skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"What I said was that the fanboys claim that the free market will utilize every opportunity of profit, and I'm claiming that's not borne out by experience."

No, the fanboys don't say that. The "fanboys" say what arethuza said.

Fanboys might also say something along the lines of "If you're so sure there's a profit opportunity here, why not try it and capture it?" Now, I'm actually not seriously suggesting that you do that, but I am seriously suggesting that if you were to try it, you may discover that there are indeed good reasons they don't have them. I've seen any number of "boutique" stores start up under your philosophy, and from what I've seen it's a very, very dangerous mindset to start up a business in.

I think the real reason people don't like capitalism is that it tends to let the cold, hard underlying reality actually impact your business, and force you to adapt to the world instead of the other way around. (And when I see companies do that in a putatively "capitalistic" environment, I'm the first to say that it's no longer capitalism.) A lot of people have a deep resistance to that idea, but I think it's at the core of why capitalism succeeds so well; the success of your system will be pretty directly proportionate to its ability to deal with reality and not fantasy, and some non-capitalistic systems can at least survive... though, well, let's talk about that again after the entitlements (aka "the fantasy that I can be promised unconditionally safe money in the future by the government today"; there is no such thing as unconditionally safe future money) are done crashing. (Yes, the US has entitlements; to that extent it isn't very capitalistic.)
excellent, I admire that you're so humble about it

I'm even more interested in trying out tarsnap!
The blue edges around the dried up lakes seems rather suspect as well. Looks like the result of using the Feather tool on a selection of the lake. For reference before and after satellite images of dried up lakes:
http://weheartworld.com/climate-change/global-devastation-ho...
Anyone find this in GoogleMaps/Earth?
He's right that design sometimes doesnt matter. But most of the time it does, especially if you're trying to break in.
It really still depends on your use case. At my day job I advocated switching from SVN to HG and the change has been great - now we "branch" and merge constantly and it really helped our processes. On my iPhone game at home I still use SVN with beanstalk.com and it works great.
America's Debt Gets Scary
* I started programming computers at 6 and I still love them :)

* I traveled all around the world in the french navy (http://carnet-escale.chez-alice.fr/JDA/escales/carte.JPG)

* I left the french navy to do IT despite having a lifelong contract there

* I'm about to move to the country-side with my family and bootstrap projects (that, I'm really proud of :-)
The county level maps look suspect, as if some normalization or bias at the state level were happening. Do people really get more obese when you cross the state line from Illinois to Missouri?
They're proposing to use a special "end of government" process where the whips agree amongst themselves it should pass without debate.
Correctly phrased, experimental data yielding a P value of .05 means that there is only a 5 percent chance of obtaining the observed (or more extreme) result if no real effect exists (that is, if the no-difference hypothesis is correct). But many explanations mangle the subtleties in that definition.

This is important, but not quite accurate. It would be more correct to say that this is what the P value means if the model is correctly specified. And in the social sciences (or, for that matter, biology), this is almost never the case.

When I was an undergrad taking econometrics, this was incredibly frustrating. I swore there had to be something I just wasn't getting; why did scientists put so much credence in numbers that rely on assumptions that they know to be false? Of course, at the same time, I love microeconomic theory, which lies on a similarly fictitious basis.

Over time, I relaxed a bit in my attitude toward statistics. While I don't mean to diminish the importance of proper, rigorous methodology, the fact is that statistical methods are just a narrative device. They give us a way of telling plausible stories and discarding implausible ones. We'd be foolish to believe that we can always tell correlation, causality and coincidence apart, but we do a better job by using statistics than we would without.
Who are you doing the Msc with?

(Im currently doing mine with the OU and I got the impression your doing the same?)
"...All those moments will be lost in time; like tears in rain. Time to die."

FYI Rutger Hauer actually wrote that last line in to the script. Most memorable scene in the movie if you ask me.
I've been thinking about this problem recently -- and it's a hard one -- because we've got a corporate client with a "decision maker" who's got no technical background, but keeps making technical decisions anyway. He does this by listening to advice from me and other technical consultants, and then ignoring that and doing whatever his old buddies at the DoD suggest.

The problem is further compounded by the fact that you can gather together four different technical generalists, ask them a specific question about your project, and get four different -- but equally correct -- answers.

For example, a good one might be: "Should I use Ruby on Rails, Python, WSGI, Java, or PHP for my project?" There's not really much in the way of technical reason to use any of those methods over the others; it comes down to a matter of personal preference on the part of the technologist.

Trying to resolve the matter through discussion is probably out, since the discussion is likely to devolve into arguments over minutiae between the different approaches.

So, I can't think of any way for a non-technologist to ask for technical advice from anyone, and get the answers they really want. It's too much a matter of dabbling in a field where you don't even know enough to know what you don't know.

You might try this instead: write up an RFP that doesn't spell out the technologies that should be used. Instead, spell out your requirements, and be specific in terms that make sense to you:

* The features listed must be N% complete in X days;

* Total development time and cost should be Y and Z;

* The project will be maintained at J rate over K months, meeting L, M, and N requirements...

...Then shop that around. If a technical person thinks they can meet those requirements using their favorite technology, then let them have at. What does it really matter to you if they use PHP or Java, so long as it works?

Set up a contract that gives both of you escape clauses early on in the development project, with minimal losses. e.g., "The developer must complete W feature by Q date, to project manager's satisfaction, or the project manager may choose to abort the project and pay the developer $ amount for their time so far."
I resewed the edging on the laptop sleeve for my 13" Macbook not too long ago. 5 minutes, and I save myself $15. Lots of sewing kits for casual users come with a diamond shaped wire loop that makes it easier to thread needles. Those are dirt cheap. This invention is even more convenient. Kudos!
Interesting data and depressing when you think of the health care costs we'll be seeing as a nation as our population ages.

I have one quibble with the presentation; white is represented as "no data", but perception wise, it makes it look like those states had 0 percent obesity rates.
Would you rather I'd said "throw X under the bus"?
Virtually no one calibrates their monitor so your carefully defined 24bit colours are going to hit eyeballs in all sorts of different forms.
Birkbeck, University of London.

They're got a couple of great professors and a few not-so-good ones. The great ones more than make up for the others and it's probably no surprise that their subjects also interest me the most.

I should be graduating this year (or maybe it's next year?), my project proposal is being reviewed and exams are in about 7 weeks time.
Yeah, the wasted repeated effort was what I initially thought about, too. The argument about how compilations of results will be systematically skewed by certain results not being published is perhaps even more persuasive, because it doesn't just lead to wasted effort but to incorrect results.
Looks like badly formatted blog spam taken word-for-word from:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/14/microsoft_vc-1_codec...
Performance Direct Van Insurance
Employers: Look to gaming to motivate staff
Agreed. It might be a visualisation, but it certainly isn't a good visualisation.

Even the user interface makes it difficult to figure out what you're looking at.
I know what you mean. I came from a fairly poor background myself - nothing as harrowing as your own though - and find myself more frugal than many of my peers. I tend not to commit to things that will become long-term obligations (for example, I rent and have no debt) and I save obsessively. I tend to measure my savings in how many years I could go without having to work. I think being in this kind of position helps with the fear.
I lived and worked in Afghanistan, great country, guys. ^^
How this article got so much points I'll never know. Its some novice advice on version control. Why don't you read the git books, they'll tell you all about it in well-organized fashion: http://book.git-scm.com
My head is in the cloud
I don't know. That long, rambling, breathlessly-written article makes me wonder about its author's mental stability.
"Hispanics are more obese than average."

Is that really true? The areas of the country that I most often associate Latino Hispanic immigrants seem to have the lowest obesity rates on this map.
Maybe one can use colour based coding depending of the karma percentile?

So something at the top 10% percentile would have small green icon next to it. The colour would be a gradient till it reaches the bottom 10%, where it would show red.

This would make it even easier to scan, to look at top comments just search for green..... just a thought.
Along the same lines, I realized that sometimes I was giving undue weight to comments depending on the author. This was also solved with Greasemonkey -- if anybody's interested, the script is at < http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/67722 >.
"If the model is correctly specified"

Indeed. I had a similar realization when I observed that the estimated parameter error on a chi-square fit does not depend on the actual chi-square value itself. This seemed preposterous to me, shouldn't the parameters be more uncertain if the fit is bad? Then I came across this passage in Numerical Recipies that said something like "remember that all of this is under the assumption that the model being fit to is actually the one from which the data points are drawn. If the reduced chi-square value is >>1, then that indicates that this is not the case and then the entire procedure is suspect."
An unintentionally good example of why choosing colors for choropleth maps can be tricky in terms of making sure the data you are conveying matches visual perception. UT, for example stands out (in later years), even though it has less obesity than states around it. In this case, a single hue changing from light to dark would be more effective.

Choropleth maps are an interesting problem because they can be unintentionally quite misleading. In particular, the modifiable areal unit problem is a frequent issue with US maps of population-related data. This is due to the use county boundaries and since counties vary drastically by both size and population, values averaged over a county are sometimes almost meaningless (the classic example is San Bernadino County in CA).
The desktop is far from being dead.

I run two machines, one with SuSE+ KDE the other with
ubuntu+gnome, its a choice i have made.

That said, Linux will never have its "desktop year" at heart i believe the issue is design, the UI in most Linux apps falls far from the closed standard, most probably due to the fact that design decisions are made mostly by developers rather then UI designers.

Be it on a desktop or on the cloud, people will not use badly designed UI.

with very few exceptions, i have not been convinced open source development model makes good design choices. graphic design follows a different path then software.
Good point. Distributions with infinite variance are less common in physics, so that's normally not something we have to worry about.
There are a few typical examples that are given whenever this question comes up:

- ITA Software does airline scheduling in Lisp.

- Naughty Dog Software created a Lisp-derived scripting language for several of its games, including Crash Bandicoot. After they were acquired by Sony, their underlying technology was rewritten in more mainstream languages.

- Paul Graham built ViaWeb in Lisp. (also rewritten after acquisition)

- AutoCAD uses Lisp as its scripting language, and several other CAD providers have followed suit.

But you are right: it isn't particularly popular. To use it commercially, you either need to be working alone, or you need to stumble into one of the few pockets of industry where it is used -- usually established by someone working alone. :)

Here's an old-ish discussion on the subject:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75126

Clojure is probably too new to find many companies using it. They do have a jobs page, though: http://clojure.org/Jobs
* I never graduated college but somehow ended up working for google

* I survived and kept a roof over 3 kids and a wife while only making 10'000 one year. (in USA)
--- Did the same with 4-5 kids while technically homeless and out of work.

* I'm raising 5 amazing children with an incredible wife

* I've taught myself C, Java, Perl, PHP, ASP, Erlang, Lisp, HTML, CSS, Javascript

* I'm a born again christian (Actually the thing I'm most proud of although I know not impressive to some, But it is a brag thread so I'm including it.)
> They're got a couple of great professors and a few not-so-good ones.

Heh, ain't that always the way.

Good luck with those exams!
For people who don't have time for a detailed comparison right now, can anyone summarize how this is different from GreaseMonkey?
I've done nothing.
The biggest issue comes down to OEMs. There are practically no OEMs making Linux machines, especially great ones. The masses don't install operating systems. It just comes with their machine ready to go.
Microsoft attributes $80-$100 million dollars in revenue to a shade of blue
What an ugly hack.
I believed the first one (7 continents) and paused on the second (Olympic gold medal). I never knew Michael Phelps used HN! (I'm glad I'm not the only one who made this mistake)
What about this reason: Windows 7 is good enough.

What would switching to Linux bring to a person that doesn't care much about computers?
That cracks me up - probably because I took drinking too seriously for many years. I can at least imagine people in that situation. I guess it's kinda sad but also fun to have won and misplaced something that serious.

That actually happenend to someone I went to high school with - he wasn't so lucky but after several surgeries he just kinda looks like a hard ass. You're definitely lucky.
I've come to find the whole 'karma' thing the most absurd aspect of this site. I give not a s#&t about my 'score' anymore. A high score can indicate someone who actually submits useful entries....but just as often (or more) it's those who are "running with the herd". The most agreeable amongst the clique. It's group-think, largely.

Personally, carrying on a debate with people via keyboard is very slow and tedious. Carrying on debates with anonymous folks along with the so-called Karma system (I think it's more of an Applause Meter) tends to sway argument based on popularity and acceptance. The 'karma' system generally leads to: "Oh, you just insulted my iPad...minus 1 for you!", or "How dare you consider JSON to be stupid...minus 1".

Toss the "points". Besides, what prize am I working towards?

I'll troll here for good articles, but I've lost any interest in being "part of the community" (a.k.a. schoolyard).
That's a very big grain my friend. :-) I'm not speaking for all of Europe but it seems like the only measurement of success here is if you are attached to a huge company that either invests in you or owns you outright. It doesn't matter what your marketshare is, it's who is paying for you. France and Germany epitomize this, huge conglomerates control 90% of what gets made and marketed. And exert an incredible amount of influence in politics.

While there are plenty of opportunities to fill a niche, you won't receive broad support without the blessing of the few gatekeepers.
That was the half-remembered article I was looking for, but Google offered this up first. Can someone edit the link?
These are notes from a presentation by Paul Ray. It's an hour long so I thought these would be better to digest. The $80 million color blue comment is down by "Data Driven Process".

If you're interested in the full video presentation you can check it out here http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL06
The author states that the dams that formed the lakes collapsed once under communal control => they look a different color because there is no water in them.
Paywalled.
A summary about what they're doing with Intel/Sony?
It's funny how it's usually easier to ditch X, and write Y from scratch, rather than try to improve X.
The unforgivable cost of state-protected monopolies
I think that is a good way to look at it.

Give her one show at Oprah though and she will definitely "take over the world"
I don't disagree with burning patent trolls at the stake... but why does it always seem that if something happens in Texas, it has to be called out specifically as if we don't have enough misinformed stigmas hanging over our head? Maybe it's my own personal bias taking offense but it just seems way to common considering the size and diversity of the state.

Sorry to sidetrack, just annoys me. Living in Austin I'm seeing a flight of out-of-state workers looking for economic refuge from so many of the other bankrupt and poorly managed states. Texas has pretty sound economic policies and infrastructure if I don't say so myself.
How has no one else asked what happened yet? Why was there a 5 year old in 6 feet of water? Why were you (or the 5 year old?) naked at the time?
These are some great points and I left it out of my original message, but that is always something I have worried about, not knowing the value of advice that I do get.

Nevertheless, I have a real need for someone who can at least take the functionality concepts that I describe and tell me if they are technically possible, describe the level of difficulty, explain any problems etc...

I have built a number of websites using freelancers and in almost every case, I left some technical description off of my rfp because I did not understand the way the underlying technology had to be structured in order to get the desired functionality.
Come on. It was clearly a bit of meta-humor.

See also

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_and_Knaves
What an excellent way to go out. Great last article Joel.
I wonder why all those tech companies don't team up and hire a bunch of lobbyist to get rid of this system as soon as possible. Is this because they lose the ability to sue their own competitors when things get though?

Thank god we don't have these lawsuits in Europe.
"The interesting part is that these systems think in terms of changes, not in terms of versions."

Not git. Git's repository model is very strongly snapshot-oriented. Of course the whole machinery for supporting changesets exists in git, but it is built atop a system that actively avoids "thinking" in terms of changes.

Linus on this: http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=111314792424707
Joel doesn't just say that SVN is obsolete; he compares it to a blood-sucking worm. That's some strong emotion.
David,

I just shot you an email (from leleu at industrial interface). I'm willing to help out.
Free article: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/18/google-tv-apple-tv/

To be honest, I'm surprised it's taken Google so long to do this. The potential benefits for Google are even greater than Apple's because Google is working hard to become a dominant player in TV advertising.

Late or not, this is very good news for consumers because hopefully it will lead to iPhone/Android apps being accessible on your TV. The possibilities for gaming would definitely make me worried if I were Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony.
If by reverse you mean going forward instead of backwards, that should be done with Ctrl-S; it does not work in Bash though, since Ctrl-S locks the scrolling of the terminal. I believe this behavior can be overridden, through some .xinputrc settings perhaps, but I haven't still found enough motivation to look it up!

edit: ok, I've found this: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bash#History_search
There's something bothering me about the hosannas to the power of merging changes. Isn't there an unspoken assumption that all your work is text files ?

If we talk drawings, photos, whatever binary data is needed for a project - what happens ? Are the binary deltas as good as SVN's ?

Even if the "binaries" are XML text - e.g. drawings in SVG - wouldn't I be out of luck trying to merge changes if 'Beth' added a squiggle and 'Cath' a square to different parts of the drawing ? (many tools, upon writing, reorder data 'ad lib'). Are there "merge tool" plug-ins ?
This is the frightening reality of what happens when you have a large business where everything scales multiplicatively and then you make a trivial change which is net-beneficial. People want this to be impossible because it strikes you as intuitively wrong that five minutes of work could be worth eight figures. Reality doesn't care what you think, though.

Relatedly, and more prosaicly, if you average one successful A/B test with a 5% lift per month, and you do nothing else, your business will grow at about 80% per year. Multiplicatively effective businesses are a wonderful place to be in life.

Then I look over at Zynga at all where you can do multiplicative effectiveness within the context of a viral loop, which is just so effective I'm almost certain it goes against my religion somehow.
The Eastern District of Texas is particularly notorious for being very favorable to plaintiffs in patent lawsuits (it's even specifically called out in the Wikipedia article on patent trolls), so it's notable that this happened in Texas both because a disproportionately large number of such cases happen there and because Microsoft had previously lost a patent suit in this exact same courtroom.

Perhaps Texas gets unfairly attacked in other areas, but when it comes to patent lawsuits there really is a pretty serious problem there.
* Bought my first house at 21 (Not outright, but I was the only one of my friends at the time near owning a home).

* Skipped college and immediately started working full-time ... for myself. Nothing beats not having a boss to answer to.

* Ranked a German company between #1-3 in Google.de for 19/20 very competitive keywords (Work I was proud of).

* Web & print design for several top musicians (Work I was proud of too).

I enjoyed reading all of you're accomplishments. Keep it up :)
Wow, I would love to be able to play like Vai. Makes me think of the awesome battle in Crossroads. Neo-classical is pretty amazing.
As for the EP, you mean you'll email it? If so sure.
moollaza@gmail.com (Thanks!)
Blogging is hard! Let's go Shopping.
Just goes to show how important it is to bug-free code when developing on the .NET platform. You don't want those exceptions slow down you're code.