skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... What happens when you don’t date your articles? ..."

I read a lot of articles and going through through them is a bit like undertaking an archeology dig for useful bits of information. The best sites include subtle hints that convey context. Useful if you are evaluating, "do I continue reading?"

How?

Authoritative sites are good because they convey more meaning than just an article. They tell you "who" is writing, "when" it was written and most important their viewpoint and intent, the "where". You find this out using subtle hints.

Date is an important clue for understanding context. Writers who don't including perceived affordances such as date, mark themselves as the writer equivalent of a first time ice skater constantly tripping over. A writer newbie, who doesn't grasp the concept of readers who use context to search and evaluate. Some sites where I have found a motherload of stuff:

- http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/

- http://htmlarchive.scripting.com/

- http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/

- http://paulgraham.com/articles.html

- http://www.avc.com/a_vc/archives.html

I read these sites again and again, because the value of the posts are increased by the "perceived affordance" of details such as the date a post was written.
This is not really accurate. The strongest chess programs (mostly Rybka, Shredder, and Fritz) are commercially available, and all top grandmasters are using more or less the same ones.

The advantage of training with an AI is that the AI will happily play you for ten or twelve hours a day, from any position you please, without tiring; you can ask it for the evaluation of any position, and it will generally provide an extremely accurate one; it will immediately reveal errors in your calculations and suggest tactical possibilities that few humans would see; and it will play perfect (for small sets of pieces) and near-perfect endgames against you.

Last, but not least, computer chess databases are like nothing available 20 years ago. Chess professionals (and amateurs) have access to all the games they have ever played, hundreds of games played by any potential rival, and hundreds or thousands of games played by IMs and GMs in any potential opening line.
I wonder how Avatar will do in DVD sales though. Everything I've heard from friends is that it is only worth watching in 3D...
Good example of how far reaching bad choices can be for a company. IE6 had a quirky embraced & extended implementation of web standards and, at the time, ActiveX was still being actively pushed as an Internet lock-in to the Windows platform. Almost a decade later we're still dealing with the fallout from it because many corporate web apps are still tied to IE6.
After spending some time using it, I don't think there is enough activity in my stream for the current implementation to be useful.

I would really like to see a list of key topics/hash tags that my friends have been talking about over the past ~24 hours... basically the way the trending topics feature from Twitter currently works, only with data just from my friends.
Disclaimer: I don't play a lot of Go, I could be completely wrong.

That's probably due to the fact that in Go there are less intermidiary goals. In chess capturing a piece, defending a piece or simply making your position better by putting a bisshop on a diagonal can be seen as a step towards winning. Thus a chess AI doesn't need to go very deep before knowing which strategies are bad. For example, chess AI's written in JS often don't go much deeper than two steps ahead but still play quite decently.

But with Go you need to build chains made of several (often > 10) stones. And that sort of calculation is very heavy for brute-force style AI, which is about all a computer can resort to at this moment.
ASCIImeo: Vimeo videos, rendered in ASCII
I'm a member of CCCKC, a hackerspace in Kansas City. We picked up one of these a while ago, and one guy is even using it to print out parts for a RepRap Mendel.

I find it inspiring that this project was born right out of the hackerspace concept via NYC Resistor.
The Nexus One does not appeal to all types of users. I know people who would much prefer the Droid.

Why?

Google is not stopping any manufacturers from releasing an Android phone. What Google is doing is raising the standard for its Android phones.

It's not a question of stopping manufacturers, it's a question of distorting the market with a phone that has an insurmountable advantage. Google can no longer be an honest broker. I assure you if HTC and Motorola had known about the Nexus neither one of them would have been so aggressive in developing their own Android phones.

Motorola, LG, etc may be allies with Google but they need to step up their game.

They aren't allies anymore, as of Jan 5th they just became competitors.
8-10% of what?
It cheats a bit and renders the ASCII video in flash. It would have been way cooler to suck <video> frames into a canvas and post-process them via Javascript (even if the framerate was much slower).

Still a neat project, though.
ChinaVista's Recipe Corner,china food, tea culture
AS3IsoLib Tutorial Series - Getting Started
How to Fake the Numbers: Lessons from Twitter and Facebook
Neat, wondered how they were going to generate revenue. A two tier system should work, low level is free, professional level gets the bells and whistles.
"... Add to that an economic crisis that has hurt traditional male jobs in manufacturing harder than female ones in services — in Germany, only 10,000 of the 230,000 who have lost jobs in the slump were women — and the female factor emerges as stark. ..."

Understanding what is going on in the world means you better understand potential markets.

"... Everywhere, women still earn less, are more likely to work part time and less likely to hold top jobs. But young female doctors, for instance, are rising in numbers, and women dominate middle management in major consumer companies. They could run the hospitals and corporations of tomorrow. Many will be family breadwinners; in Germany, every fifth household is already sustained by female income ..."

Understanding broad social changes means you can make things people want instead of potentially asking in "n" years time, "gee that's a big market, how come I missed that? Where did that come from?".

"... Is this really newsworthy or interesting ..."

If I told you I could actually hear the Earth rotate you wouldn't believe me. [0] But you can do this reading articles like this one on the changing proportions of male/female in a first world technological country. A lot of the time very specific, technical "now" posts are made but I've found you gain just as much by looking at how large societal changes shape adoption.

[0] The Dr. actuall says this in "Dr Who", S1E1, BBC, 2005 ~ http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Rose_(TV_story)
Maybe there is no customer, not yet. I suspect that right now, Android isn't much more than market research. It's talked about all the time here: release early, iterate often. Google's initial choice for a market was the geeks, and with the Android, they've given us much capability with minimal restrictions. The geeks are going to determine Android's customer, when we collectively figure out what the best uses are for what I consider to be the first true general purpose computer that fits in my pocket.
I like the app a lot.

It would be useful if you can list all the links being shared on my stream since I don't want to go through the tweets one by one.
Mixpanel hiring a software engineer [YCS09]
While reading this, it struck me as though Magento (the open-source e-commerce shopping cart) could be guilty of using some of those tactics.
@mqander (for some reason I can't reply directly):

Yeah, you're probably right. I had also forgotten about those chess databases, those are quite powerful. The problem is probably that the last commercial chess AI I used dates from ~1995, when they weren't that smart yet. Or, more accurately, the computers didn't have enough computing power to be strong and at the same time take a reasonable amount of time before playing.
What's wrong with the existence of misinformation? I don't think there's anything wrong with being able to find silly lies on google. There's something more ominous about children being forced to learn this misinformation, as would be the case in a school.
Can you legally do something like 2009-2010 where the year in italics is updated automatically?
kids have been suspended from schools for decades for jokes like this, especially after columbine. meh.
Five Myths About India
Hurrah for white (or brown) noise. If you are in an environment that is full of chat and conversation its great for blocking all that out. You can still hear that people are talking , but you can't understand what they are saying so you can more easily block it out. Wonderful if you are a bit of an introvert and want a little bit of mental isolation in cubeland, or even worse, an open plan office.

The problem with the SimplyNoise site is that the track only lasts 30 seconds or so and then repeats, so every 30 seconds you hear an annoying click. Instead, download Audacity which can generate a brown noise track as long as you want. I have a 30 minute brown noise track as an MP3 which I have on repeat.
I remember reading that study in GEB. It's kind of a big step from that to clarifying what "intuition" is, even, especially, if we feel we understand it easily.
Just in case some people are interested in doing this as a DIY project, it's based on the RepRap (http://www.reprap.org/).
I think the pro did the same as the novice on a random board.

They also misplaced groups of pieces instead individual pieces in meaningful positions.

Make perfect sense with pattern matching, pros obviously think in terms of patterns more than amateurs.

But this is still far from knowing in any significant detail how pro think in patterns.
> and willing to work at...

Well, that depends. Inside or outside?
The video on the homepage showed the finished product. It's a set of salt and pepper shakers shaped like eggs. You can plainly see that it's built layer by layer. I think MakerBot is really cool, but it fails to please the eye with rounded surfaces.
The U.S. most certainly is a proponent of free trade, even if we aren't the best practitioner of free trade.

As far as I know, only one country ever practiced fully free trade, and that was Great Britain for about thirty years starting in 1846 (after the repeal of the Corn Laws, a feat accomplished in part by David Ricardo, who you might remember came up with the theory of comparative advantage). This time period was more or less the height of the British Empire's power.
Never bet against Jim Cameron.
My favorite thing about these printers is the ability to print replacement parts for parts that you know will wear out first. http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1553 Hardware bugs that can be solved by emailing a model file. :)
giving your anecdotal, irreproducible, and wholly subjective experience of "God" a free pass

I only give my experience of God the same free pass as I give my experience of reality. Yes it's subjective.

Has anything ever happened to you that you mentioned to someone and they simply said "don't believe you"? For example I met Tony Blair on the beach once and my flatmates didn't believe me - hardly an impossible scenario - as it is communicating other experiences. For some reason we don't each recognise our experience of God or experience Him as directly.

I don't think my standards for biological evidence of macro-evolution are impossible to meet.
Agreed. I honestly see very little resemblance of the 'shop to Llamazares. I can't believe anybody even recognized his as one of the sourced pictures.
That'll change eventually.

Web apps had clunkier interfaces than desktop software ~10 years ago. Personal computers had less computing power than mainframes 20 years ago. They all had their disadvantages at first, but they make up for it by advantages along other dimensions while slowly eroding their disadvantage.

When something like that becomes cheap enough for kids and hobbyists to get their hands on it, you should keep your eye on it.
I wonder what their profit margin is per unit.
We have a more expensive version of these machines in our lab. After we print the part, if we want a finished surface we brush on super glue to make the part stronger and smoother. Then we sand and paint. We're also looking into using Bondo.
GA Court Decision Raises Questions about Restrictive Covenants
One compelling reason to not date your articles is that age sometimes destroys perceived value even if it doesn't destroy actual value.

For example, I have a bunch of stuff writing about customer service written in 2006/2007. That field has not evolved so much that "Don't curse at your customers" is bad advice in 2009. However, if one of those were posted here, the first comment would likely be "Dude, mark in the title this is from 2006", because the audience here is socialized to assume that the new and shiny is what they want to be exposed to and the old and crusty is largely not valuable with the exception of a few classics.

I have sites where I have no visible dates for exactly that reason: I intend the content to be evergreen, and if it is evergreen you don't need to know what year it was planted. (Edit to add context: elementary school teaching activities. I am not a textbook publisher so I have no incentive for ripping up my multiplication activity every year and coming out with New Shiny Multiplication 2010 Now With Numbers You Totally Couldn't Have Multiplied Last Year!)
Similar thing happened a few years ago - somebody texted the lyrics of a Clash song to another band member.
It contained the words gun and airliner - which resulted in special branch kicking the doors in. But the police deny there is a monitoring system.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/jun/03/terrorism.world

(MI5/NSA - I think you are all jolly nice people who should get raises)
Ah, so we don't really disagree at all---or, at least not much. It's my fault for using a bad analogy, and you hit on a better one. You're right, the axioms, whether in economics or physics, must come from the empirical world. Given the axioms, you can then prove theorems, but of course the axioms might need tweaking---which can dramatically change the theorems. What I see in economics are cases where people implicitly accept particular axioms, and yet reject many of the consequences (i.e., theorems). It's as if they agree that Newton's law of gravitation is correct, but don't believe that two-body orbits are closed.

Though complex in general, there are aspects of human behavior that are consistent and quite simple, and serve as a solid foundation for a study of human action. (You probably recognize this as the Austrian approach of praxeology.) When I read the Austrian argument that any fixed amount of money-stuff (e.g., gold) is sufficient for exchange, I understand the axioms, follows the steps, and accept the conclusion. When I read the Keynesian arguments for the benefits of monetary expansion and "fiscal stimulus", I see---great clouds of fog. Their arguments are often too vague to untangle, but I can see that their conclusions (a) appear to be based on the same axioms I accept and (b) disagree with a theorem. Something doesn't add up.

In sum, the value of empiricism lies in finding the right axioms. If you discover "empirical evidence" that a theorem is wrong, you must either propose a change in the axioms or find a flaw in the proof. Contemporary economists often appear to do neither.

(The Card & Krueger example is again instructive. If you raise the price of labor, people buy less of it, so minimum wage hikes must increase unemployment. And yet, from a contemporary NY Times article (http://bit.ly/5afSyk), we find this:

They [Card & Krueger] surveyed 400 fast food restaurants and found that
those in New Jersey actually added 2.5 workers after the minimum wage went
up. In Pennsylvania restaurants, meanwhile, payrolls shrank.

Why should bosses hire more workers if it's more expensive to do so? The
two economists speculate that any fast-food restaurant typically operates
with a couple of vacancies it can't fill because it doesn't pay enough.

"If you raise the minimum a little," said Professor Card, "teens who are
sitting [at] home go out looking for jobs."

Apparently, these restaurant managers are too stupid to realize they're allowed to pay above the current minimum wage, thereby getting those lazy teens off their couches to fill the vacancies without a minimum wage hike. Truly, it boggles the mind.)
Keep in mind that the Dmoz idea was just something I invented on the spot and may or may not be at all useful. An old bookmark I have is this from a few years back:

http://seoblackhat.com/2007/02/21/online-business-niches/

However, they're hardly niches and would be thoroughly dominated by MFA stuff already with little room to drive in a wedge. You could however pick a few of those, do keyword research on each and then pick a three-word keyphrase from that wider list to think about and focus on? I wouldn't bother going after a single keyword or even two-word phrase as the competition will be too fierce.

Happy to trade emails if you want to bounce any ideas off me. Can't promise anything useful or insightful, but hey, it's free to try! My background is 12+ years web development (backend and frontend) with side projects in forum/community, some passive content sites geared around AdSense plus bigger ideas that I struggle to find time to work on.
How To Get Court Reporting Jobs?
Do you know that there are lot of openings available in the court reporting jobs? Do you know that the competition level for court reporting jobs is relatively less as not many people are aware of the earning potential of these jobs? Do you know that court reporting jobs have better job security than many other careers? Yes,
I wonder: if the team of web site caretakers gets together several times a year, looks at the web pages, sometimes decides to change it, sometimes not -- is it legal enough to put the current copyright?

Or, coming from the other side: one could put forward an argument that the contents of a page is regenerated every time anyway (definitely regenerated at the client, and often regenerated on the server as well). I wonder if this argument holds water, I am not a lawyer in any way.
I think this amounts to something like (c) Current. I do not think it is legal! But maybe there is a way?
The article tried to make it about lifestyle choices, but it also mentioned the economic necessities. What I said is that I think the economic necessity is the bigger factor by far here. It is almost zynic to turn it into "women's liberation" when what it really shows is that people are struggling much harder economically than they used to.

Liberation would be to give people a choice. In fact, if the women's jobs were so great, they would probably be able to afford a nanny? Certainly the "academic women" should be able to afford it (the ones who are most likely to want to work according to the article)? If it wasn't about money, perhaps the women could volunteer in a part time job while kids are at school to get their fulfilment? Honestly, I think that is a bit of bullshit - how many people really want to work, in non-creative professions?

I don't know how much a nanny costs, but as long as the women's job pays more than a nanny earns, they should be OK? Certainly the academic ones should earn more than an nanny. Also, nannys can be pooled (they can take care of several kids at the same time) - granted, might as well send the kids to school, but why should the tax payer have to pay?

I have grown up in Germany and still live here. Maybe I come from an atypical family, but so far I have not had the impression that "Kids/Cooking/Church" is what determines our lives. That is just sensationalist writing for the newspaper.

As for the game console, it seems to me that from a certain age, kids can entertain themselves. Why should they have to stick around at school all day passively digesting input? Probably kids have even more ideas on how to spend their time than adults. Obviously I would consider the game console to only be a last resort - probably still better for the kid's imagination than school, though. But as you said, if it is all just about "locking up the kids", why shouldn't the game console be adequate?

As it happens, I went to the public library a lot as a kid, as I also grew up without parents permanently being available. Just saying. I found my way to the library and back all by myself, too.
I'm not disagreeing with what you say, but I think it's a stretch to interpret that as a threat.

I also think that if a threat is determined to be a misinterpreted joke, then the government should stop wasting time and money investigating it.

Suppose someone says something like:
"The party is really gonna blow up" or "The roof will be on fire!" Are these threats? What if some paranoid idiot reports one as a threat--should the person that wrote it be fined or prosecuted because it wasted police time? The authorities repeatedly show themselves to be morons...is it okay to rely on their discretion?

These are things I think society needs to start talking about.
Writing: Why Bother?
Facebook, AT&T play fast and loose with user authentication
Those are good points... It's got a bad headline but the article goes into decent depth.
Having some knowledge of practical shareware economics, this seems to me to neglect that the 100th most popular Mac shareware app will have significant revenue next year barring black swans or the programmer removing it from the market, but the 1000th most popular iPhone app is at the mercy of a hideous sales trajectory.

The main drivers of sales in shareware all get better with age, which is the exact opposite of the main drivers of sales in iPhone apps.
OTOH we occasionally read the story: Terrorist posted comments on Twitter feed before smuggling bomb onto plane.

In a way, it's our fault (us being the public). When we demand childishly that our security systems be comprehensive and infallible enough to catch every single would-be attacker, we inevitably end up catching a bunch of false positives in the net as well.
I don't play a lot of chess, but it seems like there are more intermediate goals in go, but they're also more nebulous. Gaining center influence, threatening an opponent's weak group, cutting an opposing group into two groups, defending your own territory, making eyes, and reducing your opponent's territory are all important goals.

The best moves are ones that further two or more of these at the same time; it's very easy to lose if you're only concerned about one at a time.
Is Google.cn A Communist Chinese Company?
Sounds like the eventual goal of the Reprap project. "RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer" - See http://reprap.org/ for more info.
And the main reason why we want to divide hours, is that we want to make beautiful clock faces.

The software I use for logging hours uses decimal fractions for minutes. Also, neither bc nor python has a reasonable syntax for summing 0:23 + 1:50.
Blipr: The Story of an iPhone App (Failure)
This was a great article! Thanks for posting.

I noticed a bit of this went I was visiting the ruins of Pompeii. Many stray dogs were waiting by the food court area but there were a few that followed us for the entire day. I'm not sure why they chose over everyone else but they did end up with some food.

It's possible that the strays that chose to follow us may not be allowed into the food court by the other dogs.
Why Subversion Still Beats Git
New home loans up 1,600pc in Shanghai