skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I assume the situation in Melbourne is similar. Here is just crazy. The two bedroom apartment I rented a few years ago for $450/w is now $700/w. A one bedroom apartment in any decent location is now minimum $400/w and probably more like $500.

Rent has gone up 50% in the last 3 or 4 years and seems like it's going to keep going. To comfortably rent a decent 1-bedroom apartment, ie to keep your rent around 30% of net income, you now need to earn $100k. Will it be $150k in 3 years? I'm not sure I will be making that much!

Maybe I should move to Brisbane, which is like Sydney 5 years ago ..
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

I often run into Flash which just doesn't work correctly, though.

And it uses 10-20% less CPU compared to 10.0, so the gap's been narrowed, but not nearly enough.
> Browser layout engines are pretty messed up

Did html5 address this?
> data on the price of housing going back to the 1600s

Care to share a link to this data (or at least a pointer to where is comes from)? I'd be interested to know where this came from because my first reaction is to distrust the accuracy/validity of such data.

That being said, how valid is data going that far back (in relation to now)? Isn't the political as well as economic landscape completely different now? I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, just that I'm not really sure if you can apply that data as a proof.
I know the iPhone app store has been very successful, but I wouldn't completely discount other ones. What makes the iPhone's app store so great?

Is it the humongous supply of apps? Androlib [1] suggests that the Android Market is approaching 30K apps. Many of them may be crap, but then again, I think many of the iPhone ones are too.

Is it the exclusive iPhone only apps? Yes, there are a lot of them (considering app store sizes alone), but I'm guessing most "popular" apps exist in both stores. Anecdotal evidence: When my dad got a Droid, he asked me about all the apps I used on my iPhone. Most of them were on the Android store too. In the few cases where the apps didn't exist, there was usually a comparable replacement app from some other app maker. Now that doesn't necessarily translate to games, but I don't really play many games on my iPhone (and can't comment on the store differences there).

Now, the Apple App store has been a huge success. If I was a mobile app developer, I wouldn't hesitate to develop for the iPhone (even being aware of the sometimes unpredictable approval process). I also don't like the idea of a network owned app store and the complications and restrictions it will probably bring, but we'll see what their announcement entails. I just don't think that Apple's app store is the only viable one, and certainly isn't the best fit for all people (nothing ever is).

[1] http://www.androlib.com/appstats.aspx
Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are paid to repeat and defend the days Republican Party propaganda points of the day.
What Paul doesn't really devote enough time to describing is the pleasure that getting rid of stuff brings. Reducing the amount of stuff you own is liberating. You feel physically lighter. Its not just about avoiding a burden. It is physically pleasurable to reduce the amount of stuff you are responsible for.

Go through your house and give to charity or throw out anything you haven't used in 12 months. Its amazing how much of an emotional lift this gives you.

I really dislike the cult of stuff. I'm getting married soon. We've requested people give us money or just their congratulations :) Some people however seem to think we're rude for refusing to accept stuff we don't need. Somehow we're obligated to accept a burdensome gift that we'll have to quietly dispose of. They spend money that we could use for things we do need and we have to go to the effort of getting rid of it. Its a lose lose. Yet somehow we're selfish for asking people not to buy us stuff.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND

6566 zak 20 0 161m 35m 15m R 60 0.9 0:28.16 npviewer.bin

That does seem to be a bit much to simply uncompress and render a low-res video on a T9600 running 64-bit Linux.
Thanks for the reply. Some very good points.

Rent is quite a bit less than mortgage payments would be, but at least with mortgage payments you're paying off your loan, not someone else's! I'm not too worried about (b) because I'd be trying to start something in my spare time, then only quitting the day job if it was actually paying enough for me to do so. Part c - well, I'd be looking for a fairly new place .. and as for (d), it's much too late for that ..

I think that what I'm taking from this article is that I have to identify a lot of "unknown unknowns". I admit that I was naively assuming housing prices around here would just go up forever; this article raises the question that they might not and I need to sit down, learn about this stuff and make an informed decision...
I've tried http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer from my Nexus One and it still says, "Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is coming to Anroid 2.0 and future releases in the first half of 2010", so I guess it's the former...
Look at this from another angle, it is equally valid to say that the sexual oppression that exists in our society has skewed many women and men in to thinking that there is such thing has a normal set of sexual behaviors.

That's why this "porn request" thing is blown to such ridiculous proportion. If the main stream perception of sex was not skewed but rather much more open-minded, this discussion would have been as casual as a discussion about ice cream flavors.
Future Augmented Reality
"Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

This Buzz stunt should haunt Google forever as we clearly can't trust them on "do no evil". This is a at least the sentiment I still have from this Buzz privacy scandal.
The sound is really quiet, except for the audience, which is really loud. The audio needs to be run through a compressor, and probably a noise reducer.
I tried to donate a stack of books to my local library. They weren't "new or as new" so they wouldn't accept them :( They weren't damaged. They just didn't look new.

Them not taking them wasn't so bad. I was more annoyed by the attitude of the staff who made a big song and dance as if they were doing me a favour by even considering taking free books.

A library accepting free books in good condition seemed like a no brainer to me :|
Think about what you just said. "Unknown knowns" (emphasis added). Therefore, they are knowns, and would fit into the "Shit you know" category.
I'm tired of all the labeling, and I don't care much for the article with it's circular argument about 100% consensus among all experts. But I'm all for his proposal of common ground:

"we need more efficiency and sustainability, desperately, in order to regain energy independence, improve productivity, erase the huge leverage of hostile foreign petro-powers, reduce pollution, secure our defense, prevent ocean acidification, and ease a vampiric drain on our economy."

I could quibble with some of his colorful language (eg, how desperately?), but the principle seems sound: we would benefit from greater energy efficiency and improvements in alternative energy sources regardless of their effect on global warming. Is there anyone here (either side) who disagrees with this? If so, why?
It turned out well! I didn't make a control sample, but both my girlfriend and I enjoyed it (for both steaks last night, and steak burritos today for lunch). As the author suggested, we also added garlic and rosemary to the salting process.

I'm kinda new to cooking steaks, so I don't have a lot of experience to measure this against, but I think I will do this again next time.
That's a specious argument that does nothing other than demonstrate the obvious agenda that you have.
Related:

"... Thus there is a 1.8% chance that none of the molecules you are (still) holding in your lungs came from Caesar's last breath. And there is a 98.2% chance that at least one of the molecules in your lungs came from Caesar's last breath."

--John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy (1988) [1]

[1] http://econ161.berkeley.edu/movable_type/archives/001392.htm...
Competition is great in any market, but the declaration that this consortium of followers is creating another app store indicates that everyone is playing catchup. The other mobile manufacturers have seen the dollar signs and all want a piece of the pie. Fair game, but Apple will always be Apple, and with some tweaks to the store, their adherence to a solid framework, gorgeous hardware and a lovely OS will see them retain their fanbase regardless of what anyone else comes up.
International support deployed. Have at it!
I think the good news is you have choices in Android, unlike in some platforms they have no choice because their CEO hate it.
Agreed. I vaguely recall some Doonesbury or Bloom County jokes about it in the eighties.

Apparently there was also a $7,600 coffee maker.
"Making mistakes" as you call it is a white wash.

Refusing to publish data, actively obstructing efforts to get that data, selective sampling and black-box "massaging" of raw data essentially invalidate any conclusion drawn from that data.

The essence of the scientific process is reproducability. Anything that isn't reproducible or at least testable is worthless. Anything built on it is worthless.

It's like some physicist somewhere announcing to the world "I've proven the existence of the Higgs Boson" and then refusing to tell you how he did it.
I noticed that while the Southpark app was displayed quite a bit, we didn't get to see almost any interaction with the Twitter app. Might be because it's unflattering, might not.

I'm sure we'll find out eventually. Given that Adobe has failed to produce a performant flash plugin for far more powerful devices (and won't even acknowledge that the plugin is buggy), I remain skeptical.
"Who can apply?

All legal residents of the United States residing in one of the 50 United States..."

:(
73.6% of all Statistics are Made Up
Good 3-minute narrated video of the birth of a "movement."
Scribbling in the margins of PDFs isn't very easy, and losing the ability to annotate effortlessly is a big loss for many readers.
The tipping point was the tired dogma of the Fox-Limbaugh conspiracy. If they say something that's wrong, it's wrong because it's wrong, not because of who said it. The so-called "conspiracy" of "Saudi princes", "Russian oil interests" and other "petro-moguls" is just populist claptrap basically.

In an ideal world, this is true. In reality, one must distinguish signal from noise and usually it's easier to just throw out most of the noise and lose a little signal too.
On the topic of "paying off your loan": be a little careful with that, because for the first several years of a mortgage (at least as usually structured in the US, but I think this is typical elsewhere too) you're not paying off the principal by very much; and if you rent rather than buy, you are not responsible for building upkeep and the little surprises that an owned home always seems to throw at you at inconvenient times.
Agreed. But I was more concerned with his continued use of "100% consensus" - it felt like a "shouty argument" and out of place in a piece which was discussing the rationality of the skeptics argument :)
Science has no agenda. Science has what's factual and what is not factual.

You have an agenda. Your agenda is to attempt to make facts and opinions carry the same weight in a political debate.

Never gonna happen, cletus.
I think it's kind of stupid to talk about 'fragmentation' of stores in general. If this was just generic retail space, would all this talk about 'confusing' the customer still sound smart or just laughable?

The idea that we need a single supplier of something or a single marketplace from which to purchase things is laughable -- to me, at least. To carry this analogy outside of the 'phone app' space, should we just give up on all generic retail space so that consumers just go to Wal-mart for everything but furniture (Ikea for furniture). Then consumers won't be so confused about where they should go to buy their furniture or groceries.
> why should we believe that these people will pay attention when their arguments are refuted again and again and again?

That's the burden that you carry if you wish to be sensible and mature when discussing with people. Some people are stupid, but you can't sink to that level. Starting to throw mud and call names isn't the right way to deal with stubborn people, and shows a lack of grace and maturity when people do it.
Interesting video, but why have a macbook sitting there in the interview, but never being used?

A small jab at Apple?
The problem is Twilio provides no way of billing end users.
In this case it comes down to a micropayments problem (which still haven't been solved sufficiently). So you either have to charge up-front for a monthly service fee of a reasonable sum, or stick adverts everywhere which will hopefully cover your costs.
It's a major flaw for the platform if you want to build a business off of it (I've been playing around with a per-monthly-fee service concept recently).
Hoping that the politicians will do the right decisions for the wrong reason won't do. The AGW scare has compelled governments to direct resources towards reducing CO2 while neglecting other environmental issues. The lower bound of food prices has doubled because more bio fuel means less food and this is causing death and starvation in third world countries. A lot of windfarms have been built which is probably the most expensive and most unreliable source of energy on the planet. Furthermore projects about geological carbon storage (pumping CO2 underground) are currently being planned. And then there is Cap And Trade and the Carbon Swaps. The tax payers will not be able to get rid of this schemes as long as CO2 is used as a benchmark for measuring environmental impact.
What do you mean by "accepts the bet"? I still think you might be giving her too much credit. I agree certain issues were raised (at least among those who actually consider said issues) but I'm not convinced she did it on purpose.

I'd guess her thinking was "Palin says it's okay as satire so I'll trap her with the most outrageous, offensive satire possible." Then again, I'm not in her head.

Thanks for the rundown of events btw. It was helpful.
Who said anything about science in general?

You attempted to make an analogy between the deliberate destruction of raw data and the metric-Imperial mismatch that caused the failure of the Mars Orbiter mission somehow impugning all data on Mars.

Not equivalent. Not even close. If you don't get that you're either blinded by zealotry or simply lack the capacity to formulate or evaluate logic.
Cletus, mind if we have a quick, public messaging discussion? We're going to be called cranks, and many people are going to be very, very sympathetic to that, so we need to avoid sounding crank-like. Yes, everybody has an agenda, but pointing that out only makes us sound like cranks so we probably shouldn't do it. Besides, it is essentially ad hominem and ad hominem is both invalid in general and stupid tactically, because comparing the men at issue will come down to "respected scientist" versus "guy on Internet" and we'll always lose that comparison.

Instead, we should criticize ideas, not people, and point to favorable facts. For example, you could suggest that the Mars example is disanalgous in at least two respects: one, the Mars example involves an honest error rather than actual attempt to defraud, two, the interesting debate in global warming isn't on prospective measurements (which we can do accurately, like you can accurately measure the topology of Mars) but on whether we are drawing the right conclusions from data which has been sliced, diced, and remixed from an error-filled patchwork collection of proxies such as, e.g., a few dozens specimens of a particular type of tree in Russia taken in the 1970s which people believe accurately measure the global climate in 1400 AD.

Check that last line out, incidentally: most listeners are going to perceive it to be mocking because it makes the enterprise sound like something which is being built on foundations of sand. However, it is very difficult to be called a crank for mockery of that nature, because to do that people would have to know paleoclimatology better than you do, and it would take an awfully dab hand at explanation to make paleoclimatology sound like something other than a bad joke.
My mistake, the data only goes back to the 1700s

Piet Eichholtz the Amsterdam series 1628-1973

http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=L5RRx0Db...

It's interesting data if you have this conversation :

"Buy property it always goes up"
"It always goes up due to inflation"
"no over the long term it always goes up in real terms, if you pay A x average yearly income for a property then in 10 years you can sell it for A + B x average yearly income!"
"Well here is a graph that shows B is hovering around 0 from 1628 to 1945 and has risen dramatically since then".

It certainly is a different way to look at things.
Better to use offline password management like Sticky Password.

http://www.stickypassword.com
> The so-called "conspiracy" of "Saudi princes", "Russian oil interests" and other "petro-moguls" is just populist claptrap basically.

It's amazing that a person can make the claim that it's ridiculous that there could be any widespread foul play amongst mainstream climate scientists - what are you, some kind of conspiracy nut? Then in the same piece, the person will turn around and point out that it's incredibly obvious that there must be widespread foul play and collusion between oil producers, Saudi Princes, the Republican Party, and Fox News.

How do they do that with a straight face? Climate science is a much smaller, much more unified community with only a few major journals and a generally accepted and favorable political position. Industry, politics, media, and foreign governments have widely different and diverging goals. So they claim it's impossible that the small, similarly backgrounded group with similar goals colludes and you'd be a conspiracy nut for even suggesting that it might be possible. And at the same time, they claim it's incredibly obvious that the large, not unified, competing goals groups are colluding. How the heck do they do that with a straight face?
The elephants in the room at TED
Meetup's great, simple user-test setup
Google Australia: Our submission on mandatory ISP level filtering
Fail, Cletus.

What it's actually like is doing the 10 to the x repeat of Newton seeing and Apple dropping an from a tree, the apple landing on the foot of a research assistant standing under the tree.

The scientist says, "Ooops, I should have told my research assistant to get out from under the tree."

While Cletus, Sarah Palin, and a few in denial friends go running off to Fox News and announce "I saw Jesus cancel gravity. It's a sign from God."
And here is the founders presentation of their method at slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/glusman/lean-usability

This is the way to test your product. Not 5USD Beer tests or lengthy and expensive usability report.

There is only one test and that is the real test.
Sure. Those Top Secret docs are right here..&*!#$#@%NO CARRIER
yes but you can't drive them around.
You get yourself a cool car, wherver you go people will see a person in a cool car. You get a nice house only people in your neighborhood will know.
I could see this argument for dropping 10.4, but plenty of people are still on 10.5 because Apple didn't release a PPC version of 10.6.
Posting it violated the Scribd TOS sections 8.1 and 8.8.
All this is fine and well but it fails to address the fact that the way things are currently done is not the right way to do things.
For those saying it's unintentional, it's pretty close to what happened with Google Reader and shared items.

For those that didn't hear about it, with Google Reader you can click on feed items to be shared, in which case they become visible from a URL that only you know about, and you can pass that URL to people you want to see the shared items (and they can subscribe to).

Then one day they decided that everyone you've every chatted to should be able to see what you've shared, which caused some rocky times for peoples relationships / jobs / families. Personally, I thought that was very, very predictable.

It was opt-out, and the official work around was to stop sharing things or to delete your contacts. I think they added some finer grain stuff later, but everyone effected had left by then.

They were unapologetic throughout - they didn't see it as a big thing at all, even with the various tales of woe rolling in. It seemed almost like they don't have any procedures for checking if something leaks personal data and that there were no repercussions when it did. Hopefully that will change now something with more public attention has gone in a similar direction.

They did have a point when they said that they never guaranteed privacy, but the secret (pseudorandom looking URL) implies that they weren't going to splash it around quite as much as they did.

See here for an overview
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/Google-...
and here for the horror stories and complaints
http://groups.google.com/group/google-reader-howdoi/browse_t...
I think this pretty much seems up your attitude towards that field: Without ever having read said book, I pretend to know what it's about and therefore deride the whole subfield of evolutionary psychology.
Sperm Wars is one of the books that has blown me away the most in my life, as it changed so many preconceived notions on why humans act the way they do. Please don't judge a book by its cover. And its thesis is of course way more interesting and complicated than you make it out to be.
I was just responding to Zak's comment about differences, giving a few. It wasn't meant as a complete argument of anything, or any sort.

That said, two points:

1) doing so is not just immoral, it's against Scribd's TOS.

2) your claim that re-hosting content without permission is indistinguishable from transport makes clear that your beliefs are so different than mine that I cannot possibly find a way to communicate with you.
Sure, but the Flash on WinMo was not made available as a web plugin.
Podcast: Stuff You Should Know
I think economics needs a lot more of this. Economists are rational people, by and large, but a lot of them have very perverse incentives. I think we could see a minor revolution in economic forecasting if we gave stronger incentives for accuracy and vice versa.
Latest iPad commercial - "Check out these apps" [video]
tlack,
when you write 'A lot of the more pedantic REST advocates' you make it seem as if there was a choice to be 'strict REST' or 'less pedantic REST'. The problem with that is as follows: REST is an architectural style, which means that it consists of a set of constraints it imposes on an architecture. The benefit is that such constraints induce a set of system properties (e.g. cacheability, scalability). Usually, the choice for an architecture means that you are interested in your system having these properties.
Now, if you drop constraints at will, you modify the style and do not get the desired system properties.
The notion of 'non pedantic REST' (or 'Low REST') is missing the point.
Google Trends: startups in decline
> poor people have poor impulse spending control

Here in the UK it is broadly true though. It's not necessarily an intelligence or "dumb" thing. It's just that the consumer culture is enticing - and no one has been taught how to control those impulses or to budget adequately.

A lot of the poorest families do budget and consume well due to necessity. The problem is those (I think the vast majority) of people living just above poverty who "splash the cash", spend money they don't have and end up in thousands of pounds of debt.

(and, yes, I've lived in that group for a fair while. Though fortunately my parents managed the money ok)