skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a little less black and white. Suppose I put a guy with a physics PhD in a dark room for a while and he tells me 'with 99% probability, a stock with a price-to-earnings ratio of under 10 will beat the S&P 500 the next year". So whenever a stock's ratio gets below 10, I buy the stock and short the S&P 500 and wait for the bags of money to arrive. In that case, I'm not really relying on noticing the actions of others who have discovered a good deal. Yet, I am keenly interested in beating anyone to the stock when the ratio gets to 9.99. In reality, the market signals are more complicated statistical relationships, they could just as easily arise from someone being very dumb, instead of very smart. Or just the result of random variation that day.
you'd honestly be amazed at the effectiveness of confidence for unattractive guys. also pro-tip: just because you don't consider yourself attractive doesn't mean that dressing well and taking care of yourself doesn't do wonders.
FTC member rips into Google's privacy efforts
Great article. I am especially happy to hear it talk about measuring utility bills before and after retrofits, since a lot of improvements in this industry have been measured more on promises of improvement, as opposed on actual data (i.e. you will save 20% on heating by buying this boiler, and therefore, once installed, it's considered to save 20%). Pretty crazy way to do things.

While there are a lot of new solutions for improving measurement of energy efficiency, a lot of them are focused on electricity, and unless you take the whole building into account, you aren't truly figuring out the costs. I can switch from electric heating to gas, but that doesn't make my house more efficient. The reality is that even with smart metering technologies, it will take many years to retrofit existing building stock (only 1% of the building stock gets replaces annually).

Another area of a lot of activity here is the financing side - you see a lot of creative solutions popping up, and even banks are looking at energy efficiency as something they want to fund.

The startup I am working on does sophisticated measurement of utility bills, and uses some cool analysis techniques to split it up into various components - heating, cooling, hot water, and nonseasonal fuel use. The goal is exactly what is described in the article - to allow people to compare before and after, to quickly figure out where the most potential savings are, etc. It's for agencies that run energy efficiency programs or owners of portfolios of buildings, as well as people interested in financing energy projects.

We are doing a closed launch this week to a couple of beta customers, so this is very timely. We don't allow demo accounts yet, but if you are interested, sign up at www.energyscorecards.com to be notified when we launch publically.
"felt (mostly) left out of the party" is perhaps accurate, although the engineer in question was one of the four founders (see my longer recent item in this thread).

Based on what happened to him I'd have to wonder if later employees got much more than beer money.
So if the VC's up card is a 6, and the true count is +5, you should ask them to sign an NDA?
We need to be careful about equating company size with company 'nastiness'.

The mining firms are (partly) of a huge scale because that is what is needed to succeed globally, and they have achieved the scale through very considerable international expansion (including substantial mergers - think Rio Tinto, and BHP Billiton).

As the post argues, the two big Australian retailers haven't been anywhere near as 'brave' internationally.
"Why Germany didn't create the iPod?" is a very good question I've been asking myself, too. Remember that MP3 was even development by Germans (Fraunhofer Institut). But it required an US company to start the digital revolution...

I still remember the end of the 90s when I was standing at the Schneider CeBIT booth talking to the booth personnel about their new niche product: One of the world's first MP3 players (I think it even had a parallel port). Shown in a corner of the booth and nobody was taking notice of the technology - even the Schneider people didn't seem to be interested. I talked to them about the huge potential of this technology and made them aware of the fact the MP3 encoding was about to take off at the universities (everybody in the CS department started ripping&encoding their CD collections). But they simply didn't see it, they didn't believe that MP3 (that they) could change the world with such a product. What a wasted opportunity!
Is this the sort of system one would want locked down to only be accessible from certain IP addresses? Like the dealership's IP address?

It truly baffles me how even the most basic security precautions seem to be beyond the ken of $100/hour professionals/companies.
Here are 3 companies in metro Chicago with more than 100 employees:

http://www.daigger.com/about-us/index.jsp
http://www.aleri.com/
http://www.emkay.com/flash/introPage/index.htm

(Selected at random from Hoovers).

Not one of them has a logo that is better than the median logo on this site.

My point is: this is great for a lot more than just mom-and-pop coffee shops.
Pablum.
They are more like the retailers... huge local players, but pretty shy about international expansion.
China: the coming costs of a superbubble
There is another good reason not to authorize so many: some states tax you based on the number of shares you have authorized (and not necessarily with their dilution). 10,000,000 shares is way too much if you can get by with less.

This tidbit comes from my girlfriend who is a tax specialist and consultant who also read the article.
Wow, and this is exactly the kind of douchebaggery I was trying to get away from in my book. You know, I think on the first page I mention that the answer to "what the best way" to do something in Ruby is always "it depends". The notion that you can follow singular design principles in all situations is absurd, if you ask me.

Context is king, and what you've done is taken a single point from my book, ripped out its context, strawmanned it to death, and used it to bolster you're own "Top 100 rails" status.

I encourage readers to actually see what I had to say in the book by downloading the PDF before taking these arguments too seriously. If there are some constructive examples to be shown that seem promising and pass peer review, they'll definitely make it into the open source version.

It might even be worth it to write up a section describing the tradeoffs that richcollins has pointed out, but it's definitely not something as universal as he makes it sound.
I have used 99designs for something else than a logo, and so far it i has been a good success for me.

You are going to get some good submissions, mediocre ones, and some crappy ones.

Be willing to pay a more than a $200 - $300, and you will get good submissions.

If you are a big corp, and have a huge brand to work on, you might not want to use them.
If you just want to get something really decent looking out of the door, then they are really good choice.

Once your site/company/whatever, starts making millions, you can spend the money on high end designs.

At the end of the day you get what you pay for. Put your logo for $500, and it is guaranteed you will get a lot of good submissions (and a river of bad ones).

I honestly think this is much better than just working with a individual designer. The main reason is that you might get submissions that are really creative and you would have never thought of.

Again, if you pay pay $300 - $500 and you will get better results.
Awesome flash - viral video done right
I'm not sure that it's fair to blame this fact on statistics. Incorrect statistics can give rise to illegitimate findings, just like improper measurement technique can. That's not the fault of statistics, it's the fault of people incorrectly applying tools and techniques.

That said, I agree with the conclusion that published research is full of incorrect results. I basically don't believe anything that comes out of a single paper unless it's been confirmed by unrelated work. That's the fault not just of incorrect statistics but of many other things, not the least of which is that doing research is hard and there is no way of knowing your end result is right.
And yet one of the requirements for being a Windows 7 capable phone is to have a physical "Bing button"
C'mon, Wired. Hacker?

He logged into the web interface from home using a password.

The better headline would have been "Poor Security Allows Disgruntled Employee to Disable Over 100 Cars Remotely."
Apple's products are not baby resistant. I've actually heard of plenty of adults who manage to break them. My suspicion is that they are designed to be beautiful, and if they're a bit more fragile than an "ugly" (but, in my experience, fairly durable) Nokia, so be it.
DVD Releases March 16 2010 | New DVD Releases
Colonoscopies cost loads of money because they are performed in a Dr's. office. Insurance won't pay for them because they don't want you to actually go to a Dr's. office.
Screenings can come down in price if they can be performed outside of Dr's. offices which they completely can. We need to separate these things out so we can move insurance out of the day to day choices about your health. That way you are in control of our health and improve your health on your own dollar with your own choices. It won't happen overnight, but getting people to think about the problem differently is the first step.
Red in Jupiter’s Spot Not What Astronomers Thought
Indeed it does, and Chris Clark very nicely summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of PEG vs other parsers. Nice find.
Curmudgeonly advice for unit tests
A war-weary veteran of the testing wars offers some advice.
Mamma and Dada's cell phones are extremely appealing to our daughter, who is nearly two. I have no conclusive evidence that this is because the objects in question receive attention and interest from us, or if it's the device itself (noisy, lights, images, etc...) that's interesting in its own right.
The book is opensource, why not submit a <strike>patch</strike> pull request. :)
you provided a tl;dr link to a BOOK???! haha, wednesday morning irony ftw
Yes, I started Prawn via the "Ruby Mendicant" project:
http://majesticseacreature.com/mendicant/

I'm still active in the project as a maintainer. But really, these days you have Brad Ediger, James Healy, and Daniel Nelson, along with about 60+ contributors to thank for where Prawn is heading.

My job is mostly to sit around naming things, and warning people about the fragility of the early code I wrote. But we will have a 1.0 plan soon, and no matter who does the work, that'll be good for everybody.
Here's a few suggestions about better alternatives to Science using statistics:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/1gc/frequentist_statistics_are_frequ...
Coca Cola overspends and has custom everything. There are industry verticals that absolutely require couture design, including print, large-scale retail, and mass market food products. But most companies aren't in those verticals.

A 200 person asset management firm doesn't need couture design. They need competant bespoke tailoring. Same goes for a chain of dental offices, a regional law firm, an HVAC company, and most enterprise software companies.

Most businesses shouldn't be spending the kind of money Coke spends on a one-off project. Not for their entire company.

Your concerns about stolen logos are valid (like I said earlier, saw that happen). But those same concerns exist at the lower end of the custom "consultatative" design market as well. And the fact is, most of the logos on the 99designs logo market aren't stolen. They're just derivative and boring. Which is fine.
Interactive horror through voice recognition
Hah, the irony here did not escape me. But good point.

So... here's the tl;dr; for the book itself:

"Ruby provides many ways to do things, many of them decent. But some are usually better than others, depending on the context."
I'm not sure that it's fair to blame this fact on statistics.

That's certainly true. The only thing you can say here about statistics is that it's hard, much harder than it looks.

Popular media reports with phrases like "Over 80% of..." create the impression that statistics can be encapsulated in a simple number, but that's far, far from true.
Thanks George. We need to catch up soon!
Wow, that is the most insight-free article I've ever read on the topic!
What's "intellectual" about the article?

Also, how do we know that it's "good hackers" voting this stuff up?

That little clause is a wormhole to the redditverse, as people use it to justify pretty much anything.

A much more fun game is "7 degrees of hacker news", where you try and create the most tenuous link possible to defend the "HN worthiness" of an article. Like saying that "Well, this is about hacking, because, see, they had restrictions, and they learned to hack around them! See!" I'm sure others can do better.

(Not that it's a bad article, of course... it's just not something I'd consider germane)
Most of the cheap iPod-lookalikes don't have anything like the level of integration that the iPod has with iTunes. And that's what set the iPod apart from the beginning, and has probably been the key to its success.

The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player, or even the first hard-disk-based player. But its integration with iTunes, along with the scroll-wheel interface (which was pretty impressive when it first came out), meant that it was the first one many people ever considered buying.

As a sidenote, iTunes did actually work with some other brands of MP3 player early on (including, IIRC, the Nomad), but Apple killed this off pretty quickly once they had their own out there. Which sucked if you owned one of those devices (they learned a valuable lesson for dealing with Apple, and iTunes specifically: beware the feature-stealing "upgrade"), but it's pretty clear why Apple did it.

There have always been MP3 players with better spec sheets as standalone devices, but none really that have anything like the software/hardware (and accessory) ecosystem. They're fine if you want to load music onto the player manually via the file browser, but the whole idea of the (HDD-based) iPod was that it would just contain your entire music library, constantly mirrored from your computer, and you'd never have to do anything.

It's always struck me as an example of how a product that's inferior (or at best "minimum viable") but really well-integrated with software can beat out more feature-rich standalone devices that cut corners on integration.
Great analogy! I wish I had thought of that.
While ip address restriction isn't foolproof, it would have probably stopped this "hacker" from gaining access. And the article says this guy was pretty good with computers?!?!? If he was, then he'd have covered his tracks better.
Writing tech books is something of a crap shoot.

I had a mixed blessing with my first book effort, Pro VB 6 & XML. I started out as one of about 10 authors, expected to contribute one or two chapters, and ended up as one of two authors and writing a little over half the book.

I got to write about stuff I was already quite familiar with, so it went pretty quick. And the book did OK, so I made some decent money, and the time spent was well worth it.

However: It gave me the impression this was a repeatable event. :)

Aside from the odd chapter for Wrox (most of which never saw the light of day because books got canceled, though I still got paid since I was not on royalties for them), my next book effort was Beginning Ruby for Wrox, around 2001 or so.

Way more work, the tech market was turning to shit, and Ruby was still an uber-niche area. Wrox then went bankrupt, and I never saw my final check for work completed. I got, I think, a grand for several months work.

Just before Wrox burned I had some discussions with my editor who suggested various ways to monetize what I had already written. Mostly it was "have a Web site".

Thing is, there is so much free quality info already available that drumming up eyeballs and getting people to part with cash is quite tricky.

If you're thinking of writing a book you really need to have your eyes open and keep realistic expectations, and be comfortable with what you can expect. If the goal is to build a rep, then sales may not matter. But you are still competing for attention.

Greg has the Ruby Best Practices blog; I'm quite honored to be allowed to publish there (and I wish I could get my ass in gear to write more). I'd be all for having ads on the site and finding a way to get some cash back to Greg & O'Reilly so long as it didn't spoil the reader's experience.

But I think that's quite doable.

I also think E-books can do better by exploiting their E-nature. I've had some ideas for E-books that weren't simply paper books turned PDF. There is lot's you can do with them, and perhaps there are ways to hook them into a recurring revenue service (say, a subscription to Best Practices screencasts or something.)

I can't emphasize enough, though, that people who find these things valuable should see about remunerating the author. If you want to see more things like this, help out.

People like Greg deserve a lot of credit for trying things out and trying to provide quality material in an affordable way. He is one of the reasons I'm proud to be part of the Ruby community.
In all seriousness, all it takes is some code examples that make me and a few others say "whoa, cool" and it'll make its way in.

If RBP becomes "Gregory Brown's Best Practices", it'll be epic fail. I am encouraging folks to prove whatever they can wrong in this book.
Funny. Also, these are very easy to bypass if you are at all familiar with automotive alarm or remote-start installation.
It depends on where the interesting discussion is happening.
“Little Things” to Boost Your Happiness at Work
For context, n-hexane is essentially gasoline.
Design for America: Gov Data Viz Contest
That sounds really interesting. Is the idea to split up the energy use into different base functions by how it correlates with time of day, temperature, and season? I've been loosely playing around with the idea of doing this for my own house.
Suppose he did use another employees account.
Suppose he used social engineering tricks to get that user to reveal his password.

That was Mitnick's MO and most have long since ceded him the epithet "hacker".

That said:
> "Omar was pretty good with computers"
If he really was, he'd have used Tor and they'd have never known it was him.
The founder (or any employer) has a responsibility to shareholders to pay employees as little as possible. An employee has responsibility to themselves (and their family) to ask for as much pay as possible. Negotiation is about finding a middle ground between those interests. Holding an employer responsible for figuring out what a given employee will be happy with is strange, to say the least.
I agree with all of these, and I personally would say that the most important ones are version control and OOP. They're two that I put off for a while as a self-taught programmer, but have paid off the most.

I started with PHP, which lulls you into thinking that procedural programming is all you'll ever need. For larger and more complex code bases though, OOP really makes things more organized.
My impression is that DOE is pretty hands-on in many energy research issues. They run the NREL (and the nuclear weapons labs) for example...
used it to bolster you're own "Top 100 rails" status.

I've mostly stopped using Rails and Ruby in favor of Io, so I have no interest in bolstering my Rails status. I was just providing evidence to counter your assertion that I was a Ruby newb.

The notion that you can follow singular design principles in all situations is absurd, if you ask me.

I agree that "it depends", but using Hashes as arguments has become idiomatic Ruby, which is unfortunate in most cases.
Most auto Stealerships are just using the same old broadband that home users have, with dynamic DHCP IP addresses.

As for the provider? I wouldn't likely blame them. It was likely that several dealerships may have set up one shared account on the system for everyone to use, or that someone left the password written or printed out in plain view. These things happen. All. The. Time.
"Omar was pretty good with computers" does not a hacker make. At most what he did was social engineering by obtaining a login of another employee.

It would be interesting to see how exactly he got the password, but I guess that is "part of an ongoing investigation."
Ask HN: Experiences w/ Dreamhost & SEO Plugin Vs. Another Host
I can fake my way through some PHP and Django, but I don't know what's going on when it comes to server administration, and I could use some advice.

I've been on Dreamhost shared hosting for several years now, and have been very happy with them.

But recently I they told me that they are getting out of memory errors on my account. I operate about half a dozen sites, mostly on WordPress, my blog, http://kadavy.net being the most popular and critical. Altogether, I'd say I get about 90k unique pageviews per month for all of my sites.

I looked into WordPress optimization a bit, and while I installed and configured WP Super Cache, I noticed that Dreamhost has banned one of my favorite plug-ins, "All-in-one SEO Pack." I'm still using it and they haven't said anything, but I did notice that the WordPress admin ran more quickly on one of my sites when I disabled this plugin.

Is it time for me to upgrade my hosting plan? Should I go with Dreamhost PS, or some other hosting service? If it costs a bit more each month, fine. I may be naive, but it doesn't seem like I should have to worry so much about optimization at this point.
What works for me is the following:
- Exercise. I work out 3-4 times a week weight lifting and cardio. But any rigorous exercise would do.

- Break down tasks into small chunks. Write them down or put them on your todo list. Work on one at a time.

- Cross off one of your tasks a day. Even if it is very small, the point is making progress.

- Rest. If you're tired and can't work, then there's no point in trying. Take a break, take a walk, go out, or get a good night's sleep. Try again the day after.

- Take vacations. Muscles adapt to increasing amount of effort if you give them enough rest. Your mind doesn't shut down so take much longer to recuperate. Do something fun every once in a while.
It wasn't likely to be so much "poor security" as it was likely to be a weakly protected account: a shared ID for everyone or credentials sitting in plain view.
I would recommend asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org/). Beware: it may be a bit overkill, and configuration is a bit in depth but it will have all the features want now, and could ever need (check out AGI scripting in your research).

You may also want to look into trixbox, which is an asterisk server with a bunch of addons, including full web based configuration already configured.

I do not have much experience with faxing but I'm pretty sure if you want to fax from a real machine over VOIP you may run into problems, but I believe there are options for email to fax.

As for real phones ringing you'll need ATAs, which can be picked up pretty cheap, or you can go with SIP phones (a bit more pricey but more functions) so the whole idea may be a bit more than you're looking to get into.
Um, no.

I think the point is that the Japanese electronics manufacturers were (and are) very good at producing standalone devices, but missed the boat on devices (like the iPod) which get their power from their tight integration with the PC.

The standalone-device model works really well for some applications (e.g. digital cameras; you wouldn't want to have an iPod-style camera that you had to tether to a specific computer to get your photos out -- you want one where you can just swap cards like disks and keep shooting), but less well for others.