skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As for the theory being obvious, as far as I know, no one has proposed it before.

Some interesting things come up for a Google Scholar search for "election charisma" (sans quotes). See "Charisma in the 1952 Election", The American Political Science Review, 1954. From a quick skim of this and some other search results, it looks like the theory has been explored a bit and not found much supporting evidence.
VisualCV Thinks It’s Time to Update That Resume
James Hong, on selling HotOrNot
TheFunded penalizes venture capital firms that “game” it
I wonder why that will be an iPhone app, rather than just a mobile website with location based elements?
What's your start-up and how much are you looking for?
As a primary interface for blogging, perhaps not. But using irb and your ORM as an admin interface to your database? Absolutely.
what's interesting is that the most charismatic personality type in Jungian theories (ENFJ in MBTI/Kiersey) has never been found in a president, nor has any other 'idealist' http://www.keirsey.com/idealist_presidents.aspx

but it's clearly not a matter of incapability. these people are very human-oriented and like working close to others, things like functional management simply aren't appealing to them
Distributed Bug tracking
McCain is pretty darn charismatic. Not in the "I'm a nice guy" sense, but in the "I'm authentic" sense. The former is more universally appealing, but the latter certainly has legs. Bush.v2 seemed to convey more of the authenticity, but he would have lost to Bill Clinton. That's what amazing to me about 2000 - Bill Clinton wins that contest, blue dress and all. Still, if there's no blue dress Gore wins in a landslide.

The McCain-Obama matchup this fall is interesting, for the contrasts, but I have to agree that Obama has the once-in-a-generation kind of charisma.
To be fair to your theory, Reagan was a beast of charisma, wasn't he? I don't think JFK could have beaten him. Mondale was the party faithful rewarding their own in spite of the coming carnage (see also, Dole).

Indeed, that explains to me the one case I'd argue against in your version of recent history. Bush '88 seems in retrospect to have been less charismatic than Dukakis. Or they were very, very close in their wonkiness. But Bush senior was given the benefit of the doubt by the electorate. He became more charismatic in being associated with the Reagan force of nature even as he was actually a big ole stiff. That eventually came out by 1992.

I'd argue the same osmosis almost carried Gore to the presidency. A few moans here and a blue dress there made it much closer than it ever should have been. Problem is, Gore never figured out how to embrace the Clinton legacy (and in so doing would have become more charismatic) while distancing himself from the more distasteful behavior. Still, Gore looked to me, at the time, like a one-term president because of his lack of charisma.
MSFT's PE ration lowest since its IPO
Microsoft Buys Danger
No - [Knuth](http://www.amazon.com/Art-Computer-Programming-Volumes-Boxed...).
"I did my part by reading about virtualization in a trade journal. Now you do the software part"
So you just execute a lisp statement (post "headline" "mybody")?
How Google Got Its Colorful Logo
Well here's an idea for the third world. It's absolutely outrageous, politically incorrect, and I'm not sure it will work. But it just might...

One of the problems with aid to the third world is that a large proportion of the funds end up in the wrong pockets due to bribes, "taxes", etc. Another problem is that once a school or windmill has been set up it needs constant repair and maintenance or it will quickly break. And very often this is exactly what happens.

Now we've all played Sim city. You buy powerstations, police stations, and other essentials and spend money keeping everything in working order. If you do it right your sims thrive.

What if you take the Sim city concept and transfer it to third world countries. You would have a map in your browser (google maps maybe?) and can zoom in and see the villages that are in the program. There will then be utilities that you can buy for the inhabitants of the village you have chosen such as windmills, water refineries, pumps, schools, etc. When you for instance pick a windmill for a village it has a price that corresponds to the real life price.You can then put money on it and it will be added to the pool of money dedicated to buying the windmill. When the full amount has been donated the windmill gets built. You now have a windmill in a third world country that has been paid partly by your money. You can then see the villagers thrive, and maybe you will want to build them a school next. And of course you will be disappointed if your windmill breaks so you will probably be inclined to pay for the repairs of it.

And of course you will know exactly where your money went.

I have no idea whether it will work, and there are probably all sorts of things I haven't thought of. But if it does work I think it would be really cool. So please steal this idea if you are so inclined.
Flash on iPhone is just around the corner
Android Hands-On Video: It's Fast, It's Still Not There
First look: Haiku poetically resurrects BeOS
UK proposing to force ISP's to cut off illegal downloaders net connections
If it's because of the Google toolbar, what features does it have that can't be replicated with Firefox plugins? Why do people insist on installing the Google toolbar, or any other toolbar for that matter? Browsers are slow enough!
I think the article is spot on, and I think it is a huge problem for American politics.

What do you get when you pick the most charismatic leader to run your country? Well, you could get anything. I hear that Hitler was pretty charismatic.

It is often easier seeing this from the outside, so coming from Europe this seems obvious and I have often discussed it with friends and colleagues.

The thing is that what this means is that candidates are not picked on basis of their beliefs, their knolwedge or their political standpoints, but on how they appear on television. And I think that the American education system is to blame. There are a lot of really smart people in America - but unfortunately there are also a lot of uneducated people that are easy to deceive simply because they have never learnt to look at an issue with critical eyes. They tend to pick the guy that is charismatic, not really caring or being able to dissect the issues behind the smile.

I come from an European country with an excellent (compared to America at least) education system, that makes sure that even people on the lowest rung of the social ladder have a critical eye for what political candidates and parties really stand for as opposed to how charismatic the candidate happens to be. Indeed some of our candidates are right out ugly and have no charisma whatsoever. But they know their stuff. And they get elected on basis of their standpoints, not their looks.

If you don't believe me look at this guy that won a landslide victory years ago. http://listan.blogg.se/images/glistrup1_1139332224.jpg Ugly as hell, but one of the most intelligent people in the country.
Old Mac server survives Digg and just keeps on ticking
Seating Plan Generator - Good together, Bad apart - uses Simulated Annealing
The weakening of the Rand will result in higher Rand revenues for the same amount of foreign currency. This is the exact reason why so many exporters have selfishly been calling for a weakening in the Rand. The idea is that the higher import costs won't increase the cost of living and doing business quite as much. So your startup must simply export its service / product to the rest of the world to take advantage of this.

I'm in Joburg. It would be good to stay in touch with like-minded individuals. My e-mail is on my profile.

Didn't run quake.co.za, but I used to hang out in #quake on irc all the time! Good old days
Would love some feedback, especially on ways to market this software.

I know, desktop software, how 2001 :)

Cheers,
Richard
I have nothing but good things to say about Slicehost. That said, 256 is a very small sandbox and Apache doesn't play nicely in small sandboxes without tweaking. Our site runs several PHP apps.

We hit the wall one day with a number of apache2 processes hitting the 60-80MB range. I could barely SSH in to fix things.

We ended up arriving empirically at the following (taken from /etc/apache2/apache2.conf), without stress testing, but watching patterns over several weeks.

<IfModule mpm_prefork_module>
StartServers 2
MinSpareServers 3
MaxSpareServers 6
# MaxClients 150
MaxClients 10
# MaxRequestsPerChild 0
MaxRequestsPerChild 200
</IfModule>

The key is to take MaxClients down to a small number, like 8-10, as each of these normally takes anywhere from 2-40MB. To make this work, you'll need to have the request count set reasonably small. We set ours to 200, so RAM consumption doesn't get too large before the process is cycled. People often suggest 4000 or some such number but the process just grew too large with that setting. You'll also note that we have tuned the startup and idle parameters to be very conservative.

This is probably a laughable configuration for many sites, but it works well for a light site like ours running a few PHP apps. I should note that we're also running MySQL and PostgreSQL. They don't have a big impact on RAM under light load.
Why is this a piece of desktop software? It seems to me that this is something people will want to use maybe once a year -- exactly where the convenience of a web application is most important.
Yeah embedded is definitely different - and a lot harder.

I did a startup once where we were developing a new display technology, and my partner (who is incidentally the greatest hacker I have ever come across) had to fit all software, including screen drivers, communication, logic, etc. into 2K of ROM and 4K of RAM.

64 megs? phew... That's 16.000 times as much as we had...
Had a quick look and twexter seems quite interesting, especially as I started learning French a while ago and am quite keen on learning more languages after that. Will investigate it further when I have a spare moment. Thanks!
I use it once every couple of weeks to tweak seating plans for my classes as I discover new relationships between the kids.

Desktop software because the SA algorithm placed too much load on the server, it started off as a Ruby web-app. Also desktop because most school networks have pretty draconian filtering in place.
How to permanently delete your Facebook account
Firetruck Maker Blames Bankruptcy on Failed ERP Implementation
The StumbleUpon toolbar is pretty sweet . . . just rate sites as you go along and then your Stumbles will be like opening presents.
It's sounds like a fun idea, but is it really a breakthrough? It seems to me if pumping the water was so important at one location, people would find the manpower to pump. How does adding child labor into the equation make it so much better? Sure, they can save themselves some work, but surely they could have found other ways to pump, for example simply adults handling the pump? (Animals have also been used, for example).
I say good for them for taking it. How many of us on here would be very happy if someone offered us right now $20 million. I know I would. Sometimes its worth taking what you can and moving on with your life - these guys will never have to worry about money again if they are careful with their money and on the basis that they are now free they can involve themselves in other ventures. Well done to them
Headline Writing: Fallout from a Torvalds Interview
Half of the time I spend in Sim City was destroying cities - so your concept is perhaps not as good as it could be.
Pipes Mashup Turns Google Maps into a Blogging Tool
Agreed. Hosting a site locally when your target is global would bankrupt you, your grandchildren and everyone your grandchildren will ever meet, so I'm not too stressed about Eskom. And even if you get loadshedded for 4 hours by accident, there's always a mall nearby with power!

Currently hosting in the US for the few small projects I'm working on now, pretty fast once you optimise a few things.

Good to hear from someone who won't let Eskom get the better of them. Stay in touch.
Actually, my reptilian brain caused my fingers to prematurely type "Sex" before I finished reading the original question.
How can you look at this without thinking about Spidey?

http://www.x-entertainment.com/articles/0913/
"It is unfortunate that Yahoo..."

Could they have sounded more sinister?

Nice little web-site you have there. It would be a shame if 'something' were to happen to it.
How about a gym on the train into work?

All those treadmills, running, rowing machines etc.. all hooked up to the engine carriage.

Commuters get their (twice?) daily workout and reduce the energy needed by the train.
At this level in politics, all candidates have "charisma" too. He only has more charisma if you define it a posteriori as having won the election.

> Bush is shorter than both Gore and Kerry. Guess what? He has much more charisma.

But he lost the popular vote to Gore. So charisma understands the electoral college?
You know what they say... if you can get at least one person to believe in your crazy idea, it might just work.

The other reason is that I'm still working full-time. Finding someone to work with would be a good catalyst for quitting my job. Then again, my future co-founder might be right here under my nose.

But you raised a good point and I've recently started considering going it alone
There needs to be a bad-ass downmodding algorithm :-)
http://ourdoings.com/2008-02-12
The most compelling reason for me is to do something meaningful, rather than stagnating due to lack of motivation as I am in my current job. I'm hoping to find someone with the same outlook.

Have a couple of ideas, but I'm open to anything.

Thanks for the reply. Got me thinking.
I dropped out of grad school for the reasons you mentioned, so I won't argue with you there. Best of luck finding a job.
9/10ths of the real charisma in this election belongs to Huckabee. His policies are ass-backwards, but he seems like a great guy. Clinton is like a robotic mom addressing a kindergarten class. Obama's charisma, as near as I can tell, is like that of Ron Paul, who actually has almost none. Rather, his supporters all support him because they have decided to see in him what they want to see. I find him hard to listen to--he forces him voice unnaturally low, and seems to stress the wrong words for emphasis.

McCain has no charisma, but he's the only candidate that could really induce fear rather than love.
I don't use Google Toolbar, but I found a link explaining that you can disable this feature:

http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/bin/answer.py?hl=en...

Anyway, if you're having this issue, you probably agreed on this behavior when you accepted their license :-).
Did you think those $2.56 checks just paid for themselves?
I fear I didn't make my point clearly. I didn't mean to malign Xobni at all -- it sounds like an excellent product.

What I was attempting to point out is that the excellence of the product is often unrelated to what gets coverage by bigwigs.

But I am also guilty of not using Outlook on any regular basis.
It's Webtender for food... :)
Ouch that rings a bell, the only thing I hated more back in my days in the slave mines were managers who insisted something wasn't possible without understanding it.

I ended up only pitching ideas after I completed a prototype otherwise the idea would be dismissed in a blink.
I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum. I used Scheme to make ourdoings.com. I know how to open up a REPL on the server but I never have. To keep me motivated to implement features in such a way that anybody can use them, I maintain a strict discipline of not doing anything that I haven't made a user interface for. This keeps me motivated to implement new features for all my users.
Exactly. This is something a user of Google Toolbar might have cause to gripe about (assuming they weren't told in advance), but not someone who owns a website with 404s that get redirected.

However, for people who like to put sensitive user data in GET variables (coughMonstercough), this is yet another reason why they shouldn't do that.
"Couldn't you write some standalone scripts to run from the commandline to insert new posts into your blog?"

As someone mentioned in the comments on that site, there's no need to write special scripts for this - using script/console does the job nicely with Rails.

script/console
post = BlogPost.new("title", "body", ... )
post.save
^d

You're modifying the database vs. in memory objects, but when you're scaling up via multiple app server instances, it's handy to store the info in the db.
I began over-commenting in college when the professors asked for detailed comments but didn't exactly specify how much detail was enough. (Or, they tried to explain what comments were appropriate but failed miserably). Grade-wise, it was safer to have too many than too few.
This might be better titled as Frameworks vs. Languages. Of course, since most people writing modular code will end up making a framework for their application, it's really Shelf Frameworks vs. In-House Frameworks.

Of course, there's also a third option, niche open source frameworks (every PHP developer and their dog has a PHP framework, and not all of them suck). Chances are, if you look hard enough, you'll be able to find an OSS framework in the language you need that would be fairly similar to one you'd make yourself. If the code is well designed, you can simply cut out what you don't need and add what you do.
Movement: A new metaphore for the web
Does anyone else just get a Mephisto login prompt?

Can I have an account please, Eric? :D
PHBs are like cats and dogs (sorry Dogbert and Catbert). They must be trained. The only real difference is that you can move on if you don't feel like training your PHB.
Damn, I was working till recently for a virtualization startup! You sometimes wonder if Scott Adams hides inside closets or conference rooms to get this kind of insight. Or maybe it was just his tenure at Bell Atlantic or wherever he worked for a long time.
Didn't know they used collaborative filtering, I thought they just used it to rank sites. If you are right they might be worth investigating.
New Google Toolbar Beta Hijacks 404 Pages?
No, I disagree. There are plenty of completely uncharismatic politicians around. (John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul, Bob Dole, Bush the Elder).
Google's Kevin Marks Introduces "The Social Cloud"
I know it's not glamorous, but this area is a phenomenal opportunity for today's generation of hackers and painters. ERP is representative of all that is bad (and good!) where business meets IT.

Most people tell me I'm nuts to focus on this. I can't wait to prove them wrong.
That's quite possibly the greatest thing I've ever seen.
On/Off
The Placebo Affect*
I'm just hoping Battlestar Galactica's last season can be salvaged. I'd hate to see it mucked up forever by something so temporary as a writer's strike.
If you are a hacker (you are posting to hacker news), I suggest you avoid it.

I don't know anything about Teach For America specifically, but several people in my graduate program did work for a variant of it (local and math focused). None of them were happy with the program, though several stuck with it for financial reasons. One of them was put in charge of statistical analysis, since he was the only person in the room who knew what a standard deviation was (I'm not exaggerating). His conclusions:

1. Except for the grossly incompetent, teacher quality doesn't matter. He could not reject the null hypothesis (teacher quality doesn't affect student outcome).

2. Students do not benefit from being in the program, unless it removes them from a dangerous school. He couldn't reject the null hypothesis here either (accepted students perform the same as rejected ones). (This fact is usually well hidden: students accepted by special teaching programs as well as students who apply but are rejected usually perform better than students who do not apply.)

According to him, other programs usually get similar results (well hidden in the appendix of a report), at least when the results are reported.

Overall, he said it is a waste for a talented individual to go into teaching. You won't make a difference. As a software person, you will.

Leave teaching to people who can't do anything else. They have a comparative advantage (even if they lack an absolute advantage).
It's not just ERP. Enterprise software in general is considered "not sexy". However, when you consider the percentage of the world's economy that flows through these systems, they are massively important.

Michael Krigsman
http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures
I'm glad you clarified that Paul. Maybe it's just a function of age but I seem to be getting more cynical.

There seems to be some sort of machine that runs the world. The American political system, despite being created as a government by and for the people is part of it.

I think you're exactly right: all things being equal, when it comes to choosing between a few popular options - regardless of whether those options are candidates or products, charisma takes the cake.

What seems to be not equal is the process by which the popular options become the popular options.
Best approach to micropayment yet. In fact, this one may well succeed. I can't think of a way to improve the mechanism - sure, it'd be nice if the tips were cash redeemable, but I realise it's not your fault, and you've made the situation pretty clear.

I know it's been mentioned by others, but I think your site layout needs a little work. In particular, your mechanism is pretty simple, yet you hide it in some text in your FAQ. Put up a "how does it work" page with a flowchart or something.

Oh, one more thing: what about mentioning the tip amount on the "Tip this" button? I know, it would make it marginally bigger, but I think it would help, psychologically. People are probably (well, I am) very wary to press a button that implies payment (if they've not signed up) or actually "destructively" affects their balance with no check-back confirmation. (if they have) Putting the amount right there would definitely put peoples' mind at ease.

I've not read your client-side code, but I'm guessing you guys have made a decent effort to avoid cross-site scripting fraud where embedded buttons are auto-clicked by a malicious script or something. Right?

In any case, keep up the good work!
That is probably the best description of Hilary Clinton I've ever read.
Grocery stores are a great idea, although the execution could be a nightmare, particularly if you're thinking globally.
The comments about 1968 showed how much has changed. On March 31, President Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection. So Hubert Humphrey launched his campaign in April. Think about it. That would be like Al Gore entering this race 6 weeks from now. What chance would he have?

Also, the nomination defaulted to Humphrey when RFK, possibly the most charismatic candidate ever, was murdered in June.

Nixon had been campaigning behind the scenes for 4 years. Add Vietnam, civil unrest, and culture clash, and Humphrey (the pseudo-incumbent) didn't stand a chance.

I agree with pg's theory. We need charismatic leaders. We crave them. I often wonder how much different the world would be today if JFK, RFK, and MLK hadn't been murdered.
That's probably because those personality types start cults.
I've no evidence to back that claim up, though.
I've discovered a lot of "programming music" using last.fm, and I totally agree on elecronic/trance for background. Lately I've been listening to a lot of Boards of Canada. I can't recommend them enough.
Obama has almost no charisma? Um, okay....
Reminds me of a funny video of Weird Al spoofing Bob Dylan by singing only in palindromes:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Nej4xJe4Tdg
"deep hack mode" I love it!

Thanks for the David Wilcox reference, but no thanks.

Just the other day I cranked Gershwin's Rapsody in Blue and had the most productive 17 minute in a month. Who would have thought?