skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article makes some interesting points but there seems to be a flawed use of statistics. Particularly the part about "the percentage likelihood that a bottom 10 percenter will ever make it to the top 10 percent. For 99 out of 100 people, rags never lead to riches." Well, what would you expect? There's going to be a pure mathematical limit to that sort of movement, nevermind issues of income mobility.

To take an absurd example, say there's a 50/50 chance of going from rags to riches. That would mean half of the bottom 10%, 5% of the population would move up to the top 10% of the population. And somehow the middle 80% don't manage that feat. You would expect the probability of going from the bottom to the very top would be low. Instead, the article tries to paint a negative picture. It points out there's a 32% chance a child born in the bottom 10% will stay in the bottom 10%, when you could just as well point out that child has a 68% chance of moving out of the bottom 10%. Bringing in statistics about how many of them move from that percentile to the highest percentile obscures rather than clarifies the issue of income mobility.

Then there's his universal welfare idea, which at $250,000 per person and a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation would only cost about 56 trillion dollars. Plus another 2 trillion or so per year with population growth.

That said it's worth reading, the “individual development accounts” idea is definitely interesting.
Ancient tribal language becomes extinct as last speaker dies
Erin didn't see it coming? Ba-dump-bump. But seriously, I stopped reading his blog at the first poly post.
Also, to be far, they don't actually separate Xbox earnings from, say, WinMo earnings. Xbox probably dominates, but it is hard to infer exactly how profitable they were.
I wonder if one can ask his electric company to upgrade his meter?
This is often seen with artists who experience apparent overnight success with break out material. When you look them up on wikipedia, you find that they've actually been slugging it out in their industry for many years.

Of course that's not always the case, sometimes they really did just get incredibly lucky. But most often, this type of success comes with tenacity, drive, and talent. Not simply talent, and not simply luck.

We miss the long starting tail that came before the meteoric rise. Unfortunately some people aren't wise to this and think that their luck is somehow worse than everyone else's.
Sure, a lot of people do not profile and optimize, but has anyone considered the environmental aspects of this? Faster code (as a result of profiling an compilation to C++ and then to machine code) = much closer to the metal, which means more efficiency and less wasted electricity and more space in a rack somewhere.
Well I own a 360 and a PS3. PS3 online is free, 360 is not. The differences aren't big enough for me to think that 35-50 bucks a year is worth it.

And note, most non-MMORPGs games on PC have free online.
Very much so. I've been going through The Book[1] trying to work out some of the calculations using clojure as an exercise in learning both topics. Baseball has an incredibly rich data and deep knowledge ecosystem that is fascinating (and sometimes profitable, just ask Nate Silver).

At my day job[2] we don't do much in the way of advanced analytics, but it's on the wishlist. I'm veering into shameless plug territory now, but if you are interested in this stuff, please check out our Saber blog[3]. Also if you are a smart dev, come work with us :)

[1] http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/

[2] http://www.sbnation.com/

[3] http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/
you are quite right. it looks totally different to when i first checked it, so yes, ignore me.
Good deal, thanks for the update. The parent's article wasn't terribly clear. :)
right now, we could use between 100k 1MM queries/day... if we had enough capital, we'd love to find a way to gather and product-ize the data. we think there are a lot of people who could use it, but that's a lot of work and huge up-front cost

we're in the position of not needing enough volume to build our own but not having enough revenue to afford to license a full index either.
Thompson's Backdoor
Stupid scientists with all their proofs of concepts. I want a better window manager RIGHT NOW.
Highway Handbook: Why We Speed
Meta-HN: It really annoys me when...
It really annoys me when I write a comment, and then someone responds, and I can't comment on their comment. I remember a thread a while back from PG explaining that this sort of back-and-forth had been removed because it leads to low-quality content, but I think it's a dumb feature.

Congratulations... you have prevented some meaningless back and forth conversations at the expense of making people want to comment less. Every time I can't respond to a comment on one of my comments, it makes me question why I'm even commenting at all. I'm in this for the conversation!

I would like to contribute to HN, but I can't. The whole idea is just a bad hack. Reddit does it much better by hiding comments below a threshold, rather than preventing contribution.
Any idea what size grids the contest is actually using or at least within what order of magnitude? The graphic used seems to show a square grid with a size of around 15-20 on a side.
Why I Caved, Bought Cable TV, And Gave Up On My 'Hulu Household'
"Peak Population": US has Most Centenarians (Infographics)
Every time I criticize Google I get downmoded, but this has to be said:

Google needs to be scrutinized and not any less than Microsoft was. This obviously applies to anti-trust, but also to user's privacy and publicity rights - something that was never a problem with Microsoft due to different nature of their business.

For example, if you are being defamed on Youtube, what kind of recourse do you have? You could take the long route of finding the culprit and suing them, but if the video is still up there the damage would continue to happen every day. Unless pressure is applied to Google to handle such situation they won't do anything because there is absolutely no financial motive for them.
That's $52k per year, which is comfortably middle to upper-middle class in much of America. If that was in the Bay or NYC then it's low, but if it was in Omaha or Des Moines it's a good salary for an entry level dev.
Hi Dusty do you have an email address?
The point of the article was that creating a sufficiently powerful language, that doesn't offer easy ways[1] of extending the syntax, does not warrant the criticism that the language has 'too much syntax'. If anything, it demonstrates the power of being able to create syntax. I don't understand how your comment relates to that point.

[1] Of course you can "do it all" in any Turing-complete language, but theoretical possibilities are often much less interesting than practical impossibilities. In Python or Java, creating new syntax is so hard it might as well not be possible.
Taleb Says ‘Every Human’ Should Short U.S. Treasuries
"Work for free or for full price. Never for cheap."
gotta love the NYT completely taking things out of context like a tabloid.

"My "nifty trick" comment to RWW wasn't meant to be negative or belittling of HipHop PHP in any way. Check the comments http://bit.ly/cH1qyV @rasmus
It's just a delay before the comment link appears. Come back in a few minutes. (The delay depends on how deeply nested the conversation is.) I think this sort of cooling-off period is a reasonable compromise. Coming back in five minutes should not impede a thoughtful conversation that's important to you. Meanwhile, it (hopefully) prevents some knee-jerk reactions or two-person threadjackings that are common on a lot of other sites.
Peak Oil Supply vs Peak Oil Demand: 2020 vs 2010
I don't have a lot of experience programming, at least not professionally. I tend to hack a lot of quick scripts together, and have recently started working on some larger projects.

Anyway, I figured it would be worth giving this a shot. I went on Craigslist, browsed through the gigs, and picked one that looked promising. I made a quick estimate of my time, doubled it, and sent off an email to him. 6 sentences, and I used the word "simple" in 2 of them, and I made sure to use a "indifferent" attitude. The lister got back to me within 15 minutes saying that my price was "too much", that he had been quoted prices for less than a third of that. And then he proceeded to give me his number, and told me to call him and discuss what needed to be done for the project.

Not that it means anything, but the 20 minutes I spent looking at craigslist during my lunch break due to this post seem to have been well worth it (although, admittedly, I barely skimmed the actual post, and just read the comments here in detail).
I've noticed a couple of teams--like the mid-00's Packers and Seahawks--where it didn't seem to actually matter who their running back was. Even their third and fourth string backs would perform well. This is when I started to suspect that a team's blocking--the offensive line and fullback--made more of a difference to the running game than the running back. Not that you don't need a good running back, but that the ability to run fast enough and go through the holes created by the blockers are dime-a-dozen type talents and it's not difficult to find someone to fit in that role.

If this is true, than probably the single most important thing that actually hinges on the running back himself is fumble rate. (On the other hand, Adrian Peterson seems like one of the rare running backs whose actual talent extends beyond, say, an Ahman Green or Shaun Alexander.)
Oh, sorry about that -- he used to have all of it up there last I looked through it. Or maybe that was because we were students and it was at a course page rather than his personal page.
That may be true of IBM today, but I’m not so sure it’s true of IBM 15 or 20 years ago, which is, I think, what you were trying to make your point about, above. For decades, IBM made more than half of all the CPUs in the world, and really had by a considerable margin the most R&D of any tech company, including all kinds of extremely forward-looking “basic research” type stuff. More recently, they’ve switched to a much more services/consulting “solve particular companies’ problems one at a time” type approach, and correspondingly sold off their PC business, among other consumer-oriented parts of the company, and ditched a lot of the most pure academic research. But that’s only been after they stopped being the dominant computer maker.

Anyway, I think you could possibly be right; I just think you need a better example than IBM. :-)
Hiya. I just filled in some info in my profile, you can find it there.
Site that provides lists/rankings of startups..
hi..

trying to find out if there's a comprehensive list of startups.. a kind of digg for startups, that rates/ranks startups using various criteria..

i'e been looking/high/low with no luck!

thanks

tom
Interview with iRule Contest Finalist Kenrik Gyllkrans
I think he meant the content of the blog, not the technologies used to run the blog. Still, it's utter nonsense.
Asking the obvious, but I suppose you have also tried the Google webmasters tools? http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Thanks for blowing off steam. I think there are a lot of other users getting really annoyed at all the "hidden" features of HN. I know the first time I hit the nested comment delay it really ticked me off.

Quite frankly, it still does. The argument goes that a deeply nested comment must be less useful for the entire board and also highly emotional for those involved. Consequently the system, knowing more than you do and having an obligation to the community at large, gives you a "time out" period to rethink your reply.

Perhaps this assumption is true 90% of the time. The other 10% the two parties are getting to some really interesting bits of self-awareness and compromise. These are things that boards don't usually have and things that benefit the community as a whole greatly. Throwing that out because of the other examples doesn't make any sense at all to me.

This entire idea of twiddling with the behavior until HN is less and less intuitive is exactly opposite to what every UI book I've ever read says is a good idea. But perhaps all the books and experts are mistaken? Beats me.
Good point on the living will... Up until now I have just made every person close to me promise to pull the plug if it ever came to a situation like this. I'll look into that some more...
Yes. Used to run a college sports web site.

Statsheet.com in my opinion is the best sports stats site out there.
One drum I've been banging is that profiling PHP with XDebug is a lot more effort than it should be. If I'm on a headless web server, why do I have to transfer the massive cache grind files to my local machine?

Happily Facebook have an internal lightweight profiler they've open-sourced called XHProf:

http://mirror.facebook.net/facebook/xhprof/doc.html

It provides a web-based instant view of the results, and while it's not as extensive as XDebug, it's perfect for 95% of my investigations. Just a shame no one's ever heard of it!
This whole story is really very fascinating, although a few details seem a bit odd.

For example, the patient didn't answer the last question because.. he fell asleep? I would imagine if I was trapped inside my body and suddenly given a mechanism to communicate, I would be too excited to fall asleep.

Did they observe any signs of excitement that I would expect a person to feel in this situation? Increased heart rate or other brain activity? Did the man try to convey his own message using the new-found communication mechanism?

It almost sounds like they are communicating with some small ghost of the man's subconscious, something that can respond to basic queries and recall memories, but lacks what we would really consider a consciousness.
yes.. in fact one of my friends is working on a fantasy baseball engine http://sabrstats.com/
I'm interested. Where are you based?
Some day it will actually appear on github so we can all judge for ourselves.
This is actually ReadWriteWeb, being syndicated by the NYT. Here's the original:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rasmus-lerdorf-php-hiph...

The RWW version has the video that the NYT version mentions but does not include.
I too, like lhuang, am working on a project using sports analytics. It has to do with amateur sports versus his NFL sports.

Regarding the math aspect - I think prediction of performance or how certain teams/coaches affect different types of athletes is very interesting.
Interesting. Thanks for your thoughts
Grow Your Mind and Increase Focus Through Reading
Yes, you are absolutely correct. I was kind of thinking in terms of interaction but got it backward.

What I was trying to convey was that no matter how dedicated your loved ones are they're not going to be with you every minute of every day if you're apparently comatose. That means this poor guy has probably spent most of the last six years lying in a bed by himself with nothing going on around him...
I rely on safety in numbers!
It is amusingly typical of Rasmus that he included a long list of flaws in RWW's own website :-)
I've been wondering the same thing. But would it be so hard to detect? Presumably the information would have to be sent to some server sometime. While I personally don't really monitor outgoing traffic, I think some people do. So they should have noticed something by now?
Fresh news: Drone attacks being carried out with govt’s nod: Nawaz
seedtrackers.com but it is under development
Google rolls lots of stuff out in "BETA" to judge how users react which gives them feedback and lets them measure engagement.

MSFT does not do as good of a job in letting users have-at these projects, they've got such a huge array of interesting research projects underway (a whole new OS Kernel for one http://www.barrelfish.org/) that they do not seem to market whatsoever. . .
Waiting for the C# kit, but maybe I'll use it as a way to teach myself Python or Ruby. Seems like a fun exercise!!
People usually recommend greasemonkey for that. I've never bothered because like I said in the article, the backlash lasts 2-3 weeks and then the bar for that writer is much higher for them to be submitted. For instance, by Valentine's day, Andrew will be lucky if he can get one interview a week on the front page.
I'm a big fan of hacker labs/collectives like Saul's Squid Labs. Here are some others I know of:

Squid Labs (Bay Area): http://www.squid-labs.com/

Applied Minds (LA): http://www.appliedminds.com/

Syyn Labs (LA): http://syynlabs.com/

NYC Resistor (NYC): http://nycresistor.com

Any others?

Wouldn't medium-sized and large companies benefit a lot from having small but independent (free to hack on whatever they feel like) "skunk works" labs like these? I'm not sure if the research labs at Microsoft, IBM are equivalent.

The Synn Labs folk are cool hackers. They often have their interactive tech projects on display at Mindshare. If you're in LA, Mindshare (http://mindshare.la) is a monthly event that I highly recommend.
At my university they held Robocode contests http://robocode.sourceforge.net/

It was a fun way to learn programming.
Where is his proof? He has this whole elaborate theory of economics and inequality worked out, and not once does he present any proof.
The groan is because:

a) If you're familiar with them, you probably already know what to expect

b) If you don't like them, you don't want to see them

c) If you like them, you've already read it, and

d) If they've been on a lot recently, you can't use # of comments as a judge of quality - they might just be complaints about "Everything Seth Godin says is common sense" or "Jeff Atwood couldn't code his way out of a paper bag", and those are no fun to read.
The Three Minute Rule
Summary:

3-Minute Rule: what are users doing 3min before, after using your prod? reveals possible new features/mktg
Did the man try to convey his own message using the new-found communication mechanism?

If I understand correctly, he was given the means to convey "yes" by imagining himself playing tennis. The concept of "no" was encoded by the absence of "yes".

If he had wanted to send some message, like "tell my children I love them", or "I feel pain in my abdomen", how would he encode it?
I am interested in adding college and professional hockey stats to my site http://hockeybias.com. Please contact me if you are in a position to help me. Guy at hockeybias dot com
Why do we need a poll for this?

If HN users are interested in it, they will vote up the stories. If not, they won't.
Small point regarding the demo-- I love that it's open and really gives you a feel for the entire product, but you might want to consider making an editable, disposable session for each time someone logs in. For example, one of the assignments I saw was "testicle1", which I doubt you put in, and may put off potential users. Instead of controlling for that sort of input, I'd just have a default recurring demo screen that is editable but not saveable, and gets destroyed once you end your demo session.
Ask HN: Everyday things you do that seem like magic
With the hullabaloo surrounding the iPad launch, I've been thinking a lot about the gulf between us techies and the rest of the world in how we use and understand technology.

I vividly remember an incident from a few years ago when I showed a friend how to create Excel macros. Within twenty minutes he had automated a task that had taken him four hours every week. He practically fell off his chair with excitement. To me it was the simplest of hacks, but to him it was as if I had taught him a magical incantation. He really couldn't believe that a computer could do such a thing.

I didn't really understand his reaction, but it occurred to me recently that he just had no concept of a computer being programmable. To him, the software on his PC seemed as hard-wired as the buttons on his washing machine.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been talking to a lot of non-geeks and have been amazed at the gulf of understanding between us. As users, they don't have the first idea about what goes on inside the computer, but as a developer, I don't have the first idea what goes on inside them. It felt like one of those moments when you learn enough to realise that you really don't know anything.

What have you done recently that has blown a non-geek's mind?
The government has your baby's DNA
Psychics, 11:11, and "creating your own reality" did it for me. Doesn't he realize that when he bans people from his forum, he's only banning a part of himself!?
InfoQ: Adam Wiggins on Heroku
I could imagine this becoming part of a regimen for "physical" therapy. Also makes me wonder about others who have had the plug pulled...
YouTube vs MySpace Growth: No Contest (2006)
I think this is interesting, because it shows that even the fastest growing sites took quite some time to get large.

A lot of people might have given up on YouTube or MySpace in the very earliest months.
This seems like a rediscovery of Norman's writings on mental models:

http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/mental_models...
That's a good point and definitely going on the to-do list.
As I remember it, he was a programmer and she was a secretary when they met. She moved on to publishing a vegan newsletter, then became a (rather successful from the sounds of it) telephone psychic from there.

(I've read him from near the beginning, keeping the wheat and discarding the chaff.)
Molecular secrets of the iron-plated snail
Another issue with Peterson is that his yards per attempt have steadily declined:
2007 - 5.6 ypa (2nd among backs)
2008 - 4.8 ypa (5th among backs)
2009 - 4.4 ypa (24th among backs)

In the playoffs this year he really declined (3.6 per attempt)

Source: ESPN ( To qualify, a player must have at least 6.25 attempts per team's games played)
Perfect byline: Dick Brass.
Google might be flagging your blog for selling links. Under the "Sponsor" area is an ad with live (and not nofollowed) links. Here's what google says:

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

Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as: * Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag * Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
This will be one of the questions that will always follow Barry Sanders. Can you imagine him behind, say, Emmitt Smith's line? Or would hit have mattered, given Sanders style of running (unbelievable field vision, lateral movements)?
The green debate goes tribal
I'd disagree. While the story itself was worthwhile, the last thing we need is more "you create your own universe (literally)" posts on HN. If this site becomes a place where "The Secret" is given any credence, it's going to go downhill in a hurry.

For example:
"Reiterating: Other people are only projections of your own consciousness. If you are not a friend to everyone then you are not a friend to yourself."

This is just plain stupid. I can't say it any plainer. I hate to Godwin this discussion, but Hitler killing millions of Jews was not a projection of myself, and if I was alive during that time-period, I sure as hell wouldn't have been a friend to Hitler.

I'm with him that you should look for how you can contribute, rather than take (positive sum game vs. zero sum game), but those lessons can be taught without the "metaphysics" and bullshit.

Last Edit: And finally, in case you don't buy into that stuff either, but think it's basically harmless, review the case of the now arrested James Arthur Ray:
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20341429,00.html
Here's a link to the transcript in a (hopefully) easier to read format: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0ATkBKEXbo6n8ZGdrNzhoM2dfND...