skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Chinese model is not new. It's called mercantilism, and this was the predominant economic development model before Adam Smith's free trading capitalist critique of mercantilism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism

This is how the United States developed in the past. Alexander Hamilton's economic strategy for the United States followed a similar script. See his Report on Manufactures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Report_on_Manufactures

This report was read by Friedrich List, who then wrote a similar development strategy for the 19th C. German economy. It was this strategy that made the German industrialization so rapid and effective. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_List

There are a number of spectators who have correctly characterized China's model as modern-day mercantilism (even though they disagree on specifics and the appropriate response):

Krugman: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/macroeconomic-ef...

NRO: http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_bartlett/bartlett20031105...

See also: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1764172/china_merca... and http://chinaconfidential.blogspot.com/2006/06/mercantilism-w...
And not just realistic load, but realistic data quantity and quality too.
After working with landing pages for quite some time, these types of numbers don't mean much to me anymore. Sure, 190% increase in conversion rate is impressive; however, I would argue that posts like this ignore some other major factors such as conversion rates along the funnel.

I'd argue that there is an inverse relationship between the conversion rate of this form and the conversion rate to the next step in your funnel. I'm not saying that either way is better, I'm just arguing that it deserves deeper analysis.
The conversion rate went up, but the quality of these conversions is probably lower.
There are always going to be outlying cases, whatever strategy you use. I suppose I could fix this one by making the threshold depend on either average comment karma or total karma. But as I said, my inclination now is just to stop displaying points on comment threads.
New iPhone 4G to be in stores in May
Friday: Our InfoGraphic SEO potpourri...
Also supported by the NIH. Why is it that Dairy is a conflict of interest, and the NIH isn't? These researchers may have trouble every getting an NIH grant again. People don't realize the kind of influence that our government funded research system has on the outcome- it is perhaps the main reason why the result of this study might be surprising to someone.

Overall the dairy industry would probably greatly benefit from a recognition that saturated fat is healthy. However, the economics of Dairy with fat/saturated fat is actually kind of strange. On the one hand, dairy ends up getting demonized. But on the other hand everybody buys low-fat milk and low-fat cottage cheese. This lets the re-use the most valuable part of the milk (cream) at low costs for butter, ice cream, etc. Even though those foods have been demonized too, people will always want to eat ice cream.
Great read. As a multilingual speaker, I had quite some chuckles. And then there are pearls like these:

"Now I think it’s lovely that such a decorative language as Arabic exists. I wish I could walk around New York and hear people talking in proverbs."

"It no longer rains in America; your TV weatherman will tell that you we’re experiencing a precipitation probability situation."

"Remember: how you write is how you define yourself to people who meet you only through your writing. If your writing is pretentious, that’s how you’ll be perceived. The reader has no choice."
> But they are difficult to get in to.

Not really. I joined one just to see what it was like. All I had to do was show up in an IRC channel and go through some 'testing process.' Apparently if I was referred by someone I could have forgone that process. My 'membership' recently lapsed because I never used it, but it wasn't hard to get in.

They did have some onerous rules though. Like getting kicked out if someone you referred breaks a rule. I think you even got kicked out if someone referred by a person that you referred got kicked out.

> They have very strict sharing requirements (you have to contribute not just leech).

The problem being that there are many torrents with only seeders connected to them. So it would be hard to keep your 'quota' without a concerted effort. It's not just 'leave your torrent client open when the downloading finishes.'
That's how I read it.
>But I know enough not to feel comfortable commenting on this in a public forum.

why?
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Fisker Raises $115.3M (incl. Kleiner Perkins), Makes Battery Deal with A123
I calculate averages differently. I only consider recent comments, and I discard outliers before averaging.
That depends on why he was cleared. If he was cleared due to some sort of technicality or due to lack of evidence then there is no reason why he cannot be prosecuted a second time. Also if any of the relevant laws have changed in any way since 2007 (which I imagine they have) then the prosecutors can try again under these new laws. Being cleared doesn't in and of itself mean that what you where accused of isn't illegal.
Untitled Startup: building an open startup from the ground up
The US government has -- and has been known to use -- the ability to exempt itself or its contractors from patent liability for specific purposes (typically national security).
Using Printed Nanocircuits to Sense Hormones
Remoteling - Run Code and Background Tasks in The Cloud
I don't know. Trent Reznor was an admitted member/user of OiNK. It's not like he couldn't have donated a decent amount to keep the site running.
Okay:

1. I hope everyone realises that reading one abstract online does not constitute medical advice, or even the true state of scientific knowledge on the field.

2. If regardless you do intend to base your life decisions based on something you read on-line, I direct you to the publications of the Cochrane Collaboration - the gold standard in meta-analyses and as close as you can get to the final word on the current state of the publication field.

In this particular case, the relevant Cochrane reports seem [I am not a doctor nor do I play one on HN] to say two things:

1. Dietary changes do affect your cardiovascular risk

2. But they have to be maintained for long periods (> 2 years) and the vast majority of people are not compliant so in practice they are ineffective.

http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab002137.html

http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab002128.html

etc.
Even if EC2's RAM is all allocated that wouldn't necessarily lead to network congestion, since network usage is workload-dependent. Conversely it would be possible for EC2 to experience network congestion even when its RAM is not full.
Combine all your store loyalty cards
I've worked with optimizing landing pages as well, and I am completely unsurprised, because the content that they removed was a Flash movie. Flash, especially big bulky gaudy presentations, tends to draw attention to itself rather than to what you want the user to do on your page. I would have liked to see a test against another version where the login/registration was inside the Flash (probably poorly for a video that long).
Ask HN: Any junior Project Managers from MSFT here?
Hey All,

Just wanted to know if any junior level Project Managers are on HN. I had a few questions about the job that HR docs don't really answer.

i.<myusername>@gmail.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_mark
Note that this site also links you to another site that makes plastic cards. I like that site less because of its privacy policy.
I wonder what the vector was? Are these things internet enabled, or is it just a matter of sticking a flash drive into one of them?
Possible answer to the post title: Their quiz-taking webapp is terrible. You can't retake the quiz or review previous questions, and can only try each question once, and if you go back and choose a different radio button as an answer for a previous question, it answers the current question instead (basically throwing away your answer).

So maybe people just couldn't use their damn webapp.

Several of their questions:

Which of the following is the most portable way to declare a C preprocessor constant for the number of seconds in a (non-leap) calendar year?

#define SECONDS_PER_YEAR 60 * 60 * 24 * 365
#define SECONDS_PER_YEAR 60 * 60 * 24 * 365;
#define SECONDS_PER_YEAR (60 * 60 * 24 * 365UL)
#define SECONDS_PER_YEAR (60 * 60 * 24 * 365)

Which of the following is the most flexible way to declare a C preprocessor macro that takes two arguments and returns the smaller of their two values?

#define MIN(A, B) ((A) < (B) ? (A) : (B))
#define MIN(A, B) { if (A < B) A; else B; }
#define MIN(A, B) ((A < B) ? A : B)
#define MIN(A, B) A < B ? A : B;

Which of the following constructs can be used to create a portable infinite loop in C?

while (1) { ... }
for (;;) { ... }
loop: ... goto loop;
All of the above

And then they asked a question which says "what was the intended effect of [some terribly misleading line of C]" and I became fed up, because I have no idea what the intent was, even if I could figure out the actual behaviour.
Thank you for linking to the actual study and not an awful news report of it!

That being said, here is a blogger that I think is adding some value to the discussion of it.
http://blog.cholesterol-and-health.com/2010/01/saturated-fat...
Visualizing survey results
But the issue is not one of displaying or not displaying, the issue is one of functionality, of votes not being counted.

If you do not display the votes but you do pretend that you're counting them you have not solved the problem at all.

On an 'average' forum that sort of trick might work but HN is populated by some of the smartest people I have run in to in the last 20 years or so and it will not take them much work at all to find out whether or not their votes are counted.

I can already think of two ways right of the bat.
One of my pet peeves is when people repeat themselves too often. Maybe I am more computer than human.
I think that's the point, yes. In software engineering, quantity has a quality all its own.
TV Mosaic 0.3.0 su Ubuntu e Debian
2.1% -> 6.1% is a 290% improvement, not 190%.

Don't cut yourself short ;-)
Confidence inspiring.
The degree to which East Asian economies are built to exploit Western liberalism is almost as astonishing as the amount of abuse Western nations will tolerate in pursuit of another quarter's profit.

The Chinese may participate in free trade, but it's a mistake to assume they've become liberals in any sense. When the Chinese learn about free trade, it's in the context of gunboats shelling their cities to protect drug runners, not John Stuart Mill.
No, many companies are WFOE (Wholly Foreign Owned Enterprise). The local entity is still a Chinese LLC company and exists at the whim of the Chinese government and all restrictions therein. The main difference being that the shareholders in this company are foreign entities.
Thanks - could you tell me what my average score is please?
That's really interesting. Especially if people can print these out themselves. It would lower the cost of getting test done. And can be used as preventive medical tech, to detect when things are starting to go astray.
"I may also try letting users specify other users whose comments they're interested in, and distinguish those in the display of the thread."

This would be awesome.
Flocking.Me temporarily shuts down due to trademark dispute with Flock Inc.
Chris, I agree. We are definitely going to follow this up with more analysis on the conversion rates on the next step of our funnel. We won't have results for that for a while though because:
1)It will be a partially manual process to match up conversations with prospects to demo form completions because the form completer often introduces us to a different person, so we can't do a simple email comparison between our form completions and our CRM
2)Conversations with prospects sometimes don't take place until weeks or even a month or two after the form is filled out.

I wouldn't be surprised if the quality of the leads goes down somewhat, but my guess is that the overall effect will be dramatically positive.
It's not just them denying it, but McAffee as well: http://siblog.mcafee.com/cto/operation-“aurora”-hit-google-o...
The ranking algorithm treats t0 as if it were actually 2 hours. Without this damping, you get too much volatility on the frontpage.
Google Embarrases Chinese Because It Could Not Win
Websockets made easy
That quiz ranged from silly curiosities to actual common mistakes.

I really dislike questions like "Most portable", etc where you have to answer what you know they want you to rather than say "I don't know how good all compiler compliance is in this respect, I suspect most do it fine, but c-compilers vary widely in quality, would you really like me to go research the standard and find out how good compliance is with respect to this behavior?"

Portability is only a concern for a subset of embedded programmers, whereas most of the other questions are a concern for most people.

Ditto for the multithreading operation item (Although I suppose most embedded programmers have ISRs at least to deal with).

In general, the author of the article is completely misinterpreting the test results which answer:

How well are embedded programmers at passing a test which involves esoteric declarations, overly detailed knowledge about compiler compliance and general portability questions probably in excess of what you worry about in any embedded design position, and otherwise designed to be beyond the experience of most practitioners in the field?

The use of a grade school grading scheme for the test is juvenile at best. They are VASTLY underrating the embedded developer pool.

For single platform coders, especially working on largely modern code, 6/10 is a fine score.

People who write for single platforms have no reason to be good at the portability questions. People who write for single platforms have no reason to be good at the compiler compliance questions. People who do not work on old code without "don't be tricky" condemnations have no reason to have memorized esoteric declarations of C variables which aren't commonly used.

Anyone who wanted 80-100% scores for MOST embedded positions would be completely wasting their companies money on overly expensive engineers. Only companies which have a multi-threaded legacy codeset which is designed to be compiled on unknown systems, running on multiple processor machines actually needs all the knowledge the test tests for, and if the company has good code reviews, such as all the "oh no" cases the article writer put out there, only SOME of the staff needs to know all these things, the rest can learn them in code reviews.
An interesting idea, but it only seems to protect the head and shoulders. I'd expect water to run along the surface of the device onto the pants of the user, effectively making them wetter than if they had no protection at all. An umbrella at least mostly routes the water onto the ground.

It also looks more awkward to use in a crowd than an umbrella.
As I also said, if I stop displaying points on comment threads, I can also get rid of the thresholds on which votes count.
Thanks. It makes sense when read on the first level. I think I read it right after some of the bike commuting comments above and was expecting something funny, so I looked for something that wasn't there.
No, this would usually be called a 190% improvement. (6.1 - 2.1) / 2.1 = 1.9

Similarly, 2.10 to 2.31 is usually called a 10% improvement, not a 110% improvement.
RoG is on the ball and has voiced something a lot of people have been up against. I don't think it should be up to you to tell people what they should do or not do.

For you it is 'just a news forum', for me it has been:

- a source of knowledge

- a source of friendship

- a source of income

- a way to help others

- a way to find help
Are you saying 2.1% -> 2.1% (no change) would be a 100% improvement, and 2.1% -> 0.21% is a 10% improvement?
I don't think I get many down votes at all. Out of interest I started tracking my karma a while ago to try to detect these sorts of changes and influences. I seem to get very few down votes.

The pattern seems to be more that I make a few contributions that are seen and well regarded. They get lots of votes. I make a few contributions that don't get noticed, or that no one likes. They get no votes. And I make a lot of contributions that cross-reference, location duplications, point people to other discussions, and generally try to help tie things up. I do that because my background in online communities is more in wiki technology, where house-keeping is essential.

Those many, many contributions get very little attention, and no up votes. The net result is that all the small notes that try to make things better drag my average down.

I think the use of the average karma is mis-guided. At least I can see what mine is, as I'm on the leader board.
That looks useful (well, not to personally to me, but I can see the attraction).

I think you are working in a fertile area. In my last trip I used the iPhone app Postino to send snail-mail postcards using pictures from the iPhone - it worked really well. So I can't help thinking "you need an app for that" :-)

I'd give your main site a try if only I could think of someone I want to snail mail!
An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg
I think their test is best described "If you're not looking up the answers to half of these, you're a shitty, arrogant, and dangerous embedded programmer because you are going to make mistakes, and those mistakes are likely going to be subtle"
I think the libertarian idea of deriving ethics/politics/economics from a small set of self-consistent principles appeals to many hackers.
It's amazing how voting gets pretty complex, pretty fast.

Although, these are more ballot-based, I remember reading about this in my discrete math class (in high school!):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system

I second a couple of people's comments about how it's very cool PG is constantly trying to improve the system. I've sometimes read his comments (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pg), and one can tell he really cares about the level of discourse (even if he just writes, 'Please stop', etc.).

The idea of preventing 'mob feel' reminds me of America's system of checks and balances. A democracy/republic with three branches of government is not a perfect system, but it's been sustainable.

I don't know the right way to do voting, but I'd recommend pg and whoever else is involved in this discussion -- think about it in terms of time (i.e., too many processes running in similar time intervals can get out of hand -- exe, leg and s.ct. are all staggered in terms of their time horizons) and symmetry (i.e., balanced levels of power).

Arguably, in a majority rule situation, the government's checks are in place primarily to protect minority rights (from mob rule). This seems a little different from the 'mob rule' problem being discussed (where people gravitate into two-sided arguments). But anyway, perhaps I'd try to figure out fractional voting. People with more karma (maybe 50% weighted by total karma and 50% weighted by karma velocity over the past couple of weeks) can upvote with maybe something like 1.5 the votes of everyone else.

But if you ask me, everyone's downvote should be significantly less than 1. Though, there could be again a 50% total and 50% velocity function for how each user's posts and comments are treated. I.e, if a user starts posting really bad stuff, then they should be able to be voted down much more quickly. But arguably, this part of the system should be tinkered with much less. Everyone, theoretically, should have a right to say whatever want. Hmm, maybe they could be forwarded to the rules for discussion and be delayed from posting (like a Hockey penalty box?)

I don't know. It's a complex issue. Maybe it's good enough the way it is. As this system moves forward though, it'd probably be smart to build in ways to vote/approve changes to the system. Not for everything, but big things (analog is the presidential election. People would probably feel a lot better about it all. It's strange. Maybe you need a Constitution too.

Update. One last little idea. You could introduce new voting functionality perhaps as A-B tests. Some posts randomly get flagged for voting with feature X, some don't. If you could establish some metric to judge 'satisfaction' with the experience (more good karma in the discussion?), you could, basically, build 'learning' into your system.
Flow batteries, wherein one may pump spent electrolytes out of your tank and replace them with new ones, fresh and charged, ready to go.

One might also use compressed air, which can be refilled with electric energy by powering a compressor, but may also be pumped quickly, for rapid recharge.
> what better place to start than with Google and Adobe's source code?

I wonder if Microsoft was targeted too.
...expressing an unpopular or contrarian opinion, etc..

Amen to that. I'm still a fairly new member, and recently I finally got past the karma threshold to be allowed to downvote. I felt like I'd ascended to Mt. Olympus, and couldn't wait for the chance to mete out some dings the way I'd been invisibly hit so often before. Of course, I actually have yet to issue a single downvote, as I try to take the high ground of only downvoting for abusive type comments, not just something I disagree with. I also feel I earned my karma the hardest way: I've only submitted one or two things, and I don't tailor comments to please others. I always thought awarding karma just for submitting stories was unwarranted.
Well, sure. But as I understand it, most people at Google are running Linux on their desktops. I'd expect most browser testing to be taking place in VMs or on separate boxes, and under test accounts -- which would have made the level of infiltration described in the article more difficult.
It was a US thing. Most international airports never allowed it.

Undeserved downvotes folks.
Cochrane is good, but not infallible.

If you read farther down in your first link: There was no significant effect on total mortality. Do you care if you have reduced your risk of CVD death, if risk of other deaths increase?

The second review is pretty much worthless for the point at hand as it is just determining if dietary advice affects risk factors (and the main benefit found- total LDL reduction- is not a good risk factor anyways).
I don't know the virtualization system they're using. Could some of the (partially virtual) network stack be software based, and thusly respond to memory pressure?
^ Not being bitter, have worked with embedded engineers who don't believe they're wrong about stupid points which if they'd looked up would have seen that they're 100 miles off course.
Running a Fortune 500 company requires a large and varied set of people: managers, marketers, accountants, janitors, and even forex traders.
I think the key statement is:

“It’s all about profit, and I understand where the silence is coming from, but they are missing the long-term picture,” Slane said in an interview. Chinese leaders’ “end game is to extract as much technology out of American companies as they can, transfer that to their own companies and, when they feel those companies have reached a level of technical maturity, show the American companies the door.”

Looks like most companies are looking at short term gains and profits and not worrying about the longer term effect, when it would be someone else's problem.