skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pretty sure that the webcomic is flawed.

In the last panel the center head says "Yes. I was lying." A head that always tells the truth would never say this because they weren't lying before and wouldn't lie about not lying. Conversely, a lying head would lie about lying and say that they weren't lying. Thus, the center head must be the random one. However, in the first panel both the right and the left heads agree that the hero may only ask one question. Since the right and left are both either truth-telling or a liar they cannot agree with each other.

Thus, the puzzle is flawed and probably just a joke.
Lumping the US and UK together in the context of debt/gdp is misleading. The UK does, as the article suggests, have a nearly 400% debt/gdp ratio, but the US is "only" 95% debt/gdp.
If Robot trucks saved 1 life per year, they would be killing people every week (assuming they replaced all trucks). Every week you would have reports about faulty software, potential hacks and such. It would be massive scares.

There are lots of places where lives are lost because a certain narrative is something that the public can swallow. You could spend billions of virtually useless aviation security dollars to save many lives. How would the public react to 50 terrorism deaths, twice a decade?
Riiight. And suppose you want them to compete with any other unwashed commoner that decides to make his/her own tools for HTML 5. I see you have never been to business school.
Change the id= parameter to get the rest of the slides (where you start is arbitrary; all the hosts serve all the pages, but each host only has a pointer to one other host.)
Hey Josh, I remember meeting you at the NYC HN Meetup, glad to see goodcrush is coming along nicely
I think this has to do with how the page handles more friends and not how it handles the actual chat. There is probably a way to fix this... I'll have to look at the code later.
Homemade CPU – from scratch
(Capital-W) Work is what we have considered for years: your boss tells you to do something, you do it, and you get paid. By contrast, (little-w) work is motivated by inherent interest and generally unpaid. Think of the difference between an Encyclopedia Britannica editor doing Work, and a Wikipedia editor doing work during spare hours. Big Work drives the economy; little work drives the Internet. Big Work builds skyscrapers; little work generates a half million fanfiction stories about Harry Potter.
Two significant changes that reduced the crime rate were the reduction of lead in the environment (lead exposure creates a number of changes in people which increase the odds of criminal behavior) and the widespread availability of abortion (unwanted children are more likely than the general public to become criminals).

The second is discussed in Freakinomics and the first was discussed in a follow-up article by the same authors. I've listed them in the order I did because my memory says that reductions in lead are believed to have had a greater impact on crime rates than increased abortions.
Given the government is funding the display they may not be able to reveal any further details.
Josh, check out http://prospectandmeeting.com/, the Brown equivalent.
news: Scientists Discover That People Think That Things That They Think Are Good Are Good.
Sure, but those were uncommon circumstances. I'm not denying that Google deserves a ton of shit for this, but I don't think it's the kind of thing that had much of a chance of negatively affecting the average user.
At the risk of sounding snobbish, brains turn me on way more than bodies. Brains last, bodies go pretty quickly.

Maybe I'm just poorly reward-motivated, though. My wife and I effectively lived together for 3 years before getting married, and we both waited until marriage for sex.
They are making some attempts along those lines, which is interesting for a socialist government. There's a public-sector wage freeze, and significantly stepped-up attempts to go after tax evasion.

Fun fact: in 2008, the average Greek doctor reported less than €10,000 in income. If you were to make a demographic map of Athens based on official income data from tax returns, most of the wealthy suburbs would look like ghettos.
And one of the servers in the chain is not responding...
Windows Phone 7 Series In-Depth Demo
Microsoft’s Many Eyeballs and the Security Development Lifecycle
I'd never heard of the "Magic Move" cited by the parent comment so I looked it up and it's pretty neat: http://movies.apple.com/media/us/mac/iwork/keynote/2009/tour...
This is an interesting approach: . “What better way to learn the true potential of the world’s most expensive slot than to buy it.”
I'm always amazed at how easy it is to fall into this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story

Not saying you're wrong, but any studies or evidence to back this up?
Scientists discover the secret of ageing
Thank you all SOO much, great feedback!

@david, thanks for the link, heard about it when I was interviewed for the Brown Daily Herald - I like what they've done

@Dalgar - I can send you a summary if you'd like

@Danny - thanks man :D say what's up at the next one or feel free to drop by DPL

@patio - GREAT GREAT feedback, thank you SO much
Computing Invisibility
Gilt is brilliant. So are things like groupon/scoopst. Throw in woot as well. What other areas can this be applied to? The usual factors can include:

a) Email newsletter delivery

b) Scarcity of time

c) Discounted price

d) Possible exclusivity

e) Very very many : 1 (or a few)

f) Possible locational constraints involved

g) An incentive to invite others.
This is relatively solid data, actually. They used a fMRI to watch the blood flow (indicative of activity) in the "reward center(s)" of the brain with a higher incidence than without that 0.7 ratio.

* shrug * more proof that the super-thin look is horrible for both women AND men.
StackOverFlow provides structure and organization to the information. I've dug through enough email threads that ended at a dead-end to be able to say that the structure is welcome.

People tag their questions, while others vote on the questions and answers. Question titles are matched against the database when people enter new questions. Admins "close" duplicates, and stop trolling. The reputation "economy" provides a way to get an answer.

StackOverflow isn't perfect but it is a big step forward in organizing the information so that that the data can be searched more effectively.

http://stackoverflow.com/search

There are 500,000+ questions tagged. Some are great, some are not. Joel and Jeff don't provide either of these. We do!

Don't try this on a mailing list.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/101268/hidden-features-of...
Romancing London Escorts
Jobs Is Said to Assist With Book on His Life
Ask HN: How do you protect your IP in a startup?
Hopefully, the co-founders have completely vetted a person when adding members to the startup team. References, coding tests, thorough interview, etc. But what happens when they actually need to start working? You are probably handing them keys to the entire kingdom because you need them in all corners of the product when it is still small.

While there is always the legal route, I am looking for more practical lessons learned by people who have already gone through this. Without impeding a new person's passion to jump right in and contribute immediately, how have you protected your code from being downloaded and walking away?
Because of some weird need for backward compatibility here, the sdcard needs to be dos/vfat formatted so file perms can not be enforced. This makes USB mounting work on all OSes, but this means many apparently need the "can modify sdcard contents" perm, which is global for the entire sdcard. I think this is why apps can not be stored and run from the sdcard currently.
I have to agree with him to some degree.

Modern medicine allows us to extend life far beyond circumstances that would normally kill us. If someone is old, unhealthy, and no longer wishes to live they should be able to choose to end their life. The medical resources that would be used to keep them alive could be devoted elsewhere.

I certainly don't advocation allowing a healthy person to end their life because they have a chance at things getting better.
Using Python to write to an Excel/OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet on Ubuntu Linux
Don't they have something close to this data already, by virtue of controlling the most popular search engine? They can already observe the search-traffic spikes for various brands and products from Super Bowl ads that they didn't pay for.

It's possible they got some new data out of it, but my guess is that it really was just an ad purchased for the reason ads usually are purchased, in this case partly to counter Bing's ad campaign.
Who knows how long Apple had been working on it?
there have been 7 million people who tried chatroullete...

craploads of people != !idiots
I've worked for another office of one of the agencies involved and the reason that they use Flash is that ad agencies love Flash, because they get to use buzzwords like "rich media" and "interactive" and HTML/CSS/JS isn't "rich" or "interactive" enough.
Ski Techs Turn Fluorocarbon to Gold
King of Cheez: The Internet’s Meme Maestro Turns Junk Into Gold
I can't wait to find out what's actually going on. I'm inclined to distrust adobe. Their track record this month has been less than stellar in the honesty category.
Marijuana Research Offers New Hope For Male Birth Control Pill
Same idea as Dan Pink's talk on intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards/motivators: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html.
Gilt is fantastic and it is also gaining a popular following here in Tokyo.

As a female consumer who loves fashion, I have been disappointed with the lag in fashion companies to adopt new technology and ideas online, I love this idea and would like to see a service like this devoted solely to shoes.

I hope to see even more services focusing on the massive group of women consumers online.
From the Privacy Policy § How We Share Information:

> To help improve or promote our service. Sometimes we share aggregated information with third parties to help improve or promote our service. But we only do so in such a way that no individual user can be identified or linked to any specific action or information.
Yo Josh,

Matt from fivesectest here. I'm intersted to hear how useful you find the feedback, how easy it is to collate results, quips and qualms, etc... considering the number of results you're getting I'm keen to hear your opinions.
The question is, how many of those downloads were forced by the website being viewed. And how many of them were from people who just wanted to do X, and would they blame the phone or the website for not making it possible?
So 4 million attempts since last June.

How many of that 4 million is from the same 1% of iphone users? (And 1% percentile of intelligence, recall the "facebook login" incident)

Can anyone using an iphone let me know how people even get to the adobe page? If all you need to do is click the blue box to get there you can write off 90% of those hits.
China, Spain, Portugal, France, Great Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Argentina all defaulted on their debt. Some of those nations were Great Powers at the time of their default. If the United States defaults, it will lead to breadlines, but not to Armageddon.

In conclusion, calm down. Stop reading every blog post on the national debt. Stop pulling up every tired Mad Max reference you can muster. And certainly stop telling your neighbors to hide gold under their floor boards.

Your company might not be here in a few years, but the United States and the global economy probably will.
The Importance of Fear, Risk and Hacking
Reporters can be perverts too.
Good question, but skip the article because the author
doesn't know the answer.
Am I overly pessimistic if I read 'remote controlled gas control computer" and immediately wonder if I really need more than 2 digits to measure the amount of C-code dedicated to security?
Data immutability in Java
This is possibly the hardest problem to solve when making social software...

Everyone else will do it when everyone is doing it. But motivating people to do something radically different is much much harder unless there's clear rewards, etc. Clay of course wrote the book on this but it's still not qn exact sciene.
Midlands home to most overweight people in Britain
Hey Matt! would you like to chat on AIM/gchat or have me post here?
HTML5 vs. Adobe is really WHATWG vs. W3C, and an echo of pmarca vs. TBL
Pharmacy Consumer Group
I moderate on a forum for a website that tries to educate people about online pharmacies. Maybe someone would like to contribute to some of the topics we have?

<a href="http://www.pharmacyconsumergroup.com">Pharmacy Consumer Group</a>
I remember a few years back when you would argue and reiterate arguments over which browser/ OS/ gaming console was better. None of those arguments mattered. It was just a giant waste of time (Unless you could convince someone to switch; yeah right!)

I don't even know why I read this article - I figured it would investigate the aspects as to why the iPhone's screen is _theoretically_ the best. Or prove that it is the best, but with facts, not opinion.

I didn't read one fact; just saw a piocture of a unicorn with an iPhone as a horn. What a waste of time.

What kind of facts can we look up to actually figure out if this is a hardware or a software comparison? I think it's in the software.
Ask HN: ChatRoulette != FAD?
Please don't hold this against me... but something about ChatRoulette has gotten me very excited over the past few weeks. Before the creator took ownership, I kept telling my roommates that it was going to be some solo hacker who had a weekend project. This application encompasses much of the HN/YN personality, and I am sure the founder does as well. But, the real question is... will it last?
It is interesting that Clay Shirky (the presenter that the article is based on) reverses the usual roles of capitalized and uncapitalized nouns. Capitalization denotes importance or emphasis and it is strange that emphasis would be put on the work you do you your boss instead of on the work you feel is important. The standard advocated by Shirky becomes even stranger when put into a different context. Students produce art all the time but most would be hesitant to call any of the pieces save a few Art.

This divergence suggests a few interesting hypotheses. First, the author values Work more and is attempting to understand work from an outsider's perspective. Second, coming from the perspective of Work leads to inaccuracies in Shirky's point of view. The accuracy of claim that "Work drives the economy" is not so clear. It could be argued that all Work trickles down from the work of company founders. Indeed this is why many companies get started; the founders have work that they want to do, they have something they think is important and worth doing.

In closing, I will suggest that Shirky and the author of this article are approaching the problem from the wrong direction. Respectively, they are attempting how to translate Work -> work and Usability -> usability. The author of the article wants to know how to "make and evaluate that miracle motivational leap" from something with no motivation to something that generates motivation. But when you are working on something with no motivation, you're already dead in the water. Far more productive to start with the motivation and try to figure out how to turn your intellectual itch into wealth. If you're creating a product, start with something users want, don't try and create the motivation after the fact.

Note: I've made several conjectures about Shirky and the author of the article based on limited information (I can't find a video or slides of the keynote). It's important to remember that I'm just speculating. It's entirely possible I'm misrepresenting Shirky's true point of view. What I wrote is only accurate based on the information from the article.
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/39545/possible-negat... - interesting comment from Joel over on meta.stackoverflow.com
Brains last, bodies go pretty quickly.

Neither last without constant care & maintenance.
Given that the comic has a punch line in the bottom of the last panel, the comic is definitely a joke.

The question becomes is the author trying some subtle play or unaware of the error? (Or are you incorrect about the comic being incorrect)

Either way, it was amusing and has value.
There is a talk by DHH where he shared stories about his jobs prior to 37Signals. These jobs were at VC funded, dot-com companies (something involving games) and he claims to have learned some lessons there. He talks about this in the beginning of the Q&A session here:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2334
There is something special there. Over the past week I have shared a handful of hilariously funny experiences with some of my closest friends and coworkers. Stories shared with people close to you end up meaning something. If there is anything that makes ChatRoulette a legitimate product, it is that concept of the "shared experience." My roommates and I are still laughing about the half-hour we spent together last week. It isn't something to be easily forgotten, even with the inclusion of the press echo chamber.
Rather than the physical hardware of the touchscreen accuracy, nobody seems to be commenting on the software accuracy and, more importantly, latency.

Android is much less responsive (yes, even on my Nexus One) than any iPhone model. This is not something people tend to measure, but it matters more than I can tell you. When your only feedback from the device consists of visual cues, it's really important to get them to the user as fast as possible. When the lag time between touch<->visual response is long, you end up performing everything more slowly overall, and the feeling of 'sluggishness' of the device increases, even if it really is doing things faster.

For example, my Nexus One can scroll and render a web page faster than my iPhone 3GS, but in my informal tests, it lags nearly 3x over iPhone when responding to actually moving the page with your finger (iPhone is less than 100ms, Nexus One/Android 2.1 usually over a third of a second by my crappy measurements, don't take it as hard fact. Try it yourself!) As a result, the Nexus One feels like more of a PITA to use, and I am subtly more frustrated when performing any task in the OS in any app.

This stuff adds up. Google needs to pay attention. Normal users cannot even tell you what is wrong when it comes to something like this -- a focus group or study will not help. People cannot tell you "oh, the touch sensing was too latent, so my actions were slowed and I was more frustrated while operating the device." They will just be frustrated in some other way that you cannot correlate to touch latency, or they will say nothing, because the problem is not something they can articulate.

The first OS update for my Nexus One added a bug where the desktop wallpaper becomes misaligned when you return to the home screen after launching an app from anywhere but the center home screen. After doing so, when you touch to begin swiping to another home screen, the wallpaper jumps into the correct place by several hundred pixels. Very jarring. This happens every single time, and it wasn't present in the version that was on the phone when I took it out of the box. How did nobody at Google see this before they released the update? Do they not have humans testing the software they're working on?

When you drag down the notification panel from the top of the screen, the bar jumps by about 30-50px every time when initially pulling it out with your finger. Every time.

I want Android to be successful. Please, Google, pay attention to this stuff.
Feel free to drop me a line on matt@angrymonkeys.com.au

I think I have that hooked into gtalk as well so you can add me on there as well if you prefer. Bit busy at the mo, but happy to have a proper chat later :)
Great comments thanks for posting this. You bring up some good points on the graphs. This was mostly quick and dirty stuff I hacked together and could certainly be improved. The 'noise' doesn't seem to bother me though and helps me compare them visually, could be a personal preference thing.

On the SEO use of subdomains, do you have any links I could read more on that? Anecdotally, my experience seems to be otherwise but I could be wrong.

Agreed that the blog needs better maintaining. I'm more focused on my personal blog to do much with it. I've tried getting some tutors to contribute with mixed results. I haven't had much luck with the quality of articles when hiring someone to write, so not sure of the ROI on that. If anyone has ideas would love to hear it.

On that A/B test, funny you mention that because I tried almost that exact thing you suggested when 37Signals came out with Haystack.com (now Sortfolio.com), where I made the free tutor account permanent and the paid account got you top placement in search results, highlighted listing, and a 'PRO' badge next to your name. I didn't run it long enough to have 100% confidence but the conversion rate dropped compared to what I have now (first 3 job requests are free, then you must upgrade if you want to continue). I still feel like the biz model could be improved though. If you have other ideas on this would love to hear it. Thanks again!
Brian
There's a test referenced in the article. With a picture of several phones' screens showing their response. I think that can be called a fact.
Cloud platform choices: a developer's-eye view
In Praise of Online Obscurity
A Developer's Take on Cloud Platforms
It's great to see posts like this to help us remember: not only do you have to build it but you have to run it. Running it and managing it to ultimate success may very well be the hard part.
You probably can't. If the code is all you've got, someone else is probably going to beat you anyway, especially if you're spending a bunch of time worrying about it instead of building stuff.

Instead of paranoid maneuvering to protect something of unproven worth, spend your time creating an awesome place to work and a business culture that treats customers/users right and it won't matter all that much if someone steals some code or clones your software, there's far, far more to being successful than a few loc's.
Were they successful without taking investors money? I mean, they took investors money, so how do we know? We don't know how much Bezos gave them, it could have been millions. I don't know. Maybe someone knows, but to say they were able to achieve success without having to take investor money isn't entirely accurate, because they did.
Hmm, except the oligarchy aspect at the end, I thought the analysis was cogent enough. I liked his points about the bailouts being a wealth transfer to baby boomers in particular. It basically boils down to a few claims. For why Greece is not the loser:

* A decrease in the amount our government is able to borrow will not hurt us very much. (This jives with your claim that Greece squandered the money lent to them.)

* Investors have short memories. They'll be knocking at our door again soon enough.

For why either baby boomers or the current generation do stand to lose:

* Bailouts represent a wealth transfer from the current generation, who will pay for them over time in taxes, to the baby boomers, whose investments are the ones being bailed out.

I'm not sure if his claims were about who was the problem so much as a pragmatic analysis of who stands to lose. I've always thought that when bankruptcy and default are options, the debtor is in fact the one that holds the power in the lender-lendee relationship, and this situation seems to lend credence to that view.
I'd like to see the data on the hip-waist ratio indicating higher fertility. Seems to me most women are capable of bearing children.
Acer Ferrari 1200 | Acer Ferrari Laptop
Again, Android is not in the Geek market. It just happens that their aesthetics seem to appeal to geeks. Google would love my mom to be using an Android Phone.