skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think math is actually one area where you can apply similar techniques. Not sure if it can be compared to the author's technique, but take a look at this http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-develop-a-mindset...
Personal Development Lessons - Kung Fu Panda Style
>the expected price of a bundle is always less than the sum of the prices of the individual things

This also goes for viewers though. If in order to watch the 4 events that I want I have to buy 2 separate bundles then the bundled price of those 4 events, for me, is greater.
The One Skill You Need To Master To Succeed And Grow As A Developer
I'll go further: all economic systems are based on greed and corruption because those are parts of human nature. The question is how to you harness the former and limit the latter. We seem to do a very good job with both when compared to the rest of the world.

In terms of the bottom lines of economic growth, standards of living and employment, again, we do much better than the rest of the world (I'm not going to count the special case of China emerging from decades of communism, returning a billion plus people to the world market is a one time thing ... and their recent grow should be weighted against how much they lost economically during the previous period).
Yay! Since we know markets are efficient, this long-standing computer-science conjecture has been resolved! Now we can break crypto systems by simply setting up an appropriate marketplace!
The problem defined by the parent comment was "the app store is displaying information you aren't interested in". For the set of users that are not interested in "iBoobs", etc. the App Store no longer displays that information. I thought that by quoting it was clear that was the problem I was referring to, and not something as vague as "a poor app store".

You may disagree with the method, but to say this does not solve a problem for a set of users is just ignorant. The problem was doing X, and now it no longer does X. I don't see how anybody can not consider that at least a partial solution to the more general problem.
This seems like decent advice, but I think such a marketing oriented crowd would do well to hive off a new name for "doing things the right, honest way" that's not "SEO", which I think at this point has been more or less permanently tarnished with the image of a zero sum game where competition is for rankings rather than improving the product, and there is, to put it mildly, a lot of bullshit involved.
Isn't the whole point of vendor lock-in to establish it and then sell based on it?
I'm one of the "lucky ones". I never studied, hardly went to lectures during my courses and had A's all through school to postgraduate level.

It's not a good thing.

I had no work ethic. Everything came too easy, and never having to work for anything made me lazy.

Luckily I found things that I loved and became experts at them (outside of my course) to keep me from boredom. Then I decided to start my own business, and I've never looked back. I work because I love it, I research because I love it, and know more now than I ever thought possible.

Oh how I wish someone had of introduced me to a challenge ten years earlier and the amazing things that happen when you work hard at something you love.
I agree completely. Sites like Mahalo and Scribd are just wrapping up content and duping people into clicking through SEO to their site, and then clicking on adSense adverts to get what they really wanted in the first place.

There's a reverse incentive at work there - they have no incentive to provide a better user experience, since then, users would get what they want, and wouldn't need to click on the ads.

Google could, and definitely should IMHO detect that user behaviour, and penalize sites for it. For example:

* If a user clicks on a natural search listing
* If that same user quickly clicks on an adSense advert at the site
* We can assume that the landing page was bad quality
* Now penalize them either by not paying the adsense, or
reduce their ranking for that page.

If you have a valuable site, Google should only be there to provide you new users, not all your users.

I think the quote about Google being the frontpage to stackoverflow is pretty ridiculous personally.
That's a prejudice that goes back to Plato.
EU data protection supervisor criticises ACTA for insufficient privacy
See also: "The two party swindle": http://lesswrong.com/lw/mg/the_twoparty_swindle/

The left vs. right spiel is nothing but a simple exploitation of the human tendency to not think about actual facts when a simple (and convenient) explanation seems readily available.
I think one of the underlying problems is the fact that economics gets described with such loaded phrases as greed and corruption. such thinking, as if parts of human nature are easily described as "bad" or "good", is what leads to much of the harmful meddling to begin with. it makes it much easier to get confused between intended ends and actual effects. basically, economic problems aren't ethical ones, even though they can cause ethical problems.
You can't handle the truth.
phone (the bottle)

In my analogy, the bottle would have been an application. The App Store (the restaurant) contains applications (the alcohol), not the phone. The phone would be, I suppose, the "world". After all, if you abandon that phone, the rules of that world do not apply.

The analogy strains at this point anyway: In my jurisdiction, and most others that I've lived, restaurants by law only sell alcohol in open containers, which you can only consume on site. You can't take it home with you. I know it's not the same everywhere, but it's hard to draw a consistent analogy when the thing being analogized to doesn't behave the same way everywhere.

On the other hand, maybe that is apt.
I don't like casinos much either, but I wouldn't mind owning one. The preferred shares in a profitable company shows the usual skilled negotiating that Buffet uses to get large pieces of large companies in deals with a high margin of safety. Here, he gets a solid dividend on his investment with the possibility of upside. The problem that Berkshire Hathaway have is size : they are running out of profitable places to invest $5 billion dollars. Their primary responsibility is to invest well for their shareholders, so that's what they are doing.

The parable is designed to highlight the folly of having 25% of your GDP devoted to what is essentially gambling. I don't think the story is weakened by the author having invested money in one of the 'casinos'.
>being less likely to succeed

More likely in their being less likely to succeed as big and as quick as the investors would prefer.

Also, from what I have read (mostly on HN), many VCs tend to be pretty control-freakish who often play-off founders against each other, which they can't do without co-founders.
How smartphones are bogging down some wireless carriers
>If you are searching for a narrow topic, page 1-2 is WP and WP copies.

It would be good to have a "remove all pages with Wikipedia content" button on searches. Sometimes it seems half the results are simply Wikipedia copies.
At the time -- this was like 5-7 years ago -- I wasn't terribly interested in startups and doing school work or hanging out with my friends probably seemed like a better use of my time. I actually solved a lot of that problem on a later project where I needed to write parsers for the log formats of a bunch of IM/IRC clients, but now I really am not interested in getting reminders about who I haven't talked to.

What this sort of thing does really bring home for me is that in terms of trying to do a startup through y-combinator I should probably ignore whether I believe there is a market for something as long as I think some people would find it useful.
Expert Profiles: Jez Liberty Sees Vast Automated Trading Potential
Expert Profiles gives Automated and Algorithmic trading system developers and theorists a chance to introduce us to their concepts and strategies.

Our expert featured in this edition of Expert Profiles is Jez Liberty.
Exactly. Sometimes you have to stare a formula for hours and after tons of practice to achieve comprehension.
World's First Junctionless Transistor Could Revolutionize Chip Industry
Life Among the 'Yakkity Yaks'
From the linked article:

>It’s a collection of fuel cells – skinny batteries – that use oxygen and fuel to create electricity with no emissions.

Fuel cells are the building blocks of the Bloom Box. They’re made of sand that is baked into diskette-sized ceramic squares and painted with green and black ink. Each fuel cell has the potential to power one light bulb. The fuel cells are stacked into brick-sized towers sandwiched with metal alloy plates.

The fuel cell stacks are housed in a refrigerator-sized unit – the Bloom Box. Oxygen is drawn into one side of the unit, and fuel (fossil-fuel, bio-fuel, or even solar power can be used) is fed into the other side. The two combine within the cell and produce a chemical reaction that creates energy with no burning, no combustion, and no power lines.

So you feed in fuel and oxygen and it outputs electricity. Wow!?!

How do they get away with claiming there are no emissions if you're using fossil fuel to power it? As presented here it smacks of fraud.
Actually, pretty savvy.

Google gets paid for the scraped site because of ad impressions and possible clicks.

Google does not get paid for running an informative blog, in fact it's a cost to them.

Google cares about getting paid.
Unfortunately it applies only to below-highschool math

> Math provides models; understand their relationships and apply them to real-world objects.

Advanced Math like analysis or algebra can be very abstract and sharp, you can't easily find any real-world reference or grab your existing experience. To me, math is like twisting your ideas, blend your thoughts and blow your mind. It's painful but fun :)
Storing Energy on Paper and Cloth
I was amazed as well...but moreso infuriated. I was at a friend's place when I realized the game was starting soon and flipped to NBC. We watched about 20 minutes of skiing and figure skating before concluding that it couldn't be on that station. (That realization took so long solely because we thought it impossible for them not to air the USA/Canada hockey game. After all, we're in America and hockey is the most popular winter sport over here; it'd be inane not to air that game.)

It being really cold and my being a poor college student, I decided to just resign myself to my fate and asked my dad to send me score updates via text.

The scores were inspiring enough-- we were keeping pace with the Canadians in hockey. But then Dad starts throwing in extras like "they're wearing 1980 throwback uniforms," "our goalie is having the game of his life," "huge fight at the end of the 2nd." Fuck fuck fuck. How am I missing this? Then he drops the bomb: "This is the best game I've seen since 1980." Fuuuuck!

Right then in the middle of watching Family Guy on Fox with everyone else, on Taco Night of all nights, I just jumped up, explained I couldn't just sit there, and left. I powerwalked down to the near-campus area and walked up and down the street till I found somewhere with the game on (which took a long while) and-- no joke-- stood outside in the freezing cold on the phone with my dad through the entirety of the third.

Christ, it was so worth it.
That's my default position on something like this. I'm waiting for someone who knows what they're talking about to say "yeah, this does what it says on the tin."
Determination is intelligent stubbornness. Stubbornness by itself is how many startups run into the ground - as PG has noted, most startups change direction at least once after they get started.
In an ideal world perfectly healthy and tasty food would materialize in front of us whenever we were hungry :)

In an ideal world sentences are never the most intelligent ones. Being able to directly get food from those who produce it removes some obstacles (like maintaining the technology for safe distribution) but adds others. For one ecnonomies of scale won't come to play. And I would think that's a rather big thing. At least if we want to maintain the status quo. I don't know whether feeding seven billion people with local food is possible. I don't think it is.
The best bug tracking system. Don’t raise bugs, write an automated test
Useful discussion, with contributions from xiph.org. I found it via http://lwn.net/Articles/375717/ (also a decent discussion of the FSF appeal to Google).
Plans for '.xxx' porn net domain revived
The Condom Is…
Buffet was never a director at Goldman.

Thanks for the catch. See my edit above for more.

Berkshire did not loan the $5 billion and receive the options until well after the financial mess...

This is effectively wrong, since the TARP funds were issued after the investment. See the link at the edit above.
Fiction can be used as propaganda, but contrast fictional evidence with fictional insight:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1lw/fictional_evidence_vs_fictional_...
One week without Google
provisional patents only cost a couple hundred.
With 120 possible combinations, you will need about 10.000 users. Good luck.
Am I supposed to like rhetoric?
Your interpretation is at odds to how I understood the article. From what I read he appears to say he does absolutely nothing for a course that is based on a final exam - maybe attending lectures, not sure - and then with merely a couple of hours of study of a textbook is able to ace the exam.

This rather suggest that the exams are badly written if they rely merely on retention of knowledge.
This is the source of the "ideas aren't important" and/or "ideas are a dime-a-dozen" and/or "idea guys are worthless" mindset(s).

The trick is to be able to differentiate between movements (in the phrasing of Weinberg's post) and powder kegs/empires. Without established idea guy cred (think Jobs, Bezos, et al) nobody's going to believe you have that ability-- at least not on the magnitude you believe yourself to have it. They'll tell you "everybody has ideas" or "I have tons of ideas too" or whatever. No... everybody has movement ideas. Just you wait. :)
Lawyer costs, though not compulsory, quickly push that up tenfold (we just filed a patent - not for software though)
* A couple of physics text books I bought months ago are still sat on my desk 50% finished because I lost interest in the ending.*

eh, you didn't miss much. turns out the zirconium did it.
One Born Every Minute (about Backupify)
Are special glasses needed for regular computer users?
How did it work - you just read the book once and you knew the material? What subjects?

I also never studied hard for, say, maths at school. But the fact is, I always voluntarily did my maths homework. Not that it took me long, but still.
I don't think technology has anything to do with it though: the reasons PG and others give for having more than one person are almost all 'human' issues, which probably don't change much whether you're starting a taco stand or trying to create 'the next Microsoft/Google/Facebook/whatever'.

It seems sort of pointless to spend too much time worrying about it though; if you don't have anyone to work with, you have to either choose to go it alone or to not make an attempt. Why dither about something you can't change?
My greatest struggles in maths were in remembering formulae and reproducing proofs. Generally I'd have to start from basics to reproduce formulae so I could apply them to a problem - this probably meant better understanding of the derivation and application but at the cost of a lot of exam time.

I can see how memorisation techniques would have helped me to improve my exam scores in some exams even though at Uni in some modules I came close to 100% scores.
To me too, it seems attention is of more importance here. It seems the author has a degree in linguistics (http://www.esmerel.com/wagons/ann/), so I won't dismiss this theory easily, but the lack of any citations or references in the submitted page looks suspicious.
Microsoft vs. Google: The empire strikes back
Duracell AAA Batteries » Battery Duracell
Virtualization With VirtualBox 3.1.x On A Headless Debian Lenny Server
>".xxx is an inherently dangerous idea with no real purpose," said Larry Flynt, the founder and publisher of Hustler magazine, at the time. "Only if it becomes a tool of censorship will it achieve its goal of preventing access to adult content by minors".

It's a tool of censorship. That's the point. Just like not selling pornography to minors is a tool of censorship.
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that comment reveals how deeply flawed math instruction is. math is not fundamentally different from other subjects and yes this technique does work for math. I know because i had a differential equations exam friday that I hadn't opened the book on until ~5 hours before the exam.

math should be taught as a natural web of ideas that are intimately connected because that's what it is even more so than any other subject. forget a formula? if you understand the topic you can re-derive it trivially. I've taken this philosophy to such an extreme that I often forget basic facts about manipulation because i know i can just figure it out with a quick proof if need be. but hardly anyone is taught this way. since we never learn to think critically about the methods we're learning from a young age we certainly can't suddenly start in college.

this is the main reason I believe there's such a heavy washout rate in higher math. all of a sudden you have to think critically about what you're actually doing with those symbols on the page and its just an extreme shock because it's literally the first time for many people. this is echoed in A Mathematician's Lament (great read BTW) where the author says that (para) kids who thought they were good at math suddenly discover they were only good at following directions.
Step by step guide on how to publish a book (how we made xkcd: volume 0)
I mean, the interviews are good and all, but really, it is just a substitute for white noise so I have something to listen to while working. SO podcast fills the same void.
Answering Soshnikov’s quiz
I still wonder: did this story make you think "hm, I wonder if trading derivatives is just like gambling in the casino", or did it make you think "yeah, those roothless traders were just gambling, I knew it"?
I think it's hard to criticize the man on those grounds since he has pledged to give the "bulk of his fortune" to the Gates Foundation. That's arguably more productive than donating money to the government.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06...
Sometimes yesterday's future is coming to us in strange ways.

It's the future, alright, but not how we imagined it to be.
OO.o Calc sort-of compares with Excel 2003, i.e. it's not quite as good but given the price (free) and the level at which most people make and use spreadsheets, it's Good Enough.

However, it seems pretty clear from the Excel / Calc comparison video that Excel has moved far ahead in power (watching it, I noticed that they seem to have fixed a lot of the pain points I currently have with Excel '03) whereas Calc is still stalled.

Disclosure: I use XP/Office 2003 at work and Ubuntu / OO.o at home.
I'll go even further: all economic systems are based on greed, of which corruption is a manifestation, and fear. Those are the two basic emotional responses to finance, and the basic question is how do you not fall prey to mental errors because of them. And in too many cases, people use numeracy to force others into making mental errors because of those two basic human emotions, not to mitigate against them. I've started an open blog at financialpreparedness.com to rant and rave about this and other sorts of things.
If you're going to say something, just say it.

Unless it's not true, in which case you wouldn't want to, because that would be libel.
Why I Closed My Service Business to Start an Internet-Based Business
More precisely, the entropy of real world pictures is considerably lower than the entropy of all pictures (the vast majority of pictures are static).
The "(fossil-fuel, bio-fuel, or even solar power can be used) " section strikes me as odd ... how on earth can you power a fuel cell with solar power?
How to take screenshots on an Android Phone
Advice to CTO Founders: Don't Let Business Kill the Business
I have a pair of Gunnar Optiks (http://www.gunnars.com/) that I LOVE.

I used to have ridiculous eye strain when staring at the computer screen for hours, but after getting a pair it's all but gone away. Like many here, I spend all day in front of a computer programming. Now I can't go anywhere I'll be using a computer for a prolonged period of time without them. When I bought them I thought they were a bit of a gimmick that worked mostly on the placebo effect, but after using them for close to a year, I can honestly say they have made a great impact on my ability to do work. I'd highly recommend that anyone who hasn't and has issues with eye strain give them a try.

Note, I do not work with Gunnar, nor am I associated with them in any way shape or form other than being a happy consumer.
I think you really have to build SEO into any business, regardless of what type. And it doesn't have to compromise anything about the user experience.

As an example, my current project is an online tutoring site. There are literally thousands of online tutoring sites out there, and dozens of ones that are good enough to rank well on Google. So even though the thing I'm building is head and shoulders above what's out there today, nobody will ever know about it if it's not ranking well for something like "online spanish tutoring" or "learn spanish online".

With that in mind, it's fundamentally important to the success of my business that SEO is baked in from the start. The tutor profile URLs need to be simple vanity ones that people are proud to give out via Twitter, on a blog entry, their school's homepage, or even scribbled onto the back of a business card. The browse results in the marketplace need to have good titles and meta descriptions so that people will actually want to click them if they show up in a Google search. We need to offer a way for existing Spanish Schools to embed a co-branded version of our site into theirs if they want.

There are dozens of architectural and business decisions that stem directly from SEO. It's not something that you can tack on at the end and hope for the best.

And if you look carefully at the above, you might notice that each of those things above actually improve the user experience in some way.
Yea, because all testers are capable of writing software tests and because all bugs warrant the effort to write a test...

Not sure what this is doing on HN, really.
...with STM thrown inside (an in-memory DB?)
But how do you read a textbook in one hour?
Partici-pants
I'm working through some wrist/hand issues now, and I've found that the biggest key in prevention/healing is taking breaks.

Find some free software that will time your computer usage (I use Time Out for Mac) and force you take 10-minute breaks every 30-45 minutes or so. I also take 15-second breaks every 10 minutes, which may sound pointless, but more than anything it's just a safety net to keep me from tensing up for too long a period of time.

As for external keyboards, if you can afford it, I suggest investing in a Kinesis Advantage (~$300).