skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but the high speed of the CDN isn't the only (or even primary) benefit. In my opinion, browser caching is a much bigger plus. As soon as a user downloads one of these hosted libraries (by visiting a site that calls for it), their cache is primed for every other relying site they visit."

It depends on the CDN and what cache information it returns. I'm not going through all the links and verifying that they all return correctly. I do recall Yahoo's YUI documentation page promising the use of far-future Expires which means that the browser very likely never even hits the CDN, but nothing stops the CDN from using E-Tags instead, which is still pretty fast but does manifest as a hit on the CDN they could track. That said, it's entirely possible that every link there uses far-future Expires.

Personally, I'd just grab the file and use far-future Expires myself. If you've got a web application that uses code that way, odds are this is not going to be your bottleneck anyhow; far-future Expires just as thoroughly fails to hit your server as it fails to hit the CDN.
Neat approach to link shortening
We just added something to our Twitter client that you might find interesting. Just paste any link into the tweet field and it shortens on the fly (with some simple animation). It also runs validation to check for dead or mistyped links.
No single fund is truly diversified. For example, the Vanguard Total Stock Market Fund offers stocks across all industries and includes growth and value companies from domestic and international, large, mid, and small-cap companies. That's pretty darn diverse, but it only covers stock. To really diversify, you may want to purchase a bond index as well.

I use Vanguard. Vanguard has some of the lowest cost index funds. The only downside is they all have $3000 (or more) initial limits. Oh and there are generally no transaction costs with Vanguard, so you could do $100 a month via direct deposit and personally incur no fees.
I'm not an objectivist, I just think intelligence has nothing to do with the choosing. Ultimately one decides animals should exist as a delicious, nutritious source of protein, or those who would harm one's family should painfully cease to.

You can arrive at a completely different conclusion, but how is intelligence a factor in the choosing?
A stackoverflow for medicine could have enormous benefits, but considering how much "blind leading the blind" goes on there I'd be terrified if this is applied to a field with immediate consequences to people's well-being.
http://blog.mongodb.org/post/381927266/what-about-durability
It is impossible to answer this question without knowing what kind of index fund you are investing in ("large, broad index fund" does not say much). For example, if you buy an S&P 500 index fund, you are not indexing the stock market. You're just indexing a bunch of blue-chip US stocks, and you don't have exposure to asset classes such as bonds, small cap equity or foreign equity.

If you will need the money in 3-6 years you should not put it in the stock market. If you want to fund an early retirement then there are a lot more variables into this equation that you do not seem to take into consideration. What is "early"? How much money will you need into retirement? What other source of income besides savings will you have during retirement? Do you intend to raise a family? Etc. It is impossible for anyone to answer these questions for you. This is why you should learn about the stock market, and about personal investing in general, if you want to make informed decisions about making your money work for you.

I very strongly suggest that you read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Burton Malkiel.
Startup 3.0: How to Build a Better Web Startup
You might get more mileage if you prefix this comment with "shameless plug".
Play tetris in the web browser with a telephone
What an embarrassing abuse of science. I'm sure the people at SFI are angry.
Yeah, that's definitely the risk, but I'd imagine community feedback + academic/clinical education/training would somewhat mitigate that, although not fully. A good verification system would help too (for physicians), but then it'd feel more like an invite-only community, which could be good or bad - I'm not sure.
I wasn't talking to you. You're the guy who pulled his thread when valid arguments were brought up that didn't support your point. I'm sure that's why you feel right at home at Real Climate.
Good point, hadn't considered that.

That said, wouldn't that generate a LOT of income tax for the city?
Though I agree with the premise that too many options can hinder many business, I don't agree that this is universal to all businesses, and in particular to the average movie goer.

It's like Amazon limiting the number of books so that you had less to choose from.

The reason I think this fails with respect to movie goers, is that you likely don't select a movie based on 'oh let's make sure we go see all the movies that were nominated for an oscar'. You are more likely going to say 'let's go see a movie. what's playing, oh that one looks interesting, and it's nominated for an oscar, let's go see that'.

I think the authors theory is being swayed by his experience as a critic, and doesn't recognize that most people aren't critics.

additionally, a few years back when Chris Rock hosted the Oscars, I seem to recall him going to theatres and asking patrons what the "best picture" nominated films where about, and nobody had any idea, but they knew 'predator vs. terminator'. This could be the Oscars attempting to appeal to a larger audience.
Absolutely. If someone 20 feet away really wants to injure you with a knife, it's probably going to happen.
can you point to the 'list' you refer too?
So does being top 10 paid(navigation) app in China translate into sizable money? I was somehow under assumption that there aren't that many iPhones in China and Chinese aren't that wiling to pay for software, so I never bothered. Japan was a huge win for me, though, totally worth the expense.

The problem I have with translating for "experiment" is that it's kind of hard to undo a failed experiment - people who bought localized app would be upset if an update removes localization. On the other hand I do not want to continue paying for localization of new features where I know it's not going to do any good for me.
I had that experience as well. It's a disaster.
Dwarf Fortress is one of my all time favourite twists on the Roguelike genre. Something Awful had a very amusing succession game that's worth a read too; http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Boatmurdered
In Canada, CTV offered access to both live video and recorded clips for these Olympics. On Windows, the service seemed to work seamlessly -- it did not prompt for cable providers, e-mail addresses, or any such thing. On Linux, the experience was less smooth. As the video relied on Silverlight, I had to install Moonlight. Through the first day or two of the Games, only the stable v2.0 was clearly offered on the Moonlight Web site, which did not support video from CTV or NBC (and which had the unfortunate habit of ballooning a freshly-launched Firefox to more than a gigabyte of memory usage). Later on, the v3.0 preview, which does support video, was prominently offered on the Moonlight site. Sadly, it performed poorly -- video ran at only about 5 FPS on my system, while consuming an entire CPU core.

In contrast, CBC handled Canadian coverage of the Beijing Games in 2008. All their video was offered via Flash, which worked splendidly in Linux. Almost every event was viewable, often without commercials and commentators. I am saddened by this backward step.
I think you've addressed something pretty important. There is a difference between where something is stored and what is being stored. My issue with the folder metaphor is that it assumes those two are related when it reality they can be completely decoupled.

Choose to save the file either on HD, external drive, or online, then choose how to find it, tags.
Is "keeping the pirates at bay" really really worth the effort, heartache, and whatever you didn't go (opportunity cost) because you were working on "protection" from something that will happen anyway?

If so, does the rest of society agree with having this cost imposed on them? I personally never play these games anyway, so I don't care about the problems with the games that arise from you guys spending your best effort on copy-protection, but I do care if you want me to finance your idiocy via draconian copyright laws.
The problem as many described here is that when there is that crowdsourcing this kind of stuff, be it second life or mturk, will often result into really crappy work which you can't even know that quality of. Yet somewhere there are bored Japanese willing to translate for less that $0.10/word and do it diligently. Some entrepreneurial soul should be able to solve this online reputation problem...
I like this product, very interesting
You've hit the nail on the head. I spent several years in one of the biggest antibiotics research centers in big pharma. I watched as they systematically disbanded it. The business folks had decided that there was no money in antibiotics. The reason? The FDA (and similar agencies in other countries) are pretty much guaranteed to make any new, very successful antibiotic a "drug of last resort". This means you can only give it to an individual who has failed all the standard line therapy.

From a business perspective, why develop something if you are never going to be able to sell it in decent enough quantities to make a profit? Now, you could argue that at some point in the future, that drug will become standard line therapy when all the current front line drugs are completely useless. Unfortunately, by that time the drug is off patent and generic competition will ensure there won't be much profit.

This is a complex situation, and I'm not pretending that there is an easy solution. It seems there are a confluence of regulations and politics that conspire to prevent serious attempts at new antibiotics development. The situation is changing somewhat, and my hope is that once the problem becomes more acute, the necessary incentives will be aligned.
> The only downside is they all have $3000 (or more) initial limits

That's what ETFs are for, among other things.

> there are generally no transaction costs with Vanguard

(but you do lose that part w/ any ETF)
If your employer isn't matching that entire $10k, you should look into other retirement options.

http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/the-worlds-easiest...

"First, I would max out any 401(k) match that my company provides. Second, I’d max out the $5,000 for my Roth IRA. Third, I’d max out the rest of my 401(k), up to $15,000. Finally–if your employer doesn’t offer a 401(k), you’re not employed yet, or you still have money left over–I’d open a regular, taxable investment account and put money there in stocks, index funds, etc.

Why max out your Roth before your 401(k)? Well, there’s a lot of dorky debate in the personal-finance world, but the basic reasons are taxes and tax policy: Assuming your career goes well, you’ll be in a higher tax bracket when you retire, meaning that you’d have to pay more taxes with a 401(k). Another common reason for the Roth is that tax rates are considered likely to increase. Remember: Your 401(k) money is taxed at the end, while Roth money is taxed right away and then grows tax-free."
This may be extremely useful until they sort out the sharing feature. At the moment, if someone who's upgraded shares a folder with you, that folder uses space in your own account. This is not very practical, because 2G gets used up fairly quickly.
Please read this very tiny succinct powerful book: http://sivers.org/book/SmartestInvestmentBook

I put my notes on that page, but the real book is really worth reading. It sums up the wisest advice about passive investing so well.

Don't go with one fund. Do three:

#1 = An index fund representative of the US stock market in its broadest terms. (Fidelity: FSTMX, Vanguard: VTSMX)

#2 = An index fund representative of the international stock market in its broadest terms. (Fidelity FSIIX, Vanguard: VGTSX)

#3 = An index fund representative of the US bond market in its broadest terms. (Fidelity: FBIDX, Vanguard: VBMFX)

ASSET ALLOCATION:

LOW RISK = 14% stocks, 6% int'l stocks, 80% bonds

MEDIUM-LOW RISK = 28% stocks, 12% int'l stocks, 60% bonds

MEDIUM-HIGH RISK = 42% stocks, 18% int'l stocks, 40% bonds

HIGH RISK = 56% stocks, 24% int'l stocks, 20% bonds

(NOTE: all stock-holdings are 70% domestic, 30% international. Only choice is how much are stocks and how much are bonds.)
You can watch other players in realtime here: telnet://nethack.alt.org . More resources: http://alt.org/nethack/
ab -n 10000000 -c 1000 is my standard, since we serve ads.
You may want to try CrowdFlower (disclaimer: I'm on the engineering team), which is a Dolores Labs project that connects users to several different crowdsourcing marketplaces, including Mechanical Turk. We offer a GUI for designing tasks and backend algorithms that automatically reject untrusted work.
Apple made a smart move here by aligning the cultural values, ethics, and morality of their user base with their products - compare this to Google's strategy of distributing any content no matter how vulgar under the guise of 'free speech'. My guess is that Apple is again the trend-setter here - a lot of people want to see more of this. Want pornography? Go elsewhere - it's not Apple's gig.

As always, these are complex issues and should be treated 'complexly'; don't assume this post covers the full breadth of the issue.
The worst part about the implementation is that the browser icons often appear unsorted initially, and then the sort kicks in 0-5 seconds later, and they all shuffle.

This has caught me out at least twice by clicking on a browser icon to choose it, then the order changes after I clicked and the wrong browser installer is launched.
would definitely be interested and would be interested to help out.
Stupid vs Smart
I should be clear - we didn't localize the app, just the description.

And China isn't large (less than $10/day), but it's growing, and it's definitely worth it considering it only cost $14 to get the translation written and edited. Same goes for South Korea.
May I suggest the #linux channel on irc.freenode.net for questions like this?
I'll let you in on a little secret about tax-funded television: you're paying for it.

The difference? If you don't like what's on cable, you can stop paying for cable! Neat.
Your comments make it sound like the author implied "we need to take action about this." The surrounding text from those points:

I say yes but just as emphatically, I say that the government’s role need not be one of a heavy-handed regulator. There’s little question that our existing regulatory structures are poorly equipped to deal with these issues. They are too slow, they are too backward looking, and they are too political to be effective.

But it concerns me that in the absence of some level of government involvement, we will lose the one thing that the Internet must have—not just to thrive, but to survive—the trust of all actors on the Internet.

...

A good place for policymakers to start as we define our role and what our actions should be is to preserve and maintain trust in the Internet.

...

At NTIA, we’re not a regulatory agency, but as the principal advisor to the President on telecommunications and information policy, I think we have role to play in preserving and building trust on the Internet.

He did not present those points above as places for the government to insert itself. Rather, he identified those as places where trust is important. The surrounding text states that he does not yet know what role government should have in maintaining that trust, but it's something that needs to be explored.
Random thoughts on being an entrepreneur
Besides considering (1) the current-tax-rate vs. retirement-tax-rate and (2) tax rates are likely to increase, the other major thing to keep in mind is (3) that the government may decide to tax Roth IRA distributions in the future (even though it says it won't now).

Think it won't happen? Social security benefits weren't taxed until 1984.

EDIT: Also, if you're currently raising a family and/or paying for kids' college, it's very plausible and reasonable that you'll be in a lower tax bracket when you retire.
One of the positives of the shellscript init.d/rc.d scripts are that you can write your own start/stop steps e.g. sending a shutdown command to a socket. Not all programs react well to a SIGTERM.
> I don't know too much about the terms of VC funding, why is this the case?

VC model breaks down if they don't get back at least ten times more than what they've put in. With upper tier VCs, I believe that's even higher.

Angels are looking for a multiplier on their return too, but generally the money they invest is so small, they won't bother blocking most exists.

Ironically, this sort of approach might lead to more "quick flips" (which Mint acquisition wasn't) than anything: you have built a highly innovative product which is starting to pick up some traction; you can sell it for $30mm to Google (netting yourself ~$2-4mm after taxes, effectively a life changing sum) or you can get (further) VC funding and try to swing for the fences. However, your chances of any exit have now been decimated.
Thanks for the reply. I took a look at the headers returned for https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.mi... and here's what I see:

Content-Type: text/javascript; charset=UTF-8
Last-Modified: Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:05:02 GMT
Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:09:20 GMT
Expires: Mon, 28 Feb 2011 21:55:22 GMT
Cache-Control: public, max-age=31536000
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
Server: sffe
Content-Encoding: gzip
X-XSS-Protection: 0

200 OK

It looks like Google is setting an expires for 1 year in the future, meaning (I believe) that the browser will use the cached copy. So, by using these libraries, you have a decent chance that a brand new visitor will arrive with a warm cache, thereby speeding up that initial page load (and first impression!) a tiny fraction.
Honest question: What's the logic behind keeping hundreds of thousands of dollars in a money market account? Is there a larger chunk of money sitting in places that earn a better return? If I had that kind of money sitting around that I wanted to use in the next couple of years, I can't imagine putting it in anything with less of a return than the low-risk Vanguard core funds. I don't know much about these things, so if I'm wrong, I'd like to know before I have money to lose.
To be honest no.

While there may be people who buy the game after being able to sample it, there are far more who would happily pirate a game and never look back. Of course, it's foolish to equate every pirated copy as lost sale (as the RIAA/MPAA do), but I do believe many titles lose a respectable number of sales through piracy.

It is important to ensure that any anti-piracy measure that affect gameplay can be identified as such and not as bugs. This can be difficult to do in the game since providing messages/warnings gives crackers a place to begin backtracking, so at least on my games we would carefully seed FAQs message/boards with questions/answers that if X occurred it was because you were running a pirated copy.

As a developer my bigger concern, both at the time and ongoing, is ensuring that any demo we release is produced in a manner that's both expedient and forward looking. If you go back 5+ years it was fairly standard for developers to release demos way in advance of a retail release - infact far enough in advance that it was possible to make changes to the final game based on feedback/metrics from the demo version.

This practice now seems to have all but died. Many games never release a demo, and games that do have a demo version often wait until after the retail version hits the shops to release it. I think that's a real shame and driven largely by fear of possibly bad press for games that need to recoup multi-million dollar investments.
Sounds like a great idea - I'd be happy to help out too if you need it.
I did no such thing. If I know which thread you mean, it was downvoted and closed so that I couldn't even comment on it.
Haleron iLet Mini HAL Is a Modest Tablet With a Modest Price
I should have made it clear - I was talking specifically about reducing economical risk by turning over your fate to a slave owner. The elevated risk to personal security is obviously a downside as you pointed out, although a sane slave-owner will never kill you because he has already paid for all your future work. In addition slave will forever forgo all chances of climbing out of that hole because he does not keep any of the surplus product he has generated. And hence my point is that someone seeking to reduce their exposure to risk can easily end up subjecting himself to a different risk he didn't think about.

The parallel with employment is direct - by trading your economic liberty for a paycheck you are reducing your exposure to risk of there being nothing to eat. However you are also eliminating your exposure to the upside of your work. You are also picking up the risk of having loaded on debt and then being laid off, ending up in a dead-end career and work-place hazards.

What Seth points out is that risk of there being nothing to eat is vastly exaggerated in our minds, thus many of us trade the very real upside of our labor for the risk-protection we didn't need.
Hmm, this article is a little light on the facts. Internet "regulation" can mean so many things that I'll wait until they make a proposal. For example, if they make some law requiring "internet security," I'll just laugh in their faces. Technology doesn't work some way just because you'd like it to.
I didn't say there is anything wrong with that. What exactly are you arguing against?
It works well until you have things that don't just fit in one bin. The folder metaphor has worked fine for me until I started getting enough files that they were harder to find. (Is that song in my blues folder or jazz? Is that photo in the Family folder or GroupShots)

I understand that it would be hard to completely remove folders, but it would be nice to have the option to use tags for those of us with over growing file collections.
I think the beginning is worth a read in any case. This:

> The answer is simple: Nethack does what computers do best - what computers were invented for. It hands you a symbolic representation of something, and lets you interact with it. The symbols are utterly mundane ... but the interaction is extraordinarily complicated.

is a beautiful idea, and had never occurred to me, despite my longterm adventures in Angband. (I'm also not quite sure that it's not pushing a metaphor too far, but it's lovely anyway.)
Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy
I would modify the question to "[...] Is Amazon just that unreliable [...]". Saying that the whole cloud is unreliable is a pretty fast generalization.
definitely a great idea
Canada beats the U.S.A., and Twitter beats the New York Times
$10/day is $3000/year. If I can spend two hours and even a $100 I am coming out way ahead on my time/money equation.

So you had good results in south Korea too?
To verify it would be super-cheap as well: setup another job in reverse (lang -> eng), and see if the terms match. Alternatively you could just present them both to another user and ask if the translation makes sense.