it should be this way, but it's worth mentioning to anyone thinking that this is a good idea.
Thanks for the good feedback to the post. I responded to the latest feedback from you and discussed with the Pope.
Isn't the point about Black Swans that they're impossible to protect against?

No, actually. The point about Black Swans is that they are impossible to predict. But one can plan to avoid the severe CONSEQUENCES of unpredictable events. The illustration that Taleb gave in a conference talk video once posted to HN was that a resident of Florida doesn't know when the next hurricane will come, but can build a house that is more resistant to hurricane damage than the typical house. Similarly, some investment strategies can be genuinely hedged against rare events that will happen at unknown times, while other investment strategies expose the investor to debts greater than the original investment.
But that's just saying the same thing. The point being made above is that working "correctly" simply isn't enough if performance is a design goal too (or rather, correct operation requires that the software meet the performance goals at design time). So if you start out working on only half the problem, you'll still fail.
The main reason for the post was that at Hashrocket we benefit from real-time streaming Vim plugins courtesy of Tim Pope and wanted to share how awesome it can be as a Rails editor. I plan to follow up with more on the individual plugins themselves. It would've been a small novel to try and cover each of the plugins themselves in any detail. Most have a solid README on the project page for starters.
+1 for this tip: I've been using WebKit nightlies for months and never noticed this.
The marketplace is NOT a meritocracy.

Right, and neither is one's own opinion of oneself.

I don't know if this John Pratt guy actually has any intelligence, perseverance or marketable skills, but one thing he certainly does have is personality disorder. If I were him I'd take some time to reflect on his public persona, figure out what's wrong with his attitude, and then go get his name legally changed before trying again.
The linked article actually shows quite a few non-trivial optimizations already being done in JGit (e.g. storing an SHA-1 in 5 ints to avoid the extra heap block). I'd be surprised if they got much farther than they are, honestly.
Right, but in the context of your function an expression is not possible -- you are passing a variable name to a lookup function.
This was voted down why, exactly?

Everyone knows I'm right. A society that fails to impel people to better themselves is next to useless.
I built my own PBX using FreeSWITCH, and used the ITSP flowroute.com.
I really like the way the "ink lcd" technology looks.

The platform has a way to go, and I'm just going to wait until I see the added functionality.
One thing I have been wondering as a non-git user: is git really CPU-bound in most operations? Maybe someone who is a regular git user can answer me this question. If it's not, I wouldn't expect Java to matter too much to its performance.
Set your code free
Actually, there are a huge number of people who lost: home owners (as distinct from mortgage-owners) and renters.

Both these groups were forced to subsidize mortgage holders and banks on the way up and on the way down.
Thanks, I've added it to my list. I feel the same way about wishing I had taken biology. At least there's always books.
"How the Mind Works" by Steven Pinker is a fantastic take on this topic.