skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Secondly, there have been calls for a US industrial policy -- that is, for Washington to essentially "pick winners and losers" by promoting some industries that they feel have a high probability of success. Asian countries have been doing this for years with remarkable success and it is a policy which we clearly need to copy.

The market is pretty good at picking winners. Washington likes to take money away from the winners and give it to the incumbent losers that bribe lawmakers.
anecdote != data
Media’s obsession with Twitter campaigns will make customer service smell French
Any anecdotal evidence of this? Most home runs that I know about are from scrappy, resourceful founders that discovered something simple through experimentation that scaled into a huge company.
I think the author is talking about the feeling of achievement. And that the only reason people care about (have the goal of) video games is that feeling. Basically, he seems to be arguing against wireheading, while those here arguing that all achievement is fake or that all achievement is real are effectively claiming wireheading, living in a permanent VR simulation, or similar is just as good as the real world.
Yes, don't you just hate it when people make a living creating software? </sarcasm>
> What's the difference between rules in a game of monopoly and laws governing corporate actions? Controlling a predator drone in real life vs in Call of Duty?

Easy. The difference is morality. In real life the consequences of your actions can hurt other people. The "life is a game" position is amoral, as numerous writers have noted and as your Predator drone example eloquently shows.
I Don't Like The iPad: driven by the same old media love affair with lock in
Here you go:

(defun fullscreen ()
(interactive)
(let (f w l r cb b)
(setq cb (current-buffer))
(setq b (switch-to-buffer "*NOSUCHBUFFER*")) ;Temp buffer otherwise
(setq f (make-frame '((fullscreen . fullboth)))) ;settings don't take effect
(select-frame-set-input-focus f)
(setq w (frame-width f))
(setq l (/ (- w 80) 2))
(setq r (- w (+ l 80)))
(seq-default left-margin-width l
right-margin-width r)
(delete-other-frames f) ;Only one main window
(kill-buffer b) ;Kill temp buffer - now original buffer will get new margins
(switch-to-buffer cb)))

(defun fullscreen-off ()
(interactive)
(let (f cb b p)
(setq cb (current-buffer))
(setq b (switch-to-buffer "*NOSUCHBUFFER*")) ;Temp buffer
(setq-default left-margin-width nil
right-margin-width nil)
(kill-buffer b)
(delete-other-frames (make-frame))
(switch-to-buffer cb)))
So, you support multiple backends (looks like two, moving towards four), but as a user, I have to choose one? Is there a plan for a RAID-type storage? One of my big fears about cloud storage is that when a provider decides it's done with the game, I have to try to slurp all my data off that provider onto a new one. If I could have a RAID5 between the four providers you offer, it would provide some peace of mind. Or is that feature already available, and I'm just missing it?
I've been doing this with emacs for years now. I usually have emacs running fullscreen on 4:3 monitor alongside my main monitor, or when I'm on laptop I run it fullscreen also. Makes me, for some reason, more focused.

clean darkroom

http://imgur.com/LloOY.png

and with menu

http://imgur.com/yTeUz.png
Yeah, that part seems like it needs more support. The situation for the largest and most diverse economy on the planet is a little bit different than the situation for those Asian countries. Our economy is far too complex for this sort of central planning to be effective. Also, politicians are idiots, and need to secure votes from the workers in industries currently existing, not the industries of the future.
I prefer training for martial arts over martial arts themselves.

I do dands (Hindu pushups) and bethaks (Hindu squats) almost every day.

Want to build character? Do 500 bethaks. Your quads will be screaming, begging you to stop at 200, 300, even 400. But you keep going. Because you know that as soon as you stop, you gave up too easily. But once you finish, you can do anything. Eerily similar to starting a software business.
If you know of noise canceling headphones that are effective against the irregular waveforms of human speech, I'd be most interested.
Free Photos - BIGADDA.com
If over 30% of a group that were born in a three year period in the same hospital do heavy drug use (>3 years), then there must be a pretty big problem in that area.
The Future Won't Be Free
BJJ is great, but: get a brazilian teacher if possible, and avoid BJJ if you have any knee problems, I messed mine up.
Http://download.cnet.com/YouTube-Downloader/3000-2071_4-10647340.html
[One motivation for background task proessing is to g]ive the impression of a really snappy web application by finishing a request as soon as possible, even though a task is running in the background, then update the page incrementally using AJAX.

This is a spiritual cousin of progressive enhancement (an old technique from the days of 24kbps modems where you'd arrange a webpage such that the layout loaded quickly and then filled with those huge bloated 20kb Under Construction GIFs you were sending the browser), and while it increases complexity for the programmer, I think it has real possibilities in a wide range of web applications. If you look at the YSlow presentations, it is absolutely insane how much of a discrepancy there is between user-perceptible loading time caused by the back and and the front end, so if you get something to the front end as quickly as freaking possible, you get "free" time to continue crunching on the back end and update the skeletal response with minimal user-perceptible delay.

I get a lot of comments from my users that my site is SO FAST!!!1 because of this. The site really isn't fast -- it is just responsive, which is something that is easy to mistake for fast. For example, the quite misnamed "live preview" feature on one of the pages (which causes about 90% of my CPU load) creates a series of images which take ~2 seconds of CPU time each to spit out and pushes them to the user in response to user input, which makes it feel to most of my users like it is springy like a native application rather than a "Type a bunch into a form then hit submit, watch an hourglass for a while then a page load, and finally see stuff" that they expect on the web.
You're looking for a field called Behavioral Economics. There's a lot of research that's being done in this area right now. Dan Ariely's book, "Predictably Irrational" is a great introduction, and he was a good bibliography for further reading as well.
hacking is not a good thing
Wow, you are quite generous!
Yep. In general, we too often use our powerful weapons with disregard, and it's coming back to bite us in the ass.
My apologies, IMO self-medication would be taking medication or something that actually helps you. Sure, coffee/alcohol/tobacco all can help very temporarily. If you're using that over prolonged periods of time, I would call that substance abuse.

I know that marihuana can help with or provide pain relief for a lot of ailments. But these kinds of ailments are typically not found in kids under 21.
Own Your Online Brand
Rent a limo in Atlanta, limo bus in Atlanta, limo prices in Atlanta
The iPad wasn't mentioned at any point in the video. I believe it was an Adobe Air application running on some other device. The video looks like it was co-produced by Adobe and Wired. That said, the demo did look pretty decent.
FBI Scam? What an Idiot
I went back to classic karate after a really long brake, Okinawan Goju-Ryu Karate, and it is really making a big difference to my life. Goju-Ryu is quite physical in the training, which means that most training passes give you a really good workout.

There are a number of things which I find particularly beneficial to my work (I am not programmer as such, but a founder of an internet services startup), some fairly obvious:

- It is great to be forced to use another part of the brain regularly, my body may be tired but my head is less tired after each training pass, it is like an energy injection

- I am physically much fitter now, 15 months after I started, this may be obvious, but it makes a big difference to how much work I can do and how well I feel

- my wife tells me I don't stall or give up so easily anymore when I have more work to do, particularly stuff at home

- I am forced to leave work on training days (I work from home) and not stay and, ineffectively, trying to get more done. I feel like I am more effective, despite the hours that go to training and commuting back and forth to the dojo

- I have no back problems or issues with circulation in my legs anymore, I tend to spend a lot of time sitting working, this is great

My club and the particular style I practise doesn't put much emphasis on competition (it is actually discouraged) which means that there is a really helpful, non-macho, atmosphere at the dojo. Everybody is very helpful and the training really becomes about self improvement rather than trying to be better than the others. It helps that we have some really excellent trainers as well. The head of the club is well respected internationally for his work. http://www.iogkf.se/
god I hate the "peaceful warrior" crap pushed by certain practitioners of aikido. Osensei tells us that the best way to start an aiki is to belt someone in the face. traditional aikido teaches both striking while the opponent is pinned down and completing the movement of joint locks to break bones. most easily understood: would aikido teach the katana if it wasn't about inflicting harm? how many non-lethal cutting techniques do you know?
I've never priced a product or service myself, but thinking about the roll over credit model from the consumer perspective I see a potential problem. If a subscriber's usage never exceeds the monthly minimum, then that subscriber is going to roll over credits every month and accumulate credits they will never use. The value of those rolled over credits that will never be used will highlight to the subscriber how much money they have paid for credits they didn't use. No one likes to know they are wasting money by paying for more than they need.

I don't know what your service is, so I can't reason about how subscribers would use it from month to month, but I would think you could control the amount of roll over credits accumulated by setting the monthly minimum low enough that most subscribers go over it and use accumulated credits.
Right. We see how well that works.

You need to research Eclipse Phase, the RPG.

Scratch that, your ignorance is startling.
It seems to me that this essay is based on a strained analogy and a whole bunch of convenient equivocation. His whole "achievement" link to video games seems to be a largely rhetorical one. What if those were called (as they are on some systems) trophies? Starts to make the rest of his essay sound a bit strange.

Furthermore, to compare arbitrary accomplishments in games and saying that the only thing which distinguishes them from achievements in life is that the video game ones are too easy or in some way "false" is to ignore that they're fundamentally different kinds of undertakings.

To play a video game is to, as Merlin Mann says, "move your hands a little and make small decisions". The activity is essentially medatative or recreational in nature and the results further that goal. The point of these "achievements" is to relax and have fun. The point of the "achievements" in real life is to better ourselves or our circumstances.

Furthermore, the in-game "achievements" are rigorously structured, those out-of-game are radically open-ended.

Both the structure and purpose of the two kinds of achievements are completely different. To conflate them and then deride video-game achievements for being inferior misses the point. It's like people who say that Guitar Hero doesn't make you a good guitarist.

Well, duh. But no one's making the argument that it will. We don't play Guitar Hero to get good at guitar. We don't play video games to accomplish anything.
Breaking News:American Government Arrested Osama Bin Laden
Entrepreneurship: Nature vs. Nurture? A Religious Debate
I slept on it, and I stand by my comment.

The moral character of the company is being discussed here.
The moral character of the CEO is completely germane to this discussion.
Why are either of them so interesting in the context of US manufacturing?

The single biggest thing to happen in the last few decades is a couple of billion people (re-)joining the world economy (the PRC, India, the former Soviet Union, etc.).

To the extent a lot of recent manufacturing is satisfying basic needs we take for granted, e.g. refrigerators, isn't that likely to be all to the better?

What I'm saying here is that this gets complicated. Economies of scale are likely to give the manufacturers in the PRC the edge in supplying the world's demand for refrigerators, but on the other hand their increased demand for say aircraft and especially jet and turboprop engines is directly to our advantage.

Or perhaps I should say, this isn't a simple matter of winners or losers at this gross a level (PRC vs. US, US vs. the world). I expect the share of US manufacturing vs. the world's to go down during this period and I expect the trajectory of PRC manufacturing to be wild compared to ours.
Doing the Microsoft Shuffle: Algorithm Fail in Browser Ballot
Running Cassandra as an embedded service
Consider how much real achievement we would see if all the motivated hackers put down WoW and started up their development environment of choice.

But there's a lot of truth to the fact that human beings need recreation. We need down-time when we're not building, making, doing, etc. There's a lot of engineers who, if they put down WoW and fired up Eclipse would just stare at the screen for hours wondering what to build next. Or they'd disappear into an equally "unproductive" passed time like email, solitaire, or social news forums like this one.
I'm not sure Seth is going that far, although I can see how one might misinterpret his message. What he's trying to say is: you can do it (be an entrepreneur) if you really want to.
And even if they do get used they heal the patient; whereas the most profitable drugs are the ones requiring continued use.
An excellent book, and one that I've sadly yet to get all the way through.

The High Cost of Free Parking by Shoup goes into exhaustive detail on the effects of parking, specifically how the idea that parking should always be provided free of charge distorts the market for automobiles and city development. It's long and pretty dry, but the first few chapters at least are very enlightening.
Another advantage to lifestyle drugs is that they are unlikely to be taken away by politicians.

Politicians are likely to nationalize/cost control/otherwise interfere with lifesaving drugs. Standing up to those greedy people trying to make money by preventing people's suffering is just good media exposure.

On the other hand, cost controls for an eyelash extender? Seems less likely.
Not an incredible answer, but surprising that the president at least knows what a bubble sort is.
one of the problems with grappling that BJJ doesn't address is that in many holds your opponent has the opportunity to stab you if they have a knife/shiv etc. this is most apparent in rear chokes. real self defense is not at all glamorous which is why it doesn't have the market that martial arts does. typically you're crushing or breaking something as fast as possible and then RUNNING.

I remember I was particularly impressed by one krav maga instructor who had the students spin in circles and then have another student blindside them before they knew what was happening. he also later had us get attacked from behind while sitting in a chair. of course we all looked like idiots and it wasn't very pleasant. several students complained. they just wanted to look like ninjas.
Hitler got away with annexing Sudetenland. And yet his photographs and "footage showing how the operation was conducted" was widely available.

Not getting away with something means having been punished for that. I do not see it happening this time, not yet anyway. This is why I say that the author's thesis is premature.
I would also like to recommend Aikido. I've studied Aikido Yoshokai for four years, and found it incredibly rewarding. It's a unique blend of happy enthusiasm (I've heard new students ask why everyone is grinning all the time) with respectful discipline.

Probably best to not characterize it as a martial art, though. You'll learn timing, joint locks and throws, sword, staff, and knife techniques, how to fall safely... but most importantly, how to clearly lead and completely follow, depending on circumstances. I've heard it phrased as "the study of harmony"--not just in physical confrontations, but in arguments, office power struggles, and hard life decisions. It's not necessarily a good way to beat someone up: maybe more of a way to resolve a conflict without so much fighting.
I paid for it! Strangely enough, I felt happy afterwards. Must have been me.
A world without newspapers: Predicted in 1984 by Murdoch
MRSA lives in the community just as much, if not more, than it lives in the hospitals. From what I know of the area, some hospitals had up to 80% community-acquired infections as opposed to hospital-acquired infections, this meant that the majority of these patients were being killed by their families. I know many ICU's in the UK have full out bans on any family members entering, because if anyone in an ICU catches MRSA they're gone.

It's easy to blame the healthcare providers, and I'm sure in many cases it is the healthcare providers' fault. However, if they simply flat-out banned people from visiting in the hospital MRSA infection rates (in good hospitals) would drop like a rock.

I wouldn't be surprised if hospitals with MRSA fatality rates over 20% allow visitors in the ICU and don't have well established visitor protocols in the regular hospital. I know some wards in the UK (I have friends and family who work in hospitals) will escort you out if they see you go between patients' beds; essentially they allow you to visit 1 person per day, and they frequently have visiting hours only a couple hours long so they can actively enforce this.

My advice to anyone visiting a friend in hospital, don't touch them. No handshakes, especially no hugs. This seems extreme, but patients have died from MRSA infection in key-hole surgery incisions.
Yeah, that's a strange contradiction. It's never enough to cut off someone's hands and cut their jugular; you need to cut clean through the abdomen too. I think various schools approach that in different ways; with Yoshokai, for example, it tends to be a timing and position exercise somewhat removed from actually killing someone. Perhaps both views of the technique are valid.
That is an incredibly long essay to describe a very simple problem. Don't randomize an array the way Microsoft does on browserchoice, because it's not random.
I'm still waiting for the app which makes the voices in my head shut up. :-)
This is a great point. Without some sort of expiration system, keeping credits will probably convince the person to ultimately drop the service.
But once you finish, you can do anything

Except walk. Kidding aside, I agree these are great exercises to get the blood going. I need to get back into practice!
JungleDisk offers all of this for 4$/user/month.
The design of something is the first indicator I use to evaluate how trustworthy a site is. The better the design the more I know that these people put alot of thought into it and spent money and time on it. Now, overly clever stuff is definitely annoying and bad.. but ugly is a big red flag.
No. I'm speculating and conjecturing on the intent of a six month EIR tenure.
Rabin was assassinated for political reasons, as part of internal (Israel's) political discourse. This guy was assassinated for completely different reasons, as part of an ongoing war (or, if you prefer, anti-terrorist operation).

"Can you imagine the outrage if Palestine assassinated an Israeli statesman?" It has happened in the past (Rehavam Zeevi), however the perpetrators were not PA officials, so the answer too was not directed at PA but at the people who had done it.

Finally, calling the guy killed in Dubai a Palestinian statesman is preposterous. A very different situation, both in legal and moral aspects.
I've heard it proposed that we could try and work with this instead of against it, by "domesticating" diseases. Take some harmful bacteria, breed a strain that's mostly benign and moderately contagious, then let it loose to displace the more harmful strains while carefully avoiding doing too much to kill it. In other words, create selection pressures that favor mild strains.
SEO/Branding/Marketing tips
Achievements, Game Mechanics and Social Software
"If they indeed didn't do it, they would have revved up their propaganda machine to the maximum denying everything." This is a good argument, but I am not sure how strong it is. I can easily imagine them not doing that.
Wing Chun. Shortest attacks from point A to point B. Get the issue over with fast. No fancy kicks or meta moves. You train in what you wear everyday. It also has an amazing history. Unlike Karate which has hard movements, like most forms of Gung Fu, it all revolves around flowing, snapping and potential energy.

Beautiful, but pragmatic.
Learning how to fall is also extremely practical self-defense training.
I'm pretty sure it was staged/prepped. I still find it pretty funny, especially the look on his face after he says that bubble sort is not the way to go.
When I buy the dead-tree version of my local newspaper, I have no expectation that it should be free. If I pick it up and walk out of the coffee shop without paying, that's stealing. But when I walk upstairs to my office and log on to the Web site for the same paper, I feel a divine right to access the entirety of that paper—and 10 years of its archives—for free

That's a straw man. Even today, we might expect to see todays news and the past month news for free - but stuff like archive access and feature content is often behind pay-walls.

As long as the marginal cost of something can be covered by advertising, lead generation etc. it'll tend to be free. I'm pretty sure that the breakthrough of a simple micro-payment system would help generate so much income that it'll cause more content to be free (since there's more income to cover the marginal cost).
I love it how they show a few charts not adjusted for inflation or anything else to claim that the US still has huge manufacturing base and then you can't find a SINGLE "made in the USA" product in a mall. Give me a break with your megalomania.
Is no Chinese!
Is dang robots tha took'ar'jobs!
How fast food packaging should be designed
I studied Aikido for a short time. I was lucky enough to train with some people who thought the whole peaceful warrior thing was basically crap. It was one of the most intense things I've ever done. If you are picking an Aikido dojo, look for one that teaches sword movements; otherwise you're not getting the full experience.

Aikido is frustrating because it might require 10 years to become good enough for it to be marginally useful in a fight. However, how often do you really get into fights? If you're an aikidoist, you've basically accepted that you're learning about a beautiful art form. If you want the most effective way to hurt someone, try Krav Maga.

If you are the sort of person who is attracted to complex, difficult ideas that make you re-evaluate everything, aikido may be for you.

Aikidoists also tend to be professionals. It is sometimes called a gentleman's martial art. (No offense to ladies.) You often encounter doctors and lawyers and artists so on. On the other hand, in any reasonable dojo, none of that matters.
I do not need the books but I want to thank you for the idea.