skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't suggest the stock market is the economy, but it is an important cog within our connected financial system. The key to my argument is in my first sentence about psychology. Did you read the WSJ article I linked to? Another quote from Buffet in the article: "I felt that this is something like I've never seen before, and the American public and Congress don't fully understand the gravity of the problem" General Motors needed to be rescued, and there are millions out of work, yet these items have little association with Bear Sterns, AIG, Wall St. etc., the financial institutions where the damage shook the pillars of our economy which rests upon the financial system and the dollar. The point being things are connected; significant trouble in one area knocks into the other, and you get a domino effect. The dollar is no longer backed by anything but promises, and people accept it because of our superior position as an economic and world power - even with all our escalating debt. However, we are not invincible (as Rome was not) and can experience a dollar crash if, as I said, enough people begin to think the dollar based system will not survive due to stress load (debt for bailouts/stimulus, future medicare). It's true the dollar has been fairly consistent for about a decade, and that's because our standing in the world has remained so - people still die to get in. However, a truer measure of faith in the dollar is the price of gold 10 years ago vs. today - $280 vs. $1080 respectively.
I cheated and used absolute debt. Relative debts aren't 100% applicable, because the US' absolute debt is large enough that they may face a problem few if any others will face, which is the world running out of money to lend, but it's anybody's guess how that will affect anything, if it has any effect at all.

Increasing union-style protection is not going to help small businesses. Everything the current Congress is capable of thinking involves raising the price of employees. They don't even always understand that's what they are doing, i.e., "making an employee harder to fire", regardless of how sweet it sounds in a politician's speech, means making them that much riskier and therefore that much more expensive to hire.
I'll add a second one where I also experienced all of those positive symptoms. Plus, I had trouble for years staying awake in the the mid-afternoon. During grad school it got so bad I had to put a futon in my office. A few days of Vitamin D supplements later, the problem completely went away.

I've continued to take D as I've had my levels tested six times in the last year and they're still low. But the positive symptoms remain.
Cool ! I've been using it too for a bit now as my main source of news. This is probably the website I most visit in a year.
What gives you the power to decide what is good and what isn't? People should define themselves by their own merits and what gives them the most utility.
I don't think we can say PostgreSQL is truly 'better' than the non-relational databases which are beginning to permeate the web.
I believe the decision is more of a mySql/postgreSQL vs. non-relational databases.

Sure, PostgreSQL may have better implementations of certain features than MySQL, but for most web developers, mysql is good enough.

How would put PostgreSQL against non-relational dbs?
I watch in amusement as the rest of the world discovers that computer games are fun.

All it really took were better UI's, and networking.
resemble each other only in that they involve teenagers and classical music

And crucially, punishment of teenagers using classical music. In the first case, for being where they are not wanted, in the second, for not behaving as they are told to, and in the third, for liking classical music.
Of course they can be made. The biggest thing that YC gives to the founders it accepts is permission to be an entrepreneur. They recognize it, which is why they beg people who don't get in to keep going since the permission itself has no intrinsic value.
There is no concept of a 'primitive' type in Common Lisp.
It handles type-checking for built-in types or for your own custom declared types. CL's type system is very powerful.

Here's a type-checking example related to CLOS :

;; High safety settings are required by SBCL for type checking of slots
;; See --> http://www.apl.jhu.edu/~hall/Lisp-Notes/Defclass.html

(declaim (optimize
(speed 0) (compilation-speed 0) (safety 3) (debug 3)))

(defclass circle()
((center :type cons
:accessor circle-center
:initarg :center)
(radius :type fixnum
:accessor circle-radius
:initarg :radius)))

(defmethod circle-area ((x circle))
(* pi (expt (circle-radius x) 2)))

(let ((c (make-instance 'circle :center '(0 0) :radius 4)))

(format t "~A~%" (circle-area c))

(setf (circle-center c) '(2 3))
(setf (circle-radius c) 7)

;; this will fail at compile with a TYPE-ERROR
;(setf (circle-radius c) "B")

;; this will fail at compile with a UNDEFINED-FUNCTION
;; because the method does not exist
;(location c)
)
Where does Judgment come from?
http://www.prh.noaa.gov/ptwc/messages/hawaii/2010/hawaii.201...
You're right. Deficit is d(Debt)/dT.
Whatever the argument, it will need to somehow apply only to the iPad, and not the iPhone.
Thanks, I'll edit the title.
Steve Jobs personally rejects FreedomTime iPhone app (2008)
No, I don't agree with that. Remember the Motorola Razr? That was 'the device' to have, and Moto was almost completely out of the market within a few years.
I don't expect Apple to rest on their laurels, but they have competitors gunning for them, and this won't be a market where everybody has only one device. This may not even be as homogeneous as the pc market. Just my 2cents.
Deficit worries are hocus pocus. America should go should in much debt as possible if there are people willing to lend it money. When it comes to payback time it can simply deflate away its currency and as a side effect get many offshored jobs back.
The real problem is not deficits, but where they are spent. military and the rich.
Quatsch. It has everything to do with it.

If it were not for the collective cognitive dissonance underlying the popular support for this kind of position - i.e. that meat is ok, but blood sports and zoos are bad - then almost any kind of moralising over animal welfare would be untenable.

Entertainment is not a necessity, but neither is meat. People justify eating meat because it would be a big sacrifice, for them personally, to go without it, and I will bet in 99% of cases they do not care for the the zoos/sports they wish to eliminate. Probably because they cannot handle the visibility of the captivity (where as outsourced captivity and cruelty is not a problem).

Ethical action entails personal sacrifice. Getting rid or something you do not care for is in general just an easy and intolerant (of other humans) position to take. This is the reality of the situation once bias and disneyfication has been taken into account.
I wasn't familiar with KDE4, I'll take a look. I like Eclipse for my dev, but I'll take a look at Quanta, I'm not familiar with that one either.
Gorgeous.

Now how do I find out what it is without watching a video or giving out my email address?

<continues listening to ipod in office>
I'm willing to watch a good video, but this one in particular is quite long, and with no narration. A much shorter narrated tour would be both more interesting and more personal.
The Digg link said it best:

"Since it was already necessary to abandon data normalization and consistency to make these approaches work, we felt comfortable looking at more exotic, non-relational data stores"

In other words, to get MySQL to superduper scale, you have to turn it into NoSQL anyway. At which point, the only reason to be using MySQL at all is inertia, because it's pretty clunky compared to the other alternatives. Back in the day before Cassandra and etc, there wasn't a concept for NoSQL, and sharding MySQL looked like an exotic way of using a relational DB. Actually, no. It's a way of crudely emulating something that isn't a relational DB.
The Io language has both actors and prototype based OO inheritance. Asynchronous messages are implemented using futures.

Furthermore: ""When an actor requires a reply message from another actor, it is known as an insensitive actor, and will not process any further messages in its mail queue until it receives that reply.""

Why must this be so? In Io, the same objects/actors can run other coroutines while waiting on a message.

Just because no language happened to implement all of these in the 1970s and does not mean no language could have implemented them. In the concluding paragraph the author does go on to say that it is now possible to do all these, but I disagree with his implication that it is advancements in technology that made it happen. A more likely explanation is simply that programming languages are notation, advancements in notation do not follow the exponential curve of Moore's law, and it simply took this long for people to think of combining all these concepts in one notation.
> animal cruelty doesn't bother me at all.

Are you perhaps, a psychopath? Do you think we should get rid of the laws that prevent people from gratuitously torturing animals?
For context, Sirlin is the "Playing to Win" guy. He's pretty much the patron saint of games that reward real player skill instead of rewarding "wasting a lot of time doing the same thing over and over".

Unfortunately, I have yet to be convinced that there's a significant market for Sirlin's approach compared to the "click button for victory" style. So if someone can find an upside or benefit to the latter, all the better.
The general warning: http://www.prh.noaa.gov/ptwc/messages/pacific/2010/pacific.2...
The main page: http://www.prh.noaa.gov/ptwc/

At 19:18Z it's predicted to hit New Zealand. That'll be the first word of how dangerous it is at range. About 2 hours later it'll hit Australia and Hawaii. It'll slowly sweep oceana and asia south-to-north after that.
That's why when I take on a new web programming project my first action is to order 10,000 NAND gates.
Physical fitness/ability aren't valuable to most people anymore. Those aren't the major selection forces acting on humans in first world countries.
CCTV captures moment earthquake hit Chile | News Break Online
They are made by cutting business taxes.
Grosch had proposed a ternary architecture for the Whirlwind, Jay Forrester’s enormous early electronic computer

I have the notion that, in one of his novels, Heinlein "let slip" that the story was not only in the future, but also in an alternate timeline, by casually mentioning ternary computers.

Which reminds me - in early Heinlein stories, analog computers were "de rigueur", and the other day, in a Fortune mag archive someone posted, I bumped into this 1949 summary: http://www.fulltable.com/vts/f/fortune/gschwind/08uu.jpg

(Part of an amazing set of illustrations by Max Gschwind, indexed at
http://www.fulltable.com/vts/f/fortune/gschwind/a.htm - the CAD/CAM workstation of 1956 and the lunar lander of 1962 are neat too.)
I'm really hoping that facebook isn't able to enforce this. Was there really no implementation of a recent activity feed before facebook did it?

This has become such a paradigm for the web, that if they truly did 'invent' it, I guess they do deserve the patent, but wouldn't you say things like twitter are nothing more than an news feed?
New York Startups, Angel Investing and Talent
Medical billing software
Activate <a href=http://www.billingparadise.com/faxing.html>faxing</a> services (TOLL FREE 1-877-323-4707) and We will automatically provision and present your new fax number. Automatically converts the fax into a scanned document, and delivers the new fax to the right practice database
Very similar to a service I did a while back ( card.ly ) but in the opposite direction- Big vs small- I love it :)

Its amazing how easy they make it for your pages to feel sexy. Not sure why they want read/write for twitter access. We do all the stream stuff without the need for any of that.
First it's inflation not deflation.

Second, what you are suggesting is one of the worst and most immoral ideas possible. Inflation steals wealth the most from the poor and middle class. Second all government debt is inherently immoral because you are in essence taking out a loan in someone else's name.
the article is really an introduction to how our 'lizard brains' react to i/o, and specifically in the web. But the author finishes by recommending 'the joy of sex' as reading for your start-up.
I'm sure there are better books out there which explain directly how to design 2 dimensional interfaces to entice people push and chose.

What books do you recommend for this sort of thing? Anybody read the joy of sex, and agree that it's the best?
Would you lend your money to such a country? If so, there are some African nations you might consider investing in.
Atlanta's A Small Orange hosting is acquired
A Small Orange hosting launched in 2004 by then Georgia Tech student Tim Dorr is acquired by Brent Oxley of HostGator in Houston, TX.
Billions? I think you're underestimating by several orders of magnitude.
What is the unifying theme to all this?...Where's the soul of this company anymore?

I suppose you could ask the same thing about:

- Exxon-Mobil
- Walmart
- Microsoft
- Berkshire-Hathaway
- General Electric
- Johnson & Johnson

At what point do we 86 the MBA mumbo jumbo, get a customer, and just make some money?
PiCloud : Cloud Computing. Simplified.
I read it as saying that Steve personally explained a rejection. And as for letting the market decide (dons Asbestos):

1. The market does decide. There's Android, Palm, Blackberry, and Zune (rebranded as Windows for some reason) to provide options. Vote with your wallet.

2. I have worked in Retail. Retails stores choose their products very carefully. What you carry is part of your brand. Sure Apple is the store and not the app, but they're still a store closely associated with their brand-sensitive product and thus they behave like a company carefully managing their brand.

Ok, have at it. But before you waste me with lectures about how Apple has some sort of moral obligation to lose money or why they're idiots for not doing the smart thing, please try to think of them as being an "opinionated" hardware manufacturer that is so opinionated they make their own OS.
Could not help notice that this was also quoted in (in fact, was a subject of) one of Pete's older articles.
It's not just debt though, it's entitlements and obligations.
Do you really believe there are large numbers of would-be entrepreneurs who are holding back only because of business taxes?
you can completely control your own background...
I really doubt he's a psychopath. According to Wikipedia, psychopaths "they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse". In other words, they do whatever the heck they want, social norms be damned.

Many meat-eaters that I know are meat-eaters because they are very much attuned to social norms. They intuitively know that breaking from the common belief that animals are objects could threaten their socialization, which can add to their reluctance to entertain vegetarian ideas.

But I'm glad that you brought up the concept of psychopathy, because anyone who reads up on factory farming would realize that people who do that to animals are not mentally healthy. It's like the 99% of us who aren't psychopaths have delegated the messy work of factory farming to the 1% of us that are psychopaths.
Movie Tells of Birth of Silicon Valley
Apple admits use of child labour in China
8.8 Earthquake hits Chile
Article from 2008
Sort of neat, but this is from September 2008. The author's conclusion that this was a "good omen" was a little off the mark — many developers can't get anyone to answer their questions, much less Apple's CEO.
You are equivocating. Not all paths are equal, or at least in the completely subjective/nihilistic universe in which they are, the words good and bad have absolutely no meaning. We have to have some value system, if only to maintain our standard of living.

Like most things, moderation is king. Extremely shallow but effective manipulations of behaviour are a bad thing. A lot of people consuming these will agree ultimately that they have wasted their time and post-hoc have prefered to been forced to do something more challenging and fruitful with the time.

Challenge, discipline and delayed-gratification remain virtuous (in my opinion) and good despite technological advances short circuiting reward sensations.
Anyone else expect the article to be about an idea for a new porn site where you unlock achievements?

I clicked the link wondering if you made progress by watching stuff, or had to submit videos of doing stuff (which, from the perspective of the site owners, could be a way to encourage users to submit free content).
Which books did you find particularly influential?
If you take the presentation literally, yes it was overblown. However, I think he made a few very insightful points:

1) Understanding psychological factors is extremely powerful, and probably even more important than good game design. i.e. WoW isn't successful because of art design and gameplay, it's successful because some people find "the grind" very addicting. Farmville isn't successful because a videogame about farm animals is fun, it's successful because it integrates with your Facebook friends.

1b) Discovering, understanding and exploiting new psychological factors is extremely profitable.

2) The rest of the world has a lot to learn from game design on how to optimize products to take advantage of these factors.

I agree with you that gamers are hooked on the point systems more than everyone else, but I disagree that it's a binary system. Like alcohol, nicotine, and gambling, it probably affects everyone to differing degrees.

The definition of gamers has had to change a lot over the last decade. When I was a kid, only nerdy kids played games. Now those gamers are fathers. Now mothers and grandmothers play farmville / scrabble / bejeweled. Even if you're right that this only affects gamers, the percentage of the population that are classified gamers is growing.

With hundreds of millions of potential customers, even small changes are extremely profitable.

Take Starbucks. If they convince one new customer to make starbucks part of their morning routine, that has an expected value of like $1000/year. I heard they started offering coupons to people in the morning, that are only valid if they come back later that day. If Starbucks figures out to apply the Farmville secret sauce, watch out.
September 23rd, 2008
This is old news, but it does illustrate the problem with locked down systems like the iPhone, where a single organization has total control over your computing experience. Personally, I would never buy an iPhone for precisely this sort of reason, instead preferring something like an Android device.
Same as http://www.sinatrarb.com/book.html

It hasn't changed in a while. Is there a way to contribute?
oops, server ressources exceeded, couldn't read the article. Any cache version around?
I've read his blog. I think you're being overly generous with his opinion.

I wish I was wrong about that, though.
Or as a pdf on the same site: http://www.demarcken.org/carl/papers/travel-complexity-notes...
You know, this is a perception I've picked up about almost every post-war generation of British youth.
Now they only need a half of that half-kilometer S-type asteroid...
Steve Jobs wrote:

> Even though my personal political leanings are democratic, I think this app will be offensive to roughly half our customers. What’s the point?

The point is that some customers would like it and buy it. Duh. The motto should be make stuff that (some) people want, not make only things that everyone wants.

The people who don't like it (which happens to include me) should just ignore it along with the thousands of other apps they don't want. TV channels publish more offensive political speech all the time, and we consider that a good thing and we're proud of the free speech in our country.
This is something I hear quite a lot from designers that irks me quite a lot. I would hate to ever leave the impression on someone that I thought what I did was a natural born talent they couldnt possibly learn.
Every piece of software is "opinionated" to some degree. *nix has its philosophy, OS x has its look and feel, webOS and Android work in fairly different ways etc.

Apple, however, is the only one that stretches it's opinion from how software works over to what kind of content its customers can consume. Jobs and Apple seem to think that sine lots of people like their opinion on software, these people must also like their their taste in content.

And please, don't give me the Safari comeback argument, we all know there's a world of difference between native apps and web sites.

I've already voted with my wallet and development time, but the more people talk about this kind of bullshit from Apple, the more informed choices they'll be able to make.
Maybe the problem is that Britain has more "Daily Mail readers" than other countries, and THAT is the great British problem (not antisocial youths).

Actually, American "Daily Mail readers" worry more about terrorists and pedophiles (and 10-20 years ago, drugs). We've had this problem forever. This is the country that declared war on Spain and conquered their overseas empire based upon agitation from the newspapers. I can't speak for other countries, but Britain's not alone in using tabloid-generated memes and moral panics to chip away at civil liberties.
As the article says, malfunctioning isn't a privilege of the body, minds can do it too.

So the word "pathetic" is uncalled for. William Styron wrote a fantastic book about what it is like to be depressed: "Darkness Visible". Well worth a read.
It certainly isn't just Zen. There are many spiritual traditions that quote could plausibly derive from. It sounds rather more Vedantic to me (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_%28illusion%29).
No, inflation steals wealth from people who own dollars and dollar-denominated assets. That's mostly the risk averse rich, as well as many foreign governments who are trying to prop up the dollar.
UX App Roundup
I think I have the phone number of some of them. Let me check my email ...
Fascinating article on successes and not successes about the use of the analysis of social networks in military intelligence, and analyzing the polarization of domestic political dialog. (My totally unsolicited advice to fellow Americans: Have a respectful two-way conversation with somebody that you disagree with politically.)

It seems the resistance to incorporating this analysis more deeply into military thinking is that it is hard to not fight the last war, or to fight our most favorite recent war.
Any achievement has scope and context.
What one achieves in any activity may or may not transcend that activity. The meaningfulness of the activity itself may not carry beyond the individual or beyond a select group. So I think, ultimately that the achiever has to make the final judgement as whether achieving the goal really matters to the achiever and whether it matters that the achievement is important to others.

Also, treadmills are not entirely useless, even in the metaphorical sense. I may not visibly being going anywhere, but my mind may be active and going through a process of re-wiring and preparation for other challenges.
Seems reasonable. Null pointers are rumored to have cost billions in waste and failures. And they're trivial to fix with a little bit of static typing.