skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I might be a bit tired right now so I couldn't grasp what she meant. But was there ever a counter-argument in this post?

"I don’t know, because it’s a faulty premise. Just because an entrepreneur minimizes his or her downside, he doesn’t render his risk meaningless."

So she's saying that Gladwell should have said "minimized risk" instead of "[about taking risks] they do no such thing".

"What he never acknowledges is that most entrepreneurs fail, whether they are zany or calculating, and whether or not they are prepared for the challenges of creating a new business."

She doesn't acknowledge this because that wasn't the point of the article. Entrepreneurs who take less risk are generally more successful, of course many (maybe even most) fail anyway, that doesn't change the fact that you are more successful if you take less risk.

This article seems more like a summary and not an actual argument for why "Malcolm Gladwell Must Be Stopped" or why "He’s also a purveyor of garbage".

Edit: he = she
No, because S-Corps can't be publicly traded, so their stock options have no liquidity.
I can't remember where but I saw some tests that showed an un-dressed figure 8 had a higher breaking strength than one where the ropes crossed. (it's kinda academic given the sort of forces required though)

Personally I use a bowline + stopper for climbing, figure 8s are a swine to undo with pumped arms if you fall on them hard & if you're pulling the rope through gear there's always the worry you won't fully untie knot.
[Edit: this is in fact false, see comment below]

I doubt that is the case, if they respond in a calm, rational manner.

That's a big part of the problem. Owners can't respond publicly to complaints on the site unless they have a paid account.
NYC SeedStart Summer '10 Program (like YC)
Yeah, that's why I generalized the argument to X. Government intervention is generally a bad thing, not only a bad thing in a few very limited cases.
this is interesting enough to follow up on. thanks for the lead.
Know of any jobs going for Freecell players?
No. Read this:

http://whygitisbetterthanx.com/

I would say the primary "hype" factor of git is because of local commits and all the infrastructure/features around them. Better server-side merges is just a nice bonus.
Well, here's the link to translation on Google Docs: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddg3849f_19kq9rz6gv

I've posted it on my LiveJournal blog with pointing to your article and my translation on Google Docs, here: http://vslashed.livejournal.com/9110.html
'What she meant'. Post is written by a Constance Loizos. http://www.constanceloizos.com/
Ah, my 7yr old's life just got a lot easier.
Bill Gates joins Twitter and reaches 66K+ followers in less than an hour
I think his observation on time is discussed in this book: http://www.amazon.com/Time-Paradox-Psychology-That-Change/dp... . The third review gives a good summary of the book.
No, frontrunning is when you are trading on your own account and a customer's account for the same security.

The article, while well-researched and well-written, seems to neglect the fact that HFT has severely narrowed the spread (now almost always one penny) whereas before it was large, and the difference went to someone else's pocket.

The other thing that seems to be missing in the thinking of the article is that there is nothing preventing the institutional traders from colocating their own box in Mawah, grabbing a piece of that cable, and joining the game.

And everything is HFT now, it seems--just look at dice for c++ jobs in chicago for one example.
Rumor roundup: the when and what of Windows Mobile 7
For the homepage, rotation through all the featured listings. On the search pages, rotation in position.
True Gladwell writes garbage that sells itself, but isn't this article attempting to do the same thing?
You could create that branch and then update the tags (IIRC, git-tag changes propagate). In general though, you're probably better off with separate branches for each major code change if you're business is obligated to support older versions (e.g. firefox-1.5, firefox-2.0, etc branches rather than relying solely on tags).
While reading Gladwell's book Outliers I got the distinct impression that you could effectively argue against his thesis, that successful people are only successful because of their circumstance, without changing many words in his book. What Gladwell fails to understand is that what makes a person an outlier isn't that they happen to have expended energy getting good at something that people want, it's that they took the time and effort to get good at something to begin with. What makes a person an outlier is the dedication and motivation to truly become an expert at something.

For example, in his book Gladwell says that Bill Gates is a victim of circumstance, and gives examples of that circumstance. One example was that Gates frequently snuck out of his parent's house in the middle of the night to ride a public bus to a local college where he worked on an unused computer terminal. Similarly, Gladwell tells a similar story about Steve Jobs, in which he looks up Bill Hewlett's number in the telephone book, and calls him to ask if he can have some spare electronic components to construct something for a school science project. What makes those two outliers isn't that they had the opportunity to do those things, it's that they actually did them. In both cases, they created an opportunity for themselves, then seized the opportunity. They didn't just created one opportunity, however, they created and took advantage of hundreds of opportunities, each time further leveraging their cumulative advantage. If it was truly just circumstance, then everyone living within bus distance to a college with an unused computer, and everyone with a telephone and a phone book should have founded Microsofts and Apples.
That's because the author is not generalizing from the case of Cameroon. He's generalizing from his years of experience in economics and using Cameroon as a real-life example to get his points across.
Oh, excuse me, fixed it right away.
Google yanks OSVDB's Checkout account without notice
Nexus One Teardown
Why you should start a company in… New York
Wouldn't it then be better to rail against specific policies that are either not proven or proven to be bad than to just say, "screw it all, we'll do nothing?"
Gabon is nearby and is relatively wealthy.
Your second paragraph here is exactly how I interpreted the book. They are not Outliers and special in any way, they are merely successful because they had the stamina to put in the 10,000 hours he talks about.

The entire point of the 10k hour rule is that anyone can become an expert and be successful if they just stick with it and do what it takes. That's the reason there are no true Outliers.
That is your opinion and I will stand for your right to say it. I would be disappointed if the folks who inhabit this site didn't agree.

As you pointed out, this is an important article. I would rather have it engage in discussing it here than on Slashdot or Reddit. One of the nicest things here on HN is that discussions are usually (one could say unusually) civil. I think "difficult" stories like this are important exercises for our community.

There are not many opportunities to practice that online.
This interpreter does not understand quote or '. When you write

(cdr '(ddd a xxx))

the interpreter reads

( cdr '( ddd a xxx ) )
|
\------ '( is a token

For example, this works:

(cdr (list 1 2 3))
Just label yourself "pre-revenue", and you can tell people reading HN is your job.
It says "the work you do while procrastinating". Sometimes when you procrastinate it will be by playing (movies, HN); but sometimes you put off one kind of work by doing another kind of work.

And some kinds of play actually involve some work within them, such as writing funny answers on reddit, photoshopping, gathering evidence by online research to prove how someone on the internet is wrong, carefully articulating an argument or idea, attempting to inspire or encourage someone, narrating a personal experience as a relatable story. Even the act of reading is a form of work.

I'm not saying that all those examples of work can be done in exchange for money on their own, but each of them is required by one job or another.
Putting Freebase in a star schema
↓ Have to agree on the colours. The green is too bright to be "money colour" and the cyan "first visit" was jarring.
There are different classes of entrepreneur that run the gambit of risk profile. An entrepreneur can be an investor who puts a deal together, a soccer mom who opens a flower shop, a software developer trying to change the world, etc, etc.

I can't read the full Gladwell article (only the abstract), but its not clear to me that Gladwell was trying to address all classes of entrepreneurs. However, if he is saying that predatory, risk-averse behavior is how one class of entrepreneurs (or some classes of entrepreneurs) have made most money / success on average - I think this is a reasonable thesis.

Anyhow, its a fuzzy rebuttal to an unclear thesis, but my takeaway is that there are plenty of people taking huge risks under the label of entrepreneur, succeeding, and setting good examples for the rest of us. Will 'predators' exist and continue to thrive? Sure. But that does not mean its the only way an entrepreneur can approach an opportunity.
http://www.viewsflow.com/ is my thing--good explanation of what we are trying to do. I admit that we don't do a great job on the site right now--i am working on that as we speak.

The plan is this:
* watch thousands of people sharing content through Tw, Del, Fb, etc.
* build up an influence model--who is a good discriminator on stuff about China? Or about tech industry?
* present an aggregated view of what the 'top discriminators' recommend in each of the fields they are genuinely good at
* anyone can become an expert--based on how good your content recommendations are (as evaluated by our algorithms)
* make it bigger

the community stuff is teetering around--hasn't yet taken off. we have some ideas about how to make it take off, and am open for your suggestions.
thanks Prakash. Come and log-in again dude. Code releases every day, we are trying to make it better for everyone.
Well - theoretically one could think about a system where freecell players would get paid low amounts to play, and their moves would be used as a crowdsourced processing power.

That's just an idea though :)
"... So now we have the best of both worlds. We can back first-time entrepreneurs and have mentors and role models for them and we have those role models in their second, third, and fourth startups and that's the magic--that creates a sustainable startup economy that Silicon Valley has had for four decades now. We're three or four years into our second decade and I think it's going to be a great period for New York. ..."

I read the article half way, looked at some of the phrases and guessed http://www.avc.com / Fred Wilson who's been pushing NY as a Startup alternative for a number of years now. Will this idea crumble when finance recovers?
If I followed this advice, my new full-time, ex-procrastination activity would transform into hard work, and I would seek relief in procrastination - probably doing exactly the thing I just got away from. See also John Perry's seminal essay on "Structured Procrastination": http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/
Yeah saw some code yesterday it's a wonder a browser accepts
<LI><br>
<LI><br>
<LI><br>

It's stupid how a browser will parse just about anything.
It points out the problem, that some firms have faster access to trade data than others, but proposes no solutions. How to make that not true? I think the low latency colo data centers with equal length cable for all might be as good a solution you can hope for.
So, I know that first statement not to be true, at least in practice; it may be that the people I've worked with just use the term for the general practice of getting extraordinary intelligence about orders and using it to buy and resell liquidity.

I agree with the rest of your comment, at least in principle; this whole thing seems less about defending "fairness" than about defending "the way things have always been done".
HBO’s ‘Boardwalk Empire’ Cost $50 Million: How They Gonna Make It Back?
> The thing is, the Chinese are fiercely nationalistic

Maybe you mean the Han Chinese. Certainly the native Tibetans and the peoples in the Muslim/Islamic regions may not share this sentiment (Tibetan Buddhists and Muslims are considered 'terrorist religions.' IIRC, it's illegal to be Muslim in China and all new Tibetan Buddhist monks are required to become Party members).
I've been typing Dvorak over 10 years now and more than anything I appreciate the comfort. Even though I type all day long I've never had a typing-related hand problem.
I think your sample size of one is not going to be statistically significant. However I do think that in this case, the plural of anecdotes might actually equal data.
The point is not about money or status, or pain and joy, but about the willingness to confidently feel into[1] these things. Mediocrity robs you of your passion. The point is not that failure teaches, or that children should not be built up by an overbearing, over-parental, society, but that all beings should seek to FEEL. It's a curious state that foreshadows knowing, and to be content with mediocrity would greatly reduce the variety of sensations that a moral, considered life can hope to expect in this world. It's existential suicide. And it grieves me dearly, so I get all righteous and pontificate.

[1:Einfuhlung, Johann Gottfried Herder, Isaiah Berlin]
I guess I would score poorly on this. I don't find most comedians very funny.
Backtype API: Now With More Tweets (YC08)
I do agree - at some point you have to do the work, and take the tip with a grain of salt.

I found it was interesting nonetheless.
I was actually happy with the display in my 2nd generation iPod touch. Note the past tense. I shouldn't have clicked on this link...
"... Encouraging children to aim beyond their means is a very bad idea. They will have very ambitious goals and will not settle for what they consider beneath them. This is a recipe for unemployment in the vast majority of cases. ..."

This idea recognises ability can be tempered by circumstance ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025431
Anything to link to other than a Tweet?
When you're a business who's non-technical, you probably wouldn't know a thing about upgrade. All you cared would be minimal cost for maximum ROI. I would agree they are poorly managed - some people assume IT is easy. Clearly, it's not.
>The entire point of the 10k hour rule is that anyone can become an expert and be successful if they just stick with it and do what it takes. That's the reason there are no true Outliers.

Having that single-minded focus and dedication needed to put in the 10k hours makes you an outlier.

I think what I actually took away from that theory is that people value innate talent as a premium and hard work as a commodity - something anyone can do if they just put their mind to it. But I think it's really the hard work that separates the really successful from everyone else, not the talent.
> 2 - Environment - China for the most part has let enforcement of environment law (the law does exist) take a back seat to capturing business. Covering the cost of protecting environment damage raises costs.

AFAIK, there are government officials and positions that care about this and try to do their job, but for example, when polluting factories are due for inspection they stop polluting long enough to pass inspection (even surprise inspections). Obviously there are other elements in the government that are subverting the process (or that just view the process as a PR campaign with the people, not really caring about the results).
I sympathize with your worries. I too don't want HN to become another Reddit or, worse, another Digg. I feel we have a good mix of deeply technical stories and some not so, but more important, we have good discussions.

Maybe the key is to keep the articles good.

Nobody has the formula to prevent a successful discussion site to turn into Slashdot, Digg or Reddit. I have faith we will eventually find it.

But it will be a shame if the only way to prevent a discussion site to become "uninhabitable" is by preventing certain topics. I like to think we can be mature enough.
I am referencing http://www.investorwords.com/2101/front_running.html and http://www.mondovisione.com/index.cfm?section=glossary&f... and http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/front_running along with others. These all reference the conflict of interest sense.
The difference is that supporting soccer teams seldom becomes law.
I'm impressed this article basically explains why do I live in a poor country.

I live in Ecuador (South America). Our land is packed with high-quality oil, virtually unlimited food and impressive biodiversity (google "yasuni").

Although our country looks perfect, 15% of us live in extreme poverty (this means living out of less than 2 bucks a day). The other 60% is mid-low class with less than $1000 of annual income.

The only explanation I have is that our presidents had not been doing their homework. Corruption, organized crime, economic crime, you name it.
> While you can’t get code into your templates, it’s easy to get UI into your code, which is (almost) just as bad.

I looked at Lift a year or two ago and this was the showstopper for me. While there's a cleanliness and purity to rigidly enforced templating I have never developed a web app where I didn't need some kind of creative "UI" logic somewhere. If you can't put it in the templates then it doesn't go away ... it goes into your core code where the poor schmuck looking at the template has no hope of doing anything with it. For me, putting what is otherwise pure UI logic in the UI layer is a lesser evil than having it permeate back to the middle tier or "view" code layer.
More like the government agencies are all falling over themselves to be the 'one true agency/military branch' that does all of the cyber-defense. I remember a few years ago about the Air Force starting up some sort of Cyber Intelligence branch which was going to be completely separate from any other branch/agency's efforts.
I think people are drawing conclusions too quickly. The current leadership is generally more pragmatic than this. There is benefit to rooting the activists. There's little benefit (from the eyes of the politburo) to a brazen reprisal like this. And why would they care about what some fringe foreigner says? Chinese are much more status conscious, and the ravings of some dude on the internets doesn't carry that much weight.

The younger generation is by contrast much more nationalistic and internet savvy, and a vigilante attack against an outright "Chinese are evil" article like the original is not unlikely. After all, we've seen Russian hackers doing it to Ukrainian sites.
If you have not already done so, you might want to try installing rkhunter (Rootkit Hunter). It scans for rootkits, backdoors and possible local exploits. It does this by comparing SHA-1 hashes of important files with known good ones in online databases, searching for default directories (of rootkits), wrong permissions, hidden files and suspicious strings in kernel modules.

Maybe installing Jailkit to chroot SSH users might plug a hole for you too. This is a set of utilities to limit user accounts to specific files using chroot() and or specific commands. It is used to secure cvs, sftp, shell or daemon processes. You can give your users shell access without having to fear that they can see your whole system. Your users will be jailed in a specific directory which they will not be able to break out of.

As a future potential preventative, you might want to think about installing fail2ban. It is an intrusion prevention framework. It blocks selected IP addresses for hosts that are trying to breach the system's security by monitoring log files and will ban any host IP that makes too many login attempts or performs any other unwanted action within a time frame defined by the administrator.

These are for Linux, and I’m not an expert with them, so I can’t really walk you through installing or using them, but you might want to look into them and see if they might help you.

If this "Security" stuff is not your cup of tea, these guys might be able to help:
http://www.serverwizards.com/
I have never used them, but have come across a few of their happy "Security" customers in tech forums in the past. I keep them in my contact list just in case.
Why would you want a slate with a 5″ screen?
Ah, thanks. I avoid keyboards with Windows keys, though; I use Ctrl and Alt so often that I don't want other keys getting in the way.
>I can be upset and angry and still participate in a rational discussion.

The problem is that it would only take a few people who can't remain rational for a tipping point to be reached whereby the overall quality of debate badly degrades. (That's when some of the most valuable contributors start to disappear.)

>What will we do when an issue is both important and divisive

If such a political issue affected hackers directly then there'd be no way to avoid that discussion.

>Do we want to prevent, to silence, discussion?

Of course not. And that's precisely why politics in general should be avoided.

Aside from the eve psych, I'm with Eliezer Yudkowsky on this:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/
I am not arguing about military censorship. It's understandable when they don't want their folks to blog about troop deployment or operational details of new weapons. I am arguing about using it to cover up crimes.

And there is the part about China. I am not sure I understood the comment and its motivations. I would like to explore why trevelian made the comparison.

We can learn a lot about ourselves by entering difficult discussions.
Gabon:Cameroon::Oman:Yemen. Oil.

No, really, the author is saying nothing. Wealth is just one part of a society. Effective government is another part. They are both effects of other causes. And they themselves feed back. It's not hard to point out the essentially gangster-like attributes of almost any government. The USA seizes its citizens' property and kills people all across the world. Oddly, since it steals so much more from a wealthier population, the theft isn't as painful. It requires infrastructure to efficiently transfer taxes up and back down to government parasites, rather than have the parasites take it by hand, as in Cameroon. So people rarely think of the USA as a gangster demanding protection money.

This guy is just another reductionist sociologist trying to come up with that one...one...one...reason why an extremely complicated situation is perpetually botched.
It might be more effective, but it's unclear: I don't know of any strategy that's likely to actually help significantly in rolling back the scope of government, by any metric. (I'm not saying there isn't any, only that I don't know what it would be).

Note, though, that even people who want the government to do less aren't saying "we'll do nothing", they're saying "we want to choose which things to do ourselves". No one needs a law or regulation to spend their own money, it's only required when you want someone else's money spent without having to convince them they should.
Is there a law that prevents the company from doing stock repurchases from private owners though?

If the private stock owners always agree to sell the stock back to the company at a higher purchase price (achievable with a handful of private owners), then there would be no liquidity problem.
This is an unenforceable standard: "off-topic: most articles about politics, crime, etc. unless they will promote civil discussions amongst reputable Hacker News users".